The blood is scalding, simmering in my cheek that I should entertain such blasphemy. It is grotesque and flies against all reason to suppose the Empire capable of such adulteration, to the point that ounce for ounce a worthless forgery might hold more value. Why, if that were so, if all the wealth of Rome were but a gilt concealing poverty, then Rome itself would be the forgery, a sham, as good as fallen with no rampart save for promissory notes to keep the tick-scarred hordes at bay. It is monstrosity itself, this thought. It is a night-start. It is stark, and bottomless.
And it is true.
It crashes in, the fearful certainty, and breaks me. Let me die, or better yet have died before this cold, weighed fact could murder me, before I knew that we were poor and all was ruin. Though my cheeks are simmering yet, the eyes boil over, tears that sting like vinegar. Behind me now the door is opening. I hear a shuffle as of many feet, and know it is the village men, that they have come to kill me, but I cannot look at them for shame: for them to witness me, to witness Rome like this.
At last I lift my head. They stand hulked in the door with muscled cudgels in their fists, the grey man with his paunch and top-knot to the fore. Stone-faced, expressionless, they watch me, watch the little Roman as he sobs above his scales, and if they feel disgust at this display it is not sharper than my own. They pass a glance between them, and the grey man shrugs. They’re going to kill me now. Kneeling upon the floor, I close my eyes and I await the blow. A final silence falls.
Then, many footsteps, moving off downstairs, an avalanche of wood and leather. Doors slam somewhere far below. I open up my eyes. The men are gone.
They saw it in my face. They saw me as a man already slain, not worth the killing. Rome is dead. Rome is dead. Rome is dead, and where shall I go now? Not home. Home is a stage façade of paper, peeling, faded by a sun of cheap pyrites. I cannot go home, and who, who else will have me?
I crouch staring at the coins, one false, one falser yet, until the light begins to fail and they are both become pale blurs there in the gloom, no longer to be told apart, a shadow fallen on that noble brow.
The room fills up with murk. I cannot bear the darkness here, that drinks all definition, and I rise and stumble as one in a dream, first down the stairs, then, dazed, into the street. The celebrations are already under way, streets heavy with the stench of ruffian life. They piss in doorways, swing oars at each other’s heads, and laugh, and kneel in their own sick. They fornicate against the alley walls like prisoners. They fart and shout and they are all that is, and all that will be. Slow, I shuffle out amongst the great lewd push of them. A jug of ale is pressed into my hand. With rotten smiles they grip my arm, and kiss my tear-tracked cheek, and draw me in.
November Saints
AD 1064
With age, the act of waking has become a great confusion. I no longer know upon which decade of this life my eyes will open: lame and frost-burned by the old church gate or in my convent cell here, morning’s first sick blueness on the wall; blue of the dead.
My cot is hard, that I may feel the bones that are inside me, restless and impatient to get out. Not long, they think. She’s old. Not long. Beneath the rough dusk sheet a chill aches in my bad leg’s starving marrow and I know it is November. Last night, on All Hallow’s Eve, I dreamed I was a man.
Rain-blind, he rode the fierce night through upon a fever-horse towards Northampton here, though in my dream I thought of it as Ham Town and I know not why. The drizzle stung my face and cold draughts rattled in my ears, and as I rode it seemed that all the terrors of November were upon me, rude jaws snapping at the steaming fetlocks of my horse so that I wept in fright, and when I woke I did not know at first what year it was, and placed a hand upon my leathered sex for fear that I should find instead his instrument, mea culpa, mea culpa, Blessed Virgin forgive me.
Creaking inside my chest I rise from off my cot, the sour sheet flung aside, my burlap habit pulled on in a single, shivering movement; coarse folds, grey against grey dawn. I finish dressing in the half-light and I limp the damp stone passages to Matins where I offer up all thanks to God that I may limp at all and dwell instead upon the passion of Our Lord. I work the days, I count the beads and say the names.
When they are mindful of my halten foot they set me to a task where I may not walk far, as when I tend the gardens here at Abingdon. My bone fists tug amongst the weeds and often will my thoughts turn now to Ivalde, when he kept the graves and gardens in the old church and I lay against its gate-post, begging. Sometimes he would talk with me, his idiot talk that had no reason since a cart-horse kicked his head while he was but a mite. Now I recall his pale green eyes, his Norse-red hair. He was not more than sixteen winters old, without a jot of harm in him.
‘Alfgiva,’ he would say to me, ‘one day I shall set out and make a pilgrimage to Rome, all for the honour of the Drotinum. What do you think of that?’ Drotinum was a word by which he meant St Peter, blessed be his name. The word means ‘Lord’. He would go on and on with Rome and all the places he would go and I would lie against the gate-post with its bare stones digging in my back and, may the Lord forgive me, I would hate him. Hate him for the things that he might live to see while I saw nothing but that grey stone post; the same great wheel of tree and field that spun about it every day, the slow and shallow river downhill fro
m that church, the bridge of blackened timber that had surely spanned it since the world was small.
He’d know the smell of foreign ports and cities all of gold, and I would lie and count the figures and the faces, raised up from the stone, that capered in the church’s eaves, and I would wonder, as I did each day, about the figures and the faces on the far side of the church, that I had never seen although they were so near. For these reasons would I hate him, may the Lord forgive me. In the winters I would freeze and in the summers did not have the strength to brush the flies from off my face or bosom.
Ivalde never went to Rome. A humour came upon his lungs the day that he and noble Bruning lifted up the flagstones of the church to dig the worm-laced earth beneath and I was with them there. His chest was never better from that day, and he was put below the ground before the month was done. I took my vows not long thereafter, in the year of Our Lord one thousand and fifty. It is fourteen years now since I last saw Ivalde’s face, or heard his senseless talk. May God have mercy on our souls, both his and mine.
I did not hate him all the time, except when I was bitter, which was often, but upon my fair days I would talk with him, and laugh, and wish him well upon his voyages. I never once saw Bruning laugh with him or heard him say a kind word to the boy, though Bruning was the parish priest and was responsible for Ivalde’s keep while Ivalde tended to the carrot crop and kept the graves. Nor, for that matter, did the noble Bruning ever throw a coin to me for all his wealth; for all he passed me every day there ragged by his gate. Still, that is in the past and Brunigus himself is dead these four years gone. I am the last alive who stood there in that church and saw: Alfgiva, who lay broken in its shadow all her life, then fled to see its light unearthed, there near the crossroads, by the river-bridge.
November grows long in its icicle tooth and I scrub the worn flags till the wet and the shine on them cast by the rare shafts of sunlight would blind you. I pray and I count off the beads. On the twentieth day of this month is the feast of the Blessed St Edmund, and we are shown pictures depicting his passion that we then may know him more nearly. We see him first scourged and then shot through with arrows, his faith yet unshaken, his God unrenounced. At the last is the head of him struck from his shoulders to roll at his feet, where a beast on all fours stands to guard it. The Reverend Mother would have it the beast is a wolf, though its image looks more like a dog, and yet monstrously big is it made so that I grow afraid of this picture and think of it even when it is no longer in sight. We can none of us know, what it is that walks under the ground.
So the days pass. A woman of Glassthorpehill over the Nobottle Woods is possessed of a spirit, and vomits up animal beings like little white frogs. This is told me by Sister Eadgyth, though I did not wait in her company long enough that I might come to know more. She endures constipations that make her breath foul, and her humour alike, but she is a good Christian and hard at her work.
I did not walk at all, from the time of my birth to my thirtieth year, when I lived in the yard by the chalk-merchant’s house that was over the way from the church. In a lean-to of sail-cloth and old, painted boards I abided alone, for my father had taken his leave while I was yet unborn and my mother had gone to the colic before I was ten. With the rise of the sun every morn I would crawl from my shack like a beetle and drag my weight over the stones of the lane to my place at the gate by my elbows, where until this day is the skin dead and worn, without feeling, and may be pinched up in grey folds that are like to dried clay.
On the boards of my lean-to were pictures of angels, but half unmade; drawn with an unpractised fist. It was sometimes my fancy that they were the work of my father and left incomplete by his leave-taking, although I knew them more likely the mark of a stranger’s hand, someone long dead, or passed over the river from Spelhoe to Cleyley. I had these boards turned with the pictures faced inward and, laid by my candle at night, I’d imagine the clumsy embrace of their arms without hands, these omitted for want of pictorial skill. I would think myself fanned by their unfinished wings.
Now the near-winter skies have a burnished and argent light to them, hung over the convent at Abingdon here in the far fields north-east of the old church where so long I lay. As the feast of St Edmund approaches, so too does my sleep grow more fitful and restless; fraught with the most wretched of dreams, where I ride through the hurricane night as a man with my thoughts in a bitter confusion and enemies hot at my heel or, worse yet, I will wake and cry out in despair at the death of my brother, though brother in truth I have none, nor have I ever wanted for such.
On the day of the feast I awake with such words in my mouth as to frighten the wits from my poor sister Aethelflaed, there in her cell next to mine. With the voice of a bear I am growling of murder: ‘In Hel’s Town was my brother Edmund flayed first from his neck to his loins, whence he wept and complained, lying spread as if garbed in a blood-shirt that Ingwar’s men folded back, shewing the red, stinking harp there beneath.’
I console Sister Aethelflaed, calming her, even though truly I am more afraid for myself. I have such thoughts inside me that make me ashamed before God; other voices and lives speaking in me, not only in dreams but throughout the day’s labours. I sit by the well in the yard with my better leg folded beneath me and busy myself with the washing of smocks, when I find myself thinking how foolish was my brother Edmund to hold with his faith through the earlier torturings, only to shriek out its renunciation in his mortal pain as he begged them for death.
Now my hands become still in the well’s freezing waters, the fingers grown numb that the smock I am rinsing falls from them and floats in a thin scum of November leaves. I am thinking that should I be captured then gladly will I offer praise unto Wotan, for all his one eye and the pale shyte of ravens encrusting his shoulders, if he will deliver me from this demise; this blood-eagle, that it may not unfold its bloody-ribbed wings and make naked my heart . . .
I may not say how long I am sitting there until I come to myself, and rise up with a cry at the horrors that visited with me while I sat in reverie. Shaking and pale, with my bad leg dragged useless behind me, I go to the Reverend Mother and tell her that I am afflicted by dreams such as may be the work of an incubus, asking permission that I might be scourged for to rid me of these noxious thoughts. Here she voices concern with respect to my frailty and age, bidding me reconsider and suffer some penance less strict and exacting. I tell her of my imprecations, alone in my cell; all the rosaries said but unanswered. I beg that she let me be scourged, that the flail drive away what the beads cannot halt, lest my immortal soul should itself be imperilled. At last she consents, with the penance to be undertaken the following day, that I might yet have time to more fully consider the rigorous path I have chosen with all of my heart to pursue. I must not shrink from this, for I fear for my faith in the face of these infidel visions and flukes of the night; Blessed Virgin forgive me, deliver me.
Later, alone in my cell with the candle-sketched devils of shadow that leap and cavort on its walls when I move, I am thinking of Ivalde, so many years dead now. He came and he sat by me there at the gate where I lay on a cold morning just before spring. In his slow, simple-minded inflection he told me of how he’d set forth on his pilgrimage that very day. He was going, he told me, to Rome, although Bruning had scolded and railed at him, saying that God and the Blessed St Peter had better to do than pay heed to a half-witted garden-boy.