NORTHMAN, page 44
She could make no sense of the foreigner, but the girl explained that although he was simple-minded he was a warrior of proven ability and might be of use when they returned to the village. The foreigner had the temerity to try to speak to her, but she forgave him since he was obviously an idiot. Even his language had a foolish cadence.
“Don’t you worry, sweetheart, I’ll take care of you all. It’s what I do.”
The shaman told her about the death of Godwif and the other victims of the Northmen. Aelflaedda knew that Cenric would have died defending his people, but for the Northmen to kill women and children with such joy made the vomit rise in her throat and a worm of a fear she had never known enter her heart. For a long time she could not speak and only the child next to her breast could feel the quickening of her breathing.
“And what of Hilla? Is she safe?” Aelflaedda knew the answer before the old shaman could reply: it was written on the faces of the three before her.
“Hilla…” the old man stumbled over the name and his eyes sparkled with tears. “Hilla perished. We saved her from the Northman, but her injuries were too severe after…” He could not go on and turned his head away. There was a long silence before the girl, eyes downcast before the queen, continued in a whisper.
“Highness, Ma-teen took us all down the river in a coracle and hid us in the rushes. My father sought out the herbs to help Hilla, but none of them worked, except the ones for her pain.”
“The old gods are dead,” the old man said, his voice cracking. “The world has ended. Even the homeless spirit has gone.”
The girl continued. “She died last evening and when we saw the Northmen row past our hiding place, we took her to the village. She is there now, with your sister. And her child.”
Aelflaedda stemmed the urge to allow the waiting tears to flow for Godwif, for Hilla; tears were for a later time, when she was alone. She wished Wigmund were here - he would know what to do. She glanced around. All faces were turned to her and for the first time since she had become Queen of Mercia she felt the power of her lineage, her descent from the mighty Ceolwulf, the unceasing stream of warriors before him and knew what had to be done.
“Follow me.”
Without a further word she turned and strode towards the village.
******
Alone in Cenric’s hut, Aelflaedda allowed herself tears as she gazed down at the dead faces of Godwif and Hilla. Hilla’s was peaceful: the old shaman’s drugs had ensured she joined the river without pain and her skin was relaxed and smooth. But for Godwif the agony of her death was etched in every facial line of her burnt and severed head.
The sob came from nowhere and Aelflaedda stroked the cold face of her elder sister remembering the many times as children that Godwif had saved her from the wrath of their father, Ceolwulf. Godwif was always the wise one and she always the mischief- maker.
She remembered one particular time aged six, when she had borrowed her father’s knife to carve a doll from elder wood. Ceolwulf, like many of the men, believed they had a spiritual affinity with their weapons and for another to even handle a warrior’s weapon was a killing matter. She had not heard Ceolwulf, known for his formidable temper and his belief in tradition, approaching her hiding place in the stables and was annoyed when Godwif snatched the knife from her hands and kicked her partially carved doll under the straw.
Godwif took the whipping without making a sound. Ceolwulf made Aelflaedda watch and when it was all over she bathed her sister’s wounds and vowed that she would die for Godwif. But Godwif hushed her.
“You will not have to die for me, sister. You will become a great queen and rule the Hwicce with gentleness and compassion. You will repay me by the side of the long river, as you look upon my motherless grandsons and take them for your own.”
“I do not understand, Godwif.”
“You will promise that when the time comes you will do as I ask.”
Aelflaedda kissed the dead lips of her sister in the darkness of the hut.
“I promise.”
She glanced across at the face of Hilla and beyond to the cradle where the infant gurgled and her tears became a flood, sobs wrenching from her without cease. She felt an arm encircle her shoulders.
“We need to bury them, sweetheart. Time to go.”
Aelflaedda turned to the foreigner with a curse on her lips. How dare this barbarian lay hands on… but she saw only compassion in his eyes and behind him the girl, carrying the other child, watched, her own eyes wet with tears. She straightened her shoulders and let out one long, shuddering sigh.
“Tell the foreigner he may release me now.”
Merwenna gently detached Martin’s hands from the queen.
Aelflaedda moved to the crib.
“He is Ailred, highness. Brother to Wystan,” Merwenna said, holding up the infant Wystan.
“Ailred,” the queen murmured and picked the baby from its crib. The infant chuckled and three faces smiled. The Queen stroked his soft, dark hair and glanced to the baby Wystan, sleeping now, but the twin of Ailred. Morwenna passed the child across. Aelflaedda held one in the crook of each arm and looked from child to child, remembering the carved doll and the deep cuts on her sister’s back. Her voice was strong.
“Wystan. Ailred. You are my sons. One day, you will be kings.”
******
Anna retraced the events of that night. It is all so clear, but only to me, she thought. I remember it all. The one they saved was not Wystan. Wystan was never under threat; he was safe in the woods with Aelflaedda.
The one they saved was the child who would become King of Mercia after Wystan. The child who created our Church.
The twin of Wystan.
Ailred.
When Bertic later killed the holy Wystan for the crown, Ailred killed Bertic and his father, Beorthwulf, in revenge for the death of his brother and became king.
From that time Ailred did no further violence but only allowed the Christian church on sufferance and just long enough to ensure his brother’s future cult status. For Wystan, of course, but also for kudos as the brother of a Christian saint and the power that brought.
On that night the first born baby, Wystan, was spirited away into the woods together with Aelflaedda, but there was not time to remove Aielred, the second born. To Thorkild, only Aielred was important: he had no interest in killing Wystan, because Wystan and Christianity were necessary for his plan. But he knew Ailred had to die. So, the Northman killed Aielred in his version of the pattern and Christianity and its antagonists were allowed to flourish to lead to the desired outcome for that which lay behind the Northman.
The death of humanity.
The version of Armageddon foretold in the old Judaeo-Christian book of Revelations: the Apocalypse of St John the Divine.
No Christ worship, no Armageddon.
Strange to think that the birth of Christianity contained within it the seeds of destruction for humankind.
Anna allowed herself a smile. The arrogance of which Thorkild accused ‘God’ was the trap into which he, himself, fell. He forgot in his pomp that he could have simply killed Ailred and his end would have been accomplished. Instead, his - almost human - sin of pride told him to make Kate kill Ailred, to make her submit to him on every level. And it almost worked, but for dad, and the indomitable spirit of the legion of women culminating in Kate.
Kate and dad saved Ailred and changed time, she thought with pride, changed history in their reality. To them, the time they live in is as it always was, but they are wrong.
This world is not the one they lived in.
When Ailred survived everything was as it should be and not how it seemed to be to them. In their world Aielred died and was lost in history; only Wystan survived and Beorthwulf was not killed because Ailred was already dead.
A barn owl flew low across the paddock and Anna watched its silent flight until it was lost in the encircling trees.
“And it all changed.” Anna heard her own words in the silence and wondered if she had said them before in another place, at another time. Nothing seemed fixed, everything mutable. She lowered her voice and glanced at the trees: solid, immovable, but destined, as her father had told her many times, to die as all things must and be reborn, again and again.
Except for one.
******
In the blackness of eternal night he stirred, the ache of incompleteness always hanging like a question mark and the pattern spread before him across a billion light years: universe after universe stacked like a child’s bricks in an infinity of possibilities.
In that infinity he saw only emptiness. In the sprawling, constantly bursting patterns of life he saw only offence. The pattern would be incomplete until there was silence. Absolute silence.
Only then would he find the one who had left. Only then would the chatter cease and he might finally find rest.
And on numberless worlds where life scampered and giggled and died, he descended, to quell the noise without pause, to bring the silence, forever.
******
“Today, we live in a world where the buds of democracy shrivelled three hundred years ago. The revolution of Oliver Cromwell and his Christian cronies was crushed in 1644 at Marston Moor by Prince Rupert and a procession of pretender kings ate themselves in a series of devastating wars. Now, a benevolent Church controls everything. A church based on a belief in a creator, but one who left his creations behind a long time ago.” Anna paused and her eyes followed the progress of an aircraft high in the dark sky, it’s lights almost disembodied. “And not a Christian church. Or any of the other religions that fell by the wayside.”
She turned from the fence as the white stallion, satiated, ran from the stable into the paddock, kicking his heels before trotting to Anna. She ran her hand down his muzzle.
“Your namesake was the first of a line of men and women who found their beliefs in the idea that God left us to get on with it and has long since gone to another place. Beliefs that glorify the works of mankind but never forget who made the man.”
The stallion whinnied. Anna watched his breath curl into the cold air and mix with hers. She giggled and gazed into his liquid eyes. “No, it wasn’t you, boy. Anyway, Christianity foundered as a result, Islam became powerful for a time, before tribal friction tore it apart and the Church of The Illumination replaced them both. A church where all are equal and whose servants are selected by their value to the community. No priests, no imams, no rabbis, no prophets or wizards, just men and women dedicated to truth and the advancement of the human race through knowledge, to the light. Ailred’s disciples left the shores of Albion and spread the light throughout the world.”
Now that same Albion spreads darkness.
But the light continues, she thought. When Ailred died, his soul inhabited others throughout time. I have care of that soul and others, now and care of the light. It is what attracted the power behind Thorkild to me when I was a child, but he only knew me as Anna.
“Religion kept us in ignorance. There is still darkness in the world, but now we see it for its nature, now we see it as something to be resisted, changed, even loved. The being that inhabited Thorkild was a servant of the shadows, left behind when God departed.”
The stallion shook his head and Anna laughed, the sound musical in the falling dark.
Sometimes, I think that all I know is more trickery.
So why do I feel so certain?
The white horses told me, as Aeffe died. Whatever they are: old gods, servants of creation, the Big Bang service team, the one God’s caretakers or something even stranger, they see the span of time, see it all, every thread of every possibility.
But they could be wrong.
“It’s weird how a dog bite and the birth of one child caused the death of belief in religion in their reality. That was the intention all along. But whose intention? Maybe the Church has got it entirely wrong, eh boy?” The stallion’s eyes sparkled in the light from the kitchen. “Ailred,” she murmured, running her hand through the thick mane.
The stallion snickered and whirling like a ballerina, flowed away, legs a blur, fading to grey as the paddock swallowed him in darkness.
Anna turned from the paddock, towards the farmhouse.
Soon, I will go out into the world and play my part, fight my fight and seek the truth of the white horses as I have been taught. The beautiful, white horses.
She glanced up to the room where Jamie slept.
I saw him created by Hêlēl, star of the morning, also known as Azazel, Attar, Thorkild, the worm and a thousand other incarnations, none of them befitting his true nature. I heard Jamie’s soul expand in the pain and knowledge of his past and his future, as he burst within the womb of Kate and Hilla. That was new. A new strand caused by small changes in the pattern, like the presence of the dog.
Dad need not know. He has his fight, mainly with superstition. Kate half remembers, but only our family matters to her now. Me? I have my fight… with the pattern. For its servants will try to rewind time, to reinstate the previous present that will lead to the death of humanity. That’s the purpose of the pattern, to lead to the end of all things, the end of days. I’ll try to stop them achieving that end.
Jamie will fight me.
Him and all the other sons and daughters of perdition. The sad, angry, captured souls. They have no choice but to fight. The world is not dead and it must be so for the pattern of their master to be revived. Must be, so that he can laugh in the void at an absent God, force him to come back, then spit in the face of redemption… and at last get attention.
In the meantime I will love Jamie more than I love dad. I will win his soul. We have an eternity.
I’ll show him the white horses.
Anna turned back to the gate and opened it, stepping into the paddock, as the stallion burst from the gloom in joy: a beacon of life in the dark.
I will win. Yes.
For a moment, a sliver of doubt slid into her mind but was as swiftly gone. She smiled and danced amongst the leaves, for the wind was cold and from the North.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people I would like to thank for helping me to write Northman. Most of them are dead. It’s a pity they couldn’t hang around so I could thank them, but I will be forever grateful to them for showing me that language is the greatest gift we have and writing is one way of using that gift. Thank you Willie, Charles, Leo, Ernest and all of the great writers who filled my young mind with the idea that there were wonders yet to be enjoyed beyond the Saturday morning matinee at Doncaster Gaumont cinema.
The list of living writers who have influenced me is too long to mention and includes nearly everyone - I read a lot - so I’ll tip my hat to you all.
On a practical level I would like to thank a few wonderful people who helped make this novel possible:
My lovely wife, Lizzie, for her unfailing patience and sharp eye for nonsense when I was in grumpy mode. Nothing in my life would have been possible without her.
My talented eldest son, Jonathan, for designing such a marvellous book cover and for his ability to deal with me gracefully, on a non-violent level.
My talented youngest son, Simon, for reading my short stories when the idea of reading fiction is, for him, like being stuck on the motorway with a blown engine and only classical music on the radio.
My editor, Juliet McHugh, for her wonderfully pernickety approach to the English language. and her dependable humour when faced with my cavalier approach to grammar, cats and political correctness. All mistakes within are mine (she says).
The Wolf’s Head Thor’s Hammer featured on the cover of this book was beautifully designed by Alban Depper of Northan (www.northan.net) and if the Vikings could have designed it, they would have. Thank you for permission to use it. Also, thanks to Robert Taylor of Jelling Dragon Ltd in York (www.jelldragon.com) for permission to use his image of the hammer.
I would also like to thank Thomas of Marlborough and Dominic of Evesham for the Chronicle of the Abbey of Evesham, Florence of Worcester, the Venerable Bede, the unknown Anglo-Saxon poet who wrote The Battle of Maldon, the Jorvik Centre, York and the many other sources of Viking and British information researched by the author. Finally, thank you to the Royal Air Force for flying such a wonderful airplane as the Typhoon.
******
Thank you for reading this story.
If you enjoyed NORTHMAN perhaps you would consider leaving a review on Amazon. As an Indie author faced with the massive marketing campaigns of the major publishers, I would appreciate it. It all helps in the struggle for visibility. You may also enjoy my dark short stories, BOMBER, ISSUE 49 and THE 500, available on Kindle and other platforms. They’re not about Vikings, I’m afraid, but have received some great reviews.
I have a blog (see below) where we can chat about anything: my writing, your writing, your reading, the state of the world, my dog, your dog… or you can sign up and I will let you know about future books, signings, readings and special offers. I hate spam and would never fill your inbox with promotional material.
If you are a fan of social media you can follow me on Twitter @JDHughes4 and find me as a Goodreads author at: www.goodreads.com/author/show/5415727.J_D_Hughes
I’m currently writing a new novel, which should be out in early 2013. More details and progress report on my blog. I’d be delighted to meet you there!
www.jdhugheswriter.wordpress.com
Table of Contents
