Conqueror tt-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Sihtric asked, 'And who taught the boy to draw these designs?'

  'Nobody,' breathed Aethelmaer, and his eyes gleamed, for this was evidently the mystery that informed his whole life. 'Nobody. He was drawing such designs from the age of four, almost as well-executed as these from the very beginning, his limits only his childish hand, his inexperience with the pen. Somehow all this was poured into his head.'

  'From where? How?'

  Aethelmaer shrugged, and winced with pain. 'How can I know? From God, perhaps.'

  Godgifu murmured to Sihtric, 'That sounds like the origin of the Menologium of Isolde.'

  'Yes. Then perhaps this prophecy, if that is what it is, and the Menologium, have a common source.'

  Aethelmaer said, 'You understand this was all before my time. I was born in the year Cnut came to the throne – long after poor Aethelred had gone back to his Maker. But as a young deacon I showed aptitude for study, and the abbot set me to working on the papers Aethelred had left behind.'

  'And what happened to you?' Orm asked bluntly. 'Were you born like this?'

  'Oh, no,' Aethelmaer said, and he squirmed as the young monk worked at his legs. 'When I was young I was strong and fit. But I became obsessed with Aethelred's works – and I let my obsession carry me too far…'

  He had become convinced that he had to try to build some of Aethelred's marvellous designs if he were to understand them fully. But there was much depicted in the diagrams he could not buy or make: very fine cogs, for instance, with accurately spaced teeth. 'Perhaps the Romans could have made these things – or perhaps the men of some future empire will be able to do so – but not the monks of Cnut's England…' However he had attempted one of the simpler-looking devices. He showed Sihtric a drawing of it. It was a kind of suit, of wood, cloth and feathers, shaped like a bird, which a man would wear.

  'I can guess what its function was,' Sihtric said dryly. 'And I can guess what happened to you.'

  'I hoped to fly like Daedalus!' sighed Aethelmaer. 'I fixed the wings to my hands and my feet. I jumped off a tower. I crashed to the earth… But I flew,' he said, and he smiled as he remembered his life's defining moment. 'And not many men can say that, can they?'

  'No indeed,' said Sihtric. 'And Aethelred? You said he was dead before you were born.'

  'Ah. Now that was a sad story…'

  As Aethelred had grown to fourteen or fifteen, his behaviour seemed to calm. He joined in the monastery's daily routine, and the abbot thought he showed signs of accepting the word of God. He continued to draw his peculiar designs, but he was willing to turn his attention to other things. For instance, he learned to illuminate. 'He actually turned out a few pages that were good enough to sell, even at such a young age,' Aethelmaer said. 'Who knows what he might have achieved, had he lived?'

  But he had not lived. As he grew he blossomed from a pretty child into a beautiful young man. There were those in the monastery who lusted after him. When they approached him, he ignored their advances; when they pressed, he fought back. So, inflamed by lust and rage, they held him down.

  'I doubt he even understood what was happening. He must have been terrified. And when they were done, such was the violence they had used, he was dead, his pretty body as broken as his mind had always been. So that was that, a terrible end. But I comfort myself that perhaps he had served the purpose for which God placed him on the earth – after all his drawings survived – and he was ready to be called back to Heaven.'

  Aethelmaer had his faced bathed by his attendant, and Orm took the opportunity to draw the others aside. 'So what do you make of this?'

  Sihtric said, 'Who knows? There's something in these "Engines of God", that's for sure. And I can't resist a cryptogram! But aside from the business of the comet I can't see what it has to do with Harold.'

  'So will you let this old man go?'

  'Oh, yes.' He grinned, wolfish, calculating. 'But I think I'll take a copy of those sketches of Aethelred's. There will be a future beyond this crisis, however it turns out, a future beyond 1066. Perhaps the sketches will be a guide…'

  Godgifu was clearly repelled. 'You never stop manipulating, do you? You never stop plotting, calculating, seeking the advantage.'

  'It's got me this far,' he said, unperturbed.

  Orm plucked Godgifu's sleeve. 'Let's get out of here. The stench is making me ill.'

  'Of his ulcer?'

  'That too. Come on.'

  They hurried out of the abbey, and made for the thegn's house Orm was sharing with Sihtric and Godifu. It was still light. Once inside, Godgifu poured wine.

  Orm felt restless, confined. He prowled around, longing to punch something. 'I've had my fill of prophecies. And hypocrisy. The fat, putrid old monk, Aethelmaer! He drools over the boy's drawings as if they were a gift from his God – and yet those who were supposed to care for the boy raped him to death. All that lost potential, a lost life – and for what?' He drained his cup.

  And Godgifu stood before him.

  Wordless, she took away his cup – and she touched his chest, as she had on that day when she had helped pull him from the mire in Brittany, and suddenly he forgot about monks and prophecies. He felt his heart speeding, his pulse beating in his throat. It was as if the world expanded, the houses and the people flying away to the horizon, leaving the two of them isolated in this small Lunden house. He covered her hand with his. 'What's brought this on?'

  She smiled up at him. 'Do you fear we might be wasting our potential, Viking? I slog after my brother as he follows the King, while you train little English boys for war. All we talk about is prophecies and successions. We live in a tumultuous age – perhaps we even glimpse future and past through my brother's prophecy – but we have no time for ourselves.'

  He smiled. 'Sihtric will be pumping information out of that old monk for a good hour yet, if I'm any judge.'

  'Then let's not waste this hour, if it's all we have.' And she raised her face to his.

  It was her first time. There was a little pain, and he could feel the blood she spilled. But she gave herself to him joyfully.

  Afterwards he clung to her. He did not know when this moment might come again. 1066, he suspected, was not a good year to fall in love.

  XI

  The very next morning, Sihtric insisted on an audience with the King. He declared that he had at last fully decoded his prophecy, and was ready to present its 'remarkable message' to Harold.

  Godgifu tried to slow him down. 'Are you sure? It's a risky business to try to change a king's mind.'

  'I have no doubt. My correspondence with the Moor confirmed it – my meeting with the fool Aethelmaer only served to clarify my mind. I worked through the night to resolve it all. This is destiny, Godgifu. Providence. I am the Weaver's instrument.' His eyes were rimmed red from the lack of sleep.

  Impulsively Godgifu took her brother's hands. 'Not providence. The truth is that damned prophecy has led you far from your chosen path through life. Far from God. Your Weaver can have no conscience about the effect of his tinkering with our lives.'

  He squeezed her hands. 'Dear Godgifu. We have always had a prickly relationship, haven't we? And yet you always look out for me. Even now you will help me – even today.'

  She frowned, suspicious. 'What do you mean by that?'

  'Never mind. Just be with me, Godgifu, before the King. And – bring Orm.'

  'Why?'

  But he would not say.

  Harold received them in his chamber, a magnificent stone-walled room at the heart of Edward's Westmynster palace, with a fireplace so large Godgifu could have walked into it. He was working through papers with clerks and a couple of housecarls, who hastily read through the documents for him and held them up for him to make his cross. Harold's big warrior's frame looked restless under the fine garb and, like Sihtric, he looked as if he had had little sleep.

  When Sihtric, Orm and Godgifu were shown in, he dismissed his clerks and crossed to a bench where he poured himself a cup of mead
. 'I'm somewhat busy, priest.'

  'I can imagine, lord-'

  'William is moving. Have you heard that? He is trying to raise an army of seven thousand, my spies tell me. He needs the support of his Norman nobles for that. He's seeking recruits from Brittany and Boulogne. He's even writing to the damn Pope. He means to invade, that's the top and bottom of it… Make your case and make it quickly, Sihtric.'

  Sihtric, his tension showing, unrolled a scroll. 'Behold the Menologium of Isolde. I now understand it fully, lord, so I believe. And, troubled as this time is for you, I believe the Menologium shows you a clear path.'

  Harold grunted. 'My brothers say I should dispose of you. My pet soothsayer. They call you a chancer.'

  Sihtric held up the parchment. 'But this is no fortune-telling, no scrying of entrails. This is scholarship, which-'

  Harold waved away a document he couldn't read. 'Yes, yes. Just tell me.'

  As the name implied, the Menologium was a calendar – a calendar of history. It was structured around the Great Year, the seventy-seven-year return cycle of the comet, which even this month should blaze in England's skies.

  'But there is no comet,' Harold pointed out.

  'It will come, sire…'

  Sihtric had been able to interpret the Menologium with the help of the Moorish scholar who had converted Great Years to Christian dates, by matching Menologium dates to histories like Bede's, and by drawing on studies of the prophecy itself that went back centuries, to Cynewulf and Boniface, long dead.

  'We have a prologue, epilogue and nine stanzas,' he said. 'Each stanza spans a Great Year, punctuated by a comet visitation. The first can be dated to Anno Domini 451, when our German forebears first rebelled against the British king who had brought them to England. And later stanzas describe specific events, though cryptically.' Thus stanza five predicted the coming of the Norse to Lindisfarena. Stanza six foreshadowed Alfred's first great victory against the Danish Force.

  Some of the Menologium's stanzas seemed to have been inserted to give a historical anchoring to the timeframe, and they were only becoming clear with the passage of time. Sihtric quoted stanza eight: '"At the hub of the world/Match fastness of rock/against tides of fire"…'

  'What does it mean?'

  'Everybody has heard of the great burning of Rome, in the year 993. In this stanza, the "hub" is Rome, the "rock" refers to Peter, after whom the cathedral of the Vatican is dedicated. And the year-date embedded in the verse is the year 993, the year of the fire. My Moorish colleagues have confirmed the calculations. This is a prophecy that can even foretell disasters befalling the eternal city itself.'

  Harold frowned, considering this.

  Orm imagined that Harold disliked such mystical talk as much as he did. But he couldn't help be perturbed by the prophecy's evident power.

  The King said, 'Tell me this, priest. How can there be such things as prophecies at all? I have a calendar; my priests read it to me every day. It is a litany of feast days and remembrances – God's design of the world, embedded in the cycle of each year. How can we look beyond that holy cycle? What right do we have to try? I have discussed this business of yours with Archbishop Stigand. "The future is locked and lightless. The Lord alone knows it." That's what he says. Is it sacrilegious even to talk of such matters?'

  'Look at it this way, lord. We are not seeking to control history but to improve it. A perfect history must be possible, because it must be conceived of by God. Our Fallen world is imperfect, but it may be made more perfect by our manipulation of events. And so to follow the warnings of the Menologium is clearly obeying God's will.'

  Harold scowled. 'Stigand would argue with you, I think. I'm sorry I asked; I've never had much time for theological sophistry, unlike my predecessor. Get to the point. What is the purpose of all this prophesying?'

  Sihtric drew himself up. 'I believe,' he said, 'that the Menologium is a plan – a scheme, that "lights step by step/the road to empire" – just as it says. And if fulfilled it will see you, Harold Godwineson, installed not merely as King of England, but as ruler of a northern empire. Spanning oceans!'

  Harold didn't seem terribly impressed. 'So I will be a new Cnut?'

  'Greater than Cnut,' Sihtric breathed. 'Far greater.' He spoke of stanza seven, which described the discovery of Vinland and the other new lands across the western ocean. 'Nobody knows how extensive those great domains are…'

  Harold listened, expressionless. 'I hear the ice makes the passage to Greenland difficult.'

  Sihtric said, 'But from England's more southerly ports the ice can be evaded. The Vikings who tried to settle Vinland could not defend themselves against the skraelings. But imagine how it would be to equip a new expedition, from an England united with the northern countries: the wealth of the English, the shipbuilding and navigation skills of the Vikings. We could challenge the skraelings – learn how they hunt for seals and for bears – take the women who sew their skin boats. "'Across ocean to east/And ocean to west/Men of new Rome sail/from the womb of the boar." We can take this new world. It's all in the prophecy.'

  Harold frowned. 'The boar, though? What can that mean?'

  'Of that detail I'm not sure-'

  'Jorvik,' Godgifu said suddenly, and they looked at her. 'I'm sorry, lord. But it just occurred to me. The city's English name is Eoforwic, which means the place of the boar.'

  Sihtric's eyes gleamed, startled by her intervention, satisfied as another bit of his puzzle was solved. 'Jorvik, then. It is the fate of our generation to build a new empire spanning oceans, reaching from Vinland in the west to the Baltic in the east, with its hub England – and its capital will be Jorvik. It won't end there. The German states will be drawn to the huge volumes of trade passing to the north, turning away from the Latin south-'

  Harold held up a hand. 'Enough. Just tell me how we reach this promised land.'

  'It is all in the prophecy,' Sihtric said. '"Step by step." The fifth stanza describes the coming of the Vikings to Lindisfarena. The copiers in the monasteries laboured for centuries to preserve the Menologium for you, lord, and the Menologium's own words gave the monks a chance to save it from the fire of the Northmen – which they did.

  'That achieved, the Menologium survived to be presented to Alfred – and proved to him that he would prevail against the Danish force, when all must have seemed lost. Another step completed. And with that achieved, we come to stanza nine.'

  'Which describes this very year,' Harold said, intrigued, disturbed. 'Which you claim predicts my actions.'

  'Yes.' And the priest read again: "'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."'

  'Brother slaying brother,' Harold growled. 'We've discussed this before. I won't have Tostig killed, priest.'

  Sihtric returned his glare steadily. 'But it may be necessary. The fighting man, the elf-wise – isn't that clear now? It was your duty to take the throne of Alfred.'

  Harold glared at him. 'Move on, move on,' he snapped. "'Brother embraces brother." What does that mean? Must I forgive Tostig now?'

  'No,' Sihtric said firmly. 'I have puzzled over this phrase, lord. It's not to be taken literally. I believe it means you must embrace the Northmen.'

  'What, Harald Hardrada?' Harold laughed.

  Sihtric pressed, 'Make your peace with him, lord, before he has a chance to strike for the crown.'

  Harold glowered, clearly not liking what he was hearing. 'And then what?'

  Sihtric took a deep breath. 'And then, when William comes, you will be ready. "The north comes from south/to spill blood on the wall."'

  'Ah. You think this means the Normans? Northmen who will attack us from the south. Their blood spilled on our shield walls.'

  'Yes! You have it, lord. English and Norse together will face the Norman Bastard, and crush him. And that will be the conclusion of the programme of the Menologium – the fulfilment of all these steps a
cross the centuries – and the Rome of the north will be built.'

  'And if not,' Harold said gloomily, 'if England falls to the Normans, what then? England will turn south, not north, I suppose, and will fall under the sway of the Popes. And the butcher of Normandy will be loose in our land… But I can't make peace with Hardrada. It would be like tupping a wild bear.'

  Sihtric was sweating now, as he saw the prize was all but in his grasp. 'But we are brothers now,' he said. 'We and the Northmen. After two centuries of blood spilled and blood mixed – you yourself, King of England, are half Danish. And consider this.' He turned to Godgifu and Orm. 'My own sister, this Viking warrior – lovers! Here is the proof.' And he produced a scrap of blood-stained sheet. 'I don't preach omens, lord. But what is this but a symbol of the unity to come?'

  Orm tensed. He was weaponless, here in the King's chamber, but he felt he could throttle the priest with his bare hands. But Godgifu held his arm, silently urging him to be still.

  Harold, watching this, said evenly, 'I doubt your sister will forgive you for this, priest.'

  Sihtric, sensing he had made a terrible blunder, rowed back. 'Lord-I only meant to show you that-'

  'Put that disgusting rag away, you fool.'

  Sihtric did so, and stood, tense. 'My case is made, lord.'

  'Is it indeed? Well, I'll tell you what I think-'

  The door crashed open, and a thegn rushed in. 'Lord – I am sorry – there is news.'

  It was Tostig. The exiled brother had gathered a fleet and had sailed from Flanders. It appeared he was heading for the English south coast. Harold threw down his mead cup and walked out without another word.

  Sihtric hurried after him. 'You should have killed Tostig,' he said, panicking. 'This is not in the prophecy. Everything could unravel. Even now, all could be lost…'

  But the King did not look back.

  XII

  When Orm and Godgifu left the palace, it was evening. It had been cloudy for some days, but now the sky was clear, and a pale light filled the sky – the moon, perhaps.