Weaver (27 page)

‘All right. So what’s it doing here?’

‘Well, Einstein’s equations of general relativity are just another example of a set of differential equations. It’s fiendishly difficult to extract any kind of analytical solution from them. And if you do need to extract solutions of Gödel’s kind, describing trajectories from present to past—’

‘Oh. You’d need a machine like this.’

‘We know that Kamen and O’Malley had access to an analyser in Princeton. And we believe, though we aren’t sure, that Fiveash and
her Nazi companions are building such a device at Richborough. We, or the mathematical boffins I recruited to work on this, thought we should study Gödel’s solutions ourselves, if we were to try to make sense of it all. Hence the beast you see before you.’

‘Kind of Rube Goldberg, isn’t it?’ Mary longed to touch the gadget, to pull the little levers and turn the pulleys. ‘Did you have to get these teeny tiny parts specially made?’

‘Actually no. They come from a kit called Meccano.’

‘A kit?’

‘A construction kit for boys.’

‘A toy? You made your calculating machine from a toy?’

He coughed. ‘Rather embarrassing to have to admit that to an American - but, yes, afraid so. Rather British, don’t you think? Of course it will make it all the more satisfying if we were to beat the bad guys with it.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Let’s go back to the office, and you can tell me all about the history you’ve dug up.’

Back in Mackie’s kitchen-study she opened her briefcase and spread the contents over the table.

‘It begins again with Ben Kamen. When he arrived in England he did a bit of research himself - he is a bright boy - and came up with a medieval study of historical anomalies.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Nope. He got to know Gary, and found out that his mother was a specialist in the period, and as soon as he met me he got me started on it.’

Kamen had found a memoir by a fifteenth-century monk called Geoffrey Cotesford. She raised a scrap of paper and read out: “‘Time’s Tapestry: As mapped by myself, that is Cotesford. “In which the long warp threads are the history of the whole world; and the wefts which run from selvedge to selvedge are distortions of that history, deflected by a Weaver unknown; be he human, divine or satanic ...”’

‘Deflections of history,’ murmured Mackie.

‘Yes. Suggestive, isn’t it? Cotesford believed he had lived through one such attempted deflection himself, and had been made aware of others. He did some research - he was a Franciscan monk, a scholar, and he knew what he was doing. Plus he had access to sources, such as from the Muslim libraries in Spain, which have now been lost to us. This is a sound piece of work, considering.

‘In all he found evidence of six deflections. He went right back to a prophecy supposedly intoned right here at Birdoswald by a Briton some decades before the Roman invasion of the country. It’s called the Prophecy of Nectovelin. That’s the one I’ve concentrated on first. Nectovelin itself is lost, at least the original. But Geoffrey was able to find extracts from it, in an old Moorish library in Toledo. Just a few lines - here.’ She passed him a paper.

Mackie read:

‘We don’t know how much was lost, and how much has been garbled in the repeated transcriptions. We don’t even know the purpose of the deflection, if it was a deflection. Geoffrey speculated it had something to do with the Emperor Constantine.’

‘Constantine? He was centuries later. What’s he got to do with the price of fish?’ He glanced down the lines again.

Hmm. I’m blowed if that doesn’t sound familiar.’

She smiled. ‘An American would recognise the reference straight away.’

‘Ah. Let me see if I can remember. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The Declaration of Independence.’

‘Right—’

‘Good Lord.’ The implications seemed to hit him then, and he sat silently for a heartbeat. ‘I think I’m going to have something eke to keep me awake at night, apart from Gödel’s banishment of time ... So a modern figure sent this back to pre-Roman Britain? Why? To establish democratic values back in the I
ron Age?’

‘Maybe. But, Tom, the important question is not why but who.’

‘Ben’s friend Rory O’Malley, perhaps.’

‘Yes. O’Malley was an idealistic Irishman who was a great admirer of the US.
And
he was a lapsed Catholic. He had grown up amid a lot of religious sectarian tension. In the US, before he went to Spain, where he met Ben, he wrote a whole series of articles attacking the Church’s oppressive nature, and the evils done in the name of organised religion.’

‘Hmm. Wasn’t Constantine responsible for the establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion?’

‘He was indeed. You can see there’s a tenuous case to be made that the Nectovelin document was authored by O’Malley, in order to deflect Constantine’s establishment of the Church. He even sent it back to 4BC, the year Christ was born, to establish the link with Christianity.’

‘But O’Malley is dead. And if there was ever a record of any material he tried to transmit to the past, that’s lost too. We’ve had agents go over everything O’Malley left behind at Princeton. Like all Nazis, Julia Fiveash is nothing if not thorough ...’ Mackie snapped his fingers. ‘But then there’s Kamen. If Rory used him he ought to know what was sent.’

‘Yes,’ Mary said. ‘Precisely. Ben knew what had been crammed into his head. And it was following up
that
that led him to Geoffrey Cotesford’s research.’

‘Well, well. So we’ve another reason to get hold of this young man, if we can.’

‘I do wish we had a more complete copy of the Prophecy,’ Mary said. ‘There could be more internal evidence. For instance, an acrostic.’

‘A what?’

‘A feature that appealed to classical and medieval scholars. You take the first letter of each line, or the last maybe, and put them together to make a new word or phrase. But this document isn’t nearly complete enough to tell...’

He fingered the papers. So what else did your chum Geoffrey dig up?’

‘A lot of material. I’m still exploring it. Not all of it may be relevant. But I think this is.’ She produced another document, another prophecy. It was in Old English, with a modern translation. It was called the Menologium of Isolde. ‘It’s reasonably complete.’

Mackie read a bit.

‘Who was Isolde?’

‘Apparently a relation of Nectovelin, generations later. The family link may be significant - an inherited susceptibility.’

‘And what is a Menologium?’

‘A kind of medieval calendar. According to Geoffrey this is another product of Birdoswald, this one produced some time towards the end of the Roman period, the early fifth century. You can see it is organised around the return of a comet to the skies, every seventy or eighty years. It traces through events fated to occur in these years - I’ve made guesses about some of them. And, it’s a little tricky, but you can reconstruct the dates by adding up these “months of the Great Years. And they match to the events they describe - the Vikings sacking Lindisfarne, a terrible fire in Rome.’ She paused for effect. ‘The ninth verse seems to relate to the year 1066.’

He was startled, and he laughed. ‘1066? Harold and the Normans, and all of that? Well, you’ve come on an appropriate day to talk about it, haven’t you? And - wait a minute - didn’t a comet turn up in that year and frighten everybody to death?’

‘So it did. It was Halley’s comet. It returns on average every seventy-six years. But the intervals differ a bit each time.’

‘Should think they would,’ he muttered. ‘Deflections by the planets’ gravity and so forth ...’ He ran his finger down the text of the Menologium. ‘Don’t tell me. The dates of these verses map onto what the astronomers say about Halley’s returns.’

‘As far as I can tell. But if the text did originate in the fifth century - look, Halley’s motion is well understood now, but it wasn’t in 1066, or any time earlier. A fifth-century author couldn’t have known these dates.’

‘Well, well, well. And you think this has something to do with our German chums?’

‘Look at the Epilogue.’

He glanced down and read:

‘Well, bugger me sideways.’

‘That crucial word “Aryan - it comes from a bit of Latin in with the Old English, ”Imperium Aryanes ... I’m still working on the interpretation of the rest of it, but—’

‘So the suggestion this time is that some Nazi has sent this back - perhaps to deflect the events of 1066? - in order, somehow, to establish an Aryan empire, a thousand years earlier.’

‘Something like that.’ She didn’t feel confident enough to tell him of Josef Trojan’s boasting at Battle of putting right the defeat of Harold Godwineson. ‘The suggestion is that the English King Harold should have made peace with the Danish invaders, and cooperated with them to drive out the Normans. If he had, all subsequent history might have been different. But he didn’t take the advice, evidently.’

‘Well, it’s completely bonkers. But Himmler would love it, wouldn’t he?’ Mackie laughed, and laced his fingers behind his head and lay back in his chair. ‘Funny - the second time we’ve come across evidence that somebody is tampering with history seems a lot less startling than the first, doesn’t it? The mind can get used to anything, I suppose. Well, we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we, Mary? The question is what we do about it. I believe the objective is clear: we get into Richborough, we find out what these beggars are up to, disrupt it if we can - and we bring Ben Kamen out.’

Mary said, ‘You keep saying “we”.’

He smiled. ‘You spotted that. I think I’m having a bit of a brain wave. Look here, Mary, suddenly you’re a jolly useful asset. The fact is, a citizen of a neutral country has a much better chance of passing through the Winston Line, and of travelling reasonably freely once he or she is in the protectorate itself. And we do believe Kamen was held in the same camp as your son, at Richborough. So you have a reason to go to that part of the world, don’t you?’

Mary tried to imagine such a journey, coming so close to Gary a full year after seeing him, and all for a lie.

‘But even if you do make it to Richborough, you’ll need some reason to get close to Fiveash and Trojan and their Ahnenerbe loonies. You say you’ve met them, but you’re a bit notorious among the Nazis because of your piece on the Peter’s Well incident. We need something for you to bluff your way in with. Hmm. I expect we’ll come up with something.’ He glanced at the Roman spear on the wall behind him. ‘We have some thinking to do. Come! Shall we walk again?’

She stood. ‘A restless type, aren’t you?’

‘Spent too long on ships to waste the opportunity to stretch my legs ... Do bring your papers with you.’

They walked across the heart of the Roman camp, heading south. The sun had climbed, but there was scattered cloud around and a bit of dampness in the air. It felt autumnal, in that lovely English word. As they walked he glanced over her papers and scribbled with a stub of pencil on a notepad.

At the camp’s southern perimeter the land fell away spectacularly to reveal a river wending through its valley, and a folded landscape beyond. ‘On a good day you can make out the hills of the Lake District,’ Mackie said. ‘Bit too murky today. Autumn mist and whatnot.’

‘I wonder if the Germans will ever come this far, if you will have to build pillboxes and barbed wire fences into the line of Hadrian’s Wall.’

‘Let’s hope not, but I suppose it’s a possibility. Or on the other hand we might just push them back into the sea where they came from.’

‘History really is fragile, isn’t it? So many possibilities for the future open out from this very moment, from the position of the war.’

‘Well, that’s true,’ he said. ‘But I can tell you that makes it tricky for
us.
Everything is poised. You Americans are supporting us, but you’re not yet in the war, despite Churchill’s best efforts to persuade you. And there is a real risk of defeat, you know. History doesn’t seem to be on our side. I mean, if you look at the global picture, you have these dreadful totalitarian empires, the German and Japanese and Italian, just gobbling up the world. It’s quite possible that if Hitler ever did plant a swastika on the Wall, it would be a long time before we could get rid of him. It took centuries for the Christians to kick the Moors out of Spain, didn’t it? Rudolf Hess is in York, you know, Hitler’s deputy, negotiating away about an armistice. There are many in the British establishment who want to listen to him - and many more, believe me, who sympathise with Hitler’s global war aims, who fear and loathe Bolshevism more even than the Nazis.’

‘And all this shapes your thinking about our options.’

‘Quite. We must avoid provoking the military government in the protectorate overmuch; we may after all choose to sign that armistice. And on the other hand we have to try to keep the Americans onside. It’s dashed tricky all round. We must be discreet. No parties must be overly alarmed. It will have to be a covert operation, put down to a random act by the auxiliaries, perhaps. We may even be disowned by the government if we get caught.’ Even as he spoke he was still doodling on his pad. ‘But look, as I say, this is all speculative unless I can get backing from my highers-up, and for that we need some clear
proof
that this material came from the present - proof that we aren’t the subject of some hoax, or misunderstanding. I have to tell you that not all the experts I’ve consulted are finding in our favour.’ He dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket. ‘Thought you might like to see this.’