Weaver

V

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.'