Fenrir (4 page)

Jehan could recall little of his early life. He’d been a foundling. That building was almost his first memory. He remembered the huge octagonal dome rising above him out of the many-sided base. He had never seen anything like it. The monk who had brought him from the east had gone inside to discuss the boy’s future, leaving Jehan standing in the overwhelming bustle of the Parisian street. He remembered how he’d run his hands all the way around the building and counted its sides – twelve, each bearing a fresco of a man he now knew to be an apostle. He recalled the deep dark windows, the sheer bulk of the stone and, when you went inside, the vaulted ceiling, the marble on the floor so shiny that he had feared to tread on it, thinking it was the surface of a pool. Then, as he’d waited for the brothers of Saint-Germain to collect him, he remembered the sun through the windows in the evening that cast shadows that seemed as deep as pits.

‘Is she alone in there?’

‘Yes, it is very late.’

‘Carry me in and set me beside her.’

The monk was lifted from the pallet and carried into the church. He felt the warrior stumble as he went through the porch.

‘Be careful,’ said the confessor.

‘I am sorry, Father. We are all blind men in here, there is scarcely a light.’

The confessor grunted. Since the siege the church would have given up its candles, and besides, why would it be lit at night?

‘Can you see her?’

‘No.’

‘I am here, whoever it is who looks for me.’ The voice was clear and strong, with that mild note of irritation that royals often employed when speaking to their inferiors. He recognised the tone. The nobility were occasional visitors to his monastery, though the men came more often than the women. Noble ladies, though, were interested to meet saints, and he had received her there when she was around twelve. He had been eighteen. Now she was eighteen and her voice had changed and deepened, but he still knew it. The girl had asked him why he was so ugly. He had replied that it was the will of God and he thanked Him for it.

The confessor breathed in, using the smell of incense and beeswax to calm himself and order his thoughts. What would he say? He had no idea now; he only knew what he would not say, that she must go, it was her duty. No, he would put the alternatives before her and the decision would be up to her.

‘It is Confessor Jehan, lady.’

‘They sent me a saint,’ she said. The voice was not that of a frightened country girl with a head full of devils. It was absolutely that of a lady of the court, one of those educated women who liked to tease the priests with their knowledge of the Bible, to argue even – however demurely – about its interpretation.

‘I am not dead yet, lady, nor would I presume to know the creator’s view of me.’

‘You are a healer, Confessor. Have you come to cure me of my resolve?’

Jehan, used to listening where he could not see, detected a note of fear in her voice.
And no wonder
, he thought. Her options in life were very unattractive.

‘I have come to speak to you, lady, that is all.’

There was a noise from outside, shouting and screaming, the ringing of bells and the blowing of horns. It was the sound, Jehan knew, of battle.

‘The Norsemen are attacking?’ said the confessor.

‘It would sound as if that were so, Father,’ said the monk carrying him.

There was a great crash quite near the church. The monk gave a cry of surprise.

Jehan said, ‘God smiles on those who fall defending his name, brother. It’s unlikely to be a serious raid; I think they’re just trying to prevent Eudes from repairing his tower. Carry me on, as I said.’

The monk walked on through the vast space of the great building. Jehan heard the scrape of a flint, smelled tinder and the burning beeswax that followed it. He heard too the lady’s intake of breath as she saw him.

‘I’m afraid the years have not improved my looks, Lady Aelis.’

‘I hope they have improved my manners,’ she said. The girl sounded genuinely shocked, and the confessor could hear she was struggling to control her voice.

‘May I sit a while with you, then?’

‘Yes.’

There were more screams from outside. The defenders would be fighting, thought the confessor, largely without armour. There would have been no time to put it on. His whole conversation, he thought, could very quickly become an almost grotesque irrelevance if the northerners got into the city. How many of them were there? Thousands. How many men-at-arms in Paris? Two hundred and fifty? While the towers held they were safe. If they fell then the city would be swamped. There was nothing for it but to proceed and to trust to the will of God, as he had always done.

‘Set me down,’ he said to the monk, ‘then draw your sword and go to the ramparts to perform the office of a faithful man.’

The monk put him down then left, clumping his way from pillar to pillar as he walked out of the candle glow.

‘You are …’ She hesitated.

‘Worse than I was? There is no need to hide from it, lady; it is a plain fact.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘Do not be. It is a gift from God, and I welcome it.’

‘I will pray for you.’

‘Do not. Or rather, pray as I pray. Thank God for visiting this condition upon me and the opportunity it has given me to prove my faith.’

Aelis caught the implication of his words. He felt blessed to have been tested in his faith. She should feel the same. She did not, however.

She looked at the figure in front of her in the candlelight. When she had seen him before he had been blind and confined to a chair. Then, she had been struck by his eyes, which didn’t focus at all but ceaselessly scanned the room, as if he was trying to follow the flight of an annoying fly. His face too had been twisted into a permanent grimace. Though she had thought him ugly, she had seen worse deformity on any market day in Paris. Now, she thought, he could be the king of beggars, if he chose. His body seemed to have shrivelled, his arms to have withered and twisted; his head was cast back as if permanently looking upwards. She knew the joke was that he always looked to heaven, but, faced with the reality, she could not find it funny. The monk swayed back and forth as he spoke, like someone in deep contemplation. Aelis found the whole effect very unsettling.

Ever since she had been a little girl, and more since she had become a woman, she had been able to perceive people in a way that went beyond the normal understanding of the five senses. It was almost as if she could hear people’s personalities like music, sense them as colours or symbols. She had grown up around warriors, seen their scars and heard their stories of battle and fortitude against the northerners. When they had spoken, the colour of iron had come into her mind, of swords and armour, and the dark skies of war. Her brother had a presence like a mailed fist, hard, uncompromising, but nevertheless insubstantial compared to that of Confessor Jehan. The monk’s body may have been broken, but his soul, his will, seemed to sit like a great mountain in the dark, solid and immovable.

She took up the candle and went to the altar. The gold of the candlesticks and communion cups caught its flame and glittered as she moved. The abbot would not have them removed – that would be to admit that the Norsemen might get in. There had been hope that the monks at Saint-Germain would send over some of their relics. They could hardly expect the bones of Saint Germain himself, but there had been talk that the stole of Saint Vincent might be sent across. However, the abbot of Saint-Germain had pointed out that the monastery had been sacked by Norsemen three times already and the stole had provided no protection then.

Aelis kneeled beneath the altar.

‘God has tested me too in a smaller way. Should I be thankful?’

Jehan measured his words carefully.

‘We should be grateful for anything that comes from God.’

The confessor was just a voice in the darkness to her.

‘I am not afraid of the Norsemen,’ she said.

‘Then what are you afraid of?’

Aelis crossed herself. Jehan heard her mutter a prayer. Her voice trembled, though she fought to suppress it, not to appear weak in front of a low-born man.

‘Something is coming for me, and I know that if I consent to go with the Norsemen, or even if I leave this church, it will find me and take me. It brings peril for us all.’

‘You can’t stay inside a church all your life,’ said the confessor. ‘What is coming for you?’

She said nothing for a moment. Then: ‘When your blindness came upon you, Confessor, you had a vision?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of the Virgin Mary.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she speak to you?’

‘No.’

‘So how did you know it was her?’

‘I knew. And from the gift she awoke within me.’

‘The prophecies?’

‘Yes.’

Jehan remembered the day that had changed his life. He had been found by hunters in the woods at the age of around five or six, and then deposited at a monastery in the East Frankish lands of Austrasia. He had been delirious. All that was certain was that someone had taught him to speak Roman and he had suffered a great shock that had left him with few memories. He had been taken west to Paris by a travelling monk, where he had been given a place at Saint-Germain by the mercy of the Church. His recovery had been as remarkable as it was quick. By the age of nine he was helping the monks, studying, playing and laughing. In many ways he outshone his peers. His facility for writing would have been surprising in a child who had been raised to it from his earliest years. Languages too came easily to him: the common tongue of Roman, Francique, as spoken at court, Latin for official business, Greek, even the Norse and Saxon that the missionaries taught him. More amazing was his ability at chess. He had watched two monks play the game and then sat to try for himself. In his first game he beat one of the abbey’s strongest players. The boy, it was said, was blessed.

Then the Virgin had appeared to him. It was high summer, the hungry month of July, and he had nothing to do but walk the fields of unripe crops. The sun was over the corn and the sky was a burning blue. When the monks spoke of visions he had always imagined that an angel or the Virgin would appear on a cloud or in a haze. But she had stood beside him so real he felt he could touch her. She had spoken to him, or rather he had heard her voice in his mind, though he had never admitted it to anyone, too unsure of what she had meant. He had pondered her words for years, and he had never revealed them.

‘Do not seek me.’

He had taken it for a warning against the sin of pride, of trying to be too holy and putting himself above other men in piety. Seeking heaven, he felt, was the surest way to lose it.

She had walked away from him and he had run after her, but the blindness fell upon him and he had been discovered wandering by the hives, lucky not to blunder into one and be stung.

His prophecies had been correct – raids along the coast, Rouen in flames, Bayeux, Laon and Beauvais ruined, the sons of the Church executed. The abbot had declared him a saint on earth – a confessor – and God had blessed him with further afflictions and further visions.

‘They made you a saint because you saw her?’

‘Yes. That and the monastery’s desire to have a confessor among its monks. It was just and it was politic,’ he said.

‘What would they make you if you had seen …’ She couldn’t finish.

Jehan was quiet, allowing her to compose herself.

‘Do you need to ask for penance?’

Aelis gave a short laugh. ‘I have nothing to confess, Father, no sin to be forgiven, but if I was to stand in front of the congregation, call what I have experienced a sin and ask a priest for forgiveness, my life might be over before I left this church. Can I ask you privately? Will you swear never to reveal what I have to say?’

‘The sacrament of penance must be conducted publicly,’ said Jehan.

‘I have nothing to be sorry for. Will you swear?’

‘This path is strewn with briars,’ said the confessor under his breath. What if the woman told him she was an adulteress or, worse, a murderer? He could not, in conscience, hold on to a secret like that.

The noise of the fighting was getting closer. Had the Norsemen taken a tower? That was impossible, he thought, without mining. The enemy had already tried that, and to no success.

The cries and the curses focused the confessor on his task.

‘I will swear,’ he said.

‘They made you a saint because you saw the Virgin,’ said Aelis; ‘what would they call you if you had seen the devil?’

‘The common people might cry witch,’ said the confessor, ‘though belief in witchcraft is heresy. Someone might be held a heretic if they declared themselves a witch, but a vision is a vision. Of itself it means nothing.’

‘So what would you call me?’

‘You have seen the devil?’

‘Yes. Am I a witch, unknown to myself?’

‘Christ saw the devil in the wilderness – was he a witch?’

She bowed her head.

Jehan swallowed and began to rock more rapidly.