The Church and The Devils 3

Ten others stood round him, but each of them, like her, was alone before the sight. Andred’s body was hard to look at – it wavered between something she recognised and the horrific thing its wounds said it should be. There was a gash that split the face through the centre. Each eye stared at her around the ruin of the nose as though demanding to be told where its partner was. Rather than face the wounds, rather than try to separate what was different from what was known to her, she looked at the grass where blood had spread over green and turned it red and made what was left of last year’s leaves curl as the thick fluid had soaked into them. She looked at the broken branches of the bushes where…it…had ploughed through twigs, twisting their compliance until they tore from the rest of the plant. She saw, hanging here and there amidst the bright new broken wood, part of…its…flesh hanging in long strands, like wool, like unholy hair. She saw leaves that had been crushed, broken twigs as though a man had been here…but could earth have lain still and whole while that…creature…of evil had been destroying things as they were? Man was defenceless before his gods. She let her sight circle around, away from the split skin, the splinters of bone that glistened in a line along the cheek, across the ground, over the villagers that stood near her, biting their fingers or staring with fish-eyes, over broad trees whose bark seemed to have become knotted in sympathy with the wrinkled ground, higher, away from the fingers whiter than new-broken wood, more bent than roots, to where branches moved serenely and squirrels chased each other amongst new-sprouting blossom. She stopped at an elbow of wood, where a branch reached down and then up, half-golden, half-shadowed – that shape was familiar. She glanced down at Andred’s leg, where it bent below the knee and the block in her throat that she had been half-aware of shifted. She coughed, half-gasped, rasped out breath, knelt where the tide of the man’s blood had ended its seeping through the new year’s grass. Wind stirred Andred’s hair either side of a wound that ran down in red-blackness to his ear. Only one bird, a sparrow, had kept his voice. He sang two tones again and again. They cut sharply into her own ear as she looked again at what had been her kinsman. The she relaised, and emotion that she could not have named reached round her heart, demanding shouting, words and gabble, movement and prostrate straining of every fingertip, tears and blood even from her teeth. But still she knelt, though her hands trembled and pulled at the grass. One thought reached clearly through the storm in her head. There was blood on the ground, a pool all around him that even drowned his outstretched hand – but no blood on his face! A crust of it here, trickled into his hair, a tiny ring below what was left of each nostril, a track of it leading from the unshaven cheek to the neck, but not enough. There was blood. There were the wounds that gaped wider than wolves’ jaws. Yet, unnaturally the blood they had shed lay in tiny separate pools. As the bird chirped incessantly in the trees above her head Aelfleda saw her kinsman lying in blood but bloodless like a pig hung before salting.
“This is devil’s work,” she gasped as Straelsith helped her to stand. “As Father Owain said.”

“Where is Ederinca?” Many winters had passed since this morning. Her voice was weaker, like an old woman’s. Her body quivered like a bag of old sticks when she moved. And she felt pain like that of feeling seasons pass. Even as she asked her question, Aelfleda somehow expected to be led to a grave that had grown grassy and weed-ridden by passing time, although Andred could not even have been dead for the whole of last night. If such time has really passed, Aefleda told herself firmly, I must look for Erderinca in the graveyard over towards Edricsham, between two grave-mounds ringed with stones, and the church will have been built by now. But the cross still stood and she could see it above the roofs.
Straelsith had needed some time to understand her question and he shook his head slowly. Around him men looked from one to the other and then to their wives, and shrugged. Aelfleda sighed.
“I’ll go,” said Straelsith. “I’ll see if she’s in her hut, if not-“ He did not finish, but took a few heavy steps through the undergrowth.
“Straelsith,” Aelfleda said. This time he turned and stopped, as he had not done on the night Godric had spoken of his vision. His eyes were wary as they met hers.
“I won’t say anything to her,” he said softly. “I’ll just go and see if she’s there.”
He turned back and made his way through the trees. Aelfleda saw that he seemed to move less easily than he had only a few weeks before.
“We should move him,” she mumbled. “We need a bier. We should tell Swefrith and Godric, and Stanmode. Aethelsunne and Father Owain.” She let her words limp to a stop as her momentary strength left her and the quaking in her stomach got worse. Around her, the villagers were slowly starting to do as she said. She thought of the church, and of Andred’s scarred folded arms. She prayed for the swift return of her brother and her priest.

Godric shivered. He laid the sharp-bladed chisel on the stone beside him and picked irritably at his clothes. The water of the river had soaked deep into the wool of his over-tunic and into the linen under it. Both garments clung to his skin and allowed the wind to enter as far as his flesh. But he couldn’t bring himself to work hard enough to fight the cold with his body heat. He glanced at the chisel with its coating of stone dust and turned his back on it. He sat on the cold grassless earth of the city and stared with dull eyes at half an arch, its rising curve cut crudely in two where it had been hacked at by generations of winds. The sound of Stanmode’s metal blade biting boldly into the ancient mortar that held stone to stone echoed nearby. The wind fell still for a moment. Godric tried to think about what had brought him here. Here, worship places were laid waste and buildings were broad, spacious and ruined. What he would build would never be so decayed… but it all seemed so far away.
“Godric!” Stanmode’s voice boomed from each corner of broken stone. The sound was huge and for an instant Godric shrank back, frightened by it in a place where men’s voices had long been still. “Look what I’ve found while you were sitting about.”
The builder’s voice was breathless, as though he had been fighting. He, at least, had worked hard enough to draw sweat. Stanmode had been in a worse temper than usual this morning. He’d barely said a word until now, and had glared at Godric as though, whatever it was, it was his fault. Perhaps it was, he thought, suddenly full of guilt. He stood slowly and moved around the shoulder of a waist-high wall to where the other man had made a pile of stones he’d cut out of the wall. “What’ve you found?”
“It’s over there. Looks like someone built a fire. There are bones too.” He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and stared hard at the expression on Godric’s face.
Godric ignored him and went over to the gleaming patch of blackened ground. It was a small circle, five palms wide, marked by fragments of charcoal in the dust. Between them lay the ribs of something like a hare.
Stanmode was still breathless. “Saw it as I brought this last block down. Wonder who it could be. I hope it’s not wanderers. Troublemakers, them. Not you of course, Godric. You’re kin now.”
But Godric barely heard Stanmode’s mistake. Stanmode had not been here when they had brought her – Aelfleda – in from the city that night, it was true, had not seen and heard what she had said to Father Owain. But he must guess, must have heard something… This was Andred’s fire.
“What do you think?”
Godric did not answer for a moment. New thoughts were spilling into his mind as he gazed at the little patch of burned ground. “I don’t know,” he said.
Andred. He had waited so long for a sign – every time he had come here since that blessed night, every time the angles and curves seen from the village had come close before his eyes and become solid giant’s work, he had wanted something. Something that would make certain that his vision was from God. That would make the church absolute in his mind, more absolute even than it was for Father Owain. But there had been nothing. And today, the first day that he had lacked the energy to move the stones that would be needed if his vision were ever to be made stone, today he had seen Andred’s mark on the ground. Smoke from heathen flames had grazed against the walls that would be part of Ediscum’s holy church.
Stanmode spoke again, he could hear something, he said. Godric walked round Andred’s mark and did not listen, but felt bitter gall in his stomach. Then he heard, too. The wind had changed and was blowing in from Ediscum. There were shouts in the chilly air. He looked at Stanmode. The builder had his chisel clutched tightly in one hand and was staring towards the village. “Something’s wrong there. Do you think we should go back?”
Godric frowned. “Perhaps.”
Both men stood among the ruins, struck by indecision. Then Godric walked quickly away from the charred ground. “We should go back. But first,” he said with a strange smile, and laying his hand on the stone that Stanmode had been working on. “We must move this. If it splits everything will take much longer.”

Erderinca sat with her back pressed against the bare hazel rods in the darkest corner of her hut. Her head was bowed and her hands were tightly pressed together. Aelfleda, trembling, knelt in front of her and touched her hand to the old woman’s face. The eyes did not move, but stared ahead. Aelfleda could barely feel breath from the wrinkled lips. She had entered the hut slowly, speaking the new-made widow’s name in undertones, hoping that she would not have to say what she had seen. Anything, anything would be better than speaking those words. Yet anything… anything was not this. No words would have to pass her parched lips, for Erderinca already knew. She had seen…it… destroy her husband. Her hair hung from under her cap in rope-locks as though untouched for weeks. Red eyes stood starkly out from the folded skin. Her eyes still did not move.
Aelfleda looked over her shoulder to where Straelsith’s shadow blocked the light that fell across the packed earth floor. “She won’t speak.”
She wouldn’t move. For a second Aelfleda shared her stillness. Andred was everywhere here. His cloak hung over the door. His belt, his knife lay on the bed. His smell, even the feeling of his face glaring over the stone-cold hearth remained. He was gone but watching. And Erderinca could feel him and could see… it… breaking her husband’s skull with its blade.
Evil was here. Aelfleda dropped Erderinca’s hand. It fell like the limb of a slaughtered sheep onto the crumpled knees. She ran across the hut and out into the air. But the thing that had pursued her through the trees near the city was here too. She dared not look towards the cross. Without Father Owain to protect it, it too might have been swallowed by the evil that had come.
She ran again, feeling air raw across her face. She saw others moving towards her asking what she had seen. She whispered once or twice, clenching her hands. The faces moved and hovered before her, not clear, broken eyed.
“I was afraid, Aelfleda and look, I was right… it’s not safe here. The old gods – they won’t g away.” Swefrith? Did he say that, or did she just know what was in his mind? Was he speaking? A hand – Leofa’s – young and strong on her arm, but unable to turn her, unwilling to use force on her.
Now figures in the distance were running. She caught her breath – what now? Could…it… have taken her brother and the Father as well as the strong old man?
No… It was Stanmode and Godric. Godric was here, and his hand took the place of Leofa’s, and his round features were close to hers, and his fingers were strong as they guided her over the grass. He was strong, and she was tempted to lay her head on the shoulder that pressed against her. But then-
She stepped away from him, suddenly clear-sighted. Round-faced, he stared and mumbled. “Have I done something wrong?” he asked. “I was just helping you to –“
“Can you build the church?”
His face filled with blood and anger but she turned, returning to Erderinca and the things Andred had abandoned in death. She couldn’t face Godric. His vision was stained by what she had seen. She could feel his eyes on her back.

Later, they moved Andred. She saw where the blood had spilled from him. A single wound cut into his back, piercing almost through him. The cloth, his hair, the earth were all soaked in the dark red. It had dried thickly and his tunic tore when Godric and Streamas pulled him from the crushed grass. Patches of cloth remained rooted in the soft earth. Aelfleda shuddered again when she saw them. Andred’s presence was here too, even though his body was gone. Now he lay in his home again, his hands crossed on his chest. Erderinca had been taken bodily by Stanmode to the riverside hut belonging to Streamas and his family, her nearest kin. Streamas had closed Andred’s eyes one after the other because his hand could not stretch over the great gap in the skull. The village went slowly, sadly, back to its work. The sound of smithy bellows could be heard loud around the feast-hall.

The faces, staring up. He wondered if they could see his struggle between the need to console them for their loss – for though the man was a heathen they had loved him – and lust to dance with joy. He had had to take the chance offered to him and now, below the cross that directed his eyes to glowing heaven, they heard his trembling words.
“Oh my children, you have seen the work of that which threatens us. Darkness has struck us. We must turn the other cheek as our Lord taught us, but in turning we must turn our hearts to Him, to salvation through Him. Faith in him will drive darkness away. And faith must be expressed in works. We have the greatest work men could have in all the land. This shall be the moment of greatest glory since your holy king raised his Cross before the battle against Cadwallen.” They still stared and he floundered a little. “It was a most Godly victory! Soon, today, stone will come from the city in Streamas’ boat. The beginning of our church has come.”
He paused and breathed in fresh wind-blown air. Godric was not here to stand by him and he felt a space by his side, where his robes were swept by the wind. The smith had refused to wait for the service and had led men off to begin the work. He could not stop them – how could he stop them doing that work? – but it concerned him. The faces of those who had stayed were paler than he remembered, and few in number. Others lingered where they could hear, but when he stretched out his hands to them they glanced over their shoulders and would not come closer. Andred’s ghost, they said when they thought Father Owain was not there, hovered here and there in the village.
“My children, the death of our kinsman –“ He saw eyes fix firmly on him when he spoke the last word, “– was performed by powers greater than each of us alone. If it makes us look for faults in our neighbours within Ediscum the same may await us each, alone. Even together we are not safe, as the fate of Edricsham has shown. Only together in the Lord, in the Lord’s work, can evil be kept from our door.”
As he spoke of the Lord’s work he trembled. The work was all that mattered now! He saw understanding spread on the faces in front of him and his body relaxed and he smiled. The chance had been taken and taken well. They must share his belief. He turned to the face he knew would show feelings close to his own. Yes – Aelfleda was with him, though he had worried that she had lost faith in all she had believed. She had welcomed him back from the new abbey with sadness as though greeting a kinsman doomed to die soon, and had stared at him while he made the sign of the cross over her. That had made him afraid. When she told them what had happened, he had been more fearful still.
But better things were to come. He raised the vellum charter he held in his right hand and waved it until they all saw it. “This paper, written out by the bishop’s own clerk, is signed in the bishop’s own hand, and sealed with his mark. Where it is torn –“ He ran his finger down the rough edge on one side. “It shows that our most noble bishop has a copy of his own. Should any man question our right to do this great work we need only match these tears with those of the copy the bishop has kept for himself, and our right will be proved.” Ah! Their eyes were raised now. They began to see the greatness of it. His eyes flashed as he brandished it. “I will read it to you, so you may understand: In the Name of Our Father most holy…” Now need to repeat the exact words. The Latin phrases were above them, so he gave them his own phrases and almost laughed out loud when he saw how little – just for a moment – Andred meant to them in the face of this holy blessing. Aelfleda’s face shone and in his heart he believed that all he had done was well done.
The two days he had passed in the company of learned men in the new abbey, especially the holy bishop, had almost made him forget everything that had happened in Ediscum. He had remembered himself as a young man, whispering in the very heart of learning so that he would not disturb the thinkers as he passed by them. He had remembered, amid the glory of holy learning, what it was to discourse on God with men who had been admitted into the highest mysteries. But they had reminded him – as if he could forget! – that the noblest work was here where souls had to be saved. Aelfleda’s face, with the heavy lines of twenty-five winters, had come to him often, filled with the light of holy understanding. He had not expected it to be a mockery of his memory when he returned.
When she got up from her work to meet them on their return, there was no holiness behind the fading bruises on her skin, only something like despair. His heart had almost stopped and he had almost shared her misery.
She told them about Andred, and he and Aethelsunne had looked at each other. There was fear in the warrior’s face too, which deepened when she whispered “The devils killed him.”
Only later, after Father Owain had sat in her hut with her for a long time, as he had done in the year of the sickness, with Aethelsunne pacing back and forth between them and the hearth grinding two of Swefrith’s trinkets making in the palm of one hand – where was Swefrith? Was it possible that he too was out in the city with the others? – had a more peaceful expression returned to her face. The time with the learned men served him well then, for the Scriptures were at the front of his mind. He had taught her again about God’s love for the penitent. At first she asked questions, but he eventually quieted her and Aethelsunne’s pacing stopped.
“Father, will you speak to Erderinca?”
Aelfleda’s question, coming after a short period of silence in the hut, was an unpleasant surprise, but she and her brother were watching him.
“Yes, my child. Though she won’t welcome me at present. I will go to her soon. Perhaps she will desire grace in the end. God loves all who repent, no matter what has happened before.”
Now, as he brought his Latin prayer to a close and blessed the faithful who had stayed, he saw Aelfleda coming towards him with a calm smile on her face.
“God spoke through you today, Father.”
“Thank you, my child. I hope he speaks through me always, though I am a poor vessel and I fail his message.”
“That’s not true, Father. But today He is truly with you. Perhaps today you should try to speak to Erderinca. She still has not said a word.”
“That’s a terrible thing. But I don’t think I can – I mean – so far as we know she still holds awful beliefs – I don’t want to waste the words of God.”
“How can they be wasted, Father? You said yourself that he cares even for the birds…”
She was suddenly uncertain. He saw the peace leave her face. She looked at him as though weighing up his thin figure against the call of other… things. Her eyes seemed to see through him – though he knew they could not. But he couldn’t risk letting that firm face and head going again into the wilderness where names like Tiw and Rheda could pull at it.
“Very well, my child. I will see Erderinca, if you will come with me. She is with Streamas and Blithespracce isn’t she?”
Aelfleda smiled. Compared with the doubt that had gone before it was like the light of Creation.

The stone fell with a crunch into the belly of the boat. Water slopped all around the vessel and some fell over the timbers and ran to and fro in the bottom. Godric watched the ripples spread across the moving surface of the river. Long green reeds shifted. He wiped the sweat from his face and turned to Aethelsunne with a grin of pleasure.
“That’s it! The first one!”
Aethelsunne grinned back, sharing his delight after all the effort. But then he looked more closely at the boat and he frowned. “We can’t put too many in, you know. It’ll sink, especially if someone’s going to sit in it.”
Godric looked carefully too. “You’re right,” he said, laying a heavy hand on his companion’s arm. “More than three and all our work will be wasted.” He looked round him at Stanmode, Streamas, Straelsith and the others. Their faces reflected the disappointment he felt himself after the long struggle with the heavy grey stone along the ground. The written words that Aethelsunne brought back said that the men of Ediscum were trusted to build their church with their own strength. This was right, because only those who were blessed in a certain way could do this work. But now help from other men would have been welcome.
They had tried dragging the stone with ropes Stanmode had brought, pushing it while it rested on short round logs cut from the woods, and even lifting it so that their eyes popped and their fingers slipped around the corners of the stone. It had taken most of the morning before they had found themselves slipping in the soft earth at the bank of the river. Godric joked that it was as though the stone didn’t want to leave its companions, but no one laughed. He realised what he had said and felt a twist in his stomach. He had strained all the harder for that, and now he was tired. Even just three stones would make him bone-weary.
He wiped his brow again and looked round the shattered building-frames of the city. It was no wonder that creatures dared not tread here. Even giants would have sweated to create this great settlement, and they must have had to use powers greater than themselves. For a moment the city seemed to stretch beyond his sight, through the trees, on forever through the empty parts of the kingdom away from the sea. He swayed a little, frightened by the littleness of almost everything he had done.
“Well, we’ll have to think about how we get more stones down. Let’s get three on their way. Everyone will see that we’re trying, even if it will take years.”
The men around him nodded grimly and squared their shoulders with determination. Aethelsunne pulled at his rich tunic which, Godric noticed with a slight stirring of interest, was torn. God’s work could overcome even vanity.
On the heels of this pious thought, he felt a shudder run through him. He wanted to look at Andred’s fire-mark again. It had a fascination for him now, now that – He wouldn’t go there. There was a better place he could go to.
He stepped away from his fellow workers as they made their way between the broken stones and took a winding route through archways and over walls. Their fragments rocked as his leather soles pressed against them. After a while, he stopped in an open space between two high walls that stared at each other over a courtyard paved with carefully shaped blocks. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His ears strained for sound – there was no birdsong here in the city’s depths and the river’s noise was swallowed up. This was the place. He remembered it well. At least, if it wasn’t the place it was the first place he had seen after the vision had dazzled him. This was the place where he had had the vision. He closed his eyes but felt that the two walls either side of him were conferring – there was something in them watching, it seemed. He shrugged, to shake the feeling from the shoulders of his blue cloak.
If he thought hard, the Cross came to him. He remembered the warmth of it, the glittering gems that ran across it. He remembered the feeling that had billowed up inside him like steam from the meeting of metal and water. He remembered, but did not feel it. He closed his eyes again – but still he could not feel. He quavered. If he could not sense the glorious light that had filled him, everything – everything he had done – was nothing. He tried, tried, and his heart beat hard in his chest. At last, a flicker, like the aftertaste of a burn. There it was. It was a true vision. This proof that God was with him meant that he was right to keep faith in everything he had done.
His eyes opened and a smooth grey lane stretched away in front and behind him, curved downwards in the centre where ancient feet had worn away at the stone. In front of him, he could see where it ended. Beyond was the greenness of grass and other plants. He looked up with defiant eyes at the walls. He saw now where the stones were weathered, where their firm shapes had softened and where they had split at weak points. They cut jagged shapes against the patchy cloud in the sky. A better thing could be made out of them.
But the stones still needed to be moved and his companions would need his help. Justification gave him strength as he picked his way through the wall-shards back to the riverside.