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  ‘Vale,’ he said. And without any warning he brought the bat crashing down onto my lower left leg. Had I not managed to lift and turn it slightly before the impact, he might have broken my shin, but the blow was directed onto the calf muscle.

  I doubled forward with shock, half falling to the ground, trying to keep myself upright to avoid a strike on the back of my head. I lifted my arm in an instinctive attempt to ward him off, stumbling to shift my weight onto my right foot. The pain was immense. For a second I thought I might throw up.

  There was a loud grunt and a groan; from the corner of my eye I saw the Moroccan throw his bony-framed body at the farmer, his hand grasping to get a grip around the man’s neck before he could hit me a second time. The two of them toppled over, the bat falling to one side. The farmer thrashed wildly, but round and overweight, he was like an upturned beetle, his short arms vainly punching the air while the Moroccan sat on his chest and began heaving his head up and down on the ground, trying to knock him out. Dust rose up from the dry earth in a cloud as the two of them grappled with each other. The farmer’s face was turning a thick shade of red.

  ‘Stop,’ I said, coughing in the haze.

  ‘Run!’ he shouted. ‘Straight down there. Go!’

  I didn’t move. Through the panic and pain, a more rational voice was making itself heard inside me.

  ‘¡Corre! The others are coming.’ The Moroccan began punching at the farmer’s throat.

  Someone, I thought, was going to die here if I did as he said. Either he would kill the farmer or the others would kill him once they found him. The man had saved me: I wasn’t about to run away. Besides, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to.

  ‘Run!’

  The farmer’s head was flopping about and his arms had stopped trying to hit up at his assailant. For a second I thought he was unconscious before I saw his eyes were still open. He looked as if he had concussion.

  ‘Get off him,’ I said. And limping over, I pulled the Moroccan off the prostrate farmer.

  ‘¿Estás loco? Are you mad?’

  ‘Grab that stick,’ I said. He walked over to where the farmer’s weapon lay on the ground and made as though to hit him over the head with it.

  ‘No!’ I held out my arm. The farmer began to groan like a child, incomprehensible words tumbling from his half-open mouth. Perhaps it was the pain in my leg, or seeing him so helpless, but I was unable to feel anger towards him. All thoughts were of escape and the other farmers.

  ‘Here.’ Stumbling, I went to lift the man up. ‘We’ll leave him in this passageway.’ Then, turning to the Moroccan, ‘Come with me.’

  We dragged the farmer to the side, propping his head up against the plastic wall of one of the tunnels. He looked all right, just shaken and bruised. But we had to move fast. The others would find him soon. Already the workers inside were beginning to shout about the fight: news of what was happening was spreading like ink.

  We began running again, down the hill. I willed myself forwards, my left leg reluctantly forced to work as the muscles clenched with pain, hopping and skipping my way behind the Moroccan. The old man had been right – they were a violent lot. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if they caught us now.

  In the distance behind us I could hear dogs barking. I’d seen Spanish farm dogs before – notoriously ferocious creatures that often killed one another in fights to the death. If they were loose, they would rip our throats out.

  ‘Go!’ I shouted ahead. ‘Faster.’

  I didn’t care about the other farmers any more. The dogs had put the fear of God in me. I desperately wanted to get out of there.

  ‘Down here.’ The Moroccan weaved to the right and I sprinted after him, all thoughts about my leg evaporating with fear. Ahead, two hundred yards in front of us, there was a break in the whiteness – a little brown streak, barely a smudge, but the first sign of an end to the labyrinth – a dirt track, leading somewhere, anywhere, it didn’t matter.

  Emerging from the plastic world, we burst out onto the road. There was nothing in sight – no nearby town, no traffic, no immediate way to escape from the murderous farmers working their way towards us. I stopped, half choking as my lungs tightened with exhaustion, black spots flashing before my eyes. Where should we go? We had to keep running. But left or right?

  Before I could decide, the Moroccan had grabbed my arm again and was hauling me up the hill. I couldn’t believe what he was doing. We could at least keep following the slope downwards to make things easier for us. But he seemed certain of where he was going. My head was bent down as we ran, shoulders sloping forwards, and I clutched at the stitch now stinging in my side. Briefly I looked up and saw ahead of us a dirty red Derbi moped parked in the shade beneath a eucalyptus tree, a helmet balanced on the back seat.

  ‘I just hope we can get it started,’ I thought.

  In a few more paces we had reached the bike. I looked back: there was no sign of our pursuers, but the dog-barking was still there, like creeping black ice.

  ‘Get on.’ The Moroccan was already gripping the handlebars: the key had been left in the lock and he was pumping at the pedals to get the tiny motor running. With a last effort I pushed the helmet to the ground and seated myself behind him, trying not to fall off as we jumped off the stabilizers and the back wheel touched the ground. The motor screamed as we headed down the hill, back towards the point where we had come out from the farmland. If they found us it would almost certainly be now. I stared ahead, eyes fixed on the gap in the plastic from which they would emerge.

  We couldn’t hear the barking now for the complaining high-pitched wail of the bike: there was no way of telling how close they might be. But they would have heard us, and would be moving in fast. I kept my eyes fixed on the gap: outrunning their dogs on this thing would not be easy.

  With the slope working in our favour, we gained momentum as we moved closer and closer to the moment when we would know whether or not we had made good our escape. As the Moroccan pulled harder on the accelerator, the tunnel moved into focus. Then in a second it flashed by and we had gone past, leaving my mind with the clear photo-image of two farmers stumbling towards the track. No dogs with them, but one of them, I was sure, had been holding a handgun.

  ‘Faster.’ I squeezed the Moroccan’s arm; the bike barely responded.

  I looked behind me to where the two men would now appear. It was not far to the first corner in the road – once we reached it we would be out of range. But if they got to us before then? ‘Pistols are useless over more than twenty or thirty yards,’ a soldier friend had once told me. ‘There’s no accuracy there.’ At least if he fired at us there was a high chance of him missing. Lifting myself to see above the Moroccan’s shoulder, I could see we were still about twenty seconds away from safety.

  In my mind’s eye I had already seen the image before I turned round again. The two men were there, standing still now having run out onto the road, one resting on his stick, the other raising his arm, the black metal weapon held firm in his outstretched hand. ‘He’s going to fire at us,’ I thought. ‘The bastard’s going to shoot us.’ I found myself ducking instinctively, as though to make a smaller target, still turned backwards to stare at our would-be assassin. Do you actually see the bullets, I wondered. A flash, perhaps.

  I never found out. The Moroccan suddenly threw one arm out to hold onto me as he jerked the bike sharply to the left, along a track that forked off down the hill and away from view. The plastic city vanished behind the crest of the slope, and with it the two farmers, the pistol, the dogs, the danger. They wouldn’t follow us now. We were safe.

  MUSA THE MOOR

  Chimo claimed he never liked the shape of his nose anyway, and that if he were twenty years younger he would emigrate. He couldn’t understand why I lived in Spain. The place was going from bad to worse, and these populares had been in power for too long now.

  ‘This violence is their fault, and just the beginning,’ he said, still dabbing spo
ts of blood with a handkerchief. But then England, he admitted with a sigh, had also produced La Thatcher and los hooligans, and now el señor Bush was about to invade Iraq, so perhaps I was better off here after all.

  Except that time was running out.

  I’d been going to see Chimo about once a fortnight for years, ambling down to his snug secondhand bookshop just a few streets away from my flat in Valencia, deliberately walking past the bigger, overpriced shop next door belonging to his fat, bald rival. Chimo would usually be sitting behind his scratched wooden desk, flicking through dusty lingerie catalogues or simply staring through his square spectacles at a street half screened out by the rarely sold books he placed on display. Opposite was a Moroccan grocer’s, while the bar next door was run by Algerians. Immigrants had concentrated in this part of the city: North Africans, Ecuadoreans and Chinese.

  Chimo would offer me a cigarette, and with a slight weariness in his voice ask what kind of thing I was looking for: times were tough, and I was expected to be part of the solution; you felt that even if you offered to buy his entire stock, it could never be enough, somehow. I’d pick something up on his recommendation, often a book I wasn’t especially interested in – a novel from the 1950s about life on the France–Spain border, or a guide to rural architecture in Castilla-León – with the idea that it could come in useful at some point. I was sure that one day he would lift some gem from his grubby shelves and hand it to me with his nonchalant shrug, looking at me out of the corner of his grey eyes as if to say, ‘Will he take the bait?’

  ‘Have you seen what they’re doing now?’ he said that afternoon as soon as I walked into his shop. His wrinkled face looked puffed and swollen. ‘Another billion on that new museum and they can’t even come and fix the drains. A storm the other night and ¡hala! the stink! Smells like a sewerage farm here. And then those young fascists start coming round saying it’s because of the moros, that there are too many of them, and they shit so much they’re blocking up the pipes. It’s a bloody joke. I told them, get out, I said. I don’t want you lot round here. We didn’t live through the dictatorship just to see people like you knocking on our doors … That’s when he hit me.’

  I looked at this skinny old man, spectacles bandaged together with sticky tape over his swollen and bruised nose, and felt a surge of anger towards the moron who’d done this to him. Things had been tense since the anti-immigrationists had taken over a heavy-metal bar five doors down the road. Most of them worked as bouncers at various nightclubs around the city. The week before, two Moroccans had been knifed; the district was in danger of becoming a no-go area.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ I asked. He was a proud man, and I didn’t want to push it too far.

  ‘No. ¡Que va! It’s nothing.’ He shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘It’s only fractured.’ He began leafing through some papers in a drawer to show how unaffected by it all he was.

  ‘What these idiots don’t understand,’ he said, looking up, ‘is the moros were here even before they were. Ha! Valencia was Moorish for centuries. These yobs don’t read, that’s their problem. If they did they’d know. Ruzafa, the name of this part of town, is Arabic: it means orchard, or garden, or something like that. These Moroccans have as much right to be here as anyone.’

  His words struck a chord. I’d often thought that Spain had retained more of its ‘Moorishness’ than people cared to admit. Arabs and Berbers had lived here for almost nine centuries, and sometimes, looking at ordinary ‘Spanish’ faces, it seemed they had never left. The Alhambra in Granada, the Great Mosque in Cordoba – these were beautiful and dramatic reminders of the Islamic civilization that had once flourished in Spain. But it seemed likely that its legacy ran deeper than a few ancient buildings and a collection in a museum – nine hundred years was a long time. There were moments when you could sense some lingering Thousand and One Nights magic about the place: exoticism, but perhaps something more than that as well: a world man had yet to throw out of balance by believing he could impose his will with impunity on fate and nature. I found constant echoes from the time I’d spent living in the Middle East – in the food, the people, the buildings and the customs.

  ‘I shit on the whore! You think this is a democracy? Well, you’re wrong. Time is running out. These skinheads will be in power one day soon, just like the fascists before them. Under Franco you couldn’t even see two people kissing in a film. That’s right – they’d cut it just before their lips met. Now, if I want to, I can go down the nudist beach and see as much as I want, when I want. Don’t know about you, not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s the most natural thing in the world to feel the sun all over. And there are some beauties down there, too …’

  Despite being in his late sixties and the latest victim of right-wing thuggery, you couldn’t help feeling that some adolescent part of Chimo’s imagination was still very active, and was probably thriving on his spending too much time alone in his little shop. It was an innocent form of lechery, though: he could be a perfect gentleman, as I’d seen on the odd occasion when women had walked in.

  ‘Still treasure hunting?’ he asked with a grin as I glanced momentarily back at the shelves. I was still angry about what had happened to him, but had heard him eulogize the female form often enough.

  ‘Just like your predecessor, el pirata Drake.’

  In Spain the great English hero – explorer, sea captain and bugbear of Philip II – was reduced to a mere ‘pirate’.

  ‘You lot always come to Spain looking for spoils,’ he said. ‘Take Gibraltar for a start.’

  ‘That’s not English: it’s Moorish,’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘I know. Gibraltar – jabal Tariq – the mountain of Tariq, the first Arab to conquer Spain. He landed there before marching north.’

  ‘The first Arab?’ I asked vaguely.

  ‘Before Musa came along. Musa was Tariq’s boss. Came after Tariq and took all the glory. Created the greatest civilization on earth, the Moors did. Right here in Spain. We had the first universities, the first paper factories, the first street lighting in the whole of Europe.’

  The Moors had first crossed the Strait of Gibraltar during the Dark Ages, at about the same time as Bede was writing his History, over half a century before the first Viking attacks on the Northumbrian coast. Muslim armies had recently spread out from the Arabian peninsula following the establishment of Islam and the death of the Prophet Muhammad, conquering as far as the Himalayas in the east and North Africa in the west. According to the old accounts, the Christian Count Julian of Ceuta, angry over the rape of his daughter by the Spanish King Roderic, asked the newly arrived Muslims to cross over into Spain to avenge him. Spain at that time was under Visigothic rule, the Germanic tribe having moved in and taken over as the Roman Empire collapsed.

  In the year 711 a small Moorish force led by the commander Tariq crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. ‘Moor’ was the term often used to describe the Muslims in Spain – an ethnically diverse group comprising Arabs, Berbers, Syrians, Persians and eventually Spaniards themselves; it originated from the Latin maurus, which had been used to refer to North Africans. It was a loose and fuzzy term, but often more accurate than simply ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’ – words that were usually too strict for the blurred divisions of the time. The following year a second group led by Musa also crossed over, and in a short period the two armies had taken control of most of Spain and started moving into France. At the Battle of Poitiers in 732, a hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, the Muslims suffered defeat at the hands of the Franks and subsequently retreated behind the Pyrenees, more or less. This was the birth of ‘Al-Andalus’, what the Moors called the territory in Spain and Portugal they controlled. The name was of uncertain origin: some said it came from ‘Vandal’, as the migratory tribe had briefly crossed through Spain on their way to North Africa in the sixth century; others said it was a derivation of an old Visigothic word landahlauts – a territory divided up by lots; others that it was an Arabic mispron
unciation of ‘Atlantic’, or ‘Atlantis’.

  Despite the Muslims’ rapid success, there were small areas in the very north of Spain, around Asturias, that remained relatively untouched. At first they posed little problem for the new Moorish rulers, but centuries later they would become the starting points for various Christian campaigns southwards, in what eventually became known as the ‘Reconquest’.

  Although initially a distant outpost of the recently formed Islamic Empire, Al-Andalus soon became caught up in the internal divisions that broke out at the political centre. Following several violent conflicts over the leadership of the Muslim community – the caliphate – a group called the Abbasids swept aside the ruling Umayyads in 750, massacring almost the entire family at a feast. At least one member survived, however, and fled to the protection of his mother’s Berber tribe in what is now Morocco. This man then crossed over to Al-Andalus, where he established himself as a new ruler, breaking away from the recently established power base in Baghdad. Abd al-Rahman I was thus the first effective emir of Moorish Spain. Religiously the country was still part of the Islamic world, yet politically it became independent.

  The first two hundred years or so saw the gradual establishment of Moorish rule: the native population – a mixture mainly of Romano-Iberians, Celts, Jews and the former Visigothic rulers – began to take on the customs of their new masters, speaking Arabic and wearing Arab-style clothes. Bit by bit they started converting to Islam, although the pressure to do so was mainly financial – Christians and Jews were tolerated and protected, but had to pay a special tax. The conquering armies had been relatively small – perhaps just a few thousand – and intermarriage was common. As a result, the racial divide became very blurred. Soon afterwards, the same would happen on a cultural level: Muslims called Christians living in Al-Andalus musta’rab – ‘would-be Arabs’, mozarabes in modern Spanish. Sometimes it wasn’t clear who were ‘Arabs’ and who were ‘Spaniards’. Some historians preferred to describe Al-Andalus as the integration of Spain and Portugal into the Islamic world, rather than a military invasion and conquest by a foreign occupying force.