The Snow on the Cross

by Brian Fitts

  In 987 Robert II the Pious came to me as his caravan passed through Le Mans. He was a troubled man, and as he came to my church he found me in my garden. His wagons ended up carving deep ruts through my plants as they rumbled into the courtyard. Although annoyed at the destruction, I bowed at the king’s approach and asked how I could help him.

  “Bishop,” Robert II whispered as he clasped me on the shoulder and pulled me aside. “Do you have time for confession?”

  “Your grace,” I said, bowing again. “I am at your service.”

  Robert the Pious was a small man and he bore the sharp features of his father, Hugh Capet. Although Robert barely reached my shoulder (and I am not a tall man by any means) he carried himself proudly, but never boastfully. He had grown a worried-looking mustache that he stroked and twiddled as a nervous habit, and his eyes twitched as well, looking as a man seeking a quick escape would.

  I led him into the cathedral interiors while his men waited outside and continued trampling down my garden. As we walked, I remembered what one of the traveling monks had told me, which I had recorded.

  Robert II the Pious had taken as a wife a young woman named Bertha of Burgandy. There was a scandal that I knew of well. The church had not approved this union, as it was reported that Bertha was a blood relative of Robert, which would make him guilty of the mortal sin of incest. Robert had earned the name of “Pious” for his good work with the church. He had personally taken a troupe of soldiers through the countryside and destroyed some pagan strongholds discovered along the hillsides. Although I would like to believe Robert did this out of a love for the church, the cynic in me (and the whispers of the monks) makes me believe that Robert did this to gain the support of the church for his marriage to Bertha.

  “Bishop, listen well,” said Robert as he was seated in the confessional. “I am in love with a woman, and my love for her, it is said, is a sin against God.”

  “Bertha of Burgandy,” I replied. “Is your blood relation. The church cannot support such a union. Rome will seek to have it absolved as soon as it can, and you will be guilty of such a sin that only God can wipe clean.”

  “You have influence over Rome, Bishop. Make the Pope see his error. Bertha is not proven to be in a direct bloodline with my lineage. It is speculation. Nothing more.”

  I could laugh at the poor man for thinking I had any influence over the Pope. Rome barely acknowledged me as the Bishop of Le Mans, and I preferred it that way. Once a year they sent an envoy to my cathedral to collect the tribute, but other than that, there was nothing. How could I have any influence over anyone? There was almost no communication between Le Mans and Rome as long as I had been in my post.

  “Your grace,” I told him. “There is nothing I can do. If you continue your relationship with Bertha that is your decision. Do not come to me and ask me to intervene on your behalf. I would simply call attention to myself in the eyes of Rome. Wait for the Pope to issue the church’s decision. Abide by whatever they decide. An absolution may come tomorrow; it may come in a few years. But Bertha is within your family, and I think you know that deep down. Save your soul before it is too late. Absolve the marriage, distance yourself from Bertha, and respect the decision of the church.”

  By the time Robert the Pious and his men left, my garden was a smashed mixture of red and green, and I sadly began the long and tedious work of resetting my plants. I mention Robert the Pious only because he came back several years later. The Council of Rome had ordered him to separate in 997, three years before I left for Greenland. He had taken another wife from Arles, and apparently was quite happy with her.

  When Robert returned to Le Mans in 997, he brought news of the North Men. Apparently they were settling colonies all along the islands surrounding Britain and beyond to the west. This was not one of the wild barbarian stories I was so used to hearing from the monks. It sounded as if these were good men: simple traders who wanted to make a place for themselves in this world.

  Robert stayed that night in my cathedral, and he sat with me long after the servants had retired. The fires were roaring as he leaned forward and told me this, which I recorded soon after:

  “Bishop, King Olaf of Norway has converted to our faith. He is sweeping through his country and wiping out the remnants of the pagan ways. It is a sign of things to come.”

  “What do you mean, your grace?”

  Robert the Pious sat back in his chair. “There are holdouts from the Christian faith. North Men who refuse to convert. Those are the men who fled west, away from Olaf and his new faith. These are the ones who cling to the old ways and their superstitions. These are the ones who are damned.”

  “I heard that Olaf converted only for political gain, your grace. Not for any hope of salvation.”

  “Nonsense. He has seen the errors of his people. He is converting them in Norway, by force if he has to. I have heard of entire villages rounded up and driven to the seaside where they are herded into the water by the point of a spear, like cattle. There they are baptized.”

  “Well?”

  “Simply because the North Men have converted does not make them any less of a danger to us, Bishop Arnald. They need a man of God, a missionary, to go to them and live with them, to teach them.”

  “Teach them what? That it’s against God to sack and burn monasteries? That rounding up women as slaves throughout the villages they conquer is a sin? Do not involve me with this, your grace. I am happy here.”

  Robert the Pious looked at me for a long time without speaking. “Bishop, there is an island about three days west of Britain. There is an outpost there, a settlement. It is there the last main holdout of the new faith lives. King Olaf desires his men to accept his new conversion. He cannot do this unless he has the support of all his subjects, even the ones who do not live in his immediate throne. The leader of the men who live there on the island has sent a request for a man of God to come to their island to live.”

  “Why?”

  Robert the Pious then shrugged. “I do not know, for the man stands against our entire faith here. Yet, he still wants someone to come to them. No one will go. Not one single man has volunteered.

  “There is a reason why,” I said. “It is too cold. The land there is frozen, and the sun never sets.”

  Robert the Pious sighed. “I understand, Bishop. You do not want to go, either. But, Norway would be satisfied if a French bishop undertook the missionary ways to convert his people for him. Politically, it would be helpful to form an alliance.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know anything about these people. They are barbarians, and they will kill me if I go. I can’t even help my own people. Why do you think I can help these men who have a reputation of killing men like me?”

  Robert the Pious simply shook his head and smiled.

  * * *

  As the winter faded into an early spring, there was more news from the north, and I began to hear the name Eirik more frequently. Although most of the tales I had heard were speculative and had no basis in fact, strings of different stories seem to link together, and it was from these stories I was able to piece together the story of the man who had settled as far west as he could go and still survive. Young Jonah, not so young anymore, returned that spring to Le Mans. Over a meal of fresh cheese and bread, he told me this:

  “Eirik the Red, as they called him, went to the west as an outlaw, presumably because the death sentence on his father had passed on to him. He settled a large tract of land to the west with his men and set up a farm there. He returned briefly to tell the story of the land he had founded. He called it the Green Land.”

  I pause here because after seeing the land myself, I assumed that Eirik was either a liar or completely insane for naming this land Greenland.

  “Nonetheless,” Jonah continued. “He attracted quite a following to go back with him to this land. Fourteen ships, I heard. Most of the men who traveled with him shared his beliefs.”

  I nodded. Eirik would have followe
d his father not only in his crime, but also his faith.

  “Jonah,” I asked him. “Why does this barbarian want a man of God to live there? Is he playing some sort of joke? Robert the Pious has asked me to go to this ‘Green Land’ to convert these men.”

  “Bishop, it is not for Eirik that you would go, but for his wife, I suppose. I hear she is a Christian, but he wants nothing to do with the faith.”

  “Then God is using her as a tool to convert the others there. It is her request through the mouth of Eirik that will save them.”

  Jonah nodded, and I retired for the evening after recording my news about the man called Eirik the Red.

  Chapter Two

  Thordhild

  I had sent a letter to Robert II the Pious about my decision later that month. By late March, the rumble of horses greeted me as his caravan pulled up. Once again, they found me in my garden where I had just set my new fledgling plants. This time I had constructed a wire and rope fence all around them, and as the riders approached, I made sure I showed them where the boundaries were. Robert laughed and apologized and ended up donating twelve gold coins to the church.

  “Now, Bishop,” he said. “We must talk.”

  Robert the Pious told me of a visitor he had just two weeks ago, shortly before my letter had arrived. The man was from Eirik’s Green Land, and he had brought a gift with him.

  “How nice,” I said. “Is it useful? Perhaps it can help the poor.” I was assuming it was a monetary gift, for I had heard the North Men were fond of silver.

  Robert frowned and twiddled the edge of his moustache. “I don’t know, Bishop. Unless the poor have a taste for bear.”

  I laughed at that. It turned out that the emissary from Greenland had brought with him a large white bear on a silver and gold chain. A gift, he had said, from Eirik.

  Robert’s worried frown turned into a half-smile. “The damned thing is growling all the time and has already eaten most of our stock of venison. The servants are afraid of it, and as far as I can tell, it might make a nice rug or drape of some sort. I don’t know what to do with it. I told that heathen that I didn’t want it, but he left without taking it with him. I could take the chain off of it and melt it down, but no one can get close enough to it to remove the collar.”

  Robert the Pious shouldn’t have worried about the bear. Two weeks later it was dead. Robert, unknowingly I’m sure, kept it locked up in the lower chambers, and the poor bear simply sweltered to death (either that or it had eaten something that disagreed with it). As a sign of thanks for the gift, Robert had the bear skinned and a rather elaborate cloak was made of its fur. Robert insisted on wearing it on royal business in the winter, especially when dealing with political situations of the North Men.

  “Your grace,” I asked him. “Tell me about Eirik’s wife.”

  “She is named Thordhild,” Robert the Pious told me. “And she has converted, against her husband’s wishes apparently. She was a peasant girl from the Ice Land when Eirik arrived there with his father. When Eirik left Ice Land, she went with him to his Green Land.”

  “And am I to believe she is the one who made the request for the missionary?”

  “That is what I believe. Does it make a difference in your decision? That a woman has summoned you?”

  “Your grace,” I tried to explain to Robert as carefully as I could. “I thought I made it clear that I had no desire to go. Find someone else. Someone better. I do not have the patience or the skill to convert those men.”

  Robert stared at me for a long time as if waiting for me to say something else, but I remained silent and still, hoping the moment would pass. I had made it clear. If I left Le Mans, who would tend my garden? How would I record my histories? No. It was better that I stayed home.

  It wasn’t long after the last visit from Robert the Pious that word came from the east. North Men ships had entered the Seine River. They left a charred path along the riverbanks as they burned everything they came to. Paris was looted. Tours was sacked. I received word that the buildings smoldered for weeks after, and the sky had turned permanently black from the smoke. My old friend, the Bishop of Tours, was found hanging from the top spires of his cathedral, his abdomen split open from belly to throat. Robert the Pious was raising an army to counter their attack, but by the time preparations were made, the North Men had vanished. They slipped their long ships back into the river and drifted away like the smoke they left behind.

  Wave after wave of wounded and sick flooded into the courtyard of my cathedral. Most were refugees whose villages had been plundered. Although the monks and I tried to help, the bodies began to stack up, and we burned them like cordwood to stifle the outbreak of disease. My cobblestones were stained forever after with their blood and ashes, and no matter how hard I or anyone else scrubbed them, the stains remained.

  I recorded these events with a weary heart. From my chamber window I could see the lands beyond, and I imagined I could see the smoke after all. It lingered, and the smell drifted for hundreds of miles: the scent of blood and wood smoke. The barbarians had taken few prisoners in their attacks. Their ships left no room for anything but themselves and their loot. Prisoners were a waste of space, so they were executed. I listened with horror at the tales some of the peasants told about how the first target of the attacks was always the church. It was the least guarded and contained the most gold, not to mention the bottles of wine for communion.

  God had sent this plague upon us, but he left Le Mans untouched. I was spared from the invasions. I sat and looked around at my towers and my holy icons that decorated the walls. I asked myself why Le Mans was spared.

  Robert II the Pious moved an army north along the Seine, and the monks who were recovering from the attack on Tours reported he had ten thousand men on the march. Robert had camped them along the beaches of Aquitaine near the city of Nantes. The barbarians had sacked Tours while traveling down the Loire River, so Robert was assuming they would try to return down that river.

  However, the raids never came, and news came of another attack to the north, this time near the city of Abbeville. Robert the Pious tried to split his army and sent half to the north for Abbeville’s protection, but it was too late. The slaughter there was unmatched of anything that had gone on before.

  I sat quietly in my cell at Le Mans and listened to the silence of the night outside my window. There were no great fires blazing, no panicked screaming of an attack. There was simply the hum of night insects that appear in early summer, and the glimmer of the stars. I scratched my words onto my parchment and waited for the news. We were untouched by war, and the wrath of the North Men had been averted from us. The people of my city were sleeping well tonight despite the ravages that had gone on around the countryside to the west and north. It would have done me no good to try to understand why. God’s plan works for us all.

  ***

  Jonah and his brothers from the monastery at Toulouse returned from a pilgrimage to Rome and brought me news of more raids from the south. This was in the early autumn of 998, and the Pope had issued a decree of conversion upon us all.

  “He writes that all men of God who have taken vows to uphold the faith are now commanded to convert these pirates to prevent future raids upon the church,” Jonah reported. “The Pope thinks that if they are converted to Christianity, they will be hesitant to attack the monasteries and churches along the coasts.”

  “It is simple thinking upon the part of the Pope,” I said. “There have been countless atrocities committed by those who have professed their faith. Having one religion over another is not going to change that behavior.”

  “It is your duty, Bishop,” Jonah told me. “You are commanded by the Pope himself to attempt conversions.”

  “I know,” I sighed. “The king thinks it would be good politically for me to go as well.”

  My thoughts returned to the request to go to Greenland. If I were to take the signs as they had been shown to me: the invitation by Thordhild, the
sparing of Le Mans from the invasions, the appeal by the king himself, then all indications would be for me to leave Le Mans and go to Greenland. I thought about my father and what he would do. His reputation was such that he wouldn’t have even been given a choice. He would go on the next ship and do God’s good work.

  But I am not my father, then or now, and I didn’t know why the signs were all pointing to me to bring Christianity to Greenland. I was an insignificant Bishop from a small city and, moreover, I had not left Le Mans since I entered the church at fifteen. I knew there was an entire civilization out there beyond the walls of my cathedral, but still I wanted nothing more than to simply sit and let the news come to me. My imagination had been set afire by all the stories the monks told me, all the things they had seen on their travels, and I had recorded it all faithfully, but to see the sights for myself was not something I greatly wanted. I was a disappointment to Robert the Pious, I know, for he held such hope in his eyes when he told me about the North Men settlements. He wanted me to go, and the monks didn’t understand why I insisted on staying home.

  Late that winter in early December, Robert the Pious came to visit me for the last time. He had aged since I last saw him. The struggle against the raiders had worn him down, and it didn’t seem to matter where his army was encamped, the North Men appeared to attack at all points all at once. Now Robert referred to the North Men as “Vikings” a word which meant “pirate.” Although some political negotiations were still going on between France and Norway, the talks were stagnant, and King Olaf of Norway refused to budge. Robert the Pious threatened and raved against the Vikings, but the raids continued sporadically, and Robert was left bewildered at their sheer persistence. If money was all they wanted, not land or kingdoms, then a yearly tribute could be arranged between the two kingdoms.

  “I am afraid, Bishop,” said Robert to me as we sat deep in the heart of the cathedral. The candles flickered across his features giving him huge shadows gaping under his eyes. “Our people are at the mercy of these pirates who attack then flee. Our treasures are vanishing, and I don’t know what to do.”