Conqueror

VII

Gudrid walked around the village, looking for the slave from Lindisfarena.

Most of the houses, set back from the fjord's shallow beach, were places of work: smithies, byres, barns. Stockades for the animals straggled up the hillside, as high as the grass could grow. But the big hall, thirty paces long and solidly constructed of squared and polished wood, was the centre of the community. Around its long hearth the endless winter evenings were passed in drink and talk, in play with the children, and in craft – sharpening blades, repairing clothes. The villagers were also proud of a small wooden building with stone-lined drains running under its walls. Here water was flung on burning logs to be turned to steam. Even in midwinter it got hot enough in there to make you sweat, and by day and night half-naked inhabitants crowded on its benches.

Did the monks of Lindisfarena have a hall, or a sauna? What were the trees like on Lindisfarena, what was the local stone? She knew nothing of the island, or of Britain. She didn't even know what a monk was for. She burned with curiosity.

The slave had been put to work feeding the pigs. He had pails of bad meat and rotting vegetables which he was stirring with a long ladle. On his face was an expression of bored disgust.

His name, she had learned, was Rhodri. He was small, black-haired, round-shouldered. He was seventeen or eighteen, a few years younger than herself. His features were regular, his jaw strong, his ears a little over-large. He might have been good-looking, she mused, in a brooding British way, if not for a sullen downturn to his full mouth.

Rhodri became aware of Gudrid looking at him. He stopped work, leaned on his long ladle and stared back at her. His gaze, if sullen, was frank, almost defiant – and he stared speculatively at her body. She was faintly shocked; no slave had ever dared look at her that way before.

She snapped, 'You'll not get those pigs fed at that rate… Do you understand me?'

'Yes,' he said, his voice heavily accented. 'You Germans have different tongues, but you all sound alike to me.'

'We aren't German. We are Norse. Or Viking. After our word Vik, which means "inlet". We are the people of the fjords.'

'Good for you.' He yawned. 'Anyway I picked up a bit of your tongue on the boat.'

'My father's boat.'

He raised his eyebrows. 'You're Bjarni's daughter? Which one – Gudrid, was it? He mentioned you.'

'You aren't telling me he talked to the likes of you.'

'It's a small boat. And I have big ears, even if I am just a slave.'

She was growing angry at his easy insolence. 'It's a shame he didn't teach you how to work.'

'I am working,' Rhodri interrupted, his voice now querulous. 'Can't you see?' He rubbed his belly. 'My gut's still a knot from that boat. By Jesus's wounds I puked myself half up.'

She snorted. 'You'll recover.'

He glanced at her, calculating now. 'You're the reason he went to Lindisfarena in the first place. You've got some kind of interest in it.' Rhodri smirked. 'A woman, interested in things. Your husband said it's a shame your womb isn't as fertile as your mind.'

She clenched down on her anger, at her father and husband for talking about her this way in front of a slave, at the slave himself for repeating it. 'You watch your mouth,' she snapped. 'I want to know about Lindisfarena. Tell me about it.'

He considered. 'What's it worth?'

She was astonished. 'Do you think I'm going to bargain with a slave? It's worth not having the skin flogged off your back!'

'All right, all right. What do you want to know?'

'How did you come to be there? Were you always a slave?'

'No,' he said, absurdly indignant at the charge. 'I was born free, in Gwynedd. That's a British kingdom. I am the son of a noble. I am a Christian, and I was taught to read. I was taken prisoner when a German army came invading.'

'Was your army defeated?'

'I don't know.' He poked languidly at the pig swill. 'They probably fought better without me. Maybe that's why they wouldn't pay the ransom for me.'

He was taken by a Mercian thegn, a companion of King Offa. But he was always an unsatisfactory slave, judging by an aggrieved list of beatings and other punishments. After a complicated series of sellings-on he found himself on the east coast of Britain, and was shipped to Lindisfarena, where he worked for the villagers. 'Cockle-pickers,' Rhodri moaned. 'By God's wounds I hate cockle-pickers. And cockles.'

'Were you as lazy cockle-picking as you are pig-feeding?'

'I was,' he said with a dash of honesty. 'I hung back one day to avoid carrying the baskets and almost got drowned by the tide. After that, I tried to be lazy somewhere safe. And then, when they found out I could read, the monks took me in. They bought me off the head cockle-picker. He took a reduced price.'

'Do monks have slaves?'

'Oh, no. They freed me. They took me in as a novice.'

It was a word she didn't recognise. 'Why would they do that?'

'I told you. I am Christian, and I can read. Even if I'm not the breed of Christian they are. They were training me to become one of them.' He grinned. 'Easiest place I've lived since I left my mother's womb.'

'So how did you end up here with the pigs?'

He sighed, mock-lamenting. 'I think you know me by now, lady. The routine of a monastery isn't hard, but it's dull, dull, dull. I skipped what I could and got others to do the rest. But in the end the abbot found me out and ordered me returned to the cockle-pickers. Even Dom Wilfrid couldn't save me.'

Dom Wilfrid, it seemed, was the monk in charge of the novices.

'This Wilfrid must have seen your vices more clearly than anybody else. Why would he protect you at all?'

'Ah, because poor, weak Wilfrid had a vice of his own. Much as he gave his wisdom to the novices, there was something he liked to get back from them. Up his bum, actually.'

She was disgusted.

He shrugged. 'It was better than cockle-picking.' Once again he looked at her, lascivious. 'Maybe I could earn a few favours from you, lady. I was one of Wilfrid's favourites. It's not just my ears that are big about me, you know.'

Anger filled her, blood-red. 'Give me one good reason I shouldn't split open your grinning face right now.'

'Because you need me to get to what you really want, which is Lindisfarena.'

She was appalled. She had never met anybody, let alone a slave, who was so manipulative. But of course he was right.

She didn't know how to phrase the question. 'Did you ever hear anything of a Menologium? Of a prophecy, a legend of Ulf and Sulpicia?'

He looked calculating again. 'Your father said something about this on the boat…'

She told him of the legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer. Ulf, strong and smart, had died old, fat, wealthy, and the owner of many cattle and slaves. But over the hearth he always told stories of his time in Britain, the beautiful Sulpicia, and the remarkable prophecy he had glimpsed and lost.

And Gudrid told Rhodri how she had spoken to traders returning across the sail road from Britain and its many islands – and, from tantalising hints, how she had worked out that the prophecy, transcribed by monks, may have been stored in the monastery on Lindisfarena.

Rhodri listened to all this. 'Well, it makes sense that your prophecy would be copied down at Lindisfarena, if anywhere. Always writing, those monks, scribbling things down and copying them and making more copies again. It's a hive of letters, of ink and vellum and the scratch, scratch of styluses.'

She was mystified. 'Why do they do this?'

'What, the copying? I don't know. But it's an easier job than tilling the fields, a safer one than going to war. That's why the monasteries of Britain are stuffed full of cowering princes.' Now he smiled. 'But that's not all they're stuffed with.'

'What do you mean?'

'You need a reason to persuade your father to go there on one of these raids he's planning, don't you? I picked up that much on the boat. I think I know just the thing.'

'What?'

His smile broadened. He was enjoying his petty bit of power over her. 'Gold,' he said.

She gazed at him. 'If there's gold there, why didn't you tell my father?'

'He never asked. And besides,' he tapped his head, 'my only wealth is my bit of knowledge. Why give it away?'

She stood up. 'I need to talk to my father.'

'Come back soon, lady. Maybe if I tup you I could lodge a baby in that dry womb of yours. Your husband would never know!…'

She dared not reply. She turned her back and walked away.