by Tim Severin
It had taken me a moment to grasp the subtlety of the Wali of Zaragoza. He had known he could count on me to help him once I’d realized that if Carolus believed that I had acted as a go-between for Hroudland collecting bribes I would also have been branded as a traitor and put to death.
‘It should be easy for you to persuade Carolus that the rearguard was betrayed,’ Osric had said. ‘A little harder, perhaps, that Ganelon was responsible.’
*
Carolus sat without moving. It was a measure of the man that his face gave no hint of what he was thinking. Finally he said, ‘Have you any proof?’
Osric did not falter.
‘Ganelon insisted that my master sign a note promising him a first payment of five hundred dinars in return for his help.’
‘And was the money ever paid?’
‘Sigwulf here can answer that,’ Osric murmured.
The king fixed me with a stare.
‘Ganelon was a rival to my nephew, that is well known. But how do you come into all this?’ he said.
I knew that I would have to lie convincingly in the face of those penetrating grey eyes.
‘When I was sent to Zaragoza,’ I lied, ‘Ganelon asked me to collect five hundred dinars from the wali on his behalf. I was to bring the money to a Jewish moneylender in the town who would arrange for it to be sent on.’
Carolus leaned forward, peering into my face.
‘You are prepared to swear to this?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘You are both dismissed,’ said the king. ‘You will not speak to anyone about this.’
*
I did not see Ganelon’s execution, though it was a public spectacle. It took place two days later and there was no trial. The damning note signed by Wali Husayn had been found among his possessions. He was taken to an open space where a stout rope was fastened to each limb. The ends of the ropes were then attached to the yokes of four ox teams whose drovers then urged their beasts to walk off in opposite directions. They tore Ganelon into pieces. This method of execution was normally done with horses, but Carolus decided that oxen would be more appropriate. The drovers had been carefully selected: each of them had lost a brother, cousin or nephew in the massacre at the pass.
I was in a delirium at the time. My shoulder wound began to fester alarmingly and I was placed on a pile of blankets in the back of a supply cart, soon to head north in the army’s supply train. I raved and thrashed, shouting that flying monsters were attacking me or that a vixen was a mortal danger. At other times I lay still, the sweat beading on my brow, and mumbled of flocks of birds at a sacred spring.
Osric stayed with me, fending off the physician sent by the king who took a personal interest in my survival. The royal doctor wanted to stuff the putrid wound with a paste of cobwebs and honey, but Osric would not let him.
‘I also had to stop him bleeding you,’ Osric told me as I began to recover on the third day, ‘you were weak enough already. The loss of any more blood would put you in your grave.’
His remark prompted a faint memory of a sentence he had translated from the Book of Dreams.
‘Osric, do you remember anything in the Oneirokritikon about tears of blood?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘When we first came to Frankia, I dreamed of a great horse and its rider crying tears of blood. Later, I saw the identical horse and rider as a statue at the palace in Aachen. On the march into Hispania I recognized the king’s own war horse as the same animal.’
‘Go on.’
‘On the day I told the king about Hroudland’s death,’ I explained, ‘I was seated by the water trough and he rode up on his horse, so close it nearly trod on me and I looked up. I knew exactly what was happening. It was all so real that I watched the king’s face and waited for the tears of blood. Yet they never came.’
‘Some people would say he had no reason to weep. He had yet to hear that his nephew had been killed.’ Osric studied me, his expression serious. ‘Yet, if we are to believe Artimedorus, there’s another meaning for your dream.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember something about horses?’
There was a long pause as Osric searched for the exact words as he remembered them. But the extract from the Oneirokritikon he quoted was not what I had expected.
‘To see blood flowing is unlucky for a man who wishes to keep his actions secret.’
I sank back on my blankets, too exhausted to keep my head raised.
‘So my dream was not about the horse and its rider. It was about me, the dreamer.’
Already I was wondering if one day Carolus would find out that I had lied to him about Ganelon and what I would find when I returned to Aachen. Did Bertha still expect me to continue with our affair? And how many of her intimate circle had she told that I had predicted the death of the king’s only son? With Osric’s help perhaps I could remember or reconstruct a few pages from the Book of Dreams and steer a safe path through the intrigues of the royal court. But Hroudland’s death meant that I had lost my patron and protector, even as I had started to come to terms with being winelas guma, a ‘friendless man’, an outcast from my own country. Once again, my future was uncertain.
Historical Note
Sigwulf’s story is based very loosely on the events surrounding Charlemagne’s failed military expedition into Moorish Spain in August 778 AD. The rearguard of his army was cut off and massacred as it was withdrawing across the Pyrenees. Several high officials of Charlemagne’s court were killed in the action, among them Anselm, the count of the palace, Count Eggihard the royal seneschal, and – notably – Count Hroudland or Roland, Prefect of the Breton March. Medieval poets and bards transmuted what had been a bloody defeat into a tale of valour and chivalry. Above all they celebrated the heroic last stand of Count Roland and his companions against an overwhelming foe whom they identified as Saracens but who were almost certainly Christian Vascons (Gascons/Basques). Their romanticized version of the battle became the best known of the chansons de geste, the ‘songs of deeds’, in the repertoire of tales known to jongleurs and minstrels as ‘The Matter of France’. Another collection, ‘The Matter of Britain’, told of the exploits of King Arthur and his knights.
The exact location of the fateful battle when Roland was killed is not mentioned in the early versions of the story. Tradition places it in the pass at Roncesvalles in Navarre, Spain, 7km from the French border. Roncesvalles became a popular stopover on one of the pilgrim routes to the shrine of St James at Compostela. ‘The Song of Roland’ as it became known was probably spread throughout Christian Europe by returning pilgrims. When Taillefer, one of William of Normandy’s warriors, was granted the honour of striking the first blow at the battle of Hastings, it is said that he advanced against the enemy singing of Roland and Charlemagne. Some of the leading characters in the chansons de gestes are authentic historical figures: King Offa of Mercia described himself as Rex Anglorum; the scholarly Alcuin moved from the cathedral church of York to teach at the royal palace school in Aachen; and three Saracen walis or provincial governors came to seek an alliance with Charlemagne against their overlord, the Emir of Cordoba.
*
The Oneirokritikon, or ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, was compiled in the 2nd century AD by the Greek writer Artimedorus and translated into Arabic by the 8th century, probably via a Byzantine Greek source. It became a popular dreambook in various languages throughout the Middle Ages when the meaning of dreams was considered highly significant. The meanings of various dreams in Sigwulf’s tale – seeing a snake, blood, an unknown riderless horse, etc. – are taken from the Oneirokritikon.
*
Charlemagne’s unusual family arrangements have attracted scholarly comment. He kept his numerous daughters close to him. There were at least eight legitimate princesses, and an unknown number by other women. One of them had for her partner an unnamed courtier who wrote verse. Over the years the animals in Charlemagne’s zoo included a
lion, peacocks, bears and an elephant . . . of which more will be written in the next volume of Sigwulf’s adventures.
SAXON: The Book of Dreams
TIM SEVERIN, explorer, film-maker and lecturer, has made many expeditions, from crossing the Atlantic in a medieval leather boat to going out in search of Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe. He has written books about all of them. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Book of the Sea Award, a Christopher Prize, and the literary medal of the Academie de la Marine. He made his historical fiction debut with the hugely successful Viking series. The Book of Dreams is the first in the new Saxon series.
Also by Tim Severin
NON-FICTION
The Brendan Voyage
The Sindbad Voyage
The Jason Voyage
The Ulysses Voyage
Crusader
In Search of Genghis Khan
The China Voyage
The Spice Island Voyage
In Search of Moby Dick
Seeking Robinson Crusoe
FICTION
Viking: Odinn’s Child
Viking: Sworn Brother
Viking: King’s Man
Corsair
Buccaneer
Sea Robber
First published 2012 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2012 by Pan
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-230-76686-0 EPUB
Copyright © Tim Severin 2012
The right of Tim Severin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.
