The boy released her and turned his back. I remember wondering if these strangers could weep. Later I heard—and I swear that the Abbess must have somehow known this or felt it, for although she was no witch, she could probe at a man until she found the sore places in him and that very quickly—that this boy’s mother had been known for an adulteress and that no man would own him as a son. It is one thing among those people for a man to have what the Abbess called a concubine and they do not hold the children of such in scorn as we do, but it is a different thing when a married woman has more than one man. Such was Thorfinn’s case; I suppose that was what had sent him viking. But all this came later; what I saw then—with my nose barely above the window-slit—was that the Abbess slipped her crucifix over the hilt of the boy’s sword—she really wished him to have it, you see—and then walked to a place near the walls of the Abbey but far from the Norsemen. I think she meant them to come to her. I saw her pick up her skirts like a peasant woman, sit down with legs crossed, and say in a loud voice:
“Come! Who will bargain with me?”
A few strolled over, laughing, and sat down with her.
“All!” she said, gesturing them closer.
“And why should we all come?” said one who was farthest away.
“Because you will miss a bargain,” said the Abbess.
“Why should we bargain when we can take?” said another.
“Because you will only get half,” said the Abbess. “The rest you will not find.”
“We will ransack the Abbey,” said a third.
“Half the treasure is not in the Abbey,” said she.
“And where is it then?” said yet another.
She tapped her forehead. They were drifting over by twos and threes. I have heard since that the Norse love riddles and this was a sort of riddle; she was giving them good fun.
“If it is in your head,” said the man Thorvald, who was standing behind the others, arms crossed, “we can get it out, can we not?” And he tapped the hilt of his knife.
“If you frighten me, I shall become confused and remember nothing,” said the Abbess calmly. “Besides, do you wish to play that old game? You saw how well it worked the last time. I am surprised at you, Ranulf’s mother’s-brother.”
“I will bargain then,” said the man Thorvald, smiling.
“And the rest of you?” said Radegunde. “It must be all or none; decide for yourselves whether you wish to save yourselves trouble and danger and be rich,” and she deliberately turned her back on them. The men moved down to the river’s edge and began to talk among themselves, dropping their voices so that we could not hear them any more. Father Cairbre, who was old and short-sighted, cried, “I cannot hear them. What are they doing?” and I cleverly said, “I have good eyes, Father Cairbre,” and he held me up to see, so it was just at the time that the Abbess Radegunde was facing the Abbey tower that I appeared in the window. She clapped one hand across her mouth. Then she walked to the gate and called (in a voice I had learned not to disregard; it had often got me a smacked bottom), “Boy News, down! Come down to me here at once! And bring Father Cairbre with you.”
I was overjoyed. I had no idea that she might want to protect me if anything went wrong. My only thought was that I was going to see it all from wonderfully close by, so I wormed my way, half-suffocated, through the folk in the tower room, stepping on feet and skirts, and having to say every few seconds, “But I have to! The Abbess wants me,” and meanwhile she was calling outside like an Empress, “Let that boy through! Make a place for that boy! Let the Irish priest through!” until I crept and pushed and complained my way to the very wall itself—no one was going to open the gate for us, of course—and there was a great fuss and finally someone brought a ladder. I was over at once, but the old priest took a longer time, although it was a low wall, as I’ve said, the builders having been somewhat of two minds about making the Abbey into a true fortress.
Once outside it was lovely, away from all that crowd, and I ran, gloriously pleased, to the Abbess, who said only, “Stay by me, whatever happens,” and immediately turned her attention away from me. It had taken so long to get Father Cairbre outside the walls that the tall foreign men had finished their talking and were coming back—all twenty or thirty of them—towards the Abbey and the Abbess Radegunde, and most especially of all, me. I could see Father Cairbre tremble. They did look grim, close by, with their long, wild hair and the brightness of their strange clothes. I remember that they smelled different from us, but cannot remember how after all these years. Then the Abbess spoke to them in that outlandish language of theirs, so strangely light and lilting to hear from their bearded lips, and then she said something in Latin to Father Cairbre, and he said to us, with a shake in his voice:
“This is the priest, Father Cairbre, who will say our bargains aloud in our own tongue so that my people may hear. I cannot deal behind their backs. And this is my foster-baby, who is very dear to me and who is now having his curiosity rather too much satisfied, I think.” (I was trying to stand tall like a man but had one hand secretly holding on to her skirt; so that was what the foreign men had chuckled at!) The talk went on, but I will tell it as if I had understood the Norse, for to repeat everything twice would be tedious.
The Abbess Radegunde said, “Will you bargain?”
There was a general nodding of heads, with a look of: After all, why not?
“And who will speak for you?” said she,
A man stepped forward; I recognized Thorvald Einarsson.
“Ah yes,” said the Abbess dryly. “The company that has no leaders. Is this leaderless company agreed? Will it abide by its word? I want no treachery-planners, no Breakwords here!”
There was a great mutter at this. The Thorvald man (he was big, close up!) said mildly, “I sail with none such. Let’s begin.”
We all sat down.
“Now,” said Thorvald Einarsson, raising his eyebrows, “according to my knowledge of this thing, you begin. And according to my knowledge you will begin by saying that you are very poor.”
“But no,” said the Abbess, “we are rich.” Father Cairbre groaned. A groan answered him from behind the Abbey walls. Only the Abbess and Thorvald Einarsson seemed unmoved; it was as if these two were joking in some way that no one else understood. The Abbess went on, saying, “We are very rich. Within is much silver, much gold, many pearls, and much embroidered cloth, much line-woven cloth, much carved and painted wood, and many books with gold upon their pages and jewels set into their covers. All this is yours. But we have more and better: herbs and medicines, ways to keep food from spoiling, the knowledge of how to cure the sick; all this is yours. And we have more and better even than this; we have the knowledge of Christ and the perfect understanding of the soul, which is yours, too, any time you wish; you have only to accept it.”
Thorvald Einarsson held up his hand. “We will stop with the first,” he said, “and perhaps a little of the second. That is more practical.”
“And foolish,” said the Abbess politely, “in the usual way.” And again I had the odd feeling that these two were sharing a joke no one else even saw. She added, “There is one thing you may not have, and that is the most precious of all.”
Thorvald Einarsson looked inquiring.
“My people. Their safety is dearer to me than myself. They are not to be touched, not a hair on their heads, not for any reason. Think: you can fight your way into the Abbey easily enough, but the folk in there are very frightened of you and some of the men are armed. Even a good fighter is cumbered in a crowd. You will slip and fall upon each other without meaning to or knowing that you do so. Heed my counsel. Why play butcher when you can have treasure poured into your laps like kings, without work? And after that there will be as much again, when I lead you to the hidden place. An earl’s mountain of treasure. Think of it! And to give all this up for slaves, half of whom will get sick and die before you get them home—and will need to be fed if they are to be any good.
Shame on you for bad advice-takers! Imagine what you will say to your wives and families: Here are a few miserable bolts of cloth with blood spots that won’t come out, here are some pearls and jewels smashed to powder in the fighting, here is a torn piece of embroidery which was whole until someone stepped on it in the battle, and I had slaves but they died of illness and I fucked a pretty young nun and meant to bring her back, but she leapt into the sea. And oh yes, there was twice as much again and all of it whole but we decided not to take that. Too much trouble, you see.”
This was a lively story and the Norsemen enjoyed it. Radegunde held up her hand.
“People!” she called in German, adding, “Sea-rovers, hear what I say; I will repeat it for you in your tongue,” (and so she did): “People, if the Norsemen fight us, do not defend yourselves but smash everything! Wives, take your cooking knives and shred the valuable cloth to pieces! Men, with your axes and hammers hew the altars and the carved wood to fragments! All, grind the pearls and smash the jewels against the stone floors! Break the bottles of wine! Pound the gold and silver to shapelessness! Tear to pieces the illuminated books! Tear down the hangings and burn them!
“But” (she added, her voice suddenly mild) “if these wise men will accept our gifts, let us heap untouched and spotless at their feet all that we have and hold nothing back, so that their kinsfolk will marvel and wonder at the shining and glistering of the wealth they bring back, though it leave us nothing but our bare stone walls.”
If anyone had ever doubted that the Abbess Radegunde was inspired by God, their doubts must have vanished away, for who could resist the fiery vigor of her first speech or the beneficent unction of her second? The Norsemen sat there with their mouths open. I saw tears on Father Cairbre’s cheeks. Then Thorvald Einarsson said, “Abbess—”
He stopped. He tried again but again stopped. Then he shook himself, as a man who has been under a spell, and said:
“Abbess, my men have been without women for a long time.”
Radegunde looked surprised. She looked as if she could not believe what she had heard. She looked the pirate up and down, as if puzzled, and then walked around him as if taking his measure. She did this several times, looking at every part of his big body as if she were summing him up while he gotredder and redder. Then she backed off and surveyed him again, and with her arms akimbo like a peasant, announced very loudly in both Norse and German:
“What! Have they lost the use of their hands?”
It was irresistible, in its way. The Norse laughed. Our people laughed. Even Thorvald laughed. I did too, though I was not sure what everyone was laughing about. The laughter would die down and then begin again behind the Abbey walls, helplessly, and again die down and again begin. The Abbess waited until the Norsemen had stopped laughing and then called for silence in German until there were only a few snickers here and there. She then said:
“These good men—Father Cairbre, tell the people—these good men will forgive my silly joke. I meant no scandal, truly, and no harm, but laughter is good; it settles the body’s waters, as the physicians say. And my people know that I am not always as solemn and good as I ought to be. Indeed I am a very great sinner and scandal-maker. Thorvald Einarsson, do we do business?”
The big man—who had not been so pleased as the others, I can tell you!—looked at his men and seemed to see what he needed to know. He said: “I go in with five men to see what you have. Then we let the poor folk on the grounds go, but not those inside the Abbey. Then we search again. The gate will be locked and guarded by the rest of us; if there’s any treachery, the bargain’s off.”
“Then I will go with you,” said Radegunde. “That is very just and my presence will calm the people. To see us together will assure them that no harm is meant. You are a good man, Torvald—forgive me; I call you as your nephew did so often. Come, Boy News, hold on to me.
“Open the gate!” she called then; “All is safe!” and with the five men (one of whom was that young Thorfinn who had hated her so) we waited while the great logs were pulled back. There was little space within, but the people shrank back at the sight of those fierce warriors and opened a place for us.
I looked back and the Norsemen had come in and were standing just inside the walls, on either side the gate, with their swords out and their shields up. The crowd parted for us more slowly as we reached the main tower, with the Abbess repeating constantly, “Be calm, people, be calm. All is well,” and deftly speaking by name to this one or that. It was much harder when the people gasped upon hearing the big logs pushed shut with a noise like thunder, and it was very close on the stairs; I heard her say something like an apology in the queer foreign tongue, something that probably meant, “I’m sorry that we must wait.” It seemed an age until the stairs were even partly clear and I saw what the Abbess had meant by the cumbering of a crowd; a man might swing a weapon in the press of people but not very far and it was more likely he would simply fall over someone and crack his head. We gained the great room with the big crucifix of painted wood and the little one of pearls and gold, and the scarlet hangings worked in gold thread that I had played robbers behind so often before I learned what real robbers were: these tall, frightening men whose eyes glistened with greed at what I had fancied every village had. Most of the Sisters had stayed in the great room, but somehow it was not so crowded, as the folk had huddled back against the walls when the Norsemen came in. The youngest girls were all in a corner, terrified—one could smell it, as one can in people—and when that young Thorfinn went for the little gold-and-pearl cross, Sister Sibihd cried in a high, cracked voice, “It is the body of our Christ!” and leapt up, snatching it from the wall before he could get to it.
“Sibihd!” exclaimed the Abbess, in as sharp a voice as I had ever heard her use; “Put that back or you will feel the weight of my hand, I tell you!”
Now it is odd, is it not, that a young woman desperate enough not to care about death at the hands of a Norse pirate should nonetheless be frightened away at the threat of getting a few slaps from her Abbess? But folk are like that. Sister Sibihd returned the cross to its place (from whence young Thorfinn took it) and fell back among the nuns, sobbing, “He desecrates Our Lord God!”
“Foolish girl!” snapped the Abbess. “God only can consecrate or desecrate; man cannot. That is a piece of metal.”
Thorvald said something sharp to Thorfinn, who slowly put the cross back on its hook with a sulky look which said, plainer than words: Nobody gives me what I want. Nothing else went wrong in the big room or the Abbess’s study or the storerooms, or out in the kitchens. The Norsemen were silent and kept their hands on their swords but the Abbess kept talking in a calm way in both tongues; to our folk she said, “See? It is all right but everyone must keep still. God will protect us.” Her face was steady and clear and I believed her a saint, for she had saved Sister Sibihd and the rest of us.
But this peacefulness did not last, of course. Something had to go wrong in all that press of people; to this day I do not know what. We were in a corner of the long refectory, which is the place where the Sisters or Brothers eat in an Abbey, when something pushed me into the wall and I fell, almost suffocated by the Abbess’s lying on top of me. My head was ringing and on all sides there was a terrible roaring sound with curses and screams, a dreadful tumult as if the walls had come apart and were falling on everyone. I could hear the Abbess whispering something in Latin over and over in my ear. There were dull, ripe sounds, worse than the rest, which I know now to have been the noise steel makes when it is thrust into bodies. This all seemed to go on forever and then it seemed to me that the floor was wet. Then all became quiet, I felt the Abbess Radegunde get off me. She said:
“So this is how you wash your floors up north.” When I lifted my head from the wet rushes and saw what she meant, I was very sick into the corner. Then she picked me up in her arms and held my face against her bosom so that I would not see but it was no use; I had already seen: all the people lying
about sprawled on the floor with their bellies coming out, like heaps of dead fish, old Walafrid with an axe-handle standing out of his chest—he was sitting up with his eyes shut in a press of bodies that gave him no room to lie down—and the young beekeeper, Uta, from the village, who had been so merry, lying on her back with her long braids and her gown all dabbled in red dye and a great stain of it on her belly. She was breathing fast and her eyes were wide open. As we passed her, the noise of her breathing ceased.
The Abbess said mildly, “Thy people are thorough housekeepers, Earl Split-gut.”
Thorvald Einarsson roared something at us and the Abbess replied softly, “Forgive me, good friend. You protected me and the boy and I am grateful. But nothing betrays a man’s knowledge of the German like a word that bites, is it not so? And I had to be sure.”
It came to me then that she had called him “Torvald” and reminded him of his sister’s son so that he would feel he must protect us if anything went wrong. But now she would make him angry, I thought, and I shut my eyes tight. Instead he laughed and said in odd, light German, “I did no housekeeping but to stand over you and your pet. Are you not grateful?”
“Oh very, thank you,” said the Abbess with such warmth as she might show to a Sister who had brought her a rose from the garden, or another who copied her work well, or when I told her news, or if Ita the cook made a good soup. But he did not know that the warmth was for everyone and so seemed satisfied. By now we were in the garden and the air was less foul; she put me down, although my limbs were shaking, and I clung to her gown, crumpled, stiff, and blood-reeking though it was. She said, “Oh, my God, what a deal of washing hast Thou given us!” She started to walk towards the gate and Thorvald Einarsson took a step towards her. She said, without turning round: “Do not insist, Thorvald, there is no reason to lock me up. I am forty years old and not likely to be running away into the swamp, what with my rheumatism and the pain in my knees and the folk needing me as they do.”
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 359