The Lost Prophecies by The Medieval Murderers Page A

great deal of looting by foot soldiers, mercenaries and indeed the nobles themselves. The churches, abbeys and priories were not always immune, I fear. This book may have been gathered up during the pillaging of some religious house.’
    The old archivist had agreed and said that he recalled that several local knights who had returned from that campaign had donated various gifts to the cathedral, probably spurred by a guilty conscience. ‘Anything vaguely literary may well have been dumped up in the library and forgotten,’ he said ruefully.
    Now Thomas was going through the mysterious book, carefully digesting each obscure quatrain and trying to make sense of the messages they must contain. There were two verses on each sheet of parchment, neatly centred on the pages. The jet-black ink looked fresh, though the brittleness of the leaves and the patina on the leather casing of the wooden covers betrayed its age.
    For several hours the little priest pored over the verses, and all he managed were questions rather than answers. Who was this Brân who had written the quatrains? Where and when had he done it? And, most important, why had he felt impelled to write them?
    Thomas puzzled over the references to plague and Tartarus’ hordes and catamite kings – all of which meant nothing to him.
    Other questions slid unbidden into his mind. Were these actual prophecies and, if so, were they in chronological order? And what time span did they cover – a hundred years or a millennium or eternity itself? And how could any reader identify whether a disaster – for that was what they seemed to foretell – would occur in his lifetime, as opposed to in the past or future?
    When he had finished reading the twenty-four quatrains through for the third time, Thomas closed the book and sat back, his eyes closed as he tried to assemble his thoughts. One thing was clear to him, even though he felt guilty about his possible duplicity.
    Canon Jordan seemed adamant that this book might be an evil influence and so should be surrendered to higher episcopal or even papal authority. If that were done, the Exeter archives would lose something of possibly great religious and academic value. There and then, Thomas decided that he would make a fair copy himself, so that even if Brân’s original was taken from them, the library would at least have a record of the quatrains for further study. Surely, he told himself, even if there were some demoniac properties in the Black Book, they could not be transferred over to a mere transcript on virgin parchment. Spurred by the thought that the archivist and the bishop might act quickly and dispatch the book to Canterbury before he had time to study every verse, Thomas set to that very minute in making a copy. There was ample parchment lying around the library, as the treasury clerks and those who had to write the timetables and orders of service for the precentor kept a store in their desks. Thomas went around the room and took a couple of sheets from each place, then settled down with a fresh candle to begin his copying. He reckoned it would take him until tomorrow evening to finish the verses, given his other duties next day, then he could bind them himself. The simple materials of wood, leather and cord were kept in the library for this purpose, and Thomas was quite capable of threading a dozen pages between two thin sheets of wood and gluing leather across them. Once he had a copy, then he could concentrate on trying to decipher their meaning at his leisure, for this presented a challenge that his nimble mind relished.
    Late into the night, he remained hunched over his desk, the only sounds being the scratch of a goose quill and the occasional sniff as his sharp nose became even redder in the freezing air.
    It was almost midnight when he gave up, to go across to the cathedral for Matins and then back to his lodgings before the next service at dawn.
    The wide-ranging duties of a coroner included many events