'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:
Across ocean to east / and ocean to west
Men of new Rome sail / from the womb of the boar.
Empire of Aryans / blood pure from the north.
New world of the strong / a ten-thousand year rule.
'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.'
XIII
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.'
It was a letter written in a neat but wavering hand. She read, 'Like Mr Dunne, I fear you have taken my playful description of duration as a dimension of space far too seriously…'