Eve of St Hilda’s Feast, November 1001
Near Saltford, Oxfordshire
She made a circuit of the clearing among the oaks, three times round and three times back, whispering spells of protection. There had been a portent in the night: a curtain of red light had shimmered and danced across the midnight sky like scarlet silk flung against the stars. Once, in the year before her birth, such a light had marked a royal death. Now it surely marked another, and although her magic could not banish death, she wove the spells to ward disaster from the realm.
When her task was done she fed the fire that burned in the centre of the ancient stone ring, and sitting down beside it, she waited for the one who came in search of prophecy. Before the sun had moved a finger’s width across the sky, the figure of a woman, cloaked and veiled, stood atop the rise, her hand upon the sentinel stone. Slowly she followed the path down through the trees and into the giants’ dance until she, too, took her place beside the fire, with silver in her palm.
‘I would know my lady’s fate,’ she said.
The silver went from hand to hand, and against her will, the seer glimpsed a heart, broken and barren, that loved with a dark and twisted love. But the silver had been given, and at her nod, a lock of hair was laid upon the flames. She searched for visions in the fire, and they tumbled and roiled until they hurt her eyes and scored her heart.
‘Your lady will be bound to a mighty lord,’ she said at last, ‘and her children will be kings.’
But because of the darkness in that heart across the fire, she said nothing of the other, of the Lady who would journey from afar, and of the two life threads so knotted and tangled that they could not be pulled asunder for a lifetime or for ever. She did not speak of the green land that would burn to ash in the days to come, nor of the innocents who would die, all for the price of a throne.
There would be portents in the sky again tonight, she knew, and high above her the stars would weep blood.
A.D. 1001 This year there was great commotion in England in consequence of an invasion by the Danes, who spread terror and devastation wheresoever they went, plundering and burning and desolating the country … They brought much booty with them to their ships, and thence they went into the Isle of Wight and nothing withstood them; nor any fleet by sea durst meet them; nor land force either. Then was it in every wise a heavy time, because they never ceased from their evil doings.
– The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
24th December 1001
Fécamp, Normandy
The winter of 1001 in northwestern Europe would have been recorded as the coldest and fiercest in seventy-five years, had anyone been keeping such records. In late December of that year, a storm tore out of the arctic north with terrible speed, blasting all of Europe but striking hardest at the two realms that faced each other across the Narrow Sea.
In Normandy, it began with a sudden drop in temperature and a freezing rain that coated the limbs of the precious fruit trees in the Seine’s fertile valley. A driving wind swept behind the rain, snapping brittle, frozen branches and scattering the promise of next summer’s harvest over wide, sleet-covered fields. For a full day and night the storm raged, and when the worst of it was spent, a light snow fell upon the wasted landscape as quietly as a benediction.
Watching