'Well, I sympathise with that. What will you do?'
'I'll go back to Normandy. In training the English thegns' sons to fight I consider I have discharged my debt to Harold, and I tire of the disdain of these flabby men. At least with William you get a good clean war, and I am respected by his followers.' He studied her. 'Are you shocked that I'm thinking of joining the enemies of Harold?'
She looked into her heart. 'No. In fact,' she said slowly, coming to the decision even as she spoke, 'I'm thinking of going to join Tostig myself. My father was his thegn after all. I have a place there. Everything is too murky here. And I too would like to get away from my brother, after today.'
'So we are separating.'
'It's a year of war, I think. Not of love. When this is over, one way or the other-'
'We'll find each other.'
But she wondered if that could be true.
He turned, and in a moment was gone into the dark, narrow streets. She returned to her lodging-house, and prepared for bed alone.
In the middle of the night she was woken by Sihtric. He had received a new letter from Ibn Sharaf in al- Andalus. Sihtric brandished this before her, his face round in the spectral moonlight that filtered through the unglazed window. 'He has seen it,' he breathed. 'The comet. It has appeared in the southern skies of Iberia…'
Too impatient to light a lamp, he had her throw on a cloak, and they went outside to study the letter by the moon's glow.
'The comet was faint – and perhaps not visible from our latitude, or under our murky English skies. But it first appeared in March, just as the Menologium promised. It has come true! Now the empire of the north longs to be born-and Harold must do as I say.'
Godgifu felt chilled at this talk. 'You are arrogant, Sihtric. A priest who would command a king.'
Sihtric said, 'But even Harold is a mere tool to enable the fulfilment of the grand scheme of the Menologium.' His eyes were bright in the eerie light.
Not for the first time she wondered at the motives of the agent who was truly behind all this: the author of the Menologium, the Weaver. What kind of being was he, who dreamed of establishing an Aryan nation in the north?
And then she saw the King himself, standing by the wall of the church. Harold's tall figure was unmistakable, as he stood with close companions, a couple of housecarls and an archbishop or two, and peered up at the sky, revealed for the first time in days.
She looked up, the way they were looking. And her skin prickled with cold.
'Ah,' Sihtric breathed, staring at Harold. 'He looks every inch a king. See how the gold thread of his tunic glitters in the moonlight.'
Godgifu looked at Sihtric. In his grimy nightshirt, his tonsured hair tousled, he looked oddly vulnerable, much younger. 'You really are unworldly,' she said. 'You have obsessed over this comet all your life, and yet you don't even look up at the sky, do you? Sihtric, that isn't moonlight.'
Now he looked up, and saw a glowing silver cloud suspended in the sky, with tails like lengths of hair washing away from it. He gasped, and mumbled a prayer.
Godgifu explored her own emotions. For all Sihtric's elaborate interpretations she had never really believed in the Menologium. But with the comet in the sky, this was no longer just an intriguing game played out by an eccentric young priest. The prophecy's fundamental truth had been demonstrated. Everything was different now, she thought.
And while Lunden lay silent under the comet's unnatural light, to north and south fleets were being assembled, armies massed, vast forces stirring. She wondered if the Weaver was content.
XIII
On his return to Normandy, Orm went back to the household of his last Norman employer, a man called Guy fitz Gilbert.
Fitz Gilbert was a minor landowner and third son, seeking his own fortune from William's latest campaign, as Norman nobles had done for generations. But, through layers of hierarchy, fitz Gilbert owed his allegiance to Robert Count of Mortain, who was one of William's half-brothers through his mother the tanner's daughter. And soon after his return in May, Orm found himself moved to the household of Robert himself. He got an increased purse and there was some kind of compensation for fitz Gilbert – and more responsibility for Orm.
Orm had no illusions about his capabilities. He knew he was a good warrior, and had commanded units of ten or a dozen men, but he was out of his depth with generals. But, decisive, intelligent and, more important, literate, he was recognised as able to contribute to the vast logistical exercise that consumed the whole of Normandy that summer: the preparations for invasion.
So Orm was in a position to watch, fascinated, as William drew up his plans against England.
William first had to persuade his own counts to follow him. Few of them had even ventured across the ocean before. England was strong and formidably organised, and Harold was well known to be a competent general. An expedition against England would be orders of magnitude more difficult than an adventure against Maine or Brittany.
But if England was powerful it was also rich. And it was the wealth to be won in this gamble of a lifetime that seduced William's warriors. One by one, strong-armed, cajoled and bribed by William, they came round.
Meanwhile William sent embassies to the Pope in Rome. In an elaborate scheme to seek the Pope's backing for the war, William was able to point to Edward's promise of the throne, and Harold's own broken oath; Harold was a perjuring usurper. Not only that, he was portrayed as complicit in the crimes of his father, including the murder of Alfred, Edward's older brother.
Orm the pagan had always thought that Christ was a prince of peace, and he found it hard to understand why the Pope would back an unprovoked military assault. But the Pope had his own ambitions; he wanted more control over the English church. Even Bishop Odo was cynical, though. 'God guides us all, but it does no harm to back a winner, even if you're the Pope.' Anyway William's embassy worked. Harold was actually excommunicated, and Odo was proudly able to display a papal banner for William's forces to carry into battle.
All this may have been a pious justification for a vast act of robbery. But the strange thing about William was that he needed to believe it, utterly. For all his achievements, Orm saw, the Duke seemed to have a grievous fear of death and the punishment of God that could follow. He genuinely needed a holy pretext to justify the blood he spilled. In this, brother Odo was useful. The bishop provided the reassurances that helped the Bastard sleep at night.
With the Pope's backing secured, William was able to present his expedition not just as a Norman adventure but a holy reconquest of a fallen Britain by a European coalition. William borrowed troops from the rulers of Flanders, Brittany and Aquitaine, and cast his net wide for mercenaries. Soon it seemed to Orm that every second son, bastard, murderer and rapist in Europe was drawn to William's banner – all of them hard, experienced fighting men, and few of them with anything to lose.
The force assembled in the estuary of the river Dives, facing England, lodging in tent cities. There would be two thousand cavalry, eight hundred archers, three thousand infantry and a thousand sailors, supported by another army of servants, cooks, carpenters and carters. Three thousand horses would be shipped over. The landing might be opposed, and so stores to feed the army for a month would be carried; for the horses alone there would be ship- loads of hay and grain.
Orm was involved in training the multinational force in how to obey commands in the Frankish tongue, and to respond to the bugles and horns. Orm was a foot-soldier and he concentrated on working with infantry troops. But he watched the cavalry training, as tightly knit teams of a dozen men wheeled across the chalky grass. Orm had seen the use of horses in Brittany. In their petty assaults on farmers the knights had never known defeat – but they had never been tested against a shield wall, and Orm was sceptical how much use they would be. But the cavalry was certainly an inspiring sight, that long Norman summer.
Meanwhile the invasion fleet was built and assembled. William's advisors had calculated that nearly seven
