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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 crowding around him were like a hundred Marwams, dark, sharp, their alien language studded with bits of Latin.
    They passed an arched gateway in a wall, lobed, delicately shaped of soft stone and covered with intricate carvings. Robert’s gaze was led through the arch from the shadow of the street into a sunlit courtyard, where a fountain bubbled in a square garden of tiles and green plants. There was nothing like this in Robert’s England, a place of gloomy fortified towns and brooding Norman keeps, nothing like this garden full of water and sunlight. It was like looking through a hole in the wall of the world, a glimpse of paradise.
    ‘This is how we do things here,’ Moraima said, watching him. ‘Our gardens are the hearts of our homes. Our wealth, poured into beauty for those whom we love to enjoy. Is it different where you live?’
    He saw the light of the secret garden reflected in her deep eyes, as if they too were doorways he might enter.
    Ibn Hafsun nudged Orm and sniggered, and the girl laughed, and the moment was lost.

VI
    They spent a day resting.
    Robert, unable to sleep late for the heat, was up at dawn. He went walking at random.
    The city was awake before he was, the streets bustling, the markets and mosques busy in the blue-grey light, the muleteers driving their beasts out of the city gates. As he walked he gradually got used to the layout of streets. Moorish houses were knots of buildings gathered around a courtyard, to be reached by narrowing paths that budded off wider highways. There was a