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  Louis swallowed hard. He would not let himself vomit in front of Ranulf and the men.

  They came at last to the abbey. Most of the smaller buildings that surrounded it were burning, many already collapsed into piles of smoldering debris. But the church at the heart of the community was a stone and slate affair and would not be easily burned. From a distance it seemed unharmed, but as they closed with it they could see the big oak door at the western end had been hacked apart, the splintered remnants still hanging from the black iron hinges.

  “Nothing we can do here, Lord,” Ranulf said, a note of urgency in his voice, which Louis dismissed as he had dismissed everything else the man had said. He climbed down from his horse and stepped cautiously through the doors of the church. Nothing moved in the twilight interior; there was not a sound to be heard save for Louis’s footfalls. It was more like a tomb than a church now. The body of a priest lay sprawled out on the floor. The blood from the sword blow that had killed him was barely visible against the dark fabric of his robe, but beneath him it spread out in a wide pool on the slate floor. Another priest, nearly decapitated, lay ten feet away.

  At the far end of the nave the ornate tabernacle door had been wrenched off and taken, and manuscripts lay strewn around the alter where they had been tossed after their covers, trimmed with gold and jewels, had been torn away. Gold monstrances, reliquaries, the sacred vessels, all the things that Louis had seen during the many times he had celebrated mass in that church, they were all gone.

  Louis heard more footfalls and turned to see Ranulf approaching down the nave. He did not so much as glance at the dead men on the floor.

  “Savages,” Louis said. “Damned, damned savages.”

  “Yes, Lord. And we have time yet to catch them.”

  “Where are the sisters?” Louis asked, still too stunned by the horror he was seeing to respond to Ronulf’s none too subtle suggestion. “Are they hiding, do you think?”

  “No, Lord. They’re gone, I have no doubt.”

  “Gone?”

  “Taken. Off to the slave markets in Frisia. Or….” He stopped. Louis looked up at him and nearly insisted that he finish the thought. But he didn’t, because he knew what Ranulf was going to say and he did not want to hear it.

  “Do you think they’ve gone? The Northmen? Are they going west, back to the sea?”

  “They’ve had good plundering so far,” Ranulf said, “and no one trying to stop them. I don’t think they’ll want to give it over just yet.”

  “Let us ride, then. East. Let us fight these sons of whores before they do any more of this.”

  They mounted and they rode off east, Louis leading the way. His horror had turned to rage and he wanted only to be at the Danes, to cut them down. For all his fencing and archery and wrestling and such, Louis de Roumois had never actually been in combat, had never drawn blood in anger. But he was not afraid to do so. Indeed, he was eager for it now, ready not just to draw blood but to spill it.

  As they rode they met more people fleeing the Northmen, the folk from the villages who had nothing beyond their poor hovels for defense, streaming away from the demons that had been loosed on them. They had with them what few sorry possessions they could carry and they led cows and sheep and goats behind, and Louis had to wonder if the Danes would have even bothered taking such pitiful things as these people owned.

  The men-at-arms continued on, riding toward the place from which the others were fleeing. “There.” Louis pointed to the west where the first trail of black smoke was rising up above a stand of trees. “There they are, the bastards, they’re burning the village. We’ll ride hard, go right at them, cut the sons of bitches down.”

  “Lord,” Ranulf said, “there’s better ways. They’re ready for an attack now, expecting one I should think, and we do not know how many they are. Nothing we can do for the poor bastards in that village. Let the Danes return to their ships, let them pull for the next. We’ll send riders to watch them and keep us informed, and we’ll stay clear. When they land, that’s when they are vulnerable. When they beach their ships but are still sorting themselves out. We fall on them then, and we’ll do a great slaughter, that I promise.”

  Louis looked at Ranulf as if the man had blasphemed during the consecration. He wondered if perhaps the old warhorse was getting a bit backward in his courage, comfortable as he was at Rouen. “Nonsense,” he said. “We attack them directly, like men. No skulking around.”

  And they did, because for all his father’s instructions that Louis was to listen to Ranulf, the simple fact was that Louis was the commander and he was the son of the count and his word carried that authority. It was Louis, or more precisely Louis’s father, that the men feared most. They were not privy to any restrictions that the count might have privately imposed.

  They rode hard for the village, pounding down the dirt road made dry by an unusually long stretch of fine weather. The hooves of their mounts raised a great cloud of dust, a cloud that must have betrayed their approach half an hour before they arrived, or so Louis would later realize as he reviewed over and over the many stupid things he had done that day.

  .

  Chapter Seven

  Childerich, who had the name of king [of the Franks]

  Was shorn of his locks and sent into a monastery.

  Annals of Lorsch Abbey

  The village was already burning as they approached. The Northmen were there, but just a few that Louis could see, and they did not seem overly prepared to fight, staggering along with armloads of loot. As the mounted Frankish warriors charged down on them they dropped their loads and fled into the cluster of squat thatch and wattle buildings that comprised the village, now nearly lost in the smoke and flames.

  Louis led his men on at full gallop as they chased after the fleeing Danes. They pounded down the village’s single road, swords draw. They rode straight into the smoke, then the heat of the flames, and then a lethal swarm of arrows from archers who were arrayed on either side of the road and hidden from view.

  It all fell apart before Louis even knew what was happening. He saw one of his men knocked from the saddle as if he had been punched, an arrow jutting from his mail-clad chest. Another horse stumbled and its rider went over its head and landed in a heap on the ground, two arrows thumping into his back even before his body had come to rest. Then Louis’ horse reared up and shrieked. Louis saw the arrow jutting from its neck and he felt himself going down.

  “Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!” In the noise and the confusion and panic it was all Louis could think to say. An arrow glanced off his helmet and the ringing and the vibration stunned him. He saw one of the Northmen leave the line of archers and race toward him, pulling a battle ax from his belt and screaming as he came. He had red hair tied in two long braids and Louis was transfixed by them. He watched the ropes of hair bouncing and swaying like serpents and seemed unable to move as the man ran at him.

  Then a horse was between him and the Northman and, though he did not see what happened, he heard an ugly, guttural scream and saw a spray of blood from where the Northman’s head must have been. He looked up. Ranulf was on the horse, sword in hand, a bright stream of blood running down the blade.

  Louis pulled himself to his feet, and without a word Ranulf reached down and grabbed him by the mail shirt and hefted him up, an extraordinary display of strength Louis would later realize. Without ceremony he draped Louis over the saddle as if he was going to spank him, and then kicked his horse forward and shouted to the others.

  Louis could not understand the words. He did not know where they were going. He could only twist his neck and watch the country pass by, doubled over Ranulf’s saddle. They were already beyond the village by the time he realized they were retreating.

  The Northmen had won a fine victory: five of Louis’s men killed outright, seven wounded, three of whom were unlikely to live. Eight were captured, and no one liked to think on what their fate might be. But for all that, the sight of so many mount
ed warriors apparently convinced the raiders that their luck and the easy takings were over, at least in Roumois, at least for the time being. They loaded their loot, their prisoners, their plundered stores onto the longships and pulled for the open sea.

  Louis went to his father on his knees, which was not his wont. Usually he would deny his transgressions, craft excuses, attempt to ward off blame that was rightfully his, but not this time. He was no stranger to sin and error, and he never gave them much thought. But neither had he ever committed any that were so grave, so unforgivable as those he had that day. He confessed it all to his father. He stated plainly that Ranulf had been right all along, that he had ignored the man’s advice. Had it not been for Ranulf, Louis admitted, he would be dead and his body picked clean by ravens.

  And his father, not always a forgiving man, forgave him. He was impressed by Louis’s sincerity, which was not something he had often seen in the boy. He not only forgave him, but he offered to allow him to continue in his soldierly pursuit if Louis in turn would promise to listen to Ranulf in the future and learn from him. And Louis did.

  Impetuous, headstrong and arrogant though he might have been, Louis de Roumois was no fool, and some lessons he did not have to learn twice. When next the Northmen came to plunder along the Seine Louis listened to everything that Ranulf had to say, and soon the Danes were fleeing back to their ships, leaving their many dead and wounded in their wake. Now it was the Frankish warriors who set the traps and watched as the Northmen fell into them and died. It was, in Louis’s eyes, a beautiful thing.

  A friendship was sparked between Louis and Ranulf, and eventually a mutual respect, as Louis began to master the art of war-craft, and to lead the men against their enemies in ways that were every bit as well considered and successful as those of Ranulf, and sometimes more so. Louis showed a fearlessness in battle that served as an inspiration to his men, a fearlessness born of youth and a natural skill that left him feeling invulnerable to his enemies.

  For four years Louis and Ranulf and their men fought off the Danish incursions. Their mounted warriors were known in the northern countries and feared. Louis de Roumois had found his calling.

  He loved the life of a soldier. Riding, fighting, drinking, whoring, he loved it all. He loved his men and they loved him, and they would have happily followed him through the fiery gates of hell without so much as pausing for a sip of water. The heathens’ vision of paradise, their heaven, Louis knew, consisted of a life of fighting and feasting, and though he would never say as much out loud, at least not sober, he understood why.

  Four years, the happiest four year of his life, and then it came to an end. Louis was adept at seeing dangers on the battlefield but he was not so quick to see them in his own home.

  He had become, in those four years, a man to whom others looked for leadership. The warriors of Rouen loved him and obeyed him. If he needed more soldiers he had only to send word and the men-at-arms of all the neighboring regions would rally to his banner.

  The people of that province loved him as well. They saw him as their protector, the handsome young man on the black steed who rode in to fight the heathen raiders and kept their homes safe.

  It would have been no great trick for Louis to set himself up to succeed his father as count of Roumois. Such a title usually went to the eldest son, but in Frankia that was not always the case. Louis, however, was enamored of the life he led and had no interest in rule. The very thought that he might use the power and status he had amassed to take his father’s office never occurred to him. But it did occur to his brother, Eberhard.

  On a cold February day in the year 853, with the wind blowing desultory flakes of snow around the great house at Rouen, their father died. He had been ill for some time with a wet cough and a fever. The doctors treated him with various herbs, examined his urine with learned and serious expressions and bled him copiously, but he died all the same. It was only then that Louis realized the effort to which Eberhard had gone to prepare for that very moment.

  The late Count Hincmar was still lying covered on his deathbed when Eberhard ordered the arrest of Ranulf and the captains of the men-at-arms who served under Louis. The rest were stripped of their weapons, mail, and horses and put under the guard of troops loyal to Eberhard, house warriors he had organized in secret. Louis could do nothing to stop any of it. He could only look on in horror and rage and wait for the ax to come down on his neck or the knife to slip between his ribs.

  But that final stroke never came. Louis was allowed a liberty of sorts as his brother solidified his rule over Roumois. He was allowed free movement in the house and on the grounds, always under the watch of at least one armed guard he could see and, he guessed, several whom he could not. He was not allowed a horse and he was not allowed to leave.

  Five days after their father’s death, on the day his body was laid to rest in a marble sarcophagus in the church at Rouen, Louis was summoned to his brother’s chamber, the great room from which their father had once ruled. Eberhard had begun making use of it even before Hincmar’s death, even as the old man lay coughing out his life. Louis stepped through those familiar doors, half expecting to see his father sitting there, unhappy to see his brother instead, comfortable in Hincmar’s chair.

  “Brother,” Eberhard began, “our late father, you know, was always concerned for your education, and for the state of your soul. He never thought this soldiering was any means of gaining heaven.”

  “Our late father was happy to see me keep the Danes from burning Roumois to the ground,” Louis said. “If you are going to kill me, you had better have another who can do that office.”

  “Kill you?” Eberhard said with a tone that sounded like genuine surprise. “I would not kill you, brother. What a thing to say. No, quite the opposite. I want you to have life, eternal life. Like father, I fear for your soul. I think it’s time you abjured the way of the soldier and its inherent sinfulness. Tell me, have you ever heard of the monastery at Glendalough? In Ireland?”

  And that was it. Eberhard did not dare kill him because he was too popular with the men-at-arms and with the people, or so Louis came to realize. Second sons were generally given over to be warriors or churchmen. Louis had picked the first and now his brother was forcing the second choice upon him. It was not unprecedented, not at all. Louis the Pious had bundled two of his troublesome half-brothers off to the monastery. But they, at least, had remained in Frankia. Eberhard was making certain Louis was much further removed.

  Two weeks later Louis was sent to Glendalough to study with the monks and to copy out manuscripts and to eventually take his priestly vows. He took to monastic life the way a fish takes to a hook, fighting and struggling and gasping for breath. Of all the novitiates, he was not the abbot’s favorite. In truth he and his bad attitude and his subtle insubordination were barely tolerated. On those few occasions when he prayed, he prayed to be cast out of Glendalough and sent packing back to Roumois. But that never happened, and Louis guessed it was because his brother sent heaps of silver to the monastery to make sure they continued to suffer Louis’s presence.

  The path that had led him to where he was now, naked in the driving rain, as completely alone and miserable as a man could be, was long and twisting. And as he stood there, a new thought occurred to him. In his haste to get past Colman’s sword he had left Failend to the fate of her furious husband. When it came to bedding her he had been eager and unhesitant, but when she stood in need of defense he had slinked away like the coward he was.

  By God, I am despicable, a slave, a ruined man, he thought. He guessed that tears were rolling down his cheeks, though in the rain he could not tell for certain. He started walking along the wall toward the gate that led to the monastery grounds, no longer concerned about who might see him in his nakedness. He was ready to just drop to the ground and let the rain and the mud cover him up.

  He staggered as he walked, the mud grabbing his feet, so lost in his despair that he was unaware of anything ou
tside his sphere of agony. And so he was startled enough that he jumped when a voice called out, “Brother Louis?”

  He turned toward the sound. On the other side of the wall stood Father Finnian, one of the priests of the monastery. He had a half smile on his face, a look of vague amusement as he reached up and unclasped the broach that held the cape over his shoulders and said, “Here, Brother, you look as if you are in need of this.”

  Chapter Eight

  In thy home be joyous and generous to guests

  discreet shalt thou be in thy bearing,

  mindful and talkative, wouldst thou gain wisdom…

  Hávamál

  No sooner had Godi closed the door then Sutare opened it again. He stepped in and held it open. Out of the wind and driving rain came a hooded figure in a long robe which, when dry, might have been any color, but soaked through as it was looked coal black. The figure stepped further in, and behind him came a man bearing a long pole from which hung the raven banner, wet and dark and dripping on the floor, and behind him another half-dozen well-armed men.

  The man with the hood reached up and pulled back the soaked cloth to reveal the full face and short, neatly trimmed beard of Kevin mac Lugaed. Despite his small stature and unassuming appearance he seemed to wield considerable authority in that country that the Irish called Cill Mhantáin, part of the region known as Leinster.