As the afternoon darkened towards evening, they stopped at an inn. Ibn Hafsun handed over some coins, and they sat on upturned barrels in the shade of olive trees while a woman cooked for them over an open fire. She threw garlic, aubergines, peppers and flour-dipped anchovies into olive oil that spat in a hot pan. As the anchovies fried, a smell of the sea spread through the air.

Ibn Hafsun came to squat on a blanket beside Robert. He dipped bread into a bowl of something foul-smelling; it turned out to be sheep’s-milk cheese laced with crushed fruit. He offered some to Robert, but Robert refused.

Even here, Robert couldn’t get close to Moraima, who sat modestly with her father.

Not far from the road a party of boys worked through a grove of olive trees. They collected the fruit by throwing sticks up into the branches. They were skilful, each throw dislodging many fruit. It looked a good game, and Robert wished he were a couple of years younger so he could join in without embarrassment.

Sihtric and Orm began at last to speak of the business that had brought Orm here.

‘I told you of the Testimony,’ Orm said.

‘Your wife’s prophecy, before she was your wife. Who spoke my name to you, long before she could have known of my existence.’ Sihtric shivered. ‘It feels uncomfortable to be under such supernatural scrutiny. But why did it take you fifteen years to get around to doing something about it?’

Orm shrugged. ‘I had a living to make. Funds to raise. A family.’ He glanced at Robert. ‘I considered forgetting about it, giving it up without ever coming here.’

‘So what changed?’

‘I met a traveller - a mercenary who had fought with King Alfonso in al-Andalus. And he told me a fragment of a Moorish legend. There was a line of Eadgyth’s prophecy I had never understood, amid much talk of doves and oceans.’

‘What line?’

‘“The tail of the peacock.” That was what she said. And that was what my traveller finally explained to me.’

Moraima smiled. ‘I understand. I have heard the story . . .’

According to an old Arab myth, she said, after the Flood the habitable lands of the world were shaped like a bird, with its head in the east and its arse in the west.

‘So much for what the Arabs think of western Europe,’ Orm remarked.

But as al-Andalus became magnificent under the Moors, the land was reimagined as a peacock’s tail.

Robert listened to Moraima’s voice, entranced. She’d hardly spoken since joining the party with her father - and hadn’t said a single word to him.