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XI

In the summer of 1485 Grace Bigod, with Friar James in tow, travelled back to Spain. Grace wanted to press her case for the adoption of the Engines of God by the Spanish court.

But the Spanish were at war. This year, Fernando and Isabel were engaged in the siege of a Moorish town the Christians called Ronda.

So James and Grace travelled across the country to Ronda with a raiding party of Castilian soldiers. Moving inland from the coast they crossed a landscape of folded hills and flood plains through which rivers snaked, glistening, and fortified towns sat squat on the hilltops. The scars of the monarchs' war were everywhere, in the burned-out fields, the hulks of abandoned farmhouses, the stinking carcasses littering the roadsides.

The knights called themselves caballeros, and they were attended by hidalgos, lesser nobles. As they rode they joked, sang and drank. James thought they had a certain lazy arrogance. If they saw a stone wall standing they would run their horses at it to knock it down, if they saw a haystack they would torch it, if they saw a well they would throw stones down it to block it up, if they saw an irrigation channel they would dam it with dead cattle. With their crusaders' crosses stitched to their sleeves they dedicated each new bit of destruction to Saint James the Moorslayer, and they dreamed of what they would do if they found a few plump Moorish women hiding out in the ruins. Thus they wrecked a landscape that had been intensively farmed for seven centuries.

Grace had no sympathy for James's unease at all this. 'You're a hypocrite,' she said bluntly. 'You gladly devote your pious, pointless little life to the development of devastating weapons. And yet you flinch when you see the results.'

James faced his conscience, and he knew she was right. He had had no choice about being assigned by his abbot to the engines project. But he was thirty years old now, and as the years had worn away he had become engaged in the intellectual exercise of the engines for its own challenge. It was thrilling to see these most remarkable toys emerge from heaps of wood and iron, saltpetre, sulphur and carbon – a thrill, his confessor warned him, that might be a compensation for other aspects of his life that he had piously put aside.

But he had, he realised, built a wall in his mind between the development of the engines and their ultimate purpose.

He said unhappily, 'It's just that I didn't expect it to be like this.' He waved a hand. 'Is this war? This wanton destruction of property – there will be famine here in the winter – this savagery inflicted on the old and the ill, on women and children.'

She laughed at him. 'What did you expect, chivalry? You ought to read a little more widely, brother. This is the way wars are fought now: French against Flemish, Italian against Italian, Moor against Christian… Why, we English pioneered the technique, in our long war with the French. You cut off your enemy at the knees by removing his food supply, by shocking his population into terror and submission. There's even a word for it, I'm told: chevauchee. Wars are fought like this all over Europe now, like it or not.

'So pray for the souls of the dead children, friar. But remember that the Pope himself says that a war for Christ is a just war, however it's fought. And pray that you're never on the losing side.'

She was a hard, brutal woman. And though she must be near fifty now, the angry lust she had so carelessly stirred in him still flickered. She had made a peculiar enemy of him by the way she had treated him, he thought. He tried to conceal this from her. And he tried to dismiss from his own mind the thoughts he had of her, fantasies of lust and violence, in which he ended her domination of him once and for all.

After days on the road, they arrived at Ronda.

The port of Malaga was the Christians' next strategic objective, as it had been for two years, but its twin fortresses stood strong and stubborn under the command of the formidable El Zagal, and the Christians did not yet have the resources to deal with it. So they had focused their energies on destroying this town, Ronda, thirty miles inland and sixty miles west of Malaga, the key to the western defence of the residual Moorish state.

The site was extraordinary. Ronda sat on top of a butte, a pillar of rock. To the north was a steep-walled gorge. To the south the butte was lower, and here the Moors had built a massive fortification, a curtain wall studded by towers. The only way into the town was by a bridge that spanned the gorge to the north. James, studying this place, thought it was a textbook example of a natural fortress, a definition of impregnability. No wonder the Romans, those great military technicians, had settled here.

But the monarchs of Spain were here to take it, and the siege was laid.

The Christian camp, out of range of the Moorish defenders' cannons, arquebuses and crossbows, was a morass of mud and tents and stinking cesspits, over which a loose cloud of greasy smoke hung day and night. But as they approached, James saw with a helpless thrill that the banners of the monarchs hung over the camp. Fernando and Isabel, the modem champions of Christendom, really were here in person, not half a mile from where James and Grace pitched their own rough leather tent.

But this place of war was not comfortable.

When night fell great cannon began to roar. On the south side of the city, targeting the walls and towers, Fernando had drawn up a battery of immense new Italian guns called bombards. Their unceasing thunder was overwhelming, and the night was a hellish scene of half-naked men, blistered from the heat of the weapons, labouring amid a stink of gunpowder and smoke to load, aim and fire, over and over, the shot gradually battering down the city walls.

And as the day broke the Moors attacked – but they came from the hills, not from the city. James learned that these were the forces of the governor of Ronda. An experienced general called Hamet el Zegri, he had allowed himself to be lured out of his city to raid Christian fields and barns, a revenge for the chevauchee of his countryside. But the Christians had sent a cavalry detachment to cut him off from Ronda, and when el Zegri returned he found his town already besieged.

Still, under el Zegri's command the Moors came riding down from their hills, every day. The armies closed amid a roar of cannon and the popping of arquebuses and a clamour of war drums, and to cries of 'For Saint James!' and 'Allah akbar!' When the Christians mounted attacks, the Moorish would kneel in blocks, their pikes at the ready, soaking up the charges, their javelins in quivers to be flung with deadly skill. And the Moorish cavalry, lightly armoured, riding fast under their colourful battle flags, was much more mobile than the Christian knights in their heavier chain-mail and plate.

For all the bustle and excitement of the cavalry charges and the spectacle of the cannon and arquebuses, the real work of killing was done, as it had always been, with pikes and swords and scimitars, wielded by human muscle, one man against another. James was appalled by the utter, fully committed violence of these encounters, even though none of them was conclusive. Isabel had set aside tents to serve as hospitals, but they were overrun, and if you went to that part of the camp the groans of the dying and the stink of rotting flesh were unbearable.

For four nights the bombardment continued, and for four days the Moors attacked. James didn't sleep for a single hour. It was a time of utter misery, for besieged and besiegers. In the Christian camp, the supply lines to Cordoba were fragile, and all there was to eat was a disgusting mixture of flour in pork fat.

Relief came when the last of Ronda's towers was demolished, and the walls crumbled. James stood beside the silent bombards, watching the end game of the siege as the caballeros swarmed into the city, and the screams began.