Belisarius wondered how this mighty rock had come to be here at all, what immense chthonic force, divine or natural, had thrust it up through the fabric of a gentler landscape of dunes and sea grass. Belisarius liked to think his mind was roomy enough for a glimmer of wonder at the marvels of the physical world, which served as a stage for humanity’s petty dramas.
At the top of the steps, before an imposing gateway, they were stopped by a guard wielding a wooden-hilted sword. Aelfric spoke to him in her own tongue.
Belisarius, catching his breath, looked around. The summit was a narrow slope, which rose to a plateau where buildings clustered. Some of the slope was given over to grass, where sheep grazed. The view from this hilltop was remarkable, with the sea lapping right up to the promontory’s cliff walls to his right, and to his left a view over the farms of the coastal plain to the rounded mountains beyond. Mountains and ocean in a single glance.
The guard waved them through. Aelfric seemed proud of this place that had been built in part by her father and his ancestors. ‘There is the hall of the King, where we will meet my father. There is a separate apartment for the King, and a bower for the women of the court - you can see it over there. We have a well, cut through the rock by the thegns of King Ida who first landed here more than two centuries ago. It gives clean spring water. And in the church,’ a compact stone building, rather grander than Lindisfarena’s wooden cathedral, ‘is a shrine to King Oswald, now a saint, where his incorruptible right hand is stored.’
Macson, of a practical frame of mind, was more interested in the stockade. ‘Look here, Belisarius. I wondered how they had managed to plant foundations in rock as hard as this. See what they’ve done.’ The stockade was actually a kind of box, with two timber walls set on the rock and the space between them filled with rubble. It wasn’t anchored to the rock at all, Belisarius saw, but was so heavy as to be immovable.
Aelfric led her party to the central hall. It was impressive enough, though like most German buildings it was built entirely of wood, solidly constructed of huge oak beams. Belisarius was intrigued to see a hefty bone key sticking out of the big oak door; evidently this wooden hall was secured by a wooden lock.
Inside, the hall was already crowded. Brightly lit by mutton-fat lamps, the hall’s hefty wooden frame was imposing, with uprights along its walls as regular as the pillars of a Greek temple, and mighty crossbeams supporting the roof overhead. The floor was lined by polished planks, and strewn with straw and some sweet-smelling herb. At the centre of the floor a fire burned smokily in a long hearth, over which huge blackened cauldrons were suspended by chains hung from the roof timbers. The walls were painted brightly, decorated with gold leaf, and hung with flags, standards and tapestries. The mournful faces of animals slain in the hunt, mighty buck deer, wolves, even the brooding snout of a bear, protruded from the glitter.
Though the Christian cross was apparent in the decoration, the tapestries’ designs were angular abstractions, or showed figures thrusting boldly through elaborate tangles of forest and vine. Once again it struck Belisarius how shallow the veneer of Christianity was among these Germans.
Around the central hearth wooden benches were set out. These were the mead benches, Macson dryly explained to Belisarius. Men already sat at these benches, talking gruffly, laughing, taking draughts of ale from horn drinking cups. They wore cloaks fixed with huge thorns. The rows of benches radiated out from a central point, near the head of the hall; and at this focus sat an immense throne, carved of stone, covered with elaborate decorations. The Butcher was not yet in residence.
They had to crowd out of the way of the bustling slaves and servants setting up the feast. They all seemed tense. Evidently working for the Butcher was not a healthy occupation.
‘Belisarius. This is my father.’
‘You’re the east Roman. My daughter has told me about you. I’m honoured to meet you.’ Bertgils was a stocky man, clean-shaven save for the usual vast moustache, and his heavy blond hair hung loose. He wore a sword at his waist, and under a leather jacket a pendant of amber glinted. He might have been forty. Belisarius saw something of his daughter’s frank intelligence in his eyes.
‘The honour is mine.’ Belisarius bowed in his turn and handed Bertgils his gift for the King. Bertgils glanced at the book dubiously, and handed it to a servant. Bertgils led Belisarius into the hall; the others followed. ‘I’d be fascinated to hear you tell of your country. The King, too, has shown an interest - hence your invitation to join the feast.’
Belisarius nodded. ‘But I’m here to give your King a warning.’
Bertgils said, ‘Aelfflaed told me about that too.’
‘If there’s a sand-grain of truth in it, you need to be prepared.’
‘All right. But I’ll be frank with you. The King is made of stem stuff - he has had to be just to survive his own succession. He has no patience with prophets and auguries.’
‘At least we can try,’ Belisarius said.
‘I owe my daughter that much. And in the meantime there is the feast.’
‘Yes, the feast!’ The voice boomed like thunder, and what felt like a side of ham slammed into Belisarius’s shoulder.
Bertgils bowed. ‘My lord.’
The Butcher was tall even among these tall Germans, and his chest was as wide as a barrel. Under a leather coat he wore a jacket of chain-mail, even here in his own hall. A monstrous silver cross hung by a gold chain around his neck, and each of his stubby fingers was adorned by a gleaming ring. He wore a vast moustache like the rest, and his hair was pulled into a knot on top of his head, exposing a neck that was dyed bright red from chin to chest, giving him the look of a huge predatory bird. His breath stank of spoiled meat. Belisarius tried not to recoil.
At the Butcher’s side was a demure woman, much younger than he was - no older than Aelfric in fact, if that. She was expensively dressed too, and bizarrely she wore a sieve of silver on a chain around her neck.
Aethelred snapped, ‘So you’re the east Roman.’ The King spoke a coarse Latin, to Belisarius’s surprise.
‘I’m honoured to meet you.’
Bertgils showed the King Belisarius’s gift; Aethelred thumbed the precious pages casually, leaving grimy marks, as Belisarius tried to explain its provenance.
‘I see you have brought along a pet monk.’ The King turned on Boniface, who quailed. ‘Ah, you’re the one they call Pretty-face, are you not? Do you have a gift for me, Domnus Pretty-face?’
‘I do not, King, for as you know I will partake neither of meat nor ale, and therefore—’
‘What do you think of our monks, Belisarius? Do you have them where you come from? Do you know, I believe the abbot of that precious monastery is as rich as I am. What do you think of that?’
‘We eschew personal wealth,’ Boniface said bravely. ‘All we have is dedicated—’
‘To the works of God, blah blah. But, Belisarius, here is the thing. I often wonder if we need these Christians at all! What is Christianity but the relic of a vanished empire? All this airy waffle, all this scribbling and writing - it makes no difference to the lives of my people, you know. You’ve seen them, Belisarius. Their lives are blood and dirt; what matters to them is kin, loyalty, not abstractions.’
Boniface, frail, spoke up again. ‘We offer the people a hope of a better life beyond this one. We offer them the healing peace of God which surpasses—’
‘Yes, yes. And meanwhile your drunken bishops lord it in their palaces, your priests collect dues from villages where they never show up to teach, your monasteries are full of false monks who neither know nor care what your rules are.’
‘I cannot defend the wrongs perpetrated by my brothers,’ Boniface said. ‘But, King, I can only do my best. For if you cup your hands around the tiniest of flames, eventually you will bring forth a conflagration in men’s minds.’
The Butcher barked, ‘Yes, but to what end? Do you really want to see a new Rome arising, defying the wyrd as much as the old,
using up everything and crashing into ruins? Must we go through all that again? Look around you, man! You are still building your churches out of the rubble of the last “conflagration”.’ Aethelred snorted magnificently. ‘I need a drink.’ And he stalked off into the body of the hall, where his thegns came to fawn around him.
Aelfric comforted Boniface, who seemed exhausted.
Belisarius murmured to Bertgils, ‘Your King expresses strong ideas, but with much anger.’
Bertgils nodded. ‘And it is always best, Belisarius, not to get in the way of that anger.’
XVI
The hall filled up. Belisarius and the others followed Bertgils to their places at the rear, behind the rows of drunken thegns.
The King sat on his throne of stone, with his young wife at his side and his athelings close by, a line of them ranging from children with wooden play-swords to young men and women. German kings still took many wives, despite the best efforts of the priests to suppress such practices.
At length the feast began, with a burst of music from a harp. Servants brought hot meaty broth from the cauldrons hanging over the fire. Others carried in immense plates of meat. The thegns used their own knives to hack at butchered hogs. In their heavy coats and fur leggings they looked like bears, tearing at the carcasses.
The air grew thick with the smoke from the candles and lamps, and the soot from the fire, and the stink of broiling meat. Huge shadows played among the rafters of the tall ceiling. The noise increased until you had to bellow like an ox to make yourself heard.
And the drink flowed like a river. Belisarius sipped only cautiously, striving to keep a clear head. He tried the mead, which, fermented from crushed honeycombs, was very strong; and wine, which was raw and new and too strongly flavoured for his taste.
The ale, which the Germans called beor, was sweet and lumpy, with a consistency like porridge. When the ale came the purpose of the King’s wife’s silver sieve became apparent. When ale was poured for the King she used her sieve to strain out the grit, which she then dumped on the floor at her feet, where dogs lapped it up eagerly.
The gift-giving began. Belisarius watched curiously as one by one the thegns approached the throne, to be given a gift by the King - and, sometimes, to deliver a gift in turn. The gifts were precious, always jewellery or weapons; often they were bracelets to wear on the arm, a very old custom. And there was no doubt much significance for these jostling courtiers in the value of the gifts exchanged, and the precise degree of warmth of the King’s embrace.
These Germans had imported their culture from their homelands. It was a primitive society of kinship, of small communities tied together by blood, with the King bound to his companions by gift-giving and oaths of loyalty. And yet this culture had displaced the sophisticated Roman Britons in a few centuries, and grown until it had sprouted powerful kingdoms. Why, Offa had negotiated with continental emperors and corresponded with the Pope.
But perhaps these petty kings in their wooden palaces had gone as far as they could. Their politics seemed fragile and anachronistic to Belisarius, and in the future their kingdoms might prove more vulnerable than any of those present tonight imagined.
As the level of general drunkenness reached new heights, the singing began. The songs were of the relentless German type, each line split into two halves with two stressed syllables each, just like the Menologium, Belisarius thought. But in their compelling rhythm Belisarius imagined he could hear the slap of oars, the echo of a migration across a cold ocean.
Bertgils leaned towards Belisarius and yelled in his ear, ‘These are old songs from the days of the great migration. We mourn our lost homeland. We mourn our ancestors. And for light relief we mourn the shortness of life.’
‘You’re a cheerful lot,’ Belisarius shouted back.
Bertgils grinned. ‘We are a people without an afterlife, at least except for those few of us who are successful warriors. We have a lot to be gloomy about.’
‘But you’re Christian now.’
‘There is that,’ Bertgils said dryly. ‘Belisarius, about this prophecy - I do think we need something a bit more substantial to take before Aethelred and the witan. For instance, if this threat of “dragons” is real - where is it to come from? Aethelred knows all about the other German kings, and the Picts to the north, and the British to the west.’
Belisarius mused, ‘It might come from another direction altogether.’ He turned to the computistor. ‘Boniface, speaking of the Menologium, what of the later stanzas - which presumably describe a further future? For instance, that business in stanza seven of how the dragon will fly west. What lies west of Britain? There are legends, centuries old, of lands to the north called Thule - could there be any truth in such a tale?’
Macson was dismissive. ‘Everybody knows there is nothing to the west but ocean.’
‘Actually that isn’t true,’ Aelfric said. ‘The monks have found that out.’
‘How?’
‘By sailing there.’
Over the centuries some monks, emulating Cuthbert, in search of ever deeper solitude, had set off on eremitic quests into the western sea. They journeyed from Lindisfarena, its parent house on Iona, and monasteries in Ireland, sailing in fragile little boats of wood and leather called currachs. Many of them failed to return - but some did, telling of lands they found scattered across the face of the ocean.
Boniface said, ‘This went on for centuries. And there grew among the monks a tradition that somewhere out there to the west was to be found the Promised Land of the Saints. And so they went further and further.’
This culminated in the seven-year voyage of Saint Brendan, founder of many monasteries, who was supposed to have sailed west to an island of sheep, an island of birds, an island of fire, an island of grapes. He came to a pillar of glass that rose out of the sea. He found the apostle Judas sitting on a rock. And so on.
‘What rubbish,’ Macson said.
‘But Brendan returned to tell the tale,’ Belisarius said. ‘Clearly he found something.’
Bertgils asked, ‘What are you getting at, Belisarius?’
‘The Menologium talks later of sea voyages. What if the threat is to come, not from the land, but from the sea? None of your kings is looking that way.’
‘But who would come?’ Bertgils asked. ‘The Franks? Offa is on good terms with them. And the ocean is a hard road to travel.’
‘Your people came raiding once, across the ocean,’ Belisarius said evenly. ‘The Romans did before you.’
‘But that was centuries ago. Everything is different now. Look around you. Northumbria is strong - no fool would come here. And besides we would have the support of Mercia. No, Belisarius, this is an interesting speculation but there is nothing in it.’
The Butcher spoke, and the hall fell quiet. ‘I can’t hear you singing, Father Pretty-face!’
Boniface stood uncertainly, his tumour livid in the lamp light. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know your songs, King.’
‘Then let’s hear one of yours.’
Boniface flinched, but all eyes turned to him. ‘Very well. This is a hymn of midsummer, composed by Dom Caedmon of—’
‘Get on with it!’ shouted a thegn, and a chicken bone came whirling out of the air.
Boniface flinched, but he began to sing. His clear voice, smoothed by a lifetime of chanting, delivered a simple, sweet, lilting song in German, of the month of June, in which John the Baptist was born, and the apostles Peter and Paul had suffered martyrdom.
The catcalls began after only a few lines. And as the bones and lumps of bread began to fly, Belisarius got to his feet and put his arm around the frail monk, sheltering him from the greasy storm. ‘Get him out of here,’ he murmured to Aelfric.
Aelfric led the bewildered Boniface away.
The Butcher was angry and mocking. ‘Where’s my little monk? I want to hear him sing!’
‘Perhaps, my lord,’ Belisarius said smoothly, ‘you would prefer to hear a song from my own
country.’ And, without waiting for agreement, he launched into a gloomy old lament of a refugee from Rome, on the eve of its terrible sacking by Alaric the Goth. “‘Great were the cries of the maidens of Rome … Even the statues of the forum shed marble tears …”’ He did his best to translate the lyrics into German; the scansion was terrible, but he doubted this audience would care about that.
He got the reaction he expected. At first there were catcalls, a few flying bones, and cries of ‘Bring back the monk!’ But then the repetitive dolefulness of the tune cut into the thegns’ drunken consciousness. Some of them swayed to the rhythm, and tried to join in the chorus: “‘Rome! Rome! When will you rise again?”’
As the verses unwound, the listeners got restive. In the end they seemed relieved when he finished and sat down. The feasting mob turned to other matters.
Bertgils handed Belisarius a cloth to mop the grease from his face. ‘You did well. That barrage would have been dreadful for poor old Boniface.’
‘Yes. And I would wager none of them would even remember having done it, the next morning.’
‘None but the Butcher,’ murmured Bertgils, ‘who sees everything.’
‘How soon do you think we can get out of here?’
From the far end of the hall there was a roar, a clatter of flying dishes, a splinter of an overturned bench.
Bertgils grimaced. ‘The fighting has started. Now would be a good time.’
‘Well, it’s been charming. We must come again.’
Bertgils grinned and clapped him on the shoulder.
When they emerged from the hall, though the drunken feast was still in progress, a cold pink light was seeping reluctantly into a cloud-strewn eastern sky. With relief Belisarius gazed at the sea, and filled his lungs with clean salty air.
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