The Snow on the Cross

by Brian Fitts

  The Snow on the Cross

  By Brian Fitts

  The Snow on the Cross

  All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Brian Fitts

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher

  Author’s Note

  Although historical in nature, this is primarily a work of fiction based around historical people and events. It is not necessarily to be taken as a firm historical account. Some liberties have been taken with timelines and names to fit the narrative.

  B.F.

  Woe unto you, ye souls depraved

  Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens;

  I come to lead you to the other shore,

  To the eternal shades in heat and frost…”

  -Dante Aligheri

  The Divine Comedy

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  In the Land of Smoke and Scrub

  Chapter Two

  Thordhild

  Chapter Three

  The Watchers

  Chapter Four

  Blood on the Ice

  Chapter Five

  Meetings

  Chapter Six

  The Hunt

  Chapter Seven

  Strange Days

  Chapter Eight

  A Visitor

  Chapter Nine

  Fellowship

  Chapter Ten

  The Request

  Chapter Ten

  Winter

  Chapter Eleven

  The Fall

  Chapter Twelve

  Smoke and Spirits

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Snow on the Cross

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Two sounds are evident as I write these words. One is the scratch of my quill on the scrap of parchment, the other is laughter: sometimes high pitched, sometimes guttural. The latter sound I have heard every day for the last twelve years as it filters through the window in my door and bounces off the stone walls into my ears. I scratch these words into this scrap of parchment I found lying outside in the corridor because if I do not, my only other choice will be to carve these words into the very stone of my prison walls with my fingers.

  There is water creeping down the rock in tiny streams. Its source is unknown. Perhaps it filters down from the wells outside from which we draw our water. Maybe it is from the kitchen vats that bubble day and night with the thick gruel they feed us. Perhaps it is the urine trickling down through the cracks in the ceiling from the mindless who live above me. I hear their thumping on the floor above. Sometimes flecks of stone shower down upon me. The powder from the stone taints my inkwell, and I sit and dip my quill and write with black and white ink. Sometimes I sit and stare at the streams pouring down the walls. They remind me of blood: the blood of the walls seeping and eroding the foundation of this prison. In a thousand years I will be free when the walls have all crumbled away. I have not seen sunlight in twelve years. They think I will die here, but I will not. I have no reason to die. Locked in this stone coffin that measures ten feet by six feet, they seek to silence me about where I have been and what I have seen. A disgrace to the church, they called me.

  Once I left my parchment too close to the walls, and it was splashed with the water. I sat for two days and let it dry out. There is nothing to do but gaze at the endless streams and listen to the laughter drifting through my window and the walls. Sometimes I imagine the sound is carried by the water directly to me, like a messenger. My quill is blunted, and my ink is partially frozen. There must be no mistakes. I must be careful. My parchment shrinks with every word I scratch and when it is gone, there will be no more.

  My name is Arnald. It was the same name as my father. Sadly, the name will end with me and our bloodline will cease. My father was a bishop of Le Mans. A great man, if you believe the chronicles I imagine the scholars will create for him. I am not such a great man, and my father’s name, as it passed on to me, leaves no mark of distinction. I, too, became a bishop, and was expected to inherit my father’s work and his legacy along with his name.

  It is not sunlight I miss, but the trees. I remember trees. I even sketched a little one here in the margin next to my words so I would not forget. Not too big, just enough to jab my memory. If the sketch is too large, then it takes away valuable space for my words.

  I have a story. Although the scholars will not remember me like my father, I think the work I did bears telling before I die. I am old, but as I said before I have no reason to die, at least not yet. I will even write the date here in the margin beside my tree: the Year of our Lord 1015 A.D. That will be enough.

  There are many more words to write, so I begin with only God’s truth to guide my hand. I will tell the story of the man they called Eirik, and the Green Land he so passionately believed in. My name will be forgotten by time, but I am sure his will not. I was there. I saw his land and his people. I was Bishop Arnald of Le Mans, and now I begin the tale so those who follow may read and learn.

  Chapter One

  In the Land of Smoke and Scrub

  There are no trees in Greenland. The entire landscape is hills and valleys dotted by scrub bushes. There is good pasture on the southern end of the island, but to the north, I don’t even know of any North Men who would dare settle there. It is all frozen tundra threaded with lichen and moss. No beasts survive there, so I know no humans could either. Everything is one of two colors: blue or brown. Even the grasslands are mud colored.

  Our ship approached the rocky shoreline early one morning. Even before I saw the land, I could smell the smoke drifting up from a dozen stone chimneys. As we came closer, I saw the flat gray of the stone huts lined along the beach. Behind the little row of houses a sheer grass hill, impossibly steep, concealed what was beyond. I eventually climbed that hill and got my first look at Greenland, and it was as if I had stepped out of my world and into some dream.

  No trees, just little bushes that seemed to reach out and snag one as one passed. Miles and miles of nothing.

  So our little ship rocked and splashed toward those rocks on the beach where there was a gathering of men: huge bundles of fur with faces peeking out from behind long thick beards. There was the occasional glint of metal from a pin that held their furs together. One pin pulled, and the bundles would fall away to reveal ordinary men, some quite small after the layers peeled off. Some were waving. Others looked angry, and even from the distance I was, I could see the creases on their brows and the hatred in their eyes.One of the men with whom I was sailing tapped my shoulder and pointed. “Look, Bishop,” he said. “See that man standing away from the others? That’s Eirik. The leader of these men. He’s the one that sent for you.”

  I looked in the direction indicated. Yes, the largest of the bundles. I called them bundles because I could not see them as men. From a distance, they appeared as beasts lined against the gray water. Some carried axes that flashed, others had no hands, as they were concealed in their furs. Others were shouting, and their voices were foreign to me.

  The wind coursed over the bow of the ship and caused me to pull the cloak around myself tightly. One of the men on the shore produced a torch that smoked and sputtered in his hand. He threw it onto a pile of driftwood stacked on the beach. In a matter of moments, thick black smoke smoldered in little clouds along the shoreline.

  “It’s a welcome,” said my companion. “They light their fire to welcome you.”

  The driftwood was crackling fiercely in a matter of seconds. Its smoke mingled with the smoke from the huts and flew
into the dismal, cold sky. My gaze returned to the largest of the bundles. Eirik. He made no acknowledgment of our approach, nor did he join in the shouting of his men. He stood as if entranced, looking remarkably older than the others. His thick red beard stood out in contrast to his black fur.

  He stared at me, and I could see his eyes, dark and grim, like two holes in the center of his pale skin. His mouth was a tight line as he glared at me. I should have taken it as a sign of things to come.

  I don’t know why he had decided to go there and try to settle that lonely place. As far as I could tell, there was no good farmland, and nothing to recommend others to go there. Certainly not for the weather, for I hadn’t even set foot on the shore, and already I was longing for the warmer days I had left far behind me in Le Mans. It was a land of smoke and scrub, and whatever reasons Eirik had for going there were his own. Others followed him because they had faith in his leadership, but as I saw him for the first time, I was not overly impressed. He seemed ill tempered, and the bright red of his hair and beard made him appear almost comical.

  I could hear the distant low of the cattle somewhere over the hills, probably roaming the endless pastures with only a small stone fence to separate them from the frozen nothingness that I knew lay to the north. This was Greenland, but it was certainly not what I had imagined. The entire land seemed laced with gray.

  Springtime at the turn of the millennium. Since God had decided not to end the world, much to the disappointment of the zealots, I assumed it was going to be my fate to live out my days huddling beside a fire in a frozen wasteland. I could see the spring thaw’s effect on the land, and it even seemed as if tiny flowers were springing up on the hillside behind the huts. Greenland, after much straining and searching on my part, had some slight tinges of green along the shoreline and so, I suppose, it earned the named Eirik had given it.

  I would find out later that the wood burning so fiercely on the beach before us was the accumulated effort of several weeks of work on the part of the men who lived there. Most of it was driftwood that had been painstakingly collected one slivered fragment at a time as it washed up on the rocks. Now they were burning it all at once as a sign of my welcome. I didn’t know what to think. Our patron St. Augustine teaches of the sins of the wasteful and the indulgent. Later that winter as the winds howled, I found myself thinking back to that blazing fire that burned on my arrival and cursed the North Men for their squander

  A slight bump and our narrow ship was hauled up against the rocks of the shore. The bundles who trotted toward us were shouting in that strange language of theirs. Only one stayed behind. Eirik didn’t move. He folded his arms across his chest, stared at me for half a minute longer, and then turned his back.

  I stepped out of the boat into ankle-deep water that numbed my legs and bit sharply. As the men led me across the water and onto the beach, I could see Eirik moving away. He walked quickly toward the line of huts, not looking back. I watched him go for a moment before kneeling down on the ground and offering my prayers of thanks to St. Nicholas for a safe journey across the sea. The North Men stood around me quietly while I performed my ceremony. I touched the earth, felt its chill, and knew I had finally arrived. It was to be my home for the next two years.

  * * *

  Earlier, in the winter, I held my position as Bishop of the Le Mans Cathedral near the river. The monks who lived nearby often came to visit me as they traveled from here to there and back again. Often, when the weather was warm, they helped me tend to my garden, which was a great matter of pride to me. The garden was behind the church near a small path that led out past the stone markers to the road beyond. I worked the garden very carefully and managed to become quite adept at growing strawberries, which I would often share with my friends the monks as they passed.

  The nights turned cold quickly in Le Mans, as we often caught the chilled wind blowing off the river. I spent my nights copying scripture by the hearth. Although the position of Bishop did not require me to copy text, I found it was a comfort. There was a consistency in the faint scratch of a quill that soothed me. The monks would bring me new parchment if I requested it, but I believe they did it more out of gratitude for my strawberries.

  In those days I recorded the histories as they were reported to me. The monks in their travels would bring news of happenings in foreign lands and, as they told me, I would record them. It was in this manner that I first heard the story of the North Men. One of the monks, a young disciple named Jonah, had traveled to Britain and told me the tale of the destruction he had seen.

  “Bishop,” young Jonah said. “Our brothers in the monastery of Lindisfarne tell of the horror of the first encounter with these barbarians. A blind monk named Orin, locked in his cell one night, had visions of portents. One of them foretold of disaster: a fiery dragon descending upon them all, burning everything to ashes. The monks took this as a sign: a warning from God. They barricaded themselves within their monastery for weeks. It was then, in early June, after the monks had long since consumed all of the meager supplies they had managed to hoard, that they crawled out into the sunlight, awaiting their fate. They were starving and sick, and they looked for another sign.

  “Orin died the night before the raid, but before he died he whispered of visions of lightning flashing through the heavens. Rain the color of blood fell from the clouds, and the ink the brothers used for their books dried up and blew away as dust. During the morning hours, after Orin’s body had been discovered in his cell, the first cry arose from the tower: square sails emerging out of the sunrise, the bloodcurdling shouting of the hoard approaching the shore.

  “The blood of our brothers coated the walls of their church as the heathens slaughtered them. The holy ornaments of our God were shattered, and the rest plundered. The library was devoured by flame and the monastery was sacked. Our brothers put up no struggle, for how could they stand to fight such monsters? Some fled to the library to try to save the books, but they were trapped and burned alive there.

  “I know this story well,” Jonah told me. “My father’s grandfather was a boy at the time. He lived near the stables and saw the attack. He never forgot the sight, or was able to block the screams. He fled to the hills, and he lived to tell of the North Men’s cruelty.”

  I listened to young Jonah’s story, and I recorded it faithfully as you see here. Although I believe parts of young Jonah’s story to be the wild accounts of youth, I know his story holds some grains of truth; the monastery on Lindisfarne no longer exists, at least, not in its former grand state. After Jonah told me his tale, I began to hear other reports of savage raids along the coasts of Britain. At first they interested me, but then the accounts of the barbarism grew to unbelievable proportions. Still, I recorded them all. I even wrote down the name of the man whom I would eventually meet on the thawing beach of Greenland: Eirik.

  I only recorded his name because it was mentioned to me in a wild story told by the Bishop of Tours, who had stopped by Le Mans Cathedral for a rest while traveling to Rome. After eating most of my winter supply of strawberries I had carefully preserved, the Bishop settled back and told me this:

  “The Norwegian King, a stout fellow named Olaf, has declared a bounty of 100 pounds of silver for the capture of a renegade warrior named Thorvald. Apparently the king has declared Thorvald an outlaw and traitor. Some report Olaf will pay the bounty for the return of just Thorvald’s head and the head of his wife.”

  “What would a man do,” I asked. “To deserve such a bounty?”

  The Bishop of Tours simply shrugged. “Murder. The murder of an heir. Thorvald fled west with some of his men and his son, Eirik.”

  I shook my head. “Rumors.”

  “Believe what you will, Arnald. The North Men are spreading like an infection down the coasts. Some monasteries have taken to burying their most holy treasures to prevent them from being taken. Others are known to have committed mass murder upon themselves if they see the approach of those damned boats. It is
God’s will that saves us now and prevents them from coming here.”

  I scratched this all down with my quill that night long after the Bishop of Tours’ departure. I made a side note that he insisted on taking a healthy supply of strawberries for his journey. There was more news later that year about the Norwegian king. He had converted to the one true faith, although it was probably done while facing the point of a sword. Now, King Olaf insisted, was the time to destroy all pagan relics and dismiss the old gods in favor of the new. I was happy to hear this news, and as I recorded it there was a smile on my face.

  * * *

  I was appointed Bishop in the year 965 after my father’s death. My father, the first Bishop Arnald of Le Mans, was appointed under the rule of Charlemagne, who brought the holy faith to our land. I was fifteen when taken into the church, and by the time I arrived in Greenland in the year 1000, I had long since considered myself an old man. Listening to the poor peasants who clawed a living out of the mud wore down my heart. During confessionals I would find myself nodding off to sleep, dreaming about their little lives. How could I help them? I decided I could not. I could offer them a little hope that God was watching them, but that was all. Some would come to me in tears, and I would send them away, not because I didn’t want to help them, but simply because I found that I didn’t know how. I wrapped myself in my recordings of the histories and decided that would be enough. I would go on no great pilgrimages. I would not journey outside of the world I had built for myself here in Le Mans. My writings and my garden, and my precious strawberries, and that was all.