Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower Page B

Agatha, though Odo shows no sign of interest in the meal she has so carefully arranged for him, the cheese and bitter apples she knows he cannot get in England, the brandy usually dispensed only to the sick. He crosses to the window and peers out, rubbing away the frost with his sleeve.
    “I have very little time,” he says, pacing the room, picking things up and putting them down, forgetting his injured hand and wincing when he tries to bend his fingers. His prowling makes even this room seem small, the early dark closing in around them, swallowing the candlelight. “I must tell you about the Byrhtnoth hanging.”
    “The what? Who is Byrhtnoth? Odo, please sit down.”
    He does so, but on the edge of his chair.
    “Well?” she prompts. “If you have so little time, you must tell me about the hanging. Is this the marvellous and surprising thing you wrote to me about?”
    “I saw it in the abbey church at Ely, an odd place. The local people call it an island, though it stands on a marsh, not water. Shall we say it aspires to be like Mont Saint Michel, but fails. For one thing, their churches admit scarcely any light, as though they are loathe for God to see what goes on in them. They’re pagans, Agatha, for all their Saint Augustine and Saint Cuthbert and Bede’s History. I have seen images of the Norse gods on their altars and everywhere odd little shrines stuck with blood and feathers.” He shivers and stretches out his hands to the fire.
    “Odo, has something happened to you? I do not know you like this.” No, not strictly true. She has seen him this way twice before, torn between the risk and its consequences, between love and duty, and both times it was William’s doing.
    He frowns, his mouth working, whether to form words or keep them back she cannot tell. “I…dream…” He shakes himself, like a dog shaking off water. “No, nothing has happened to me, just a touch of fever as I said. This hanging. It’s not woven, the style is more like…embroidery on clothes or vestments…except for the colours. No gold, no purple.”
    “No gold? I would have thought you would have wanted plenty of gold, Odo.”
    “You miss the point, Agatha. It’s a story, a chronicle in pictures, about the Earl Byrhtnoth, who was some sort of tribal leader in East Anglia about a hundred years ago. When he was killed, his widow apparently made this work as a memorial to him and gave it to the abbey. It’s on a long strip of, I don’t know, linen I suppose. It hangs around all four walls of the church, like a frieze. You see it by torchlight, and the figures seem to leap out at you, so real I kept my hand on my sword hilt, I half believed some warrior was going to jump down from the wall and revenge himself on me for William’s triumph.” He gives a sheepish laugh.
    “I notice you have taken to wearing a sword.”
    “All pictures of this Byrhtnoth and his people, fighting, feasting, holding councils, even love making,” he goes on, choosing to ignore her reproof. “It seemed to me to unfold like life does, some stages orderly and clearly seen, others obscure, muddled, contradictory. That’s why it doesn’t want gold. It’s the story of a life, a real life. There’s a commentary, but it’s in English. I’ve set myself to learn to speak the language, but they make their letters strangely so it’s difficult to read. It doesn’t matter, though, the pictures speak for themselves. Wonderful pictures, ordinary people, so the artist didn’t have to conform to the conventions.”
    “Of representing the saints, for example? No haloes, no eyes raised to heaven? If you have one leg shorter than the other or a nose shaped like a bottle, the artist can show it? I begin to see what you mean.”
    “None of the constraints of holiness.” Their eyes meet and they exchange smiles of understanding.
    “And it set me thinking,” he goes on, “that it would be an excellent way to record what we have done.”
    “Surely a