Conqueror by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

Ammanius, his battered nose livid, shook with rage. ‘To have come all this way, for this! ... It is obvious what has happened here. The old man read his prophecy to you two last night. Don’t bother to deny it. I heard him, though I could not make out the words. And now one of you has come back, destroyed the parchment, and murdered this wretch - one of you has sought to steal the prophecy for himself. To think that I recruited you when I saw you save one old man, only for it to end like this, in the murder of another at your own hands.’
    Wuffa looked at Ulf, who returned his gaze steadily. So, Wuffa thought, the only traces of Isolde’s Menologium left in the world existed in their two heads. He had expected his rivalry with Ulf to last a lifetime. Now, he sensed, it was a rivalry that might last centuries. He shivered, as if the hall of time was opening up around him.
    ‘And perhaps you have murdered the last man alive who knew Artorius. What a crime!’ Ammanius glared at them, from one to the other. ‘Which of you was it? Which of you?’
    Wuffa was no killer. But he remembered his fragmentary dreams. He said truthfully, ‘I don’t know.’

II
    SCRIBE AD 793

I
    On Lindisfarena it was a late May morning, in the monastery’s study period, when Elfgar and his black-souled cronies came for Aelfric. That was the chance unpleasantness that began her own true involvement with the Menologium.
    For Belisarius, bookseller of Constantinople, it was chance too, an encounter with an ambitious Briton in a southern port and an ordeal by fire, that lured him to Lindisfarena.
    And Gudrid was drawn here all the way across the sea. She shouldn’t really have come at all. But while her father and her husband came for gold, she came in search of a legend of love.
    None of them would have been there, none of their lives perturbed, if not for the promise of the Menologium, with its tangled threads reaching from lost past to furthest future. None of them would have been there but for the Weaver.

II
    The day started well for Aelfric.
    She walked barefoot across the dewy ground to the church. The monks’ blocky shadows as they padded over the grass around her, the hems of their woollen habits rustling. The second equinoctial hour, when the monks were called for the night service, Matins, was usually a gruesome time to be stirred from your cell. This morning, though, it was warm and not quite dark, for midsummer was approaching, and the island of Lindisfarena was so far to the north of the world that even now a little light lingered in the sky.
    They all crammed into the church. Immersed in the stink of damp wool, the monks signed, mimed and gestured to each other busily. But not a word was spoken, for the rule of Saint Benedict, whose instructions governed every aspect of the monks’ lives, was that the first spoken words each day should be in praise of God. The candlelight evoked deep colours from the tapestries and friezes on the walls, and from the silver and gold that adorned the shrine of Saint Cuthbert. The wooden church was a place of sanctuary, of warmth - for, despite unpleasant worms like Elfgar, this was indeed Aelfric’s family now.
    Led by the abbot, the monks began their chants. Aelfric tried to deepen her voice, but she sang with gusto. She had been taught that the chants were devised by an Arch Cantor based in Rome itself. It was a wonderful thing to imagine all of Christendom, all across Europe, singing the same beautiful songs.
    But even as the brothers sang, Elfgar watched Aelfric, his gaze as heavy as lead.
    She had spotted his rapacious look as soon as she had landed on Lindisfarena. It was a look she had not expected to encounter here, among the monks of the Shield Island. Perhaps he could smell the stink of a woman on her. But she saw the way others, even those older than herself, cowered from Elfgar’s gang.
    A pilgrim might come away believing that the oblates, deacons and novices laboured at their daily