'A kind of calendar. Authentic-looking document for the time. And a prophecy, if you will – or it would be, if you were stuck in the sixth century. Entirely faked, of course. I've been working on it with various scholars – linguists, astronomers.' He sounded paternally proud, and he wanted Ben to understand. 'It must span centuries. My parapsychologists assure me that its most likely recipient will be a relative of the hapless pagan afflicted by O'Malley, generations before my own target. The document is encoded to ensure its own survival – for instance, in the hands of monkish scribes – and has an embedded chronology. Look – can you see? It is structured around the repeated visits of a comet to the skies.'
'What comet? I don't understand.'
'Halley's comet,' said Trojan, and he grinned. 'Now, Halley's comet might not mean much to you or me, Kamen, but it means a lot to the English-'
'The Norman Conquest.' Ben looked at the Menologium, piecing it together. 'Halley's comet returned in 1066. This is what you want to send back to the past, isn't it? This document.' It seemed unbelievable. 'Are you planning to, um, adjust the outcome of the Norman Conquest of England?'
'Think of it,' Trojan said ardently. 'Hastings! What a catastrophe that October day was, so long ago! England, you know, was thoroughly Nordic. Why, only a generation before 1066 it had been part of Cnut's Scandinavian empire. King Harold himself was half-Danish! But William, that creature of the Pope, defeated Harold; the Jewish-Christian conspiracy defeated the Nordic race that day. And now the Aryan stock of the English is polluted by cross-breeding with the degenerate French. Quisling, the wise leader of Norway, argues this cogently, by the way.'
'And what if that could be reversed?' Ben said evenly.
'You have it,' Trojan said. 'Exactly! The Normans would have been smashed for a generation, and Harold secure on his throne. England, Scandinavia, Germany – the Nordic countries would have remained strong, and dominant over the Jewish-Christian south.' His eyes were misty, almost as if his own rhetoric was making him cry. 'Think of it. I would shine in Himmler's eyes. And 1 could become a hero of the English – Harold's grave was the first place I visited after the invasion. They would tear down the Objective wall and strew my path with petals…'
Ben saw that this man had no real idea what he was meddling with – no idea that if this prophecy did what he intended there was every possibility that he would be erased from existence, along with Ben, Himmler and the applauding English.
Trojan turned to him. 'Now do you see the scope of my ambition? Even a Jew can think. And I hope that you will share some of my intellectual excitement.' Then his expression shifted, becoming more calculating. 'Of course the gesture is the thing. Even if the Loom doesn't work the very effort will grab Himmler's imagination. So what do you think?'
'I think I have no choice but to work with you.'
'But I need you to want to work with me, Benjamin Kamen. Can you do that?'
'Oh, yes, sir, I can do that,' Ben said. He glanced down at the Menologium, thinking fast. 'Perhaps I could study this draft. Polish it a bit. Make it more mine.'
'Yes!' Trojan clapped his hands. 'Good idea. Keep it, work on it. Perhaps that will help you make the whole project part of you. I think that's enough for today. I have other duties. But you have only one duty, Benjamin – sleep! And sleep well.' He was already turning to other papers.
Clutching the Menologium to his chest, Ben turned and made for the door. And he began to plan how he could use this opportunity to make a cry for help.
XX
There was bottled beer in the fridge.
Bathed, wrapped in a dressing gown, having eaten his fill and then some, and mildly drunk after sipping his first alcohol in more than a year, Gary sat before the television. Earnest German voices spoke over images of spectacular advances in the east and in Africa. Gary had no way of working out how much of it was true. Other voices spoke of gloomy news from the rest of Britain, of a hungry, cold and demoralised population, the famine to come in the winter, the flight of the people from cities like Birmingham and Manchester. There were even pictures of queues at the Winston Line, defeated English folk clamouring to come into the Reich protectorate, smiling Wehrmacht troops handing out cans of meat and chocolate for the children.
Now a documentary programme came on. Sponsored by the SS, it illustrated the cosmological ideas of one Hans Horbiger, an Austrian engineer. Gary understood little of the German commentary, but he soaked up the general ideas from the pictures.
Horbiger said the universe was driven by heat, like a giant steam engine. A cartoon sky filled up with tiny stars so cool they were clad in ice, and hot giant stars. When the icy stars fell into their hot neighbours there were spectacular explosions that sprinkled planets and moons, like sparks from a firework. That was how the earth had been born. Initially earth had had a whole family of moons, which were made of ice – as was the existing moon, the last survivor. One by one the moons fell to the earth, causing immense cataclysms. Gary watched as the earth was repeatedly plated over by ice, save for a central belt where giant tides were raised by the falling moon. The most recent of these disasters had been eleven thousand years ago, said Horbiger; life had survived only in a few refuges.
This amazing cosmology explained a lot, from the true meaning of the Scandinavian creation myths to the destruction of Atlantis. And it was the reason why, even after years of ardent searching, nobody had found a trace of proof that the primordial Aryan race, source of all high civilisation on Earth, had ever actually existed.
If he'd been watching this with friends, with his buddies from the stalag, Gary might have laughed. As it was he was chilled. Most Germans he had met were as sane as he was, more or less. But there must be somebody high up in the Nazi hierarchy who believed in this garbage sufficiently to have it researched and dramatised. They're crazy, Gary thought. And they are in control. I'm trapped in a world of the mad, as if the whole planet is a vast stalag run by lunatics-
There was a tap on the door.
Reflexively he hid the beer under his chair, as if he was in the stalag and a goon had called for a late-night inspection. He checked himself, deliberately picked up the beer, and set it on the coffee table. He stood, turned off the television, and wrapped his dressing gown tight around him as he walked to the door.
A young woman stood there. She was dressed plainly, in a knee-length black skirt and a modest blouse with a kind of neckerchief. She wore her dark hair pinned back in a bun. The whole effect was of a uniform, like a Girl Guide troop leader. She had a face that was more handsome than beautiful, he thought. She looked strong.
She grinned at him. 'What's wrong with you? Never seen a woman before?' Her accent was some English variant unfamiliar to him.
'Not hardly, for a year. Look, I'm sorry.' He stepped back, impossibly awkward. 'I guess I left my manners back in the stalag. Come in.'
She swept past him. 'You weren't expecting visitors.'
'Hell, no. I mean – sorry. I guess you know who I am, right?'
'Yes, Corporal Wooler.'
'Call me Gary.'
'Thanks,' she said, amused. 'I'm Sophie Silver. But you can call me Doris Keeler.'
That threw him completely. 'What did you say?'
She glanced around the room, at the beer, the empty food plates, the television.
'You've been making yourself at home. Good for you. Mind if I sit down?'
'I-'
'Have you got any more of those beers?' She sat confidently on one of the easy chairs. 'Needs a bit of colour, this place, doesn't it?'