The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

Yes, my uncle also was an adherent of the old religion. It was on account of his faith that he had fallen out with my father or vice versa. All this I had from Margaret. My father, an unforgiving man in some ways, had cut himself off from his only sibling, had never spoken to him, had never attempted to communicate with him.

Margaret had seen my name on a playbill she had picked up in Oxford a couple of years previously. The Chamberlain’s Men, as we then were, had played Oxford at a period when plague closed the London theatres. Margaret Revill had been struck by the coincidence of names. When she showed the bill to her husband, he remarked that John, my father, had himself been drawn towards the stage-play world in his young days. (This was amazing to me. My father was stout in his abhorrence of the stage. But then I reflected on the way in which people’s passions can change violently to their contrary and it became less amazing.) Anyway, the coincidence of names and my father’s one-time ardour for acting had been enough for Margaret to write at her husband’s dictation a letter addressed to me at the Theatre, London. Nicholas was on his deathbed and he was eager to see his nephew, having no surviving children of his own. So even if he was not absolutely sure who I was, I hope I brought some comfort to his dying moments.

The other event was more momentous. The cryptic lines in the Armageddon Text about parleyment and sparks and fires were a prediction of the powder-treason which caused such a stir in the land later that year. When the attempt was made to destroy parleyment, Abel and I at once remembered that verse which I had laboriously copied out and translated. We could scarcely look each other in the eye for a time, as if we were the guilty ones!

It was said that the plot and plotters, both lay and priest, were nurtured in houses very similar to Combe. I am sure that was true. But we two humble players were less certain about the part played by the Black Book of Brân. When Abel and I did eventually talk together after the powder-treason was revealed in the November of 1605, we conversed in low tones and whispers. Like everyone else, we were outraged by the attempt to destroy our king and the members of parleyment (to say nothing of those innocents who would have been caught up in the slaughter).

As you know, the plot was thwarted and no lives were forfeit except those of the plotters. But in our hints and whispers Abel and I couldn’t help wondering how long beforehand the authorities had been aware of the conspiracy, whether, in fact, they might have been instrumental in bringing it to a head so that it could be lanced like a boil.

In this counter-plot against the powder-plot, it was useful to both sides to have possession of the black-bound volume, the Armageddon Text. For the plotters, the prediction of the ruin of parleyment gave validity to what they were trying to do. See, they could say, this event was foreseen hundreds of years ago by an Irish monk, divinely inspired. While for men like Robert Cecil and his agent ‘Thomas Cloke’, the existence of the book and the ‘parleyment’ verse in particular was proof of the other side’s wicked purposes and a useful means of smoking out traitors. Those who suffered were people like the Shaws, decent and honourable families who simply wanted to live and worship as they had always done. No doubt they were under special scrutiny now. My uncle too, had he survived, might have been added to the catalogue of suspects.

But I kept this line of thinking to myself. It was not a good time to voice doubts about the activities of the Privy Council nor to express fellow feeling with adherents of the old religion. The world slipped back to black and white, as it does from time to time.

I wondered what had happened to the Black Book of Brân. The man who wasn’t Cloke had carted it off, no doubt taking it back to London, where it might cause further mischief. I wondered too what was contained in the rest of the volume, what other disasters and catastrophes it predicted. Best not to know, I thought. If the disasters were in the past, they had already happened and the world had survived. And if Armageddon was still to come – and we are promised it will come – well, then, it would come despite anything that Nicholas Revill might do. With luck, he would not be around to see it. I shouldn’t think you would feel any different.

March 2135

Five hundred thirty years, then God returns to save

His chosen, once the sinful have been purged.

Their wicked cities flayed by burning sun and

drowned in purging flood,

And at the end a sun-bright fire of blood.

The news on the radio that morning was bad. Shiva listened to it as he dressed. The giant rivers carrying meltwater from the remnant Antarctic ice sheet had risen again; another metre rise in sea levels was predicted for the decade. Locally, the newscaster reported that changes in seabed currents around the drowned Sizewell B power station had brought increased radioactivity in the sea around the eastern English islands. Shiva thought ruefully that in coming to Yorkshire for his holiday he had only placed himself in a different kind of danger from that which he faced in his work. Like most English people, Shiva wore a radiation ring; Alice had given it to him, a heavy gold ring with a circle in the middle. The circle turned red if the radiation in the atmosphere approached dangerous levels. It was the usual safe dark green this morning, but he would avoid the fish tonight.

On the windowsill he had set his foot-high copper statue of Shiva, the Indian god after whom he was named, a young man dancing inside a circle of fire, keeping the world in existence, in balance. It was a thing of beautiful symmetry, brought by an ancestor from India. Although Shiva had no religion, he liked to sit contemplating it. The face of the four-armed god was enigmatic, with a secret smile.

There was a beeping sound from the computer on the table. Shiva frowned. The POWER OFF switch could be overridden only by an urgent official message. Hastily buttoning his kaftan, he crossed to his machine and opened it up. A single, short message in his receive-box, unsigned:

Please attend EU Commissioner Williams at Commission HQ, Victoria Square, Birmingham, today 21.3.35 at 9 p.m. Fast motorboat arriving to collect 10 a.m. Please confirm receipt.

Shiva hesitated, then pressed the ACKNOWLEDGE button. Ten a.m. – he had only an hour. He looked thoughtfully at the blank screen. A commissioner rather than his superintendent? And a motorboat, eating into the Commission’s petrol ration? This was something urgent.

He walked outside. A pair of canaries took off from the bush beside the chalet. The air was crisp and clear, the heat of the day hours off. A palm-shaded walkway led past the other chalets, the rising sun glinting at an angle on their solar panels. Nearby, dwarfing the young coconut palms with its steeple, stood a square-towered Norman church. There had been a village here for a thousand years and there still was, a cluster of low earthhouses, the blades of their little windmills clacking gently in the morning breeze, chickens and skinny goats poking for food in the dusty street. The space between the chalets was closely planted with vegetable gardens; every patch of fertile ground on earth was planted now.

A tall red-haired man, an inspector from Wales, stood in the doorway of the next chalet, cup in hand, enjoying the early cool. Shiva nodded and walked past him, down to the sea. He had spoken little to his fellow vacationers since his arrival a week ago. The hurt look Marwood gave him as he was led down from the dock kept coming back to him in the middle of conversations.