Navigator

I

In the last days / To the tail of the peacock / He will come: / The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer / The Dove…

Long before he had ever heard of the Testament of Eadgyth, James grew up believing, or at least fearing, that the world's last days were indeed near. Legends of the last days had rattled around the house in Buxton since James had been taken in as a boy, and had listened wide-eyed to the lurid speculations of the older brothers.

As he grew, however, he learned that Franciscans had always been fascinated by legends of the Apocalypse. And as his soul and mind were opened up by the new mood of scholarship that embraced Europe, he thought he became sensible. Pragmatic. He put aside the grim prognostications, the peculiar antique longing for the end of things.

But now the quality of the whispering changed. Dreams that had once clung to the year of Our Lord 1000 accreted like ivy over another milestone year: AD 1500. That was not a remote future. That was a year James expected to live to see; he would not yet be forty.

And when the abbot took him aside one day, and showed him the abbey's secret library, where for two centuries the brothers had been labouring over spidery designs for engines of war – engines that might bring about that final catastrophe – then, in some secret library of his own soul, he began to feel afraid.

For Harry Wooler, it was the Dove himself whose beating wings cast shadows over his own life, on the day his own small world came to a kind of end, as his father lay dying.

Harry, just seventeen years old, was forced to lean over a face already like a skull, smell breath that still stank of ale, and listen while his father whispered in his ear a family tale centuries old, a tale of ancestors called Orm and Eadgyth, and a strange, dark prophecy of a man called the Dove who would shape all history. In the end this morbid tale merged seamlessly into his father's ale-drowned death-rattle. But Harry was the eldest son, and it was his turn to receive the legend, as had his father, an eldest son before him – it was his duty to listen. And after all, his father had driven away everybody else, his mother, his sister, his brothers.

So Harry listened, and after his father died he locked this morbid stuff away in his heart, and tried to imagine it had gone away.

But it had not.