King Hereafter (84 page)

They were new. The previous spring, the Archdeacon Bernard of Aosta had brought his monks and his workmen from the Italian side of the mountains and had built the hospice of St Nicholas, whose guestmaster stood on its threshold, and whose hot soup and great fires were soon warming them.

‘The passes are open. It is well. We have food,’ the guestmaster said. ‘When there is a synod in Rome, the Bishop makes special provision. Some men are
more used to mountains than others. We had a party from the north of the world, from Alba, two weeks ago.’

‘On all fours?’ said Alfred. ‘In animal pelts?’

‘Like you or me. You would notice no difference,’ said the guestmaster kindly. ‘They tell me they have seen Roman cities.’

‘Anyone who has seen York or Winchester, or Bath or Chester or Exeter, has seen a Roman city,’ said Bishop Ealdred. ‘The Romans were in England for five hundred years.’ He blew his nose, which was dissolving in the heat.

‘I wonder where the King of Alba will stay,’ Bishop Hermann remarked.

It was a matter of more than ordinary interest. Secular Rome and its republic of senators was not free with its hospitality. Since the time of Constantine the Great, only two Roman emperors had ever lived in the city, and in living memory the young half-Greek Emperor Otto had been besieged in his house on the Aventine. Notoriously, every coronation ended in conflict between the imperial troops and the Pontiff’s militia. Charlemagne himself had had to lodge over the river, in what was now the Leonine City, the Borgo, the suburb where all the foreigners and their monks set up their hostels.

The English hospice was there. ‘Not in the English hospice, at least,’ Bishop Ealdred said. ‘The King of Alba a pensioner of King Edward’s? No. Not the figure he would wish to cut. I wonder.’

‘What do you wonder?’ said Hermann. He remembered a little exhibition in Winchester, mounted by Emma, in which this man Thorfinn had performed, along with Alfgar of Mercia and young Alfred’s kinsman the Archbishop of Dol. It struck him that after a week or so more of Ealdred’s company, he might be quite ready to have the King of Alba staying at the English hospice.

Ealdred said, ‘I wonder why he stayed so long in Woffenheim.’

Within the golden dunghill of Rome, the Pope came back from Siponte as the fourth week of Lent drew to its close and the theatre of the city began to draw back its curtains for Easter.

The box from Woffenheim had arrived. Like Pope Leo himself, his aunt the Abbess was particular about dates. That Sunday, Laetare Sunday, he rode, as was the tradition, from the basilica of Constantine, his home on the Caelius Hill, eastwards to the Sessorianan Palace, once Constantine’s also.

For eight hundred years, the central hall of the palace, converted into a church, had held the fragment of the True Cross brought to Rome from Jerusalem by St Helen, Constantine’s mother. The church was called Holy Cross of Jerusalem. His parents’ abbey of Woffenheim was named after the Holy Cross also. It was fitting that as he rode the short distance under the banner of St Peter, with the great cross from the Lateran flashing before him, and the steel-lined causeway before and behind him crammed like a flower-filled river with colour, with scent, and with song—it was fitting that the rose he bore in his hand, the golden rose scented with balm and with musk, the emblem of Christianity, should emanate from his family, the family of Bruno of Nordgau.

Seated in his ivory chair below the half-dome of the apse, he listened critically to the Introit:
Oculi mei semper ad Dominum
, and felt the hand of Constantine again on his shoulder. Constantine the Great, who had recognised the Pope as Christ’s Vicar on Earth and had made over to St Sylvester the imperial palace of the Lateran, where he now lived, beside the basilica now known as St John’s. At this altar, Pope Sylvester had died while saying Mass: died
in Jerusalem
, as had been prophesied.

Rome was full of churches built by Constantine, most of them in need of repair. He had pointed them out to the bishop from the other Constantine’s city, Coutances in Normandy, who had shared his expedition to Italy. To build a new church in Coutances was admirable. But to save the souls of his unfortunate kindred, Bishop Goisfrid might not find it unwise to invoke the aid of Saints Peter and Paul in their basilicas outside the walls, into which the roof tiles were leaking.

There was a voice of some stridency in the choir. Pope Leo frowned and looked up at the rafters, whose gilding showed no sign of dampness. He had given the returns from this monastery, only last year, to Richer of Monte Cassino, sitting over there unmoved, apparently, by any defect in the praises.

Richer had admired the rose in the Pope’s hand. It was not, of course, the rose his aunt the Abbess had been instructed to send, although it encompassed it. What he held was a wand wound about with rose leaves and half-open roses. In the centre was the golden rose, weighing two Roman ounces, that he had stipulated as Woffenheim’s annual tribute.

With the wand, his aunt had sent a note of explanation. The smithwork on the rose he recognised. It came from Essen. The wand, he fancied, was English. Soon, showing it to the people, he would be required to discourse on it.

So that Rome might have roses for pious use, Constantine had provided Pope Mark with a rose-farm. He, Leo, did not propose, in the present state of unrest, to encourage the throwing of roses from church roofs. But of the symbolism of the wand he could make something. Aaron’s rod, bringing forth blooms in the tabernacle; signifying God’s chosen race, set aside for the priesthood.

A clever, even an inspired implication. The name Constantine, he seemed to remember, was not unknown among the monarchs of Alba, although he had a feeling that Bishop Goisfrid might be nearer the blood-line than the emperors of Constantinople or Rome.

Nevertheless, the gift implied a certain degree of education, a familiarity with the ways of the church, and a desire to please.

The Holy See should respond.

Beneath the unwelcome sound of the next choral offering, the Pope spoke to the Archbishop of Sicily on his right.

‘When the rose has been blessed, I intend to dedicate it. Prepare the Prefect to ride at my right hand to the Lateran. And I have a message for the Chancellor. I wish to know when the harbingers of the Archbishop of Metz approach the City.’

‘The Archbishop of Dol, Holiness?’ said Humbert. ‘It is arranged. You will be told as soon as he arrives, or any of the disaffected from Brittany.’

The Pope had great hopes of Archbishop Humbert. He had brought him from his own diocese of Toul and given him Sicily, which was, of course, still in the possession of the heathen. But through the power of the Apostolic spirit, along with Humbert’s Greek, all might soon, God willing, be altered. Meanwhile, Archbishop Humbert ought to remember that this Pope was no child, or decadent princeling with his mind on his food or his women.

Leo said, ‘The word I used was Metz. He is bringing the King of Alba to Rome. Pray attend to what you are told.’

He watched Humbert go and slip back, under cover of the singing. The singing had changed.

‘I have conveyed your message, Holiness,’ Humbert said. ‘Also, I have advised the chorister with the sore throat not to harm himself by trying to sing in your presence.’

He sat down, returning his attention to the service, a little flushed; and the Pope leaned back, caressing his rose. The voices sprang, strong and pure, bright as jewels, to the ellipses of light and silver and wax that blossomed through the haze of the incense and sparkled on the gold on the altar, and the sheen of the hangings, and the hundreds of ruddy faces, lifted rapt and waiting towards him.

The Pope remembered all the other reasons why he had brought Humbert to Italy, and was moved. When he began to speak, the rose in his hand, it was to be seen that there were tears in his eyes; and by the time he had ended, they were running quite freely into the bright, carroty strands of his beard.

As directed, the Prefect, secular governor of the city of Rome, rode from the church at the side of the Pope, and through the crowds up the slope to the Lateran. There, on the steps of the palace, the Pontiff turned and, drawing his churchmen about him, made formal gift to the city of the golden-rose wand supplied by his aunt the Abbess, in its setting provided by the King of the country called Alba.

Later, one of the deans followed the Prefect to the Castella to obtain his written receipt, at a fee of one silver penny.

‘I will tell you a truth,’ said Gillocher of Lumphanan, toying with a moustache-end. ‘It was in me that this man had overreached himself and I should never get to Rome, save as much of me as birds should carry out in their claws. Eighty-eight bodies they found in that inn-keeper’s hut in Châtenay. And that’s no more than a minute ago.’

Odalric of Caithness grinned tolerantly without turning. ‘So the eighty-eight various pilgrims didn’t ride with the Archbishop of Metz. An uncle with connections in Basle. A niece married in Montbéliard and another the wife of the Marquis of Tuscany. Not to mention enough armed men to scare off the Valkyries. Aren’t we supposed to be talking in the Italian tongue?’

Cormac of Atholl, standing by the wide shutters, consigned the Latin tongue to another destination and continued without turning either. ‘When
Thorfinn overreaches himself, I dare say you will know it, but I doubt if he will. What’s that tower? Where is Thorfinn, anyway?’

‘In Rome,’ said Thorfinn behind him. ‘The conscience and confessor of Metz has just removed himself to his own house elsewhere in the Borgo. Will this do?’

He came to the window and they made way for him, but only a little, for his height gave him a better view than most. When they closed about him, it was with no particular care, although it might have been noticed that none pressed against him or incommoded him in any way.

They went on talking. Fourteen vigorous men who had come a long way since they left Alba six months before. Fourteen men of mixed race who had found nothing remarkable in the country of Denmark, for to some of them it offered the language and nature of home, while to others it was a land of aliens with whom one learned, as had one’s fathers, to consort without’ quarrelling.

From Denmark to Goslar, the circumstances of their journey had been little different. There were towns, but none of them was large. There were rich churches, but they had seen churches before.

From Goslar to the Vosges, from the Vosges to the Alps, from the Alps down through Italy to the rolling plain of the Roman Campagna and the dark, honey-comb slabs of a road two thousand years old that had led them to this spot—that was another matter entirely.

They fell out with one another. That had not changed. They were a self-opinionated and disparate group: it was for that reason that they had been picked. One was full-blooded Norse and two, from Orkney and Caithness, were Norse of the half-blood. Ten were of Irish descent, and one was Cumbrian, with all that implied of Breton-Welsh in the strain. Two were priests: Tuathal from beside Dublin and Eochaid of Ulidian descent. While a third priest, who had joined them at Goslar, was Isleifr the Icelander, who, alone of them all, had lived in the Roman Empire and had already embraced its canons.

So they fell out with one another and not infrequently with their King, but did not notice perhaps that the grounds for dispute were not quite the same as they had been, or that now and then they noisily made common cause over quite a few issues.

Whatever they did, Thorfinn’s treatment of them, naturally, had undergone no improvement. It was like being propelled by a brief, battering wind that smacked your ears and kept your brain in a turmoil. On some wax tablet somewhere, Thorfinn’s energy was no doubt being made into a proverb. Saddle-weariness never afflicted the wayfarers from Alba: their brains got more worn out each day than their rumps did.

And now they were here; and Thorfinn said, ‘Will this do?’ and Cormac of Dunkeld, who was little and peppery, said, ‘I suppose it will have to, failing the Elysian Fields. It’s the Emperor’s palace, isn’t it?’

‘You should have listened,’ said Thorfinn, ‘to your latimer. You are outside Rome, in the foreigners’ suburb over the river. Where you are standing now
was the Circus of Nero, where St Paul met his death, on the slopes of the Vatican hill. The big church with the bell-tower outside is built over the tomb of St Peter. To pray there is why most pilgrims come here. Hence the schools and churches and hospices, built all around us. Eochaid, there is St Cecilia’s, as I told you.’

His voice echoed; and he glanced round, as if reminded of where he stood. The hangings glimmered and footsteps, crossing a floor just beyond, clacked light and clear on the marble. Outside in the afternoon sun, the leaves of spring glittered, bright as embroidery.

Thorfinn said, ‘Herimann the German Arch-Chancellor has rooms here, and so has the permanent Imperial Commissioner, who is our host.’

‘The Emperor pays our expenses?’ said Otkel of Orkney, who had a profound interest in prices, particularly when paid by other people.

‘The Pope allows Archbishop Herimann the dues from the church of St John of the Latin Gate. It probably dates from Pope Victor’s exile in Germany. Now,’ said Thorfinn, ‘I imagine he can use it for the Emperor’s guests or his own. It is for you to remember that we are guests. We don’t go out unattended, nor do our servants. That is, you are free to walk as you wish in the Leonine City. But to enter Rome, you must be invited.’

‘You can’t see the river,’ said Eochaid the priest, his voice a shade flat. He had understood the interpreter and the guide. Down there beyond the laurels and oaks flowed the Tiber, and the drum fortress called the Castella of Cencius marked the bridge into the city,
Felix Roma
.

Rome. Its seven green mounds lay over the river before him, and beyond them, low blue hills ringed the horizon: the hills of Tusculum, of Prenestina, of Tibur. He said, speaking to no one, ‘It looks like a walled garden created for angels.’

It was true. Terracotta and white in the sunlight, the slim columns stood; the reeled arcades, the thumbnail arches, the delicate boxes of brick, cross-pleated with staircase and portico. The triangles of pyramid and pediment. The assiduous tooth-comb of the aqueducts, bringing the rivers riding on triumphal arches. The domes; the campanile stalks; the tablets of fluted clay tile or chalked bronze with their feet in drifting blue smoke from the other, invisible roofs of reed and of wood.