Orm said to Sihtric, ‘You see? I knew you were in Spain, but Eadgyth didn’t. She said your name without ever meeting you. And when I came across the business of the peacock’s tail - it all seemed to fit together and I felt I had to follow it up.’

Sihtric smiled. ‘Typical of the Weaver to be cryptic - if it is the Weaver. Let’s refer to the agent who put these words into your wife’s head as, let me see, a Witness. He may be the same as the Weaver, or he may not.’

‘She.’

‘What?’

‘When I showed Eadgyth my transcript of the words she spoke - she had no memory of it - she always called, um, her visitor “she”.’

‘She it is,’ Sihtric said. ‘And what do you believe the Witness has mandated you to do?’

Orm looked at him. ‘Stop you.’

Sihtric gazed back. ‘Well, you’ll have to find out what I’m doing here first, won’t you?’

If Ibn Hafsun was curious about their talk, he didn’t show it. He worked his way through his sheep’s-milk cheese silently.

Somewhere a wailing voice cried. It was a muezzin, Ibn Hafsun told Robert, calling from his tower in the nearby town, summoning the faithful to prayer. Ibn Hafsun fetched his own blanket from his horse, and knelt and faced east.

In the dusty heat, with the alien song in his ears and the exotic scent of the Arab food in his nostrils, Robert had never felt so far from home. And when Moraima glanced at him, her pale blue eyes were the strangest thing of all in this strange new world, and the most enticing.

III

III

The next day Robert ignored his duty with the camels. He pushed his way up the column so he rode closer to Ibn Hafsun, and spoke to him.

The Spanish peninsula, he learned, was like a vast square, all but cut off from France by a chain of mountains, the Pyrenees. More chains of mountains crossed the interior, running roughly east to west, and in the lowlands between the mountains rivers snaked over the land. Four of the five greatest rivers drained west into the Ocean Sea.

The north-west corner, around Santiago de Compostela, was green and temperate, and many people made a living from the sea. In the south-east was more greenery, and there the Moors ran market gardens, rich with fruit trees. But here they were passing through the heart of the country, a vast extent of arid lowlands cut through by the mountains and rivers. The Christians in their degenerate descendant-tongue of Latin called it meseta. The winters were long and bitterly cold, the summers dry and intense. There were no woods here, and little in the way of grass, only patchy scrub. No small birds sang, Robert noticed, for there was nowhere for them to nest; only buzzards wheeled, and eagles scouted the hills.