Then we rounded the promontory into the river and I could see the southern bank and I felt a surge of relief because there, in front of me, tied to a newly built wharf that jutted across the marshland into the river, was Ieremias’s ragged ship, the Guds Moder. A dozen smaller ships, all fishing craft, were tied to the pier, while two others, also fishing boats, were anchored offshore. Nearer was the beach where, years before, I had been freed from slavery when the red ship slammed into the shingle and my rescuers had leaped from the bows. It had been my uncle, my cousin’s father, who had sold me into slavery, fully expecting me to die, but somehow I had lived, and I had met Finan, another slave, and there, on that shingle beach, our long road to revenge had begun. Now I prayed that road was almost over.
Ieremias had been alerted of our arrival by his look-outs, and some forty or fifty men and women were waiting on the beach, while still more were coming downhill from the old monastery that was Ieremias’s hall. Swithun, wearing the fur-trimmed cloak again and with my gold chain bright at his neck, stood in the Eadith’s bows and waved a lordly greeting. I was at her stern where I turned and cupped my hands to call to my son who was steering the Stiorra. ‘You know what to do?’
‘I do!’ he sounded cheerful.
‘Do it slowly!’
He just grinned for answer, then gave an order that prompted his oarsmen to take the Stiorra slowly upstream. They did not row hard, just dipped the blades to pull their ship gently away from the Eadith and the Hanna, which were heading towards the shingle, using the oars to steady their hulls against the river’s current and the ebbing tide. The Stiorra drifted back towards us for a moment, then the rowers pulled her upstream again, but still very lazily, as if she had no intention of putting men ashore, but was simply holding her position in the river until it was time for us all to go back to sea.
We were lingering off the beach because I was looking for Ieremias and could not see him among the men and women waiting on the shingle, but then an extraordinary procession appeared on the low hill where the monastery stood. Twelve men, I knew Ieremias called them his disciples, led the group, but these disciples were clad in mail, wore helmets, and carried spears and shields. Six small children followed, all robed in white and all holding leafy branches, which they waved from side to side as they sang. Ieremias followed them. The mad bishop was astride a diminutive ass, a beast so small that the mad bishop’s feet dragged on the ground. He was again dressed in richly embroidered robes, carried his silver-hooked bishop’s crozier, and wore a mitre crammed over his long white hair. Three women, all dressed as nuns in grey robes and grey cowls, followed. The six children’s voices sounded clear and sweet above the sigh of the wind and the beat of the river’s small waves breaking on the shingle beach. I gave Gerbruht the steeringoar. ‘Hold her just offshore,’ I told him. He was a good ship handler and I trusted him to keep the Eadith a few paces from the beach while I crouched in the belly of the boat where thirty of my men were also staying low, all of them in mail, but none of us had yet put on our helmets. Shields, swords, axes, and spears lay ready on the deck. The folk waiting ashore could see us, but would not see that we were ready for battle. I buckled Serpent-Breath around my waist. Rorik, grinning, was holding my helmet, the fine helmet with the silver wolf crouching on the crown.
‘Who are you?’ a voice shouted from the shingle bank. The man used the Saxon tongue, presumably because Yngvild’s messenger had told Ieremias who we were. That message had evidently not caused any alarm because, though many of the men on the beach wore swords, only the twelve disciples were in mail.
‘I am Æthelstan of Wessex,’ Swithun called from the prow, ‘and I bring you friendly greetings from my father, King Edward of Wessex, and from his sister, Æthelflaed of Mercia!’
‘No closer!’ the man called.
‘The Lady Æthelflaed has sent your bishop a gift!’ Swithun shouted, and held up a stinking jerkin we had wrapped in a piece of clean linen. ‘They are the swaddling clothes worn by the infant John the Baptist! They are still stained with his holy piss!’
Rorik, crouching beside me, started to laugh. I hushed him.
‘You can throw it to me!’ the man called from the beach. He was being properly cautious.
‘Wait! Wait!’ It was Ieremias’s high-pitched voice that interrupted. He had abandoned the tiny ass and was striding down the beach and shouting in his native Danish. ‘Do not be so rude to our guests! A gift? It must be given properly. Lord Æthelstan!’ I ducked out of sight as the bishop came near the water’s edge.
‘Lord Bishop?’ Swithun responded.
‘Come ashore!’ Ieremias used the English tongue now.
‘You want me to jump in the water?’
‘I want you to walk on it, like our lord did! Can you walk on water?’
Swithun, taken aback by the question, hesitated. ‘Of course not!’ he finally shouted.
‘You should practise!’ Ieremias called reprovingly. ‘You should practise! It just takes faith, nothing else, just faith! So come a little closer, just a little. And you may bring six men ashore, only six for now.’
‘Do it clumsily!’ I hissed at Gerbruht. The Eadith had drifted a little downstream, which is what I had wanted, and now Gerbruht called on the steerboard-side oarsmen to pull, which was the last thing he should have ordered if he was really trying to bring the Eadith gently into the shore because, instead of nosing slowly onto the shingle, the ship turned her head downstream and was carried seawards by the tide. Gerbruht appeared to panic by shouting at all the oarsmen to pull together. ‘Now! Hard! Pull!’ Then, as the Eadith surged, he dragged the steering-oar hard towards himself and I felt her turning towards the beach. ‘Pull!’ he bellowed. ‘Hard now, pull!’ He had done it beautifully.
At the same time Finan, or at least Berg who was Finan’s helmsman, had let the Hanna go gently upstream, using nothing but lazy, slow oar strokes, just enough to carry her fifty or sixty paces away from us, and now he suddenly turned the long ship and also headed for the beach. ‘Row!’ I heard Berg shout. ‘Row!’
‘One more stroke!’ Gerbruht bellowed. ‘Now!’
The long oars bent with that final effort, and Eadith’s prow scraped on shingle, the boat jarred to a sudden stop, and mail-clad men erupted from her belly, scrambled past the oarsmen, and leaped ashore. Finan’s men were jumping from the Hanna’s bows. What we had achieved by our apparently clumsy seamanship was to trap Ieremias and his men between our two forces, while my son, seeing us assault the beach, was suddenly rowing hard as he took the Stiorra fast towards the pier, which lay a good half-mile upstream.
‘I want the bishop alive!’ I shouted at my men. ‘Alive!’
I was one of the last men off the boat. I stumbled in the shallow water and almost fell, but Vidarr Leifson, one of my Norse warriors, caught and steadied me. Rorik gave me the helmet. I carried no shield. I drew Serpent-Breath as I waded the last few feet, but I doubted I would need her. She would have her moment, and soon, but at this moment, on this beach, my men had done exactly what I had asked of them. Finan’s men were upstream of Ieremias’s warriors, and mine were downstream, and together we outnumbered him. Ieremias, if he had had any sense, should have run the moment he saw what was happening. Most of his men had neither shields nor mail, and there were women and children among them who added to the panic by screaming, but Ieremias just gaped at us, then shrieked as he shook his crozier towards the clouds. ‘Smite them, Lord! Smite them!’ Three of his disciples mistook the prayer for an order and ran towards us, but my men were ready for battle, indeed were eager for it, they were starved of it, and there was a sudden clash on the shingle, a clangour of sword-blades, and each of Ieremias’s men was facing at least two of mine, and I watched the sword-blades deflect the spear-thrusts, saw the sword-blades pierce bellies or hack into necks, and I heard the vicious roar of my men as they ruthlessly cut the three down and heard the shrieking from the women who saw their men dying on the beach.
A few folk,
more sensible than those who had died, turned and fled towards the old monastery on the hill, but Finan’s men simply scrambled up the grassy bank to block the inland path. It was all over in moments. Three men sprawled bloody on the beach, while the rest were being shepherded back to where Ieremias had dropped to his knees and was screaming to his god. ‘Send Thy holy angels, Lord!’ he pleaded. ‘Defend Thy servants! Rip out the tongues of Thine enemies and blind their eyes! Avenge us, O Lord, avenge and save us!’ Meanwhile his men were dropping their weapons. Some, like Ieremias, knelt, not in prayer as he was, but in submission.
I looked upstream and saw that my son had captured Guds Moder. I suspected that the capture of that ship was even more important than seizing Ieremias, who, knowing that he had been tricked, now called for heavenly reinforcements. ‘Let worms consume their bowels, O Lord,’ he screeched, ‘and maggots feast on their bladders! They are loathsome in Thy sight, O Lord, so smite them with Thy mighty power! Send Thy bright angels to avenge us! Rot their flesh and shatter their bones! Lord, have mercy! Lord, have mercy!’
I walked up to him, my boots scrunching on the shingle. None of his men tried to stop me.
‘Consume them with unquenchable fire, Lord! Drown them in the devil’s stinking excrement!’ His eyes were tight closed, turned up to the sky. ‘Let Satan vomit down their throats, Lord, and feed their vile flesh to his dogs! Scourge them, Lord! Smite them! All this I ask in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and—’
‘—and of the other one,’ I finished for him, tapping Serpent-Breath’s blade against his shoulder. ‘Greetings, Ieremias.’
He opened his blue eyes, looked up at me, paused for a heartbeat, and then offered me a smile as sweet as any child’s. ‘Greetings, lord. How kind of you to visit me.’
‘I came to have words with you.’
‘You did!’ he sounded delighted. ‘I love words, lord! I love them! Do you love words, lord?’
‘I do,’ I said, and touched the sword-blade against his gaunt cheek. ‘And my favourite word today is banahogg.’ It meant a death-stroke, and I reinforced it by nudging his face with Serpent-Breath.
‘That’s a fine Norse word, lord,’ he said earnestly, ‘a very fine word indeed, but of all the Norse words I think I prefer tilskipan. Do you think we might come to a tilskipan?’
‘That is why I’m here,’ I told him, ‘to come to an arrangement with you. Now on your feet.’
We would have words.
‘No, lord, no! No! No!’ Ieremias was crying. The tears ran from those very blue eyes and trickled down the deep furrows of his cheeks to disappear into his short beard. ‘No! Please, no!’ The last ‘no’ was a scream of despair. He was on his knees, hands clasped in supplication, gazing up at me, sobbing.
Fire flared bright in the night-time church. The flames leaped up, burned for a moment, then subsided.
‘What did you say that was?’ I asked.
‘Jacob’s spoon, lord.’
‘It’s ashes, now,’ I said happily.
‘Jacob stirred Esau’s pottage with that spoon, lord,’ Ieremias said between sobs.
The spoon, crudely carved from beechwood, was now white ash on the sea-coal fire that warmed and lit Ieremias’s cathedral. More light came from candles on the altar, but beyond the windows it was dark, deep night. The building, he insisted on calling it a cathedral, was a stone church, built years ago, long before my grandfather’s time, and it had once been an important place for Christians, but then the Danes had come, the monks had been killed, and the church and its monastery had fallen into ruin until Ieremias was given the place. He had been named Dagfinnr then, and had been a house-warrior to Ragnar the Younger, but one morning he had appeared naked in Dunholm’s great hall and announced that he was now the son of the Christian god and had adopted the name Ieremias. He demanded that Ragnar, a pagan, should worship him. Brida, Ragnar’s woman and a hater of Christians, insisted that Dagfinnr should be put to death, but Ragnar, pitying the man and mindful of his long service, had sent him and his family to the monastery ruins instead, doubtless thinking that the crazed fool would not live long. But Dagfinnr had survived, and landless men, outlaws, men without lords, found him and swore him fealty so that he was now the ruler of Gyruum and its lands. Rumour said that he had dug a well soon after arriving at the ruined monastery, but that instead of finding water he had discovered a hoard of silver buried by the old monks of Gyruum. I did not know whether that tale was true or not, but certainly he had prospered enough to buy Guds Moder and a fleet of smaller ships that trawled the sea beyond the river for herring, cod, haddock, salmon, ling, and whiting, which were smoked or salted on the foreshore before being traded up and down the coast. Brida, when she became the effective ruler of Northumbria after Ragnar’s death, had left Ieremias alone, perhaps recognising in him an echo of her own madness or, more likely, amused that the real Christians were so outraged by Ieremias’s absurd claims.
The old church, now repaired with a crude thatched roof, was crammed with small wooden boxes, each of which contained one of Ieremias’s treasures. So far I had burned Jacob’s spoon, a lock of hair from Elisha’s beard, a piece of straw from the baby Jesus’s crib, the fig leaf Eve used to cover her left tit, and a forked stick with which Saint Patrick had caught the last snake in Ireland. ‘And what’s this?’ I asked, opening another box.
‘No, lord, not that! Anything but that!’
I peered into the box and saw a shrivelled pig’s ear. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘The ear of the high priest’s servant, lord,’ Ieremias muttered between sobs. ‘Saint Peter cut it off in the garden of Gethsemane.’
‘It’s a pig’s ear, you fool!’
‘No! It’s the ear our Lord healed! Christ touched that ear! He put it back on the servant’s head!’
‘How did it end up here then? In this box?’
‘It fell off again, lord.’
I held the dried ear close to the glowing brazier. ‘You’ve lied to me, Ieremias.’
‘No!’ he wailed.
‘You’ve lied to me,’ I said. ‘Lie after lie after lie. I saw you in Dumnoc.’
The sobbing stopped suddenly and a wicked grin crossed Ieremias’s face. He was capable of sudden changes in mood, maybe because he was mad? ‘I knew it was you, lord,’ he said slyly.
‘You said nothing when you saw me.’
‘I saw your face, and at that moment I was not certain, and so I prayed, lord, and God took His time to answer me, but He did after a while, and when I told Lord Æthelhelm what God had said to me he thought I was moon-touched.’
‘He still sent men to search for me,’ I said angrily.
‘He did?’ Ieremias asked with apparent ignorance.
‘Because you told him I was there,’ I said, angry now. ‘I’m your lord and you betrayed me!’
‘I prayed to God to protect you.’
‘You lying maggot!’
‘God is my Father, He listens to me! I prayed!’
‘I should slit your throat now,’ I said, and he just made a whining noise. ‘You told Æthelhelm your suspicions,’ I said, ‘to gain favour with him. True?’
‘You’re a pagan, lord! I thought I was doing my Father’s will.’
‘By betraying me.’
‘Yes, lord,’ he whispered. He frowned at me. ‘You’re a pagan, lord! I was just doing my Father’s will.’
‘And next day,’ I said, ‘I saw Guds Moder with Einar’s ships. So whose side are you on?’
‘I told you, lord, I am doing God’s work by making peace! Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be named the children of God! The archbishop told me that, lord, the archbishop himself! Hrothweard told me! No!’ The last despairing word came as I dropped the dried ear into the brazier’s flames. There was a burst of fire, the smell of bacon, and Ieremias sobbed again. ‘The archbishop said I must make peace!’
‘Just kill the bastard,’ Finan growled from the shadows.
‘No!’ Ieremias
shuffled back towards the altar. ‘No, no, no.’
‘Lord Æthelhelm,’ I said, ‘who welcomed you in Dumnoc, is allied with my cousin. But Jarl Einar, who welcomed you and your ship when he sailed north from Dumnoc, now serves Constantin. Both think you are on their side.’
‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ Ieremias muttered.
‘I don’t have much time,’ I said, ‘just this one night. But that’s time enough to burn everything here.’
‘No, lord!’
‘Let me talk to him,’ Finan growled.
Ieremias glanced at Finan and shuddered. ‘I don’t like that man, lord.’
‘He’s a Christian,’ I said, ‘you should like him.’
‘Bless you, my son,’ Ieremias made the sign of the cross towards Finan. ‘I still don’t like him, lord. Horrible man.’
‘He is horrible,’ I said, ‘but perhaps he can get the truth from you?’
‘I’ve told you, lord! Blessed are the peacemakers!’
I paused, watching him. Was he truly mad? Half the time he made perfect sense and half the time his mind wandered off into some airy place where only he and his god existed. His distress when I burned his baubles seemed real enough and his fear was no pretence, yet he still lied stubbornly. Finan wanted to beat the truth from him, but I suspected Ieremias would welcome some sort of martyrdom. And if you beat the truth out of a man you can never trust that it is the truth because a terrified man says what he thinks his tormentor wants to hear. I wanted to hear the truth, but what, I suddenly wondered, did Ieremias want? And why had he mentioned the archbishop? I remembered being told that he had travelled to Eoferwic and had talked with Hrothweard, the new archbishop, so perhaps there was some truth in his wild shrieks of peace?
I walked towards him, and he instinctively shrank away and began gulping air. ‘I won’t …’ he began, but the words were overcome by a great sob.
‘You won’t what?’ I asked.
‘Tell you!’ he said savagely. ‘You’re not a maker of peace! You’re a pagan! You are Uhtredærwe!’ It meant Uhtred the Wicked, a name Christians liked to give me. ‘You worship idols and brazen images! You are an abomination to my Father in heaven! I would rather die than tell you!’ He closed his eyes and raised his face to the roof where the brazier’s smoke writhed slow about the rafters. ‘Take me, O Lord,’ he cried, ‘take Thy suffering servant into Thy loving arms. Take me! Take me! Take me!’