Weaver

IV

So they walked, heading through the heart of the city towards the minster.

It was a hot June day, a little after three. In the centre of the city the shops were busy, the place bustling even on a Friday afternoon, full of military and pinstripe-suited civil service types. A British Restaurant, a self-service cafe ostensibly for the use of the bombed-out, was doing brisk business. Mackie and Mary, both bookish, paused by a W.H. Smith's whose window was piled high with Penguin editions of Graham Greene and Agatha Christie novels, and pot-boiler crime and romance.

It was the GIs who caught the eye, though. You saw them everywhere, hanging around on street corners like unruly kids, endlessly chewing gum, and ostentatiously smoking their Camels and Lucky Strikes at a time when smokers in England mostly had to put up with foul Turkish brands. They had a kind of loose casualness about them that was just this side of slovenly, and it made you realise how prim and proper most British servicemen looked by comparison. In England's cities and towns, 1943 would always be remembered as the GI summer, Mary thought.

York was busier than most towns in free England, because it was the emergency seat of government. But it shared with the rest the marks of the long war: the ack-ack gun emplacements, the pillboxes, the sandbags around the public buildings. The major air campaigns had been abandoned after those frenetic months of the invasion in 1940, but because it was the seat of government York had taken more than its share of the sporadic Luftwaffe raids – the Brits called them 'tip and run' raids. So there were gaps in the streets, marked by stubs of walls and broken pipes, the rubble cleared away and piled up in vast mounds in the parks. Some of these bomb sites were four years old and were choked with greenery; the weeds loved the brick dust and the ash. Mary supposed glumly that when W-Day came the bombing would resume in Britain, just as it was about to resume, so she'd heard, in the heart of Germany, and that York and other cities would soon have fresh scars to add to the old.

Some of the changes wrought by the war seemed positively medieval. Every park, playing field and flower bed was given over to growing crops or raising pigs: it must have been five hundred years, Mary mused, since the farmyard had penetrated the city in such a way. And there was a pervasive atmosphere of neglect. The city was stripped of railings and lamp-posts, the metal turned over to the armaments industry. After nearly four years without a lick of fresh paint the homes and shops and offices looked shabby, slowly decaying, their blacked-out windows like closed eyes. Mary thought she saw a similar round-shouldered shabbiness in the people, in their patched-up clothes and shoes, now enduring the fourth year of a war that had become, worse than grinding, boring.

The most spectacular bomb site of all was the minster itself. In one week in the summer of 1942 the Luftwaffe had launched a series of particularly spiteful raids against the grand old building, evidently meaning to make a symbolic strike against Halifax's seat of power. When they reached it, Mary and Mackie stepped cautiously through the main entrance on the northern side, with flags of St George, Britain, the United States, Poland and France flying over their heads, and into the shadow of ruin. The central tower had been pretty much demolished, and the rest of the roof was blown in, the stone floors smashed to shrapnel. But the minster was still a working church. A small open-air altar had been set up beneath the Great West Window which had, by luck or a miracle, survived the bombing. But most of the interior, cleared of rubble and swept for unexploded shells, had been dug up to form allotments. Today squads of Land Girls toiled in the shadows of the broken walls.

Mary and Mackie sat on a fallen pillar in the shade of the ruined north transept, their feet in the long grass, and watched the girls working. They were cheerful enough, their young voices echoing from the stone walls.

Mary said, 'Looks as if they are fighting a losing battle against the rosebay willow herb.'

Mackie shrugged. 'I'm told it's more a symbolic effort than anything practical. Morale booster, you know. I mean it's rather too shady in here to grow anything worthwhile. Of course the archaeologists have been crawling all over this place since Hitler conveniently blew it up for them.'

'Well, they would. There are roots here going back to a Roman military headquarters, the centre of power in the whole of the north of England.'

'And now York finds itself the locus of a world empire. Remarkable how things come around. I wonder what archaeologists of the future will find of our time. A layer of ash, I suppose. Rubble and bones.'

'Geoffrey Cotesford visited the city many times, according to his memoir. In fact his first monastery was just outside the walls.'

'Ah, our friend Brother Geoffrey! I thought he might have done. So to business, Mary.' He dug out his pipe and began the usual rather theatrical business of filling it, shred by tobacco shred. It occurred to Mary that she hardly ever saw Mackie without the pipe. Perhaps he needed this prop for reassurance; perhaps he was less calm than his urbane British surface would have led her to believe. 'Tell me first how you are getting on with your counter-history. What was your hinge of fate?'

'Dunkirk,' she said immediately.

This was an exercise the two of them had set themselves. In an effort to delve into the minds of history-meddling Nazis, Mackie had proposed that they try to devise their own 'counter-histories'. If you had a Loom, what tweaks to history would you consider making? It was not so much the results that were of interest, he argued, but the habits of thinking and the types of research, a bit removed from the conventionally historical, that he wished to understand.

Mackie nodded sagely. 'Dunkirk. I should have guessed you would wish to spare your son the consequences of living through that horrendous defeat.'

She said fiercely, 'Let it be done to someone else's son, not mine.'

'Fair enough. How could that calamity have been averted?'

'If Hitler had hesitated…'

She had had access to remarkably thorough briefings. Mackie's MI-14 had moles that penetrated all the way, it seemed, to the top of the Nazi Party. And she had learned that in those dark days of May 1940, when the BEF and the remnant French forces were trapped on the beaches, it had been a full day before Guderian had been authorised to unleash his Panzers for the final assault and his resounding victory. The delay was obvious even to the allied soldiers on the beaches; Gary had spoken of it.

'There seems to have been a debate at all levels within the military and the Party,' she told Mackie. 'Guderian himself had some concerns about the nature of the ground they would have to cover. The blitzkrieg had advanced so fast he was short of proper intelligence.'

'Ah,' Mackie said around his pipe. 'Germans never did like a heavy pitch.'

'Meanwhile Guderian's superiors were well aware that France was not yet conquered. The BEF was beaten; so let it go, and keep back Guderian's forces, let them rest and re-equip for the French campaign. And then Hitler was still dreaming of peace with England. He thought that sparing the BEF from slaughter might demonstrate to you Brits that he was a civilised kind of guy after all. But in the end they concluded that the destruction of the BEF was too good an opportunity to miss.'

'So how would you make the change? You remember the rules we set. You're allowed to go back and whisper in one person's ear.' This was, from Geoffrey's evidence, how the Loom seemed to operate.

'I'd reach back to Hitler's court in those hours when they were debating whether to unleash Guderian. And I'd mess about with the head of Karl Ernst Krafft.'

'Who's he?'

'An astrologer.'

'I thought Hitler didn't believe in astrology.'

'Yes, but there are those around him who do, Himmler and Goebbels to name but two. In 1939 this guy Krafft sent a prediction to Himmler's intelligence service that there would be a bomb attempt against Hitler. Well, the prediction came true.'

Mackie snorted. 'Pure coincidence!'

'Of course. But it gave him an in at court. Mess with him, and you can influence at least two Nazi barons.'

'And if the decision about Guderian was so close, that might be enough to swing it. What would you say to him, though?'

Mary shrugged. 'Some suitable gobbledygook, couched in Aryanmythos phraseology. Hitler is a Taurus, which is supposedly ruled by the element earth. Hitler is a lion on land but lost in the water – so he should spare Britain, an island nation, and concentrate on the ground he can conquer, which after all stretches all the way to Russia. Something like that.'

'Um. So what next? If the BEF had been reprieved-'

'I think everything would have been different,' Mary said. She hesitated, then plunged on, 'I think the German invasion might not have happened at all.'

Mackie raised his eyebrows.

A different Dunkirk would have altered the mood on both sides of the Channel, she argued, and so affected the chains of decision-making that led up to the invasion itself. A saved BEF might have boosted British morale. Churchill might have survived politically – and then, emboldened, he might have forced through such belligerent actions as disabling the French fleet, to prevent it being absorbed by the German navy. As for the Germans, facing a tougher, more resolute Britain, and with the balance of power less in their favour on both land and sea, the invasion might have seemed that bit more daunting.

'They were always disunited at the command level,' she said. 'Each service seeking to shuffle off responsibilities onto the others. If the invasion had seemed more difficult, the infighting might have got that much worse.'

Mackie nodded, but looked doubtful. 'You know, actually I'm not sure how much difference the invasion has made, up to now at any rate, in the bigger picture of the war. Essentially the land war in the west has been stalled since September 1940. It doesn't matter much whether Hitler's troops were held up on this side of the Channel or the other. Without an armistice, he couldn't have withdrawn too many units for the eastern front – I doubt if he could have launched Barbarossa any earlier or more violently. And in the meantime he still had the Luftwaffe. He would have been able to strike at us even without an invasion. Hammer the cities – London especially. And he could attack the Atlantic convoys. In some ways we might have suffered more.'

'That's true,' Mary insisted, 'but with an unoccupied British mainland the allied western front would have been a hell of a lot stronger. You wouldn't have to go through a W-Day counter-invasion to scrape the Germans back into the sea before you could even contemplate going into France, for instance.'

'Perhaps. And with Britain intact, the Japanese might not have been bold enough to launch their invasion of Australia, for instance…' He pulled his lip, clearly not convinced. 'The trouble is, Mary, all the military logic of the time dictated invasion. In that summer the Germans had the momentum of blitzkrieg, and we were the last pawn to be taken. One way or another they'd have had a go, I think, whether the BEF was spared or not. Nice try, Mary, but invasion was inevitable, whatever happened at Dunkirk! Tell you what, though: if I may, I'll hand this to my tame boffins back at Birdoswald. See what they make of it. All right?'

'Sure. I'll give you my notes. So how did you get on? Where would your turning point be?'

'1938,' he said without hesitation.

It was hard to think back that far, to remember what was going on in the world before the great shock of the war. 'That was the year Britain was trying for peace, right?'

'We call it appeasement now,' Mackie said, his face hard. 'Bloody great mistake. We should have declared war when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, thereby tearing up all the guarantees he'd given up to that date.'

'But Britain wasn't ready for war – was it?'

'We were in a damn sight better shape than Hitler. He couldn't have mounted a blitzkrieg. He didn't have the tanks or the trucks. Why, he only had three months' fuel! He'd placed orders for ships, for instance, that could have overwhelmed the Royal Navy a few years later. But he couldn't wait, had to move fast. His Nazi economic expansion was heading for a bust, and at court there was plotting against him, according to our spies. And that's also why he's kept on moving – it was no surprise to me when they took on Russia. Nazism is a bankrupt ideology sustained only by endless expansion and conquest. In retrospect we muffed it; we should have struck when the balance of power was at its most favourable for us. By waiting another year we gave him the chance to arm to the hilt.

'As to what would have followed if we had gone to war then, there are many uncertain factors. I can't imagine the French poking their noses much beyond the Maginot Line, for instance. But at worst it might have been a war like the close of the last show, a lot of infantry manoeuvres. And at best it could all have been over by Christmas, and that would have been that for Hitler and his crew. It certainly would not have been the catastrophic collapse in the west that we actually saw.'

But it would have been politically impossible to have gone to war then, Mary thought. She remembered the mood in Britain, and indeed America. Only twenty years since armistice, another European war was a horrible prospect, and Chamberlain had been a hero, briefly, when he produced what looked like a peace deal. But Mackie was showing a side of himself she had perceived among other Brits, especially in the military. These were a people who believed themselves destined to rule the world. Hitler had humiliated them the first time he put a tank-tread on a south coast beach. Anything to reverse that.

She asked, 'So how would you make the change?'

'Actually we haven't got that far. Not as far as you! I must sack my historians.'

But he was being cagey, and suddenly she wondered if he was lying, if he had some team of military thinkers working on this counter-history for real, just in case. Which made him as bad as the lunatics in Richborough – and as bad as herself, for she had been seduced into seriously contemplating how her Dunkirk project would work. The power implicit in the idea of the Loom was just too tempting.

He smiled. 'Well now, look – enough of the fun stuff. Tell me what you've found out about this old fossil Geoffrey, and his inventory of history-botherers.'

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.'

'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.