knows what he might have achieved, had he lived?'
But he had not lived. As he grew he blossomed from a pretty child into a beautiful young man. There were those in the monastery who lusted after him. When they approached him, he ignored their advances; when they pressed, he fought back. So, inflamed by lust and rage, they held him down.
'I doubt he even understood what was happening. He must have been terrified. And when they were done, such was the violence they had used, he was dead, his pretty body as broken as his mind had always been. So that was that, a terrible end. But I comfort myself that perhaps he had served the purpose for which God placed him on the earth – after all his drawings survived – and he was ready to be called back to Heaven.'
Aethelmaer had his faced bathed by his attendant, and Orm took the opportunity to draw the others aside. 'So what do you make of this?'
Sihtric said, 'Who knows? There's something in these 'Engines of God', that's for sure. And I can't resist a cryptogram! But aside from the business of the comet I can't see what it has to do with Harold.'
'So will you let this old man go?'
'Oh, yes.' He grinned, wolfish, calculating. 'But I think I'll take a copy of those sketches of Aethelred's. There will be a future beyond this crisis, however it turns out, a future beyond 1066. Perhaps the sketches will be a guide…'
Godgifu was clearly repelled. 'You never stop manipulating, do you? You never stop plotting, calculating, seeking the advantage.'
'It's got me this far,' he said, unperturbed.
Orm plucked Godgifu's sleeve. 'Let's get out of here. The stench is making me ill.'
'Of his ulcer?'
'That too. Come on.'
They hurried out of the abbey, and made for the thegn's house Orm was sharing with Sihtric and Godifu. It was still light. Once inside, Godgifu poured wine.
Orm felt restless, confined. He prowled around, longing to punch something. 'I've had my fill of prophecies. And hypocrisy. The fat, putrid old monk, Aethelmaer! He drools over the boy's drawings as if they were a gift from his God – and yet those who were supposed to care for the boy raped him to death. All that lost potential, a lost life – and for what?' He drained his cup.
And Godgifu stood before him.
Wordless, she took away his cup – and she touched his chest, as she had on that day when she had helped pull him from the mire in Brittany, and suddenly he forgot about monks and prophecies. He felt his heart speeding, his pulse beating in his throat. It was as if the world expanded, the houses and the people flying away to the horizon, leaving the two of them isolated in this small Lunden house. He covered her hand with his. 'What's brought this on?'
She smiled up at him. 'Do you fear we might be wasting our potential, Viking? I slog after my brother as he follows the King, while you train little English boys for war. All we talk about is prophecies and successions. We live in a tumultuous age – perhaps we even glimpse future and past through my brother's prophecy – but we have no time for ourselves.'
He smiled. 'Sihtric will be pumping information out of that old monk for a good hour yet, if I'm any judge.'
'Then let's not waste this hour, if it's all we have.' And she raised her face to his.
It was her first time. There was a little pain, and he could feel the blood she spilled. But she gave herself to him joyfully.
Afterwards he clung to her. He did not know when this moment might come again. 1066, he suspected, was not a good year to fall in love.
XI
The very next morning, Sihtric insisted on an audience with the King. He declared that he had at last fully decoded his prophecy, and was ready to present its 'remarkable message' to Harold.
Godgifu tried to slow him down. 'Are you sure? It's a risky business to try to change a king's mind.'
'I have no doubt. My correspondence with the Moor confirmed it – my meeting with the fool Aethelmaer only served to clarify my mind. I worked through the night to resolve it all. This is destiny, Godgifu. Providence. I am the Weaver's instrument.' His eyes were rimmed red from the lack of sleep.
Impulsively Godgifu took her brother's hands. 'Not providence. The truth is that damned prophecy has led you far from your chosen path through life. Far from God. Your Weaver can have no conscience about the effect of his tinkering with our lives.'
He squeezed her hands. 'Dear Godgifu. We have always had a prickly relationship, haven't we? And yet you always look out for me. Even now you will help me – even today.'
She frowned, suspicious. 'What do you mean by that?'
'Never mind. Just be with me, Godgifu, before the King. And – bring Orm.'
'Why?'
But he would not say.
Harold received them in his chamber, a magnificent stone-walled room at the heart of Edward's Westmynster palace, with a fireplace so large Godgifu could have walked into it. He was working through papers with clerks and a couple of housecarls, who hastily read through the documents for him and held them up for him to make his cross. Harold's big warrior's frame looked restless under the fine garb and, like Sihtric, he looked as if he had had little sleep.
When Sihtric, Orm and Godgifu were shown in, he dismissed his clerks and crossed to a bench where he poured himself a cup of mead. 'I'm somewhat busy, priest.'
'I can imagine, lord-'
'William is moving. Have you heard that? He is trying to raise an army of seven thousand, my spies tell me. He needs the support of his Norman nobles for that. He's seeking recruits from Brittany and Boulogne. He's even writing to the damn Pope. He means to invade, that's the top and bottom of it… Make your case and make it quickly, Sihtric.'
Sihtric, his tension showing, unrolled a scroll. 'Behold the Menologium of Isolde. I now understand it fully, lord, so I believe. And, troubled as this time is for you, I believe the Menologium shows you a clear path.'
Harold grunted. 'My brothers say I should dispose of you. My pet soothsayer. They call you a chancer.'
Sihtric held up the parchment. 'But this is no fortune-telling, no scrying of entrails. This is scholarship, which-'
Harold waved away a document he couldn't read. 'Yes, yes. Just tell me.'
As the name implied, the Menologium was a calendar – a calendar of history. It was structured around the Great Year, the seventy-seven-year return cycle of the comet, which even this month should blaze in England's skies.
'But there is no comet,' Harold pointed out.
'It will come, sire…'
Sihtric had been able to interpret the Menologium with the help of the Moorish scholar who had converted Great Years to Christian dates, by matching Menologium dates to histories like Bede's, and by drawing on studies of the prophecy itself that went back centuries, to Cynewulf and Boniface, long dead.
'We have a prologue, epilogue and nine stanzas,' he said. 'Each stanza spans a Great Year, punctuated by a comet visitation. The first can be dated to Anno Domini 451, when our German forebears first rebelled against the British king who had brought them to England. And later stanzas describe specific events, though cryptically.' Thus stanza five predicted the coming of the Norse to Lindisfarena. Stanza six foreshadowed Alfred's first great victory against the Danish Force.
Some of the Menologium's stanzas seemed to have been inserted to give a historical anchoring to the timeframe, and they were only becoming clear with the passage of time. Sihtric quoted stanza eight: ''At the hub of the world/Match fastness of rock/against tides of fire'…'
