his hand. The palm was long and strong, the nails thick and the fingers muscular, like the claws on the gargoyle of a devil on the church at Saint-Denis. He stroked his jaw and clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, moistening his lips. His tongue felt almost too big and was cut and blistered where he had accidentally bitten it when feeding. Jehan breathed in. His lips too felt raw, his skin tight over his bones. The men, the raiders with their fast-beating hearts and miasma of tension that accompanied them, were coming. He spat and spat again, saliva filling his mouth.
Elation filled him and he heard himself giggle, though he could not think why. The shallowness of his laughter struck him.
Smell burst in on him in a million registers. It was as if all his life he had suffered from a heavy cold and had suddenly found himself free of it in a summer meadow. Rot was on the breath of the Vikings — from their teeth, from the meat between their teeth. Their sweat was sour but in a fascinating rainbow of shades. He breathed in the smell of the furs they wore, sensed the stress of the animals’ deaths, smelled the wool of their cloaks, damp with dew, the odour of the farmyard clinging to it. And from down the beach, just detectable in the light breeze, he smelled something else. A woman. Not all of the raiders were men.
‘We’ll make it quick,’ said Ofaeti. ‘Double back around the dunes smartish. Slash the rudders on two of the boats then away.’
‘They’ll leave guards.’
‘Like I say, we’ll have to be quick.’
‘What about the monk?’
‘Leave him to his graveyard feast,’ said Egil. ‘The man is bewitched.’
‘He led us to great gold,’ said Ofaeti.
‘I won’t have a corpse-muncher on my ship,’ said Fastarr.
‘It’s not your ship.’
‘And it won’t be yours if you don’t hurry up.’
‘We should leave him, Ofaeti. You know the Christians are cannibals. They freely admit that as their rite and ritual.’
‘I…’ Ofaeti was going to say he had no time to argue, but the monk had gone. ‘Right, lads, this is it. Death or glory. Maybe death and glory. Death anyway. Are you ready?’
‘Let’s have them,’ said Fastarr.
The Vikings ran out of the back of the monastery and around the dunes to its side, crouching low.
Jehan heard them go. He crawled down the alley, drinking in its rich smells of mould and piss. They were as enticing to him as any posy he had smelled in his life. He came to the scriptorium, where the scrolls and books were made. The door was half open and the tang of the vellum drew him inside. He knew what he needed to do: he needed to read, to anchor his mind to the word of God. The bitterest thing about his blindness had been his inability to read, the necessity of listening to the Bible read by monks who had no feel for the words. He had memorised large sections, said them back to himself in the quiet of his cell, purging the snivelling syllables of Brother Frotlaicus, the leaden delivery of Brother Ragenard from his mind and recalling the words as he thought they should be said.
The roof was damaged, a hole an armspan wide allowing the moonlight in. There had been a fire in there, the previous raiders unable to resist the lure of the inflammable books and scrolls. Scraps of burned vellum were all over the floor, the smell of charred animal skin and damp thick in the room. The Vikings destroyed these works because they did not value them and their enemies did. They had marked their territory, imposed their values. The residue of the sweat of the raiders still clung to the room. He could smell the delight. It had been fun to burn and wreck.
Jehan sat down on the floor and picked up a sheet of vellum.
‘And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home — these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgement on the great day.’ He said the words aloud, tried to will himself back into what he had been — the learned man of Saint-Germain, the man God had cursed in the body but lifted up in the soul and intellect. ‘Clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’
The words meant nothing to him now, but their sounds, the collision of their consonants and the gong notes of their vowels in his ears, linked him to what he had been.
‘I am man,’ he said, ‘in the image of a god.’ No, that was wrong. ‘I am a man, in the image of God.’ He read out more: ‘To the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in the truth — and not I only, but also all who know the truth — because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us for ever-’
There was a sound in the courtyard. The feeling was on him again. He put the vellum to his mouth and bit, tasting skin and ashes. The hunger would not relent. He lay on the floor of the scriptorium trying to ignore it, trying to sate it, shoving pieces of script into his mouth, tasting ink, goat, the blood tang of the unborn kid used to make the uterine vellum. The hunger grew sharper still. He writhed on the floor, trying to banish it from his mind. He caught glimpses of fragments of script as he stuffed the vellum into his mouth — only a few words but enough to trigger the memory of the whole passage.
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Jehan shoved more into his mouth. He felt he was little more than a hunger trapped in flesh.
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.
‘I am a man,’ said Jehan.
There was shouting now: ‘Look in there! Try in there! There is something here for us. The sorceress wouldn’t lie.’
Boots outside the door. The door pushed open. A flood of moonlight rushing to meet the cascade that fell from the hole in the ceiling.
‘Lads, lads, in here.’ A big Viking was in the doorway, a flash of silver at his knees as he turned the haft of his axe around in his hands.
‘In the image of a god,’ said Jehan in Norse.
‘What’s that, matey. Where’s your gold, you cringing coward? Lead us to your gold.’
‘In the image of a god.’
‘In the what? Lads, get in here. I’ve got one of them. Are you a monk, matey? Are you a monk?’
‘I am a wolf,’ said Jehan and leaped at the Viking’s throat.
The kill was quick, the Viking’s neck broken with one twist. Flat against a wall in the shadows, Jehan waited for the next. The corpse lay in the moonlight, its eyes wide, like a drowned man lying beneath a waterfall.
‘There’s someone in there.’
‘Erik went in, didn’t he?’
‘He hasn’t come out.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Hey, Erik, are you all right?’
Men were rushing all over the monastery. They seemed to be looking for something. He crouched, leaning forward on his hands, stretched out his back, turned his head. He felt powerful and strong, a deep energy welling inside him. When he had first been afflicted he had not come to terms with his condition easily and would find himself weeping in frustration on his bed, the smells of the summer outside enticing him to run in the fields, his body a fetter holding his spirit down. The feeling was similar — a desire for movement — but now it was exaltation that he felt inside. He could move. He would move. It was just a matter of biding his time.
‘Erik! Erik!’
A man was in the doorway. He came inside, peering in with little pecking motions of the head, as if he feared the dark would bite him. It did. He was dragged into the room in a breath, dead before he could scream.
More voices: ‘Erik! Oh no, Thengil! Thengil’s in here. He’s down.’
A Viking came in and crouched in the moonlight to look at his friend. ‘By Freyr’s fat cock, look at his neck! Look at his neck!’ He put his hands to the fallen man’s throat. Two more entered complaining about the dark. Their eyes were on the corpse, their movements slow and clumsy.
