Jehan felt dizzy. The hunger had not gone from him, that terrible hunger for the sticky sweet stuff beneath the snow. What was it? Raven was covered in it, he could tell. The confessor swallowed, offering a prayer for guidance.
‘You killed all the Vikings.’
There was no reply. The Raven just sat staring into space.
‘Why did you kill them? They were your kinsmen. Why?’
The Raven looked around him. His eyes betrayed fear. ‘The will of God.’
‘How can you know the will of God? It is given to us through prayer and the edict of the Pope.’
‘It would seem to be his will that Vikings die. Do not your monks, your Ebolus and your Joscelin who died at Paris, fight to kill them?’
‘For just reasons, according to Saint Augustine. In a war waged for good, sanctioned by holy authority and with peace the aim.’ Jehan kept his voice calm.
‘You are not a monk — I see by your hair — yet you speak like a monk,’ said Hugin.
‘I am a monk,’ said Jehan, ‘though I have travelled a hard road.’
Jehan looked around him. Something seemed to move in the shadows, there and gone in an instant. The Raven stroked his forehead and looked at the floor. He seemed to be struggling for the strength to continue.
‘Then know that there was nothing to displease Augustine in the Vikings’ deaths, nor that of your monks. They died, or will die, for good, sanctioned by the holiest authority there is, and, as you say, with peace the aim.’
‘Did you eat them?’
‘What?’
‘They say you eat corpses.’
‘They say that of your priests too. I have eaten no one. That is a route to madness. Men have misunderstood certain practices, that is all.’
‘What practices?’
Raven swallowed. ‘I am, whatever you might think, a man of compassion. The berserkers told you this, the ones you travel with?’
‘How do you know who I travel with?’
‘I watch the land, before and behind. The fat one is distinctive even at a distance, and I know they are not a people with a talent for deceit. The cross that went before them was carried by you, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was with your band in Sigfrid’s camp. Some of the men there are Christians, there with their families. They heard that I could heal. I tried for their daughter and failed. I could do nothing. She had been hit by a horse and her body was broken. The priests of your land are cowards and fled when they heard Varangians were on their way. They would not come to tend to her. I said I’d do what I could. The girl was dying. She was a Christian; her family were distraught. I said the mass for them and administered the unction. Ofaeti and his men took it as true that I was eating flesh.’
‘You are a heathen.’
‘I am a man,’ said the Raven, ‘and my god is not jealous.’
‘Nor is he compassionate.’
‘His halls are full of the souls of warriors dead in battle. He doesn’t seek the soul of a little girl. Where it goes is of no concern to him. Your god should be pleased that I would cast his magic for him.’
The Raven cupped his hands around the flame of the candle for warmth, reducing the light in the church to a ball in his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was stronger.
‘Our gods are not so different. Mine wants blood. So does yours. Sometimes, as when the black saint marched through these passes, it seems their desires are as one. Odin is here, in the stones, in the mountains, in the pass. He is the god of the dead and he seeks deaths to please him. How lucky then that your god wanted the same from his Theban martyrs.’
‘My god is not your god.’
‘What do you know of my god?’
‘Only that he is false.’
Raven nodded. ‘He is that, he is that.’ He seemed to ponder for a few moments. ‘But isn’t it just a matter of how you look at it? My god’s treachery is well known. He kills his heroes to take them to his halls. Yours lets his martyrs die to test their faith and sends them to heaven.’
The confessor forced himself to think straight, willed his mind back to the favour he had asked of God with his hand on the saint’s casket. There was the movement again at the side of his eye. Jehan remembered the conversation in Sigfrid’s house, the Raven’s revelation that he had been a Christian once and that this place had found him and lost him in the faith. To know his purpose was to know his weakness. Jehan said those words over and over in his head. Reason was now a candle in a storm, only kept alight by diligence and great attention.
‘You are not a monk, yet you speak like a monk,’ said Jehan.
‘I once was,’ said Hugin.
‘So why did you desert Christ?’
‘Because Christ deserted me.’
‘He is always there for you.’
‘He was not there for me when I asked him to be. Something else was.’
The Raven took his hands from around the flame. The sudden illumination caught the gold of the altar, the dancing light rendering it liquid in the darkness.
‘What?’
‘Another way.’ The horse shifted from foot to foot and the candle guttered in a draught. The Raven had his face in his hands, almost as if grieving, his emaciated head like a golden skull in the candlelight. He spoke in a low voice: ‘Christ abandoned me. I prayed and he abandoned me.’
In the shadows, like something half glimpsed through murky water, was a figure. It was the child Jehan had seen on the riverbank, the dreadfully starved waif with the lined and drawn face. The Raven had not seen her, and Jehan did not draw his attention to her, afraid of what the sorcerer might do. As the Raven stared at the floor, Jehan gestured, trying to shoo the girl away. She didn’t move, just stood looking at him, her face a pale mask in the darkness.
‘My family were poor people of this village, and they had many sons and daughters. I was not their own but a foundling who the monks had paid my mother — the woman I called my mother — to wet-nurse. I stayed with them until I was five and my father died. Then the monks took me in as an act of charity. They schooled me and fed me and were to make me one of them.’
‘That was Christ’s work indeed,’ said Jehan.
‘Indeed. The life here for boys was not so hard, and I still could get away down the valley to see my family. My sister, in particular, was dear to me.’
‘Better to have looked forward to God than back to earthly ties,’ said Jehan.
He was speaking almost by rote, doling out the wisdom that had been doled out to him, counselling as he had been counselled. It was as if the very ease of the words was a line to which he could cling as the rage inside him threatened to sweep away everything that he had been.
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Hugin. ‘She meant more to me than God did. My mother was busy with the flock and her children, my father was dead, my sister was the focus of any tender feelings I had. When I had been five years at the monastery, the fever took her.’
‘She died?’
‘She would have died, had I not acted.’
‘Did you pray?’
‘Yes. And I petitioned the abbot to send for a healer. He said that the valleys were overrun with little girls and one less wouldn’t displease the Lord. He would move to save a peasant’s son who could tend a herd, build and fight for God, but not one of their sluttish daughters.’
‘The man was wrong to say that,’ said Jehan.
‘It cost him his life,’ said Raven. His voice had lost all its earlier weakness. Now it was strong, certain, deepened by anger.
