Stephen Baxter - Conqueror

But he was disappointing, she thought drearily. Sex with him had been painful the first few times, then for a while vaguely pleasurable – but quickly, like much else in their lives, it had become a chore. Nowadays they would lie together of a night, and he would spend himself into her, and they would roll apart and sleep, all without exchanging a single word, even without kissing. It had been like this since she was sixteen years old.

And when the sons refused to blossom in her womb, their relationship turned dull. He had stayed with her. Perhaps he loved her in his way. But it was a cold, deadened love. Surely the love of Ulf and Sulpicia, six generations back, had been much more fiery than this.

It didn't help that these days the fjords swarmed with other men's sons. Sons were a source of pride, a sign of virility, a promise of wealth in old age. And all those sons wanted their own homes.

That was the trouble, her father said. The fjords were full, they were already living halfway up the mountains, and still more sons popped from the women's loins. That was why the people were sailing off to Britain, or even further.

These thoughts reminded her why Askold had said he had come here. 'You say my father is back?'

He nodded and pointed. 'Look, you can see his ship. Good trading with the British. Whale ivory in exchange for wool and hunting dogs and slaves. Plenty of good places for a landing, he said.'

She knew what that meant. Good places to raid.

'Oh,' Askold said. 'He told me to tell you. The island you've mentioned before – where the story of Ulf and Sul – Sulpi-'

'Sulpicia.'

'Where all that's supposed to have happened.'

She guessed, 'Lindisfarena?'

'That's the place.'

'It didn't happen there. There's just supposed to be a copy of the prophecy there. The Menologium of Isolde…'

Askold waited, staring into the misty distance and chewing his meat, until she shut up. He hated to be corrected.

'Tell me what my father said.'

'Not much more than that. They landed, did a bit of trading with black-robed monks, left. Bjarni said he couldn't see why he would ever go back.'

Gudrid was disappointed. 'He said that?'

'Oh, and he brought a slave back. Got him cheap. A useless-looking lad who puked all the way back across the ocean.'

That was something, she thought. Slaves often saw more than their masters imagined; perhaps he could tell her about Lindisfarena.

She had finished her bread and meat. She stood, stretching her arms. 'Askold, are you busy? I've a spare axe, and water.'

Askold glanced at the trees she had been stripping. 'I've nothing better to do.' He got to his feet, took the better of the two axes she had brought, and set to work.

As they laboured through the spring afternoon, they exchanged barely a word.

V

The scriptorium was a quiet, dark, silent room, smelling of old vellum and sour ink, its walls lined with stacks of books. Aelfric was alone here, working by the sputtering light of a goose-fat lamp. This inky womb was her favourite place, she thought, in all the world.

The nib of her pen scratching softly at smooth vellum, Aelfric laboured over her copy of the fourth stanza of the Menologium of the Blessed Isolde:

The Comet comes/in the month of October.

In homage a king bows/at hermit's feet.

Not an island, an island/not a shield, a shield.

Nine hundred and seven/the months of the fourth Year…

Her pen was cut from a goose quill. The ink, which the monks called encaustum, came from an oak tree gall. You crushed the gall in vinegar, thickened it with gum, and added salts for colour. The ink was thick and caustic and bit into the surface of the vellum – and so you had to take great care with your lettering, for a mistake when made could not be unmade (though it could be disguised as embellishment, as Aelfric had quickly learned).

The vellum on which she wrote was the skin of a calf, soaked in urine to remove the hair and fat, then scraped clean, stretched on a frame and smoothed with a stone. There was something wonderfully earthy about it all. She could smell the monks' piss, and even when the book was complete it would have to be bound in a wooden frame to stop it curling back into animal hide.

Dom Boniface, the old computistor who was her tutor, said Aelfric, a mere novice with less than a year's experience, should regard it as an honour to be working on the Menologium. It was the small library's 'hidden treasure', as he put it, in among the Bible commentaries, hagiographies and histories, and books of grammar and computistics and chronologies. For this brief and enigmatic document supported the abbot's claim for the Blessed Isolde to be confirmed as a saint by the Pope, thus adding to Northumbria's already glittering array of celestial warriors. And the words themselves were precious. They had almost been lost, Boniface told her, committed to the memory of illiterate pagans for several generations before being transcribed once more.

But the Menologium's terse enigmas irritated Aelfric. Take this fourth stanza, for instance: how could a shield not be a shield, an island not an island? And she knew kings; her father was the thegn of a king, and no king would bow to a hermit. It was all much too opaque for Aelfric, who was impatient with riddles, artificial obstacles to the truth.

But she could always find pleasure in the work itself.

This copy of the Menologium would be little more than a transcription of the text with some simple illumination in black ink. She longed to be able to use colour, to unleash her imagination fully, as she was promised one of these days – one of these years, such was the pace of monastic life. But around the opening 'T' of that first line she carefully sketched out a tree, with roots fading into unseen depths and branches reaching to the sky. The tree image was a secret joke. In this Christian manuscript she hinted at Irminsul, the World Tree of legends repeated around her father's fire: the tree in whose mighty branches lodged the universe itself…

Elfgar and his novices pushed their way into the scriptorium.

'Ah, novice – Aelfric, is it? We haven't had a chance to talk.' Elfgar's face was round, almost fat. He must eat far more than he was supposed to. But his eyes were deep and sharp. His companions, whose names she didn't know, were still, watchful.

'And you're Elfgar.'

Elfgar bowed.

She stood warily, with her back to the desk. Elfgar and his cronies fanned out, cutting her off from the door. She saw low cunning in their overfed faces. But her head was full of words, and her first reaction wasn't fear but irritation that they were wasting her precious time. 'What do you want? You can see I'm working. Soon study hour will be done-'

'Ah, yes, study.' Elfgar leaned over the manuscript, coming close to her. She could smell him, a kind of sickly milkiness under the dirt stink. 'You're not very good at it, are you?' With a slow, obscene gesture, he put his finger in his mouth, drew it out wet, and held it over the page.

'Please,' Aelfric said hastily. 'You'll ruin it.'

'So what? It's only scribble.'

'It's hours of work. I'll go to Dom Wilfrid. I mean it.'

Elfgar snickered. 'Dear old Wilfrid. It's a long time since I heard a harsh word from him, I can tell you that. But then he's so ashamed.'

'Ashamed? Of what?'

'Of what we give him, and how he longs for it.'

'Whatever it is you want, Elfgar, get it over.'

He stepped closer, so that milky stink was even stronger. 'Why, do you think I'm here to hurt you, novice? Not at all. I'm here to help your frail little soul. It will do you good to eat a little less each prandium, and hand over the rest to me and my brothers. It will speed your way into Heaven to work a little longer in the fields in the hours of opus manuum, while I and my brothers doze. You see? That sort of thing. And just to prove how sincere I am, I'll freely give you a little of what Dom Wilfrid so longs for, in his cold and lonely cell.'