Court of Lions

Though the shadows of these walls have long

since gone, the memory of them will live on as

the final refuge of dreams and art. And then the

last nightingale to breathe on this earth will build

its nest and sing its farewell song among the

glorious ruins of the Alhambra.

FRANCISCO VILLAESPESA

Molten silver flows through the pearls, which it

resembles in its pure, white beauty

Water and marble seem to be one in appearance, and

we know not which of the two is flowing.

Do you not see how the water spills into the basin,

but the hidden spout hides it immediately?

It is a lover whose eyes brim over with tears, tears that

it hides for fear someone will reveal them . . .

IBN ZAMRAK

Dramatis Personae

KATE’S STORY

IN SPAIN

Kate Fordham, Englishwoman working in Granada under the name of Anna Maria Moreno

Jimena, owner of the Bodega Santa Isabel in Granada

Juan, Axel, Leena, Giorgio, Kate’s co-workers in the bodega

Hicham, Moroccan man working in an Internet café

Dr. Khadija Boutaki, expert in Islamic gardens

Brahim Boutaki, her husband, a retired zlellij worker

Omar Boutaki, Brahim’s brother, working in restoration at the Alhambra

Abdou, a ma’allem—master—zellij worker

Mohamed Boutaki, Omar’s son, a zellij expert from Fez

In ENGLAND

Jess Scott, née Fordham, Kate’s twin sister

Luke, Kate’s son

Evan Scott, Jess’s husband

James Foxley, antiques dealer

Yusuf, corner-shop assistant

BLESSINGS’S STORY

GRANADA IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Blessings, child from a desert tribe sold into the Granada court as a companion to

Prince Abu Abdullah Mohammed (Momo), soon to be Mohammed XII of Granada, known by his enemies as Boabdil

Abu’l Hasan Ali, sultan of Granada, known also as Moulay Hasan, father to Momo

Abu Abdullah Muhamed al-Zaghal, his brother, called usually al-Zaghal

Lalla Aysha the Pious, the Chaste, the sultana, married to Moulay Hasan, mother to Momo

Rachid, the younger son of Moulay Hasan and Lalla Aysha

Qasim Abdelmalik, the vizier (chief minister) at the Granada court

Dr. Ibrahim, court doctor

Isobel de Solis, war captive, convert to Islam, married to Moulay Hasan and renamed Zoraya, Star of Morning

La Sabia, the Wise One, her servant

Ali Attar, pasha of the town of Loja

Mariam, his daughter, wife to Momo

Ahmed, the elder son of Momo and Mariam, known also as Alfonso

Yusuf, the baby son of Momo and Mariam

Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan, chief of the Banu Serraj (Abencerrages) clan, allied to Lalla Aysha

CASTILIANS AND ARAGONESE

Queen Isabella, queen of the conjoined kingdom of Castile and Aragón

King Ferdinand, her husband and king of the conjoined kingdom of Castile and Aragón

Don Diego Fernandez of Cordoba, the Count of Cabra

Don Diego, his nephew, a knight

Don Gonzalo Fernandez of Córdoba, known as the Great Captain

Don Rodrigo Ponce de León, the Marquis of Cádiz and King Ferdinand’s general

Cristoforo Colombo, also known as Cristóbal Colón and Christopher Columbus, adventurer

1

Kate

GRANADA

NOW

Kate didn’t consider herself a vandal. She had never wilfully damaged anything in her life (apart from herself), let alone a World Heritage Site. Intrigued by a plant that resembled a familiar English weed she knew of as the Mother of Thousands or Kenilworth ivy, she had been taking a closer look, and glimpsed something that shouldn’t have been there. Winkling it out, she’d triggered a little cascade of debris.

She glanced around, hoping no one had seen. The Alhambra palaces, constructed by the medieval Moorish kings of Granada and wrapped around by their majestic gardens, represented to her a sort of perfection: a paradise on earth. To get thrown out would be like getting expelled from Eden. She managed to fiddle the object into her palm and sat back, trying to look innocent.

No one appeared to have noticed, not even the group of tourists she’d come in with, who were now standing in a knot, poring over a guidebook, then staring across the gorge to the summer palace, their sun visors glinting in the low afternoon light and their Nordic walking poles tucked under their arms. She’d watched them striding purposefully up the hill from the Pomegranate Gate, their poles clacking on the stones, as if they were making their way to Everest Base Camp instead of a sunlit garden in Andalusia.

Turning slightly away from them, Kate tucked her hair behind her ears to examine what she had found, feeling an unexpected simple pleasure in the act. Her hair had taken its time growing back, as if nervous to be seen out in public, but now it brushed her shoulders. Perhaps it marked the extent to which she was being restored to herself.

She opened her hand. It was just an old screw of paper, probably a scrap of rubbish crammed into the crack in the wall by a visitor. Habit dictated that she painstakingly unroll it. (She did this with used wrapping paper, peeling off the tape, trying not to tear it. As a child, she had frustrated her family at Christmas by holding up the gift opening with her mildly autistic patience.) Inside the scroll of paper was a layer of coarse white grains, and beneath this was inked a series of symbols.

Her brain buzzed at a sudden memory: sitting with Jess on a long-ago wet Sunday afternoon with a book on the floor between them.

They were twins. Non-identical, but if they made the effort, it could be hard for people to tell them apart. They had been taking turns reading to each other, but she had been interrupting Jess, driving her mad with a typical eight-year-old’s questions. Yes, but what sort of spiders are they? Where did they come from? How did they get to be so big? Are there spiders in our woods that cocoon people and eat them alive?

Infuriated, Jess had put the book down flat as if hiding its contents from Kate, who had spied something she had never noticed before: that the pattern on the front cover also ran across the spine and onto the back of the book. And not just any pattern: symbols that looked sort of like an alphabet but were a type of writing she couldn’t quite understand. She had touched the border in wonder. Look, she’d said. Letters!

Jess had sighed. They’re runes, stupid, she’d declared with almost adult condescension. It’s another language. She pointed to a section of the border. See, there? You must be able to work that out.

It was a sort of spiky double B. In a flash of revelation Kate understood how the letters grouped around it made up a name. "It says ‘The Hobbit’! she squealed. It was a glimpse into a secret world. What does the rest say?"

They had spent the remainder of the afternoon transliterating the code and making up messages to each other. Over the years it had become their thing. Different codes, different games. Kate would receive postcards from Jess when she was travelling through Europe on a student rail card in her gap year: a few lines of neat runes, followed by a heart and a J, notes that remained cryptic even when decoded.

Boys like wolves roam. A lick or a kiss?

This, with an Italian stamp and a picture of a statue of Romulus and Remus. From Spain, a postcard showing a statue of a mounted hero named Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar in Burgos. C Heston’s steely gaze and auto da fe hair, she translated from Jess’s code. Reader, I swived him.

Swived was one of their code words, gleaned from reading Chaucer’s tales. The moment Kate had translated that fourth letter she’d burst out laughing and their mother had demanded to know why. Of course she hadn’t told.

Remembering, Kate smiled as she examined the paper further. The symbols on it resembled Tolkien’s runes: but here, she could find no simple guiding principle, could not even tell if they ran from left to right, right to left, top to bottom. They were a series of tiny markings, as if to save space, or to make the secret they contained even more obscure.

Perhaps this was a note left for an illicit lover, admitting to jealousy or betrayal or everlasting adoration. But more likely it was just a game, or a shopping list; or her imagination running away with her. A meaningless bit of garbage crammed into this crevice because someone couldn’t be bothered to find a bin to throw it away in. Which was probably what she should do with it.

But instead, she tucked it into her jeans pocket. Perhaps it was just in a language she didn’t know, like Hebrew or Cyrillic. Maybe she should show it around at the bar and see what anyone there could make of it. They were a cosmopolitan lot. She glanced at her watch. Nearly five o’clock. She was on evenings this week, which was better for tips but played havoc with her sleep. She pushed herself to her feet, grimacing as her knees cracked. Showing your age, Kate. Creaking knees and a watch. No one else at the bar even owned a watch: smart phones had taken over. This thought triggered another: I must phone Jess and Luke.

The idea of reconnecting to the world should have warmed her, but it was as if a cloud passed across the face of the sun.

Anna! Anna Maria, I’m talking to you—did you hear a word I said?

Kate looked up with a start from the chalkboard on which she was writing—in Spanish on one side, English on the other—that night’s specials: patatas a lo pobre, poor man’s potatoes; piquillos rellenos, stuffed peppers; boquerónes, Spanish white anchovies. Sorry, I was a million miles away. It took her a moment to find a suitable Spanish phrase. "Un millón de millas."

Jimena shook her head wearily. "Sometimes it’s as if you’re in another world. When I started working, if I didn’t leap to attention as soon as Paolo called my name, I’d have been out in the gutter, doing trabajo de negros."

Black man’s work.

Jimena’s tales of her hardscrabble life before she clawed her way up to owning the Bodega Santa Isabel were always colourful; her racism, however, was highly unpleasant. Kate bit her tongue and held up the finished chalkboard. There—is that okay?

Jimena ran her eyes over the Spanish text, her thin face as intent as a hawk’s as she concentrated. "Two r’s in chicharrón, she said, focusing on the single error, handing the tablet back without a word of praise. And as I was saying, table seven is filthy and the candle on table five needs to be replaced."

And she was off to berate someone else.

Kate watched as she headed for Leena and Giorgio, standing together with their backs foolishly to the bar as they laughed about something, their heads bent in joyful complicity. She wished she could warn them, but seconds later they jolted upright like guilty children, away from the phone they’d been craning over, and in an instant Jimena had it in her hands like some sort of wicked stepmother, confiscated for the rest of the night. Kate fingered the scrap of paper in her jeans pocket, and left it there.

She moved deftly between the tables, setting chairs and placemats straight, aligning a knife someone had put down askew. She replaced the candle on table five and wiped down the plastic cloth on table seven, going through her paces on automatic. But all the while she was thinking: I must call Jess.

It had been less than a week since they last spoke, but something was niggling at her. She hoped Luke wasn’t ill. A stabbing pain went through her at the thought of that.

Hi, Anna! Axel called through a cloud of steam. Beside him Juan was peeling and chopping potatoes.

Drink later? he asked.

Maybe. Sometimes they sat out on the back step after service, drinking beer: the two lads were good company, though she did feel old enough to be their mother.

Axel had blond, blunt Swedish features; Juan was dark and aquiline and Spanish, from Madrid. They were like flip sides of the same coin: in their twenties, working their way from town to town, devouring life as they went. Kate was thirty-nine. She envied them their unmoored lifestyle. Yet here she was, cast away with no anchor, a long, long way from the life she had known. But she did not feel blithe and carefree: far from it. Perhaps that was the difference between thirty-nine and twenty-five.

Try to live in the moment, Kate, she told herself fiercely. She took a few deep breaths. You only get the one life. Okay, she amended. If we don’t finish too late.

The crowd in tonight was varied. The Alhambra, and the city that had grown up around it, attracted all sorts of visitors. Youngsters making the rounds of the sights of Europe, too full of narcissism and hormones for its majesty and tragedy to touch their hearts; academics who carried notebooks with them, looking, looking, but never really seeing; couples on honeymoon, come to sigh over the sunsets and the romantic courtyards; seasoned travellers who walked briskly through the gardens, eating the ground away till they could get to the Nasrid palaces and tick off the most famous marvels from their itineraries; batty old women who touched the walls when they thought no one was looking as if they might raise a ghost or two; dark-eyed men from North Africa, glowering at all that was lost, when once they had been kings. They all came in here for tapas, for the deep-red local wine and for cerveza.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. When Jimena was front of house, the latter group got turned away with a curt We have no tables; unspoken: for the likes of you—even though the place was patently empty.

To say her boss was racist was too simple a statement. It was as if Jimena felt she was the last bastion of Catholic Spain, a holy inquisitor holding back the Moorish hordes. Arabs were not welcome in the bodega under Jimena’s regime and woe betide you if you let one in. They’re terrorists, all of them. You think they wouldn’t kill you in an instant if they could get away with it? I lost a cousin in the Madrid bombings. It’s what their kind has been doing for centuries. It’s in their blood. They hate us for what we took back from them, and they’re planning all the time how they’re going to get it back, or destroy it if they can’t. They are the enemy. They have always been the enemy. I may not have the power to keep them out of my country, but by God I’ll keep them out of my bar!

The first time Kate had heard this tirade—levelled at a newcomer who’d had the temerity to seat a pleasant family of Moroccan tourists—she’d felt something inside her shrivel. Once, she’d have called Jimena to account, but she’d lost that earlier confidence, found it hard to summon the courage. And she hated herself for that.

There were Swedes and French, Germans, Japanese and Danes in tonight; she heard Leena greet the latter group with a cheery Hej hej. No English, which was something of a relief. Kate felt herself tense whenever she heard an English accent, no matter how unfamiliar it might be. It was absurd, she knew, but she couldn’t help it.

Taking a short break at half past eleven, she stepped out into the street to get a better phone signal and called her sister’s landline. There was a long pause before the dial tone kicked in, and then the ringing went on and on and on. For so long, in fact, that she thought she must have keyed in the wrong number. She kept no stored information on the phone—it was a cheap one loaded with a local SIM card that she topped up with cash—and she was tired, so a wrong number was quite possible. Concentrating, she punched the number in again, but still there was no response, not even from the answering machine. Kate’s skin prickled. Probably Jess was out for the evening and had forgotten to set it. But wouldn’t the babysitter have answered in that case? She tried Jess’s mobile; it went to voice mail. Jess must have had an early night, Kate told herself firmly. She would try phoning again in the morning; nothing to worry about.

Even so, she felt a tug of anxiety for the rest of her shift, despite playing her part with professional smiles and small talk.

By the time the party of Danes had finished their drinks and finally departed with a promise to return before the end of the week, it was long past one and Kate was suppressing yawns that felt as if she might dislocate her jaw. The youngsters didn’t seem to care at all that it was so late: they just slept in the next day. But Kate had a routine and breaking it made her uncomfortable. She thought: If I hurry, I can get six hours’ sleep. So when Juan approached with a pair of beer bottles swinging between the fingers of one hand, she shook her head. Actually, I changed my mind, Juan. Not tonight— I’m too tired.

He shrugged. Maybe tomorrow, huh?

Good night, Anna! Leena kissed her on the cheek. See you Sunday. Lucky Leena: two whole days off.

Kate said her farewells and slipped into the night. She’d arrived in Granada the previous summer, during a particularly sweltering July, but she still couldn’t seem to catch the relaxed local vibe. Her heels rang on the uneven stones of the narrow road down to the Plaza Nueva, the sound echoing off the metal-shuttered shopfronts. As she crossed into the Arab quarter, known as the Albayzin, something shot out of the shadows and scurried through a patch of moonlight and into the obscurity of the undergrowth at the foot of the Sabika Hill. She jumped, startled, and then chided herself—a cat, she thought. Or maybe a fox. Silly to feel so shaken up because of some small creature that was no doubt a lot more scared of her than she should be of it.

She followed the course of the River Darro along the main road for a while, then turned left up the Calle Zafra and climbed the narrow street steadily, the pebble mosaics underfoot made slippery by centuries of walkers, lethal when it rained. Approaching the Calle Guinea at last, she dug out her key, clutched it in her palm, letting the tang protrude between her fingers as she’d been taught in self-defence classes. It really wasn’t that sort of place, the Albayzin, though it had an edge to it sometimes, but she was always careful. At that moment she saw the bit of paper she’d taken out of the wall that afternoon fluttering to the ground. She’d forgotten to show it around at work to see if anyone recognized the markings on it. Never mind. There was always tomorrow.

Crouching, she retrieved it and was about to stand again, when someone said her name. Not a shout but a quiet statement.

Kate.

Here, no one called her Kate. No one. Here, she was Anna. Anna Maria, to be precise. Her surname Moreno. It was a common name, meaning dark haired. A small private joke. Even a clue . . .

She sprang upright, heart beating wildly, the key in her hand ready to jab. She thought the voice had come from behind her. Her pulse raced. She interrogated her surroundings at speed. But nothing moved in the darkness.

Stop it, Kate.

Forcing herself to ignore her terror, she ran down the alley to her door.

As she reached for the lock, moonlight picked out the web of tiny, pale scars on her forearm.

2

He was nearly on her. She could feel his hot breath on her naked back. Her legs felt like lead as she forced them to run, but he caught her and—

The bleep of the phone on the bedside table woke Kate just as the hand closed on her shoulder. She lay there, heart thudding, and tried to push through the membrane of the dream, tried to puzzle out why she had been running naked down an alley. The return to reality came slowly, as if the dream were in league with her pursuer. She realized it was still fully dark, not even a hint of light flickering around the edges of her closed curtains. Nervously, she picked up the phone and stared at the text message. From Jess, of course; the only person who had this number:

At Sarah’s. Just walked up the cliff for signal—none in the house. Will email tomorrow a.m. Love you. Jx

It was 3:28 a.m. and Jess’s friend Sarah lived in a remote cottage in North Cornwall. What on earth had driven her sister to be walking up a Cornish cliff in the middle of the night to send her a text? She rang back at once, but there was no reply. Beset by anxieties, Kate swung her legs out of the narrow bunk and walked barefoot over the cool tiles to the window. She pushed back the drapes and gazed out across the Darro gorge to where the moon limned the roofs and walls of the ancient fortress. What was she doing here, a thousand miles away from her real life? She leaned her forehead against the window, watched her breath bloom and evaporate upon the cold glass. Breathe in and out, keep breathing. Sometimes it was all she could do.

Eventually, she got back into bed and lay there, trying to summon sleep, reciting the common names of wildflowers she and Jess used to find in the hedgerows on their walk to school instead of counting sheep:

Yellow archangel

Alexanders

Queen Anne’s lace

Charlock

Bird’s-eye speedwell

Kenilworth ivy

When this proved ineffective, she started on their botanical names:

Lamium galeobdolon

Smyrnium olusatrum

Anthriscus sylvestris

Sinapis arvensis

Veronica chamaedrys

Cymbalaria muralis

Her love of plants should have carried her into a career as a botanist. Instead she’d ended up as a data analyst. She used to think that by applying logic she had some control over her choices, but life seemed determined to prove her wrong. For where was she now? No longer a well-respected analyst on a good salary but a waitress living in a foreign country under an assumed name, having lost everything she cared most about in the world.

Kate woke again to the sound of a phone ringing, but when she grabbed her mobile to answer it, the wretched thing died, its battery flat. She’d forgotten to plug it in overnight, something she did religiously, part of her pre-bed routine. She had been spooked last night.

She paced the apartment while she waited for the phone to charge, made some coffee, took a cup of it out and sat to drink it in a pool of sunlight on the edge of the terrace wall. She loved this view looking over the undulating terracotta rooftops that had sheltered the houses beneath for hundreds of years in some cases, to the presiding grandeur of the Alhambra on its great platform of rock across the gorge, with its massive tawny walls, its turrets and towers. How extraordinary it must have been to live in such magnificent surroundings. She wondered if anyone raised in a palace could ever be a normal person, could even begin to function as an understandable human being. In her small experience of the world, luxuries spoiled people; made them increasingly less human, less accommodating to others; made them think too highly of themselves. Made them cruel.

She shuddered, and turned that thought aside.

The phone had some charge now. She rang Jess’s number, but it went to voice mail and all she could do was to say she had called, that she hoped Jess and Luke were okay, and that she would call back. She plugged the phone back into its charger. Made another cup of coffee. Drank it. Shook the phone, stared at the message again. Left another voice mail:

Call me, Jess—I’m really worried now!

Then she wished she hadn’t. Another ten minutes passed with no response from her sister. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t spend all day waiting for the phone to charge and Jess to call; she had a life to live, even if that did mean such mundanities as dealing with laundry and grocery shopping.

It was approaching eleven by the time she’d walked up to the Calle Charca to drop her laundry off with Rosita, a cheerful, tubby Spanish woman whose husband made the deliveries to the bodega and who washed three times a week for those with no machines, like Kate. Picking up fresh laundry a day later was one of Kate’s pleasures. Nothing smelled as nice as sheets that had been dried in the Albayzin sun: it seemed to imbue them with a whiff of the incense of ages past, with bitter oranges and spiced brandy. Then it was on to the little supermarket on the Calle Panaderos and the market in the square for beautifully organic fruit and veg. And still Jess hadn’t rung!

As Kate was making her way back home with her groceries, she thought she heard the muezzin at the mosque, the Mezquita Mayor, just a few streets away, starting to call the Muslim faithful to prayer. She strained her ears toward the fragile sound, but a truck came rattling along the narrow street, making her flatten herself against the rough wall, and by the time its roar had passed, the muezzin had fallen silent. The mosque had been constructed less than twenty years ago, the city finally bowing to the pressure to provide its significant North African population with somewhere to worship other than out of sight in garages and private houses. Catholic Spain might have expelled its Moors at the end of the fifteenth century, but it seemed they had been allowed to return more than half a millennium later, and be woven back into the rich warp and weft of the country they had done so much to civilize. Even if they hadn’t been permitted to give the muezzin a loudspeaker.

She dropped into the Internet café to send Jess an email. Hicham, not Saïd, was on duty, and he did not meet her eyes when she greeted him, or hold his hand out for the money, but instead waited for her to put the coins down on the counter, as if her touch might contaminate him. The place was usually stuffed with young men, but when Saïd was here, she never felt uncomfortable coming in on her own. The way Hicham treated her, though, made her clumsy. Trying to fiddle her change back into her bag, she dislodged a slip of paper, which spun across the melamine countertop toward him. Hicham stopped its progress with a stab of his finger.

Sorry, she said automatically. Then added, Perdón. She reached out to take it back, but he put his hand flat over it. His black eyes challenged her.

Why you have this?

What?

He repeated the question. Flummoxed, she shrugged. Sorry, it’s just a bit of rubbish. I should have put it in a bin. But there’s never one around when you need one, is there? She laughed awkwardly. Had she unleashed some sort of obscure insult: dropping a bit of waste paper in front of a Muslim man? She had no idea.

If it just rubbish, why you want it back?

There was no answer to this. She watched Hicham pick up the paper to scrutinize it. Then she realized what it was. The scrap of paper that she’d winkled out of the wall in the palace gardens yesterday. Oh. Please, I do want that back.

Hicham’s lip curled. I don’t think so. It not yours.

For a brief, embarrassing moment Kate thought she might burst into tears. What on earth was the matter with her? When had she become so pathetic? He was only a local café worker playing a game with her. A rather nasty, dour little game, exercising a bit of power over a woman: she should recognize that sort of thing by now. And really, did it matter so much? All this fuss over a scrap of rubbish. She rallied herself. Keep it, then.

For a moment he looked confused. Then he shoved the paper back across the counter at her. You don’t trick me like that. He turned and made for the back room, his mobile phone already to his ear.

She slid the scrap back into her bag. Hicham had truly rattled her; how dare he be so rude? Saïd was always so nice, so easy to talk to, even a bit flirty. He had a Spanish girlfriend, though, a handsome woman called Pilar, who worked at a museum. At least, she thought Pilar was his girlfriend. Did men from his culture even have girlfriends, or were they expected to marry to have a relationship? Really, what she knew about Muslim men—indeed, any sort of men—she could fit on the back of that sweet wrapper, or whatever it was.

She found an unoccupied monitor along the back wall between a group of giggling teenagers and a quiet young man who swiftly angled his body to shield the screen of his monitor from her. As if she cared that he was looking at pornography at midday on a Friday. Except. . . it seemed she did care. Unwelcome images swam up from the depths of her memory, cutting through dark waters with sharp fins.

No. She would not think about any of that. She would not. She must find out why Jess had left her a message in the middle of the night, see if the promised email had arrived yet.

She logged into her anonymous email account, but there was nothing from Jess. A couple of bits of spam from addresses she didn’t recognize. Not opening those. Sighing, she clicked out of her emails and onto a news site, her mind whirling. A terrorist bombing in North Africa. The breaking of a ceasefire in the Middle East. Drone strikes, drowned migrants, a volcano erupting in South America. Death and disaster all around.

Why hadn’t Jess returned her call? Perhaps it was the signal at Sarah’s. The area was pretty remote: on the north coast of Cornwall, at the tail end of a narrow valley leading down to the sea. Amid the ramsons and nettles on the overgrown path were standing stones of mossy granite covered with ancient carved spirals. Kate and Jess had helped Sarah to move in. Getting the fridge down that track had been a nightmare. In fact, the whole experience had rather freaked her out. She found the place eerie, the only consolation for that being that she had spotted the glowing lights of fireflies darting between the trees on that first night, and on the heathland at the top of the cliff she had climbed, desperate for some sunlight, had come across a Dactylorhiza. maculata, a heath spotted orchid, its whorls of lilac and white as intricate as a printed paisley pattern.

But something was definitely up with Jess. What had made her sister drive all that way without warning? Kate thought of Luke bundled in a blanket in the passenger seat of the ailing Fiat as Jess drove fiercely through the night, all the way to Cornwall, which was pretty much the end of the world.

Kate felt her stomach clench with anxiety.

She went back to her emails, checked her phone again. Still nothing. She was about to click out of her session, when she realized one of the spam emails might not be what she’d thought.

[email protected]

Suddenly she remembered that was the name Sarah used for her refurbishing business. She clicked on the email. It took an age to load, and when it did, the message was in code.

Kate felt a frisson of terror tinged with excitement. Terror, that Jess had felt the need to obscure her message. Excitement, that there was a puzzle to be solved.

She burrowed in her bag for a pen and something to write on. There was only the scrap of paper that had come out of the wall. She couldn’t write on that. The symbols taunted her: the inverted triangles and dotted circles, the stick figures and sideways E’s. One symbol looked like a trestle table, another like a wide-armed Y. It was clearly as much of a language as the code she and Jess had devised. And it might be old, and important. No, she couldn’t use the scrap of paper for her workings. Yesterday’s newspaper lay on the floor. She picked it up. On the sports pages was a huge photo of Cristiano Ronaldo. The wide, blank planes of his face offered plenty of room for the code working. After all, the message was not, she was disappointed to see, a long one.

G3.E2D4.D5A3B4 . . .

Kate couldn’t help but smile. It was an easy code—with a twist. She didn’t even have to draw the grid: she could picture it quite easily.

HE FO—

By the time Kate had reached the fifth letter her heart was thudding. No. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t— She felt coffee begin to come back up her throat, had to swallow it with a choking gulp that caught even the attention of the teenagers, who turned dark-eyed stares upon her. For a moment she felt light-headed. She gritted her teeth, fought for control.

When she opened her eyes, she found one of the boys peering at her. Had she chanted aloud? He would think she was a madwoman. Or a penitent, praying. Or a witch, making an incantation. He said something and they all turned to look at her, leering. Then suddenly they were off out the door, shouting and laughing.

Kate was shaking. She took a deep breath to steady herself and went back to the coded message, praying she had made a mistake.

She had not.

HE FOUND US, KATE.

3

Blessings

GRANADA

1476, OR IN THE HEGIRA SHA’BAN 891

He stroked the tiled skin of the palace wall, and I wished suddenly, fervently, it were my skin he touched with such tenderness.

Look, Blessings, he said again. Really look. What do you see?

I was bored now. Patterns, I said, deliberately obtuse. Just patterns.

Prince Abu Abdullah Mohammed, heir to the throne of Granada, known to me as Momo, sighed. Sometimes he was so patient it made me want to break things. Spiderwebs—can’t you see them? Hundreds of spiderwebs, thousands of them.

They didn’t look much like spiderwebs to me, who had seen real ones stretched between cactuses in the desert, their fragile filaments barely catching the light. These webs were green, and gold, and red, and white. I supposed the craftsmen had used their imagination and jewelled them up. Sultans didn’t want their palaces adorned with real webs: they employed a battalion of slaves to get rid of all such traces of reality.

They represent the webs the spiders made to protect the Prophet when he was fleeing his enemies on the road to Medina, Momo went on.

He liked to educate me in such matters, since he regarded me as a heathen, a wild little savage. Both were pet names for me and I had allowed them to define me.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, hid in a cave in the mountains and the spiders worked furiously to spin their webs across the entrance. When the murderers came upon the cave in which he hid, the webs were so thick they passed by, convinced no one could have been there in years.

I yawned. I had heard the story before. Can’t we go outside? I whined.

"In a minute. The men who made this zellij were the finest craftsmen in the world. Imagine the care and patience it must take to cut each piece so precisely." His finger traced the design of the intricately pieced together tiling. There was such awe in his voice. It might seem mad to be jealous of a wall, but I was.

When they brought me to the Alhambra, it seemed so massive I was scared of it. The ceilings, so high, so heavy with detail in carved and coffered