Conqueror

by Baxter, Stephen

While the novices slept in a stable in the Anglish village, the four guests were to stay the night in the fort, Ambrosias insisted. He prepared a meal. ‘Eat, drink,’ he said. ‘A Roman is nothing if he is not hospitable.’ He shuffled around with a plate of cut meat and a pitcher of ale. ‘Of course I am grateful to my new Anglish neighbours down the hill, but I wish they could lay their hands on some good continental wine rather than this filthy German ale. Do you know, I tried to grow some vines here at one time, up against the southern wall of fort. Withered and died, the first hard winter. Ah, well! …’

  Ambrosias’s four guests, Ammanius and Sulpicia, Ulf and Wuffa, reclined on couches. This was the Roman way to take your meals, lying down. They were in a room carved out of the ruins of the old fort’s principia, its headquarters building. It was a little island of Rome, with mosaics on the floor, frescos, crockery and cutlery, amphorae leaning against the walls of a minuscule kitchen. The floor was heaped with scrolls and wood-leaf blocks, the walls crowded with cupboards. The principia’s original roof was long gone, but this one section had been roofed over by mouldering thatch.

  Everything was worn and old, the pottery patched, the cutlery sharpened so often the knife blades were thin as autumn leaves, and the room was a mouth of dust and soot.

  Ammanius quickly turned to the subject of Isolde. ‘Do you know of her? If she ever existed—’

  ‘Oh, she existed,’ said Ambrosias. ‘And I’m the living proof!’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I am a descendant of Isolde,’ Ambrosias said. ‘And therefore of Nennius, her father. I am the grandson of the grandson of the son of Isolde, in fact. And since she was born in Rome, as was her father, then I am a Roman, by descent.’ He winked at Wuffa. “‘The Last Roman.” That’s what you Angles say of me, isn’t it?’

  It would do Wuffa no good to point out the difference between Angles and Saxons, so he kept his silence.

  Ammanius prompted, ‘And the story of Isolde?’

  It had happened nearly two centuries ago, Ambrosias said, in this very fortress. Isolde, then a young girl heavily pregnant, had been hauled all the way here from Rome by her own father, for purposes of his own. Far from home, Isolde had given birth, to the first of a line of five males that would eventually lead to Ambrosias himself.

  And as she was in the pains of labour, she began to speak: to gabble in a tongue that was alien to herself and her father.

  Ammanius was tentatively interested. ‘She spoke in tongues, then. It is a common miracle. Did she speak of the Christ?’

  ‘Oh, she mentioned Him,’ Ambrosias said. ‘But what was miraculous about it was that the tongue she spoke was German.’

  Wuffa could see that that detail jarred with Ammanius’s notion of what constituted a proper Christian miracle. But it intrigued Wuffa, for to him it made it seem more likely that something remarkable had happened, that this hadn’t been a mere plague fever. What possible insanity could cause a Latin-speaking woman suddenly to spout German?

  Sulpicia asked, ‘And did she speak of the future? Was it really a prophecy?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Nennius and the others with her recognised it as such immediately. They wrote it down, and it has been preserved by my family, in this place, ever since.’

  Ammanius pressed, ‘What did she say?’

  Ambrosias sighed and gulped down a little more Anglish ale. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. Tomorrow we will discuss the past and the future and similar nonsense. But for now let us talk of other things. I am starved of educated conversation, stranded here among illiterate Germans. You are tired - or if you aren’t, I am - and most of us are a little drunk on this scummy ale, I suspect.’ He eyed Ammanius when he said this, and the bishop glared back.

  Ambrosias turned to Ulf and Wuffa. From the moment they had met he had seemed far more interested in the two young men than in the bishop or the girl, although there was no trace of Ammanius’s lasciviousness in him. Ambrosias asked where the two of them were from, and they tried to explain, though their lack of a common geography was a problem: to Ambrosias they were both simply barbarians from beyond the old empire.

  ‘And now you are here,’ Ambrosias said, ‘on the west coast of Britain, so far from home.’

  ‘My people came to Britain,’ Wuffa said, ‘because of the sea. So my father told me. Every year the tides came higher. The beaches and cliffs eroded away. We were forced to retreat from our farms, which became waterlogged. But there was nowhere for us to go, for the land was full.’

  ‘And so you came across the ocean. The sea rises, and we petty humans must flee. Before such forces, the coming and going of empires seems trivial - don’t you think? But there may be deeper patterns yet.’ Ambrosias leaned close to the two young men, peering into their faces. ‘I once met an old man, a poor Briton fleeing west from the Angles, who told me of an ancient legend - it must date back thousands of years if it is true at all - that once you could walk across the ocean, or rather the floor of what is now the ocean. But the sea rose up. Sometimes, if you dig in the exposed sands on the coast you will find reindeer bones, even a stone tool or two. Do you think that we are all one, we people of the lands surrounding the ocean, that in a sense you are not migrants, you have simply come home?’

  The idea was astounding to Wuffa. ‘But how you could ever tell if that was true?’

  Ammanius grunted grudging approval. ‘An intellectual answer. I could make a scholar of you, wolf-boy, given time.’

  Ulf, always more earthy than Wuffa, was uninterested. ‘We have no legends of drowned lands. My people are warriors.’

  ‘Ah, warriors,’ said Ambrosias. ‘The world is never short of warriors! When I was an infant my father presented me to the greatest warrior of all. Have you young blades ever heard of Artorius?’

  They had not. Ambrosias seemed shocked.

  Ammanius told them that as the German immigrants expanded from their coastal footholds and conflict spread across the island, the British found a general in Artorius, who had the authority to work across the boundaries of the province-states and organise significant resistance. He won a string of victories. ‘Artorius’ may have been a nickname, meaning ‘the Bear man’, perhaps a reference to his size. He was said to be the nephew of one of the last Roman commanders to have stayed at his post in Britain.

  ‘All this was a century after the Roman severance,’ Ammanius said. ‘Artorius won peace for a generation. But all he really secured for his people was time.’

  Wuffa asked, ‘So why would this Artorius come here?’

  ‘He retired here after a last battle,’ Ambrosias said. ‘Already an old man he was gravely wounded - worn down by the treachery and cowardice of his own men as much as the enemy’s efforts. He died, here at Banna - on the Wall, the greatest monument of the empire to whose memory he devoted his life.’ He was misty-eyed now. ‘In another age they would have built him an arch here to rival any in Rome! And I, a child, was presented to him. He ruffled my hair! Here.’ He knelt stiffly, presenting his bowed head to Wuffa. ‘Touch my scalp. Go on!’

  Wuffa glanced at the bishop, who shrugged. Wuffa laid his hand on the old man’s head. His skin felt paper-thin, stretched over a fragile skull.

  ‘Always remember. Tell your children! …’

  After more conversation of this sort Ammanius stood and stretched. ‘You’ve worn me out, sir, with your kind hospitality,’ he said in his dry way.

  Sulpicia stood. She wasn’t about to be left alone with Wuffa and Ulf, even with the old man as chaperone. ‘I will bid you goodnight too.’ And, impulsively, she planted a light kiss on the crown of the old man’s head.

  Ambrosias smiled, pleased.

  Wuffa and Ulf began to clamber to their feet too. But Ambrosias raised his hand in an unmistakable gesture. Wait. Let them go.

  Ambrosias closed the door behind the bishop and the girl. Then, padding quietly, he went to a cupboard. ‘I thought the bloody-nosed old fool would never tire. Our business is nothing to do with bishops, or even wit
h that rather charming girl you both lust after.’ Wuffa avoided Ulf’s eyes. Ambrosias drew a scroll from the overfull cupboard. He glanced at the two of them, with a complicated mixture of regret and longing. ‘Chance has brought you two here, in the wake of the bishop. But this was meant to be, the ancient words have been fulfilled.’

  Wuffa glanced warily at Ulf. He felt his heart hammer; suddenly, in the presence of this limp old man who brandished nothing but a scroll of parchment, he felt fearful. He asked, ‘The words of what?’

  ‘This.’ Ambrosias unrolled the parchment, holding it in trembling hands. ‘It is the prophecy of Isolde.’

  X

  The document was yellowed with age, grimy with much handling. Wuffa recognised handwriting in somewhat ragged lines, perhaps scrawled in a hurry. But he couldn’t read it. He couldn’t even read his own name.

  ‘So this is the prophecy,’ prompted Ulf.

  ‘Yes! It was written down at Isolde’s birthing bed. For two hundred years my family have preserved it - two hundred years of waiting, reduced to this moment. I knew you would come. I knew.’

  Ulf said cautiously, ‘What do you mean? How did you know?’

  ‘Because the light has returned to the sky.’ Ambrosias pointed to the ceiling of his cramped room.

  ‘The comet,’ Wuffa breathed.

  ‘Yes! And it is the comet around whose visits the prophecy is structured.’ In a quavering voice Ambrosias began to read:

  These the Great Years/of the Comet of God

  Whose awe and beauty/in the roof of the world

  Light step by step/the road to empire

  An Aryan realm/THE GLORY OF CHRIST.

  The Comet comes/in the month of June.

  Each man of gold/spurns loyalty of silver.

  In life a great king/in death a small man.

  Nine hundred and fifty-one/the months of the first Year.

  The Comet comes/in the month of September.

  Number months thirty-five/of this Year of war.

  See the Bear laid low/by the Wolf of the north.

  Nine hundred and eighteen/the months of the second Year …

  ‘And so on.’ Ambrosias said reverently, ‘This prophecy says that the comet will come again - and it has come before.’

  ‘How can that be?’ Ulf asked reasonably. ‘Comets are like clouds. Aren’t they? How can it come back?’

  Ambrosias snorted. ‘How could I possibly know? Ask Aristotle or Archimedes or Pythagoras - not me! All that matters is that it does so. And that is the basis of what the prophecy describes. My family, scholars all, refer to this as Isolde’s Menologium, a calendar. For it is a calendar of a sort - but not of the seasons but of the comet’s Great Years, each of them many of our earthly years long, marking out the events of man. Do you see?

  ‘For example, the second stanza talks of the comet’s appearance in the year of the Saxon revolt against the Vortigern. And then nine hundred and fifty-one months pass, marking the first Great Year, before the comet returns again, and then thirty-five months after that—’

  ‘Nine hundred and fifty-one months,’ Ulf mused. ‘That’s seventy years? Eighty?’

  Ambrosias looked at him. ‘You people are traders, aren’t you? Illiterate or not, you can figure well enough.’

  Wuffa said, ‘You’re going too fast. Why do you speak of the Vortigem?’

  ‘Because that’s what the prophecy says, in the first stanza. Look, here - ah, but you can’t read it! “Each man of gold/spurns loyalty of silver. In life a great kingin death a small man” …’

  “‘Man of gold?”’

  Ambrosias reached out and tugged a lock of Wuffa’s blond hair. ‘Don’t you people use mirrors? And as for “great king”—’

  ‘That is what “Vortigern” means.’

  ‘Yes! The reference is clearly to the revolt against him. So, you see, knowing that enabled my family to fix the start of the first Great Year at the date of the revolt. And then we were able to look ahead to the events foretold in the second stanza, to calculate its date. By then Isolde was already long dead, and I was not yet born. Yet the events the verse foretold came to pass, thirty-five months into the Great Year. “See the Bear laid low / by the Wolf of the north.”’

  Wuffa glanced at Ulf. ‘Ammanius told us that “Artorius” may have been a nickname—’

  ‘The Bear,’ said Ambrosias. ‘And what is the Wolf but you Germans? Why - that is your own name, Wuffa.’ His watery eyes gleamed. ‘And if you count up the months, the forecast date of Artorius’s death was correct. Thus my prophecy holds truth. History is the proof of it - the proof!’

  Wuffa felt uncommonly afraid. A practical man, he was not accustomed to thinking deeply on such mystical issues. It was only chance that he had run into the bishop in Lunden, chance that had brought the two of them here - but chance that seemed to have been predicted centuries ago. And yet, he saw, if he could take all this in, there could be advantage to be gained.

  But surely the same thought had occurred to Ulf, his rival.

  Ulf got to the point. ‘And what next? What does the prophecy say of the future?’

  Trembling now, Ambrosias raised his document, but it seemed he knew the words by heart:

  The Comet comes/in the month of March.

  The blood of the holy one/thins and dries.

  Empire dreams pour/into golden heads …

  Again Wuffa was baffled. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Why, don’t you see? The blood of the holy one thins and dries … Dreams pour into golden heads … Isolde’s blood is drying in my old veins; I am the last of her line. But you are here, with your golden heads, to be filled with the dream and to carry it forward. I knew this night would come. Even when my family abandoned me here, I knew all I had to do was to stay and wait for the Second Great Year to elapse, for those nine hundred and eighteen months to wear away, wait for the comet to reappear. For these words, uttered by an ignorant young woman in labour two centuries ago, are describing our meeting - right now, here, tonight. And now my sole remaining duty is to pass the prophecy to you. Isn’t it marvellous?’ And he clutched the prophecy to his chest. He seemed to be trying not to weep. Wuffa saw that these brief moments were in some way the fulfilment of his whole life.

  Ulf said, practically, ‘We cannot read, either of us. What use are we to you?’

  Ambrosias replied, ‘You can remember, can’t you? You people are famous for your sagas, your long dreary poems. I hear them floating up from the village on the night air, though I thank Sol Invictus that I don’t understand a word. You will remember, and teach your own children, who will teach theirs. Thus the prophecy will be passed down your families until such time as even you Outer Germans learn the benefit of literacy. My time is at an end - my life, my family - even Britannia, or the last vestiges of it. It has been an heroic age. But now that day is done. You are the future, you Germans, you Norse. You! Why, the Menologium says so.’

  ‘But what’s the point of all this?’ Wuffa asked quietly. ‘What of the far future? What does your calendar say of destiny?’

  Ambrosias’s eyes were huge. ‘There will be a great crisis,’ he said. ‘At the close of the eighth Great Year.’

  Wuffa said, ‘And when is that?’

  ‘Who can say? My grandfather once tried to add up all the months in the Menologium, and divide by twelve and so forth, but everybody knows you can’t do figuring with numbers above a few hundred.’

  ‘But it will be centuries from now—’

  ‘Oh, yes! More than four hundred years, my grandfather believed.

  The whole world will tremble, north pitted against south. But a hero will emerge, and with the love of his brother he will win an empire. And then the future will be shaped by the will of his children - of yours - and they will call themselves Aryans. An Aryan empire. This is his plan.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘The Weaver’s. The spinner of the prophecy, who sits in his palace of the future and sees all - and schemes
to establish the new Rome. But, you understand, the prophecy must be fulfilled, in every particular, in all the Great Years, if this shining future is to come to pass. Otherwise darkness will surely fall.’ And with these chilling words he pawed at his prophecy, reading it over in the dim light of the animal-fat lamps. ‘Now. Are you ready to learn?’

  XI

  Wuffa, on a straw pallet, reluctantly sharing the floor of Ambrosias’s kitchen with Ulf, found it difficult to sleep.

  And when he did doze he dreamed of centuries, stretching around him like a vast firelit hall.

  He imagined the power the Menologium might give him and his family. But he was afraid. Were even gods meant to know the future? Could it be that all this was an elaborate trap set by Loki - a trap he had walked into that day when he had gone breaking windows in a haunted city?

  He dreamed of Ambrosias’s fine, ruined face, his wrinkled neck, the drone of his voice as he pounded his Menologium into their heads. And he imagined wrapping his hands around that scrawny neck, choking the last life out of the old man who had inflicted this prophetic curse on Wuffa and his descendants.

  He was woken by a scream.

  It was a grey dawn. He glimpsed Ulf hurrying out of the door. He pushed out of his bed and rushed to follow.

  The scream had been the bishop’s. Wuffa found him in the triclinium, with Sulpicia. They were both in their night clothes, and at another time Wuffa might have been distracted by the glimpses of Sulpicia’s ankles and calves, her bare arms. But Ulf was here too, glowering. The light from the open door was dim, blue-grey.

  On the floor lay Ambrosias, Last of the Romans. His body looked oddly at peace, his arms by his sides. But his head was at an impossible angle, and purple bruises showed on his throat.

  Wuffa smelled burning. He saw ashes around one of Ambrosias’s animal-fat lamps on a low table, the remnants of a burnt parchment.

  Bishop Ammanius, his battered nose livid, shook with rage. ‘To have come all this way, for this! … It is obvious what has happened here. The old man read his prophecy to you two last night. Don’t bother to deny it. I heard him, though I could not make out the words. And now one of you has come back, destroyed the parchment, and murdered this wretch - one of you has sought to steal the prophecy for himself. To think that I recruited you when I saw you save one old man, only for it to end like this, in the murder of another at your own hands.’