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СКАЧАТЬ if he doesn’t pay, we go.’

      I thought Asser would translate, but the monk stayed silent.

      Iseult still stared at me and I stared back. She had a flawless skin, untouched by illness, and a strong face, but sad. Sad and beautiful. Fierce and beautiful. She reminded me of Brida, the East Anglian who had been my lover and who was now with Ragnar, my friend. Brida was as full of fury as a scabbard is filled with blade, and I sensed the same in this queen who was so young and strange and dark and lovely.

      ‘I am Uhtred Ragnarson,’ I heard myself speaking again, though I had scarcely been aware of any urge to talk, ‘and I work miracles.’

      Why I said that I do not know. I later learned that she had no idea what I had said, for at that time the only tongue she spoke was that of the Britons, but nevertheless she seemed to understand me and she smiled. Asser caught his breath. ‘Be careful, Dane,’ he hissed, ‘she is a queen.’

      ‘A queen?’ I asked, still staring at her, ‘or the queen?’

      ‘The king is blessed with three wives,’ the monk said disapprovingly.

      Iseult turned away and spoke to the king. He nodded, then gestured respectfully towards the door through which Iseult had come. She was evidently dismissed and she obediently went to the door, but paused there and gave me a last, speculative look. Then she was gone.

      And suddenly it was easy. Peredur agreed to pay us a hoard of silver. He showed us the hoard that had been hidden in a back room. There were coins, broken jewellery, battered cups and three candleholders which had been taken from the church, and when I weighed the silver, using a balance fetched from the market place, I discovered there was three hundred and sixteen shillings’ worth, which was not negligible. Asser divided it into two piles, one only half the size of the other. ‘We shall give you the smaller portion tonight,’ the monk said, ‘and the rest you will get when Dreyndynas is recovered.’

      ‘You think I am a fool?’ I asked, knowing that after the fight it would be hard to get the rest of the silver.

      ‘You take me for one?’ he retorted, knowing that if he gave us all the silver then Fyrdraca would vanish in the dawn.

      We agreed in the end that we would take the one third now and that the other two thirds would be carried to the battlefield so that it was easily accessible. Peredur had hoped I would leave that larger portion in his hall, and then I would have faced an uphill fight through his dung-spattered streets, and that was a fight I would have lost, and it was probably the prospect of such a battle that had stopped Callyn’s men attacking Peredur’s hall. They hoped to starve him, or at least Asser believed that.

      ‘Tell me about Iseult,’ I demanded of the monk when the bargaining was done.

      He sneered at that. ‘I can read you like a missal,’ he said.

      ‘Whatever a missal is,’ I said, pretending ignorance.

      ‘A book of prayers,’ he said, ‘and you will need prayers if you touch her.’ He made the sign of the cross. ‘She is evil,’ he said vehemently.

      ‘She’s a queen, a young queen,’ I said, ‘so how can she be evil?’

      ‘What do you know of the Britons?’

      ‘That they stink like stoats,’ I said, ‘and thieve like jackdaws.’

      He gave me a sour look and, for a moment, I thought he would refuse to say more, but he swallowed his British pride. ‘We are Christians,’ he said, ‘and God be thanked for that great mercy, but among our people there are still some old superstitions. Pagan ways. Iseult is part of that.’

      ‘What part?’

      He did not like talking about it, but he had raised the subject of Iseult’s evil and so he reluctantly explained. ‘She was born in the springtime,’ he said, ‘eighteen years ago, and at her birth there was an eclipse of the sun, and the folk here are credulous fools and they believe a dark child born at the sun’s death has power. They have made her into a,’ he paused, not knowing the Danish word, ‘a gwrach,’ he said, a word that meant nothing to me. ‘Dewines,’ he said irritably and, when I still showed incomprehension, he at last found a word. ‘A sorceress.’

      ‘A witch?’

      ‘And Peredur married her. Made her his shadow queen. That is what kings did with such girls. They take them into their households so they may use their power.’

      ‘What power?’

      ‘The skills the devil gives to shadow queens, of course,’ he said irritably. ‘Peredur believes she can see the future. But it is a skill she will retain only so long as she is a virgin.’

      I laughed at that. ‘If you disapprove of her, monk, then I would be doing you a favour if I raped her.’ He ignored that, or at least he made no reply other than to give me a harsh scowl. ‘Can she see the future?’ I asked.

      ‘She saw you victorious,’ he said, ‘and told the king he could trust you, so you tell me?’

      ‘Then assuredly she can see the future,’ I said.

      Brother Asser sneered at that answer. ‘They should have strangled her with her own birth-cord,’ he snarled. ‘She is a pagan bitch, a devil’s thing, evil.’

      There was a feast that night, a feast to celebrate our pact and I hoped Iseult would be there, but she was not. Peredur’s older wife was present, but she was a sullen, grubby creature with two weeping boils on her neck and she hardly spoke. Yet it was a surprisingly good feast. There was fish, beef, mutton, bread, ale, mead and cheese, and while we ate Asser told me he had come from the kingdom of Dyfed, which lay north of the Sæfern Sea, and that his king, who had an impossible British name which sounded like a man coughing and spluttering, had sent him to Cornwalum to dissuade the British kings from supporting the Danes.

      I was surprised by that, so surprised that I looked away from the girls serving the food. A harpist played at the hall’s end and two of the girls swayed in time to the music as they walked. ‘You don’t like Danes,’ I said.

      ‘You are pagans,’ Asser said scornfully.

      ‘So how come you speak the pagan tongue?’ I asked.

      ‘Because my abbot would have us send missionaries to the Danes.’

      ‘You should go,’ I said. ‘It would be a quick route to heaven for you.’

      He ignored that. ‘I learned Danish among many other tongues,’ he said loftily, ‘and I speak the language of the Saxons too. And you, I think, were not born in Denmark?’

      ‘How do you know?’

      ‘Your voice,’ he said. ‘You are from Northumbria?’

      ‘I am from the sea,’ I said.

      He shrugged. ‘In Northumbria,’ he said severely, ‘the Danes have corrupted the Saxons so that they think of themselves as Danes.’ He was wrong, but I was scarcely in a position to correct him. ‘Worse,’ he went on, ‘they have extinguished the light of Christ.’

      ‘Is the light of СКАЧАТЬ