scars and heard their stories of battle and fortitude against the northerners. When they had spoken, the colour of iron had come into her mind, of swords and armour, and the dark skies of war. Her brother had a presence like a mailed fist, hard, uncompromising, but nevertheless insubstantial compared to that of Confessor Jehan. The monk’s body may have been broken, but his soul, his will, seemed to sit like a great mountain in the dark, solid and immovable.
She took up the candle and went to the altar. The gold of the candlesticks and communion cups caught its flame and glittered as she moved. The abbot would not have them removed — that would be to admit that the Norsemen might get in. There had been hope that the monks at Saint-Germain would send over some of their relics. They could hardly expect the bones of Saint Germain himself, but there had been talk that the stole of Saint Vincent might be sent across. However, the abbot of Saint-Germain had pointed out that the monastery had been sacked by Norsemen three times already and the stole had provided no protection then.
Aelis kneeled beneath the altar.
‘God has tested me too in a smaller way. Should I be thankful?’
Jehan measured his words carefully.
‘We should be grateful for anything that comes from God.’
The confessor was just a voice in the darkness to her.
‘I am not afraid of the Norsemen,’ she said.
‘Then what are you afraid of?’
Aelis crossed herself. Jehan heard her mutter a prayer. Her voice trembled, though she fought to suppress it, not to appear weak in front of a low-born man.
‘Something is coming for me, and I know that if I consent to go with the Norsemen, or even if I leave this church, it will find me and take me. It brings peril for us all.’
‘You can’t stay inside a church all your life,’ said the confessor. ‘What is coming for you?’
She said nothing for a moment. Then: ‘When your blindness came upon you, Confessor, you had a vision?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of the Virgin Mary.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she speak to you?’
‘No.’
‘So how did you know it was her?’
‘I knew. And from the gift she awoke within me.’
‘The prophecies?’
‘Yes.’
Jehan remembered the day that had changed his life. He had been found by hunters in the woods at the age of around five or six, and then deposited at a monastery in the East Frankish lands of Austrasia. He had been delirious. All that was certain was that someone had taught him to speak Roman and he had suffered a great shock that had left him with few memories. He had been taken west to Paris by a travelling monk, where he had been given a place at Saint-Germain by the mercy of the Church. His recovery had been as remarkable as it was quick. By the age of nine he was helping the monks, studying, playing and laughing. In many ways he outshone his peers. His facility for writing would have been surprising in a child who had been raised to it from his earliest years. Languages too came easily to him: the common tongue of Roman, Francique, as spoken at court, Latin for official business, Greek, even the Norse and Saxon that the missionaries taught him. More amazing was his ability at chess. He had watched two monks play the game and then sat to try for himself. In his first game he beat one of the abbey’s strongest players. The boy, it was said, was blessed.
Then the Virgin had appeared to him. It was high summer, the hungry month of July, and he had nothing to do but walk the fields of unripe crops. The sun was over the corn and the sky was a burning blue. When the monks spoke of visions he had always imagined that an angel or the Virgin would appear on a cloud or in a haze. But she had stood beside him so real he felt he could touch her. She had spoken to him, or rather he had heard her voice in his mind, though he had never admitted it to anyone, too unsure of what she had meant. He had pondered her words for years, and he had never revealed them.
‘Do not seek me.’
He had taken it for a warning against the sin of pride, of trying to be too holy and putting himself above other men in piety. Seeking heaven, he felt, was the surest way to lose it.
She had walked away from him and he had run after her, but the blindness fell upon him and he had been discovered wandering by the hives, lucky not to blunder into one and be stung.
His prophecies had been correct — raids along the coast, Rouen in flames, Bayeux, Laon and Beauvais ruined, the sons of the Church executed. The abbot had declared him a saint on earth — a confessor — and God had blessed him with further afflictions and further visions.
‘They made you a saint because you saw her?’
‘Yes. That and the monastery’s desire to have a confessor among its monks. It was just and it was politic,’ he said.
‘What would they make you if you had seen…’ She couldn’t finish.
Jehan was quiet, allowing her to compose herself.
‘Do you need to ask for penance?’
Aelis gave a short laugh. ‘I have nothing to confess, Father, no sin to be forgiven, but if I was to stand in front of the congregation, call what I have experienced a sin and ask a priest for forgiveness, my life might be over before I left this church. Can I ask you privately? Will you swear never to reveal what I have to say?’
‘The sacrament of penance must be conducted publicly,’ said Jehan.
‘I have nothing to be sorry for. Will you swear?’
‘This path is strewn with briars,’ said the confessor under his breath. What if the woman told him she was an adulteress or, worse, a murderer? He could not, in conscience, hold on to a secret like that.
The noise of the fighting was getting closer. Had the Norsemen taken a tower? That was impossible, he thought, without mining. The enemy had already tried that, and to no success.
The cries and the curses focused the confessor on his task.
‘I will swear,’ he said.
‘They made you a saint because you saw the Virgin,’ said Aelis; ‘what would they call you if you had seen the devil?’
‘The common people might cry witch,’ said the confessor, ‘though belief in witchcraft is heresy. Someone might be held a heretic if they declared themselves a witch, but a vision is a vision. Of itself it means nothing.’
‘So what would you call me?’
‘You have seen the devil?’
‘Yes. Am I a witch, unknown to myself?’
‘Christ saw the devil in the wilderness — was he a witch?’
She bowed her head.
Jehan swallowed and began to rock more rapidly.
‘There are many explanations for this sort of thing. An illness, perhaps, a passing brain fever. A dream is often just that, lady, a fancy without any connection to the day-to-day.’
‘I dream him while waking. He is always there.’
More screams. Jehan heard a shouted word in the Norse tongue: ‘Die.’
He didn’t pause. ‘And how do you know him for the devil?’
‘He is a wolf. A man and a wolf at the same time. He comes from the shadows and the side of my sight. He is beside me as I fall to sleep and there in the instant of my waking. He is a wolf and he speaks to me.’
‘What does he say?’
Aelis crossed herself again. ‘He says that he loves me.’
There was a clamour right outside the cathedral. The fighting was close now. Aelis looked up. The darkness around the weak candle glow seemed to swim and to seethe, a liquid black. There was a thump against the door, so hard that it seemed it would splinter.
‘Are we to die, Confessor?’ said Aelis.
