Saxon: The Book of Dreams (Saxon 1) (42 page)

Carolus subjected me to a long, brooding stare. Then, seeing that I was swaying on my feet, he added, ‘You may sit.’

Gratefully I sank down on a stool.

‘Tell me what you know about my nephew,’ he commanded as soon as the two servants were out of earshot.

‘Count Hroudland is . . . dead, Your Majesty,’ I said. ‘He and Count Anselm and Eggihard died defending the rearguard of your army.’

‘When and where did this happen?’

‘Yesterday, just short of the mountain pass. The rearguard was ambushed and badly outnumbered.’

‘By whom?’ The question was delivered in a flat voice.

I told him about the Vascons, and all that had happened from the moment we had been ambushed. I omitted any details about the foray to find the rumoured Graal. I did not want to give the king
any indication that Hroudland might have been irresponsible.

When I finished my description of the catastrophe, the king sat very still.

‘Strange,’ he said quietly. ‘Last night, just as I was falling asleep, I thought I heard the sound of a horn. Not once, but several times, far in the distance.’

‘The battle took place half a day’s ride from here, Your Majesty. No sound could carry that far,’ I said.

He gave me a strange look.

‘Maybe I was already asleep and dreaming,’ he said. ‘You would understand that.’

I was too exhausted to make any reply.

‘I should have paid more attention to the rearguard,’ Carolus continued, as if speaking to himself. ‘It was my mistake to let them lag so far behind.’

My moment had come.

‘They were betrayed,’ I said.

His head came up sharply and he stared at me.

‘How do you mean “betrayed”?’

‘The enemy knew when and where to ambush the rearguard, the size and number of its troops.’

He drew his eyebrows together in a scowl.

‘Have you any proof?’

I pointed to Osric standing at a distance behind the cordon of soldiers.

‘That man can tell you. He is an envoy from the Wali of Zaragoza.’

‘A conniving Saracen,’ muttered Carolus, but he beckoned to the soldiers. ‘Bring that fellow over here.’

The guards searched Osric for hidden weapons, and then led him to the little tent. Once again the king’s memory for people astonished me.

‘Haven’t I seen that limp before,’ he demanded as Osric stood before him.

‘He was my servant in Aachen,’ I intervened. ‘Now he is a free man and in the service of Wali Husayn of Zaragoza.’

‘I’m told that my rearguard was betrayed.’ There was an undertone of menace in the king’s statement.

‘That is what Wali Husayn has instructed me to inform you.’ Osric managed to be respectful yet very sure of himself.

‘Why would the wali want to do that?’ growled the king.

‘He wishes to re-establish good relations with Your Majesty.’

Carolus gazed at Osric thoughtfully.

‘So this is some sort of peace offering?’

‘That is correct,’ said Osric.

‘Is he prepared to identify the traitor?’

Osric nodded.

Carolus turned his shrewd grey eyes on me. There was no warmth in the look he gave me, only calculation.

‘Do you know who betrayed my nephew?’

I shook my head.

‘I only know that we stood no chance.’

Carolus’s voice took on an edge that was chilling.

‘Name this traitor,’ he demanded of Osric.

‘He is one of your inner council, a man called Ganelon,’ Osric replied. ‘He has been supplying information to my master for months.’

*

Osric and I had discussed this moment while he was stitching up my shoulder wound. It was then, to distract me from the needle’s pain, he had told me why Wali Husayn had
sent him as an envoy to Carolus.

‘The wali intends to destroy Ganelon. He holds him responsible for what went wrong with the plan to invite Carolus into Hispania.’

I had sucked in my breath, stifling a yelp as the needle pierced my flesh.

‘I remember when you met Hroudland and me outside the walls of Zaragoza,’ I’d said, ‘and refused us entry to the city. At that time you told Hroudland that it was Ganelon
who persuaded the king to turn on his ally, the Wali of Barcelona, and make him a prisoner.’

‘And later? Did you see the look on Wali Suleyman’s face when he rode into Zaragoza after Husayn had paid his ransom?’

‘He looked crushed. I felt very sorry for him.’

‘He was deeply ashamed. When Wali Husayn greeted him, he drew back from his embrace. Since then Suleyman has scarcely emerged from his living quarters.’ Osric had given a grunt of
annoyance. The cotton thread had snapped again. I’d felt the loose end slither through my skin as he’d pulled it free of the stitch hole. ‘Saracens value family honour. Wali
Husayn and Wali Suleyman are brothers-in-law. To humiliate one is to humiliate the other.’

‘So Husayn seeks to avenge his brother-in-law’s dishonour?’

‘Already he’s recovered much of the ransom he paid. That was his agreement with the Vascons, and it makes things somewhat easier between himself and his brother-in-law.’

‘Is that why Husayn agreed so easily to the payment of such a huge ransom?’ I’d asked.

Osric hadn’t answered, and instead re-threaded the needle, this time with the horse hair. Finally he’d said, ‘He was already planning how to get the money back. His spies would
have told him that the Franks would soon have retreated over the mountains. That meant passing through Vascon territory. When we stayed overnight with that Vascon shepherd, he told us himself that
he was on good terms with the Vascons.’

‘So now it remains for him to destroy Ganelon. Just how will he do that?’

‘With your help we dispose of Ganelon using the same weapon he plotted to use against Hroudland.’

I had forgotten the note that Ganelon had asked Husayn to sign, that had promised a payment of five hundred dinars, with me as the named person to collect the money but without an eventual
recipient named. Ganelon had planned to accuse Hroudland of selling out to the Saracens and produce the note as evidence.

My friend’s brown eyes had searched my face.

‘Sigwulf, it will mean lying to Carolus.’

I had hesitated.

‘I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in this. Hroudland and Ganelon hated one another. But now Hroudland is dead and I have no quarrel with Ganelon. There was a time when I believed
he was trying to have me killed to get at Hroudland through me. But this wasn’t true.’

‘You have a different score to settle with Ganelon.’

I’d looked at my friend questioningly.

‘Have you thought what would have happened to you if Ganelon’s plot against Hroudland had succeeded?’ he’d asked softly.

It had taken me a moment to grasp the subtlety of the Wali of Zaragoza. He had known he could count on me to help him once I’d realized that if Carolus believed that I had acted as a
go-between for Hroudland collecting bribes I would also have been branded as a traitor and put to death.

‘It should be easy for you to persuade Carolus that the rearguard was betrayed,’ Osric had said. ‘A little harder, perhaps, that Ganelon was responsible.’

*

Carolus sat without moving. It was a measure of the man that his face gave no hint of what he was thinking. Finally he said, ‘Have you any proof?’

Osric did not falter.

‘Ganelon insisted that my master sign a note promising him a first payment of five hundred dinars in return for his help.’

‘And was the money ever paid?’

‘Sigwulf here can answer that,’ Osric murmured.

The king fixed me with a stare.

‘Ganelon was a rival to my nephew, that is well known. But how do you come into all this?’ he said.

I knew that I would have to lie convincingly in the face of those penetrating grey eyes.

‘When I was sent to Zaragoza,’ I lied, ‘Ganelon asked me to collect five hundred dinars from the wali on his behalf. I was to bring the money to a Jewish moneylender in the
town who would arrange for it to be sent on.’

Carolus leaned forward, peering into my face.

‘You are prepared to swear to this?’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘You are both dismissed,’ said the king. ‘You will not speak to anyone about this.’

*

I did not see Ganelon’s execution, though it was a public spectacle. It took place two days later and there was no trial. The damning note signed by Wali Husayn had been
found among his possessions. He was taken to an open space where a stout rope was fastened to each limb. The ends of the ropes were then attached to the yokes of four ox teams whose drovers then
urged their beasts to walk off in opposite directions. They tore Ganelon into pieces. This method of execution was normally done with horses, but Carolus decided that oxen would be more
appropriate. The drovers had been carefully selected: each of them had lost a brother, cousin or nephew in the massacre at the pass.

I was in a delirium at the time. My shoulder wound began to fester alarmingly and I was placed on a pile of blankets in the back of a supply cart, soon to head north in the army’s supply
train. I raved and thrashed, shouting that flying monsters were attacking me or that a vixen was a mortal danger. At other times I lay still, the sweat beading on my brow, and mumbled of flocks of
birds at a sacred spring.

Osric stayed with me, fending off the physician sent by the king who took a personal interest in my survival. The royal doctor wanted to stuff the putrid wound with a paste of cobwebs and honey,
but Osric would not let him.

‘I also had to stop him bleeding you,’ Osric told me as I began to recover on the third day, ‘you were weak enough already. The loss of any more blood would put you in your
grave.’

His remark prompted a faint memory of a sentence he had translated from the Book of Dreams.

‘Osric, do you remember anything in the Oneirokritikon about tears of blood?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘When we first came to Frankia, I dreamed of a great horse and its rider crying tears of blood. Later, I saw the identical horse and rider as a statue at the palace in Aachen. On the march
into Hispania I recognized the king’s own war horse as the same animal.’

‘Go on.’

‘On the day I told the king about Hroudland’s death,’ I explained, ‘I was seated by the water trough and he rode up on his horse, so close it nearly trod on me and I
looked up. I knew exactly what was happening. It was all so real that I watched the king’s face and waited for the tears of blood. Yet they never came.’

‘Some people would say he had no reason to weep. He had yet to hear that his nephew had been killed.’ Osric studied me, his expression serious. ‘Yet, if we are to believe
Artimedorus, there’s another meaning for your dream.’

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember something about horses?’

There was a long pause as Osric searched for the exact words as he remembered them. But the extract from the Oneirokritikon he quoted was not what I had expected.

‘To see blood flowing is unlucky for a man who wishes to keep his actions secret.’

I sank back on my blankets, too exhausted to keep my head raised.

‘So my dream was not about the horse and its rider. It was about me, the dreamer.’

Already I was wondering if one day Carolus would find out that I had lied to him about Ganelon and what I would find when I returned to Aachen. Did Bertha still expect me to continue with our
affair? And how many of her intimate circle had she told that I had predicted the death of the king’s only son? With Osric’s help perhaps I could remember or reconstruct a few pages
from the Book of Dreams and steer a safe path through the intrigues of the royal court. But Hroudland’s death meant that I had lost my patron and protector, even as I had started to come to
terms with being
winelas guma
, a ‘friendless man’, an outcast from my own country. Once again, my future was uncertain.

Sigwulf’s story is based very loosely on the events surrounding Charlemagne’s failed military expedition into Moorish Spain in August 778
AD
. The rearguard of his army was cut off and massacred as it was withdrawing across the Pyrenees. Several high officials of Charlemagne’s court were killed in the action, among
them Anselm, the count of the palace, Count Eggihard the royal seneschal, and – notably – Count Hroudland or Roland, Prefect of the Breton March. Medieval poets and bards transmuted
what had been a bloody defeat into a tale of valour and chivalry. Above all they celebrated the heroic last stand of Count Roland and his companions against an overwhelming foe whom they identified
as Saracens but who were almost certainly Christian Vascons (Gascons/Basques). Their romanticized version of the battle became the best known of the
chansons de geste
, the ‘songs of
deeds’, in the repertoire of tales known to jongleurs and minstrels as ‘The Matter of France’. Another collection, ‘The Matter of Britain’, told of the exploits of
King Arthur and his knights.

The exact location of the fateful battle when Roland was killed is not mentioned in the early versions of the story. Tradition places it in the pass at Roncesvalles in Navarre, Spain, 7km from
the French border. Roncesvalles became a popular stopover on one of the pilgrim routes to the shrine of St James at Compostela. ‘The Song of Roland’ as it became known was probably
spread throughout Christian Europe by returning pilgrims. When Taillefer, one of William of Normandy’s warriors, was granted the honour of striking the first blow at the battle of Hastings,
it is said that he advanced against the enemy singing of Roland and Charlemagne. Some of the leading characters in the
chansons de gestes
are authentic historical figures: King Offa of
Mercia described himself as Rex Anglorum; the scholarly Alcuin moved from the cathedral church of York to teach at the royal palace school in Aachen; and three Saracen walis or provincial governors
came to seek an alliance with Charlemagne against their overlord, the Emir of Cordoba.

*

The Oneirokritikon, or ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, was compiled in the 2nd century
AD
by the Greek writer Artimedorus and translated into
Arabic by the 8th century, probably via a Byzantine Greek source. It became a popular dreambook in various languages throughout the Middle Ages when the meaning of dreams was considered highly
significant. The meanings of various dreams in Sigwulf’s tale – seeing a snake, blood, an unknown riderless horse, etc. – are taken from the Oneirokritikon.