He stands abruptly and marches over towards Guthred, who looks up at the warrior towering over him.
‘Listen, priest. I couldn’t care less about the things that you’ve done. I’m not interested in whatever guilt burdens you, or in your search for redemption. As I said before, I’m not going to Lindisfarena. I’m going to Hagustaldesham, and nothing is going to make me change my mind. Not you. Not anyone. Understand?’
Guthred nods, carefully. His eyes are dark and hollow. How hard it must have been, Tova realises, for him to say all these things, and in front of strangers besides.
Except that he hasn’t told them everything yet. He hasn’t said how the story ends.
She clears her throat to get his and everyone else’s attention. ‘After Rypum, what happened? Where did you go? How did you escape?’
‘I’d been wondering that myself,’ says Oslac.
Guthred rubs at his eyes, trying to stave off sleep or possibly tears. ‘I suppose it’s only right that you should hear the rest. It’s about the only part of it that gives me any pride, after all.’
*
You ask how I got away. Well, this is how.
We sheltered that night in an old hall on a deserted manor – so recently deserted, in fact, that the rushes were still fresh, still dry. There was a frost that night and I wondered if it might even snow. I tried to settle underneath my many blankets, but they weren’t enough; my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering and I couldn’t sleep. None of us could. Not far away I could hear Cuffa whimpering softly, still worried for his brother, while Wulfnoth groaned as he turned. His hand was paining him. Gytha refused to be near him; she was sitting in one corner of the barn by herself, her knees drawn up in front of her chest, mumbling curses and from time to time sniffing back tears.
None of that, though, was what kept me awake. It was that every time I shut my eyes and tried to give myself up to sleep I kept seeing Plegmund’s plaintive, questioning face. The disbelief in his eyes. The inability to comprehend. What he was asking me with that look was the simple question: why?
And even all those hours later I had no answer. There was nothing I could have said, no reason or explanation or excuse I could have given that would possibly have been enough.
I’d failed him. I’d failed all of them. My students, my fellow priests. The masters who taught me all those years ago. Saintly old Bishop Leofgar, who had first chosen me for the holy life. God himself. I felt him looking down upon me, and I felt the crushing weight of his disappointment.
My whole life serving God, and yet it took all of that to happen before I finally found him. Before I finally sought out his grace. Before I finally believed, and saw clearly for the first time.
I’d sinned worse than I’d ever imagined possible. I’d long realised that I was no paragon of virtue, nor had I ever been, nor was I going to be. But what I’d done that night – what I’d been a part of – was far worse than any misdeed I’d ever committed before. My soul would surely be condemned to the fiery depths, I knew, unless I did something. This was my last chance.
You might think I would have been too afraid, too cowardly, to run away from Wulfnoth and his band, just like I’d been too scared to act back in the minster at Rypum. But I tell you it was fear that drove me to it. Fear of ending up in Hell.
That same fear is what drives me now.
One by one I think the others must have fallen asleep; after a while I realised the whimpering and the groaning and the cursing were no longer to be heard. I was still lying there, wrapped in my grubby blankets. There was a gale blowing, but I could barely hear it for all the thoughts clamouring like a thousand voices in my ear. I tried to shut them out, to fix my mind on other things so that they would go away, but every time I tried to settle they kept coming back, stronger and louder than before, until I could bear it no longer.
I threw off the blankets covering me and got to my feet. Our packs were in a pile in the middle of the barn. As silently as I could, I crept towards them, limping a little as I went. My ankle was paining me; I vaguely remember stumbling and twisting it when we were fleeing Rypum. Anyway, I found my own tattered pack and threw it over my shoulder. That’s when I saw the sack containing the plunder from the church.
I couldn’t let them have it. It wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t mine either, but I was the one who’d led them to it, and so it was up to me to do the right thing. I had to take it. Somehow I had to return it, to make sure it went back to its rightful owners.
Yet I couldn’t go back to Rypum. There was only one place I could think of where I could take the treasures so that they would be safe, and that was the Holy Isle. What I also knew was that it was up to me. I, Guthred the liar, the robber, the sinner. I had a chance to redeem myself in the eyes of the Lord, and I couldn’t afford not to take it.