Sworn Brother (17 page)

‘I thought they were going to throw the bones at the disgraced huscarl,’ I muttered to Gisli’s cup-bearer.

‘He’s in luck tonight,’ he answered. ‘Instead they’re celebrating the day that one of the Saxon high priests, an archbishop, I think his name was Alfheah, got himself killed. A man named Thyrmr did it, smacked the archbishop on the back of his head with the flat of his battleaxe at the end of a particularly boisterous feast after everyone had pelted the priest with ox bones.’

This drunken boasting was infantile and pointless, I thought to myself as I watched the stumbling drunkards. It was the response of men who felt outmanouevred by their rivals. This hollow mummery was not the way to protect the future veneration of the Old Gods.

I grew more and more depressed as the evening degenerated into brutishness. The only moment I raised a smile was when the company began to chant a lewd little ditty about Queen Emma and her priestly entourage. The words were clever and I found myself joining in the refrain, ‘Bakrauf! Bakrauf!’ I realised I was thick tongued and slurring my words, even though I had been trying to stay sober. So when Kjartan slumped from his seat, completely drunk, I beckoned to Gisli’s cup-bearer to help me, and together we carried the one-armed huscarl back to his barracks bed. Then I started out on the long walk back through London to reach my own room, hoping that the chilly winter air and the exercise would clear my head.

I scratched quietly at the heavy door of the mint. It was long past the time that Thurulf and I normally returned from tavern, but I had bribed the door keeper, who was by now quite accustomed to my drinking excursions. He must have been waiting by the door, for he opened it almost at once, and I went in, walking as quietly and as straight as my drunkenness would allow. I was just sober enough to realise that it would be foolish to use the stairs to the upper floor that went past Brithmaer’s chambers. A creaking floorboard or falling up the stairs would attract attention. I decided to go to my room by the far stair, which led directly from the workshop floor to the balcony. I removed my smart yellow shoes, and holding them in my hand, walked quietly along the length of the workshop, trying to keep in a straight line. In a pool of lantern light at the far end of the workshop, the two elderly men were still at the coining bench. I could see them bent over, tapping out the little coins. Neither of them was aware of my approach — one because eye disease had damaged his sight, the other because he was concentrating hard on his work and, being deaf, would not have heard me even if I had not been barefoot. I was more drunk than I thought and I swayed and swerved in my walk enough to brush against the deaf man. It gave him such a shock that he started upright and fumbled his work. The striking iron dropped to the floor, as he turned to see what was behind him. In tipsy embarrassment I put my finger to my lips, entreating silence. Then, concentrating ferociously as only a drunkard can, I managed to bend over without tumbling headlong, picked up his striking iron from the ground, and returned it to him. A glint of silver caught my eye. It was the coin he had just struck. It too had fallen to the floor. Risking another attack of sot’s vertigo, I picked up the coin and put it in his hands. Then with an exaggerated salute, I turned and wove my way to the staircase, then climbed it hand over hand like a novice sailor, and eventually toppled into my manger bed.

I awoke next morning with a vile headache and the taste of stale mead in my mouth. As I was bent over a bucket of well water, trying to wash my bleary eyes, my position bent over the bucket reminded me of something that had puzzled me. I recalled something strange when I leaned down and picked up the old man’s striking iron and the dropped coin. I could not remember exactly what it was. Then I remembered: as I placed the coin into the workman’s palm, a gleam of lantern light had fallen across it. The freshly minted coin was a silver penny. But the face I saw stamped on the coin was not Knut’s familiar image, but someone else’s.

Or was I too drunk to know the difference? The mystery nagged at me all morning until I realised that I could check. The striking irons used at night were kept for safe keeping in the jewellery workshop, and so mid-morning I reminded Brithmaer that the crystal necklace should be repaired by now and asked if I might visit the workshop to examine it.

Thurulf opened the door to the strongroom and wandered off, leaving me on my own. A few moments was all the time I needed to locate the striking irons that the two night workers used. They were tucked away out of sight under the workbench, wrapped in a leather cloth. There was also a lump of old wax, tossed aside when the engraver had made moulds for repairing jewellery. I nipped off two little pellets of wax and pressed them between the faces of the striking irons and their counterparts, then replaced the nightworkers’ tools. When Thurulf returned, I was admiring the rock crystals in their new settings.

I was so eager to examine the wax impressions that I had scarcely gone a hundred paces on my way back to the exchange when I shook them out from my sleeve. Even the simplest pedlar would have recognised the patterns pressed on them. There was no mystery: they could be found in half the markets in the land, and they lay in the mint’s storerooms by the thousand - the king’s head on the striking irons was that of King Ethelred the Ill-Advised, dead these four years past. On their reverse, one wax impression bore the mark of a moneyer in Derby and the other a moneyer in Winchester. I was intrigued. Why would Brithmaer secretly be making coins that were out of date? Why would he want coins that were already valueless and should be melted down, and that at a discount?

There seemed no logic to it, and in the tavern that evening I casually asked Thurulf if he had heard of a moneyer in Derby by the name of Guner. He told that the name was vaguely familiar, but he thought that the man was long since dead.

I drank little, telling Thurulf that I was still queasy from the huscarls’ gemot. In fact I wanted to look my best the following morning for that was when I had arranged with Aelfgifu’s chamberlain that I would return with a selection of jewellery for her inspection.

Aelfgifu was in a mischievous mood. Her eyes sparkled when - at last — she managed to dismiss her attendants, telling them that she would try on the jewels in private. It seemed a feeble excuse to me, but she carried it off, and moments later we were in the private bedchamber where she had first taught me how to love.

‘Let me look at you!’ she gloated, making me stand back so she could admire the effect of my new tunic. ‘Yellow and brown and black. The colours really suit you — you look good enough to eat. Come, let me taste you.’ And she walked across and threw her arms around me.

Feeling the softeness of her breasts, I was flooded by my own craving. Our mouths met, and I realised that if my longing had been acute, hers was also. Previously in that room our love had been tender and forbearing, with Aelfgifu leading my novice hesitancy. Now we both plunged into the certainty of our passion, greedy for one another, tumbling together on the bed. Within moments we were naked and making love with desperate urgency until the first wave of passion had spent itself. Only then did Aelfgifu disengage herself and, as always, run her finger down my profile. ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’ she asked teasingly.

I rolled over to the side of the bed and reached down to pick up the bag of jewellery, and tipped it out on the sheet. As I had hoped, she pounced immediately on the crystal and amber necklace.

‘It’s beautiful’ she exclaimed. ‘Here help me put it on,’ and she turned so that I could fasten the clasp at the nape of her neck. When she turned back again to face me, her eyes shining to match the crystals, I could have imagined no better place for the gems that I had stolen. Now they lay supported on the sweet curves of her breasts. What would the Irish monks have thought? I wondered.

Somehow Aelfgifu had arranged that we could be alone together for several hours, and in that time we were unrestrained. We made love light-heartedly and often. We delighted in one another’s bodies. Aelfgifu was provocative in her response when I covered her with jewellery — the necklace, of course, but also bracelets on her ankles and wrists, a pendant as a belt, and two magnificently gaudy brooches to cup her breasts, all at once.

When we had laughed and loved one another to exhaustion and were lying side by side, I told her about the fire ruby hidden in the amulet of lead — she had lifted it from my neck after the first encounter, saying the lump would give her bruises. She listened to my story and before I had finished, had guessed my intention. ‘Thorgils,’ she said gently, ‘I don’t want to have that stone. You are not to give it to me. I have a feeling that stone should remain with you. It has your spirit. Somewhere inside you flickers that same light, which needs someone to make it glow,’ and gently she leaned over and began to lick my chest.

Great
happiness;
great
danger — another of Edgar’s proverbs. Only two days after my impassioned visit to Aelfgifu, I was shaken awake by Brithmaer’s door keeper. A palace messenger was waiting for me in the street, he grunted, on an urgent matter. Groggy with sleep since it was not yet dawn, I dressed in my tunic, elated that this summons to the queen’s apartments had come so soon after our last tryst.

But when I opened the door to the street, I did not recognise the messenger standing there in the half-dark. He was sombrely dressed and looked more like a minor clerk than a royal servant.

‘Your name is Thorgils?’ he enquired.

‘Yes,’ I replied, puzzled. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Come with me, please,’ the man said. ‘You have a meeting with Archbishop Wulfstan.’

A chill came over me. Archbishop Wulfstan, co-regent of England, was no friend to followers of the Old Ways, and by reputation was the cleverest man in the kingdom. For an instant I wondered what business he had with someone as insignificant as myself. Then a hard knot formed in my stomch. The only person who connected me with matters of state was Aelfgifu.

The messenger led me to the royal chancery, a melancholy building at the rear of the palace where I was shown to an empty

waiting room. It was still only an hour after daybreak when I was ushered into the archbishop’s council chamber, yet the king’s chief minister was already deep in his work. Flanked by two priests as his secretaries, Wulfstan was seated at a table listening to some notes being read to him in Latin. He looked up as I entered, and I saw that he must have been well past his sixtieth year. He had a seamless face, scrubbed and pink, a few wisps of white hair remained on his scalp and his hands, which were folded on the table, were soft and white. His serene demeanour and the benign smile he directed towards me as I entered gave him the appearance of a kindly grandfather. But that agreeable impression withered the moment he spoke. His voice was so quiet that I had to strain to hear him, yet it carried a menace far more frightening than if he had shouted aloud. Worse was his choice of words: ‘The fly that plays too long in the candle singes his wings at last.’ I felt as if I was about to faint.