The thunder-mouth was a copper tube, shining in the sun. Its muzzle protruded over the battlements, pointing at the Christians' scattered camp. A brazier enclosed the rear of the tube, and when Ibrahim got there a fire was already burning hotly, so intense that it had turned that part of the cylinder red-hot. The brazier was being tended by two of Peter's scholars, who poked at the fire nervously.
Subh looked on with a complacent pride.
Ibrahim walked around the thunder-mouth cautiously. 'Quite a job to haul this thing up here,' he said.
'Oh, yes,' said his mother. 'That alone was a marvel.'
'Well, I hope it's worth the effort.' But, looking at the device now, he doubted it. In the glimmering shadows of the old Roman water tank Peter's machines had looked mysterious, potent, even magical. But here the slim copper tube and the brazier looked absurd, a toy beside the massive stone reality of the walls. 'Does the emir know about this?'
'You're his eyes and ears,' Subh murmured. 'When it all goes to plan, when Christian soldiers are scattered like wheat stalks in a storm, then you can tell him what we have done.'
Ibrahim looked at Peter. This mention of the slaughter of Christians didn't evoke any reaction in him. Obsessed with his machines and his ambitions, in the thrall of Subh, the man was quite without conscience, Ibrahim saw; he was a lost soul.
Peter nodded at the scholars. 'Let's get on with it.'
The two of them approached the thunder-mouth carrying a heavy pail of water between them. Ibrahim saw they were going to tip the water into a kind of funnel mounted over the brazier.
'All that water is coming out of somebody's ration,' Ibrahim said weakly.
'This will put an end to rationing,' Subh said.
Peter pointed. 'The water, poured in here, goes straight down into the hot barrel. It immediately flashes to steam. And steam, as you know, requires more space than water. The steam will roar up the tube and shoot the iron lump out over the walls, as a man spits out a pea, propelling it with his breath, spit it away and into the Christian lines. I am confident of the range. We have tested smaller models; the arithmetic is simple.'
'It will seem a miracle,' Subh said. 'The explosion of the steam, the roar of it as it gushes out of the thunder-mouth – and the iron ball itself, a mass heavier than a man, flying miles through the air. A mouth of thunder indeed.'
'But you haven't tested it,' Ibrahim said.
'Only smaller models. What else could we do, in the conditions of the siege?'
'And what better way to prove it,' Subh said silkily, 'than against live Christians?'
Peter stood straight. 'Do it,' he said to the scholars.
The cowering scholars tipped their great bucket. The water gurgled into the funnel, and through a length of copper pipe that fed it straight through the brazier's coals and into the cylinder. The thunder-mouth shuddered. And in that last heartbeat Ibrahim snatched his mother's arm and pulled her back, putting his body between her and the engine.
Ibrahim was slammed in the back as if by an immense hot fist, and he was thrown forward. An enormous noise crashed painfully into his head. Steam washed over him in a moment, scorching, gone.
He found himself sprawled over his mother. He pushed himself up. His back was tight and sore, burned. His mother seemed unharmed. Lying on the floor, looking up at him, her lips moved. But he could not hear a word she said.
In fact, he realised, he couldn't hear anything at all. He noticed blood trickling from his mother's ears and pooling in her throat. When he touched the sides of his own face, his fingers came away sticky with blood. He felt shocked. He had never heard such a noise, never in his life.
He stood up and turned around.
The thunder-mouth was destroyed, ripped open. The brazier was shattered, its hot coals scattered smoking on the platform. The two scholars lay on their backs, unmoving. He saw with wonder that misshapen bits of copper were embedded in the stone wall.
And Peter writhed on the floor. Blood pumped from a dozen wounds punched into body. His face was all but gone, Ibrahim saw, horrified, the skin scorched away, though some awful chance had left his eyeballs intact, staring terrified from lidless sockets.
The thunder-mouth tipped up silently. Ibrahim saw the tube nod down over the battlements, and an iron ball rolled harmlessly out to fall straight down the wall to the ground below.
XXVIII
Saladin and Thomas were not permitted to go with the scouting party to the foot of the walls beneath the strange explosion. But they were able to inspect what was recovered: some twisted bits of metal, and an immense ball of iron.
'An engine,' Thomas said darkly. 'Or the remains of one that failed.'
'Subh,' Saladin said. 'My mother's cousin. She is in there. This proves it.' He glanced at the city walls, and wondered if this remote relative whom he had never met was looking back at him now. 'She must have the engine plans. She must have dug them up from the mosque-'
'Not necessarily. Fernando has the city riddled with his spies. If that were going on we'd have heard about it. Subh's letter to your mother hinted of other designs, sketches developed by Sihtric and his co-workers from the originals – sketches that were not entirely lost when Sihtric died. Perhaps that's what we're seeing here.' He grunted, poking tentatively at a bit of torn copper sheet. 'It would certainly explain why it failed. We may yet not be too late to get to those originals first.'
'I hope so. Or mother will be furious.'
XXIX
Word came from the vizier's office that King Fernando was prepared to accept the surrender of the city on the twenty-third of November. Three days before that cut-off the emir's ministers were to meet with representatives of the King and the Pope, where Fernando's terms would be presented.
Ibrahim was dulled by the months of siege. But Ibn Shaprut counselled him to be hopeful. Perhaps in this moment of surrender the Christians might discover in themselves the mercy of Jesus of which they boasted so loudly.
On the morning of the meeting, Ibrahim woke from a restless night, soon after dawn. He could hear rain hissing down.
Ibrahim left the palace and walked the streets of the city, hoping to clear his head. The rain on his upturned face was light and fresh. The people were coming out of their houses, men and women with scrawny arms protruding from grimy sleeves. They put out pots and bowls and cups to catch the rain. This was the first significant rainfall of the winter, and Ibrahim imagined it cleaning the air, washing away the last of the heat and stench of the filthy summer of siege. The world was being kind to Seville, then, at last.
But it had come too late. The bodies bundled into doorways or heaped in alleyways told him that: the night's dead, dumped by those too weak or apathetic to dispose of them properly. Ibrahim made a mental note of where the corpses lay, so he could brief the day's working parties. But he supposed that in a few more days such problems would be the concern of some Christian soldier, and he, at last, could rest.
He walked down to the river, where no ships sailed this morning, and the waterwheels stood idle. It struck him how very quiet the city was now. There were few animals around; in a starving city the dogs and cats had gone into the pot before the rats. Even the songbirds had been netted, plucked and consumed. Few children too, and fewer old people. Ibn Shaprut the doctor had told him how hunger and disease and drought always took away the very old and the very young, always the most vulnerable.
He tired quickly as he walked, and his burned back still ached sometimes, and the cold of the rain cut into his
