In the Court of the Yellow King

by Tim Curran

  A Viking ship, a longship, a ship of pagans and killers from the savage north! A raid! Fire and plunder, murder and rape!

  He should have fled already.

  Yet he was unable to so much as move. The boys clung to him, quaking.

  The oars rose and fell, rose and fell. Upon its oar-benches sat men in mail-coats, men in leathers and furs. Their faces were pale, their hair fair and stirred by the same wind that filled the striped sail, though no wind rustled the leaves on the shore and no wind tugged at Wigleof’s own hair or clothing.

  A row of shields hung along the ship’s side. Round shields of lime-wood, some with rims and bosses of iron. Shields painted... painted not with horses or ravens, dragons or wolves... painted with... symbols? letters?

  Wigleof of course could not read, but he had seen some writings. And if these were letters, they were like none he had ever seen. They were...

  They were hideous, those painted symbols, those yellow signs. Hideous and horrible. Loathsome to the eye, to the mind, in much the same way as the strange fish had been. Unnatural. Vile.

  The ship glided on. The oarsmen never turned from their labor. If they noticed the fisherman and his sons on the river’s bank with their fish-traps and baskets, they gave no indication.

  At the stern, upon the steering-platform, stood a tall figure, wrapped in a long and tattered cloak of yellow leather trimmed with the jaundiced-looking fur of a far-northern bear. He wore a gilded helm with a lank yellow horse-tail for a plume, the coarse strands blowing about his shoulders in that same unfelt wind. His helm’s visor was made from ivory or bone, its aspect pallid and inhuman.

  He alone among the men turned his head as the ship passed by. His gaze sought and held the three of them, there on the shore. Through his visor, his eyes seemed to blaze as black as the stars.

  ...as black... as the stars?

  How could that be? That could not be. That made no sense. No sense at all.

  Rising and falling, the oars cut the water. The striped sail swelled full from the mast. The yellow-cloaked Viking kept a thin-fingered hand curled to the steering-oar. He tilted his helmed head ever-so-slightly in wry acknowledgment, then faced forward again, faced the carved prow, faced upriver in the direction of the unsuspecting village and abbey beyond.

  Skeins of mist whirled and wafted about the longship’s stern. It became shape again, shape and shadow. Then it was no more to be seen.

  Wigleof blinked, as if one emerging from a dream. He glanced at the baskets and fish-traps, and saw that every last fish – even those not yet pulled to land – lay or floated lifeless.

  Somewhere, very faint and very far, a lone gull cried a dirge. Rain began to patter on the leaves, in the mud.

  The boys looked at their father. Both had soaked their breeches. Becoming aware of the clammy wetness at his crotch and thighs, Wigleof realized he had done the same.

  The village. The abbey.

  His house. Aelda and the girls, and the baby.

  Raid, rape and plunder. Fire and murder and blood.

  Those shields, painted with those yellow signs.

  He crouched and put an arm around each of his sons. He hugged them tight to his sides, picked them up, held them to him. They twined their little arms around his neck, and buried their faces against his shoulders.

  Neither of them struggled as he carried them into the river, wading deeper to the dark channel where a strong current swept toward the sea. Nor did they make a sound, even as the cold water closed over their heads.

  The blinded monk had passed another bad night. His urgent wordless gurgles grew louder, into raving grunts and groans. Though his hands were swaddled in soft wool wrappings, he tugged at them, pulled at them with his teeth, until Sister Gehilde was forced to restrain his wrists with strong bonds.

  At last, she’d been able to persuade him to drink a sleeping-draught, though the sleep to which he finally succumbed was shallow, and fitful. His head tossed. Low, guttural mumbles issued from his sore-scabbed lips.

  Only when the sky began to lighten and the fog gave way to rain did the monk sink into a true slumber. Gehilde, her own weariness weighing upon her, drew a blanket to his shoulders. The bandage about his face had come askew, and with a murmured prayer she adjusted the cloth over the weeping wounds where once were eyes.

  She stretched. She sighed. She rubbed her brow, and temples. For a moment, the thought of her narrow bed beckoned, tempting her with its promise. But day had dawned, if damp and dreary. The morning business of Marymeade Abbey must be done.

  It had been built about the remains of a stone fort of the old Romans, moss-grown ruins, tumbled walls and archways, a few intact inner chambers with floors of tiled mosaic. From a hilltop, it overlooked the winding ribbon of the river valley. Behind it, beehive-dotted flower meadows and orchards sloped away toward the green farms and grazing lands around the village.

  The nuns kept the bees, collecting combs and honey, making candles and sticks of colored sealing-wax. These were their main source of livelihood in addition to what they received from the church. They also brewed fruit-wine to sell and trade.

  At any given time, some three dozen women called it home. Not all were sworn to holy vows; some were lay-sisters, widows or forsaken wives. Their father-monastery was St. Neot’s of the Stave and Crook, located further inland and upriver, some days’ ride away at Shepsbury. Twice monthly, or more often during holidays, priests would come from St. Neot’s to lead services, and supervise the running of the abbey.

  And, when one of their monks might fall injured or ill, Marymeade was where they were sent to be tended as they recovered.

  Monks such as Brother Oston, this poor and damaged soul. And Brother Camden, to whose room Gehilde now went. She found her sister there – Gamyl, her sister by birth as well as in their holy order. Gamyl was the younger, and of slighter frame. Otherwise they much resembled one another, with fine features, fawn-brown hair beneath head-coverings of white linen, and eyes the blue of ripe bilberries.

  “How does he fare?” Gehilde asked.

  Gamyl glanced up from where she sat upon a stool at the monk’s bedside. “He woke for a while, spoke for a while,” she said. “But he still does not know me, or himself, where he came from or where he is.”

  Brother Camden, though gone to grey, had been a hale and hearty, vibrant man... jovial in his humor, stalwart in his faith. Now he lay stricken, the entire right side of his body gone feeble and frail. The right half of his face hung slack, those corners of eye and mouth drooping. Age seemed to have draped him in a sudden cloak of additional years. If not for the slow swelling of his chest with each breath, he might have been a corpse awaiting the shroud.

  “He inquired again after someone called Silvia,” Gamyl went on, “then wept a bit, bade me be sure to remember to feed the cat, and...” She trailed off with an expressive, hopeless gesture at the monk.

  “Did he take any broth or gruel?”

  “Not much, no.”

  They watched over him together a moment, each speculating on who this Silvia might be. Mother? Sister? Lost sweetheart from Brother Camden’s youth, before taking his vows?

  Then Gamyl spoke. “How fares Brother Oston? I heard him through the night.”

  The weariness settling onto her again, Gehilde nodded. “Worse than ever. I had to bind down his wrists for fear he’d do himself more harm.”

  “What could have caused—?”

  “It is not for us to wonder,” Gehilde interrupted sharply.

  “But after Brother Rubert, sister, surely you must—”

  “I must not, I do not, and neither shall you.”

  They crossed themselves at the mention of the unfortunate monk’s name. He had come to their care from St. Neot’s greatly troubled, greatly distraught. After a time, he’d begun to regain both his senses and spirits... then went missing an
d was found in the orchard, a length of rope ’round his neck.

  As she and Gamyl shared this conversation, Gehilde remained attentive to the quiet and orderly bustle of Marymeade’s morning routine. Now it was disrupted in a flurry of commotion. Voices rose in anxious queries. Footsteps slapped quick in the halls. Robes swished and rustled.

  “Sister Gehilde!” That was Magrin, not a nun but a short and stocky widow who served as a kind of gruff but well-meaning mother-bear nursemaid to them all.

  Gehilde hastened from the room, Gamyl close behind her. In the abbey’s main chamber, which they used as their common space for dining and sitting, the tables had not yet been set for the fast-breaking. Nuns and lay-sisters crowded in, wide-eyed, looking alarmed and frightened.

  And with good reason.

  Vikings.

  Vikings, pagan sea-raiders, attacking the village below.

  Through the fog and rain, they could see nothing of it. But they heard the shouts and screams, and the brief clash of battle.

  Aeldwyn, the fisherman’s daughter, had brought the grim news when she fled her family’s house down by the shore.

  “Mother told me to run, to take Wigla and the baby and get far away,” the girl said, gasping for breath. “She went to look for Father and the boys.”

  The baby, red with indignation, fussed and squalled in a bundle slung across Aeldwyn’s back. Little Wigla, a pretty child with long curls and freckles, began to sob.

  Everyone looked then to Gehilde, their abbess. Weary though she was, she cast it aside at once. She barked swift instructions to Sister Udela, bidding her fetch the treasures of their humble church – a silver crucifix, an ivory cup set with garnets that had been a gift from Alfred of Wessex, the bronze-inlaid reliquary containing a clump of straw from the manger in which Christ had slept, and their holy books – and for the others to gather only their most prized possessions.

  “Meet by the well-stone,” she told them. “There is a tunnel there, through the old Roman bath. It leads to the hut in the orchard. Magrin, you know the way.”

  The stout widow nodded.

  “Go, then, and hurry! Aeldwyn, you and the children go with them.”

  “Our mother—”

  “Would want you to be safe. Go with Magrin.”

  The rest scurried to obey. Their lives of humble piety and simplicity here meant that they had little in the way of belongings. It would not take them long.

  “What about you?” Gamyl asked.

  Gehilde shook her head. “Marymeade is in my charge. The monks are in my care, and they are in no fit state to be moved. I will plead for them.”

  “The Vikings will surely kill them where they lay!” Gamyl protested.

  Remembering Brother Rubert, who had damned himself by taking his own life, Gehilde softly said, “If that is God’s will, then so be it and let it be a mercy.”

  Gamyl raised her chin in a manner Gehilde knew all too well from their girlhood. “I am staying with you,” she declared.

  There would be no arguing. Gehilde smiled and squeezed her hand.

  Soon, the others had gone. The abbey was empty but for the four of them: the two ailing monks and the two sisters.

  No more sounds of violence reached their ears from the direction of the village. They could make out a dull glow that might have been the smoldering fires of thatch-roofed houses, but nothing else.

  Out of the grey fog and rain, the Vikings appeared. They came in a line, round shields held before them as if they expected to be met by armed men.

  A wretched, despairing moan slid from Gamyl’s lips. She covered her mouth, then murmured through her fingers. “Gehilde... their shields... do you see?...”

  “I see,” said Gehilde, touching the rosewood cross she wore on a cord around her neck and sending a silent prayer to the blessed Virgin.

  “They are the same that Brother Oston would—” Gamyl could not go on.

  Brother Oston, however, had lacked yellow paint. Or indeed any paint or ink with which to inscribe the hellish symbols. It had not stopped him. Nor had the absence of his sight, just as the tearing out of his eyes had not stopped him from seeing the marks... the words. With gruel, or blood, or excrement, he’d etch them upon the walls. When prevented from doing that, he’d claw them into his own skin, gouging wounds and scars.

  “Do not look,” Gehilde, shuddering, told her sister. “Do not look at their shields. Do not look at them.”

  The Vikings came closer, came to the abbey’s very door. There, they stood and waited. Their faces were corpselike. Their eyes were empty, and dead.

  Another emerged from the mists. This one did not wait at the door but crossed its threshold undaunted. He was tall, with a cloak of tattered yellow leather sweeping from his shoulders and a yellow horse-tail as the plume of his helm. The contours of a visor carved from ivory obscured his features with a pallid mask, but for glittering eyes like dark jewels, or shining black stars.

  “You have three monks here,” he said, in a voice that rasped, the voice of a dry desert wind. “I want them.”

  “We have only two,” said Gehilde, straightening her spine. “And you may not have them.”

  “Two?”

  “The third hanged himself.”

  “Pfah. He was weak.”

  “The others are ill,” she said. “Ill unto death.”

  “They have done you no harm.” Gamyl stepped up beside her, chin again defiantly raised. “And harming them will do you no good, whatever your evil intention.”

  “Leave them in peace,” Gehilde said. “Leave this place in peace. This is a house of God, and you are not welcome here.”

  The man laughed, and it was the scrape of a spade upon stone, the grind of bones in a grave. “They have looked upon that which should not have been seen. It is for their own sakes, and yours, that you stand aside.”

  “Looked upon something?” echoed Gamyl. “Are you saying that’s what brought this misfortune on them? That’s what left Brother Camden brain-stricken, what drove Brother Oston to his state, what made Brother Rubert take his own life?”

  “As I said, he was weak. They are all weak. Cowardly, and mad.”

  Gehilde shook with anger. “You come here, nameless and face-hidden, and call them weak? Call them cowards? For shame! Take off your visor, then! Show yourself unmasked, if you have such strength and courage!”

  “My visor?” He removed his helm with its horse-tail plume and met her gaze with his blazing black eyes. “As you see, I wear none.”

  Or perhaps it was not anger that shook her. Perhaps it was terror.

  “No visor...” said Gamyl in a high, fainting whimper. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She clutched at Gehilde’s sleeve. “Sister... he wears no visor....”

  They put their arms around each other, held tight in a trembling embrace, as the tall man in the cloak of tattered yellow slowly advanced.

  Gehilde kissed Gamyl’s brow, then leaned her own against it.

  “Pray, sister,” she whispered. “Let us shut our eyes, and pray.”

  He stood atop a rise as the day waned, as the sun sank like a fiery bauble in the west. The rains of previous days had passed, leaving clear the skies now darkening to woad, indigo and violet. The first few stars – white, and sharp – glinted in the gloaming.

  Before him was a scene that, upon first glance, looked both peaceful and pastoral. Sheep grazed across the hillsides. Geese waddled, honking, to and from ponds where a few swans sailed with necks arched regal. Smaller birds darted from the bushes and whirled above the trees. The town spread in amiable clusters in front of the monastery’s gate, the tanneries set further off.

  Sheep, yes, sheep, a great many of them... the wool and mutton secondary to the main industry here, which was the making of fine vellum from the sheepskins. The monks had endless need of vellum. And for goose-f
eather quills and pots of ink in many colors, for blotting dust, for sealing wax. They needed leather for book-binding, gilt with which to emboss and stamp.

  The monks. Yes, the monks. The monks of St. Neot’s of the Stave and Crook.

  The monks who busied themselves long hours, bent squinting by candle-light or the little flicker of tallow-oil lamps. Reading. Writing. Copying. Transcribing and translating. Adorning their calligraphy with glorious illumination and illustration.

  Somehow, and to their sorrow, they had come by a tome of dire potency and power. Had the thief who’d stolen it sold it to them, unmindful of what it contained? Did they think to learn from it? To add its lore to the writings of their kings and saints?

  Whatever their reasoning, they now paid the price.

  Witness the monks who’d read from those pages. Who’d sought to make copies of the manuscript, perhaps to send to all their churches, add to their libraries.

  Witness the one called Brother Oston, who had torn his own eyes from their wet sockets to spare himself having to see another word, only to find to his horror that he could not unsee them even then! How, in his madness, he’d shouted them, reciting passages until his fellow monks could bear hearing it no longer! They wrenched wide his jaws and severed his tongue at the root. But even then, blinded and dumb, he’d written the words, drawn the symbols and the signs.

  Witness Brothers Camden and Rubert, one left shattered of mind and body, the other driven to the worst of sins.

  And now, witness this scene... so pastoral and peaceful...

  Upon first glance.

  Further glances showed that all was not as it seemed or should have been.

  The sheep roamed the hills unshepherded, at an evening hour when they belonged safely sheltered in their sheep-byres. The honking geese likewise went untended, nary a goose-girl to be seen.

  In the town, light shone in but few windows, and smoke curled from fewer chimney-holes. No peasants trudged home from the fields, or from the woods with faggots bundled on their backs.