Belisarius stood up. ‘I know very little about God. I have paid for the room for the rest of the day. You should rest. Keep your wound clean, bathe it in more wine, and try not to damage the skin further.’ He turned to go.
Macson, wincing as he moved his hand, struggled to his feet. ‘Wait. Please.’
‘I have business.’
‘I know. Perhaps I can help you.’
Belisarius, used to dealing with chancers, could see that Macson, groggy with pain and opium, was nevertheless thinking fast. ‘You can buy my books at a better rate than Theodoric, can you?’
‘No, but I can take you to better customers.’
‘Who?’
‘The monks. Especially in the north and east. Some of those monasteries are remarkably rich, Belisarius, considering what an impoverished island this has always been. And as they try to stock their libraries the abbots will pay a good price for your books - that is, they will pay a good price to Theodoric, once he brings them the books he purchased from you, marking up a handsome profit in the process.’
‘And how would I reach these monks of the north?’
‘I will guide you,’ Macson wheedled. ‘The old roads are still good, in places. It is not so difficult, if you know the way.’
‘Britain is a hazardous country, of many nations—’
‘Four. The British, the Picts, the Irish, and the Germans.’
‘Even the German lands are full of squabbling minor kings; everybody knows that.’
Macson shook his head. ‘For decades much of the German country has been under the sway of Offa of Mercia. The other German kings recognise him as bretwalda, overking. He has brought a certain brutish calm to the island.’
‘Offa’s name is known on the continent.’
‘Then you see the wisdom.’
Belisarius hesitated. What Macson said made a certain sense. Theodoric was a mere middleman, and an odious middleman at that. Would it do any harm to cut him out of the deal, just this once? Besides, he suspected there was something more than Macson was telling him - something Macson wanted out of this opportunity which had so fortuitously fallen into his lap. But what could it be?
Belisarius was naturally inquisitive and adventurous; he would never have become a trader if he hadn’t been. And now his curiosity was piqued. To see more of this strange island, cut off from the Roman world for four hundred years, might make a good chapter in his memoirs of travel.
Macson, shrewd and watchful, saw something of this inner dialogue. ‘Think of the tales you will be able to tell!’
Belisarius made an impulsive decision. ‘We will make this journey—’
Macson tried to clench his fist in triumph, but winced as his burned claw refused to respond.
‘But,’ Belisarius said heavily, ‘not for three days.’
‘The law is the Germans’, not mine!’
‘If you are healing, if God’s grace is on you, we will travel on this exotic adventure of yours. If not - well, I will have lost nothing but a little time.’
‘You won’t regret it.’ Macson raised his hand. ‘I am confident this will heal, thanks to Roman medicine, if not God’s grace. One condition, though.’
Belisarius, heading for the door, turned, amused. ‘Are you serious?’
‘My father comes too.’
VII
Gudrid walked around the village, looking for the slave from Lindisfarena.
Most of the houses, set back from the fjord’s shallow beach, were places of work: smithies, byres, barns. Stockades for the animals straggled up the hillside, as high as the grass could grow. But the big hall, thirty paces long and solidly constructed of squared and polished wood, was the centre of the community. Around its long hearth the endless winter evenings were passed in drink and talk, in play with the children, and in craft - sharpening blades, repairing clothes. The villagers were also proud of a small wooden building with stone-lined drains running under its walls. Here water was flung on burning logs to be turned to steam. Even in midwinter it got hot enough in there to make you sweat, and by day and night half-naked inhabitants crowded on its benches.
Did the monks of Lindisfarena have a hall, or a sauna? What were the trees like on Lindisfarena, what was the local stone? She knew nothing of the island, or of Britain. She didn’t even know what a monk was for. She burned with curiosity.
The slave had been put to work feeding the pigs. He had pails of bad meat and rotting vegetables which he was stirring with a long ladle. On his face was an expression of bored disgust.
His name, she had learned, was Rhodri. He was small, black-haired, round-shouldered. He was seventeen or eighteen, a few years younger than herself. His features were regular, his jaw strong, his ears a little over-large. He might have been good-looking, she mused, in a brooding British way, if not for a sullen downturn to his full mouth.
Rhodri became aware of Gudrid looking at him. He stopped work, leaned on his long ladle and stared back at her. His gaze, if sullen, was frank, almost defiant - and he stared speculatively at her body. She was faintly shocked; no slave had ever dared look at her that way before.
She snapped, ‘You’ll not get those pigs fed at that rate … Do you understand me?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice heavily accented. ‘You Germans have different tongues, but you all sound alike to me.’
‘We aren’t German. We are Norse. Or Viking. After our word Vik, which means “inlet”. We are the people of the fjords.’
‘Good for you.’ He yawned. ‘Anyway I picked up a bit of your tongue on the boat.’
‘My father’s boat.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re Bjarni’s daughter? Which one - Gudrid, was it? He mentioned you.’
‘You aren’t telling me he talked to the likes of you.’
‘It’s a small boat. And I have big ears, even if I am just a slave.’
She was growing angry at his easy insolence. ‘It’s a shame he didn’t teach you how to work.’
‘I am working,’ Rhodri interrupted, his voice now querulous. ‘Can’t you see?’ He rubbed his belly. ‘My gut’s still a knot from that boat. By Jesus’s wounds I puked myself half up.’
She snorted. ‘You’ll recover.’
He glanced at her, calculating now. ‘You’re the reason he went to Lindisfarena in the first place. You’ve got some kind of interest in it.’ Rhodri smirked. ‘A woman, interested in things. Your husband said it’s a shame your womb isn’t as fertile as your mind.’
She clenched down on her anger, at her father and husband for talking about her this way in front of a slave, at the slave himself for repeating it. ‘You watch your mouth,’ she snapped. ‘I want to know about Lindisfarena. Tell me about it.’
He considered. ‘What’s it worth?’
She was astonished. ‘Do you think I’m going to bargain with a slave? It’s worth not having the skin flogged off your back!’
‘All right, all right. What do you want to know?’
‘How did you come to be there? Were you always a slave?’
‘No,’ he said, absurdly indignant at the charge. ‘I was born free, in Gwynedd. That’s a British kingdom. I am the son of a noble. I am a Christian, and I was taught to read. I was taken prisoner when a German army came invading.’
‘Was your army defeated?’
‘I don’t know.’ He poked languidly at the pig swill. ‘They probably fought better without me. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t pay the ransom for me.’
He was taken by a Mercian thegn, a companion of King Offa. But he was always an unsatisfactory slave, judging by an aggrieved list of beatings and other punishments. After a complicated series of sellings-on he found himself on the east coast of Britain, and was shipped to Lindisfarena, where he worked for the villagers. ‘Cockle-pickers,’ Rhodri moaned. ‘By God’s wounds I hate cockle-pickers. And cockles.’
‘Were you as lazy cockle-picking as you are pig-feeding?’
‘I was,’ he said with a da
sh of honesty. ‘I hung back one day to avoid carrying the baskets and almost got drowned by the tide. After that, I tried to be lazy somewhere safe. And then, when they found out I could read, the monks took me in. They bought me off the head cockle-picker. He took a reduced price.’
‘Do monks have slaves?’
‘Oh, no. They freed me. They took me in as a novice.’
It was a word she didn’t recognise. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘I told you. I am Christian, and I can read. Even if I’m not the breed of Christian they are. They were training me to become one of them.’ He grinned. ‘Easiest place I’ve lived since I left my mother’s womb.’
‘So how did you end up here with the pigs?’
He sighed, mock-lamenting. ‘I think you know me by now, lady. The routine of a monastery isn’t hard, but it’s dull, dull, dull. I skipped what I could and got others to do the rest. But in the end the abbot found me out and ordered me returned to the cockle-pickers. Even Dom Wilfrid couldn’t save me.’
Dom Wilfrid, it seemed, was the monk in charge of the novices.
‘This Wilfrid must have seen your vices more clearly than anybody else. Why would he protect you at all?’
‘Ah, because poor, weak Wilfrid had a vice of his own. Much as he gave his wisdom to the novices, there was something he liked to get back from them. Up his bum, actually.’
She was disgusted.
He shrugged. ‘It was better than cockle-picking.’ Once again he looked at her, lascivious. ‘Maybe I could earn a few favours from you, lady. I was one of Wilfrid’s favourites. It’s not just my ears that are big about me, you know.’
Anger filled her, blood-red. ‘Give me one good reason I shouldn’t split open your grinning face right now.’
‘Because you need me to get to what you really want, which is Lindisfarena.’
She was appalled. She had never met anybody, let alone a slave, who was so manipulative. But of course he was right.
She didn’t know how to phrase the question. ‘Did you ever hear anything of a Menologium? Of a prophecy, a legend of Ulf and Sulpicia?’
He looked calculating again. ‘Your father said something about this on the boat …’
She told him of the legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer. Ulf, strong and smart, had died old, fat, wealthy, and the owner of many cattle and slaves. But over the hearth he always told stories of his time in Britain, the beautiful Sulpicia, and the remarkable prophecy he had glimpsed and lost.
And Gudrid told Rhodri how she had spoken to traders returning across the sail road from Britain and its many islands - and, from tantalising hints, how she had worked out that the prophecy, transcribed by monks, may have been stored in the monastery on Lindisfarena.
Rhodri listened to all this. ‘Well, it makes sense that your prophecy would be copied down at Lindisfarena, if anywhere. Always writing, those monks, scribbling things down and copying them and making more copies again. It’s a hive of letters, of ink and vellum and the scratch, scratch of styluses.’
She was mystified. ‘Why do they do this?’
‘What, the copying? I don’t know. But it’s an easier job than tilling the fields, a safer one than going to war. That’s why the monasteries of Britain are stuffed full of cowering princes.’ Now he smiled. ‘But that’s not all they’re stuffed with.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You need a reason to persuade your father to go there on one of these raids he’s planning, don’t you? I picked up that much on the boat. I think I know just the thing.’
‘What?’
His smile broadened. He was enjoying his petty bit of power over her. ‘Gold,’ he said.
She gazed at him. ‘If there’s gold there, why didn’t you tell my father?’
‘He never asked. And besides,’ he tapped his head, ‘my only wealth is my bit of knowledge. Why give it away?’
She stood up. ‘I need to talk to my father.’
‘Come back soon, lady. Maybe if I tup you I could lodge a baby in that dry womb of yours. Your husband would never know! …’
She dared not reply. She turned her back and walked away.
VIII
Dom Boniface had always been kind to Aelfric, yet she found him intimidating. Even in this famous monastery Boniface’s piety stood out. It was said that he would keep himself awake for three or four days at a time, praying intensely. Even his illness only spurred him on to thank God even more. But after the incident with Elfgar the computistor spent more time with her. Perhaps he felt guilty for what had been done to her, even if it wasn’t his fault.
And, he said mysteriously, he wanted to help her understand the true purpose of the monastery.
‘Saint Benedict taught us that idleness is the enemy of the soul,’ he said. ‘All work is good work. Your copying shows promise in its artistry, Aelfric, though how that promise may be fulfilled, only Heaven knows yet. Here in the monastery we are never short of time, and with the slow sifting of one generation’s judgement after another, only that which has true deep value persists. It is not me who will assess your work, but the centuries.
‘But you must always remember that you are here to serve, not your own art, but the words you preserve. The copies you make of these words may be transmitted all over the world -’
Sold on for a tidy profit, she thought a little sourly.
‘ - or, more importantly still,’ Boniface went on, ‘transmitted to the future. And that is our contribution to the ages, the preservation of such treasure for better times than this. Since the fall of Rome, Britain has been overrun by barbarians. We ourselves are the spawn of illiterate pagans! Like dogs learning to talk, we Angles have taught ourselves to read. But sometimes our veneer of civilisation seems awfully thin.’ He sounded tired, his voice a whisper. He was thinking of Elfgar, she supposed.
She felt an impulse to cheer him up. ‘We Angles might be barbarians. But we produced Bede.’
‘Ah, Bede! He died before I was born, but I met a man who knew him as a boy … Historian, theologian, computistor, Bede had it all. I think Bede would be horrified to see the corruption that has come upon the Church since his day. But perhaps every generation says the same. He was more Roman than the Romans, you know, but Bede had it wrong about them. We are the purer sort, we of northern blood. In the end the future is ours, not the Romans or the Greeks or the Moors.’
This baffled Aelfric. ‘What do you mean, Domnus? How can we be better than the Romans?’
‘Never mind, never mind. I digress,’ said Boniface. ‘We were talking about you. The abbot consulted with me, you know. When your father asked for permission to lodge you here.’
‘My father thought it was best for me. I am too restless. Too interested in books. I wouldn’t be a good wife.’ Her sisters had been married off by the age of twelve and thirteen. And, she suspected, in an increasingly literate age her father thought that a daughter who could read would be a boon to him. ‘He said that if I must learn, it should be here.’
‘I disapproved, if it matters to you,’ he said sternly. ‘This is a male house. There are mixed houses you could have been sent to.’
‘My father wanted me close by him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he loves me,’ she blurted.
‘Ah, a father’s love. I suppose I didn’t think of that. I have no children of my own, and never will. In this place one sacrifices family for a greater good.’
‘If you disapproved why am I here?’
‘The decision was the abbot’s.’ And the neutral way he said that implied that less than holy considerations, such as her father’s ‘dowry’, would have swayed the abbot’s decision. ‘Now that you are here, however,’ Boniface said, ‘and have been put into my care - one of the better jokes the abbot has played on me over the years - it is my duty to care for your soul. And I have seen that small soul blossom, I believe. Your father was right. Once the Romans had schools, you know, where you could learn anything you li
ked. The law. The sciences. History, art, philosophy. Now the only schools in Britain are in the monasteries—’
‘And all I am allowed to learn about is Christ.’ Her hands flew to her mouth in horror. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘Yes, you did,’ he said mildly. ‘You have the virtue of truth, at least. But you must repeat it to your Father Confessor.’
‘I will.’
‘It is obvious you are curious about far more than the Bible.’ He gestured at the vellum on the desk. ‘You would not adorn your work with pagan symbols otherwise. And don’t try to deny it. I am not one who believes curiosity is sinful, child. But I fear your questions may never be answered - not until your death, when you give yourself up to the light of Christ, and all answers will be revealed. And now your curiosity is engaged by the Menologium, isn’t it?’
‘How could it not be?’ she said politely. ‘But the Menologium - I know how important it is—’
‘Oh, speak freely, child, I can’t stand waffling.’
‘I don’t like riddles! When can a shield not be a shield, an island not an island? And I can tell you that a king would never bow to a hermit.’
‘I am disappointed in you. One reason I let you work on the Menologium is because I expected you to work it out. Think again - pick out the simplest element. Can you not think of an example of an island which is not an island? Are you really so obtuse? Child, you live on one.’
And, in her mind’s eye, she immediately saw the causeway. ‘Lindisfarena? Here?’
‘An island not an island, an island like a shield … As for rest of the stanza - the king and the hermit - have you not read Bede’s history? Have you never heard of Saint Cuthbert?’
A hundred and fifty years before, in the days of King Oswald who had summoned Aidan to found Lindisfarena, the other German kings, of the Mercians, the East Angles, the Kentish, and the West, East and South Saxons, recognised the Northumbrian ruler as their bretwalda; a great hall was built inland at ad-Gefrin, and Bebbanburh, not distant Lunden, was the capital of German Britain. But the times were turbulent. Northumbria was repeatedly invaded by British and Germans, Christians and pagans. And Oswald himself was killed by a scion of a rival dynasty, Oswiu.
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