Conqueror

by Stephen Baxter

  Amid this cheerful gaggle, a man came striding out to greet them. He was tall but spare, with a streak of grey in his dirty blond hair; he was perhaps in his mid-thirties. He wore a luxuriant moustache, and a necklace of shell and stone. Further away Belisarius saw other men and women watching them with a cautious curiosity. Belisarius, like Macson, made sure his hands were visible at all times.

  ‘My name is Guthfrith,’ the man said. ‘You’ve travelled far, I can see that. Are you here for the monks?’

  ‘We are.’

  Guthfrith said that one of the monks was here in the village this morning - a ‘deacon’ called Elfgar, here to collect shellfish for the monastery. Though he shouted for this Elfgar, he wasn’t to be seen, and Guthfrith gruffly invited the travellers to rest in his own home.

  The travellers accepted, and followed Guthfrith. In the course of the journey Belisarius had learned that the Germans had an honourable tradition of hospitality, even in a country not yet fully controlled by its kings, where people were wary of strangers. Of course it always helped to grease the axle of this old tradition of generosity with a couple of silver coins.

  The hut’s smoky interior was dark, although the skin doors were tied back on this bright summer day. The floor was dirt-strewn, and the planks laid over the storage pits underneath creaked softly as Belisarius stepped across them.

  Remarkably, Guthfrith’s home had been built around the trunk of a tree, a dark pillar at the centre of the floor. Some of the tree’s branches, leafless and scorched over the hearth, showed beneath the thatched roof, and grimy tokens of cloth and hay strands dangled from its twigs.

  Guthfrith sat the two of them in a dark corner and fetched them tankards of gritty ale, wooden bowls full of a kind of shellfish broth, and slabs of bread that felt harder than the wood of the bowls. This was the staple food of the farmers, and Belisarius knew the drill. You dipped your bread into your soup to soften it, and worked on it with your teeth until you could chew a little off. The soup, made with a little precious animal stock and laced with sea brine, was thick and salty, but flavoursome.

  Guthfrith apologised for this fare. ‘The hungry months are coming.’

  Belisarius understood, and waved away his apologies. With the winter store long gone, and the first crops of the year needed for the animals, the villagers had to wait until late summer for the harvest - so summer, a time of nature’s bounty, was paradoxically hard for the farmers. If things went wrong there could be famine.

  But not today. His food heavy in his belly, and with Macson telling tall tales of their journey, Belisarius excused himself and wandered around the hut.

  He came to a woman cutting dried meat. She used her teeth to anchor the meat as she cut away bits of fat. A dog sniffed at her feet, hoping for scraps. She smiled at Belisarius - her teeth were white and even, oddly beautiful in her grimy face - said something he didn’t quite understand, and he smiled back and moved on.

  In another corner an old man tended a girl, who lay ill in bed. Swathed in a woollen blanket, stick-thin, she might have been fourteen, or younger. Her eyes were closed, but she was coughing, and Belisarius discreetly stood back so he wasn’t splashed by her spittle. At least it didn’t look like the yellow plague, or worse leprosy, which was remarkably common in Britain. The old man wiped her brow with a moist cloth, prodding at the leeches which clung to her bare flesh, fat with blood.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Belisarius asked softly, in his best German.

  The man cocked his hand behind one ear. Perhaps he was a little deaf. ‘Elf-shot,’ he said. ‘Elf-shot.’

  The old man showed Belisarius how he was trying to tend to the girl, with the leeches, murmured prayers, and a bit of oddly shaped wood which dangled from a rope above the old man’s head. It was a wooden peg from a wagon-axle; it had come from a wagon which had once carted a venerable domnus from the monastery to his grave, and was said to have healing powers. Britain was studded with sacred sites and magic and miracles, and tokens like this.

  ‘She is praying to God,’ the old man managed to say. He grinned at Belisarius, and the Greek saw, to his astonishment, something moving, wriggling out of the corner of the man’s own eye. It was the head of a maw worm. The Germans were so fantastically ignorant about medicine, their only remedies to most ailments a prayer or a charm, that it was a surprise to Belisarius that any of them survived at all.

  Belisarius bowed, wished the girl well, and withdrew.

  Outside the hut he wandered around the slumped wooden houses. The only sounds were the voices of the people, the songs of birds, and the hiss of a blacksmith’s bellows. There only seemed to be one plough team in the village, but it would work for everybody, in return for other services rendered in turn. Nobody in this country was free, exactly, it seemed to him; everybody owed allegiance to somebody more powerful - in this case no doubt the abbot of the monastery. But the kings were remote enough not to interfere very often, and everybody was bound up in a web of obligations and mutual help. Sometimes Belisarius envied the sturdy certainty of this society, though he had no ambition to live his whole life with hunger held at bay only by a relentless cycle of work.

  At length Belisarius met Guthfrith, who was cutting wood. In Belisarius’s uncertain German they spoke of the weather and the prospects for the harvest, and Guthfrith showed Belisarius the wood he was working. Ash made the best firewood throughout the year: birch burned too quickly, and elm was too waterlogged to give much heat. Oak was kept piled up to dry out for the winter; its logs burned slowly and well. Hawthorn was best for oven fuel, and lime was a poor burner but useful for carving. Alder was good for making charcoal. In the olden days, Guthfrith said, you wouldn’t burn elder indoors because it was infested by the Hag Goddess, and you wouldn’t want her in your house ...

  To Belisarius, wood was wood. He was glimpsing the mind of a man whose ancestors had lived off forests, to whom the tree was sacred, the connection between earth and sky, and in its patient longevity the repository of all wisdom. The consciousness of this German, whose ancestors had had no contact with the Roman empire, was quite alien, he thought, unlike the Goths and Vandals who had occupied the continental provinces. It was fascinating, and Belisarius determined to remember as much as he could for his memoir.

  Macson came up. ‘I think I’ve found our guide to the monastery,’ he said dryly. He raised his finger to his lips for silence, and led the way to one of the huts.

  In the doorway a couple lay with their legs in the sun, their heads and shoulders in the shade. The man lay on top. He wore a black habit, hitched up over his waist, and his white arse bobbed up and down like a rabbit’s tail. The woman lay back passively, her eyes unfocused. She had the look of a slave.

  It wasn’t the first time Belisarius had seen such behaviour among the Germans. Masters commonly copulated with their slave girls in the open, even when they were trying to sell them in the markets of Brycgstow. But as Macson murmured, ‘This is not an approved monkish custom, I don’t think. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this village is full of little tonsured bastards.’

  At last, with a shudder of his white thighs, the monk spent himself and rolled off. The girl lay for a moment, her legs splayed, her tunic stained with his sweat. Then she stood, straightened her clothes, and immediately trudged off to the fields.

  Macson stepped forward. ‘You must be deacon Elfgar.’

  The monk opened his eyes, startled. He jumped up, pulling his habit down over his limp cock. ‘God be with you,’ he murmured in Latin, sweating.

  XII

  Boniface had a novice called Aelfric serve Belisarius and Macson a little wine. It was at the express permission of the abbot; otherwise the brothers only took wine with their noon meal, the prandium, on Sundays.

  ‘We live according to the guidance of Saint Benedict,’ said Dom Boniface in his heavily accented Latin. ‘The rules are elaborate, but at their heart are simple principles. Our waking hours are devoted to the Work of God, the Work o
f the Body, and the Work of the Mind.’ Opus Dei, Opus Manuum, Lectio Divina. ‘And as far as possible we inhabit the Great Silence, listening only to the echo of our own souls, and the Thoughts of God ...’

  They sat in the monastery’s small library, a nest of books, scrolls and bound parchments heaped up on shelving. The only light came from oil lamps. There was a smell of old leather and sour ink - although that was to be preferred to the seven varieties of shit that greeted the nose in the average German village.

  The only other person in the room was this young novice who served the wine, Aelfric, a slight, oval-faced youth. Macson could hardly keep his eyes off Aelfric’s smooth neck - but he was obviously confused by his own reaction. Belisarius understood what was going on, but decided mischievously he would let Macson suffer a little before putting him out of his misery.

  And Aelfric, though the novice scarcely said two words, seemed fascinated in turn by Belisarius, a man of the Roman east. The Greek recognised a deep curiosity in her.

  Deacon Elfgar had brought them to the monastery in the middle of the afternoon. They had been welcomed by the abbot, who promised to look over Belisarius’s stock of books for sale - but not until the end of the monastery’s day. While Macson retired to a cell and slept, the death of his father still weighing on him, Belisarius had explored the monastery, with its little workshops and gardens tended by silent monks and novices. He sat in on no less than three services in the little church, intoned and sung beautifully by black-robed monks lined up like so many crows.

  Theirs was a rigid, enclosed life, with every waking hour dedicated to some purposeful task or other, with little room for the exercise of free will. But, compared to the chaos outside, this was a calm, ordered, thoroughly civilised environment, and it was no wonder that the sons of kings fled here. Why, the monks even had a latrine that sluiced into running water.

  The church, dedicated to Saint Peter, was very modestly constructed with walls of oak and wattle, though at some point in its history a thatch roof had been replaced by one of lead. Rather gruesomely the coffin containing the remains of the monastery’s greatest saint, Cuthbert, sat in the middle of the floor. But this wooden cathedral was crammed with treasures: an altar service of gold and silver, some quite exquisite stained-glass panels, and frescoes and vestments adorned with intriguing tangled designs, woven with glittering gold. Even Cuthbert’s coffin sat in a jewel-crusted shrine. Belisarius was astounded by the wealth he had found in this remote and rather shabby place. It augured well for his book sales, he thought.

  And all of this in a monastery where not a hundred paces away people lived in a house built around a sacred tree.

  After cena, supper, which the monks shared with their guests, and the last service of the day, compline, Dom Boniface had at last guided Belisarius and Macson to the library. It was a small collection, dwarfed, said Boniface, by a much greater amassing at the monastery of Saint Paul on the mainland, where the famous Bede had once worked. But still there were volumes here to be proud of - and Belisarius’s professional eye quickly spotted a few gaps his own stock would fill.

  And here, Boniface promised, inscribed on cool vellum, were the enigmatic stanzas of the prophecy Macson had come so far to see.

  Boniface was a ‘computistor’. His primary function was to calculate the date of Easter and other significant calendar days for his fellow monks. He was disfigured by a swollen, red-purple tumour on his cheek. Belisarius had been unable to resist remarking gently on the contrast with his monastery name, Boniface. The monk smiled, and called it ‘God’s joke on a sinner’.

  As Belisarius listened absently, the old computistor spoke of the challenges of his life. ‘It’s a continual battle, to keep faith burning bright in the souls of the people,’ he sighed. ‘It gets harder every time there’s a joint in time - like the midsummer festival they will soon be celebrating - for joints in time, like joints in space at river banks or crossroads, are holy for these people. And every time there’s a plague, out come the straw dolls to be tied to the branches of their sacred trees.’

  Belisarius nodded. ‘It seems to me that Christianity needs to be primitive here. I don’t mean that unkindly. You must combat the magic of paganism with the greater magic of Christ.’

  ‘Oh, yes, there’s no doubt about it,’ the computistor said, his tumour flaring hotly. ‘Not only that, we must colonise the pagans’ emblems of belief. Think of Christ nailed to His cross. He is pinned to a tree, the fount of wisdom for our German forefathers, and fixed with iron nails, like the elf-shot which brings the pagans sickness and death. What a rich mixture of symbols, eh, Belisarius? ...’

  They talked on. And at last, with ill-concealed impatience, Macson brought the conversation around to the subject of the Menologium of Isolde.

  Truth be told, this ‘Menologium’, as Boniface called it, was only a curiosity for Belisarius; he had let it guide his footsteps here but he expected little of it. But now he had a chance to inspect it he grew intrigued. It was written in some sort of German, competently transcribed, rather crudely illuminated. He counted a prologue, nine stanzas and an epilogue, all more or less puzzling. The poetry seemed authentically German, what he knew of that earthy art form, with each line composed of two balanced halves, each with two stressed syllables. It was peculiarly full of numbers for a product of a more or less innumerate people.

  ‘It is enigmatic,’ Boniface said, watching Belisarius’s reaction. ‘But as a prophecy it is true.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  And Boniface summarised the first four stanzas, explaining the meaning of each of them, leading to the summoning of Cuthbert by the King in the year 684 by the Christian calendar.

  Macson sat up straighter, his greed evident in his posture.

  Belisarius asked, ‘Are prophecies possible in your theology, Domnus?’

  Boniface said, ‘Ah! Interesting question. Can even God know the future? Augustine of Hippo believed that God stands outside time, and sees past and future all of a piece - as a scholar might survey the pages of a book, laid out on a table before him. But even Augustine put limits on God; he didn’t believe God could change the past, for instance.’

  Belisarius grunted. ‘It seems to me heretical to put limits on God.’

  ‘Perhaps. Our friends in the village would think differently altogether. To them we humans are woven into the tapestry of all things, the tapestry of time. Every event that is to come grows out of all that went before. You have free will, to some extent, but only within the greater embedding of the universe. In our German tongues, the word for “weave” has the same root as that for “fortune”. Gewaef and gewif. Only the Sisters of the Wyrd, who endlessly weave their tapestry, have greater power.’ He winked at Belisarius. ‘In such a world prophecy is possible, of a sort, but only in that one may dimly guess at the continuation of the pattern in the tapestry from the lines of its threads. No god could see the future, not even Woden, for the future does not exist. The future is a process of becoming from the present, as a tapestry emerges from the loom.’

  ‘But you do not believe in the Sisters of the Wyrd.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then who made your prophecy? I don’t mean Isolde—who poured these words into her head?’

  Boniface closed his eyes and smiled. ‘The author of this document - man or angel or demon—is said by legend to inhabit not the root of the tree of destiny but its topmost branches - not the past but the future. He is known as the Weaver. And he has a plan ...’

  Belisarius was not impressed by this vague mysticism. But his attention was drawn to the next stanza, the fifth. For if Boniface was right, this was the first of the remaining stanzas which described the future. He read it aloud:

  The Comet comes/in the month of May.

  Great Year’s midsummer/less nine of seven.

  Old claw of dragon/pierces silence, steals words.

  Nine hundred and twenty-one/the months of the fifth Year ...

  �
��This sounds gloomy, Dom Boniface. What can it mean? A dragon is a pagan symbol, hardly appropriate in a Christian poem. And what is this silence?’

  Macson’s eyes widened. ‘There is a Great Silence here in this holy house. You’ve spoken of it yourself, Domnus, the Great Silence of your monkish lives. Is it possible this dragon, whatever it is, will disrupt your lives?’

  Boniface did not respond. But the three of them, Belisarius, Aelfric and Macson, shared glances.

  Belisarius said, ‘If this is true, the question is when.’ He looked again at the Menologium with its lists of numbers of months. ‘We have that specific date, when your Cuthbert was called by his King. From that we should be able to work out the date of your fifth stanza.’ He stared at the words. ‘Nine hundred and twenty-one months: how many years is that?’

  ‘Don’t try,’ Aelfric warned. ‘You can’t work out sums that big. That’s what the Domnus says.’