I nodded. ‘And a good man, which is a greater loss.’
He murmured agreement, then added: ‘I’ve been watching your progress, Kenneth. At first I thought I’d made a dreadful mistake by so much as allowing you near a page of paper with a pen in your hand. But God reassured me I’d done the right thing, and of course He was right.’ Odolric made the sign of the Cross over his breast. ‘Your work’s as good as anybody’s now, better than most.’
I turned half away, embarrassed.
‘Listen to me, Kenneth. I’m not just here to flatter you. I’ve sensed, I’ve sensed there’s something . . . more about you.’
My heart sank. I’d been through this sort of conversation before. It happens to all travellers. It never crosses anyone’s mind you could be a visitor from the future – crazy idea! – but often enough somebody realises you’re not quite right. The most sensible thing to do when that happens is to get out of Dodge City, and fast – especially if you’re in an era where odd-seeming folk can easily be called witches and have a bonfire put under them. At least I didn’t have that to worry about – the people here followed the line of Saint Augustine of Hippo that witchcraft is a myth.
Odolric was still talking. I soon realised my sudden fears had been for nothing.
‘You have an imagination, Kenneth. It is a gift from God that not all of us have. I’ve seen you at your desk, industriously performing your duty of copying the Lord’s word and yet not actually engaged in it. Your mind has clearly been wandering elsewhere even as your hand has been forming the words. I should’ – he gave a little coughing laugh – ‘I suppose I should be angry with you for failing to show your task full reverence, but, as I say, imagination is God’s gift, so who am I to speak against it?’
‘You’re kind, Father.’
‘Karl-Georg thought the same about you. He said that you have the makings of an historian.’
‘Me?’
‘Don’t be so surprised. The Lord crafts us all for different roles in life. I have plenty of monks who can replicate the words in front of them with skill and accuracy. But the historians are a breed apart. And Karl-Georg believed you belong to that breed. I think he was right. I think it’s as an historian that you can best serve the Master of us all.’
‘But I—’
He held up a hand to silence me. ‘The other historians will tell you all you need to know. I’ll inform them during the course of the morning. You will join them for the midday meal, and they will welcome you as one of their number.’
They will? From what I’d seen they were an exclusionary bunch who’d regard me as about as welcome as a dog turd. But Odolric’s word was law inside the Abbey of Saint Martial and for some distance around it.
‘Very well,’ I said.
And, to give them credit, the other historians received me with friendliness and open arms.
In the afternoon the Norman monk Turold, who had taken over from Karl-Georg as the head of the little clan of historians, led me on a stroll around the cloisters and, his breath steaming in the icy air, told me what being an historian entailed.
That night I sent another of my occasional missives back up the timeline to Benny.
*
Luckily there was a full moon to guide my way as I trudged through the snow away from the Abbey of Saint Martial. The skin of my lower calves and ankles had already been scraped raw by the crust of ice that lay on top of the snow; the cold, mercifully, had numbed all sensation from my feet some while ago.
For once, Benny had replied to one of my messages. As always, he wasted few words:
Get out of there. Now. Back here for redeployment.
I could have used the portal right then and there in my cell, but after a moment’s thought I’d decided to wait until the early morning and leave a trail of footprints in the snow to ‘explain’ my disappearance. Otherwise an inexplicable vanishing from a house of God could all too easily be construed as a miracle. I didn’t accept the existence of the God these people worshipped, but I liked and respected men like Odolric and Turold enough that I didn’t want to add a further piece of baloney to their belief system. Far better for them to think that, perhaps frightened off by the responsibility of being an historian, a creator rather than a copyist, I’d fled the abbey. They might be surprised, but they wouldn’t think it had been a direct intervention by God.
Saving them from false beliefs . . .
I smiled in the darkness. Who was I kidding? I’d tripped over what was probably the biggest piece of deliberate falsification in human history, and I was trying to save some of its perpetrators from a few months of bamboozlement.
I managed to walk a couple of miles before I got to the stage where each new step made me want to scream. My throat was sore from gasping the freezing air. My fingers were so cold they felt as if they didn’t belong to me, but I was somehow able to wrestle the portal from my cowl and flip it open.
I keyed it for home. The twenty-fifth and New Vatican had never seemed so alluring.
*
And they still do.
Portals don’t last forever. They’re finicky. They usually give some advance warning of their demise, so they can be replaced long before their deterioration becomes a problem. And perhaps this one had done exactly that but I’d failed to notice through having become so focused on the obligations of daily life in the abbey. More likely, the cold and my clumsy handling of the device as I programmed it was the last straw for some undetected weakness . . .
I can theorise as much as I want to, but it won’t change the reality.
*
Some of the truth I already knew, from what Turold told me as we ambled around the cloisters that afternoon. Anyone looking at us might have thought we were just two friends discussing the matters of the day, or perhaps arguing some subtle theological point. In fact, in his earnest, gentle, pedantic way Turold was tearing apart myths that I’d always believed as accepted truth.
Over the years since then, I’ve been able to put together more of the pieces. My own interest in history got me part of the way: when there’s nothing to do on a sleepless night except stare through the gloom at a blank wall, it’s surprising how many memories come back. In addition, Odolric has helped me with much, even while unaware of what he was helping me to do. Turold likewise. Léon, who has become a staunch friend as our hair has greyed, brings news of the outside world when he passes this way, and this has enabled me to fill in a few further gaps. And of course there are the books in the abbey library – the factual books, that is, the dusty records with their dates and their annotations: not the holy books, and most certainly not the ‘histories’.
Karl-Georg had just begun the writing of one of those ‘histories’. When he died, Turold asked me to continue the task in his stead.
That task was the writing of the work that would, after a century’s worth of embellishments by other hands, become generally known as La Chanson de Roland.
*
Back in the twenty-fifth I’d read a translation of La Chanson. As the monk talked to me, I realised that I knew his name. In the introduction to the edition I’d read, Turold was mentioned as a possible author of the piece. Sometimes in bed together Helen and I had read to each other. I remembered La Chanson twice over: the second time, it was being spoken gently, the words being rolled in appreciation, in Helen’s voice.
It had never occurred to me – how could it have? – that I myself might have been the author of that epic poem.
And it had surely never occurred to Helen that her lover was largely responsible for creating the historical evidence for the object of her obsession.
Charlemagne.
Karl-Georg devised him. I gave him a story.
Here’s as much as I have learned:
The history that we know – that you know – is a mess. It was made a mess by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. If you look at his biography you can see immediately that there’s something wrong. He was supposedly born in 980 and became Kin
g of Germany at the age of three on the death of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II. At the age of sixteen the boy king led an army to Italy to claim the title of Holy Roman Emperor. He died in 1002 at the age of just twenty-one.
Those dates aren’t impossible, of course, but they’re odd enough to arouse an initial suspicion.
Among the boy king’s tutors was the scholar Gerbert d’Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II in 999. This was among his lesser achievements. He was the man responsible for introducing the Arabic decimal numbers to Europe in place of the clumsy Roman system, for rediscovering the astrolabe and the abacus, and for much else besides. Some said he was a sorcerer of the black arts. There’s more, much more that Gerbert/Sylvester did . . . too much more, in fact. If we’re to believe the histories, he was a virtual Leonardo.
Two men, their lives closely intertwined, whose official biographies seem suspect.
Beyond suspect, in fact, as I discovered from Turold as we walked through the cloisters around and around the quadrangle of the Abbey of Saint Martial.
Otto and Gerbert were born not in the 900s but in the 600s. They were two men with high ideas of their own importance. As a single example, the reason Gerbert took the papal name of Sylvester was that the first Pope Sylvester had been the adviser to Constantine the Great. So we can assume that Otto saw himself as a figure of comparable stature to the great Emperor who put Christianity on the map – arguably, indeed, the most significant influence on the history of Christianity since Saint Paul and even Jesus Christ.
Surely, the two allies thought as the year 700 approached, it was God’s will that the reign of Otto as Holy Roman Emperor be marked by a far more important change of centuries. Would it not be a grand thing if Otto’s rule could be marked by the millennium?
At the time, no one outside the Church had any clear idea of how many years had elapsed since the birth of Christ. (The common folk didn’t use the AD system: they counted the years in terms of the incumbency of whoever was their current monarch – the tenth year of King John, the seventh year of King Peter, and so on.) There were several different estimates of the true date: although the one usually accepted was 699, some authorities claimed the Lord had been born 696 years ago, or 698, or even 703. It was important, it seemed, for both Church and State to establish a fixed standard for further counting. The precise number chosen was immaterial, so long as it was one that everybody could be made to agree upon. And, since only clerics would notice if the year 699 were to be followed not by the year 700 but by the year 1000 . . .
It was done. There was no intent to deceive. It was just a tidying operation that happened also to feed the vanity of two powerful men.
A couple of years after the redating, Otto died, his death being followed just a matter of months later by Gerbert’s. Neither death, Turold told me, was natural: both men were hastened from this world by their enemies. By then it was too late to revert to the previous dating system. The Pope had declared the year to be 1000, and it was inconceivable that the Pope might have been wrong to do so – just as it was inconceivable that Pope Gregory XIII could have been wrong when, in 1582, Thursday, the 4th of October was followed by Friday, the 15th of October. Like Sylvester II, Gregory changed the calendar in order to tidy it up, although the reasons for the tidying were rather different.
In 1582 many people were confused by the ten ‘missing days’, believing those days had somehow been stolen from their lives. Imagine the reaction in 1000 (or 700), even among the educated clergy, at the ‘loss’ of three whole centuries.
Those centuries must surely contain a history, people reasoned – a secret history, now lost to us. A history that God knew but that mortals had somehow forgotten. And that gap in knowledge was intolerable to the religious sensibility: the forgetfulness of sinners was an offence against God.
So the Vatican, that greatest of puppet masters, began pulling strings, and each of the puppets it set into motion pulled further strings until, in monasteries all over Europe, ‘historians’ started their work of not recording or preserving history but of creating it.
Once again, there was no intent to deceive. The clerics believed that God was revealing the secret history to them. They were merely writing it down. If there were inconsistencies in the revelation, so what: it was just God’s way. After all, in the Bible itself He’d given two different versions of the Creation.
What none of the pious monks could have predicted – could even have conceived – was the effect that their ‘restoration’ of the three ‘lost’ centuries would have on the calibration of the portals used by travellers from the distant future . . .
*
The Abbey of Saint Martial could never truly be said to sleep: there was always someone around, engaged in menial or other duties – toiling in the kitchens, taking out the cesspots, praying in the chapel for the salvation of his immortal soul. I nodded to a couple of monks I didn’t know as I re-entered the building and made my way back to my lonely cell. No one commented on my flayed legs or the heavy, soaked hem of my cowl. They probably assumed I’d been out in the town ministering to someone in need . . . or perhaps whoring, as many of the monks occasionally did.
I sat on the hard bed, looking at my now-useless portal. At least its malfunction was terminal. I was stuck here in the eleventh, without hope of reprieve unless Benny sent someone after me – which if I were him I wouldn’t do. His assumption would be that 1040 had proven to be as lethal to travellers as the preceding three centuries, that mine was just yet another mysterious disappearance. Of course, he might eventually learn better and send someone, but, however long he took, his emissary would surely have arrived almost immediately. No one’s arrived so far and it’s been over twenty years.
Ten of those years ago I wrote out this account and secreted it among the abbey’s records – no one ever goes there except me. Every now and then, if I discover or remember something I want to add, I pull it out and read through it.
And always I think of Helen.
Where are you, my dear heart? When are you? You set off for the year 800 and found yourself in the year 500. You probably thought at first there had been a mistake in the setting of your portal, but then you wondered how it could possibly be that you’d landed in the right place, just the wrong time. The clock on your portal said the year was 800, but it was soon obvious to you that you’d arrived long before your intended destination – centuries, even. Clearly, you must have concluded, you’d been cursed with a defective portal. The one strict rule with a defective portal is that you don’t use it – otherwise you’re likely to find yourself floating in empty space.
Did you settle down and wait for rescue to come? Or did you attempt to reach the twenty-fifth? But how could you set your portal’s destination when you didn’t know where on the world’s timeline you were? Did you decide to take the risk? If you did, it was surely a gamble you lost.
Each night I pray to the God in whom I don’t believe that you didn’t try to go home.
*
If the abbey’s records survive the centuries there may come a day when someone else reads this account of mine. Of course, it won’t make any difference to the future if they do. The future’s already written: I’ve been there, I’ve seen it.
These days I wear my useless portal on a chain around my neck. When people peer at it I tell them it’s a holy object of the kind that many people wear in my native Scotland, and so far I haven’t met anyone who could put the lie to this. The gadget will be buried with me, I’m sure, as if it were a key to Heaven’s gates.
As, in a way, it once was.
Ω
Part of the job of historians is to re-imagine the past, to paint a picture or a series of pictures from the barest sketches that are available. Sometimes, in doing so, they come up with what may seem improbable theories.
Kenneth’s personal account of being trapped in the past because 300 years of history never occurred is (for most historians) a disturbing confirmation of j
ust such a theory. The idea that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II reconfigured the calendar is known as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, and was formulated by the German systems analyst and unorthodox historian Heribert Illig (b. 1947) in books like Das Erfundene Mittelalter: Die Grösste Zeitfälschung der Geschichte (The Invented Middle Ages: The Greatest Time Falsification of History, 1996). Until now the vast majority of historians dismissed it as fantasy – but if we are to take Kenneth’s story at face value, we must now be prepared to re-examine Illig’s theory, and so potentially rewrite our understanding of medieval history.
We should perhaps be grateful that Kenneth’s interrupted travels in time did not grant credence to a far more complex idea, most clearly put forward by the Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko (b. 1945) and others in books such as History: Fiction or Science? (seven volumes, 2003–7). Known as the New Chronology, this posits (among much else) that what are generally regarded as the historical events of Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt actually happened in the Middle Ages, and that Jesus lived in the twelfth century CE . . .
____________________________
* Roughly speaking, the former USA and its North American conquests. For more episodes of the Empire’s history, see Leaving Fortusa (2008) by John Grant.
c. 1150
The following letter appears to have been written to Heinrich, Archbishop of Mainz, around 1150, and forwarded by him to Pope Eugenius III. The name of the writer is not present; parts of the letter seem to have been eaten by mice.
The Latin of the original is competent but not distinguished, suggesting a man educated but not learned, perhaps a monk from a foundation a little distant from Rupertsberg, who knew of Hildegard von Bingen’s reputation and something of her visions. The formality of his voice has been retained in this translation.
It is possible that the writer may have been one of the monks of St Disibod, who was at the convent to say Mass. Some of the brothers, when Hildegard left to found her own abbey, were angry at her leaving, and this might account for the resentment he evidently feels against her. His reference to the abbot adds some weight to this suggestion.
Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more Page 8