Conqueror

by Stephen Baxter

  However it was the bishop himself who had contributed most to the group’s tension. With his battered nose bloody and sore, he raged at the novices, at Wuffa and Ulf, even the horses when they shied. Wuffa saw that Ammanius’s anger was really for himself, for the way he had behaved that night at Bebbanburh. But he was a prisoner of his own flaws, as all men were, Wuffa thought.

  Thus the little group, barely speaking, at last approached Banna. Here, not far from its western end, the Wall strode over a high ridge from which Wuffa could make out the hill country to the north, and to the south a river wound through a deep wooded valley.

  A small, mean village of Anglish farmers huddled a little way away from the fort, down the northern slope. On arrival, Ammanius led his party to the village, fearlessly summoned the chieftain, and demanded to know if the man knew anything of this ‘Last Roman’. Wuffa and Ulf had haltingly to translate for him, for these Anglish knew no Latin, and Ammanius certainly knew no Germanic.

  Yes, said the Anglish farmer-warrior, he knew all about Ambrosias, the Last Roman. In fact he and his people had been keeping the old man alive for years.

  The Anglish had been encouraged to settle here by their kings. They had chosen not to live inside the old fort, but they would rummage there for abandoned tools, coins, even bits of jewellery, the detritus of centuries.

  And in Banna they had found Ambrosias. For generations the old man’s family had lived in the township that had grown up inside the ruined fort. With the coming of the Anglish his family had all packed up and gone, the farmer neither knew nor cared where. But the old man, stubborn, had remained alone, scraping at the dirt of a small-holding inside the walls of the fort. He was magnificent, in his frail way. He had even raised his rusty hand-plough and had threatened to break the heads of any burly Anglish who tried to evict him from his fort.

  Some impulse led the Angles to tolerate the old man. They even shared their ale with him. Ammanius, hearing this, complimented the farmer on a Christian generosity surprising in a ‘hairy-arsed heathen’. But Wuffa knew it was easy to be awed by the Romans’ mighty ruins. Perhaps to the Anglish, some of them newly arrived from across the sea, the old man of the Wall had seemed like a relic of vanished days, a living ghost. They may even have been trying to propitiate the gods of the Wall by keeping him alive.

  But it had been fifteen years now, the burly farmers grumbled, and still the old man refused to die.

  They rode into the fort. Choked by grass and weeds the place was very old. Halls of wood and wattle had been erected on the neat rectangular foundations of vanished stone buildings, but even these latter huts had slumped back into the dirt from which they had been shaped. But the place was not quite abandoned.

  Ambrosias was gaunt, perhaps seventy years old, and wore a thick, hooded woollen cloak even though the spring weather was not cold. But he wore his silver-grey hair cut short, and he was clean-shaven, though his leathery skin was stubbly. He must once have been handsome, Wuffa thought, with a proud nose and a strong chin. Now, though, his face looked sunken in on itself, and his frame was withered.

  This was the ‘Last Roman’, kept alive as a sort of pet by illiterate Anglish farmers.

  And when Ammanius approached him, Ambrosias ignored the bishop and turned to Ulf and Wuffa. He was avid, eager, and Wuffa recoiled from his intensity. He said in Latin, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

  IX

  As evening fell the comet, suspended in dark northern skies, was brighter and more startling than ever.

  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 g
o, 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 with 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 king/in 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: