He advanced into the room. ‘The boy belongs to Holy Mother Church. None may touch him.’
A couple of Ethelbert’s men sprang at him, swords drawn. He gave them a brief, contemptuous look, then turned back to Ethelbert.
‘Let one hair of this boy’s head be harmed’, he said in the strong, dramatic voice he used for preaching, ‘and you will answer to Holy Mother Church in this life and to God Our Father in the life that is to come. ‘I tell you this as the representative in this room of the universal bishop in Rome who sits in the place of Our Lord’s Apostle Peter.’
There was a laugh at the back of the room. We weren’t ten years into the first mission to England, and these savages didn’t care either way for the Faith. A word from Ethelbert, and they’d cut him down before he could draw breath again.
But Ethelbert had dropped on his knees, his face grey with fear. It may have been thoughts of hellfire. More likely, it was thoughts of Queen Berthe. She was hard at work, building more new churches than her husband had fathered bastards. The last thing he wanted was the whole kingdom excommunicated.
No one – certainly never in public before his senior men – had spoken like this to him before. Yes, he’d been defied, but no one had ever denied his authority to do as he liked when he liked. And yet he was grovelling among the filthy rushes on his own floor before a little, soft-handed foreigner.
You can forget all those fake miracles the Church lays on for the simple. So far in Maximin’s service, those were all I’d seen. He’d explained them to me as necessary frauds for getting a barbarous race to accept a truth not otherwise communicable.
Now, for the first time, I was seeing the real thing. I’ve seen more like it since then. These priests have a courage born of belief that none of the heroes in our old epics come close to matching. You can kill them. You can burn their shrines and wipe your arse with their books. You will never touch the fundamentals of their imperium over the soul. Rome’s conquest of Britain was by the sword, and by the sword it was lost. Its conquest of England has been by men like Maximin, and this will never be lost.
‘Reverend Father,’ Ethelbert cried. ‘This boy is a criminal. He has sinned against God, and he has broken our law too. He must be punished according to our law.’ He looked desperately round for confirmation. There was a mutter of agreement from somewhere. Otherwise, the room was now as tense and silent as in a village just before a promised miracle. Though not sheathed, the swords were all now pointing down. The churl who’d betrayed me was repeating his dead act, his face pushed deep into the reeds as if to avoid notice.
‘He has sinned against God, that much is sure,’ Maximin continued, with a grim look in my direction. ‘But he stands within the Church, and he shall be judged within the Church. Give him up to me now, King Ethelbert. I speak with full authority.’
‘What judgement shall the Church make against him?’ Ethelbert whispered.
‘None less than His Holiness in Rome shall decide the penance,’ Maximin replied.
I thought he had gone too far now, but Ethelbert remained kneeling.
‘We leave for Rome before Advent,’ Maximin added. ‘Depending on the penance, the boy may never return.’ He pointed at my guards. ‘Untie him and give him to me.’ Ethelbert nodded to them. I felt a knife brush cold against my wrists, and the blood came back into my hands. I stumbled forward. Someone held me from falling.
Maximin beckoned me to follow him and walked towards the door. As I walked past him, Ethelbert, still kneeling, said in a voice so low I wasn’t certain I heard him: ‘If I catch you in my realms after this man has left for Rome, I’ll have your balls on a church plate, and fuck the priests.’
The man was a stinking bastard. Some years later, I rejoiced when I heard about his death. It was from some disgusting pox he’d caught off one of his whores. The priests put out their usual rot about the deaths of those who have advanced the Faith – angelic choirs above, flowery smells, and all that – but my source told me he died screaming while maggots dropped out of his burst scrotum.
When we were about fifty yards down the cart track towards the road, the music started up again. I turned to Maximin in the darkness. I was shaking.
‘What will we do next?’ I asked.
‘As I said,’ he replied blandly, ‘we are going to Rome. You have penance to seek there. And I have been sent to gather more books for the mission library. After that, I have no idea. But I have no doubt you will find our trip of interest.’
I heard the rattle of his pillbox.
3
I was dreaming again last night. I’d normally be glad of that. My bodily pleasures may be less than they were. But the dreams remain as vivid as always.
Sadly, this wasn’t one of the good dreams. I was back in the early March of the year I moved to Canterbury. It was the late afternoon, and I’d just arrived back in Richborough from some business I’d been transacting inland – that is to say, I’d been stealing. Instead of my mother mending clothes, I found the renegade monk Auxilius in the ruined storehouse where we’d been dumped by Ethelbert. He was giving her the last rites while his woman cleaned vomit off the floor.
She’d eaten something bad Ethelbert had sent over. It had been fast, Auxilius told me. Between her falling down outside the privy and dying had been barely enough time to get her baptised.
‘Baptised?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Auxilius replied firmly, but looking away from me. ‘She died in the Faith.’
Was she poisoned? I’d put nothing past Ethelbert. But it was more likely he’d simply killed her with the more than usually shitty food he had taken to sending us. He’d been going off her in the past year, and his charity was going the way of desire. My half-sister sat in a corner clutching a broken doll and weeping quietly. My mother lay still quieter on the rush bed.
Given any control, I’d have stopped the dream there. But it had carried on regardless of my own will, every sight and sound and smell as clearly recalled as if I’d been standing there again.
Spring was coming on early. The birds were singing outside. The trees were beginning to bud. But a shaft of sunlight came through the open door and played on my mother’s dead features. I could remember when she had been so beautiful and strong. It had only been a few years before. A young fisherman had used to come and sing to her from outside the house while she tried to look scandalised. But then she had grown so suddenly old and pinched. Now she was dead. It hadn’t been much of a life, and now it was all over at the age of thirty-two.
Little wonder I woke crying again. I pulled the window open and ignored the rain as I waited for dawn and then the call to morning prayers.
It wasn’t all bad in Richborough, you know. I was too young to remember the time before Ethelbert had killed my father and taken our lands. While they were alive, my brothers would tell me what scraps they could themselves remember. My mother never spoke of the past.
So Richborough was all I really had. I was happy enough there as a child. I’d run about with the other boys, playing at hide-and-seek in the empty shells of the administrative buildings. Often, I’d climb onto the broken walls to watch the grey, surging waves of the Channel.
I even got an education there. When I was seven, I went to the school run by Auxilius. He’d killed a man in France. Even under King Chilperic, that was considered not quite proper for a man of the cloth. So he’d gone on the run. Safe in Richborough, he’d taken a wife and some students.
He used to teach in a little church that still had most of its roof. ‘I am a man of God,’ he would say. ‘Therefore, God’s house is mine.’
To be fair, no one else wanted the place. The few Christians left in town were even more lapsed than he was. He taught me and a few of the other boys in town. In return, we dug his garden and took him drink and whatever food we could lift from the local villages. What I remember most about him is his pockmarked face and his habit of blowing his nose on the ragged hem of his monastic robe – I don’t think he had any other clothes. But he was a good teacher.
He started me on scratching the letters and syllable combinations on bits of broken roof tile. Then he taught
