Conqueror

XXI

Five years had passed since Cynewulf's last meeting with Alfred when the letter found him.

'I was impelled to write to you, Fr Cynewulf, for I knew you to be a good man, and always respected your intellect – though I believe that intellect to be wasted on your immature theology. I have no doubt you think ill of me, but perhaps you can understand how it was for a man like me to be condemned to a life of slavery under a man like Arngrim.

'In any case I do not write for your forgiveness, but to satisfy my own longing to tell you my news.'

And that news, Ibn Zuhr said, concerned the fate of Aebbe – and the meaning of the Menologium of Isolde.

Ibn Zuhr, perhaps understandably, said little of himself. After the death of Arngrim he had escaped out of Wessex into Mercia and then, following the roads he had once travelled with Cynewulf and his master, he had made for Eoforwic-Jorvik. Cynewulf understood; this man of the cities of al-Andalus had sought the nearest to a city that Britain had to offer.

Among the Danes and English of Jorvik the Moor stood out, of course, but there were many traders from the southern lands in Jorvik. And in the bustling, open economy of the Danish town he had soon managed to scrape a living from his medicinal knowledge. 'Perhaps my exotic appearance helps reassure my patients of my healing powers,' he noted dryly.

He had always intended to earn enough money to get himself out of the country and back home to al-Andalus, and perhaps some day he would. 'But I was such a young man when I was stolen from my home, and so much must have changed about it – and about me – that perhaps only disappointment would follow were I to travel back.' And besides, as Jorvik grew and prospered, Ibn Zuhr found he rather liked his new life. He found the fusion of cultures fascinating. 'Danish women spin all winter to make sails of English wool…'

But he had never forgotten Arngrim, 'the only man I ever killed' or so he claimed. And through contacts with patients and traders he followed the fates of the leaders of the Force that had once assaulted Cippanhamm.

He learned that Egil, the Beast of Cippanhamm, nemesis of Arngrim, 'and co-murderer with me of my master', had come to Jorvik to end his days in the hall of his brother, a ship-owner called Ulfjlot, 'just as brutal as his brother, though in possession of both his arms, and indeed all his teeth and an intact nose'.

Not long after Egil's return, Ulfjlot died of 'heathen excess', wrote the Moor. And Egil and his family mounted a lavish funeral rite to ease the passage of Ulfjlot into the pagan otherworld. Ibn Zuhr described what occurred at this rite, as relayed to him by an eye-witness, he said, but in such detail that Cynewulf wondered if he himself had not attended the rite.

As is the custom of these people, the slaves of the dead man were asked which of them would die with his master. A young English woman who called herself Aelfflaed put herself forward. The other slaves, of course, made themselves scarce. This Aelfflaed, ageing, scarred but comely enough – for that would be important in what followed – would do.

So she was taken, and put in charge of two young women of the household, who waited on her for ten days. She ate, drank and indulged in any pleasure they could provide.

Meanwhile Ulfjlot's finest ship was dragged on to the river bank and placed on a wooden scaffold, under which firewood was heaped. Amidships a tent of sail-cloth was set up over a couch. Ulfjlot's brothers and their men set up tents for themselves close around the ship; there were seven of them, including Egil.

All this time Ulfjlot's unlovely corpse had been rotting in a temporary grave. Now they dug it up, dressed it in fine clothes and furs, and placed it in the tent on the ship, propped up with cushions on the couch. They piled up food and drink at its feet, and weapons and armour at its side. Animals – a dog, a rooster, two horses and two cows – were slaughtered and their butchered parts put in the ship.

The slave's ten days of pleasure were done; now only duty remained. She went from tent to tent, and Ulfjlot's men had intercourse with her. Each of them ritually told her, 'I do this out of love for your master. Tell your lord this.' It went hard on her, for these types love roughly, and by the time the brute Egil had used her she could barely walk. But my witness noticed that the men did not seem comfortable in themselves afterwards.

With that grubby duty performed she was taken to a kind of doorway, a wooden arch. She was held up on the men's palms (only one hand provided by Egil!), and she looked through the frame and said, 'I see my lord in the Upperworld. Send me to him.'

So the seven of them took her into Ulfjlot's tent on the ship and laid Aelfflaed out by the side of her dead master. Their men gathered around the ship and yelled and banged their shields, so that the other slaves would not hear what happened.

Two of them got her by the feet, two by the hands, while two others held the ends of a rope wrapped around her neck. You must imagine the scene, Father: the poky sail-cloth tent stinking of salt, the rotting corpse in its finery, the brutish men like animals huddled over Aelfflaed.

Now a woman they called 'The Angel of Death' entered the tent, and, as the two men pulled the cord tight, she stabbed Aelfflaed again and again in the chest, until there was no life in her. Then they all withdrew from the tent.

Egil, chief mourner, stood before the ship. Naked, one-armed, his face a ruin, what a sight the Beast of Cippanhamm was! With his one remaining hand he held a burning brand, and he set fire to the bonfire. Within an hour the ship was gone, destroyed by the fire, taking Ulfjlot to his brutish paradise.

But after this uninteresting heathen nonsense, Cynewulf, one by one, the seven men who had mourned Ulfjlot fell ill. Even at the funeral feast they were vomiting, and soon acidic bile hosed from between their hairy buttocks. Within a day the vomit and stools turned bloody – I saw this, as I was brought in to examine them.

It took most of them two or three days to die. Egil was stronger than the rest and it took him seven. He was conscious to the end, as the substance of his body drained out of his arse.

I think you can guess my conclusion, Cynewulf. The slave who died with Ulfjlot was surely Aebbe, who, her body and life wrecked by Egil, devoted herself to plotting her revenge. I seem to recall that Aelfflaed was the name of the great-grandmother of Lindisfarena she admired. Of course she still bore the scars Egil left her with. Perhaps she covered them over. Or perhaps Egil could not remember inflicting them. Perhaps he has hurt so many women in this way the memories blurred together. It seems he did not recognise her.

And as each of Ulfjlot's men lay with her that day, she infected them with the disease that killed them. I have some small knowledge of medicine. I have heard talk of such foul contagions emanating from the jungles in the south of Africa. She might have administered it through a seed pod, delivered in a kiss.

Is revenge a sin in your faith, priest? I am sure murder is. If so Aebbe is surely laughing in Hell, even now…

Ibn Zuhr closed with some excitable speculations on the Menologium, which he had managed to memorise on hearing it read to Alfred. 'This strange prophecy-poem came into my life lodged in Aebbe's head, and is now stuck in my own…' He had scrawled some ideas about the enigmatic stanzas of the future, but he added a wry note: 'I am not qualified to be an oracle.'

He had been able to make sense of the Great-Year numbers embedded in the Menologium. Using the strange arithmetic of the Moors, which made adding large totals easy, he had summed forward all the Great Year months. With the sixth stanza's prophecy of Alfred's victory as an anchor he had calculated the date of the dawn of the ninth Year, when, said the Menologium, the final battle would be fought, and the earthly paradise of the Aryans would be founded.

'You will see that your Menologium reaches beyond the Christian millennium,' he noted dryly. 'Will the world still exist to see this come to pass? Well, neither of us will live to find out; we are mere footnotes in the Menologium's long story.

'I offer this to you, priest, for what it is worth, in the hope that it will satisfy some sliver of curiosity of your own. As for me, I will go to my grave wondering about the true intentions of the Weaver, if he exists…'

The year of the final battle would be the 5070th since the creation of the world, the 1819th since the founding of Rome, and the 487th year of the Islamic calendar. As for the Christian system, the date Ibn Zuhr had written down boldly was, in Roman numerals: MLXVI

And in the Moorish system: 1066