Raven: Sons of Thunder (22 page)

I looked at Egfrith, who had given up on the horse trader, expecting him to propose a more diligent course of action than Penda’s.

‘I agree with Penda,’ he said brightly, raising his voice above the hubbub. ‘A drop of wine will inspire us.’

‘Wine, monk?’ I said. I had heard of the stuff, of course,
but I had never wet my lips with it. Wine was a rich man’s drink.

But Egfrith and Penda were already on the move. Folk instinctively stepped out of Penda’s way, for he was every inch a warrior and a frightening sight, whilst the monk wriggled through the crowds like a weasel through a field of stiff green barley. So, clutching Sigurd’s silver as though it were one of mighty Thór’s precious iron gauntlets, I followed.

We fought our way through herds of pigs being driven to the butcher’s block in preparation for winter. Fattened by the woodland mast of beechnuts, chestnuts, acorns, and other fruits of the forest, the hogs would make delicious eating, though to look at them swathed in filth, aggressive and wild-eyed, you would have thought they had just burst from the fetid pits of Hel.

Held down by three men, an old horse screamed as a fat woman sliced the artery in its neck, and nearby a pair of worn-out hounds quietly waited for death whilst their master sharpened his knife. It was that time of year, when a man must decide which of his animals will consume more fodder in the coming months than their remaining life can justify. Any old or ailing beasts would soon find themselves in the pot, and the tang of blood, stale and fresh, was just another ingredient of the fug.

We walked along an ancient, rotting gangway between densely wedged houses, some wattle-and-daub, others timber caulked with clay, and all leaking yellow-brown smoke through old thatch. A grey-haired warrior sat in the mud holding up a bowl containing three small silver coins. His left leg stopped at the knee where the breeks had been cut and tied off, and flies were swarming unopposed on a weeping sore on his neck. He looked a poor, wretched soul but for the tarnished silver warrior ring on his arm, which pride had not let him sell for food, though there was no pride left in his eyes. Penda
produced a coin, stopping to drop it into the bowl, and the man grimaced, taking the coin and secreting it away leaving three in the bowl once more.

‘Might have been something once,’ Penda muttered, moving on as Egfrith signed the cross over the old soldier before hurrying after us. We followed the lane round to the right, passing a shoemaker, whom I told myself to visit later, and a hideously ugly woman selling an assortment of young girls. Far from looking terrified, these girls grabbed at us as we passed, trying to make us touch their fledgling breasts and crotches, and it was enough to make the bile rise in your throat.

‘Holy Mary mother of Christ!’ Father Egfrith screeched, throwing his hands into the air out of their reach, as though these children were the brides of Satan himself, which they might have been for all I knew, though they flinched from me when they saw my blood-eye. We hurried on, past a row of rowdy fishmongers, then sidestepped a pile of congealing puke and looked up to see a barrel hanging from the eaves of a squat timber building from which the sound of drunken men leaked with the meal-fire smoke. We went to rinse our hands in the rain barrel by the door, but the water was a suspicious colour and so we left it alone, instead ducking into the crowded dark place which stank of sweat, old mead and ale, and guttering mutton tallow candles. Penda’s elbows carved us a ragged passage to a stout oak table behind which the tavern’s owner, a tall, thin, beak-nosed man, greeted us with a curt nod and began filling three leather jacks with ale.

‘Keep them coming, Frank,’ Penda said as I handed the man a silver finger ring from the ratskin hat. He bit into it and nodded, satisfied, then grinned at me.

‘I can fill them if you can empty them,’ he said in heavily accented English, already turning to serve a rowdy knot of fishermen who stank of herring guts and were covered in glinting fish scales. Dark red joints of meat hung curing above the
tavern owner’s table, some missing flesh wedges where they had been carved to the bone.

Penda drank deeply, then dragged the back of his hand across his lips. ‘Ah, that puts the fire out, boys,’ he said, and he was right, it was good ale. ‘Plenty of hops but not too much bog myrtle. As good an ale as you’ll find.’

‘And safer than drinking Bram’s mead,’ I said, stepping on a man’s toes to let a pretty serving girl wriggle past.

‘
Fils à putain!
’ the man growled. I turned to face him and he frowned when he saw my red eye. Then he took one look at Penda and turned back round, continuing the conversation with his friends as though nothing had happened.

‘I like it here, monk,’ I said, amazed by the loud murmur of so many men all talking at once. It was a sound like the sea breaking and plunging amongst rocks. But Egfrith was already fighting his way back to the tavern owner, empty jack in hand.

‘I think he likes it here too, Raven,’ Penda said with a smirk. A few moments later the monk was back with a wine skin, looking serious. Cradling the skin as though it were his precious Christ child, he filled our jacks with the red liquid. When I tasted the stuff I wondered if I had in fact been killed on the beach by the reeve’s men and was even now in Óðin’s hall Valhöll drinking the Spear-Shaker’s own drop. It was thin like water but had a strong, fruit taste which warmed my stomach, clouded my head, and put a stupid smile on my face. Before I knew it we were on our second skinful.

‘Now I know why you churchmen are always celebrating the sacrament, Father,’ Penda said. ‘Cut off my hair and give me a skirt if it means drinking this all day. This, Raven, is the blood of Christ. Isn’t that right, Father?’

I swallowed gingerly and stared at my wine, then stared at Egfrith, who nodded solemnly. ‘The Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed took bread, and when He had given
thanks, He broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” So it was written by Paul the Apostle,’ Egfrith said, ‘and so it is a great blessing to receive the Eucharist.’ He frowned at me. ‘You don’t know this, Raven? There
is
a church in Abbotsend?’

‘There was,’ I said, ‘but Wulfweard told me to stay away and that was fine by me.’

He shrugged and gulped another mouthful as though there really was a fire in his belly that needed dousing, but I had been put off and was now holding my jack at arm’s length. ‘No need to worry your twisted, black, heathen soul about it, Raven,’ Egfrith said, filling his jack again. ‘This wine has not been blessed. Not unless the tavern owner is one of the Lord’s ministers, which is about as likely as you being born of a virgin. Which means that this is still just wine. Not a drop of Christ’s blood in it.’ He sniffed, saluting me with his jack before swilling some more.

But it was too late for me. I tipped the rest of mine into Penda’s jack, the Wessexman smacking his lips together eagerly, and turned to shove my way to the serving table to fetch more ale. The White Christ must have been a giant with more blood in his veins than there is water in the oceans, I thought, if all his followers drank the stuff as vigorously as Father Egfrith.

Just before sunset there was a commotion when a Frankish official burst into the tavern with armed men at his back and began questioning the locals.

‘Someone has killed Radulf the reeve,’ Beaknose said, filling my jack again when I asked him what the excitement was about. He still seemed happy with the trade we had done and I wondered how much ale and wine a simple silver ring would buy. ‘A fisherman found him and Bernart and Arthmael
half buried in mud beyond the north wall. God knows what they were doing out there. Shame. Bernart was one of my best customers,’ he said with a sad shake of his head.

‘And some of that pork,’ I said, pointing above his head. He fetched a joint down, whipped a knife from his belt and began deftly carving slices of the meat and putting them on a platter. ‘Why would anyone kill the reeve?’ I asked, my mouth watering at the sight of the meat. Beaknose shrugged.

‘He was a nosy bastard,’ he said simply, producing a great lump of cheese which he added to the platter, ‘but a decent man all the same. Used to drink here most nights. All three of them.’ He shrugged again, handing me the platter proudly. ‘Still, no one likes paying taxes,’ he said.

We pretended to be dead drunk when the official and his soldiers got as far as us. Or maybe we were dead drunk. Either way, the man realized he would get more sense from a cuckoo, and seeing that Egfrith was a monk he moved on into the press. As it turned out, another ingot of silver about half the size of my thumb bought us each a space on the floor at the rear of the tavern, fresh straw, as much ale as we could drink until sunrise, and the name of an English-speaking fisherman who might tell us what we needed to know. That name was Winigis and Beaknose said we could find the man at cock’s crow by the jetty on the island’s south-west side, where boats from across the river could moor free of the clinging mud of the banks.

Egfrith woke us at dawn. My head felt like an anvil being pounded by Völund’s hammer and my mouth tasted like a dead dog’s balls as I splashed fresh water over my face from the bucket Beaknose had left by my head the night before. Then, after a long, cool drink of ale I felt alive enough to follow Egfrith and Penda out of that stinking tavern and into the Paris dawn. In the east the sky was blood red. In the west it was still black as pitch. All across the city cocks were crowing excitedly, the sound frantic, desperate almost, as though the birds had
never before seen the sun and were now fulfilling their life’s duty with wilful pride. And yet tomorrow’s dawn would break to the same strange song. ‘If all I had to do was fuck and crow, I’d be good at both, too,’ Penda said, holding the back of his head gingerly.

We walked through the streets thankful to find them all but empty, though the first traders were already setting up their stalls and carefully laying out their wares.

‘I’ll admit I have felt better,’ Penda said as we lined up behind a hazel screen and pissed into a trench by the inner embankment which tunnelled beneath the mound and out of the city.

‘You’ve looked better too,’ I said, ‘though not much.’ A shiver ripped through me as the hot liquid left my body. Even Egfrith seemed jaded this morning, though he claimed that was down to the last skin of wine’s having been bad. ‘Or perhaps it was the cheese,’ he suggested seriously.

‘You’re no Baldr the beautiful, either, lad,’ Penda said, his neck bones cracking as he rolled his head. ‘Whose idea was it anyway, to drink Paris drier than a nun’s cunny like that?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said, ‘speak to the man with no shoes,’ which reminded me to visit the shoemaker after our meeting with Winigis.

Egfrith let out a long squeaking fart that any Norseman would have been ashamed of. ‘O Lord,’ he chirruped, dropping the skirt of his habit to cover his little white legs once more.

‘That was a prayer He could have done without, Egfrith,’ Penda chuckled, pinching his nose.

We found Winigis the fisherman selling his morning catch of pike, perch, chubb and carp. The jetty was busy with boats coming and going and other fishermen were competing for trade with their own loud, repetitive cries. Nearby, apprentices knelt mending their masters’ nets or stood in moored skiffs bailing rain and seawater from the vessels.

When Winigis saw us trudging along the bank towards him
he smiled broadly and spread his hands over his catch, which flapped in baskets on a crude trestle of three long planks on two old tree stumps set in the mud. He spoke too but we could not understand him and so Egfrith raised a hand in a gesture that told him to save his patter for other customers.

‘We have been told that you speak English,’ the monk said as Penda picked up a fat chubb and examined it. The man frowned.

‘A little,’ he said, pinching two fingers.

‘Praise the Almighty,’ Egfrith replied, throwing his arms heavenward dramatically. ‘Then we have found the man we need.’

‘Aix-la-Chapelle,’ I said, checking that we were not being overheard. ‘You know it?’ Gulls shrieked above. The water, which moments earlier had looked black and cold, was now a distorted image of the brightening sky, its surface touched by gold, orange and red. A chill came off the moving water, making me huff into my cupped hands.

‘I have been there. Once,’ Winigis said guardedly. ‘You have not come for my fish?’ he asked, taking the chubb from Penda, who sniffed his hands and rubbed them on his breeks.

‘No, we don’t want your fish, Winigis. We want to go to Aix-la-Chapelle.’

‘We have business with the emperor,’ Egfrith said proudly.

Winigis shrugged. ‘I do not see what that has to do with me. I am a fisherman. And you are obstructing my trade, so kindly move along,’ he said, his eyes lingering on mine. Two women had come to judge Winigis’s catch against that of the stall to the right, but Penda turned to them and gave them a smile that made them blanch and walk away. Winigis was beginning to get agitated. He took off his hat in frustration and, glancing at each of us in turn, decided to appeal to Egfrith. ‘Please leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I am a simple man.’

‘You have an apprentice? Or a thrall perhaps?’ I asked. He
nodded, turning a palm to Egfrith as if to say so what? ‘Then your boat will be safe until you return,’ I said.