Conqueror

She clenched down on her anger, at her father and husband for talking about her this way in front of a slave, at the slave himself for repeating it. 'You watch your mouth,' she snapped. 'I want to know about Lindisfarena. Tell me about it.'

He considered. 'What's it worth?'

She was astonished. 'Do you think I'm going to bargain with a slave? It's worth not having the skin flogged off your back!'

'All right, all right. What do you want to know?'

'How did you come to be there? Were you always a slave?'

'No,' he said, absurdly indignant at the charge. 'I was born free, in Gwynedd. That's a British kingdom. I am the son of a noble. I am a Christian, and I was taught to read. I was taken prisoner when a German army came invading.'

'Was your army defeated?'

'I don't know.' He poked languidly at the pig swill. 'They probably fought better without me. Maybe that's why they wouldn't pay the ransom for me.'

He was taken by a Mercian thegn, a companion of King Offa. But he was always an unsatisfactory slave, judging by an aggrieved list of beatings and other punishments. After a complicated series of sellings-on he found himself on the east coast of Britain, and was shipped to Lindisfarena, where he worked for the villagers. 'Cockle-pickers,' Rhodri moaned. 'By God's wounds I hate cockle-pickers. And cockles.'

'Were you as lazy cockle-picking as you are pig-feeding?'

'I was,' he said with a dash of honesty. 'I hung back one day to avoid carrying the baskets and almost got drowned by the tide. After that, I tried to be lazy somewhere safe. And then, when they found out I could read, the monks took me in. They bought me off the head cockle-picker. He took a reduced price.'

'Do monks have slaves?'

'Oh, no. They freed me. They took me in as a novice.'

It was a word she didn't recognise. 'Why would they do that?'

'I told you. I am Christian, and I can read. Even if I'm not the breed of Christian they are. They were training me to become one of them.' He grinned. 'Easiest place I've lived since I left my mother's womb.'

'So how did you end up here with the pigs?'

He sighed, mock-lamenting. 'I think you know me by now, lady. The routine of a monastery isn't hard, but it's dull, dull, dull. I skipped what I could and got others to do the rest. But in the end the abbot found me out and ordered me returned to the cockle-pickers. Even Dom Wilfrid couldn't save me.'

Dom Wilfrid, it seemed, was the monk in charge of the novices.

'This Wilfrid must have seen your vices more clearly than anybody else. Why would he protect you at all?'

'Ah, because poor, weak Wilfrid had a vice of his own. Much as he gave his wisdom to the novices, there was something he liked to get back from them. Up his bum, actually.'

She was disgusted.

He shrugged. 'It was better than cockle-picking.' Once again he looked at her, lascivious. 'Maybe I could earn a few favours from you, lady. I was one of Wilfrid's favourites. It's not just my ears that are big about me, you know.'

Anger filled her, blood-red. 'Give me one good reason I shouldn't split open your grinning face right now.'

'Because you need me to get to what you really want, which is Lindisfarena.'

She was appalled. She had never met anybody, let alone a slave, who was so manipulative. But of course he was right.

She didn't know how to phrase the question. 'Did you ever hear anything of a Menologium? Of a prophecy, a legend of Ulf and Sulpicia?'

He looked calculating again. 'Your father said something about this on the boat…'

She told him of the legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer. Ulf, strong and smart, had died old, fat, wealthy, and the owner of many cattle and slaves. But over the hearth he always told stories of his time in Britain, the beautiful Sulpicia, and the remarkable prophecy he had glimpsed and lost.

And Gudrid told Rhodri how she had spoken to traders returning across the sail road from Britain and its many islands – and, from tantalising hints, how she had worked out that the prophecy, transcribed by monks, may have been stored in the monastery on Lindisfarena.

Rhodri listened to all this. 'Well, it makes sense that your prophecy would be copied down at Lindisfarena, if anywhere. Always writing, those monks, scribbling things down and copying them and making more copies again. It's a hive of letters, of ink and vellum and the scratch, scratch of styluses.'

She was mystified. 'Why do they do this?'

'What, the copying? I don't know. But it's an easier job than tilling the fields, a safer one than going to war. That's why the monasteries of Britain are stuffed full of cowering princes.' Now he smiled. 'But that's not all they're stuffed with.'

'What do you mean?'

'You need a reason to persuade your father to go there on one of these raids he's planning, don't you? I picked up that much on the boat. I think I know just the thing.'

'What?'

His smile broadened. He was enjoying his petty bit of power over her. 'Gold,' he said.

She gazed at him. 'If there's gold there, why didn't you tell my father?'

'He never asked. And besides,' he tapped his head, 'my only wealth is my bit of knowledge. Why give it away?'

She stood up. 'I need to talk to my father.'

'Come back soon, lady. Maybe if I tup you I could lodge a baby in that dry womb of yours. Your husband would never know!…'

She dared not reply. She turned her back and walked away.

VIII

Dom Boniface had always been kind to Aelfric, yet she found him intimidating. Even in this famous monastery Boniface's piety stood out. It was said that he would keep himself awake for three or four days at a time, praying intensely. Even his illness only spurred him on to thank God even more. But after the incident with Elfgar the computistor spent more time with her. Perhaps he felt guilty for what had been done to her, even if it wasn't his fault.

And, he said mysteriously, he wanted to help her understand the true purpose of the monastery.

'Saint Benedict taught us that idleness is the enemy of the soul,' he said. 'All work is good work. Your copying shows promise in its artistry, Aelfric, though how that promise may be fulfilled, only Heaven knows yet. Here in the monastery we are never short of time, and with the slow sifting of one generation's judgement after another, only that which has true deep value persists. It is not me who will assess your work, but the centuries.

'But you must always remember that you are here to serve, not your own art, but the words you preserve. The copies you make of these words may be transmitted all over the world -'

Sold on for a tidy profit, she thought a little sourly.

' – or, more importantly still,' Boniface went on, 'transmitted to the future. And that is our contribution to the ages, the preservation of such treasure for better times than this. Since the fall of Rome, Britain has been overrun by barbarians. We ourselves are the spawn of illiterate pagans! Like dogs learning to talk, we Angles have taught ourselves to read. But sometimes our veneer of civilisation seems awfully thin.' He sounded tired, his voice a whisper. He was thinking of Elfgar, she supposed.

She felt an impulse to cheer him up. 'We Angles might be barbarians. But we produced Bede.'

'Ah, Bede! He died before I was born, but I met a man who knew him as a boy… Historian, theologian, computistor, Bede had it all. I think Bede would be horrified to see the corruption that has come upon the Church since his day. But perhaps every generation says the same. He was more Roman than the Romans, you know, but Bede had it wrong about them. We are the purer sort, we of northern blood. In the end the future is ours, not the Romans or the Greeks or the Moors.'