Conqueror (28 page)

Cynewulf never saw the King again. Nor did he see Aebbe. But he did learn of her fate - in, astonishingly, a letter from the runaway slave and murderer, Ibn Zuhr.

Five years had passed since Cynewulf’s last meeting with Alfred when the letter found him.

‘I was impelled to write to you, Fr Cynewulf, for I knew you to be a good man, and always respected your intellect - though I believe that intellect to be wasted on your immature theology. I have no doubt you think ill of me, but perhaps you can understand how it was for a man like me to be condemned to a life of slavery under a man like Arngrim.

‘In any case I do not write for your forgiveness, but to satisfy my own longing to tell you my news.’

And that news, Ibn Zuhr said, concerned the fate of Aebbe - and the meaning of the Menologium of Isolde.

Ibn Zuhr, perhaps understandably, said little of himself. After the death of Arngrim he had escaped out of Wessex into Mercia and then, following the roads he had once travelled with Cynewulf and his master, he had made for Eoforwic-Jorvik. Cynewulf understood; this man of the cities of al-Andalus had sought the nearest to a city that Britain had to offer.

Among the Danes and English of Jorvik the Moor stood out, of course, but there were many traders from the southern lands in Jorvik. And in the bustling, open economy of the Danish town he had soon managed to scrape a living from his medicinal knowledge. ‘Perhaps my exotic appearance helps reassure my patients of my healing powers,’ he noted dryly.

He had always intended to earn enough money to get himself out of the country and back home to al-Andalus, and perhaps some day he would. ‘But I was such a young man when I was stolen from my home, and so much must have changed about it - and about me - that perhaps only disappointment would follow were I to travel back.’ And besides, as Jorvik grew and prospered, Ibn Zuhr found he rather liked his new life. He found the fusion of cultures fascinating. ‘Danish women spin all winter to make sails of English wool ...’

But he had never forgotten Arngrim, ‘the only man I ever killed’ or so he claimed. And through contacts with patients and traders he followed the fates of the leaders of the Force that had once assaulted Cippanhamm.

He learned that Egil, the Beast of Cippanhamm, nemesis of Arngrim, ‘and co-murderer with me of my master’, had come to Jorvik to end his days in the hall of his brother, a ship-owner called Ulfjlot, ‘just as brutal as his brother, though in possession of both his arms, and indeed all his teeth and an intact nose’.

Not long after Egil’s return, Ulfjlot died of ‘heathen excess’, wrote the Moor. And Egil and his family mounted a lavish funeral rite to ease the passage of Ulfjlot into the pagan otherworld. Ibn Zuhr described what occurred at this rite, as relayed to him by an eye-witness, he said, but in such detail that Cynewulf wondered if he himself had not attended the rite.

 

 

As is the custom of these people, the slaves of the dead man were asked which of them would die with his master. A young English woman who called herself Aelfflaed put herself forward. The other slaves, of course, made themselves scarce. This Aelfflaed, ageing, scarred but comely enough - for that would be important in what followed - would do.

So she was taken, and put in charge of two young women of the household, who waited on her for ten days. She ate, drank and indulged in any pleasure they could provide.

Meanwhile Ulfjlot’s finest ship was dragged on to the river bank and placed on a wooden scaffold, under which firewood was heaped. Amidships a tent of sail-cloth was set up over a couch. Ulfjlot’s brothers and their men set up tents for themselves close around the ship; there were seven of them, including Egil.

All this time Ulfjlot’s unlovely corpse had been rotting in a temporary grave. Now they dug it up, dressed it in fine clothes and furs, and placed it in the tent on the ship, propped up with cushions on the couch. They piled up food and drink at its feet, and weapons and armour at its side. Animals - a dog, a rooster, two horses and two cows - were slaughtered and their butchered parts put in the ship.

The slave’s ten days of pleasure were done; now only duty remained. She went from tent to tent, and Ulfjlot’s men had intercourse with her. Each of them ritually told her, ‘I do this out of love for your master. Tell your lord this.’ It went hard on her, for these types love roughly, and by the time the brute Egil had used her she could barely walk. But my witness noticed that the men did not seem comfortable in themselves afterwards.

With that grubby duty performed she was taken to a kind of doorway, a wooden arch. She was held up on the men’s palms (only one hand provided by Egil!), and she looked through the frame and said, ‘I see my lord in the Upperworld. Send me to him.’

So the seven of them took her into Ulfjlot’s tent on the ship and laid Aelfflaed out by the side of her dead master. Their men gathered around the ship and yelled and banged their shields, so that the other slaves would not hear what happened.

Two of them got her by the feet, two by the hands, while two others held the ends of a rope wrapped around her neck. You must imagine the scene, Father: the poky sail-cloth tent stinking of salt, the rotting corpse in its finery, the brutish men like animals huddled over Aelfflaed.

Now a woman they called ‘The Angel of Death’ entered the tent, and, as the two men pulled the cord tight, she stabbed Aelfflaed again and again in the chest, until there was no life in her. Then they all withdrew from the tent.

Egil, chief mourner, stood before the ship. Naked, one-armed, his face a ruin, what a sight the Beast of Cippanhamm was! With his one remaining hand he held a burning brand, and he set fire to the bonfire. Within an hour the ship was gone, destroyed by the fire, taking Ulfjlot to his brutish paradise.

But after this uninteresting heathen nonsense, Cynewulf, one by one, the seven men who had mourned Ulfjlot fell ill. Even at the funeral feast they were vomiting, and soon acidic bile hosed from between their hairy buttocks. Within a day the vomit and stools turned bloody - I saw this, as I was brought in to examine them.

It took most of them two or three days to die. Egil was stronger than the rest and it took him seven. He was conscious to the end, as the substance of his body drained out of his arse.

I think you can guess my conclusion, Cynewulf. The slave who died with Ulfjlot was surely Aebbe, who, her body and life wrecked by Egil, devoted herself to plotting her revenge. I seem to recall that Aelfflaed was the name of the great-grandmother of Lindisfarena she admired. Of course she still bore the scars Egil left her with. Perhaps she covered them over. Or perhaps Egil could not remember inflicting them. Perhaps he has hurt so many women in this way the memories blurred together. It seems he did not recognise her.

And as each of Ulfjlot’s men lay with her that day, she infected them with the disease that killed them. I have some small knowledge of medicine. I have heard talk of such foul contagions emanating from the jungles in the south of Africa. She might have administered it through a seed pod, delivered in a kiss.

Is revenge a sin in your faith, priest? I am sure murder is. If so Aebbe is surely laughing in Hell, even now ...

 

Ibn Zuhr closed with some excitable speculations on the Menologium, which he had managed to memorise on hearing it read to Alfred. ‘This strange prophecy-poem came into my life lodged in Aebbe’s head, and is now stuck in my own ...’ He had scrawled some ideas about the enigmatic stanzas of the future, but he added a wry note: ‘I am not qualified to be an oracle.’

He had been able to make sense of the Great-Year numbers embedded in the Menologium. Using the strange arithmetic of the Moors, which made adding large totals easy, he had summed forward all the Great Year months. With the sixth stanza’s prophecy of Alfred’s victory as an anchor he had calculated the date of the dawn of the ninth Year, when, said the Menologium, the final battle would be fought, and the earthly paradise of the Aryans would be founded.

‘You will see that your Menologium reaches beyond the Christian millennium,’ he noted dryly. ‘Will the world still exist to see this come to pass? Well, neither of us will live to find out; we are mere footnotes in the Menologium’s long story.

‘I offer this to you, priest, for what it is worth, in the hope that it will satisfy some sliver of curiosity of your own. As for me, I will go to my grave wondering about the true intentions of the Weaver, if he exists ...’

The year of the final battle would be the 5070th since the creation of the world, the 1819th since the founding of Rome, and the 487th year of the Islamic calendar. As for the Christian system, the date Ibn Zuhr had written down boldly was, in Roman numerals:

MLXVI

And in the Moorish system:

1066

Orm Egilsson didn’t even notice the bog until his horse went down under him. The animal screamed in agony as its legs snapped like twigs, and Orm was sent flying out of his saddle and came down face-first in the mud.

Winded, he pushed up to his knees, and scraped cold black dirt from his eyes and mouth. His mail coat was a mass of heavy iron on his shoulders. His horse lay prone, a steaming mass, and silent. Orm could see its head was bent back impossibly far; it was a mercy that the horse had died instantly.

But that left Orm stranded, on his knees in the middle of this muddy bog.

He glanced back the way he had come, to the north. He could see the Norman raiders, a thousand of them, galloping under the June sky across a burning landscape. This adventure into Brittany included a party of English, and Orm could see the bright red-and-gold Fighting Man standard of Earl Harold, where he rode alongside William of Normandy. Sensibly, the leaders were avoiding the copse where Orm had got himself tripped up.

Orm Egilsson was no Norman but a Dane. He was an adventurer, a mercenary. He had actually been riding ahead of the Norman raiding party. That way he had a chance to be the first upon the next hapless Breton farmer and his terrified family. It wasn’t much of a way to wage war, in Orm’s opinion, to ravage a countryside, torch the buildings, slaughter the men, and leave every woman over the age of nine raped to death. But it was the Norman way - and though he avoided the butchery and the rapes, the best way Orm could impress his employer, a Norman count, was to be out ahead of the pack, his blade flashing, his war cries louder than anybody else’s.

And that was why, as he took a short-cut through a small, tangled copse, he had been the first to come upon this patch of clinging bog.

Well, he had to get out of the mud. But when he tried to push himself up his arms just sank in the mush up to his elbows, and as he thrashed around the links of his mail coat clogged up and grew heavier. Winded from the fall, he was starting to tire. And, he realised, each time he struggled to free himself, all he succeeded in doing was stirring up the mud and sinking a little deeper. He had to laugh. Was this how his life was to end, drowning in mud? He would be turned away from paradise with the heroes’ mockery ringing in his ears.

And so much for impressing the Duke, he thought bitterly. But he had no choice but to ask for help.

‘Hey!’ He shouted as loudly as he could, and took off his conical helmet to wave it. ‘A hand! Over here!’

The Normans surged on like a storm, but he thought he saw a couple of riders peel off.

He struggled further, sank deeper. He repeated his cries in the Frankish spoken by the Normans, in English, and in Danish.

‘I can hear you. No need to yell.’

The new voice was English, and a woman’s. Orm tried to turn. The mud was now almost up to his waist, its heavy grasp tightening around his legs.

The woman, who must have been riding with the warriors, was standing at the far side of the copse, with a man beside her. Short, confident, wiry-looking, she wore no mail but a sensible tunic and trousers of tough-looking leather. Her brown hair was pulled back revealing a face bronzed by sun and rain. Blue-eyed, around twenty, she might have been pretty, Orm thought bleakly, if she wasn’t so obviously amused by him.

The man beside her had similar pale blue eyes; he was in mail and carried a mace, but looked too slight to be a warrior. Older than the woman he looked sly to Orm - slim and lithe, like a snake.

Orm knew him. ‘You’re the priest who rides with Harold.’

‘That’s true,’ the man said. ‘My name is Sihtric. This is my sister, Godgifu.’

Orm tried to straighten up, recovering as much dignity as he could. ‘And I am Orm, son of Egil, son of Egil, who—’ But he tipped over backward, and, thrashing in the mud, sank a bit deeper.

Like the call of a bird Godgifu’s laughter echoed around the little copse.

Sihtric murmured, ‘It isn’t polite to mock the poor chap, Godgifu. So you’re Egilsson? In fact I’ve been meaning to find you. Is it true your father was born in Vinland?’

‘Conceived there,’ Orm said, gasping in the mud. ‘Born in Greenland.’

‘Ah. And do you have an ancestor, another Egil, who fought Alfred at Ethandune?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then our families have a connection,’ said Sihtric. ‘You see—’

‘I would happily debate genealogies with you all day, priest,’ Orm said, breathless, ‘but I have rather more pressing issues on my mind.’

‘He’s right,’ said Godgifu practically. ‘Come, brother, we can discuss the Menologium later; for now let’s help him out.’

Godgifu and Sihtric cautiously worked their way around the bog. They found a fallen branch and laid it across the mud. The branch was heavy, its bark rotten and crusted with lichen, and they were both soon filthy. Orm managed to grab the branch, which at least stopped him sinking further into the mud. But he couldn’t pull himself out. They all kept trying, and Sihtric murmured a prayer in Latin.