King Hereafter (87 page)

Italian was only Latin spoken familiarly, as the Legions had spoken it before they left England. But Thorfinn was not fluent in it, although he could understand all that was being said. He said, ‘My Saxon is different from the tongue of the Vosges, but I think I can make myself understood, if His Holiness will forgive my lack of skill.’

‘On the contrary. I compliment you, my son,’ said Leo. It was, thank God, the accent he had been led to expect. Four low stools appeared and were carefully placed in a row facing the throne.

‘Be seated,’ said the Pope. ‘And tell me if it is true—I have been led to believe that it is true—that one of you has mended Pope Gerbert’s steam organ in St Cecilia’s?’

Behind Hildebrand, Sicho was fidgetting. Airard, whom Hildebrand was to succeed at St Paul’s and whom he did not like, gave a great yawn. The rest of the Pope’s entourage, with the exception of the Archbishop of Sicily, stood silent. Audiences, in their experience, were seldom as lengthy as this one.

The Archbishop of Sicily was not among the silent because he was locked in four-part verbal combat with the two Irish-trained priests and the Holy Father on the subject of the flattened note in the Irish musical scale. Occasionally, from among the wagging heads, a vocal example from Egypt, Servia, or Wallachia would float piping aloft and jettison itself against the unmusical branches of a Jesse tree.

Sub-deacon Hildebrand did not interfere, nor did anyone else. In the hands of this Pope, the power of music to enliven injurious mourning, suppress foaming rage, soften bloody savageness, and incite the indolent and weary was not only exercised but extended into areas where Cassiodorus had never ventured.

The tranquil, black-haired priest from the place called Scone might think he was talking solely about the purity of Greek music in the Roman church of seven hundred years since, before the wave of antiphony from Syria drowned it, but the Pope’s response, instant and candid, went on to embrace with perfect ease the subject of early Irish unorthodoxy on the dating of Easter and the fashion of tonsure, long since corrected, with happy results for both Rome and those churches which adopted the customs of Ireland.

Of course, he said, smiling: as with the flattened note, antique customs persisted, such as the way Irish churchmen still mixed the chalice, and the Greek method of arranging the breads in cross-form for feast day, the Lamb in the middle.

Indeed, said unexpectedly the subterranean voice of the King of Alba at that point. Indeed, one could not praise too highly the famous tolerance of the Holy See when Constantinople, as he had heard, was denouncing the Latin church as Jewish because of its unleavened bread, and found rude and ignorant the Latin habit of shaving, and of eating strangled beasts, and of forbidding priests to take a wife.

The church, remarked the King, was of course already established in Ireland and Alba when the great Pope Gregory sent his mission to England and at the same time performed his unparallelled service to the music of the Western church. Passing through Basle, said King Macbeth, they had been lost in admiration for the song composed by Pope Leo, a second Gregory, in honour of his great predecessor.

He wished, said the King, he had also managed to hear the response of nocturnes Pope Leo had also composed for the Abbot of Gorze, to serve the feast of the martyr whose relics St Chrodegang of Metz had sent him. The men of God—the Culdees, one might almost call them—who followed St
Chrodegang’s Rule in Alsace and Lorraine and then in Ireland were, he supposed, men of the sort Pope Gregory thought of as
golden-mouthed
, the true upholders of Christianity.

That was so, assented Leo cheerfully, nodding; and even glanced round at his relative Frederic of Lorraine, who nodded briskly as well. Although, said Pope Leo, his orange beard spreading again, was it not Pope Gregory’s sensitive conscience that detected something subversive in the Blessed St Columba’s views of the Holy Trinity, as exemplified in the hymn
Altus Prosater Vetustus?

They all hummed a few bars, the priest Eochaid in harmony.

Of course, said the Pope, there was much to admire in the early church of western Europe. Its austerity. The authority of personal rule, as invested in its early missionaries, who, like the travelling ministry of the Apostles, brought the Word to the north. Such had been the custom of the Mother Church itself for two hundred years, until each town had its sufficiency of churches and those churches came under the rule of a bishop who was himself subject to authority and of uniform learning with his fellows.

‘We have no towns,’ said the priest Tuathal. The King Macbeth had not intervened.

Leo’s good mood continued. No more had St Benedict, he said, when in his cave he had promulgated the way of life that had commended itself to all the Western world outside those placid waters of the antique church. From the deserts of Egypt, mankind had moved into cities, and the church must so arrange herself that she might minister to them.

The King of Alba must know, said the Pope, of that place on the banks of the river Loire where the bones of St Benedict rested. The King had a fleet. He sustained his people by trade. He must have observed, said the Pope, the animation, the good sense, the orderliness of the men of business in Tours and in Nantes when compared with those more primitive lands of the north whose tenets were full of prejudice and whose loyalties were confused.

And that, thought Hildebrand, was dangerous ground. All very well to hint about Brittany. But anyone who had heard the rumours could retort that they were breeding heretics in Tours and Angers these days, and the Bishop of Nantes had been no saint either.

On the other hand, this little group of men also knew what they were about. There was the slightest pause, and then the Culdee Prior broke in to congratulate Archbishop Humbert on the metrical responsaries he and his Holiness had written together for the Feast of St Columbanus. ‘For,’ said Prior Tuathal, ‘all churchmen of the older condition remember what that great Irishman replied when accused by the Franks of a different manner of worship:
Let Gaul, I beg, contain us side by side, whom the Kingdom of Heaven shall contain
.’

He then questioned the Pope on a matter of mixed intervals in the later responsaries, and the Pope answered by singing the appropriate portion and inducing Prior Eochaid to accompany him.

The names of John and Theodore, Moengal, Notker, Hogar, Huebald,
Ratpert, and even John Scotus Erigena came up in rapid succession, followed by that of Tuathal’s namesake, of whom it was said that the Frankish Emperor cursed whoever had made such a man a monk.

They sang, briefly,
Hodie cantandus
.

They touched lightly on acrostic sermons, and the dialogues for soloist and chorus composed by Romanus for Constantinople, which the Culdee Prior had off by heart in their entirety.

They came, at last, to Guy of Pomposa and the new system now taught in the Lateran choristers’ school, coupled with the song the Pope was this week composing for the saint-bishop Hidulphus’s memory, in advance of his proposed autumn visit to Trèves. The Pope sang, in his extremely melodious voice, several extracts. The priests, their eyes shining, applauded, and so, after a moment, did the entourage standing behind, with the exception of Hildebrand himself, who thought that enough was enough.

The King of Alba, who evidently felt the same, said, ‘How can we thank you sufficiently, my lord Pope, for your generosity, both of your time and your wisdom? Of your glorious music, it is useless for laymen such as we are to speak.’

It had been a long session, and ceremonial garments were heating; but the warmth that suffused the Pope’s face owed something to personal satisfaction as well. He said, ‘Men do not make the long journey to Rome to discuss nothing but music. They come for advice, and this I have given you. All episcopal order inherits the power Christ first granted to Peter, and this order you must now reinstate, if your people are not to walk as aliens in the error of blindness. I have considered the candidature of the priest Isleifr, and when the time comes, I shall instruct the Archbishop of Bremen to consecrate him as Bishop for Iceland.

‘Alba has one bishop nearing the end of his office, and no other consecrated by any recognised authority. I have advised that you end this state of affairs, and you have accepted my advice. When two priests have been found who will meet with your requirements, both as to language and the nature of their training, they will be sent to you. As the church in Alba strengthens and flourishes, you hope, you say, to train their successors and fellows yourselves. From the priests you have brought with you today, I should say that your hope is well founded.

‘You also look forward,’ said the Pope, ‘as does King Svein of Denmark, to the time when the number of bishops may justify the appointment of a metropolitan of your own, and you express the wish, also expressed by King Svein, that such an archbishop or even archbishops should be directly responsible to the Holy See, and not to any intermediary.’

He paused, and Hildebrand did not blame him. This had emerged in the early minutes of the audience, closely entwined in a matter to do with the use of the Magnificat at Matins, and although the name of Adalbert of Bremen had never been mentioned, it had performed an antiphony of its own behind every sentence, along with the unspoken name of Archbishop Herimann of Cologne.

The Pope said, ‘I have decided that the Metropolitan of Alba, when the time comes, should claim the pallium from the Apostolic See, and should regard himself as responsible to the Apostolic See in all things, including such dues as the kingdom of Alba may then contrive to afford from the prosperity with which the protection of St Peter may well endow her.

‘There remains the matter of your spiritual welfare. I came barefoot to Rome. Bearing scrip and staff, King Canute himself came here thus and traversed the paths of due pilgrimage. This, I have told you, I expect of you all. You who are priests will have no more required of you. You who are monarch of your people, and who have sinned as mortal man must, will come to me here at my chapel after the purification of your pilgrimage, to learn what further atonement God may demand. For the King, so your old records say, must be without blemish; and so must he who expects to receive an Apostolic Blessing under this roof.… You may leave.’

Transported, they prostrated themselves with inhuman deftness, and left.

‘I thought,’ said Sub-deacon Hildebrand to the Pope, ‘that you might have considered a final chorus before letting them go?’

It was a liberty, but he spoke in a murmur, as the Pontiff was rising, and he thought that to strike a note less than serious would not go amiss.

‘It was necessary,’ Leo said. ‘You were right. I have seldom seen such application.’

‘A man like that could clear Calabria for you,’ Hildebrand said. ‘If his brother hadn’t died, you might have tempted him, like the Normans, into profitable exile. As it is …’

‘As it is,’ said the Pope, ‘he may well be travelling in the opposite direction. I have invited him, with his priests and his noblemen, to the Easter procession and banquet. The Archbishop of Dol ought not to be present. Macbeth of Alba should then have audience of me and leave, before the opening of the synod. Let him be advised.’

It was a privilege indeed to observe the great, and to learn. Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen, it was said, was building a house for himself in the Borgo. It would be interesting to know if, in time to come, he would ever occupy it. It would be interesting to know whom, in time to come, he might have to sell it to.

Down in the platea of St John, the nobles of Alba awaited in silence the return of their King from his audience.

It seemed a long wait. Here and there, a horse trampled, shaking its bit, and the officers of the city wards and the escorting senators fell into conversation among themselves and rubbed their sleeved arms against a little spring wind.

Then at last there came a small bustle glimpsed between pillars, and a splash of red, and another, followed by the glint of gold as Thorfinn came down the steps, followed by Isleifr, Tuathal, and Eochaid. With their escorting deacons, they began the traverse of the courtyard.

Kineth of Angus said,
‘A’ Ghaoitha
. My God, they’ve bungled it. Look at Thorfinn. He looks like a thunderstorm.’

‘He always looks like a thunderstorm,’ said Morgund. ‘What about the three priests? Can you see them?’

The procession came nearer, and he could see them.

‘A’ Ghaoitha
, they’re weeping,’ said Kineth. ‘He’s excommunicated them.’

Thorfinn was within earshot. He turned and surveyed Isleifr, who was red-eyed, and Tuathal and Eochaid, whose cheeks were not dry.

‘No,’ said Thorfinn. He switched to Gaelic. ‘It’s something worse. I’ve promised to kiss them all when we get back to the Ager. And then to sing them a song.’

‘A song? What sort of song?’ said Kineth of Angus.

Thorfinn took his leave of the churchmen, fitted himself into the procession, and gave the signal for the departure. He looked back at his inquisitor.

‘An address to sore feet,’ he said. ‘Eochaid is just composing it. Tell them about it, Eochaid.’

And Eochaid did.

O MORE THAN
the next man did Ealdred, Bishop of Worcester, England, enjoy the rigours of travelling. But in the art of arriving he was matchless.