He was picked up again, this time between two of them, grabbing an arm each. He could almost hear his joints squealing as they lifted him, but he was master of himself again and made no complaint. He sensed that he was carried up a hill, and gradually he came into noise — rough singing, the crackling of fires, the braying of animals, conversation and shouts.
He was dumped on the ground once more. He heard the Norsemen making a fire, collecting pots, pissing and laughing. One of the berserkers said he was going in search of a ‘proper’ healer to tend his arm. Again, Jehan thanked God for his trials. Other men, more able men, had the illusion of taking a hand in their fate. He could have run, if his legs would have carried him, fought, if his arms had held a weapon. The outcome would have been the same — whatever God willed. In his condition there was no lying to himself or misreading his place in the cosmos. He was a cork bobbing on the tides of God’s mind, as all men were. God had just granted him the affliction that let him see it more clearly.
Then there were voices nearby.
‘Ofaeti, why are you so fat?’
‘Because every time I fuck your wife she gives me a hazelnut.’
‘That’s as good as a password!’
‘It’s good to see you alive, my friend!’
There was laughter, backslapping and questions about what had happened to who; who had died and who lived.
‘We walked in there with twelve of us and came out with twelve. We should tell the rest of this army to go home; we can take this city ourselves, I reckon.’
‘Did you get the girl?’
‘Oh yes, I just didn’t mention it.’
‘That’s a no, then.’
‘It’s a no.’
‘But we did get this kind merchant and his stack of wine. Merchant, introduce yourself.’
‘Leshii, servant of your kinsman Helgi the Prophet, friend to King Sigfrid and to all who serve him.’
‘Very nice, where’s the wine?’
‘Boy, a couple of bottles for our friends,’ said Leshii with a note of forced jollity in his voice. ‘I will take the advice of these fine warriors and allow you to see where I keep them but know that, should any go missing I will give you the best justice — the Viking kind!’
‘Just two? Seems a bit skinny. Boy, get more.’ That was a Norseman.
‘He doesn’t understand your tongue, friend.’ The exotic voice again. An easterner, Jehan thought.
‘Then translate.’
‘Lady, the bag on the rear mule contains the best wine for these fellows. Take out a skin of that, would you?’
Had Jehan heard right? ‘Lady’? The merchant hadn’t said domina, which even non-Latin speakers would recognise. He’d said era, which was mildly less respectful but probably wouldn’t be known to the Norsemen. So there was a woman there, a disguised woman.
The merchant spoke in Norse: ‘Serve the wine, boy; don’t stand there staring at the monk. Haven’t you ever seen a god before? You’ll be seeing another soon enough if you don’t hurry up.’ More laughter. Then the exotic voice in Latin: ‘Take heart, lady. This is the easiest way to make them see what we want them to see.’
‘The lad’s crying again!’
‘The monk’s a cripple, boy, like you can see on any roadside. By Thor’s bulging bollocks they don’t breed ’em very tough in Miklagard, do they? Maybe we should try our luck there. If they don’t like deformity we could just show ’em Ofaeti’s bollocks and they’d open the gates to us. That’s more like it, get another. Let’s drink this lot dry and think about seeing the king later. We deserve a little reward after our labours, don’t we, lads?’
It couldn’t be her, could it?
‘Give me that.’ It was a cold, hard Norse voice, close by.
Under his breath, more felt than spoken, he said the word: ‘ Domina.’
The confessor felt fingers brush his face, a gesture of tenderness. He had the strangest sensation, the only way he could have described it was to say that it felt like her, but he had never touched her, nor any woman that he could remember. Still, the touch seemed to carry her signature, the note of her, like a distinctive perfume, almost. The pain and the indignities had not daunted him. This did. No one had touched him but to lift or bathe him since he had been seven years old. A chill went through him, a delicious cold tingle from his forehead to his knees. He had warned people about the pleasures of the flesh since he had been old enough to speak in church but to him such pleasures had been only dry things, spectres raised from the Bible by the readings of his brother monks. He had despised them without knowing them. One touch, though, and he had understood. Who had done that? Was it her? For the first time in years he hated his blindness. He needed to see, to know.
The men settled down to drinking and the confessor felt the cold of night deepen.
He calmed himself by focusing on preparing to face Sigfrid. He would not beg or bargain for his life, he was determined. The monk knew that the longer he stayed in the camp, the more likely the Emperor Charles was to come and rescue him. A living saint could not be allowed in the hands of heathens. Jehan made himself forget the strange feelings that the touch had raised in him and tried to reason. What would he do if he was Sigfrid? The Viking was no fool and he must see that holding the monk was dangerous for him. Would he ransom him? Jehan doubted it. Why bother? The city would fall soon enough and then he’d have whatever was in it for free. No, while he lived, the confessor realised he was only a unifying force for Sigfrid’s enemies. The Viking king would kill him, he felt sure.
He turned his mind to prayer but could only think of the touch that had set his skin singing. Jehan was in some ways a humorous man, and it did strike him as ironic that he had discovered the sin of carnal pleasure just in time for it to admit him to hell. He made himself pray: ‘Heart of Jesus, once in agony, receive my sinner’s soul.’ In the morning, thought Jehan, he would see Christ’s face and, he hoped, be taken into his peace. He knew his fate among the Normans was God’s way of chastising him for his pride. It was Lucifer’s sin, and Jehan’s old weakness, to think yourself better than others. He had let them call him a saint, a living saint. Well saints suffered and died, so God had granted that he would do the same. The Norsemen had crushed three churchmen at Reims with great stones. He put it from his mind. He was going on a journey. The conveyance did not matter.
There was the sound of shouting and the men all around him got to their feet.
‘Who are you?’
‘King’s man Arnulf. Sigfrid wants to see you straight away. You have something of his.’
‘That will be me,’ said the eastern voice.
‘The Christian holy man, the flesh eater, he wants him.’
Perhaps, thought Jehan, he would be seeing the face of Jesus sooner than he had anticipated.
9
Confessor Jehan had been taken. In the rush of her flight and the fear of her capture Aelis had forgotten he had been at her side when the Norsemen attacked. And her brother, what of him? Eudes was a peerless warrior, a prodigy at arms according to his tutors. It had never even occurred to her that he could be hurt, let alone killed. But the Norsemen had walked away with the confessor. Eudes would never have allowed that while he had breath in his body. She went cold. Did her brother still live?
She had touched the confessor on impulse, to reassure him, or rather just to let him know he was not alone. She could imagine what he would say to that. ‘I am never alone; I am with God.’ And yet it had felt right to reach out to him.
Now her mind began to clear and she was terrified. Inside the church she had been unable to bring home to the confessor just how real her dreams had been. And then the wolf had appeared, a wolfman rather, who had given his life for her. The simmering sense of danger she had in her dreams of the wolf now spilled over into her
