by Tim Severin
As the bagpipe continued to play, the naked man began to dance. Deliberately at first, lifting each spear in turn and bringing its butt end down with a thump on the ground in time with the music. As the music quickened, so too did the dancing figure, turning and cavorting, leaping in sidelong jumps down one side of the table, then up the other. As the cadence of his dance became familiar, the huscarls took up the rhythm, beating gently at the start and then with increasing fervour on the table with their hands, their dagger handles, and chanting, Odinn! Odinn! Odinn!’ The figure whirled, holding out the two spears so they whistled through the air, and he leaped and leaped again. I saw several of the older huscarls reach out and dip their hands in the bloody juices of the horse carcass and mark their own foreheads with a bloody stripe, dedicating themselves to the All-Father.
Then, as unexpectedly as he had arrived, the masked figure darted out of sight back into the room he had come from.
Again the bagpipe began to play, and this time the musician emerged from his hiding place. He was a young man and he was playing a smaller pipe than those I knew from Ireland. He took up his station behind Earl Eirikr and I guessed that the Northumbrian earl had brought the piper with him for our entertainment. He had also hired a professional mimer, for the next person to appear from the side room with a dramatic leap was dressed in the costume of a hero, with helmet, armour and a light sword. It took only moments for the audience to recognise he was playing the role of Sigurd in the lay of Fafnir. They roared their approval as he mimed the ambush from the trench in which the hidden Sigurd stabs upwards into Fafnir’s slithering belly and the gold-guarding dragon dies. Then, in a sinuous movement the actor changed character and became Regin, Sigurd’s evil foster-father, who arrives upon the scene and asks Sigurd to cook the dragon’s heart so he may eat it. Another leap sideways and the mimer became Sigurd, licking his burned thumb as he cooks the meat, and from that taste learns the language of birds, who tell him that the treacherous Regin intends to murder him. A sham sword fight, and Sigurd killed the evil foster-father, ending his display by dragging away two imaginary chests of dragon’s gold. And not entirely imaginary gold either, for several of the huscarls threw gold and silver coins on the floor as a mark of their appreciation.
At this point Thorkel and several of the more senior huscarls left the hall. They must have known that the gemot could last far into the night, and into the next day as well, and that the celebrations would soon grow even more ribald and disorderly. But Kjartan made no move to go, so I kept to my cup-bearer’s duties as the evening grew more and more raucous. Prodigious quantities of mead and ale were consumed, and the liquor loosened tongues. I had not anticipated the strength of dislike that the traditional huscarls showed towards the White Christ faction at court. They talked of the Christians as devious, smug and crafty. The special targets for their odium were the queen, Emma of Normandy, and the king’s chief lawmaker, Archbishop Wulftstan. A very drunk huscarl pulled out a long white shirt – he must have brought it with him for that purpose – and waved it in the air to attract the attention of his drinking companions. Unsteadily he got to his feet, pulled it on over his own head and mimicked the act of Christian prayer, shouting, ‘I’ve been prepared for baptism three times, and each time the priests paid me a month’s wages and gave me a fine white shirt.’
‘Easy money,’ yelled a companion drunkenly. ‘I collected four payments; it’s a new version of the Danegeld’.
This drew a roar of drunken laughter. Then the assembly began to chant a name. ‘Thyrmr! Thyrmr! Remember Thyrmr!’ and the huscarl took off his white shirt and threw it into the corner of the room. ‘Thyrmr! Thyrmr!’ chanted the men, now completely intoxicated, and they began picking up the remnants of the meal, and throwing the chewed bones and discarded gristle in the direction of the crumpled cloth.
‘I thought they were going to throw the bones at the disgraced huscarl,’ I muttered to Gisli’s cup-bearer.
‘He’s in luck tonight,’ he answered. ‘Instead they’re celebrating the day that one of the Saxon high priests, an archbishop, I think his name was Alfheah, got himself killed. A man named Thyrmr did it, smacked the archbishop on the back of his head with the flat of his battleaxe at the end of a particularly boisterous feast after everyone had pelted the priest with ox bones.’
This drunken boasting was infantile and pointless, I thought to myself as I watched the stumbling drunkards. It was the response of men who felt outmanouevred by their rivals. This hollow mummery was not the way to protect the future veneration of the Old Gods.
I grew more and more depressed as the evening degenerated into brutishness. The only moment I raised a smile was when the company began to chant a lewd little ditty about Queen Emma and her priestly entourage. The words were clever and I found myself joining in the refrain, ‘Bakrauf! Bakrauf!’ I realised I was thick tongued and slurring my words, even though I had been trying to stay sober. So when Kjartan slumped from his seat, completely drunk, I beckoned to Gisli’s cup-bearer to help me, and together we carried the one-armed huscarl back to his barracks bed. Then I started out on the long walk back through London to reach my own room, hoping that the chilly winter air and the exercise would clear my head.
I scratched quietly at the heavy door of the mint. It was long past the time that Thurulf and I normally returned from tavern, but I had bribed the door keeper, who was by now quite accustomed to my drinking excursions. He must have been waiting by the door, for he opened it almost at once, and I went in, walking as quietly and as straight as my drunkenness would allow. I was just sober enough to realise that it would be foolish to use the stairs to the upper floor that went past Brithmaer’s chambers. A creaking floorboard or falling up the stairs would attract attention. I decided to go to my room by the far stair, which led directly from the workshop floor to the balcony. I removed my smart yellow shoes, and holding them in my hand, walked quietly along the length of the workshop, trying to keep in a straight line. In a pool of lantern light at the far end of the workshop, the two elderly men were still at the coining bench. I could see them bent over, tapping out the little coins. Neither of them was aware of my approach – one because eye disease had damaged his sight, the other because he was concentrating hard on his work and, being deaf, would not have heard me even if I had not been barefoot. I was more drunk than I thought and I swayed and swerved in my walk enough to brush against the deaf man. It gave him such a shock that he started upright and fumbled his work. The striking iron dropped to the floor, as he turned to see what was behind him. In tipsy embarrassment I put my finger to my lips, entreating silence. Then, concentrating ferociously as only a drunkard can, I managed to bend over without tumbling headlong, picked up his striking iron from the ground, and returned it to him. A glint of silver caught my eye. It was the coin he had just struck. It too had fallen to the floor. Risking another attack of sot’s vertigo, I picked up the coin and put it in his hands. Then with an exaggerated salute, I turned and wove my way to the staircase, then climbed it hand over hand like a novice sailor, and eventually toppled into my manger bed.
I awoke next morning with a vile headache and the taste of stale mead in my mouth. As I was bent over a bucket of well water, trying to wash my bleary eyes, my position bent over the bucket reminded me of something that had puzzled me. I recalled something strange when I leaned down and picked up the old man’s striking iron and the dropped coin. I could not remember exactly what it was. Then I remembered: as I placed the coin into the workman’s palm, a gleam of lantern light had fallen across it. The freshly minted coin was a silver penny. But the face I saw stamped on the coin was not Knut’s familiar image, but someone else’s.
Or was I too drunk to know the difference? The mystery nagged at me all morning until I realised that I could check. The striking irons used at night were kept for safe keeping in the jewellery workshop, and so mid-morning I reminded Brithmaer that the crystal necklace should be repaired by now and asked if I might visit the w
orkshop to examine it.
Thurulf opened the door to the strongroom and wandered off, leaving me on my own. A few moments was all the time I needed to locate the striking irons that the two night workers used. They were tucked away out of sight under the workbench, wrapped in a leather cloth. There was also a lump of old wax, tossed aside when the engraver had made moulds for repairing jewellery. I nipped off two little pellets of wax and pressed them between the faces of the striking irons and their counterparts, then replaced the nightworkers’ tools. When Thurulf returned, I was admiring the rock crystals in their new settings.
I was so eager to examine the wax impressions that I had scarcely gone a hundred paces on my way back to the exchange when I shook them out from my sleeve. Even the simplest pedlar would have recognised the patterns pressed on them. There was no mystery: they could be found in half the markets in the land, and they lay in the mint’s storerooms by the thousand – the king’s head on the striking irons was that of King Ethelred the Ill-Advised, dead these four years past. On their reverse, one wax impression bore the mark of a moneyer in Derby and the other a moneyer in Winchester. I was intrigued. Why would Brithmaer secretly be making coins that were out of date? Why would he want coins that were already valueless and should be melted down, and that at a discount?
There seemed no logic to it, and in the tavern that evening I casually asked Thurulf if he had heard of a moneyer in Derby by the name of Guner. He told that the name was vaguely familiar, but he thought that the man was long since dead.
I drank little, telling Thurulf that I was still queasy from the huscarls’ gemot. In fact I wanted to look my best the following morning for that was when I had arranged with Aelfgifu’s chamberlain that I would return with a selection of jewellery for her inspection.
Aelfgifu was in a mischievous mood. Her eyes sparkled when – at last – she managed to dismiss her attendants, telling them that she would try on the jewels in private. It seemed a feeble excuse to me, but she carried it off, and moments later we were in the private bedchamber where she had first taught me how to love.
‘Let me look at you!’ she gloated, making me stand back so she could admire the effect of my new tunic. ‘Yellow and brown and black. The colours really suit you – you look good enough to eat. Come, let me taste you.’ And she walked across and threw her arms around me.
Feeling the softeness of her breasts, I was flooded by my own craving. Our mouths met, and I realised that if my longing had been acute, hers was also. Previously in that room our love had been tender and forbearing, with Aelfgifu leading my novice hesitancy. Now we both plunged into the certainty of our passion, greedy for one another, tumbling together on the bed. Within moments we were naked and making love with desperate urgency until the first wave of passion had spent itself. Only then did Aelfgifu disengage herself and, as always, run her finger down my profile. ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’ she asked teasingly.
I rolled over to the side of the bed and reached down to pick up the bag of jewellery, and tipped it out on the sheet. As I had hoped, she pounced immediately on the crystal and amber necklace.
‘It’s beautiful’ she exclaimed. ‘Here help me put it on,’ and she turned so that I could fasten the clasp at the nape of her neck. When she turned back again to face me, her eyes shining to match the crystals, I could have imagined no better place for the gems that I had stolen. Now they lay supported on the sweet curves of her breasts. What would the Irish monks have thought? I wondered.
Somehow Aelfgifu had arranged that we could be alone together for several hours, and in that time we were unrestrained. We made love light-heartedly and often. We delighted in one another’s bodies. Aelfgifu was provocative in her response when I covered her with jewellery – the necklace, of course, but also bracelets on her ankles and wrists, a pendant as a belt, and two magnificently gaudy brooches to cup her breasts, all at once.
When we had laughed and loved one another to exhaustion and were lying side by side, I told her about the fire ruby hidden in the amulet of lead – she had lifted it from my neck after the first encounter, saying the lump would give her bruises. She listened to my story and before I had finished, had guessed my intention. ‘Thorgils,’ she said gently, ‘I don’t want to have that stone. You are not to give it to me. I have a feeling that stone should remain with you. It has your spirit. Somewhere inside you flickers that same light, which needs someone to make it glow,’ and gently she leaned over and began to lick my chest.
SIX
GREAT HAPPINESS; GREAT danger – another of Edgar’s proverbs. Only two days after my impassioned visit to Aelfgifu, I was shaken awake by Brithmaer’s door keeper. A palace messenger was waiting for me in the street, he grunted, on an urgent matter. Groggy with sleep since it was not yet dawn, I dressed in my tunic, elated that this summons to the queen’s apartments had come so soon after our last tryst.
But when I opened the door to the street, I did not recognise the messenger standing there in the half-dark. He was sombrely dressed and looked more like a minor clerk than a royal servant.
‘Your name is Thorgils?’ he enquired.
‘Yes,’ I replied, puzzled. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Come with me, please,’ the man said. ‘You have a meeting with Archbishop Wulfstan.’
A chill came over me. Archbishop Wulfstan, co-regent of England, was no friend to followers of the Old Ways, and by reputation was the cleverest man in the kingdom. For an instant I wondered what business he had with someone as insignificant as myself. Then a hard knot formed in my stomch. The only person who connected me with matters of state was Aelfgifu.
The messenger led me to the royal chancery, a melancholy building at the rear of the palace where I was shown to an empty waiting room. It was still only an hour after daybreak when I was ushered into the archbishop’s council chamber, yet the king’s chief minister was already deep in his work. Flanked by two priests as his secretaries, Wulfstan was seated at a table listening to some notes being read to him in Latin. He looked up as I entered, and I saw that he must have been well past his sixtieth year. He had a seamless face, scrubbed and pink, a few wisps of white hair remained on his scalp and his hands, which were folded on the table, were soft and white. His serene demeanour and the benign smile he directed towards me as I entered gave him the appearance of a kindly grandfather. But that agreeable impression withered the moment he spoke. His voice was so quiet that I had to strain to hear him, yet it carried a menace far more frightening than if he had shouted aloud. Worse was his choice of words: ‘The fly that plays too long in the candle singes his wings at last.’
I felt as if I was about to faint.
One of the notaries passed a sheet of parchment to the archbishop. ‘Your name, Thorgils, is a pagan one, is it not? You are an un-believer?’ Wulfstan asked.
I nodded.
‘Would that be why you attended the banquet at the huscarls’ mess hall the other evening? I understand that certain gross ceremonies were conducted during the course of the meal.’
‘I attended only as a cup-bearer, my lord,’ I said, wondering who was the informer who had told the archbishop about the evening’s events. ‘I was a bystander.’
‘Not entirely, I think,’ said the archbishop consulting his notes. ‘It is reported that at times you participated in the debauchery. Apparently you also enthusiastically joined in the chorus of a blasphemous and scurrilous song, which might be said to be treasonable and is certainly seditious.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, my lord,’ I answered.
‘Let me give you an example. The song noted here apparently referred to our noble Queen Emma, and repeatedly, as a Bakrauf.’
I stayed silent.
‘You know what Bakrauf means?’
Still I said nothing,
‘You ought to be aware,’ the archbishop went on unrelentingly, ‘that for a number of years I served as Archbishop of York. In that city the majority of the citizens are Norse a
nd speak their donsk tunga, as they call it. I made it my business to learn the langage fluently, so I do not need my staff to tell me that the word Bakrauf means the human fundament, or in a more civilised speech, an anus. Hardly a fitting description of the wife of the king of England, do you think? Sufficient cause for the culprit to suffer some sort of punishment – like having his tongue cut out, perhaps?’ The archbishop spoke in little more than a gentle whisper. Yet there was no mistaking that he meant his threat. I recalled that he was famous for the virulent sermons he delivered under the name of ‘the Wolf’. I wondered where this line of questioning was leading.
‘Do you deny the charge? There are at least three witnesses to the fact that you participated in the chorus and with apparent relish.’
‘My lord,’ I answered, ‘I was fuddled at the time, having taken too much drink.’
‘Hardly an excuse.’
‘I mean I misunderstood the meaning of the word Bakrauf,’ I pleaded. ‘I know that Bakrauf means anus in the donsk tunga, but I was thinking in Latin, and those who taught me Latin told me that anus means “an old woman”. They never said that it might also mean part of the human body. Of course I humbly apologise for referring to the queen as an old woman.’
Wulfstan, who had begun to look bored, suddenly became more attentive. ‘So Thorgils knows his Latin, does he?’ he mumured. ‘And how is that?’
‘Monks in Ireland taught me, my lord,’ I said. I did not add that, judging from his conversation in Latin with the notaries when I came in, my command of the language was probably better than his own.
Wulfstan grimaced. ‘Those benighted Irish monks,’ he observed sourly. ‘A cluster of thorns in the flesh of the true Church.’ He noticed the lead amulet hanging round my neck. ‘If you studied with the Irish monks, how is it that you were not baptised? You should be wearing a Christian cross around your neck. Not a pagan sign.’