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XVIII

Outside the light of the low afternoon sun seemed dazzling bright. The guard stood just a pace away, his arms folded, glaring.

Robert faced the girl. 'Moraima, I-'

'Hush. Don't talk. Not here.'

They walked across the palace compound. They soon reached ruins, for only a fraction of Madinat az-Zahra had been restored to habitability by the vizier's workmen. But Moraima knew the way, and led Robert further. Following rubble-strewn paths they came to a complex of high walls and fallen roofs, where tiles and broken stucco littered a weed-cracked floor. 'Once a harem,' Moraima whispered. 'Complicated place. Easy to get lost. Come on.' She took his hand, and they ran, turning left then right and doubled back, hurrying between high walls and across empty, broken floors. Robert soon became lost himself, even though the afternoon sun hung as a constant beacon in the sky.

And before long the vizier's guard had been completely left behind.

She brought him to a ruined patio. Weeds clogged ponds long since stagnant, wiry little bushes pushed through cracks in the paving stones, and palms had outgrown the gardeners' neat configurations and gone wild. The walls of the rooms here were burned out and open to the sky. But some of the arches still stood, still serving as doorways to this secret garden.

For Robert, walking into this place with Moraima at his side was a fulfilment of the overheated, fragmentary fantasies he had had since he first arrived in Cordoba.

They found a stone bench and sat. A small bird fluttered away, disturbed. Somewhere a guitar played, and a thin voice sang a plaintive song.

'I like it here,' Moraima said. 'Even though nobody has touched it for fifty years. I like the idea that a place can be beautiful even when the people have vanished, that things will go on when all our fussing and fighting is over. If this is all we leave behind when we've gone, a pretty place where the birds can nest, perhaps that's enough.'

He took her hand. In fact it felt like a bird in his palm, the bones thin, fragile, the flesh warm. 'That's a melancholy thought.'

She smiled, enigmatic. 'But you've seen how I live. They say they love me, the two of them.'

'Sihtric and Ibn Tufayl.'

'Father and grandfather. I sometimes think that all they do is use me to hurt each other. And sometimes, it's awful, sometimes I think they don't love me at all. That they blame me for killing my mother, who they both loved more than they love me.'

He wanted to comfort her, to reassure her that couldn't be true. But the priest and the vizier were complicated, ugly creatures, locked together, feeding off each other's weakness and pain. How could he say if they loved her well or not? No wonder she dreamed of a world without humans.

'Moraima, I've heard what they want. But what do you want? What kind of life?'

'I don't know,' she said honestly. 'I can't imagine it. Things are too complicated. But…'

'Yes?'

'It doesn't feel complicated when I'm with you.'

His heart hammered. 'If it wasn't for the others – my father, yours, the vizier – if things were different-'

'If Jesus and Muhammad had never existed? What's the good of talking like that? Things are as they are; you can't change the past.'

But her father, he thought, seemed to believe that the past could be changed. 'But even so. If it was only a question of the two of us, could we make a life together?'

She said firmly, 'We can never know. Because it isn't going to happen, is it? All we have is this moment.' Her face was before his, softened by nearness, her eyes huge, the colours of the wild garden reflected in her smooth skin. 'That's all anybody has.'

'Then we should grasp it.'

Their lips closed together. Her breath was like the breeze off the desert. 'I don't even mind,' she whispered into his mouth, 'that you smell so bad.'

They kissed again, and he felt as if he was passing through another arched gateway into a still more wonderful place yet.