Daughter of the Wolf (59 page)

And where better to start than with this child, to whom he was irrevocably tied in blood?

‘Wynn,' he said thoughtfully. ‘Your father, would he let you make things for the church?' A cross for the altar. Candlesticks. They needed so much. She was young, but she would learn.

She shrugged, expressionless, but he wasn't fooled.

‘Shall we start again?'

Thancrad held out his hand.

Elfrun stared at it, as though this collection of fingers, thumb, palm, knuckles, were some alien object. The waves rustled endlessly, like the rushing of the blood in her ears, and the herring gulls shrieked overhead. Her own hands were hidden, clutching the folds of the red cloak around her. She had kept Wynn's tag on the cloak-strap, with the original still tucked in the pouch at her belt. The cloak was stained now, the red fading, the hem tattering; and she suspected Radmer would have disdained wearing it in its present state. But it wasn't her father's cloak any more. It was hers.

All Hallows' Eve, a whole year since she had waited here for Finn in the rain, scrabbling after cockles. This year the day was fine, with thin sunlight, mist-filtered, a cold grey-gold that reminded her of tarnished parcel-gilt.

‘They have played me for a fool,' he said. ‘I was lied to from beginning to end by my father – and my mother, my friends, and Athulf most of all. I thought you loved me, and I thought everything I was doing was with your blessing. For us and for the best. I was wrong, and I am sorry.'

Elfrun listened carefully to each word, weighing and measuring, tugging it and testing its strength. Everything held. And more, she could hear in his voice how hard it was for him to say these things, and yet he was saying them.

‘I hurt you.'

She nodded.

‘You are still hurt.'

Another nod, and at last his hand dropped to his side.

She swung away from him to look out over the river and the estuary. Early mist hung low across the water. No foreign merchants' boats, no red-and-white sails. Misery welled up in her throat like a solid ball, blocking all air and light. Finn had gone, taking his secrets with him. She would never know what had caused that spider's web of scars across his skin, or where the much deeper damage had come from, that kept him so light and merry on the surface, and so quiet and remote down deep.
A cold fish
, Saethryth had said. She was sure that was not true, that she had prompted some real warmth from him. She would never forget his gift of the mirror, his naming her as beautiful, that sudden impulse that had spurred him to ask her to come away with him. Down all the green lanes of summer, with the cow parsley as high as their heads, and a single fork-tailed kite soaring and mewing far above, and the warm dust of the roads...

Behind her, Thancrad said, ‘I have no right to ask, but I wish you would say something. There are hard times coming, for us and for all Northumbria, and we would be stronger, together.' He exhaled sharply. ‘We may yet be very grateful to have Tuuri and Auli as our friends.'

Elfrun shook her head, not denying the truth of his words, merely indicating that she could not answer him, not quite yet.

But no more could she follow Finn's elusive shape down that winding road. And how safe would those green lanes have been, or the sea-roads, with war looming? She still could not bear to turn round and look at Thancrad, so she went on staring out to the mist-hung sea. Higher, the sky was clearer, and the geese were arriving from the north, arrow after arrow of them, little black shapes writing words on the sky in a language she could not read, crying their alien music. They began to appear at the turn of the leaf, they left in daffodil season, year in and year out, like the in-breath and out-breath of the world. And she had no idea where they went, or what they had seen.

‘I found this for you.'

She turned to face him at last. His hand was extended again, and this time cradled in his palm was a white shape, long and curved and folded, the length of her thumb. She could make no sense of it at first, it looked like the drawn-out bud of a creamy flower, or some monstrous tooth. But when she reached out from inside the cloak and took the thing from his palm its meaning discovered itself. The innermost spiralling core of a big dog whelk, shaped and smoothed by the sea. She looked at it from the side, and from above, noticing where tiny, long-ago worms had bored through the shell, how the outer whorl of the spiral folded in to embrace the core as a parent might a child. Peering into the folds, she could make out a scatter of tiny barnacles, deep-embedded. How long had this shell been tumbling in the sea, to be so broken and polished and transformed? The relentless, impersonal perfection of that spiral tugged at her memory: the maker of her mirror must have spent hours looking at shapes like these. She wondered what Wynn might make of it.

He was looking embarrassed now. ‘It's a worthless thing. I just picked it up on the foreshore. But I thought you would like it.'

She gripped it tight, and it moulded itself to the shape of her palm. ‘I do.' She looked up into his face. His brown eyes held concern, and she wanted to reassure him. ‘It's beautiful.'

She hardly knew him, this reserved, proud young man, despite the strange intimacy that had been forced upon them. But then, she had hardly taken the trouble to look. The sea-fret was clearing; those rags and skeins of vapour that had seemed so solid were disappearing in the morning sun. Still holding his gaze, Elfrun fiddled with the ties of her pouch and tucked the worn heart of the shell safely away, and made up her mind.

When her pouch was fastened again she held out her left hand to Thancrad. She didn't know what her face looked like, but she could guess from the look of relief and – yes – delight, on his; and she marvelled at the transformation worked by the play of tiny muscles across his strong, bony features. Her hand was cold, but he gripped it firmly, and slowly she felt a little kernel of warmth begin to grow in the secret hollow where their palms met.

2 N
OVEMBER
860, F
EAST
OF
A
LL
S
OULS

‘What shall I do with this, my lord?'

Archbishop Wulfhere pulled the quire of vellum towards him. He unfolded it and smoothed it out, but only the area which would become the front page of the still-uncut quire had been written on. His eyes widened briefly, then narrowed as they scanned the close-packed lines of text.

In this year died King Cinaed ap Alpin of the Picts; and also Athelwulf Ecgberhting of the West Saxons. Domnall ap Alpin and Athelbald Athelwulfing succeeded to the kingdoms. Also in this year the pagans burned the minster at Tours. In this year a girl gave me a flower on the kalends of March. Her face and bosom were freckled, and her eyes were blue. She made me think of a songthrush egg. In this year there was no famine, no murrain of cattle. The pagans were elsewhere. In this year Ingeld was made priest against his better judgement and appointed to the abbacy of Donmouth.

In this year, also, Amlaibh and Imhair made an alliance with Cerball against Mael Sechnaill, and Meath suffered greatly because of it. Athelbald of Wessex married his father's young widow, and the bishops of the West Saxons were much troubled thereby. In this year, King Osberht of the Northumbrians brought Tilmon back into his favour, and granted him Illingham. In this year also, the same king sent Radmer of Donmouth to Rome. Men wondered at both these things. In this year the swallows came back to their wonted places on the ides of April. The cuckoo called in the woods. The sun shone.

In this year, a woman's breasts were like mounded cream tipped with strawberries, and they moved me more than pen can express. In this year, I have trespassed on other men's woods and fields, and hunted their private runs. In this year, I have lost my soul, and found it.

‘Ingeld?'

The librarian nodded, but Wulfhere had not needed to ask. He had wanted, rather, to turn his friend's name over in his mouth one last time. But he would have known Ingeld's distinctive hand anywhere, with its square
a
and its long, jaunty descenders.

And even more than the hand, the voice.

‘Perhaps I should give it to his mother. I hear she is in need of comfort.'

The librarian cackled. ‘Give it to his girl, rather. But which one? Songthrush or strawberries?'

A smile twitched Wulfhere's cautious face. ‘More fitting, to be sure. But even if I knew who they were, I doubt either of them can read.' He folded the quire over on itself again, once, twice, three times, and handed it to the librarian. ‘Put it with the archive. Maybe one day someone will find it interesting.'

 

 

 

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, is coming in spring 2017

 

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Donmouth is a real place, yet no one knows where it was. Inevitably, therefore, the maps in this book are almost as fictional as the narrative. In 757/8, a century before this story begins, the Pope wrote to the King of Northumbria, demanding that the king return to their rightful abbot three monasteries which he had confiscated. Two of these are the well-known North Yorkshire sites of Stonegrave and Coxwold; the third is
Donaemuthe
. No site of this name is known, and yet the name itself tells us that it must be where a river known as the Don flows into the sea. Of the various candidates, I have chosen the Humber estuary, and the borderland of moor and marsh between the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. However, you will not find my landscape on any map, and the modern, drained and reclaimed landscape of the region is very different from how it lay twelve centuries ago. Much has also been lost to coastal erosion. The shifting landscape and the ambiguous evidentiary status of Donmouth are like folds in the space–time continuum, allowing me to slip my river, estuary, hill and salt marsh seamlessly into the real geography of the Humber hinterland.

Further gaps and ambiguities govern other aspects of my story. In 866 York fell to the viking ‘Great Army'. The way in which that army's leaders exploited the politics of Northumbria's Church and State to establish themselves in the landscape between the Humber and the Tees suggests that they were very well informed; yet there is little in the historical record to tell us how they gained that information. The kings and archbishops of ninth-century Northumbria are hardly more than names: we cannot be clear about their family relationships, their alliances, or how they died. One of the few facts that we do know is that Northumbria was embroiled in civil war when the vikings invaded. Please note that this is the first paragraph in this book in which the word
viking
appears, and that it is lower case on purpose. The word means
pirate
, and it is a job description, not an ethnicity. Nor is it a word which we find in contemporary English sources, applied to the bands of first raiders, then invaders, who are recorded from 793 onwards. The ideas exploited in this story – that there were Baltic and Scandinavian traders and wandering entertainers travelling the coasts of Eastern England who were in the pay of viking warlords, and that those warlords were themselves ready to take up the role of mercenaries on the different sides of the Northumbrian factions – are plausible hypotheses, but the evidence does not survive. I am indebted here to the work of Shane McLeod; and very grateful to Clare Downham for discussions about the nature of the viking trade diaspora, and the way in which such mercantile networks are based fundamentally on trust and shared interests. Her argument that the vikings and the churchmen formed mutually beneficial alliances from very early on in their encounters is powerful and persuasive. There is no viking attack on Northumbria recorded in the 850s: of course this need not mean that there
were
no attacks, but for the purposes of my story I have chosen to read the record in this way. The evidence provided by coins suggests that there was disruption in Northumbrian politics in the mid-ninth century, but this could equally well have been caused by the civil strife attested in the chronicles.

One fascinating type of coin evidence illustrates both the complexity and the ambiguity of the data. In the eighth and ninth centuries the various English kingdoms had established a consensus on currency, the widely accepted and standardized silver penny, weighing 1/240 of a pound, often beautifully designed, and minted under licence from the kings and occasionally the archbishops. A single silver penny represented a sizable amount of wealth, and cannot have been used for the smaller, everyday transactions. Northumbria, uniquely, moved away from the silver-penny model in the ninth century, and introduced a small debased silver/bronze coin known as the
styca
, with comparatively crude imagery, and worth much less than the silver penny. A previous generation of historians and numismatists interpreted this as indicating the isolated and backward nature of Northumbria; but these coins are now being seen by some revisionist scholars as evidence of a sophisticated economy, focused on external trade.

These coins are perhaps the best contemporary source for the politics as well as the economics of mid-ninth-century Northumbria, which are painfully obscure. We have a list of names of kings, found both on coins and in annals, but almost no recorded events, and the dates of those kings are very hard to pin down. The evidence of the coins does not match easily with that from the annals (which are themselves contradictory). Although I have placed Osberht on the throne in this story, as he is generally thought to have succeeded in around 850, other scholars have wanted to put the start of his reign a decade or more later. Almost the only thing we know about Osberht is that his civil war with the non-royal claimant Ælle (whose name I have expanded to Alred) was entrenched enough to continue even after the viking assault on York on 1 November 866. Nor do we know much about Archbishop Wulfhere, other than his dates (to which the same caveat applies).