‘I told you. I am Christian, and I can read. Even if I’m not the breed of Christian they are. They were training me to become one of them.’ He grinned. ‘Easiest place I’ve lived since I left my mother’s womb.’

‘So how did you end up here with the pigs?’

He sighed, mock-lamenting. ‘I think you know me by now, lady. The routine of a monastery isn’t hard, but it’s dull, dull, dull. I skipped what I could and got others to do the rest. But in the end the abbot found me out and ordered me returned to the cockle-pickers. Even Dom Wilfrid couldn’t save me.’

Dom Wilfrid, it seemed, was the monk in charge of the novices.

‘This Wilfrid must have seen your vices more clearly than anybody else. Why would he protect you at all?’

‘Ah, because poor, weak Wilfrid had a vice of his own. Much as he gave his wisdom to the novices, there was something he liked to get back from them. Up his bum, actually.’

She was disgusted.

He shrugged. ‘It was better than cockle-picking.’ Once again he looked at her, lascivious. ‘Maybe I could earn a few favours from you, lady. I was one of Wilfrid’s favourites. It’s not just my ears that are big about me, you know.’

Anger filled her, blood-red. ‘Give me one good reason I shouldn’t split open your grinning face right now.’

‘Because you need me to get to what you really want, which is Lindisfarena.’

She was appalled. She had never met anybody, let alone a slave, who was so manipulative. But of course he was right.

She didn’t know how to phrase the question. ‘Did you ever hear anything of a Menologium? Of a prophecy, a legend of Ulf and Sulpicia?’

He looked calculating again. ‘Your father said something about this on the boat ...’

She told him of the legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer. Ulf, strong and smart, had died old, fat, wealthy, and the owner of many cattle and slaves. But over the hearth he always told stories of his time in Britain, the beautiful Sulpicia, and the remarkable prophecy he had glimpsed and lost.

And Gudrid told Rhodri how she had spoken to traders returning across the sail road from Britain and its many islands - and, from tantalising hints, how she had worked out that the prophecy, transcribed by monks, may have been stored in the monastery on Lindisfarena.

Rhodri listened to all this. ‘Well, it makes sense that your prophecy would be copied down at Lindisfarena, if anywhere. Always writing, those monks, scribbling things down and copying them and making more copies again. It’s a hive of letters, of ink and vellum and the scratch, scratch of styluses.’

She was mystified. ‘Why do they do this?’