“It cannot be denied that King Harald was a dreadful sinner,” he said; “and on the occasion to which you have referred, I all but joined the regiments of the blessed martyrs. In many ways, though, he was not altogether unlike King David—the resemblance is, perhaps, more noticeable if one compares him with King Sven—and I do not think he would have been pleased to hear one of his daughters jest on the subject of priest-murder.”
“We are all sinners,” said Orm. “Even I am no exception; for I myself have more than once laid violent hands on a priest, during our campaigns in Castile and León, when we stormed the Christians’ towns and burned their churches. Their priests fought bravely against us, with spear and sword, and it was my master Almansur’s command that we should always kill them first. But that was in the days when I knew no better, so that I think God will not judge me too severely for it.”
“My luck is better than I had feared,” said Spjalle. “For I see that I have fallen among honorable men.”
The pale young man with the short black beard, who was the fourth of these beggars, had till now sat silent and heavy-eyed. Now, however, he sighed and spoke.
“All men are sinners,” he said. “Alas, it is too true! But none of you bears as heavy a burden on his soul as I carry. I am Rainald, an unworthy priest of God, canon to the good Bishop Eckard of Schleswig. But I was born at Zülpich in Lotharingia and was formerly magister in the cathedral school at Aachen, and I have come to these northern climes because I am a sinner and a most unlucky man.”
“A man would have to look far before finding more rewarding beggars than you,” said Orm, “for not one of you but has a tale to tell. If your story is good, Rainald, let us hear it.”
“Stories about sin are always good to hear,” said Ylva.
“Only if one listens to them in a pious frame of mind, and profits from them,” said Father Willibald.
“There is, I fear, much profit to be gleaned from my story,” said the magister sadly, “for ever since my twelfth year I have been the unluckiest of men. Perhaps you know that in a cave in the earth between Zülpich and Heimbach there lives a wisewoman called Radla, who has the power of seeing into the future. I was taken to her by my mother, who wished to know if it would be a lucky thing for me to enter the priesthood; for I had a great longing to become a servant of Christ. The wisewoman took my hands in hers and sat for a long while rocking and moaning with her eyes closed, so that I thought I would die of terror. At last she began to speak, and said that I would be a good priest and that much of what I did would prosper. ‘But one piece of bad luck you must carry with you,’ she said. ‘You shall commit three sins, and the second shall be worse than the first, and the third shall be the worst of all. This is your fate, and you cannot escape it.’ Those were her words, and more than that she would not say. We wept bitterly, my mother and I, as we walked home from her cave, for it was our wish that I should be a holy man and free from sin. We went to our old priest to ask his advice, and he said that a man who committed only three sins in his life should be regarded as lucky; but I derived little comfort from that. So I entered the priest-school at Aachen, and none of the students was more zealous or industrious than I, or more assiduous in his avoidance of sin. Both in Latin and in liturgy I was the best in the school, and by the time I was twenty-one I knew the Gospels and the Psalms by heart, as well as much of the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Galatians, which were too difficult for the majority of the students, so that Dean Rumold praised me highly and took me to be his deacon. Dean Rumold was an old man with a voice like a bull and large glaring eyes. People trembled when he addressed them, and he loved two things above all else in the world, after Christ’s holy Church: namely, spiced wine and knowledge. He was expert in sciences so obscure and difficult that few people even knew the meaning of their names, such as astrology, mantik,1 and algorism,2 and it was said that he was able to converse with the Empress Theofano in her own Byzantine tongue. For in his younger days, he had been in the Eastland with the learned Bishop Liutprand of Cremona and had rare and wonderful stories to tell of those regions. All his life he had collected books, of which he now possessed more than seventy; and often in the evenings, when I brought the hot wine to him in his chamber, he would instruct me in learned matters, or let me read aloud to him from the works of two ancient poets who were in his library. One of these was called Statius; he sang in difficult words about old wars that had been fought between the Byzantines and a town called Thebes. The other was called Ermoldus Nigellus, and he was easier to understand; he told of the blessed Emperor Ludwig, the son of the great Emperor Charles, and of the wars he had fought against the heathens in Spain. When I made errors in reading Statius, the old Dean would curse me and swipe at me with his stick saying that I ought to love him and read him with care, because he was the first poet of Rome who had turned Christian. I was anxious to please the Dean and to escape his stick, so I did my best to obey him; but I could not come to love this poet greatly, much as I tried to do so. There was, besides, a third poet whose works the Dean possessed, bound more finely than the others, and sometimes I saw him sitting mumbling over them. Whenever he did this, his mood would mellow, and he would send me to fetch more wine; but he would never let me read to him from that book. This made me all the more curious to know what it might contain, and one evening, when he was visiting the Bishop, I went into his chamber and searched around for this book, finding it at last in a small chest that stood beneath his wall-seat. The first thing in the book was ‘Rules for a Magister,’ which is the blessed Benedict’s counsel on how to lead a godly life; and after that there came a discourse on chastity by a man from England called Aldhelmus. Following this was a long poem, beautifully and most carefully inscribed. It was called Ars amandi, which means the Art of Love, and was written by a poet of ancient Rome called Ovid, who most assuredly was not a Christian.”
The magister looked sadly at Father Willibald as he reached this point in his narrative, and Father Willibald nodded pensively.
“I have heard tell of this book,” he said, “and know it to be highly regarded by foolish monks and learned nuns.”
“It is as Beelzebub’s own brew,” said the magister, “and yet it is sweeter than honey. It was difficult for me to understand it completely, for it was full of words that do not appear in the Gospels or the epistles, nor in Statius either; but my eagerness to discover its meaning matched my fear at what it might contain. Of its content I will say nothing, save that it was full of details concerning caresses, sweet-smelling substances, strange melodies, and every form of sensual pleasure that man and woman can indulge in. At first I feared lest it might not be a great sin to read about such matters, but then I bethought myself (it was the Devil speaking to me) and decided that what was fit matter for a wise Dean could not be sinful reading for me. This lustful Ovid was, in sooth, a great poet, though wholly of the Devil’s party, and I was surprised to find that his verses remained in my head without my making any effort to memorize them—far more so than the Epistle to the Galatians, though I had struggled most assiduously to memorize that. I continued reading until I heard the Dean’s footsteps outside the house; when he entered, he gave me a sharp drubbing with his stick because I had neglected to meet him with torches and help him home. But I scarcely noticed the pain, for other things were uppermost in my mind; and on two later occasions when he was absent, I stole again into his room, and so read the poem to its end. The result of this was that a great change came over me; for from that time my head was filled with sinful thoughts in most melodious verse. Shortly afterwards, because of my knowledge, I was made magister at the cathedral school, where all went well for me until I received a summons to appear before the Bishop. He told me that the rich merchant Dudo, in the town of Maastricht, a man known for his piety, who had bestowed rich gifts upon the Church, had asked for a godly and learned priest to be sent to him to instruct his son concerning the Christian virtues, and also to teach him to write and reckon; for which post the Bishop had chosen me, because the Dean held me to be the best of the young teachers, and the only one skilled in the difficult art of reckoning. In order that I might also conduct services for the merchant’s household, the good Bishop raised me to the rank of presbyter, with the right to hear confession; and I straightway departed for the town of Maastricht, where I found the Devil awaiting me.”