The Lost Prophecies (2 page)

The bishop picked up a thin book from the rough table at which he sat and brandished it at the abbot. ‘Is this the product of a Christian brother – or the ravings of the devil that lives within him?’

Conan opened the covers of wood covered with black leather that were bound over a thin sheaf of yellow parchment. He held it out towards the abbot and riffled the pages under Alither’s nose.

‘What demonical evil is this? Who in Ireland has ever seen the like of this before? Can you doubt that Satan had a hand in this?’

Alither had no need to look at it; he was only too familiar with the weird volume that, along with its author, had been the bane of his life for the past few months. Though the script was neat and regular, the content of the text was beyond comprehension.

‘Perfect Latin, beautifully penned!’ continued an exasperated Conan. ‘And what does it mean? Gibberish, blasphemous gibberish! Apparently claiming to foretell the future, blasphemously encroaching on God’s Holy Will, which has preordained every action until the end of time!’

The abbot nodded reluctantly. ‘It seems that way, bishop,’ he agreed sadly. ‘Compared with this, the Revelation of St John is crystal clear!’

Wearily, Conan dropped the book back on to the table. ‘Tell me again, before I cast my eyes upon him, how came this Brân to be here?’

Alither refilled the bishop’s mead cup from a small jug before replying.

They were seated in the bare room where the abbot slept, worked and prayed, one of a dozen wooden buildings clustered inside the palisade on a low gravel ridge on the banks of the great river.

‘He was named Brân, as the simple fisherfolk who found him were besieged by his namesake ravens as they rescued him from the beach – and Brân is well known as the son of a sea-god!’

With little effort he mixed pagan beliefs with his Christianity as he continued. ‘They took him straight to the abbey of Ard Fert, not two miles from where the babe was washed ashore. The women there cared for him for seven years, until he was brought up the Shannon to us here at Clonmacnois.’

Conan knew, as did every
religious
in Ireland, of the magical origins of this Brân. But as the years passed and the child grew first into a scholar, then a novice and finally a monk without any further manifestations of the Other World, it was forgotten for almost three decades.

‘He was talented with a quill and was put to work in our scriptorium, copying the Psalms and the Gospels,’ said the abbot. ‘Then one night last autumn, when the moon was full, he suddenly fell to the ground and had great spasms of his limbs. When he eventually fell quiet, he slept for a whole night and a day, then woke as if normal.’

‘Not quite normal, brother,’ said Conan dryly. He knew all this from the deliberations of the High Council in Tara five days previously.

Alither nodded slowly. ‘No, you are right, Conan. As soon as he awoke, he went like a man in a trance to the scriptorium and began writing these verses, with such obscure meaning.’

‘He had never written anything like this before?’ growled Conan.

The abbot shook his head. ‘Never. His copying was perfection itself. Over the years he prepared a large section of the Vulgate of St Jerome which was a joy to behold. Others did the coloured illumination, but his penmanship was exquisite.’

‘But the fits worsened, I understand? What did he have to say about all this?’

‘He told us that he always knew when a seizure was coming, as he was transported to some ethereal place where a voice spoke to him, filling him with prophecy and commanding that he record it as a warning to posterity. Then he knows nothing more until, when he recovers from the spasms, he has an irresistible urge to seize his pen and write.’

The bishop frowned. ‘Whose was this voice? Does he claim it was the Lord God Almighty – or maybe the Horned One?’

The abbot shrugged under the coarse brown habit that hung on his weedy frame. ‘He does not know, he says. It is just a voice that must be obeyed. He has no power to resist.’

‘And his chaining? That cannot control his convulsions, surely?’

Alither raised his hands in despair. ‘The fits come more frequently with every week. Now he suffers one almost every day. Lately, he has taken to wandering off like a sleepwalker, when he is in the trance that precedes each seizure. We cannot watch him all the time, so he has been shackled to prevent him walking into a fire – or into the river, which is so near.’

Conan grunted. ‘Maybe it would have been better to let him plunge into the Shannon – it would have saved us a painful task.’

He hauled himself to his feet with a groan. His journey here from Tara had been undertaken with reluctance, both from the distasteful nature of his mission and the effort at his age of riding a pony across the bogs of the Midlands.

‘Let us see this man, if indeed he is a man?’ He sighed, picking up the book again as they left the room.

Outside, in the circular compound that encompassed the wooden buildings and three tiny churches of the abbey, a group of monks and their women stood uneasily, watching the abbot lead this emissary of bad tidings across to a thatched hut on the extreme edge of the enclosure. Just beyond this, the low knoll on which the abbey stood sloped down to the oily waters of the Shannon, gliding silently through its many lakes down to the distant sea.

As they walked through the new spring grass, Alither made one last attempt. ‘Is there no other way, bishop? Can he not be hidden away in some hermit’s cell on the Cliffs of Moher or somewhere even more remote, like the Isles of Aran?’

Conan gripped the speaker’s shoulder in a rare moment of compassion. ‘And how would he manage to live, in his condition? Maybe choke in one of his fits, all alone? It is better this way, Alither. Our pagan forefathers would have strangled him or slit his throat and buried him in a bog-pool.’

Outside the hut stood two burly soldiers, part of the High King’s guard who had accompanied the bishop from Tara.

‘These will do the deed, brother,’ said Conan stonily. ‘I appreciate that no one here should be called upon to take part.’

Men and women, monks, servants, mothers and even children were drifting towards them, to stand in a silent ring around the hut as the two senior priests entered through the low doorway, which was covered with a flap of thick leather. Their eyes adjusted to the dim light that came through a narrow slit in the walls of clay and straw plastered over hazel withies between oaken frames. They saw a man in a coarse brown robe squatting in a corner on a pile of dry ferns. A stool, a wooden bucket and a small table with writing materials were the only furnishings, apart from a long iron chain that was looped around the central pole that supported the rafters. The other end was riveted to a wide metal band that encircled Brân’s waist.

The captive looked up as Conan entered and made the sign of the cross in the air.

‘God be with you, brother,’ intoned the bishop. ‘I am Conan, come from Tara to see you.’

The man on the floor looked up, his blue eyes guileless in a face drawn with exhaustion. ‘I know you, bishop. You were sent to kill me.’

There was no fear or loathing in his voice, just a plain statement of fact, lacking any emotion.

‘Why have you written these strange words, Brân?’ asked Conan, holding up the slim wood-covered volume.

‘I had no choice, father. It could not have been otherwise. I was commanded to set down the voice I heard. I am but a device for recording these awful truths. They emerge not from my mind but only from my pen.’

He shifted a little on his heap of bracken. ‘But it is ended now. There is no need for more writing.’

‘Do you understand what is said in the words you wrote, Brân?’ persisted the old bishop.

‘It is no concern of mine. These events will come to pass far in the future. Maybe I will be there to see some of them.’ He said this in an uncaring fashion, as if it was of no consequence.

‘Who gave you these prophecies, brother? Or are they of your own invention?’

Brân, his dirty red hair embedded with bits of fern and straw, turned a face like a tired angel to the old priest. ‘I know that you wish to discover whether it is God or Satan. But I cannot tell you, for I do not know.’

‘Where did you come from, Brân?’ persisted Conan.

‘Again, I know not! My first memories are of the good people who cared for me as a child. My last memories will be of the inside of this mean dwelling!’

Suddenly, his eyes rolled up so that the whites showed, and he fell back against the wall, lolling inertly with his jaw slack.

‘This is the prelude to a seizure,’ said the abbot. ‘He will be like this for a few minutes, then the spasms will begin. Maybe someone is speaking to him now, inside that head.’

Conan made a sudden decision. ‘It would be kinder to get it over with now, when he is unaware.’

Pushing Alither aside, he went out of the hut to speak to the two warriors who waited outside. The abbot hurried after him in time to hear his commands.

‘Release that chain, but leave the band around his belly – it will help to weigh him down! Bind his wrists in case he recovers, then carry him to the river and throw him well out from the bank.’

He turned to Alither, who was standing aghast and trembling. ‘Must this be, bishop? Is there no other way?’

Conan shook his head as the two guards moved towards the doorway. ‘From the waters he came and to the waters he must return!’

As the words left his lips, an ear-splitting clap of thunder crashed overhead though the sky was clear. On the river, a single high wave rolled smoothly up between the banks, splashing up on to the grass and sending birds squawking into the air. It passed as quickly as it had appeared, but now there were shouts from within the hut. Conan and the abbot pushed aside the leather flap and stared as the two soldiers pointed to the corner.

A metal band lay on the bracken, still chained to the post. Inside it was a brown habit, the coarse cloth crumpled into a small heap in the centre. On the table, Brân’s black book lay as it was left.

Alither picked it up and, crossing himself, stared at the bishop, his eyes wide with fear. ‘A miracle, Conan! But is it for good or evil?’

When three golden beasts did reign by bishop’s rule,
A bearded champion fought oppression’s realm,
His secret horde defied the edicts cruel,
But all was lost beneath the budding elm.

It was an unusual case for coroner Sir John de Wolfe – not so much because it was a find of treasure-trove but that it occurred not a hundred paces from his dismal chamber in Rougemont Castle. He was more used to ranging the length and breadth of the county of Devon to view some corpse, sometimes riding for three days on a journey to the more remote parts.

His clerk brought the news to him on a winter morning when the frost lay hard on the ground and even the sewage lying in the city streets was frozen solid. Thomas de Peyne, his thin cassock swathed in a threadbare cloak of grey serge, pushed his way through the curtain of sacking on the doorway at the top of the winding stairs cut into the walls of the tall gatehouse. The little priest’s narrow face, with pointed nose and receding chin, was blue with cold, but he managed to control the chattering of his teeth to blurt out the exciting news.

‘Crowner, they have found money in the outer ward!’

De Wolfe, sitting behind his rough trestle table, almost the only furniture in that spartan chamber, looked up irritably. ‘What, has some man-at-arms dropped a penny?’ he asked cynically.

‘No, there are many coins, hundreds of them – and some gold too!’ squeaked Thomas, rubbing an almost frozen dewdrop from the end of his nose. ‘Ralph Morin is there. He asked that you come and look, for it will be coroner’s business.’

There was a voice from the other side of the room, where Gwyn of Polruan, de Wolfe’s officer and squire, was sitting in his usual place on the cold stone of a window embrasure, apparently impervious to the icy wind that whistled through the slit.

‘What’s going on, Crowner?’ he rumbled in his deep Cornish accent. ‘This is the fourth such find since Christmas!’

John rose to his feet and pulled his grey wolf-skin cloak closer about his long, stooped body. As tall as Gwyn, but much leaner, he looked like a great crow, with his jet-black hair, hooked nose and dark stubble on his leathery cheeks.

‘After the first two hoards that were found, folk seem to have caught gold fever,’ he growled. ‘Half the town has found shovels and are digging into every mound they come across.’

As the three men moved to the doorway, Thomas added: ‘This wasn’t a mound. They were digging a new well for the garrison families living in the outer bailey. It seems they had not gone down more than an arm’s length when they found it.’

At the bottom of the stairs, which came out in the guardroom at the side of the entrance arch, they were joined by Gabriel, the sergeant of the men-at-arms who formed the garrison of Rougemont. The castle was so called from the red colour of the local sandstone from which it had been built by William the Bastard a mere two years after the Battle of Hastings. Gabriel was a grizzled veteran of some of the same wars in which John and Gwyn had fought, and they were old friends.

As they walked down the drawbridge over the dry moat that separated the inner from the outer wards of the castle, they saw a small crowd clustering around a wooden tripod, fifty paces off the steep track that led to the outer gate. Most of them were soldiers, huddled in thick jerkins against the cold, but a few hardy wives were peering from behind them, and a brace of children, apparently oblivious to the winter chill, were racing around and shouting. The outer ward, meant to be the first line of defence for the castle, was where most of the families of the garrison lived, their huts forming a small village inside the city walls.

Striding over the sparse grass and frozen mud, de Wolfe and his companions reached the excavation, where the circle of onlookers opened up to let them through. Here, another large man was issuing orders to the soldiers who were digging the well. He was Ralph Morin, the castle constable, responsible to the king for the defence and maintenance of Rougemont, for it was a royal possession, not the fief of a baron or manor lord. A tall, erect man, he had a forked beard that gave him the look of a Viking warrior.