'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).
Ken Dark's Britain and the End of the Roman Empire (Tempus, 2000) is a recent and fascinating reference on the transitional centuries that followed the formal end of Roman Britain in AD 410. The sketch of the career of Arthur given here is based on the fragmentary sources available (see for instance Celt and Saxon by Peter Berresford Ellis (Constable, 1993)), and is of course speculative, as are all such accounts.
A reference to recent work on Bamburgh is Bamburgh Castle: The Archaeology of the Fortress of Bamburgh, AD 500 to AD 1500, published by the Bamburgh Research Project in 2003. A recent reference on Lindisfarne is Lindisfarne: Holy Island by Deirdre O'Sullivan and Robert Young (English Heritage, 1995).
Two useful references on the age of Alfred and the Vikings are Douglas Woodruff's The Life and Times of Alfred the Great (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1993) and Julian D Richards' Viking Age England (Tempus, 2000).
Biographies of the key protagonists of 1066 include David Bates's William the Conqueror (Tempus, 2004) and Ian Walker's Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King (Sutton, 1997). There are many but contradictory sources on the Battle of Hastings. Stephen Morillo's The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations (Boydell Brewer, 1996) is a valuable compendium, and a recent review of these sources and the problems they pose is M.K. Lawson's The Battle of Hastings 1066 (Tempus, 2003). The description of the events given here is informed fiction. 1066 by Franklin Hamilton, a.k.a. science fiction writer Robert Silverberg (Dial Press, 1964) contains counterfactual speculation on the outcome, as does Cecelia Holland's essay in More What If (ed. Robert Cowley, Pan, 2002).
The 'flying monk' Aethelmaer was an historical character, mentioned in William of Malmesbury's twelfth- century history Gesta Regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings). The monk Aethelred is my invention, however.
Names of people and places have been a challenge. The spellings of names which emerged from a pre- literate society are inevitably variable, and the names by which we know the peoples of this period aren't necessarily labels they would have applied to themselves. According to Bede, the British referred to their 'Anglo- Saxon' invaders as 'Germans', and I have used this label in relevant sections. By Alfred's time, the 'Anglo-Saxons' referred to themselves as 'English'. I have used Stenton as my primary guide to names and spelling. But this is a novel, and my priority has been editorial clarity.
Note that any dates given here are according to the calendar as used before its medieval adjustment of eleven days. The Battle of Hastings, fought on 14 October 1066, was 'our' 25 October – rather later in the autumn. However this period was in the middle of the 'Medieval Warm Period' (AD 900-1300) – a warm spell which enabled the Viking colonisation of Greenland and Vinland – and late October would typically be warmer than we would expect it now.
Regarding specific places, the remarkable sites I visited in the course of this project include Bamburgh, Pevensey, Jarrow, Lindisfame, Yeavering Bell and York. In October 2005 I witnessed a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings itself, at Battle in Sussex, mounted by English Heritage and the Viking Society. Of course, as I noted in the first book of this series, there is no substitute for visiting these wonderful places.
Any errors or inaccuracies are my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
August 2006
