Conqueror

by Baxter, Stephen

He sat beside her, solid, round-shouldered, his hair greasy. With ill grace he took the food. Sitting side by side, not touching, they ate.

  Askold had always been a bit short, solidly built, not the brightest - ‘muscle all the way to the top of his head’, her father liked to joke. He wouldn’t have been her first choice of husband. But he had been the first to come courting, in his clumsy way, when she was fourteen. Since then he had stuck with her, and she had never seen him do a deliberate unkindness to another - although she had heard he could be brutal when he went raiding. He wasn’t a bad man, then. Probably.

  But he was disappointing, she thought drearily. Sex with him had been painful the first few times, then for a while vaguely pleasurable - but quickly, like much else in their lives, it had become a chore. Nowadays they would lie together of a night, and he would spend himself into her, and they would roll apart and sleep, all without exchanging a single word, even without kissing. It had been like this since she was sixteen years old.

  And when the sons refused to blossom in her womb, their relationship turned dull. He had stayed with her. Perhaps he loved her in his way. But it was a cold, deadened love. Surely the love of Ulf and Sulpicia, six generations back, had been much more fiery than this.

  It didn’t help that these days the fjords swarmed with other men’s sons. Sons were a source of pride, a sign of virility, a promise of wealth in old age. And all those sons wanted their own homes.

  That was the trouble, her father said. The fjords were full, they were already living halfway up the mountains, and still more sons popped from the women’s loins. That was why the people were sailing off to Britain, or even further.

  These thoughts reminded her why Askold had said he had come here. ‘You say my father is back?’

  He nodded and pointed. ‘Look, you can see his ship. Good trading with the British. Whale ivory in exchange for wool and hunting dogs and slaves. Plenty of good places for a landing, he said.’

  She knew what that meant. Good places to raid.

  ‘Oh,’ Askold said. ‘He told me to tell you. The island you’ve mentioned before - where the story of Ulf and Sul - Sulpi—’

  ‘Sulpicia.’

  ‘Where all that’s supposed to have happened.’

  She guessed, ‘Lindisfarena?’

  ‘That’s the place.’

  ‘It didn’t happen there. There’s just supposed to be a copy of the prophecy there. The Menologium of Isolde …’

  Askold waited, staring into the misty distance and chewing his meat, until she shut up. He hated to be corrected.

  ‘Tell me what my father said.’

  ‘Not much more than that. They landed, did a bit of trading with black-robed monks, left. Bjarni said he couldn’t see why he would ever go back.’

  Gudrid was disappointed. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Oh, and he brought a slave back. Got him cheap. A useless-looking lad who puked all the way back across the ocean.’

  That was something, she thought. Slaves often saw more than their masters imagined; perhaps he could tell her about Lindisfarena.

  She had finished her bread and meat. She stood, stretching her arms. ‘Askold, are you busy? I’ve a spare axe, and water.’

  Askold glanced at the trees she had been stripping. ‘I’ve nothing better to do.’ He got to his feet, took the better of the two axes she had brought, and set to work.

  As they laboured through the spring afternoon, they exchanged barely a word.

  V

  The scriptorium was a quiet, dark, silent room, smelling of old vellum and sour ink, its walls lined with stacks of books. Aelfric was alone here, working by the sputtering light of a goose-fat lamp. This inky womb was her favourite place, she thought, in all the world.

  The nib of her pen scratching softly at smooth vellum, Aelfric laboured over her copy of the fourth stanza of the Menologium of the Blessed Isolde:

  The Comet comes/in the month of October.

  In homage a king bows/at hermit’s feet.

  Not an island, an island/not a shield, a shield.

  Nine hundred and seven/the months of the fourth Year …

  Her pen was cut from a goose quill. The ink, which the monks called encaustum, came from an oak tree gall. You crushed the gall in vinegar, thickened it with gum, and added salts for colour. The ink was thick and caustic and bit into the surface of the vellum - and so you had to take great care with your lettering, for a mistake when made could not be unmade (though it could be disguised as embellishment, as Aelfric had quickly learned).

  The vellum on which she wrote was the skin of a calf, soaked in urine to remove the hair and fat, then scraped clean, stretched on a frame and smoothed with a stone. There was something wonderfully earthy about it all. She could smell the monks’ piss, and even when the book was complete it would have to be bound in a wooden frame to stop it curling back into animal hide.

  Dom Boniface, the old computistor who was her tutor, said Aelfric, a mere novice with less than a year’s experience, should regard it as an honour to be working on the Menologium. It was the small library’s ‘hidden treasure’, as he put it, in among the Bible commentaries, hagiographies and histories, and books of grammar and computistics and chronologies. For this brief and enigmatic document supported the abbot’s claim for the Blessed Isolde to be confirmed as a saint by the Pope, thus adding to Northumbria’s already glittering array of celestial warriors. And the words themselves were precious. They had almost been lost, Boniface told her, committed to the memory of illiterate pagans for several generations before being transcribed once more.

  But the Menologium’s terse enigmas irritated Aelfric. Take this fourth stanza, for instance: how could a shield not be a shield, an island not an island? And she knew kings; her father was the thegn of a king, and no king would bow to a hermit. It was all much too opaque for Aelfric, who was impatient with riddles, artificial obstacles to the truth.

  But she could always find pleasure in the work itself.

  This copy of the Menologium would be little more than a transcription of the text with some simple illumination in black ink. She longed to be able to use colour, to unleash her imagination fully, as she was promised one of these days - one of these years, such was the pace of monastic life. But around the opening ’T’ of that first line she carefully sketched out a tree, with roots fading into unseen depths and branches reaching to the sky. The tree image was a secret joke. In this Christian manuscript she hinted at Irminsul, the World Tree of legends repeated around her father’s fire: the tree in whose mighty branches lodged the universe itself …

  Elfgar and his novices pushed their way into the scriptorium.

  ‘Ah, novice - Aelfric, is it? We haven’t had a chance to talk.’ Elfgar’s face was round, almost fat. He must eat far more than he was supposed to. But his eyes were deep and sharp. His companions, whose names she didn’t know, were still, watchful.

  ‘And you’re Elfgar.’

  Elfgar bowed.

  She stood warily, with her back to the desk. Elfgar and his cronies fanned out, cutting her off from the door. She saw low cunning in their overfed faces. But her head was full of words, and her first reaction wasn’t fear but irritation that they were wasting her precious time. ‘What do you want? You can see I’m working. Soon study hour will be done—’

  ‘Ah, yes, study.’ Elfgar leaned over the manuscript, coming close to her. She could smell him, a kind of sickly milkiness under the dirt stink. ‘You’re not very good at it, are you?’ With a slow, obscene gesture, he put his finger in his mouth, drew it out wet, and held it over the page.

  ‘Please,’ Aelfric said hastily. ‘You’ll ruin it.’

  ‘So what? It’s only scribble.’

  ‘It’s hours of work. I’ll go to Dom Wilfrid. I mean it.’

  Elfgar snickered. ‘Dear old Wilfrid. It’s a long time since I heard a harsh word from him, I can tell you that. But then he’s so ashamed.’

  ‘Ashamed? Of what?’


  ‘Of what we give him, and how he longs for it.’

  ‘Whatever it is you want, Elfgar, get it over.’

  He stepped closer, so that milky stink was even stronger. ‘Why, do you think I’m here to hurt you, novice? Not at all. I’m here to help your frail little soul. It will do you good to eat a little less each prandium, and hand over the rest to me and my brothers. It will speed your way into Heaven to work a little longer in the fields in the hours of opus manuum, while I and my brothers doze. You see? That sort of thing. And just to prove how sincere I am, I’ll freely give you a little of what Dom Wilfrid so longs for, in his cold and lonely cell.’

  The others rushed her from either side. Before she could raise a hand they had pinned her arms and spun her around, and Elfgar pushed her down so she sprawled over the table, belly-down over the precious Menologium. She struggled, and was punched in the back hard enough to wind her. It took only heartbeats. Obviously these brutes practised their moves.

  The sudden violence in this place of learning was shocking.

  And when they had her pinned, the others yanked her arms over her head, and Elfgar fumbled at her habit, dragging it up over her legs.

  She understood. They were trying to tup her - even thinking she was a boy. So this was how they exerted their power, even over poor, confused Dom Wilfrid.

  But she was no ordinary novice.

  ‘You can’t do this. You’ll burn in Hell!’ She thrashed and squirmed. Her reward was another punch, this time in the nose. Her mouth filled with blood. Elfgar ripped down her pants and kicked apart her legs. He fumbled at her, and she felt the hot tip of his prick pushing at the cleft of her buttocks.

  Dazed by the blow, confused, she tried to think. Perhaps if he used himself up in her arse, she could still get out of this with her secret intact, and no worse than a bloody nose and a sore backside.

  But now, with horror, she felt his hand snaking around her hips. Perhaps he meant to play with Aelfric’s balls. There was nothing she could do about it. She felt his hot hand slide over her belly, and then down into the tangle of hair below—

  He pulled back. ‘Tears of Christ!’ He laughed. ‘Why, lads, he’s no Aelfric! You’re a—’

  Wood slammed on bone. ‘Animals! Hell-hounds!’

  Elfgar howled and fell back. Aelfric’s hands were released. She slipped backwards off the table, her manuscripts sliding back with her. Frantically she fumbled at her habit.

  Dom Boniface was laying about him with his walking stick, the purple scar on his face flaring. The three novices yelled and ran. Elfgar was bleeding from the back of his head, his pants around his ankles, his prick comically still erect. They clattered into tables, spilling heaps of vellum and ink pots, until at last they made it out of the door. Boniface chased them. ‘I’ve had enough of you animals! I know what you do! Never mind your confessor, I’m going to the abbot about this, and you’ll be scourged as even you have never been scourged before! …’

  The Menologium was on the floor, covered in blood and spilled ink. Aelfric lifted it to the table and tried to smooth it out.

  She was distracted by a wheeze. Boniface, his burst of energy used up, had collapsed to the floor, still clinging to his stick.

  She ran to him. ‘Dom Boniface. Let me help you.’

  With one arm under his, she got him to his feet. He was lighter than she had imagined, frailer, and there was a strange stink about him. Perhaps it came from the purple growth that enveloped one cheek and the side of his jaw. As she walked him to a chair, she tried not to recoil.

  He noticed, of course. Gasping, he said, ‘Oh, you needn’t be afraid of it, child.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘Of my demon, the thing which is eating me from the outside in. I don’t fear it. I thank God for sending me an opportunity to show my strength! I have had a good life, and a long one - I’m forty-three, you know - I thank Him and praise Him.’ She got him to the chair, but he tried to kneel. ‘Join me now, child, in a prayer of gratitude.’ He closed his eyes.

  She knelt, but she felt unable to concentrate. ‘Oh, Dom Boniface - the manuscripts are ruined! Even the original is covered in blood.’

  ‘The blood you spilled defending it. That’s no sin. Ruined? Well, perhaps. But time ruins all things. That is why we make copies, after all. Your copy may last a century or two, but when it wears out there will be another novice, in this very room, to make a fresh version, and so it will go on.’

  ‘But all the time I put into it—’

  ‘Then you must thank God for giving you the opportunity to start again and to do it even better. Everything that happens to us reflects the generosity of God.’ He opened one eye. ‘I don’t think he saw, you know. Elfgar. He felt below your belly, but he may not believe the evidence of his fingertips. Especially since he was distracted by my stick colliding with his thick head. Your secret is still safe. Safe with you, your father, the abbot - and me, Aelfric.’

  ‘Aelfflaed,’ she said miserably. ‘My name is Aelfflaed.’

  ‘No,’ Boniface said gently. ‘In this holy place, your name is Aelfric. Come now, Aelfric, and join me in prayer.’

  She closed her eyes, kneeling, and followed as he began to chant a rosary. The repeated words soon lost their meaning, and the throbbing pain of her nose subsided in the soothing rhythms.

  VI

  At last Macson opened his eyes.

  He was lying on a straw-filled pallet, in a small, smoky, mud-walled room. He turned his head to see Belisarius, who sat gravely on a battered couch in a corner of the room. Macson raised his right hand. Belisarius had stripped it of its bandages. At the sight of his ruined palm, Macson blanched.

  Belisarius waited patiently.

  Macson said something in a tongue Belisarius didn’t recognise. Then, evidently remembering further, he repeated it in Latin: ‘Where am I?’

  ‘A tavern,’ Belisarius said. ‘Near the docks. I took a room.’

  ‘You brought me here.’

  ‘It wasn’t cheap. I had to hire two men to carry you.’ Two of those accusers who had filed out of the church, in fact, who hadn’t been averse to accepting a little of Belisarius’s silver.

  Macson looked at his hand. ‘What have you done? The bandage—’ ‘The priest’s rag would not have helped. I removed it and bathed your wound in wine, which may stop it festering. And it is better to leave the burn exposed to the air, rather than to cover it.’

  ‘You are a bookseller, not a doctor.’

  Belisarius frowned at how much this stranger seemed to know about him. ‘True. But I have always travelled. I have necessarily picked up a little medical knowledge, if only to keep myself healthy. The Moors, in fact, are proficient in medicine, having preserved ancient wisdom and built upon it.’

  Macson moved his hand cautiously; it was rigid, claw-like. ‘I’m not even in much pain.’

  ‘I gave you a little opium. The pain will return, I’m afraid.’ Macson turned to him. ‘Thank you. You helped me. Though I’m not sure why.’

  Nor was Belisarius. He had no business here, save to sell his books, and he certainly didn’t want any entanglement with local criminals. But perhaps there had been something in the dignity of this shabby Latin-speaker, tortured before his eyes by barbarian Germans, that had appealed to his soul. He said simply: ‘You asked me.’

  Macson propped himself on his left elbow and laughed, hollow. ‘A man may ask for charity from a bishop, but he doesn’t always receive it.’

  ‘Besides,’ Belisarius said carefully, ‘you claimed you know me.’

  ‘So I do. You are Basil—’

  ‘Belisarius.’

  ‘Yes. Belisarius the east Roman. You deal in rare books from the libraries of Constantinople and Alexandria. I have worked for Theodoric before. You may not remember me - but I do you.’

  Belisarius didn’t remember this man, but he had no reason to believe he was lying. ‘You are not a German.’

  ‘No. I was born on the other side of the estua
ry of the river Sabrina, in what was known as the land of the Silures, - in the days when this island was a province of Rome.’

  ‘You are of the wealisc.’ Welsh.

  He grimaced. ‘I am British. The wealisc is what the Germans call us. It is a word that means “foreigner”. Or “slave”.’

  ‘Tell me what was being done to you, in that church.’

  ‘It was a trial,’ Macson said darkly. ‘I am a learned man, sir, as is my father, who raised me as a scholar. I worked faithfully for Theodoric in his book business for many years. But Theodoric accused me of stealing from him. So I was brought to the church, to be paraded before supporters of Theodoric’s case.’

  ‘And you must return in three days.’

  Macson studied his hand. ‘If the wound is healing I must be innocent, for God protects the good, and I will go free. But if the wound is festering it is because of the corruption of my inner heart.’

  Belisarius shook his head. ‘These Germans call themselves Christians, but such a ritual has more of the pagan about it.’

  ‘How true,’ Macson said. ‘And how good it is to be able to converse in a civilised tongue.’

  Belisarius, a hard-nosed trader, was immune to flattery. ‘Are you a slave, Macson?’

  ‘No,’ Macson said fiercely. ‘My father was born a slave, from a line of six generations of slaves. But we never forgot who we are. We are descended from a British woman called Sulpicia, who was raped by a German, or possibly a Norse. Her bastard child, neither British nor German nor Norse, was given up to slavery.’

  ‘Six generations? That’s a long time to hold a grudge.’

  ‘We remembered who we were, and what had been done to us. At last my father was able to purchase his freedom. Thanks to him I am free-born - the first since Sulpicia herself.’

  Belisarius, not much interested, merely nodded. ‘Then tell me this, free-born. Are you guilty?’

  Macson looked him in the eyes, and evidently calculated. ‘Yes. Yes, I am guilty. Theodoric is a fat, greedy fool who cut my pay. I stole food to keep my sick father alive. In your heart, do you believe that is a crime before God?’