Conqueror Page 3

  Wuffa looked around at the battered walls, the swarming Norse and German traders, the huddles of British refugees. Standing amid these complicated, many-layered ruins, he sensed the past, as if the doors of a vast abandoned hall opened to him. It was thrilling, disturbing.

  And yet when he glanced at Sulpicia it was only the bright present that filled his mind, like the diffuse light off the sea which banished the shadows of the fort’s rotting walls.

  VI

  Wuffa and Ulf spent some days escorting Ammanius to other south-east ports, where the bishop had to supervise more bands of refugees fleeing to the continent. Many of the ports had massive old Roman fortifications like Reptacaestir’s. The only one Wuffa had heard of was Pefensae, which the bishop called Anderida. Here, after the Romans, a British town had grown up within the walls, but a century ago the Saxons had landed here and slaughtered every last Briton, a bold strike of which the scops still sang.

  With Ammanius’s obligations fulfilled, the six of them set off for the far north, in search of the legend of Isolde.

  Their journey mostly followed the roads left behind by the Romans, some of which were well maintained, some not. Ulf and Wuffa travelled by horseback, while the bishop, Sulpicia and the novices rode in a sturdy Saxon cart. Britain was full of petty kingdoms, but Ammanius was able to transfer them from the protection of one polity to the next through letters he carried from his archbishop - and, Wuffa thought, by his own sheer force of personality.

  By night they stayed in old Roman towns, or in forts on top of hills, or in villas in the countryside. Ringed by hastily built walls the towns were more like shabby fortresses, where amid thatched houses of mud and straw a few mighty stone structures loomed. In the Roman-British domains the towns were protection in bad times, markets in good times, and places where kings or other petty rulers collected their taxes.

  The forts on the hills were more interesting to Wuffa, because they were so different from anything he had seen before. They were fortified not by stone walls like the towns but by earthen ramparts and wooden palisades. Ammanius, aware of Wuffa’s growing curiosity, told him these forts had brooded on their hills long before the Caesars ever came. ‘And later the British drifted back to the fortresses of their ancestors. It was as if the Romans had never been here at all …’

  Ammanius preferred to stay in the villas. Grand old farmhouses, once owned by rich Roman British, they had been either abandoned when the Roman system broke down, or occupied as much-reduced farms. And later, as Britain’s Christianity spread, they became monasteries.

  Here, surrounded by the calm toil of monks, Bishop Ammanius evidently felt at ease. And as he relaxed he drank. Holy man he might be, but Ammanius was fond of his wine.

  And the drunker he got, the more fascinated he seemed by Ulf and Wuffa. Ammanius spoke more often to Wuffa. He said he saw the ‘empty minds of two pagan boys’ as vessels to be filled up with his God’s truth. But when the big Norse moved the bishop’s stare always followed, as if Ulf were some fascinating animal.

  One long evening the four of them sat in a firelit room deep within a windswept monastery-villa. They were alone save for a novice who brought them food and drink. Tapestries hung on the walls and there was a thick carpet on the floor. This had been the triclinium of the Roman villa, the bishop said, a word that meant nothing to Wuffa; evidently it meant some kind of living room. The monks said that the carpets and tapestries were there to keep the pagan symbols on the walls and floor from pious gazes, and also to warm a room whose system of under-floor heating had long since broken down.

  Ulf and Sulpicia played a complicated game of dice and counters, worn with use, left behind by the villa’s original owners and now popular with the novices. Sulpicia sat on her couch close to Wuffa, her loose tunic falling around the soft flesh of her neck. Wuffa was aware of every soft laugh she and Ulf shared, the way Ulf’s tousled golden hair touched her dark British brow, the way their fingers touched over the grimy surface of the wooden game board.

  Since that pivotal day in Lunden when they had met, Wuffa had believed he had had an agreement with Ulf, that Sulpicia was, if not Wuffa’s, at least his to try for first. But was Ulf to be trusted? Was he more subtle than Wuffa, was he quietly working to take the advantage? Wuffa felt baffled, out-thought.

  And if Wuffa watched Sulpicia, so Ammanius watched Ulf.

  Ammanius leaned close to Wuffa, and the Saxon could smell the stale wine on his breath. ‘You Germans fascinate me,’ he said. ‘You don’t build empires. You have no values save loyalty to your chieftain’s hall, where your warlords sit around and get drunk. You have no laws, save the most brutal. You actually put a cost on a man’s life, don’t you? A penalty to be paid if one takes it?’

  ‘We call it the wergild.’

  ‘Nothing but a rationalisation of a barbarian’s blood-feud. And you enforce your laws by maiming, by mutilating eyes and tongues and limbs. I’ve seen the results! Your society is riddled with violence; it is run by it. You have no medicine to speak of; the sick, the handicapped, the old, you put to death.’

  ‘Don’t believe all you hear about us from our enemies,’ Wuffa said evenly.

  ‘Even your religion is only a ragged collection of myths and legends.

  Your stories of Woden, your earth-mother Frig … By Christ’s eyes.’ He took another long draught from his wine cup, which a nervous-looking novice refilled. ’And yet,’ Ammanius said, his chin stained red by spilled wine, ’and yet you have much to envy. Oh, yes! The passion of a warrior people, the primitive vigour. Your guttural tongue is full of words for “love”, for “honour” - so unlike the cold formality of Latin—’ He belched, leaned further, and tumbled off his couch, landing heavily on the carpeted floor.

  The novice came hurrying over, a resigned look on his face. Wuffa and the novice took an armpit each, hauled the bishop heavily to his feet, and began to lead him from the room.

  ‘The love between warriors,’ Ammanius cried. ‘The bond between strong men! Is there such a bond between you and your Norse, Wuffa?

  …’ But he was gulping, and they only just managed to get him out of the door before he vomited heavily, spilling wine-dark bile over the carpeted floor.

  Ulf and Sulpicia hadn’t said a word through this exchange. They continued their game, the worn pieces tapping across the antique board.

  VII

  The next day the travellers moved on, heading steadily north. Bishop Ammanius was poor company, glowering at the world, still stinking of vomit and drink, and taking out his anger on the hapless novices. They were all locked together by unspoken lust and burning jealousy, Wuffa thought.

  They reached at last what had once been the northernmost province of Britannia, which Ammanius called Flavia Caesariensis, and they made for the principal town, Eoforwic - Eburacum, as the Roman British had called it. This turned out to be a spectacular Roman city, set inside massive walls on high ground overlooking a river. It was dominated by a grand stone building, its tiled roof and colonnades intact. This had been the headquarters of the old Roman fort, Ammanius said, the principia.

  But as the travellers approached Wuffa saw that the city walls were breached and burned. Inside the town there was much activity, with the walls being repaired and traders and immigrants moving in. These busy folk were not Romans, or British. Eburacum was in the hands of Germans now.

  When Roman authority withdrew, a Roman military commander called the Dux Britanniarum had used this legionary capital and the forts on the Wall to take control of the old northern province. The polity had survived well, despite raids on the east coast, where over the decades a German people known as Angles had landed in great waves. For a time the British had confined the Angles to a coastal fortress called Bebbanburh, and pushed them back still further to an offshore island called Lindisfarena. But the Angles kept coming, and had long since broken out. Now their kingdom sprawled across the north of Britain, and in just the last few years they had taken Eoforwic for them
selves.

  And today, cattle were herded beneath the colonnade of the principia, and German chieftains stalked over its marble floor. Ammanius, surveying all this, tried to convey to a reluctant Wuffa his sense of loss, of regret, a feeling that he had been born out of his time.

  They stayed in the city only one night, before travelling on to the centre of the new Anglish kingdom on the east coast. Bebbanburh was a stronghold built on to a plug of hard black rock that loomed uncompromisingly above a bank of dunes. They had to climb stairs cut into the rock to reach its summit. The stronghold was crude, only a handful of wooden-framed huts surrounded by a hedge. Once this slab of rock had been the whole of the Angles’ holding. Now it was the heart of a kingdom that sprawled across northern Britain.

  It was named after the wife of an Angle king. The British had once called it Dinguardi, but nobody cared about that.

  The weary travellers were greeted by a thegn of the local king, and were granted lodging in a small, cramped hall. In this typically Germanic building Wuffa felt more at home than since he had left Coenred’s village. It was a spectacular site too, looming above a restless sea over which the comet spread its ghostly light. But the bishop was soon in a black mood, for as he pressed the king’s advisors for news of how he could track down Isolde’s prophecy he was told there was yet more travelling to be done - and this time west, along the line of the old Roman Wall itself. ‘The Last Roman’, the thegn said superstitiously, said to be a descendant of Isolde herself, was to be found haunting a Wall fort called Banna.

  Wuffa, indifferent, found himself a corner to curl up on straw that smelled of cattle, and fell soundly asleep.

  He was woken in the pitch dark by a heavy, wine-soaked breath, a clumsy hand fumbling beneath his blanket. Without thinking about it he raised his knee, jammed it into a fat belly, and lashed out with his fist. Ammanius fell back with a grunt; of course it was him.

  Furious, Wuffa scrambled up from his straw pallet, went to the door and kicked it open. By the comet’s light he could see the bishop sprawled on his back, a dark bloodstain spreading over his tunic. ‘In the name of your God nailed to His tree, what are you doing, Ammanius?’

  The bishop pawed at his face. His words were muffled, masked by the gurgling of blood. ‘I think you’ve broken my nose.’

  ‘I should have broken your drunken neck. Why did you come to my bed?’

  ‘Because,’ the bishop said desolately, ‘she was in his.’

  It took Wuffa, still dizzy from broken sleep and shock, some time to work out what had happened. The bishop, perhaps misled by signals from Ulf that may have existed only inside his head, had gone to the Norse’s bed - and there he had found Sulpicia. He had come to Wuffa out of desperation and longing.

  So, Wuffa thought bleakly, in one gruesome moment the tensions that had been building up between the four of them all this long journey had come to a head. He ought to feel anger, but he was too numb for that. He gazed out of the doorway, at the comet which sailed over the ocean.

  The bishop floundered on the floor like a beached fish. ‘We are betrayed, Wuffa, both of us! Betrayed!’

  VIII

  They had to ride south to the line of the Wall; coming up along the coast they had bypassed the old fortification. They passed through a gate fortress, unmanned, long abandoned and derelict. Then they came to a road in reasonably good repair that ran along the south face of the Wall, beside the track of a rubbish-filled earthwork. They rode along this road, following the line of the Wall west towards Banna.

  The Wall showed its age. Its clean-cut facing stone had been robbed in places to expose a rougher core of rubble and cement, but there were long stretches where it survived, and even traces of whitewash and red paint that must have been centuries old. The gate forts and turrets were regularly spaced out, and from higher ground you could see them like distance markers along the Wall’s line. There were more major forts too, nuzzling against the line of the Wall: ‘forts’ that were the size of small towns. Some were still occupied, no longer by soldiers but by farmers, some British, some German, dwelling in humble wooden halls that huddled in the lee of the great structures of the past.

  And as they rode, gradually the sheer scale of the Wall impressed itself on Wuffa’s mind. The Wall simply cut across the countryside, allowing neither ridge nor river to stand in its way. Spanning the neck of this island country from east to west, from coast to coast, it enclosed the entire southern portion of the island, from Eoforwic to Lundenwic to Reptacaestir, protecting all those fragile places from the predations of the barbarians who had lived in the further north. And for all its decrepitude it was so immense it took them four days to ride its length. Wuffa had never been one to gape in awe at ruins. But as he grew to understand the Wall he felt he glimpsed the towering, inhuman ambitions of emperors who with a single decree could order a country cut in half.

  And in the shadow of the mighty Wall the four of them were still mired in rivalry and lust.

  Since Bebbanburh any friendship Wuffa had had with Ulf had been corroded by envy. Ulf had come to seem sly to Wuffa, manipulative and false - and he had won Sulpicia, which maddened Wuffa. Sulpicia herself seemed offended by Wuffa’s anger. As far as she was concerned she belonged to herself, and was not some slave to be fought over.

  But as the journey continued her health worsened. She tried to hide this, but Wuffa saw her holding her belly, and heard her emptying her guts in the mornings. Had Ulf planted his Norse seed in her? If he had, it did not make her happy. Wuffa didn’t imagine her people would welcome her back with a barbarian’s brat at her tit.

  And Ulf backed away from her. Now he had won her, now she was ill, he showed no interest in Sulpicia. His coldness infuriated Wuffa even more. He would not behave this way if the child were of his loins, if Sulpicia were his.

  The violence that simmered affected everybody. Wuffa and Ulf even came to blows once, over a trivial argument about the best way to ford a river by a ruined Roman bridge.

  In the end Ammanius took Wuffa and Ulf aside. ‘I hired you two for your muscle, but I scarcely expected you to turn on each other. Remember you are in my pay. Try to think with your heads, not your cocks.’

  However it was the bishop himself who had contributed most to the group’s tension. With his battered nose bloody and sore, he raged at the novices, at Wuffa and Ulf, even the horses when they shied. Wuffa saw that Ammanius’s anger was really for himself, for the way he had behaved that night at Bebbanburh. But he was a prisoner of his own flaws, as all men were, Wuffa thought.

  Thus the little group, barely speaking, at last approached Banna. Here, not far from its western end, the Wall strode over a high ridge from which Wuffa could make out the hill country to the north, and to the south a river wound through a deep wooded valley.

  A small, mean village of Anglish farmers huddled a little way away from the fort, down the northern slope. On arrival, Ammanius led his party to the village, fearlessly summoned the chieftain, and demanded to know if the man knew anything of this ‘Last Roman’. Wuffa and Ulf had haltingly to translate for him, for these Anglish knew no Latin, and Ammanius certainly knew no Germanic.

  Yes, said the Anglish farmer-warrior, he knew all about Ambrosias, the Last Roman. In fact he and his people had been keeping the old man alive for years.

  The Anglish had been encouraged to settle here by their kings. They had chosen not to live inside the old fort, but they would rummage there for abandoned tools, coins, even bits of jewellery, the detritus of centuries.

  And in Banna they had found Ambrosias. For generations the old man’s family had lived in the township that had grown up inside the ruined fort. With the coming of the Anglish his family had all packed up and gone, the farmer neither knew nor cared where. But the old man, stubborn, had remained alone, scraping at the dirt of a small-holding inside the walls of the fort. He was magnificent, in his frail way. He had even raised his rusty hand-plough and had threatened to break the heads of any burly
Anglish who tried to evict him from his fort.

  Some impulse led the Angles to tolerate the old man. They even shared their ale with him. Ammanius, hearing this, complimented the farmer on a Christian generosity surprising in a ‘hairy-arsed heathen’. But Wuffa knew it was easy to be awed by the Romans’ mighty ruins. Perhaps to the Anglish, some of them newly arrived from across the sea, the old man of the Wall had seemed like a relic of vanished days, a living ghost. They may even have been trying to propitiate the gods of the Wall by keeping him alive.

  But it had been fifteen years now, the burly farmers grumbled, and still the old man refused to die.

  They rode into the fort. Choked by grass and weeds the place was very old. Halls of wood and wattle had been erected on the neat rectangular foundations of vanished stone buildings, but even these latter huts had slumped back into the dirt from which they had been shaped. But the place was not quite abandoned.

  Ambrosias was gaunt, perhaps seventy years old, and wore a thick, hooded woollen cloak even though the spring weather was not cold. But he wore his silver-grey hair cut short, and he was clean-shaven, though his leathery skin was stubbly. He must once have been handsome, Wuffa thought, with a proud nose and a strong chin. Now, though, his face looked sunken in on itself, and his frame was withered.

  This was the ‘Last Roman’, kept alive as a sort of pet by illiterate Anglish farmers.

  And when Ammanius approached him, Ambrosias ignored the bishop and turned to Ulf and Wuffa. He was avid, eager, and Wuffa recoiled from his intensity. He said in Latin, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

  IX

  As evening fell the comet, suspended in dark northern skies, was brighter and more startling than ever.