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XX

The great expansion of Islam had begun within a generation of the death of Muhammad. It became necessary, for the first caliphs, like Roman generals, quickly came to depend on plunder to survive. 'It was conquer or perish,' Sihtric said. So the armies of Damascus exploded out of Arabia, swept west across North Africa, and stormed across the Pillars of Hercules and through the Gothic kingdom of Spain.

And, with al-Andalus under the control of governors appointed by the Damascus caliphate, the raiding armies went further north still. The Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees to attack Septimania, a Gothic domain within Gaul. They were Arabs and Berbers, men of the east and of Africa, now pouring into the green belly of Gaul.

Soon, under an able general called Abd al-Rahman, all the cities of the Mediterranean coast of Gaul were in Muslim hands. It was the eighth century. Less than a decade since the first crossing of the strait.

'There were fault lines, on both the Moorish and Christian sides,' Sihtric said. 'Abd al-Rahman always had trouble with the Berbers. One Berber general called Munuza managed to carve out an independent kingdom for himself in northern Spain, bordering Gaul. And his neighbour in Gaul was the Duke Odo of Aquitaine, who had nominally pledged allegiance to the French kings, but like Munuza craved his own independence. Both pebbles in the shoes of their respective rulers, you see.

'Well, Abd al-Rahman had a tidy mind. He shook out both these pebbles. He killed Munuza, and then crossed the mountains into Aquitaine. Odo's forces were defeated, and Abd al-Rahman, leading his army in person, drove forward, thrusting deep into Gaul. Fifteen thousand men he had, to carry out the usual burning, looting, massacring, enslavement and so forth. And he advanced to within two hundred miles of Paris, to a place called Poitiers.'

'I know it. Not far from the sanctuary of Saint Martin of Tours.'

'And there, history turned,' Sihtric said. 'The Muslims were at the door to the "Great Land", as they called it, of western Europe. Perhaps they could go further – perhaps they could advance all the way to Constantinople.

'But there, on the Roman road north of Poitiers, al-Rahman faced the army of the Frankish king, the last significant obstacle between the Muslims and all Europe.'

Orm knew the story. 'Charles Martel. The Hammer.'

'Well, Charles became known as "the Hammer" only after his great victory, after he saved Europe for Christendom. A story told to every young Christian warrior since! But it need not have been so. This is where we come to the rent in time's tapestry, Orm. This is what happened…'

Odo of Aquitaine, his army defeated by the Moors, his cities stormed, his people slaughtered or enslaved, was in despair. His only possible ally was Charles of the Franks, on whom Odo had previously made war himself. Odo considered surrendering to the Muslims, who might prove more merciful to him and his family than the Christians.

Sihtric said, 'He seems to have been a poor sort of a man, and a worse ruler. But then he got help. A monk turned up at Odo's camp. He rode only a humble ass, like Christ entering Jerusalem, and carried nothing, no food, not even a bottle of water. He relied for his life on the Christian charity of the folk whose lands he crossed. He was a peculiar type, too well-fed to be a monk – and well-spoken, with a peculiarly accented Latin on his lips. He impressed with minor miracles – fortune-telling, an ability to predict bad storms and harsh winters, that sort of thing. He said his name was Alfred, he was from the famous monastery of Lindisfarne in England, and he had a message from Christ for Odo.'

'He was al-Hafredi.'

'Well yes, but don't run ahead of the story, Viking. He might have been killed, for Odo's troops were by this time cowering from shadows. He did have his wretched ass stolen, slaughtered and eaten by the starving warriors. But he was let live, and was admitted to Odo's presence. And there he changed Odo's mind.'

'How?' Orm asked.

Sihtric shrugged. 'I don't know what he said to Odo. I don't know what he promised him, what he showed him. But, Viking, if I knew your future, all of it, it would not be hard to manipulate you. Perhaps you can see that.

'In any event al-Hafredi persuaded Odo that he should not submit to the Moors, and despite his hostility to Charles he should throw himself on the Frank's mercy and face the Moors with him. And he whispered to Odo how the Moors might be beaten.'

'And Odo was convinced by this?'

'He must have been. For that's precisely what he did.'

So the Moors faced the Franks, that October three centuries past, the future of all Europe at stake. The two forces had been well matched. Charles was a proven war leader, as was Abd al-Rahman. There followed seven days of inconclusive skirmishes and scouting.

At last the combat came. Odo's weary forces made little difference to Charles's military strength – but the advice Odo was able to give on how the Moors fought, and how Abd al-Rahman thought, was much more valuable.

'The Moorish cavalry charged. But Charles's infantry held their ground. The Muslims were taken aback. They had been used to Christians breaking and running from their advances. In that one moment the battle turned, just as al-Hafredi said it would. And then Charles shocked the Moors by attacking them aggressively.

'In the combat that followed, Abd al-Rahman was killed. I have always wondered if al-Hafredi had something to do with it – perhaps that drab monkish habit concealed a knife. The Moors were not broken. They could have fought on, but without their leader, they chose to turn away.

'The battle itself was inconclusive. But it was a crucial day, in all our histories – Bede of Jarrow knew this, in faraway England. The Moors had come a thousand miles north from the strait to Africa. Now at last they had been turned back. And though they continued to raid southern Gaul, they were never to progress so far north again. Why, less than a century later Charles's grandson Charlemagne was mounting expeditions the other way across the Pyrenees.'

'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 body.'

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.'