sergeant, or-'

Without warning Subh let out an extraordinary animal howl. She leapt at Joan and dug fingers arched like claws into her face. Joan screamed and fell backward.

Saladin and Michael rushed forward. They grabbed Subh and hauled her off Joan, but with difficulty, for she was a heavy woman animated by utter rage. At last Michael got his arms clasped around her, pinning her hands to her body.

Joan would have attacked Subh in turn, had not Saladin held her back. Her face was streaming with blood from gouges under her eyes. 'Look at me. Look at me! I'm lucky she didn't take out an eye.'

Michael called, 'What do you want me to do with her, lady?'

Saladin said quickly, 'Mother, she is our cousin.'

'She's a boil that needs to be lanced. Take her,' she said to Michael. 'Do what you want with her, you and your lads. Then throw her out of the city, naked.'

Subh struggled, but Michael grinned and hauled her away to the squad of soldiers playing dice. They laid their hands on her, and pushed her down on the floor of the mosque.

Thomas was ashen. But his eyes were alive with anticipation. 'The Codex. Come. We may not have much time.' He led the way back to the bonfire.

Joan dabbed her torn face with a bit of cloth.

Saladin said, 'You need to find a doctor.'

'Oh, stop your fussing, boy.'

'Did you mean what you said? About the designs – the weapons, and using them to take the Holy Land?'

'Of course I did. It is the most sacred place in the world, Saladin. And our home. We will use the engines for the purpose for which they were intended.'

As a boy in Jerusalem, a 'warrior cub' as Thomas had once called him, Saladin would have applauded such an ambition. But he had grown since those days, grown into a man of twenty-one who had seen much more of the world – and had seen much suffering. 'Mother, are you sure that was the intention? And are you sure that's what we should do?'

'What do you mean?'

'Remember the Dove.' He meant his family's other prophecy, the Testament of Eadgyth, handed down since the days of Robert and his father Orm, a commandment that seemed to warn against the use of Sihtric's Engines of God.

'Gibberish,' she said. 'Meaningless. I care nothing for prophecies. All I care about is acquiring the power to achieve my goals. All I care about is getting hold of those designs, and building the weapons, and turning them on Muslim flesh.'

Saladin heard screams, and the angry shouts of the men. Subh was putting up a fight. 'And what of your cousin?'

'She deserves what's coming to her,' Joan spat. 'I hope they split her open.'

Saladin decided in that moment that he would not follow his mother, not any more, not after this. He would fight for the Holy Land, yes. But he would do it the honourable way, the Pope's way. He would take the Cross again, and join King Louis's crusade in Egypt.

And he would not forget the prophecy of the Dove as long as he lived, and he would pass it on to his own children, and instruct them to pass it on to theirs, so that in the unimaginable future they might make their own judgements about the Engines of God.

They reached the fire. Thomas was rubbing podgy hands. 'Perfect, perfect. All we have to do is retrieve the designs, ship them back to England, and let Roger Bacon get to work.'

Joan, her blood leaking between her fingers, snapped, 'Must we clear this fire first?'

'No need. In fact the fire will help us. Perhaps it was sent by God for that very purpose.' And from his sleeve he drew a packet.

'What's that?'

'A present from Bacon. Black powder.'

Joan grinned, and held out her hand. 'Let me.'

There were howls from the soldiers with Subh. 'Ow!' Saladin heard Michael call. 'The old witch has bitten through my cheek!… By God's wounds. She's dead! Now, how did she manage that? Poison under her tongue? I think she's defeated us, lads…'

Joan sprinkled the powder on the floor, on the spot Subh had indicated. Thomas took an ember from the fire and threw it. Fire blossomed, its noise echoing like thunder, beneath the mosque's low ceiling, and the floor broke open.

III

NAVIGATOR AD 1472-1491

I

In the last days / To the tail of the peacock / He will come: / The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer / The Dove…

Long before he had ever heard of the Testament of Eadgyth, James grew up believing, or at least fearing, that the world's last days were indeed near. Legends of the last days had rattled around the house in Buxton since James had been taken in as a boy, and had listened wide-eyed to the lurid speculations of the older brothers.

As he grew, however, he learned that Franciscans had always been fascinated by legends of the Apocalypse. And as his soul and mind were opened up by the new mood of scholarship that embraced Europe, he thought he became sensible. Pragmatic. He put aside the grim prognostications, the peculiar antique longing for the end of things.

But now the quality of the whispering changed. Dreams that had once clung to the year of Our Lord 1000 accreted like ivy over another milestone year: AD 1500. That was not a remote future. That was a year James expected to live to see; he would not yet be forty.

And when the abbot took him aside one day, and showed him the abbey's secret library, where for two centuries the brothers had been labouring over spidery designs for engines of war – engines that might bring about that final catastrophe – then, in some secret library of his own soul, he began to feel afraid.

For Harry Wooler, it was the Dove himself whose beating wings cast shadows over his own life, on the day his own small world came to a kind of end, as his father lay dying.

Harry, just seventeen years old, was forced to lean over a face already like a skull, smell breath that still stank of ale, and listen while his father whispered in his ear a family tale centuries old, a tale of ancestors called Orm and Eadgyth, and a strange, dark prophecy of a man called the Dove who would shape all history. In the end this morbid tale merged seamlessly into his father's ale-drowned death-rattle. But Harry was the eldest son, and it was his turn to receive the legend, as had his father, an eldest son before him – it was his duty to listen. And after all, his father had driven away everybody else, his mother, his sister, his brothers.

So Harry listened, and after his father died he locked this morbid stuff away in his heart, and tried to imagine it had gone away.

But it had not.

II

AD 1481

The January morning was still grey when Harry Wooler walked into London from the north, passing through

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