And she gave a room to Peter. He peeled off his travel clothes with relief. He imagined he had sweated away half his body’s weight into the fur of his wretched, patient mule. That night, in an airy room and on a soft pallet, out of the iron stink of the desert, he slept more deeply than he had since he was a child.

XII

XII

Joan’s smoky English hall was scarcely less tolerable in the evening’s cool than in the heat of the day.

And here Saladin was told the strange truth about his family.

‘It’s a tangled story,’ Thomas said, studying Saladin, trying to gauge what he understood. ‘A story of prophecies - not one, but three of them, a whole sheaf.’

Joan told Saladin, sketching in brisk, efficient strokes, the story of how over a hundred and fifty years ago Robert the Wolf had travelled to Moorish Spain with his father, Orm the Viking, in search of a rogue priest.

Thomas said, ‘Sihtric had come into the possession of plans for marvellous weapons. These plans were called the Codex of Aethelmaer, the weapons the Engines of God. But the Codex was compressed and enigmatic, and contained words nobody could read. So Sihtric went to Moorish Spain—’

‘What? Why?’ Saladin sounded outraged. ‘To hand these weapons over to the caliphs?’

‘The caliphs had gone by then,’ Thomas said patiently. ‘But, no, it was not Sihtric’s intention to give his weapons to the Moors. He hoped to use the Moors’ greater scholarship to help him understand the Codex and develop the weapons. And then, so his scheme seems to have gone, he would turn the weapons on his Moorish hosts.

‘While he worked on these plans, as he researched the past, he came upon the second of the three prophecies - a sort of sketch of the future left by a wizard called al-Hafredi. More of that later.

‘And then Robert and his father, Orm, turned up. Now Orm had a vision of his own - the third prophecy. He called it the Testament of Eadgyth.’ And he repeated Eadgyth’s legend of the Dove, who must be turned to the west.

‘Lots of prophecies, then,’ Saladin said, confused.

‘Orm believed his Testament of Eadgyth warned against the use of the Engines of God. That is why, armed with the Testament, a troubled Orm travelled with his son to the distant land where Sihtric was developing his weapons.’

‘And in the middle of all this,’ Joan said drily, ‘our ancestor Robert found time to fall in love, and implant his seed in the loins of a Moorish girl, Moraima.’

Saladin was intrigued despite himself. ‘So what happened to them all?’

‘It all went predictably wrong,’ Thomas said, and he sighed over the foolishness of the long dead. ‘There was a fire. The result of some struggle, probably. Orm and Sihtric were both killed. The prophecies and plans were lost, or so it was believed . . .’