by MD. Lachlan
He went out of the refectory and back to the dormitory building. The warming house was a good one, complete with the Roman system of underfloor heating, the vents at his feet. He bent down. Someone had sealed them with earth. He opened the door and went in.
Jehan stepped back and gave an involuntary cry. There were forty or fifty Norsemen crammed into a room not ten paces by ten, huddled around the cold hearth of the warming house. The air was heavy with the smoke of the dead fire but he could make the bodies out through the murk by the light of the candles. They were sitting upright, leaning on each other or against the walls, rich plate and candlesticks strewn about them, one, a big man with a three scars across his bald head, seated on a glorious chair of gold and enamel – the reliquary of Saint Maurice, which contained the saint’s bones. No one moved and Jehan could see that not one of the Norsemen was alive.
A celebration had been interrupted here, thought Jehan, by the angel of death. He felt his heart racing. He was sweating despite the cold, salivating so heavily that drool ran down his chin. Was this the beginning of the condition that had claimed the Norsemen? He was so hungry. The Vikings had clearly raided the kitchen before retiring, and half-eaten fowl, bread and cheese were in their hands, in their laps and on the floor. It held no appeal for Jehan, though. He must, he thought, be ill. To be starving but unable to eat was surely a sign of the onset of some sort of malady.
He held up the candlestick and stepped into the room to examine one of the dead warriors. He was a young man of around fifteen, blond and beardless. His mouth smelled of pitch and at his lips was a black froth. The same with the next fellow and the next. In the lap of the man with the three scars was a big bowl of the monks’ cloudy beer, still unspilled. Behind him was a barrel, a hole smashed in one end. Jehan sniffed at it. The smell of the pitch was there too. Poison. But why was the room so very smoky? Jehan looked down. Someone had broken a hole in the floor. The smoke from the warming fire would be able to go directly into the room. Someone had killed these men in the most deliberate way.
He was suddenly very cold. He took one of the Vikings’ cloaks and, for good measure, the sword, scabbard and belt of the big man in the chair. It was a good Frankish blade. The people would trade with the invaders, no matter what penalty their nobles threatened.
Before he left, he put his hand on the chest that was built into the chair – the one that contained the remains of Saint Maurice. His reason was available to him only in glimpses but he used a moment of clarity to talk to God.
‘Strengthen me,’ he said. ‘Let me know your will. Make me your right arm, God, that I may serve you.’
It was no good, though. He couldn’t clear his head, couldn’t work out what do. His reasoning powers were failing him. All he could think of was his hunger. Even the fate of the monks seemed to pale beside that. But what was he hungry for?
He went out of the warming house and over to the infirmary. There might be some sort of physic or purgative he could use to get this sensation out of his head. He opened the door and peered in. The iron smell of cut meat filled the room. There were five or so monks asleep in their beds, their bald heads reflecting the candlelight like a row of strange pink flowers shining from the dark. Jehan felt relief coursing through him, but then he realised what was missing. There was no snoring, no breathing. His heart was the loudest thing in his ears. It was only then that he really looked at what was in front of him. The two nearest him were lying normally, but the others were at odd angles, limbs half out of bed. They had been slaughtered.
Jehan desperately wanted help but there was nowhere to go to get any. He would need to send a messenger to the next monastery. Where was that?
He walked forward to the end of the infirmary. Was there no one alive here? And then he saw him. In the candlelight, watching him, was a figure. It gave him a start. A man was standing stock still at the far end of the room looking at him but saying nothing.
‘What happened here, brother?’ asked Jehan.
The man didn’t reply. Jehan took a pace forward.
‘Brother?’
As he drew nearer Jehan saw there was something wrong with the man. His weight was distributed incorrectly. That is, he seemed hunched forward, as if leaning over a high bar. Jehan moved the last few paces through the dark and drew level with him. He was a monk – he could tell by his tonsure – but that wasn’t what took the confessor’s attention.
The noose at his neck was suspended over a ceiling beam. Jehan put out his hand and touched the man’s cheek. He was cold as a fish on a slab. There was no point cutting him down, clearly. Jehan looked at the knot that tied the noose. It was a strange affair, three knots in one, in tight interlocking triangles. Jehan swallowed. He had seen that somewhere before, he felt sure. He drew the sword, his hand brushing his tunic. It was wet at the front and a thin stream of drool dribbled down from his lips.
How many monks were there at Saint-Maurice? Five dead in this one room. That left maybe fifty or sixty others at a minimum. What had happened to them? Where were the boys, the scholars and the novices? Jehan could only think that, by God’s mercy, they lived down the valley in the winter or had been away for some reason.
He felt powerfully intrigued by the dead men. His mouth ran with saliva. Jehan shook his head, overcome by horror, unable to acknowledge the thoughts that were growing in his mind. He had to get out of the infirmary and he blundered for the door, dropping the candlestick as he went.
The horse in the church neighed. Jehan heard a voice say a single word in Norse across the still air. He recognised it. ‘Easy.’ Someone was soothing the animal. He left the candles where they were and made no bid to relight them.
Jehan gripped the sword and crept across the courtyard then up the night stairs towards the door, just visible in the gloom. It was still ajar, as it had been when he’d gone out. As quietly as he could, he made his way into the church. He drew back the curtain covering the internal porch.
A single candle burned, a bud of light in the great soil of the church’s dark. He could see no one in the darkness, only the lustre of the candlelight on the gold of the altar. Something caught the candlelight lower down, a flash of silver near the floor. At first he couldn’t make out what it was. It was as if there was a crescent moon of light but a piece of blackness ran up and down its length.
‘I am cleaning my sword, monk of Saint-Maurice. Do not make me dirty it again.’
Jehan couldn’t see who it was but he replied in an even voice, ‘I am not a monk of Saint-Maurice.’
There was a clatter and someone stood up. The horse, disturbed by the noise, blew and whinnied in the darkness.
‘Then who are you?’
Jehan said nothing. An animosity and anger he had never felt before was buzzing through his bones. He had never seen the man’s face but he recognised the voice. Hugin – Hrafn – the Raven, the man who had tortured him.
The Raven said in a faltering voice, ‘You must have seen some things here that are difficult to understand. I—’
‘Where are the monks?’ Jehan cut across him.
The Raven tilted back his head as if in thought. ‘Come, share my meal. The day has been hard for me, and I would welcome conversation and forgetfulness for a while.’
Jehan stepped towards the light. Hugin’s eyes flicked to the sword the confessor held. ‘There can be no calm talk while that is in your hand,’ he said.
‘You killed them?’
The Raven pursed his lips. ‘Not all of them, not yet,’ he said, ‘though that may yet turn out to be necessary. Please. Sit. I am not the monster that I might appear.’
Jehan lowered the sword to the floor and sat down beside it, pulling the Viking cloak about him. He had the instinct to attack this abomination but needed to know what had happened, why such strange forces were arrayed against the Lady Aelis.
The sorcerer stank of something, a deep, enticing odour of iron and salt.
‘Where are the monks?’ Jehan watched his
breath clouding the candlelight in the freezing air.
‘Below.’
‘Live or dead?’
‘Both.’
‘Below where?’
‘I will show you soon enough.’ The voice was not the one that Jehan had heard in front of the king, or nursing him through the torture beneath the beaks of the birds. That voice had been calm and even. Now the Raven stammered and his words were faint and weak, scarcely audible.
Jehan felt dizzy. The hunger had not gone from him, that terrible hunger for the sticky sweet stuff beneath the snow. What was it? Raven was covered in it, he could tell. The confessor swallowed, offering a prayer for guidance.
‘You killed all the Vikings.’
There was no reply. The Raven just sat staring into space.
‘Why did you kill them? They were your kinsmen. Why?’
The Raven looked around him. His eyes betrayed fear. ‘The will of God.’
‘How can you know the will of God? It is given to us through prayer and the edict of the Pope.’
‘It would seem to be his will that Vikings die. Do not your monks, your Ebolus and your Joscelin who died at Paris, fight to kill them?’
‘For just reasons, according to Saint Augustine. In a war waged for good, sanctioned by holy authority and with peace the aim.’ Jehan kept his voice calm.
‘You are not a monk – I see by your hair – yet you speak like a monk,’ said Hugin.
‘I am a monk,’ said Jehan, ‘though I have travelled a hard road.’
Jehan looked around him. Something seemed to move in the shadows, there and gone in an instant. The Raven stroked his forehead and looked at the floor. He seemed to be struggling for the strength to continue.
‘Then know that there was nothing to displease Augustine in the Vikings’ deaths, nor that of your monks. They died, or will die, for good, sanctioned by the holiest authority there is, and, as you say, with peace the aim.’
‘Did you eat them?’
‘What?’
‘They say you eat corpses.’
‘They say that of your priests too. I have eaten no one. That is a route to madness. Men have misunderstood certain practices, that is all.’
‘What practices?’
Raven swallowed. ‘I am, whatever you might think, a man of compassion. The berserkers told you this, the ones you travel with?’
‘How do you know who I travel with?’
‘I watch the land, before and behind. The fat one is distinctive even at a distance, and I know they are not a people with a talent for deceit. The cross that went before them was carried by you, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was with your band in Sigfrid’s camp. Some of the men there are Christians, there with their families. They heard that I could heal. I tried for their daughter and failed. I could do nothing. She had been hit by a horse and her body was broken. The priests of your land are cowards and fled when they heard Varangians were on their way. They would not come to tend to her. I said I’d do what I could. The girl was dying. She was a Christian; her family were distraught. I said the mass for them and administered the unction. Ofaeti and his men took it as true that I was eating flesh.’
‘You are a heathen.’
‘I am a man,’ said the Raven, ‘and my god is not jealous.’
‘Nor is he compassionate.’
‘His halls are full of the souls of warriors dead in battle. He doesn’t seek the soul of a little girl. Where it goes is of no concern to him. Your god should be pleased that I would cast his magic for him.’
The Raven cupped his hands around the flame of the candle for warmth, reducing the light in the church to a ball in his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was stronger.
‘Our gods are not so different. Mine wants blood. So does yours. Sometimes, as when the black saint marched through these passes, it seems their desires are as one. Odin is here, in the stones, in the mountains, in the pass. He is the god of the dead and he seeks deaths to please him. How lucky then that your god wanted the same from his Theban martyrs.’
‘My god is not your god.’
‘What do you know of my god?’
‘Only that he is false.’
Raven nodded. ‘He is that, he is that.’ He seemed to ponder for a few moments. ‘But isn’t it just a matter of how you look at it? My god’s treachery is well known. He kills his heroes to take them to his halls. Yours lets his martyrs die to test their faith and sends them to heaven.’
The confessor forced himself to think straight, willed his mind back to the favour he had asked of God with his hand on the saint’s casket. There was the movement again at the side of his eye. Jehan remembered the conversation in Sigfrid’s house, the Raven’s revelation that he had been a Christian once and that this place had found him and lost him in the faith. To know his purpose was to know his weakness. Jehan said those words over and over in his head. Reason was now a candle in a storm, only kept alight by diligence and great attention.
‘You are not a monk, yet you speak like a monk,’ said Jehan.
‘I once was,’ said Hugin.
‘So why did you desert Christ?’
‘Because Christ deserted me.’
‘He is always there for you.’
‘He was not there for me when I asked him to be. Something else was.’
The Raven took his hands from around the flame. The sudden illumination caught the gold of the altar, the dancing light rendering it liquid in the darkness.
‘What?’
‘Another way.’ The horse shifted from foot to foot and the candle guttered in a draught. The Raven had his face in his hands, almost as if grieving, his emaciated head like a golden skull in the candlelight. He spoke in a low voice: ‘Christ abandoned me. I prayed and he abandoned me.’
In the shadows, like something half glimpsed through murky water, was a figure. It was the child Jehan had seen on the riverbank, the dreadfully starved waif with the lined and drawn face. The Raven had not seen her, and Jehan did not draw his attention to her, afraid of what the sorcerer might do. As the Raven stared at the floor, Jehan gestured, trying to shoo the girl away. She didn’t move, just stood looking at him, her face a pale mask in the darkness.
‘My family were poor people of this village, and they had many sons and daughters. I was not their own but a foundling who the monks had paid my mother – the woman I called my mother – to wet-nurse. I stayed with them until I was five and my father died. Then the monks took me in as an act of charity. They schooled me and fed me and were to make me one of them.’
‘That was Christ’s work indeed,’ said Jehan.
‘Indeed. The life here for boys was not so hard, and I still could get away down the valley to see my family. My sister, in particular, was dear to me.’
‘Better to have looked forward to God than back to earthly ties,’ said Jehan.
He was speaking almost by rote, doling out the wisdom that had been doled out to him, counselling as he had been counselled. It was as if the very ease of the words was a line to which he could cling as the rage inside him threatened to sweep away everything that he had been.
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Hugin. ‘She meant more to me than God did. My mother was busy with the flock and her children, my father was dead, my sister was the focus of any tender feelings I had. When I had been five years at the monastery, the fever took her.’
‘She died?’
‘She would have died, had I not acted.’
‘Did you pray?’
‘Yes. And I petitioned the abbot to send for a healer. He said that the valleys were overrun with little girls and one less wouldn’t displease the Lord. He would move to save a peasant’s son who could tend a herd, build and fight for God, but not one of their sluttish daughters.’
‘The man was wrong to say that,’ said Jehan.
‘It cost him his life,’ said Raven. His voice had lost all its earlier weakness. Now it was strong, certain, deepened by anger.
Jehan couldn’t reply. His head was spinning. The odour of that stuff was in his nostrils again. The rage was growing inside him. He fought to hold on to it, to remember his purpose of finding out why this thing sought out the Lady Aelis, to understand it so he might defeat it.
‘I went to her side and I knew that she was dying. My mother had called in a woman from the hills, one who kept to the older faith, who had burned her face for her art. She told me that this place, this valley, is a special place. The church was built on a spring sacred to the old god – the dead god, the god of the hanged, the keeper of the screaming runes. The Romans said there was a temple of their god Mercury here when they arrived. I know him by a different name: Odin. Others call him Wotan, Wodanaz, Godan, Christ.’
‘Christ has nothing to do with idols, only in that he casts them down.’ Jehan was focusing hard on the Raven now, trying to keep his mind away from … from what?
‘Your god is as hungry for blood as any men have bowed to since the world began,’ said Hugin. ‘Tell me, when the first stone struck the first martyr, when Stephen spilled his blood for Christ, did your god smile?’
From blood. The sensations of his torture at Saerda’s hands came back – the taste of the flesh in his mouth, the coursing energy that had filled his body as the warm blood had trickled down his throat. It had been horrible then but now the memory seemed not horrible at all, dear to him even.