The Flame Bearer. Bernard Cornwell

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Two

      We rode next morning. I led one hundred and ninety-four men, together with a score of boys who were servants, and we rode south through rain and wind and beneath clouds as dark as Father Eadig’s robe. ‘Why did my son-in-law send a priest?’ I asked him. Sigtryggr, like me, worshipped the old gods, the real gods of Asgard.

      ‘We do his clerical work, lord.’

      ‘We?’

      ‘We priests, lord. There are six of us who serve King Sigtryggr by writing his laws and charters. Most …’ he hesitated, ‘it’s because we can read and write.’

      ‘And most pagans can’t?’ I asked.

      ‘Yes, lord.’ He blushed. He knew that those of us who worshipped the old gods disliked being called pagans, which is why he had hesitated.

      ‘You can call me a pagan,’ I said, ‘I’m proud of it.’

      ‘Yes, lord,’ he said uneasily.

      ‘And this pagan can read and write,’ I told him. I had the skills because I had been raised as a Christian, and the Christians value writing, which is, I suppose, a useful thing. King Alfred had established schools throughout Wessex where boys were molested by monks when they were not being forced to learn their letters. Sigtryggr, curious about how the Saxons ruled in southern Britain, had once asked me whether he should do the same, but I had told him to teach boys how to wield a sword, hold a shield, guide a plough, ride a horse, and butcher a carcass. ‘And you don’t need schools for that,’ I had told him.

      ‘And he sent me, lord,’ Father Eadig went on, ‘because he knew you would have questions.’

      ‘Which you can answer?’

      ‘As best I can, lord.’

      Sigtryggr’s message on the parchment merely said that West Saxon forces had invaded southern Northumbria and that he needed my forces in Eoferwic as soon as I could reach that city. The message had been signed with a scrawl that might have belonged to my son-in-law, but also bore his seal of the axe. The Christians claim that the one great advantage of reading and writing is that we can be sure a message is real, but they fake documents all the time. There is a monastery in Wiltunscir that has the skill to produce charters that look as if they are two or three hundred years old. They scrape old parchments, but leave just enough of the original writing visible so that the new words, written over the old in weak ink, are hard to read, and they carve copies of seals, and the faked charters all claim that some ancient king granted the church valuable lands or the income from customs’ dues. Then the abbots and bishops who paid the monks for the forged documents take them to the royal court to have some family thrown out of its homestead so that the Christians can get richer. So I suppose reading and writing really are useful skills.

      ‘West Saxon forces,’ I asked Father Eadig, ‘not Mercians?’

      ‘West Saxons, lord. They have an army at Hornecastre, lord.’

      ‘Hornecastre? Where’s that?’

      ‘East of Lindcolne, lord, on the River Beina.’

      ‘And that’s Sigtryggr’s land?’

      ‘Oh yes, lord. The frontier’s not far away, but the land is Northumbrian.’

      I had not heard of Hornecastre, which suggested it was not an important town. The important towns were those built on the Roman roads, or those which had been fortified into burhs, but Hornecastre? The only explanation I could think of was that the town made a convenient place to assemble forces for an attack on Lindcolne. I said as much to Father Eadig, who nodded eager agreement. ‘Yes, lord. And if the king isn’t in Eoferwic then he requests that you join him in Lindcolne.’