The Pope's Assassin Read online

  As I limped towards the door, I wondered if I should have told the archbishop that the leader of my attackers spoke Frankish with a distinctive foreign accent. Admittedly, the man’s accent was not much of a clue to his identity; half of Paderborn spoke with regional accents and I was still unable to place where the man came from by the way he spoke. But I had deliberately withheld that information, not wanting to admit that I had been smug and stupid in believing that I was being clever enough to avoid the dangers that my friend the ex-Nomenculator in Rome had warned me about. I had realized my error only when I was on the ground with my head swaddled in a cloak and being kicked with carefully judged and vicious accuracy. My attacker had told his accomplice that the light was not good enough to confirm my identity: he was referring to the mismatched colour of my eyes; one is pale blue, the other greenish hazel. It is an accident of birth and the contrast between them is less than when I was young, but Chamberlain Albinus had noted the difference when I first met him in the monastery. He had spotted it again when I sat opposite him at table in the banquet, and immediately deduced that I had something to do with the warrior flagon. I had been an over-confident fool. Albinus was neither innocuous nor timid, but alert and ruthless; so too were the men he worked with. The spreading throb of my bruises was a reminder that whoever he had sent to interrogate me had enjoyed inflicting such a savage beating. I hobbled out of the archbishop’s office, resolved that if Arno had his own unstated agenda, so did I. Simply put, I had a score to settle.

  *

  There was no mistaking the tall, rangy figure leaning with his back against the wall outside the archbishop’s office. The watchful, slightly arrogant gaze, one hand resting on the well-worn hilt of the short sword in his belt while the fingers of the other hand fiddled with a cord almost certainly attached to a hidden dagger hung around his neck – all these spoke of a professional soldier. His thick dirty blond hair was cut in a simple pudding-bowl style, and his moustache and beard were closely trimmed. The plain grey tunic was devoid of any decoration and worn over loose-fitting dark trousers tucked into boots. I put him at between thirty and forty years old, and there was a wariness as well as a chill indifference on the face he turned towards me as I approached him.

  ‘I believe we are to travel together into Avaria on Archbishop Arno’s instructions,’ I said.

  The eyes that regarded me were the very palest blue, and slightly protruding. They were also unwelcoming. I realized that the archbishop had not told me the name of my future companion.

  ‘I’m Sigwulf,’ I added.

  ‘Beorthric,’ he replied. His voice was guttural and came from deep in his throat. He made no attempt to sound pleased, nor did he bother to straighten up, but remained propped against the wall. His unusual name was a clue. Furtively, I stole a glance at the weapon at his belt. It was not the standard issue army sword forged by Carolus’s armourers. The wooden handle was longer, and Beorthric was carrying it horizontally. The scabbard of well-worn oiled leather was the length of my forearm and revealed the shape of the blade. I was looking at a scramseax, the single-edged fighting sword of the northerners that my own people carried into battle. It was also the favoured weapon of Carolus’s most implacable enemies – the Saxons.

  I studied Beorthric’s features again, more closely this time, looking for other signs as to who he was. The skin was ruddy and very slightly freckled, the pale-blue eyes wide set, and a strong jaw and wide mouth made his face seem broader and flatter than most. Now I had no doubt that he was a Saxon, and that caused me a tremor of disquiet. The only Saxons allowed to carry weapons within the wooden ramparts of Paderborn were those who had abandoned their ancient tribal allegiances. They had pledged their allegiance to the Franks instead. For twenty years Carolus had been waging a savage war to break the Saxon tribes and bring them to heel. Small bands of unsubdued rebels still remained, roaming the deep forests. To hunt them down and destroy them, Carolus had recruited the most ferocious of their defeated cousins and formed them into an elite, well-paid force renowned for its brutal efficiency. Their countrymen, surly in defeat, considered them to be turncoats and traitors. I had little doubt that Beorthric was a member of that unit.

  ‘The archbishop has instructed me to write up a report of your findings when we are in Avaria,’ I said carefully. As a Saxon whose family had been wiped out by a rival Saxon warlord, I had no reason to trust in tribal loyalties.

  Beorthric’s cool expression did not change. ‘Then we should be on our way. I don’t want to have to spend a winter there.’

  I bridled at his bluntness. He could see that I was in poor shape to travel. ‘There are one or two things I need to arrange before we set out.’

  I might as well have been talking to the wall behind his head. ‘I’ll meet you here at dawn tomorrow, with horses. Keep your baggage light. A single pack animal is enough for both of us.’

  It was difficult to keep hold of my temper. ‘The earliest I can be ready is in the afternoon,’ I snapped.

  The way he looked me up and down made it clear that he thought I was a weakling. ‘Then don’t be late,’ he grunted dismissively. He straightened up and walked off with long confident strides, a hand still on the hilt of his scramseax. I watched him go, trying to come to terms with the prospect of travelling hundreds of miles in the company of a mercenary who might decide to kill me for the gold I would be carrying. It added to my existing concern that we would be venturing into a land where the native people had an evil reputation as pagan savages and whose territory had been recently over-run and wrecked by an invading army. And if we ever reached our destination, I saw little likelihood of tracking down a master craftsman who might no longer be alive.

  Chapter Eight

  THERE WAS NO shred of compassion from Beorthric, however shaky and exhausted I must have looked when I came to our rendezvous next afternoon. All I wanted to do was to retreat to the milites barracks and curl up in bed. Already I had dragged myself to the Treasury, shown the note from Archbishop Arno, and signed for a thousand gold solidi from what remained of the Avar treasure. I had then paid a visit to a leatherworker in the artisans’ quarter. When I met Beorthric, the coins were out of sight, neatly sewn into a money belt of soft calfskin tied tightly around my waist with tapes. Two saddlebags slung over my shoulder contained a change of clothes and the stock of writing materials that I had obtained from the chancery clerks. A rolled-up cloak and a sword completed my baggage. Beorthric was already astride a sturdy-looking horse and holding the leading rein of a pack pony. He handed me a letter sealed with Arno’s ring and addressed to Margrave Gerold. ‘The archbishop says you are to give this to the margrave, and no one else,’ he informed me curtly. He nodded towards a second riding horse tied nearby. ‘That’s yours,’ he announced and, pulling his horse’s head around, rode off down the street without a backwards glance. Hoisting myself into the saddle was agony and I followed him, cursing under my breath. The motion of the horse discovered sprains and bruises that I had not even known before. Every hoof beat sent a stab of pain into my lower back. To my dismay I saw Beorthric kick his horse into a trot, and I called out to him to slow down. He ignored me and we trotted out of Paderborn’s south gate with me bending forwards in the saddle, tears of pain running down my face. I found myself disliking him intensely.

  For the next eight days he gave me little reason to modify my opinion. We were following a well-used merchants’ road that ran south through the gently rolling countryside of Hessen and East Frankia. There were many small towns and villages along our route and I would have preferred to find overnight lodgings and sleep in a bed. But Archbishop Arno had not told me who was in charge of our mission and, because Beorthric had previously travelled this route to Avaria, I found myself accepting my companion’s inflexible and punishing routine. He insisted that we were on the road soon after dawn, that we put thirty or forty miles behind us each day, and that we stopped for the night wherever we found ourselves. Usually this meant sleeping on th
e ground, wrapped in a cloak, which was further torment to my bruises as they slowly mended.

  Conscious of the gold I was carrying around my waist, I remained wary of my travelling companion, observing him closely during the long hours on the road. The night-time attack on me outside the Paderborn barracks had left me alert to men’s accents, and though Beorthric spoke little and then only in short, clipped sentences, I occasionally detected an underlying Saxon intonation in his Frankish. I also noted how awkwardly he rode, long legs dangling down, graceless and out of rhythm with the horse’s gait. This fitted my theory that he was a Saxon renegade because the Saxon war bands were indifferent cavalrymen and much preferred to fight on foot. On the other hand, Beorthric showed himself to be meticulous in tending to the well-being of our horses. My guess was that at some stage in his mercenary career he had served with Carolus’s mounted expeditionary forces and, while he would never make an accomplished rider, he had learned the importance of looking after his mounts: he would check their hooves at the start and finish of the day, walk and trot the animals to vary the pace, always stop and rest them for a long break at midday, remove saddles and packs whenever we halted, and purchase oats of good quality along the way. In all other respects he was a remarkably prudent traveller. He selected overnight campsites well away from the road where we would escape casual notice, and he built cooking fires that were small and unobtrusive. In the morning he tidied up, leaving scarcely any trace of our presence. Whenever the road lay through thick forest, and the trees pressed in closely on both sides, I saw how he rode bolt upright, his head turning from side to side as he searched for signs of ambush. It occurred to me that these were the ingrained habits of an army scout or, just as likely, a brigand.

  We rarely exchanged more than ten sentences throughout the day, and it was only when I asked Beorthric what he knew about the Avars that, finally, I managed to glean a few details about his past. It was on the fifth day of our journey and we found ourselves about to ride down into a fertile valley spreading out before us in the late afternoon sunshine. There was a glint of a river winding through the patchwork of fields, yellowish brown and bare after the harvest, random lines of hedgerows, dark clumps of orchards and, best of all from my point of view, the sight of a small town in the distance where the next range of hills rose. By the time we reached the town, we would have achieved our daily forty miles and I was looking forward to finding a bed to sleep in.

  ‘Archbishop Arno told me that you speak the Avar language,’ I said, riding up alongside Beorthric.

  He allowed a full minute to go by before he answered. ‘I learned the usual way, from a woman.’

  ‘Was that difficult?’

  He allowed himself a non-committal grunt. ‘Learning Avarish or being with an Avar woman?’

  ‘Either or both.’

  ‘After I’d picked up a couple of hundred words I knew where I was with the language.’

  ‘And the Avar woman?’ I coaxed, attempting a light tone.

  He turned his face towards me, and there was no trace of amusement in the pale-blue eyes. ‘With the Avars, whether men or women or children, you never know where you stand or what they are thinking.’

  ‘I presume you speak from hard-won experience.’

  ‘I was twice in Avaria,’ he said, and there was a hard edge to his voice. ‘The first time was seven years ago with the big invasion that Carolus launched. We won every fight but there was never a final battle. The Avars kept retreating, dodging us, promising to acknowledge Carolus as their overlord but never doing so.’

  ‘Why couldn’t Carolus force them into proper submission?’

  The big Saxon leaned forward to pat his horse on the neck. ‘Our horses began to die by the hundreds and we had to turn back. It was an unknown sickness. Myself, I think it was an infection that the Avars deliberately introduced. Their overlord, the khagan, sent Carolus a herd of horses as a gift.’

  That must have been when Beorthric learned the importance of looking after horses, I thought to myself. ‘And what happened the second time you were in Avaria?’

  ‘That was different. I already knew the Avar country so I was hired by the Duke of Friuli to go with the vanguard of his army. The duke finished the job that Carolus started. I was with the troops when they sacked the Avar capital, the Ring, though it turned out to be more of a summer camp than a real town.’

  ‘You make it sound as if the second campaign was straightforward. The Avars didn’t put up much resistance.’

  Beorthric rebuked me with a scornful glare. ‘The only reason they lost was because they didn’t agree amongst themselves. They are as false and treacherous to one another as they are to outsiders.’

  I had thought it wiser not to ask him about the Avar woman, but he was pulling up the side of his tunic. A puckered scar began at his left hip and ran diagonally across his ribs until it disappeared from sight.

  ‘That’s how loyal my language teacher was,’ he growled. ‘I saved her life when our troops finally broke their way into the Ring. She was grateful for a few months, but when the chance came to get back to her people, she took it . . . and most of my share of the plunder with her.’

  ‘Let’s hope we don’t meet up with her or her brothers,’ I muttered.

  ‘If we do, we’ll have some of Margrave Gerold’s troopers with us. Archbishop Arno told me that he’s asking the margrave to send a full company of his best cavalry with us to the Ring and to stand guard while we are there.’ Beorthric tucked his tunic back inside his belt.

  I rode on thoughtfully. Beorthric’s words had left me uneasy. When Arno had given me strict instructions that I was to deliver his letter only to Gerold, I had supposed that the letter contained a private request for the margrave to facilitate our short trip to the Ring. Now it turned out that Arno was asking Gerold to devote significant resources to help our mission. A coil of anxiety began to form in my gut as I could not escape the conclusion that our mission into Avaria was far more important to the archbishop than he had chosen to reveal to me. This in turn meant that he would have thought nothing of risking the lives of Beorthric and myself if it furthered his ambition.

  Quite what the archbishop was plotting was a question that nagged at me for the remainder of that day and gave me a poor night’s rest even though, in response to my suggestion, Beorthric finally agreed that we could spend the night in an inn for travellers. I tossed and turned on the prickly straw mattress, thinking about the Avar Hoard and picturing the moment when Theodore had found the gold warrior flagon hidden in Albinus’s house. Without success I tried to find the connections between pagan Avaria, the Pope’s chamberlain, and why my former mentor Alcuin should have recommended me to Archbishop Arno. At some point the image floated up into my mind of the gold belt buckle that my friend Paul had shown me in Rome. The buckle modelled a griffin, a creature that was half lion and half eagle. Paul had assured me that the workmanship was Avar, and I found myself wondering where the man who made the buckle had got his inspiration. I decided that if I ever tracked down the master craftsman who made the warrior flagon, I would ask him. Perhaps he would tell me that the griffin was a creature that still roamed beyond the Avar territory in the great grasslands that stretched far to the unknown east. At last, just before dawn, I nodded off and dreamed that the Khagan of the Avars was showing me his menagerie and it contained a griffin and its fledgling cubs.

  *

  Five days later, everything changed. We reached the north bank of the great river Donau, crossed by ferry and began following the right bank downstream. The road had become a very busy highway, wide enough for two carts to pass one another. There was a constant flow of traffic, drovers with cattle, farmers bringing produce to the market towns along the Donau, beggars and pilgrims, and merchants riding while their servants on foot led pack animals. As a rule, they took one glance at my companion and made the same judgement as I had made when I had first encountered Beorthric. They mumbled a polite greeting and gave us a wide ber
th. Beorthric ignored them, riding straight ahead as though he owned the track.

  I was surprised, therefore, when, in the middle of the morning, he suddenly pulled up his horse and raised a hand. It was my turn to lead our pack pony and, riding close behind him, it was all I could do to stop my horse blundering into his. Looking past him, I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Coming towards us was an empty farm waggon drawn by two oxen. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Listen!’

  I could hear nothing except the grinding of the oxcart’s wooden wheels on their axle and an occasional thump and creak as the vehicle rolled slowly over the uneven road surface. The driver was seated on the cart, half-asleep in the sunshine, his head under a broad-brimmed straw hat tilted forward, and his chin on his chest.

  Then, very faintly in the distance, I heard the single beat of a large drum. After an interval, the drum beat was repeated, deep and mournful.

  Beorthric frowned, then, with a jerk of his head, indicated that I should follow him. He turned aside, and soon our horses were scrambling up a narrow side track that climbed through beech forest. We emerged on a low spur of land that overlooked the road. Here we dismounted and tied our horses to the trees. We walked to where we had a clear view ahead. Now we could hear the drum more clearly. It was keeping up its steady, slow, relentless beat.

  Below us and half a mile away appeared a column of armed men on horseback. They were approaching along the highway at a slow walking pace. From our vantage point we could see the other road users scuttle to the verges, and wait meekly for the procession to pass by.