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XV

In a cramped, smoky visitors' room in the priory, Thomas served them mead. Saladin sipped from his cup. The flavour was disgusting, the drink a kind of fermented honey, but it delivered a strong kick.

'Listen to the story I have to tell you,' Thomas said. 'Listen, believe, try to understand.'

He had come upon this truth by accident, when Thomas, in the service of Joan, was studying the progress of the Mongols.

Armed with al-Hafredi's glimpse of the future, Joan and her ancestors had been able to profit from a foreknowledge of the Mongols' advance. But in the year 1242 the Mongols had suddenly withdrawn from Europe. Thomas, digging into the reasons for this reversal, eventually found a man who had actually been at the court of the Mongols in that crucial season, two years ago. He was a knight called Philip of Marseilles. Devout, strong, fearless, Philip had taken the Cross more than once.

And he had agreed to serve as a legate for the Pope, in the pontiff's hopeful negotiations with the Mongol Great Khan.

The Mongols had been a nomadic people, one of many who hunted and warred across the vast grassy ocean of the Asian steppes. The Mongols' expansion across the world was the dream of Temujin, who called himself Genghis Khan, which meant 'the emperor of mankind', and he taught the Mongols to believe that they and only they were born to rule the whole world.

Genghis first unleashed his war dogs against China to the east. With one ancient civilisation reduced, the Mongols next assaulted the prosperous Islamic states to their west and south, especially Khwarazm, where they shattered an irrigation system that had endured since antiquity. Then Genghis's son Ogodai assaulted the Viking-founded cities of Russia to the north. Mongols cared nothing for cities or civilisation; resolute nomads, they wanted only plunder, and space to graze their horses.

Then the Mongols turned west, to Europe, and Christendom.

The great general Sabotai led the attack. He split his forces into three, making diversionary thrusts to north and south while Sabotai himself led the main body of his forces across the Hungarian plain. Thus Sabotai controlled forces separated by hundreds of miles and by mountain ranges; there had been nothing like this coordination and control since the legions. And the forces of the Hungarian King Bela broke before these savage horsemen, their leathery dress strange, their horses small, fast and muscular.

Sabotai set up his yurts on the plain of northern Europe, and, in the autumn of 1241, prepared to overwinter before his next push west.

He was only a few days' ride from Vienna, along the Danube. No Christian army had even slowed the Mongol advance, let alone halted it. Now it was a dagger held over the heart of Europe, a world empire preparing to overwhelm the petty, squabbling states of Christendom.

And yet Pope Innocent IV tried to deal with the Mongols. Even as the horses of Sabotai grazed east of Vienna, Philip of Marseilles was attached to a party of clerics and knights despatched to the court of Ogodai, son of Genghis Khan.

Many Christians had applauded as the Mongol attacks thrust into the soft belly of Islam. There were even hopeful rumours that some of the Mongols were Christians, adherents of a heretical sect called Nestorians who clung to an obscure argument about the separation of the divine and human nature of Christ. And there was a popular legend of a figure called Prester John, said to be descended from one of the magi who attended the birth of Christ, a Christian ruler of a vast kingdom in the east. So in the Pope's counsels there was hope that the Mongols could be turned into allies against Islam, the ultimate foe.

Thus Philip and his party came to the strange capital of the khans, deep in their Asian homeland. This was a 'city' of nomads, a town of tents, each laden with pointless heaps of booty. And yet in this place they found embassies from across the known world and beyond. The Mongols' destruction was terrible, but the unity they had imposed connected empires which had had little knowledge of each other since antiquity.

But Philip found that Ogodai, a clever, impulsive, hard-drinking man, was no Christian, no Prester John. In fact only a few Mongols were Nestorians; the rest adhered to a kind of primitive animism. And besides the Mongols waged war not for religion but for the conquest itself. To Ogodai even the Pope was no more than the weak leader of a rabble of petty states that would, in due course, be conquered, reduced and assimilated, and that was that. The Pope's embassy failed.

But it was while they remained as guests of the Khan that one of the papal party, a nervous but intelligent young monk called Bohemond, discovered in his pack an 'amulet', as he called it. He had no idea how it had got there.

'Philip eventually examined the amulet for himself,' Thomas whispered. 'He described it to me. It was a sealed box, the size of a man's hand, slim and flat and smooth to the touch. It was pale, cream-coloured, but with coloured markings on its upper surface. It was made of neither wood nor ceramic nor metal – something none could identify. The Christians, huddled in their Mongol tent, exploring this thing, found they could not cut it with a knife, nor would fire bum it.'

But Bohemond himself discovered that if he pressed a certain marking on the upper lid, a green arrow, the box would speak to him – in good if stilted Latin, in a tiny insect's voice. The legates were startled, terrified, intrigued. After much praying, and the application of much of their precious stock of holy water, they gathered around the box to hear what the imp in it had to say.

The imp spoke clearly of the future: of the next day, and of the years to come.

Of the next day, it described in detail Ogodai's movements: the hour he would rise, the breakfast he would take, the councillors, ambassadors and generals he would meet, the letters he would dictate and have read to him, the wife he would lie with – and the cup of mare's milk laced with Chinese rice wine that he liked to drink in the middle of the day.

On that cup of mare's milk and wine, said the imp in its tiny voice, the future of the world depended. For it spoke then of what would happen if Ogodai lived – what would become of the world at the feet of the Mongols, in the future.

Mongol armies always advanced in the depths of winter, with their horses fat on the grasses of summer. So it would be, in just a few weeks, that they would fall at last on Vienna. The city would be plundered, torched and razed, and the Viennese scattered to starve on the plains. As the Mongols advanced further west, the Christian princes, hastily uniting, would raise another army, which would meet the Mongols in a pitched battle before Munich. The numbers were well matched. But the Christians would be lured by a false retreat into an ambush, a classic Mongol tactic. Munich would be smashed. The Mongols' advance would be barely interrupted.

Next the Mongol force would split once more into three detachments. The first would strike at the Low Countries, plundering the rich young trading cities there before shattering them and slaughtering the population in the usual way. Holland's dykes would be broken up; the sea would complete the Mongols' victory.

A second detachment would spend the summer grazing their horses in the plains around the smoking ruins of Paris, while students from what had been the finest university north of the Pyrenees scratched in the rubble for food.

The final Mongol detachment would meanwhile cross the Alps and descend on Italy. The vibrant modern cities of Milan, Genoa, Venice – all put to the sword, all destined never to rise again. And then there was the Eternal City. When the Mongols were done, it would be said that Rome had been reduced to the villages on the seven hills from which the great old city had once coalesced. The Mongols considered the Pope a prince, and therefore no hand would be raised against him. Instead the successor to Saint Peter would be thrust into a sack and trampled to death by horses.

The next season, the squabbling Christian kings of Spain would provide no serious resistance to the Mongol force that marched south through the Pyrenees. And then there was England. The Mongols had learned how to build boats in their campaigns in the far east. By the autumn of that year, London would burn.

So the conquest would be completed. With its great cities shattered, its monasteries and churches broken, Europe would be reduced to a shrunken population living in utter poverty in villages too small to be worth the plunder, ruled brutally by the khans' governors and tax-collectors.

Eventually, the imp said, the Mongols would withdraw, their empire withering away. But the damage would be permanent, Europe cut off from its own antiquity. And, worse, Christ would be lost from the world. With their priests slaughtered, the mass of the population slowly reverted to paganism, finding comfort in the gods they rediscovered in the trees and fields and rivers around them.

Bohemond, Philip and their companions listened to this dreadful account with growing horror.

But it need not be so, the imp whispered. Already grievous damage had been done to the cities of Russia, and even to the great Islamic civilisations of the east, which would never recover their sparkling brilliance of the past. But in the west, Christendom might yet be saved.

A tiny lid opened in the flat top of the box. Inside, revealed to the astonished men, was a pinch of crystals. This, the imp whispered, was a salt of quicksilver. If these crystals were dropped into Ogodai's milk and wine the next day the ruin of Christendom would be averted.

And then the box fell silent, and would not speak again, no matter what markings they pressed. The crystals sat in their little tray, silent, beckoning.

The Christians debated what this all meant. The soldiers like Philip discussed the Mongols' campaigns. The priests and monks explored the theological nature of the imp in the box: was it sent by God, or the devil?

And while they debated, Bohemond slipped away.

'By the end of the next day,' Thomas said, 'the Great Khan was doubled up in pain. His vomit was copious, while bloody diarrhoea hosed from his leathery backside. His doctors could do nothing. By the following morning he was unable even to pass water, and howled in agony. And by the end of the day after that he was dead. It was a horrible death – but not as dreadful as that inflicted on Brother Bohemond, who was discovered skulking in the Khan's tent.'

Like many of the other embassies, the Christian party packed up and fled in haste from the decapitated court. The Mongols' own messengers spread the news of the Khan's death to the generals and governors across their scattered domains.

'And that is why,' Thomas said, 'early in the year 1242, rather than press his conquest west, Sabotai turned back from the walls of Vienna. For all their conquests the Mongols remain tribesmen, bound by oaths of loyalty to their Khan. So when Ogodai died, their leaders were forced by their own laws to return in person to their homeland, to elect a new ruler.'

'And will they not return to Europe?' Saladin asked.

'They haven't yet. They have the rest of the world to occupy them. And as for the amulet – after the envoys had fled from the Mongol city, Philip told me they finally shattered its casing with rocks. Inside they found not the shrivelled corpse of an imp, but bits of wire. Metal discs, like coins, but blank. Other strange little sculptures.'

'Charms, perhaps,' said Saladin.

'Philip thought they were like bits of an engine. But what its function could be, how it worked – even what drove it, for there was no spring, no lever – he had no idea.'

Joan said, 'But whatever it was, why was this amulet put into the luggage of this boy Bohemond?'

'I think that's clear enough. It was put there so Bohemond should kill Ogodai. If he had lived, Christendom was lost. If he died, Christendom was saved. As simple as that. So he had to die.'

'But who could know this?… Ah,'Joan said. 'A prophet. Or-'

'Or a meddler with time,'Thomas said. 'A Weaver. A man, or an angel or a demon, with the power to speak to the past. A man stranded in this dismal future wrecked by the Khans, who managed to send back this imp-in-a-box – just as somebody, somewhere, somewhen, sent back – perhaps, perhaps! – the designs of your war machines to a young boy's addled head, and somebody else sent al-Hafredi back to the time of Charles Martel, and somebody else whispered in the ear of your ancestress Eadgyth, and, and…'

'But this was not the work of al-Hafredi's people.'

'I do not believe so. A different method was used to persuade the minds of men – an imp in a box rather than a human being thrown into history. And, though it is not clear, it seems that the makers of the amulet sought a different future from that described by al-Hafredi.'

Saladin struggled to absorb these dreadful ideas. He feared they were heretical, feared that even to speculate about such matters in the darkness of his own head might be to commit a sin.

But his mother briskly focused on the practicalities. 'I see your point,' she said to Thomas. 'He who sent Ogodai's imp may or may not have been our Weaver. But this does seem to prove that time can be spanned by an agent's will, be he human or divine.'

'Exactly.' Thomas's rheumy eyes were bright.

'Well, it's clear what we must do now. The veracity of the Codex is proved to be more than plausible.'

'You never wrote back to your cousin Subh?'

'I was never sure about that. After all Subh is a Muslim. Yet we need the Codex.'

'You're thinking of going to Seville yourself?' Thomas asked cautiously.

'Of course! I will dig up that mosque with my bare hands if needs must.'

'But the armies of the Castilians are moving in on the city. Soon it may be besieged.'

'All the more reason to move quickly, before some other chancer happens on the plans – or worse, Subh herself.' Her eyes were cold. 'I am sure now that this is our opportunity, our chance to revive our family's prospects. We must take it without hesitation.'

Saladin gladly put aside the strange mysteries of the ever-changing tapestry of time, and grasped the essence of this new mission. 'We are going to al-Andalus?' He bunched his fists. 'There are many Muslims there. I shall take the Cross!'

Joan stroked his cheek fondly. 'That's my boy.' She stood. 'We have much to do.' Briskly, still talking, planning, scheming, she led them out of the room.

Thomas hurried after her. 'Of course there is still the question of your enigma: Robert's scrap of cipher, which may or may not have something to do with that phrase in Subh's letter – Incendium Dei. As it happens I have heard of a young man who may be able to assist us, another Franciscan, a bright young philosopher at Oxford who is becoming notorious for his radical philosophies. His name is Roger Bacon…'