Fenrir Read Online Free Page B

grotesque irrelevance if the northerners got into the city. How many of them were there? Thousands. How many men-at-arms in Paris? Two hundred and fifty? While the towers held they were safe. If they fell then the city would be swamped. There was nothing for it but to proceed and to trust to the will of God, as he had always done.
    ‘Set me down,’ he said to the monk, ‘then draw your sword and go to the ramparts to perform the office of a faithful man.’
    The monk put him down then left, clumping his way from pillar to pillar as he walked out of the candle glow.
    ‘You are …’ She hesitated.
    ‘Worse than I was? There is no need to hide from it, lady; it is a plain fact.’
    ‘I am sorry.’
    ‘Do not be. It is a gift from God, and I welcome it.’
    ‘I will pray for you.’
    ‘Do not. Or rather, pray as I pray. Thank God for visiting this condition upon me and the opportunity it has given me to prove my faith.’
    Aelis caught the implication of his words. He felt blessed to have been tested in his faith. She should feel the same. She did not, however.
    She looked at the figure in front of her in the candlelight. When she had seen him before he had been blind and confined to a chair. Then, she had been struck by his eyes, which didn’t focus at all but ceaselessly scanned the room, as if he was trying to follow the flight of an annoying fly. His face too had been twisted into a permanent grimace. Though she had thought him ugly, she had seen worse deformity on any market day in Paris. Now, she thought, he could be the king of beggars, if he chose. His body seemed to have shrivelled, his arms to have withered and twisted; his head was cast back as if permanently looking upwards. She knew the joke was that he always looked to heaven, but, faced with the reality, she could not find it funny. The monk swayed back and forth as he spoke, like someone in deep contemplation. Aelis found the whole effect very unsettling.
    Ever since she had been a little girl, and more since she had become a woman, she had been able to perceive people in a way that went beyond the normal understanding of the five senses. It was almost as if she could hear people’s personalities like music, sense them as colours or symbols. She had grown up around warriors, seen their scars and heard their stories of battle and fortitude against the northerners. When they had spoken, the colour of iron had come into her mind, of swords and armour, and the dark skies of war. Her brother had a presence like a mailed fist, hard, uncompromising, but nevertheless insubstantial compared to that of Confessor Jehan. The monk’s body may have been broken, but his soul, his will, seemed to sit like a great mountain in the dark, solid and immovable.
    She took up the candle and went to the altar. The gold of the candlesticks and communion cups caught its flame and glittered as she moved. The abbot would not have them removed – that would be to admit that the Norsemen might get in. There had been hope that the monks at Saint-Germain would send over some of their relics. They could hardly expect the bones of Saint Germain himself, but there had been talk that the stole of Saint Vincent might be sent across. However, the abbot of Saint-Germain had pointed out that the monastery had been sacked by Norsemen three times already and the stole had provided no protection then.
    Aelis kneeled beneath the altar.
    ‘God has tested me too in a smaller way. Should I be thankful?’
    Jehan measured his words carefully.
    ‘We should be grateful for anything that comes from God.’
    The confessor was just a voice in the darkness to her.
    ‘I am not afraid of the Norsemen,’ she said.
    ‘Then what are you afraid of?’
    Aelis crossed herself. Jehan heard her mutter a prayer. Her voice trembled, though she fought to suppress it, not to appear weak in front of a low-born man.
    ‘Something is coming for me, and I know that if I consent to go with the Norsemen, or even if I