Chapter 20

Judgement

Light rain fell, ringing the surface of the slow, sleek river which ran high against the banks, licking along the planking of the quayside, swallowing over the black mudflats and drawing away flotsam and effluent towards the open bay, where a ship flying the colours of the King’s messenger rode at anchor. I sat near the place where the Salach meets the Lífe, where a timber pier cut out into the current, its ribbed point trailing vivid green weed downstream.

I sat close enough to keep vigil but far enough away to look as though I observed the boats plying in from the ship, bringing cargoes of well-dressed men ashore. Above me, big herring gulls swooped, barrelling ravens from the sky, chasing them clumsily from a hanging shape—a creature of dread. The face gnawed, red gore frayed like old rope come undone, the nose and mouth all broke open and pecked into one rounded cavity, fringed along the bottom with teeth. The head crooked at a wicked angle, slight shoulders tilted like a yoke stretched between mismatched oxen. Only the hair was unspoilt, shimmering and catching in the brief stirrings of air. Such fine hair, its strands sliding free of themselves, like gold wire under the sun. Fair. Bold. Untrammelled.

They had dragged Hamund through the quayside streets in a dead weight of silence. Dragged him up the hill past the shambles, towards High Street, through a gaunt crowd of townspeople, muffled in solemnity—his slim knees broken with an iron rod. Gunnar, bound together with the dying Thorkil, was dragged behind, drawn along by a truculent gelding who hocked and whinnied, sending them sprawling in paroxysms of pain. The sound of their screeching mingling with the tumult of gulls who had not the sense to stay quiet. Closer to the corn-market, the Bristol men broke the terrible silence. They laughed and jeered where they were gathered in numbers, or where their own soldiers were near.

Sergenz dragged them up to the market cross and threw the three forms down harshly at its pedestal. Young Hugo came forward from the crowd, out from under his father’s hand, diffident but vengeful. He carried a long, thin iron rod with a serrated ball atop. He pissed on them each liberally as they lay, unfeeling, gasping into the sky above, before striking each a wrecking blow on the shoulder. They had no more howls to part with, the heaving in of breath consuming their only energies. The soldiers handled them upwards into a sitting position, slumped against the quartering stump. Saer, holding his halberd, proclaimed their crimes and their fates, naming each one in turn as their families cowered in the crowd, crying raggedly into their hands, the women rending their own faces, clenching fistfuls of their own hair.

‘Thorkil Mic Amlaíb, for conspiring with foreign kings, abduction and violent disobedience, your body will be broken and you will hang by your neck over the quayside as a warning to our enemies’, and the same crimes called out for Hamund Haraldson and Gunnar of Uí Ímair, each to freshening cries and ululations. Then Saer called out a last name, ‘Gryffyn FitzRoger’—and the tall knight was pushed forward into the clearing before the cross, his face a storm of shame and sorrow, his tensioned and bunched forearms gripped behind his back—‘for abandoning your duty, and through weakness and omission, endangering the life of your master’s son, you will hang by your neck, and your body will be buried in the churchyard of the priory’.

I stood uncertainly by on the fringes of the Justiciar’s party, head bound in cotton strips, burdened with a shame of my own. Unable to look up for fear of meeting the seething eye of Basilia or, worse, of the Lady Monmouth, her presence weighing like a millstone around my neck. But my name was not called. Nooses were lowered then from the distended timber scaffold, elongated as a crane-fly, erected to swing far out over the river—a dire warning to ships entering the port. I shut my eyes tight against what followed.

‘They say there’s not a man left from Fingal to the river to lead a horse over a brook’.

This from an old man with a bulbous red nose leaning back on the wharf, languidly watching over a gang of slight children playing with old gorse-wicker pots at the water’s edge. Above us, the cadaverous remains of Gunnar swung gently by Hamund’s side, regarding, with meatless sockets, the unlading of boats and the bustle of the quayside. The old man slumped comfortably against a mooring post, his attitude of eternal wisdom the embodiment of resigned acceptance, raising his broad, curled hand in rich gesture to passing boats. Something in his recumbent presence calmed me. Though he was right—after the executions, the Justiciar had responded with an abrupt severity, rounding up the last of the Ostmen and sending them south with Raymond le Gros to slay their cousins in Vadrafjord.

The following morning the civitas awoke to find a pole in the marketplace, as high as a man with his hands held aloft, on top of which a horse’s head had been driven, its improbably long tongue spilling out over of the side of its jaw, black eyes covered in flies. What the Ostmen call the nidstang—the scorn post, carved with runes, hastily cut and raised to level a black curse over the market, over the town, over the Engleis.

For my part, I waited. I waited on the quay; in the hostel; on the walls. Sergenz ever near. I had slipped the noose. For now. But I knew the reckoning would come once all had settled. Once de Lacy had ground the Ostmen under his heel. Once his desperate and fierce embraces, thrown around his quaking son, had turned to open-handed blows of recrimination—they would start to ask questions. They would come for me. Hamund had made sure of that. Screeching in a high, wrenching voice as he was dragged aboard, pointing his broken finger in my face.

‘Lords, it was him. The stained bastard. He is behind this. Him and Conn Máel Sechlainn’. His repeated, tortured lies bound around with strands of truth worming into all in the boat as the Justiciar’s men rowed in stern silence and I slumped against the side with blood pouring across my face, into my mouth. De Lacy beside me with Hugo in his arms. Hamund’s lies unspooling and dashing themselves to pieces against the implacable silence. Contradictions, hoarse pleadings, ravings rising over the slow, dying sounds huffing from Thorkil in the bilge. Seeding my future with thorns. Though I could feel no anger towards him.

‘The end of Duiblinn’, the old man said, breaking into my thoughts. ‘Time was we sold the sons and daughters of their nations. So many of them that, if five galleys landed their prey together, you could almost buy a girl for a handful of gull’s eggs’. He laughed cruelly, his laughter breaking into a rattling cough.

‘A strange source of pride’, I said, and he read the flush of anger on my face.

‘I know who you are, fendinn. I know what you have done’. He pushed himself upright, coming forward in that same easy manner, stumping heavily on a palsied leg. ‘And may the evil of your betrayal afflict your belly with great shitting and shooting pains, and your bowel with great swelling. May your bones split asunder, may your guts burst, may your farting never stop, neither day nor night. May you become as weak as the fiend Loki, who was snared by all the gods’. The children had stopped their play, looking on with unconcealed joy.

‘Fendin, faen’, they shouted, looking around for discarded guts and fish heads to throw. Their old father coming yet closer. His broad hand rising towards me. A finger pointing.

‘She will haunt you to your end’, he said, and his words struck hard, jarring the memory that was near the surface. An image that had not left me in the days since the execution. In the thrust towards the gallows, the three broken bodies dragged cruelly through the press of the Bristol men, who bent, punching and tearing at the prisoners. Not even Gryffyn was spared their evil sport as he marched behind, an easy mark in the crowd. The hangman cleared a space around them, looped the noose first over Thorkil and pulled the rope taught. If life remained in the Ostman, it did not show, and he was hoisted high to coarse cheering. Hamund was next. Clothes torn from his meagre frame, one arm broken and hanging slack as the other clawed uselessly at the rope. The hacking, jeering, laughing clamour surrounded all. The rope was pulled tight and Hamund’s body raised to standing. I watched with a terrible pain within me, and he rose slowly above the heads of the crowd, all sound stopped so that we could hear the terrible, choking gurgle.

‘A cunny’ went up a cry of disbelief before the clamour came again, repeating in a shocked ripple of sound. A cunny. All eyes flew to the spot between Hamund’s legs. And it was surely there. Beneath a barely present furze of gold. A dark cleft. A woman’s fruit. A cunny. And suddenly two men from the crowd had rushed forward, had bunched up beneath the hanging form, grabbing her legs, lifting her weight off the noose as the hangman’s frightened face turned in our direction, seeking the Justiciar. Seeking an order.

Those several bleak moments. Hamund’s body suspended in air, legs propped from below and torso curling away towards the ground but hitched at the neck, gently snagged by the noose. Her eyes closed, her live fingers hooked beneath the thick, hairy rope, creating space. Her chest enlarging with breath. Her ghastly mouth breathing. Determinedly drawing air into a chest rising and falling, pushing upwards with each breath the undeniable budding paps, the womanly nipples that by some unknowable sorcery I had been blind to for months. In that moment, I too surged forward, surged towards her, bursting to get to her feet and push upwards, to free her delicate neck, to allow her to draw a deep draught into the slim cage of her body. But I fell instantly, pitching forward, my legs hooked from behind, and I came down heavily, my face plunging into the stony muck of the square. In the horrible blackness I felt a figure move over me, a foot pressing into the curve of my spine, and away to the right, a bellow come from the Justiciar.

‘Unhand that traitor. Unhand that witch or I will break your arms with this rod’. For one instant there was a kind of silence as the crowd fell dumb. Loud crying and keening amplified in the silence. Gulls. The shuffling of garments. Water. I struggled to rise, shouting with full-throated panic ‘no!’ as the crowd roiled suddenly, the Ostmen trying to break in towards her. The shimmer and hiss of weapons drawn and once again a hand from behind, striking me savagely, and a foot tripping me, sending me back into the serried press of legs. Again I was down, roaring into the muck. And above every sound, the tightening squeak of the rope and the groaning of the timber frame, and I did not have to see it to know that that insubstantial form flew skywards with the ease of a straw effigy. Her trapped fingers crushing knuckles into her windpipe. Her eyes opening frantically to the towering grey sky. I roared myself out into the filth. Howled useless words, curses, promises into the earth. It changed everything. That cunny. I do not know why, but it changed everything.

Three drops of a bedded woman: a drop of blood, a tear, a bead of sweat.

The memory scattered along with the harrying children as Gautier arrived onto the quay with a tight clutch of sergenz around him. The old man cowed back to his post, the soldiers’ quick eyes following every movement of the quayside, gripping their halberds, shifting the staves from palm to palm. The fear of conquerors in a conquered land. The alertness of burghers after the bull has gored, the horse bolted, the dog bit. I stood up slowly to meet him, and my left knee buckled momentarily with loose-jointed fear.

‘Come’, he said flatly, and I went with them, to finally know my fate. I walked within a circle described by the soldiers, a step behind Gautier, who did not speak further nor look towards me. Though I know it was he who had tripped me. Who had pressed me firmly into the mud as Hamund soared. He had preserved me from the same end. But perhaps it was to be for a short reprise. Gautier led me along the wood quay and out of the town, walking on in mounting silence. We followed the road, fording the Steyne and passing the priory of All Hallows and its dour walls. I perceived that we were making for an Rinn. He did not take me straight to the village, however, and a mile out, we walked down onto the shingle, shadowing the shore. The strand was a light-coloured grey with a thin mist coming in from the sea. I felt tired and sad and emptied. I felt anger and disgust, and some of it was directed at myself and some at the Justiciar and some again at Hamund. That beautiful, vibrant fool. That dead thing. That dangling, sad majesty.

Gautier paced along the strand and I laboured over the shingle, trying to keep step with the wind coming on fuller from the bay, bringing with it a keen freshness, an open mineral tang as, in the shallows, dense shrubs of seaweeds floated on the rising tide. We followed the heaps of flotsam and shingle along the high water mark, crunching laboriously through the shell which gave way sideways at each step, sending swarms of hopping insects away over the bladder-wrack. Through the mist, figures solidified from watery greyness to leaden forms. A reckless lightness came upon me as I recognised these bodies.

Adam de Feypo, Petit, Tŷrel and others, standing on a hummock of springy ground above the beach, speaking together, their swords in their belts steadied by the weight of their reposed fists. Dark de Angulo there also, and the Justiciar, a grim pillar behind, staring inland. They all turned when the sound of our crunching step announced us, and the Justiciar’s face, when it separated itself from the dense trailing vapour in the air, was also grey, the smooth scars dull, his eyes tired but hard. He drew his sword, unhampered by his bandaged left shoulder and, sighting down the length of grooved metal, pointed its tip towards me.

‘Give him a blade’, he roared. And the mist dulled the reverberation of his voice. Terrible. I heard the shush of oiled steel pulled from Gautier’s wool-lined sheath beside me. He put the sword into my fist and stepped backwards. The men around de Lacy stood off also, fanning in an arc around him. That terrible flat voice, raised loudly above the sucking tide, addressed me now.

‘Here I am, boy. Was it not I who lifted your woman by the neck? Flung her into the sky? Was it not I who spoiled her face and her cunny? Come for me’.

I looked quickly towards Gautier, and by his stony impassiveness, his weighted stance, I knew he would not intervene. With my eyes still on him I started forward, throwing the sword in forehand and backhand swipes, as if it were an immána stick, quick, exact revolutions that skimmed the shingle, scuffing pebbles and winkles into the air. De Lacy’s own blade swooped in response, with infinitely more strength, infinitely more poise, carving a figure of eight in the air before him. I paced forward channelling all the strength I could into my thighs, to carry me forward in ranging steps, up the slope to the hummocky turf. De Lacy stood waiting for me, and, a step beyond range, I slid out my leading foot, swung in a wide feint towards the outside of his sword arm. I stopped the swing short, at my elbow, pivoting the blade across my body, allowing the momentum to carry me around in a spin, a sidestep to his right. I dropped down onto a knee and plunged the blade into the turf, feeling it slide through and strike, sinking into the grinding gravel. De Lacy’s blade punched into the turf to my right, where I had been standing a heartbeat before. I bowed my head, resting my chin on my hands, which clasped the pommel of Gautier’s sword, and I waited.

De Lacy’s blade landed a stinging slap on the back of my neck before his rough hand caught me by the shoulder and dragged me up. We stood face-to-face and he stared into me. I could not hide the tears.

‘You did not know, then’, he confirmed, and I shook my head.

‘I did not know’, I said in a low rasp of a voice. A wretched sound. He let his sword fall and both of his large calloused hands came up around my head, putting pressure on my skull, shifting the knitting flap of scalp painfully, and it seemed that for a moment he would crush me. But instead he pushed me, half rough, half paternal, towards the foreshore, snuffing and pulling his cloak closed over his paunch. He did not speak for a moment. We walked over the shifting ground, moving towards the village of an Rinn, labouring, and when we reached the finer, packed sand closer to the water, he said, ‘I have a fortune spent on geomancy and on auguries of the Astra. These masters that come like market-day doctors in their rich hats and their little chests of oil and incense and fussy tools. They answer my questions of the future, explaining their responses through long discourse on the nature of shapes, or through the movement of the heavenly bodies. I have asked them much about what is to come. Should I bring my family or leave them here? Who should I send to Míde? Who will move against me in my absence? And while these arts have their uses, they are not conclusive’.

‘Yes’, I said, ‘and the study of scripture can only take one so far’.

‘And who takes you the rest of the way?’ he said. I looked to him, confused, and he continued, ‘Who told you what to do just now, for example? With the sword?’

I thought about it for a moment and then said, ‘No one. I could neither attack you nor not attack. I did what I could’.

He nodded, satisfied, and spoke further. ‘Success is decided within five beats of the heart. This I teach to my children. To act in the heat of the moment, with surety, with purpose and without hesitation. Nay, not rashly as some would—this is to misunderstand the quality required. The skill is to act in the moment with the knowledge of what to do. Without doubt or vacillation. Without the slightest pause. And how to know what to do? How to act?’ He looked at me squarely, stopping me with the backs of his fingers. ‘By long and ceaseless hours of thought. In the bed, on the back of a horse, supping at a table, on the hunt, gambolling with children. At every moment to be in thought. Where will your enemy strike? Where will you strike him, who is now friend that may be better served joining your enemy, and what enemy can become an ally? When the swords are finally drawn, your thinking should be done, and you will know what to do. To act, to act bravely, but above all to act with belief. Without delay’.

We moved forward again, skirting the black line of polluted sand showing the high water mark. Behind us, his retinue followed, Gautier gathering the swords we had left in the turf.

‘Men are cautious, rational beings, Alberic. They sit and talk about the future. About what crop might do well in the fallow field next year, about how much firewood to set in for the winter, how to cope if there is blight, what saint to bend a coin to or which pilgrimage will afford the better absolution’.

We stepped onwards as he spoke, parallel to the shore, walking over the wet surface where coils of dirty sand showed the passage of lug-worms. The wet carcass of a dog at the edge of the reaching foam.

‘When the solution presents itself, men think on it some more, they examine it for flaws and look at it in the round, they want to speak it to a confidant, to test out the sound of the words and to see, in their fellow’s face, the right of it reflected back, assured and agreed on. Men crave that assurance. In secret they ask their wives—who are often better counsel than the shrewdest philosopher—and then they think again upon the answer. And do not hear me wrongly, prudence has its place. But not when the eye tooth of the wolf is bared. When the boar turns to charge. The prudent man hesitates when events move at speed. When a decision is do or die’.

His broad hand came out from beneath his robe, cupping the back of my head. ‘Not you, Alberic FitzJohan. Your life has taught you to act like a chaualier. Speed, decision and result. You saved my boy’.

‘I feared you would hang me’, I said tersely, and he spat, saying, ‘Paah. And maybe I would have. But Hugo told me all, he told me that you were true and that you tried to get him off the boat once your suspicions were raised’. After a moment’s silence, he continued, ‘But, I mistrusted you again, when Hamund’s true nature was unveiled. Because a lad can be enthralled to a cunny like a dog to the kennel master. The sorcery of their sex. But you did not know, that much is plain’.

We walked on until I could see the huddle of huts at an Rinn materialising from the vapour-laden air. Men, soldiers, chaualiers, heads bowing and coming up in a knot of misted shadow. A long boat with oars set lay against the long jetty. Amongst the shapes, the Justiciar’s family stood, waiting.

‘We are leaving, Alberic. The King has called me to war. I am summoned to his side. His impious wife and his brainless, impatient, cock-headed sons have joined with Philippe, King of Franks. He has need of me in Normandy’.

This struck me like an unlooked-for blow.

‘But you are the Justiciar. You hold the city for the King’.

De Lacy laughed. ‘One is only Justiciar until one is not. Another will take my place and take up residence in the castel. It is to be FitzAudelin, that mannered courtier, the baron of the bushel. I do not see good coming from his governance, and I do not wish my family to stay here under his rule. I will bring them home to Herefordshire, and Tŷrel and de Feypo will look to my affairs here. I want you to go with them to Troim. You know the terrain and the families there. I want you to take the head of Magnus Meylocklan, the man who still pretends to kingship of Míde. Meyler is there already, unloosed, and I do not trust his motives’.

‘Baile Átha Troim’, I said, ‘but I do not know it so well’. The sudden thought of returning to that distant, green kingdom and all that it contained chilled me instantly.

‘I’ll not have you picked off for FitzAudelin’s court, lad. You are too valuable to me and my household. You will take Tŷrel through that country and you will advise him who is related to whom. Who is pledged to what house. Whose son is fostered to another and who holds the hostages that might cause another to revolt. Keep your sword arm loose and your mind sharp. When I have served the Franks their due of blood, I will return to broaden our lands in Míde to stretch from the sea as far inland as the Shannun. And you will have what is owing to you for your part in this work. You will have land and a hall upon an earthen hill and a marriage of worth. Alberic, do not read emptiness in these words. Serve my cause, and you will be rewarded’.

We had reached the dirty foreshore, littered with nets stretched out to dry and wizened gorse crab pots tumbling feckless in the slow surf. Through the mist I could see boats plying to and fro, men pulling creaking oars running provisions and de Lacy’s chests of plate and fine fabrics and furs out to a ship anchored beyond the sandbanks in the bay. Beyond sight and beyond sound. A secret leave-taking.

I saw many chaualiers embarking and those on the shore calling out the secret, coded words of fighting men. The écuriers preparing the horses to be swum out into the tide, and everything moving in a hushed efficiency. From the jetty, de Lacy’s children came running towards their father, the young ones crowding my legs and Hugo coming up diffidently. The Lady Monmouth approached then. She embraced me rigidly and kissed my cheek, the faint wet residue from her lips flaring cold on my skin in a sudden breeze.

‘Come, Alberic, there is something I have been wanting to tell to you’, de Lacy said, leaving his family to board the boat. He steered me aside, his hand gently propelling me by my elbow. He spoke close, his hot breath against my ear. ‘And it may not be pleasant for you to hear’.

The boat rode the roll of the waves, thunking against the wet posts of the jetty. I watched over his shoulder as he bent close, delivering his words as the Lady Monmouth marshalled her household into the skiff. ‘The good Earl of Chester is my mother’s cousin—hoary old Ranulf. We were not strangers to his land in our younger days. There was a young man named de Crécy at Frodsham. A man who was amiable enough and ran a good farm for his master. But he was not kind to those in his power. Serfs and villeins in fee. He made free with their women—which, my lad, I can tell you is no rarity. He was brought before the manorial court for a serious crime alleged against him. That he put up for sale maidservants after toying with them in bed and making them pregnant. I do not remember what became of the case, if he was found guilty or not—only that it caused a pretty scandal to be discussed in shocked tones among the ladies of the county’.

I found it hard to reply, the weight of shame like hands pressing down on my shoulders. The venom of these gentle words tapping into my blood and beating sickly through me.

‘We do not keep slaves in our dominions, lad’.

He spoke to me tenderly then, his wide hands once again cupping around my head, forcing my eyes to rise to his. To rise from his feet which wore the finest cut leather shoes, tooled with lavish knotwork and fringed with tasselled leather thread. My eyes rose to his face. He stood there against the wash of white light blaring from the sea. Beyond in the retreating tide, black stumps of ancient posts and carcasses of coracles lying on the slobland trailing bladder-wrack.

‘Mostly because our churchmen and women do not allow it’, he said with a soft laugh, and this somehow rose the ghost of a smile to my lips as he stared sharply into me. The rippled flesh of his ruined face and those eyes glowing out like an echo of the fire that had marked him.

‘Nor do we persecute the son for the sins of the father’.

Confusion roiling in me. Disgust. And his confidence, in my weakness, something to claw on to, to hold like a floating beam as my ship foundered on the rocks of his making.

His broad hand smoothed over my head, pushing back the hair and curling back around my ears, fussing as I had seen him do so often, absently worrying the head of his favourite hound.

Three locks that lock up secrets: shame, silence, closeness.

‘You will lead them there and find your old master, Meylocklan’, he said in that same tone—both sympathetic and forceful. A neutral, levelled voice, as one repeating an inevitable truth. ‘Seek judgement of your father. Though the Lord has punished him in his own way, making a comedy of the suffering he inflicted on others. Take the woman who scorned you. Inhabit her body and break its pride. Own the land that fettered you. Win wealth from the produce of its soil. Hang the man that enslaved you. Watch the life leave him. Stamp your foot on the neck that oppressed you’.

He said this all again and again, nodding, and, in the act of smoothing back my hair and manipulating my head, I too was nodding. And then it was ‘yes? yes?’ repeated warmly in the voice of friendship, the voice of succour. Until I too was saying yes, yes. Yes to it all. To the ravage and destruction of all I once knew. Until the die was truly cast. And my path lay northwards. My path led home. Whatever that word now meant.