Weaver

'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…'

'That seems a drastic point of view,' Mackie murmured. 'My gut feel is that history might be a bit more resilient than that. I mean, it seems to me it's possible that if you were to make some sort of change, the consequences would just sort of ripple through. The tapestry of time must be a hefty piece of work. The patterns would persist, wouldn't they, even if you pulled out the odd thread? The physicists have nothing to say, incidentally. Nothing sensible anyhow, which is typical of that crew.'

'So if you could push the button?'

He pursed his lips. 'I'd like more data. But it seems to me that it might be possible to calibrate the effects of interventions.'

'Calibrate?'

'It would mean turning history from an art to a science, but still! Think what a boon for good such power could be.'

And there, she thought, was the difference between herself and men like him. Mackie was an instrumentalist, who saw in this technology only a weapon. She saw horror. But then she thought of her own Dunkirk counter-history. Only if one were sufficiently desperate, she thought. Only then…

'Of course,' Mackie said, 'all this mandates us to keep this technology, if indeed it exists at all, out of the wrong hands.'

'You mean the Nazis, the Russians-'

'And the bally Americans, my dear, no offence! Now come, let's get out of here. Can I offer you a lift anywhere?' She stood. He took her arm, and guided her out of the ruins of the minster.

A liberty bus drew up outside the minster, a 'passion wagon' that took young women to dances at the GIs' bases. The Land Girls flocked that way, colourful, grimy, laughing.

VI

3 July

The marshalling area for the British Second Army was south of Guildford.

It was late afternoon when Gary reached Guildford, having been driven down from Aldershot with Willis Farjeon and Dougie Skelland and the rest of their platoon in the backs of studebakers. When they got there a river of men and machines was pouring through the town's old centre. MPs and NCOs stood at every junction, directing the flow according to some complicated scheme. Even the roads had had to be rebuilt to take the traffic, bridges strengthened, junctions widened, the tarmac reinforced to withstand tank tracks. Gary could smell the fumes of the engines, like a vast traffic jam.

It was like this all the way along the Winston Line, from coast to coast.

South of the town, as they neared the marshalling area, the spectacle was even more amazing. The column broke up, and the vehicles swarmed off the road looking for a bit of hard standing to park up. From the elevation of his troop carrier Gary saw vehicles crowding as far as he could see, their backs glistening green or American olive in the dusty afternoon sunlight, with men moving everywhere and dumps of weapons and ammo covered in camouflage netting. There were more complicated machines too, such as the bridge-building gear of the Royal Engineers, who had been training to provide roadways over the concrete trenches of the Winston Line. Tanks moved through this crowd like elephants at a waterhole. Gary recognised the profiles of Shermans and Centaurs, and even a few squat Soviet T-34s; the Russians had insisted on making a contribution to this crucial push in the west. All this was going on under a cloud-littered sky through which fighter planes soared, Spits and Hurricanes and Mustangs and a few Soviet MIGs, there to deter the Luftwaffe from any ideas it might have entertained of disrupting the build-up. It was a spectacle that battered all the senses.

There was no secrecy now, no creeping around in the dark. Gary, lost in the middle of it, had a sense of huge energies gathering, a vast coiled spring about to be released. The war had turned. The Germans had been defeated in Africa and at Stalingrad, the Allies were winning the Atlantic war against the U-boats, and the Japs were held at Midway. Now Roosevelt and Halifax had done a deal, to sort out Europe first before resolving the Pacific war. This July the Allies were effectively opening four fronts against the Nazis. In the Mediterranean an invasion force was closing on Sicily, the beginning of an operation planned to knock Mussolini's Italy out of the war. British and American bombers were beginning an intensive campaign of assault on the German homeland; the first great target was Hamburg. In the east the Russians were taking on the Germans in a gigantic tank battle on the Kursk salient.

And here in Britain Operation Walrus was ready to be launched. Gary knew there had been plenty of muttering in the British press about the time it had taken to get the Nazis out of England. But you wanted to assemble an overwhelming force before you could consider such an operation. Here, today, was the result. And it was remarkable to think that all this was just a prelude to the main event, when England would be used as the platform to launch the invasion of Europe itself, next year or the year after.