flesh. After months of rationing there were times he felt so light and flimsy, so detached from reality, that it was as if he had become a ghost, haunting the streets of the city he had tried to help save.
He had wandered far enough. He turned back.
Inside the emir's palace Christian troopers gawped at the tiles and the frescoes, and leered at the Muslim women. The Christians wore chain-mail and steel helmets, and had bright red crosses emblazoned on their shoulders. These were crucesignati, crusaders, holy warriors, infused by piety and blessed by the Pope. But they were nearly as ragged and half-starved as the surviving population of the city itself.
Ibrahim walked across the patio outside the turayya, the hall at the centre of the suite of rooms called the Pleiades, and the grandest in the palace complex. The patio was a lovely rectangular space encompassed by a gallery of delicate trefoil arches. One Christian soldier had taken his boots off and was soothing his filthy, blistered feet in the rainwater trapped in the fish pond. His mate saw Ibrahim pass by and kicked the bather, speaking in rough Latin.
'Get up, Michael, you arse, you're showing us up.'
'Oh, leave me be, Saladin. Arse yourself. This isn't so bad, is it? Not so bad for soldiering…'
Ibrahim was surprised by that famous Saracen name, Saladin, given to a Christian soldier. But Fernando's army was international, drawn from all across Christendom. 'Saladin' could have come from anywhere.
He walked on into the turayya itself, where he found that the discussions had already started. The Christian party had lined up against one wall, and glared at the emir's representatives, led by the vizier, who clustered opposite. Hapless servants, trembling with fear, scurried between the parties with trays of sweetmeats and wine. The Christian leaders were warriors and clerics, knights and princes, envoys of the Pope. Some were both military and pious; Ibrahim saw a man in a tonsure with a chain-mail vest over his monk's habit. And they all wore the shoulder-cross of crusade.
There was only one woman in the Christian party. She was still young, in her thirties perhaps, and quite pretty, with a face like an almond. A fat elderly monk accompanied her. Pretty or not she glared at her Muslim opponents as severely as any of the men.
As for the Moorish party, Ibrahim spotted Ibn Shaprut at its heart – and, he was shocked to see, his own mother stood close by.
He walked up. 'Mother. What are you doing here? It's hardly safe.'
Dressed in a robe as white and clean as mountain snow, her face shining with expensive oils and her hair drawn back under her veil, Subh looked magnificent. Magnificent, but furious. 'Safe? Where is safe? None of us is safe, Ibrahim. Well, none of us save for him.' She pointed.
Ibrahim glanced across the room. There was the almond-faced woman, and beside her, talking animatedly to her and her monk companion, was a flabby, sleek, sweating Moor.
'Ali Gurdu,' Ibrahim said with disgust. 'That grafter. I should have cut off his hands and feet while I had the chance.'
'What's done is done,' Ibn Shaprut said. 'You can't blame him for trying to save himself. And he might even help, though he doesn't mean to, if he makes the Christian passage into the city a little easier.'
''Makes the Christian passage easier',' Subh snapped. 'What are you talking about, you quack? Do you understand nothing of what's happening?'
Ibrahim frowned. 'What do you mean? Fernando has the city. What else can he want?'
'Expulsion,' said Subh.
'What?'
'We must leave. Every Moor – all of us who can walk, and even if we can't. That is the condition Fernando is going to impose. Fernando doesn't want a living city. He doesn't want us. He only wants the stones, to house a new population of Christians.'
Ibrahim was stunned. The room spun around him, and the rich colours faded to yellow-grey. He felt Ibn Shaprut's strong hands on his shoulders, and he was helped down, to sit on a heap of floor cushions.
Ibn Shaprut offered him a cup of watered wine. 'Drink this.'
Subh stood over him, glaring, a pitiless mother. 'You've worn yourself out, and for nothing. I told you so, but would you listen to me? Now look at you – fainting like an old woman, in this hour of our family's greatest crisis.'
'The family.' His own voice sounded distant to Ibrahim. 'What does the family matter? It hasn't been like this before. Even in Cordoba. There Muslims still live under Christian rule, as once Christians lived under our rule.'
'Things have changed,' Subh said. 'Look at them, Ibrahim. Look at them with those hateful crosses stitched to their shoulders.'
'They won't even know how the city works. The city is its people, its history… This is unthinkable.'
'And yet such things are being thought,' said the doctor. 'You are a sane man, Ibrahim, in a world of the mad. And we men of sanity must cope with the consequences of the decisions of the others. Come, my friend. Stand with me now. In the coming days, the city will ask one last service of you.'
'Yes. One last service.'
'And,' Subh said, glaring at the Christians, 'the family has one great goal to achieve before we abandon this place, as we were forced out of Cordoba.'
Ibrahim knew she meant the Codex, supposedly lost under the floor of the mosque. She was scheming over trifles in this moment of catastrophe for a whole civilisation. He thought she was as insane as the Christians. And yet he must cope with her as well as the city's calamity.
He struggled to rise, leaning on Ibn Shaprut.
XXX
Fernando set a deadline of one month for the evacuation. He told the emir bluntly that he wished to celebrate Christmas Day in Seville's great mosque, reconsecrated as a Christian cathedral.
And in that last month, Ibrahim worked harder even than in the worst days of the siege, as he helped to organise the abandonment of a great city.
When he walked through the streets he found a mood of anger and disbelief about the evacuation. He was shown around houses and gardens, still grand even after the siege, where patios shone and rusted fountains had once bubbled water; he was shown shops and offices and businesses, carefully built up over generations. How could all this be given up for ignorant Christian barbarians to despoil? Some people wouldn't move for sheer stubbornness. And others hoped, no matter how sternly Ibrahim spoke of the Christians' ruthless determination. Perhaps you could find some way to accommodate under the Christians. Or perhaps you could simply hide in your home behind a locked door, and somehow everything would turn out all right. Ibrahim knew this was fantasy. He encouraged people to take away the deeds of their houses, to lock the doors, to carry off the keys. This was enough to allow at least some of these desperate new paupers to walk out proudly, bundles on their heads, the deeds tucked carefully inside their djellabas expressing their intention to return. But others were determined to stay, defying the Christians come what may. Often Ibrahim could only walk away.
If there were some who wouldn't leave, there were many more who couldn't, for they were too ill or too young or too old, or damaged by the long siege. So Ibrahim organised parties of refugees who might be able to carry a few of the vulnerable with them. He tried, too, to gather people into parties large enough to resist the predations of the bandits in the country.
And while all this went on, Ibrahim still had a city to run. Even in this last month people still had to eat and drink, sewage had to be taken away, fires controlled, outbreaks of disease contained. Ibn Shaprut told him that it was like tending a dying man, all mundane detail and a steady decline, and an awful knowledge that an utter termination was near.
In the end, as Fernando's deadline neared, the people of the city simply began walking out of the gates to the south and east. These were urban folk, not used even to walking far, and many of them overloaded themselves at the start of their flight. Some even tried to carry out precious bits of furniture, even carpets. You would see these bundles dumped after a few hundred paces, as the harsh landscape quickly took its toll.
Ten thousand people drained out of the city, to vanish into the plains of the south. At the peak of the flight it
