Viking Hostage

by Warr, Tracey;

  ‘How much longer can they keep us here?’ Audebert said for the hundredth time. Helie looked at him exasperated but did not reply. There was no good reason to ever let them out. Since Helie’s reckless raid had inadvertently led to the blinding of a priest, their captor, Gerard of Limoges, was within his rights to keep them prisoner. No doubt their father had tried to treat for their release but he must be angry with Helie for his actions. And he has other sons, Audebert told himself bleakly.

  ‘I’ve barely begun,’ he said. ‘I can’t end my life here, like this, in this hole.’ Audebert was sixteen when they were captured and by his reckoning his seventeenth birthday was last week.

  Helie said nothing. A search of the dungeon for any means of escape took them less than an hour on their first day. It had no weaknesses. It was a deep pit with a small opening high above their heads, covered with a metal grate. At least they could see the distant circle of day fading to night and stars, and occasionally they heard geese honking and glimpsed a flurry of white flying overhead. The hole was a natural rock formation adjacent to the castle, its surfaces giving no purchase. At the beginning of their imprisonment Audebert had tried over and over to find handholds in the rough grey stone to climb up, but he never got higher than a few feet and his hands were cut and bloody, his knees and shoulders bruised from his repeated falls. The jailor reporting on these attempts, had come and fitted them with ankle shackles. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ said Helie, picking at the scabs forming on the sores around the iron cuff on his leg.

  The jailor lowered down a jug of water, bread and other scant provisions now and then. Audebert had been in peak physical condition when they were captured but now his clothes hung on his large bones and the muscles of his sword-arm were gone. He tried to persuade his brother to pace and wrestle every day but Helie was morose and lethargic. Audebert conceded that it was difficult to want to exercise when you were starving and your stomach muscles clenched on air. ‘You haven’t eaten each other yet then!’ the jailor called down to them cheerfully. His visits were erratic: some days he came, others he did not.

  The jug of water was not enough for washing, so they had to exist in their own filth. Audebert found a flint on the ground with a fine edge and scraped his body in the fashion of the Romans, although he lacked their sweet perfumed oils. He set up a latrine near a small crack in one stone corner. When it rained their waste sluiced away into the moat and the rain washed them too. If Audebert had a vessel down here he could have collected rainwater but his attempts to fashion something from loose stones had so far failed and the jailor insisted on pulling the jug up each time he gave them water. The jailor repulsed Audebert’s efforts to talk to him, to ask for a vessel to wash with. ‘I’m not here to chat with murderers,’ he said. When it did not rain for days, they must ferment in the soil of their own bodies and breathe the stench of their excrement and urine. So Audebert was grateful that it had rained the night before when the jailer yelled, ‘Oi! You’ve got a visitor!’

  Audebert pushed himself to his feet and thought that the sun had come down to visit him as the bright face of a young girl with a shining tumble of abundant golden hair, peered down from high above him.

  ‘Hello,’ she called tentatively.

  ‘Hello,’ Audebert called up, his voice ricocheting on the stone. ‘Who are you, Lady?’ Even at this distance he could see her face was pensive and sensitive, her large green eyes framed by dark brown lashes and brows.

  ‘Adalmode. My father is Lord Gerard.’

  He guessed that she was around twelve – on the brink of womanhood. She was beautiful as the day, as the sky, as freedom. She looked down with a frankly curious expression.

  ‘Hello Lady Adalmode. I am Audebert, son of the Count of La Marche. What brings you to my hearth?’ he laughed, gesturing around himself.

  Adalmode peered down into the deep hole at the two young men. One sat huddled on the floor leaning against the wall and the other who had called out to her was standing in the middle of the circular floor his face turned up, catching the sparse light. She grimaced at the boy’s description of the awful place he was in. In the gloom at the bottom of the dungeon pit, Audebert’s smile lit his face, crinkling startling blue eyes that sloped downwards at their corners, lifting his mouth into a perfect curve and a glimpse of even white teeth, dimpling one cheek.

  ‘Is that your brother?’

  ‘Yes Lady.’

  ‘Is he ill?’

  Helie glanced briefly up at her and resumed his hunched position.

  ‘No Lady Adalmode, he is merely miserable. His ailment is in his shackles.’

  The brothers bore a strong resemblance to one another, but whilst the vivid blue of Audebert’s eyes against his black hair and his strong masculine features contradicted by boyishness gave him beauty, the similar features were merely compiled on Helie’s face.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said and suddenly her fair head was gone, the circle of sky was empty.

  ‘Goodbye Lady Adalmode,’ Audebert shouted, raising a hand towards the empty sky, hoping that she was still within earshot. ‘Come again!’

  The only reply was a shower of bread and bruised apples from the jailer. Audebert rescued the food, dusted off as much of the dirt as he could with the dirty sleeve of his tunic and placed it on a large flat stone that he had designated as ‘the table.’

  ‘To table,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘At least today we have something nice to talk about, rather than rats and regrets.’

  ‘Nice!’ said Helie, reaching for a lump of bread. ‘She came to gloat.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I hope she will come again. Did you see how pretty she was?’

  ‘Hope will kill you Audebert,’ said Helie.

  The next morning Audebert did hope. It rained in the night and he was grateful again for that. He took his flint scraper and with difficulty cut off hanks of his hair. Helie sniggered at him from his corner. He had taken up that corner early in their captivity and rarely moved from it. It was the only spot that received a splinter of sun when there was any. ‘Audebert, I’m sorry to tell you that even with your barbering and your rain-wash, you are not looking your best in the unlikely event that your sweetheart calls again.’

  Audebert carried on hacking off small chunks of black hair and studied the corpse-pallor of his brother’s face. No doubt he looked the same, like a thing found under a turned stone, his nut-brown tan leached from his skin by captivity.

  ‘If she does visit again,’ said Helie, ‘she’ll like as not let down a long skein of spittle on your hopeful face. She is the spawn of our enemy you fool.’

  Audebert kept silent and waited, but Adalmode did not return.

  In the cold night Audebert felt the agony of his imprisonment more sharply because he had glimpsed life beyond this stone place. He wept quietly in the dark, allowing the tears to trickle coldly down his cheeks, hearing his brother’s gentle snores, the occasional distant sounds of the night-time castle above, the lap of the moat waters against the stone, the hoot of an owl. He remembered his life before: the pampered life of the lord’s son, and thought of his mother at home in Bellac, worrying over her two lost boys. He pictured his bed piled with thick brown bear skins, his wooden chest filled with clean, fine clothes, his horses and dogs, the bread baking in the kitchen and the cook scolding him for ‘testing’ her works in progress. How could he go on bearing this? He wished that Adalmode had not shown her face and reminded him of the wife and children he might never have now. He looked with self-disgust at the ‘chess pieces’ he had made from bits of stone and mud. His brother only condescended to play infrequently. You fool, he told himself, to be so full of hope. The season was growing colder and soon the rain would be replaced with wind, hail and snow. How would they survive that down here?

  They would moulder, take ill and die, or grow thinner and thinner and starve. Or one day Gerard of Limoges would come and convict them. They would be pulled, blinking and filthy from the hole, pelted with rotte
n food by howling, laughing people, made to walk barefoot as criminals, blinded probably – their eyes for the eyes that Helie had taken from the priest, and then hanged on the gallows, their legs dancing and jerking briefly.

  Audebert licked at the salt tears on his mouth, cuffed them away from his cheeks, clenched his fists and fought hard to see some glimmer of hope. Helie was wrong. Hope would keep him alive. The memory of Adalmode’s face and her voice – the few words she had spoken – would keep him alive.

  He took up his flint and scratched another line on the wall in the place that was his ‘calendar.’ His name was scratched there too. He thought before this that his name would ring in the halls of lords as they toasted his victories and war-feats – Audebert of La Marche! – he imagined men shouting, the goblets clashing and the drinking horns raised in his direction, the beer dribbling in the glossy beards of his soldiers. He thought that his name would ring through history, down the generations of his sons and daughters. Now perhaps, it would be just this hole and starvation, pain, shame, death. He peered at the wall in the moonlight, at the count of, so far, one hundred and ninety-seven days. One hundred and ninety-seven nights when the damp seeped into his bones and his fingers were swollen red and ugly with the cold – fingers, he thought, looking at them, that should be tracing the soft curve of a young woman’s breast, a young woman lying next to him on a fine white sheet. Audebert wrapped his painful hands around his knees and assumed his brother’s habitual position. ‘Stop whimpering,’ he told himself aloud.

  In the chamber Adalmode shared with her sisters, the door was slightly ajar as she stood guard peering into the passageway, whilst her oldest brother Guy stood at a lectern placed close to the window. He put the goose quill back into the ink horn and rubbed at the brown ink stain on the callus on his right middle finger – his writing bump. The lump was permanent and had been there since he was ten and started writing his Annals. The ink stain was fairly permanent too – and only really came off in the summer when he swam every day in the river. Guy learnt to read and write in the cathedral school in Limoges and saw in the library the records and genealogy of his family who had been dispossessed of their right to rule the city. He determined to do his best to keep those records up to date in his own small way until the family honours were restored. Only Adalmode knew about his scribing. His father would be angered by it. Writing was for clerks, not for the sons of noblemen, he would shout. If his brother Hildegaire came to know of Guy’s Annals he would tell their father, so Adalmode was on the watch for anyone coming and then she would hiss to Guy to conceal his writing.

  The bumpy sheets of parchment were folded in half around each other in gathers, forming a small book. The pages of this gather were nearly filled and Guy reminded himself to buy more used parchment at the next fair in Limoges so that he could wash the old writing from it with milk and oat bran as the monks had shown him, and make himself a new book, a second book of Annals. He wondered how many books he would fill in his lifetime and if he would ever write there: ‘In this year Guy became Viscount of Limoges.’ He retrieved the quill and added ‘Book I’ to the title on the front page. He lent down close to the manuscript, moving a clear glass filled with water over the parchment to help him read through his earlier entries.

  The Annals of Guy of Limoges Book I

  + 966 In this year of the reign of King Lothaire of the Franks who is descended of Charlemagne, Gerard of Limoges, his wife Rothilde of Brosse and their family continued in exile at the castle of Montignac, dispossessed of their rights to the viscounty of Limoges, through the continuing anger of the Duke of Aquitaine caused by the disloyalty of Gerard’s grandfather in the time of Ebles Mancer. The great city of Limoges continued in the custodianship of Gerard’s cousin, Ademar of Ségur, who prospers with trading in the lands of the northern seas. Just after mid-winter the nursemaid at Montignac, Editha, died at a great age, that she did not know herself but it looked like over a hundred. A hot summer.

  + 967 In this year King Lothaire and Queen Emma rejoiced at the birth of their son, Louis. A monk named Bede has explained some mysteries of the world in his books The Reckoning of Time and On the Nature of Things. It is written by the Anglo-Saxons that the earth resembles a pine nut and the sun glides about it, although some country folk say instead that the sun dives into the ocean each night and rises up again from the waters in the morning. The firmament is adorned with many stars and is perpetually turning around us. In June a large circle surrounded the sun with the colours of the rainbow and four brighter circles embraced it.

  + 968 In this year, after the negotiations of his uncle Ebles, Bishop of Limoges, Duke Guillaume IV of Aquitaine, known as ‘Strong Arm,’ took Emma, the sister of the Count of Blois, as his wife. Around mid-summer the hound, Egil, had eight pups at Montignac, one white, which went to Gerard’s daughter, Adalmode of Limoges.

  + 969 In this year, Emma of Blois bore an heir for the Duchy of Aquitaine. The fortress at Brantôme was struck by lightning and badly burnt. The head groom at Montignac died. The bread failed in the villages of the Limousin. It was reported that vermin like moles with two teeth fell from the air and ate everything up and were driven out by a priest through fasting and prayer.

  + 970 In this year the day before the nonas of April, at the end of the night, while the brothers were singing the divine office of the night, innumerable stars were seen to fall as a rain from the sky over the whole world.

  + 971 In this year the Vienne rose up over its banks, covered the water meadows and lapped at houses, bridges and churches and then retreated leaving a great slick of mud in its wake. It seems that as the veins lie in a man’s body so lie the veins of water that run through the earth, the great rivers such as the Vienne in Limoges.

  Guy smiled at the comical mix of youthful earnestness and everyday concerns in the entries for the early years, and frowned at the errors that he had scraped at with a knife, leaving ugly patches on the parchment. He moved the glass of water to one side and picked up his quill again to write this year’s entry, bending with his face an inch from the surface. He had been composing this year’s entry in his head since his conversation with his father at breakfast and he scribed it carefully now, only needing to scrape at two errors.

  + 972 In this year Helie and Audebert, the sons of Count Boso of La Marche, blinded Benedict, a priest under the protection of the Bishop of Limoges and the Duke of Aquitaine. The sun was covered by the passing of the moon and day turned to night. The Duke of Aquitaine held Assembly in Limoges. Gerard of Limoges pledged allegiance and asked for the return of his rights and was again refused. Gerard, on the advice of his eldest son, Guy, continued to hold Helie and Audebert of La Marche, in his dungeon, in hopes of winning favour in time. Rothilde, wife to Gerard of Limoges, gave birth to an eleventh child, a daughter named Calva. An heir named Robert was born to Hugh Capet, Duke of France and his Duchess Adelais who is sister to the Duke of Aquitaine.

  Guy read the entry back over and closed the book, retied the black ribbon around it in a cross shape and put it back in its hiding place in the locked casket under Adalmode’s bed.

  With one hand Adalmode held her thick fair hair bunched behind her head, away from her face, stood at a distance of three paces from the long trestle in the Great Hall and expertly spat an olive pit into a metal bowl. She loosed her hair, smiling smugly at the loud ping the stone made as it hit the dead centre of the bowl and swirled around its own momentum before coming to a stop. She giggled as Guy stepped up beside her, ostentatiously chewing on his olive.

  ‘Stop laughing,’ he said, his voice muffled around the olive in his mouth, ‘you’ll make me swallow it.’ His pit, spat in response to Adalmode’s, inevitably missed the bowl and the trestle and struck a disgruntled old lurcher sleeping in front of the fire.

  ‘What did I get?’ Guy called out triumphantly.

  ‘You hit the dog, you idiot.’

  ‘Best of three?’ asked Guy, as the dog staggered to its feet, stared bal
efully at them, and moved towards the doorway where a patch of sunlight gleamed on the worn stone floor.

  ‘Poor dog,’ Adalmode called after it. ‘You are wise to move out of the way!’

  ‘Adalmode! Are you doing anything useful?’ She turned to the sharp note of anxiety in her mother’s voice and removed the mirth from her face. ‘And Guy, shouldn’t you be out practicing in the bailey with your brothers at this hour?’

  ‘I am on my way there, Mother,’ declared Guy with gusto, and Adalmode automatically stepped to his side so that he could lay his hand on her arm in what appeared to be a gesture of affectionate companionship but was in fact a gesture of necessity to conceal his extreme short-sightedness. Guy was tall and thin, gangly, with light brown, tousled hair. The lines of his features were distinctive, too sharply angled for beauty, but it was an intelligent, humourous face.

  ‘I’m going with Guy, Mother, as Sergeant Rufus has asked me to take them wine to relieve their sweaty exertions,’ Adalmode lied smoothly, picking up an empty jug from the table with her free hand.

  ‘Very well,’ said Rothilde. Adalmode watched with concern as the tense lines around her mother’s mouth smoothed briefly into a vague smile, before she sat and placed both elbows on the table, dropping her forehead into her upturned palms.

  Adalmode picked her way carefully to the door, guiding Guy’s feet away from the mounds of dog faeces and discarded, congealing food, which littered the thin rushes on the floor, giving off a sweet, sickly odour. Between them they had made shift for years to conceal the extreme weakness of Guy’s vision from the rest of the family, and above all from their father. Adalmode was six when she realised her favourite brother needed her help. He was hopeless at all physical activities: swordplay, quintain, games of chase. He played boule erratically, winning through sheer fluke or losing and never hitting the ball. In chess he had to peer closely at the board and make excuses for it: ‘I thought I saw a spider on the board; I thought I saw an ant.’ It was a family joke. ‘You are checkmated and no insects about it!’ his brother Hildegaire would shout. His younger brothers teased him relentlessly over his lack of physical ability which they were acquiring so well, just as they teased Adalmode simply because she was a girl. Guy and Adalmode were allies against The Brothers. His tongue and seniority, as the oldest son, protected her; her eyes served him.