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PROLOGUE

Orm Egilsson was among the last to reach the village this bright February morning, and the place was already a ruin. The wooden houses had been set alight, the stone barns cracked open like eggs, the winter food robbed, the seed corn torched and the animals slaughtered or driven off, even the pregnant ewes and cattle.

And the bodies were everywhere. Men and boys had been cut down like blades of grass. Some of them had makeshift weapons in their hands, scythes and rakes, even pikes and rusty swords. They had been useless against Norman warriors. But these farmers had to fight, for there was no English army to fight for them, no English king since Harold had been destroyed at Hastings more than three years ago. And once the men had fallen the women and girls were kept for the Normans' usual sport. Orm looked away from the twisted bodies in their bloodied rags, the mud scuffed around them by the knees and feet of the soldiers.

It was like this all across the land. Whichever way Orm looked he saw smoke rising, plumes of it dominated by the tremendous column that rose up from York itself, a few miles away. It was the Normans' intention to ensure that this country could not support any more rebellion, not even the furtive pinpricks of the wildmen, not for a generation or more. And the Normans pursued such goals with relentless efficiency.

At a command from his officer Orm dismounted and tied his horse's rein to a burned stump. The job of the mop-up party was to ensure the work was finished thoroughly. The heat from the smouldering fires made Orm sweat inside his heavy chain-mail coat, and the sooty air was gritty under his conical helmet. But he prodded at charred ruins with a stabbing-sword and kicked over bodies with the rest of them. It wasn't as bad as taking part in the slaughter itself.

He came to one ruined hovel, actually a little Christian chapel, devoted, he saw from the remnant of a dedication stone, to Saint Agnes, a Roman martyr. Orm kicked away the debris of the fallen walls, exposing an earth floor covered with a layer of straw. Here was a hearth, the stones still warm from the night's fire, a couple of wooden chests already broken open. Nothing left of value.

But something moved under the straw, a rustle in the dirt. Perhaps it was a rat. He stepped that way.

And he heard a voice, a woman, softly, rapidly chanting English words:

In the last days

To the tail of the peacock

He will come

The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer

The Dove.

And the Dove will fly east…

A prayer? Not one he knew – but as a pagan, he wouldn't expect to.

He stamped hard. His boot clattered, a hollow sound. The voice fell silent.

He kicked aside the straw and exposed planks, roughly cut. In the gaps between the planks he saw a flicker of movement, a flash of a blue eye.

Orm braced himself, his sword raised in the air, ready to stab down. But he hesitated, sick of blood. He leaned down, slipped his gloved fingers between the planks and pulled them up.

A woman huddled in the hole, dressed in a grimy black habit. She flinched from the light, her hands over her face. In the hole with her was a half-chewed loaf of hard winter bread, a wooden pitcher of water, and a discoloured patch of ground that, from its stink, told him she had been in here some hours.

He ought to finish her off. It would be kinder than to let the Normans have her. He hardened his grasp on the hilt of his sword.

She lowered her hands and looked at him. She had bright blue eyes, a round, sturdy face, short-cropped hair.

He gasped. 'Godgifu,' he said. And he lowered his sword.

The woman in the hole watched him, her gaze fixed on his face.

'But you are not Godgifu,' he said in English.

She thought that over. 'Are you sure?'

'You can't be. I saw her die.' No, his pitiless memory informed him. More than that. Orm had killed her, or his murderous machine of a body had, in the blood-lust on Senlac Ridge, during the slaughter men had come to refer to as the Battle of Hastings. Killed the woman he loved, without thinking. He had never forgiven himself, even though he had obtained absolution of a sort from Sihtric, Godgifu's priest-brother.

'Well, you're right. My name is Eadgyth. I wish I were your Godgifu, though.' Her voice was scratchy from disuse. She wasn't much older than twenty.

'Why do you wish that?'

'Because you would spare Godgifu. You will soon kill me.'

'Why are you here, Eadgyth?'

'I'm hiding.'

'From the Normans?'

'From the Normans, and my parents.'

'Why your parents?'

She shivered in her hole. 'I want to give my life to God. They want to give it to the Conqueror.'

He glanced around. The other troopers were busy with something they had found on the far side of the village, a cache of money, or a woman still alive. There was nobody near Orm, nobody watching. Orm squatted down, stiff in his grimy mail coat. 'Tell me.'

It was a familiar story. Under Harold and his predecessors Eadgyth's family had been land-owners, well-to-do. But more than three years after the Conquest, any vague intentions King William might have had for rapprochement with the old English aristocracy had been burned away by rebellion. All over the country there were wildmen operating from the woods and hills and marshland, places the heavily armoured Normans could not follow. The sons of dead King Harold had been raiding from Ireland. The Scottish King Malcolm had married his sister to Edgar the Atheling, the relative of Edward the Confessor who some argued had a better claim to the throne than even Harold had. And so on. As one rebellion after another was put down, very few of the native English nobility retained their positions.

Eadgyth's parents' intention was to survive under the new regime. And their main asset, as they saw it, was their only daughter.

'They brought me back from my convent. I was told I must marry the son of the Norman lord who now owns us. I met the boy. No more than seventeen. He tried to rape me before I told him my name. He's a bishop now.' She laughed, not bitter.

'So you ran away.'

'I've travelled from safe-house to safe-house, sheltered by the clergy and by the people of places like this.'

Orm had heard of this. For peasants stripped of custom and English law, hermits like Eadgyth were a reminder of the old days, the old English ways.

She said to him, 'And you-?'

'Orm. My name is Orm Egilsson.'

'Why are you here? You are not Norman, or English. This is not your home.'

'I am a mercenary. I fight for pay.'

She shifted in her cramped hole. 'You were at Hastings?'

'I was.'

'On such a day it was better to fight for the winner. Why have the Normans brought you here?'

'To put a stop to the rebellions.'

Eadgyth said, 'My own uncle is a wildman, in the fen country of the east.'

'Yes. The Normans call them silvarici. People of the woods.' All over England the wildmen had taught the Normans another new word: murdrum, furtive slaughter. 'The north has been worst, though. This country. And so it will suffer most grievously. Everywhere it is like this, from Durham to York – burned – uninhabited.' There would be no harvest this year, no lambs or calves; famine would follow the steel.

'So at last the Conqueror has come here,' Eadgyth whispered. 'From Hastings all the way to this remote place of farmers and sheep and cattle.'

Orm heard voices calling. 'We have no more time,' he said.

'Then you must earn your pay.'

He looked into her calm eyes, so like Godgifu's.

'What's this?' The voice was heavy, the accent crude French.

Orm was dismayed to see Roger fitz Gommery standing over him. Roger was a common soldier, a slab of hardened muscle from toe to brain, and an ardent rapist. The crotch of his leather trousers was already smeared with blood and ordure from his day's sport. 'Have I broken into your party, Orm Egilsson? Let's see what we've got.'

He closed his leather glove over Eadgyth's short hair, and dragged her to her feet. She screamed, and her legs flapped, too weak to support her weight.

'Roger-'

'You'll get your share, Orm.'

With his gloved hand Roger ripped at the neck of Eadgyth's habit. Old, much patched, the material gave easily. She was left naked save for pants of stained wool, which Roger pulled away. Her body was skeletal, her skin pocked by lesions, her breasts shrunken mounds behind hard nipples. She whimpered, her eyes closed, and she seemed to be praying:

And the Dove will fly east,

Wings strong, heart stout, mind clear.

God's Engines will burn our ocean

And flame across the lands of spices.

All this I have witnessed

I and my mothers…

As she gabbled these words, Roger looked her up and down, contemptuous. 'Skin and bone. Chicken legs. You know what, Dane? I can't be bothered; I've had my fill today. But we can still have a little sport. Have you ever carved a chicken?' He took a knife from his belt and, almost thoughtfully, drew it across Eadgyth's back. She jerked rigid at the pain, and warm blood poured.

And her eyes snapped open.

She stared directly at Orm. 'Egilsson,' she said. 'Orm Egilsson. Can you hear me? Are you there?' All the weakness had gone from her voice, despite the way Roger held her up by her hair, despite the wound that crossed her back. It didn't even sound like her voice any more, but deeper, heavier, the accent distorted. 'Are you there, Orm Egilsson?'

Roger gaped. 'Is she possessed?'

'Orm Egilsson. Listen to what I have to tell you. Listen, and remember, and let your sons and their sons remember too.' And again she began to intone her eerie, unfamiliar prayer.

In the last days

To the tail of the peacock

He will come:

The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer

The Dove.

And the Dove will fly east…

Roger crossed himself. 'By God's wounds, she's a prophet.'

She spoke on in that clear alien voice, of fires consuming an ocean, of war.

All this I have witnessed

I and my mothers.

Send the Dove west! O, send him west!

Orm was unaccountably afraid of this naked, helpless woman. 'What peacock, what dove? I don't know what you mean.'

'Find him,' Eadgyth said, and her voice was a hiss now.

'Who?'

'Sihtric.'

It was the name of Godgifu's brother, the priest. He had not told Eadgyth of him. The name shocked Orm to his core. 'But Sihtric is in Spain,' he said weakly.

'Find him. And stop him.'

Roger lost his nerve. He let go of the woman's hair and she crumpled into a heap. 'Screw her, kill her, or marry her, she's all yours, Dane. I'm having no more of this.' He turned and stomped off, massive in his armour, obsessively crossing himself.

The woman was huddled over on herself, her back bright with blood. Orm lifted her face with a gloved hand. Spittle flecked her lips, and he saw blood on her tongue. She had bitten it while speaking. He said, 'Who are you? By whose authority shall I command Sihtric?'

She looked at him. 'Orm?'

'Who are you?'

'I am Eadgyth. Only Eadgyth.' She frowned. 'I – have I fallen?'

'Do you remember what you said to me?'

'What I said… What's happened to me, Orm Egilsson?'

He stood up. The bright February day became insubstantial around him, and a harsher light shone through its sparse threads. He remembered all Sihtric's talk in the days before Hastings, the mystical babbling of a possibly heretical priest – talk about the tapestry of time, and how its weave might be picked undone and remade by a god, or a man with sufficient power. The Weaver, Sihtric had called him. And now Sihtric and his mysteries had returned to Orm's life.

But on the ground before him was a woman, helpless, naked, shivering, bleeding. That was the reality. He reached up to his horse, pulled a blanket from the saddle, and draped it over her shoulders. The Norman soldiers, drunk on blood and rape, drawn by Roger's gabbled account, gathered around curiously.