Conscience of the King

by Alfred Duggan

  I was confirmed in my resolve to keep silent about this episode by the bad reception of the story of my flight from Kent. During the Yule-feast I told Aella the whole business, thinking that it would increase his confidence in me, as a deadly foe to King Oisc. To my surprise, he frowned fiercely, and said it was nothing to be proud of; he seemed to think I should have made an effort to rescue Gertrude, and died gloriously in the King’s hall with my sword out. In vain I protested that I had never been in love with her, and that I certainly did not want to be tied to her for life; he answered that if that was so I should never have seduced her in the first place, and I saw that I had fallen in his estimation. After the way this story of my resourcefulness and quick wit was received I decided not to tell my leader any more about my past life.

  Aella himself was rather a contradictory character; he was never tired of preaching the advantages of caution, and the stupidity of throwing away your life for the sake of a glorious reputation after death; but I think he was always so emphatic about this because his true nature was strongly tempted in the opposite direction. Certainly he had a rather un-German conception of honour. To most barbarians the word means no more than prestige, but Aella had his standards, and he would not depart from them. He had thrown up his command in Kent because he had been falsely suspected of keeping back a valuable sword, instead of adding it to the common stock. He said that the particular matter could easily have been cleared up, for he knew where the sword was hidden, but he preferred to leave a comitatus whose comrades thought him capable of such an action. He was very easy-going, and a delightful leader in peace time, but always I was aware of those unswerving moral standards underneath, and I feared his displeasure more even than that of Count Ambrosius.

  He had his hankerings after civilization; in fact every German I knew at all intimately disclosed the same secret longing; but they find it too difficult to keep the rules, and they are very sensitive to ridicule. He knew that I had done some things in the past which he considered very wrong, but he was quite certain that I would improve under his leadership. Though in anyone else I would have thought this the most outrageous impudence, Aella was so serious about being a good influence over his men that I took it from him without a murmur.

  He confided to me his ambition to found a civilized state, with an aristocracy of brave German warriors supported by a Roman peasantry and educated Roman officials. But the chance to do that had really passed a generation ago, and he used to lament that the West had been spoiled before he grew to manhood.

  ‘The Vandals and both branches of the Gothic race had all the luck,’ he complained to me on one occasion. ‘In Italy and Africa and Spain the people submitted without fighting, or at most after losing one big battle. The land was not hopelessly smashed up by years of warfare, and the Christian priests handed over an intact civilization after the Emperor’s soldiers had fled. The Germans had the good sense to adopt the very latest and most fashionable variety of the Christian religion, and now no Roman is ashamed to serve them. But the Romans in Britain are so confoundedly war-like; we have beaten them in the field time and again, but they always come back for more. The result is that by the time we have conquered a new tract of land it has been reduced to a howling wilderness. You served among the Saxon mercenaries of Count Ambrosius, and you must have had some contact with the peasantry. Do you think that if I went to an untouched part of Britain, where there has been no serious fighting so far, I could chase out the rulers in one quick campaign, and get the peasants and citizens to recognize me as their King?’

  I had been forced to tell Aella all about the campaigns of Count Ambrosius and the part I had played in them; for he knew that I had not been in the comitatus of the Kent-folk while he was serving there himself. He thought none the worse of me when I explained that I had served faithfully for as long as I was paid, and had stuck by my leader until the whole army was dissolved in defeat. Now I answered him truthfully, as his inquiring mind deserved.

  ‘I think, noble Aella, that you yourself might be able to carry out such a plan, if you could find some remote land where the Saxon name was not already hated. But you could never do it with the followers you now have. Your war-band is made up of young Saxons and Frisians who have most of them never left Germany; they are brave men of noble birth and the most impeccable honour, but do you yourself imagine that you will be able to prevent them murdering every man they come across in Roman land? You could never persuade them to spare the coloni so that next year they would have serfs to till their lands; they can’t see so far ahead. And the citizens of Britain are not Italians; they have always been a fighting race, and not long ago they utterly repelled the Irish raiders. They still hope that one day they will beat the Saxons, and they will never stop fighting until you have killed them to the last man.’

  Aella was forced to agree with me. The Saxons are such complete barbarians that no one could fit them into a civilized community, even as a fighting aristocracy at the top.

  Quite naturally he looked on me as an expert authority on which was the best land to invade. Most small war-bands made for the marshes of the east coast, and then went up the sluggish rivers in little boats; but all those eastern river-valleys were already settled by isolated groups of Germans. He wanted if possible to land directly on Roman territory. The obvious objective was the shore of the Channel, the part of Britain that I knew best; I told him that there was a fertile stretch of country between the Forest and the sea, studded with towns and hill-forts that the Kent-folk had never been able to sack. I remember I felt some foolish qualms about handing over my own people to pillage and massacre, for even the wisest man finds sentiment occasionally interfering with self-interest; but I hid them away at the back of my mind. It was arranged that in the spring we should sail for the land of the Regni, and that I should act as guide.

  As the winter drew on our comitatus increased in size, and we were joined by three more descendants of Woden. But Aella had known me longer than any of these cousins of ours, and I remained his most intimate friend. I think that one reason why he liked me was that although I was his equal in birth I was quite alone, without followers or family; while the other nobles had each his own little following. He often worried about the rather sordid reasons for my flight from Kent, and was determined that from now on I should be a credit to his war-band; he had made up his mind to get married before he went over-sea, so that he should have sons to succeed him in his Kingdom, and he thought it would be an excellent thing if I followed his example. He was always pointing out that one should take long views, and he very sensibly said that a bachelor never bothers about what will happen after he is dead.

  There was a suitable girl in the neighbourhood, an orphan called Frideswitha; her mother had died when she was born, and her father had been drowned off the coast of Gaul a couple of years ago. Now she lived with a widowed aunt, and they were hard put to it to make ends meet, with no warrior in the family. The lack of relations was a great advantage in my eyes; a father-in-law with a sharp sword can be very awkward if your wife gets above herself. She was Woden-born on both sides, and it would be unseemly for her to marry anyone of lesser birth. All the arrangements were made for a double wedding at the spring festival, for I could never have afforded a feast of my own.

  Aella was a stickler for the formalities, and he insisted that the girl should see me before the wedding day, to give her a chance of refusing her consent; this was a very remote contingency, since she was unlikely to get another offer, but so that all the rules should be observed I rode over to see her a week before the day. She lived in a very dilapidated old hall a few miles away, and both she and her aunt were delighted to welcome me.

  I found Frideswitha very much as I had expected. If she had been a raving beauty she would have married long ago, and if she had been positively deformed Aella would never have suggested the match. She was tall and well-built, like all the descendants of Woden, but she must have been at least twenty-five years old, an
d her strong and resolute face was scored by a bad-tempered frown. Well, that did not matter; I would be leaving her in a few weeks, and I ought to find plenty of pretty and submissive girls in Britain; what I wanted was an honourable mother for my children. We exchanged polite greetings, and I told her a few much-edited stories of my adventures in the past; neither of us expressed any positive repulsion, and I tendered the oath of betrothal to her aunt.

  All this may sound rather cold-blooded, but I am convinced it is much the soundest way to make a marriage that will last. No man can be expected to stay physically in love with the same woman for long, and of course a woman who so guides her life by desire as to insist on marrying the man she loves will probably fall in love again before very long; then the unfortunate husband has to bring up someone else’s children, or what is even worse, fight a dangerous single combat with a man who is usually younger and stronger than himself. Aella was marrying a girl of fifteen, which was rather a risky thing for a middle-aged man to do; but she was in love with the idea of being the wife of an independent King, and pride in her great position would probably keep her straight.

  The spring festival, though it is not such an occasion for feasting as Yuletide, is even more important from the religious point of view; in winter the heathen celebrate a successful year after the gods have done their duty, but in the spring they have to remind the appropriate goddess, who is called Eastra, to bring them a warm summer. Saxons in general are not very devout; I think this is because their religion is bound up with the reverence of certain sacred places, groves and springs and so on; they have been gradually drifting south for more than a hundred years, from their original seat at the northern extremity of Germany, so they have left many of these sacred spots behind. But they all take trouble about the spring festival, on which the luck of the harvest depends.

  I did not find it difficult to enter into the spirit of the thing. I was brought up a practising Christian, but I have never been able to get into the proper believing frame of mind. It seems very likely that there is a God who made Heaven and Earth, and most religions have Him somewhere in the background, but I could never see why He should bother Himself about the puny and disreputable race of men; no matter whether we behave well or ill I am sure that we have no other immortality than the songs of the poets.

  Some time in May a hereditary priest who lived in the neighbourhood gave notice that the feast would be held on the next day; a great many of the more prominent descendants of Woden are hereditary priests, but Aella, who could have been one, found the various ceremonial commandments a nuisance, and had long forgotten the sacred and unintelligible words of the prayers. In the morning we set out for the rather second-rate sacred grove, which had only been sanctified in the last twenty years; we stood in a close little crowd while a horse, a pig, and a condemned thief were sacrificed, and the blood sprinkled on the growing crops. One could feel that the whole crowd were rather bored with the ceremony, and only attended out of good manners; in the same spirit in which Romans listen to the speech at the laying of a foundation stone, for the sake of the feasting that will follow. It ought to be quite easy to change the religion of the Saxons, though whether they will accept the tiresome sexual restrictions which Christianity imposes is a different matter.

  When the goddess had been given her due we all trooped back to Aella’s hall, for the weddings and the other spring-time amusements. Aella was married first, while the comrades clashed their swords against their shields. Then it was my turn, and I walked up beside the long fire with Frideswitha, who had stretched her stern face into an unaccustomed grin; she wore a silver circlet over her kerchief, and three long necklaces of amber, and that was the whole of her dowry. I was twenty-five years old, the same age as my wife, and we made a very fine-looking couple. The priest recited a formula in a language so archaic that no one could understand it, and we both joined hands; then we were man and wife, and Woden would be seriously annoyed if she was not faithful to me.

  Of course, the religious formula was only a preliminary to the real fun. All traces of the gods were cleared away, and the comrades settled down to feasting. Frideswitha and I sat with Aella and his bride at the high table, and the traditional songs were sung in our honour; some of these, and the shouted felicitations that came between the verses, were outspoken in the extreme, and as none of them liked to take too many liberties with their leader, my wife and I came in for more than our share of shy-making jokes. To my annoyance, I found myself blushing right down my back, but Frideswitha took it all in good part, and laughed at anything that was funny as well as salacious; a wedding feast is the only occasion on which a woman is the centre of attention.

  At last I took my bride to the hut that had been put at my disposal for the wedding night. Frideswitha had long wanted a husband, any husband, and I had quite an enjoyable time; but the whole episode was much more than an amorous adventure, which is why I have related it at such length. By my marriage I was accepted into the family of the Aellingas, of which Aella was the head; since I had left the land of the Regni so suddenly I had been a solitary individual, with no one to guard my back, and it was a great relief to have kinsmen again. My ambition was asleep, for there seemed to be no chance of my ever becoming a King, and I was quite content to remain with them for the rest of my life.

  We should have sailed in the spring, but of course nothing was ready at the appointed time; in all my long experience of armed expeditions the supplies and transport never are. It was a full two months after the wedding before we set out, and I had a longer honeymoon with my new wife than I had expected. The delay meant that I had time to learn her character as well as her body, and I was agreeably surprised.

  Frideswitha was not a callow girl; she was old enough to have seen something of her own barbarian world, and she had listened to the distorted fragments of history that made up the songs in hall. She was also passionately ambitious, quite as ambitious as I was, and her advice on how to get on in the world was worth hearing. I guessed that she was serious and intelligent enough to keep a secret, and I told her about my boyhood and education as a good Roman. I did not explain exactly why I had to leave home in a hurry, just mentioning trouble with my brother, the heir to the throne; I felt that the complete story might be rather a strain on the respect that she owed to her husband. In some ways she was very like poor Gertrude, for example in her reverence for a good education. It is a common trait among the Germans; they find learning a great effort for their dull and heavy brains, and they stand in awe of those who have survived the painful operation.

  She at once made the point that I was much better suited than Aella to rule over a subject population of Roman coloni. Of course the idea had occurred to me often enough, but it was quite impracticable unless I could gather a war-band of my own. I was too fond of my leader to stab him in the back, and there seemed no other way of rising to supreme command. I told her that if the expedition managed to conquer quite a number of peasants without killing them I would mention my qualifications to Aella, and ask him to put me in charge of the slaves; then, when he grew old, I might have a chance of succeeding to his territory. Aella was at least twenty years my senior, and one day he would be too old for battle.

  I congratulated myself on having chosen a wife I could talk to about the things that were really at the back of my mind; so many German women think of nothing except meals, and when the next baby is coming. Of course there is a certain danger in educating a woman; the end of it may be that she thinks herself as wise as her husband, and takes an independent line in politics. But in this case I would soon be leaving Frideswitha for a considerable time, before she had persuaded herself that she was wiser than I was.

  Meanwhile Aella was having a hard time fitting out the expedition. The plan was that we should sail southwest along the coast of Gaul until we were opposite the land of the Regni, cross the Channel and land by surprise at a spot that I would point out. If we were to conquer the land without turning it into a
desert we would have to fight a pitched battle at once; but it would be better if we could land unopposed and fortify our camp before the defending army appeared.

  The great problem in all expeditions by sea is the water-supply. A warship is narrow, and it is always crowded with as many fighting men as it will hold; if you take bedding, food, spare weapons, and all the wealth of a crew who never intend to return to Germany, that leaves little room for fresh water, and you soon have to put in at a river-mouth. Then the inhabitants know there are raiders about, and you find them waiting for you at the next landing-place. Aella wanted to go ashore only once, at the Saxon settlement on the north coast of Gaul, near the mouth of the river Sequana. Then we ought to be able to hurry across to our real objective without refilling the water-pots. But it took careful planning, with long consideration of the tide and the weather; he leaned heavily on my expert advice, though he was himself acquainted with the coast of Kent.

  I found one curious difficulty in this planning. At the age of seven I had been taught to read and write, and until I left home I had been accustomed to jot down any figures I wished to refer to later; in my present position I dared not do so, for my companions would never have believed that a literate Roman was whole-heartedly on their side. I discovered that my memory was hopelessly unreliable, while Aella and the other Woden-born captains who had now joined us could remember any calculations they had made a fortnight ago. They regarded me as scatter-brained, but they still needed me as a guide, and I kept my place in the council.