37
Jehan held up his cross and walked towards the monastery below the great cliff, towards the walls and the buttresses of the church, which rose above him like a headland from the sea.
No one came to greet him. The squat villa outside the walls that served as a guest house was empty save for some chickens sheltering from the cold. This wasn’t odd in such a season — pilgrimages wouldn’t start until the threat of winter had subsided. Only the very, very holy or the very, very mad would try to cross before the snows melted. With the country at war — northerners to the west and the north, Bavarians and Slavs stirring in the east, and infighting between the emperor and his nephew all around — there would be few even when they came.
He went across to the doors in the monastery wall. They were strong and thick, though wide enough to drive a cart through. Cut into them at the bottom was a smaller door to admit pedestrians. Jehan knocked. There was no answer. He turned the handle and pushed at the door. It was open. Jehan felt a sense of disquiet, although he wouldn’t have expected the door to have been barred. The monastery was far from the sea and access to it was through well-defended lands. The door would only be locked at times of threat.
He looked back at the Vikings. They were scarcely visible in the mist. They’d get restless soon enough and go into the guest house, he thought. They weren’t the sort of men to freeze to death for fear of offending anyone. He stepped inside the doorway. The church was in front of him, the arches of the cloister stretching away to his left, but there was no one at the gate. More worryingly, he could hear no singing. The song of ages should have been coming from the church. It was a building of pale stone with towers at either end. Into the wall facing Jehan were cut four arched windows, glazed and patterned with rich blue glass. Jehan remembered how wealthy the monks of Saint-Maurice were said to be and barred the door behind him.
He walked to the church. The door to that was open too and he went inside. His eyes took a second to adjust to the dark of the interior. That smell was there again — deep, sour, appetising. Jehan couldn’t place it at all. What was it? Some sort of dough? Incense? There was another smell too, slightly incongruous — a powerful scent of horse.
He passed through a vestibule, which was plain and unadorned. This was clearly the poor door. The main and nobles’ doors would be on the other side of the church. He continued through into the church proper. The light from outside was weak and at first the arches of glass looked like doorways of light floating in a black void. To his left, an arched walkway curved around behind the altar; in front of him were the aisles where the monks stood before the splendid altar of gold and silver topped with an image of Christ on the cross. The light on the gold seemed to dance and swim like the shimmer of bright coins in a fountain.
Why had that image come to him? There was a fountain at his monastery, and visitors could never be dissuaded from throwing small coins into it. The monks tolerated the practice but Jehan disapproved. It was a tradition left over from the Romans, he knew, and therefore not far from the worship of idols. It was his last childhood memory before the Virgin had taken his sight away.
He became aware of a noise. Someone breathing. Or rather something. There was movement beneath the altar. He peered into the darkness. The light was fading further, the windows just dim blurs now. He could see very little of the interior of the church.
He went to a branched candlestick and took up the flint and tinder beside it. In a few moments he had a flame and lit a candle and then another, until all four candles on the holder were alight. He walked forward. At the altar he stopped and held up the light. There was movement and a snort, and then a different kind of lustre to the gold of the altar, a deep chestnut brown. Behind the altar, tied up next to a font, was a horse. It was calm but noisy as all horses are. Its blowing and stamping had been so incongruous and unexpected in the church that he’d failed to realise what it was. A saddle lay on the floor — it had a high cantle and pommel in the Frankish style — along with a healthy pile of shit. Jehan felt his anger rise that someone had chosen God’s house as a stable. A Frankish knight would never do that.
He considered leading the animal outside but something was very amiss in this place. Should he get the Vikings? He looked at the gold on the altar. No, they’d have torn it off and be halfway to the coast with the rest of the monastery’s treasures by morning if he did.
He went to the rear of the church, taking the candlestick with him, and the horse went back to staring into nothing. The door to the night stair leading to the monks’ dormitory was in front of him. It too was open. He walked into the cold air outside. The dormitory was a large two-storey villa he could just make out in the light of his candles. There was no light leaking from it, though that was no surprise. He was going to look stupid and be very unpopular if he woke the monks. Perhaps keeping animals in the church was a Burgundian custom, though he doubted it.
He walked down the stairs, the candles guttering as he moved. He was cold and decided that the best chance of finding anyone awake was to go to the warming house, the only part of the monastery other than the kitchen that would be allowed a fire. Monks were supposed to live an austere life, but it would not be unusual to find half the monastery asleep by the fire in really cold weather like this. He guessed the warming house was on the ground floor of the dormitory building, so the heat would rise into the sleeping area.
To his right was a low building with a tiny door cut into it. He knew instinctively that this was the sacristy, where the holy vessels for celebrating mass would be kept. The snow by the doorway was a different colour, almost black in the weak candlelight. Someone had dragged something from the sacristy, and it had left a long dark trail on the white of the snow. It smelled of something deep and sour. Without thinking, he put his hand down and scooped some up. The snow melted in his fingers, leaving them strangely sticky. Jehan licked his fingers and felt a cold thrill go through him. The snow tasted delicious. Had someone spilled some food there? If it was food, it was none he had ever tasted. It seemed to carry a sensation of the frost inside it, and sent a tingle rippling over the skin of his arms and back.
He looked around him and breathed in. The taste of the snow filled him up, prickling the hairs on his neck, causing him to swallow, jolting his mind as if he had suddenly woken from dozing at the side of a fire.
Jehan walked on, following the trail. Away from the wall more snow had fallen to cover the stain but the smell didn’t go away. He put his hand through a knuckle’s depth of snow. The sticky stuff was beneath it. He put down the candlestick. Then he cast his arms about him, scrabbling at the ground. It was as if the whole surface of the inner courtyard was covered in the dark goo, just under the sheet of freshly fallen snow.
Jehan smeared the goo onto his face, scooped handfuls into his mouth, lay down in the snow and lapped at it like a dog. He had never been so hungry. It was as if all the days without food, the meals where he had watched uninterested as the Vikings cooked their fish and game, came back to him now and sent him into a wild hunger for whatever it was beneath the snow.
He didn’t know how long he had lain and lapped like that but the sound brought him to himself. Again, it was horses. He stood, soaked and shaking though not cold, not cold at all. His mind seemed a thing of many parts, as if he couldn’t quite get his reason to engage, as if his normal patterns of thought were there but unavailable to him, as useless as a book to a blind man. He picked up the candlestick. Only one candle remained alight and he used it to light the other three. Then he went through another open door into the large building to his right. It was the refectory, the large dining hall of the monastery, benches pushed to one wall, a long table overturned next to them. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, offered a prayer for guidance to help him think and slowly he regained his clarity. There were the horses, six of them. This time he noticed that, though the horses were good riding animals, the saddles stacked in the corner of the room were all pack saddles. Or rather, two of them had been fine Frankish riding saddles but they had been adapted to carry big baskets at either side. Jehan had seen enough horses before his affliction to know that animals as fine as these should not be used for hauling. You could buy five nags to carry your pack for the price of one of these animals. Norsemen, he knew, were neither great riders nor judges of horseflesh.
He went out of the refectory and back to the dormitory building. The warming house was a good one, complete with the Roman system of underfloor heating, the vents at his feet. He bent down. Someone had sealed them with earth. He opened the door and went in.
Jehan stepped back and gave an involuntary cry. There were forty or fifty Norsemen crammed into a room not ten paces by ten, huddled around the cold hearth of the warming house. The air was heavy with the smoke of the
