Finn’s death was impossible, and yet it was the only solid thing in her shifting, restless world, caught between smoke and water. There was no profit in fighting it.
She looked back at the rising smoke of Illingham, and then across the glittering water to Donmouth. She had never seen her home from the seaward side before. Where to go now, and what to do?
She was lord of Donmouth. And Thancrad, she supposed, was now the lord of Illingham. Until the king chose otherwise.
That was what they had to do.
‘The king.’ She had spoken aloud. ‘Osberht. We must tell him.’
Thancrad turned his eyes away from the smoke. ‘York. The king is in York, with the archbishop.’
Tuuri nodded, half turning to wave at his men on the shore. ‘We can take you, up the Humber and the Ouse.’ He grinned, and laughed a laugh with no mirth in it. ‘But you will forgive me if we do not come with you, into Osberht’s hall.’
Elfrun nodded. ‘That would be a great kindness.’ She turned and looked at Auli, who was sitting back on her heels gazing down at Finn’s body. Even soaked and bloodstained, the stranger girl had a swanlike composure to her, her neat head so graceful on her long neck. Those amber eyes, with their trowie light. And Elfrun gave a laugh, a little, bitter thing which caught in her belly and her throat. ‘You got something wrong, Auli. Blood, yes, and fire. But shallow water.’
75
Cobnuts, this time. Another of the simple, finely plaited little rush baskets, and a couple of dozen nuts tucked inside. Fredegar stood in the church doorway looking down at the gift in his hands and shaking his head. An ordinary enough object: the hedgerows were ripe, even overladen, but the basket was cunningly woven and the nuts laid carefully within, giving value to the everyday.
When he looked up the girl-child stood in front of him. The smith’s child, the one who had stayed on with him at the forge when the wife had taken the little ones back to her father’s house. He had tried to speak to them, but there was a wall of silence there. He had wanted to explain to the woman why he had done what he had done, that it had been done with the smith’s blessing, that the boy would almost certainly have died in the end, after slow agony.
All empty words, to justify the unjustifiable. He had killed Cudda merely to soothe his own distress, because he could not bear to see the pain.
And now this girl. She had a bruise on one cheek, he noticed. He held out the basket of nuts.
‘From you,’ he said. It was not a question.
She nodded.
‘Everything was from you – flowers, hare, strawberries.’
‘The little cross.’ It was barely a whisper.
He tugged it out from the collar of his robe and showed it to her, and something relaxed in her taut, pointed little face. He nodded, thinking. ‘Why?’
Her eyes flickered to the church door.
‘Come on then.’ There was a long bench along the back, for those such as Abarhild who could not stand for the length of the mass. Fredegar sat down in the dimness, and indicated that the child should do the same, but instead she stood in front of him, plaiting her fingers together, twisting one ankle round the other in unselfconscious agony. It made him uncomfortable to watch. What was tormenting this child? It came to him that he couldn’t remember her name, and he said as much.
‘Wynn,’ she whispered.
Joy. It seemed ridiculously inapposite for this whey-faced little creature.
He took the cross from around his neck for the first time in months and looked at it properly again. The bone was warm from his skin. ‘This must have taken many hours.’
She nodded.
‘You are a craftsman.’
The first flicker of something lively in her eyes.
‘Why have you been bringing me gifts?’
He could see her swallowing, running a dry tongue over her lips, trying to find words, to meet his eye. At last she took in a sharp breath, and fixed him with her blue stare. Then, very fast, ‘To say thank you.’
That took him aback. ‘To thank me? For what?’
‘You made it all right.’
‘I made it...’ He was feeling stupid. He looked at the little cross. She had made it, not him.
‘Cudda,’ she said, and burst into tears.
Feeling helpless, Fredegar put out his hands and she grabbed them with astonishing force and clutched them to her face. ‘Child.’
Her grief was astonishing, like a wind from nowhere that tears through the woods, blasting branches and toppling oaks. Her whole body shook with the force of her sobs, and she pressed his knuckles ever harder into her eye-sockets as though trying to gouge out her own eyes rather than to stem the flow of tears.
And she was silent, or as nearly silent as someone crying her heart out can be. Gasps, and snuffles, but never a sob.
Fredegar let her grip his hands, and waited for the storm to blow itself out. And he thought. Cudda. And she wanted to thank him for making it all right.
Was it possible that this child would understand? That the forgiveness he sought could be found at her hands?
The spasms were fewer, further apart, less frantic. But still he said nothing, just let her clutch his hands to her eyes and weep.
At last she gulped one last time, and stood back a little, still holding his hands. She was staring down at them, the sallow skin, her tears still wet on the prominent knuckles. Fredegar too stared at his hands as though he had never seen them before.
Her left hand gripped his right in a sudden convulsion. ‘This hand?’
‘This hand what?’
‘You killed Cudda with this hand, and my father’s knife.’
He nodded slowly.
She slipped her hands from his and held them out to him. ‘I pushed him with both.’ Her face and voice were flat.
Her words sank into his brain as though into deep and murky water, swaying and settling into the silt.
After a moment he said, ‘On purpose?’ But he knew, he didn’t need her nod.
‘You were angry?’
A little shrug. ‘He was drunk again. He was laughing at me, again.’
‘But you never meant to hurt him?’ He was offering her a reprieve, a way out of the net, and he could see she understood. But she lifted her pointed little face and stuck out her chin, the tendons of her neck taut.
‘It’s not that easy. I meant to hurt him. I don’t know if I meant to kill him, but I wanted him to die.’
‘But’ – and he had to be clear about this – ‘you did not mean for him to fall in the fire and be burned?’
She shook her head, a little frightened gesture, eyes huge, and he was reminded how very young she was.
‘Oh, child.’ He remembered her name. ‘Wynn. Living with other people is the hardest thing God asks of us.’
‘I thought he would just stumble. I was going to run. I thought he’d lam me. But he tripped on the stone, and he fell, and he didn’t get up. He fell in the fire!’ Her voice went up, and he heard the scream building and he grabbed her hands again and clung on until she was breathing once more. ‘And I didn’t try to get him out. I thought he was faking it. And then I could smell burning. Him. Burning. Smelling like a roast.’ She shuddered. ‘I couldn’t look. I just ran.’
Fredegar could feel his own heart pounding. The shock of finding the boy so damaged was very present to him. He had not been thinking, he realized now, that day in the forge. He had moved in an eerie calm, administering the last rites, and despatching the boy, and then haranguing Ingeld to admit the body into the minster turf, as though burial so close to the altar of the sacred mysteries would somehow compensate for a life unshriven. As though ending Cudda’s pain and digging a hole in holy ground through which the boy’s soul might just find its way to paradise would somehow make amends for all the pain at Noyon, for the slaughter that he alone had somehow survived. He uncurled his fingers and she slipped her hands from his.
‘You made it go away,’ she whispered.
Her face was frowning, intent. She nodded.
‘But,’ and he lifted a hand, though she had not so much as opened her mouth, and as he spoke he realized that he had never allowed himself to think these thoughts before, ‘but we must not take up guilt that does not belong to us. God hates that as much as he hates the proper guilts we don’t admit. You were angry with your brother. You pushed him. Terrible things came of it, but your intention was so much less than your deed.’ Could she possibly understand?
He wondered if he should tell her about Noyon, about how he had rung the bell that – without him knowing – had been the signal for the attack, when all the pilgrims and all the tenants, all the brethren but him alone, had already been on their way to the church for the great mass.
Ring the bell, and unleash the Devil.
‘No.’ He hadn’t realized he had spoken the word aloud until her pale face swam back into view, frowning at him.
He half smiled and shook his head. He was helping her to set down her burden. Could she do the same for him? Perhaps he would go to York and make his confession to some minster priest; and perhaps not. Had Ratramnus sent him here as his penance? They would make Heahred first priest, and then abbot of Donmouth. He knew that now. But if his place were here he would have to try and do better, put down the burden of guilt and take up the one of love, with more force than he done hitherto.
And where better to start than with this child, to whom he was irrevocably tied in blood?
‘Wynn,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Your father, would he let you make things for the church?’ A cross for the altar. Candlesticks. They needed so much. She was young, but she would learn.
She shrugged, expressionless, but he wasn’t fooled.
76
‘Shall we start again?’
Thancrad held out his hand.
Elfrun stared at it, as though this collection of fingers, thumb, palm, knuckles, were some alien object. The waves rustled endlessly, like the rushing of the blood in her ears, and the herring gulls shrieked overhead. Her own hands were hidden, clutching the folds of the red cloak around her. She had kept Wynn’s tag on the cloak-strap, with the original still tucked in the pouch at her belt. The cloak was stained now, the red fading, the hem tattering; and she suspected Radmer would have disdained wearing it in its present state. But it wasn’t her father’s cloak any more. It was hers.
All Hallows’ Eve, a whole year since she had waited here for Finn in the rain, scrabbling after cockles. This year the day was fine, with thin sunlight, mist-filtered, a cold grey-gold that reminded her of tarnished parcel-gilt.
‘They have played me for a fool,’ he said. ‘I was lied to from beginning to end by my father – and my mother, my friends, and Athulf most of all. I thought you loved me, and I thought everything I was doing was with your blessing. For us and for the best. I was wrong, and I am sorry.’
Elfrun listened carefully to each word, weighing and measuring, tugging it and testing its strength. Everything held. And more, she could hear in his voice how hard it was for him to say these things, and yet he was saying them.
‘I hurt you.’
She nodded.
‘You are still hurt.’
Another nod, and at last his hand dropped to his side.
She swung away from him to look out over the river and the estuary. Early mist hung low across the water. No foreign merchants’ boats, no red-and-white sails. Misery welled up in her throat like a solid ball, blocking all air and light. Finn had gone, taking his secrets with him. She would never know what had caused that spider’s web of scars across his skin, or where the much deeper damage had come from, that kept him so light and merry on the surface, and so quiet and remote down deep. A cold fish, Saethryth had said. She was sure that was not true, that she had prompted some real warmth from him. She would never forget his gift of the mirror, his naming her as beautiful, that sudden impulse that had spurred him to ask her to come away with him. Down all the green lanes of summer, with the cow parsley as high as their heads, and a single fork-tailed kite soaring and mewing far above, and the warm dust of the roads...
Behind her, Thancrad said, ‘I have no right to ask, but I wish you would say something. There are hard times coming, for us and for all Northumbria, and we would be stronger, together.’ He exhaled sharply. ‘We may yet be very grateful to have Tuuri and Auli as our friends.’
Elfrun shook her head, not denying the truth of his words, merely indicating that she could not answer him, not quite yet.
But no more could she follow Finn’s elusive shape down that winding road. And how safe would those green lanes have been, or the sea-roads, with war looming? She still could not bear to turn round and look at Thancrad, so she went on staring out to the mist-hung sea. Higher, the sky was clearer, and the geese were arriving from the north, arrow after arrow of them, little black shapes writing words on the sky in a language she could not read, crying their alien music. They began to appear at the turn of the leaf, they left in daffodil season, year in and year out, like the in-breath and out-breath of the world. And she had no idea where they went, or what they had seen.
‘I found this for you.’
She turned to face him at last. His hand was extended again, and this time cradled in his palm was a white shape, long and curved and folded, the length of her thumb. She could make no sense of it at first, it looked like the drawn-out bud of a creamy flower, or some monstrous tooth. But when she reached out from inside the cloak and took the thing from his palm its meaning discovered itself. The innermost spiralling core of a big dog whelk, shaped and smoothed by the sea. She looked at it from the side, and from above, noticing where tiny, long-ago worms had bored through the shell, how the outer whorl of the spiral folded in to embrace the core as a parent might a child. Peering into the folds, she could make out a scatter of tiny barnacles, deep-embedded. How long had this shell been tumbling in the sea, to be so broken and polished and transformed? The relentless, impersonal perfection of that spiral tugged at her memory: the maker of her mirror must have spent hours looking at shapes like these. She wondered what Wynn might make of it.
He was looking embarrassed now. ‘It’s a worthless thing. I just picked it up on the foreshore. But I thought you would like it.’
She gripped it tight, and it moulded itself to the shape of her palm. ‘I do.’ She looked up into his face. His brown eyes held concern, and she wanted to reassure him. ‘It’s beautiful.’
She hardly knew him, this reserved, proud young man, despite the strange intimacy that had been forced upon them. But then, she had hardly taken the trouble to look. The sea-fret was clearing; those rags and skeins of vapour that had seemed so solid were disappearing in the morning sun. Still holding his gaze, Elfrun fiddled with the ties of her pouch and tucked the worn heart of the shell safely away, and made up her mind.
When her pouch was fastened again she held out her left hand to Thancrad. She didn’t know what her face looked like, but she could guess from the look of relief and – yes – delight, on his; and she marvelled at the transformation worked by the play of tiny muscles across his strong, bony features. Her hand was cold, but he gripped it firmly, and slowly she felt a little kernel of warmth begin to grow in the secret hollow where their palms met.
CODA: THE CHRONICLE, YORK MINSTER SCRIPTORIUM
2 NOVEMBER 860, FEAST OF ALL SOULS
‘What shall I do with this, my lord?’
Archbishop Wulfhere pulled the quire of vellum towards him. He unfolded it and smoothed it out, but only the area which would become the front page of the still-uncut quire had been written on. His eyes widened briefly, then narrowed as they scanned the close-packed lines of text
.
In this year died King Cinaed ap Alpin of the Picts; and also Athelwulf Ecgberhting of the West Saxons. Domnall ap Alpin and Athelbald Athelwulfing succeeded to the kingdoms. Also in this year the pagans burned the minster at Tours. In this year a girl gave me a flower on the kalends of March. Her face and bosom were freckled, and her eyes were blue. She made me think of a songthrush egg. In this year there was no famine, no murrain of cattle. The pagans were elsewhere. In this year Ingeld was made priest against his better judgement and appointed to the abbacy of Donmouth.
In this year, also, Amlaibh and Imhair made an alliance with Cerball against Mael Sechnaill, and Meath suffered greatly because of it. Athelbald of Wessex married his father’s young widow, and the bishops of the West Saxons were much troubled thereby. In this year, King Osberht of the Northumbrians brought Tilmon back into his favour, and granted him Illingham. In this year also, the same king sent Radmer of Donmouth to Rome. Men wondered at both these things. In this year the swallows came back to their wonted places on the ides of April. The cuckoo called in the woods. The sun shone.
In this year, a woman’s breasts were like mounded cream tipped with strawberries, and they moved me more than pen can express. In this year, I have trespassed on other men’s woods and fields, and hunted their private runs. In this year, I have lost my soul, and found it.
‘Ingeld?’
The librarian nodded, but Wulfhere had not needed to ask. He had wanted, rather, to turn his friend’s name over in his mouth one last time. But he would have known Ingeld’s distinctive hand anywhere, with its square a and its long, jaunty descenders.
And even more than the hand, the voice.
‘Perhaps I should give it to his mother. I hear she is in need of comfort.’
The librarian cackled. ‘Give it to his girl, rather. But which one? Songthrush or strawberries?’
A smile twitched Wulfhere’s cautious face. ‘More fitting, to be sure. But even if I knew who they were, I doubt either of them can read.’ He folded the quire over on itself again, once, twice, three times, and handed it to the librarian. ‘Put it with the archive. Maybe one day someone will find it interesting.’
Daughter of the Wolf Page 45
