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IX

Abdul's office was a pretty room with a fine view, cluttered with scrolls and books and charts and heaps of scribbled-on parchment.

Here Harry and Abdul talked briefly of their lives.

They had little in common, Harry thought. Nearly twice Harry's age, Abdul lived alone. For most of his life he had made a living at sea, a career recorded in his leathery face. But he was a navigator, perhaps strictly an astronomer, not a sailor or a trader. He showed Harry a trophy of those days. It was an astrolabe, a kind of map of the sky compressed down onto a sheet of brass, exquisitely made. It was descended from gadgets devised to show the faithful the correct direction for prayer.

Harry was intrigued to hear that in his youth, some decades ago, Abdul had served on the mysterious Chinese treasure ships that had once plied the Indian Ocean and beyond; Moorish and Arab navigators had always been prized by the Chinese.

Abdul had done well, and by the age of forty-five had been able to retire, 'to tend my garden', he said. But when open hostilities had broken out between the emir and the Christian monarchs he had come to the palace to work for the viziers. 'For this is a struggle for survival,' he told Harry.

Harry, listening patiently while sipping cold pomegranate juice, found it hard to believe that this elegant seafaring Muslim could be any sort of relation. And yet it was true.

Geoffrey Cotesford had discovered this branch of Harry's extended family, which for two centuries had been living in Granada. The first of them had been another Ibrahim. He had fled here from Seville when that city fell to the Christians. He had married a woman called Obona, adopting her child from a previous relationship. In Granada, Ibrahim and Obona lived to old age in peace, raising many children, and the family had prospered ever since. Abdul said the family still remembered Ibrahim. Abdul hoped his own patient service for his emir matched that offered by Ibrahim during the last days of Moorish Seville.

For Ibrahim and Obona, it turned out to be a good time to have come to Granada. The last great wave of Reconquest broke with the fall of Seville. In the natural shelter of the mountains, with support from the Islamic nations of the Maghrib, the wily emirs of Granada had been able to play off one Christian leader against another, and the terrible calamity of the Great Mortality had sapped the Christians' will to expand. Even the fall of the Baghdad caliphate to the Mongols had not harmed al-Andalus, which had gained a further measure of independence. It had been a period of uneasy truce – a peace that had lasted centuries.

But the truth was the emirs of Granada had always been vassals of the Christian kings. In return for security they paid heavy tributes in African gold, a steady bleeding.

And since the time of the Great Mortality, which the Moors called the Annihilation, Granada had slowly declined. It was all because of trade, Abdul told Harry. The strait to Africa had fallen into Christian hands, and Italian merchants monopolised the fruit trade, a vital component of Granada's economy, and drove prices down. But the Christian tribute still had to be paid, the defences maintained. Abdul said, 'I pay my taxes at three times the level of a Castilian. No wonder the emirs are unpopular!

'Still, the long truce endured. But it has all changed under our latest emir. The Christians call him Muley Hacen; his name is Abu al-Hasan Ali. He grew up seeing his father bowing before Christians, and he loathed it. About twenty years ago he refused to pay the tribute to Castile, and hasn't since. And three years ago Muley became aggressive, riding out to assault a fortified Christian town. It was a grave miscalculation. These new monarchs, Isabel and Fernando, are united and purposeful.

'And we Moors are suddenly disunited. There have been rebellions. Last year Muley was overthrown in favour of his son, Muhammad Abu Abd Allah, whom the Christians call Boabdil. But Muley's knights still support him. Others back Muley's brother Abu Abd Allah Muhammad az-Zaghall – El Zagal, the "Valiant One". And so it goes. There are rumours Boabdil is concluding secret deals with the Christians. Where once we played off one Christian nation against another, now the wily King Fernando plays us for fools.

'Last winter the long war proper resumed, after a pause for breath that lasted more than two hundred years, when the Christians assaulted a place called Loja. And I came to work in the palace.'

Harry shook his head. 'I can't understand such numbers. Two hundred years? How can a single purpose endure over such a huge time?'

Abdul laughed and topped up his drink. 'Men like you and I, Harry Wooler, traders and sailors, live in the moment, in the business of the world. But popes and caliphs, princes and emirs – those sort of folk like to believe they cast long shadows over history.'

Harry tried to get a sense of this cousin. He seemed intelligent, competent, and with a taste for beautiful things, judging by his clothes, and the wistful glances he cast out of the windows. But he was alone, without a family. Was he a man who preferred men? Whatever his taste he had evidently nothing but failed relationships behind him. And yet he had a place in this city, this ancient civilisation he obviously cherished.

He and Harry could hardly have been less alike, Harry thought. And yet here they were, related, considering working together.

He turned the conversation to the matter of the Testament.

Abdul said, 'I'll tell you the truth. In my family – or my branch of it – we have a sort of memory of prophecies. Of terrible weapons of war, of a man called the Dove, all of that. But if this was ever written down, it was long lost, and reduced to a memory of a memory. I don't think Ibrahim cared much for that sort of stuff. So why have you sought me out? Why come here, to al-Andalus? And why now?'

'It was Geoffrey's suggestion…' Harry had told Abdul of his contact with the monk. Now he produced a parchment on which the first twelve lines of the Testament of Eadgyth were written out.

Abdul lodged small spectacles on his thin nose and scanned it quickly. '"The tail of the peacock",' he read. He looked up. 'There is an old Arab myth, of the Flood-'

'I know,' said Harry. 'Or rather, Geoffrey knows. That's what he found out. He believe that al-Andalus must be the peacock's tail of the Testament.'

'So that tells me why you've come here. But why now?'

And Harry spoke of the 'last days' of the Testament's first line, and how some Christians believed that the year 1500 in the Christian calendar would mark the end of time.

Abdul looked amused at that. 'Muslim scholars rather look down on the Christian calendar. Full of errors! Our calendars and clocks are somewhat superior – the demand for the accurate timing of the calls to prayer five times a day sees to that. But I see the relevance of the date to Christian thinking.'

'When Geoffrey found out about you, he thought you may be able to help understand the prophecy, perhaps even track down the Dove.'

'So I would be an ally in al-Andalus. And,' Abdul said drily, 'I would be committed to help, given that it is my home that will surely be the target of the marvellous weapons of which you speak.'

'What do you think we should do?'

'Think it through,' said Abdul firmly. 'Always the best policy.' He scanned down the Testament. 'Some of this seems quite explicit, doesn't it? A fire consuming "our ocean" – that must be the Mare Nostrum, as the Romans called it, our ocean, the Mediterranean. "God's Engines will… flame across the lands of spices." A massive war in the east, then, if the Dove turns that way – perhaps a war with the Islamic states which control trade with the spice islands? That much is logical. But why would this Dove, if he exists, wish to travel west? To the west is only the Ocean Sea.'

'For trade,' Harry said immediately. 'Perhaps that's a bias in my own thinking. But there is money to be made out there. That's why I would go…'

For decades European navigators had been probing the Ocean Sea, seeking new trade routes. This drive was a legacy of the Mongols, whose hundred-year peace had briefly united Asia with Europe. Travellers like Marco Polo, following the new continent-spanning trade routes, brought back accounts of great eastern empires. Italian colonies on the Black Sea and the crusader cities in the Levant made a handsome profit as conduits for imports from the east, including sugar, spices and textiles, furs, pelts and hides, wax, honey, amber, metals.

'But it wasn't only wealth that came swarming into Europe along the Mongol trade routes,' Abdul put in darkly. 'The Annihilation dawned in the heart of Asia, and travelled with the traders and their ships out of the east. You can tell from the records…'

When the Mongol peace ended, the rise of Muslim empires like the Ottomans' cut off the Christian west from the rich markets of the east. Now nobody even knew if the Khans were still on their throne. In the south too Christian traders found themselves boxed in by Muslims, who controlled the spice trade from India and the far east, and whose caravans, snaking across the Sahara, were the only access to the great gold fields of west Africa.

So, in search of new trade routes, the Europeans were taking to the seas.

'It's an exciting time,' Harry said. 'You must have seen the new maps.

The ships continue to get better too. The Portuguese, for instance, are inching their way down the west coast of Africa, seeking a sea route to the African gold mines. Some say it might be possible to go all the way down the coast of Africa and find a channel east, through to the Indian Ocean and the spice islands that way. And others are already working their way out west into the Ocean Sea. They are coming to understand how the wind blows, where the great ocean currents flow.

'And we know there are new lands to be found out there. Like Madeira, which the Portuguese control. And the Canaries, which the Spanish have conquered, and they call the Fortunate Isles.'

Abdul said, 'So there are solid reasons for this Dove to turn his energies west.' He fixed Harry with a glare. 'But you haven't told me everything, have you, cousin? If the Dove goes east there will be war between Christians and Muslims – but there is always war between Christians and Muslims. What would be so terrible about this one?'

Harry sipped his pomegranate juice. And he showed Abdul the rest of the prophecy, the lines his sister had discovered scratched in the wall of her cell in York.