Raven: Sons of Thunder (33 page)

‘You are a blade with two edges, Raven,’ he said, his knowing yellow eyes like rivets in my soul. ‘The All-Father wields you like a sword and when he does, men die. Good men. But because of you our jarl did not give himself to the nailed god.’ There were murmurs of agreement. He raised a drinking horn to me and I looked over at Sigurd.

‘Asgot is right, Raven,’ Sigurd said simply. ‘The All-Father did not want me washing in the Christians’ river.’ He smiled at Egfrith. ‘Or perhaps, monk, your nailed god did not want a wolf in his sheep pen.’ Egfrith sat slumped and defeated and it was clear that he was bitterly disappointed to have come so close, yet failed to ensnare a great jarl in his White Christ net. ‘I thought it would not matter,’ Sigurd said, ‘but I was wrong.’

‘Bjorn died because of me,’ I said gloomily, drinking deep of my mead horn.

‘And now my brother drinks in Valhöll!’ Bjarni yelled, raising a chorus of ‘hey’s. ‘Do not pity him, Raven. Would that we all had such deaths.’

‘We have a hoard the like of which has never been seen in the north,’ Olaf said. ‘It will blaze for years and light the long winter months. It will keep our old bones warm.’ He raised his horn to the Fellowship. ‘And our jarl has seen the sense of telling the Christ god to go and fuck himself.’ He smiled such a smile as I had not seen from him since before his son Erik was killed at Ealdred’s hall. ‘It is a good day,’ he said, banging his drinking horn against Svein’s. But it was not a good day from where I sat. A good friend was dead because of me, gone to the afterlife too soon. And then there was Cynethryth. The Franks were beating her because they thought I was a devil who had entrapped her soul by some foul seidr.

‘Don’t drown yourself, lad,’ said a voice. I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth, turning my foggy head to see Penda leaning on a rolled skin, watching me in a way that told me he had been at it a while. He slid his long knife over a whetstone. ‘I want you with a clear head in the morning,’ he said, spitting on the stone. ‘We have scheming to do.’ I looked at him, my head spinning and too sick with misery to poke around for his meaning. ‘You hear me, lad?’ he said, pointing the knife at me, then testing its edge against his thumbnail. ‘No more mead. I want you sober.’

‘Why?’ I asked dolefully.

‘Because tomorrow night we’re going to get Cynethryth,’ he said. I felt my mead-slick lips pull back from my teeth.

The plan was simple. Too simple, it seemed to me. Father Egfrith had come up with it next morning, which had surprised me because I thought he was still too sour about Sigurd’s failed baptism to help us free Cynethryth. But when he heard Penda and me talking about breaking Cynethryth out of the convent, his weasel eyes came alive.

‘Cynethryth is a good girl,’ he said, rubbing the stubble on his cheeks and frowning. ‘I have grown fond of her. What she did to Ealdred . . . well, that was unfortunate.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She must seek the Lord’s forgiveness for that terrible sin. But she has suffered too. I believe Christ weeps for the poor child and how cruelly the Franks are ministering to her. There are other, kinder ways to tend to Cynethryth’s soul. As for Abbess Berta, she is a curdled old crone. Forgive me, Father,’ he muttered, signing the cross over his chest. ‘She is misguided. I do not agree with her methods and I do not believe our Heavenly Father does either. Therefore I cannot stand idle whilst the poor child suffers.’

And so Egfrith was to take some of the silver, go to the monastery of Aix-la-Chapelle and there buy from the cellarer two large, cowled habits and then meet Penda and myself at nightfall by the boundary ditch between the forest and the city.

‘I’ll pay the cellarer well enough to see he will not ask questions,’ Egfrith said confidently. Then he looked at Penda and me dubiously. ‘So long as you keep your mouths shut and your cowls up, we should be able to enter the convent and steal young Cynethryth away.’

‘We can do that, monk,’ I said, glancing at Penda, who smiled mischievously. ‘Just get us in and we will do the rest.’

‘You’ll be poking a wasps’ nest with a big stick,’ Olaf warned, cuffing a trickle of mead from his beard. The sun was rising fast, shining through the misty eastern woods so that the lichened ash trunks seemed on fire. Pigeons cooed softly, their patient song clashing with the noisy trilling of robins, wrens and chaffinches. ‘The Franks will spit teeth when they find out,’ Uncle added, ‘and that spindling bishop would have fought us last time if that old goat Alcuin had not been there to keep the Franks’ swords in their scabbards.’

‘Uncle is right, Raven,’ Sigurd said, ‘so you must be quick.
We will be at our benches and have the ships ready to leave. But if they catch you in the city you will be on your own.’

‘I understand,’ I said. Penda nodded agreement.

‘Let me take some men and go with them,’ Svein the Red asked, his broad forehead wrinkled with worry. ‘We can wait for Raven in the trees, but at least we can be close in case there is a fight.’

‘We only have six decent horses, Svein, and none of them would move faster than an ox with you on its back.’ Svein harrumphed sulkily.

‘I will go,’ Black Floki offered, his mouth grim-set. ‘Halldor too.’ Halldor was Floki’s cousin. A man obsessed with his weapons, Halldor had given them all names and you could be sure that his blades were the sharpest of any in the Wolfpack. He nodded simply at his cousin’s suggestion and Floki held Sigurd’s eye. ‘We will wait for them as Svein said, out of sight amongst the trees. But our spears will be ready in case the Franks come after them.’

‘If we can we will spirit the girl away without the nuns knowing anything about it,’ Egfrith said hopefully. Sigurd nodded, but his eyes betrayed doubt.

‘Thank you, Floki,’ I said, ‘and you, Halldor. Light a torch so that we can find you when we have Cynethryth. But do not leave the trees. If we are caught it is our concern. I don’t want the Franks seeing Sigurd’s hand in it.’

Floki scowled. ‘Just try not to bring a herd of the blue cloaks with you,’ he said.

The five of us set off on horseback. At dusk we came to the edge of the forest from where we could see Aix-la-Chapelle and there we waited below a rookery suspended high up in a stand of ash and watched Father Egfrith ride on, his horse flicking its tail at the clouds of flies that followed.

When the monk returned he was puffed up and his weasel
face glowed with pride, though I could not blame him, for he had managed to get hold of two new habits of brown wool.

‘Well done, Father,’ Penda said with a grin as he disappeared into the scratchy garb, his spiky head soon emerging so that with his scarred face he did not look like any monk you have ever seen.

Black Floki spat disapprovingly, but Halldor laughed. ‘You two make good Christ slaves,’ he said, plucking the wool at our shoulders where the habits were far too tight. ‘The Christ brides will bolt their door on the inside and make you poke the cobwebs from their cunnies until Ragnarök.’

‘If there is a good-looking one amongst them I might,’ Penda said, earning a scolding look from Egfrith.

‘
Cucullus non facit monachum
,’ Egfrith muttered, cocking an eyebrow. ‘The hood does not make the monk.’

We left our mail behind because the habits were tight as it was and because the iron rings might be heard rattling beneath, but we wore our swords and long knives and hoped that their hilts would not be visible against the wool. Then, because we were humble monks, we left our horses with Floki and Halldor and set off on foot, passing the old boundary ditch and gazing up at the city walls which loomed before us, reflecting the last of the sun. Even from a distance as we walked amongst the clutters of smoke-wreathed dwellings, I could hear the birds in the rookery far behind, their parched, leathery rasping sounding like a tavern full of drunken men.

‘It doesn’t get any less impressive, does it?’ Penda said, the tilt of his cowl betraying the focus of his unseen eyes. The city wall dominated the landscape, its stone construction mocking the timber-built houses without, mocking even us men who were, after all, mere flesh and mortal. For they would stand long after our names had dissolved like smoke in a gale. Like Bjorn’s rune stone, I thought.

‘It is a monument to civilization in a barbarous world,
Penda,’ Egfrith said, casting a blessing at a woman who was milking a goat by the path. The woman dipped her head gratefully.

‘This civilization you speak of beats young women who have done no wrong, monk,’ I growled, touching the All-Father amulet at my neck. Egfrith wanted to say that Cynethryth had been wrong to kill Ealdred, but he thought better of it and held his tongue.

The imperial guards manning the gate did not ask questions this time, for they were used to monks and their vows of silence, but one of them did pull his head back and look Penda and me up and down. I wondered if I could get to my sword before they ran me through with their spears. I doubted it. But then Egfrith took out his small wooden cross and touched it to the guard’s forehead and spouted a stream of Latin, which turned the man’s suspicion to confusion. He nodded stiffly to Egfrith and waved us on, muttering under his breath to the other man, who seemed amused and relieved to have escaped the monk’s attention.

‘Benedictine brothers do not tend to have shoulders that could take a yoke,’ Egfrith muttered once we were inside the walls. I could see his point. The rowing and the training had made me as broad as the other Norsemen, broader even than some of them, and I wondered if my real father, whoever he had been, had had big shoulders and strong arms from ploughing the whale road. And though I felt horribly conspicuous in a Christ slave’s habit, it seemed that to the folk of Aix-la-Chapelle I was invisible. The merchants and the children and the whores let us alone so that we walked the gangplanks above the mud, following the wall westward and avoiding the seething heart of the city. Hearth smoke stung my eyes. Delicious smells made my mouth water one moment, only for some foul stench to bring a lump to my throat the next, and I was glad of the cowl because it felt like a refuge from the chaos around us,
giving my thoughts room to breathe. And my thoughts were of Cynethryth.

The city was in shadow when we came to the Convent of Saint Godeberta. The pasture beyond the western wall would still be flush with twilight, but the city walls defied the setting sun so that imperial soldiers were going round lighting fires in braziers atop iron poles. These flames gave instant life to stuttering shadows and attracted moths by the hundred, whilst cockroaches and rats scurried for the darkness beneath the bulwarks.

The convent had walls of its own, though the whitewashed stone was crumbling in places and it could be climbed easily enough as a last resort, though I did not relish that prospect. There were too many guards walking the streets and we would not last long in monks’ habits instead of brynjas.

‘Remember,’ Egfrith warned after thumping three times on the gate, ‘keep your mouths shut and your heads down.’ After a while Egfrith thumped again, harder this time, and soon there was a commotion from inside, followed by the drawing of a bolt. A face appeared at a shutter, the eyes suspicious if not angry, followed by a stinging rattle of Frankish, which I could not make head or tail of. Calmly, Egfrith replied in Latin and the eyes widened. ‘You are the English monk,’ the nun accused. Then she giggled and I was surprised to hear that sound from a Christ bride. ‘You are the one who tried to baptize the heathen jarl and nearly drowned,’ she said, her English so good she might have come from Wessex.

‘I did not nearly drown,’ Egfrith insisted irritably. ‘I assure you, sister, I swim like a fish. Now are you going to let me in?’

Within the dark space of her wimple the nun’s eyes narrowed again. ‘What business have you here with the sisters at this late hour? It is compline, Father Egfrith, the sisters are at prayer.’

‘I am well aware of the hour, sister, but I have been sent by Bishop Borgon, who believes I may be of some help to the Reverend Mother.’

‘Help?’ the nun said suspiciously. ‘Help with what?’

‘I really do not see it as any business of yours, sister, but since you seem to share a pig’s bent for rooting around I will indulge you with this acorn. The girl Cynethryth. I am told she is not . . . cooperative.’

The nun frowned. ‘That one’s lost as a coin dropped in a tavern,’ she said. ‘Abbess Berta says she has spent so long with the heathens that the good Father has turned His back on her. She struck the abbess.’ Her eyes betrayed a hint of amusement at that. ‘Can you imagine that, Father? But the sisters made her pay for it.’ I was about to break down the door when I felt Penda’s hand grip my arm.

‘And yet despite the sisters’ efforts I hear the girl is still full of wickedness,’ Egfrith said, shaking his head sadly.

‘We pray for her soul, Father Egfrith,’ the nun said.

Egfrith wagged a finger before her eyes. ‘
Facta, non verba
,’ he said. ‘Sometimes what is needed is actions, not words, my dear child.’ He swept a little arm back. ‘I have brought brothers Leofmar and Gytha who, as you can see, possess the strength to challenge Satan for the poor girl’s soul. Bishop Borgon believes they will be more . . .’ he paused, ‘persuasive than the good sisters, who are after all but sweet and gentle creatures. Now, please let us in so that we may begin our work.’

The nun peered at Penda and me through the slit as a trickle of sweat ran down my back. Then she unbolted the gate, which creaked with complaint to be opened at such a late hour. We walked into a courtyard of grass upon which shadows danced, born of flaming torches that seethed quietly. Round the edge of the grass ran a covered walkway of polished oak in which faces and crosses had been carved with great skill. Somewhere the nuns were praying, their voices deadened by stone walls,
and I fixed the sound to a small church on the east side of the courtyard. Other buildings of varying sizes surrounded the grass, some of wood but most of stone, which the nun who had let us in took pleasure in naming as we passed each one: the kitchen, the buttery, the refectory, the library, the chapter house, barns, bakeries and store houses. There was a peacefulness about the place that weighed heavily on me, making my chest tight as a full mead skin. I could feel the White Christ breathing down the neck of that coarse monk’s robe.