Conscience of the King

by Alfred Duggan

  ‘So you see that he is under the curse of all the Gods of the Family, and especially those who manage the affairs of Britain,’ Frideswitha was saying with great earnestness. ‘The raid has no chance of success under an accursed leader, and we shall be defeated and slain in the first battle. I would not mind for myself, I am his wife and have sworn to share his good and evil fortune; but there is my son to consider. I come to you because I know that you will serve me faithfully.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, my lady,’ answered the double-dealing old ruffian. ‘I served your father thirty years ago, and now I take orders from you, not from that parricide. At the crisis of the first battle I shall get behind him, and give him a whack with my shield on his swordarm; when he is disarmed some Roman will do the rest, and there will be no wound from a Saxon weapon to make men suspect treachery. Then your noble son will succeed to the command, and the gods will be on our side.’

  ‘Yes, Boda. That is a good plan. Get him killed without raising suspicion of foul play, and I will see that Cynric appoints you chief captain. Now turn away while I sit on the rail, as though I had come up here to relieve myself.’

  I pulled my head in and lay down. I now knew that I had two deadly enemies aboard my own ship; the first question to answer was whether there were more of them. On the whole, I thought not; it seemed from what I had overheard that my wife had just opened the subject for the first time, and to the man on board whom she most trusted. Once I had dealt with the two traitors any other discontented comrade would be awed by the bad luck that had befallen them and would conclude that the gods were on my side after all.

  For I had quite made up my mind that it would be unwise to take action openly. If I just put my sword into my wife without giving any explanation I should start a blood feud with her kin, and perhaps Cynric would turn against me also; I could not bring her to a formal trial without making public the whole story of my father’s death, and if I just packed her off home to Germany she would still intrigue against me. I must arrange for an accident to Frideswitha as soon as possible. Boda could wait; he was not the man to start a plot, though he would carry out anything that strong-willed woman planned for him.

  So that afternoon my decision was made. But time was pressing, for it was not more than two days’sail to the Sea of Vectis, and we would probably have to fight as soon as we landed. Luckily the calm continued that night, and we remained off the Gallic coast. It would be foolish to arrive in Britain with the warriors exhausted by long rowing, and we wanted to cover the last few miles, after we had been seen by the defenders, as quickly as possible.

  Soon after dawn a strong easterly breeze sprang up, which would take us to our destination with full sails and no tiresome labour. The ship bowled along at a good rate, with her four consorts in line abreast. When we were in mid-Channel the coast of Britain began to show clearly, and naturally the crew clustered in the bows with their eyes fixed on the outline of their new home. I went to the little stern-platform, and took over the steering oar myself, for we were getting into waters where I had gone fishing as a boy. I called Frideswitha, and began to point out to her the eastern entrance to the Sea of Vectis. A Roman fishing-boat had recognized us and panicked; the fishermen were trying to get away with oars and sail, and our men were watching to see if we could overtake them. I put my back against the steering oar, so that I had both hands free, and nudged my wife in the ribs to make her turn towards me. As her head came round I hit her with all my force on the point of the jaw, and then gave her a jab in the stomach with the other hand that sent her tumbling into the sea. I shouted to the crew, and abandoned the steering oar to run to the mast; the men were all in the bows, and I got to the mast-head first, which was the trickiest part of my plan. I did not want some officious and keen-eyed ass to keep her in sight while the ship came up into the wind.

  It all worked out perfectly. The tide was running strongly up Channel, and the body was swept away as the unsteered ship hung in the wind. At first the crew all rushed to the side, and several vital moments passed before anyone thought of taking over the steering oar; many were landsmen making their first voyage, and such people always think that because a ship can move fast in one direction it can be made to go wherever you want as easily as a horse. At last old Boda came to his senses and took over the helm; but from the mast-head I conned us wide of the floating body, and once we were downwind of her they had to get out the oars before we could continue the search. Presently I saw her sink for the last time, though a woman’s clothes keep her afloat much longer than you might expect. We gave up the search, and continued our voyage to Britain.

  It was a very merciful death to give to a woman who had plotted the murder of her husband, and perhaps in strict justice I should have thought out something more elaborate and painful. But I had always been rather fond of Frideswitha; not, of course, as a man is fond of a pretty girl, she was too old for that and she had never been beautiful; but as someone with an adult mind, with whom I could discuss my plans. I am glad she had no time to see death approaching, and drowned without a cry.

  We had lost more than an hour of the favouring tide, and our fleet was widely scattered. By the time we had picked up our formation there was not much daylight left, and I gave orders that we should anchor for the night off the coast of Vectis. I wanted to have a talk with Boda before we landed; he must have guessed that the death of Frideswitha was more than an accident, and he would keep his sword handy and his back up against something solid while I was about; but he was a sensible man, and I might be able to come to an arrangement with him. I was prepared to offer him a good bribe to go away and keep his mouth shut, but he spared me that expense. As soon as it was dark he must have slipped over the side and swum ashore; next morning he was missing, and I have never heard of him since; I suppose the Jutish raiders who use the island as a base knocked him on the head for his weapons. The whole affair was nicely tidied up, and since then no one has tried to put Cynric on my throne, nor has he rebelled of his own accord.

  In the morning we penetrated the inland sea, our sails set to a favourable wind, but with oars ready to keep us clear of the numerous shoals. We had to steer a winding course, which meant that we were observed from the mainland for some hours before we landed, and the local inhabitants had plenty of time to gather their forces to oppose us. This was a disadvantage, for no one fights his best after a tiring and cramping voyage, and the enemy would bury their valuables before we could start plundering. But I did not greatly fear any levy that could be raised on the shores of the Sea of Vectis.

  Ever since I can remember that land has been without a ruler. To the west lies the powerful Kingdom of the Dumnonians, and on the east was once the Kingdom of the Regni; it is always a sensible plan to have a desert on your boundary, and neither my father nor the Dumnonian King had given much help when pirates landed to ransack again the ruins of the once flourishing city of Portus. That city had suffered a nasty civil war soon after the Emperor’s authority was withdrawn from Britain, and its trade had vanished when the sea became unsafe for merchants. Presently it had been deserted, like so many other cities of Britain. By the time I was a young man, twenty-five years before I landed with my army of Saxons, the whole district had lost its Roman civilization; there was no central authority, gathering taxes and paying a comitatus, between Regnum and Dumnonia. That is not to say that the country was entirely empty. Anyone who took the trouble to clear away the trees would find rich soil underneath, and there were plenty of Romans who preferred to live in a land without law; they would be exceptionally tough warriors, but there ought not to be very many of them, and they would probably not unite under one leader. We expected that we could face them in open battle.

  Soon after midday we rowed up a little creek in the shore of the mainland that I am proud to say is still called Cerdics-ora, meaning Cerdic’s landing-place. The five ships were close together and we were able to drive the bows into soft mud and run ashore dryshod. A few Romans had co
llected to oppose our landing, but we were three hundred strong, much more numerous than the average party of raiders, and we must have outnumbered them considerably; we soon drove them from the battlefield, without ourselves suffering much loss. It was Cynric’s first battle, and the dear boy exposed himself freely; but I had seen to it that he had a good bodyguard of experienced veterans, and no harm came to him. In one way it is a good thing to win a reputation for courage in early youth, for it is very hard to lose afterwards, and gathers good men to the war-band; but I had a serious talk with him that evening, and explained that there was no point in my founding a Kingdom if I had no heir to succeed me. He promised to take more care of himself in future.

  Now we were established on the coast, and the perennial question of what to do with our ships had to be settled. Of course, we had made up our minds to live permanently in Britain, and we did not need them to take us back to Germany; on the other hand, ships are valuable possessions, and I could not bear to watch them burn. Finally I sent away all five, with very small crews; four were to be exchanged for good presents, after the German manner of selling, and the largest was to come back carrying the crews of the other four, and a few recruits as well. We would have to wait in a fortified camp until it returned; but that would be in about six weeks, and the neighbourhood would supply us for that time.

  We lived peacefully in our camp for two months. There was no local ruler who could bring a regular comitatus into the field against us, and the Dumnonians were on the defensive now that they had no organized Roman state to the east of them. My present territory was at one end of the wide belt of devastated country that stretched through the middle of Britain, I believe right up to the Kingdom of Elmetia somewhere near Eboracum; there was no ruler who felt it his duty to turn me out at all costs.

  All the same, I was not satisfied with our present hunting ground; for the land immediately north of the Sea of Vectis is so thickly wooded and so little cultivated that it is a hunting ground and nothing more. A gang of hunters with wooden clubs, who had forgotten their laws and lived bestially in small family groups, was no sort of inheritance to leave to Cynric.

  Also we were too near the coast. I am told that the Empire still lingers on at the eastern end of the Middle Sea, but it will be many generations before a powerful fleet brings law and order to the pirates of the Channel. I have seen from my boyhood what a terrible drain it is on the resources of a Kingdom always to keep a look-out for raiders from the sea; I did not want Cynric to spend his life sitting on the beach waiting for news of pirates, and incessantly driving his cattle to shelter. I must go inland, to a hilly country where beacon-fires would give good warning of the approach of enemies, and where there was open grass for farmers to plough.

  But I had to persuade my followers of this, for if I gave them orders that they did not like they could march off and join the South Saxons on our eastern border. In any case we would have to winter at Cerdics-ora, since it was too late to plant corn. We did not have a very good time, but we managed somehow with deer from the woods and fish from the streams. I kept my men together as much as possible, so that they would feel they were one community, and in the evenings we held long discussions about our future plans, in which I tried to guide them to fall in with my ideas. Cynric was a great help to me; he was always cheerful and active, even when food was scarce, and the younger men would follow him anywhere. He will make a splendid ruler for the organized Kingdom I have founded after so many years of gruelling warfare.

  There was another point on which I tried to influence my men to comply with my wishes. The real wild Germans of Germany, who have had no contact with Rome, are in the habit of burying with their dead most of the valuable possessions of the corpse; it is a pious idea, and a strange contrast to their usual appalling avarice. But in our present situation we really could not afford to bury good swords and golden arm-rings in the earth. We needed all the treasure we could muster, and I set myself to alter the religious prejudices of my men.

  This was not as difficult as you might expect, for the Germans are not a religious people; they are sensible enough to be nervous about the future, and they take what precautions they can; but they themselves do not believe that their sacrifices have much effect, for the gods are fundamentally hostile to mankind. Furthermore, they have an uncomfortable feeling that other people know more about the supernatural than they do, and any outlandish wizard impresses them enormously. I had been careful not to bring with me any holy men, and of course we could not set up sanctuaries in this new land until someone had dreamt the appropriate dream; we got on very comfortably that winter without any religion at all, and were none the worse for it. I had hopes that when we moved north in the spring they would bury the dead with nothing more than their best clothes; especially as we had no women with us, who are always the conservatives. There was not a single woman in the camp, which was rather unusual; Frideswitha’s servant had been drowned as an offering to the ghost of her mistress, and I ordered that no Roman women should be caught alive. I did not want Cynric to get into any entanglement before he was safely married to a Woden-born girl with a good dowry.

  Our numbers were slightly greater than when we had landed, for we had lost few men in battle, and there had been no serious sickness; while the ship had arrived with reinforcements. That ship was a great bother; I could not bear to part with it, but I did not want to split the army by leaving it guarded. When we were ready to march in the spring I put on board a small crew, and sent it back to Germany to bring more men. For miles to the north the land was empty and uncultivated, and I could promise good farms to all who joined me. These farmers are not the best type of recruit for serious fighting, being mostly poor and badly armed; but if I picked my way carefully I ought to be able to reach open country without rousing any Roman King against us.

  During winter hunting parties had scouted the neighbourhood thoroughly, and I knew the lie of the land. The abandoned ruins of Venta and Calleva lay attractively just to the east of our line of march, but I regretfully decided that it would be unwise to take them over just yet. Nobody lived in them, but the South Saxons might regard them as within their sphere of influence, and I did not want to start a war with the settlers on our eastern border. I could not diverge to the west without bringing the fierce Dumnonians on my track, but there were several alternative routes, since most of the rivers in that land flow southward. Some hunters had found a good track leading overland to the westernmost of these rivers, which was called the Avon (like half the streams in Britain). From the look of the winter floods I guessed it must rise in chalky country, and as the chalk will not bear forest there must be a stretch of open land between us and the Thames valley. This was the gateway to Britain that I chose.

  In the beginning of May in the year 496 we set off to found our Kingdom. We were about three hundred and twenty strong, all fighting-men without a single woman or child. Aella had founded South Saxony with less; but that had been on the coast, in sight of the pirate ships that could reinforce him or take him back to Germany. I could not conceal from myself that an attack on the inland country was a more risky undertaking.

  We advanced for two days, and had covered about thirty miles when we emerged on to the uplands. These were rugged hills, much steeper than the smooth crests of the land by the Channel, and as always with chalk it was hard to find drinking water; the grass was rougher than I had expected, and there did not seem to be many sheep about.

  The inhabitants were the greatest surprise of all. I thought I knew southern Britain, and the kind of people who lived in it; if I had been asked to describe them I would have said that they were the ordinary type of citizen, growing more and more barbarous as order decayed, and beginning to copy the Saxon method of fighting; at the very bottom of the scale were a class of coloni who spoke Celtic in their homes, though of course their masters ordered them about in Latin and their tools and methods of cultivation were Roman. But this rugged plain was covered with little hill-
top villages where Celts ploughed with the implements that their ancestors used before Caesar came to Britain; they spoke no language but Celtic, and seemed to pay rent to no landowner. The only possible explanation was that no one had ever interfered with such a poor district.

  Quite recently someone must have taken an interest in the land, for on its northern border was a great entrenchment that did not look to be a hundred years old. My men were worried for fear the builders of such a mighty work might come and chase them into the sea; but I guessed that it had been built by the Dumnonians when Saxon mercenaries first came to the upper Thames, and abandoned soon after, when they realized that those savages were not dangerous. My followers called it the Ditch of Woden, which to them was a satisfactory explanation of any remarkable object that they could not have made for themselves; it was a complete waste of labour, in any case, and had no influence at all on the course of future campaigns.

  I did my best to get into touch with the miserable Celts who lurked on the hill-tops, but without success; they always fled when I sent an envoy to negotiate with them. The trouble is that nowadays no one trusts a Saxon even when he wants to make peace, and of course I was quite unable to persuade my men to spare the life of anyone they caught while he was running away. In that respect Saxons are like greyhounds, and just as impossible to stop once the pursuit has begun. So I learned nothing of the history of that part of the country; probably the brutish Celtic peasants could have told me very little.