by Angus Donald
Chapter Fourteen
The palace of the king
Bjarki was so astonished he could not speak. The building was simply enormous, far bigger than any human-built structure he had ever seen before. It was far bigger than the church at the castrum. It was a kind of hall, he guessed, but it was nothing like the thatched-roofed longhouses of home.
They had passed large dwellings on the journey, mansions even, and, as they travelled into Aachen, they had passed large churches, substantial barns and broad warehouses, huge market squares paved with stone slabs with big houses on all four sides, and one circular structure on the edge of the city, built of ancient crumbling stones, which the guards called the amphitheatre.
This hall, however, was a mountain of a building, fifteen times the height of a man, just as wide as it was high, and as long as a decent-sized barley field – more than fifty of a tall man’s strides. It was constructed of bright red bricks with two decks of huge arched windows along the sides. At the eastern end was a massive square fortified tower, taller even than the hall it guarded, at the western was a semi-circular extension with a domed roof.
They entered this massive building by a portico in the long north wall, having come through a bustling street market to reach it – and this was only the most northerly part of the Frankish king’s sprawling palace complex, Bjarki learned. Once the Red Cloaks had pushed him into the interior of the enormous hall he was even more impressed. It was a cavernous space, with high timber beams supporting the distant roof, the lime-plastered walls painted a pure brilliant white where they were not covered with rich woven tapestries, with human figures and animals depicted, along with several huge golden crosses and a scatter of silver stars and other symbols. The hall’s floor was made of grey flag stones – no cut rushes or beaten earth underfoot in here – and, even more extravagantly, gold candleholders, dozens of glittering crown-like arrangements as wide as the span of a man’s arms, were suspended at two-stride intervals from the ceiling, lit beeswax candles shedding a yellow light throughout the space, even though it was broad day!
There were colonnades inside along the north and the south sides of this vast rectangular space, creating two internal thoroughfares of a kind, where scores of people were now wandering up and down, greeting each other and stopping to gossip. Both men and women were present, clad in robes of silk and satin and velvet, and many were heavily laden with rings, brooches and fine jewels. Their faces were grave and beautiful, Bjarki thought, and they moved gracefully and murmured quietly with each other, as if engaged in some kind of intricate dance. But not all were so refined. A few of them wore the same undyed robes in white or brown as Father Livinus and had wooden crosses on their chests and sported the cleric’s tonsure. There were also half a dozen fair-haired folk he spotted in Saxon and even more northerly styles: furs and leather, wool tunics and cross-gartered trews.
‘What is this place?’ Bjarki whispered to Tor. ‘It must have been built by giants!’ They were both unnecessarily wrapped in heavy iron chains from shoulder to wrist, weighed down and clinking, and forced to move forward by a squad of Red Cloaks who poked at their backs with their spear butts. But, at least, for the first time in ten days, they were out of that rolling cage.
‘Behold the manifestation of the earthly glory of Karolus Arnulfing!’ said Livinus, who was walking beside them in a proprietorial manner. They had barely seen him on the road but, now that they had arrived in Aachen, it seemed, he wished to be more closely associated with his two captives.
‘This is the council hall of the royal palace of Aachen,’ he said, ‘the northern seat of Karolus, son of Pepin, King of Francia, lord of lands from the rocky Breton coast to the dark forests of Moravia, ruler of men from the stinking marshes of Frisia to the snowy mountains of the Spanish March!’
The pride in Father Livinus’s voice was apparent. ‘This palace complex – impressive as it must seem – is far from complete. And no giants built it, young wizard,’ he said, smiling at Bjarki, ‘mortal men, like me and yo— uh, well, anyway the faithful Frankish people constructed this marvel, with their strong hands and broad backs, as a tribute to their beloved king.’
‘The northern seat,’ said Tor. ‘Does your king have one of these draughty barns in the south, west and east of his domains as well?’
Father Livinus seemed to be taken aback by Tor’s irreverence. ‘This region is the hearth and heartland of the Frankish tribes. This royal palace is Karolus’s capital, his home. But, yes, he has several other palaces in Paris, Lyon, Strasburg, he is building one in Regensburg, on the Bavarian border.’
‘Just the five palaces?’ said Tor. ‘How does he manage?’
Father Livinus’s handsome face contorted into an ugly scowl but he said nothing. He jerked his head at the nearest red-cloaked spearman, who jabbed Tor with his spear butt, forcing her to take a dozen stumbling steps forward.
* * *
Bjarki looked ahead at the west end of the council hall. As they approached it, shuffling and clanking in their ostentatious chains, he could make out a pair of golden thrones, raised up on a dais. And two people sitting on them.
A fine lady occupied the right-hand throne. She wore a beautiful gown of cream silk and green velvet, and a headdress shining with golden and silver thread. Her jet-black hair was curled and oiled and just peeking out on either cheek from under the headdress. The effect framed her face enticingly and made her slim white neck seem impossibly long. She was very slender, although not in any way malnourished, and her large dark eyes sparkled with intelligence. As Bjarki drew closer he realised she was very young under her finery – a girl – perhaps a year or two younger than he was.
Beside her, on a second throne, was a richly dressed young man – this fellow was roughly Bjarki’s age. He had the same dark hair as the lady, the same long neck – a family resemblance – but his expression, in contrast to her cool stare, was petulant, even slightly bored. He fidgeted with a golden tassel on his enamelled belt, drummed his fingers on the arm of the throne.
Father Livinus stepped forward and made a low bow. The Red Cloaks shoved the clanking pair of captives to their knees, and retired a few paces.
‘Your Highness, greetings,’ said Livinus. ‘May Almighty God bless you all your days. I see your husband His Majesty has not returned from his travels. Nevertheless, it is an honour, my queen, to stand before you—’
‘I think you mean “Your Highnesses”,’ said the young man. ‘Am I not sitting here too?’ He had a whining tone, a voice designed for complaining.
‘Not now, Gerold,’ said the lady. ‘Let dear Father Livinus speak.’
‘Thank you – ah, yes, Your Highnesses – it is a great honour to stand before you both today. I salute you, Queen Hildegard, and you, Duke Gerold.’
‘Was that so difficult, man?’ Gerold said, smirking down at priest.
‘Be quiet, Gerold,’ said the lady. ‘Must I send you from the court?’
Bjarki, chained and kneeling, watching from under his brows, saw the young man’s face darken with blood, his forehead knit. But the duke held his tongue at the younger lady’s words. Brother and sister, Bjarki thought.
There were two other figures, he saw, standing behind and slightly to the side of the seated pair. The man on the left was a giant, nearly seven feet tall and thick in the chest and arms. His face was covered in a thatch of dark beard that almost joined his two bushy eyebrows, and the little skin that could be seen was raw-red and covered with flakes of dried skin. His eyes were small and sunken, black and brutish, his nose red and swollen with drink. But he stood perfectly still, unnaturally so, upright as a lance.
The black-bearded giant reminded Bjarki a little of Brokk, in his animal otherworldliness, in his latent strength and violence. But this huge fellow was clearly no Rekkr; his attire proclaimed him as a Frankish soldier: he was bare-headed, his skull covered with a cap of cropped black hair. But he wore a black iron breastplate with a white cross emblazoned on the m
etal, scale-mail shirt underneath, a kilt of strips of leather laced with iron, and black iron greaves. A dark cloak fell from his shoulders to his hairy calves. He had a short, broad stabbing sword on one side of his waist and a long cavalry sword – a spatha – sheathed on the other. As if that were not enough of an armoury, he leaned on a long vicious-looking pole-arm: a tall weapon with a heavy wooden shaft and a shining axe, hook and spike at the head.
He caught Bjarki’s eye and held it, staring back at him impassively, measuring his worth or assessing the young man’s potential as a threat.
The second figure was short, plump and dressed in a robe of blue, red, white and gold, very similar to Livinus’s war mantle, although far more ornately decorated. His brown hair was shaved on top like the other priest’s. He held a giant golden shepherd’s crook in one chubby ring-covered hand. A huge golden cross hung down to his drooping breasts from around his neck.
‘You are back from the realm of the heathen, Father Livinus,’ said this gaudy little fellow. ‘You must doubtless have a full report for me to read.’
‘Indeed, I do, my lord bishop,’ said Livinus, bowing to the little man, ‘it shall be in your hands directly. But, of greater import, I believe, is the fact that I bring from the Northlands these two barbarian prisoners of war.’
‘I will decide what is important to the Church, Livinus. I have not had a word from you for six weeks. You were told to report every sennight—’
‘I crave your indulgence, Lord Paulinus, but sending dispatches from barbarian lands is no easy matter. I shall render a full accounting in due—’
‘Six weeks, Father, I had begun to wonder if you’d been martyred—’
‘This is all utterly fascinating,’ said the queen. ‘Yet perhaps, my lord bishop, you could discuss the minutiae of episcopal communications at another time. Who are these wretches, Livinus? What are they doing here?’
‘My lady, they’re barbarian warriors from Saxony. I captured them.’
‘I can see that, Father Livinus,’ said Hildegard. ‘I can even smell them. May I ask why you’ve brought these two filthy specimens before the court?’
The arrival of Father Livinus, the Red Cloaks and the two prisoners in chains had caused a stir in the general thoroughfares beyond the arches and columns. People were drifting towards the dais, in ones and twos, gathering in a loose semi-circle behind the four figures looming above Bjarki and Tor.
‘They really are quite disgusting,’ said Duke Gerold. ‘Dirty. No doubt riddled with diseases – crawling with lice and worms. We should have them scrubbed in boiling lye before they bring a plague down on the whole city.’
‘Why have you brought them to me, Livinus?’ said Hildegard. ‘If they are prisoners of war, they are slaves and should be sent to the pens. If you wish to execute them as a warning to the rest of their kind, be my guest. You don’t need my sanction as regent. Our beloved king would surely approve.’
‘Your Highness,’ said Livinus, failing to hide his deep pleasure, ‘these two undoubtedly noisome prisoners are, nonetheless, rather special.’
He paused for effect. ‘They hail from the devil-ridden lair called the Groves of Eresburg in the forests of south Saxony, from the beating heart of their heathen world. The big ugly one is, in truth, one of their beast-warriors, a shape-shifter, a berserkr, in their heathen tongue. I saw him in battle. And since there has been much discussion at court of whether these wizards truly exist, I thought Karolus might like to see the truth of the matter for himself.’
Father Livinus’s words had a marked effect on his growing audience. There were gasps; a few of the fainter hearts drew back a step. One lady gave a little shriek of fear, before smothering her cries with a linen kerchief.
The lovely young queen leaned forward in her throne and peered down at the two filthy prisoners lying in chains at her feet.
‘Beast-warriors? Can this really be true, Father Livinus?’ she said.
‘I saw them both in combat with my own eyes, Highness. The male one slew or badly injured a score of my Red Cloaks – he killed some of them after he’d been wounded half a dozen times, bleeding, and deprived of weapons. A devil or demon of some kind possessed him. I saw it myself.’
‘The one on the left is only a skinny little girl,’ said Duke Gerold.
‘I could kick your soft white arse, sunshine, with one hand tied behind my back.’ Tor’s unexpected words set off a gale of twittering in the crowd.
A Red Cloak stepped forward and thumped the butt of his spear into the side of Tor’s head. Her skull banged hard against the flagstones of the floor.
‘Somebody give me a sword, and I’ll kill the insolent witch right here, right now,’ said Gerold. Everyone ignored him – except the dark giant who began to fumble at the hilt of his short sword, half drawing the blade.
‘Put that away, Grimoald,’ snapped the queen. ‘Don’t play the fool, Gerold. Nobody is going to touch these two until the king has had a good look them. You know he’s always been interested in this type of savage.’
‘We should kill them now,’ rumbled the giant. ‘Better to be safe.’
‘So these barbarians can speak our language… in a crude fashion,’ said Hildegard, ignoring the giant. ‘How intriguing! Animals with the speech of men. Can you make them transform before our eyes, Father?’
‘As I understand it, Highness,’ said Livinus, ‘they only change into wild beasts in the heat of battle. I am not sure if it is a voluntary process or if some malign outside agency inhabits them. There’s a great deal to learn.’
‘How exciting!’ said the queen. ‘Our very own beast-warriors here in Aachen. My husband will be pleased with you, Livinus. We must arrange a suitable demonstration of their wizardly powers when His Majesty returns.’
‘I do not think that would be entirely proper,’ said Lord Paulinus, peering down at the pair in front of him, ‘it would, indeed, be a grave sin. We would be abetting the foulest kind of witchcraft. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, it says in the Holy Bible, Deuteronomy, um, chapter, ah—’
‘In Exodus, my lord bishop,’ said Livinus. ‘Chapter twenty-two, verse eighteen.’
Lord Paulinus gave the priest a poisonous look. ‘The point is that I agree with our friend Lord Grimoald here. We should execute them now.’
‘You’re such a spoilsport, Paulinus,’ said the lady. ‘We are certainly not going to destroy them before the king has had a good look at them.’
‘They are a living abomination, my lady, an affront to Almighty God. The Church is abundantly clear on this matter: all forms of witchcraft and wizardry, shape-shifting, demon worship, what-have-you, are forbidden.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said the queen, ‘I say we shall keep them securely till Karolus returns to Aachen. That, my lord bishop, is the end of the matter.’
* * *
The cell they were put into was large enough to house a score of prisoners. It was one of many such big, dank chambers connected by a wide passageway in the underground part of the vast, circular, half-ruined building they had passed on the way to Aachen, which they learnt was the amphitheatre.
There were no windows and only three solid walls. The fourth wall was a progress of vertical iron bars set into the stone floor and brick ceiling a hand-width apart and joined by horizontal flatter bars to make a cage-like effect. They could be observed at all times in this open-fronted brick box. There was a single, heavy iron door set into this front wall of bars and no furniture or fittings at all. A mound of straw had been piled in the corner and Tor, nosing about in the corners, restless and newly freed of her chains, found the remains of dry, crumbling bones.
‘They used to keep lions in here,’ said their gaoler cheerfully. He was a fat, pale, elderly man named Henk, a Breton who had been taken as a slave when he was a mere boy some sixty years ago, when his country had fought a series of vicious wars with Neustria, the northwestern province of Francia.
‘Of course, that was long before my time
,’ Henk said, passing a pile of thick blankets to Bjarki through the bars of the cell. ‘No one has seen a lion here for hundreds of years, not since the Romans had charge of the place, back in the old days. Nowadays it’s mostly for prisoners. More’s the pity.’
‘You would like to have a lion down here?’ said Bjarki.
‘If we could get ’em. But you just can’t get lions any more. Bears, yes, we’ve housed several bears. Wolves too. We had a small pack in the end cell yonder only last year – God knows how they captured them alive.’
‘What do they do with these animals?’
‘They make them fight each other to the death, in the amphitheatre – the arena above our heads, didn’t you know about that, young fellow?’
‘Why do they do that?’
‘Our new king is mad keen on all things Roman. Obsessed, they say. He claims he’s going to remake the Roman Empire – now, in the modern age! All his courtiers must learn to write proper Latin – by royal decree – and he’s got a house full of monks over in the palace busy copying out all the old imperial texts. Karolus revived the Venatio – the beast hunt – three years ago, after his coronation. They said he was a fool – but he did it anyway. It’s always hellishly expensive but we put on a good show. The people love it.’
Bjarki looked at him blankly.
‘The people of Aachen flock to the amphitheatre to watch the animals fight each other. It’s a wonderful spectacle. But we don’t do it so much any more. Karolus is far too busy – and, as I say, it costs the earth. But when we do put on a Venatio, you should hear the cheering. Wolves against bears, we’ve had. That was a good one. Hunting dogs against a wild auroch. But no lions, sadly – we haven’t had a lion here since the days of Emperor Romulus. The biggest wild cat we ever had was a she-lynx from Moravia two years ago. It died after a day or two – I don’t know why. The master of Venationes, old Malleus – he’s the big chief in the amphitheatre – he said it died of loneliness. I don’t know how that’s even possible. Known plenty of lonely men, lonely women, too – by the Blessed Virgin, I’m lonely – but I never heard of anyone who actually died of it.’
