Two of them got her by the feet, two by the hands, while two others held the ends of a rope wrapped around her neck. You must imagine the scene, Father: the poky sail-cloth tent stinking of salt, the rotting corpse in its finery, the brutish men like animals huddled over Aelfflaed.
Now a woman they called 'The Angel of Death' entered the tent, and, as the two men pulled the cord tight, she stabbed Aelfflaed again and again in the chest, until there was no life in her. Then they all withdrew from the tent.
Egil, chief mourner, stood before the ship. Naked, one-armed, his face a ruin, what a sight the Beast of Cippanhamm was! With his one remaining hand he held a burning brand, and he set fire to the bonfire. Within an hour the ship was gone, destroyed by the fire, taking Ulfjlot to his brutish paradise.
But after this uninteresting heathen nonsense, Cynewulf, one by one, the seven men who had mourned Ulfjlot fell ill. Even at the funeral feast they were vomiting, and soon acidic bile hosed from between their hairy buttocks. Within a day the vomit and stools turned bloody – I saw this, as I was brought in to examine them.
It took most of them two or three days to die. Egil was stronger than the rest and it took him seven. He was conscious to the end, as the substance of his body drained out of his arse.
I think you can guess my conclusion, Cynewulf. The slave who died with Ulfjlot was surely Aebbe, who, her body and life wrecked by Egil, devoted herself to plotting her revenge. I seem to recall that Aelfflaed was the name of the great-grandmother of Lindisfarena she admired. Of course she still bore the scars Egil left her with. Perhaps she covered them over. Or perhaps Egil could not remember inflicting them. Perhaps he has hurt so many women in this way the memories blurred together. It seems he did not recognise her.
And as each of Ulfjlot's men lay with her that day, she infected them with the disease that killed them. I have some small knowledge of medicine. I have heard talk of such foul contagions emanating from the jungles in the south of Africa. She might have administered it through a seed pod, delivered in a kiss.
Is revenge a sin in your faith, priest? I am sure murder is. If so Aebbe is surely laughing in Hell, even now…
Ibn Zuhr closed with some excitable speculations on the Menologium, which he had managed to memorise on hearing it read to Alfred. 'This strange prophecy-poem came into my life lodged in Aebbe's head, and is now stuck in my own…' He had scrawled some ideas about the enigmatic stanzas of the future, but he added a wry note: 'I am not qualified to be an oracle.'
He had been able to make sense of the Great-Year numbers embedded in the Menologium. Using the strange arithmetic of the Moors, which made adding large totals easy, he had summed forward all the Great Year months. With the sixth stanza's prophecy of Alfred's victory as an anchor he had calculated the date of the dawn of the ninth Year, when, said the Menologium, the final battle would be fought, and the earthly paradise of the Aryans would be founded.
'You will see that your Menologium reaches beyond the Christian millennium,' he noted dryly. 'Will the world still exist to see this come to pass? Well, neither of us will live to find out; we are mere footnotes in the Menologium's long story.
'I offer this to you, priest, for what it is worth, in the hope that it will satisfy some sliver of curiosity of your own. As for me, I will go to my grave wondering about the true intentions of the Weaver, if he exists…'
The year of the final battle would be the 5070th since the creation of the world, the 1819th since the founding of Rome, and the 487th year of the Islamic calendar. As for the Christian system, the date Ibn Zuhr had written down boldly was, in Roman numerals: MLXVI
And in the Moorish system: 1066
IV
CONQUEROR AD 1064-1066
I
Orm Egilsson didn't even notice the bog until his horse went down under him. The animal screamed in agony as its legs snapped like twigs, and Orm was sent flying out of his saddle and came down face-first in the mud.
Winded, he pushed up to his knees, and scraped cold black dirt from his eyes and mouth. His mail coat was a mass of heavy iron on his shoulders. His horse lay prone, a steaming mass, and silent. Orm could see its head was bent back impossibly far; it was a mercy that the horse had died instantly.
But that left Orm stranded, on his knees in the middle of this muddy bog.
He glanced back the way he had come, to the north. He could see the Norman raiders, a thousand of them, galloping under the June sky across a burning landscape. This adventure into Brittany included a party of English, and Orm could see the bright red-and-gold Fighting Man standard of Earl Harold, where he rode alongside William of Normandy. Sensibly, the leaders were avoiding the copse where Orm had got himself tripped up.
Orm Egilsson was no Norman but a Dane. He was an adventurer, a mercenary. He had actually been riding ahead of the Norman raiding party. That way he had a chance to be the first upon the next hapless Breton farmer and his terrified family. It wasn't much of a way to wage war, in Orm's opinion, to ravage a countryside, torch the buildings, slaughter the men, and leave every woman over the age of nine raped to death. But it was the Norman way – and though he avoided the butchery and the rapes, the best way Orm could impress his employer, a Norman count, was to be out ahead of the pack, his blade flashing, his war cries louder than anybody else's.
And that was why, as he took a short-cut through a small, tangled copse, he had been the first to come upon this patch of clinging bog.
Well, he had to get out of the mud. But when he tried to push himself up his arms just sank in the mush up to his elbows, and as he thrashed around the links of his mail coat clogged up and grew heavier. Winded from the fall, he was starting to tire. And, he realised, each time he struggled to free himself, all he succeeded in doing was stirring up the mud and sinking a little deeper. He had to laugh. Was this how his life was to end, drowning in mud? He would be turned away from paradise with the heroes' mockery ringing in his ears.
And so much for impressing the Duke, he thought bitterly. But he had no choice but to ask for help.
'Hey!' He shouted as loudly as he could, and took off his conical helmet to wave it. 'A hand! Over here!'
The Normans surged on like a storm, but he thought he saw a couple of riders peel off.
He struggled further, sank deeper. He repeated his cries in the Frankish spoken by the Normans, in English, and in Danish.
'I can hear you. No need to yell.'
The new voice was English, and a woman's. Orm tried to turn. The mud was now almost up to his waist, its heavy grasp tightening around his legs.
The woman, who must have been riding with the warriors, was standing at the far side of the copse, with a man beside her. Short, confident, wiry-looking, she wore no mail but a sensible tunic and trousers of tough-looking leather. Her brown hair was pulled back revealing a face bronzed by sun and rain. Blue-eyed, around twenty, she might have been pretty, Orm thought bleakly, if she wasn't so obviously amused by him.
The man beside her had similar pale blue eyes; he was in mail and carried a mace, but looked too slight to be a warrior. Older than the woman he looked sly to Orm – slim and lithe, like a snake.
Orm knew him. 'You're the priest who rides with Harold.'
'That's true,' the man said. 'My name is Sihtric. This is my sister, Godgifu.'
Orm tried to straighten up, recovering as much dignity as he could. 'And I am Orm, son of Egil, son of Egil, who-' But he tipped over backward, and, thrashing in the mud, sank a bit deeper.
Like the call of a bird Godgifu's laughter echoed around the little copse.