Glendalough Fair by James L. Nelson Read Free Book Online Page B

river, east of where that village is burning.”
    Louis understood the point that Ranulf was making and he ignored it the same way he was ignoring his father’s instructions. He did not care to be told what to do. As the son of the count he was not accustomed to it.
    “I want to see what’s become of this village,” he said, hoping to justify the mistake he had already made. “I want to see if there’s any help we can bring.”
    They reached the place an hour later, realizing as they drew nearer that it was a village by the name of Jumièges, home to an abbey established there two hundred years before. They rode slowly past burning huts of wattle and thatch, the dead laying strewn in the dirt yards, blood dark on their worn and filthy clothing, the living staring blankly at them as they passed. A man lay propped to a tree, eyes open, mouth wide, an arrow jutting from his forehead and pinning him in place. At his side was a pathetic ax with which he had apparently been defending himself. An old woman lay hacked nearly in two, her hand still clutching a basket, its contents gone.
    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