I, Aelric of Richborough, also known as Alaric of Britain and by sundry other names throughout the Greek Empire and in the realms of the Saracens, in this six hundred and eighty-fourth year of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the second year of the second Pope Leo, and in the twenty-fifth year of the fourth Emperor Constantine, and in my own ninety-fifth year, sit here in the monastery at Jarrow to write the history of my life.
And that’s as far as I got yesterday afternoon. I got called in, you see, to take over the mathematics class for that lunatic monk from Spain Abbot Benedict engaged against my advice. He’d been faint again from scourging himself – not a wise act at any time, let alone in this ghastly climate. By the time I’d remembered enough to cane into the boys, I was pretty knocked out. So I came back here to my cell to recover myself with hot beer and took to my bed.
When I woke this morning, I looked again at my opening, and thought to burn it. I didn’t feel up to continuing.
Am I at last going senile? Am I no longer good for extended composition? At my age, there’d be no shame in that. Far off in Canterbury, Archbishop Theodore is only eighty-eight, and is getting decidedly past it.
I’ll not deny my pretty boy looks are long gone. I saw my reflection a few days back, and I reminded myself of nothing so much as one of the unwrapped mummies they sell in Alexandria – brown teeth sticking through shrivelled lips, a few wisps of hair hanging at random from my scalp. The beauteous Alaric – or Aelric: call me what you will – whose face shone more brightly than the moon, is long gone.
But the great Flavius Alaric, Light of the North, Scholar of Scholars, author of histories, intelligence reports, libels, begging letters, flattery, smutty poems, and so much more – he remains very much still here, magnificent even in his external decay.
No – what had me holding up the sheet of papyrus over my little charcoal brazier was one of my very rare stabs of conscience.
‘Why don’t you write your life?’ Benedict asked me again the other day, after he’d watched me on my best behaviour in the advanced Latin class – that is, not ogling every boy without spots. ‘God has blessed you with so many years, and these have been crowded with so many worthy deeds. A full record would be so very edifying.’
Is Benedict wholly ignorant of all I’ve got up to in the past eighty-odd years? Since he lacks any noticeable taste for irony, I suppose he is. Perhaps it’s for the best if he remains ignorant.
Then again, a refugee does have some obligation to those who take him in. So, here I sit, a moth-eaten blanket over my knees, the rain falling in sheets outside my window, pen in hand. Benedict wants a full record of my life, and a full record he shall have. But since he said nothing about a comprehensible record, I will, my Latin opening aside, write in the privacy of Greek. If I am obliged at last to tell the whole truth about myself, I feel a coordinate obligation not to shock the sensibilities of my good if enthusiastic hosts.
I don’t know who you are, my Dear Reader, and I don’t know where or when you are. But I do suspect you will be less pained by the truth than good Benedict. And I do promise that the truth I shall write will indeed be the truth and nothing but the truth.