One day in spring another caravan arrived, full of strangers and their possessions; they had heard of the new town Baraka, and wanted to move there. It was another ship of fools, come from the Armenian and Zott settlements in Portugal and Castile, its criminal tendencies made obvious by the high incidence of handlessness and musical instruments, puppeteers and fortune tellers.

'I'm surprised they made it over the mountains,' Bistami said to Ibn Ezra.

'Necessity made them inventive, no doubt. Al Andalus is a dangerous place for people like these. The Sultan's brother is proving a very strict caliph, I have heard, almost Almohad in his purity. The form of Islam he enforces is so pure that I don't believe it was ever lived before, even in the time of the Prophet. No, this caravan is made of people on the run. And so was ours.'

'Sanctuary,' Bistami said. 'That's what the Christians called a place of protection. Usually their churches, or else a royal court. Like some of the sufi ribat in Persia. It's a good thing. The good people come to you when the law elsewhere becomes too harsh.'

So they came. Some were apostates or heretics, and Bistami debated these in the mosque itself, trying as he spoke to create an atmosphere in which all these matters could be discussed freely, without a sense of danger hanging overhead – it existed, but far away, back over the Pyrenees – but also without anything blasphemous against God or Mohammed being affirmed. It did not matter whether one was Sunni or Shiite Arabian or Andalusi, Turk or Zott, man or woman; what mattered was devotion, and the Quran.

It was interesting to Bistami that this religious balancing act got easier to maintain the longer he worked at it, as if he were practising something physical, on a ledge or high wall. A challenge to the authority of the caliph? See what the Quran said about it. Ignore the hadith that had encrusted the holy book, and so often distorted it: cut through to the source. There the messages might be ambiguous, often they were.

But the book had come to Mohammed over a period of many years, and important concepts were usually repeated in it, in slightly different ways each time. They would read all the relevant passages, and discuss the differences. 'When I was in Mecca studying, the true scholars would say…' This was as much authority as Bistami would claim for himself; that he had heard true authorities speak. It was the method of the hadith, of course, but with a different content: that the hadith could not be trusted, only the Quran.

'I was speaking with the Sultana about this matter This was another common gambit. Indeed, he consulted with her about almost every question that came up, and without fail in all matters having to do with women or child rearing; concerning family life he always deferred to ber judgment, which he learned to trust more and more as the first years passed. She knew the Quran inside out, and had memorized every sura that aided her case against undue hierarchy, and her protectiveness for the weak of the city grew unabated. Above all she commanded the eye and the heart, wherever she went, and never more so than in the mosque. There was no longer any question of her right to be there, and occasionally even to lead the prayers. It would have seemed unnatural to bar such a being, so full of divine grace, from the place of worship in a city named Baraka. As she herself said, 'Did God make me? Did He give me a mind and a soul as great as any man's? Did men's children come out of a woman? Would you deny your own mother a place in heaven? Can anyone gain heaven who is not admitted to the sight of God on this Earth?'

No one who would answer these questions in the negative stayed long in Baraka. There were other towns being settled upstream and to the north, founded by Armenians and Zott who were less full of Muslim fervour. A fair number of the Sultan's subjects moved away as time passed. Nevertheless, the crowds at the grand mosque grew. They built smaller ones on the expanding outskirts of town, the usual neighbourhood mosques, but always the Friday mosque remained the meeting place of the city, its plaza and the madressa grounds filled by the whole population on holy days, and during the festivals and Ramadan, and on the first day of snow every year, when the bonfire of winter was lit. Baraka was a single family then, and Sultana Katima its mother and sister.

The madressa grew as fast as the town, or faster. Every spring, after the snows on the mountain roads had melted, new caravans arrived, guided by mountain folk. Some in each group had come to study in the madressa, which grew famous for Ibn Ezra's investigations into plants and animals, the Romans, building technique, and the stars. When they came from al Andalus they sometimes brought with them newly recovered books by Ibn Rashd or Maimonides, or new Arabic translations of the ancient Greeks, and they brought also the desire to share what they knew, and learn more. The new convivencia had its heart in Baraka's madressa, and word spread.

Then one bad day, late in the sixth year of the Barakan hegira, Sultan Mawji Darya fell gravely ill. He had grown fat in the previous months, and Ibn Ezra had tried to be his doctor, putting him on a strict diet of grain and milk, which seemed to help his complexion and energy; but then one night he took ill. Ibn Ezra woke Bistami from his bed: 'Come along. The Sultan is so ill he needs the prayers.'

This coming from Ibn Ezra was bad indeed, as he was not much of a one for prayer. Bistami hurried after him, and joined the royal family in their part of the big palace. Sultana Katima was white faced, and Bistami was shocked to see how unhappy his arrival made her. It wasn't anything personal, but she knew why Ibn Ezra had brought him at such an hour, and she bit her lip and looked away, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Inside their bedroom the Sultan writhed, silent but for heavy, choked breathing. His face was a dark red colour.

'Has he been poisoned?' Bistami asked Ibn Ezra in a whisper.

'No, I don't think so. Their taster is fine,' indicating the big cat sleeping curled in its little bed in the corner. 'Unless someone pricked him with a poisoned needle. But I see no sign of that.'

Bistami sat by the roiling Sultan and took his hot hand. Before a word had escaped him, the Sultan gave a weak groan and arched back. His breathing stopped. Ibn Ezra grabbed his arms and crossed them before his chest and pressed hard, grunting himself. To no avail; the Sultan had died, his body still locked in its last paroxysm. The Sultana burst weeping into the room, tried to revive him herself, calling to him and to God, and begging Ibn Ezra to keep up his efforts. It took both men some time to convince her that it was all in vain; they had failed; the Sultan was dead.

Funerals in Islam harked back to earlier times. Men and women congregated in different areas during the ceremonies, and only mingled in the cemetery afterwards, during the brief interment.

But of course this was the first funeral for a sultan of Baraka, and the Sultana herself led the whole population into the grand mosque plaza, where she had ordered the body to lie in state. Bistami could only go along with the crowd and stand before them, saying the old prayers of the service as if they were always announced to all together. And why not? Certain lines of the service made sense only if said to eve one in the community: and suddenly, looking out at the stripped, desolate faces of every person in the city, he understood that the tradition had been wrong, that it was plainly wrong and even cruel to split the community apart at the very moment it needed to see itself all together as one. He had never felt such a heterodox opinion so strongly before; he had always agreed with the Sultana's ideas out of the unexamined principle that she ought always to be right. Shaken by this sudden conversion in his ideas, and by the sight of the beloved Sultan's body there in its coffin on its dais, he reminded them all that the sun only shone a certain number of hours on any life. He spoke the words of this impromptu sermon in a hoarse tearing voice which sounded even to him as if it were coming from some other throat; it was the same as it had been during those eternal days long ago, reciting the Quran under the cloud of Akbar's anger. This association was too much, and he began to weep, struggled to speak. All in the plaza wept, the wailing began again, many striking themselves in the self flagellation that took some of the pain away.