Stephen Baxter: Conqueror

'Why, don't you see? The blood of the holy one thins and dries… Dreams pour into golden heads… Isolde's blood is drying in my old veins; I am the last of her line. But you are here, with your golden heads, to be filled with the dream and to carry it forward. I knew this night would come. Even when my family abandoned me here, I knew all I had to do was to stay and wait for the Second Great Year to elapse, for those nine hundred and eighteen months to wear away, wait for the comet to reappear. For these words, uttered by an ignorant young woman in labour two centuries ago, are describing our meeting – right now, here, tonight. And now my sole remaining duty is to pass the prophecy to you. Isn't it marvellous?' And he clutched the prophecy to his chest. He seemed to be trying not to weep. Wuffa saw that these brief moments were in some way the fulfilment of his whole life.

Ulf said, practically, 'We cannot read, either of us. What use are we to you?'

Ambrosias replied, 'You can remember, can't you? You people are famous for your sagas, your long dreary poems. I hear them floating up from the village on the night air, though I thank Sol Invictus that I don't understand a word. You will remember, and teach your own children, who will teach theirs. Thus the prophecy will be passed down your families until such time as even you Outer Germans learn the benefit of literacy. My time is at an end – my life, my family – even Britannia, or the last vestiges of it. It has been an heroic age. But now that day is done. You are the future, you Germans, you Norse. You! Why, the Menologium says so.'

'But what's the point of all this?' Wuffa asked quietly. 'What of the far future? What does your calendar say of destiny?'

Ambrosias's eyes were huge. 'There will be a great crisis,' he said. 'At the close of the eighth Great Year.'

Wuffa said, 'And when is that?'

'Who can say? My grandfather once tried to add up all the months in the Menologium, and divide by twelve and so forth, but everybody knows you can't do figuring with numbers above a few hundred.'

'But it will be centuries from now-'

'Oh, yes! More than four hundred years, my grandfather believed.

The whole world will tremble, north pitted against south. But a hero will emerge, and with the love of his brother he will win an empire. And then the future will be shaped by the will of his children – of yours – and they will call themselves Aryans. An Aryan empire. This is his plan.'

'Whose?'

'The Weaver's. The spinner of the prophecy, who sits in his palace of the future and sees all – and schemes to establish the new Rome. But, you understand, the prophecy must be fulfilled, in every particular, in all the Great Years, if this shining future is to come to pass. Otherwise darkness will surely fall.' And with these chilling words he pawed at his prophecy, reading it over in the dim light of the animal-fat lamps. 'Now. Are you ready to learn?'

Wuffa, on a straw pallet, reluctantly sharing the floor of Ambrosias's kitchen with Ulf, found it difficult to sleep.

And when he did doze he dreamed of centuries, stretching around him like a vast firelit hall.

He imagined the power the Menologium might give him and his family. But he was afraid. Were even gods meant to know the future? Could it be that all this was an elaborate trap set by Loki – a trap he had walked into that day when he had gone breaking windows in a haunted city?

He dreamed of Ambrosias's fine, ruined face, his wrinkled neck, the drone of his voice as he pounded his Menologium into their heads. And he imagined wrapping his hands around that scrawny neck, choking the last life out of the old man who had inflicted this prophetic curse on Wuffa and his descendants.

He was woken by a scream.

It was a grey dawn. He glimpsed Ulf hurrying out of the door. He pushed out of his bed and rushed to follow.

The scream had been the bishop's. Wuffa found him in the triclinium, with Sulpicia. They were both in their night clothes, and at another time Wuffa might have been distracted by the glimpses of Sulpicia's ankles and calves, her bare arms. But Ulf was here too, glowering. The light from the open door was dim, blue-grey.

On the floor lay Ambrosias, Last of the Romans. His body looked oddly at peace, his arms by his sides. But his head was at an impossible angle, and purple bruises showed on his throat.

Wuffa smelled burning. He saw ashes around one of Ambrosias's animal-fat lamps on a low table, the remnants of a burnt parchment.

Bishop Ammanius, his battered nose livid, shook with rage. 'To have come all this way, for this!… It is obvious what has happened here. The old man read his prophecy to you two last night. Don't bother to deny it. I heard him, though I could not make out the words. And now one of you has come back, destroyed the parchment, and murdered this wretch – one of you has sought to steal the prophecy for himself. To think that I recruited you when I saw you save one old man, only for it to end like this, in the murder of another at your own hands.'

Wuffa looked at Ulf, who returned his gaze steadily. So, Wuffa thought, the only traces of Isolde's Menologium left in the world existed in their two heads. He had expected his rivalry with Ulf to last a lifetime. Now, he sensed, it was a rivalry that might last centuries. He shivered, as if the hall of time was opening up around him.

'And perhaps you have murdered the last man alive who knew Artorius. What a crime!' Ammanius glared at them, from one to the other. 'Which of you was it? Which of you?'

Wuffa was no killer. But he remembered his fragmentary dreams. He said truthfully, 'I don't know.'

On Lindisfarena it was a late May morning, in the monastery's study period, when Elfgar and his black-souled cronies came for Aelfric. That was the chance unpleasantness that began her own true involvement with the Menologium.

For Belisarius, bookseller of Constantinople, it was chance too, an encounter with an ambitious Briton in a southern port and an ordeal by fire, that lured him to Lindisfarena.

And Gudrid was drawn here all the way across the sea. She shouldn't really have come at all. But while her father and her husband came for gold, she came in search of a legend of love.

None of them would have been there, none of their lives perturbed, if not for the promise of the Menologium, with its tangled threads reaching from lost past to furthest future. None of them would have been there but for the Weaver.

The day started well for Aelfric.

She walked barefoot across the dewy ground to the church. The monks' blocky shadows as they padded over the grass around her, the hems of their woollen habits rustling. The second equinoctial hour, when the monks were called for the night service, Matins, was usually a gruesome time to be stirred from your cell. This morning, though, it was warm and not quite dark, for midsummer was approaching, and the island of Lindisfarena was so far to the north of the world that even now a little light lingered in the sky.

They all crammed into the church. Immersed in the stink of damp wool, the monks signed, mimed and gestured to each other busily. But not a word was spoken, for the rule of Saint Benedict, whose instructions governed every aspect of the monks' lives, was that the first spoken words each day should be in praise of God. The candlelight evoked deep colours from the tapestries and friezes on the walls, and from the silver and gold that adorned the shrine of Saint Cuthbert. The wooden church was a place of sanctuary, of warmth – for, despite unpleasant worms like Elfgar, this was indeed Aelfric's family now.

Led by the abbot, the monks began their chants. Aelfric tried to deepen her voice, but she sang with gusto. She had been taught that the chants were devised by an Arch Cantor based in Rome itself. It was a wonderful thing to imagine all of Christendom, all across Europe, singing the same beautiful songs.