Conqueror by Stephen Baxter

your womb isn’t as fertile as your mind.’
    She clenched down on her anger, at her father and husband for talking about her this way in front of a slave, at the slave himself for repeating it. ‘You watch your mouth,’ she snapped. ‘I want to know about Lindisfarena. Tell me about it.’
    He considered. ‘What’s it worth?’
    She was astonished. ‘Do you think I’m going to bargain with a slave? It’s worth not having the skin flogged off your back!’
    ‘All right, all right. What do you want to know?’
    ‘How did you come to be there? Were you always a slave?’
    ‘No,’ he said, absurdly indignant at the charge. ‘I was born free, in Gwynedd. That’s a British kingdom. I am the son of a noble. I am a Christian, and I was taught to read. I was taken prisoner when a German army came invading.’
    ‘Was your army defeated?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ He poked languidly at the pig swill. ‘They probably fought better without me. Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t pay the ransom for me.’
    He was taken by a Mercian thegn, a companion of King Offa. But he was always an unsatisfactory slave, judging by an aggrieved list of beatings and other punishments. After a complicated series of sellings-on he found himself on the east coast of Britain, and was shipped to Lindisfarena, where he worked for the villagers. ‘Cockle-pickers,’ Rhodri moaned. ‘By God’s wounds I hate cockle-pickers. And cockles.’
    ‘Were you as lazy cockle-picking as you are pig-feeding?’
    ‘I was,’ he said with a dash of honesty. ‘I hung back one day to avoid carrying the baskets and almost got drowned by the tide. After that, I tried to be lazy somewhere safe. And then, when they found out I could read, the monks took me in. They bought me off the head cockle-picker. He took a reduced price.’
    ‘Do monks have slaves?’
    ‘Oh, no. They freed me. They took me in as a novice.’
    It was a word she didn’t recognise. ‘Why would they do that?’
    ‘I told you. I am Christian, and I can read. Even if I’m not the breed of Christian they are. They were training me to become one of them.’ He grinned. ‘Easiest place I’ve lived since I left my mother’s womb.’
    ‘So how did you end up here with the pigs?’
    He sighed, mock-lamenting. ‘I think you know me by now, lady. The routine of a monastery isn’t hard, but it’s dull, dull, dull. I skipped what I could and got others to do the rest. But in the end the abbot found me out and ordered me returned to the cockle-pickers. Even Dom Wilfrid couldn’t save me.’
    Dom Wilfrid, it seemed, was the monk in charge of the novices.
    ‘This Wilfrid must have seen your vices more clearly than anybody else. Why would he protect you at all?’
    ‘Ah, because poor, weak Wilfrid had a vice of his own. Much as he gave his wisdom to the novices, there was something he liked to get back from them. Up his bum, actually.’
    She was disgusted.
    He shrugged. ‘It was better than cockle-picking.’ Once again he looked at her, lascivious. ‘Maybe I could earn a few favours from you, lady. I was one of Wilfrid’s favourites. It’s not just my ears that are big about me, you know.’
    Anger filled her, blood-red. ‘Give me one good reason I shouldn’t split open your grinning face right now.’
    ‘Because you need me to get to what you really want, which is Lindisfarena.’
    She was appalled. She had never met anybody, let alone a slave, who was so manipulative. But of course he was right.
    She didn’t know how to phrase the question. ‘Did you ever hear anything of a Menologium? Of a prophecy, a legend of Ulf and Sulpicia?’
    He looked calculating again. ‘Your father said something about this on the boat ...’
    She told him of the legend of her ancestor Ulf the Wanderer. Ulf, strong and smart, had died old, fat, wealthy, and the owner of many cattle and slaves. But over the hearth he always told stories of his time in Britain, the beautiful Sulpicia, and the remarkable