Richard Blake: The Blood of Alexandria

Jarrow, Tuesday, 21 August 686

‘You know, Brother Aelric,’ Benedict told me this morning, ‘you may be up for canonisation.’

I grunted and carried on looking at the draft manifesto one of King Aldfrith’s clerks had given me to correct. It was dire stuff. Latin has no aorist, and you can’t use participles to supply the lack. And that was probably the most literate error.

I think the Abbot mistook my silence. He brightened his voice, adding, ‘Of course, I would never dream of wishing you called out of this life. For all your great age, the work you do for us here makes you irreplaceable’ – he repeated the word ‘irreplaceable’, and emphasised it – ‘but the common people are already calling you a saint.’

I’m now alone in my little cell, and free to think again. Benedict is a good man. I’m grateful for the refuge he gave me in his monastery, no questions asked. I’m particularly grateful at the moment for the stove he’s had brought in to keep the afternoon chill away. If you think I was upset by his reference to the inevitable, you’re as mistaken as he was. At ninety-six, that is something you’ve had plenty of time to consider. And Saint Aelric! It may not make death any less of the darkness it probably is. But it does have a nice sound.

The truth is, I was cutting off any renewal of the questioning. What did happen yesterday afternoon? Everyone is itching to know. Benedict first asked just after I’d been carried back here, and I lay dripping on to the polished floor of his refectory. All he got for his trouble was a blank stare. The boy who dared ask this morning got a box on the ears. But questioning by others is easily handled. The problem is that I don’t myself know what happened. Oh, the generality is easy: lack of air can do funny things to the mind. The question remains, though, of the attendant circumstances. How to explain those?

Well, as Epicurus said, facts must be described before they can be explained. Before I go any further, let me here – in the double privacy of this journal and of the Greek in which I keep it – set out the facts as best I have them. Since what I must explain happened yesterday afternoon, I suppose it is with the facts of yesterday afternoon that I must begin.

Generally, the Northumbrian summer is shite. So it was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. I can’t speak for the year before that, as I still had my summer palace in Nicea, and rain was the least of my worries. Yesterday, though, it was almost warm. And that’s what had me out for a sightseeing tour on the banks of the Tyne.

Nothing there to see ordinarily, I’ll admit. Even when not hidden in mist, the whole prospect is one dreariness of green with a great expanse of water running through to the sea. But let the sun be out, and it’s here that the boys come to bathe and play. So, fighting off the stupor of beer at lunch, I stepped out of the monastery garden, and in my slow, rickety gait made my way down to the river and settled myself on a convenient stone.

The stone was too convenient. I was no sooner arranged than the beer won its battle and I nodded off in the sun. I can’t say how long I slept. I don’t know if I dreamed. But I woke to a sound reminding me in a smaller way of the great, collective wail that went up in Ctesiphon when we smashed through the southern gate. I propped myself up on an elbow and looked blearily at one of the boys standing nearby. Water ran off him as he hopped terrified from one foot to the other.

‘What’s going on?’ I croaked. I was stiff all over. I could feel that my face and hands had caught the sun. Behind, I was cold and itchy from having rolled on to the damp grass. I think I’d pissed myself a little. Certainly, I could feel a sicky burp coming on.

The boy looked through me and turned away to look into the water.

‘Well, come on, lad,’ I said, louder now. I struggled to my knees, and, pushing my walking staff into the soft turf, heaved myself unsteadily up. Yes, I had pissed myself, and it was still dribbling down my legs. ‘What’s all this racket?’

All the boys, I could now see, were standing still and silent, and looking into the water. I squinted against the glare from the water and waited for my eyes to focus. It wasn’t hard to see what had happened. Being so close to a strong tidal sea, the bed of the Tyne here is rippled with sandbanks. Stay on one of these, and you can walk far out at low tide, paddling in just a few inches of water. A foot or so either side, the water may be bottomless. One of the boys had walked out a few hundred feet. Then the tide had swept back in. The water had suddenly risen from his knees to his chest, and was still rising.

No problem there, I thought. If he couldn’t see the sandbank now, all he had to do was step off and splash however feebly while the tide washed him back in. If he couldn’t swim, however… I turned back to the boys.

‘Well, don’t just stand there, you stupid buggers,’ I said in Northumbrian dialect as I hobbled down to the water line. ‘Get back in there and bring him out.’

I might have shouted in Persian or in one of the Slavonic dialects for all the effect my words had. They just stood there, surly looks on their faces. Some had turned now to face inland.

It was fear, I could see, of the Old Gods. It’s only been a generation or so since the missionaries turned up in this part of England. Before then, the locals had drowned the occasional human offering in the Tyne – something to do with the fishing, or perhaps the harvests. If the boys rattle off their prayers well enough in class, they’ve picked up an older nonsense at home. They were terrified of going back into the water now that one of them was being taken.

I sighed. It struck me once again how ugly most of the boys are in Northumbria. The line put out from Canterbury is that we’re all one people in England. My own experience is that the better sort of barbarians who came here settled the south, the very best, I’m in no doubt, settling my own Kent. The further north you go, I find, the more runtish the people become. Why I’d bothered staggering down to look at those white, knock-kneed bodies I couldn’t now imagine.

Meanwhile, the tide was still coming in. As if he wanted to keep as much of his body from the chill waters, the boy held his arms over his head. I might have heard sobbing from far out. Even by local standards, he was a pathetic specimen. I thought of quoting Lucretius on the evils of religion, and settling back to reflect on how rotten life can be. Then, as I strained to see more clearly, my stomach turned upside down.

It was Bede out there. What the sodding hell had he been doing in the river? With his asthma, it was a miracle he’d even walked out that far. I poked my staff sharply into the stomach of the boy most conveniently in reach. It was an unexpected blow, and it doubled him up.

‘Get in there, you little shitbag bastard,’ I snarled, ‘or I’ll see you won’t sit down for a week. Get in there and pull him out.’

He simply ran up the bank out of further reach. The others huddled together. One of the older boys who’d sprouted a few muscles over his ribs began to puff and look ferocious. I suddenly recalled this was near enough how Brother Paul had got his head bashed in last summer. I looked desperately around. There were no adults in sight. I was in no condition to run off for help. The little churls and semi-churls around me couldn’t be trusted to get any sort of message back to the monastery. It was a matter of standing impotently on the river bank watching as my best student drowned in some stupid accident.

When that toad Croesus grassed me up in Constantinople, it was annoying but manageable. The confiscation of goods, the loss of status, the midnight escape down the Straits, Catania, Rome and all the continued shuffling along the roads good or bad, never more than one step ahead of the Imperial agents – all that and more I’d borne with surprising equanimity. I’d even put up with Jarrow. But the loss of Bede, I knew, would be the end.