Weaver (39 page)

‘1938,’ he said without hesitation.

It was hard to think back that far, to remember what was going on in the world before the great shock of the war. ‘That was the year Britain was trying for peace, right?’

‘We call it appeasement now,’ Mackie said, his face hard. ‘Bloody great mistake. We should have declared war when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, thereby tearing up all the guarantees he’d given up to that date.’

‘But Britain wasn’t ready for war - was it?’

‘We were in a damn sight better shape than Hitler. He couldn’t have mounted a blitzkrieg. He didn’t have the tanks or the trucks. Why, he only had three months’ fuel! He’d placed orders for ships, for instance, that could have overwhelmed the Royal Navy a few years later. But he couldn’t wait, had to move fast. His Nazi economic expansion was heading for a bust, and at court there was plotting against him, according to our spies. And that’s also why he’s kept on moving - it was no surprise to me when they took on Russia. Nazism is a bankrupt ideology sustained only by endless expansion and conquest. In retrospect we muffed it; we should have struck when the balance of power was at its most favourable for us. By waiting another year we gave him the chance to arm to the hilt.

‘As to what would have followed if we
had
gone to war then, there are many uncertain factors. I can’t imagine the French poking their noses much beyond the Maginot Line, for instance. But at worst it might have been a war like the close of the last show, a lot of infantry manoeuvres. And at best it could all have been over by Christmas, and that would have been that for Hitler and his crew. It certainly would not have been the catastrophic collapse in the west that we actually saw.’

But it would have been politically impossible to have gone to war then, Mary thought. She remembered the mood in Britain, and indeed America. Only twenty years since armistice, another European war was a horrible prospect, and Chamberlain had been a hero, briefly, when he produced what looked like a peace deal. But Mackie was showing a side of himself she
had perceived among other Brits, especially in the military. These were a people who believed themselves destined to rule the world. Hitler had humiliated them the first time he put a tank-tread on a south coast beach. Anything to reverse that.

She asked, ‘So how would you make the change?’

‘Actually we haven’t got that far. Not as far as you! I must sack my historians.’

But he was being cagey, and suddenly she wondered if he was lying, if he had some team of military thinkers working on this counter-history for real, just in case. Which made him as bad as the lunatics in Richborough - and as bad as herself, for she had been seduced into seriously contemplating how her Dunkirk project would work. The power implicit in the idea of the Loom was just too tempting.

He smiled. ‘Well now, look - enough of the fun stuff. Tell me what you’ve found out about this old fossil Geoffrey, and his inventory of history-botherers.’

She opened her handbag and drew out a stack of papers, neatly folded. She spread these out on the pillar between them.

‘Not such an old fossil. Quite an imaginative chap, our Geoffrey. Look - this is the summary table he appended to the front of his memoir.’ It had been translated into modern English:
’Time’s Tapestry:
As mapped by myself ...’ ‘We have a couple of versions, actually, but the earliest seems to have been written down in 1492.’

‘The year Columbus sailed.’

‘Yes - and as it turns out that’s no coincidence. I’ll come to that. The
last
version was found in Geoffrey’s coffin, though that copy has been lost.’

‘This was a man determined to speak to the future,’ Mackie murmured.

‘Oh, yes. He was asking for our help, actually; he wanted rid of the menace he called the Weaver“. Now, look. Geoffrey has listed no less than six deflections of history, revealed to him by his researches - and, he says, deriving from his own experience. But I’m going to propose, Tom, that we neglect two of these ...

She spoke of Geoffrey’s account of the ‘Testament of al-Hafredi’, in which a strange visitor to the court of a petty Frankish duke had deflected an eighth-century Muslim invasion of France.

‘And an entirely Muslim Europe,’ Mackie murmured.

‘Quite so.’ And she described the ‘Amulet of Bohemond’, through which a time meddler appeared to have arranged the murder of the Mongol Khan in the thirteenth century. ‘If not for that the Mongols would surely have swept on into western Europe, laying waste our cities - wrecking Europe for all time to come, as they wrecked so much of the east.’

‘Good God almighty,’ Mackie said. He worked at his pipe. ‘So why do you say we should exclude these possibilities?’

‘Because the technology seems to have been different. The Loom depends on feeding information directly into a subject’s brain. But the Amulet of Bohemond was some kind of gadget that spoke“ to its subjects.’

‘Like a recording device. A tape or a phonograph.’

‘Perhaps. Sent back to the thirteenth century.’

‘All right. And this al-Hafredi?’

‘He seems to have been a man who was hurled bodily across time -
the man himself,
not just his words.’

‘Well-gosh. Hard to know what to say to that. But look here, if these cases are
not
to do with our Nazis and their Loom, then what
are
they to do with? Who else is building a time machine - the Japs?’

‘I think it’s stranger than that,’ she said carefully. ‘I can think of two possibilities. One, that these interventions come from our own future. More advanced technologies. Or, two—’

‘Yes?’

‘That they come from different histories. Ones that were, um, obliterated by the changes in the past. Geoffrey seems to hint that this al-Hafredi was a witness to a Muslim empire that stretched as far as Hadrian’s Wall.’

‘Which never came to pass in our world.’

‘No. But his own history vanished, when he went back in time and blocked the Muslim expansion in France. And that left him stranded, I suppose. The last relic of a reality wiped into oblivion, into non-existence, the moment he threw himself back in time.’ She said all this forcefully, hoping Tom Mackie would find it as scary a thought as she did.

‘Oh my good golly gosh.’ He got up and walked around in the long grass, his right hand cradling his pipe, his left slapping at his uniformed leg. ‘Every so often - these extraordinary matters - speak to me, oh spirit of Mr Wells!’ But he sounded more excited than appalled. ‘All right. Then Geoffrey’s remaining four instances, you believe,
are
to be dealt with.’

‘I think so.’ She spoke of the Prophecy of Nectovelin, which was apparently the result of meddling by Rory O’Malley, using a prototype of the Loom in Princeton before the war. And then there was the Menologium of Isolde, sent back by the Nazis at Richborough - and with Ben Kamen’s name surreptitiously coded into it.

Mackie sat again. ‘Well, we know all about those. And Geoffrey’s two remaining cases, then -’ He squinted at her document. ‘The Codex of Aethelmaer“. The Testament of Eadgyth”. Ah. And I see that Geoffrey links them both to the destiny of Christopher Columbus.’

‘That’s the idea. Columbus was a significant figure, but one striking point is that Geoffrey couldn’t possibly have known
how
significant Columbus would become - he wrote down his account in the year Columbus sailed.’

‘Um. And the purpose of these deflections?’

‘I’m speculating,’ she said warily.

He smiled. ‘Speculate away.’

‘I think the Nazis have moved on from all those baroque Aryan dreams - the reversal of Hastings, the establishment of a northern empire deep in the past. They’re too bruised by the war for all that. So what is the problem for the Germans right now? America, with all her resources and might. I think Trojan
and Fiveash are trying to muck about with the founding of modern America - to abort it completely, or at least change history to such a degree that no entity like the modern United States could emerge. And they’re doing it by meddling with Columbus.’ She described the Codex of Aethelmaer. ‘It’s essentially a weapons programme,’ she said.

‘A very Nazi idea!’

‘They seem to be trying to implant seeds of weapons technologies, anachronistically advanced, centuries before Columbus - giving them enough time to come to fruition.’

‘Ready to be placed in the hands of Columbus, yes? But after centuries of development, who would know what to do with the stuff?’

‘That’s where the Testament of Eadgyth comes in. The second of the Columbus prophecies. Unfortunately it only survives in fragments.’ She showed him some of this. The Testament“, supposedly whispered into the ear of an eleventh-century Christian woman, was a kind of poem in old English. ‘It refers to Columbus, I think, if elliptically.’

‘Not that elliptically. The Christ-bearer“ - Christopher. The Dove” - Columbus.’

‘It mightn’t have seemed so obvious to contemporaries, and certainly not to anybody in the eleventh century. There are lots of references to God’s engines“ and coming wars, and finally the main commandment: All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers. / Send the Dove east! O, send him east!”’

‘And these two messages would, you’re arguing, set up chains of events which will converge in the career of Christopher Columbus. And then what?’

‘You have to remember that Columbus was a militant Christian as much as an explorer. He thought he was going west to Asia, yes? He was after wealth from new trading routes. But he also dreamed of taking on Islam, which was then on the march across Europe. He carried a letter from the Spanish monarchs to the Mongol Khan, hoping they could team up.’

‘And squeeze Islam in a pincer movement. Good plan. Shame for him the Americas were in the way! But I think I see where you’re going with this. If he had these super-weapons from friend Aethelmaer—’

‘He mightn’t have felt the need to enlist the Mongols. With such weapons he could conceivably have given up his dreams of sailing west, and turned east instead, to launch a direct attack on Islam. Europe would have been consumed by a new age of crusading and jihad, fuelled by anachronistic weaponry. The destruction would have been horrific. And though others would surely have sailed to the Americas, nothing like the modern United States might have emerged.’

‘So, America aborted - but Europe destroyed in the process. Why would the Nazis want that?’

Mary shrugged. ‘They don’t approve much of Islam, or the Jewish-Christian conspiracy“. The usual Aryan nonsense. It’s a bit drastic, but they might be quite happy to see medieval history expunged.’

‘Remarkable. Intricate. Audacious! But it didn’t work, did it?’

‘Apparently not,’ she said. ‘But then, in our present, these messages
may not yet have been sent back.’

‘But we see traces of them in Geoffrey’s memoir.’

‘Well, we saw the Menologium before Trojan sent
that
back. I don’t pretend to understand it all, Tom!’

‘All right. I’ll put the squeeze on my intelligence sources, and try to find out what Trojan is up to - in particular if he’s working on anything like these messages you’ve discovered in the record. And then we must decide what to do about all this.’

Mary folded up her notes. ‘I’d say that’s clear enough. Destroy the Loom before it can be used again.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said sagely. ‘And that’s why I’ve asked for your son Gary. Security around Richborough has been as tight as a mouse’s arsehole since our raid in ‘41. But Operation Walrus gives us an excellent chance. If we send in a small team, highly trained and motivated, going in perhaps ahead of the main counter-invasion front - hit them before they even know we’re there.’ He tapped his teeth with his pipe stem. ‘But we must plan for all contingencies. Suppose, for instance, we’re too late to stop this Codex being sent back. What then? Do we block the Eadgyth material?’

She frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve no idea what harm the Codex engines might do to history
without
the Eadgyth testament. It might be better to make a minimal change in the record. Sabotage the testament rather than destroy it. Turn it into a mandate to send Colombus west, not east.’

‘In war it always pays to have back-up plans. I wonder if you’d work through these possibilities for me.’

She thought that over. ‘Perhaps I could work out a warning about what might have followed a destructive fifteenth-century European war. A conflict with China, perhaps. A counter-invasion by the American cultures, the Incas or the Aztecs ... But I’m no expert, Tom.’

‘Well, who is, in this peculiar field?’ He sucked on his pipe, and brushed bits of ash from his trousers. ‘You know, all this mucking about with the past by one side or another - it’s as if our modern war with the Nazis is folding down into the past. Remarkable thought. Tell me this, though,’ he said. ‘
Purely hypothetically. If
you
had the power to make a change - say, your Dunkirk intervention - if it was just a matter of pushing a button - would you do it?’

She’d thought about that, long and hard. Having studied Geoffrey’s agonised testimony, she’d become convinced that nobody really understood the deep structure of the tapestry of time, even though so many hands eagerly plucked at it. And when they did meddle, they left flaws. She didn’t want to mention to Mackie evidence she thought she had unturned of
holes,
where it seemed entirely plausible a figure had been torn from the weave of centuries. Robin Hood, for instance - a shell of legend around a character that
ought to
have existed. Bubbles of remnant causality.

‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I think it’s possible that even the slightest change might wreak the most devastating consequences. You might be like al-Hafredi, deleting your own history entirely, cut away at the root you tamper with. You might create a world in which nobody like you would ever be born ...’