Stephen Baxter: Conqueror

'But could it have been different?'

Sihtric snorted. 'You were there, Viking. You know how close it came. If Harold had eliminated Tostig as I urged him – if common cause could have been found between Harold and Hardrada – if only the winds had shifted earlier and William had landed in midsummer, when Harold was waiting with a fresh army – at the battle, if William had stayed down when he fell – if not for that arrow which brought down Harold himself, if the shield wall could have held just another hour… There are so many ways it could have happened. And we would be attending Harold's Christmas feast.'

'And if any of these ifs had come about? What then?'

Sihtric pulled his lip. 'Well, with Hardrada dead and William fallen, England would have faced no serious outside threat for a generation. There's always the question of the succession. Tricky, that. If Harold had lived long enough he might have married his son by the sister of the northern earls into the family of Edward. Then, you see, he could have united in his grandson the Godwine blood, the northern earls, and the line of Alfred and the Cerdicings, the oldest royal dynasty in Europe. Who could challenge the legitimacy of that?'

'I'll tell you who,' Orm said. 'Harold's children of his first family, by Edith Swanneshals.'

'Perhaps, perhaps,' Sihtric said. 'But it's a game that will never play out.'

And Edith, rather than siring kings, had had to identify her husband's butchered corpse on his last battlefield.

'But then?' Orm asked, intrigued by this unreal history despite himself. 'If Harold had won, if his children were athelings not refugees – and then, and then?'

And then, the priest said, with its southern neighbours beaten and reduced to disarray, England would have turned north.

'Think of it,' Sihtric said ruefully. 'Longships laden with English goods would sail to the east into Constantinople and the heart of Asia, and to the west they would reach the unknown continents where the Vikings founded Vinland. England is already richer than any of the petty kingdoms of Frankia, Germany or Italy; in time this federation of the north would have overwhelmed the wretched south. England's last ties to the ruins of the Roman empire would be cut. And these ambitious soldier-Christian brutes like William, thwarted in England, might have abandoned their dreams of murderous crusades in al-Andalus and the Holy Land.'

'And your prophecy would be fulfilled,' Orm said. 'An empire in the north.'

'Yes. Or a republic.'

Orm frowned. 'What do you mean by that?'

'You spoke to me of how the Vikings planted a new kind of society out in the ocean. Where the landowners and the wealthy men gather to make mutual decisions about the future.'

'The althings.'

'Freedom is in our blood, we northern folk. We Germans arrived here in Britain without kings. The Danes too. Perhaps it would have been our fate to build, not an empire, but a republic, as the first Romans did, with its capital at Jorvik, sustained by an endless frontier to the west. Freedom, Orm, freedom in a new world. But it was not to be. Instead we English have lost our freedoms to these Norman brutes, and it will take a thousand years to wrest them back.'

'All this hinged on the battle at Haestingaceaster. The whole world would be different, for ever, if-'

'Yes. But the chance is gone and that's that,' Sihtric said briskly, almost business-like. 'The Aryan empire is lost. As is the life you might have had with Godgifu.'

Orm stiffened. 'Sihtric – your sister-'

Sihtric waved him away. 'She shouldn't have been fighting in the wall. Don't blame yourself. Don't even blame her. Blame the ambitious men who led us to war. Or blame the Devil, or the pagans' gods of war. Blame Mars – yes, that's it.' He looked closely at Orm. 'You must build a new life,' he said. 'Without her. As best you can. As must I.'

Orm nodded, finding it difficult to speak. 'You forgive me. Perhaps you have it in you to become a good priest, Sihtric.'

Sihtric laughed. 'Praise indeed.'

But Orm saw a gleam in his eye, a trace of his old calculation. 'You have a plan. Don't you, priest?'

He winked at Orm. 'I'm thinking of travelling.'

'Where?'

'Al-Andalus. My friend Ibn Sharaf will host me, in a land of libraries and learning. And, perhaps, we will discuss the strange designs of Aethelmaer.'

'You always have a scheme in play, don't you, Sihtric? Well, perhaps you will be safe there.'

Sihtric looked at him sharply. 'What does that mean? Am I under threat?'

'Sihtric – the Menologium. When we were crossing from Normandy, Odo approached me…' He told the priest how Odo had instructed him to get rid of the prophecy, and Sihtric himself. 'He believed it could be destabilising, I think.'

Sihtric snorted. 'A real eye for detail, that man. Well, he can have it.' He pulled a scroll from his vestment. 'My only copy. What use is a prophecy whose future was not realised? One thing though-' He hesitated, then unrolled the scroll. 'An oddity I noticed only recently, only since the battle. There is an acrostic.'

'A what?'

'An embedded phrase made up of the first letters of each line. Like a puzzle. Bede used similar tricks. Look, you can see it clearly in the epilogue. AMEN.'

Orm shrugged, caring nothing for word puzzles. 'I see no other words here.'

'No, but look – look at the stanzas, ignore the prologue and the framing lines about the Great Years. Look at the content lines alone. Now can you see?'

Orm picked out the letters. 'E – I – N – S… It looks German.'

'I think it's a name. Or several names. I don't know what they mean. They would have made no difference anyhow. Give the thing to Odo. Let him puzzle over it. I'm done with it.'

There was a stir among the thegns. William was at the altar. The old coronation rite of the English kings was read, in English and Frankish. Now the nobles were asked if they accepted William as king. They all shouted in acclamation. 'Yes! Yes!-'

There was a crash. Soldiers in long mail coats came bursting in through the church doors, their swords drawn, yelling. They had mistaken the acclamation shouts for a threat to William, and had come in to deal with it. The nobles' retainers turned to meet them, raising their own weapons. Fighting broke out.

And smoke poured in through the open doors. In their usual way when faced with a crisis, the Norman troops were torching the buildings of Westmynster.

'What a farce,' murmured Sihtric. 'Violence cloaked by piety and spurious legitimacy. What a bloody farce.'

As the stink of burning filled the church, as the fighting continued amid cries of anger and fear, the archbishop anointed the Bastard's brow with sacred oil, and lowered the crown of England on to his head.

Afterword

I'm deeply grateful to Adam Roberts for his expert assistance with the translation of the Menologium of Isolde, and for an invaluable reading of the book at manuscript stage.

Perihelia of Halley's Comet, close approaches to the sun, took place at the dates indicated in the text. The intervals are irregular because of the perturbation of the comet's orbit by the planets, among other effects. As seen from Earth, some of these visitations were more prominent than others.

Readable primary sources on the period from the end of Roman Britain to 1066 include Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (trans. Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin, 1990), and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (trans. Anne Savage, Tiger Books, 1995). As a general survey of the period Frank Stenton's comprehensive Anglo-Saxon England (third edition, Oxford, 1971) is inevitably dated but hard to beat, and an unparalleled introduction to the spirit of the times is the epic poem Beowulf, especially Seamus Heaney's translation (Faber and Faber, 1999).