Conqueror

This baffled Aelfric. 'What do you mean, Domnus? How can we be better than the Romans?'

'Never mind, never mind. I digress,' said Boniface. 'We were talking about you. The abbot consulted with me, you know. When your father asked for permission to lodge you here.'

'My father thought it was best for me. I am too restless. Too interested in books. I wouldn't be a good wife.' Her sisters had been married off by the age of twelve and thirteen. And, she suspected, in an increasingly literate age her father thought that a daughter who could read would be a boon to him. 'He said that if I must learn, it should be here.'

'I disapproved, if it matters to you,' he said sternly. 'This is a male house. There are mixed houses you could have been sent to.'

'My father wanted me close by him.'

'Why?'

'Because he loves me,' she blurted.

'Ah, a father's love. I suppose I didn't think of that. I have no children of my own, and never will. In this place one sacrifices family for a greater good.'

'If you disapproved why am I here?'

'The decision was the abbot's.' And the neutral way he said that implied that less than holy considerations, such as her father's 'dowry', would have swayed the abbot's decision. 'Now that you are here, however,' Boniface said, 'and have been put into my care – one of the better jokes the abbot has played on me over the years – it is my duty to care for your soul. And I have seen that small soul blossom, I believe. Your father was right. Once the Romans had schools, you know, where you could learn anything you liked. The law. The sciences. History, art, philosophy. Now the only schools in Britain are in the monasteries-'

'And all I am allowed to learn about is Christ.' Her hands flew to her mouth in horror. 'I didn't mean that.'

'Yes, you did,' he said mildly. 'You have the virtue of truth, at least. But you must repeat it to your Father Confessor.'

'I will.'

'It is obvious you are curious about far more than the Bible.' He gestured at the vellum on the desk. 'You would not adorn your work with pagan symbols otherwise. And don't try to deny it. I am not one who believes curiosity is sinful, child. But I fear your questions may never be answered – not until your death, when you give yourself up to the light of Christ, and all answers will be revealed. And now your curiosity is engaged by the Menologium, isn't it?'

'How could it not be?' she said politely. 'But the Menologium – I know how important it is-'

'Oh, speak freely, child, I can't stand waffling.'

'I don't like riddles! When can a shield not be a shield, an island not an island? And I can tell you that a king would never bow to a hermit.'

'I am disappointed in you. One reason I let you work on the Menologium is because I expected you to work it out. Think again – pick out the simplest element. Can you not think of an example of an island which is not an island? Are you really so obtuse? Child, you live on one.'

And, in her mind's eye, she immediately saw the causeway. 'Lindisfarena? Here?'

'An island not an island, an island like a shield… As for rest of the stanza – the king and the hermit – have you not read Bede's history? Have you never heard of Saint Cuthbert?'

A hundred and fifty years before, in the days of King Oswald who had summoned Aidan to found Lindisfarena, the other German kings, of the Mercians, the East Angles, the Kentish, and the West, East and South Saxons, recognised the Northumbrian ruler as their bretwalda; a great hall was built inland at ad-Gefrin, and Bebbanburh, not distant Lunden, was the capital of German Britain. But the times were turbulent. Northumbria was repeatedly invaded by British and Germans, Christians and pagans. And Oswald himself was killed by a scion of a rival dynasty, Oswiu.

To cement his position Oswiu, a British Christian, took as his wife a queen who followed the teachings of Rome, and called a synod. After much intense debate the Roman way was chosen over the British. Britain was left with a unified Church, though the country itself remained disunited.

Oswiu's son Ecgfrith was a warrior king. Ecgfrith needed a strong bishop at Hagustaldasea, a town on the Roman Wall, and he turned to Lindisfarena, where a priest called Cuthbert lived in exemplary eremitic austerity in the British tradition, in contrast to the Roman bishops in their extravagant pomp.

Ecgfrith, ambitious and expansionist, launched assaults on the Irish and the Picts; he was defeated and killed, and Northumbria was never so strong again. But in the century since Ecgfrith Northumbrian scholarship had become the envy of Europe: Bede had been famous, it was said, throughout the known world.

'So,' Aelfric said with mounting interest, 'when Ecgfrith came to Cuthbert, a king really did come to a hermit, on an island which is not an island…'

'Now you see,' Boniface whispered. 'Just as it says in the fourth stanza.'

'And the date? Does the Menologium predict that too?'

'Oh, yes. Look at the first stanza: the "men of gold", the "great king". We know that this refers to the coming of the Saxons at the invitation of the British great king, the Vortigem.'

'The brothers Hengist and Horsa,' she recited obediently, 'and their three ships.'

He snorted. 'Two legendary brothers, like Romulus and Remus. Two names which mean "horse" and "gelding". Remarkable how quickly history transmutes to myth! But the story is in Bede, even if he qualifies it… Using Bede and other sources we have dated this revolt to the four hundred and fifty-first year after the birth of Our Lord. We use the system of dating devised by the Scythian scholar Dionysius Exiguus, and made popular by Bede himself – although as Bede well knew that calculation incorporates errors.'

'Anno Domini four hundred and fifty-one,' Aelfric said. 'Then that is the date of the first stanza. Then the second, which follows nine-hundred and fifty-one months later-'

'Plus thirty-five, brings us to Anno Domini five hundred and thirty-three, and the death of Artorius, the Bear, the last great British leader.' He grinned, and his tumour crumpled, grotesque. 'It took an able computistor to work that out, believe me! The third stanza is dated at Anno Domini six hundred and seven, and appears to refer to the discovery of the Menologium itself. And then we come to the fourth stanza.'

She remembered Cuthbert's date from her studies. 'Anno Domini six hundred and eighty-four.'

'Precisely. But here's the remarkable thing, novice: the Menologium was written down more than two hundred years before the meeting of Cuthbert and Ecgfrith, and yet that meeting was prophesied to the correct year.'

She was chilled. 'Some say that prophecies and auguries and fortune-telling are the province of the Devil, not of God.'

'Ah, but here we have a text that was dedicated to Christ in its first stanza; we hold the word of God. It came to us by chance, you know – or by divine providence. A man called Wuffa found this document in an old fort on the Roman Wall. There was some murky business involving a Norse brute and a British whore, but Wuffa came away having learned the words of the prophecy, which he taught to his own children. He never got over whatever happened on the Wall. He was convinced he had somehow offended his god. He died, it seems, a poor and frightened man. When Wuffa's grandchild several times removed wandered into our grasp, a perspicacious brother realised what he had in his head, had the Menologium transcribed, and we have preserved it ever since. Of course that muddled grandchild never left, and became the last of the male line of Wuffa: all lines end here, however ancient.'

He leaned closer. 'Now do you see how important this is? Now do you see why we have such a strong case for the canonisation of Isolde? Now do you see why we middle generations labour to preserve this prophecy down through the ages which it describes? I told you I would explain to you our true purpose. It is as if we are steering an ark in this sea of barbarian darkness, until the light of empire burns brightly again – and it is the Weaver of time's tapestry who guides our way in the dark.'