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  But as al-Andalus became magnificent under the Moors, the land was reimagined as a peacock’s tail.

  Robert listened to Moraima’s voice, entranced. She’d hardly spoken since joining the party with her father - and hadn’t said a single word to him.

  Orm said to Sihtric, ‘You see? I knew you were in Spain, but Eadgyth didn’t. She said your name without ever meeting you. And when I came across the business of the peacock’s tail - it all seemed to fit together and I felt I had to follow it up.’

  Sihtric smiled. ‘Typical of the Weaver to be cryptic - if it is the Weaver. Let’s refer to the agent who put these words into your wife’s head as, let me see, a Witness. He may be the same as the Weaver, or he may not.’

  ‘She.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I showed Eadgyth my transcript of the words she spoke - she had no memory of it - she always called, um, her visitor “she”.’

  ‘She it is,’ Sihtric said. ‘And what do you believe the Witness has mandated you to do?’

  Orm looked at him. ‘Stop you.’

  Sihtric gazed back. ‘Well, you’ll have to find out what I’m doing here first, won’t you?’

  If Ibn Hafsun was curious about their talk, he didn’t show it. He worked his way through his sheep’s-milk cheese silently.

  Somewhere a wailing voice cried. It was a muezzin, Ibn Hafsun told Robert, calling from his tower in the nearby town, summoning the faithful to prayer. Ibn Hafsun fetched his own blanket from his horse, and knelt and faced east.

  In the dusty heat, with the alien song in his ears and the exotic scent of the Arab food in his nostrils, Robert had never felt so far from home. And when Moraima glanced at him, her pale blue eyes were the strangest thing of all in this strange new world, and the most enticing.

  III

  The next day Robert ignored his duty with the camels. He pushed his way up the column so he rode closer to Ibn Hafsun, and spoke to him.

  The Spanish peninsula, he learned, was like a vast square, all but cut off from France by a chain of mountains, the Pyrenees. More chains of mountains crossed the interior, running roughly east to west, and in the lowlands between the mountains rivers snaked over the land. Four of the five greatest rivers drained west into the Ocean Sea.

  The north-west corner, around Santiago de Compostela, was green and temperate, and many people made a living from the sea. In the south-east was more greenery, and there the Moors ran market gardens, rich with fruit trees. But here they were passing through the heart of the country, a vast extent of arid lowlands cut through by the mountains and rivers. The Christians in their degenerate descendant-tongue of Latin called it meseta. The winters were long and bitterly cold, the summers dry and intense. There were no woods here, and little in the way of grass, only patchy scrub. No small birds sang, Robert noticed, for there was nowhere for them to nest; only buzzards wheeled, and eagles scouted the hills.

  ‘And the Christians and the Moors?’

  Ibn Hafsun said, ‘You must think of Spain as sliced into three: the Moors in the south, Christian kingdoms in the north, and a kind of frontier land between. As the Christians have gradually grown stronger, the frontier has, with the centuries, been pushed southwards. Now that the Castilians have captured Toledo the frontier roughly cuts the peninsula in two, east to west: the north Christian, the south Moorish.’

  Robert nodded, picturing it. ‘And one day that frontier will be pushed all the way south, and Spain will be free of Moors once more.’

  ‘Are you sure? Look around you. Look what the Moors made of this country.’

  They happened to be following a river bank. Robert saw that irrigation systems striped the countryside, and along the river itself huge waterwheels turned patiently.

  ‘All this is Moorish,’ Ibn Hafsun said. ‘There was a high civilisation here, Robert son of Orm. The highest since the Romans. Higher than Christendom.’

  ‘Not so high,’ Robert said fiercely, ‘that Alfonso’s Christian armies could not drive the Moors out.’

  Ibn Hafsun shrugged. ‘Well, that’s inarguable.’

  ‘Must it be so?’

  The soft voice startled Robert. It was Moraima, who had come to ride alongside the two of them. She spoke English, her father’s language, but heavily accented.

  Robert said to her, ‘Those are the first words you have spoken to me. And must they be about war?’

  ‘But it’s all you talk about. You and our fathers.’ Her voice, like her face, was delicate, and yet Robert thought he saw a strength beneath the fragile surface. It only made her more desirable.

  ‘We weren’t talking about war. Ibn Hafsun was telling me about the country.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ibn Hafsun, ‘but you are a warrior of God - a warrior cub at any rate. Tell me that you aren’t dreaming of riding across this land in your mail coat, your sword in your hand, at the side of Rodrigo, El Cid, “The Boss”, the greatest Castilian warrior of all!’

  Moraima laughed, a sound like bubbling water. ‘I ask you again, Robert: must it be so?’

  Robert said reluctantly, ‘The Pope himself says that if you fight to reclaim Christian lands from infidels, you are fighting for Christ.’

  ‘Well, the Pope would say that,’ Sihtric called back from his own mount. ‘But the Pope has wider ambitions.’

  Across Europe the conflict between Christianity and Islam was already four centuries old. Now the Seljuk Turks, ferociously warlike, had taken the Holy Land itself, all but extinguishing Christianity in the country that had given it birth. And they pressed on the East Roman Empire, long the bulwark between west and east, taking the rich province of Asia Minor. Alexius, emperor in Constantinople, had appealed to the west for help. But after centuries of invasions and war, the post-Roman states of west Europe were like armed camps, fractious and suspicious, bristling with petty armies any of which would have been dwarfed by the legionary forces of old. The Pope, spiritual leader of all these domains, longed to unify them in a great cause.

  ‘And what better ambition for a pope than a war against Islam?’ Ibn Hafsun murmured.

  Moraima eyed Robert again. ‘I ask you once more: Must it be so?’

  Robert said, ‘I hope not.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I would rather you and I were friends, than enemies.’

  ‘Then we will have to see how this little adventure of ours unfolds, won’t we?’ And she trotted back to her father’s side.

  The older men exchanged bawdy glances, but Robert ignored them.

  IV

  In the days that followed, as they pushed steadily south, the country became rougher. The olive groves and vineyards grew wild, the scrub encroached on the roads, and many of the towns looked abandoned. There were some inhabited communities, but all were heavily defended: fortified hilltops, towns with complicated systems of walls and towers. Ibn Hafsun and Orm kept their swords exposed.

  Ibn Hafsun said, ‘This is the boundary, Robert. This is what you get when great civilisations rub against each other. The Arabs have a word. They call this the tugur. The front teeth.’

  At last they party approached Toledo. The party drew to a halt, all of them subdued.

  It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was in the south, so that, approaching from the north, Robert saw the city in silhouette. The heart of Toledo was a fortress that sat on a promontory, with a river glistening at its feet. And on the plain outside the town, across a stout stone bridge, an army had gathered, pennants glittering in a cloud of dust, tents fluttering in the soft breeze. It was a Christian army, gathered under the cross of Jesus.

  Ibn Hafsun came to Robert. ‘What do you make of it, soldier?’

  Robert glanced around. ‘A naturally defensible site, on that rock. The river guards it on three sides. The walls are Moorish?’

  ‘Roman, then Gothic, then Moorish.’

  ‘And yet the town fell to Alfonso.’

  ‘Only months ago. The wounds are raw. You have come to the very edge of Christe
ndom, young soldier. We will stay here only one night. The city is a place of narrow streets, winding, many shadows. Watch your back, and your father’s. And tomorrow - al-Andalus! Or what is left of it. Now, come. Have you any coin? I have a feeling those soldiers of the King will extract a toll from us for crossing their bridge ...’

  The next day, beyond Toledo, they pressed on, further south again. With every plodding step of the camels the heat gathered, and Robert Egilsson felt as if he was being walked steadily into some great hearth.

  They were deep in the territory of the Moors now. That became apparent the first time they stopped at a small town to replace a lame camel. Marwam, a dark, skinny, rodent-faced man, insisted on replacing both their camels with fresh beasts, and for the price he threw in his own services as an escort.

  ‘It might be wise,’ said Ibn Hafsun. ‘We’re a long way past the border with the Christians, but relations are tense among the taifas - I mean, the Moorish kingdoms. You never know when you might cross the wrong border, or fail to pay the correct toll.’

  But Sihtric snorted his contempt. ‘Waste your money on this weasel-eyed camel-driver if you like. I’ll have nothing to do with it.’

  So Marwam joined the party. As they left, a gaggle of little children ran out onto the road to wave them off, shrieking and jumping, all of them as rodent-faced as Marwam.

  Marwam was the first authentic Moor Robert had met - not a mixed-blood like Moraima, or a descendant of a Gothic Christian like Ibn Hafsun - and Robert watched him curiously. Dressed in swathes of grubby white cloth, Marwam was a wiry man who looked as at home on a camel as on foot. As they rode along he sang wailing, nasal songs, the songs of a desert people sung in a country that had once been Roman. But Robert thought that sometimes he was singing to Moraima, for he would gaze at her with deep brown eyes, his words sung in an unfamiliar tongue making Moraima blush.

  Robert muttered to his father, ‘If I knew the Moorish for “remember your wife and kids” I’d sing that back to him.’

  Orm grinned, tolerant. ‘I wouldn’t worry. She’s a city girl. I don’t think she has any interest in camel-drivers. He’s just flirting, and so is she. Besides, shouldn’t you put such things out of your head? Jealousy is a Christian sin, I imagine. As is lust.’

  ‘Most things are,’ Robert conceded gloomily.

  In all this business of borders and tolls and taifas, Robert was learning, to his surprise, that there was more than one Moorish country here in Spain. He had imagined that all of Islam would be united like one vast army, without individual faces or minds, under the orders of the caliph in Baghdad.

  In fact the Muslims were diverse peoples. Even the armies who had originally invaded Gothic Spain three hundred years ago - whom the Christians called Moors, imagining they came from the old Roman province of Mauretania - had not all been Arabic. The leaders had been Arab, yes, but they had been outnumbered by their Berber warriors, who came from the harsh lands of the Maghrib just to the south across the Pillars of Hercules. Many of the Berbers’ descendants were prone to complain, even fifteen or twenty generations later, how they had been tricked by the Arabs when it came to parcelling up the old Gothic kingdom.

  And, Robert learned, Muslims went to war with each other, as well as with Christians.

  It had been fifty years since a single ruler, in Cordoba, had controlled all the Muslim lands in Spain. That ruler, remarkably, had been a second caliph, independent of the one in faraway Baghdad. ‘It is as if,’ Sihtric said, ‘a city like Paris or York hosted a second pope of its own.’

  When the caliphate fell, al-Andalus splintered into taifas - so many of these little statelets that nobody had been able to count them; there may have been three dozen. But as is the way of politics and war the taifas had squabbled among themselves like fish in a pond, eating each other up until there were only half a dozen left.

  As they drove steadily south the land became ever starker, drier, dustier, baked in the heat. And yet the irrigation channels brought green life to the land in great broad strips. Sihtric said that ‘water courts’ sitting in the towns supervised the upkeep of the irrigation systems, which were a communal treasure. The land actually seemed richer than England, where the peasants toiled with heavy ploughs. But then this land was not as God had designed it but as people had made it, people who had walked out of deserts, who knew how to extract life from the slightest drop of moisture.

  In one place where they stopped for the night, Marwam paid a farmer a few coins for them to pitch their blankets under the shade of fruit trees. Robert had never seen such fruit, heavy and bright. They were oranges, Moraima told him, an Arabic name for a fruit brought here by the Moors. She clambered up a trunk and picked a couple of samples, and showed him how to remove the thick peel. When he dug in his thumbs he squirted her with zest, and when he bit into the fat segments, juice gushed out and rolled down his chin. The orange was bitter, making his tongue curl, but the flavour was like light in his mouth.

  So they ate their oranges, their faces plastered with sticky juice and zest, laughing at each other. It was a simple, wordless moment between the two of them which even the faithless camel driver couldn’t spoil.

  V

  At last the party came to Cordoba.

  Approaching the walled kernel of the city, they passed through a hinterland of cultivated country. Farthest out estates sprawled, astonishingly green, with hanging gardens and citrus groves crowding the river banks, and with buildings like blocky jewels shining in the sun. These estates were like the villas of the long-gone Romans, Sihtric said. He called them munyas, country houses.

  Then the old roads brought them through suburbs of the city itself, communities of mud-brick houses that jostled by the road. Sihtric said that the city had long outgrown its Roman walls, and many of its necessary functions had been transplanted out here: residential areas, markets, bathhouses, industry, gardens. Most of the buildings inside the city walls were official, such as palaces, a chancery, the mints, prisons.

  But the place had seen better days. The travellers passed burned-out buildings, and even some grand estates looked abandoned. These wrecks were nothing to do with the Christian armies but were scars of the wars between Muslims. Cordoba was no longer a capital of anything, not even of its own destiny, for it had been absorbed into the rule of a taifa run out of another Moorish city called Seville.

  As they neared the city, vendors of water sacks, meat on sticks, and even bits of sparkling jewellery crowded around the travellers. Beggars too pushed forward, holding up the stumps of severed arms, or stretching open hideous wounds on their faces. Old soldiers, perhaps, or refugees from the cities the Christians had occupied to the north.

  At last Cordoba itself loomed before them, a walled forest of minarets and domes and cupolas. They approached a gate in the walls, one of seven. Traffic streamed through it, pedestrians, horses, mules, the camels towering over the rest.

  Soldiers stood by the gate, languid. Robert studied them. They wore quilted jackets over long mail coats, and round helmets, and they had mail masks they could pull up over their faces. They carried shields of wood, long spears, stabbing swords and complicated-looking bows. Some of them carried crossbows, which Ibn Hafsun said were of a design that dated back to the Romans. It seemed odd to Robert to see a soldier without Christ’s cross emblazoned anywhere on his costume.

  They lodged their animals at a stable, and left instructions for their goods to be brought after them. Robert was surprised to find slaves working here; there weren’t many slaves in England.

  Then they walked into the crowded city itself, Sihtric leading the way. The streets were so narrow that in places two people couldn’t pass without brushing, and woven into a network of dead ends and double-backs so dense that Robert was soon lost. His nose was filled with the spicy scents of unfamiliar cooking, and his ears rang with the muezzin cries that billowed out from the towers of the city mosques. Marwam had already turned back, to Robert’s relief, but the faces cr
owding around him were like a hundred Marwams, dark, sharp, their alien language studded with bits of Latin.