‘So Husayn seeks to avenge his brother-in-law’s dishonour?’
‘Already he’s recovered much of the ransom he paid. That was his agreement with the Vascons, and it makes things somewhat easier between himself and his brother-in-law.’
‘Is that why Husayn agreed so easily to the payment of such a huge ransom?’ I’d asked.
Osric hadn’t answered, and instead re-threaded the needle, this time with the horse hair. Finally he’d said, ‘He was already planning how to get the money back. His spies would have told him that the Franks would soon have retreated over the mountains. That meant passing through Vascon territory. When we stayed overnight with that Vascon shepherd, he told us himself that he was on good terms with the Vascons.’
‘So now it remains for him to destroy Ganelon. Just how will he do that?’
‘With your help we dispose of Ganelon using the same weapon he plotted to use against Hroudland.’
I had forgotten the note that Ganelon had asked Husayn to sign, that had promised a payment of five hundred dinars, with me as the named person to collect the money but without an eventual recipient named. Ganelon had planned to accuse Hroudland of selling out to the Saracens and produce the note as evidence.
My friend’s brown eyes had searched my face.
‘Sigwulf, it will mean lying to Carolus.’
I had hesitated.
‘I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in this. Hroudland and Ganelon hated one another. But now Hroudland is dead and I have no quarrel with Ganelon. There was a time when I believed he was trying to have me killed to get at Hroudland through me. But this wasn’t true.’
‘You have a different score to settle with Ganelon.’
I’d looked at my friend questioningly.
‘Have you thought what would have happened to you if Ganelon’s plot against Hroudland had succeeded?’ he’d asked softly.
It had taken me a moment to grasp the subtlety of the Wali of Zaragoza. He had known he could count on me to help him once I’d realized that if Carolus believed that I had acted as a go-between for Hroudland collecting bribes I would also have been branded as a traitor and put to death.
‘It should be easy for you to persuade Carolus that the rearguard was betrayed,’ Osric had said. ‘A little harder, perhaps, that Ganelon was responsible.’
Carolus sat without moving. It was a measure of the man that his face gave no hint of what he was thinking. Finally he said, ‘Have you any proof?’
Osric did not falter.
‘Ganelon insisted that my master sign a note promising him a first payment of five hundred dinars in return for his help.’
‘And was the money ever paid?’
‘Sigwulf here can answer that,’ Osric murmured.
The king fixed me with a stare.
‘Ganelon was a rival to my nephew, that is well known. But how do you come into all this?’ he said.
I knew that I would have to lie convincingly in the face of those penetrating grey eyes.
‘When I was sent to Zaragoza,’ I lied, ‘Ganelon asked me to collect five hundred dinars from the wali on his behalf. I was to bring the money to a Jewish moneylender in the town who would arrange for it to be sent on.’
Carolus leaned forward, peering into my face.
‘You are prepared to swear to this?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘You are both dismissed,’ said the king. ‘You will not speak to anyone about this.’
*
I did not see Ganelon’s execution, though it was a public spectacle. It took place two days later and there was no trial. The damning note signed by Wali Husayn had been found among his possessions. He was taken to an open space where a stout rope was fastened to each limb. The ends of the ropes were then attached to the yokes of four ox teams whose drovers then urged their beasts to walk off in opposite directions. They tore Ganelon into pieces. This method of execution was normally done with horses, but Carolus decided that oxen would be more appropriate. The drovers had been carefully selected: each of them had lost a brother, cousin or nephew in the massacre at the pass.
I was in a delirium at the time. My shoulder wound began to fester alarmingly and I was placed on a pile of blankets in the back of a supply cart, soon to head north in the army’s supply train. I raved and thrashed, shouting that flying monsters were attacking me or that a vixen was a mortal danger. At other times I lay still, the sweat beading on my brow, and mumbled of flocks of birds at a sacred spring.
Osric stayed with me, fending off the physician sent by the king who took a personal interest in my survival. The royal doctor wanted to stuff the putrid wound with a paste of cobwebs and honey, but Osric would not let him.
‘I also had to stop him bleeding you,’ Osric told me as I began to recover on the third day, ‘you were weak enough already. The loss of any more blood would put you in your grave.’
His remark prompted a faint memory of a sentence he had translated from the Book of Dreams.
‘Osric, do you remember anything in the Oneirokritikon about tears of blood?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘When we first came to Frankia, I dreamed of a great horse and its rider crying tears of blood. Later, I saw the identical horse and rider as a statue at the palace in Aachen. On the march into Hispania I recognized the king’s own war horse as the same animal.’
‘Go on.’
‘On the day I told the king about Hroudland’s death,’ I explained, ‘I was seated by the water trough and he rode up on his horse, so close it nearly trod on me and I looked up. I knew exactly what was happening. It was all so real that I watched the king’s face and waited for the tears of blood. Yet they never came.’
‘Some people would say he had no reason to weep. He had yet to hear that his nephew had been killed.’ Osric studied me, his expression serious. ‘Yet, if we are to believe Artimedorus, there’s another meaning for your dream.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember something about horses?’
There was a long pause as Osric searched for the exact words as he remembered them. But the extract from the Oneirokritikon he quoted was not what I had expected.
‘To see blood flowing is unlucky for a man who wishes to keep his actions secret.’
I sank back on my blankets, too exhausted to keep my head raised.
‘So my dream was not about the horse and its rider. It was about me, the dreamer.’
Already I was wondering if one day Carolus would find out that I had lied to him about Ganelon and what I would find when I returned to Aachen. Did Bertha still expect me to continue with our affair? And how many of her intimate circle had she told that I had predicted the death of the king’s only son? With Osric’s help perhaps I could remember or reconstruct a few pages from the Book of Dreams and steer a safe path through the intrigues of the royal court. But Hroudland’s death meant that I had lost my patron and protector, even as I had started to come to terms with being winelas guma, a ‘friendless man’, an outcast from my own country. Once again, my future was uncertain.