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 logic to it, but it wasn't the straight-line logic of a Roman city like London; here the streets branched like the limbs of a tree, leading to endless dead-ends. The people weren't like English people either. They were a mixed-up sort, the result of generations of intermarriage between the invaders and the old Gothic peoples. Not everybody was Muslim either; there were Christians here, and many Jews.
The city nestled within the circling safety of its old Roman walls, which ran down to a river where waterwheels turned languidly, and which was still spanned by a stout Roman bridge. The city's heart was full of grand buildings, finely tiled, intricately adorned with carved stone and moulded plaster. The greatest building of all was a vast mosque that sprawled in its own compound close to the river: a temple to a god who was not God, a firm Islamic statement planted proudly in a Roman city. There was a sense of wealth here, Robert thought, of care, of intensive labour over every detail. And yet it was an architecture born of war. The buildings had stout fortress- like walls and towers and gateways, but these warlike structures were made elegant by their proportions, and the fine embellishment of fretwork and stucco and inscription.
As the day wore on he learned the cycle of the city. Because of the heat and the light the very rhythm of life here was quite different from any English city. As noon approached the people retreated to the shade of their homes, windows closed and shutters drawn. Even the animals grew quiet, as if the whole city slept beneath a shroud of dense, dusty orange air. But as evening approached and the first whispers of coolness arrived, the city began to stir once more. The street lights were lit, and the city came alive as a firmament of light and movement, of music and laughter.
Robert was entranced.
On the second morning they made their way to Sihtric's small town house. Robert's heart quickened when Moraima joined them.
Sihtric served them watered wine, and announced that later in the day he would introduce Orm to his sponsor, one Ahmed Ibn Tufayl, a vizier of the emir of the taifa which now owned Cordoba. 'When he heard you were coming, Orm, the vizier demanded I bring you to him. The caliphs always saw off the Vikings; this wasn't Alfred's England, weak, backward and divided, and there are few Vikings here. So you're an object of curiosity!'
'I hope I don't disappoint,' Orm growled ungraciously. In the bright Spanish sunlight he was massive, heavy, somehow dark, Robert thought. He wasn't comfortable here. And his head probably hurt from the monkish wine he and Sihtric had consumed the night before. Orm said to Robert, 'Don't you notice anything different about me today?'
'By God's eyes. You cut your hair.'
He stroked his chin. 'Look, a good shave too. And I had a bath.'
Robert was genuinely shocked. 'You didn't.'
'I went to one of those bathhouses the Moors have. Quite pleasant it was, if you can put up with smelling like an East Roman whore.'
Ibn Hafsun smiled. 'You have to make yourself presentable to meet a Muslim ruler. Clean clothes, a wash. The envoys of the Christian kings, even of the Pope, have always known this. Of course Christians aren't quite as in awe of the Moors as they were in my father's day.'
Moraima, serving more wine, passed Robert. 'I'm glad you haven't bathed. I quite like the way Christians smell.' And with a fleeting, luring smile, she turned away.
Sihtric lectured them about Cordoba's magnificence. 'At its peak, only a generation ago, it was the greatest city in the west. Why, its population even matched Constantinople. Five hundred mosques. Three hundred bathhouses. Fifty hospitals. Do you even know what a 'hospital' is, young Robert?
'And the greatest library in all the world, it is said, flourished here in Cordoba, under the caliphs. It all started when the East Roman emperor sent the caliph a copy of a pharmacology text by Dioscorides – have you heard of him? It was like dropping a bit of hot iron into a pan of water. Scholarship boiled in al-Andalus…'
The caliphs, rich and at peace, embraced learning as an emblem of power and sophistication. And they were much better placed to do so than western Christendom, for they had access to the surviving works of antiquity. Employing legions of copyists and translators, the Moorish scholars merged Greek and Roman learning with what their cousins in Damascus and Baghdad had acquired from the Persians, and they built on what they learned. The result was a flowering in astronomy and physics, medicine and philosophy.
Sihtric said, 'The library itself grew to four hundred thousand books. The catalogue alone ran to forty-four volumes! This was at a time when the kings of England were entirely illiterate. But when the caliphate fell the library was broken up. How I wish I had been born a generation earlier. But there are still books milling around the city, as if released into the wild. It is my skill at tracking the books down as much as my learning that makes me so useful to Ibn Tufayl, I think…'
Sihtric was a man of contradictions. For all his admiration of Cordoba's Moorish achievements, he was keen to play up its deeper Roman origins.
'All of western Europe is the same. All of us dwelling in the vast ruins of the empire, four centuries after some German brute pushed aside the last boy-emperor from his throne. Did you know that the philosopher Seneca
