Inside the box was a wooden frame over which was stretched a sheet of what looked like vellum. Orm peered closely. Words had been marked onto the vellum, pricked in some black ink. The small, closely spaced letters were lined up in neat rows, but had been distorted by the stretching of the vellum, and in places the skin was pocked and broken, crudely stitched. There was nothing else in the box.

With faint dread Orm reached out and touched the vellum. It was dry, rough. ‘What is this, calfskin?’

Sihtric would not say. ‘When I found this object it was rolled up inside a wooden cylinder, for it had been preserved as a holy relic. It is old, three centuries or more.’

‘So you stretched it on this frame.’

‘With infinite care, yes. But I couldn’t help a little distortion of the letters.’

Orm looked closely at the first few lines. ‘Is this Latin? “My name is al-Hafredi, as the scribes tell it, and Alfred, as my family knew me. That liveth, was dead, evermore . . .” I don’t understand. A riddle? The name, though. Al-Hafredi is a Moorish name. But Alfred—’

‘English, of course. The name of our greatest king.’

‘Here is a man who lived under the Moors, then,’ Orm said. ‘His name, Alfred, was rendered in a Moorish way. Just as our guide Ibn Hafsun’s name was a corruption of the old family name of Alfonso.’

‘You should have been a scholar.’

‘Don’t mock me,’ Orm said mildly. ‘However my scholarship doesn’t extend to puzzling out the rest. “That liveth, was dead, evermore.” It’s not even a sentence. What does it mean?’

‘There lies the cunning. The manuscript isn’t in any kind of code. But it does contain fragments like this. They puzzled me too, until I saw that the intention of this man, a Christian living under the Moors, was to speak clearly to other Christians, in a way that his Moorish masters would not understand. So, pagan, what piece of literature do all Christians share?’

‘The Bible.’

‘Correct. And I realised that what we have in this line is a fragment of the Bible, a quotation, compressed and embedded.’

‘What quotation?’

‘From the Book of the Revelation of Saint John.’ He closed his eyes. ‘“I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore.” Liveth, dead, evermore. You see?’

‘If you say so.’

‘The quotations come from both the Old and New Testaments. With patience I riddled them all out. It would take a Christian to do so. The Muslims do study the Bible, you know; they call it the “Holy Book”. However no Muslim scholar will know the Bible as intimately as a Christian. Of course the quotations are allusive rather than literal. Puzzling out the story al-Hafredi wished to tell; that was the real challenge.’

‘But you did it.’

‘Oh, yes. Given time.’

‘Then tell me what you learned.’