'To put a stop to the rebellions.'
Eadgyth said, 'My own uncle is a wildman, in the fen country of the east.'
'Yes. The Normans call them silvarici. People of the woods.' All over England the wildmen had taught the Normans another new word: murdrum, furtive slaughter. 'The north has been worst, though. This country. And so it will suffer most grievously. Everywhere it is like this, from Durham to York – burned – uninhabited.' There would be no harvest this year, no lambs or calves; famine would follow the steel.
'So at last the Conqueror has come here,' Eadgyth whispered. 'From Hastings all the way to this remote place of farmers and sheep and cattle.'
Orm heard voices calling. 'We have no more time,' he said.
'Then you must earn your pay.'
He looked into her calm eyes, so like Godgifu's.
'What's this?' The voice was heavy, the accent crude French.
Orm was dismayed to see Roger fitz Gommery standing over him. Roger was a common soldier, a slab of hardened muscle from toe to brain, and an ardent rapist. The crotch of his leather trousers was already smeared with blood and ordure from his day's sport. 'Have I broken into your party, Orm Egilsson? Let's see what we've got.'
He closed his leather glove over Eadgyth's short hair, and dragged her to her feet. She screamed, and her legs flapped, too weak to support her weight.
'Roger-'
'You'll get your share, Orm.'
With his gloved hand Roger ripped at the neck of Eadgyth's habit. Old, much patched, the material gave easily. She was left naked save for pants of stained wool, which Roger pulled away. Her body was skeletal, her skin pocked by lesions, her breasts shrunken mounds behind hard nipples. She whimpered, her eyes closed, and she seemed to be praying:
And the Dove will fly east,
Wings strong, heart stout, mind clear.
God's Engines will burn our ocean
And flame across the lands of spices.
All this I have witnessed
I and my mothers…
As she gabbled these words, Roger looked her up and down, contemptuous. 'Skin and bone. Chicken legs. You know what, Dane? I can't be bothered; I've had my fill today. But we can still have a little sport. Have you ever carved a chicken?' He took a knife from his belt and, almost thoughtfully, drew it across Eadgyth's back. She jerked rigid at the pain, and warm blood poured.
And her eyes snapped open.
She stared directly at Orm. 'Egilsson,' she said. 'Orm Egilsson. Can you hear me? Are you there?' All the weakness had gone from her voice, despite the way Roger held her up by her hair, despite the wound that crossed her back. It didn't even sound like her voice any more, but deeper, heavier, the accent distorted. 'Are you there, Orm Egilsson?'
Roger gaped. 'Is she possessed?'
'Orm Egilsson. Listen to what I have to tell you. Listen, and remember, and let your sons and their sons remember too.' And again she began to intone her eerie, unfamiliar prayer.
In the last days
To the tail of the peacock
He will come:
The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer
The Dove.
And the Dove will fly east…
Roger crossed himself. 'By God's wounds, she's a prophet.'
She spoke on in that clear alien voice, of fires consuming an ocean, of war.
All this I have witnessed
I and my mothers.
Send the Dove west! O, send him west!
Orm was unaccountably afraid of this naked, helpless woman. 'What peacock, what dove? I don't know what you mean.'
'Find him,' Eadgyth said, and her voice was a hiss now.
'Who?'
'Sihtric.'
It was the name of Godgifu's brother, the priest. He had not told Eadgyth of him. The name shocked Orm to his core. 'But Sihtric is in Spain,' he said weakly.
'Find him. And stop him.'
Roger lost his nerve. He let go of the woman's hair and she crumpled into a heap. 'Screw her, kill her, or marry her, she's all yours, Dane. I'm having no more of this.' He turned and stomped off, massive in his armour, obsessively crossing himself.
The woman was huddled over on herself, her back bright with blood. Orm lifted her face with a gloved hand. Spittle flecked her lips, and he saw blood on her tongue. She had bitten it while speaking. He said, 'Who are you? By whose authority shall I command Sihtric?'
She looked at him. 'Orm?'
'Who are you?'
'I am Eadgyth. Only Eadgyth.' She frowned. 'I – have I fallen?'
'Do you remember what you said to me?'
'What I said… What's happened to me, Orm Egilsson?'
He stood up. The bright February day became insubstantial around him, and a harsher light shone through its sparse threads. He remembered all Sihtric's talk in the days before Hastings, the mystical babbling of a possibly heretical priest – talk about the tapestry of time, and how its weave might be picked undone and remade by a god, or a man with sufficient power. The Weaver, Sihtric had called him. And now Sihtric and his mysteries had returned to Orm's life.
But on the ground before him was a woman, helpless, naked, shivering, bleeding. That was the reality. He reached up to his horse, pulled a blanket from the saddle, and draped it over her shoulders. The Norman soldiers, drunk on blood and rape, drawn by Roger's gabbled account, gathered around curiously.
I
I
The north Spanish country did not interest Robert, son of Orm.
Why should it? Green, damp, mild even in July, it was too like England. And besides, Robert, fourteen years old, believed that his soul yearned for spiritual nourishment, not for spectacle. So he was glad when he and his father reached Santiago de Compostela, the city of Saint James of the Field of Stars, where he would be able to prostrate himself among the flocking pilgrims before the tomb of the Apostle, Santiago Matamoros, James the Moorslayer.
As it turned out, it was not his soul he would give up in this city, but his heart, and not to the dusty bones of a saint, but to the sweet face of a half-Moorish girl.
The three of them, Robert, Orm and Ali Ibn Hafsun, their guide, sat on little stone benches in the shade of an apple tree, resting bodies weary from the day's ride from the coast, and sipping a vendor's sharp-flavoured tea. Saint James's city was small, shabby, somewhat decayed, as if nobody had repaired a wall or fixed a broken roof tile since the departure of the Romans. But this little square bustled, as pilgrims in travel-stained dress queued to pay homage, children chased chickens, women shopped for food, and men in loose white clothes conducted business in various tongues.
And in the shadow of the squat church, camels groaned and jostled. The camels were extraordinary. Robert thought they looked wrong, somehow, as if put together from bits of other creatures.
Orm laughed at the camels. 'I always heard that Africa starts on the other side of the Pyrenees. Now I know.'
Ibn Hafsun was studying Robert. About Orm's age, somewhere in his forties, Ibn Hafsun dressed like a Moor, and yet he had greying blond hair and blue eyes. He seemed to sense Robert's restlessness. 'You are distracted, boy. I can see it in the way you gulp down that hot tea, the way your gaze roams over every surface, looking at all and seeing nothing.'
Orm had always said Robert had the spiritual soul of his long-dead mother, Eadgyth, who had once been a hermit. But Robert had the build and temper of his father, who was a soldier. 'What's it to you?' he snapped back, fourteen years old, bristling.
Ibn Hafsun raised his hands. 'I mean no offence. I am your guide in this strange country. That's what I'm paid to do. And though I have delivered your body to this place, I'm doing a poor job if I allow your spirit to wander around like a chick that has lost its nest.' He spoke an accented Latin dialect. Robert had expected everybody to speak Arabic, but there were two tongues in Spain, Arabic and this diverged version of Latin, which the people called aljami or latinia.