So, in the light of a fire built in the ruins of Banna’s headquarters building, Belisarius spoke of Bethlehem, where he had seen a grotto faced with marble, known to be the site of Jesus’ birth. And he spoke of Jerusalem, where he had seen the hill of Golgotha, and the rock where the cross of Jesus had been raised, where now stood an immense silver cross and a bronze lamp-bearing wheel. And he spoke of a mighty church erected by the first Emperor Constantine, at the site where his mother Helena had discovered the True Cross.
‘Helena, yes,’ Caradwc whispered. ‘The British always loved Helena …’
Those were the last words he spoke, and by the morning he was dead. With help from Belisarius his son buried him on the ridge that overlooked the river, his grave marked by a simple wooden cross.
X
Some days after her talk with Rhodri, as the whale-blubber candles burned smokily in the hall and the conversation rumbled contentedly, Gudrid approached her father with her suggestion that he should go back to Lindisfarena.
She wasn’t surprised when he was sceptical.
‘It might be fun to split open a few monkish heads,’ Bjarni said. ‘But it’s not what we’re going there for.’
‘Then what?’
‘Land. We need more land, Gudrid.’
Bjarni was a hefty man, with greying blond hair tied back from a high forehead, and a nose sharp as an axe blade. In his forty-five years he had done his share of fighting, but Gudrid knew that he had earned his muscles in building up his farms. He was not a natural raider, not bloodthirsty; he was embarking on this course of action for a wider purpose.
Bjarni was following in the footsteps of many of his elders. Like bees venturing from a hive, the ships of the Vikings were probing out of the overcrowded fjords. This was not directed by any king, for kings were weak in a land so divided by nature, but by the ambition of independent, wilful men. That probing was aimed not just at Britain and its islands but at the warmer lands further south, and even to the east, where huge rivers drained the heart of Asia, just as navigable by Viking ships as were the seas.
‘The first raids are always vital. The German kingdoms in Britain are fragile, fractious, riven by internal strife. Everybody knows that. In the long term we should achieve great success against them. But the cheaper the success the better, as far as I’m concerned. And the element of surprise is everything.’ He smiled at her. ‘And that’s why it would be a mistake to go chasing your dream of a family legend.’
‘I won’t deny that’s what I want,’ she said. ‘But, Father, listen to me. There are other reasons to go to Lindisfarena. Those monks are rich. Richer than you’d imagine.’
He shook his head. ‘That makes no sense. Nobody would store riches in such as vulnerable place as a coastal island.’
‘You’re thinking like a seafarer, not a Christian. Father, the monks came to Lindisfarena to convert their countrymen to their faith. They wanted a safe place to live. But the threat in their eyes came from the land, not the sea. And so they chose to live on a tidal island because it is hard to reach from the land. It doesn’t even seem to have occurred to them that an attack might come from the sea. They will be quite defenceless.’ She repeated what Rhodri had told her, about how pilgrims brought their money to give to the monastery. ‘Believe me, those monks on Lindisfarena are rich!’
‘Believe you, or a slave on the make?’ He thought it over. ‘All right, child. Just this one time we’ll do as you say - if the others agree. One thing, though: are you sure this prophecy is worth all the trouble? Doesn’t it speak of the Christ? Everybody knows the Christ is a powerful god. He has His adherents even here. Some of the men might fear tangling with His worshippers.’
She grinned. ‘The Christ let Himself be nailed to a tree. I’d back Woden in a fight any time. Just give him a hammer!’
He grinned and clapped her on the shoulder. ‘Gudrid, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Sometimes I wish you could be more like your sister Birgitta. But you have the mind of a son—’
‘And the womb of one too,’ she said bleakly.
He covered her hand with his. ‘Have patience.’
‘There’s one more thing,’ she said, pushing her luck. ‘The raid on Lindisfarena.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m coming too.’ And she bolted from the hall before he had a chance to refuse.
XI
Belisarius and Macson arrived at the north-east coast of Britain, opposite the island of Lindisfarena, early in the morning. As it happened the tide was high, and the island was cut off. There was no boat to carry them across, indeed no signs of human life on this sandy coast. So Macson led their horses to a patch of tough dune grass, and then came to sit with Belisarius in the shadow cast by their cart.
Belisarius wasn’t sorry to be held up. It was going to be a warm day, and a humid one; the sea was like a pool of molten glass, barely stirring even as the tide tugged at it, and the Germans’ holy island floated like a slab of pumice. It was pleasant to sit here, and to watch the birds wheeling over the sea, intent on their own tiny dramas of life and death.
And Belisarius was glad to see the sea again, to breathe in its sharp saltiness. He might even take a dip in the water at some point; the brine would wash out the sores and blisters he had picked up on the journey, and purify a skin that had gone too long without a proper cleanse, the only bath-houses on this benighted island being ruins where nobody had fired up the boilers for four hundred years.
As the morning wore on, the sea subsided. It was noon, the sun high, when at last they stirred themselves and made the crossing. The causeway’s damp sand gave way under their querulous horses’ hooves and clung to the cart’s wheels. Macson walked alongside the horses, soothing them with soft words - German words for horses bought from a German - while Belisarius walked behind, steadying the cart.
The causeway was so low that at times the sea almost lapped at their feet, and half way across, suspended between the island and the mainland, Belisarius felt as if they were walking across the surface of the ocean itself. He remembered that these half-converted Germans were superstitious about border places, crossroads, liminal zones between one kind of landscape and another. Suspended on the hide of this ocean, Belisarius felt a flicker of their ancient fear of the world’s edges.
At last they reached the island, and rolled up a shallow beach to firmer land. They came upon a village. The monastery itself, quite humble, was a small distance away.
The village was the usual sort, a huddle of houses, shacks, lean-tos, bowers and pens, fading into the worked countryside, muddy and slumped. Beyond the mean huts fields stretched away in long uncertain strips, a geography determined by the limitations of the Germans’ heavy wheeled plough. There were baskets everywhere, full of shellfish or glistening fish carcasses, and clouds of flies hung over the dung heaps and open cesspits. The most unusual, and charming, aspect of this seashore village was that the hulls of worn-out boats had been upturned and reused as houses or stores. And at least the usual sewage stinks of a German village were laced with a tang of rotting fish.
The children were the first to notice the approach of Macson and Belisarius, as always. They came running, curious. They were followed by alarmingly big dogs - shepherds’ dogs, kept to drive off the wolves.
Amid this cheerful gaggle, a man came striding out to greet them. He was tall but spare, with a streak of grey in his dirty blond hair; he was perhaps in his mid-thirties. He wore a luxuriant moustache, and a necklace of shell and stone. Further away Belisarius saw other men and women watching them with a cautious curiosity. Belisarius, like Macson, made sure his hands were visible at all times.
‘My name is Guthfrith,’ the man said. ‘You’ve travelled far, I can see that. Are you here for the monks?’
‘We are.’
Guthfrith said that one of the monks was here in the village this morning - a ‘deacon’ called Elfgar, here to collect shellfish for the monastery. Though he shouted for this E
lfgar, he wasn’t to be seen, and Guthfrith gruffly invited the travellers to rest in his own home.
The travellers accepted, and followed Guthfrith. In the course of the journey Belisarius had learned that the Germans had an honourable tradition of hospitality, even in a country not yet fully controlled by its kings, where people were wary of strangers. Of course it always helped to grease the axle of this old tradition of generosity with a couple of silver coins.
The hut’s smoky interior was dark, although the skin doors were tied back on this bright summer day. The floor was dirt-strewn, and the planks laid over the storage pits underneath creaked softly as Belisarius stepped across them.
Remarkably, Guthfrith’s home had been built around the trunk of a tree, a dark pillar at the centre of the floor. Some of the tree’s branches, leafless and scorched over the hearth, showed beneath the thatched roof, and grimy tokens of cloth and hay strands dangled from its twigs.
Guthfrith sat the two of them in a dark corner and fetched them tankards of gritty ale, wooden bowls full of a kind of shellfish broth, and slabs of bread that felt harder than the wood of the bowls. This was the staple food of the farmers, and Belisarius knew the drill. You dipped your bread into your soup to soften it, and worked on it with your teeth until you could chew a little off. The soup, made with a little precious animal stock and laced with sea brine, was thick and salty, but flavoursome.
Guthfrith apologised for this fare. ‘The hungry months are coming.’
Belisarius understood, and waved away his apologies. With the winter store long gone, and the first crops of the year needed for the animals, the villagers had to wait until late summer for the harvest - so summer, a time of nature’s bounty, was paradoxically hard for the farmers. If things went wrong there could be famine.
But not today. His food heavy in his belly, and with Macson telling tall tales of their journey, Belisarius excused himself and wandered around the hut.
He came to a woman cutting dried meat. She used her teeth to anchor the meat as she cut away bits of fat. A dog sniffed at her feet, hoping for scraps. She smiled at Belisarius - her teeth were white and even, oddly beautiful in her grimy face - said something he didn’t quite understand, and he smiled back and moved on.
In another corner an old man tended a girl, who lay ill in bed. Swathed in a woollen blanket, stick-thin, she might have been fourteen, or younger. Her eyes were closed, but she was coughing, and Belisarius discreetly stood back so he wasn’t splashed by her spittle. At least it didn’t look like the yellow plague, or worse leprosy, which was remarkably common in Britain. The old man wiped her brow with a moist cloth, prodding at the leeches which clung to her bare flesh, fat with blood.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Belisarius asked softly, in his best German.
The man cocked his hand behind one ear. Perhaps he was a little deaf. ‘Elf-shot,’ he said. ‘Elf-shot.’
The old man showed Belisarius how he was trying to tend to the girl, with the leeches, murmured prayers, and a bit of oddly shaped wood which dangled from a rope above the old man’s head. It was a wooden peg from a wagon-axle; it had come from a wagon which had once carted a venerable domnus from the monastery to his grave, and was said to have healing powers. Britain was studded with sacred sites and magic and miracles, and tokens like this.
‘She is praying to God,’ the old man managed to say. He grinned at Belisarius, and the Greek saw, to his astonishment, something moving, wriggling out of the corner of the man’s own eye. It was the head of a maw worm. The Germans were so fantastically ignorant about medicine, their only remedies to most ailments a prayer or a charm, that it was a surprise to Belisarius that any of them survived at all.
Belisarius bowed, wished the girl well, and withdrew.
Outside the hut he wandered around the slumped wooden houses. The only sounds were the voices of the people, the songs of birds, and the hiss of a blacksmith’s bellows. There only seemed to be one plough team in the village, but it would work for everybody, in return for other services rendered in turn. Nobody in this country was free, exactly, it seemed to him; everybody owed allegiance to somebody more powerful - in this case no doubt the abbot of the monastery. But the kings were remote enough not to interfere very often, and everybody was bound up in a web of obligations and mutual help. Sometimes Belisarius envied the sturdy certainty of this society, though he had no ambition to live his whole life with hunger held at bay only by a relentless cycle of work.
At length Belisarius met Guthfrith, who was cutting wood. In Belisarius’s uncertain German they spoke of the weather and the prospects for the harvest, and Guthfrith showed Belisarius the wood he was working. Ash made the best firewood throughout the year: birch burned too quickly, and elm was too waterlogged to give much heat. Oak was kept piled up to dry out for the winter; its logs burned slowly and well. Hawthorn was best for oven fuel, and lime was a poor burner but useful for carving. Alder was good for making charcoal. In the olden days, Guthfrith said, you wouldn’t burn elder indoors because it was infested by the Hag Goddess, and you wouldn’t want her in your house …
To Belisarius, wood was wood. He was glimpsing the mind of a man whose ancestors had lived off forests, to whom the tree was sacred, the connection between earth and sky, and in its patient longevity the repository of all wisdom. The consciousness of this German, whose ancestors had had no contact with the Roman empire, was quite alien, he thought, unlike the Goths and Vandals who had occupied the continental provinces. It was fascinating, and Belisarius determined to remember as much as he could for his memoir.
Macson came up. ‘I think I’ve found our guide to the monastery,’ he said dryly. He raised his finger to his lips for silence, and led the way to one of the huts.
In the doorway a couple lay with their legs in the sun, their heads and shoulders in the shade. The man lay on top. He wore a black habit, hitched up over his waist, and his white arse bobbed up and down like a rabbit’s tail. The woman lay back passively, her eyes unfocused. She had the look of a slave.
It wasn’t the first time Belisarius had seen such behaviour among the Germans. Masters commonly copulated with their slave girls in the open, even when they were trying to sell them in the markets of Brycgstow. But as Macson murmured, ‘This is not an approved monkish custom, I don’t think. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this village is full of little tonsured bastards.’
At last, with a shudder of his white thighs, the monk spent himself and rolled off. The girl lay for a moment, her legs splayed, her tunic stained with his sweat. Then she stood, straightened her clothes, and immediately trudged off to the fields.
Macson stepped forward. ‘You must be deacon Elfgar.’
The monk opened his eyes, startled. He jumped up, pulling his habit down over his limp cock. ‘God be with you,’ he murmured in Latin, sweating.
XII
Boniface had a novice called Aelfric serve Belisarius and Macson a little wine. It was at the express permission of the abbot; otherwise the brothers only took wine with their noon meal, the prandium, on Sundays.
‘We live according to the guidance of Saint Benedict,’ said Dom Boniface in his heavily accented Latin. ‘The rules are elaborate, but at their heart are simple principles. Our waking hours are devoted to the Work of God, the Work of the Body, and the Work of the Mind.’ Opus Dei, Opus Manuum, Lectio Divina. ‘And as far as possible we inhabit the Great Silence, listening only to the echo of our own souls, and the Thoughts of God …’
They sat in the monastery’s small library, a nest of books, scrolls and bound parchments heaped up on shelving. The only light came from oil lamps. There was a smell of old leather and sour ink - although that was to be preferred to the seven varieties of shit that greeted the nose in the average German village.
The only other person in the room was this young novice who served the wine, Aelfric, a slight, oval-faced youth. Macson could hardly keep his eyes off Aelfric’s smooth neck - but he was obviously confused by his own r
eaction. Belisarius understood what was going on, but decided mischievously he would let Macson suffer a little before putting him out of his misery.
And Aelfric, though the novice scarcely said two words, seemed fascinated in turn by Belisarius, a man of the Roman east. The Greek recognised a deep curiosity in her.
Deacon Elfgar had brought them to the monastery in the middle of the afternoon. They had been welcomed by the abbot, who promised to look over Belisarius’s stock of books for sale - but not until the end of the monastery’s day. While Macson retired to a cell and slept, the death of his father still weighing on him, Belisarius had explored the monastery, with its little workshops and gardens tended by silent monks and novices. He sat in on no less than three services in the little church, intoned and sung beautifully by black-robed monks lined up like so many crows.
Theirs was a rigid, enclosed life, with every waking hour dedicated to some purposeful task or other, with little room for the exercise of free will. But, compared to the chaos outside, this was a calm, ordered, thoroughly civilised environment, and it was no wonder that the sons of kings fled here. Why, the monks even had a latrine that sluiced into running water.
The church, dedicated to Saint Peter, was very modestly constructed with walls of oak and wattle, though at some point in its history a thatch roof had been replaced by one of lead. Rather gruesomely the coffin containing the remains of the monastery’s greatest saint, Cuthbert, sat in the middle of the floor. But this wooden cathedral was crammed with treasures: an altar service of gold and silver, some quite exquisite stained-glass panels, and frescoes and vestments adorned with intriguing tangled designs, woven with glittering gold. Even Cuthbert’s coffin sat in a jewel-crusted shrine. Belisarius was astounded by the wealth he had found in this remote and rather shabby place. It augured well for his book sales, he thought.
And all of this in a monastery where not a hundred paces away people lived in a house built around a sacred tree.
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