The vizier walked steadily, apparently sober, but he was pale, drained. ‘You haven’t told the whole truth, Sihtric,’ he said in Latin. ‘I know enough English by now to understand that. Isn’t a lie by omission still a lie?’

Orm said, ‘What whole truth?’

The vizier faced Sihtric. ‘The truth of how he took his revenge.’

XVII

XVII

They were brought out of their battered cell, and returned to an audience room with the vizier. Ibn Tufayl sat on a couch, and sipped a steaming potion. Orm and his party were offered no refreshment.

Moraima stood beside her father, her slim beauty somehow highlighted by the cool abstraction of the patterns on the tiled wall behind her. Robert couldn’t take his eyes off her.

‘So,’ Orm said. ‘Let us speak of revenge.’

The vizier glanced around the room, at attendants and soldiers, a doctor who fussed at his elbow. He dismissed them all with a gesture. The soldiers left reluctantly, and Robert saw they took station just outside the room. Ibn Tufayl said, ‘Tell them, Sihtric. It’s the story of your cunning, after all. And it worked so well!’

So Sihtric, reluctantly, began. He said that after Muzna’s death, the two men were locked together in grief and in blood, through Moraima, daughter of one, granddaughter of the other.

‘He sent Moraima off to an aunt in Seville,’ Sihtric said. ‘He promised me he intended nothing but the best for her, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted Moraima in my life - she was my daughter, a child for a man who had never expected such a blessing. She was all I had left of Muzna. And besides I didn’t trust him. Moraima inherited her mother’s beauty - you can testify to that, Robert! I didn’t like the idea that in twelve or fifteen or twenty years Ibn Tufayl might use her as he once used her mother.’

The vizier said languidly, ‘Don’t pretend it was for Moraima or Muzna. It was all for you. Is revenge-taking a sin in your church? It should be.’

‘Tell us what you did,’ said Orm.

With Muzna dead and Moraima gone, the two men continued to work on their shared project, Aethelmaer’s designs.

‘I used the opportunity of my time alone with the vizier,’ Sihtric said. ‘I interested him in the work. I tried to become his friend. And I began to bring him gifts.’

‘What gifts?’

‘Wine,’ said the vizier bluntly.

Wine, forbidden under Muslim custom and law but manufactured in the Christian monasteries still permitted within al-Andalus, and smuggled into Madinat az-Zahra by Sihtric.