"Indeed not. I have seen my share of them, some worse than what is detailed by the author of that diary. Fortunately neither of my marriages were like that."

Seimei turns a page in the storybook.

"Ah! Here is Kamo no Tadayuki," he says, showing the picture to Ysalwen. In it, a young boy (presumably Seimei himself) is writing Chinese and Sanskrit on a paper with a calligraphy brush. Sitting beside him and overseeing his efforts is a man with a flowing grey beard and prodigious eyebrows. He looks down on the boy with a smile of approval.

"Kamo-sensei did have a beard like that, but he almost always looked very stern. And I would not have been writing on paper at that age! Paper was too expensive in those days for a child to scribble on. I had a tray of wet sand and a stick. I didn't graduate to paper until I knew my characters." Seimei shakes his head and clucks his tongue.

"I was fortunate to have such a teacher, even if he was a curmudgeon. He had studied yin-yang magic - onmyodo, we called it - with the Daoist masters in China. To him it was not simply a job or a means to an end, as it was for so many, but a sacred calling.

"My mother also had a hand in my training - beyond engaging Kamo-sensei, I mean - but that is not generally known."