‘The gates of the Upperworld are closed to me yet.’
‘Does it hurt?’
Arngrim grimaced, as if trying to laugh. ‘For a priest you are an idiot, Cynewulf. I half-woke while the Moor was rummaging in my gut. Imagine how that felt. Worse than the Dane’s blade.’
‘I’m not ready to give you the last rites yet.’
‘My sword. And my trophy.’
‘Ironsides is here, at the foot of the bed. And the King nailed the Beast’s arm to the oak tree.’
Amgrim snorted. ‘That will do. Egil lived, I think. But by Woden’s eyes I hope the bastard dies of the wound I inflicted on him today. Listen, Cynewulf. When I die - my sword - I promised it to the river—’
‘Arngrim, I’m a priest of Christ. I can’t perform a pagan ritual.’
‘You must,’ Arngrim croaked. ‘Or my way to the Upperworld will be barred. You are kin, Cynewulf. Isn’t human blood more important than an argument between gods? And my family in Brycgstow. Tell my sons how their father died.’
Cynewulf, through tears, had to smile. ‘You speak of your sword before your family.’
Arngrim grunted. ‘Tell them that too. Make them laugh instead of cry. And don’t you go baptising them on the sly, you pious bastard.’ He coughed, and groaned as the spasm tore at his wound.
Ibn Zuhr stepped forward. ‘You must rest now.’ He held a cup full of another of his teas. ‘Drink this, and you will sleep a while.’ One arm was concealed by his body as he leaned over Arngrim, the other arm raised the cup. Arngrim accepted the drink. But as the liquid touched his lips his eyes widened. Then he fell back into unconsciousness.
Cynewulf stayed with his cousin all night, praying. But the thegn did not wake again.
And as the dawn light broke over a green country that was once again English, Arngrim breathed his last. Cynewulf closed his cousin’s mouth and eyes, and wiped his face clean of the last of his blood and sweat.
It was only then, as Cynewulf stood back from his cousin’s body, that he noticed the dagger which protruded from Arngrim’s side, buried up to the hilt. And he knew how he had finally died, what Ibn Zuhr had done in that moment when he had leaned over Arngrim’s body to give him the sleeping potion.
For the rest of the day Cynewulf searched for the Moorish slave, but he had vanished.
That evening Cynewulf rode alone to the river bank, bearing Ironsides. The weapon was so heavy Cynewulf could barely lift it, let alone imagine wielding it in combat.
At the river bank, Cynewulf tethered his horse at a tree. The water lapped peacefully, and birds fluttered away as he walked. He would never have known that yesterday hundreds of men had wilfully murdered each other, not an hour’s ride from here.
He walked along the bank until he found an outcropping of rock. He jammed the sword into a break in the rock face, and hauled at its hilt. The mighty blade would barely bend at his pulling, let alone break. Cynewulf told himself there was no shame in using his mind in carrying out this pagan ritual. He found a broken branch about as long as the sword, and with his belt fixed it to Ironsides’ hilt. After a couple of false starts, with his whole weight applied to his lever, he managed at last to bend the sword, and break it.
Then, breathing hard, he took the two halves of the sword and hurled them into the river, muttering prayers to God, and to Woden.
XIX
Cynewulf saw Alfred only once more. The King summoned him to Lunden, won back from the Danes.
It was nine years after Ethandune.
‘And it will be,’ Cynewulf remarked, as his patient horse bore him along the broken Roman road towards Lunden, ‘a meeting I would never have imagined could take place, in the darkest hours at Aethelingaig.’
‘What’s that, Father?’ asked Saberht, who rode at his side.
‘Oh, nothing, boy, nothing,’ Cynewulf said. ‘Just talking to myself.’
The novice scratched his tonsure, raggedly cut in a head of thick black hair. Of course, his manner implied, this mumbling dotage was to be expected of a man of Cynewulf’s advanced years - nearly forty, by God.
Cynewulf wiped the sweat of an unseasonably warm April day from his brow, and tried to master his irritation. After all, it wasn’t the boy’s fault he was growing old. The novice, not yet twenty, was as lithe as a stoat, and as randy, as his lurid confessions proved. But he was a good boy who did his best to take care of Cynewulf, even if he did treat the priest as if he were Methuselah’s twin.
Of course forty years was well short of the three-score-years-and-ten promised in the Bible. But life was hard in these fallen times, and bodies wore out, even those of priests. In particular Cynewulf’s knees ached constantly, no doubt a relic of the long hours he spent on them each day. He embraced such suffering and dedicated it to God.
But in a sense he had been spared. Most of Cynewulf’s boyhood friends were dead and gone, and he knew very few people older than himself. Suddenly he found himself lost in a world full of youthful innocents, like Saberht, who knew nothing of the remote past of thirty years ago, or twenty or even ten, the days of Aethelingaig and Ethandune, knew nothing and cared less.
Why, Saberht didn’t even fear the Dane. To him the Dane was a spent force who had been defeated by Alfred and now, in the King’s latter years, was being beaten steadily back. Oh, the Dane clung on in the north-east, but what was there to fear? So quickly the generations turned, Cynewulf thought, so quickly the past was forgotten.
But Cynewulf had not forgotten, and nor had Alfred.
So Saberht was unafraid of the Dane - but, oddly, he was wary of Lunden.
On this last day of travelling, coming down towards Lunden from the north—through lands taken under Alfred’s sway from the Danes just a year ago - they crossed over a ridge of high ground, and Lunden and its river opened up before them. Cynewulf pulled up his horse, breathing hard, and Saberht slowed beside him.
The river snaked lazily across a broad valley, its waters shining like beaten iron. The Roman wall was a great ellipse that hugged the north bank. The city had been abandoned so long ago that mature oak trees sprouted from the foundations of ruined office buildings. But today, smoke rose up from a hundred fires burning within the walls and gathered in a pall. For centuries the English had shunned Lunden’s antique walls, but today the old city was no longer empty.
‘Now look,’ Cynewulf instructed Saberht. ‘What a magnificent sight. And there are layers of histories, visible to us even from here.’
‘Yes, Father,’ Saberht mumbled passively.
‘Once the Romans called this place Londinium, and it was the capital of their province, one of the greatest cities of the western empire. Now it is ours, and we call it Lundenburh.’ Fortified Lunden.
Alfred had planted his burhs, his new towns, across his half of an England partitioned between Wessex and the Danes. The burhs had been based on the remains of Roman cities, or older hill-forts, or where necessary had been built from scratch, like Wealingaford. The streets were planned, the towns walled by stone or turf, and every one of them had a mint and a market. It was a whole country laid out to a grand design. Ultimately no point in England would be more than twenty Roman miles from a burh - and when the Northmen came again, they would find a country of towns rolled up like hedgehogs.
Cynewulf closed his eyes and smiled. ‘The value of history - the value of reading, novice. Once the Emperor Constantine, faced by barbarian threats, developed a similar sort of deep defence. And now we do it again.’
‘Yes, Father.’
And of all the burhs, none was greater than Lunden.
Cynewulf clapped Saberht on the shoulder. ‘Somewhere in there, right now, the King is holding court. And that is where we’re going.’
‘We’re going in there? Inside the walls?’ Saberht touched his throat and muttered.
Cynewulf took the young man’s wrist and pulled it smartly back. Around his neck Saberht wore a small crucifix, carved of wood. Cynewulf knew immediately that it wasn’t t
he Christian cross that comforted Saberht but the wood itself.
‘Oh, Saberht,’ Cynewulf said. ‘A wooden charm to protect you from cities of stone?’
‘Yes, Father. I mean—’
‘Never mind. We’ll discuss this during your confession. For now we will complete our journey, and I want no more superstitious twitching from you.’
‘No, Father.’
Side by side priest and novice rode down from the higher ground, towards the gates of Lunden.
XX
Cynewulf and Saberht sat cautiously on a mead bench at the feet of the King. It was not the first time Alfred had kept Cynewulf waiting, while he worked through business with his clerks.
The royal hall was unimpressive. Like many of the new buildings of Lundenburh, overshadowed by mightier ruins, it was a simple framework of oaken posts, so new you could smell the drying mud of the walls. But, floored by reused Roman roof tiles and with a fire blazing in the big central hearth, it was warm and well-lit, and its walls were adorned with tapestries and bosses of silver and gold.
Alfred himself sat on a handsome giving-throne that looked as if it had been carved out of a single massive trunk. On his head was the crown he had worn in the field that day at Ethandune. He still had his taste for display; his tunic, a rich purple, looked like silk from Constantinople. Flanked by clerks, he was working his way through a mound of papers, signing, hastily amending lines here and there with a pen adorned by a handsome jewel. But Alfred’s skin was sallow, his tall frame was skeletal, and he habitually held a handkerchief to his mouth. Yet he laboured steadily. The years had been much harder on Alfred than on Cynewulf, who now felt ashamed of his own self-pity.
One of Alfred’s famous candle-clocks burned down on a table. It was a row of six candles, each marked with four lines to map the hours, and connected to the others by lengths of wick, so that the burning-down of one would light the next. Invented by the King himself, it was a way of keeping track of time without reference to the sun. In this as in all things Alfred liked order, control, and records.
At last Alfred shooed away his clerks, like chasing away geese. ‘It is good to see you, priest. I have my hearth-companions look out for veterans of those days at Aethelingaig and Ethandune.’
‘I’d hardly call myself a veteran—’
‘You did your part, Cynewulf. You and that enigmatic prophecy of yours. And you still have your reward?’
Cynewulf lifted up his arm so that his silver ring showed. Saberht gaped. He hadn’t known that this feeble old priest owned such a ring, a gift from a king.
‘I like to see those left alive,’ Alfred said, ‘so that I can refresh my memory of those who fell. Like your cousin Arngrim. His men gave him a ship burial, you know. On a tub we captured from the Danes.’
‘Yes. Arngrim lived and died a pagan, and there was nothing I or any priest could do about that.’
Alfred laughed, but it was a harsh sound that coarsened into a cough. ‘We were glad of it at the time. But it’s an irony that I see more of my old adversary Guthrum than I do of those who fought with me against him. We pray together, you know. We even sing psalms - though his singing voice makes Arngrim sound like the Arch Cantor.’
‘I’m glad the Danish king’s Christianity has stuck.’
Alfred smiled. ‘Isn’t cynicism a sin, priest?’
‘I’ll have to ask my bishop.’
Saberht blurted, ‘Lord. Everybody asks why you deal with the Danes at all. You had the Danes on the run at Ethandune. Why give them half the country? Why not just push them back into the sea?’
Cynewulf made to apologise, but Alfred held up his hand. ‘You are fiery for one of the cloth, aren’t you, boy? Your tonsure is a little ragged too, you ought to take more care over that. The truth is, and hard though it is even for my thegns to accept it, we did not defeat the Danes at Ethandune. We defeated the remnant of one army. If I had pursued the Danes to Eoforwic I would have won myself some glory, but at the risk of losing everything when the next assault came. Instead I have spent my energies in making England impregnable.’
‘Not England,’ Saberht said, despite Cynewulf’s glares. ‘Half of England, dominated by Wessex. And what about the rest?’
‘I have sons,’ said Alfred. ‘I need to leave them something to do. And in the meantime I have my books to write.’
Alfred, whose life had been dominated by the war with the Danes, had always had larger goals. He was designing a written code of law, assembled from the wisdom of the old English kingdoms - a programme inspired by the example of the east Roman emperor Justinian. And to make his country literate again he was having books translated, from the Latin to the English. He had begun with his favourite Boethius, and with histories, including Bede’s famous work.
‘I intend to leave an England rebuilt on surer foundations,’ he said. ‘An England united under God and a just law. An England where the King’s writ extends into every shire, every hundred, every man’s home. An England which maintains a fyrd, properly organised and equipped, ready to be called at any time to deter any aggressor. An England where a free man may read the word of God in his own tongue ... One must take a long view.’
‘And none,’ Cynewulf said, ‘takes a longer view than you, lord.’
Alfred warned, ‘Like all kings I am a fool, but not one who responds to flattery.’
‘It was meant sincerely.’
‘But what of you, Cynewulf? Still a priest, at your time of life? Didn’t I offer you a bishopric?’
‘You did, and I was honoured. But it wasn’t for me. After Ethandune I had had enough of history. I concluded I could best serve God’s will by remaining a humble priest.’
‘And by binding souls to Christ.’ Alfred nodded. ‘You see, we are alike, you and I. Always thinking of the longer term. What of your companion, the girl who knew the Menologium?’
‘Aebbe? She has long gone. After her treatment by the Danes she couldn’t bear children, the doctors told her. Well, she wasn’t one for the convent. And so she left. I haven’t heard from her since.’
‘Many savageries were committed in those days,’ Alfred said. ‘One must fix what one can fix, and put aside the rest.’ He glanced at his clerks, who were waiting patiently with more documents.
Cynewulf knew it was time to leave. He stood, pulling Saberht up with him. ‘Lord, may I ask one more thing? The prophecy. Did it truly guide your decisions, in those days?’
Alfred stroked that long chin, now grizzled with grey stubble. ‘I don’t know, priest. That’s the truth. The prophecy was and is a strand in my thinking - but so is Bede, so are the lives of the Caesars, and so above all is the Word of God.’ He smiled. ‘But if the task of our generation was to save a corner of England we’ve succeeded, haven’t we? We must leave oceanic empires to another age.’
‘Do you still have the Menologium?’
‘My clerks made copies. The remaining stanzas speak of the far future, you know - many of your Great Years, hundreds of months. It will take centuries for the rest of it to unfold, though nobody in my court can add up numbers well enough to tell me exactly how long. And so it is the task of the future to deal with it - and, therefore, of my own dynasty. Which, let me remind you, springs from Cerdic himself, if not from Woden, and ought therefore to persist as long as there is an England.’ He winked at the priest. ‘I could scarcely believe otherwise, could I?’ He glanced at his clerks. ‘Now, where were we? ...’
Cynewulf never saw the King again. Nor did he see Aebbe. But he did learn of her fate - in, astonishingly, a letter from the runaway slave and murderer, Ibn Zuhr.
XXI
Five years had passed since Cynewulf’s last meeting with Alfred when the letter found him.
‘I was impelled to write to you, Fr Cynewulf, for I knew you to be a good man, and always respected your intellect - though I believe that intellect to be wasted on your immature theology. I have no doubt you think ill of me, but perhaps you can understand how it was for a
man like me to be condemned to a life of slavery under a man like Arngrim.
‘In any case I do not write for your forgiveness, but to satisfy my own longing to tell you my news.’
And that news, Ibn Zuhr said, concerned the fate of Aebbe - and the meaning of the Menologium of Isolde.
Ibn Zuhr, perhaps understandably, said little of himself. After the death of Arngrim he had escaped out of Wessex into Mercia and then, following the roads he had once travelled with Cynewulf and his master, he had made for Eoforwic-Jorvik. Cynewulf understood; this man of the cities of al-Andalus had sought the nearest to a city that Britain had to offer.
Among the Danes and English of Jorvik the Moor stood out, of course, but there were many traders from the southern lands in Jorvik. And in the bustling, open economy of the Danish town he had soon managed to scrape a living from his medicinal knowledge. ‘Perhaps my exotic appearance helps reassure my patients of my healing powers,’ he noted dryly.
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