The Abbot's Tale

by Conn Iggulden

  When the thaw came, the barges began to vanish and return again, filled with scores of bales to start the looms all over Ghent and Bruges. I went down to the docks and waited with my arms folded, shivering as they loaded and unloaded. One or two of the sailors made mock of me at first, until more devout members of their crew bade them be silent. They had no desire for bad luck, those crewmen. No appetite for my curse.

  I continued to write my letters, of course, but as the spring warmed, I began to despair, certain somehow that Alice or my mother was preventing them from reaching Wulfric. I was alone and Abbot Reynault’s conversation had palled. Over the winter, I had endured a number of meals with Count Arnulf, who was perhaps the dullest, most earnest man I have ever met. An evening in his company was like a glimpse of eternity, with no chance to repent.

  In all, I had begun to weary of Ghent and I was homesick. Perhaps I understood then why Leofa had come back after just three years of his five. It can be a cruel thing, especially when English voices can be heard on the boats, calling to one another. I imagine it is more bearable to be a Frenchman.

  I stood on that dock in rain and sun whenever there was a rumour of an English ship unloading closer to the coast. Most of the vessels that came in were huge, slow barges, laden high with goods and a few passengers.

  I was there when Wulfric stepped ashore with a companion, looking around him in wonder at the strangeness of a port that was not home. I gave a great shout of joy to see him and I ran across the cobbles, though there was a drizzle and they were slippery under me.

  I am not usually given to open displays. I keep my secrets well and prefer them not to be shouted to the rooftops. In that way, I fitted in with the Flemish, who are much the same. Yet I could not help myself. I embraced Wulfric and crushed him to me, feeling his single arm batter me on the shoulders in happiness. I was not alone.

  I turned to the fellow he had brought with him, who stood wrapped in a thick cloak and layers beneath that reeked of old sweat. The face too was covered, as children will tie scarves over their mouths on cold mornings. I waited as Wulfric’s companion tugged it loose and then I just stared, raising my hand as if to ward him off.

  Skinner’s face was a mass of scars, with a huge hollow where the nose had once been. I could see into his skull, where brown teeth moved and raw skin glistened and seeped. As I stared, frozen, he coughed long and hard into a cloth, his eyes never leaving mine.

  ‘Why . . . what is this, Wulfric?’ I said. ‘Why have you brought this man here?’

  I did not take my eyes off the forger, in case he went for a knife and his own vengeance, right there on the Ghent dock.

  ‘I think perhaps this is too open a place for idle talk,’ Wulfric said with false cheer, looking around him. ‘Where is the abbey?’

  ‘No. I’m not moving a step until I understand this. Did you ask Skinner how he came by such terrible scars?’ I said.

  Wulfric frowned at me.

  ‘He said he was burned.’ My stunned expression had begun to worry my brotherhtml. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Skinner?’

  ‘It’s right, yes,’ the man said. I winced at the way his voice slurred, the damage I’d done with my forge tongs. ‘And your brother was the one what burned me.’

  Wulfric looked back and forth between us, his eyes wide.

  ‘What? I swear, Dun. He didn’t say anything like that to me. I didn’t know. You asked me to find someone and I thought of him. I went to him, Dunstan. Why . . . by God, Dunstan, why did you burn him?’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme, Brother. What do you want, Skinner?’ I asked. ‘Is it vengeance you’re after? You won’t find it here.’

  ‘Your brother came to me and asked me if I’d be interested in paying work. He mentioned silver. So I came with him.’ ‘I’m sorry, you have been misled. I can’t trust you, Skinner. Do you understand? You came to me before, with threats . . . and lies, wanting money to be quiet. I can’t buy a man who won’t stay bought, I’m sorry.’

  He took me by the arm suddenly and I almost pulled away.

  ‘Don’t send me home. I got nothing, father! Not a penny to my name. My burns went bad and I nearly died. No one wants a man who looks like this, understand? They throw stones and kick me out of every place I go, like a bleeding leper. But my boy has no one else, so I’ll work till I’m dead for him. You fill my pouch with silver and I give you my oath on the life of my son you won’t see me ever after, unless it’s to visit my grave.’

  ‘Dunstan, I’m sorry,’ Wulfric said. ‘I had no idea this was between you.’

  ‘No, Brother. You were right to bring him.’

  I saw something in Skinner’s eyes that I needed. I think it was desperation. I understood that better than most.

  ‘You must have hated me, when I hurt you,’ I said to him.

  ‘I did, I won’t deny it! I went mad for a time, with the pain and the fevers. I realised I brought it on myself, that I’d gone to you. You who’d rescued me once, didn’t you? And the boy, which matters more. If you’d said to me, Skinner, I will save your boy, but burn you worse than you’ve ever known, I would still have taken your hand in that yard.’

  It was true I had no other choices, but I saw truth in him.

  ‘Kneel then, Skinner. Give me your oath on your immortal soul and the soul of your son. Swear you will be obedient to me, no matter what I ask of you.’

  ‘I will,’ he said, dropping down. ‘Thank you.’

  I took a silver locket from around my neck and handed it to him. He eyed it almost in fear.

  ‘You hold a piece of the cross on which Christ died. It is stained in his blood. Do not lie, Skinner. Do not dare to. I ask you again. Will you swear on your immortal soul and that of your son to obey me in all things? To never speak of what we are about here? To keep your word?’

  ‘I do, sir. I do!’ he said.

  I took his hand and found it cold and shaking. I raised him up. The docks had grown still around us as the sailors with their bales and goods had come to a halt to watch the strange scene. The noise came back as I glared at them.

  ‘I gave you both your lives. You, Skinner, when I took you from the scaffold, on the morning of your death. You, Wulfric, when I put the screws into your bones and cut your arm from you. I saved you both – and now I have a task for you. Come with me. Let me show you St Peter’s Abbey.’

  Wulfric was visibly relieved at my forgiveness. As he strode along at my side, he was fascinated by everything he saw and some part of his mind was intrigued at the possibilities. He had the shop in London, after all. Wool and cloth was his business.

  I listened to him exclaim and comment, but walked every step under a cloud. I knew what I wanted to do would hurt him. He was an innocent, in a way, a good man. My work was cruel and it would mark him, as I had marked poor Skinner.

  I could have turned away then, before I had gone too far. Yet I clenched my jaw and told myself it was already decided, that there was no going back. My enemies had brought me to that point, beyond all endurance. My feet were steady on the path ahead.

  Abbot Reynault was uncomfortable with my desire for privacy, he made that perfectly clear. I had to add to my sins with lies about family matters to be discussed with Wulfric, just to get a room to ourselves. Reynault was as hungry for news of England and Glastonbury as I was, but there were other matters I did not want him to hear. In the end, Wulfric, Skinner and I ate lunch speaking of very little. Perhaps it was too much caution, but I became convinced I could be overheard and said nothing of consequence until we were alone in the abbey gardens.

  ‘Brother, I am sorry,’ Wulfric said. ‘I hate to bring you such news.’

  ‘In truth? It is just one more small hurt. I am already banished, Wulfric, without limit. Thieves might get five years, but not for me, an abbot and a bishop, who merely tried to stop the king’s lust corrupting the court! Of course he gave my abbey to Caspar! I see her hand in it, Wulfric. Elgiva is the witch who drives him. She is our enemy, the one ba
d tooth that will kill a man.’

  Wulfric frowned at me, understanding from my manner that I did not speak lightly.

  ‘She had you beaten, at the coronation, I know. Can you not put it behind you?’

  ‘No. The king’s whore had an abbot beaten. She had a bishop bloodied at the coronation. I do not speak on my own behalf, Wulfric, but for God. When she is punished, it will be for her injury to the Church. Although I will take some satisfaction from it.’

  Wulfric and Skinner watched me as they might have a wild dog, waiting to see if I would snap at them.

  ‘Why did you summon me here, Dun?’ Wulfric said. ‘What was it that could not be written in your codes, which I can barely read myself?’

  I gestured to a bench and they both sat down. I could not join them as my anger swelled, so that I paced up and down while they watched and listened to me talk.

  ‘I have lost the abbey I built. I have lost my bishopric. I am no longer the royal treasurer.’ I saw Skinner frown. ‘Oh, I have more gold and silver than I could ever spend, Skinner. Do not fear for your reward.’

  I leaned forward.

  ‘I do trust you both, or I would not say this. Edwy may reign for fifty years. I will not spend that reign in Ghent! His wife is the poison. We will draw her out, take her from the king’s side. He will find another. Perhaps he might even become the king he should have been. We could do some good here, Brother, for Wessex and for England.’

  ‘What do you mean, draw her out? I won’t be involved in murder, Dunstan, not for you or anyone. I won’t do it.’

  I smiled at him in affection.

  ‘You are a gentle fellow, Wulfric. I know it. I would not ask you to do such a thing.’

  ‘I would do it,’ Skinner murmured. He gave a shrug when we looked at him. ‘If you say the word, I’ll cut a royal throat, as easily as you giving me a pouch of silver.’

  ‘No, Skinner,’ I told him. ‘I won’t kill that young woman. I would prefer her just to be taken away from the king, to be lost to him, so that he might always wonder whether she abandoned him or if she was taken.’

  ‘Where could she be taken?’ Wulfric asked.

  ‘Ireland,’ I said. I had considered a dozen places, but Ireland was far enough. ‘If she was sold as a slave there, she would vanish into the hills as if she’d never been born. Let her wail and scream as she scrubs the floor of some peasant’s hut. Let her never see home again, exactly as she wished for me.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ Wulfric said. ‘I don’t even know how it could be done! This is not some washerwoman, Dun! Elgiva is the queen.’

  ‘It should be in daylight,’ Skinner said. ‘Somewhere she feels safe, where she won’t have too many guards. At night, she’ll sleep with the king, safe and sound, like. There’ll be men, walls, all sorts. In the day, though, I could take her with a couple of lads.’

  He was talking as if we were hunting hares or setting traps for birds. I was grateful Wulfric had brought him to me.

  ‘You will work with Master Skinner, Wulfric, because you owe me your life – and your loyalty.’

  ‘It’s too much. I can’t. Have you any idea what the king would do if we were caught?’

  ‘It would be the end,’ I said. ‘The end of the life I gave you: the wife, the daughter, the shop, the respect of other men. The fine house you built for your family in London. When I stood over you and your blood was on my hands, I just wanted to save your life, that’s all. Now they have hurt me, Wulfric. Worse, they have mocked the Church. This is my answer for them – and this is the question I have to ask you, though it twists my gut to do it. If I could keep you out of it, I would, you know that! I would dirty my own hands. Yet I am too well known in Winchester. If I set one foot in that place, I will be taken up. So, Brother, all my choices are made. Will you do this for me? Will you pay your debt to me at last?’

  He bowed his head and I knelt before him, looking up at his eyes as he rubbed tears from them.

  ‘All right, Dun. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Thank you. Skinner? I took your word, but I’ll fill a sack with silver if you act for me as well.’

  ‘I am your man, sir,’ he said, bringing out his cloth and touching it to himself almost delicately.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling some of the weight I carried lift away.

  ‘Very well. Then we three will bring it about.’

  I am not proud of that day in the garden. My anger and shame and hurt overwhelmed me. I have always forgiven my enemies, but only when they have been punished.

  35

  It does sound a terrible thing to have sold a queen into slavery, when I write the words. I cannot defend all I have done, but I will say that when a woman persuades a king to tumble her – with her mother, mind – it does not make her a queen, not in the greater sense. Even if he calls her a queen, she merely sleeps in a king’s bed and gives birth to princes. That is all that changes.

  Wulfric stayed for a month in Ghent. He tried a score of times to dissuade me, but in that one thing I would not be moved. I could not forgive her.

  I waved them off at the end of April, then waited, helplessly. I’d given Wulfric permission to draw on my deposits – telling him where they were and what words he needed to say as his bona fides. It was his task to provide whatever Skinner needed and even to accompany him.

  I hated that I had to depend on another for something I’d rather have done myself. I have always been that way. Yet I had not lied. I could not wrap myself like a leper on a summer’s day and walk the streets of Winchester. Men and women were too afraid of plague. They would demand to see my face, and then I would have been recognised and snatched up, perhaps to slavery or execution. I did nothing to Edwy’s queen she would not have done to me, given the chance.

  No news came that summer, though I had letters from Wulfric saying they were watching our bird build her nest. It seemed too that Archbishop Oda was making complaint about my treatment to the Witan, the dear old Dane. Wulfric wanted to wait, to see if Edwy would relent, or be forced to bring me home. My brother was too soft-hearted. Edwy could not be overruled. I had seen his face and known his venom when I laid hands on him. He would not call me back, not while that woman whispered in his ear.

  I wrote in fury to tell Wulfric not to delay, that the nest should be struck down. I received no reply and my second year of exile was as dull as the Flemish. It rained almost every day, and when I did receive a letter, it would be read and read a hundred times before I sanded it clear to be used again.

  That winter I spent illuminating and drawing mechanical illustrations for a work of Diogenes. That was a comfort to me, as he was a Greek who had been exiled and even sold as a slave, yet made a virtue of needing nothing from the world. I wonder how it must have been to know such men, back when the world was young.

  I worked in a little scriptorium with some thirty other monks, all scratching and painting from sunrise to sunset. I used my English silver to pay for new lamps for us as the days became too short, in part because I would have gone mad without work to fill the hours. The monastic life is in repetition and ritual, and it creates a great peace in a man. I could not feel it that year, with all my plans and all my waiting for my brother to find his nerve. I did not fool myself. I knew his softness could undo us all.

  As Christmas passed and the new year began, I sent Wulfric a single, stern command, then waited, setting aside new work and instead walking deep into the countryside around the city. I had learned a few words of the Flemish tongue, though I was still mostly a deaf-mute where Latin and Greek were not spoken. It was isolating – and Latin is a cold tongue in some ways. The structure of it seeps into the mind and reorders, I think. I missed the old words, with all their Wessex richness.

  In March, a single ship came in from home, showing a lashed and splintered spar from some storm endured on the grey. I went down to it from the abbey as soon as I heard bells sound. The first one was always an event each year, as it was the herald of wor
k and wealth for the merchant houses. It woke the whole city, just about.

  This particular ship was barely bigger than the barges, which might have explained why it was limping into harbour. I was just one of a crowd that gathered, waiting for news or letters, or trade goods they had ordered the previous autumn and waited for all winter.

  I had begun to understand some of the words they spoke to one another in their excitement. Yet I stood like a crow amongst those people, dressed in black. I felt their glances alighting on me and sliding away like snowflakes on cold cloth. I was not of them and I wore my dignity like a cloak.

  The captain himself stepped across to the dock, if that name is not too grand for the master of such a small craft. He fetched out a bundle of letters and called each one, often collecting a few coins for his trouble. I passed over a couple of silvers and took a single letter away with me. I could feel the cold wrap against my skin as I went.

  I could not wait, so I undid the cords and looked for the wyvern crest. Wulfric and I had agreed a different seal for success, a Wessex oak. I sank back against a wall when I saw it, as if I had been struck and lost my wits. My vision swam and I could not see. I hardly dared to open it after so long spent staring, but when I did, it was just three lines.

  "The poor bird has gone from our garden. It is a great sin to hurt innocent creatures. I wish we had not.’

  Wulfric had not put his name to those lines, though I knew his hand well enough. I felt irritation at his mealy-mouthed regrets. I knew only satisfaction at having brought her low.

  I have said I cannot defend all I have done, but as I write, I feel I should. Slavery was not unknown to me, though the thralls on my father’s farms were well treated. I think the truth is that I hated without limit, as a child can wish his parents into the fires of hell.

  That is the comparison. When I was six or eight years old and my mother refused some sweet, or smacked me, I would lie in the darkness and clench my fists and wish such vengeance upon her that I thought I would burst my heart. No one hates as a child can hate.