‘Christendom was saved, then. And what became of al-Hafredi? How did his story come down to you?’
‘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.
‘By the year of Our Lord 793,’ Sihtric said, ‘in which your Viking ancestors first raided England, Orm, there were Moors in Paris and in Rome. Even Constantinople had fallen, after a decade-long siege from both east and west. After that the political history of Moorish Europe was no simpler or less fractious than that of al-Andalus, but overall the Moorish grip on the Great Land never loosened.
‘There was to be no Jorvik, no Danelaw, and no Normandy. There was no battle at Hastings, no Norman invasion of England - for there were no Normans! The emirs never allowed Vikings to settle on their territory as the Frankish kings did.’
Armed with the legacy of antiquity, the Moors were able to make the northern lands flourish as they had al-Andalus. Populations rose steadily, and gained in wealth and health - and, just as steadily, converted to Islam. There was an intellectual revolution, and marvellous medicines and machines transformed the lives of the people.
‘The greatest mosque in Europe was built in Seville, but the second grandest was in Paris,’ Sihtric said. ‘The greatest library in the world was in London. Think of that!
‘And it was in a Moorish London that a young man called al-Hafredi was to be born. In a few words he sketches his London for us, a London where minarets and marble-columned palaces rise within the old Roman walls, and the cries of the imams drift across the Thames.
‘Al-Hafredi claimed he had come from a far future, a thousand years beyond the Muslim conquest. And he sketches that millennium - a future that was already history to him. There will be invaders,’ Sihtric said. ‘From the east. A wave of savage horsemen, bursting out of Asia. The Muslim rulers, fractious as ever, will be unable to stand before them. Al-Hafredi details their progress. But the nomads’ world empire will be brief, gone in a few generations, leaving only memories of distant lands.
‘In the next age, plague. Many will fall. It would have been far worse, says al-Hafredi, if not for Muslim medicine.
‘And in the age after that there will be a terrible war, a war of the Silk Road, as empires of east and west fall on each other. The war will engulf the whole world, and will last another century. And it will be won by machines. I imagine engines like mine, like Aethelmaer’s, or even more destructive, born in the fecund minds of warriors and those who serve them.
‘The war, long and bloody, will be won by the Muslims. In the end Islam will hold sway across all the world as it is known, from Scandinavia to Africa, from Ireland to India and the lands beyond. And ships bearing the crescent banner will sail far beyond the horizon in search of new lands to conquer, new peoples to convert.’
‘And somewhere in this future Islamic world,’ Orm said, ‘your friend al-Hafredi broods, unforgiving.’
‘Yes. And here is the strangest part of the story. Just as in al-Andalus, Christianity will be tolerated - even a thousand years after Abd al-Rahman. But the bitter monks of Lindisfarne and elsewhere will be pinpricks of Christianity in a Muslim map. Christ will live on through them, for al-Hafredi quotes Matthew, chapter eighteen: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” But Islam will be everywhere else. The situation will be intolerable, the whole world lost - and in the end, al-Hafredi feared, Christianity would be extinguished altogether. Something must be done.
‘So the devious monks will steal one of the Moors’ own marvellous engines, and hatch a plot to use against its inventors. Don’t ask me how it is done - I barely understand the what, let alone the how. But they will find a way to hurl one man across history, just as my crossbow will hurl a bolt across the sky, just as your Witness sent her words across the firmament to Eadgyth - they will hurl him, naked and alone, into another time and place.’
Orm saw it. ‘They sent al-Hafredi from Lindisfarne, in this future century, to Poitiers, in the deep past.’
‘That is what al-Hafredi tells us happened to him,’ Sihtric said firmly. ‘And, following the mission that had been devised for him, he made his way to Odo, and turned that weak man’s mind around.’
Orm tried to take all this in. ‘If that was his mission, he succeeded. This other Europe is now extinguished altogether. The mosque of Paris, the great library in London—’
‘They never existed - and never will.’
Orm thought of the beauties he had seen here in al-Andalus, and he remembered the Normans’ harrying of the English north. ‘Do you think this world, our world, is a better one, Sihtric?’
Sihtric sniffed. ‘That other wasn’t a Christian world; it deserved to vanish.’
Orm studied the vellum again, and stroked it gingerly with a fingertip. ‘What is this stuff - goat, lamb? Why didn’t your long-dead scribe use a better quality bit of leather? These wounds are odd. This one looks like an arrow puncture. Was this animal hunted down?’
Sihtric eyed him. ‘Can’t you guess what this is, Viking? A pity; I thought you were showing imagination for once. Think about it. Al-Hafredi brought back an account of his own lost future in written form; perhaps he feared that his crossbow-shot across time would leave him dead, but that his message might do some good even so ... And yet he travelled naked.’
Orm saw it. He drew his hand back. ‘He bore his message on his bo
dy.’
Sihtric traced the letters on the bit of vellum with his finger. ‘Tattooed across his back, compressed Bible quotations and all. This evidence of a stitched-up arrow wound is a detail that adds veracity to the whole saga, doesn’t it? And when he died, stranded centuries out of his own time, the monks who tended him cut the skin off his back, and treated it as they would any bit of calfskin to be used for scribing.’
Orm stared at the bit of human skin, flayed off the body of a man from a vanished future. He felt obscurely angry. What strange world was he living in that such things could be possible? ‘Tell me what you intend to do about all this.’
‘I intend,’ Sihtric said coldly, ‘to follow al-Hafredi’s example.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have seen an Islamic future, through al-Hafredi’s words. The Moors may have been turned back at Poitiers, but Islam is still strong-rampant. I will not allow such a victory to come about.’ He smiled coldly. ‘Like al-Hafredi, I will use the Moors’ own wealth and learning against them.’
Orm said slowly, ‘So you intend to develop your engines with Moorish money. Then you will hand over the weapons to the Christian kings. And with those engines, all of Islam will be destroyed.’
‘That’s the plan. Simple, isn’t it? It may be that I won’t live to see the project completed, of course. But that’s of no relevance. The march of Christendom transcends a mere human life.’
‘But to betray your sponsor—’
‘It won’t be hard. You’ve met him. The vizier’s no fool, but he is a drunk. He’s not hard to manipulate.’
Orm wasn’t so sure about that. ‘And what of your conscience, Sihtric? What of the helpless millions whose destinies you plan to deflect? What of their souls? Does that not trouble you?’
‘No, Orm, I am not troubled. There is another line from Revelation here. Chapter three: “I will not blot out his name out of the book of life.” But al-Hafredi did, and I will. You came here with your head full of vague plans to oppose me, didn’t you? Your wife’s nonsense about the Dove. But you’re full of doubt. Lesser men always are. But I, I am doing God’s work - I am sure of that - that is all that matters.’
A shadow crossed the room; a candle flickered. The vizier stood in the doorway, an armed guard at his side. ‘And all that matters to me, priest, is that at last I have proof of your treachery.’
XXI
Alone in the dark, Robert measured space and time.
The floor was square, thirty by thirty of his foot-lengths paced out toe against heel. He could not see the ceiling, but he knew that many of the palace’s rooms were rough cubes, so he imagined the room was as tall as it was wide. He explored the walls with his fingers. The room had arched doorways, but they were bricked up, save one closed by the heavy wooden door that had slammed shut after he had been thrown in here by the vizier’s guards.
And he measured time. There was no passage of day or night; the bright Spanish sunlight was banished from his life. But he counted the meals that were shoved through a hatch in the door - bread, rice, a bit of water, delivered with a precious splinter of light. He counted his own pissing, his stools. He counted the times he slept, but his sleeping was poor.
In the dark he became confused in his counting, which distressed him.
It took him some of that passing time to work out that he was, in fact, imprisoned. There were few gaols in England, no cells save for a few dismal dungeons beneath the Normans’ keeps, where athelings or other valuable captives might be held. If you committed a crime you might be executed, or mutilated, or fined; if you lived you went back to work. There wasn’t the spare food to feed a population of prisoners. In al-Andalus, it seemed, things were different.
And as the days wore away and it dawned on Robert that he could see no end to this captivity, a deep horror settled on him.
He prayed every day, of course. Prayed every hour. Prayed constantly. He tried to mark Sunday, when he thought that day came. He recited the words of the holy Mass, as best he remembered them. Praying was better than thinking. Better than wondering what had become of his father, or Moraima, better than endlessly speculating why he had been thrown into this hole. Better than wondering what might become of him when he was finally released. Or, worse, how it would be if he were never released at all.
After the first few days he decided that he should treat his captivity as a trial. He thought of heroic monks like Saint Cuthbert, who deliberately sought out purposeful solitude in order better to understand their own souls, and God. If he were to become a soldier of God, fighting in the Pope’s armies, he would face far worse torments than this.
He longed to be with Moraima. And he longed for his father to come and save him. But these were the weak thoughts of a child and he put them aside. He would use these hours in the hot, foetid, alien dark to cleanse his soul of weakness.
By the time his captors came for him, he thought only of God.
The door opened, flooding the cell with light. Two burly guards dragged him out of the dark. He was dazzled by the brilliance of a low sun. But he thought the guards flinched from the new holy light that burned from his own eyes.
XXII
Robert was shoved inside a reception room. Released, he staggered, and stood upright.
He glanced around. Books, bound volumes and scrolls, were piled roughly in one corner. Four arched doorways were all blocked by the burly bodies of guards - dark, stocky, powerful men, Berbers perhaps. The room was beautiful. But he had no time for beauty now; this was just as much a prison as his own shit-filled cell.
But Moraima, sweet Moraima was here too.
Moraima came to him, her hands folded into an anxious knot. A delicate scent of jasmine hung around her. He longed to take her in his arms, to let out the warmth that surged inside him. But he knew he must not.
She stood before him, uncertain how to read him. ‘Robert. It has been so long. I thought they might have killed you. The vizier is like the weather; he comes and goes in his moods. He got angry with Sihtric, and he just locked everybody away.’ She said hastily, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here, Robert. But we must talk.’ And she placed a hand on her belly.
Now Orm and Sihtric were brought in. Robert saw that they, too, had been imprisoned. Orm’s beard was ragged, his hair untrimmed, the dirt ground deep into his pores, and there was a sewer stink of the cell about him. The priest, too, was shabby, and he scratched himself under a grimy habit.
Orm ran to his son and took his shoulders. ‘Robert. What did they do?’
‘I was stuck in a hole. They kept me in the dark.’
‘In the dark, and alone? And we thought we had it bad, priest.’
‘I am not harmed.’
Orm looked deep into his eyes, troubled. ‘Are you sure? You look different.’
‘Harder, I’d say,’ said Sihtric. ‘Not necessarily a bad thing, a bit of toughening up.’
‘Shut up,’ Orm said. ‘Come sit over here.’ They settled on floor cushions. ‘Robert, I’m sorry.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s my fault.’
Robert felt impatient that his father and this flawed priest were drawing the crisis about themselves like a cloak. ‘How is it your fault? You were imprisoned too.’
Orm scratched his stubble. ‘But I fear all this came about because of my foolishness - ours.’
He told Robert about the conversation he had had with Sihtric in another corner of the palace, about the Engines of God, and the Testament of al-Hafredi, and Sihtric’s real intentions.
‘Evidently we were overheard,’ Orm said.
Sihtric said glumly, ‘I’ve used that room for years.’
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