Conqueror (19 page)

Amgrim said, ‘His name is Ibn Zuhr. I bought him at the slave market at Brycgstow.’

‘A Moor,’ Cynewulf said, startled.

‘He has his uses. He can count, for example.’

‘Even
you
can count,’ Cynewulf said dryly.

‘Not like him. He can compute sums beyond nine hundred!’

‘Impossible,’ breathed Cynewulf.

‘Apparently not.’

‘Why bring him here?’

Amgrim sighed. ‘Alfred insists his thegns be Christian, and literate. Well, I can fake the Christianity but not the literacy, and I don’t have time to learn, not with the Northmen rampaging around the country. If I have
him
I am literate too, at least by proxy. But he hasn’t got me any closer to Alfred.’

Cynewulf was intrigued. ‘Does he have a tongue of his own? Say something in your own language.’

Ibn Zuhr spoke rapidly, a string of harsh syllables.

‘What did you say?’

‘I complimented you on your appearance.’ But there was a hint of mockery in this slave’s eyes.

‘Why are you literate?’

‘In my country, although I was taken away by the Northmen when I was a young man, I was a scholar. A pharmacist, in fact.’

There was a commotion at the head of the hall, where the King had interrupted his prayers. He was bent over, his hands on his chest, evidently struggling to breathe.

Aebbe murmured, ‘He looks ill.’

‘They say he has struggled for breath all his life,’ Arngrim said.

‘Perhaps he is
asthmatic,’
suggested Ibn Zuhr. It was a Greek term the others weren’t familiar with.

Aebbe was interested. ‘You said you were a pharmacist. Perhaps you have something to treat the King.’

The Moor smiled, and opened his cloak. The interior was stitched with tiny pockets, each barely wide enough to admit a probing forefinger. ‘I had my stock with me when I was taken from al-Andalus. It is much depleted, but a little remains. Hold out your hand,’ he said to Arngrim. He sprinkled a pinch of a ground leaf, deep green, into the thegn’s palm.

Arngrim sniffed this suspiciously. ‘What is it?’

‘Its name is—never mind. It is a plant from Africa, a country my people now own. Tell your King to crush this in a little wine, and then to rub the paste under his nose. It will not cure him but will relieve his symptoms.’

Arngrim closed his fist. ‘Maybe this will be my way to the King’s hearth.’

‘You trust this slave?’ Cynewulf asked. ‘What if it’s poisonous?’

Arngrim glanced at the Moor. ‘I’ve seen him work his magic before. And he’s a very long way from home. If he did betray me, where could he go, with skin that colour? Eh, Moor?’

Ibn Zuhr merely smiled.

Arngrim had to wait until the King’s latest prayers were finished. Then he pushed his way through the line of supplicants and presented his pinch of herbs to the King. With some scepticism Alfred’s physicians took it away to be prepared, and at length returned with a bowl of paste. When the King applied this to his face, leaving a smear like a green moustache under his prominent nose, his breathing seemed to ease.

Alfred smiled on Arngrim.

The Moorish slave, eyes downcast, said nothing.

They found a place to sit, at one end of a long mead bench.

Ibn Zuhr fetched food and drink for them all. Even at this dying end of the Twelve Days feast there was meat - pork, mutton and game bird - and winter vegetables blended into a broth, and ale and wine to drink. Cynewulf wondered if this greasy meat, thick broth and lumpy ale was much like the food the Moor had been used to at home. But Ibn Zuhr had evidently learned the lesson of all slaves that you filled your belly whenever you got the chance, and, sitting at Arngrim’s feet, he wolfed down his portion.

Aebbe was curious about Arngrim and Cynewulf. ‘You don’t look like cousins.’

Arngrim grunted. ‘That’s what your choices in life will do for you. I always hunted and wrestled, and drank myself into a stupor in honour of Woden, while poor Cynewulf laboured over obscure books and argued with even more obscure theologians. And look at us now!’ He slammed his heavy arm down on the table.

‘My father encouraged me,’ Cynewulf protested. ‘He could sense the way the wind was blowing - Alfred’s father King Aethelwulf was just as learned and pious as he is himself. Anyhow I don’t regret it, not for a second, for my course in life has brought me closer to God.’

Arngrim snorted. ‘But it has denied you a family, among other pleasures. I have three strong boys, Aebbe, tucked away with their mother this cold Christmas, safe within the walls of a town. But for all our differences, we were always friends - eh, Cynewulf?’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ the priest said resentfully. ‘You were five years older than me, twice my size, and you bullied me relentlessly.’

Amgrim laughed and quaffed his gritty ale. ‘I was only trying to toughen him up. Maybe it worked too. But what about you, Aebbe? What’s all this about a prophecy?’

And Aebbe, haltingly, with assistance from Cynewulf, told him the story of Aelfric.

The Northmen’s first raid on Lindisfarena, still shocking nearly ninety years later, was well known to Arngrim. ‘And this Aelfric was there, your grandmother—’

‘My great-grandmother,’ Aebbe said. ‘She escaped with her life - and with the Menologium of Isolde, the prophecy, locked up in her head.’

‘The only copy,’ said Cynewulf mournfully, ‘for the Northmen burned or stole the rest. Copies of copies, lovingly preserved across centuries—’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Arngrim testily. ‘Then how did
you
know about it, priest?’

‘Through my ability to read,’ said Cynewulf, allowing himself a stab of triumph. ‘Another survivor wrote down an account of that terrible assault - and that is where I came across a mention of the prophecy. Whether it is the work of God or the devil, it seems to contain a seed of truth, a rough map of the future. And I knew I must try to track it down.’

‘Why?’

‘Because - so I believe, based on what I have read -
the sixth stanza concerns Alfred,
and the great trial he faces against the Danes.’

From the floor the Moor listened, evidently intrigued.

Aelfric, returning to her family at Bebbanburh, had in time taken a husband, the son of a thegn, and had children of her own. It was said that she filled her house with books, a habit her husband and children never shared nor understood. But she was never able to wipe away the scars on her soul left by the events at Lindisfarena.

And she never forgot about the Menologium. She had lost the scroll to a Viking raider, but she had spent long months labouring over its words in the scriptorium. With time she trawled it all from her memory, word by word, stanza by stanza. But she never wrote it down.

When her own daughter grew old enough she taught the whole long poem to her, by rote, word by word. And when that daughter had children of her own, in turn, she entrusted the memory of the Menologium to her own youngest daughter’s memory.

Aebbe said, ‘Aelfric preserved the Menologium in the minds of daughters and granddaughters. She said men were good for nothing but slaughter and rapine.’

‘Probably true,’ grunted Arngrim.

Cynewulf had managed to trace Aelfric’s descendants down to his own time, and to Mercia where they had fled as the Danish force carved up Northumbria.

Arngrim said, ‘And so you went looking for this child - Aebbe, greatgranddaughter of a woman who impersonated a monk.’ He laughed at the thought. ‘And this is the story you want to take to the King.’

‘I must take her, Aebbe, for even now she won’t write down the Menologium. But I believe that I must bring this prophecy to Alfred. More than our lives are at stake - the whole future of England, and the future of our children’s children, may depend on it too.’

‘I’m curious,’ said Ibn Zuhr suddenly, and inappropriately. ‘Master—’

Arngrim drank his ale and shrugged. ‘Ask what you want.’

‘You refer to this island of yours, the part you own, as England.’
Engla-lond.
‘And to yourself as English.’
Englisc.

Cynewulf shrugged. ‘So what?’

‘You are not English - or not all of you. The “English”, the Angles, are just one of the German nations who came across the ocean centuries ago.’

Arngrim growled, ‘The word “English” has spread to mean us all. I don’t know why; I’m no scholar. I blame Bede, that toiling monk, scribbling his life away. He was an Angle, wasn’t he?’

Cynewulf was irritated by this slave’s air of superiority. ‘What do names matter, Moor? What do
you
call yourself?’

The slave smiled at the priest. ‘The children of God.’

Arngrim said, ‘Ibn Zuhr tells me that his people believe their civilisation to be the most advanced in Europe. All that ancient learning they preserved, you see.’

The priest sneered. ‘Such claims are easy to make.’

‘But my medicine has soothed your king,’ Ibn Zuhr pointed out.

‘Where are you from? Africa?’

‘No. Al-Andalus. Which is in Iberia.’

‘Tell me how you come to be here.’

‘Because of the Northmen ...’

When the western Roman empire had collapsed, German immigrants called Visigoths took over the former province of Iberia. They maintained the old Roman machinery of government, and in time the province had become a strong, unified, Gothic Christian nation. But Africa was only a short sea journey away to the south. And there, new forces stirred.

A mere seven decades after the death of the Prophet the armies of Islam swept across North Africa, and launched a series of devastating assaults into Iberia. In just four years the horde had burned across the peninsula, shattering the fragile Gothic state, and had even pushed into southern Frankia. Their advance resounded across a nervous Europe, and was noted by Bede in faraway Northumbria.

In Iberia the Muslims built a new nation, eventually independent of the caliphate in Damascus; it was called al-Andalus, an Islamic society within western Europe. Soon al-Andalus was exchanging embassies with Constantinople.

Then the Northmen came. Raiding across Europe, they sent their dragon ships sailing up the great rivers of Iberia to assault the cities of al-Andalus, just as they had raided elsewhere. The emirs, stronger and better organised than the post-Roman monarchies of Europe, turned them away.

But still the Vikings pressed. Sixteen years ago, Ibn Zuhr said, two adventurers called Bjorn Ironsides and Hasting had led a bold raid down the western coast and into the Mediterranean sea. Their ultimate goal had been to reach the treasures of Rome. In this they failed, but they did make it home with a cargo of treasure and captives from al-Andalus - one of them Ibn Zuhr, then a young man of twenty from a city called Granada. He had been sold into slavery in Ireland, and then, when his pharmacological skills had been proven, sold on at higher prices through a chain of owners until he finished up in a market in Brycgstow, where Arngrim had spotted him.

Cynewulf shook his head. ‘From Lindisfarena to Iberia, the Northmen do mix up our lives.’

There was a sound like distant thunder, dimly discernible beyond the walls of the noisy hall. Arngrim turned to the door, frowning.

Cynewulf asked, ‘And do you worship God, Moor?’

‘Muhammad was the prophet of the one God,’ Ibn Zuhr intoned.

‘And what of Jesus?’

Arngrim said, grinning, ‘To them He is just another prophet.’

‘This man is a pagan then,’ snapped Cynewulf.

‘But he isn’t,’ said Arngrim. ’I’m no more a theologian than I am a scholar. But it seems to me that the faith of this chap is based on a prophet who came
after
the Christ. Now, how can you priests make sense of that?’

Cynewulf shook his head. ‘This is a testing age for Christianity. The Pope says so. We are caught between the pagans of the north and these unbelievers from the south. Do you seek to crush us, Moor?’

‘That is for the emirs,’ Ibn Zuhr said gently, ‘not for me.’

Aebbe asked, ‘What about prophecies? Can your God see into the past and future, even change it?’

‘Allah is unknown and unknowable.’

Which was no answer, Cynewulf thought, and yet a very deep one. Fascinated, irritated, longing somehow to puncture the sleek hide of this very certain man, he tried to frame his next question.

And then the door was smashed down. Freezing air flooded in. The wall lamps flickered.

The invaders ran straight into the hall, roaring.

Tall, helmeted men, they wore coats of leather, and they swung gleaming axes. They ran down the central aisle, between the great oak pillars. They even climbed on to the long tables, running. None had shields. Perhaps they believed no shield would be necessary.

And those cruel axes swung, lopping off heads and limbs with single strokes, and swords stabbed into crowded flesh. Suddenly there was blood everywhere, an iron stink, and a fouler smell of loosened bowels. The hall became a churn of flesh. And the English warrior nobility ran screaming, as panicked as sheep.

For Cynewulf, still sitting stunned on his bench, it was a transition from light to dark, from order to chaos, from humanity to something bloody and primeval, and it had happened in a heartbeat, less. And he was shocked by the youth of these rampaging men. Few of them looked much over twenty. There was an avidity about their work, a joy in killing.

Arngrim dragged Cynewulf to his feet and pulled him back against the wall, out of the crush. He was armed with a boar spear he had taken from the walls, and his expression was an iron mask. ‘We have to move.’

‘Arngrim, how can this have happened? There was a truce.’

‘Broken. It doesn’t matter. Are you listening to me? Ibn Zuhr, get him out of here.’

The Moor, calm as ever, took the priest’s arm.