Conqueror

by Stephen Baxter

  Anger filled her, blood-red. ‘Give me one good reason I shouldn’t split open your grinning face right now.’

  ‘Because you need me to get to what you really want, which is Lindisfarena.’

  She was appalled. She had never met anybody, let alone a slave, who was so manipulative. But of course he was right.

  She didn’t know how to phrase the question. ‘Did you ever hear anything of a Menologium? Of a prophecy, a legend of Ulf and Sulpicia?’

  He looked calculating again. ‘Your father said something about this on the boat ...’

  She told him of the legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer. Ulf, strong and smart, had died old, fat, wealthy, and the owner of many cattle and slaves. But over the hearth he always told stories of his time in Britain, the beautiful Sulpicia, and the remarkable prophecy he had glimpsed and lost.

  And Gudrid told Rhodri how she had spoken to traders returning across the sail road from Britain and its many islands - and, from tantalising hints, how she had worked out that the prophecy, transcribed by monks, may have been stored in the monastery on Lindisfarena.

  Rhodri listened to all this. ‘Well, it makes sense that your prophecy would be copied down at Lindisfarena, if anywhere. Always writing, those monks, scribbling things down and copying them and making more copies again. It’s a hive of letters, of ink and vellum and the scratch, scratch of styluses.’

  She was mystified. ‘Why do they do this?’

  ‘What, the copying? I don’t know. But it’s an easier job than tilling the fields, a safer one than going to war. That’s why the monasteries of Britain are stuffed full of cowering princes.’ Now he smiled. ‘But that’s not all they’re stuffed with.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You need a reason to persuade your father to go there on one of these raids he’s planning, don’t you? I picked up that much on the boat. I think I know just the thing.’

  ‘What?’

  His smile broadened. He was enjoying his petty bit of power over her. ‘Gold,’ he said.

  She gazed at him. ‘If there’s gold there, why didn’t you tell my father?’

  ‘He never asked. And besides,’ he tapped his head, ‘my only wealth is my bit of knowledge. Why give it away?’

  She stood up. ‘I need to talk to my father.’

  ‘Come back soon, lady. Maybe if I tup you I could lodge a baby in that dry womb of yours. Your husband would never know! ...’

  She dared not reply. She turned her back and walked away.

  VIII

  Dom Boniface had always been kind to Aelfric, yet she found him intimidating. Even in this famous monastery Boniface’s piety stood out. It was said that he would keep himself awake for three or four days at a time, praying intensely. Even his illness only spurred him on to thank God even more. But after the incident with Elfgar the computistor spent more time with her. Perhaps he felt guilty for what had been done to her, even if it wasn’t his fault.

  And, he said mysteriously, he wanted to help her understand the true purpose of the monastery.

  ‘Saint Benedict taught us that idleness is the enemy of the soul,’ he said. ‘All work is good work. Your copying shows promise in its artistry, Aelfric, though how that promise may be fulfilled, only Heaven knows yet. Here in the monastery we are never short of time, and with the slow sifting of one generation’s judgement after another, only that which has true deep value persists. It is not me who will assess your work, but the centuries.

  ‘But you must always remember that you are here to serve, not your own art, but the words you preserve. The copies you make of these words may be transmitted all over the world -’

  Sold on for a tidy profit, she thought a little sourly.

  ‘ - or, more importantly still,’ Boniface went on, ‘transmitted to the future. And that is our contribution to the ages, the preservation of such treasure for better times than this. Since the fall of Rome, Britain has been overrun by barbarians. We ourselves are the spawn of illiterate pagans! Like dogs learning to talk, we Angles have taught ourselves to read. But sometimes our veneer of civilisation seems awfully thin.’ He sounded tired, his voice a whisper. He was thinking of Elfgar, she supposed.

  She felt an impulse to cheer him up. ‘We Angles might be barbarians. But we produced Bede.’

  ‘Ah, Bede! He died before I was born, but I met a man who knew him as a boy ... Historian, theologian, computistor, Bede had it all. I think Bede would be horrified to see the corruption that has come upon the Church since his day. But perhaps every generation says the same. He was more Roman than the Romans, you know, but Bede had it wrong about them. We are the purer sort, we of northern blood. In the end the future is ours, not the Romans or the Greeks or the Moors.’

  This baffled Aelfric. ‘What do you mean, Domnus? How can we be better than the Romans?’

  ‘Never mind, never mind. I digress,’ said Boniface. ‘We were talking about you. The abbot consulted with me, you know. When your father asked for permission to lodge you here.’

  ‘My father thought it was best for me. I am too restless. Too interested in books. I wouldn’t be a good wife.’ Her sisters had been married off by the age of twelve and thirteen. And, she suspected, in an increasingly literate age her father thought that a daughter who could read would be a boon to him. ‘He said that if I must learn, it should be here.’

  ‘I disapproved, if it matters to you,’ he said sternly. ‘This is a male house. There are mixed houses you could have been sent to.’

  ‘My father wanted me close by him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he loves me,’ she blurted.

  ‘Ah, a father’s love. I suppose I didn’t think of that. I have no children of my own, and never will. In this place one sacrifices family for a greater good.’

  ‘If you disapproved why am I here?’

  ‘The decision was the abbot’s.’ And the neutral way he said that implied that less than holy considerations, such as her father’s ‘dowry’, would have swayed the abbot’s decision. ‘Now that you are here, however,’ Boniface said, ‘and have been put into my care - one of the better jokes the abbot has played on me over the years - it is my duty to care for your soul. And I have seen that small soul blossom, I believe. Your father was right. Once the Romans had schools, you know, where you could learn anything you liked. The law. The sciences. History, art, philosophy. Now the only schools in Britain are in the monasteries—’

  ‘And all I am allowed to learn about is Christ.’ Her hands flew to her mouth in horror. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ he said mildly. ‘You have the virtue of truth, at least. But you must repeat it to your Father Confessor.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘It is obvious you are curious about far more than the Bible.’ He gestured at the vellum on the desk. ‘You would not adorn your work with pagan symbols otherwise. And don’t try to deny it. I am not one who believes curiosity is sinful, child. But I fear your questions may never be answered - not until your death, when you give yourself up to the light of Christ, and all answers will be revealed. And now your curiosity is engaged by the Menologium, isn’t it?’

  ‘How could it not be?’ she said politely. ‘But the Menologium - I know how important it is—’

  ‘Oh, speak freely, child, I can’t stand waffling.’

  ‘I don’t like riddles! When can a shield not be a shield, an island not an island? And I can tell you that a king would never bow to a hermit.’

  ‘I am disappointed in you. One reason I let you work on the Menologium is because I expected you to work it out. Think again - pick out the simplest element. Can you not think of an example of an island which is not an island? Are you really so obtuse? Child, you live on one.’

  And, in her mind’s eye, she immediately saw the causeway. ‘Lindisfarena? Here?’

  ‘An island not an island, an island like a shield ... As for rest of the stanza - the king and the hermit - have you not re
ad Bede’s history? Have you never heard of Saint Cuthbert?’

  A hundred and fifty years before, in the days of King Oswald who had summoned Aidan to found Lindisfarena, the other German kings, of the Mercians, the East Angles, the Kentish, and the West, East and South Saxons, recognised the Northumbrian ruler as their bretwalda; a great hall was built inland at ad-Gefrin, and Bebbanburh, not distant Lunden, was the capital of German Britain. But the times were turbulent. Northumbria was repeatedly invaded by British and Germans, Christians and pagans. And Oswald himself was killed by a scion of a rival dynasty, Oswiu.

  To cement his position Oswiu, a British Christian, took as his wife a queen who followed the teachings of Rome, and called a synod. After much intense debate the Roman way was chosen over the British. Britain was left with a unified Church, though the country itself remained disunited.

  Oswiu’s son Ecgfrith was a warrior king. Ecgfrith needed a strong bishop at Hagustaldasea, a town on the Roman Wall, and he turned to Lindisfarena, where a priest called Cuthbert lived in exemplary eremitic austerity in the British tradition, in contrast to the Roman bishops in their extravagant pomp.

  Ecgfrith, ambitious and expansionist, launched assaults on the Irish and the Picts; he was defeated and killed, and Northumbria was never so strong again. But in the century since Ecgfrith Northumbrian scholarship had become the envy of Europe: Bede had been famous, it was said, throughout the known world.

  ‘So,’ Aelfric said with mounting interest, ‘when Ecgfrith came to Cuthbert, a king really did come to a hermit, on an island which is not an island...’

  ‘Now you see,’ Boniface whispered. ‘Just as it says in the fourth stanza.’

  ‘And the date? Does the Menologium predict that too?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Look at the first stanza: the “men of gold”, the “great king”. We know that this refers to the coming of the Saxons at the invitation of the British great king, the Vortigem.’

  ‘The brothers Hengist and Horsa,’ she recited obediently, ‘and their three ships.’

  He snorted. ‘Two legendary brothers, like Romulus and Remus. Two names which mean “horse” and “gelding”. Remarkable how quickly history transmutes to myth! But the story is in Bede, even if he qualifies it ... Using Bede and other sources we have dated this revolt to the four hundred and fifty-first year after the birth of Our Lord. We use the system of dating devised by the Scythian scholar Dionysius Exiguus, and made popular by Bede himself - although as Bede well knew that calculation incorporates errors.’

  ‘Anno Domini four hundred and fifty-one,’ Aelfric said. ‘Then that is the date of the first stanza. Then the second, which follows nine-hundred and fifty-one months later—’

  ‘Plus thirty-five, brings us to Anno Domini five hundred and thirty-three, and the death of Artorius, the Bear, the last great British leader.’ He grinned, and his tumour crumpled, grotesque. ‘It took an able computistor to work that out, believe me! The third stanza is dated at Anno Domini six hundred and seven, and appears to refer to the discovery of the Menologium itself. And then we come to the fourth stanza.’

  She remembered Cuthbert’s date from her studies. ‘Anno Domini six hundred and eighty-four.’

  ‘Precisely. But here’s the remarkable thing, novice: the Menologium was written down more than two hundred years before the meeting of Cuthbert and Ecgfrith, and yet that meeting was prophesied to the correct year.’

  She was chilled. ‘Some say that prophecies and auguries and fortune-telling are the province of the Devil, not of God.’

  ‘Ah, but here we have a text that was dedicated to Christ in its first stanza; we hold the word of God. It came to us by chance, you know - or by divine providence. A man called Wuffa found this document in an old fort on the Roman Wall. There was some murky business involving a Norse brute and a British whore, but Wuffa came away having learned the words of the prophecy, which he taught to his own children. He never got over whatever happened on the Wall. He was convinced he had somehow offended his god. He died, it seems, a poor and frightened man. When Wuffa’s grandchild several times removed wandered into our grasp, a perspicacious brother realised what he had in his head, had the Menologium transcribed, and we have preserved it ever since. Of course that muddled grandchild never left, and became the last of the male line of Wuffa: all lines end here, however ancient.’

  He leaned closer. ‘Now do you see how important this is? Now do you see why we have such a strong case for the canonisation of Isolde? Now do you see why we middle generations labour to preserve this prophecy down through the ages which it describes? I told you I would explain to you our true purpose. It is as if we are steering an ark in this sea of barbarian darkness, until the light of empire burns brightly again - and it is the Weaver of time’s tapestry who guides our way in the dark.’

  She asked, ‘Who is the Weaver?’

  But he would not reply.

  Aelfric’s mind raced with implications. It made her feel odd, that long perspective - to think that she was a ‘middle generation’, her life dedicated to preserving relics produced by forefathers who were dust before she was born, for the benefit of children who would not see the light until long after her own death. But then wasn’t that the Christian message, that each small life was dwarfed by the greater narrative of the universe?

  And even if it were so, she thought now, was it possible that some of the Menologium’s stanzas could refer to her own future?

  ‘Dom, if the fourth stanza refers to Cuthbert, what does the fifth stanza mean?’ She read it out from her smudged copy:

  The Comet comes/in the month of May.

  Great Year’s midsummer/less nine of seven.

  Old claw of dragon/pierces silence, steals words.

  Nine hundred and twenty-one/the months of the fifth Year ...

  Fear brushed her mind, like the smoke of fire breath far away. ‘A dragon’s claw? Can this be a warning, Dom? A warning for us?’

  ‘Ours is not to inquire,’ he said.

  ‘But the date - the midsummer of this fifth “Great Year” of nine hundred and twenty-one months, less nine sevens, which is sixty-three - you could work it out.’

  ‘That is not for you,’ he said firmly. ‘The date is in God’s mind, and mine. And there it must stay.’

  IX

  After three days Macson submitted himself to the judgement of his priest and his peers, and his wound was judged to have healed well enough to prove him innocent. So he was free, and Belisarius kept his word.

  They made their journey to the north in a hired cart drawn by two patient geldings and laden with Belisarius’s precious books. Aboard rode the three of them, Belisarius, Macson - and Caradwc, Macson’s father.

  If Macson was around thirty, Belisarius judged, Caradwc must have been at least fifty. He rarely spoke. When he breathed his lungs bubbled, and he coughed up a spray of bloody droplets which Belisarius was careful to avoid. The Greek, armed only with his traveller’s rough-and-ready medical knowledge, had no idea what was broken deep inside the old man, still less how to fix it.

  There seemed an unusually strong bond between father and son. But then in Macson’s eyes, Caradwc was more than just his father; he was the man who had bought the family out of slavery, after generations of too-well-remembered servitude. The old man’s dying was hard for the son.

  The journey north was easier than Belisarius had expected. As Macson had promised they generally made good time along the old Roman roads. But the legionaries had been gone for centuries, and in long stretches the roads had been robbed of their pavement stones, making the going uncomfortable. At least they were not troubled by bandits. Just as Macson had promised, the reign of the ageing Offa of Mercia had brought something resembling a rule of law to the island.

  And this was May. The weather on this northern island was warmer than Belisarius had expected, and the greenery of the farmers’ fields and the leaves of the forests, if stunted compared to the richness of the Mediterranean, the heart of the
world, was pleasing to the eye. Unexpected, too, was the length of the days, which faded only subtly to dark, such was the northern latitude of the island.

  It was a peculiar countryside for a former province of Rome. The hovel-like settlements of the Germans were everywhere. They could be close to the road, but never near a crossroads, for Macson, with some contempt, said the Germans were superstitious of crossroads, junction places where demons could escape. Sheep ran all over the place, and pigs rooted in forest patches. The animals looked small to Belisarius’s eye; the pigs were long-legged, sharp-snouted, wild-looking. The Germans did not husband their animals as one did in the east - or indeed as the Romans once had here in Britain. Rather they let them run more or less wild, and harvested the slow and old in the autumn.