“It is called variously Franco, or Sabir, which in Spanish means ‘to know.’ Some of it comes from Provence, Spain, and Italy, some from Arabic and Turkish. Your Sabir has much French in it, Jack, mine has more Spanish.”

“Surely you’re no Spaniard-!”

The man bowed, albeit without doffing his skullcap, and his forelocks tumbled from his shoulders and dangled in space. “Moseh de la Cruz, at your service.”

“ ‘Moses of the Cross?’ What the hell kind of name is that?”

Moseh did not appear to find it especially funny. “It is a long story-even by your standards, Jack. Suffice it to say that the Iberian Peninsula is a complicated place to be Jewish.”

“How’d you end up here?” Jack began to ask; but he was interrupted by a large Turk, armed with a bull’s penis, who was waving at Jack and Moseh, commanding them to get out of the surf and return to work-the siesta was finis and it was time for trabajo now that the Pasha had ridden through the Beb and entered into the cite.

The trabajo consisted of scraping the barnacles from the hull of the adjacent galley, which had been beached and rolled over to expose its keel. Jack, Moseh, and a few dozen other slaves (for there was no getting round the fact that they were slaves) got to work with various rude iron tools while the Turk prowled up and down the length of the hull brandishing that ox-pizzle. High above them, behind the wall, they could hear a sort of rolling fusillade wandering around the city as the parade continued; the thump of the kettledrums, and the outcry of the siege-oboes and assault-bassoons was, mercifully, deflected heavenwards by the city walls.

“It is true, I think-you are cured.”

“Never mind what your Alchemists and Chirurgeons will tell you-there is no cure for the French Pox. I’m having a brief interval of sanity, nothing more.”