Navigator by Stephen Baxter

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