Conspiracies of Rome (2 page)

    Thus, like thieves lying in wait, we readied ourselves for our miracle of the day. I was my usual convincing self as the young freeman who’d just happened to find a dead churl under some bushes. Speaking for myself, I’d not have got off the horse for that unshod foot sticking out. Maximin performed nobly as the missionary who’d just happened to be riding by on his donkey. The churl stayed absolutely still until Maximin had finished getting the villagers to gather round and join him in the call on God.

    I’ve seen more convincing pantomimes booed mercilessly in Constantinople. In Kent, this one was enough to have a dozen men begging for the ‘magic water’ of the priests. And they gave the pair of us some of their bread and cheese.

    Now we were back in Canterbury. Maximin was off writing up his brief report on the proceedings. Without that, the others wouldn’t go out and baptise the wonder-stricken villagers. I was alone in the mission library. The autumnal heat was leaching more new smells from the plaster on the walls. This mingled with the smell of book dust and of the latrines outside. A few late flies buzzed overhead.

    I should have been working on the dictionary of English and Latin that Bishop Lawrence had commanded me to prepare once he’d discovered I was an educated native. Now the mission was into unlimited expansion, barely any of the priests who were pouring into Kent and fanning into the neighbouring kingdoms knew a word of English. If still alive, the older missionaries who’d come over with Augustine were now stretched very thin. And the other English converts had poor Latin.

    That landed me with a job I just didn’t have the skills in those days to do at all, let alone do well. You try taking an unwritten language, in which the words for basic things are different every few miles, and squeezing it into the categories of Latin grammar.

    I shoved the wooden writing tablets aside, buried my face in my hands and thought [again] of Edwina. She was the one bright point in my life.

    Maximin had sensed some of my pain. In his good and practical way, he was talking now about accelerated ordination for me into the priesthood. It made sense. I had no place among my own people. At the same time, I wasn’t really one with the missionaries.

    But Edwina stood between me and that idea. Our illicit relationship had begun shortly after my arrival from Richborough. Almost every night since then, we’d been meeting long after dark behind her father’s stable to entertain ourselves till dawn with her grey fingers fringed the Kentish sky.

    Like one of those ancient novelists, I could fill up pages with accounts of what we did, and how often. But I won’t. Either you’ve had a lot of sex when young and in love or you haven’t. If you haven’t, no mere words will convey the ecstatic union of bodies and souls. If you have, there is no need of words.

    But now the weather was turning against us, and there was another, more specific, problem to consider. When she’d explained about monthly flows and their absence, I was young enough and stupid enough to be as much pleased as alarmed. Edwina was simply alarmed. I’d suggested we should run away to France. She’d asked the usual womanly questions about what to do there and how to eat. I’d given the answers usual of youth. They’d failed to convince.

    I jumped at the touch of a hand on my shoulder. I grabbed at a writing tablet and prepared to explain that I’d been trying to think of an English phrase to stand as equivalent for the Latin ‘
Saluatio
’.

    But it wasn’t Maximin who stood behind me, or anyone else who had a right to know how I was passing the afternoon.

    ‘Oh, it’s you’, I said coldly to the churl assistant. I put my hands down into my robe to hide their trembling. ‘You should know your sort aren’t allowed near the books. What do you want?’

    The low creature squinted back at me, a knowing grin only half wiped from his face.

    ‘Be pleased, Your Honour,’ he said, ‘I won’t say if you’ve been catching up on your sleep.’

    He dodged back as I stood and wheeled round at him. He wouldn’t get away with this again now we were alone.

    ‘You listen here,’ I said, trying not to sound alarmed. ‘One word from you to anyone about me, and you’ll be shitting your own teeth tomorrow. Do you understand?’

    He looked back at me for just a moment longer than gave him the right to get away with unscathed. At last, though, he lowered his eyes and made a submissive bow. I let the matter drop.

    ‘So what do you want?’ I repeated.

    ‘The master will have you know he is out of pills,’ the churl replied.

    Not more opium for Maximin? This would be my second trip to the market in as many days. I’d been getting his lead box refilled ever since he took me on. He’d soon given up explaining that the pills were for his rheumatism, and I’ve never been one to judge the weaknesses of others. But a second round of fifty pills so soon after the first? Much more of this, and I’d find myself teaching English to someone far less easy to get along with.

    I relaxed the muscles in my face. No point in letting an inferior see I was annoyed. Stupid as he was, he’d see a means of using that.

    ‘I suppose the reverend father gave you some coin,’ I said. ‘The stallholder doesn’t give credit.’

    The churl bowed again, showing empty hands. Well, I still had some of the change I’d kept from another shopping mission, for Bishop Lawrence. Maximin would be too bombed out on his last dose to wonder what I was doing with money of my own.

    The churl shuffling along behind me, I stepped out into the crowded main street of Canterbury.

    It was always a joyous sight. Richborough – the nearest I’ve had to a home town – had once been the main port into a very rich province. But there was no recovery from the comprehensive smashing up my people had given it after the invasion. In short, it was a dump. Even the few people who still lived there knew that. Canterbury, though, was a living place. The streets between the churches were narrow, and crowded with the usual wood-and-thatch houses. But the city had a rush and general feeling of life, and to me, in those days, it was the ultimate in civility. There were churches and administrative buildings going up all over. Much of the material was cannibalised from ruins – there was a regular train of carts trundling up and down from London, then still abandoned. But it was all cleaned and made to look fresh. It must have been the first proper stone- and brick-work since my people took over from the Romans.

    Hundreds of missionaries and their retainers filled the streets, all dressed in what to me seemed fine clothes and talking Latin together with other languages I didn’t know.

    And there were stalls and little shops everywhere, selling things I’d never before seen. No man of taste and culture would have sniffed at the manky things on offer in those early days. But when you’ve never done more than read about olives and olive oil and pepper and opium and the like, it was almost magical to stand looking at them.

    ‘Begging Your Honour’s pardon,’ the churl whimpered from behind me, ‘but the pill man is moved to the other side of the market.’

    He pointed into the side street that would take us there without having to jostle through the square. Then again, my feet would get muddy.

    The decision was almost made for me.

    ‘Hello, Aelric. Looking lost again away from your fields?’

    It was the bishop’s secretary with a few of his hangers-on. They tittered on cue at his joke.

    ‘When will you come and teach English to me?’ he added with a knowing smirk. His fat, beardless face was sweaty from lunch in some tavern. ‘I can show you a better time in Canterbury than that sad loser Maximin.’

    ‘I have important business,’ I said haughtily to hide my distaste. ‘I have no time for conversations in the street.’

    I certainly had none for creatures like him. For all his airs and graces, he was just a French barbarian – hardly one up on me. And he spoke Latin like a dog.

    I hurried into the side street. Now I was out of the sun, I could feel a chill in the autumnal air. I thought again about Edwina. We’d agreed to meet in the usual place as soon as she could get her servant woman off to bed. The thought of being with her was enough to start a thrill that radiated gently through my body.

    I thought so hard about the dark, brown hair, about those fine, regular features, about all the ripe perfection of her fourteen years, that I paid no attention to the scuffling just behind me. The crashing blow to the back of my head was a complete surprise.

    I came to in one of the masonry carts, trussed up like a bundle of wood. We jolted east over a broken road until I was black and blue from the communicated rapid motion. I had the answer to my continually shouted question late that evening. Soaked by the rain that had been falling almost since I’d woken, and so frozen I couldn’t have stood when cut loose without the support of the two strong men who held me tight, I found myself outside the hunting lodge Ethelbert had near Rochester.

2

The gleemen were singing an old battle song as I was pushed into the high single room of the lodge. It was built in the traditional style – a layer of reeds on the trampled earth of the floor, a central hole in the thatch covering that let rain in from the drizzle above while not doing much with the smoke from the great fire below. The damp wood smoke competed with the smell of farting. I quickly gathered that the company had been feasting for hours. Sitting pulling meat off a whole roast sheep were Ethelbert and about thirty of his cronies and retainers. Snarling and yapping, their dogs ran among them.

    ‘Well, just look what the fucking cat’s brought in!’ roared Ethelbert, pulling himself unsteadily to his feet.

    The music stopped. He staggered towards me, his feet kicking up the reeds and the stinking filth below them. He nearly tripped over something that lay out of sight, and one of his retainers had to run forward and steady him.

    Ethelbert stopped for an extended fart. He took a gulp from his drinking horn. He looked round to make sure every pair of eyes was turned in his direction.

    If you read the history that I – or, more likely now, little Bede – will write, King Ethelbert is one of the heroes in the conversion of England. Because his Frankish wife was born into the Faith, he was the first ruler to welcome the missionaries. That’s why the Church made him a saint.

    The Ethelbert I knew was a pop-eyed monster with skin complaints and a partiality to other men’s wives. He’d put on even more weight than when I’d last seen him, a few months before my mother died. In the flickering light cast by the wall torches and the cooking fire, his face shone with sweat and mutton grease. There was that exultant tone to his voice that I remembered well from when he was minded to let everyone around him know who was the absolute boss.

    ‘You’ve been a bad boy’, he said, his voice dropping to what a stranger might have taken for good humour. ‘You’ve been making that two-backed beast with someone you shouldn’t never have looked at. You’ve dishonoured my best man’s daughter. You’ve dishonoured him. You’ve dishonoured me.’

    He stopped a few feet from where I was held fast, and gloated as I tried without the slightest effect to wriggle free.

    ‘Come on, my lad’, he said with a smile that showed a good dozen of his riddled teeth, ‘speak up.’

    ‘I can explain,’ I croaked. How I could explain I had no idea. I didn’t know how much he knew. I guessed Edwina had been to one of the household women to ask about herbs. But effective lying needs some awareness of what the other party knows.

    Besides, I was hardly able to keep the tears back. I knew what he could do, and was beginning to shake with terror as well as the cold.

    ‘I – I  . . .’

    And that was all the speaking Ethelbert wanted. He dropped the façade of good humour and reverted to his more usual tyrannical mode.

    ‘You fucking piece of shit!’ he screamed at me, his large face purple with rage, veins in his forehead swollen. ‘I gave you your life. I gave you food from my table. I gave you everything. And this is how you repay me.’

    He jerked his head over to the company. Alfred sat there among the others. He was somewhat less demure in his bearing than I’d seen him among the missionaries. And if he didn’t seem inclined to embrace me as a son-in-law, he didn’t seem that put out either by his daughter’s dishonour. He raised his horn and grinned at me.

    Ethelbert continued: ‘You snake. You fucker. You fucking piece of shit. Do you know what we’re going to do to you?’

    He put his face close to mine. I could smell the sour breath – all rotting teeth and vomity beer and food. His jowls shook.