Prologue

            The boys become suddenly silent. They are no longer boys really, but young men, perhaps finally delivered into manhood by this moment of realisation. The wind blows across the fields, hindered by nothing more than a few primitive buildings and a few ancient trees. The rope swings in time with its gusts, creaking against the branch to which it is tied, the branch dipping in a forced obeisance on each pass of the weight that it bears.

            They had not believed that he would do what he had promised, though some are cynical enough to question whether the others had really been so sure of that. Even now, perhaps, they might cut him down and save his life, but they are shocked and immobile. Only he moves, rocked to a dreamless sleep by the wind which blows down from the castle, across the friary, across the fields and beyond him, along the line of the river, down towards London. The dark skin of his face is darkened further by the accumulation of blood which, thanks to the tightness of the rope that digs so deeply into the flesh of his neck, cannot escape. His eyes are rolled upwards, bulging sightlessly from a head that will speak no more. One of the boys breaks his paralysis and takes a half-step towards the wilted figure hanging from the tree, but at the same moment, another takes two steps away, then turns and runs. His comrades follow. The boldest of them is the last to flee, but only by an instant.

            Across the fields, in the grey friary, a grey friar in a grey habit watches the scene. Twenty years earlier he would have known how to bury his sorrow in academic speculation. He might have noted the precise regularity with which the boy’s body swung to and fro, and perhaps wondered, four centuries too soon, whether such a motion could be used as the basis for a device that could record the passage of time. He might have considered the ‘species’ that emanated from the sun and those that emanated from his eye intermingling on the field and on the tree and on the rope and on the body and allowing him the benefit of sight. He might even have wondered whether the Greek-rooted ‘photon’ might be a better word than the Latin ‘specie’.

            His curiosity has always been a convenient veil for his emotion, hiding it both from himself and from others. But to hide is not to obliterate; he still knows that, but wonders whether others do. Today, however, his curiosity has evaporated. At the same moment that the boys became men, so the old man became a dying man. He returned to Oxford a year ago, knowing that it would be where he would think his last thoughts. Now he has thought them; all that remains is to record them, safe from an ignorant world.

            He turns away from the narrow slit that is the window of his cell – a cell little different from the one in which he so recently spent ten years imprisoned – never to look outside again, nor even to ponder the nature of looking. If anyone cares to look at him, they will see his lips move but briefly. They will hear nothing beyond wheezing exhalation, but if they choose to follow the movement they may make out the words.

“Time’s passed.”

The old man sits at a cluttered wooden table and picks up a quill. Staring at the blank stone wall, the words come quickly to him, but he writes them slowly, cross-referencing each individual letter in another book before scratching it down onto the vellum. What he writes is gibberish

NUXUAZTXGZONUKNELEDZFOPUQUNULRGFKV

and he means it to be gibberish. He writes a little over a page, completing a work of many, then puts down his quill. His work – his final work – is done. He waits.

It is almost two days before the friars emerge to cut the boy down. They have been afraid. His death reminds them too much of the Betrayer. And he was close to the old man, who, so they have heard, has the power to command the dead.

But no such commands are given, or at least none are heeded, and the friars carry out their work in rapid silence. A slight grunt of effort is heard as the last strands of the rope snap and one of the grey-cowled figures is le over a page, then puts down the quilles is gibberish.

lank stone, knowing that it would be where he would thtakes the sudden weight of the corpse in his arms. They do not return to the friary with it; he cannot be buried there. He lies scarcely feet from where he died; just a little way away from the roots of the tree, to make the digging easier. They glance back at the friary, but it is too far away to see if the old man is watching. They hurry back, just in case he is, and because the wind blows coldly.

The old man dies within the month. It is a relief to everyone, to him more than any. Again, the friars wait, perhaps in fear, perhaps as a show of disrespect, but in the end they bury his body fittingly. It is the feast of Saint Barnabas. The next day, they go to work on his work. A stream of men can be seen, each carrying a mallet and a handful of long, iron nails, going into the dead friar’s cell and then heading to the church with sheets of vellum clutched in his hand. The sound of hammering echoes across the town, up to the castle and across to the tree beneath which a plot of fresh grass has just begun to grow back.

The friars neither know nor care what they do as they attempt to crucify the old man’s words – the old man’s thoughts. Pages flutter in the breeze, covering every inch of the small wooden church, the iron nails piercing them and preventing their flight. The friars feel safe at last; safe from that which they don’t understand.

But there is one manuscript that none can begin understand, not even enough to fear it. In the other’s the Latin could be read. The words could be comprehended, if not their import. But this one is different. It is just letters, not even words. They seem random, but that cannot be – not from him. Not from that old man. He was a magician; they all know that. He would have known of the power of runes. Could this be some kind of spell, recasting the runes as Latin in some last trap set catch them even from beyond the grave? One brave friar approaches the church, holds the sheets of vellum up against the wall and raises his mallet, anticipating the sensation of his own heart being pierced even as the nail pierces the old man’s hidden words.

A gust of wind takes the sheets from his hand. The friars chase, but the papers run like startled cats, avoiding their clutches. As each page is tracked down, it flees once again, choreographed even from hell by a magus who will use any dark art to prevent his work – this vital part of his work – from being destroyed. When, eventually, they have all been recaptured, no one will step forward to raise his mallet to them.

Better to be rid of them. A friar heads east across the town to an old church whose new tower is just beginning to rise above the line of the surrounding roofs. The rector will know what to do with these papers. At least he will take possession of them. Round here they have less fear of words. It was round here that the old man studied as a young man; round here where he first started having his dangerous ideas.

The rector is busy. He has to find money to pay for the new tower, even though he knows he will never live to see it completed. He puts the papers to one side and promises to deal with them. That is enough for the friars. The problem is no longer theirs.

The years pass and the papers that decorated the church rot away. For a long time to come, fragments will adorn the nests of rats and birds, but none who can read will see them. Some consider it fortunate – others not so – that much of the old man’s work had long before been sent to His Holiness, or to libraries throughout Europe. Most will survive, some will be lost, some rediscovered.

The new tower is taller now. Work is beginning on the steeple. The wind still blows along the river valley, but every year there are more buildings to interrupt it. Halls and colleges are being built where men may study and live together. A new rector, going through some old papers, comes across pages that make no sense. The letters are random, forming no words. The rector has heard of such things. He goes through the first page, keeping a tally as he reads; the number of ‘A’s, the number of ‘B’s, the number of ‘C’s. After that it will be easy; but it isn’t. No letter has a count which stands out. There is variation, but not as he had expected. He is undeterred, and begins to write his version on a separate page, but still it is meaningless. He casts the document aside.

The spire is complete. The remains of the old church have been razed and a new building is rising. Already it is complete enough to hold services. The church is becoming important – people are calling it the University Church. Such importance should be preserved for posterity. A pile of papers – records of the church and its parish – is hurriedly delivered to a bookbinder’s just across the square. Neither the men of the church nor the men of books check the contents properly. In the middle of hundreds of pages that will never be read nestle a dozen or so that can never be read. The bound book is returned to the church, placed on a shelf and forgotten.

The church is still not complete, but the city around it has grown and is growing. Far away in France, a king wins a battle against all odds, but later dies of a disease of the gut. His brother, a duke, makes a gift to the university: books, manuscripts and documents. The university has nowhere to put them, so it builds a library, naming it after the duke. Now it needs further books to fill the library. Some are taken from the church on the other side of the square. Still no one looks inside – there will be time for that.

A new faith takes the country. The old one must be expunged. The grey friary is taken, the buildings flattened, the land sold off, new buildings built. The iron nails found in the rubble are recycled, hammered deep into new wood to make new buildings. Faith, however, is found not only in buildings, but in books. The dean of a new college, an ardent lover of the new faith, hunts down the books of the old one. The duke’s library is not spared. Some books are burned, some have their leather bindings stripped to bind newer, more acceptable volumes. Some are sold intact.

Within a few years, the old faith has once again taken hold. Three bishops are burned to death on a broad street to the north of the church. But the fire is fleeting. A queen dies and her half-sister takes her place and the new faith is quickly restored.

In a shop in London, a merchant flicks through a volume of parish records. It is of little interest, but for a section towards the middle, which stands out only by virtue of its being unintelligible. The merchant has already chosen several books, and the bookseller will throw this one into the bargain for almost nothing, so he takes it. He travels to Europe, buying and selling, and at length arrives at the court of an Austrian prince.

The prince has a princely taste for flattery. It is easy enough to sell him texts that he will never read, but that will decorate his walls, but such wallpaper only fetches a price that befits its purpose. What though is a fair price for a book whose contents are disguised? The greatest minds in Europe, so the merchant tells the prince, have pondered the mysterious writing. In reality, the merchant took a brief glance as he crossed the English Channel, but only enough to satisfy himself that there was no easy solution – no solution that can be spotted before he has comfortably left town. However, a man like the prince, so the merchant tells the prince, could make his name – as a thinker as well as a warrior – if he could just decipher it. The prince is tempted. He has no idea how to approach the problem, but he has only to get lucky once. He buys the book.

In Oxford, the library founded by the long dead duke is restocked by a rich man – rich from marrying a rich widow whose husband made had made his money selling pilchards. The library is rebuilt and extended, talking on the name of it new benefactor. The old duke’s name is memorialised in a single room.

In Austria, the prince studies his newly bought mystery for almost two weeks. It reveals nothing. He throws the book angrily onto the fire, but it misses, landing on the hearth. The prince goes to fight a war, where he dies painfully. A servant quietly puts the book back on a shelf.

The library – and around it the university and the city – continues to grow, both in buildings and in books. It begins to receive a copy of every new book published in England. A fire breaks out in the west of the city, in buildings close to one of the new colleges, not far from the castle and the site where the grey friary once stood. As repairs are made, a few human bones, of one scarcely older than a child, are found and discarded – but the tree and the rope are long since decayed. A century later, back over in the east, a new library is built, between the old library and the church. With its domed roof, it is architecturally grand, but academically it does not compete with its older sibling.

The university – or an alternative in the flat lands of East Anglia – becomes an essential step on a young man’s road to adulthood. One such is a baron. Like many before and many who will come after, he makes little effort with study, and never ventures inside the library. But he dutifully attends the University Church, which, once the pinnacle of the stonemason’s art, is now old and cold and gloomy. The baron’s prayers – and his parentage – succeed where study failed. He attains his degree. He puts it to immediate use, embarking upon a popular war in Europe, at which – thanks, perhaps, to his education – he is a great success.

The English baron’s greatest victory is over an Austrian prince, as little capable on the field of battle as had been his great great great grandfather. By way of reward, the baron receives an earldom and the late prince’s library. The books provide a quality of grandeur to the newly elevated earl’s newly built country estate. The earl lives to be an old man, but is sadly childless – thanks to a wound inflicted by one of the Austrian prince’s more capable foot soldiers. In his dotage, he reflects on the gifts bestowed on him by his alma mater. He decides he must repay, and so bequeaths his library, unextended and unread since the day he so violently acquired it. On the earl’s death, librarians shake their weary heads at the arrival of his donation; yet more books for an overflowing library; books that must be catalogued and stored, and perhaps one day read.

Mechanisation speeds up the printing of books and education provides a literate population. Still the library receives a copy of every new book published in the country, a number which increases with every passing year. It is too much to cope with. The new library – the one with the dome – now not so new anymore, is taken over by the old one. It is no longer called a library, simply a room. Still there is not enough space. Within another hundred years, another new building is added. Man-made caverns are excavated to house the books. An underground railway links the various parts of the library. A king – another victor, by proxy, of a war in Europe, distantly related to the king whose brother, the duke, founded the library – opens the new wing and, in an omen of ill fortune, snaps off the key in the lock.

Beneath his feet, in the subterranean stacks, sits an old, bound volume of manuscripts. Within its leaves are a few pages of random letters, written seven hundred years before, occasionally looked at, rarely noted, never deciphered. They have waited; they can wait. History will present them with a window during which they can be significant. A few decades earlier, they would have been a curiosity; a few later – an anachronism. Now is their time, if only someone has the wit to read them.

A canister rattles along a tube, propelled by compressed air. It contains a request. Books are loaded onto a conveyer, the object of that specific request buried amongst dozens of others. The conveyer trundles along the tunnel, between the domed building and the old library. The book is taken out, taken up to the duke’s library where it had once rested briefly, centuries before. A tall man with in white suit dons his eyeglasses to inspect it. He translates the Latin documents by sight, noting down a few points that interest him slightly. Then he comes to a section in the middle of the volume, written on velum. His power to translate is lost.

He ponders. He wonders. He comes back the following day and looks once more. Later again he returns, accompanied by a young woman. He shows her the pages. Wearily she sits and transcribes them, the laptop that she is using saving little labour in the chore. Then, for months, the book is left on the shelf. Occasionally the man or the woman comes back to refer to it, but they work on its secrets elsewhere.

The book has waited seven centuries, never complaining as it travelled Europe and returned, almost, to its starting point. A world has changed around it, but it remains unchanged, unread, undiscovered. It can little know that its meaning has been revealed, never mind where or how, but if it had the capability simply to look out of the window, across the courtyard and through the gate, it would see the first violent consequence of its decipherment, as a man in his twenties rides with unnecessary and reckless haste a bicycle whose front wheel is about to converge with a recently discarded fragment of orange peel.