The Bone Thief (9 page)

Wulfgar nodded, thoughtful. In some ways, then, they weren’t so different, he and Ednoth.

Jolt,
jolt
. Jolt,
jolt
. Jolt,
jolt
. At every lurch, Wulfgar felt the thud of his bones against the wooden frame of his saddle. The layers of woollen padding might as well not have been there. He wasn’t looking forward to a week in this saddle. The least St Oswald could do in return was to be waiting for them at the end of the road. St Oswald … His thoughts were questing this way and that, hounds on the scent, trying to remember everything he had ever learned about the saint.

‘What are you singing?’ Ednoth asked.

Wulfgar was startled back into the moment.

‘Singing? I wasn’t singing, was I? What have I got to sing about?’

‘You were. Humming, if you like. Under your breath.’

‘Was I?’ Wulfgar had to stop and think. ‘Oh! Oh …’

‘What?’

‘It was that song about St Oswald’s niece,’ he said slowly. ‘She finds his body on the battlefield and reburies it at Bardney. You must know it.’

But Ednoth shook his head.

‘If I do, I’ve forgotten it. What happens next?’

Wulfgar swallowed.

‘She’s that Queen of the Mercians who …’

‘Who what?’

‘Who’s murdered by her own thanes, when – after her husband dies.’

After that, they rode in silence.

Wulfgar had been trying to ward off his darker fears by keeping pace with the Maundy Thursday liturgy in his head, measuring the time by the angles of sun and shadow. The chrism mass at the cathedral should be over by now, and the Bishop would be washing the feet of the twelve paupers. They’d be celebrating the institution of the Eucharist now, and now they would be ringing the bells for the last time until Sunday. He rubbed the top of his head absently, feeling for the palm-sized shaven circle that should be newly there, and wasn’t. He was just imagining the sombre ritual of veiling the crosses, snuffing all the lamps and stripping the altars, preparatory to the great and mournful solemnities of Good Friday when Ednoth broke into his reverie.

‘Do you want to hear a riddle?’

He jumped violently.

‘What did you say?’

‘You’ll never guess.’ Ednoth grinned. ‘I’m long and hard and hairy at one end, and I make maidens weep – who am I?’

Wulfgar remembered this sort of thing all too well from his schooldays.

‘An onion?’ he hazarded, with ill-concealed distaste.

‘What? No …’ Ednoth made a suggestive gesture. ‘Oh, Wulfgar, you’re such an innocent.’

Wulfgar sighed. That was the worst thing about those riddles,
he
remembered belatedly. You couldn’t win. If he had given the obvious, shameless answer, Ednoth would only have hooted with laughter and accused him of having a filthy mind. It’s the sort of joke my father used to love, he thought. God rest his soul.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Good Friday

THEY SPENT THE
night in a verminous inn at the little hamlet of Stratford, which did little to cheer Wulfgar. He woke at his usual early hour in a small hall, pitch-dark and full of snoring, farting strangers, aching in every muscle and with new flea bites in a band across his ribs from the musty straw. No one else was stirring. He huddled himself into his cloak to contemplate the banked embers of the hearth and pass the time till dawn by saying the prayers and psalms appropriate to
Tenebrae
, the heart-breaking service of the shadows, dedicated to darkness and loss. And then he had perforce to watch Ednoth break his fast with roasted eggs and fresh wheaten bread.

‘Have some,’ the ale-wife said cheerily, offering him the treen platter.

‘I’m fasting.’

‘But you’re a traveller, like everyone else,’ Ednoth joined in, gesturing round the hall. ‘Surely you don’t have to fast?’

He could see the steam rising from the bread as Ednoth broke
the
crust apart with his fingers. The moist, white interior smelled deliciously yeasty.

Tight-lipped, Wulfgar said, ‘But it’s Good Friday.’

‘And I’m excommunicated, so I’m doubly exempt.’ Ednoth grinned and reached for another small loaf from the heaped platter.

Wulfgar got up and walked out of the inn. Penance, he thought furiously. Penance and fasting and alms-giving. That’s what excommunication means. It’s not a charter of liberties.

Even another bright day couldn’t cure his bad temper. Getting back into the saddle had been agony on his already aching limbs. I should be at home in the cathedral, he thought bitterly. Holding up the cross for the people to venerate.
The royal banners forward go
, he chanted under his breath,
The cross shines forth in mystic glow
…

Ednoth had been riding a length or two ahead. Now Wulfgar saw him stiffen. The road dipped here to cross a small stream, and he was reining Starlight in to peer down at the mud of the churned-up track-way.

‘What is it?’

Ednoth didn’t answer. He had jumped down from the saddle and now he squinted at the soil.

‘There’s been a large party of horsemen along this way. They joined the road a hundred yards back or so. Not long ago, either.’

‘Well, we’re drawing close to the Fosse Way,’ Wulfgar said, not understanding Ednoth’s concern. ‘We can expect to meet farmers, and merchants.’

Ednoth snorted.

‘
Wulfgar
. Look at the hoof prints.’

Wulfgar slid gingerly out of his saddle. The mess of half-moons meant nothing to him.

‘So?’

‘Look at the size! And do you see the depth to them? We’re not talking pack-ponies here, or farm nags like these beasts we’re riding. Those were good horses – really good horses. More than a dozen. Ridden hard, too. Look how they’ve thrown the mud up.’ He gestured with his free hand.

‘Are you sure?’

Ednoth gave him a long-suffering look.

‘Yes, I’m sure. I wonder who they might be. It looks like they’ve come up from the south. Wessex, maybe?’

‘Do we want to stay on this track, then?’

‘Do we have a choice?’

‘I just thought we might be better …’ Wulfgar tailed off, unwilling to give his fears a name.

Ednoth yelped with laughter.

‘But that’s why I’m here! I’ll look after you.’

Wulfgar shied away from his pitying look.

‘Wulfgar really isn’t a very good name for you, is it? You’re more like a mouse, really. I think I’ll call you Wulfgar
Mouse
.’ He snorted at his own wit. ‘
Mousegar
.’

‘You will not call me Mousegar.’

‘Give me a reason not to, then.’

Their grassy track joined the Fosse Way soon after that. The famous high-road stretched ahead, straight and true, as far as the eye could see, a hundred feet across. It led them due north east, all the way to its terminus at Lincoln, the lines of old square stones still breaking the soil in places.

Wulfgar found his mind running after the ancient Mercian estate records he had been archiving all Lent, trying to transpose their dry-as-dust legal phrases onto the lush April landscape
unfolding
around him. When those tattered leaves of vellum had been issued by long-dead kings of Mercia, the Fosse Way on which they were now riding and Watling Street had formed a great saltire cross, carrying Mercia’s lifeblood in the form of merchants and warbands and missionaries. Mercia, the Middle Kingdom, had reached east to the Humber, the Wash, the Thames.

But now only the south-western reaches of the Fosse Way belonged to Mercia, and every frontier was menaced.

Watling Street was the frontier with the Danes.

Wessex was laying claim to both Oxford and London.

The border with Wales was endlessly disputed.

Chester and Bristol were the only surviving Mercian ports, and even they were being slowly strangled by the Danish pirates in the Irish Sea.

For all the spring sunshine around him, Wulfgar found his mind’s eye overtaken by darkness. Foes on all fronts, and the Lord on his deathbed. Soon, perhaps, the light of the ancient kingdom of Mercia would be extinguished altogether.

Not if he could help it.

Not if St Oswald came back in triumph to Mercia. Not if the Lady’s new church in Gloucester became a great node of pilgrimage. Not if the shield-wall of Mercia could march into battle with St Oswald’s reliquary in the vanguard. He squared his shoulders, tightened his abdominal muscles, and sat taller in the saddle.

‘
Oof
!’

‘What?’

‘Cramp! It’s my thighs –
ow
– Ednoth, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to walk for a bit.’

He bit his lip, clutching his reins in one hand as he frantically massaged the muscles of his left thigh with the other.

‘Could you help me down?’

Ednoth looked at him with what Wulfgar read as contempt but, saying nothing, he swung himself easily to the ground and came to lend him his arm.

Wulfgar bent over for a moment, waiting for the deep muscular torment to subside.

He took a deep breath.

‘All right.’

They walked side by side for a while, Ednoth leading both horses, with Wulfgar, suffering in pride as much as in body, flinching at every step and trying to keep to the soft turf rather than the unforgiving stone.

The Fosse Way is proving my
via dolorosa
, he thought. My
via crucis
. A feeble imitation of the real blood-stained path to Calvary and the Cross, to be sure, but it felt right to be on this penitential journey, to be fasting and in pain, this day of all days. He plodded on, trying not to let Ednoth see him wince.

The great road was busy. When his cramp had eased enough for Wulfgar to look around he realised that the traffic had a festive air to it which left him baffled: enormous flocks of sheep herded by cheerful shepherds; plodding ox-carts laden with chattering folk; the odd smiling horseman; bands of barefoot girls with wreaths of blackthorn and violets in their hair, carrying beribboned lambs – and all heading in the same north-easterly direction that he and Ednoth were going. Eventually, indignation tempered with curiosity got the better of him, and he hailed one of the passers-by, a stout, friendly-looking woman clinging onto the side of a crowded cart.

She stared down at him, gape-mouthed.

‘Don’t you know? St Modwenna? At Offchurch? It’s her feast today.’

Shock rendered Wulfgar speechless.

‘Are you coming?’ she went on blithely. ‘Everybody’s welcome.’

He found his voice at last.

‘But it’s Good Friday!’

‘Aye, to be sure, and the priests will keep that. But we can’t slight our St Modwenna, just because another holy day falls along with hers.’ She stared at him as though he were simple. ‘She hallows the flocks.’ She shook her head now. ‘It’s the great day for us, young man. Where do you come from, that you don’t honour St Modwenna?’

‘But, but—’ But
nothing
was more important than Good Friday. All other feasts were shunted ahead a few days in the kalendar, or abandoned altogether, if they fell foul of Easter. Nothing but
nothing
outranked Easter.

Especially not some petty little saint of whom he had never even heard.

Was this what the Bishop had meant, when he had said the upland minsters needed sorting out? Wulfgar hadn’t understood at the time. Now he was beginning to. In his bafflement and unhappiness, it was a moment before he realised Ednoth was talking to him.

‘Oh, Wulfgar, you must know about St Modwenna’s milk. My sisters will all be drinking milk tonight and dreaming of the men they’re going to marry.’

‘That’s it,’ the woman in the ox-cart called over the rumbling of the solid wheels. ‘The lads, too, up this way. Nice, warm dreams.’ She gave Ednoth a complicit smile.

Ednoth reached over and prodded his ribs.

‘Come on, Wulfgar! Don’t look so furtive. Who’s the girl you’re dreaming about?’

Wulfgar looked fixedly at the road and tightened his grip on Fallow’s reins.

‘I don’t know any girls. Of course I don’t. I’m going to be a priest.’

‘But priests have women,’ Ednoth said. ‘Our chaplain at Sodbury has got seven children.’

‘Exactly,’ Wulfgar said, cheeks burning. ‘Village priests. Not bishops.’

‘And you’re going to be a bishop?’ Ednoth sounded incredulous. ‘What would you want to do that for?’

It was true, though, Wulfgar thought defensively. All his life, he had been told he was destined for the highest ranks of the Church. And senior clerics were married to their minsters, his uncle, the canon of Winchester, had always told him. His elder brother Wystan had been destined for the land, and the wife and the son. You can do better than that, Wuffa, his uncle used to say. And Wulfgar would look at his father, his libidinous, foul-mouthed father, and thank the Queen of Heaven he didn’t have to grow up to be like that. Two wives, and a field-slave for a mistress, and Wulfgar was sure there had been other little by-blows running around in the slaves’ quarters, even though Garmund was the only one their father had ever acknowledged.