The Transversale to Lyon was a good old Roman road but fraught with danger. When they met travellers he told them the Norsemen were Christian converts, protecting him on a pilgrimage to Rome. The eleven proved their worth. Bandits lurked on the road, and about forty of them barred the way near Auxerre, too scared to attack but testing the northerners mettle. They found the mettle in good order and scattered when Ofaeti screamed for his men to charge. There were easier targets than a troop of well-armed and battle-bold northerners, and the thieves disappeared as quickly as they had come. But it was all Jehan could do to talk one group of merchants — a hundred or so strong — from attacking the Norsemen, so when they got to the Saone, which flowed in the right direction, they took the broad river south.
Huddled on a stolen river barge — hardly more than a glorified raft — wrapped in their cloaks and travelling by night when the moon allowed, the Norsemen were less conspicuous than they had been on the open highway. The abbeys they passed were poor and mean-looking and the Vikings took Jehan’s word that there were no great bargains to be made there. They didn’t even make use of the pilgrim hostelries the abbeys kept for travellers both religious and secular; they were too wary of the reception they might get. The human remains they carried with them were kept in a sack which was towed on an improvised raft of branches because of the smell. Jehan had to admire the Vikings’ woodworking skills. The little raft took them next to no time to make and even he — who had spent most of his life inside a monastery — could see it was better built than the one they had stolen from the riverbank.
The Vikings fed him nothing, but he wasn’t at all hungry. He drank from the river and felt he needed nothing more to sustain him. This was just part of God’s blessing, the same one that had cured him of his affliction, he was sure. The words of Romans 14: 17 came to him: For why the realm of God is not meat and drink but rightwiseness and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit did really seem to be filling him. Sometimes the rain was so heavy it was almost painful, but he was not cold and he put back his head to drink it in, enjoy its taste and delight in the looseness and power of his limbs.
He had, he was sure, been blessed. The trials he had undergone, the tortures at the hands of the Raven and Saerda, had been a gateway of agony through which God had stepped. He had eaten of unclean meat, true, but even that did not seem so bad now. The taste of the blood haunted him but he did not find it unpleasant. That in itself, he thought, was a message from God telling him not to blame himself for what had been forced upon him and not to question what had happened to him. He had been freed from the bonds of his infirmity for a purpose. Every instinct he had told him to pray, to know God’s mind.
When Jehan prayed it was not as the weavers, butchers, candlemakers and reeves of Paris prayed — requests for help, a word of thanks, something like a silent conversation. Jehan had spent years with God as his main companion, a presence by his side in the dark of his cell, the guiding principle of his every thought. Prayer was indivisible from his life. In some ways his life was a prayer, every action, every mouthful of food enabling him to serve God. So he sat in the dark and the chill on the raft as the Vikings steered it on under the black sky, sinking down into himself, surrendering will, surrendering personality, to God.
‘Let me know your purpose, Lord.’ The movement of the raft lulled him, the cold seemed to leave him. He fell through a thicket of his own thoughts, jolting awake as he relived the shock of the moment when he realised strength and freedom had returned to his limbs. Infirmity and constraint had been so familiar to him that the sensation of free movement was very disconcerting.
As he prayed, the feeling of Saerda’s head in his hands came back to him, the quick snap with which he had broken the Viking’s neck repeating itself over and over in his mind. He remembered something else from that moment: a presence — yes, a presence, and not one he had ever felt before. There was a sort of signature note to the way it felt. He was tempted to say that it was evil, but it wasn’t quite that. No, this presence that watched him unseen did not have a moral nature at all. He tried to think of a word to sum up what he thought of it, ‘hungry’ seemed to fit best.
The movement of the raft seemed indistinguishable from the movement of his mind towards God. The words of Psalm 51 came into his head. He knew it well, the Miserere, and the memory of his brother monks singing its verses rose in his mind, a chant as rhythmic and restful as the lapping of water against a riverbank. The beauty of the Latin carried him away, though three lines came to him in plain Roman.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.
Deliver me from the guilt of blood, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
The guilt of blood, the guilt of blood. That taste was in his mouth now, the meat that had been forced through his lips. He could smell it too, coming from the little raft behind, blood and rot, putrefaction and something else. What was that smell? It was the body of Brother Abram, he could tell, but it wasn’t a smell he’d noticed in the streets of Paris or on the countless occasions when he had been brought to the sick, dying and dead. It was deeply disturbing. The odour, strong and deep, was almost pleasant. He was hungry, he realised, very hungry indeed, but curiously the idea of food repulsed him. Only the subtle flavours of decay that seeped from the little raft that bore the monk’s remains seemed appealing.
His mind wandered and the poetry he had heard in his agonies before came back to him.
Brother will fight brother and be his killer,
Axe age, sword age, shields are split asunder,
Wind age, wolf age, before the world plunges down.
No man shall spare another…
He forced his mind back to prayer. He needed to summon his powers of concentration, to hear nothing but the words in his head, but at the same time he had to surrender himself, to let go of ordinary thought and let God come to him. Why have I been chosen, Lord? What is it you want from me?
The budding trees beside the river stretched up their branches as if in supplication to the sky, as if they too were begging God for an answer.
There was a movement on the bank, something pale.
Jehan peered into the darkness. Someone was watching the boat, not twenty paces away. At first Jehan thought it was a child, but as the raft moved nearer he could see that it was a very strange figure indeed. It was a girl, he thought, or, rather, it was female. She was a pauper and all she had was a rough blanket of dirty wool pulled around her. Her face, though, was what really took his attention. It was not that of a child, but not quite that of an adult. It seemed to hover between youth and age, terribly drawn, pale and shrunken, with eyes that burned and hated. Jehan guessed she must be starving, though there was no need to starve so close to a river and easy fishing.
‘Do you see?’ said Jehan, gesturing to the figure.
‘What?’ said Fastarr.
‘The child, on the bank.’
‘I see nothing,’ said Fastarr. ‘Beware of tricks, monk. You’ll find we have a few of our own you might not like.’
Jehan could not believe the Viking couldn’t see her, but when he looked back, the child was gone. He returned to his prayers and tried to think no more about it. But that face kept coming back to his mind, the face of a child who had seen too much suffering for her years, a face that looked at him with an unswerving stare into which he could only read animosity.
The boat was coming to a bend in the river, where a broad but shallow beach bore a couple of huts. A big wooden cross marked the beginning of the road towards Mont Joux, and then on into Italy and Rome
‘Here, monk?’ It was Ofaeti, the fat one.
‘Here,’ said Jehan. ‘You will wait while I speak.’
‘It’s a bold slave who gives his masters orders,’ said Ofaeti.
The confessor looked hard at the big
Viking. ‘You are in my country now,’ said the monk, ‘and everything you dream of, everything you are, depends on me. If you want to live you will do as I say.’
‘You gave your oath that you would serve us.’
‘And I am keeping it,’ said Jehan. ‘You need me now, do not let pride blind you to that. I serve you best by leading you. The first thing you will do is buy some blankets and, if you can, a tent or two here. The local farmers will have something. If you don’t have shelter in the mountains you will freeze to death.’
Ofaeti looked at the confessor and nodded. He turned to Fastarr. ‘These monks have more nuts than a squirrel’s larder,’ he said, ‘but they see the truth right enough. Let him be our voice for as long as he is useful.’
They were met with stares, but the fisherman at the beach was too mindful of the safety of his family to ask many questions of the Norsemen. Jehan again explained that they were his bodyguards, hired to take him on a pilgrimage to Rome. The fisherman nodded at the Vikings and said something about thanking God that such men could be bought, for if they couldn’t the whole country would be in ruins. Then he took their money and sent his boy off to buy blankets and two small tents.
When he returned, the berserks set off, Jehan at the front, up into the icy mountains and the valley of the black saint.
35
The Valley of the Black Saint
The way up into the mountains was hard. Rain turned to sleet as they climbed and then to snow. The winter snow had gone and the fresh falls came down on a cold, green landscape. On the lower slopes it didn’t settle. Further up, though, the mountains were shrouded in white.
They rounded a great lake with settlements all along it. They didn’t stop but Jehan cut a staff and made a cross, holding it high before them. Pilgrims were common on that route, if unusual at that time of the year, and the locals seemed reassured. The Vikings sounded their horns and trusted to luck. No one attacked them and they were even able to buy a little bread. Jehan did the talking and the Norsemen kept silent. The mules were loaded with firewood on the advice of the locals. The way into the mountains would be cold and they would need all the warmth they could get when they camped.
The body of the dead brother was dragged on a roughly constructed sled. The smell of rot was becoming unbearable to the Norsemen, though Jehan did not find it unpleasant.
‘We should boil his flesh off,’ said Egil.
‘And where’s the pot big enough for that?’ said Ofaeti.
‘Then burn him,’ said Egil. ‘Hey, monk, is a cooked saint as good as a raw one?’
Jehan said nothing.
As they turned south into the pass the snow set in properly, and the river they were following up began to turn to ice. The berserkers were northern men and so well dressed for such weather, but they had to keep moving throughout the day to keep the cold at bay. The nights were made tolerable, though not pleasant, by a fire, but there was little to eat, save some fish the Vikings had caught in the river and the bread they had bought.
Luckily the dead monk’s body soon froze and the smell abated. The mountains were closing in, dark walls rising up into grey cloud. It was as if they were trapped in a trough between gigantic waves that towered above them as though suspended in the moment before collapse. Five days in and the waves vanished, invisible in the snow. There was little shelter in the valley and the firewood was running low. The tents were a mercy, even though they bulged with the number of men they held. The cramped conditions at least meant they were warm.
They pressed on, faces cast down to the ground. Only the feel of the track beneath their feet, worn smooth by traders and pilgrims, kept them going, though often they stumbled and fell. None of the Vikings complained, though Jehan could see that they suffered. The confessor couldn’t get the face of the child who had watched him from the riverbank out of his mind. He imagined her watching him still, just out of sight. When rocks or icefalls loomed out of the mist, for a second he thought it was her.
On the sixth day the weather relented. The cloud was still low but the snow was lighter and they could see their way forward. Jehan saw Ofaeti looking at him.
‘You are a strong man, monk.’
Jehan kept going.
‘When did you last eat?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Two weeks at least. And yet you stride out like a man on a good breakfast. You don’t even wrap your feet in rags. What is it that drives you on?’
‘God.’
Ofaeti nodded. ‘Tell me about this god.’
So Jehan told him the story of Jesus’ birth, how he had been born among the animals, raised as a carpenter and died on the cross so mankind could live eternally.
The Norsemen loved stories and they all listened with great interest. Ofaeti in particular seemed intrigued. ‘I will try this god of yours. He will sit alongside Tyr in my heart for a while and I will see the luck he brings.’
‘Christ sits alongside no one. You must reject your idol.’
‘That I will not do. Is your god so jealous that he cannot admit another?’
‘Yes,’ said Jehan. ‘If you were baptised but did not reject your devil then God would punish your descendants to the third generation.’
‘For what?’ said Egil. ‘I have a wife, but can’t I lie with another woman if I choose? Will my wife curse me if she hears of it?’
‘Your wife should curse you. You should be bound to one woman only.’
‘I am bound but not so tightly I can’t take a roll in the hay with another if I choose. What woman would begrudge her seafaring man that? Do such witches exist?’
‘The Lord tells us, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” I will tell you a holy story and see if it can sway your pagan heart.’ Jehan told the story of Moses and how he had brought down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai.
Ofaeti and the berserkers laughed.
‘So you Franks believe, “Thou shalt not kill?” How many of us northerners would you slaughter if you went to it without a tender heart?’
‘It is permissible to kill the enemies of God. There is just and unjust killing, the Hebrew makes that clear. The command is closer to “Thou shalt not murder.”’
‘How do you know an enemy of God?’
‘Ordinary men need not worry about such things; the priests can point them out,’ said Jehan.
The Vikings laughed again.
‘A convenient set-up for all, I think. I like this God, he who knows the difference between noble fight and murder,’ said Ofaeti.
‘He is my strength and my light.’
‘And for that reason I’ll think him a good god. He has made you a mighty man.’
‘He has,’ said Jehan, ‘though I would thank him more if he had made me the weakest.’
‘Why?’
‘Because God tests those that he favours. From his own son, he asked the sacrifice of life.’
‘That is not such a great sacrifice,’ said Ofaeti, ‘not to us. You go on to dwell in the halls of the All Father to feast eternally and battle eternally. Death is like moving to another land, as so many of our people do.’
‘In pain, crucified, nailed to a cross?’
‘A funny end for a carpenter,’ said Ofaeti.
‘King Nesbjorn crucified a shoddy boatbuilder once — said he’d teach him how to drive in nails,’ said Egil. ‘Perhaps it was similar.’
Jehan swallowed his anger. ‘He knew what his fate was and went willingly, for our sins.’
‘To be fair,’ said Ofaeti, ‘I’ve got any number of uncles who knew the Valkyries were hovering above them. Heggr and his boys got trapped by a bunch of islanders out west. They could have surrendered and waited for ransom but a man called him a coward — only word the bastard knew in Norse — so they showed them they weren’t. Two out of ten came out alive, but no one in those parts has ever called us cowards again, so it was worth it. A brave man, this Jesus, no doubt, but the world’s full of brave men. Or rather the next world is!�
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‘When you are downtrodden, when you are at your lowest, when every one of your fellows has deserted you, my god lifts you up and walks beside you. Does yours?’
‘Tyr likes powerful warriors. He leaves cowards to make their own way,’ said Ofaeti.
Jehan turned to the big Viking and took him by the shoulder. ‘Am I a coward?’
Ofaeti looked into his eyes. ‘I believe you are not,’ he said.
‘No Christian is. Let me tell you the story of this place. Do you know who the black saint was?’
‘No.’
‘A saint is someone perfect in holiness, as Maurice was. He is known as the black saint because that was the colour of his skin.’
‘Black skin!’ said Egil. ‘A dwarf then?’
‘A man of the Roman Theban legion, a descendant of the ancient pharaohs.’
‘The people of those lands are blue,’ said Ofaeti. ‘I know it because it is said that is why they are called Blaumen.’
‘One man’s blue is another’s black,’ said Jehan. ‘The Theban legion was composed entirely of Christians, 6,666 men strong.’
‘That’s a mighty force,’ said Ofaeti.
‘Depending on the mettle of the men,’ said Egil.
Jehan went on: ‘They served the pagan king Maximium Caesar, who ordered them, for the pleasure of his god Mercury, to kill some Christian families who were living in this place. The legion refused.’
‘They were wrong to do so if they had taken an oath to the king,’ said Ofaeti.
‘They had a stronger bond to their god,’ said Jehan. ‘When the news of their refusal came back to Caesar he ordered that one-tenth of their number be killed.’
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