The Woden-born watched each other like hawks, and there was danger of a premature civil war breaking out before the command was vacant. Aella saw what was in our minds, and decided, for the sake of peace, to give us each a little district to defend from casual raiders. Cymen was sent down to the coast, where the settlement of Cymens-ora is still called after him, though some ignorant people think it is where he first landed; Wlenca farmed in the north between the chalk and the Forest, where the Wlencingas still dwell; Cissa was given charge of the city of Noviomagus, whose name was changed to Cissas-ceaster. Aella himself travelled from village to village, settling disputes among his men and eating the rents in kind they owed to their leader. He kept me as his companion on these travels, for he found the smattering of Roman law that I had been taught as a child useful in giving his dooms. The position was rather irksome; nothing is more annoying than to give sound advice without any guarantee that it will actually be followed; and I could never forget that I was dependent on his bounty, since I had no land of my own. In fact, my place was very like that of those Roman officials in Gaul who have thrown in their lot with the barbarians.
Frideswitha was not contented either. She had her full share of the devouring ambition that is the mark of all the children of Woden, and it maddened her to see three other leaders intriguing for the succession while her own husband had such a poor chance in the struggle. She used to tell me, far too frequently, that I was being done out of my rights; and that I ought to pick a quarrel with Cissa, the weakest of the captains, and kill him in single combat. I think I could have done so, but it would have entailed a tiresome blood feud. In any case, Aella would be angry with me, and I might have lost the fairly prominent position I now enjoyed.
But I should have to do something for my Cynric, who was really an outstanding child, and deserved a Kingdom. He was the only child I had, and Frideswitha had gone through a difficult time at his birth; the old women told me that she would henceforth be barren. I could have taken a second wife, or got rid of my present one by a convenient accident; but no woman of good blood would take the status of a concubine while my chief wife was alive, and on the whole I quite liked Frideswitha. She no longer shared my bed, since it would have been a waste of time, but I gave her all the honour due to a Woden-born lady; the pretty slave-girls were kept well in the background.
The astonishing thing was that our new little state managed to survive without serious fighting for more than ten years. Of course, there was a certain amount of trouble with the pirates of the Channel. But we were not the sort of people who were profitable to wandering pirates; we had plenty of corn and pork, but very little gold and silver. The Dumnonians were a better quarry, and the Gauls better still. On the land side we had peace, apart from a few young men of Anderida who wanted to show that they were not afraid of Germans; these occasionally crept over the open chalk to burn a farm and run away before we could catch them. In all those years our war-band never marched out in a body to meet a foe of equal strength.
In the meantime Cynric was growing up. In the year 490 he was twelve years old, and I was thirty-nine. He was a very brilliant and charming boy, and already showed great promise with his weapons; but his future was obscure. Frideswitha became worse-tempered with middle age, as happens to so many women, and she was always badgering me to do something for our son. The real trouble was that we had settled down into a routine. Aella was growing old, quite glad that there was no fighting for him to do; he had even suggested once or twice that we should send envoys to Anderida, to come to an agreement with the Romans there. None of his subordinates was in favour of such a course, for they liked to feel there were enemies to be raided on every frontier; and history shows that these truces between Germans and Romans soon break down. I was consulted, as the expert on the ways of civilized men, and I was able to stop anything being done; I pointed out all the obstacles in our way, and the unpopularity of the scheme even with our peaceful low-class farmers. I certainly did not want any intercourse between Cissas-ceaster and Anderida, for I knew that Roman envoys or traders would soon spot me as the runaway son of old King Eleutherus; Aella would despise me if he learned that I was a traitor to my kin.
Frideswitha was puzzled by the vehemence with which I rejected all talk of negotiation with our neighbours, especially as I had the reputation of being in favour of as much civilization as our farmers could cope with; she was a very intelligent woman, and saw that it did not fit in with the rest of my character. In the end I decided to tell her the whole story; I paid her the compliment of assuming that she could keep a secret, particularly if it was in her own interest to do so, and warned her that I would cut her throat at once if the business became generally known. I could see that she was shocked; any woman would be a little upset to learn that her husband is a fratricide, quite prepared to be a parricide if he gets the chance.
‘My dear husband,’ she said, when I had finished my explanation. ‘It has all turned out for the best, and you have a greater position now than you would ever have held as the King’s brother in Anderida. But you were very rash and ill-advised to come back as guide to a hostile army. We won’t discuss the slaying of your brother; I know that such things happen among warriors who constantly go armed, though the murderers sometimes find that they have incurred a hereditary curse on themselves and their descendants. Have you felt the Gods of the Family bothering you? No, I should have noticed if you thought yourself under a curse. Very well, we will put this unfortunate affair at the back of our minds, and never refer to it again. As you seem to have dodged the curse of the Avengers of Fratricide I suppose you can safely make war on your father without interference from Heaven. The best solution is to destroy Anderida, and everyone in it, before the whole story becomes known to Aella. You must get him to see that our only chance of living here undisturbed is to wipe out that city.’
Frideswitha was quite right; I should have seen to it long ago that Anderida and my surviving relatives were put out of the way as quickly as possible. The reluctance I felt was very curious. I have always prided myself on being the completely rational man; yet here I was, delaying such an obvious step because of some nursery tale, which I had already found to be greatly exaggerated, about the curse of blood-guiltiness that might fall on my darling son. It is very hard to be completely rational and strong-minded, if you have been brought up by a Saxon nurse.
My chance came in the spring of 491. Aella was more than sixty years old, and soon he would be unable to go on campaign; but his son was only twelve, the same age as my dear Cynric, and though he already carried arms he was too young to lead the war-band. During the previous winter I had been impressing on Aella that he ought to round off his land while his age still allowed him to take the field, and that the easiest way to do it was to make an end of the fragment of the Regni. One side or the other were bound to start raiding as soon as the young lambs were big enough to march with the rest of the plunder, and then it should be easy to fasten a quarrel on the Romans.
One slight nuisance was that the gossip of the Channel pirates had exaggerated the strength of Anderida, so that our men thought it impregnable. I suppose that it was once a very strong place, and it had beaten off many a pirate attack; but its strongest side naturally faced the sea, and it was not so well prepared for an assault from the land. I also reflected that in my boyhood I had never seen repairs done to any part of the walls, and I was pretty sure that in the last seventeen years not one dressed stone had been laid upon another anywhere in Britain. I knew a way of climbing in without disturbing the guard, which had come in useful for my boyish love-affairs, and I might be able to lead a small party of good men on a successful escalade.
Our Woden-born captains were in favour of the scheme; they also had sons growing up, and they wanted to see them rich men and great landowners before their own fighting days were finished. But the peasant ploughmen from the valleys had no particular wish to better their condition, for they had already as much land as th
ey could cultivate. That was rather an obstacle, since an unwilling army, always thinking of the work that ought to be done at home, very easily finds itself beaten. The obvious remedy was to recruit a number of the professional warriors who lived by plunder on the outskirts of Kent, though that would mean that the Romans would get word that we were coming.
We decided that this was a risk that must be taken. Our council was composed entirely of Woden-born nobles, and they had a very poor opinion of peasant spearmen; though I found in later years that even the lowest class of Saxon will fight, if he has his heart in the work.
We would not be ready to start before the early autumn, which gave me plenty of time to examine the fortifications we must overcome. The long nights of winter would really have been better, but nothing had been definitely decided until the spring, and I had been reluctant to show myself where I might be recognized. In any case, I have sometimes found that you can have a good look at a place that is not expecting you if you take advantage of the early summer dawns, when daylight comes while men are still asleep; in winter the lower classes are usually stirring before it is light.
I borrowed a fast pony from Aella; a sure-footed beast guaranteed not to neigh even if there were mares about, and clever at getting up and down the steep hills of the chalk country. I rode gently to the last farmhouse that was safely in our hands, and spent the afternoon sleeping. It was the middle of May, and the nights should be long enough for me to do a twenty-mile ride and still arrive outside the walls before dawn.
The sky was unclouded when I set out after sunset, and the stars gave enough light to ride along the crest of the hills. All this open, dry land had been constantly harried by Romans and Germans, but the grass is very good, and our peasants had little fortified sheepfolds dotted over our share of the open country. At least a dozen spearmen lived in each one, and the flock was safe from anything except a raid in force. I expected that the Romans would live in much the same fashion once I was across the border, and that after dark they would all be inside their thick thorn hedges; we had purposely made no serious raids that spring, and it was unlikely they would post sentries in the open, among the evil spirits of the night. I cantered briskly along, without trying to hide the sound of my approach; they would not leave their valuable sheep to investigate a solitary horseman.
The high chalk-land stops short some miles before Anderida, which lies on a low knoll among the marshes of the coast. I picked my way carefully down the last slope, and went cautiously on the low ground; shepherds keep to a fairly strict time-table, but here were fishermen and wildfowlers, who are often about at all hours of the night. It was hard to see among the mists of the marsh, but I noticed that conditions had changed since I was a boy; there was much more cultivation, and an attempt had been made to drain the land with deep straight ditches. The shift of population was interesting; obviously the light, open land that the coloni had preferred to cultivate twenty years ago had now become too dangerous, exposed as it was to raids; they had been compelled to grow their food in the marshes, with a great expenditure of labour to prepare the ground. That must have caused great reversals of fortune among the landowners; the little Kingdom of Anderida would be suffering from a discontented aristocracy and a disturbing crowd of the newly enriched; perhaps the social strains would be reflected in their resistance to invasion.
I left my pony in a hollow, where a drainage ditch had been dug wide for the winter floods, and the receding water had left a little beach. He was trained to raiding, and would stand quietly at his picket.
Of course, my ride in enemy country had taken longer than I had planned; in my experience such things always do. The sky was reddening when I made out the black shape of Anderida against the shimmer of the sea, and I lay down in the nearest ditch until it would be light enough for me to discern the sentry. Presently I picked up the gleam of his metal helmet; he was staring out to sea as I had expected. The land gate had recently been repaired with fresh white timber, and it remained closed after the sun was fully risen; I was surprised to see so little activity at the chief entrance to the city (for no traders would nowadays come to the water gate). Presently the sleepy sentry was relieved by another; but I could see no officer going his rounds with the new guard, as Count Ambrosius had told us was the correct thing to do, and still no one bothered to open the land gate. At last the mystery was explained; from the sagging roof of the parish church came the sound of many voices singing. I tried to remember what festival of the Christians fell about this period of the summer; then suddenly I recognized the hymn they were all singing at the top of their voices, and a thousand recollections of my boyhood came flooding back; they were celebrating the Coming of the Holy Ghost in the Feast of Pentecost.
Sounds are more evocative of the past than anything you can see. I was once more a little boy, yawning through the long service, and fidgeting in the clothes that a King’s son must wear for great occasions. I wondered how they were all getting on in that mutilated and threatened fragment of the great Empire of civilization, and whether any of them were foolish enough to hope that their children’s children would still be singing Christian songs in that old, purposeless, unrepaired building a hundred years from now. I had a strange impulse to enter the city, to join the tattered remnants of the Roman army that lurked behind the moss-grown wall, and to give my life in their inevitable defeat. Then I recalled that they would at once put me to death, as the murderer of my brother. I was here to spy for their destruction, not only to enlarge the realm of my friend and patron, Aella, but because the information about my past that they might give would lead to the loss of the honourable position that I held among the barbarians. I hardened my heart and began to look more closely at the wall, where the low early-morning sun showed up every weakness in the alternate bands of brick and stone. I only mention the incident as an example of the curious pull of Christian civilization, which can be felt even by the most savage barbarians.
This was my best opportunity to get close to the wall, for no one would leave the gate while the service was in progress, and the sentry was as usual staring out to sea; in the afternoon there would be no work done, even by the slaves, and the citizens would come outside to picnic and enjoy themselves. I scampered from one bit of cover to another while the sentry’s back was turned, and soon found myself up against an angle where a semicircular bastion jutted from the curtain. The masonry was rough and irregular, a mass of unshaped flints embedded in great quantities of rough mortar. Roman mortar is made to endure for centuries, and this wall was not more than a hundred years old; but the stones that the great Theodosius had used as filling for his concrete had been gathered at random in the neighbourhood, and some of them had weathered away in the frosts and gales of a century. There were plenty of footholds for an active man, and I was still active at forty; soon I was lying full length on the ramparts.
So far so good, but I wanted a secure hiding-place where I could remain until nightfall. I saw a heap of firewood in the backyard of a large house that encroached on the pomoerium between the fortifications and the dwellings; by all the rules of city management this space should have been kept clear, so that the garrison could quickly reach any part of the defences, but I suppose the owner of the house had enough influence to disregard the laws; that has been the great weakness of all Roman rule for as long as I can remember. Anyway, there it was, and I found it a very convenient hiding-place; I burrowed in among the corded bundles of brushwood, and pulled others over me until I was safely hidden.
Nobody came poking round wood-piles on such an important holiday, and I was left undisturbed until nightfall. When it was quite dark I went boldly up the nearest stair to the ramparts, and climbed easily down the angle of the wall by the way I had entered the city. I had learnt all I needed to know: the Regnians kept a careless watch, and active men could climb quietly within the walls without raising an alarm.
I rode home rather slowly, partly because I was still depressed at the thought of th
e destruction I should bring on Anderida, and partly because I was very tired and sleepy. Daylight found me still among the sheepfolds of the Roman coloni, and they sent their dogs snarling at my horse’s heels while signal fires were lighted on the hills; but the shepherds themselves all went on foot, and they had no ambition to meddle with a well-armed Saxon who was not driving off their sheep. I rested at one of our own fortified farms, and rode into Cissas-ceaster on a very stiff and hungry pony the following afternoon.
The report I had to give was as good as could be expected. If the Romans had time to call in the shepherds from the outlying farms, and the guards who must be stationed at the edge of the Forest, any war-band that Aella could gather would be considerably outnumbered; but of course his men would be trained swordsmen, while many of the Romans would only be coloni armed with spears and clubs. What it all boiled down to was that we could easily break into the city if we could approach it unobserved; but that would be a very difficult task to accomplish, since for the last fifteen miles we should be marching through Christian territory. In theory one could surprise them from the sea, but I had seen enough to realize that in that direction they kept a very good look-out. Wlenca, who was by far the most stupid of the descendants of Woden that I have met (most of them are intelligent as well as strong), suggested that we should send a party in disguise, pretending to be travelling merchants. I had to point out that there had been no travelling merchants in our part of Britain since the Aellingas had landed. The obvious way out of the difficulty was to rely on cold-blooded treachery; Aella had been thinking of sending an embassy to delimit the frontier, and they might carry hidden arms, or rely on their seaxknives like Hengist’s men long ago. But when I put forward this plan it was badly received; they all spoke of the oaths the envoys would have to take before they were admitted to the city, and the very bad luck that generally pursued oath-breakers; Aella said that one day he might want to make a genuine peace with some other Romans, and that a reputation for dishonesty hampered a ruler in all his subsequent negotiations. They were too shy to make speeches about the sacred honour of a Saxon, but I saw that at the back of their minds was a superstitious fear of treachery.
Conscience of the King Page 16
