King Hereafter (90 page)

The tone of voice, for a moment, matched the look on Tuathal’s face when he had come back with Thorfinn from the Lateran. Eochaid said, ‘So you heard the cock crow.’

Tuathal stopped and looked at him.

Eochaid said, ‘That is why I told Thorfinn to take you, and why he agreed. I knew if he was asked a direct question, he wouldn’t evade it.… He wouldn’t lose anything either, of course. The Emperor needs him. Here is a king of the north taking positive steps towards Rome. The fact that his own faith is wanting will be treated as a matter for injunction and penance. He will build a church on Birsay. But it was a shock?’

Tuathal the business-like, the practical, sat down. ‘He was honest,’ he said. ‘He said, since he was asked, why he found it hard to choose his faith. If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.’

‘Only Sulien knows it all,’ Eochaid said. ‘But if you are to serve him, it is right that you should understand. So you will leave?’

‘I gave my word not to talk about what happened,’ Tuathal said. ‘It would undo his work. I can see that.’

Eochaid said nothing. After a moment, he too sat down, and waited.

‘The runes,’ Tuathal said. ‘He wore runes even there, on a chain round his neck. Leo leaned forward and snapped it, and Thorfinn said, “It makes no difference.” ’

Still Eochaid said nothing.

Tuathal said, ‘I don’t care all that much. I want success for him: success for the country. I thought I knew what was going on, precisely. I thought I knew where I was with him. I don’t.’

Eochaid said, ‘You don’t speak of what lies ahead for him if he is not saved?’

Tuathal looked up sharply. He said, ‘No. It would have been your first thought; and Sulien’s. It must have been, when you found out. But, whatever you both have said to him, it has made no difference. Oh, he is aware. He is aware, and he carries his own despair about with him.’

‘What did he say?’ Eochaid said. ‘You were bitter afterwards; and what did he say?’

‘What did he say? He answered in the words of the serpent; the manipulator; the creature of no belief who prepares other men for their doom. He answered in Irish. I shall go to my grave listening to him,’ Tuathal said.

‘I know,’ said Eochaid; and spoke in his musical voice.

‘Will you leave him?’

‘How can I?’ said Tuathal.

The King of Alba and his people departed.

On the twenty-ninth day of April of the year 1050 there opened in Rome the Easter Synod of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

During the three days of its deliberations, it was attended by fifty-three archbishops and bishops, including Halinard of Lyons, Humbert of Sicily, Adalbero of Metz, Ealdred of Worcester, Herimann of Wiltshire, Geoffrey of Coutances, Main of Rennes, and Hugo of Nevers.

After a short dispute in which blood was shed, Guy, Archbishop of Milan, sat on the Pontiff’s right side.

Peter, Cardinal Archdeacon of the Holy Roman Church, proclaimed the agenda, after divine service before the high altar of the Lateran, on which were placed the golden reliquaries containing the heads of the Apostle Peter (broad, so men said, with a hairy beard of black mixed with white) and of the Apostle Paul (long, and bald as to the crown, with a red beard and hair, said those who knew those who had seen it).

The Pope announced that he intended to canonise his saintly predecessor, Gerard, Bishop of Toul, and would visit Toul to that end in October. The synod (
Fiat! Fiat!
) chorussed agreement.

The Pope caused to be read aloud a heretical letter from Bérenger, Archdeacon of Angers and Scholar of Tours, to the Prior Lanfranc of Bec,
who was then required to stand up and prove his faith, which he did, to the satisfaction of both the Pope and the synod. The heretic Bérenger was excommunicated in his absence. The present synod (
Fiat! Fiat!
) concurred.

The Pope referred to the renewed complaint by the clerics of Tours against Juhel, Bishop of Dol, who, with seven suffragans, had defied the authority of the Metropolitan of Tours and himself taken the title of Archbishop. This was an error of long standing which ran counter to ancient edict.

The legates of the bishopric of Tours were now present in Rome and should stand forth to be judged. The Bishop of Dol and his suffragans should do likewise.

There was a stir, and Richer of St Julien, Tours, stepped forward, with three priests behind him.

There was a long pause.

‘Holy Father,’ said Cardinal Peter. ‘The Bishop of Dol does not seem to be present, or his suffragans.’

‘Let them be called,’ said the Pope. ‘On the part of God, and on the part of glorious Peter, Prince of Apostles, of whom we the Vicar are present.’

The Archdeacon called the summons, and repeated it twice.

‘Let them be searched for,’ said the Pope; and the Cardinal Archbishop of Porto, with John of Civita-Vecchia and Bernard of Padua, left the basilica.

The synod returned to its business. Time passed. The three envoys returned and were admitted. The Pope called them forward.

‘Holy Father,’ said John of Porto. ‘The Bishop of Dol and his companions have escaped. That is, they have left the place of their lodging without leave and are nowhere to be found.’

The Pope’s face did not change, nor his great robe tremble as he stood to rehearse the sins of the absent Bishop: his presumption in disdaining the Metropolitan; his conduct that embraced, so men informed him, the pollution of simony.

The Bishop of Dol might, if he wished, attend in person and plead his case at the forthcoming synod at Vercelli. Until then, by the authority of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, of St Peter, and of himself, the Universal and Apostolic Pope, Bishop Juhel of Dol and all his suffragans were hereby excommunicated.

‘
Fiat! Fiat!
’ responded the Pope’s Easter synod in chorus.

‘
Fiat!
’ said Bishop Ealdred of Worcester slowly, all by himself.

Hermann, he noticed, was not quick enough to say even that.

Far from Rome and his discreet detention in the Cluniac monastery of St Mary’s, Juhel, Archbishop of Dol, paused for the first time in his headlong flight to await and finally to receive the man to whom he owed his freedom.

‘Well, thank God,’ said Archbishop Juhel on greeting him. ‘We thought you had been stopped among the eternal snows and martyred, like St Maurice, for failing to persecute Christians. Do you suppose,
Domino cooperante
, that I’m excommunicated yet?’

‘I would say,’ said Thorfinn of Alba, ‘that if you’re not, we’ve had a lot of
trouble for nothing. Is the food better than on the Aventine, or do you want to return?’

Juhel de Fougères laughed and shouted back, through the din of arrival and the uproar of welcome. ‘Come in and find out,’ he said, ‘before there’s a rock-fall.’

Rock-falls were not unknown at the monastery of St Maurice at Agaune; or worse. Here the Alpine road from Rome to Geneva, topping its crest, plunged winding down to find itself locked in a towering gorge, with the torrent of the Rh
ne, white and snow-green, its only companion.

Where the river debouched from the gorge to flow through green, flooded meadows towards the next defile had been recognised by many races as a place of command, a place to live, a place of sanctuary in which to rest and pray. The Celts had called it Acaunus, from the slender white spires that rose behind the great mountain bulwarks that shut in the valley.

The Romans had built there an imperial customs-house, and a shrine dedicated to Mercury, and another to the nymphs of the spring that marked the bluff closing the north-western neck of the valley. There a Roman legion had camped, brought back from Thebes in Upper Egypt to help drive back the attacks of the Alemans, and there Maurice, its Christian leader, had been killed with his companions because he spared fellow-believers.

Or so the legend ran. During the subsequent seven hundred years, tales of martyred Theban legionaries proliferated and were believed. But the kings of Burgundy, keepers of the Lance of St Maurice, thought it good to take special care of the little basilica built on the spot where the nymphs once had their shrine, and where pilgrims, soldiers, merchants and churchmen, emperors and their officials, Popes and their legates passed on their way to and from Rome. Whose chief glory, so it was said, was the singing of psalms day and night, without cease, in praise of the Lord Who sent the spring as well as the snows.

The Roman Emperor Henry was now King of Burgundy, and St Maurice Agaune was his, which was why, having escaped in the King of Alba’s advance baggage-train, Juhel of Fougères had found here a refuge in which to await the arrival of the King of Alba himself.

‘But I wondered,’ said the Archbishop inside the hospice, ‘if I had made a mistake, or if you had. Then I heard your men singing.’

‘I thought I had stopped them,’ Thorfinn said, ‘before anyone could make out the words. And these are your companions? I know the Bishop of Aleth.’

‘Bishop Hamon: of course,’ said Juhel of Dol. ‘He was at your marriage in Forres, with Ealdred, and then there was the matter of the relics of St Serf. How percipient, one must allow, the Lady Emma has always been. Now let me introduce the rest of my suffragans. For they certainly know you, both through me and through your charming friend Sulien.’

They were sitting by then at the long boards inside the main room of the hospice, with soup and bread and cheese on the table, and flagons of ale.

Earlier, they had taken wine with the Prior himself, poured from the golden ewer of Charlemagne, with its medallion of lions and gryphons, its slender
neck-strips, smoother than satin, of enamel-work peeled from some Sassanid sceptre. Upon the slab of the altar, engraved with odd Celtic whorls, Thorfinn had placed a dish as Greek as the carved sardonyx vase that stood there already. When the Pope called to celebrate the Feast of St Maurice in September, he would see and no doubt recognise it and perhaps even redeem it, at the cost of some land or some privileges.

Introducing his five Breton bishops—Adam of St Brieuc, Dudic of Vannes, Salomon of Léon, Guy of Tréguier, Orscand of Quimper—Juhel said, ‘Most of them, as they will tell you if I do not, are naturally also the mactierns of their regions, or at least of the blood of the ruling house, as your abbots are. Indeed, Brittany and Alba are two halves of the same picture: a collection of parties who are not always content to acknowledge a common leader. Did your noblemen not fear, also, that they would incur the Pope’s wrath and even his excommunication?’

‘The risk seemed remote,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And then when at the Pope’s banquet I was seated between Prior Lanfranc and Hugo of Cluny, it vanished altogether.’

‘So you knew that I was at the Cluniac monastery,’ Juhel said. ‘But you kept going to the other St Mary’s. They told us. They were amused.’

‘Perhaps you would rather have been freed by the English party?’ Thorfinn said. ‘It seemed to me, however, a little unwise, so I forestalled them. Is Sheriff Alfred quite the nuisance he appears? He is related to you?’

‘He’s my uncle of the half-blood. Being with Ealdred probably brings out the worst in him. There is no one quite so undiplomatic as Ealdred when he is not being diplomatic,’ Juhel said. ‘Alfred is, as you will have noticed, half my age, but has had relatives in England since the time of King Canute. I assume you know that also. You know his uncle Osbern. You know Carl of York and Exeter.’

The bishops were talking among themselves as they ate, and so were the men Thorfinn had brought with him, rather loudly. They were, of course, on their way home. Their manners were better polished than those of their counterparts in Brittany would have been. And these were youngish men: not the mactierns, the mormaers, the chiefs of each region whom Thorfinn had taken to Winchester. Thorfinn had brought to Rome not the men who ruled his districts, but the next generation.

He had also, it would appear, weighed up the situation in Rome with remarkable accuracy. He had deduced that the Pope did not want a confrontation. That it would defeat all his hopes of reform in Normandy as well as Brittany if the Archbishop of Dol, publicly instructed to bow to the Archbishop of Tours, had refused, and had thereby incurred something more drastic than excommunication. In engineering his escape, Thorfinn had saved Archbishop Juhel from the Lateran prison.

Thorfinn said, ‘Tours will go on complaining. What will you do?’

‘Prevaricate,’ Juhel said. He rubbed his bent nose and grinned. ‘After all, they haven’t heard my side of the dispute. All they can accuse me of is not appearing to present it.’

‘And if one day you must?’ Thorfinn said.

‘Then,’ said Archbishop Juhel, ‘it so happens that I have this excellent two-hundred-year-old letter from Pope Adrien to King Salomon of Brittany conveying the insignia of authority to Festinien, his elected Archbishop of Dol. I would have brought it with me, except that the ink isn’t dry.’