February 1492, more than twenty li west of Granada, on the banks of the Genil River.
Granada's mountains rose in a continuous wall to the north and south, blocking the cold winds blowing down from the north. The long Genil River flowed through the gray-yellow drylands like a blue jade belt. The irrigation canals the Moors had maintained for centuries were spreading out one after another along the east-west river, like roots extending from a blue trunk. And wherever those blue roots reached, there lay patch after patch of enchanting green. Those ancient orchards and farmlands still bore the marks of abundance, as though they had endured from the age of Carthage two thousand years ago all the way to the present day.
Yet year after year of brutal war had long since burned this once-richest riverside valley of the Moorish Kingdom into ashes. The fruit trees in the orchards had been chopped down to the last, turned into firewood for the army. The fields, too, were overgrown with lush weeds, with no Moorish farmers left at their work.
Most of the prosperous Moorish villages on both sides of the long river were now nothing but broken silence and desolation. As for the Moors with eastern faces, they had either been buried forever in the earth or turned into slaves of the Crusader Army. At this very moment, the only things wandering through the wilderness were red-eyed hyenas, carrion-stuffed Crows, and small crusader patrols roving and looting... oh, and two men riding mules westward along the long river, almost at the bridge by the water.
"Diamine! Cazzo! Stupid, bloodthirsty Castilians, stupid, greedy Aragonese! Not only do they ruin goats, they ruin these orchards and estates too, turning valuable fields into worthless pasture!... Damn them! In those hardwood skulls of theirs,