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by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I thought you Carthusians were contemplative.’

  ‘Well, we are, some of us. But we have other vocations. I always had too restless a mind to be bothering God with my fragmentary prayers. So I became involved in my house’s business affairs. We Carthusians make a bit of a living from the wool trade too, in fact. And I have always been more interested in the souls of others than in my own, a disadvantage for a contemplative! Your soul is as transparently displayed as this poor old fellow’s desiccated heart, Harry.’

  ‘It’s just so gloomy,’ Harry admitted. ‘Transi tombs and chantries, monks murmuring your name long after you are dead. The priests say we must all long for the afterlife. Fair enough. But why long for death?’

  Geoffrey studied him. ‘Ah, but death sometimes longs for us. You’re a young man, Harry, and like all old fools I envy you your youth. But as you grow older you’ll develop a sense of the past. And our past contains a great calamity, a time when the dead invaded the shore of the living.’

  ‘You mean the Mortality.’

  ‘The Great Mortality, yes. The Big Death. My own grandfather told me tales of what his grandfather, who lived through it, saw for himself. England used to be crowded, you know! But everybody was stirred around by war, and the cities were brimming with filth... Well. We were ripe for the plague. In London, half the population died off in a few years. Think of how it was for the living, Harry, as all those faces around you melted away. The shock left scars in their souls, I think. No wonder they carved these transi tombs, memorials of a world become a vast boneyard.’

  Harry was restless, feeling he was being preached at. ‘You wrote to me about Agnes. Where is my sister?’

  ‘Far from here, I’m afraid. She’s in York. And you must travel to her; she can’t come to you. You’ll see why. But she’s asking for you. Big brother Harry! And, you know, to understand your sister’s situation, you will have to think about history - I mean, your family’s. Your ancestors weren’t always wool traders. You’ll see, you’ll see...’

  ‘My business - I’ve work to do.’

  ‘I know,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But you’ll come with me even so, won’t you? A spark of duty is bright under that woollen merchant’s shirt. I see that in you too.’

  These words made Harry feel trapped. With a mumbled apology he hurried down the aisle to the door, and drank in the reassuringly foetid air of the Strand.

  III

  Spain crushed James’s soul.

  The mule train plodded across a landscape like a vast dusty table, where nothing grew but scrub grass and rough untended olive trees, nothing moved but skinny sheep, and there was no sound but the raucous singing of the muleteers echoing from ruined battlements, and the thin mewl of patient buzzards. And, James knew, the journey could only end with more strangeness. For he was travelling to Seville, where, it was said, the Anti-Christ was soon to be born.

  His companion and employer, Grace Bigod, was not sympathetic. She was a formidable woman in her forties, perhaps twenty years older than James. Her face was beautiful in a strong, stern, proud way; her greying blonde hair was swept back from her brow. And, sharp, bored, she picked on James. ‘What’s the matter, Friar James? All a bit much for you?’

  ‘Everything’s so strange.’

  ‘Well, of course it’s strange. We’re a long way from England now.’ Her fine nostrils flared as she sucked in the air. ‘Smell it! That spicy dryness, the wind straight off the flats of the Maghrib. My family have roots in the Outremer, you know.’

  He nodded. It was well known in James’s house in Buxton that Grace and her family were descended from a woman called Joan, who had fled Jerusalem when it fell to the Saracens more than two centuries ago.

  ‘Maybe the country of the Outremer is like this - hot, dry, dusty. Maybe there is something in the very air that pulls at my blood. Or maybe it’s the stink of the last Muslims in Spain, holed up in Granada. This is the crucible of the whole world, James! The place where the sword-tip of Christianity meets the scimitar-tip of the Moors, a single point of white heat. What do you think?’

  James saw only a landscape wrecked by war and emptied by plague. He turned inward, trying not to see. He longed to be safely enclosed within the reassuring routines of his Franciscan monastery.

  But Grace and her forebears were generous supporters of the house, and had been for generations. It was through her family’s influence that the house was committed to its strange and dark project, a secretive work centuries old. It was through Grace’s influence that James, who longed only for a life of scholarship devoted to the peace of Christ, found himself studying terrible weapons of war.

  And it was through her influence, her peculiar desire to bring on the end of the world, that he had been dragged from his book-lined cell and been brought all the way across Europe to this desolate, prickly landscape. Her purpose was to sell her Engines of God to the King and Queen of Spain, and she had a copy of the Codex of Aethelmaer, and a summary of two centuries’ worth of its development, tucked in her bags.

  James did not want to be here. But there was purpose in all things, he told himself. God would show him the true path through the strange experiences to come. He crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.

  Grace watched him, hard-eyed, analytical, and she laughed. She was a vigorous, physical woman. Sometimes she stared at him, as if wondering what shape his body was under his habit. And at night, when they stopped in towns or taverns, she would come close to him, brushing past so he could smell her hair, and see the softness of her skin. James knew she felt not the remotest attraction to him, and that this was all part of her bullying of him. But he was unused to women, and his youthful body’s reaction to her teasing left him tormented. She made him feel crushed, pale and pasty and worthless, less than a man. And she knew it.

  It was a relief when the caravan at last reached Seville, and James was able to get away from her company, if only for a short while. But Seville had its own mysteries.

  The Guadalquivir reminded him a little of the Thames in London. Navigable from the sea, the river was crowded with ships, and the wharves and jetties were a hive of activity, where sailors and dockers, beggars, whores and urchins worked and laughed, fought and argued in a dozen languages - the usual folk of the river, James thought, just as you would find in London. Trade shaped the city’s communities too; Seville was home to officers and sailors who had participated in Spain’s explorations of the Ocean Sea, and there were Genoese and Florentine bankers and merchants everywhere.

  But in other ways Seville was quite unlike London. He walked to the site of a grand cathedral, bristling with scaffolding. It would be the largest in the world, it was said. But it had been built on the site of the city’s Moorish mosque, and a surviving muezzin tower still loomed over it; slim and exquisite, the tower would always draw the eye away from the solid pile of the Christian church.

  And just over the plaza from the cathedral was an old Moorish fortress-palace which the Moors called the al-qasr al-Mubarak, and the Christians called the Alcazar. James peered curiously through its arched doorways. Though the Moors had been expelled from Seville by the city’s conquerors, later generations of Christian rulers had brought back craftsmen from Granada to work on these buildings, maintaining and even enhancing them.

  Seville was not like London, then, where with their forts and cathedrals the conquering Normans had erased any symbol of the old Saxon state. Here the spirit of the Moors lived on in a Christian country.

  Perhaps things were going to change, however. Two hundred and thirty years after its conquest Seville was still the southernmost Christian city in Spain. The great tide of Reconquest had stalled. The Christians were distracted by conflicts between their own rival kingdoms, and their vast project to repopulate the occupied country was diluted by the Mortality; where once the Moors had turned the land green, now only Christian sheep grazed. Seville remained a city on the cusp of a great change, James thought. Perhaps it was no wonder that apocalyptic
legends had gathered around the place.

  But James, in his first walk around this strange, complicated, muddled city, did not see a need for cleansing, but a kind of mixed-up human vitality he rather relished.

  Near the Alcazar he came across two girls who sat on a bench, eating oranges they unpeeled with their thumbs. No older than twelve or thirteen, dark, shy-looking, they giggled with each other as they ate, but kept a wary eye on the folk around them. The girls both had yellow crosses stitched to their blouses. They were Jews, then. They had to wear ugly symbols on their clothing, but at least they were here. In England there were no Jewish girls like this, laughing in the sun and eating oranges.

  When the girls saw James watching them, they looked away nervously. Embarrassed, annoyed at himself for frightening them, he hurried on.

  He made his way back to the river, and walked to a complicated pontoon bridge of seventeen barges.

  And across that bridge he glimpsed the brooding pile of the castle of Triana. It was the headquarters of the Inquisition.

  IV

  Before travelling to York, Harry returned to Oxford for a few days to put his affairs in order.

  Then he joined Geoffrey Cotesford on the great north road, the old Roman route that ran from London to Scotland. Harry would have preferred to make his way by sea, which would have been far more comfortable, but Geoffrey pleaded poverty. So they clattered away in their cart, Harry wincing as they hit every pothole. In places the way was difficult because of fences left untended, bridges unrepaired, work left unfinished for more than a century because there was nobody to do it.

  Geoffrey pointed out features of the landscape. ‘Still empty - I told you!’

  Here was a town half given over to farmland. Here were villages abandoned altogether, the roofless houses slumped like old men, the fields overgrown. Swathes of the country had been given over to herds of sheep, which bleated piously as they nibbled the grass that grew around the ruins. Harry usually rode past such grassy mounds of tumbled walls and abandoned buildings without looking too closely; they were just part of the landscape. But Geoffrey was pitiless.

  ‘The country has a way of cleansing itself. Crows and rats and flies! Even they have a purpose in God’s grand scheme. But we have never come back, Harry; we have never taken back our villages.’

  ‘Why are we talking about the Big Death again?’

  ‘Because it shaped your family, Harry - or, rather, reshaped it. This is what I have discovered about you. The empty world after the Mortality was quite different from what went before. Suddenly there were too few folk to get the work done; a bad lord could not hold onto a man, for there was always work somewhere else. There were revolts as the nobles tried to stuff everything back into Pandora’s box, but it was too late. And opportunities opened up.’

  ‘Such as for my family.’

  ‘Yes! Your grandfathers saw the chance to slip the bonds of allegiance to the lords. You became merchants, wealthy in your own right, and you called yourselves Wooler - you had no surname I can trace before.’

  ‘And before the Mortality? What were we then?’

  ‘You were soldiers - perhaps all the way back to the days of William. It’s said you had an ancestor who came over with the Conqueror. But then every family in England says that. Certainly your forefathers fought alongside Edward Longshanks.’

  ‘The Hammer of the Scots.’This story of a lost and different age rather thrilled Harry the merchant.

  ‘And before that they rode with him to the Holy Land, for Edward was a great crusader. But to your family the crusades weren’t a mere adventure. To them, the Holy Land was home - or had been.’

  And he told Harry of his ancestor Saladin, born and raised in the Holy Land, who had come to England, and fought in Spain, and then joined a crusade. Surviving, he returned to England to start a family of his own. ‘Saladin was always determined that his family should remember the Testament of Eadgyth; he thought it contained important lessons for the future. Your own father taught it to you, didn’t he? But other prophecies accreted around you too...’

  The news about Saladin was disturbing for Harry. ‘Then I might have Saracen blood in my veins.’

  ‘A dash of it, probably,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m keeping this to myself. I wouldn’t wish to harm your business reputation. Be grateful there’s no sign of Jewry in your blood line. But then, Edward Longshanks expelled all the Jews from England nearly two hundred years ago, by God. We were the first in Europe to do it, and we set a fashion, didn’t we?’

  Harry, impatient, asked, ‘Just tell me simply - why are you so interested in my family’s past?’

  ‘Because you will need to understand your own complicated history if you’re to understand what has become of your sister. Poor Agnes! I got involved, you know, because my house is not far from the parish church where she lives.’

  ‘She lives in a church?’

  ‘You’ll see. I was brought to her. But she was calling for you, the brother she hasn’t seen for ten years. You always protected her, she said.’

  ‘So I did, I suppose,’ Harry said uneasily. ‘My father was always short with her. And when he was in his cups - I deflected his blows a few times. He repented before he died; I forgave him.’ Harry didn’t enjoy talking of his family’s past; it hadn’t been a happy time. ‘But my sister disappeared - she ran away, she was no older than ten. We heard nothing more of her.’

  ‘You didn’t try to look for her?’

  ‘At first. But after my father died I took over the business, and found he’d run it down - squandered the legacy of my grandfather. It was hard work restoring it. I had no time.’

  ‘I understand. And in all probability your sister didn’t want to be found. But she did not die, Harry; somehow she survived. And she found a place in the world. But eventually her troubles overwhelmed her, and she asked for you. So I came to find you.’

  ‘It’s good of you to do this,’ Harry said, though he felt resentful rather than grateful. ‘To come all this way, to give up your own business for her.’

  ‘You’re welcome. But it isn’t just charity that motivates me. I rather think your sister’s plight has a wider significance.’ He eyed Harry. ‘I know you’re a sceptic, Harry, about matters beyond the material, and that’s healthy. But the fact is your family is steeped in prophecy...’

  Harry didn’t want to hear this.

  They lapsed into silence, as the countryside of England, echoing only to the bleating of the sheep, rolled past them.

  V

  York, within its rectangle of much-battered, much-repaired walls, was bustling, a city of trade. But it was dominated by its immense cathedral, the newest sections of which, only a few years old, were fresh-cut, bright and sharp. Geoffrey said the minster had been built on the site of a Roman military headquarters, and that the city after the Romans had become a sort of Viking trading capital, a tradition of commerce that still lingered. There were layers of history written in the stones, Geoffrey said, layers that shaped the present.

  They stayed the night in the hall of Harry’s merchants’ guild. It was a grand building, with religious paintings hanging from the stone walls and long tables groaning with food and drink. Harry was made welcome. There was much business to discuss, for Harry only rarely travelled this way, and it was a great relief for him to be able to escape from Geoffrey and history and his family’s complicated past, and to immerse himself in the real world of commodities and prices. Geoffrey excused himself and went to sit with the apprentices at the hall’s service end. Later Harry found him in the basement, where the guild ran a small hospital for the poor, who were expected to pray for the souls of their benefactors.

  In the morning they mounted their cart again and set off to find Harry’s sister.

  The church she had attached herself to, another Saint Agnes’s, was a few miles north of the city walls. It was a small, modest establishment at the centre of a village built of stone recovered from a much lar
ger, abandoned settlement, whose ruins lay all around. The church itself was quite new, in the Perpendicular style. But Harry saw it had been built on older foundations of blackened stone - perhaps a Saxon chapel burned down by the Normans; there had been a lot of that in this area.