Fenrir

34

As Jehan headed east, the rain was unceasing, turning the fields to mires and the trade tracks to swamps. The Seine was in flood, the current too strong to row against for long, even if the Vikings could have scouted out a decent boat. The stars were invisible under the cloud by night, so when they came to forks in the river they either guessed the way or waited for day and took direction from the sun. Jehan knew that the Vikings might be seen as raiders and told Fastarr to hide his splendid shield with its hammer motif and on the plainer shields chalked the sign of the cross. The berserkers agreed to this but would not cut their cloaks in the Frankish fashion. Ofaeti said he’d rather die of a spear than a frozen arse.

The Transversale to Lyon was a good old Roman road but fraught with danger. When they met travellers he told them the Norsemen were Christian converts, protecting him on a pilgrimage to Rome. The eleven proved their worth. Bandits lurked on the road, and about forty of them barred the way near Auxerre, too scared to attack but testing the northerners mettle. They found the mettle in good order and scattered when Ofaeti screamed for his men to charge. There were easier targets than a troop of well-armed and battle-bold northerners, and the thieves disappeared as quickly as they had come. But it was all Jehan could do to talk one group of merchants — a hundred or so strong — from attacking the Norsemen, so when they got to the Saone, which flowed in the right direction, they took the broad river south.

Huddled on a stolen river barge — hardly more than a glorified raft — wrapped in their cloaks and travelling by night when the moon allowed, the Norsemen were less conspicuous than they had been on the open highway. The abbeys they passed were poor and mean-looking and the Vikings took Jehan’s word that there were no great bargains to be made there. They didn’t even make use of the pilgrim hostelries the abbeys kept for travellers both religious and secular; they were too wary of the reception they might get. The human remains they carried with them were kept in a sack which was towed on an improvised raft of branches because of the smell. Jehan had to admire the Vikings’ woodworking skills. The little raft took them next to no time to make and even he — who had spent most of his life inside a monastery — could see it was better built than the one they had stolen from the riverbank.

The Vikings fed him nothing, but he wasn’t at all hungry. He drank from the river and felt he needed nothing more to sustain him. This was just part of God’s blessing, the same one that had cured him of his affliction, he was sure. The words of Romans 14: 17 came to him: For why the realm of God is not meat and drink but rightwiseness and joy in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit did really seem to be filling him. Sometimes the rain was so heavy it was almost painful, but he was not cold and he put back his head to drink it in, enjoy its taste and delight in the looseness and power of his limbs.

He had, he was sure, been blessed. The trials he had undergone, the tortures at the hands of the Raven and Saerda, had been a gateway of agony through which God had stepped. He had eaten of unclean meat, true, but even that did not seem so bad now. The taste of the blood haunted him but he did not find it unpleasant. That in itself, he thought, was a message from God telling him not to blame himself for what had been forced upon him and not to question what had happened to him. He had been freed from the bonds of his infirmity for a purpose. Every instinct he had told him to pray, to know God’s mind.

When Jehan prayed it was not as the weavers, butchers, candlemakers and reeves of Paris prayed — requests for help, a word of thanks, something like a silent conversation. Jehan had spent years with God as his main companion, a presence by his side in the dark of his cell, the guiding principle of his every thought. Prayer was indivisible from his life. In some ways his life was a prayer, every action, every mouthful of food enabling him to serve God. So he sat in the dark and the chill on the raft as the Vikings steered it on under the black sky, sinking down into himself, surrendering will, surrendering personality, to God.

‘Let me know your purpose, Lord.’ The movement of the raft lulled him, the cold seemed to leave him. He fell through a thicket of his own thoughts, jolting awake as he relived the shock of the moment when he realised strength and freedom had returned to his limbs. Infirmity and constraint had been so familiar to him that the sensation of free movement was very disconcerting.

As he prayed, the feeling of Saerda’s head in his hands came back to him, the quick snap with which he had broken the Viking’s neck repeating itself over and over in his mind. He remembered something else from that moment: a presence — yes, a presence, and not one he had ever felt before. There was a sort of signature note to the way it felt. He was tempted to say that it was evil, but it wasn’t quite that. No, this presence that watched him unseen did not have a moral nature at all. He tried to think of a word to sum up what he thought of it, ‘hungry’ seemed to fit best.

The movement of the raft seemed indistinguishable from the movement of his mind towards God. The words of Psalm 51 came into his head. He knew it well, the Miserere, and the memory of his brother monks singing its verses rose in his mind, a chant as rhythmic and restful as the lapping of water against a riverbank. The beauty of the Latin carried him away, though three lines came to him in plain Roman.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.

Deliver me from the guilt of blood, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

The guilt of blood, the guilt of blood. That taste was in his mouth now, the meat that had been forced through his lips. He could smell it too, coming from the little raft behind, blood and rot, putrefaction and something else. What was that smell? It was the body of Brother Abram, he could tell, but it wasn’t a smell he’d noticed in the streets of Paris or on the countless occasions when he had been brought to the sick, dying and dead. It was deeply disturbing. The odour, strong and deep, was almost pleasant. He was hungry, he realised, very hungry indeed, but curiously the idea of food repulsed him. Only the subtle flavours of decay that seeped from the little raft that bore the monk’s remains seemed appealing.

His mind wandered and the poetry he had heard in his agonies before came back to him.

Brother will fight brother and be his killer,

Axe age, sword age, shields are split asunder,

Wind age, wolf age, before the world plunges down.

No man shall spare another…

He forced his mind back to prayer. He needed to summon his powers of concentration, to hear nothing but the words in his head, but at the same time he had to surrender himself, to let go of ordinary thought and let God come to him. Why have I been chosen, Lord? What is it you want from me?

The budding trees beside the river stretched up their branches as if in supplication to the sky, as if they too were begging God for an answer.

There was a movement on the bank, something pale.

Jehan peered into the darkness. Someone was watching the boat, not twenty paces away. At first Jehan thought it was a child, but as the raft moved nearer he could see that it was a very strange figure indeed. It was a girl, he thought, or, rather, it was female. She was a pauper and all she had was a rough blanket of dirty wool pulled around her. Her face, though, was what really took his attention. It was not that of a child, but not quite that of an adult. It seemed to hover between youth and age, terribly drawn, pale and shrunken, with eyes that burned and hated. Jehan guessed she must be starving, though there was no need to starve so close to a river and easy fishing.

‘Do you see?’ said Jehan, gesturing to the figure.

‘What?’ said Fastarr.

‘The child, on the bank.’

‘I see nothing,’ said Fastarr. ‘Beware of tricks, monk. You’ll find we have a few of our own you might not like.’

Jehan could not believe the Viking couldn’t see her, but when he looked back, the child was gone. He returned to his prayers and tried to think no more about it. But that face kept coming back to his mind, the face of a child who had seen too much suffering for her years, a face that looked at him with an unswerving stare into which he could only read animosity.

The boat was coming to a bend in the river, where a broad but shallow beach bore a couple of huts. A big wooden cross marked the beginning of the road towards Mont Joux, and then on into Italy and Rome

‘Here, monk?’ It was Ofaeti, the fat one.

‘Here,’ said Jehan. ‘You will wait while I speak.’

‘It’s a bold slave who gives his masters orders,’ said Ofaeti.

The confessor looked hard at the big Viking. ‘You are in my country now,’ said the monk, ‘and everything you dream of, everything you are, depends on me. If you want to live you will do as I say.’

‘You gave your oath that you would serve us.’

‘And I am keeping it,’ said Jehan. ‘You need me now, do not let pride blind you to that. I serve you best by leading you. The first thing you will do is buy some blankets and, if you can, a tent or two here. The local farmers will have something. If you don’t have shelter in the mountains you will freeze to death.’

Ofaeti looked at the confessor and nodded. He turned to Fastarr. ‘These monks have more nuts than a squirrel’s larder,’ he said, ‘but they see the truth right enough. Let him be our voice for as long as he is useful.’

They were met with stares, but the fisherman at the beach was too mindful of the safety of his family to ask many questions of the Norsemen. Jehan again explained that they were his bodyguards, hired to take him on a pilgrimage to Rome. The fisherman nodded at the Vikings and said something about thanking God that such men could be bought, for if they couldn’t the whole country would be in ruins. Then he took their money and sent his boy off to buy blankets and two small tents.

When he returned, the berserks set off, Jehan at the front, up into the icy mountains and the valley of the black saint.