Tim Severin - The Book of Dreams

I knew that I would have to lie convincingly in the face of those penetrating grey eyes.

‘When I was sent to Zaragoza,’ I lied, ‘Ganelon asked me to collect five hundred dinars from the wali on his behalf. I was to bring the money to a Jewish moneylender in the town who would arrange for it to be sent on.’

Carolus leaned forward, peering into my face.

‘You are prepared to swear to this?’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

‘You are both dismissed,’ said the king. ‘You will not speak to anyone about this.’

*

I did not see Ganelon’s execution, though it was a public spectacle. It took place two days later and there was no trial. The damning note signed by Wali Husayn had been found among his possessions. He was taken to an open space where a stout rope was fastened to each limb. The ends of the ropes were then attached to the yokes of four ox teams whose drovers then urged their beasts to walk off in opposite directions. They tore Ganelon into pieces. This method of execution was normally done with horses, but Carolus decided that oxen would be more appropriate. The drovers had been carefully selected: each of them had lost a brother, cousin or nephew in the massacre at the pass.

I was in a delirium at the time. My shoulder wound began to fester alarmingly and I was placed on a pile of blankets in the back of a supply cart, soon to head north in the army’s supply train. I raved and thrashed, shouting that flying monsters were attacking me or that a vixen was a mortal danger. At other times I lay still, the sweat beading on my brow, and mumbled of flocks of birds at a sacred spring.

Osric stayed with me, fending off the physician sent by the king who took a personal interest in my survival. The royal doctor wanted to stuff the putrid wound with a paste of cobwebs and honey, but Osric would not let him.

‘I also had to stop him bleeding you,’ Osric told me as I began to recover on the third day, ‘you were weak enough already. The loss of any more blood would put you in your grave.’

His remark prompted a faint memory of a sentence he had translated from the Book of Dreams.

‘Osric, do you remember anything in the Oneirokritikon about tears of blood?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘When we first came to Frankia, I dreamed of a great horse and its rider crying tears of blood. Later, I saw the identical horse and rider as a statue at the palace in Aachen. On the march into Hispania I recognized the king’s own war horse as the same animal.’

‘Go on.’

‘On the day I told the king about Hroudland’s death,’ I explained, ‘I was seated by the water trough and he rode up on his horse, so close it nearly trod on me and I looked up. I knew exactly what was happening. It was all so real that I watched the king’s face and waited for the tears of blood. Yet they never came.’

‘Some people would say he had no reason to weep. He had yet to hear that his nephew had been killed.’ Osric studied me, his expression serious. ‘Yet, if we are to believe Artimedorus, there’s another meaning for your dream.’

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember something about horses?’

There was a long pause as Osric searched for the exact words as he remembered them. But the extract from the Oneirokritikon he quoted was not what I had expected.

‘To see blood flowing is unlucky for a man who wishes to keep his actions secret.’

I sank back on my blankets, too exhausted to keep my head raised.

‘So my dream was not about the horse and its rider. It was about me, the dreamer.’

Already I was wondering if one day Carolus would find out that I had lied to him about Ganelon and what I would find when I returned to Aachen. Did Bertha still expect me to continue with our affair? And how many of her intimate circle had she told that I had predicted the death of the king’s only son? With Osric’s help perhaps I could remember or reconstruct a few pages from the Book of Dreams and steer a safe path through the intrigues of the royal court. But Hroudland’s death meant that I had lost my patron and protector, even as I had started to come to terms with being winelas guma , a ‘friendless man’, an outcast from my own country. Once again, my future was uncertain.