The meeting was held in the monastery’s church that was a surprisingly large hall made of timber and thatch, but with great leather panels hanging on the walls. The panels were painted with gaudy scenes. One of the pictures showed naked folk tumbling down to hell where a massive serpent with a fanged mouth swallowed them up. ‘Corpse-Ripper,’ Ragnar said with a shudder.
‘Corpse-Ripper?’
‘A serpent that waits in Niflheim,’ he explained, touching his hammer amulet. Niflheim, I knew, was a kind of Norse hell, but unlike the Christian hell, Niflheim was icy cold. ‘Corpse-Ripper feeds on the dead,’ Ragnar went on, ‘but he also gnaws at the tree of life. He wants to kill the whole world and bring time to an end.’ He touched his hammer again.
Another panel, behind the altar, showed Christ on the cross, and next to it was a third painted leather panel that fascinated Ivar. A man, naked but for a loincloth, had been tied to a stake and was being used as a target by archers. At least a score of arrows had punctured his white flesh, but he still had a saintly expression and a secret smile as though, despite his troubles, he was quite enjoying himself. ‘Who is that?’ Ivar wanted to know.
‘The blessed Saint Sebastian,’ King Edmund was seated in front of the altar, and his interpreter provided the answer. Ivar, skull eyes staring at the painting, wanted to know the whole story, and Edmund recounted how the blessed Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier, had refused to renounce his faith and so the emperor had ordered him shot to death with arrows. ‘Yet he lived!’ Edmund said eagerly, ‘he lived because God protected him and God be praised for that mercy.’
‘He lived?’ Ivar asked suspiciously.
‘So the emperor had him clubbed to death instead,’ the interpreter finished the tale.
‘So he didn’t live?’
‘He went to heaven,’ King Edmund said, ‘so he lived.’
Ubba intervened, wanting to have the concept of heaven explained to him, and Edmund eagerly sketched its delights, but Ubba spat in derision when he realised that the Christian heaven was Valhalla without any of the amusements. ‘And Christians want to go to heaven?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Of course,’ the interpreter said.
Ubba sneered. He and his two brothers were attended by as many Danish warriors as could cram themselves into the church, while King Edmund had an entourage of two priests and six monks who all listened as Ivar proposed his settlement. King Edmund could live, he could rule in East Anglia, but the chief fortresses were to be garrisoned by Danes, and Danes were to be granted whatever land they required, except for royal land. Edmund would be expected to provide horses for the Danish army, coin and food for the Danish warriors, and his fyrd, what was left of it, would march under Danish orders. Edmund had no sons, but his chief men, those who lived, had sons who would become hostages to ensure that the East Anglians kept the terms Ivar proposed.
‘And if I say no?’ Edmund asked.
Ivar was amused by that. ‘We take the land anyway.’
The king consulted his priests and monks. Edmund was a tall, spare man, bald as an egg though he was only about thirty years old. He had protruding eyes, a pursed mouth and a perpetual frown. He was wearing a white tunic which made him look like a priest himself. ‘What of God’s church?’ he finally asked Ivar.
‘What of it?’
‘Your men have desecrated God’s altars, slaughtered his servants, defiled his image and stolen his tribute!’ The king was angry now. One of his hands was clenched on the arm of his chair that was set in front of the altar, while the other hand was a fist which beat time with his accusations.
‘Your god cannot look after himself?’ Ubba enquired.
‘Our God is a mighty God,’ Edmund declared, ‘the creator of the world, yet he also allows evil to exist to test us.’
‘Amen,’ one of the priests murmured as Ivar’s interpreter translated the words.
‘He brought you!’ the king spat, ‘pagans from the north! Jeremiah foretold this!’
‘Jeremiah?’ Ivar asked, quite lost now.
One of the monks had a book, the first I had seen in many years, and he unwrapped its leather cover, paged through the stiff leaves and gave it to the king who reached into a pocket and took out a small ivory pointer that he used to indicate the words he wanted. ‘Quia malum ego,’ he thundered, the pale pointer moving along the lines, ‘adduco ab aquilone et contritionem magnam!’
He stopped there, glaring at Ivar, and some of the Danes, impressed by the forcefulness of the king’s words, even though none of them understood a single one of them, touched their hammer charms. The priests around Edmund looked reproachfully at us. A sparrow flew in through a high window and perched for a moment on an arm of the high wooden cross that stood on the altar.
Ivar’s dread face showed no reaction to Jeremiah’s words and it finally dawned on the East Anglian interpreter, who was one of the priests, that the king’s impassioned reading had meant nothing to any of us. ‘For I will bring evil from the north,’ he translated, ‘and great destruction.’
‘It is in the book!’ Edmund said fiercely, giving the volume back to the monk.
‘You can keep your church,’ Ivar said carelessly.
‘It is not enough,’ Edmund said. He stood up to give his next words more force. ‘I will rule here,’ he went on, ‘and I will suffer your presence if I must, and I will provide you with horses, food, coin and hostages, but only if you, and all of your men, submit to God. You must be baptised!’
That word was lost on the Danish interpreter, and on the king’s, and finally Ubba looked to me for help. ‘You have to stand in a barrel of water,’ I said, remembering how Beocca had baptised me after my brother’s death, ‘and they pour more water over you.’
‘They want to wash me?’ Ubba asked, astonished.
I shrugged. ‘That’s what they do, lord.’
‘You will become Christians!’ Edmund said, then shot me an irritated look. ‘We can baptise in the river, boy. Barrels are not necessary.’
‘They want to wash you in the river,’ I explained to Ivar and Ubba, and the Danes laughed.
Ivar thought about it. Standing in a river for a few minutes was not such a bad thing, especially if it meant he could hurry back to quell whatever trouble afflicted Northumbria. ‘I can go on worshipping Odin once I’m washed?’ he asked.
‘Of course not!’ Edmund said angrily. ‘There is only one God!’
‘There are many gods,’ Ivar snapped back, ‘many! Everyone knows that.’
‘There is only one God, and you must serve him.’
‘But we’re winning,’ Ivar explained patiently, almost as if he talked to a child, ‘which means our gods are beating your one god.’
The king shuddered at this awful heresy. ‘Your gods are false gods,’ he said, ‘they are turds of the devil, they are evil things who will bring darkness to the world, while our God is great, he is all powerful, he is magnificent.’
‘Show me,’ Ivar said.
Those two words brought silence. The king, his priests and monks all stared at Ivar in evident puzzlement.
‘Prove it,’ Ivar said, and his Danes murmured their support of the idea.
King Edmund blinked, evidently lost for inspiration, then had a sudden idea and pointed at the leather panel on which was painted Saint Sebastian’s experience of being an archers’ target. ‘Our God spared the blessed Saint Sebastian from death by arrows!’ Edmund said, ‘which is proof enough, is it not?’
‘But the man still died,’ Ivar pointed out.
‘Only because that was God’s will.’
Ivar thought about that. ‘So would your god protect you from my arrows?’ he asked.
‘If it is his will, yes.’
‘So let’s try,’ Ivar proposed. ‘We shall shoot arrows at you, and if you survive then we’ll all be washed.’
Edmund stared at the Dane, wondering if he was serious, then looked nervous when he saw that Ivar was not joking. The king opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say and closed it again, then one of his tonsured monks murmured to him and he must have been trying to persuade the king that God was suggesting this ordeal in order to extend his church, and that a miracle would result, and the Danes would become Christians and we would all be friends and end up singing together on the high platform in heaven. The king did not look entirely convinced by this argument, if that was indeed what the monk was proposing, but the Danes wanted to attempt the miracle now and it was no longer up to Edmund to accept or refuse the trial.
A dozen men shoved the monks and priests aside while more went outside to find bows and arrows. The king, trapped in his defence of God, was kneeling at the altar, praying as hard as any man has ever prayed. The Danes were grinning. I was enjoying it. I think I rather hoped to see a miracle, not because I was a Christian, but because I just wanted to see a miracle. Beocca had often told me about miracles, stressing that they were the real proof of Christianity’s truths, but I had never seen one. No one had ever walked on the water at Bebbanburg and no lepers were healed there and no angels had filled our night skies with blazing glory, but now, perhaps, I would see the power of God that Beocca had forever preached to me. Brida just wanted to see Edmund dead.