The Burning Land sc-5

by Bernard Cornwell

  “No, lord,” Finan whispered, “he’s possessed.” He fingered the cross which always hung from his neck. “I’ve seen holy men in Ireland,” he went on softly, “just like him.”

  “The spirit talks through him,” Steapa said in awe. Alfred must have heard our low voices because he turned an irritated face on us. We went silent, and suddenly Godwin began to writhe and then he let out a great shout that echoed in the hall. Smoke from the braziers wreathed around him before vanishing through the smoke-hole ripped in the Roman roof.

  I learned much later that Brother Godwin had been discovered by Bishop Asser, who had found the young, blind monk locked in a cell at the monastery of Æthelingæg. He was kept locked away because the abbot believed Godwin to be mad as a bat, but Bishop Asser decided Godwin really did hear his god’s voice and so had brought the monk to Alfred who, of course, believed that anything from Æthelingæg was auspicious because that was where he had survived the greatest crisis of his reign.

  Godwin began to yelp. The sound was of a man in great pain and the harpist took his hands from the strings. Dogs responded to the sounds, howling in the dark back rooms of the palace. “The holy spirit comes,” Finan whispered reverently, and Godwin let out a great scream as if his bowels were being torn from him.

  “Praise God,” Alfred said. He and his family were gazing at the monk who now stood as though crucified, then he relaxed his outspread arms and began speaking. He shivered as he spoke and his voice meandered up and down, now shrill, then almost too low to hear. If it was singing, then it was the strangest noise I ever heard. At first his words sounded like nonsense, or else were being chanted in an unknown language, but slowly, from the jabber, coherent sentences emerged. Alfred was the chosen of God. Wessex was the promised land. Milk and honey abounded. Women brought sin into the world. God’s bright angels had spread their wings over us. The Lord most high is terrible. The waters of Israel were turned to blood. The whore of Babylon was among us.

  He stopped after chanting that. The harpist had detected a rhythm in Godwin’s words and was playing softly, but his hands checked on the strings again as the monk turned his blind face about the hall with a look of puzzlement. “The whore!” he suddenly started shouting over and over. “The whore! The whore! The whore! She is among us!” He made a mewing sound and twisted down to his knees and began sobbing.

  No one spoke, no one moved. I heard the wind in the smoke-hole and I thought of my children somewhere in Æthelflæd’s quarters and wondered if they were listening to this craziness.

  “The whore,” Godwin said, drawing the word “whore” into a long throbbing howl. Then he stood and looked quite sane. “The whore is among us, lord,” he said toward Alfred, in a perfectly normal voice.

  “The whore?” Alfred asked uncertainly.

  “The whore!” Godwin screamed again, then once again reverted to sanity. “The whore, lord, is the maggot in the fruit, the rat in the granary, the locust in the wheatfield, the disease in the child of God. It saddens God, lord,” he said, and began weeping.

  I touched Thor’s hammer. Godwin was mad beyond help, I thought, but all the Christians in that hall gazed at him as though he had been sent from heaven. “Where’s Babylon?” I whispered to Finan.

  “Somewhere a long way off, lord,” he answered softly, “maybe beyond Rome even?”

  Godwin was weeping silently, but saying nothing, so Alfred gestured that the harpist should touch his strings again. The chords sounded and Godwin responded by starting to chant again, though now his words lacked rhythm. “Babylon is the devil’s home,” he shouted, “the whore is the devil’s child, the yeast in the bread will fail, the whore has come to us. The whore died and the devil raised her up, the whore will destroy us, stop!”

  This last command was to the harpist who, in frightened obedience, flattened his hands on the strings to stop their quivering.

  “God is on our side,” Alfred said in a kindly voice, “so who can destroy us?”

  “The whore can destroy us,” Bishop Asser said, and I thought, I could not be sure, that he glanced toward me, though I doubt he could see me because I was deep in the shadows.

  “The whore!” Godwin shouted at Alfred, “you fool! The whore!”

  No one reproved him for calling the king a fool.

  “God will surely protect us!” Bishop Erkenwald said.

  “The whore was among us, and the whore died, and God sent her to the fires of hell and the devil raised her and she is here,” Godwin said forcibly. “She is here! Her stench sours God’s chosen people! She must be killed. She must be cut into pieces and her foul parts cast into the bottomless sea! God commands it! God weeps in his heaven because you do not obey his commandments, and he commands that the whore must die! God weeps! He hurts! God weeps! The tears of God fall on us like drops of fire, and it is the whore who makes those tears!”

  “What whore?” Alfred asked, then Finan put a warning hand on my arm.

  “She was called Gisela,” Godwin had hissed.

  At first I thought I had misheard. Men were looking at me, and Finan was holding my arm, and I was certain I had misheard, but then Godwin began to chant again. “Gisela, the great whore, is now Skade. She is a piece of filth in human guise, a whore of rottenness, a devil’s turd with breasts, a whore, Gisela! God killed her because she was filth and now she is back!”

  “No,” Finan said to me, but without much urgency. I had stood.

  “Lord Uhtred!” Alfred called sharply. Bishop Asser was watching me, half smiling, as his pet monk writhed and screamed. “Lord Uhtred!” Alfred called again, slapping the table.

  I had strode to the hall’s center where I took Godwin’s shoulder and turned his blind face toward me.

  “Lord Uhtred!” Alfred had stood.

  “You lie, monk,” I said.

  “She was filth!” Godwin spat at me. He began striking my chest with his fists. “Your wife was the devil’s whore, a whore hated by God, and you are the devil’s instrument, you whore-husband, heathen, sinner!”

  The hall was in uproar. I was aware of none of it, only of a red anger that consumed me and flared in me and filled my ears with its howling sound. I had no weapons. This was a royal hall and weapons were forbidden, but the mad monk was hitting me and howling at me and I drew back my right hand and hit him.

  My hand half hit him. Maybe he sensed the blow was coming be cause he backed away fast, and my hand caught him on the jaw, dislocating it so that his chin was skewed sideways as blood poured from his lips. He spat out a tooth and took a wild swing at me.

  “Enough!” Alfred shouted. Men were at last moving, but it seemed to me they moved with exaggerated slowness as Godwin spat blood at me.

  “Whore-lover,” he snarled, or I think that was what he said.

  “Stop! I command it!” Alfred called.

  “Whore-husband,” the bloody mouth said distinctly.

  So I hit him again, and with that second blow I broke his neck.

  I had not meant to kill him, merely silence him, but I heard his neck crunch. I saw his head loll unnaturally to one side, and then he fell across one of the braziers and his short black hair blazed into bright flame. He collapsed on the floor’s broken mosaics and the hall was filled with the stink of burning hair and scorched flesh.

  “Arrest him!” I heard Bishop Asser’s loud shout.

  “He must die!” Bishop Erkenwald called.

  Alfred was staring at me in horror. His wife, who had ever hated me, was screaming that I must pay for my sins.

  Finan took my arm and pulled me toward the hall’s door. “To the house, lord,” he said.

  “Steapa! Hold him!” Alfred called.

  But Steapa liked me. He did move toward me, but slowly enough so that I reached the door where the royal guards made a halfhearted effort to bar my way, but a menacing growl from Finan drove their spears aside. He dragged me into the night. “Now come,” he said, “fast!”

  We ran down the hill to the dark
river.

  And behind us was a dead monk and uproar.

  PART TWO

  VIKING

  ONE

  I stayed furious, unrepentant, pacing the large room beside the river where servants, cowed to silence by my rage, revived the fire. It is strange how news spreads in a city. Within minutes a crowd had gathered outside the house to see how the night would end. The folk were silent, just watching. Finan had barred the outer doors and ordered torches lit in the courtyard. Rain hissed in the flames and slicked the paving stones. Most of my men lived close by and they came one by one, some of them drunk, and Finan or Cerdic met them at the outer door and sent them to fetch their mail and weapons. “Are you expecting a fight?” I asked Finan.

  “They’re warriors,” he said simply.

  He was right, so I put on my own mail. I dressed as a warlord. I dressed for battle, with gold on my arms and both swords at my waist, and it was just after I had buckled the belt that Alfred’s emissary arrived.

  The emissary was Father Beocca. My old friend came alone, his priest’s robes muddy from the streets and wet from the rain. He was shivering and I put a stool beside the central hearth and draped a fur cloak about his shoulders. He sat, then held his good hand toward the flames. Finan had escorted him from the front gate and he stayed. I saw that Skade, too, had crept into a shadowed corner. I caught her eye and gave a curt nod that she could remain.

  “You’ve looked under the floor?” Father Beocca said suddenly.

  “Under the floor?”

  “The Romans,” he said, “would heat this house with a furnace that vented its heat into the space under the floor.”

  “I know.”

  “And we hack holes in their roofs and make hearths,” he said sadly.

  “You’ll make yourself ill if you insist on walking about on cold, wet nights,” I said.

  “Of course a lot of those floors have collapsed,” Beocca said as if it was a very important point he needed to make. He rapped the tiles with the stick he now used to help himself walk. “Yours seems in good repair, though.”

  “I like a hearth.”

  “A hearth is comforting,” Beocca said. He turned his good eye to me and smiled. “The monastery at Æscengum cleverly managed to flood the space under their floor with sewage, and the only solution was to pull the whole house down and build anew! It was a blessing, really.”

  “A blessing?”

  “They found some gold coins among the turds,” he said, “so I suspect God directed their effluent, don’t you?”

  “My gods have better things to do than worry about shit.”

  “That’s why you’ve never found gold among your turds!” Beocca said and started laughing. “There, Uhtred,” he said triumphantly, “I have at last proved my God is mightier than your false idols!” He smiled at me, but the smile slowly faded so that he looked old and tired again. I loved Beocca. He had been my childhood tutor and he was always exasperating and pedantic, but he was a good man. “You have until dawn,” he said.

  “To do what?”

  He spoke tiredly, as if he despaired of what he told me. “You will go to the king in penitence,” he said, “without mail or weapons. You will abase yourself. You will hand the witch to the king. All the land you hold in Wessex is forfeited. You will pay a wergild to the church for the life of Brother Godwin, and your children will be held hostages against that payment.”

  Silence.

  Sparks whirled upward. A couple of my wolfhounds came into the room. One smelled Beocca’s robes, whined, and then both settled by the fire, their doleful eyes looking at me for a moment before closing.

  “The wergild,” Finan asked for me, “how much?”

  “One thousand and five hundred shillings,” Beocca said.

  I sneered. “For a mad monk?”

  “For a saint,” Beocca said.

  “A mad fool,” I snarled.

  “A holy fool,” Beocca said mildly.

  The wergild is the price we pay for death. If I am judged guilty of unjustly killing a man or woman I must pay their kin a price, that price depending on their rank, and that is fair, but Alfred had set Godwin’s wergild at almost a royal level. “To pay that,” I said, “I’d have to sell almost everything I own, and the king has just taken all my land.”

  “And you must also swear an oath of loyalty to the etheling,” Beocca said. He usually became exasperated with me and would splutter as his exasperation grew, but that night he was very calm.

  “So the king would impoverish me,” I asked, “and tie me to his son?”

  “And he will return the sorceress to her husband,” Beocca said, looking at the black-cloaked Skade, whose eyes glittered from the room’s darkest corner. “Skirnir has offered a reward for her return.”

  “Skirnir?” I asked. The name was unfamiliar to me.

  “Skirnir is her husband,” Beocca said. “A Frisian.”

  I looked at Skade who nodded abruptly.

  “If you return her,” I said, “she dies.”

  “Does that concern you?” Beocca asked.

  “I don’t like killing women.”

  “The law of Moses tells us we should not allow a witch to live,” Beocca said. “Besides, she is an adulterer, so her husband has the God-given right to kill her if that is his wish.”

  “Is Skirnir a Christian?” I asked, but neither Skade nor Father Beocca answered. “Will he kill you?” I asked Skade and she just nodded. “So,” I turned back to Beocca, “until I pay the wergild, make my oath to Edward, and send Skade to her death, my children are hostages?”

  “The king has decreed that your children will be cared for in the Lady Æthelflæd’s household,” Beocca answered. He looked me up and down with his good eye. “Why are you dressed for war?” I made no answer and Beocca shrugged. “Did you think the king would send his guards?”

  “I thought he might.”

  “And you would have fought them?” He sounded shocked.

  “I would have them know who they came to arrest,” I said.

  “You killed a man!” Beocca at last found some energy. “The man offended you, I know, but it was the Holy Spirit who spoke in him! You hit him, Uhtred! The king forgave the first blow, but not the second, and you must pay for that!” He leaned back, looking tired again. “The wergild is well within your ability to pay. Bishop Asser wished it set much higher, but the king is merciful.” A log in the hearth spat suddenly, startling the hounds, who twitched and whined. The fire found new life, brightening the room and casting shaky shadows.

  I faced Beocca across the flames. “Bishop Asser,” I spat angrily.

  “What of him?”

  “Godwin was his puppy.”

  “The bishop saw holiness in him, yes.”

  “He saw a way to his ambition,” I snarled, “to rid Wessex of me.” I had been thinking of the feast’s events ever since my hand took Godwin’s life, and I had decided that Asser was behind the mad monk’s words. Bishop Asser believed Wessex safe. Harald’s power was destroyed, and Haesten had sent his family to be baptized, so Wessex had no need of a pagan warlord, and Asser had used Godwin to poison Alfred’s mind against me. “That twist of Welsh shit told Godwin what to say,” I said. “It wasn’t the holy spirit speaking in Godwin, father, it was Bishop Asser.”

  Beocca looked at me through the shimmer of fire. “Did you know,” he asked, “that the flames in hell cast no light?”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “It is one of the mysteries of God,” Beocca said, then grunted as he stood. He shrugged off the borrowed fur cloak and leaned heavily on his stick. “What shall I tell the king?”

  “Is your god responsible for hell?” I asked.

  He frowned, thinking. “A good question,” he finally said, though he did not answer it. “As is mine. What shall I tell the king?”

  “That he will have my answer at dawn.”

  Beocca half smiled. “And what will that answer be, Lord Uhtred?”

 
; “He will discover that at dawn.”

  Beocca nodded. “You are to come to the palace alone, without weapons, without mail, and dressed simply. We shall send men to take the witch. Your children will be returned on payment of one hundred shillings, the remainder of the wergild is to be paid within six months.” He limped toward the courtyard door, then turned and stared at me. “Let me die in peace, Lord Uhtred.”

  “By watching my humiliation?”

  “By knowing that your sword will be at King Edward’s command. That Wessex will be safe. That Alfred’s work will not die with him.”

  That was the first time I heard Edward called king.

  “You’ll have my answer at sunrise,” I said.

  “God be with you,” Beocca responded, and hobbled into the night.

  I listened to the heavy outer door bang shut and the locking bar drop into place, and I remembered Ravn, the blind skald who had been Ragnar the Elder’s father, telling me that our lives are like a voyage across an unknown sea, and sometimes, he said, we get tired of calm waters and gentle winds, and we have no choice but to slam the steering oar’s loom hard over and head for the gray clouds and the whitecaps and the tumult of danger. “That is our tribute to the gods,” he had told me, and I still do not know quite what he meant, but in that sound of the door closing I heard the echo of the steering oar slamming hard to one side.

  “What do we do?” Finan asked me.

  “I tell you what I won’t do,” I snarled. “I will not give that damned child my oath.”

  “Edward’s no child,” Finan said mildly.

  “He’s a milksop little bastard,” I said angrily. “He’s addled by his god, just like his father. He was weaned on that bitch wife’s vinegar tits, and I will not give him an oath.”

  “He’ll be King of Wessex soon,” Finan observed.

  “And why? Because you and I kept their kingdom safe, you and I! If Wessex lives, my friend, it’s because an Irish runt and a Northumbrian pagan kept it alive! And they forget that!”