Raven of the Waves Page 3

  They dug their heels into the mud, slipped, and each found new places in the grass that had not yet been trodden to dirt soup. And at that point, as the warm spring rain was beginning again, their father arrived.

  Sigemund had brought his mattock with him. He was always carrying this tool, half shovel, half peat chopper, when he was not carrying his wood ax. When he saw his two grown sons straining like men trying to unearth a stump, he shook his head.

  The square-headed farmer caught sight of Wiglaf and gave a wry grin. “Look how they both stare back at me, Wiglaf,” he said, giving his frail youngest son a rough pat. “Why has Jesus blessed me with such fools for sons? Twins, as though you needed two noses where one would do, or two rump holes instead of one.”

  Wiglaf’s father flung aside the mattock, sending it deliberately into a hummock of grass and not into the mud, and strode toward the twins, giving them dramatic but not terribly accurate punches to the head. “Grab it, you two piss holes. No, leave it,” he commanded. “I’ll do it myself.”

  Wiglaf knew this was a test. His father had to prove that he was wise and strong-armed, but the bull was too willful. All the powers of the day and all the powers of the night could not help Sigemund drag this bull. The animal rolled its eyes. It fought the mud and it fought the rope and bellowed.

  But Sigemund was stubborn. The dark-haired man pulled slowly, hand over hand. The bull threw up its hooves on all sides and floated, like a horse killed with bloat and only not dead yet, still looking around to say good-bye to the grass and the trees.

  “We’ve got him,” called Sigemund. “Come on, help me drag him. No don’t, you two old women; I change my mind—get out of the way.” Sigemund reasoned that a man of strength could drag a floating bull through the spring river or he might as well die. He fought the rope to an alder and took a turn around the trunk, tied a quick oxen knot, and then there was only the prayer that the tree—a good tree but little older than Wiglaf’s thirteen years—would hold.

  Sigemund spat. So with bulls, so with sons. He spat again and grinned at the bull, who rolled its eyes, afraid and angry. Sigemund laughed. “He’s going to gut you for shoe straps,” he hooted at his sons. He kicked one of the twins. “And right too.”

  The mattock was not muddy. Sigemund knew how to cast down a tool. Never in mud, never before God into water, and never so that someone in haste or as stupid as one of his sons might step on it and hurt themselves.

  He turned back, and the twins were working at the rope, retying the knot. The hair along the bull’s spine was tufted in fury. Sigemund leaned on the mattock and sighed, shaking his head at Wiglaf. “Forni and Edwin are much more stupid than I ever was. Strong, but what’s strength compared to a bull?”

  Wiglaf started to ask how the bull had escaped, and why it had tried to cross the river, but was sorry as soon as he opened his mouth because his father was examining him, eyeing his crippled arm, walking around behind him, as though appraising a piece of livestock.

  “They feed you well enough, those churchmen?”

  “Quite well enough, Father,” said Wiglaf.

  The bull started after the twins as they greeted Wiglaf, the two seventeen-year-olds scampering. The beast snorted, the two brothers dodging the great hooked horns. Stag, who had no reason to love horned creatures, shrank behind a dock bush with its large, lush leaves.

  The bull reached the end of the rope. The alder tossed and straightened itself up again, and the bull, pulled sideways, collapsed. And was on his feet at once, strong and stupid, clawing mud with one hoof, and furious.

  “Hush!” said Wiglaf’s father. He leaned on the mattock and squinted, cupping a dirty hand behind one ear.

  The twins quieted too at the approach of hoofbeats. Riders were rare here beside the river. Wiglaf recognized the horseman just as his father did.

  “It can’t be!” said Sigemund. “Lord Redwald is off as usual to Eoforwic, that city at the end of the world.”

  Wiglaf thought that the rider carried himself exactly like Lord Redwald, and wore Redwald’s blue cloak, but did not say so.

  “What if he’s seen the foolishness with the bull?” said Wiglaf’s father. The beast had nearly drowned through its own mischance, but what lord understood the ways of wyrd—fate? “Lord Redwald’s always smiling,” said Sigemund, “and a good giver of the ale at feasting tide, but you know how these ealdormen are, all song and ring gifts and no more sense than a cock sparrow.”

  Lord Redwald rode around a huge puddle, his horse picking its way through the sloppy mud.

  “Besides, Redwald took away my youngest, Wiglaf. This was an unjust thing to do,” said Sigemund, not unkindly, “when every lord should know that a strong fist to the head and a stout foot in the backside would pound a boy into manhood. Even a boy with a withered arm. Look at you, smarter than the twins put together.”

  Redwald approached, beaming, only a few flecks of mud on his deep blue cloak. Some men were wise and gentle, thought Wiglaf, like Father Aethelwulf. But some men had happy faces that cheered the heart, and Redwald was one.

  “It’s a good warm rain,” said Redwald brightly.

  “A good warm rain, my lord,” said Sigemund.

  “We are lucky to be here, Sigemund. The city is not a place for honest men.”

  Sigemund blinked. Not with the rain. The rain had just now stopped. Wiglaf sensed his father’s attempt to match noble Angle speech with proper words of his own. “It’s true, my lord,” said Wiglaf’s father, “that Dunwic is a fine place with a good name.”

  Lord Redwald laughed. “I like talking to you, Sigemund. You have a wise tongue. But if you wanted to name things all over again, what would you call them?”

  “Perhaps the animals would have new names, although there is no better word for dog than hund.”

  Dunwic was a small hamlet of hardworking peasants, with a smell of livestock in the cool air. And, of course, the abbey, with scaffolding rising like a tower’s skeleton where, someday, there would be a stone edifice, the pride of God and man.

  Sometimes Wiglaf was as happy as Lord Redwald seemed to be. Wiglaf loved this countryside. There was, he was certain, no better place under Heaven.

  “The river isn’t so high this year,” said Redwald.

  “No, not so high, my lord,” Sigemund agreed.

  “And it’ll go down soon,” said Redwald. His voice was a little less merry as he said this.

  “Lord Redwald, pray, what does the river have to do with me?”

  Redwald knew that Sigemund was a good farmer, and he knew the spark in his eye was a look of intelligence, but there was something untrustworthy about the man. He was a peasant, and entirely belonged with mud and hens and ox droppings. His wife—who looked like Sigemund, as Sigemund looked like his sons, who in turn looked like each other—was missing all the teeth on her left side, the side where Sigemund’s fist struck her jaw. It was common enough. Men struck their women. It was hardly a surprise.

  But here was the bright youth Wiglaf, a lad for whom Redwald had paid good silver. It had to be done. An ealdorman had to take care of what belonged to him. His beasts, his men. An intelligent peasant boy could not be wasted.

  So Lord Redwald had bought the boy three winters past, and now the boy studied at the abbey, enduring the abbot’s scholarly habits, and learning also the holy man’s gift with medicine. It was not merely kindness on Redwald’s part. The abbot was old. The winters were harder every year. Another man in Dunwic with a touch for healing would be a blessing.

  “The bull looks tired,” said Redwald. “And ill-tempered. He’s rolling his eyes and digging a trough with his hoof. I saw several dead sheep floating by me in the river today. Tumbling over and over. It’s surprising how animals end up in the river and drown.”

  “They have no more sense than some people, Lord Redwald.” The peasant’s eyes looked aside for an instant, and then looked back at Redwald with new intensity. “But even at flood time it takes a very unlucky beast to end
up in the river.”

  Like most of the folk of Dunwic, Sigemund loved to talk. Redwald leaned down. “Has the bull been in the water?”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not far in,” said Sigemund. “Only a short way in,” he added. “Only for a swim and then out again on his own with no trouble to any of us.”

  “None of us seek trouble,” said Lord Redwald.

  Wiglaf caught something in the nobleman’s tone.

  “Whatever God wills, my lord,” said Wiglaf’s father.

  “You and your twin sons always have an ax close by?” said Lord Redwald. It was less question than statement.

  “Or mattock, or hammer,” said Wiglaf’s father. “We have a weapon against beast or devil all day long, my lord.”

  “And you keep an eye on the river, like good men,” said Lord Redwald.

  Wiglaf knew that his father never so much as skipped a stone on the river. Farmers took little notice of mud hens or river barges. The river that flowed past Dunwic was called affectionately the Ooze, if village folk referred to it at all.

  “Why, my lord,” said Sigemund, “if I may ask?”

  For a peasant to ask a direct question of a lord was close to insubordination, and Wiglaf could not look at the alert, insolent expression on his father’s face.

  The lord gave Wiglaf a thoughtful smile and gazed at the gray-green horizon to the south.

  He rode off without answering.

  5

  Wiglaf was late, and Aethelwulf was worried.

  When the abbot had stepped out earlier that afternoon to observe the stonemasons’ progress, he had seen a fox at the edge of the woods. The vixen, with hair as bright as Lord Redwald’s, was brazen, cutting a way through the tall grass the sheep had not yet been allowed to touch.

  In his younger years Aethelwulf had been the most foul-tempered of Christian men. He had chosen a life as a man of faith because he was too surly to deal with bread eaters, as servants were called. He wanted books and quiet. And now in this tiny monastery, with a scant seven brothers and the boy to help with the sheep and to listen to him prattle his medical lore, which leaves could kill and which could cure, he was growing timid as well.

  Every peasant knew that a fox was a potent omen, but as a man of learning he should have been more skeptical. The abbot made the sign of the holy cross and clapped his hands three times. The vixen froze and looked at Aethelwulf.

  It was like the glance of the very Devil.

  Aethelwulf stooped to pick up a stone, sharp and heavy. The beast vanished.

  The masons were slow-working fellows, city men accustomed to cow’s cheese at every meal. They liked to stand, arms folded, admiring their progress. Aethelwulf found himself more patient than he would have been in earlier years, understanding that skilled laboring men must proceed with care. They had constructed a circular trough for the mixing of mortar, the mortar mill worked by two men walking a slow circle. Some stones were already in place, to show how grand the tower would be when the masons decided to labor as well as they planned.

  But not even the deliberate speech of the masons could irritate him, the foreman indicating, in his methodical way, that there the scaffolding would rise further, and here the stone chips would gather—things the abbot could clearly see for himself.

  “All is as it should be,” said the lead mason gently but emphatically, the way some men of town and village spoke to priests, as though church folk were saintly but slightly simple, ignorant of the real world.

  Aethelwulf smiled, bland and understanding. “Good work, men,” he heard himself say. He returned to his studies, marveling at himself. Since when was he so patient? It was all the influence of Wiglaf—there could be no question.

  And Wiglaf was late.

  When a hound had been found near the henhouse a few months past, so badly slashed by a stag’s antlers that its jaw hung like bloody flap, none of the brothers would touch it. But Wiglaf had marched up to the strange hound, put a hand on it, and told it that all would be well.

  Father Aethelwulf had never cured a dog, but the boy’s faith in him gave the abbot a taste of God’s faith in man, and so Aethelwulf bound the jaw with linen and devised a funnel so that the boy could feed the hound raw eggs. The jaw had healed crooked, and the dog had a lopsided sneer no matter what it was feeling, boredom or happiness. The boy called it Stag, with a sort of logic the great learned man Bede no doubt would have found hard to follow, but which Aethelwulf, with his ever weaker mind, quite understood.

  Now Aethelwulf sat reading the treatise on the Sphere of Apuleius, a formula used to foretell the outcome of an illness. At least, he was trying to read. It was an easy concept to understand. The numerical values of a patient’s name were added to the day of the moon on which the man fell ill, and the prospects of his recovery could then be calculated.

  What could have happened to Wiglaf on this mild spring day?

  At last there was a step, and Wiglaf was back, smiling and closing the door with his strong, unwithered right arm. “Lord Redwald is back. I saw him, and he said he’d be here to see you before vespers.” The dog went over to the fire and gave a crooked yawn.

  “I sent you for some mistletoe and a cockerel, and you should have been able to accomplish all that without wasting a nobleman’s patience.” Still, Aethelwulf was pleased. It was always good to see Redwald. He had sensed that a special guest would arrive before nightfall; the cockerel would be a blessing.

  Aethelwulf dried the mistletoe on the hearth, and then spread it on the table before him beside the white rooster. “Brother Aelle has been coughing, and a cough like that can disturb the sleep. Stir the fire, Wiglaf. We need some hot water. Tell me what I’m going to do.”

  “Why aren’t you using mallow?”

  “We’re out of mallow.”

  “No, we have some still; let me—”

  Aethelwulf tested a leaf in his fingers. “Mistletoe will help Brother Aelle sleep, and sleep is a great healer.”

  Redwald’s bright red hair was always tousled, his cheeks ruddy, flushed with firelight or the wind. “My good friend,” he said as he sat. “And good Wiglaf. I have come for a little of God’s peace here.”

  “You can find such peace here, with masons’ stone powder everywhere and Wiglaf teaching me how to be a physician?”

  “I left the king’s hall early. I heard something there that troubled my heart.”

  “What news disturbs a man-leader like yourself?” asked Aethelwulf.

  “Don’t you serve ale in this God haven?”

  Wiglaf poured from the fine blue clay pitcher.

  “There is something I want to ask you,” said Redwald, his voice low, leaning forward so his shadow fell across the table. “I heard something in Eoforwic city that was always told to me with a whisper. No one can believe it. But it has everyone fighting phantoms in their sleep.” He glanced at Wiglaf as the youth ground the dry leaves. The old churchman gave a gesture—Wiglaf could be trusted.

  “What,” proceeded Redwald, “do holy men know that the rest of us have to discover?”

  Aethelwulf bowed his head.

  “Why haven’t you told me?” Redwald asked.

  Aethelwulf did not answer.

  “This is my land, my people,” said Redwald. “Every cowslip is dear to me—I am ring giver here. If there is any danger—”

  “I know very little,” said Aethelwulf, “but I’ll tell you what I have heard.” He clasped his hands, as if in prayer. And, indeed, he did pray for a moment.

  Redwald waited.

  “One night last summer ships of strange men streamed across the sea road out of the rising moon. They did not bother to comb downward along the coast. They knew they had no road enemy. They did not need to hide in the dark. They fell upon Lindisfarne, on the abbey there, and sacked it.”

  These words made Wiglaf stop his work, pestle heavy in his hand.

  “Men died,” Aethelwulf continued. “There
was burning.” Aethelwulf surprised himself. He wanted to weep. He was growing old. Or perhaps he could no longer think of human suffering. “And then they left with the gold from the altar. They didn’t disturb Saint Cuthbert’s bones. They slit only the throats of the living.”

  “Who were these brutes?”

  “No one knows.”

  Redwald was a handsome man, Wiglaf thought, with a sunrise-red beard, the only red-haired man Wiglaf had ever seen.

  But the abbot saw quite a different guest from his open-eyed assistant. Redwald’s habitual cheerfulness hid a nature given to nightmares—Redwald sometimes confessed them to the abbot. His fingernails were bitten to the quick, and weeks passed without Redwald being truly sober for more than a brief hour. Redwald’s land extended along the river, all the way to Hunlaf’s village, and south almost all the way to Bodeton, a town of fishers and boatbuilders, a worthless place despite its many dwellings. Lately Redwald had been spending his days drinking in the distant city of the king, or perhaps visiting the women who entertained men with fat purses.

  “They won’t come to our little place,” said the abbot. “It was a punishment from God, no doubt for sins the monks had committed. We are in no danger. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would tremble, and because it makes me sad to think of all the pain of that night. The strangers left to the east, and they haven’t been seen since. If there were danger, it would have befallen us by now.”

  “Were the monks of that holy island unusually sinful?” asked Redwald.

  Not even Brother Aelle dared ask the abbot such a straightforward question. Of course the monks of Lindisfarne were as chaste as most others and hardworking, by reputation. The abbot could not guess why they had been punished. “God looks upon the heart,” said the priest.

  “What sort of warriors,” asked the nobleman after a long moment, “would do such harm to innocent men?”

  “Don’t ask questions I cannot begin to answer,” said Aethelwulf.

  “Summer’s coming. Men sail when the sea is clear. It would be easy to sail the Humber and sweep up along our gentle river.”