Conqueror

by Baxter, Stephen

  It had been a genuine crisis. King Edward had backed Tostig, who was his appointed earl. But Harold had ridden north, unarmed. And he recommended to the King that the demands of the rebels be met. Edward reluctantly backed down, Morcar was installed, and the crisis was passed.

  But the cost for Harold was an irreparable breach with his brother. Tostig sailed off to exile in Flanders; rumour had it that he was plotting.

  ‘Harold, you see,’ said Sihtric, ‘sacrificed his brother for a greater good - he did it once before, with another troublesome sibling called Swein who seduced a nun - although he let Tostig live, and I believe that was a mistake. Harold is a great man who will put the interests of peace even before his family - a remarkable man.’

  ‘And,’ Orm said, ‘you who were Tostig’s man are now welcome in Harold’s court.’

  ‘In Normandy I heard Harold’s confession,’ Sihtric said piously, ‘for taking an oath he doubted he would ever be able to keep.’

  Godgifu snorted. ‘You weren’t just there when Harold took the oath. You urged him to do it. Harold sees you as a witness to his sin, I think. Or perhaps even the demon who goaded him to it. That’s why he keeps you close.’

  ‘Providence shapes all our lives. If I were not close to Harold I would not be able to bring him the Menologium.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘His prophecy,’ Godgifu said dryly. ‘You remember. Comets and kings and dubious poetry.’

  ‘He still believes all this?’ Orm said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Godgifu said. ‘He’s even been writing to Moor scholars in Iberia to have them check his calculations of the dates. ’

  Sihtric said, ‘I have found an astronomer in Toledo, who has some philosophies about the comet.’

  ‘What comet?’

  Sihtric’s face remained impassive. ‘The one that will appear in March, according to the Menologium. Or rather reappear.’

  Everybody knew that comets, hairy stars, were bad omens. But as signs in the sky they were quite unpredictable; they came and went according to the whim of God. ‘If a comet appears in March, priest,’ Orm said, ‘I’ll swallow my own sword whole.’

  Sihtric glowered darkly. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Viking.’

  Godgifu said, ‘Oh, don’t be so pompous, Sihtric. He has a rival, you know.’

  ‘A rival?’

  ‘There is another sibyl hanging around Edward’s court. A monk called Aethelmaer.’

  Sihtric said, ‘A buffoon who dreams of marvellous machines—’

  ‘And who speaks of comets,’ Godgifu reminded him. ‘In laughing at him the thegns are learning to laugh at you too, brother.’

  Sihtric snorted. ‘I’ll deal with Aethelmaer. Of course the challenge is interpreting the Menologium. I told you it couldn’t be a coincidence that you are involved, Orm, a descendant of Egil. Now I think I have worked out how you can help me interpret the Menologium, and to persuade Harold to accept its advice.’

  Orm frowned. ‘You’re going too fast, priest. Perhaps you should show me this prophecy of yours.’

  Sihtric raised his eyebrows. ‘Can you read?’

  ‘I find it helps when some wily cleric in the pay of an illiterate Norman count puts parchments in front of me to sign.’

  The priest had a small leather bag under the table. ‘I have a copy of it here …’ He drew out a parchment and unrolled it on the sticky tabletop. Orm saw the stanzas of the Menologium, neatly transcribed, but tangled in a thicket of notes and arrows, all in a crabbed hand that Orm presumed was the priest’s. ‘I told you it remains cryptic,’ Sihtric sighed. ‘Even after a lifetime’s study. But look here …’ He read the ninth stanza aloud.

  The Comet comes/in the month of March.

  End brother’s life at brother’s hand./A fighting man takes

  Noble elf-wise crown./Brother embraces brother.

  The north comes from south/To spill blood on the wall …

  ‘A bit of nice symmetry about those lines, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m no skald,’ Orm growled. ‘So a brother slays a brother. Why do you think it refers to Harold?’

  ‘Who else? What fraternal rivalry matters in England save the feud between Harold and his fuming, exiled brother?’

  ‘And what about the rest of it? What’s all this about fighting men and elves?’

  ‘That doesn’t concern you,’ Sihtric said dismissively.

  ‘The truth is he doesn’t understand that bit himself,’ Godgifu said.

  Suddenly all this talk of prophecies and politics was too much for Orm. He regretted coming. He longed to be free of this place, this cramped city, free of this grasping, manipulative priest with his entangling words - free to be with Godgifu. ‘Just tell me what you want from me.’

  ‘It comes here.’ Sihtric pulled his parchment across the table. ‘The seventh stanza. I need to understand these words.’

  Orm glanced at the stanza: ‘The dragon flies west./Know a Great Year dies/Know a new world born.’

  ‘I believe this stanza hints at the ultimate prize,’ Sihtric said, his face flushed. ‘That in our grasp is not just England, but a new world.’

  Orm looked at Sihtric. ‘What new world?’

  The priest smiled. ‘Vinland.’

  A young man in a drab black habit came into the tavern. Squinting in the gloom, he spotted Sihtric, hurried over, and whispered in his ear. Sihtric nodded, stood and hurried out.

  Orm and Godgifu followed his lead. Orm called after Sihtric, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The King is dying, the doctors confirm it. And he has asked for Harold.’ Sihtric seemed full of energy, as if this news had burned off the drink. ‘The world pivots, this dismal afternoon.’

  Godgifu said, ‘And Harold has asked for you?’

  ‘No, but I’m going to be there anyway. I bet you didn’t expect all this when you paddled up the river in your dragon-ship today, eh, Viking? Come with me, but stay close.’ And he bustled ahead.

  VII

  A crowd surrounded the palace that chill afternoon, drawn like moths to the black light of Edward’s death. There was grief in the air, but there was an extraordinary crackling tension too. With the death of a king, everything would be different, and no man could be sure of his place in the new order - not even the Godwines.

  Despite Sihtric’s status as a confidante of Harold, it took some time to get past the royal guards. And while they waited in line before the great door, the priest ordered Orm to tell him about Vinland.

  It was a story of Orm’s ancestors. The Egil who had once faced Alfred’s army at the famous battle of Ethandune had died of an undignified illness. The shame had been so severe that Egil’s son, the next Egil, had felt compelled to leave his home in Denmark. He chose to join the great emigration of Northmen across the western ocean.

  It was a heroic age, this, when the Northmen’s dragon ships had broken into the heart of the old world, reaching as far as Constantinople - and at the same time they headed west. Vikings had settled the outlying islands of Britain, unoccupied save for primitive folk and a few eremitic monks. But some had sailed further west still, and found another island, much larger, which they had called the Land of Ice - Iceland. For the first time the Vikings found themselves in a land empty of previous peoples, a land they could shape as they liked. They worked out a stable and functional society, of a new sort. The great landowners would meet for a general assembly called an althing, at a spectacular central site called the thingvellir.

  ‘I’ve heard of this,’ Sihtric said. ‘The remarkable thing is, these hairy-arsed settlers proclaimed they had no king but the law. Democracy, flourishing across the northern ocean! But I don’t suppose you know who Demosthenes was, do you, Orm?’

  And still more ambitious settlers had pushed even further west.

  ‘A man called Eric the Red made the first journey,’ Orm said. ‘A son of Egil sailed with him. This was Egil’s son’s son’s—’

  ‘Never mind.’<
br />
  Eric led settlers to this new island, which he enticingly called Greenland, and soon two healthy settlements developed. ‘I visited them myself,’ Orm said. ‘My father once took me there on a trading voyage. They raise cattle and sheep, and they hunt walrus, seals, white bears, and catch fish. Some cling to the old faiths, as my father did, as I do. Mostly they are good Christians. They send tributes to the bishops at home, who send them on to the Pope.’

  ‘And,’ Sihtric prompted him, ‘explorers went further west yet.’

  So they had. The new lands had been first sighted in the time of Eric the Red by a man called Bjarni Herjolffson who, sailing for Greenland, had been blown off course by strong winds and lost in deep fog. He came to a thickly forested shoreline he had not recognised as Greenland. Bjarni had not landed, but some time later Leif, the son of Eric the Red, intrigued by Bjarni’s account, tried to recreate Bjarni’s accidental journey. He used Bjarni’s ship, for ships knew their own way.

  Sihtric rolled his eyes. ‘Pagan superstition!’

  The first place Leif landed was worthless, nothing but glaciers and slabs of rock, and he called it Helluland. The next landing was at a place he called Markland, which was thickly forested. And finally he came to a place called Vinland, the land of wine, for one of his men got drunk from eating the grapes that grew abundantly. Leif wintered in Vinland and returned to Greenland with a cargo of grapes and timber. Leif never returned, but later other children of Eric the Red led an expedition to colonise.

  Sihtric leaned close, studying Orm, his breath foul with wine. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘You visited this Vinland?’

  ‘With my father, as a boy. He showed me the places my grandparents lived.’

  It had been a late afternoon when his father and his men dragged the ship up a boggy beach from the still water of a bay. The land was low, with worn islands offshore. On a scrap of land above the marshy beach stood the settlement, a clump of huts with walls of sod. Fires had curled up into the sky, and voices in clipped Danish or Norwegian called to and fro, just like home. ‘I was thrilled,’ Orm admitted. ‘I was old enough to understand that I had crossed an ocean, and yet here were people living and working, and speaking in my own language.’

  Godgifu smiled, enchanted.

  Orm remembered that as he had walked with his father and his men along the beach, they discovered what looked like three humps on the beach. They turned out to be skin boats, upturned, with three skraelings hiding beneath each one.

  ‘Skraelings?’

  Orm shrugged. ‘Savages. Ugly and brutish. They sail in boats sewn together from skin, and their women stink of fish.’

  The Vikings killed eight of the skraelings, but one escaped. Later, more came boiling out of the forest, seeking vengeance.

  ‘That was why the settlement was abandoned. Just too many skraelings. But there are many who still regard Vinland as their home.’

  ‘And some day the Vinlanders will return,’ Godgifu said. ‘To reclaim their land from the skraelings.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, they will,’ Sihtric said. ‘The prophecy demands it. Now we come to the crux of the matter. Orm, when exactly did this Bjarni—’

  ‘Bjami Herjolffson.’

  ‘When did he lose his way and find Vinland?’

  The date by the Christian calendar turned out to be hard to establish. Orm, like most people, remembered the years not by numbers but by great events: wars, the passing of kings, the coming of plagues or floods - or strange lights in the sky, like the comet of the prophecy. At last they established that the year of Bjarni’s voyage had been during the long reign of Edward’s father Aethelred, a time when the Danes were ravaging Britain - and that year, a murrain, a cattle disease, had afflicted England.

  Sihtric had another document in his bag, a closely-written little book, a copy of a chronicle of the years that had been kept by English monks since the time of Alfred. It turned out that there was only one year in Aethelred’s reign noted for a murrain: the year 986 AD.

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘I don’t see what you’re getting at,’ Orm admitted. ‘There is no “986” in your prophecy.’

  ‘Ah, but there is - embedded in its puzzles. Look again at the seventh stanza.’ He fumbled with his scroll, unrolling it. “‘The dragon flies west … Know a new world born.” What else can that mean, but the discovery of Vinland by you Vikings? And the stanza says more. “Less thirty-six months … Know a Great Year dies …” My Moorish colleague has dated the end of the seventh Great Year, the seventh cycle of the comet, as September, AD 989. He does this by adding up the given months and dividing by twelve, so that—’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And the “less thirty-six months” gives a date of three years before the Great Year’s end. So the prophecy predicts Bjarni’s discovery - in the year AD 986.’ And he slapped the cover of his chronicle in triumph. ‘I knew it.’

  Godgifu seemed shocked; it seemed that the priest hadn’t shared this secret even with his sister. She asked uncertainly, ‘But what does this mean?’

  The priest rolled up his parchment. ‘I hold in my hand the power to shape history. That’s what it means.’

  At last they were passed by the guard at the door, and made their way inside the palace. Sihtric led them through the crush of jostling English nobility towards the King’s bedchamber.

  ‘I’ll tell you another story of Vinland,’ Orm murmured to Godgifu as they lined up again. ‘My father told me that once, as they explored the coast, the first Viking settlers came across a human skull, smashed in as if by a stone. Searching further they found the wreck of a leather boat, a rude hovel made of piled-up sod - and a silver crucifix. These were the remains of a monk, one of those mad Irish hermits who sailed off in search of solitude, and God. It was a miracle he had crossed the ocean without starving to death. But he was the first to see Vinland, even before the Vikings.’

  ‘And the skraelings ended his journey.’

  ‘It seems so …’

  They made it at last to the door of the King’s bedchamber. It took bluff and bluster for Sihtric to persuade Edward’s thegns and housecarls to let him and his companions through.

  And once again, to his astonishment, in the chamber of a dying king, Orm found himself witnessing history.

  VIII

  He lay on a pallet shrouded in rich cloth, like a skeleton already, his skin stretched over his skull, his hair white and thin as frost. He was attended by his wife—Edith, sister of Harold. Their marriage had been an alliance forced on Edward by an over-mighty earl, but now, whatever their differences, Edith looked genuinely saddened as she held the hand of her dying husband.

  Doctors fidgeted, and the air was full of the stink of their potions; but there were more priests than doctors, and monks droned a dreary psalm. And Harold Godwineson Earl of Wessex was here, hands clasped in prayer, face grave. Sihtric sidled up to his lord.

  The King stirred, startling them all. He raised a hand and feebly beckoned.

  Harold stepped forward, and Sihtric, rat-like, followed. Though they spoke in whispers, Orm made out what followed.

  ‘Serve the Atheling,’ whispered the King. ‘Harold, do you hear?’

  ‘Of course, but—’

  ‘Edgar the Atheling is the true heir. In his veins flows the blood of Alfred.’

  ‘It is up to the witan to decide who succeeds. Not me.’

  Edward snorted softly. ‘The witan will do what you tell them.’

  ‘But it is a dangerous time for England. And the Atheling is a boy. It is not the time to have a boy on the throne. Make me regent until the Atheling is ready.’

  ‘No.’ That was Sihtric, daring to interrupt a dying king.

  Godgifu gasped, and Orm held her back.

  Flushed, the priest whispered to Harold, ‘The throne is yours, lord. The prophecy says so. We have spoken of this before, and my studies since have shown me the truth. This is what you must see now. In the ninth stanza
: “A fighting man takes/Noble elf-wise crown.” Elf-wise - Alfred.’

  Shocked, Orm suddenly saw it. Harold’s standard was the Fighting Man; the crown Sihtric urged him to take belonged to a king descended from Alfred. He felt cold at the Menologium’s precision - and at the idea that a document drafted centuries ago had been designed to intervene in this moment, right here, right now.

  And Godgifu looked shocked too. Evidently her brother had not shared this new interpretation even with her.

  ‘I have thought this through carefully, lord,’ Sihtric urged. ‘You must do this. England requires it. Providence demands it. You know I have openly admired your honourable intentions towards the succession of the Atheling. But it is not a question of honour or dishonour any longer. You have no choice.’

  Harold turned on him, his broad, handsome face twisted. ‘Damn you, priest. You’re always here, aren’t you? Always darkening my soul. Always ready to lead me one step further towards perdition.’

  ‘Harold,’ Edward whispered. ‘Do you hover over me to steal my throne?’

  ‘No—this priest - that is not my intention—’

  ‘I kept the peace in our shores for twenty years. Well, England is for the furnace now. All my life I have been stifled by you Godwines. You are a better man than your father, but now in this extreme you show yourself to be no more than he was.’

  ‘Sire—’

  ‘Your father blinded and slew my brother. I pray you see your brothers die before you, Harold Godwineson. I pray you see them all die, before you are blinded, and die in your turn.’

  Harold’s face hardened. Sihtric, wisely, said nothing.

  Edward’s breath rattled in his throat, once, twice, three times. Then came a final exhalation, almost of relief, as if he were laying down a heavy load.

  Harold straightened up. ‘The King recognised the threat to England. He vouchsafed the throne, and the safety of his queen, my sister, to me.’ He glared around the room. ‘You all heard it.’

  Of course nobody present had heard any such thing. But no one challenged Harold’s cold fury. Even Edith, his sister, the King’s widow, would not meet his eyes.