Conqueror

by Baxter, Stephen

  Ulf thought that over. ‘I’m more confused.’

  ‘The walkers are all British Christians. I think. The man leading them is a Roman, a bishop.’

  ‘So why are they following him, if he’s not one of theirs?’

  ‘I—’ Wuffa spread his hands. He knew next to nothing about Christians. He only observed their behaviour from outside, as if they were exotic birds. ‘They are leaving for good. You see it all the time. Look.’ Wuffa pointed. ‘See the jewellery? They are wearing their wealth. These are the people who bury your coin hoards. Their church is organising the flight.’

  ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘To the west, perhaps, or over the sea to Gaul.’

  ‘Away from you Saxons.’

  Wuffa grinned. ‘Away from us, yes.’

  ‘Carrying all that wealth makes them easy to rob.’

  They shared another glance. But then they turned away, the thought unfinished. Evidently, Wuffa thought, neither of them was an instinctive thief.

  A bonfire burned on the road, and the hymn-singers had to divert to pass it by. An abandoned house was being looted by a pair of Saxons, a rougher sort than the mercenary warriors who accompanied the refugees. The looters evidently weren’t having much luck. They hurled old clothes and broken furniture out of the house and onto the fire - and books, rolled-up scrolls of parchment and scraped leather and heaps of wooden leaves that curled and popped as they blackened. Most of the pilgrims passed by this scene with eyes averted.

  But one old man, his toga flapping about his skinny frame, broke from the column and tried to get the books off the Saxons. His cries were a broken mixture of British and Latin: ‘Oh, you pagan brutes, you illiterate barbarians, must you even destroy our books?’ A young woman called him back, but friends held her.

  The two looters watched the old man’s ranting, bemused. Then they decided to have a little fun. They pushed the old man to the dusty ground, picked him up by his scrawny legs and arms, and stretched him out like a pig on a spit. The filthy toga fell away from the old man’s body in loops of cloth, revealing a grubby tunic and a kind of loincloth.

  The young woman yelled at the hired warriors to do something about it, but they just shrugged. The old man had provoked the looters; it was his own affair. Even the bishop marched on, singing his hymns lustily, as if nothing was happening.

  Now the looters lifted the old man up and held him over the fire. The flames from the burning books licked at the loose toga cloth, and the old man’s yells turned to pained whimpers.

  Wuffa glanced at Ulf. ‘They will kill him.’

  ‘It’s not our affair,’ Ulf said.

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘I’ll take the one on the left. If you can get the old man—’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  The two of them sprinted at the looters. Ulf lowered his massive shoulders and clattered into the man on the left. The old man would have fallen into the flames, but Wuffa leapt over the bonfire, scooped up the old man in his arms, and dropped him to the ground. Wuffa knew the second looter would be on him in a flash, so he bunched his fist and swung it even as he turned. Knuckles smashed into skull with a thud that made Wuffa’s whole arm ache, and the man was knocked sprawling.

  Wuffa sat on the man, snatched a knife from his belt and pressed it to the Saxon’s neck. The looter, dazed and enraged, was heavier and stronger than Wuffa. But when Wuffa nicked his throat with the blade he submitted and fell back, panting.

  Wuffa glanced across at Ulf. The big Norse had his man pinned face-down on the ground, and was slamming his fist into the back of the looter’s head, over and over.

  ‘I think you’ve made your point,’ Wuffa called.

  Ulf paused, breathing hard, his fist held up in the air. ‘Fair enough.’

  In a lithe movement Wuffa rolled off his man’s torso and got to his feet. The man, evidently dazed, got up, crossed to his companion, and dragged him away. Wuffa wiped his knife clean of the Saxon’s blood and slipped it back into his belt. His heart pumped; he never felt more alive than at such moments.

  It was in that surge of blood and triumph that he first met Sulpicia.

  III

  ‘Oh, Father, you could have got yourself killed!’

  The old man was breathing hard but was not seriously hurt. He tried to sit up, as his daughter adjusted the folds of his toga about his thin legs.

  Now that the action was safely over, the bishop in his tall hat and bright robes came over. ‘Orosius! Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, Ammanius. But I feel a fool, such a fool.’

  The bishop, Ammanius, set down his crook and helped the old man to sit up. ‘I would never call you a fool, brave Orosius. But there are many books in Armorica, and there is only one of you, old fellow.’

  ‘But I could not bear to see those pagan brutes abuse the library so.’

  ‘They will never know what they were destroying,’ Ammanius said. ‘They are to be pitied, not despised.’

  Ammanius glanced now at Wuffa and Ulf. Wuffa saw how the bishop’s gaze roamed over Ulf’s muscular legs. Ammanius was perhaps forty. Clean-shaven like his British charges, he had a full, well-fed face, skin so smooth it looked oiled, and eyebrows that might have been plucked. His Latin was heavily accented. Perhaps he was a continental, then.

  ‘And it seems,’ Ammanius said to Orosius, ‘that you have another pair of “pagan brutes” to thank for your life.’

  ‘Yes, thank you both,’ said the daughter breathlessly.

  Her eyes wide, she might have been twenty; she seemed careworn, but she was pretty in a dark British way, Wuffa thought.

  Ammanius said, ‘Do you have Latin?’

  ‘We speak it,’ Ulf said warily.

  ‘Then you understand what is being said to you. Old Orosius is grateful for your intervention—’

  The old man coughed and spoke. ‘Don’t put words in my mouth, Bishop.’ He looked the young men up and down. ‘You don’t carry weapons within the walls. It’s a city law.’

  Wuffa frowned. ‘Not under King Aethelberht.’

  ‘I don’t recognise any pagan king’s authority.’

  The daughter sighed.

  ‘Don’t take offence,’ Ammanius said emolliently to Wuffa. ‘It is a hard day for Orosius. These people are leaving their homes - the city their ancestors built centuries ago. But you care little for history, you Saxons, do you?’

  ‘I am a Saxon,’ Wuffa said. ‘He is Norse, a Dane. His name is Ulf. I am Wuffa.’

  The girl looked at him, her brown eyes clear. ‘And I am Sulpicia.’

  ‘In my tongue, my name means “wolf”.’ Wuffa grinned, showing his teeth.

  She returned his gaze coolly. Then she bent over her father. ‘Bishop Ammanius, these two, Ulf and Wuffa, saved my father. Even while we looked away. But they are pagans. Isn’t this proof that all souls may be redeemed by Christ’s light?’

  Ammanius looked into Wuffa’s eyes. ‘Is there really goodness in you, boy? And your Norse friend too?’

  Wuffa took a step back and raised his hands. ‘I’m not seeking conversion to your dead god, bishop.’

  ‘No? But plenty of your sort are coming over to Christ. That’s why Augustine led us here. You Saxons are easy to convert, you are such a gloomy lot! Your songs drone endlessly of loss. You don’t know it, but your German soul longs for the glow of eternity, Wuffa.’

  Ulf laughed. ‘Eternity can wait.’

  Sulpicia said now, ‘Pagan or not, these two proved themselves a lot more use today than the mercenaries we hired to protect us.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’ The bishop stroked his long nose. ‘And that could be useful.’

  Ulf and Wuffa shared a glance. Perhaps there was an opportunity for them here. Ulf said, ‘Tell us what you mean.’

  Ammanius gestured at his flock of pilgrims. ‘Do you understand what is happening here? I am leading these people to river boats which will take them down the estuary to the port of Rutupiae - Rep
tacaestir you call it, perhaps you know it. From there they will travel across the ocean to Armorica. But I will not travel with them. I have another mission, from my archbishop. I have to go to the far north of this blighted island. And there I am to seek out a prophecy said to have been uttered centuries ago by one Isolde …’

  The Roman church was trying to assimilate its British counterpart. An element of its strategy was to acquire any British saints, relics and other divine material worth keeping. One such candidate was a strange prophecy of the distant future said to have been uttered by this ‘Isolde’, centuries before.

  ‘It is guarded by one they call “the last of the Romans”,’ Ammanius said. That phrase thrilled Wuffa. ‘It will be a long and hazardous journey. I will need companions I can count on. You two have heathen souls, and yet today you stepped forward to save the life of an old man you had never seen before. Perhaps you have the qualities I seek. What do you say - will you come with me? I will pay you, of course.’

  Wuffa would have to speak to his father. But Ulf grinned at him. Such an exotic adventure was hardly to be missed.

  Ammanius gathered up his crook. ‘If you are interested, meet me at Reptacaestir in seven days.’

  Sulpicia helped her grumbling father to his feet. ‘What an adventure,’ she said wistfully. ‘I wish I could come with you!’

  Ulf grabbed the opportunity. ‘Then come.’

  She looked flustered. ‘I can’t. My father—’

  ‘Do something for yourself, not for him,’ Ulf said. ‘You’ll be able to find us.’ And, without allowing her to argue, he turned to Wuffa.

  Wuffa said, ‘It will be quite a trip. Bandits on the road, the bishop snatching at our souls—’

  ‘And the lovely Sulpicia grabbing your arse! I saw the way she looked at you, wolf-boy …’

  The old man, Orosius, called after them, ‘Do you even know the name of the city your kind is despoiling, you barbarians? Do you even know where you are?’

  Wuffa looked back. ‘This is Lunden. What of it? Who cares?’

  The old Briton they had saved continued to shout insults, but the young men walked away.

  IV

  On Wuffa’s last day before he set off for Reptacaestir, a scop, a wandering poet, called at his home village. Coenred welcomed the ragged wanderer, fed him meat and ale, and assigned him the village’s one precious slave for his comfort.

  The village itself was homely, a huddle of timber-framed houses with smoke streaming from their thatched roofs. To the wheeze of the smiths’ bellows the people went about their chores, talking in grave rumbles about business, chasing children and chickens. The more substantial houses had doorposts carved with entwined decorations, brought over the sea from the old country, a reminder of home. Around the halls were rougher huts with sunken floors, workshops for weaving, iron-working and carpentry, and beyond that were pens for the chickens, sheep and pigs. There was no street planning, as Wuffa had seen in the ruins of Lunden; the houses grew where they would, like mushrooms.

  The village of Coenred and his kin was one of hundreds of such settlements spread in a great belt around the walls of Lunden. There was still enough wealth flowing, through the old docks and the new trading area called Lundenwic, to make Lunden valuable to Aethelberht and his underkings - that and the prestige of owning the huge carcass of what had been the most valuable city in Britannia. So people were drawn here, to live and work.

  As evening closed in, the village’s largest hall filled up. A fire blazed in the hearth, and the people gathered on benches and patches of straw-covered floor, their faces shining in the firelight like Roman coins. Many had taken the opportunity of the scop’s visit to dress in their best, in clean, brightly-dyed clothes adorned with brooches, with necklaces of amber and bits of old Roman glass, and silver finger rings. The men had their seaxes at their waists, the bone-handled knives that gave the people their name. Many of the older folk flexed fingers and joints riddled by arthritis. Coenred, at forty-four, was one of the oldest.

  Wuffa was related to almost everybody here; this was his family.

  As the ale circulated the mood mellowed, and the laughter began. At last the scop stood up, with his traditional command: ‘Listen!’ He looked a little unsteady on his feet, but when he spoke his voice was powerful and sonorous. ‘Hear me, gods! I am crushed by longing and regret. I wake in mist-choked air, and labour the soil of a dismal island. For I have followed my lord across the sea, and my home lies far away. The fields of my fathers are drowned by the sea. My children grow stunted in murky dark. For I have followed my lord across the sea, and my home lies far away …’ As he warmed to his theme, a typical Saxon lament of loss and regret, the adults, swaying gently to the rhythms of his speech, joined in the line of the chorus.

  That bishop was right, Wuffa thought. The Saxons were a gloomy lot. Then the ale started to work on him, softening his thoughts. He drifted into the comforting, sombre mood of the hall, murmuring along with the other men to the scop’s dismal chorus, and dreaming of the pale thighs of the British girl, Sulpicia.

  As night fell the eerie whiteness of the comet was exposed, as flesh falls away to reveal bone, its unearthly light penetrating the warmth of the hall.

  V

  Reptacaestir was a Roman fort, with immense walls and curving towers laid out according to a cold plan. It was like a tomb of stone. A greater contrast with the warm village of Coenred could hardly be imagined.

  Alongside Ulf, Wuffa led his horse cautiously into the bustling port. The land here, close to the east coast, was dead flat under a huge, washed-out sky. Wuffa could smell the sea. They dismounted and stood uncertainly among crowds of Norse and German traders. Huddles of British refugees sat quietly on the ground, waiting for their ships.

  ‘Ah, here you are.’ Bishop Ammanius approached, a calculated smile on his broad, well-fed face. He wore more practical clothes than in Lunden: a coarse tunic, leather trousers, sturdy boots, a cloak. He was accompanied by a couple of young monks, heavily laden with baggage, their tonsured scalps bright pink. Ammanius called them ‘novices’ and barely gave them a second glance.

  With him, too, was the British girl Sulpicia. Wuffa couldn’t take his eyes off her. The sturdy, almost mannish clothes she wore today set off the delicate beauty of her face. She looked strong, he thought, strong and supple. She was British, she was Christian, she was different— and yet his body cared nothing about that.

  He approached her. ‘So you came,’ he said.

  She returned his stare. ‘My father is safely dispatched to Armorica. I have some skills in writing and figuring; I will be of use to the bishop, I think.’

  ‘And you will be with us for fifty days, perhaps more. How lucky for me.’

  ‘We have a holy mission to fulfil,’ she said, faintly mocking. ‘That should be uppermost in our thoughts.’

  ‘Ah, but I’m no Christian.’

  ‘Then we have nothing more to say to each other.’ She turned away. Her hair blew across her face in the soft breeze off the sea. She smiled.

  The game is on, he thought warmly.

  Ammanius insisted on walking them around the port. Within the walls of the old Roman fort, timber houses stood on the plans of ruined stone buildings. On a low mound at the centre of the fort he pointed out a complicated series of foundations and stumps. ‘They built an arch here to celebrate the triumph of Claudius. This was the very first place the Romans landed.’ He took a deep breath of sharp, salt-laden air. ‘Why, Christ was barely down from His cross. Later the arch was demolished to help build the walls of the fort, to deter you hairy-arsed raiders and your bee-sting assaults on the coast. But you came even so. And then a king called the Vortigem fought and won a great battle against you, here on this very spot …’

  Britannia had been a Roman diocese, with its capital at Londinium. The British had thrown off the imperial yoke by their own will, through rebellion. The diocesan authority collapsed, but the four sub-provinces survived. The provincial st
ates were successful. The old towns and villas continued to function; taxes continued to be collected. Literate and Christian, the British even exported their Roman culture to the peripheries of Britain, to the west and north and to Ireland, places where the eagle standard had never flown.

  But in an absence of power, strong men took their chances. Here in the south-east, a man called Vitalinus struggled to the top of a heap of town councillors and military commanders. With dynasty in mind he married the daughter of Magnus Maximus, one of many British pretenders to the imperial purple in the old days. Soon he was calling himself ‘the Vortigern’, a word that meant something like overking. He had been the Aethelberht of his day.

  But, lacking trained troops, Vitalinus hired Saxon mercenaries for protection. The Saxons beat off attacks from the Picts from the north. But when plague struck southern Britain and Vitalinus’s tax revenues collapsed, the unpaid Saxons rebelled.

  Ammanius said, ‘At first Vitalinus fought well. His son, Vortimer, won that great victory, here at Reptacaestir. This was, oh, about a hundred and fifty years ago. Your grandfather’s grandfather might have fought in that battle, Wuffa! I doubt your poets sing songs of defeats. But the British triumph could not last …’

  Within five years the Saxons broke out of their island enclave. And new waves of immigrants arrived. In Wuffa’s village the scops still sang of the great crossings from the drowning farms of the old country, tales told by grandfathers of grandfathers, just at the edge of memory. These were not bands of mercenaries; this was a people on the move.

  Ammanius said, ‘The British lost their land, footstep by footstep. So here they are, refugees fleeing from the land of their ancestors. And in the last decade Reptacaestir has been trodden by the feet of a new wave of invaders.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Wuffa asked.

  The bishop brought them to a small church, constructed of bits of Roman stone. ‘This is a chapel dedicated to Augustine. Just ten years ago the archbishop landed here, with a mission from the Pope to convert you heathen children to the one true faith. And this is one invasion of Britain which will know no ending.’