The Abbot's Tale

by Conn Iggulden

  ‘Well, serjeant? Hand Father Dunstan the bag of coins!’

  I accepted it and the man seemed relieved.

  I followed Eadred back inside and thought about what I had just done and whether I’d had any choice.

  ‘Sit with me, father – and tell me what you will do in the office,’ Eadred said over his shoulder.

  There was a table with two chargers and a bowl of fruit, so I lowered myself into a chair, with rafters high above me and the room rather cold. The river Ouse wandered by outside our window and I could hear its passage, but all the time I was thinking, ‘I’m to be treasurer of England.’ I only wished my father could have lived to see it. Wulfric would be astonished, I knew – and perhaps for the first time, his wife Alice might consider she had married the wrong man.

  Eadred talked of new coins and the supplies of silver ore and natural gold, brought up from Cornwall and Wales. We had some good mines, apparently, with rich seams, as well as purifying furnaces of the sort I understood very well. Other coins came from mountains in Brandenburg or Saxony in exchange for wool. As he talked I could hardly take it in. My appetite quite dwindled away.

  I do not think I had ever eaten with Eadred before that afternoon. I would remember it, for it was a strange sight. He saw me staring and coloured.

  ‘My stomach cannot bear whole food,’ he said. ‘I am told it disturbs my thanes, so I prefer to eat alone. Yet I have so little time. I needed to ask you if you would accept the appointment – and I am starving.’

  I tried not to stare as Eadred chewed another piece of red beef for an age, then removed a flaccid grey thing from between his lips, putting it back on the plate. In that way, he sucked the juices from every mouthful, working hard at them, then placing or spitting the result back on a side dish to be given to his dogs. It meant he ate everything and nothing, which seemed a poor way to live.

  Seeing that my scrutiny made Eadred uncomfortable, I addressed myself to the slices of beef on my own plate, eating with some pleasure until I looked up and saw how wistfully he was watching me. I paused with a big piece still wedged into a cheek.

  ‘No, no, father. Please go on. I wish I could eat so . . . lustily. It is my curse, that my body is too weak to hold my spirit.’

  He smiled and I almost choked as I tried to swallow.

  ‘I know you see a small man of no great strength, who must chew his food to pap and juice or vomit it back. Yet I feel such things as ill-fitting clothes. They are not me, Father Dunstan. I am a greater soul than that! I will be a greater king, though I did not ask for it – and God knows, I did not want it in such a way.’

  ‘Your brother said the same,’ I told him.

  ‘I know. Edmund told me. He told me too that you would be more than just a humble abbot – and I trust that judgement. I know you did not come to me today to be my treasurer, but I suspect you are exactly the man I need, to root out thieves and sloth and bribes – before I sink under my debts. Truly father, you have no idea.’

  ‘Your Highness, it is a great honour. It is true I hoped only for another grant of land for the abbey, so that I do not have to spend so much of my year raising funds. If I can secure that grant . . .’

  He waved a hand, as if it was nothing.

  ‘Earl Enlac has just died without heirs. He had two hundred hides, not forty miles from here. Two villages, with a fine manor house and a maker of barley ale. I will seal them to the Church. Was there anything else?’

  I shook my head and swallowed the lump in my throat, which of course was more than he could do.

  27

  By the rivers Tees and Tyne, by the mountains of the north, almost all the way to Scotland, lie the ancient kingdoms of Northumbria, Cumbria and Strathclyde. And those treacherous bastards have caused me pain about as far back as I can remember. They had supported Anlaf of Dublin when he’d taken York. It seemed the lesson of their oathbreaking had not been learned.

  No sooner had King Eadred returned to London on his tour than we had news of a great rebellion in the north against his rule. The earls of Northumbria had thrown their allegiance behind another sea-raider, who rejoiced in the name of Eric Bloodaxe. They are like children with their names! Harald Dog-strangler might have been a better choice, or Magnus Cow-raper.

  While I grappled with my new authority in the face of royal mint masters, none of whom would acknowledge my right to command them, King Eadred had to go forth once again. His entire army marched three hundred miles to face those lords of the north who refused to see the new century was English. There would be no more small kingdoms: no Mercia, no East Anglia, no York and Northumbria, no, not even my beloved Wessex. We were modern men, by God, with one land and one king.

  Christ was with our cause. I am told Eadred destroyed great swathes of the land, tearing down halls and homes and setting them on fire in his royal rage. He made such an example to them that they abandoned Bloodaxe out of fear. The invader was sent running and Archbishop Wulfstan even languished in prison for a time, believing he would be executed for supporting a foreign invader. As he should have been, in my belief. I will not support a man of the cloth who turns against his king. There is no excuse for it.

  I was pleased Archbishop Oda had kept his nose out, unlike his equal in the north. I asked Oda about it, bearing in mind his Danish ancestry. He said Bloodaxe was out of Norway, as if that explained all. They are quite mad, you know, those Vikings.

  It seemed to me that four main mints was asking for trouble, never mind the host of smaller ones run by licence or just long use and tradition. I saw some respectable houses, but they had no right to claim the king’s seal or put his face on their coins! I wrote my first assessment and sent it to the king, but Eadred was still busy in the north then and I had only my own authority. I told the mint master of Lincoln I was considering closing his works and he told me to ‘try it’.

  I could not go running to the king in a time of conflict, nor did I want to let Eadred see I had been thwarted by a mere mint master. Yet there were coins coming out of York then that had ‘Eric Rex’ on them. Mind you, at least the silver was good in those. Worse were the fake coins from forgers, made of polished tin, lead, goodness knows what – but not silver. The king’s coin stampers were serious men on the whole, who both carved and thumped the royal presses, hammering and repairing them by hand at their benches and clipping off the metal waste to be melted down and used again. Yet there were some retired ones, or those who had been caught stealing and had run. They would often take the only skill they had and make a backstreet forger’s shop.

  I could not discover the weight of silver ingots delivered to the mints, though they came from royal mines, or from land where the rights were claimed by the Crown. It was even harder to go back to the weight of mined ore and the expected results. Simple questions – how much pure gold or silver can be made from sixty pounds of ore, say – caused them to bristle and grow red. At every stage, there were men employed to guard and make life difficult for anyone prying too closely.

  When at last I was shown records, there were such huge differences reported from mine to mine that I began to suspect a thousand small sins that added up to a great one. Nothing burns silver like a war – and Eadred had found his coffers almost empty when he set out.

  As I had been turned away from almost all the mints in England by then, I went to see my brother Wulfric. It was not to ask his advice, but rather that I needed to talk it over with someone I trusted. I was in London then, so I sent a messenger to bring him to the shop where my mother still lived. I knew he’d kept that business running all the years he’d been my reeve and bursar. I cared not for that, as I warmed to my new responsibilities. No, I had other work for him.

  I was both surprised and irritated when Wulfric arrived two days later than I had expected at the shop, with his wife and daughter in tow. He tried to forestall my objection by saying Alice and little Cyneryth would wait in the back, but even when we’d closed for the day, the shop was too small for anyt
hing like that to be practical. I could hardly send mother and daughter to wait behind a curtain – where they would still have been able to hear every word! My niece was also at that age where children exclaim on everything, in loud tones of amazement.

  I had to endure them, so I gave in rather than appear spiteful. Such concerns were beneath me, though it seemed typical of Wulfric that he should test my patience in such a way. I noticed Alice looked rather smug as she greeted my mother and agreed to a dab of honey on bread for her daughter and a hot barley tisane for herself.

  Determined to ignore my audience, I laid out for Wulfric the problems that faced me – four main mints, a dozen smaller ones, as many mines and no one willing to let me see their accounts. When I had finished, there was perhaps a single beat of silence before my mother joined the conversation. She wanted to know why I did not ask for a sealed letter from the king to open those doors.

  ‘Mother, please! This is not just your gossiping, or women’s conversation. This is serious. It’s my suspicion they are robbing the king blind and I can’t prove it . . .’

  To my surprise, Wulfric turned to answer her, interrupting me.

  ‘First of all, those who have something to hide will just claim the king’s letter is a forgery – and gain time to conceal whatever they are doing. And Dunstan does not get in. Second, he does not want to go back to the king with the very first job he has been given and have to say “They won’t listen to me!” – to a man younger than he is. To a man younger than us both.’

  I could only wince at the description, but Wulfric was broadly right. I shrugged when my mother looked at me once more to confirm his words, hoping she would tend to her embroidery after that. I held up my palm to her, in silent command.

  ‘Yet . . . all these mines and mints employ a great number,’ Wulfric went on. ‘We’ll need to get men inside, who can see what is to be seen and report back.’

  ‘Not you, Wulfric,’ said his pert wife suddenly, looking up and biting a thread. Alice had been embroidering something with only reasonable skill and pretending not to hear a word, while clearly listening to everything.

  Wulfric only chuckled.

  ‘There’s not much call for one-armed men in the mines, my love – nor the mints. That was not my suggestion. No, we should ask Master Justin at the site. He can recommend good men. Why not? We have score upon score of young fellows at Glastonbury. If he will not do it, let me select . . . a couple of dozen of them for this work. Clever young lads who’ll know when to be silent and when to talk. I’ll send one to each mint and two or three to each mine, to work quietly until we call them back.’

  ‘Will they be able to leave?’ my mother asked suddenly. ‘Those men in the mines, I mean.’

  Wulfric shrugged.

  ‘They won’t be thralls, Mother. Thralls work as they are told, purchased by contract. Yet there are free men as well in such places – working for pay. I suppose they do the same tasks, though they work for their own benefit rather than some master. That is no more than we all do.’

  He grinned at me and I was struck once again at how Wulfric had grown up and somehow apart. There had been a time when I would have known exactly what he would say. Yet over the years, my little brother had become expert in places I had not gone, just as I could calculate the angle for a window arch, as not one in a score of masters could.

  ‘I work for the glory of God,’ I told him.

  He frowned at that.

  ‘You are well rewarded, Dun, though not in pay, I admit.’

  I blinked at him, feeling anger swell. There I was on the king’s work and he made it seem as if I was more concerned with tawdry pelf and status! I raised a shaking finger to point at him and my mother spoke over me.

  ‘Settle down, Dunstan. Your brother meant no harm and you know it.’

  I dipped my head and swallowed anger out of habit, as I had done a thousand times before. She was the only one who could command me in such a way then. I settled my thoughts and spoke to Wulfric without quite looking at him, so that I addressed the empty air rather than meet his gaze.

  ‘How do we know these places will take the men we send?’

  To my dismay, Wulfric only blew air out and chuckled as if he were the teacher and I the student.

  ‘Men get injured in mines, Dun. We’ve lost a few ourselves at the abbey site, with broken bones, or pulled joints, or fevers of the brain. As well as poor Brother Guido, we’ve had three deaths. Mines are dangerous places, so they will always need new men. The mints, though, will be much harder as a prospect. They won’t let any new lad off the street go sweeping up the clippings, or stamping the coins. Those are skills they’ll guard.’

  ‘They may fear spies too, in the mints,’ my mother said.

  I tutted at her to make her understand it was unwanted, but she didn’t hear and went on anyway, embarrassing herself.

  ‘From one another, I mean. The York mint will know the men of the mint in Lincoln, of course, by sight even. If they are competing for the same suppliers and customers, they’ll worry about spies as much as thieves. I imagine it is the same in London and Winchester.’

  She went back to her stitching. I turned from her to find Wulfric exchanging a glance with his wife, as if she had a part to play as well! It was too much. In something of a foul mood, I excused myself and left the shop, walking the streets for hours in thought.

  By the time I returned, the moon was up and I had the seeds of a plan – born out of Wulfric’s idle chatter, as it happens. The whole country knew Eadred was short of fighting men that year. Vikings had ambushed royal forces at Castleford – a brutal battle from dawn till sunset, before Bloodaxe quit the field, running for the coast. Still, four thousand of Eadred’s men had been killed. By all accounts, it had been a close-run thing.

  I knew the king had returned to London and I made up my mind to seek him out there, to lay my plans for the mines and mints before him. In the end, though, I was granted barely an instant of Eadred’s time as he prepared for war once again. Some other Olaf or Swein had landed in the north, welcomed by the thanes of Northumbria against rightful authority and their oaths. Some new cousin of Denmark or Norway to threaten all we had, no doubt as bearded and savage as Bloodaxe or Anlaf of Dublin. It beggars belief that our own lords can be so faithless, that they must seek always for something more and never see the grass we own is good enough – and better than most. This is our field, our England. No, better still: this is our Wessex.

  Poor Eadred was rushing through his halls in mail and armour when his abbot and new royal treasurer tried to explain a plan involving mines and mints that interested him not at all.

  ‘Act with my authority, Dunstan!’ Eadred called, as I babbled at him. ‘I gave you the position and I have faith in you. You have my trust.’

  I noticed he used my Christian name. The little man was growing into his crown, which I was beginning to expect. On the first day, all men sit the throne as if they are a child in their father’s chair. Yet as the months and years pass, they swell to fit the seat – and it becomes truly theirs.

  In a line of carts more commonly used to transport coal, wood and stone, I accompanied twenty-two of our young workers over the marsh road at Glastonbury, clattering along the wooden planks. Wulfric joined me, for once without his wife on his arm, as well as Master Justin, who took a fatherly interest in the whole enterprise once he understood it. I do not know how the mason reconciled the trip with his usual concerns, either building the abbey or his joining of the Benedictines.

  In the last cart, we had six soldiers of a sort, on loan to us from the king’s estate guards. Those men had earned their posts as reward for long service. Very long service in some cases. Such white-haired veterans could not have been included in the king’s forces marching away once more. Yet they made it very clear they were not delighted to have been given over to my care, either. I had asked for John Wyatt to be one of their number, but Eadred had refused and taken him into the north instead.
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  It was not difficult to find places for our lads in the mines, as we reached each one. We waited half a day for the first ones to come back, but no one did. As Wulfric had suggested, the foremen were all so desperate for strong backs that our lads hardly had to ask for work before they were in and wheeling a barrow, or hacking away at a seam.

  It began to feel as if we were planting seeds. They had their instructions from Justin, from Wulfric – and a last prayer from me. As we came into range of one of the mines, they’d slip over the side, alone or in a pair, then vanish into the roadside. Such a strange caravan as ours would be noticed in the local area and we told them to wait a day until they were good and hungry before seeking out the foreman for work. We bore the king’s crest on our papers, if some thane or shire reeve had brought us to a halt.

  As it happens, we were not stopped, not once, as we made our way through the green lanes. Though we were at war, that was all happening too far away to disturb the peace there. We left two lads at the great mine the Romans had begun near Bath, one more at works just across the Bristol Channel, two in Shropshire, and so on. Wherever there was a royal grant to take silver or gold from Crown lands, we made our way. We left our seeds behind – to seek and to grow.

  There were a dozen lesser mints than the four I wanted to test. I could have dropped a lad in every market town just about, and found some backstreet workshop that stamped its own coins. It was an almighty mess in those days, but then that was why Eadred had called me to the work. Wulfric took two lads to the London mint, with fine letters of recommendation from a goldsmith in Winchester who owed him a favour. My brother caught up on my own mount, Scoundrel, though that old horse was in his last days. Scoundrel turned away from the apple I offered him and I knew. When the appetite begins to go, it all goes.

  The beauty of it was how desperate the mints were for men, like the mines before them. That was our doing, with all young men of sound appearance needed in the shield lines. It had been simple enough to send a dozen king’s men up the road a week or so ahead of us. With a writ from the royal treasurer as their authority, they’d sneered at those who guarded the doors, then entered despite their objection, as real soldiers always will. I heard they’d made a show of peering at teeth and palms, then signed up half a dozen fine fellows in every mine and mint from Winchester to York.