Conqueror

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Ibn Sharaf argues that a comet isn’t a cloud, or a kind of star, as has been supposed by some. Some astronomers have seen the comets slide across the sky, brightening and darkening as they go. Ibn Sharaf says that comets ride on invisible roads between the spheres of heaven, brightening as they near the glow of the sun, diminishing as they recede. Ibn Sharaf is trying to establish the shape of such paths, for if one had that then perhaps one could explain the comets’ strange periodicities. And perhaps one could know when to expect the next visitation.’

  ‘As,’ Godgifu said slowly, ‘the drafter of the Menologium seems to have known.’

  ‘To the men of the future,’ Sihtric said pompously, ‘the path of a comet in the sky will be a trivial puzzle.’

  This irritated Orm. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘even if that’s so, they’ve got it wrong this time, haven’t they? For March is nearly over, and your prophesied comet hasn’t appeared yet.’

  ‘It will come,’ Sihtric promised. ‘Ibn Sharaf and his astronomers are watching under the clear skies of al-Andalus.’ But, a small man full of nervous tension, he was unable to sound confident.

  X

  That year, Easter fell in the middle of April.

  Harold, with his pregnant bride, returned to Lunden, and held his Easter court at Westmynster. He took this first opportunity to display his power and status. There was a cycle of feasting, worship, receptions, and meetings to deal with royal business. He welcomed bishops, earls and thegns, and embassies from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the continent.

  Sihtric and Godgifu took lodging in a house close to Westmynster that had belonged to a thegn of Tostig.

  It was an uneasy time for Sihtric, for even now his overdue comet did not appear. Restless, agitated, he decided to deal with his ‘rival’ prophet, the monk Aethelmaer. Leaning on the authority of the bishops at the court, he summoned Aethelmaer from his monastery in Wessex.

  Aethelmaer, crippled, had to be carted across the country on the back of a wagon, and then in Lunden two hefty young monks carried him everywhere on a litter.

  On his arrival, Sihtric, Godgifu and Orm were shown into Aethelmaer’s presence in Westmynster abbey. He was a fat man of about fifty lying stiffly on a couch, animated only from the waist up, his useless legs withered. There was a stink of rot in the room, only partially masked by wood smoke and a sharper tang of unguents.

  At Aethelmaer’s side was a low table covered in manuscripts and notes. Sihtric said, ‘Despite your handicap, you have remained busy. God would be pleased.’

  Aethelmaer, evidently an earthy man, snorted at that. ‘But it was God who put me in my litter in the first place - God, and a handful of feathers, and the hardness of the earth ... These sketches are just that, you know, scribbles on paper. It is only when you realise the machines, with wood and rope, canvas and cloth, metal and feathers, that you start to see what works and what doesn’t - and how much you don’t understand. And if God had chosen to leave me my legs I could have got a lot further by now. Eh, eh?’

  ‘Machines?’ That sparked Orm’s curiosity, and he walked over to see the sketches for himself. Filled with complex diagrams they were grimy with handling and covered by spidery notes.

  Sihtric said, ‘Word of your prophecies have reached the court. They say that you have forecast the coming of a comet.’

  ‘A comet? Oh, yes.’ Aethelmaer reached painfully to tap the heap of papers. ‘It’s all in here. The comet will come, and England will fall - but it will rise again, changed.’ He slumped back, face twisted with pain. ‘But it’s not the comet that matters, you know. It’s all this.’

  Orm said, ‘These look like machines of war. Are they siege engines?’

  ‘Oh, more than that,’ Aethelmaer said, and he grinned to reveal rotting teeth. ‘Have you ever seen a siege engine that could swim under the sea? Have you ever seen an engine with wings - an engine that could fly? The Engines of God, we call them.’

  Orm stared, shocked.

  A young monk came in, an attendant from Maeldubesburg, carrying a tub of water and a cloth. ‘Time for your wash, Domnus.’

  Aethelmaer grumbled, ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  The monk wouldn’t be put off. ‘You’re always busy. Come now.’

  Aethelmaer acquiesced as the monk lifted his habit. His legs were white as snow, and one shin was afflicted by an ulcer, a suppurating, bloody, pus-soaked sore with the gleam of exposed bone. The stench of rotting flesh filled the room. Sihtric gulped, and Godgifu turned away. But Orm, a veteran of battlefields, had seen worse.

  Sihtric said, ‘Tell me where this prophecy came from.’

  Aethelmaer seemed to feel nothing at all as the monk swabbed out pus and cut back rotten flesh. ‘You’re aware that our comet is a repeat visitant.’

  ‘That’s trivial,’ snapped Sihtric.

  ‘Then let me tell you that my “prophecy”, as you call it, was a product of the comet’s last visit to the earth.’

  Sihtric, not to be outdone, hastily checked his own figures. ‘In the year of Our Lord 989.’

  ‘Exactly! And in that year, as the comet shone, a child was dumped at the gate of our monastery in Maeldubesburg: naked, no more than a few days old ...’

  The monks had taken in the child, as was their custom, and found him a wet-nurse. As a private joke they called him Aethelred, after the then King.

  It soon became apparent why the baby had been abandoned. As he grew he was a pretty boy, but quick to walk and slow to talk. He would spend hours on his own sketching figures in the dirt, but if put with the other children in the monastery school he would fight and scratch. ‘He was a damaged child,’ Aethelmaer said, ‘with something broken inside - broken or never formed.’

  Nobody knew what to do with him until one inspired brother, seeing him scratching in the dirt, handed him a bit of chalk. At first his obsession with drawing was merely a way to keep Aethelred occupied - but it soon became clear that his drawings were more than just scribbles.

  Sihtric guessed, ‘You mean these designs.’

  ‘Yes! You can see how detailed they are - look, it’s as if you can see inside the bodies of the engines. But there is no explanation, no lettering - save for blocks, like this one, of cryptic symbols, which nobody has been able yet to decode.’

  Orm gazed at one such block, which was unhelpfully labelled ‘Incendium Dei’:

  BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM BGNSD

  DYEED OSMEM HPTVZ HESZS ZHVH

  It meant nothing to him.

  There was, though, one picture which showed one star looping on an egg-shaped course around another. This was the diagram which Aethelmaer had unpicked to establish that the comet that had marked Aethelred’s birth was destined to return in the year 1066.

  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 becam
e 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 structur
ed 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.