In Two Minds

by K T Findlay

  In Two Minds

  K.T. Findlay

  Copyright © 2019 K.T. Findlay

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  King Offa, Queen Cynethryth, Ecgfrith, Eadburgh, Ealfflaed, Alfthrytha and Archbishop Jaenberht were real people, but their words and deeds in this book are imagined.

  All other characters and events are fictitious

  products of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or other persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1 The strands of life

  2 Coming to terms

  3 Testing the waters

  4 Dinner and destiny

  5 First Steps

  6 Manor from heaven

  7 Foundations Established

  8 A Matter of choice

  9 New ways and means

  10 A natural fit

  11 When all at once

  12 Double digits

  13 Steeling themselves

  14 The game’s afoot

  15 A visitation

  16 Marwig’s education

  17 Making good

  18 A last meal

  19 The clash of arms

  20 The aftermath

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also By K.T. Findlay

  AUTHOR Website

  This book is dedicated to Deborah, whose incredible support made it possible, and to Hazel and Colin for forging the tools I needed to write it.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank James Burke for his incredible Connections, and The Day the Universe Changed television series which sparked off the whole idea in the first place.

  I’d also like to thank Lewis Dartnell for his superb book, The Knowledge, which provided an excellent framework on which to build the technical aspects of the story.

  Finally, I’d like to thank the wonderful people who played such important roles in bringing this book to fruition. They include Brett who got me started down the author’s path, Deborah and Hazel for their incredible support and quality control, and my team of wonderful beta-readers who always told me the truth, especially when something wasn’t right.

  1 The strands of life

  Fresh bread, now leather, then cheese, next cattle, every breath filled his lungs with a different smell as Wulfstan raced through the palace market place at top speed. He threw out his arms to counterbalance a jink around a large lady carrying a basket of wood, and slightly increased his lead. As long as there were people and things to run around, he could stay ahead. He’d always been the nimbler of the two.

  The pair raced on, jumping over a pig here, twisting around a stack of spears there, flashing through the blast of heat from the smith’s forge, until they hit the wall of the market street warehouse. Wulfstan turned sharply to the left, again stretching his lead a fraction. He was running as fast as he could go, but he knew he was in trouble now. Ethelwulf was faster in a straight line and he was sure to close the gap. Wulfstan couldn’t go right because of the wall, and the stalls, animals and produce to his left didn’t have a gap where even a ten year old boy could fit.

  Above his own ragged breathing he could hear Ethelwulf’s pounding feet getting closer and closer. Surely he must be almost able to touch him, and then the game would be over! If he could just reach the corner, he might be able to lose his pursuer.

  Twenty feet, ten, five, made it! Wulfstan’s shoes scrabbled for grip in the gravel as he turned hard right. Half way round the bend he risked a look back, Ethelwulf was indeed almost upon him, fingers stretched out towards Wulfstan’s back, but he was already running wide and losing ground.

  ‘Yes!’ Wulfstan exulted, planning to do a spin turn and head back into the market.

  He heard the noise of the impact, and a brilliant flash of light filled his brain. There was no pain, just a sense of floating.

  Standing above Wulfstan’s body, Hengist looked down in horror. He’d had time to twist his sword before it hit the boy’s head, but couldn’t stop the swing. The flat of the blade had hit hard on the left side of the skull, and Wulfstan’s body simply crumpled at his feet. The young face gazed sightlessly up at him, blood oozing through the hair, falling each side of the ear, staining his cheek and neck before pooling in the grass.

  Hengist’s sparring partner gasped ‘You’ve killed the King’s son!’

  A crowd was already beginning to form, and the clamour, yammer and uproar of dismay began to rise.

  ✽✽✽

  A world away, an old man was working on a life sized diorama in the Dark Ages section of the Rumstratten museum. He adjusted the dummy Anglo Saxon warrior until its spear was held vertically, and bent to pick up a cloak from the floor. He groaned inwardly as his sciatica stabbed ruthlessly down into his legs.

  Henry, fifteen years old with an enquiring mind, had a burning question. ‘Thomas, why were people back then so dumb?’

  Thomas Woodcock, the museum’s curator smiled gently. ‘Any specific examples you have in mind Henry?’ He carefully set the cloak around the warrior’s shoulders, making sure the chest armour was still partly visible.

  Henry frowned. ‘Well what about thinking the sun goes around the earth, instead of the way it really goes? I mean that’s obvious!’ He flicked his head to clear the fringe out of his eyes so he could see to put on the dummy’s sandals.

  There was a short pause, ‘Mmmmmmm. But I wonder what it would look like to us down here if the sun really did move around the earth?’

  There was a longer pause while Henry digested this and thought about the answer. Finally he sighed and said ‘You mean it would look exactly the same unless you knew what to look for?’

  Thomas smiled, eyes sparkling behind his bifocals, ‘Exactly! Next example?’ He dropped down on his knees with a quiet groan, moved a knotted rope aside and began to make chalk marks on the floor.

  Henry was ready, keen to level the score. ‘Okay, how about choosing base twelve instead of the decimal system for numbering things? All that twelve inches to a foot rubbish! The decimal system is so much easier to use!’

  Again, there was a smile on the face of the old man. ‘Up to a point. Divide ten by three for me.’

  ‘Three and a third.’

  ‘Ten by four?’

  ‘Two and a half.’

  ‘Ten by six?’

  ‘Uummmmm . . . . . one and two thirds.’

  ‘Did you find that easy?’ asked Thomas, his smile widening just a little.

  ‘No of course not.’ snapped Henry. ‘I had to really think.’

  ‘Okay then, let’s try this. Divide twelve by three.’

  “Four.”

  ‘Twelve by four.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Twelve by six.’

  ‘Two!’

  Thomas nodded happily. ’So if you didn’t have a calculator, and were measuring stuff to make a castle, or weighing out equal portions of bread for your villagers, which would be easier, dividing into ten or dividing into twelve?’

  ‘Oh…’ said Henry thoughtfully. ‘You mean twelve can be divided by more numbers, so it’s easier to use?’

  ‘Yep. And we can use it to make stuff too. Look at this.’ Thomas said, picking up the knotted strand of rope off the floor. ‘At every foot along this cord we’ve tied a knot, and it’s twelve feet long.’

  ‘So?’ asked Henry.

  Thomas stood up, wincing as his knees creaked and cracked. ‘Here, you take one end and I’ll take the other. Now, we can use it like a tape measure by counting the knots, but that’s just beginner’s stuff.’

&n
bsp; ‘What else can it do?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Pull it out straight, away from me until the third knot and put it on the floor. That makes a three foot length.’

  Thomas carefully knelt down and put his left hand on the knot. ‘Now, I’ll hold this in position while you pull the rope off to the right and count out another four knots.’

  Henry did as he was asked.

  ‘Okay,’ said Thomas, ‘you hold that knot up there and throw me the other end of the rope. Now keep the four foot line straight and taut, but allow the rope to move left or right as I pull the end you just gave me.’

  Thomas held down the knot in his left hand, and moved the free end of the rope back down to touch the original end to make a triangle. Henry allowed his knot to move, and kept the rope tight on both the lines that now came from it.

  ‘Now my friend,’ said Thomas, ‘if the sides of a triangle are three, four and five units long like this one, you get a right angle triangle. Every single time. We can use rope, string, cloth, wire, anything at all to make it, and it will always be a right angled triangle. Once you’re certain you’ve got ninety degrees, you can then divide that up so you can measure any angle you want to. And that means you can make pretty much anything, and it’ll all fit together properly. Watch.’

  Thomas picked up a yardstick and marked out the right angle’s two lines with chalk. Then holding the right angle knot, he grabbed the next knot along with the chalk and pulled it down to the other line, marking a perfect quarter circle.

  He rubbed his hands together to get rid of the chalk dust. ‘Now, that curve is ninety degrees, so if we break it into ten equal parts, we’ll have ten wedges of nine degrees each. Divide each of them into three, we’ll have three smaller ones, and divide each of those by three again and we have a protractor with one degree marks. We’ve just made a protractor with nothing more than a piece of rope, and can now measure any angle we want! This isn’t just a knotted bit of rope, it’s a computer and a drawing tool!’

  Henry shook his head in wonder. ‘I had no idea.’

  Thomas nodded, his slightly too long hair flicking into his eyes. He brushed it away. ‘All technology is like that. You need to know how to use it before it makes sense. Your mobile phone is the most useful thing you own, but give it to an Anglo Saxon and it’s just a pretty box you can’t even put things in. Useless in fact.’

  Henry mulled it over for a moment or two. ‘So is it always like that? Is it always that there’s a reason for something, but it looks stupid to us because we’ve forgotten the thinking behind it?’

  The old man laughed. ‘Not always. Sometimes they had it completely wrong, but culture, religion, or politics locked their heads into a box and they couldn’t get out of it. They needed a rebel, like Galileo, to break the mould and move on.’

  ‘Or you!’ said Henry, and they both burst into laughter.

  The pair worked in silence for the next few minutes, until Thomas offered a contrasting thought.

  ‘Funny folk the Saxons.’ he murmured while twisting the warrior’s spear. ‘You couldn’t find a braver people anywhere, but too wedded to their own macho sense of honour to ever be truly great in my opinion. That’s a good example of a cultural belief getting in the way.’

  Henry, examining the warrior’s pattern welded sword, was a little taken aback. He was proud of his Anglo-Saxon origins. ‘What do you mean? They did all right until the Normans came along, didn’t they?’

  Thomas was fiddling again with the spear and did not look up. ‘You know these violent criminal gangs we have these days, like the Mafia? Well I reckon the Saxons weren’t that different from them, especially in times of war. Might is right, and personal honour were their catch cries. Oh sure, they had the odd gifted king like Alfred the Great, who did tremendous things, but you have only to look at King Harold’s family to see what it was usually like…’

  The old man stepped back for a last look, and walked off to the next job. Henry picked up the toolbox and followed him down the hall. A five minute walk found the pair of them on the mezzanine floor above the Anglo-Saxon display. They spent the next hour attending to the steam engine to be used in the next day’s demonstration, and then went home.

  Morning found Thomas and Henry back at said engine, surrounded by a group of young schoolchildren from the local high school’s junior science class.

  ‘The thing about steam,’ Thomas was saying, ‘is that the engine often seems like a living thing.’ He looked carefully over his young audience, and then gestured at the inert machine. ‘It doesn’t seem like it at the moment I’ll admit, but we can soon change that!’

  Animatedly he reached up and pulled the whistle cord. ‘The whistle is meant to tell people to stand clear, but it also tells us that we have pressure in the boiler. Blowing the whistle releases a tiny amount of that pressure. Can anyone tell us how else we might release it?’

  He looked around the sea of faces. Between the spots and freckles, Thomas could see the typical reluctance of the teenager to draw attention to itself. He sighed inwardly and continued. ‘The most obvious way is to allow it to operate the machine.’ and stepping to the rear of the steam engine he pulled a lever that set the pistons into motion. ‘You can hear it breathing now as the pistons move in and out. It’s that breathing sound that captures the imagination, and makes it seem as if it’s alive.’

  The children stepped back slightly in alarm as the pistons began to gather speed, and the huffing and chuffing drifted up from gentle wheeze, to frenetic and athletic gasps.

  Henry, enjoying the show, knew another way to release pressure. Sensing that Thomas was having trouble grabbing the kids’ attention, he was contemplating a joke.

  Thomas moved back down the side of the engine and gestured out over the balcony of the mezzanine floor to the exhibits below. ‘Half the stuff you can see down there would never have existed if it had not been for engines like these.’ He turned back to his audience, resting his backside on the railing. ‘In fact…’

  His sentence was abruptly cut off by a huge cloud of shrieking steam that enveloped him as Henry hit the release valve. Childish screams almost drowned out the blast, and tapered off only as the laughing teen released the valve and bounded around the machine to see the state of his victim.

  Thomas was no longer there.

  Henry stared blankly, puzzlement creasing his young brow. A young girl, horror written deep in her face, pointed to the balustrade and gasped ‘He fell over the rail!’

  Appalled, Henry rushed to the edge and looked down. Below lay Thomas, now a key fixture in the diorama, with the spear that he himself had placed with such care, thrusting out through his chest.

  ‘Thomas!!!’ screamed Henry, and then spinning on his heels, he made a mad panicked dash for the stairs.

  Thomas watched him go.

  From his viewpoint, about six feet above the mezzanine floor, he could see all that was going on. He was puzzled by the fact that one of the things he could clearly see was apparently himself. The more he looked at it, the more glad he was that it definitely wasn’t him, because it didn’t look too comfortable.

  As Henry reached the body and started searching desperately for signs of life, Thomas, floating about the level of the mezzanine floor, became aware of something above him. Looking up he saw what looked like the entrance to a brilliant, white tunnel.

  He flew away from it, down towards the floor, following a thin gleaming white strand that connected him to his body, and he could clearly see now that it really was his own body. Equally clear was the fact that the wound was fatal, and he was going to die very, very soon. Strangely, this didn’t disturb him much. He was more concerned about Henry, and the amount of anguished guilt etched onto his young face.

  He laid his hand gently on the boy’s shoulder, but Henry didn’t seem to notice, and was now commanding one of the children to call the ambulance, while he tried to support the body. Some of the children were in tears, others sobbing in fright, but about
half simply stared at the sight of Henry cradling the body in his arms, watching the growing blood stain that steadily covered more and more of his clothes.

  Then Thomas felt himself being gently lifted up from the floor. He looked up, to see the tunnel had followed him down. Before he could even try to resist, it softly and silently sucked him in, and up he went. He twisted to look back down, and was astonished at how far away he was already. Very quickly, the only thing visible was the thin strand that connected him to his body. It was getting thinner by the second.

  ‘Oh well.’ he thought. 'It’s an adventure. There’s nothing I seem to be able to do about it. Let’s see where things lead! At least the arthritis doesn’t seem to hurt anymore.’

  Suddenly, about ten feet away to his right, another tunnel flashed into life, visible through the walls of his own. As he watched, the young boy in it seemed to drift upwards with him, keeping pace.

  The boy had spotted him too, and was smiling and waving. Thomas reciprocated. Each curious about the other, the two moved to the walls of their respective tunnels to see more clearly. Thomas put his hand up against the wall of his tunnel. The boy did likewise. Suddenly, and without warning, the two tunnels swung rapidly towards each other, and the two hands were placed palm to palm.

  Thomas tried to pull his away, but it was glued in place. The boy’s face registered real fear, and he too struggled to wrench himself free. He screamed, but Thomas could hear nothing. The wall of the tunnel slowly changed colour, and began to become more translucent than transparent. Then abruptly it split, like water when a diver plunges into a pool, and the two hands properly met. A heartbeat later, Thomas was sucked from his own tunnel into the boy’s. The hole slammed shut behind him, and even before Thomas could turn around to look, his own tunnel winked out of existence. His silvery cord, severed now, lashed around wildly, both man and boy ducking their heads instinctively to avoid it as it flashed past their faces. Hands stuck together, they were like German duellists in a mensur, unable to pull apart, waiting to see who would be struck first. In the end it was the boy, who took the blow full in the forehead.