Conqueror

VII

A crowd surrounded the palace that chill afternoon, drawn like moths to the black light of Edward's death. There was grief in the air, but there was an extraordinary crackling tension too. With the death of a king, everything would be different, and no man could be sure of his place in the new order – not even the Godwines.

Despite Sihtric's status as a confidante of Harold, it took some time to get past the royal guards. And while they waited in line before the great door, the priest ordered Orm to tell him about Vinland.

It was a story of Orm's ancestors. The Egil who had once faced Alfred's army at the famous battle of Ethandune had died of an undignified illness. The shame had been so severe that Egil's son, the next Egil, had felt compelled to leave his home in Denmark. He chose to join the great emigration of Northmen across the western ocean.

It was a heroic age, this, when the Northmen's dragon ships had broken into the heart of the old world, reaching as far as Constantinople – and at the same time they headed west. Vikings had settled the outlying islands of Britain, unoccupied save for primitive folk and a few eremitic monks. But some had sailed further west still, and found another island, much larger, which they had called the Land of Ice – Iceland. For the first time the Vikings found themselves in a land empty of previous peoples, a land they could shape as they liked. They worked out a stable and functional society, of a new sort. The great landowners would meet for a general assembly called an althing, at a spectacular central site called the thingvellir.

'I've heard of this,' Sihtric said. 'The remarkable thing is, these hairy-arsed settlers proclaimed they had no king but the law. Democracy, flourishing across the northern ocean! But I don't suppose you know who Demosthenes was, do you, Orm?'

And still more ambitious settlers had pushed even further west.

'A man called Eric the Red made the first journey,' Orm said. 'A son of Egil sailed with him. This was Egil's son's son's-'

'Never mind.'

Eric led settlers to this new island, which he enticingly called Greenland, and soon two healthy settlements developed. 'I visited them myself,' Orm said. 'My father once took me there on a trading voyage. They raise cattle and sheep, and they hunt walrus, seals, white bears, and catch fish. Some cling to the old faiths, as my father did, as I do. Mostly they are good Christians. They send tributes to the bishops at home, who send them on to the Pope.'

'And,' Sihtric prompted him, 'explorers went further west yet.'

So they had. The new lands had been first sighted in the time of Eric the Red by a man called Bjarni Herjolffson who, sailing for Greenland, had been blown off course by strong winds and lost in deep fog. He came to a thickly forested shoreline he had not recognised as Greenland. Bjarni had not landed, but some time later Leif, the son of Eric the Red, intrigued by Bjarni's account, tried to recreate Bjarni's accidental journey. He used Bjarni's ship, for ships knew their own way.

Sihtric rolled his eyes. 'Pagan superstition!'

The first place Leif landed was worthless, nothing but glaciers and slabs of rock, and he called it Helluland. The next landing was at a place he called Markland, which was thickly forested. And finally he came to a place called Vinland, the land of wine, for one of his men got drunk from eating the grapes that grew abundantly. Leif wintered in Vinland and returned to Greenland with a cargo of grapes and timber. Leif never returned, but later other children of Eric the Red led an expedition to colonise.

Sihtric leaned close, studying Orm, his breath foul with wine. 'And you,' he said. 'You visited this Vinland?'

'With my father, as a boy. He showed me the places my grandparents lived.'

It had been a late afternoon when his father and his men dragged the ship up a boggy beach from the still water of a bay. The land was low, with worn islands offshore. On a scrap of land above the marshy beach stood the settlement, a clump of huts with walls of sod. Fires had curled up into the sky, and voices in clipped Danish or Norwegian called to and fro, just like home. 'I was thrilled,' Orm admitted. 'I was old enough to understand that I had crossed an ocean, and yet here were people living and working, and speaking in my own language.'

Godgifu smiled, enchanted.

Orm remembered that as he had walked with his father and his men along the beach, they discovered what looked like three humps on the beach. They turned out to be skin boats, upturned, with three skraelings hiding beneath each one.

'Skraelings?'

Orm shrugged. 'Savages. Ugly and brutish. They sail in boats sewn together from skin, and their women stink of fish.'

The Vikings killed eight of the skraelings, but one escaped. Later, more came boiling out of the forest, seeking vengeance.

'That was why the settlement was abandoned. Just too many skraelings. But there are many who still regard Vinland as their home.'

'And some day the Vinlanders will return,' Godgifu said. 'To reclaim their land from the skraelings.'

'Perhaps.'

'Oh, they will,' Sihtric said. 'The prophecy demands it. Now we come to the crux of the matter. Orm, when exactly did this Bjarni-'

'Bjami Herjolffson.'

'When did he lose his way and find Vinland?'

The date by the Christian calendar turned out to be hard to establish. Orm, like most people, remembered the years not by numbers but by great events: wars, the passing of kings, the coming of plagues or floods – or strange lights in the sky, like the comet of the prophecy. At last they established that the year of Bjarni's voyage had been during the long reign of Edward's father Aethelred, a time when the Danes were ravaging Britain – and that year, a murrain, a cattle disease, had afflicted England.

Sihtric had another document in his bag, a closely-written little book, a copy of a chronicle of the years that had been kept by English monks since the time of Alfred. It turned out that there was only one year in Aethelred's reign noted for a murrain: the year 986 AD.

'I knew it.'

'I don't see what you're getting at,' Orm admitted. 'There is no "986" in your prophecy.'

'Ah, but there is – embedded in its puzzles. Look again at the seventh stanza.' He fumbled with his scroll, unrolling it. "'The dragon flies west… Know a new world born." What else can that mean, but the discovery of Vinland by you Vikings? And the stanza says more. "Less thirty-six months… Know a Great Year dies…" My Moorish colleague has dated the end of the seventh Great Year, the seventh cycle of the comet, as September, AD 989. He does this by adding up the given months and dividing by twelve, so that-'

'Yes, yes.'

'And the "less thirty-six months" gives a date of three years before the Great Year's end. So the prophecy predicts Bjarni's discovery – in the year AD 986.' And he slapped the cover of his chronicle in triumph. 'I knew it.'

Godgifu seemed shocked; it seemed that the priest hadn't shared this secret even with his sister. She asked uncertainly, 'But what does this mean?'

The priest rolled up his parchment. 'I hold in my hand the power to shape history. That's what it means.'

At last they were passed by the guard at the door, and made their way inside the palace. Sihtric led them through the crush of jostling English nobility towards the King's bedchamber.

'I'll tell you another story of Vinland,' Orm murmured to Godgifu as they lined up again. 'My father told me that once, as they explored the coast, the first Viking settlers came across a human skull, smashed in as if by a stone. Searching further they found the wreck of a leather boat, a rude hovel made of piled-up sod – and a silver crucifix. These were the remains of a monk, one of those mad Irish hermits who sailed off in search of solitude, and God. It was a miracle he had crossed the ocean without starving to death. But he was the first to see Vinland, even before the Vikings.'

'And the skraelings ended his journey.'

'It seems so…'

They made it at last to the door of the King's bedchamber. It took bluff and bluster for Sihtric to persuade Edward's thegns and housecarls to let him and his companions through.

And once again, to his astonishment, in the chamber of a dying king, Orm found himself witnessing history.