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III

Spain crushed James's soul.

The mule train plodded across a landscape like a vast dusty table, where nothing grew but scrub grass and rough untended olive trees, nothing moved but skinny sheep, and there was no sound but the raucous singing of the muleteers echoing from ruined battlements, and the thin mewl of patient buzzards. And, James knew, the journey could only end with more strangeness. For he was travelling to Seville, where, it was said, the Anti-Christ was soon to be born.

His companion and employer, Grace Bigod, was not sympathetic. She was a formidable woman in her forties, perhaps twenty years older than James. Her face was beautiful in a strong, stern, proud way; her greying blonde hair was swept back from her brow. And, sharp, bored, she picked on James. 'What's the matter, Friar James? All a bit much for you?'

'Everything's so strange.'

'Well, of course it's strange. We're a long way from England now.' Her fine nostrils flared as she sucked in the air. 'Smell it! That spicy dryness, the wind straight off the flats of the Maghrib. My family have roots in the Outremer, you know.'

He nodded. It was well known in James's house in Buxton that Grace and her family were descended from a woman called Joan, who had fled Jerusalem when it fell to the Saracens more than two centuries ago.

'Maybe the country of the Outremer is like this – hot, dry, dusty. Maybe there is something in the very air that pulls at my blood. Or maybe it's the stink of the last Muslims in Spain, holed up in Granada. This is the crucible of the whole world, James! The place where the sword-tip of Christianity meets the scimitar-tip of the Moors, a single point of white heat. What do you think?'

James saw only a landscape wrecked by war and emptied by plague. He turned inward, trying not to see. He longed to be safely enclosed within the reassuring routines of his Franciscan monastery.

But Grace and her forebears were generous supporters of the house, and had been for generations. It was through her family's influence that the house was committed to its strange and dark project, a secretive work centuries old. It was through Grace's influence that James, who longed only for a life of scholarship devoted to the peace of Christ, found himself studying terrible weapons of war.

And it was through her influence, her peculiar desire to bring on the end of the world, that he had been dragged from his book-lined cell and been brought all the way across Europe to this desolate, prickly landscape. Her purpose was to sell her Engines of God to the King and Queen of Spain, and she had a copy of the Codex of Aethelmaer, and a summary of two centuries' worth of its development, tucked in her bags.

James did not want to be here. But there was purpose in all things, he told himself. God would show him the true path through the strange experiences to come. He crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.

Grace watched him, hard-eyed, analytical, and she laughed. She was a vigorous, physical woman. Sometimes she stared at him, as if wondering what shape his body was under his habit. And at night, when they stopped in towns or taverns, she would come close to him, brushing past so he could smell her hair, and see the softness of her skin. James knew she felt not the remotest attraction to him, and that this was all part of her bullying of him. But he was unused to women, and his youthful body's reaction to her teasing left him tormented. She made him feel crushed, pale and pasty and worthless, less than a man. And she knew it.

It was a relief when the caravan at last reached Seville, and James was able to get away from her company, if only for a short while. But Seville had its own mysteries.

The Guadalquivir reminded him a little of the Thames in London. Navigable from the sea, the river was crowded with ships, and the wharves and jetties were a hive of activity, where sailors and dockers, beggars, whores and urchins worked and laughed, fought and argued in a dozen languages – the usual folk of the river, James thought, just as you would find in London. Trade shaped the city's communities too; Seville was home to officers and sailors who had participated in Spain's explorations of the Ocean Sea, and there were Genoese and Florentine bankers and merchants everywhere.

But in other ways Seville was quite unlike London. He walked to the site of a grand cathedral, bristling with scaffolding. It would be the largest in the world, it was said. But it had been built on the site of the city's Moorish mosque, and a surviving muezzin tower still loomed over it; slim and exquisite, the tower would always draw the eye away from the solid pile of the Christian church.

And just over the plaza from the cathedral was an old Moorish fortress-palace which the Moors called the al-qasr al-Mubarak, and the Christians called the Alcazar. James peered curiously through its arched doorways. Though the Moors had been expelled from Seville by the city's conquerors, later generations of Christian rulers had brought back craftsmen from Granada to work on these buildings, maintaining and even enhancing them.

Seville was not like London, then, where with their forts and cathedrals the conquering Normans had erased any symbol of the old Saxon state. Here the spirit of the Moors lived on in a Christian country.

Perhaps things were going to change, however. Two hundred and thirty years after its conquest Seville was still the southernmost Christian city in Spain. The great tide of Reconquest had stalled. The Christians were distracted by conflicts between their own rival kingdoms, and their vast project to repopulate the occupied country was diluted by the Mortality; where once the Moors had turned the land green, now only Christian sheep grazed. Seville remained a city on the cusp of a great change, James thought. Perhaps it was no wonder that apocalyptic legends had gathered around the place.

But James, in his first walk around this strange, complicated, muddled city, did not see a need for cleansing, but a kind of mixed-up human vitality he rather relished.

Near the Alcazar he came across two girls who sat on a bench, eating oranges they unpeeled with their thumbs. No older than twelve or thirteen, dark, shy-looking, they giggled with each other as they ate, but kept a wary eye on the folk around them. The girls both had yellow crosses stitched to their blouses. They were Jews, then. They had to wear ugly symbols on their clothing, but at least they were here. In England there were no Jewish girls like this, laughing in the sun and eating oranges.

When the girls saw James watching them, they looked away nervously. Embarrassed, annoyed at himself for frightening them, he hurried on.

He made his way back to the river, and walked to a complicated pontoon bridge of seventeen barges.

And across that bridge he glimpsed the brooding pile of the castle of Triana. It was the headquarters of the Inquisition.