Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

  They were greeted by the parish priest, a kindly, elderly man called Arthur. It was Arthur who had first called in Geoffrey to help him cope with Agnes’s requests. ‘But you must understand we very much value your sister’s presence with us here,’ he told Harry. ‘Very much. She brings the love of God into our small lives ...’

  Geoffrey led Harry, not to the door of the church as he had expected, but to a side wall. Here a kind of cell protruded from the church’s wall, with no door, and no window save for a slit.

  And here, Geoffrey said, was his sister: bricked up in the cell within which she would spend her whole life. Harry stared in horror.

  Geoffrey touched his shoulder. ‘You must try to understand. This is the life your sister has chosen for herself. And she serves her people, you know. As the father said, most parishes are proud to have an anchoress attached to their church.’

  A voice floated up from the slit window. ‘Geoffrey Cotesford? Is that you?’

  The tone was deeper than it had been, softer, but it was unmistakable. Harry’s heart thumped; he had not realised how much he had missed his little sister.

  ‘It is Geoffrey.’

  ‘I knew you’d return.’

  ‘Your faith in your brother was justified too.’

  She gasped. ‘Harry?’

  Harry forced himself to speak. ‘I’m here, Agnes.’

  ‘Then come to my window.’

  Harry knelt down. The window was a slit, just large enough to pass food and waste. Only a little light leaked into the cell within. He could see another window on the far wall where the anchoress was able to look into the church. The room was simply laid out, with a bed, a bench, a table, a crucifix on the wall. On the table were two books, a leather-bound Bible, and a copy of the Ancrene Wisse, the manual of the anchoress. The room’s only other feature was a shallow trench in the floor. It puzzled Harry, who knew little of the lifestyle of an anchoress, a walled-in hermit.

  And through the squint, this slit window, his sister’s familiar blue eyes gazed out at him. ‘I prayed you would come. I knew you would. You always did protect me, Harry.’

  But, he thought, I did not protect you from this morbid fate. ‘I have news of the family,’ he said.

  ‘My father is dead,’ Agnes said softly. ‘I know that much.’

  ‘Mother is well. She misses you.’

  ‘Tell her I pray for her ...’

  Geoffrey interjected gently, ‘I will leave you to talk. But we must turn to business. Harry needs to understand why you summoned him, Agnes.’

  ‘I would not have disturbed you,’ she said. ‘But I had to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of what I found. In this cell ...’

  And she spoke of family legends: of Orm, who may or may not have sailed with the Conqueror, and Eadgyth, or Edith, the wife he may or may not have found demented and raving in the ruins of an old Saxon church outside York, while William’s Norman thugs rampaged across the north of England.

  ‘Do you know why I was called Agnes? It is part of the old story - my mother told me this - in every generation there is an Agnes, so we remember that Eadgyth’s church was dedicated to that saint. And it is said that Eadgyth returned to the church later, when she sickened, and her mind failed. Poor Orm had to seek her here again.

  ‘When I ran away from home, I was only ten years old. I had travelled no further than a day’s walk from home. I had no idea what shape England was, Harry! The only place I had ever heard of that had anything to do with the family was Eadgyth’s church near York. So I made my way here.’

  ‘This is Eadgyth’s church?’

  ‘Rebuilt since then - but yes, it is her church.’

  ‘Quite a journey for a child,’ Geoffrey murmured.

  ‘I hardened.’

  Harry thought there was a whole desperate saga contained in those two words. He was full of guilt.

  She whispered, ‘I worked here, on the farms. I knew how to shear a sheep. Then I worked for the parish. And, in time, God and Father Arthur granted me the privilege of this, my enclosed life of prayer. My only stipulation was that my cell had to be here, in this corner of the church, on the old foundations.’

  Harry guessed, ‘Because this was where Eadgyth had hidden.’

  ‘And where she came back to at the end of her life. I know this, Harry, because she scraped an account of her visions into the wall. The lettering is faded and lichen-choked, half-buried by rubble, old-fashioned and hard to decipher - but it is here. And as I dig my trench, I have uncovered it steadily.’

  Harry felt a return of that uncomfortable dread, a sense of enclosure. He wanted nothing to do with this antique strangeness. ‘I know the story of the man called the Dove,’ he said. ‘Who will be the spawn of the spider, and so on. And in the last days before the end of the world is due, he must have his head turned west to the Ocean Sea...’

  Geoffrey quoted from memory, “‘All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers. / Send the Dove west! O, send him west!”’

  ‘There is more,’ Agnes whispered. ‘Orm remembered twelve lines. That is what we have come to know as Eadgyth’s Testament. But there is more.’

  ‘More lines scraped in the wall?’

  ‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Ten more lines, Harry. In which Eadgyth records her vision of what would become of the world if the Testament was not fulfilled - of a future in which the Dove turned, not west as he should, but east. I can see you’re having trouble believing any of this, Harry. But when I tell you of this hideous future you will see why I summoned you here. Not just for your sister. We have to work out what to do about this. For we cannot let this dreadful future come about. He crossed himself.

  Harry felt his whole life hingeing on this moment. He longed to flee from this madness, the woman in the hole, the terrible words scribbled on a wall, the memory of his dying, drunken father. But, as Geoffrey had seen, he had a sense of duty which would not allow him to walk away.

  He said impulsively, ‘Agnes - never mind prophecies. I still don’t understand. What made you do this? Why run away - why throw away your life - why wall yourself up in a cell?’

  ‘For the love of God.’

  There must be more. ‘And?’

  She sighed. ‘And because I thought I would be safe,’ she said softly. ‘If I am in here, far from Oxford, encased in stone, he could not reach me again.’

  He thought he understood at last. ‘Our father.’

  ‘Yes. It was not until Geoffrey came that I learned he was dead.’ She closed her eyes.

  ‘What did he do, Agnes?’

  ‘He was maddened. He was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing. I forgive him; I have prayed for him. But I was ten years old. I feared that if I stayed, if I became a woman, and if his seed was planted in me - I left to save myself, and him, from that terrible sin.’

  ‘Oh, Agnes. I didn’t know. You say I protected you. But I failed, I failed—’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, but his. Agnes is the name he gave me. But Agnes was a holy virgin. I am no Agnes.’

  Impulsively he pushed his hand through the slit window. Tentatively his sister clasped his fingers, and then he felt the softness of her cheek on his hand.

  Later he asked Geoffrey about the trench in the cell. It was Agnes’s own grave, Geoffrey said, a grave she scraped every day, for an anchoress was commanded to keep her death before her eyes at all times. Agnes would live and die in her stone box, and when her life was done she would lower herself into her self-dug tomb.

  VI

  Grace Bigod and Friar James had come to Seville to meet a man called Diego Ferron, a Dominican friar with contacts in the court of the Spanish monarchs. He was attached to a monastery outside the walls of the city, and had offices, it was said, in the palace complex of the Alcazar itself.

  Ferron kept them waiting for days after their arrival. The date he suggested for their meeting, he told them in his note, was ‘suitable for our joint purpose’. James didn’t k
now what this meant.

  On their tenth day in Seville, Grace and James were at last summoned to Ferron’s presence, at a private house in an old part of the city. When they arrived early at his house, they were led by a barefoot servant through a complicated archway into a garden, where water bubbled languidly from a fountain into a pool full of carp. The house was clearly Moorish, presumably abandoned by its owner on the fall of the city more than two hundred years ago. At least the Christian owners of this place had taken care to preserve what they had taken, though the furniture, lumpy wooden chairs, benches and low tables, would not have looked out of place in the home of a well-to-do Englishman, and walls which still bore Arabic inscriptions in praise of Allah were now studded with crucifixes and statues of the Virgin.

  Friar Diego Ferron walked in briskly, introduced himself, ensured they had been served with tea and sweetmeats, and sat upright on a severe wooden chair. His habit was adorned with a magnificent black and white cowl made of some very fine wool. He was perhaps forty, his tonsured hair jet black and well groomed. He was a handsome man, his features sharp, his eyes brown, and his skin, shining with oils, was so dark that if not for his vestments James might have thought he was a Moor himself.

  James was uneasy in his presence. When the brothers in Buxton had learned he was to meet Dominican friars in Spain, they had laughed. ‘They’re an odd lot, those Dominicans,’ one comfortable old friar had said. Saint Dominic, fired by his experience of the Albigensian heresy in France, had dedicated his order solely to the task of fighting heresy in all its forms. ‘And they’re worst of all in Spain. Mad as a bat.’

  Ferron did not strike James as mad, but businesslike. Certainly he did not waste any time on pleasantries.

  He focused his attentions on Grace. ‘First let me be sure you understand my role in the court of our glorious monarchs, Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile.’ He spoke fluent Latin. ‘You wrote to court to request an audience with Tomas de Torquemada. The friar is a Dominican colleague of mine, and was confessor of the Queen.’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘Friar Torquemada is now working with the Inquisition. The Queen’s confessor is now Friar Hernando de Talavera, a Hieronymite. Pious, ascetic - a good man. The second of the Queen’s chief prelates is Cardinal de Mendoza, the archbishop of Seville. These persons will be involved in assessing your proposal for the court. I myself am on the staff of Friar Torquemada.’

  ‘You work for the Inquisition, then,’ Grace said.

  ‘Yes. But I have good relations with both Friar de Talavera and the archbishop, as well as Friar Torquemada, and so he passed on your request to me as a suitable first point of contact.’

  This politicking among holy men baffled James, and dismayed him obscurely.

  Grace bowed. ‘I’m sure we will be able to do business together, brother.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out,’ Ferron said slickly, quite coldly. ‘For it is business we are talking about, isn’t it? You are here to sell arms to the monarchs. These weapons, the Engines of God as you refer to them.’

  ‘There is more to it than that—’

  ‘We have arms. We have cannon, we have arquebuses.’

  ‘But nothing like the weapons I can offer you,’ Grace said urgently. ‘The engines are founded on the words of a prophecy, retrieved by my ancestor Joan of the Outremer from a cache beneath the mosque of this very city. The designs have been developed in secret for two hundred years by Franciscans, followers of the sage Roger Bacon - perhaps you have heard of him. Brother James here has studied the developments closely and can tell you all you wish to know.’

  Ferron’s glance flickered over James. ‘I already know the most salient fact. That these weapons of yours are decidedly expensive.’

  ‘Decidedly better than anything you have. And decidedly what you need for the coming war. I do not mean the conflict with the Moors of Granada. I mean the war to end wars that will follow.’ She paused, her face intense, beautiful. ‘Brother, I know of this, deep in my bones. My family is of the Outremer, the Holy Land - we lived in Jerusalem itself. We were expelled by the Saracens in the same decade as Seville fell to the Christian armies. This was over two hundred years ago, and we still bear the scars in our souls. They are scars of the long war with the Muslims which has been waged since the death of Muhammad himself. And it is a war Christendom is losing.

  Ferron sat back, startled.

  She had seized control of the exchange, James saw. They were the same age, roughly, Grace and Ferron. Both strong, both determined, both combative. They would be formidable enemies, still more formidable if they became allies.

  James knew, though, that any cold-eyed observer of history would draw the same conclusion as Grace. Ever since the loss of Jerusalem in Joan’s day, Christendom had been on the retreat.

  The problem was the rise of the Turks. A decade after Seville fell to the Christians, the Mamluk Turks defeated the Mongols - the first significant defeat suffered by the nomads across three continents. It was a turning point for the Islamic empires. The Mamluks, rampant, marched on; within decades they had obliterated the last trace of the old crusader states. Eventually the Mamluks fell to new waves of Mongol invaders. But out of their shattered polities rose a new nation of Turks called the Ottomans, who dismembered what was left of the old East Roman domains. The last Roman emperor died fighting for Constantinople, when the old city fell in 1453. A jubilant Sultan Mehmet crowed that Rome itself was next, that soon he would be feeding his horses on oats from the high altar of Saint Peter’s. And in the year 1480, just a year ago, as if making good that promise, Mehmet had assaulted Italy.

  ‘Thus from Jerusalem to Rome Christendom is in retreat,’ Grace said relentlessly. ‘Only here in Spain are Christian armies taking the fight to the Muslims. Only here, under Isabel and Fernando, are Christians winning. And that,’ she said, ‘is the key to the future.’

  Ferron considered. ‘But the monarchs are barely at ease on their own thrones. Their marriage united the Christian kingdoms of Spain, but they must deal with over-mighty nobles, empty coffers, a mixed population of Christians, Jews and Muslims - and, of course, the great canker of Granada, whose emir has refused to pay his proper tribute for fifteen years. The final war against Islam?’ He smiled, languid. ‘Let’s be rid of the Moors in Granada first and then we’ll see.’

  Grace said urgently, ‘Friar Ferron, I accept what you say. But time is short.’

  ‘Tell me what you mean.’

  And she told him briefly of another prophecy: her family’s legend of the Testament of Eadgyth. Of the mysterious, crucial figure known by his three titles, the Dove, the spawn of the spider, and the Christ-bearer. Of warring destinies, which must be resolved ‘in the last days’ - which might come as soon as the year 1500.

  ‘We have two decades, then,’ Ferron said drily. ‘Not long to conclude a war that has lasted for eight hundred years! But why do you want this, lady?’

  ‘This is my destiny. My family’s destiny, as we have perceived it since the days of Joan of the Outremer.’

  Ferron pursed his lips. ‘And you are unmarried. No husband - no children.’

  ‘My life has a single purpose, friar. As I said, that has been the case since I was twenty. What need have I of children when I have the Engines of God?’

  James shared a glance with Ferron, one of the few times the two of them communicated. Even Ferron looked disturbed by her intensity.