Godwin was weeping silently, but saying nothing, so Alfred gestured that the harpist should touch his strings again. The chords sounded and Godwin responded by starting to chant again, though now his words lacked rhythm. “Babylon is the devil’s home,” he shouted, “the whore is the devil’s child, the yeast in the bread will fail, the whore has come to us. The whore died and the devil raised her up, the whore will destroy us, stop!”
This last command was to the harpist who, in frightened obedience, flattened his hands on the strings to stop their quivering.
“God is on our side,” Alfred said in a kindly voice, “so who can destroy us?”
“The whore can destroy us,” Bishop Asser said, and I thought, I could not be sure, that he glanced toward me, though I doubt he could see me because I was deep in the shadows.
“The whore!” Godwin shouted at Alfred, “you fool! The whore!”
No one reproved him for calling the king a fool.
“God will surely protect us!” Bishop Erkenwald said.
“The whore was among us, and the whore died, and God sent her to the fires of hell and the devil raised her and she is here,” Godwin said forcibly. “She is here! Her stench sours God’s chosen people! She must be killed. She must be cut into pieces and her foul parts cast into the bottomless sea! God commands it! God weeps in his heaven because you do not obey his commandments, and he commands that the whore must die! God weeps! He hurts! God weeps! The tears of God fall on us like drops of fire, and it is the whore who makes those tears!”
“What whore?” Alfred asked, then Finan put a warning hand on my arm.
“She was called Gisela,” Godwin had hissed.
At first I thought I had misheard. Men were looking at me, and Finan was holding my arm, and I was certain I had misheard, but then Godwin began to chant again. “Gisela, the great whore, is now Skade. She is a piece of filth in human guise, a whore of rottenness, a devil’s turd with breasts, a whore, Gisela! God killed her because she was filth and now she is back!”
“No,” Finan said to me, but without much urgency. I had stood.
“Lord Uhtred!” Alfred called sharply. Bishop Asser was watching me, half smiling, as his pet monk writhed and screamed. “Lord Uhtred!” Alfred called again, slapping the table.
I had strode to the hall’s center where I took Godwin’s shoulder and turned his blind face toward me.
“Lord Uhtred!” Alfred had stood.
“You lie, monk,” I said.
“She was filth!” Godwin spat at me. He began striking my chest with his fists. “Your wife was the devil’s whore, a whore hated by God, and you are the devil’s instrument, you whore-husband, heathen, sinner!”
The hall was in uproar. I was aware of none of it, only of a red anger that consumed me and flared in me and filled my ears with its howling sound. I had no weapons. This was a royal hall and weapons were forbidden, but the mad monk was hitting me and howling at me and I drew back my right hand and hit him.
My hand half hit him. Maybe he sensed the blow was coming be cause he backed away fast, and my hand caught him on the jaw, dislocating it so that his chin was skewed sideways as blood poured from his lips. He spat out a tooth and took a wild swing at me.
“Enough!” Alfred shouted. Men were at last moving, but it seemed to me they moved with exaggerated slowness as Godwin spat blood at me.
“Whore-lover,” he snarled, or I think that was what he said.
“Stop! I command it!” Alfred called.
“Whore-husband,” the bloody mouth said distinctly.
So I hit him again, and with that second blow I broke his neck.
I had not meant to kill him, merely silence him, but I heard his neck crunch. I saw his head loll unnaturally to one side, and then he fell across one of the braziers and his short black hair blazed into bright flame. He collapsed on the floor’s broken mosaics and the hall was filled with the stink of burning hair and scorched flesh.
“Arrest him!” I heard Bishop Asser’s loud shout.
“He must die!” Bishop Erkenwald called.
Alfred was staring at me in horror. His wife, who had ever hated me, was screaming that I must pay for my sins.
Finan took my arm and pulled me toward the hall’s door. “To the house, lord,” he said.
“Steapa! Hold him!” Alfred called.
But Steapa liked me. He did move toward me, but slowly enough so that I reached the door where the royal guards made a halfhearted effort to bar my way, but a menacing growl from Finan drove their spears aside. He dragged me into the night. “Now come,” he said, “fast!”
We ran down the hill to the dark river.
And behind us was a dead monk and uproar.
PART TWO
VIKING
ONE
I stayed furious, unrepentant, pacing the large room beside the river where servants, cowed to silence by my rage, revived the fire. It is strange how news spreads in a city. Within minutes a crowd had gathered outside the house to see how the night would end. The folk were silent, just watching. Finan had barred the outer doors and ordered torches lit in the courtyard. Rain hissed in the flames and slicked the paving stones. Most of my men lived close by and they came one by one, some of them drunk, and Finan or Cerdic met them at the outer door and sent them to fetch their mail and weapons. “Are you expecting a fight?” I asked Finan.
“They’re warriors,” he said simply.
He was right, so I put on my own mail. I dressed as a warlord. I dressed for battle, with gold on my arms and both swords at my waist, and it was just after I had buckled the belt that Alfred’s emissary arrived.
The emissary was Father Beocca. My old friend came alone, his priest’s robes muddy from the streets and wet from the rain. He was shivering and I put a stool beside the central hearth and draped a fur cloak about his shoulders. He sat, then held his good hand toward the flames. Finan had escorted him from the front gate and he stayed. I saw that Skade, too, had crept into a shadowed corner. I caught her eye and gave a curt nod that she could remain.
“You’ve looked under the floor?” Father Beocca said suddenly.
“Under the floor?”
“The Romans,” he said, “would heat this house with a furnace that vented its heat into the space under the floor.”
“I know.”
“And we hack holes in their roofs and make hearths,” he said sadly.
“You’ll make yourself ill if you insist on walking about on cold, wet nights,” I said.
“Of course a lot of those floors have collapsed,” Beocca said as if it was a very important point he needed to make. He rapped the tiles with the stick he now used to help himself walk. “Yours seems in good repair, though.”
“I like a hearth.”
“A hearth is comforting,” Beocca said. He turned his good eye to me and smiled. “The monastery at ?scengum cleverly managed to flood the space under their floor with sewage, and the only solution was to pull the whole house down and build anew! It was a blessing, really.”
