It came out somewhere between a whisper and a croak. ‘Listen,’ I said, now urgent, ‘do you remember the gap behind the bread oven – the crack in the outer wall made by the heat? It can’t be seen from the outside because of all the brambles. Well, I want you to gather yourself a bag of food and water from the kitchen and be prepared to get out through that gap.’ I took hold of his arm and shook him as he began his protests. He trailed off into another of his coughing fits. A drop of opium in wine would fix that. Sadly, opium is just another of the civilised luxuries that can’t be had in England. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I know you can squeeze through. There’s no point my even trying. All else aside, I still have the chest and shoulders of a big man. If anything happens, I want you straight out. Get out and run. Don’t look back. Don’t fall in with anyone else who may know about the gap. Get out, run, and don’t stop running until you hear men talking English.’
‘And you, Master?’ he asked, trying not to cry.
I tried for a laugh, but felt it turning to a cough. ‘At my advanced age, dear boy,’ I said, ‘I can’t say death is such a loss as it might seem to you. I already stand far over its threshold. There isn’t much the northerners can do that would make it more inconvenient than if I just stopped breathing one night in my sleep. Now, I want you to promise that you won’t stick around if any of the gates are forced. And I want you to promise that you will help write the Universal History that I’ve been promising the world these past fifty years, and still haven’t delivered.’
I sat back and gritted my teeth as the chill of the wall went straight through my bones. ‘Listen,’ I said, fighting for control, ‘I don’t know more than anyone else about what tomorrow will bring. But it never does any harm to prepare for the worst.’ I got up. ‘Now, you get yourself off to the kitchens. Get something proper to eat, and sit as long as you can in the warm. If anyone challenges you, just say that Brother Aelric sent you.’ Wilfred stood before me in silence. I waved him about whatever duties had made him cross my path. I’d said what I’d wanted. There was no more to discuss. I listened as his racking cough vanished into the maze of corridors that spread out behind the great hall. Expecting him to run more than a hundred yards without falling down was optimistic. But I’d now done all that I could given the limits imposed.
I looked angrily at the fifteen feet between me and the closed door of my cell. Now I was up, my bladder was letting off trumpet blasts of urgency. I could already feel a warm dribble on my left shin.
It is much later. It may be around the midnight hour. It may be later still. With the disruption of regular observances, there are no bells or chanting to let me know the time of night. It may be a waste of my dwindling papyrus to sit here writing up new events. But I’m sure you will pardon me, dear Reader, if I dwell on the siege. So far, pestilence and the cold have been the main perceived dangers in Jarrow. Barbarian raids are not a common occurrence.
And there is yet more of the here and now to write up before I can settle back down to my narrative of the past. I got to my cell and had a piss. I sat awhile, warming myself and brooding over another cup of the beverage that inebriates and only sometimes cheers. I did then write the whole of the above. When I’d finished, I sat up and wiped the ink from the end of my nose. I looked at my pens. The steady scraping across cheap papyrus had blunted all the reeds. It was now I noticed that my knife was missing.
Fucking nuisance! I thought. For old times’ sake, I had the usual suspicious attack, and began looking through my stuff. There are no locks on the cell doors. But since I’d been with Joseph – or been aware of his movements – all day, there was no cause for suspicion. He’d not been snooping through my cell. No one else can read the sort of Greek in which I normally write. No, someone had most likely been in to sharpen my pens and then simply gone off with the knife. Just to be sure, I had another look in all the likely places, then got up to see if anyone else might be awake and have a bladed instrument to hand.
I was about to lift the catch on the door to my cell when I heard voices in the corridor outside. It was Cuthbert, whose cell was next door but one to mine. For once, I was glad to hear his voice. He’d surely have a penknife. All I had to do was paint on a toothless grin and overlook our little differences of earlier in the day.
But he was in a hurry. By the time I’d got the door open, he was already disappearing round the corner towards the front of the monastery.
‘I feel the hand of God on my shoulder,’ he was saying to someone else – as if any Supreme Being might give a toss about the doings of some broken-down teacher of logic out here in the middle of nowhere. ‘My work is plainly not yet done.’
Knowing Cuthbert, his work would be some while in the doing. I wasn’t standing out here in the freezing cold on the chance he’d cut it short. There was a candle guttering away in his cell. So I shuffled down the corridor and pulled his door shut behind me.
Mine was hardly luxurious, but this place was bleak to the point of uninhabited. The cot was of bare boards. The one blanket was folded ostentatiously on the table, which was devoid of writing materials. There was a wooden cross hung on the wall. That was just beside the window – which was wide-sodding-open to the courtyard.
‘God-bothering shitbag!’ I snarled softly. Little wonder it was always so cold. ‘No consideration for others,’ I muttered again. ‘Just self, self, self.’ I thought of pulling the shutters to. Then again, Cuthbert would only reopen them, and wouldn’t take kindly to the attack on his humility. I looked round the room. It really was bare. I couldn’t see so much as a teaching note, let alone a penknife. I could feel the advance warnings of another shivering attack, and was about to go when I saw the box. The candle was at the far side of the room, and the box was the same colour as the bed boards under which it had been pushed. It’s more of a surprise that I saw it at all than that I’d almost missed it. I stared at it a moment, wondering if it was worth the effort of bending down. But old habits die hard. If something was worth any degree of concealment, it was worth looking at. I opened the wind shield and pressed the candle into shape until its flame was clear. Setting it on the edge of the bed, I bent creakily forward and pulled the box into the open. About fifteen inches square, it had been adapted from some original use that I couldn’t guess. There was no lid. Instead, a mass of stained rags covered whatever lay within. I sat carefully down on the floor. Taking care not to disturb any arrangement that might have been methodical, I lifted out the rags so far as possible in a single mass.
Oh, joy! I hadn’t been so lucky with snooping since that time in Ctesiphon when, got up as a Nestorian bishop, I let myself into the diplomatic archive and found those letters that helped us win the Persian War. First thing I saw was a dildo. It was a big, alarming thing – twelve inches of finely stitched leather over a thick wooden dowel. I picked it up and sniffed. It had the smell of recent use. I sniggered and blotted the cold out of mind. I’d think about this thing stuffed up his arse as often as I saw Cuthbert in prayers. The way he walked about so stiffly, perhaps he had it with him in prayers. Remembering its position in the box, I put it on the floor. Ditto with the many-headed whip coiled up beside the dildo. That showed signs of less frequent use. Underneath was a little book of parchment sheets sewn together. There was no name or other details on the binding. I opened it at random and held it up to get what help there was from the guttering flame of the candle. It was the buggery small writing you get on parchment, and I thought at first it was beyond my old eyes. But I squinted hard and found a distance where the neat lines of blurriness resolved themselves into something legible:
Puer decens decor floris gemma micans uelis noris quia tui decus oris fuit mihi fax amoris…
So it went on in a paean of love to some unnamed boy. As it didn’t even try to keep to any of the quantitative rules, I’ll not call it poetry. Still, it had a nice accentual rhythm, and the end-rhymes were interesting. Was this something Cuthbert had picked up on his travels before settling in Jarrow? Was it his own work? Hard to say. The script had a vaguely English look about it, and Cuthbert was a native. One thing, though, I could say, was that he’d have every word of this stuff whispered back to him the next time we sat together in prayers. That would wipe the pious look off his face.
I carried on looking into the box. The revelations were not exhausted. There was a bag of silver coins. They were the crude, heavily clipped money issued by the French kings. I counted thirty of them. I’d learned all I needed to know about Cuthbert’s vow of celibacy. So much now, I’d found, for his vow of poverty.
Then, right at the bottom of the box, hidden under more of those disgusting rags, I found a canvas document pouch. Weighing about half a pound, it had once been sealed. It reminded me strongly of the pouches used in the Empire for sending out confidential instructions to provincial governors or generals in the field. The seals were now cut away. In their place, the pouch was closed with a set of tight knots. I pressed it all over, trying to guess the nature of the documents it contained. Of course, I didn’t get much further than knowing they were written on parchment. Given time, I could get the knots undone. Getting them retied would be the problem. My hands might still be up to that sort of work – but not here, not now. I’d keep quiet for the moment, I decided, on the poetry.
