‘He was wounded in the battle, it’s said, an arrow in the back, but it did not penetrate deep enough to kill him. He survived, and, thanks to a grateful Odo, he was feted as something of a hero. He ended his life in Spain, in the city of Santiago de Compostela. He was never beatified, but when he died his relics were preserved, and stored in the cathedral of Saint James the Moorslayer.’

‘I have always been faintly revolted,’ Orm said, ‘by the Christian obsession with bits of their holy dead.’

‘Well, you should be glad of it. For, much later, when al-Mansur raided Santiago—’

‘He who stole the cathedral bells.’

‘Precisely. During that same raid he made off with the relics of al-Hafredi of Poitiers and brought them to Cordoba. So I came across the relics, as I followed hints of the story of al-Hafredi in other accounts - and so I eventually found the testament he left behind.’ Sihtric stroked his bit of old skin.

‘His testament. His story of how he came to Odo.’

‘Yes. But there is more, Orm. In his testament Al-Hafredi goes on, beyond the events of the battle itself. He tells of another history. A history that would have come about if he had not come to comfort the defeated, suicidal Odo that dark October night. A history in which the Moors did not lose at Poitiers.’

This was the true history of the world, attested al-Hafredi of Poitiers, as it had been taught to him. It was a history in which no monkish wanderer had come to turn Odo’s head.

Without the encouragement of the mysterious Alfred, Odo of Aquitaine surrendered to Abd al-Rahman, who used him as a hostage before casting him aside. When Charles of France faced the Moors without Odo, his numbers were not significantly weakened - but without Odo’s whisperings about Moorish tactics he had a much poorer idea of the nature of the force he was facing. That inadequate knowledge led to crucial indecision. The Frankish force, rather than holding against the onslaught of the Moorish cavalry, broke and fled, as had all the Christian armies Abd al-Rahman had faced before.

‘And it was not Abd al-Rahman who was killed that day,’ Sihtric said grimly, ‘but Charles.’ The Franks, demoralised by defeat and convulsed by a succession dispute, could offer the Moors little further resistance.

And the gate to the Great Land was open.

The subsequent Moorish expansion across Gaul and then Germany was like the story of their conquest of Spain - if anything more dramatic. Then there was England. The Umayyad caliphate had long been a great naval power in the Mediterranean; the ocean between England and Gaul offered them no resistance, and nor did the squabbling Saxon kings when Moorish ships sailed up the estuaries of the Thames and the Severn and the Tyne.