In the morning Granada surrendered its keys.
No music of victory sounded within the walls, but grief was not the only feeling either. People tied up their belongings, closed their shops and prepared for the new rule. Children clung to their mothers. Men stood bewildered outside their houses, while the women were already thinking about bread again: water had finally ceased to occupy every thought.
At the gates, people looked not at the sky but at the jugs. The lot of the city was hard to comprehend, but water was simple: a jug was either full or empty; a child either drank or waited.
Yusuf was not executed at the fountain.
Boabdil ordered him held under guard until he could face judgement under water law and judgement by the new rulers. It was less than the crowd wanted and more than Yusuf had expected. Marwan was taken away separately. Gonzalo was stripped of the right to control the city's water pending a royal inquiry: too many witnesses had confirmed that he meant to flood the northern ditch with people still in it.
No one called it justice. It was too soon. But for the first time, punishment had not begun with thirst, and that in itself was a new rule.
Khalid was carried out into the morning light.
He could not see Granada, but he heard it: wheels, footsteps, weeping, water in bowls and the dry cough that was no longer a sentence.
"Is it falling?" he asked.
Zulaykha stood beside him.
"Yes."
"And flowing?"
"Yes."
"Then not all of it."
Íñigo walked with them towards the mountain sabil beyond the city wall. He wore no chain, but the mark of the iron remained on his skin. Some Granadans turned away from him, while the Castilians looked at him as a traitor. He kept walking all the same.
At a bend in the road, he said quietly to Zulaykha:
"My mother died two years before this water came. My father said she had not had the strength. Now I think what she lacked was Granada."
Zulaykha did not try to comfort him. She merely rested her palm on the rim of the bowl she carried. Íñigo understood: at the sabil they would remember Amina as well.
Halfway there, one of the Castilian diggers approached him, the same man who had raised his hand beside the cracked stake during the inquiry before the envoys.
"I saw the pit," he said. "It was cleared out during the night."
Íñigo stopped.
"Why did you say nothing?"
The digger looked towards the royal banners.
"Because I have children too."
Íñigo did not forgive him, but he nodded. That morning many people found the courage to tell the truth too late, yet their testimony was still needed.
By the wall of the poor quarter's sabil, the children were painting the blue bird again. Rafiq directed them so solemnly that Nura said:
"Master, your beak is crooked."
Rafiq replied:
"But the water runs straight."
Elias laughed for the first time in many days. Fatima held her children by the hands and did not ask Zulaykha to forgive her. Instead, she brought two more sick people from the neighbouring courtyard to the sabil.
Nura kept order in the queue and scolded everyone alike: the Granadans for jostling, the Castilians for standing too proudly, the children for trying to put their fingers into the stream.
"Water is not a toy," she said.
Still painting the bird, Rafiq replied:
"But now it is playing on our side."
"Water is on no one's side, master."
He blushed at the word and painted the wing broader.
At the edge of the queue stood a woman with a child in her arms. Zulaykha did not know her name. The little boy was alive and crying angrily with thirst. Zulaykha let the mother go ahead and handed her the bowl herself.
The mountain sabil was opened to those who were leaving and those who remained.
Khalid explained that the sabil was fed by an old outlet of the northern branch, long believed to be empty. When the smaller drains relieved the pressure on the ditch, water began flowing through that branch again.
The first person brought to the bowl was the boy from the northern baggage train, whom the current might have swept away if Zulaykha had released the water towards the ditch. He was Castilian or Aragonese, but first of all he was a child whose lips trembled with thirst.
Zulaykha handed him the bowl.
He drank holding it in both hands.
The women of Granada drank after him. Then a wounded guard. Then the old digger who yesterday had been afraid to raise his eyes to the cracked stake. Then the girl from the hammam, her fever gone.
Granadans and Castilians stood in the same queue, and no one had to beg for water as a victor's favour.
"What is this course called?" Íñigo asked.
Zulaykha looked towards the mountains.
Above the city, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada gleamed white and still.
"Nothing yet."
He waited.
She took the empty bowl and set it on the edge of the sabil.
"Then we shall name it later, when we understand what we must answer for."
Íñigo nodded.
Khalid, seated by the wall, raised his head.
"Do not call it the Last."
Zulaykha turned.
"Why?"
"Because water called the last is too easily turned into a weapon. Call this spring the first for those who come after us."
Íñigo looked at Zulaykha.
"The First Spring?"
She shook her head.
"No. That would make it seem as though it belonged to us first."
Khalid laughed softly.
"Then let the children argue over it. They have less pride and more future."
Íñigo bent towards the children and sang them only the first line of Amina's song, gentle, without stress or key:
"Snow water sleeps beneath the white stone."
The children immediately began arguing over where the bird's snow should go and whether water could be painted above its wing. He did not sing them the fourth line. He was leaving the children the memory of his mother, not the key.
Rafiq heard him and at once told the children:
"Paint the bird higher."
The children laughed.
Behind them, Granada was passing under new rule. Ahead lay fear, change, someone else's laws, the mountain roads of the Alpujarras and acequias that appeared neither on Castilian plans nor in the palace records.
But beneath the stone the water flowed on, and now responsibility for it belonged not to a single keeper or a single conqueror, but to everyone who stood beside the common bowl.
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