Orm shrugged. 'I had a living to make. Funds to raise. A family.' He glanced at Robert. 'I considered forgetting about it, giving it up without ever coming here.'
'So what changed?'
'I met a traveller – a mercenary who had fought with King Alfonso in al-Andalus. And he told me a fragment of a Moorish legend. There was a line of Eadgyth's prophecy I had never understood, amid much talk of doves and oceans.'
'What line?'
''The tail of the peacock.' That was what she said. And that was what my traveller finally explained to me.'
Moraima smiled. 'I understand. I have heard the story…'
According to an old Arab myth, she said, after the Flood the habitable lands of the world were shaped like a bird, with its head in the east and its arse in the west.
'So much for what the Arabs think of western Europe,' Orm remarked.
But as al-Andalus became magnificent under the Moors, the land was reimagined as a peacock's tail.
Robert listened to Moraima's voice, entranced. She'd hardly spoken since joining the party with her father – and hadn't said a single word to him.
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
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.
'And the Christians and the Moors?'
Ibn Hafsun said, 'You must think of Spain as sliced into three: the Moors in the south, Christian kingdoms in the north, and a kind of frontier land between. As the Christians have gradually grown stronger, the frontier has, with the centuries, been pushed southwards. Now that the Castilians have captured Toledo the frontier roughly cuts the peninsula in two, east to west: the north Christian, the south Moorish.'
Robert nodded, picturing it. 'And one day that frontier will be pushed all the way south, and Spain will be free of Moors once more.'
'Are you sure? Look around you. Look what the Moors made of this country.'
They happened to be following a river bank. Robert saw that irrigation systems striped the countryside, and along the river itself huge waterwheels turned patiently.
'All this is Moorish,' Ibn Hafsun said. 'There was a high civilisation here, Robert son of Orm. The highest since the Romans. Higher than Christendom.'
'Not so high,' Robert said fiercely, 'that Alfonso's Christian armies could not drive the Moors out.'
Ibn Hafsun shrugged. 'Well, that's inarguable.'
'Must it be so?'
The soft voice startled Robert. It was Moraima, who had come to ride alongside the two of them. She spoke English, her father's language, but heavily accented.
Robert said to her, 'Those are the first words you have spoken to me. And must they be about war?'
'But it's all you talk about. You and our fathers.' Her voice, like her face, was delicate, and yet Robert thought he saw a strength beneath the fragile surface. It only made her more desirable.
'We weren't talking about war. Ibn Hafsun was telling me about the country.'
'Ah,' said Ibn Hafsun, 'but you are a warrior of God – a warrior cub at any rate. Tell me that you aren't dreaming of riding across this land in your mail coat, your sword in your hand, at the side of Rodrigo, El Cid, 'The Boss', the greatest Castilian warrior of all!'
Moraima laughed, a sound like bubbling water. 'I ask you again, Robert: must it be so?'
Robert said reluctantly, 'The Pope himself says that if you fight to reclaim Christian lands from infidels, you are fighting for Christ.'
'Well, the Pope would say that,' Sihtric called back from his own mount. 'But the Pope has wider ambitions.'
Across Europe the conflict between Christianity and Islam was already four centuries old. Now the Seljuk Turks, ferociously warlike, had taken the Holy Land itself, all but extinguishing Christianity in the country that had given it birth. And they pressed on the East Roman Empire, long the bulwark between west and east, taking the rich province of Asia Minor. Alexius, emperor in Constantinople, had appealed to the west for help. But after centuries of invasions and war, the post-Roman states of west Europe were like armed camps, fractious and suspicious, bristling with petty armies any of which would have been dwarfed by the legionary forces of old. The Pope, spiritual leader of all these domains, longed to unify them in a great cause.
'And what better ambition for a pope than a war against Islam?' Ibn Hafsun murmured.
Moraima eyed Robert again. 'I ask you once more: Must it be so?'
Robert said, 'I hope not.'
'You do?'
