‘Your best hound?’
‘Lightning, bring him. I’ll expect you tomorrow.’
We crept back out of the passage and the slaves put back the great boulder that sealed the dead from the living, and that night the sky was lit with great curtains of pale blue and glowing white that shivered high to hide the stars. I have seen those lights before, usually in the depths of winter and always in the northern sky, but it was surely no coincidence that they shimmered the heavens on the day I had let light fall on the dead beneath the earth.
I had rented a house from ?lwold. It was a Roman house, mostly in ruins, which lay a small distance from a village called Turcandene, which was a short ride south of the tomb. Brambles choked most of the house and ivy wriggled up its broken walls, but the two largest rooms, from where the Romans had once lorded the nearby countryside, had been used as a cattle shed and were protected by crude rafters and stinking thatch. We cleared those rooms and I slept under the thatch that night and next morning went back to the tomb. A mist hovered about the long mound. I waited there with the slaves squatting a few paces away. Ludda returned about midday and the mist still lingered. He had Lightning, my good deerhound, on a leash, and with him was Father Cuthbert. I took Lightning’s leash from Ludda. The hound whimpered and I ruffled his ears. ‘What you have to do now,’ I told Cuthbert, ‘is make certain that the spirits in this grave don’t interfere with us.’
‘May I ask, lord, what it is you do here?’
‘What did Ludda tell you?’
‘Just that you needed me, and to bring the doggy.’
‘Then that’s all you need to know. And make sure you drive those spirits away.’
We took the great entrance stone away and Cuthbert went into the grave where he chanted prayers, sprinkled water and planted a cross he made from tree branches. ‘We must wait till the night’s heart, lord,’ he told me, ‘to make sure the prayers have worked.’ He looked distraught and waved his hands in gestures that suggested hopelessness. He had the hugest hands and never seemed to know quite what to do with them. ‘Will the spirits obey me?’ he asked, ‘I don’t know! They sleep during the day and should wake to find themselves chained and helpless, but perhaps they’re stronger than we know? We’ll discover tonight.’
‘Why tonight? Why not now?’
‘They sleep in the daytime, lord, then they’ll wake tonight and scream like souls in torment. If they break the chains?’ He shuddered. ‘But I shall stay through the night and summon angels.’
‘Angels?’
He nodded seriously. ‘Yes, lord, angels.’ He saw my puzzlement and smiled. ‘Oh don’t think of angels as pretty girls, lord. Simple folk believe angels are lovely bright things with wonderful,’ he paused, his huge hands fluttering over his chest, ‘fawns,’ he finally said, ‘but in truth they’re the shield-warriors of God. Fiercely formidable creatures!’ He flapped his hands, to suggest wings, then went very still as he became aware of my gaze. I stared at him so long that he became nervous. ‘Lord?’ he asked tremulously.
‘You’re clever, Cuthbert,’ I said.
He looked pleased and bashful. ‘I am indeed, lord.’
‘Saint Cuthbert the Clever,’ I said in admiration. ‘A fool,’ I went on, ‘but such a clever fool!’
‘Thank you, lord, you’re so kind.’
That night Cuthbert and I stayed in the tomb’s entrance and watched the stars grow bright. Lightning lay with his head on my lap as I stroked him. He was a great hound, full of running, fierce as a warrior, and fearless. A quarter moon climbed above the hills. The night was filled with noises, the rustle of creatures in nearby woods, the haunting call of a hunting owl, the cry of a vixen far away. When the moon had climbed to its height Father Cuthbert faced the tomb, went to his knees, and began to pray silently, his lips moving and his hands clasping the broken cross. If angels came, I did not see them, but perhaps they were there; the bright-winged and beautiful shield- warriors of the Christian god.
I let Cuthbert pray as I took Lightning to the top of the mound where I knelt and cuddled the hound. I told him how good he was, how loyal and how brave. I stroked his coarse pelt and I buried my head in his fur and I told him he was the greatest hound I had ever known, and I was still cuddling him as I cut his throat with one hard tug of a knife I had sharpened that afternoon. I felt his huge body struggle and lurch, the sudden howl fading fast, the blood soaking my mail and knees, and I was crying because of his death, and I held his shivering body and I told Thor I had made the sacrifice. I did not want to, but it is the sacrifice of things dear to us that touches the minds of the gods, and I held Lightning until he died. It was mercifully swift. I begged Thor to accept the sacrifice and in return to keep the dead silent in their grave.
I carried Lightning’s body to some nearby trees and I used the knife and a shard of stone to make a grave. I laid the hound inside, put the knife beside him, then wished him happy hunting in the next world. I filled in the grave and heaped rocks over it to preserve his body from the carrion-eaters. It was almost dawn by the time I had finished and I was dirty, blood-soaked and miserable.
‘Dear God, what happened?’ Father Cuthbert stared aghast at me.
‘I prayed to Thor,’ I said curtly.
‘The dog?’ he whispered the question.
‘Is hunting in the next world,’ I said.
He shuddered. Some priests would have chided me for sacrificing to false gods, but Cuthbert just made the sign of the cross. ‘The spirits have been quiet,’ he told me.
‘So one of the prayers worked,’ I said, ‘either yours or mine.’
‘Or both, lord,’ he said.
And when the sun rose the slaves came and I had them open the tomb and then move the dead from one of the two deeper chambers. They piled the bones in the opposite chamber, and then we sealed that corpse-crowded space with a slab of rock. We put skulls in the two cavities nearest the entrance, so that any visitor, stooping into the passageway, would be greeted by the grinning dead. The hardest work was disguising the entrance of the northernmost chamber, the one we had cleared of bones, because Ludda needed to be able to get in and out of that artificial cave. Father Cuthbert found the solution. His father had taught him the stonemason’s trade, and Cuthbert clumsily chipped away at a limestone slab until it resembled a thin shield. It took him two days, but he managed it and we balanced the thin slab on a flat rock and Ludda found he could tip it easily enough. He could pull it outwards, crawl past it into the chamber and then another man could push it back upright so that Ludda was hidden behind the shield-like slab. When he spoke from behind the slab his voice was muffled, but audible.
We sealed the grave again, piling earth over the entrance boulder and then went back to Fagranforda. ‘Now we go to Lundene,’ I told Ludda. ‘You, me and Finan.’
‘Lundene!’ He liked that. ‘Why are we going, lord?’
‘To find two whores, of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘I can help!’ Father Cuthbert said eagerly.
‘I thought I’d make you responsible for collecting the goose feathers,’ I told Cuthbert.
‘Goose feathers?’ He stared at me, appalled. ‘Oh, lord, please!’
Whores and goose feathers. Plegmund was praying for peace and I was planning for war.
I took thirty men to Lundene, not because I needed them, but because a lord should travel in style. We found quarters for men and horses in the Roman fort that guarded the old city’s north-western corner, then I walked with Finan and Weohstan along the remnants of the Roman wall. ‘When you commanded here,’ Weohstan asked, ‘did they starve you of money?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I have to beg for every coin,’ he grumbled. ‘They’re building churches, but I can’t persuade them to repair the wall.’
And the wall needed repair more than ever. A great stretch of the Roman battlements between the Bishop’s Gate and the Old Gate had fallen into the stinking ditch beyond. It was not a new problem. Back when I had been commander of the garrison, I had filled the gap with a massive oak palisade, but those trunks were dark now and some of them were rotting. King Eohric had seen this decayed stretch and I did not doubt he had noted it, and after his visit to Lundene I had suggested that repairs be made urgently, but nothing had been done. ‘Just look,’ Weohstan said, and scrambled awkwardly down the slope of rubble that marked the ruined wall’s end. He pushed
