The Church and the Devils 12

Even when he had come up from the river that now sparkled along in front of him after diving for the stone that had fallen in, the air had not tasted so sweet. He ought to be ashamed for so celebrating his life, but he couldn’t help it.
He, Godric, was alive and the only scar he bore was the tiny wound made by Aethelsunne’s knife the night before. He fingered the puckered skin and sent up prayers in gratitude for his deliverance.
The Lord had spared him despite his own folly. He could almost have danced with rage at himself. Why had he done it? Why confess to the crime of which he was innocent? Some devil must have been in him – No, no. It was too easy for man to blame devils when the fault lay at his own door.
Godric had been a weak man. Too weak to die when his kin died, he had sought solace on earth and believed he had found it in Ediscum, found it in Aelfleda. She had come to him, she would have been the very foundation of his new kin. But it was all weakness. He had forgotten that there could be no joy on earth except through God, and God had had to remind him. Aelfleda, the very soul on whom he had depended, had belived him guilty of Andred’d death. Instead of bringing him solace, she had tormented him with constant reminders of the blood she saw on his hands until he had seen it there himself. If Aelfleda, his hope, had believed him guilty, then so he was. What did it matter who had killed Andred if Aelfleda believed it was Godric?
And so, swallowing his pride and fear, he had pulled up the bench and spoken so that Aelfleda would not think he was a coward. Now, he guessed, she would think him a fool. But that did not matter. Here, on the bank of the river, with God’s sun beaming down through the new leaves onto him, Godric was a strong man again. The Lord had chosen Aelfleda to be the instrument of his deliverance as she had been of his folly, but he could see beyond her now. Beyond her was the Lord. He turned away from the river and faced what would be the church. His heart beat faster as he felt the presence of God.

“I hope your brother will agree to it.”
“Do you think he will?”
“Soon I’ll return to my lord, and I want to take you with me. I’ll show you what it’s like to be the wife of a thane’s man. And soon I’ll be granted land. It’ll hard to remember what it was like to be in Ediscum. For that reason at least, I hope your brother will agree. I know he loves you enough to give you a different life. But I don’t know whether he loves me enough to give you to me.”
“Why not? Didn’t you go to him when he was angry?”
“I did, but I’d insulted him and told him to shut his mouth. He’s a proud man, and forgiveness doesn’t seem to be easy for him.”
“What did he say when you went to him?”
“Many things. But it doesn’t matter. It’s what he will say now, now that you yourself have accepted me, that’s important.”
Aethelsunne let his arm fall loosely around Leofa’s waist. They were betrothed now, and he could touch her. It surprised him how much it made him tremble. He had always thought his interest in her had begun the moment that Aelfleda had told him to think about it. If that was true, then beforehand he had been blind to the softness of her hair and the easy way that she moved. When she told him about Swefrith’s night-walks, his excitement had been so mixed he couldn’t tell whether it came from taking a step closer to catching the killer or from finding that she and he were bound together.
She hadn’t blinked when he had gone to her. She was milking goats with Aelfleda. He leant over and asked her to come to the edge of the swine-woods with him. Aelfleda had said nothing. He didn’t know what she thought, but she had always been impossible for him to understand, even before she had come so close to shaming herself over Godric. He had thought that he knew his sister, but it was clear to him now that he knew Leofa better, and always had done.
They had walked shoulder to shoulder between the huts. Villagers had turned as they passed, and, he was sure, they smiled. Even the sounds of the children and animals had seemed full of harmony.
At the edge of the woods, where all the world and God in his sky could see, he had faced Leofa, his feet resting in the joints of the roots and new leaves fluttering over their heads. He had read his question in her face and knew that he hardly had to ask it. Afterwards they embraced and her body had a feel to it that he had been unaware of in the caresses of the women who waited on the men at Thane Berhtic’s court.
They were going back to the village. Its roofs seemed tiny in the midst of the great open fields and the ring of woodland. The haze of smoke over it blurred it and made it less real.
“I can hardly believe that there’ll be a stone church here,” he whispered in her ear as they walked along the packed earth of the path back to the village’s heart. She smiled and he saw again the smoothness of her cheek.
Hand in hand, they passed between the outermost huts, confident in each other. Aethelsunne realised with a start that he had been walking without a thought in his head beyond a gentle glowing. As they moved on that glow faded into a deeper part of his mind as he began to think again exactly about how the immediate future would be. He had to go to Swefrith and ask his permission, that was certain. And he also had a duty to his kin to find Andred’s killer… and would he have to wait until the church was built before he could marry? All this was broken up by an idea of Leofa as his wife, on his arm, shining with jewellery. And sons…
He had to concentrate on what he had to do now, at this moment. He had to see Swefrith. He turned to her and kissed her hand lightly. She watched him with a half-smile creeping up her lips.
“I’ll go now and speak to Swefrith. I should do it quickly.”
“Shall I wait for you?”
“I – what is it, Leofa?”
She was staring over his shoulder and her mouth was open. A half-word struggled out of her throat, but before she could finish it, he turned too.
Streamas was beating Father Owain out of his hut with a thick heavy stick. The priest fell to the ground under the blows, and lay there while the fisherman struck again and again at his shoulders and back. Father Owain grovelled on the earth. Aethelsunne could see his face stained with soil, and his fingers digging between the blades of grass. Streamas raised the stick again and again to bring down the blows that shocked the ear with their dull sounds.
Aethelsunne stood still, stunned into stillness. His fingers told him to reach for his sword, but when he finally did it wasn’t there. But that realisation brought him to himself. He ran as fast as he could, his arms out in front of him. There was flesh beneath his foot, then flesh against his hands, then he was falling forward, cracking his skull against another. He saw Streamas’ face clearly for an instant, all its anger undiminished. Then he was lying across the old man with his knees soaking up the coolness of the ground and his feet on another body that barely moved.

Aelfleda saw her brother fall. As he did, and before she knew what she was doing, she found herself praying that he wouldn’t be hurt. Then she ran to the heap of slowly stirring bodies. Aethelsunne was getting to his feet and helping Streamas to rise. Father Owain’s legs shifted from side to side and a groan escaped his mouth.
“Erderinca,” gasped Streamas between great wheezes.
Aelfleda spared one more glance for the fallen priest and then hurried into the hut. There was devastation. She snatched a piece of burning clothing from the hearth and stamped its smouldering threads into the floor with trembling feet. Then she saw Erderinca spread out on the ground. Her headscarf lay on her throat. What she could see of the skin under it was chafed, red raw. She knelt beside the aged frame and touched the hot neck with gentle fingers. Slowly, she lifted the headscarf and blinked away for a second as she saw the red patches where the skin had been broken. She hardly dared bend her head to the open mouth where the tongue stuck out over the cracked lips. But there was breath.
“Erderinca! Erderinca!” She slapped at the cheek, willing there to be some answer. “Erderinca!”
The eyelids fluttered. Then an arm moved and the muscles under the ravaged skin of the neck shifted.
“Thank God! Thank God! Thank God!” She almost fell across the sunken chest in relief. Erderinca was still alive. “Aethelsunne!” she shouted through the door of the hut. “Bring some water! Quickly!”
He answered and she heard his running steps. Aelfleda slipped her hand under the old woman’s head and gradually helped her sit so that her weight rested on Aelfleda’s arm. After a few moments, Aethelsunne entered with a wooden bowl in his hands. He held Erderinca’s weight while Aelfleda helped her to sip.
“What is going on?” Aethelsunne asked after a little while.
“I don’t know,” Aelfleda said honestly. “I was passing here on my way to the river to see if they needed any help.” That she had thought this things seemed strange now that she crouched over an old pagan half-strangled by a Christian priest. “I saw Streamas creeping round his hut listening, and I stopped to see what was happening. Then there was a cry from – him” She made a violent gesture towards the door “And noises of things falling. Erderinca never made a sound. Now I know why.” She raised the crumpled headscarf and pointed at the widow’s throat. “Streamas rushed in and came out – well, you saw.”
Aethelsunne paused and looked round him, frowning. “But why –“
“Do you suppose I’d know?” she demanded sharply and regretted it when he dropped his eyes down to the thin hair on Erderinca’s head.
“No. But this almost the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“So it is. The Lord will help us to understand it, brother.” She was sure of that, at least. God would bring understanding. She guessed and dreaded what that understanding would be.

Owain had not felt fear like this since he had waited in the bushes in that cold hour before dawn, his fingers chilling as they gripped the smooth wood of the pick – or no, since he had taken the first steps towards the unsuspecting back, raising the blade so that it shone in the beginning of the light – or no, since, after pushing the sharp point between the warrior’s ribs and watching the blood run along the clean metal he had fallen backwards and stained his old cloak with that heathen blood, hearing the rattle of death in the old man’s throat. No, that had been the worst until now. When he had shattered Andred’s skull and torn the flesh of his chest with the bloody metal, when he had cleaned it and thrown the cloak in the river, and hidden the pick, he had simply been doing what he had set out to do.
Since then there had been moments of darkness, but he had not known how much worse than the fear of losing God was the knowledge that God truly had gone from him for ever. As he lay face down, tasting the earth of Ediscum between his teeth, Streamas’ blows only tugged distantly at his thoughts. No man of God he, no, he had been possessed by a darker power and its temptations had drawn him further from the light than any heathen. But all had been done in God’s name!
Andred’s shattered face hovered in front of him. It had not taken long for the old man to die. He was breathing his last even as his attacker got to his feet, leaning on the slippery pick handle. It had been well planned. A devil would have struck in Ediscum and the good priest would be riding to the new abbey alongside Aethelsunne.
They were lifting him. His head hung down towards his chest and now his shoulder began to hurt. The pain spread and spread and at last he cried out in pain but they did not stop. They dragged him and his feet caught on the ground. At last they stopped and he was face down on the ground again and a different kind of grime was in his mouth.
But he had tried to save a heathen soul, he thought brokenly. And in that moment God’s hand had opened and all Owain’s holy lies had become visible. Was he bleeding? He could not turn over. A heathen soul… the blood soaked into the ground around him.

“He mutters to himself like a child,” Straelsith reported to the villagers gathered in the hall. “He says things about holiness and heathen souls and all sorts of things.”
Around him the men nodded sagely.
Godric looked at the bowed heads. He was sure that the faint sounds behind him, from Upheahric, were ones of weeping. He had seen heads bowed like this before, on the battlefield. Men who had thrown away their weapons and been captured at swordpoint watched their feet like this. Their lord had died, they had, to their shame, tried to flee, and had failed even in that. Godric knew this look of men broken by misfortune very well. But his own heart was free and happy. It had not been him but someone else who had been summoned by darkness. His angel was a true one. That was what Aelfleda had understood in the city after all. Now he kept the memory of her in his heart close to the light of the Cross itself. Both were holy in his eyes, visions of the Living God granted to his poor mortal eyes. Another soul had lost God and that was a terrible thing, but at least the whole village was not building a devil’s church. And he, Godric, was still part of their kin, even though so many of them had been quick to believe him guilty of the darkest sins.
The only problem would come in bringing the village back to a belief in the church so that it could be built. There was no sign of that happening. The only other raised head in the hall belonged to Aethelsunne and he was arguing fiercely with Swefrith in a corner. Throughout the rest of the space, the men looked defeated. They waited passively.
The argument in the corner had come to a head and the raised voices spilled over to the quiet circles near the fire.
“It’s you who’ve kept the rest of the world in ignorance since Andred’s murder! Why should we now turn to others who are not from Ediscum and not from our kin and ask them to deal with our own priest?”
“Because my authority is not so great –“
“If it is enough to try me, Aethelsunne, it is great enough to let us deal with Father – I mean him!”
“But Swefrith –“
“I have given you my sister. That settles the debts between us. I will ask the men of Ediscum what they think. You will have to abide by them.”
A few of them looked round as Swefrith joined them. He was respected now, thought Godric with a flash of anger, not through good work, but because Father Owain had disliked him. The priest hadn’t lost all his holiness after all. He had despised a doubter. But men were men and were swayed by circumstances. The faithful had to wait their turn.
“My kinsmen,” Swefrith began, not looking in Godric’s direction. “What shall we do now that we have found this viper? Shall we rush off to the to some abbey to try and gain the ear of a man who knows nothing of what has happened here, or shall we finish this mystery as we began it – among ourselves?”
Aethelsunne’s face was red with anger even in the ruddy firelight. “He has made no confession, though it was very likely it was him. What will our bishop – his friend – and Thane Berhtic say, and they do know us well, when they find we’ve made someone suffer who was once a holy man, and they weren’t told of it until after the deed was done? I fear what will come if it if we are hasty.”
Upheahric spoke from behind the shelter of Godric’s back in a stronger voice than he had had for a while. “It’s very likely that Owain killed Andred, and so no ill fortune will come to us if we punish a guilty man. We only have to be sure that, as well as trying to kill Erderinca, he killed Andred. If so, then blood should have blood here amongst the kin as our laws have always said, even in heathen times. Has he confessed anything, Straelsith?”
The young man stepped forward from his place by the wall. “He’s only said that he did everything for God’s will. And he’s prayed for forgiveness. But no, he’s not spoken Andred’s name.”
“I will go and speak to him then,” Upheahric said. Aethelsunne rose to his feet but Upheahric raised a hand to stop him. Aethelsunne was still about to protest, but Upheahric turned on him. “Twice before I’ve let you use my place because I was too weak to do it myself, and twice before you’ve failed. You’re too young, Aethelsunne, and you like to stand before us all too much. I’m not so weak as all that – there’s no need for any of your trials or to bring in men from outside.” This was met by a murmur of agreement. “I am the oldest left of the kin and it is up to me to discover the truth. You must all wait until I return.” The old man stood slowly. In his stance, Godric saw a remnant of the dignity he had once had. “Are there any who oppose me?”
Aethelsunne seemed about to speak, but then he looked away. He couldn’t argue because was the way things had always been. It was Upheahric’s place to be the judge of the kin, even in these times when God made each man accountable for his own soul. Godric remembered his own lord and how he too had borne the weight of his kin’s worries. Upheahric was doing the duty of all elder men, something that had been forgotten recently. Upheahric left the hall. Godric turned his face back to the circle of men. Aethelsunne and Swefrith glanced at each other with distaste, but neither spoke. It was soon clear who had swayed the most hearts.
“We all bear the burden of our kinsman’s blood,” said Streamas. “Even against a priest.” Many of the villagers nodded in silent agreement. “There’s no need for further talk about it, only that he should be punished. We’ve let him talk too long.”
“And he let two men be tried and be in danger of their lives, and you all spent your time listening to his lies. He deserves no defence, and I hope Upheahric is quick,” Swefrith added grimly. A log slipped down the fire sending up a stream of long orange sparks. By their light Godric could see an unusual glistering around Aethelsunne’s eyes. Pretending not to see, he spoke to the warrior. He felt a kind of sick anger in him. If Owain was the guilty man – and he was! – he was no more a holy man than Godric or poor Swefrith. Aethelsunne’s pride was very coward-like when it came to robes of office. His lord had trained him too well.
“It was you who said that the kin should end its own problems. That can’t be changed just because a different man is guilty. I would have received my fate from my kinsmen. All we have done here has been for each other. God will be our witness that we have been brothers. The church is ours, Andred was ours and so our judgement will be ours.” He sensed that men did not like what he was saying about kinship, but he forgave them. “Justice was done by you all to Swefrith and to me. Let it be done to Owain. In God’s sight we can only do what is right. Our holy bishop can’t condemn us for doing God’s will.” He saw Swefrith nodding and realised that no matter how unpleasant the idea, he and Swefrith that spoke together. The thought of the stone Swefrith had sunk in the river crossed his mind, but knew that both their prides would not let their trials be forgotten. God forgive his pride, but he couldn’t help himself. “If Owain is to suffer his fate, let it be at our hands who have worked together for so long.”
“And I remember what fate he should have,” Godric tore his eyes from Aethelsunne’s drooping shoulders. Stanmode was standing with a snarl on his face. “It’s an old one.”
“A Godly punishment, I hope,” Godric replied with a serene face.
“The punishment he deserves for killing God in us and letting heathen thoughts prey on us.”
“How has he killed God in you? Surely he killed him only in himself.”
“He betrayed us,” There was a murmur of agreement. Godric cursed himself for talking about the man’s fate.
“But in God is justice,” he said desperately.
“And he betrayed God.”
Godric began to sweat. He looked to Aethelsunne for help, but he, having been beaten by Godric, offered none. His head was bowed and his hands played idly in his belt. “W-what will you do?”
Stanmode laughed cruelly. “It’s something we’ll all remember.”
But then the cloak was pushed aside at the end of the hall. From the light that flooded in, he heard Aelfleda’s voice, once again putting off a sentence he did not want to hear.
“Upheahric says you should all go to him where Owain is kept.”
The cloak dropped. One by one they left the hall and made their way to the mean hut into which the fallen priest had been flung. Upheahric waited outside. Godric lingered at the back of the group, near Aethelsunne but not looking at him. He strained his ears to hear the old man’s weak voice.
“It is confessed,” Upheahric said. “Now – shall we send him to Thane Berhtic and the bishop for higher judgement, or finish it all here?” He looked at each man in turn. Each of them, except Aethelsunne and Godric, who remained silent, firmly answered: “Here.” From inside the hut came a frightened whisper of prayer.