Sworn Brother (15 page)

I abandoned the idea of making up a coin necklace for Aelfgifu, and instead prepared a package of the necklaces and brooches which I thought might please her. Thurulf wrote down a careful list of what I was taking. Then we left and locked the strongroom, and one of Brithmaer’s burly watchmen escorted me and the jewellery to the palace.

I asked to see the queen’s chamberlain and told him that I had samples of jewellery for the queen to view. He kept me waiting

an hour before he returned to say that the queen was too busy. I was to return the same day the following week to seek another appointment.

As I was emerging from the palace gate, a leather stump tapped me on the shoulder and a voice said, ‘If it isn’t my young friend, the huntsman.’ I turned to see Kjartan the one-handed huscarl. ‘Someone said you had found a job with Brithmaer the moneyer,’ he said, ‘but by the glum look on your face, it would seem that you had found Fafnir’s golden hoard and then lost it again.’

I mumbled something about having to return to Brithmaer’s workshop. My escort, the watchman, was already looking impatient. ‘Not so fast,’ the huscarl said. ‘At year’s end we hold our gemot, the dedication feast. Most of the brigade is still in Denmark with Knut, but there are enough of us semi-pensioners and a few back on home leave for us to make a gathering. Each huscarl is expected to bring one orderly. To honour the memory of our good friend Edgar I would like you to be my attendant. Do you accept?’

‘With pleasure, sir,’ I replied.

‘I’ve just one condition to make,’ said Kjartan. ‘For Aesir’s sake, get yourself a new set of clothes. That plum-coloured tunic you wore last time at Northampton was beginning to look very shabby. I want my attendant to be turned out smartly.’

The huscarl had a point, I thought, as I pulled my much-worn tunic out of the satchel when I got back to my room. The garment was spotted and stained and a seam had split. The tunic was getting a little too small for me. I had filled out since coming to England, partly due to exercise and good meals when living with Edgar but more from all the ale I was drinking. For a moment I thought of borrowing something to wear from Thurulf, but I decided I would be adrift in his larger garments. Besides, I was already in his debt for our visits to the taverns. I received board and lodging from Brithmaer but no wage, so my friend was always buying the drinks.

If I was to have a new tunic, I had to pay a tailor, and I believed I knew how to raise the money. Better still, I would be able to show my love for Aelfgifu.

When Thurulf had shown me the amber necklace with its missing crystals, I had immediately thought of my satchel. Closed deep in a slit in the thick leather where I had stitched them three years earlier were the five stones I had prised from an ornate bible cover in a fit of rage against the Irish monks who I felt had betrayed me, before I fled their monastery. I had no idea what the stolen stones were worth, but that was not the point. Four of the stones were crystals and they matched the stones missing from the necklace.

I suppose only someone so much in love as I was would have dreamed what I now proposed: I would sell the stones to Brithmaer. With the money from the sale I could repay my debt to Thurulf and still have more than sufficient to purchase new clothes for the banquet. Best of all, I was sure that once Brithmaer had the stones he would tell his craftsman to set them in the necklace. Then, at last, I would have some jewellery worthy to offer the queen.

With a silent prayer of thanks to Odinn I took down the satchel from its peg, slit open the hiding place and, like squeezing roe from a fish, pressed out the stones into the palm of my hand.

‘How many of
these do you have,’ asked Brithmaer. We were sitting in his private room at the rear of the exchange when I handed him one of the gleaming flat stones to inspect. ‘Four in all,’ I said. ‘They match.’

The mint master turned the stone over in his hand, and looked at me thoughtfully. Again I noted the guarded expression in his eyes. ‘May I see the others?’

I handed over three more stones, and he held them up to the light one by one. He was still expressionless.

‘Rock crystal,’ he announced dismissively. ‘Eye-catching, but of little value on their own.’

‘There’s a damaged necklace in the jewellery coffer which lacks similar stones. I thought that—’

‘I’m perfectly aware of what jewellery is in my inventory,’ he interrupted. ‘These may not fit the settings. So before I make you an offer I’ll have to check if they suit.’

‘I think you’ll find they are the right size,’ I volunteered.

I thought I detected a slight chill, a deliberate closeness in the glance that met this remark. It was difficult to judge because Brithmaer masked his feelings so well.

His next question was certainly one he asked every customer who brought in precious stones to try to sell.

‘Have you got anything else you would like me to take a look

at?’

I produced the fifth of my stolen stones. It was smaller than the others and dull by comparison. It was a very deep red, nearly as dark as the colour of drying blood. In size and shape it resembled nothing so much as a large bean.

Brithmaer took the stone from me, and once again held it up to the daylight. By chance — or maybe by Odinn’s intervention — the winter sun broke through the cloud cover at that moment and briefly flooded the world outside with a luminous light, which reflected off the surface of the Thames and came pouring in through the window. As I looked at the little red stone held up between Brithmaer’s forefinger and thumb, I saw something unexpected. Inside it appeared a sudden vivid flicker of colour. It reminded me of an ember deep inside the ashes of a fire which feels a draught and briefly gives off a radiant glow that animates the entire hearth. But the glow the stone gave off was more alive. It travelled back and forth as if a shard from Mjollnir’s lightning flash when Thor throws his hammer lay imprisoned within the stone.

For the first and only time in my meetings with Brithmaer, I saw him drop his guard. He froze, hand in the air, for a moment.
I
heard a quick, slight intake of breath, and then he rotated the stone and again the interior lit up, a living red gleam flickering back and forth. Somewhere inside the jewel was a quality which rested until summoned into life by motion and light.

Very slowly Brithmaer turned to face me - I heard him exhale as he regained his composure.

‘And where did you get this?’ he asked softly.

‘I would rather not say.’

‘Probably with good reason.’

I
knew that something untoward had entered our conversation. ‘Can you tell me anything about the stone?’ I asked.

Again there was a long pause as Brithmaer looked at me with those washed-out blue, rheumy eyes, carefully considering before he spoke.

‘If I thought you were stupid or gullible, I would tell you that this stone is nothing more than red glass, cleverly made but of little value. However, I have already observed that you are neither simple nor credulous. You saw the fire flickering within the stone, as well as I did.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ve had the stone in my possession for a while, but this is the first time I’ve looked at it carefully. Until now I kept it hidden.’

‘A wise precaution,’ said Brithmaer drily. ‘Have you any idea what you have here?’

I stayed silent. With Brithmaer silence was the wiser course.

He rolled the stone gently between his fingers. ‘All my life I have been a moneyer who also dealt in jewels. As did my father before me. In that time I’ve seen many stones, brought to me from many different sources. Some were precious, others not, some badly cut, others raw and unworked. Often they were nothing more than pretty lumps of coloured rock. Until now I have never seen a stone like this, but only heard of its existence. It is a type of ruby known vulgarly and for obvious reasons as a fire ruby. No one knows for sure where such gems originate, though I would make a guess. In my father’s time we used to receive many coins, mostly silver but a few of gold, which bore the curling script of the Arabs. So many were reaching us that the moneyers found it convenient to base their system of weights and measures on these foreign coins. Our coins were little more than substitutes, reminted from their metal.’

Brithmaer was looking pensively at the little stone as it lay in his palm. Now that the sunlight no longer struck it directly, the stone lay lifeless, nothing more than a pleasant dark-red bead.

‘At the time of the Arab coins I heard reports about the fire rubies, how they glow when the light strikes them in a certain way. The men who described these stones were usually the same men who dealt in the Arab coins, and I conjectured that fire rubies came along the same routes as the Arab coins. But it was impossible to learn more. I was told only that these gems originated even further away, where the desert lands rose again to mountains. Here the fire gems were mined.’

The mint master leaned forward to hand me back the little stone. ‘I’ll let you know whether I want to buy the rock crystals, but I suggest you keep this gem somewhere very safe.’

I took his hint. For the next few days I kept the fire ruby concealed in a crack behind the headboard of my manger bed, and when Brithmaer decided he would buy the rock crystals and have his workman repair the faulty necklace, I went to the pedlars’ market. There, using a fraction of his purchase price, I bought a cheap and ugly amulet. It was meant to be one of Odinn’s birds, but was so badly cast in lead that you could not tell whether it was eagle, raven, or an owl. Yet its body was fat enough for my purposes. I scraped out a cavity, inserted the ruby and sealed the hole. Thereafter I wore it on a leather thong around my neck and learned to smile sheepishly when people asked me why I wore a barnyard fowl as a pendant.

My other purchases took a little longer: a tunic of fine English wool, yellow with an embroidered border; a new set of hose in brown; gaiters of the same hue; and garters to match the tunic. I also ordered new footwear - a pair of soft shoes in the latest style, also in yellow with a brown pattern embossed across the toe. ‘Don’t you want to take away the leather scraps with you, young master, so you can make an offering for your Gods?’ asked the cobbler with a grin. The cross displayed in his workshop denoted he was a follower of the White Christ. He had recognised me as a northerner by my accent, and was teasing me about our belief that on the terrible day of Ragnarok, when the hell wolf Fenrir swallows Odinn, it will be his son Vidar who will avenge him. Vidar will step onto the wolf s fanged lower jaw with one foot and tear away the upper jaw with his bare hands. So his shoe must be thick, made from all the clippings and scraps that shoemakers have thrown away since the beginning of time. The cobbler had made his jibe good-humouredly, so I answered in the same spirit, ‘No thanks. But I’ll remember to come back to you when I need a pair of sandals that will walk on water.’

Kjartan raised an appreciative eyebrow when he saw my finery as I presented myself at the huscarl barracks on the morning of the gemot. ‘Well, well, a handsome show. No one will think me poorly attended.’ He was looking resplendent in the formal armour of a king’s bodyguard. Over his court tunic he wore a corselet of burnished metal plates, and the helmet on his head had curlicues of gold inlay. In addition to his huscarl’s sword at his hip, with its gold inlay handle, a Danish fighting axe hung from his left shoulder on a silver chain. In his left hand he gripped a battle spear with a polished head, which for a moment reminded me of Edgar’s death facing the charging boar. But the item which caught my eye was the tore of twisted gold wire wrapped around his arm, the same one that lacked a hand. He noticed my glance and said, ‘That was royal recompense for my injury at Ashington.’