CHAPTER 41
East Anglia
It wasn’t often that anyone complained to the abbey that people weren’t turning to salt.
Hildegard had puzzled over the message all the way to Hreodwater.
It was surely, surely that somebody had turned to salt: or, she had thought so.
But when she reached the fen and the Flood after the long ride from Lincoln, and a man rowed out to fetch her after she lit the beacon fire on its little stone pillar at the water’s edge, he only nodded mournfully when she said she was here about the salt problem.
“Yes,” he said, “An El, we think he must be sick. He did nothing to the chevaliers. They came through and took the salt mine right from us, and nothing. Sorry about the pigs,” he added.
It was a kind of English she hadn’t heard before. It had other, older words in it. The nearest she knew was the way the shepherds counted—that was Celtic counting—but this was more . . . more. She could understand, or at least, she could guess.
“An El?” she repeated, not sure if it was an obvious thing he was just pronouncing differently.
She might have been able to concentrate better if the back of the boat hadn’t been full of happy pigs.
One of them came to snuffle at the pockets of her cloak.
She stroked its ears. She’d always liked pigs; and she was inclined to like a man who took his for outings.
The man pointed just past the rocky island that, she understood from the map, was Hreodwater.
There was a littler island next to it, linked by a wooden causeway.
It was a way off, but she could see what might have been standing stones around it.
“An El,” he repeated. “Hregs Halen. I don’t know English for this. But he didn’t come this time.”
She couldn’t tell if he was talking about a person, or a thing.
“I see,” she lied, and hoped things would become clear if she shut up and listened.
She had come to these islands five years ago from Byzantium, and initially she had panicked, because there seemed to be nearly as many languages as there were people, and not a single one of them was normal Greek, but what you soon learned was that in any given situation, most people were probably only trying to say one of five things to you, and none of the five things was wildly unexpected.
An El would be a standing stone, or an old curse.
“When was last time?” she asked instead.
He pointed to the stones again. “The Northmen. The Roman soldiers before then, but you can’t see them until you go down the mine.” He looked upset. “But this time—the chevaliers, they just stormed through, they killed Beortnoth, and now they say the mine is theirs. Nothing happened to them.”
“What should have happened?”
“He turns them to salt,” he said seriously.
She wondered if that was true. She had passed salt stones on the way here. And out in these wilds, so far from any real civilisation . . . who knew what old magic still stalked the marshes.
She was tired. It was a long way from Whitby, and the weather was bitter, and her bad leg was hurting.
She had thought Northumbria was cold, but Hreodwater was worse.
The mist, which tasted of salt, seemed to seep into everything.
She wanted to ask if was possible to sit down for a while, but she could already see it wouldn’t be.
The ferryman didn’t only seem drawn and weary; he looked frightened.
The town was rich. She could see why the French had come.
The buildings were stone, the windows glazed with jewel-coloured crystal, and the people she saw were dressed as well as any courtier in Byzantium.
They all looked strange. Britain had all sorts in it—Northmen, Celts, Saxons, now the French, not to mention church people from across Europe and Africa, doing the gradual work of bringing this isolated, rainy little island into the broader economy and faith of the rest of the world, but she had never seen people like the Hreoda before.
They were . . . healthy. Even in great cities, especially in great cities, there were beggars, and people with sicknesses and injuries, and limbs that had formed differently to the usual way.
In Britain, because it had never been fit for human habitation anyway, everyone was pale and washed-out in the way normal people were only if they were right on the edge of dying of plague.
But nobody here looked ill. Nobody stooped, or trembled; nobody limped, or went carefully over the steep ways in the rocky town.
They were tall, as well, and much darker than Saxons, more like the ancient images of the hunters who had been in these lands in the time of the ice and drawn themselves onto the walls of the caves beside the great tusked beasts they had followed here, and . . .
And they all had the same eyes. Violet.
She shifted her grip on her staff, trying to transfer her weight less painfully. She was struggling with the steep steps. This place hadn’t been made for anyone like her. Clearly you walked well here, or you didn’t go anywhere.
At the top of the hill was a kind of palace, ancient and low-slung but with a miraculous dome that looked like it was made of glass.
This, said the ferryman, was where the Witan sat.
They were gathering now. She was grateful for the little wait, inside by a fire.
Someone gave her some hot wine, and after the chill of the fen, it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
“Are you injured, sister?” one of the guards asked her, polite and worried. “Do you need to see a witch?”
Witch: physician, it must have meant. The two were the same in plenty of heathen places.
“No, no, I’ve had this since I was a child,” she explained.
He blinked as though the idea of a childhood injury lasting into a person’s forties was as outlandish as seeing a giraffe lope across the fen.
She had half thought she had misunderstood the ferryman, but what the Hreod ealdormen had to say was the same.
There was—something—they called An El, and it usually protected Hreodwater, but this time, it hadn’t.
The French knights had come, and taken the mine, which was the town’s only source of wealth, killed the witches, and nothing had happened to those riders at all, and everyone was baffled.
The person who told most of the story was .
. . Hildegard couldn’t tell what she had used to be.
Perhaps she had been the jarl, subservient to York; or perhaps the queen.
Now, though, the French had explained that she was a regional secretary who must report to a new baron from France thank you, and if she didn’t like it, they were happy to burn down Hreodwater just like they’d burned down half the towns in England.
Hildegard started to feel more and more uncomfortable, because nothing like this had happened to her before.
She had never been completely unable to tell if she was talking to ordinary people who were worried about something real, or people from such an isolated place that their stories were real to them and they were mourning the breaking of a legend that everyone had believed was true history.
The language was making it impossible to tell whether the queen was educated or not, whether she was the kind of person who travelled, who understood the world beyond the fen, or the kind who would see the edge of the flood as the edge of everything.
There was an empty chair next to her, and she had a haunted look. Those two things together made Hildegard suspect the French had also requisitioned the heir.
“Sister,” the perhaps-queen said at last. “You are not from England?”
“Constantinople. It’s . . .” Unbelievably far away, if your whole life was a tiny island in a salt marsh. “In the east.”
“Like Saint George,” someone murmured, and to her surprise, there were approving nods.
“Strong magic comes from there,” the lady said, very carefully, and clearly trying to choose words she was sure Hildegard would know. “We are pleased you came, but—we can understand it is hard to know if we are mad in the way of tiny places, or if we speak true.”
Hildegard had hoped it wasn’t written all over her face, but she had one of those faces that was a fully illuminated manuscript, with beasts and devils etched in turquoise around the capital letters. “No, I believe you. I’m just not sure what I can do.”
“We need for a holy person to be in talking to An El,” the lady said quietly. “We have no holy people here now, and no magic. The French, they took our witches.”
Someone spat. It was fast becoming the traditional reaction to any mention of the French. The French called their king Guillaume the Conqueror. The English called him William the Bastard.
Hildegard nodded slowly. Christ and the Church must never have made it to Hreodwater, even if stories of Saint George had.
The abbey wouldn’t love that, but in all the ways that mattered, it was irrelevant.
They were in need and they had asked the abbey for help, and the only good thing to do was give it.
That was how you shone the light of the Church into the dark places: not by turning away when someone needed a lamp. “How do I talk to him?”
“He is north, under the earth.” The lady glanced around the other elders, some of whom nodded. “We are in hoping that he is alive, but we fear he is not.”