Michael called, ‘What do you want me to do with her, lady?’
Saladin said quickly, ‘Mother, she is our cousin.’
‘She’s a boil that needs to be lanced. Take her,’ she said to Michael. ‘Do what you want with her, you and your lads. Then throw her out of the city, naked.’
Subh struggled, but Michael grinned and hauled her away to the squad of soldiers playing dice. They laid their hands on her, and pushed her down on the floor of the mosque.
Thomas was ashen. But his eyes were alive with anticipation. ‘The Codex. Come. We may not have much time.’ He led the way back to the bonfire.
Joan dabbed her torn face with a bit of cloth.
Saladin said, ‘You need to find a doctor.’
‘Oh, stop your fussing, boy.’
‘Did you mean what you said? About the designs - the weapons, and using them to take the Holy Land?’
‘Of course I did. It is the most sacred place in the world, Saladin. And our home. We will use the engines for the purpose for which they were intended.’
As a boy in Jerusalem, a ‘warrior cub’ as Thomas had once called him, Saladin would have applauded such an ambition. But he had grown since those days, grown into a man of twenty-one who had seen much more of the world - and had seen much suffering. ‘Mother, are you sure that was the intention? And are you sure that’s what we should do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Remember the Dove.’ He meant his family’s other prophecy, the Testament of Eadgyth, handed down since the days of Robert and his father Orm, a commandment that seemed to warn against the use of Sihtric’s Engines of God.
‘Gibberish,’ she said. ‘Meaningless. I care nothing for prophecies. All I care about is acquiring the power to achieve my goals. All I care about is getting hold of those designs, and building the weapons, and turning them on Muslim flesh.’
Saladin heard screams, and the angry shouts of the men. Subh was putting up a fight. ‘And what of your cousin?’
‘She deserves what’s coming to her,’ Joan spat. ‘I hope they split her open.’
Saladin decided in that moment that he would not follow his mother, not any more, not after this. He would fight for the Holy Land, yes. But he would do it the honourable way, the Pope’s way. He would take the Cross again, and join King Louis’s crusade in Egypt.
And he would not forget the prophecy of the Dove as long as he lived, and he would pass it on to his own children, and instruct them to pass it on to theirs, so that in the unimaginable future they might make their own judgements about the Engines of God.
They reached the fire. Thomas was rubbing podgy hands. ‘Perfect, perfect. All we have to do is retrieve the designs, ship them back to England, and let Roger Bacon get to work.’
Joan, her blood leaking between her fingers, snapped, ‘Must we clear this fire first?’
‘No need. In fact the fire will help us. Perhaps it was sent by God for that very purpose.’ And from his sleeve he drew a packet.
‘What’s that?’
‘A present from Bacon. Black powder.’
Joan grinned, and held out her hand. ‘Let me.’
There were howls from the soldiers with Subh. ‘Ow!’ Saladin heard Michael call. ‘The old witch has bitten through my cheek! ... By God’s wounds. She’s dead! Now, how did she manage that? Poison under her tongue? I think she’s defeated us, lads...’
Joan sprinkled the powder on the floor, on the spot Subh had indicated. Thomas took an ember from the fire and threw it. Fire blossomed, its noise echoing like thunder, beneath the mosque’s low ceiling, and the floor broke open.
III
NAVIGATOR AD 1472-1491
I
In the last days / To the tail of the peacock / He will come: / The spider’s spawn, the Christ-bearer / The Dove ...
Long before he had ever heard of the Testament of Eadgyth, James grew up believing, or at least fearing, that the world’s last days were indeed near. Legends of the last days had rattled around the house in Buxton since James had been taken in as a boy, and had listened wide-eyed to the lurid speculations of the older brothers.
As he grew, however, he learned that Franciscans had always been fascinated by legends of the Apocalypse. And as his soul and mind were opened up by the new mood of scholarship that embraced Europe, he thought he became sensible. Pragmatic. He put aside the grim prognostications, the peculiar antique longing for the end of things.
But now the quality of the whispering changed. Dreams that had once clung to the year of Our Lord 1000 accreted like ivy over another milestone year: AD 1500. That was not a remote future. That was a year James expected to live to see; he would not yet be forty.
And when the abbot took him aside one day, and showed him the abbey’s secret library, where for two centuries the brothers had been labouring over spidery designs for engines of war - engines that might bring about that final catastrophe - then, in some secret library of his own soul, he began to feel afraid.
For Harry Wooler, it was the Dove himself whose beating wings cast shadows over his own life, on the day his own small world came to a kind of end, as his father lay dying.
Harry, just seventeen years old, was forced to lean over a face already like a skull, smell breath that still stank of ale, and listen while his father whispered in his ear a family tale centuries old, a tale of ancestors called Orm and Eadgyth, and a strange, dark prophecy of a man called the Dove who would shape all history. In the end this morbid tale merged seamlessly into his father’s ale-drowned death-rattle. But Harry was the eldest son, and it was his turn to receive the legend, as had his father, an eldest son before him - it was his duty to listen. And after all, his father had driven away everybody else, his mother, his sister, his brothers.
So Harry listened, and after his father died he locked this morbid stuff away in his heart, and tried to imagine it had gone away.
But it had not.
II
AD 1481
The January morning was still grey when Harry Wooler walked into London from the north, passing through the wall at Newgate. It was here that cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens were funnelled into the city to the shouts of the drovers, a steady flow of provision pouring into an ever-hungry gullet. It was like walking into one immense farmyard, Harry thought. Further south he came to the slaughterhouse district where the animals were killed, skinned, and dismembered, and then continued their journey in bits to the butchers’ shops and the tanners’. Here he found himself walking on a slick of blood and animal guts, steaming in the cold air, and there was an almighty stink of shit and piss, and the iron tang of blood.
Then he pushed on south to Cheapside, where the farmyard bleats were drowned out by the clank of metal on anvil and the pounding of nails into wood or leather, as the blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, tanners, dyers and potters all laboured, and the cowshed stink was replaced by the stench of the fullers’ urine jars. Cheapside was a magnificent, unending festival of trade. You could buy anything you wanted here, from a hot veal pie to a flagon of beer, from a Flemish-style hat to Italian-style shoes, from imports like French linen and Spanish silk to eastern spices and Scandinavian walrus ivory - from the words of an apocalyptic preacher that would fire your soul, to the moist quim of a girl to soothe your body. For Harry this was a wonderful place to be, for all the stinks and the filth and the crowding, and the beggars that swarmed like crows pleading for spare farthings.
Harry was Oxford born and bred, but he was a merchant, and England’s capital of business felt like a second home to him. And in Cheapside industry and commerce pulsed as nowhere else in England.
But today Harry was not here for trade.
He pushed further south still, past the walls of Saint Paul’s, and through narrowing streets lined with warehouses. Their walls were plastered with posters bearing apocalyptic pronouncements from the Bible. He looked at the posters curiously, for they were printed, a novelty still rare in Oxford.
&
nbsp; He came at last to the river bank. He could just make out the brown, filthy water through a forest of cranes and ships’ masts and furled sails, and he could hear the cursing of the stevedores in a dozen languages. He was near the old bridge, the only span over the river to the south bank. To his left there was the ugly pile of the Tower, to his right the great palace of Westminster with the abbey beyond, in their suburb around the bend of the river. He turned right and walked perhaps a quarter of a mile along the bank. When he came to the ancient dock road called the Strand he cut north, heading inland past more warehouses and factories.
And here he found, just where the monk’s letter had described, a small, gloomy parish church, its roughly cut stone stained black by city soot. Chantries clustered around the church, chapels devoted to the souls of the long-dead rich. A stone tablet told him that the church was dedicated to Saint Agnes, a virginal martyr of Rome, and his sister’s patron saint.
He felt a deep reluctance to enter. But it was to here that he had been summoned.
The letter from the monk had arrived in a pile of business correspondence. At his home in Oxford, Harry Wooler had read the letter, from a Carthusian called Geoffrey Cotesford, with a sinking heart, for it concerned a matter of conscience. Harry didn’t regard himself as a sinful man, but he preferred to stick to commerce, and leave the affairs of the soul to others. But he could scarcely ignore this summons, for it had concerned his sister, Agnes, lost since Harry was a boy.
The church’s heavy wooden door was open. Harry stepped inside. The church was cold, its heavy stone walls sucking out the heat, and the air was thick with incense. A man swept the floor with a cane broom, a portly fellow in a loose black robe, but otherwise the church was empty. Harry knelt at a pew, crossed himself, and uttered brief prayers. Then he walked up the church’s central aisle to the altar.
He paused by an elaborate tomb that had been set against one wall, cut from some black stone. It was on two levels. Above rested the figure of a man of about fifty, handsome in life, well-dressed in a robe like a Roman toga, with his hands clasped in prayer. But on the level below lay the same man given up to decay, his clothes rotted to rags, his skin peeled back to reveal a cage of ribs, those praying fingers reduced to bone.
Harry didn’t like transi tombs. The hideously realistic corpses always reminded him of his own father’s death, and his final morbid mutterings.
But Harry was twenty-five now. He was a merchant, as his father had been before him, and his grandfather too - his family as far back as anybody cared to mention. As their name implied, the Woolers sold prime wool from the heart of England to the continent. Trade was what interested Harry - trade, and stories of exploration, of Prince Henry and his school of navigation in Portugal, of new routes to India and China and perhaps even to countries nobody had even heard of yet. Harry didn’t like transi tombs and chantries. He didn’t even much like churches, he admitted. Give him Cheapside any day, rather than this!
‘You don’t seem comfortable.’
The man who had been sweeping was resting on his broom, studying Harry. Harry saw that he had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, and that his black robe looked like a habit.
‘I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t realise - I would have paid my respects—’
The brother brushed that away. He might have been about forty, a tonsure neatly cut into greying hair. He looked sleek and comfortable, but his brown eyes showed a sharp intelligence. ‘And I should not have crept up on you - not before a tomb like this, at any rate! But I don’t apologise for reading your soul, for it’s written on your face.’
Harry felt resentful. ‘I’m not here to pray but to meet a man.’
‘Geoffrey Cotesford from York?’
‘You know him?’
‘Only too well.’ The friar stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Geoffrey. I am glad to meet you, Harry Wooler.’
Harry shook the hand uncertainly.
‘I was early.’ The friar held up his broom. ‘The door was unlocked - careless, that - and I saw the broom resting against a wall, and I thought I should make myself useful. You have a businesslike look about you - I expected that. I’m here on business myself, in fact.’
‘I thought you Carthusians were contemplative.’
‘Well, we are, some of us. But we have other vocations. I always had too restless a mind to be bothering God with my fragmentary prayers. So I became involved in my house’s business affairs. We Carthusians make a bit of a living from the wool trade too, in fact. And I have always been more interested in the souls of others than in my own, a disadvantage for a contemplative! Your soul is as transparently displayed as this poor old fellow’s desiccated heart, Harry.’
‘It’s just so gloomy,’ Harry admitted. ‘Transi tombs and chantries, monks murmuring your name long after you are dead. The priests say we must all long for the afterlife. Fair enough. But why long for death?’
Geoffrey studied him. ‘Ah, but death sometimes longs for us. You’re a young man, Harry, and like all old fools I envy you your youth. But as you grow older you’ll develop a sense of the past. And our past contains a great calamity, a time when the dead invaded the shore of the living.’
‘You mean the Mortality.’
‘The Great Mortality, yes. The Big Death. My own grandfather told me tales of what his grandfather, who lived through it, saw for himself. England used to be crowded, you know! But everybody was stirred around by war, and the cities were brimming with filth... Well. We were ripe for the plague. In London, half the population died off in a few years. Think of how it was for the living, Harry, as all those faces around you melted away. The shock left scars in their souls, I think. No wonder they carved these transi tombs, memorials of a world become a vast boneyard.’
Harry was restless, feeling he was being preached at. ‘You wrote to me about Agnes. Where is my sister?’
‘Far from here, I’m afraid. She’s in York. And you must travel to her; she can’t come to you. You’ll see why. But she’s asking for you. Big brother Harry! And, you know, to understand your sister’s situation, you will have to think about history - I mean, your family’s. Your ancestors weren’t always wool traders. You’ll see, you’ll see...’
‘My business - I’ve work to do.’
‘I know,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But you’ll come with me even so, won’t you? A spark of duty is bright under that woollen merchant’s shirt. I see that in you too.’
These words made Harry feel trapped. With a mumbled apology he hurried down the aisle to the door, and drank in the reassuringly foetid air of the Strand.
III
Spain crushed James’s soul.
The mule train plodded across a landscape like a vast dusty table, where nothing grew but scrub grass and rough untended olive trees, nothing moved but skinny sheep, and there was no sound but the raucous singing of the muleteers echoing from ruined battlements, and the thin mewl of patient buzzards. And, James knew, the journey could only end with more strangeness. For he was travelling to Seville, where, it was said, the Anti-Christ was soon to be born.
His companion and employer, Grace Bigod, was not sympathetic. She was a formidable woman in her forties, perhaps twenty years older than James. Her face was beautiful in a strong, stern, proud way; her greying blonde hair was swept back from her brow. And, sharp, bored, she picked on James. ‘What’s the matter, Friar James? All a bit much for you?’
‘Everything’s so strange.’
‘Well, of course it’s strange. We’re a long way from England now.’ Her fine nostrils flared as she sucked in the air. ‘Smell it! That spicy dryness, the wind straight off the flats of the Maghrib. My family have roots in the Outremer, you know.’
He nodded. It was well known in James’s house in Buxton that Grace and her family were descended from a woman called Joan, who had fled Jerusalem when it fell to the Saracens more than two centuries ago.
‘Maybe the country of the Outremer is like this - hot, dry, dusty. Maybe there is so
mething in the very air that pulls at my blood. Or maybe it’s the stink of the last Muslims in Spain, holed up in Granada. This is the crucible of the whole world, James! The place where the sword-tip of Christianity meets the scimitar-tip of the Moors, a single point of white heat. What do you think?’
James saw only a landscape wrecked by war and emptied by plague. He turned inward, trying not to see. He longed to be safely enclosed within the reassuring routines of his Franciscan monastery.
But Grace and her forebears were generous supporters of the house, and had been for generations. It was through her family’s influence that the house was committed to its strange and dark project, a secretive work centuries old. It was through Grace’s influence that James, who longed only for a life of scholarship devoted to the peace of Christ, found himself studying terrible weapons of war.
And it was through her influence, her peculiar desire to bring on the end of the world, that he had been dragged from his book-lined cell and been brought all the way across Europe to this desolate, prickly landscape. Her purpose was to sell her Engines of God to the King and Queen of Spain, and she had a copy of the Codex of Aethelmaer, and a summary of two centuries’ worth of its development, tucked in her bags.
James did not want to be here. But there was purpose in all things, he told himself. God would show him the true path through the strange experiences to come. He crossed himself and mumbled a prayer.
Grace watched him, hard-eyed, analytical, and she laughed. She was a vigorous, physical woman. Sometimes she stared at him, as if wondering what shape his body was under his habit. And at night, when they stopped in towns or taverns, she would come close to him, brushing past so he could smell her hair, and see the softness of her skin. James knew she felt not the remotest attraction to him, and that this was all part of her bullying of him. But he was unused to women, and his youthful body’s reaction to her teasing left him tormented. She made him feel crushed, pale and pasty and worthless, less than a man. And she knew it.
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