Read Online Conqueror by Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online

together of a night, and he would spend himself into her, and they would roll apart and sleep, all without exchanging a single word, even without kissing. It had been like this since she was sixteen years old.
    And when the sons refused to blossom in her womb, their relationship turned dull. He had stayed with her. Perhaps he loved her in his way. But it was a cold, deadened love. Surely the love of Ulf and Sulpicia, six generations back, had been much more fiery than this.
    It didn’t help that these days the fjords swarmed with other men’s sons. Sons were a source of pride, a sign of virility, a promise of wealth in old age. And all those sons wanted their own homes.
    That was the trouble, her father said. The fjords were full, they were already living halfway up the mountains, and still more sons popped from the women’s loins. That was why the people were sailing off to Britain, or even further.
    These thoughts reminded her why Askold had said he had come here. ‘You say my father is back?’
    He nodded and pointed. ‘Look, you can see his ship. Good trading with the British. Whale ivory in exchange for wool and hunting dogs and slaves. Plenty of good places for a landing, he said.’
    She knew what that meant. Good places to raid.
    ‘Oh,’ Askold said. ‘He told me to tell you. The island you’ve mentioned before - where the story of Ulf and Sul - Sulpi—’
    ‘Sulpicia.’
    ‘Where all that’s supposed to have happened.’
    She guessed, ‘Lindisfarena?’
    ‘That’s the place.’
    ‘It didn’t happen there. There’s just supposed to be a copy of the prophecy there. The Menologium of Isolde ...’
    Askold waited, staring into the misty distance and chewing his meat, until she shut up. He hated to be corrected.
    ‘Tell me what my father said.’
    ‘Not much more than that. They landed, did a bit of trading with black-robed monks, left. Bjarni said he couldn’t see why he would ever go back.’
    Gudrid was disappointed. ‘He said that?’
    ‘Oh, and he brought a slave back. Got him cheap. A useless-looking lad who puked all the way back across the ocean.’
    That was something, she thought. Slaves often saw more than their masters imagined; perhaps he could tell her about Lindisfarena.
    She had finished her bread and meat. She stood, stretching her arms. ‘Askold, are you busy? I’ve a spare axe, and water.’
    Askold glanced at the trees she had been stripping. ‘I’ve nothing better to do.’ He got to his feet, took the better of the two axes she had brought, and set to work.
    As they laboured through the spring afternoon, they exchanged barely a word.

V
    The scriptorium was a quiet, dark, silent room, smelling of old vellum and sour ink, its walls lined with stacks of books. Aelfric was alone here, working by the sputtering light of a goose-fat lamp. This inky womb was her favourite place, she thought, in all the world.
    The nib of her pen scratching softly at smooth vellum, Aelfric laboured over her copy of the fourth stanza of the Menologium of the Blessed Isolde:
     
     
    The Comet comes/in the month of October.
In homage a king bows/at hermit’s feet.
Not an island, an island/not a shield, a shield.
Nine hundred and seven/the months of the fourth Year ...
     
     
    Her pen was cut from a goose quill. The ink, which the monks called encaustum, came from an oak tree gall. You crushed the gall in vinegar, thickened it with gum, and added salts for colour. The ink was thick and caustic and bit into the surface of the vellum - and so you had to take great care with your lettering, for a mistake when made could not be unmade (though it could be disguised as embellishment, as Aelfric had quickly learned).
    The vellum on which she wrote was the skin of a calf, soaked in urine to remove the hair and fat, then scraped clean, stretched on a frame and smoothed with a stone. There was something wonderfully earthy about it all. She could smell the monks’ piss, and even when the book was complete it