Conqueror

It soon became apparent why the baby had been abandoned. As he grew he was a pretty boy, but quick to walk and slow to talk. He would spend hours on his own sketching figures in the dirt, but if put with the other children in the monastery school he would fight and scratch. 'He was a damaged child,' Aethelmaer said, 'with something broken inside – broken or never formed.'

Nobody knew what to do with him until one inspired brother, seeing him scratching in the dirt, handed him a bit of chalk. At first his obsession with drawing was merely a way to keep Aethelred occupied – but it soon became clear that his drawings were more than just scribbles.

Sihtric guessed, 'You mean these designs.'

'Yes! You can see how detailed they are – look, it's as if you can see inside the bodies of the engines. But there is no explanation, no lettering – save for blocks, like this one, of cryptic symbols, which nobody has been able yet to decode.'

Orm gazed at one such block, which was unhelpfully labelled 'Incendium Dei':

BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM BGNSD

It meant nothing to him.

There was, though, one picture which showed one star looping on an egg-shaped course around another. This was the diagram which Aethelmaer had unpicked to establish that the comet that had marked Aethelred's birth was destined to return in the year 1066.

Sihtric asked, 'And who taught the boy to draw these designs?'

'Nobody,' breathed Aethelmaer, and his eyes gleamed, for this was evidently the mystery that informed his whole life. 'Nobody. He was drawing such designs from the age of four, almost as well-executed as these from the very begi

'From where? How?'

Aethelmaer shrugged, and winced with pain. 'How can I know? From God, perhaps.'

Godgifu murmured to Sihtric, 'That sounds like the origin of the Menologium of Isolde.'

'Yes. Then perhaps this prophecy, if that is what it is, and the Menologium, have a common source.'

Aethelmaer said, 'You understand this was all before my time. I was born in the year Cnut came to the throne – long after poor Aethelred had gone back to his Maker. But as a young deacon I showed aptitude for study, and the abbot set me to working on the papers Aethelred had left behind.'

'And what happened to you?' Orm asked bluntly. 'Were you born like this?'

'Oh, no,' Aethelmaer said, and he squirmed as the young monk worked at his legs. 'When I was young I was strong and fit. But I became obsessed with Aethelred's works – and I let my obsession carry me too far…'

He had become convinced that he had to try to build some of Aethelred's marvellous designs if he were to understand them fully. But there was much depicted in the diagrams he could not buy or make: very fine cogs, for instance, with accurately spaced teeth. 'Perhaps the Romans could have made these things – or perhaps the men of some future empire will be able to do so – but not the monks of Cnut's England…' However he had attempted one of the simpler-looking devices. He showed Sihtric a drawing of it. It was a kind of suit, of wood, cloth and feathers, shaped like a bird, which a man would wear.

'I can guess what its function was,' Sihtric said dryly. 'And I can guess what happened to you.'

'I hoped to fly like Daedalus!' sighed Aethelmaer. 'I fixed the wings to my hands and my feet. I jumped off a tower. I crashed to the earth… But I flew,' he said, and he smiled as he remembered his life's defining moment. 'And not many men can say that, can they?'

'No indeed,' said Sihtric. 'And Aethelred? You said he was dead before you were born.'

'Ah. Now that was a sad story…'

As Aethelred had grown to fourteen or fifteen, his behaviour seemed to calm. He joined in the monastery's daily routine, and the abbot thought he showed signs of accepting the word of God. He continued to draw his peculiar designs, but he was willing to turn his attention to other things. For instance, he learned to illuminate. 'He actually turned out a few pages that were good enough to sell, even at such a young age,' Aethelmaer said. 'Who knows what he might have achieved, had he lived?'

But he had not lived. As he grew he blossomed from a pretty child into a beautiful young man. There were those in the monastery who lusted after him. When they approached him, he ignored their advances; when they pressed, he fought back. So, inflamed by lust and rage, they held him down.

'I doubt he even understood what was happening. He must have been terrified. And when they were done, such was the violence they had used, he was dead, his pretty body as broken as his mind had always been. So that was that, a terrible end. But I comfort myself that perhaps he had served the purpose for which God placed him on the earth – after all his drawings survived – and he was ready to be called back to Heaven.'

Aethelmaer had his faced bathed by his attendant, and Orm took the opportunity to draw the others aside. 'So what do you make of this?'

Sihtric said, 'Who knows? There's something in these "Engines of God", that's for sure. And I can't resist a cryptogram! But aside from the business of the comet I can't see what it has to do with Harold.'

'So will you let this old man go?'

'Oh, yes.' He gri

Godgifu was clearly repelled. 'You never stop manipulating, do you? You never stop plotting, calculating, seeking the advantage.'

'It's got me this far,' he said, unperturbed.

Orm plucked Godgifu's sleeve. 'Let's get out of here. The stench is making me ill.'

'Of his ulcer?'

'That too. Come on.'

They hurried out of the abbey, and made for the thegn's house Orm was sharing with Sihtric and Godifu. It was still light. Once inside, Godgifu poured wine.

Orm felt restless, confined. He prowled around, longing to punch something. 'I've had my fill of prophecies. And hypocrisy. The fat, putrid old monk, Aethelmaer! He drools over the boy's drawings as if they were a gift from his God – and yet those who were supposed to care for the boy raped him to death. All that lost potential, a lost life – and for what?' He drained his cup.

And Godgifu stood before him.

Wordless, she took away his cup – and she touched his chest, as she had on that day when she had helped pull him from the mire in Brittany, and suddenly he forgot about monks and prophecies. He felt his heart speeding, his pulse beating in his throat. It was as if the world expanded, the houses and the people flying away to the horizon, leaving the two of them isolated in this small Lunden house. He covered her hand with his. 'What's brought this on?'

She smiled up at him. 'Do you fear we might be wasting our potential, Viking? I slog after my brother as he follows the King, while you train little English boys for war. All we talk about is prophecies and successions. We live in a tumultuous age – perhaps we even glimpse future and past through my brother's prophecy – but we have no time for ourselves.'

He smiled. 'Sihtric will be pumping information out of that old monk for a good hour yet, if I'm any judge.'

'Then let's not waste this hour, if it's all we have.' And she raised her face to his.

It was her first time. There was a little pain, and he could feel the blood she spilled. But she gave herself to him joyfully.

Afterwards he clung to her. He did not know when this moment might come again. 1066, he suspected, was not a good year to fall in love.