Conqueror

by Stephen Baxter

  Belisarius smiled at her. ‘Yes, if you count the way the Romans always did. But I have Saracen acquaintances who have taught me some new tricks. I wish I had my abacus, though ...’

  He imagined a table of Saracen numerals, complete with that marvellous invention the zero, and worked through the division in his head. Seventy-six years and nine months. Very well, but what was this talk of ‘midsummer’, and ‘nine of seven’? The words clearly meant the ‘midsummer’ of this Great Year marked out by the comet, and ’nine of seven’ surely referred to nine times seven months, to be subtracted. Half of 921, less sixty-three, gave 397, rounded down, or thirty-three years and one month. That had to be reckoned from the beginning of the fifth great year; the fourth began in Anno Domini 684, and was 907 months long ...

  Boniface sat still, eyes closed, as Belisarius worked this through.

  At last Belisarius had his result - and he was stunned. He turned to Aelfric. ‘Tell me today’s date, novice.’

  Aelfric said, ‘May the twenty-fourth.’

  ‘The year! Tell me your Popish year, according to Bede’s calendar.’ ‘793, the Year of Our Lord,’ said Aelfric. And her eyes widened when she saw Belisarius’s shock. ‘Is that the date of the fifth stanza?’

  Belisarius could not deny it. In fact the prediction was even more specific: the dragon’s claws would be unsheathed in the month of June, in this very year. Next month. Belisarius felt a faint whisper of fear, like a rumble of thunder from far across an ocean. He was a rational man, he liked to believe, in the tradition of Aristotle and others of his forebears. Though a Christian, he preferred to keep angels and demons in a separate corner of his mind, away from the business of real life. But now, in the body of this prophecy, that separateness was breaking down, and some impalpable threat was breaking through. Boniface’s eyes were closed, as if he were sleeping, but a slight smile lingered on his lips. Belisarius had the feeling that Boniface the computistor had known all along exactly what the prophecy would reveal - and when this threat was due.

  He straightened, trying to think. ‘Our safest course is surely to assume this stanza is as true as the earlier verses, that this threat is looming. We must seek protection. Who can help?’

  Macson shrugged. ‘The King commands the fighting men. But how could we reach him?’

  To Belisarius’s surprise, Aelfric said, ‘I know how.’

  XIII

  In the morning Belisarius and Macson rose early - though later than the monks - and impatiently waited out the latest service, after which they hoped to speak to Boniface again.

  Macson complained of a growling stomach. ‘These monks might fill up on the word of God, but my belly needs something more.’ He jogged down to the village.

  Hunger wasn’t Macson’s problem, Belisarius knew. In the end Belisarius had relented, and pointed out the obvious truth about Aelfric: that he was a she, that this boy monk was a girl. Suddenly Macson’s helpless attraction to the novice made sense to him, but he was humiliated, and angry. Belisarius was careful not to mock him.

  Macson returned with some heavy last-winter bread. Standing in the chill morning light amid the huddled buildings of the monastery, as birdsong competed with the high, thin chanting of the monks, they both chewed at the hard bread until it was soft enough to swallow.

  When the monks filed out of the little wooden church to continue their day, Aelfric came to find the two of them. ‘Dom Boniface is resting. He has a dispensation from the abbot not to join in the opus manuum in the middle of the day. He will speak with you then.’

  Macson sneered at her. ‘How good of him.’

  Aelfric turned on him. ‘Are you angry with me? Why?’

  Belisarius said, ‘I had to tell him you are female, which he couldn’t work out for himself. You have muddled up his flinty British heart, Aelfric—or is that not your true name?’

  ‘My father christened me Aelfflaed.’

  Macson blushed. ‘You are a liar,’ he spat. ‘Your whole life is a lie. Is that the way Christ and your Saint Benedict would have you live?’

  Aelfric shot back, ‘What’s it to you?’ In her anger she looked more feminine than at any time since Belisarius had met her, despite her grimy habit and the ugly tonsure cut into the crown of her hair. ‘Perhaps the truth is you’re disappointed I’m not a pretty boy after all.’

  Belisarius said, ‘I’m intrigued to find you here, Aelfric. Why is a girl hiding away in a monastery full of men?’

  ‘There is nowhere else for me to learn. And my father thought I would be safe here.’ She said that her father, called Bertgils, was a thegn of the current King of Northumbria, Aethelred. ‘They call him Aethelred the Butcher,’ Aelfric said gloomily. ‘He is Northumbria’s twelfth king in a century, of whom four have been murdered. Indeed Aethelred was once exiled, but won his throne back. And then to secure his position he put to death the infant sons of his rivals.’

  Belisarius could see that for a thegn like Bertgils, to be close to such a king as the Butcher gave a chance of advancement, but was also supremely dangerous. And this father certainly seemed to have the measure of his daughter. ‘I’m getting the impression Bertgils is a wise man. And it is through your father that you will win us an audience with the King?’

  ‘My father is on the witan. The King’s council.’

  ‘So,’ Macson snapped, ‘he sent you to masquerade as a man inside a monastery. Your husband should protect you.’

  Aelfric’s nostrils flared. ‘I have no husband.’

  ‘Why? Are your legs withered, your womb dry?’

  Belisarius interrupted quickly, ‘Aelfric, you should understand that it is no accident we are here. Macson has come all this way because he is descended from one of the protagonists of the legend which spawned your Menologium in the first place. Or at least he believes he is.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You are a grandson of Wuffa? Or Ulf? But you are British.’

  ‘One of those brutes - yes,’ Macson spat back. ‘I am descended from Sulpicia, the British woman who was raped by one or both those barbarians.’

  ‘There was no rape,’ Aelfric said. ‘Wuffa loved Sulpicia. Ulf tried to take her from him, and the prophecy. They fought.’

  ‘Who told you this story?’

  ‘It comes from the descendant of Wuffa who brought the prophecy here in the first place.’

  ‘We will surely never know the full story,’ Belisarius said emolliently. ‘Perhaps these are all partial truths.’

  Aelfric seemed fascinated by Macson now. ‘So your family kept this story alive. Did your grandfathers write it down?’

  ‘We were illiterate,’ Macson said with a kind of perverse pride. He tapped his forehead. ‘We remembered, man-woman.’

  ‘And now you’ve come here for what? Revenge?’

  ‘It is as good a motive as any,’ Macson said coldly.

  ‘The British are good at nursing grudges,’ Aelfric said. ‘Even now they call this country the Lost Land in their tongue. Boniface says its loss was a punishment from God for wickedness and corruption. Easier to blame the Germans than to accept your sins!’

  Macson glowered, and stalked away.

  XIV

  The dragon ship was fifteen paces long. She was laid down on a keel cut from a single oak timber, its curve so gentle the centre was only the length of a forearm lower than the end points. It was this carefully shaped keel that gave the ship the shallow draught that made her so easy to beach, and also gripped at the water when underway to balance the pressure from the sail and keep her from capsizing. The ship’s hull was of oak too, thick polished planks laid down so they overlapped each other, and held in place by wooden pegs.

  Gudrid had sailed in such ships all her life, of course - but only in the fjords, or around the coast. Never before had she sailed into the open sea, and out of sight of land; never had she taken the sail road.

  In the days before the raid Gudrid helped scrub the boat clean, scrape her hull and repair its caulking, and then
they lowered the hull under the sea water so that the salt could kill off rats and worms and fleas.

  The men hung their war shields on racks along the ship’s sides, and they embarked. When she got a chance Gudrid took her turn at the oars. She worked as hard as any man. But the woollen sail with its bright checks billowed overhead; they were fortunate with the winds, needing to resort to the oars only occasionally.

  The slave Rhodri was taken along on the voyage. There was always bailing, shit-shovelling and other chores to be done, and he might have useful local knowledge at the end of the journey. But Rhodri spent most of the journey with his head hanging over the side of the boat, and Bjami got very little work out of him. He was too stupid even to avoid vomiting into the wind, and as the men wiped his bile from their faces they were all for pitching him over the side, and Gudrid had to argue for his life. She made sure that he knew he was in her debt.

  Her father showed her the elements of navigation. The Norse mostly stayed within sight of land, and he showed her crude maps drawn on vellum and parchment, with key landmarks to be sighted. To get to Britain, however, it was necessary to cut west across the open sea. Sightings of the sun and the stars were used to keep to a line running dead straight east to west. The principle was simple; if you ensured the pole star never dipped or rose in your sky, you could not be travelling either north or south over the surface of the curving world. You could also use the wheeling of the sun and moon to find your way. It was harder to tell how far east or west you travelled, but estimates were made by dead reckoning, as days were counted and logs dropped over the side to gauge their speed.

  The more experienced sailors had deeper skills. By the colour of the water, the fish and sea birds they saw, even the scent of the air, they seemed able to ‘smell’ their way across the sea, all the way to the land. Gudrid envied them.

  Gudrid marvelled at how the ship and her crew performed. The ship’s very hull twisted in response to the sea’s buffeting. A product of centuries of sailing the fjords, she was like a sleek animal, like an otter or a whale, perfectly adapted for her environment. And her companions, slim forms dimly seen through ocean mist, looked like the dragons of myth, strange creatures from the edge of reality, hurtling across a forgiving sea to a new junction in history.

  The coast of Britain came in sight within half a day of Bjarni’s first guess. Their position was soon established with the maps, and they began scudding south towards Lindisfarena.

  XV

  Aelfric managed to arrange a meeting with her father, Bertgils the thegn, at the King’s coastal citadel of Bebbanburh. Perhaps an audience with the King would follow.

  But Belisarius was aware that as they waited for this meeting the days slipped by, and May gave way to June, the month specified in the Menologium stanza, when disaster was due to strike.

  At Aelfric’s suggestion Belisarius took along a gift for the King. He chose one of his most precious books, the comedies of the Greek Aristophanes, centuries old, said to be only a few copy-generations younger than the playwright’s own manuscript.

  Aelfric/Aelfflaed discarded her habit before travelling. Dressed in leggings and a long tunic, her hair tied back under a cap to hide her tonsure, she looked more womanly than Belisarius had expected. He noticed that Macson, who seemed to have got over the ‘lies’ Aelfric had told him, looked at her with renewed interest. She instructed them they must all call her ‘Aelfflaed’ during the visit, for her monkish career was supposed to be a secret from all at the Butcher’s court. Belisarius would try, but he could only think of her by her brave pseudonym.

  Bebbanburh was half a day’s ride north along the coast from the causeway to Lindisfarena. The citadel was a massive misshapen lump of hard black rock, right at the edge of the ocean, with tidal wrack and barnacles crowded at its foot. Looking up, shielding his eyes against a bright sky, Belisarius saw a bristling line of fortifications around the summit plateau. They ascended a flight of steps cut into the rock. The climb was lung-straining for them all, but poor old Boniface had to be practically carried up.

  Belisarius wondered how this mighty rock had come to be here at all, what immense chthonic force, divine or natural, had thrust it up through the fabric of a gentler landscape of dunes and sea grass. Belisarius liked to think his mind was roomy enough for a glimmer of wonder at the marvels of the physical world, which served as a stage for humanity’s petty dramas.

  At the top of the steps, before an imposing gateway, they were stopped by a guard wielding a wooden-hilted sword. Aelfric spoke to him in her own tongue.

  Belisarius, catching his breath, looked around. The summit was a narrow slope, which rose to a plateau where buildings clustered. Some of the slope was given over to grass, where sheep grazed. The view from this hilltop was remarkable, with the sea lapping right up to the promontory’s cliff walls to his right, and to his left a view over the farms of the coastal plain to the rounded mountains beyond. Mountains and ocean in a single glance.

  The guard waved them through. Aelfric seemed proud of this place that had been built in part by her father and his ancestors. ‘There is the hall of the King, where we will meet my father. There is a separate apartment for the King, and a bower for the women of the court - you can see it over there. We have a well, cut through the rock by the thegns of King Ida who first landed here more than two centuries ago. It gives clean spring water. And in the church,’ a compact stone building, rather grander than Lindisfarena’s wooden cathedral, ‘is a shrine to King Oswald, now a saint, where his incorruptible right hand is stored.’

  Macson, of a practical frame of mind, was more interested in the stockade. ‘Look here, Belisarius. I wondered how they had managed to plant foundations in rock as hard as this. See what they’ve done.’ The stockade was actually a kind of box, with two timber walls set on the rock and the space between them filled with rubble. It wasn’t anchored to the rock at all, Belisarius saw, but was so heavy as to be immovable.

  Aelfric led her party to the central hall. It was impressive enough, though like most German buildings it was built entirely of wood, solidly constructed of huge oak beams. Belisarius was intrigued to see a hefty bone key sticking out of the big oak door; evidently this wooden hall was secured by a wooden lock.

  Inside, the hall was already crowded. Brightly lit by mutton-fat lamps, the hall’s hefty wooden frame was imposing, with uprights along its walls as regular as the pillars of a Greek temple, and mighty crossbeams supporting the roof overhead. The floor was lined by polished planks, and strewn with straw and some sweet-smelling herb. At the centre of the floor a fire burned smokily in a long hearth, over which huge blackened cauldrons were suspended by chains hung from the roof timbers. The walls were painted brightly, decorated with gold leaf, and hung with flags, standards and tapestries. The mournful faces of animals slain in the hunt, mighty buck deer, wolves, even the brooding snout of a bear, protruded from the glitter.

  Though the Christian cross was apparent in the decoration, the tapestries’ designs were angular abstractions, or showed figures thrusting boldly through elaborate tangles of forest and vine. Once again it struck Belisarius how shallow the veneer of Christianity was among these Germans.

  Around the central hearth wooden benches were set out. These were the mead benches, Macson dryly explained to Belisarius. Men already sat at these benches, talking gruffly, laughing, taking draughts of ale from horn drinking cups. They wore cloaks fixed with huge thorns. The rows of benches radiated out from a central point, near the head of the hall; and at this focus sat an immense throne, carved of stone, covered with elaborate decorations. The Butcher was not yet in residence.

  They had to crowd out of the way of the bustling slaves and servants setting up the feast. They all seemed tense. Evidently working for the Butcher was not a healthy occupation.

  ‘Belisarius. This is my father.’

  ‘You’re the east Roman. My daughter has told me about you. I’m honoured to meet you.’ Bertgils was a stocky man,
clean-shaven save for the usual vast moustache, and his heavy blond hair hung loose. He wore a sword at his waist, and under a leather jacket a pendant of amber glinted. He might have been forty. Belisarius saw something of his daughter’s frank intelligence in his eyes.

  ‘The honour is mine.’ Belisarius bowed in his turn and handed Bertgils his gift for the King. Bertgils glanced at the book dubiously, and handed it to a servant. Bertgils led Belisarius into the hall; the others followed. ‘I’d be fascinated to hear you tell of your country. The King, too, has shown an interest - hence your invitation to join the feast.’

  Belisarius nodded. ‘But I’m here to give your King a warning.’

  Bertgils said, ‘Aelfflaed told me about that too.’

  ‘If there’s a sand-grain of truth in it, you need to be prepared.’

  ‘All right. But I’ll be frank with you. The King is made of stem stuff - he has had to be just to survive his own succession. He has no patience with prophets and auguries.’