Yusuf summoned Zulaykha to the water accounts room before the morning prayer.
She did not come alone. Nura stood by the door, Eliaz kept close behind her shoulder, and Rafiq remained in the corridor, intently counting the guards' footsteps.
Yusuf did not object.
"Witnesses are useful," he said. "They argue less afterwards than lovers do."
Zulaykha laid the full seal on the table.
"You added the second line."
Yusuf did not look at the seal. His gaze rested on the fine red marks the copper rim had left on Zulaykha's fingers.
"I allowed the message to reach those who were waiting for it."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the answer of the keeper of the water. I direct it where the city needs it most, not where people demand it."
The walls of the room were hung with tablets listing the aljibes' turns, the sick, the names of the quarters, the garden schedules and records of the court's consumption. Nothing suggested a villain's lair. Everything was orderly and reasonable.
That made it worse.
Yusuf opened a low chest and took out three sheets.
"You think I want Granada to die of thirst. No. I want it to surrender and be spared the flames."
He placed the first sheet before Zulaykha. The letter was in Castilian, with an Arabic translation by a palace scribe running down one side.
Eliaz read quietly:
"If the city holds out until the spring sickness comes, the royal camp will demand an example. If it surrenders before the water is entirely fouled, the craftsmen may be spared."
"Gonzalo?" Zulaykha asked.
"It is in his hand."
The second sheet was older. It bore three names: Khalid al-Mairi, Gonzalo de Mena, Amina. They appeared not in a charge, but in a list of pupils and hostages at the old school of water.
Nura swore under her breath.
"He studied here."
"Yes," said Yusuf. "A Castilian boy placed with the masters of Granada. An exchanged hostage, then a pupil, then a man who realised water could achieve more than a siege. Khalid knew him before the war. Amina knew him before she married."
Now Zulaykha understood: Gonzalo had not studied Granada's waterways from the outside. He had grown up among their masters.
Yusuf laid down the third sheet.
It was a fragment of a letter from Amina to the old school of water, intercepted many years before and preserved among the papers from the false inquiry into Khalid. A few stark lines:
"The mark would not take beneath the left collarbone. The boy cried very little. I tore the iron away before his skin accepted the circle. Later he put the mark on the wrist, where the skin took the iron more cleanly."
Íñigo.
The scar beneath his left collarbone.
A battle scar would have looked different. Gonzalo had tried to burn a mark into his son's body when he was still a child. First beneath the collarbone, then on the wrist. Afterwards he had spent years forcing him to measure ditches, set stakes and search for water courses.
It took Zulaykha a moment to recognise her own voice.
"You knew this, and you kept him in irons."
"I knew that a man with such a mark was dangerous without them."
"Dangerous to whom?"
Yusuf looked at her wearily.
"To everyone who wants the guilty to be simple."
He did not shout. He did not gloat. He spoke as Eliaz spoke of an illness once it had entered the blood.
"You think I am worse than Gonzalo. Perhaps I am. He wants to drain Granada dry so the kings can enter as saviours and entrust him with rebuilding our waterways. I want to force the city to surrender before the assault. Gonzalo thinks of the power he will hold afterwards; I think of those who will still be alive. There is a difference between us, even if you find it abhorrent."
Zulaykha said nothing.
The most frightening thing was that Yusuf's reasoning held a truth of its own.
He continued:
"Boabdil wavers. The kings wait. The quarters are angry. One false cry by the Darro, and the city will either open its own gates or burn against them. I need a surrender before the assault."
"By thirst."
"By fear of thirst. They are different things, so long as the reckoning holds."
"For those who do the reckoning."
For the first time, Yusuf looked away.
Then he took out a small wooden model of a sluice. Its upper tooth was finely carved. He turned it, and a little channel on the table directed a drop to one side. He turned it farther, and the drop struck straight into the sand that represented the ditch.
"Open it sharply, and the water will strike the Castilian trenches. Not the whole camp, only the northern ditch. There are diggers there, sick men, cooks, cart boys and several companies. The torrent will tear out the tunnels. The kings will withdraw for several days, and Granada will secure better terms."
Nura said:
"And who will count those it carries away?"
Yusuf answered:
"Whoever remains alive."
Zulaykha looked at the full seal and felt for the first time the whole weight of the authority she had accepted.
"Here is the bargain," said Yusuf. "Give up Íñigo. Release the torrent into the ditch. I will bring Khalid alive before the water court and name him not as a traitor, but as keeper of the final prohibition. The charge against the house of al-Mairi will be lifted."
He had divined her oldest desire, and despite herself Zulaykha pictured her father exonerated.
"And if I refuse?"
"Then Gonzalo will take his son and the song. Boabdil will give the seal to whoever dares release the water. Khalid will die a blind prisoner in the listening passage. And you will be innocent only before yourself."
Eliaz said quietly:
"Sometimes that is the only court that cannot be bought."
Yusuf looked at the physician with an almost kindly pity.
"Physicians can afford such phrases. They bury people one at a time."
Outside, the alarm bell sounded at the northern wall.
They were digging openly now.
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