Читать книгу Herotica 1 - Kerry Greenwood - Страница 8

Spring, 793, Lindisfarne Monastery, off the coast of Northumberland

‘But why did the Devil send you?’ asked Brother Aelfwine. ‘I’m a man. I should have got an incubus, a fallen angel in the shape of a woman. Why did they send me a succubus?’

‘I’m not a succubus,’ replied the tall, cloaked figure.

‘Of course you are,’ asserted Brother Aelfwine. ‘You appeared out of nowhere in my locked cell. You’re naked under that cloak, I can see a glimpse of your thigh, it’s bare. And...’ he consulted a sheet of vellum on which a condemnation was written for the brothers to meditate upon before falling asleep. A Warning Against Night Demons. ‘Let me see,’ said Brother Aelfwine, referring to the Warning. “Their skin is as white as dead men’s bones”. Your skin is as pale as a pearl. “Their hair is as black as sin”. You have dark curly hair. “Their mouths are as red and as hot as a coal in the fires of Hell,” and you have a mouth that begs for a kiss, and eyes like the Abbot’s gem that he set in the cover of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Emerald eyes. What else could you be?’

‘You are leaping to conclusions,’ said the succubus, in a dark, velvety voice, with a lilting accent which was music to Brother Aelfwine’s ears. He shed the cloak and was indeed naked under it. He was the most beautiful man Aelfwine had ever seen.

‘Look at you,’ he mumbled. ‘You are made of perfection, as all fallen angels must be. No wonder the daughters of men fell in love with you.’

‘You are doing lovely work,’ said the succubus, moving closer to look at the vellum laid out on Brother Aelfwine’s desk. The picture of Saint Aidan, seated at his own desk, his white cat on his lap, was drawn in outline. The white cat sitting on Brother Aelfwine’s bed was clearly acting as a model. It sniffed at the succubus’ extended fingers and allowed a caress. But it was well known that cats were creatures of night.

‘That is Pangur Ban, the Abbot’s cat,’ explained Brother Aelfwine. ‘I borrowed him. He’ll only stay as long as my supply of dried fish lasts. He doesn’t really like anyone except Father Eadward. There, thank you, God bless you, Pangur, that’s the lot, I’ll just let you out,’ said Brother Aelfwine, handing over the last of the tiny dried fish. The cat, crunching, was standing at the door a moment later. Brother Aelfwine let him out and re-locked the door.

He expected the succubus to have vanished but he was still present, looking over the other leaves on the desk.

‘Your lettering is excellent,’ he commented.

‘Aren’t you supposed to try to seduce me?’ asked Brother Aelfwine. Hope was colouring his voice.

‘Oh, very well,’ sighed the succubus. ‘But afterwards, I want to talk to you.’

‘Are you so sure that you can seduce me?’ asked Brother Aelfwine.

‘We succubi like a challenge,’ purred the succubus, seized Brother Aelfwine by his scapular and drew him into a kiss so hot, so sweet and so long that the brother gasped for breath. The succubus’ skin was so smooth, so delicate and his limbs so long and fine that the brother shed his clothes and drew his seducer into his arms, laid them down on his narrow, chaste bed, and gave himself completely over to pleasure. The only reason that the whole abbey was not aware of his forbidden liaison was that the succubus, at his moment of climax, locked mouths with Aelfwine and swallowed his scream.

Oddly enough, thought Brother Aelfwine when he could think again, the succubus had also spilled semen, which was not like the Warning at all. Possibly the Warning had been wrong. The overheated tone of the warnings about these night demons had always obscurely worried him. He said so. The succubus laughed.

‘I always thought that someone should have told them to stop drooling into their ink,’ he chuckled, hauling Brother Aelfwine up to lie on his chest, so that they were face to face. He smelt of sea water and musk: very earthy smells for a demonic creature.

‘Oh, thou art lovely, Aelfwine! So sweet is thy love, my bones are melted with thee.’

‘Thou art fair, my love, thou art fair,’ sighed Brother Aelfwine. ‘Thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks, and thy lips are a thread of scarlet.’

The succubus tasted some of the seed spilled between them.

‘My hands drip with myrrh,’ he said. ‘I feed among the lilies.’

‘Now that you have seduced me, succubus, and ruined my vocation and damned me to eternal torment, what is there left to talk about?’ asked Brother Aelfwine, comfortably.

‘You joined this monastery because they would let you spend all your time drawing and illuminating,’ chided the succubus. ‘You have a reputation for chastity because you do not desire women. If you were truly holy you would not have assumed that I was a succubus. If you come with me, I can take us to a prince who will employ you as an artist, and me as a singer, and we can lie together every night.’

‘Vade retro, sathanas.’ The succubus was offering him everything he could possibly want. The Warning rose to his mind again. The price would be his eternal soul. Brother Aelfwine tried to push the succubus away, but the strong arms held him tight. ‘Begone, tempter!’

‘No. Have some sense. You Saxons are supposed to be sensible,’ exclaimed the succubus, exasperated.

There was a long silence.

‘You’re not a succubus, are you?’ asked Brother Aelfwine, drawing the man back into his embrace. ‘That should have driven you away. I made the sign of the cross.’

‘And if you’ll give me use of a hand I will make it myself. There. See, you stubborn Saxon oaf? I am an escaped slave of the Vikings. I came with the ships that are presently lurking just off your island.’

‘What is your name?’ asked Aelfwine, very gently. His exploring hands had just found the scars of many a flogging on his lover’s back.

‘They call me Thrall in Dubh Linn,’ he whispered bitterly.

‘That is not your name,’ said Aelfwine. ‘Thrall just means ‘slave’.’

The beautiful man closed his eyes and spoke very fast.

‘My mother was Welsh. A princess of Gywnedd. She called me Evan. She died young. Her master was kind enough, but she faded away in captivity. I know where her father’s land lies. I will go there tonight, and I will take you with me, if you can find us some clothes and provisions. I slipped overboard naked and swam here.’

Aelfwine sat up, calculating, all action, now that his mind was made up.

‘Vikings. Right. Clothes, worldly garments. And I must rescue the Lindisfarne Gospels. They are in a jewelled box. They can have that. But not Eadwin’s work. I will be back,’ he kissed Evan, sweetly. ‘I will be back soon, my Evan.’

The candle had not burned down more than half an inch when Aelfwine was back with a bundle of garments, a sack, and something folded into an oilskin bundle.

‘Dress, my honey,’ he said to Evan. ‘I raided the kitchen, I stole some coins from the treasury, I roused the monastery, I have the Gospels. If I leave them here, no one will think them valuable. The Danes don’t usually kill. The monks will be re-housed. They will take them to their new home and make them a new cover.’

Aelfwine pulled on hose and shirt, and dragged over that a shabby jerkin and a worn cloak of dark green cloth. Evan wore much the same in dark blue, with his black cloak over all. Both wore monk’s sandals.

‘But the problem remains,’ said Aelfwine, ‘how are we to escape?’

‘The way I entered. The builders left themselves a way out to the mainland,’ replied Evan. ‘Look.’

He pressed a corner of a lintel, and a doorway gaped in what Aelfwine had thought was a solid stone wall. Evan took his hand. Aelfwine looked back at his cell. He had been very happy there, drawing uninterrupted, with someone to feed him, and no possessions except his vellum and his paints and inks. He observed that Evan had packed up all his painter’s colours and added to the box the pages he had been illuminating.

‘You shall have a place,’ said Evan, holding up his free hand in pledge, ‘where you can write and draw, and a door you can lock. And my love,’ he added, pressing a sweet kiss to Aelfwine’s mouth. ‘My love, always.’

‘And mine,’ swore Aelfwine. ‘My dearest succubus.’

They left Lindisfarne, and the door swung silently shut behind them, as the crashing and shouting started outside.

ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF THE BRITISH ISLES

The Princes of Gwynedd were always considered patrons of the arts. Singers and musicians were particularly welcome in their courts, or llys. However, the Book of Merlin is unique even amongst that royal house’s treasures. It is a folio consisting of twelve twelves of vellum, stitched and boxed in oak with a jewelled inlay. The pages are lettered in oak gall ink, which has etched the vellum. Every page of text has a corresponding picture. The painter is only identified as EAE. The free pictorial style and the rich use of colours is strongly reminiscent of the best monastic work, and is dated by an inventory as being completed in A D 820.

The text is an early version of the Mabinogion, with only one surprising addition. This is a verse from the Song of Solomon. The figures are partly concealed by flourishes of ivy leaves, but appear to be a fair figure lying in the lap of a dark figure with curly hair. The verse is ‘Stir not my love nor wake him till he please: he feedeth amongst the lilies’.

This may have been a make-up page to complete the twelve, or maybe a favourite verse of the patron prince, Owain the Blessed. The Book of Merlin has survived as a treasure of the Welsh ever since and may be found in the National Library of Wales in Cardiff.

The survival of the Lindisfarne Gospels through two Viking raids can only be explained by the thesis that the book was housed in a decorative box, from which the text was taken and hidden somewhere dry. It has been rebound twice, and the pages are in excellent condition, the colours as bright as when Eadwin drew them circa A D 700. Robert Cotton collected it, and it resides in the British Museum.