I Am the Chosen King

by Helen Hollick

  “If it rains again, I fear for the village. Will the crypt flood if the waters break through the abbey walls?” Edyth mused aloud.

  Harold sat up, yawned and wrapped a fur around his nakedness to join his woman at the window. Leaning his hands on the sill, he peered out. Cattle, sheep, swine had all been moved these last few days to higher ground, were grazing uneasy in more cramped conditions. A few families, those with house places close by the river, had taken what possessions they could and moved to safer havens. Others, belligerently, intended to stay. His son, Goddwin, among them.

  “There is a story,” he said, encircling Edyth with his arms, bringing her close under his fur, “that Cnut once proved he was only a mere mortal by attempting—and failing—to turn back the tide. We need God’s hand to help stem this rise of water, for I fear, like Cnut, no man can stop it.” He kissed the tip of her nose. How he had missed her these last months—and only these next two or three to be with her before Edward wanted him to go off again? Dissension was reheating in southern Wales, but at least Wales could be quashed. Normandy and Tostig were not going to be so easily controlled. Sodding Normandy and bloody Tostig! What was to be done with the both of them—what could be done? And even if there was anything, would Edward do it? Harold doubted it.

  As long as the King lived for three, four more years. As long as Edgar was allowed by God to come to manhood. His eyes searched the water glistening along the valley. The river banks needed shoring up with turfs, mud, stones, anything that might hold the water at bay. As did England. A tide of danger was rising to the north and across the Channel Sea. Either it would recede and the danger would pass, or the defences would break and the flood tide pour in to engulf them.

  “I do not know what to do about this ambitious greed of my brother and the Duke,” Harold admitted to Edyth. “I feel like I am stuck, holding everything at bay as best I may, while the water gushes between my feet.”

  “Tostig will find his own course, surely? You have warned him to tread with care; beyond that, what can you do? This thing is for him and the North to settle, is it not?” She was uncertain if that was so, for if it was, why would Harold be so anxious? Would an uprising in the North adversely affect the South? As far as she could see, these grumbles were the same as the troubles in Wales. A diplomatic intervention, a show of disciplined strength and the dissent would be smoothed. At least for a while.

  “Mayhap Tostig will see that he is pushing men’s patience over-far. We can only hope he does, but Normandy…” Harold released a lengthy sigh. “I fear that Duke William does not possess a half-ounce of sense in his smallest finger, let alone his worm-addled brain.”

  Something caught Harold’s attention; he leant forward, squinted out of the window. A rider was coming, fast, from the direction of Goddwin’s steading, “Someone comes, I think there’s trouble.”

  They dressed rapidly and went to meet the rider, one of Goddwin’s retainers, as he pulled a sweating horse to a standstill.

  “My Lord,” he panted, “my master bids that you come with all available men. The river is about to break its bank. If it cannot be held, the steading will be lost.”

  Within ten minutes, Harold was riding at a fast canter down the hill with fifty of the manor’s men, all of them knowing that there was little to be done but that they had to try.

  Edyth’s instinct shouted at her to ride with them, to help bale and build, but her practical self knew otherwise. She would take down food and ale, then fetch back those who, for their own safety, could no longer reside in the valley. Among them Frytha. Goddwin’s wife would have to leave her home, although she would protest and grumble as was her tedious way, but with their second child due within six weeks, she would have no choice. Edyth sighed, resigned. Not that she welcomed Frytha’s dour company, but it seemed she too had no choice.

  The water was sloshing over the river bank, running into the meadow. Twenty yards beyond stood the steading courtyard and its buildings, the winter-stocked barn, house place, sty, kennel and stable. Goddwin himself was standing in the river, stripped to the waist, taking his turn at heaving the cut slabs of turf into a secondary bank. If they could only shore up this stretch so that the water would break through lower down into the western fields, then perhaps the farm would be safer. An inch or two of river water would cause little harm. Let this portion of the bank give way, though, and the flood would do untold damage.

  Leaving the horses tethered on higher ground, Harold and his men ran to join Goddwin’s, who were already mud-spattered, sodden and weary.

  Seeing his father, Goddwin stood a moment, fists at his hips, catching his breath. They had spoken once only since Harold’s return, and that a curt exchange. Now Goddwin still said nothing, but words were no longer necessary. He held out his broad hand as his father came up to the bank to take his proffered clasp, readily acknowledging his son’s unspoken gesture of thanks. Quickly, Harold removed his cloak and tunic, lowered himself into the water alongside Goddwin and the line of desperate men, and took hold of a clod of turf to pack it into the makeshift wall. Then another and another. The river reached to mid-thigh, the slippery mud beneath his boots uncertain, the water cold. Once, his footing gave way and he fell, tumbling backwards into the mud-swirl current. Goddwin, with a cry of alarm, lurched to grab at him, help him regain his balance.

  Harold grinned, wet hair dripping into his eyes. “I’m trying to decide,” he said amicably, grasping his son’s arm and allowing his quickened breathing to settle, “whether ’tis better to do battle with this damned river, or pluck up the courage to inform Duke William that I want to chain myself to him as much as I’d welcome a constipated turd in my bowels.”

  “Which is the greater threat?” Goddwin asked, heaving another turf to the top of the reinforced bank. So far they were winning, the thing was holding, but the tide would have been rushing up the Thames by now and would be sweeping up the tributary of the Lea.

  “That is what makes decisions hard, lad,” Harold panted, scooping mud to fill the cracks. “Which takes precedence, danger to yourself and your immediate family, or to the wider spread of the people you hold responsibility for? You or your country?”

  Goddwin was about to answer that family must come first, but he had no chance to form the words, for the river suddenly swirled and lifted. Water seeped through the wall they had just laboured so hard to build, finding cracks, areas of softer mud, lighter turfs not so well clamped down. A trickle or two became three and four, more, became a gush of water. Frantically Goddwin attempted to stem the flow, cover the widening holes; men, shouting with fear, were scrabbling from the river, running from the crumbling bank. Harold heaved himself from the water, leant down to grasp his son’s arm, angrily pulling him out. “Leave it!” he bellowed. “Leave it, it’s going to go!”

  As the turf and the natural bank collapsed in a seething torrent of overspilling water, Harold clasped his son’s arm; together they waded and battled their way through the flood. Already water was swirling at the walls of barn and Hall, creeping under doors, sucking at the timbers.

  They stumbled to the rising land of the north pasture and stood, panting and defeated. Nothing now would stop the river as it cascaded over the bank and into Goddwin’s home.

  A chicken, squawking with terror, wings flapping, sailed by, clinging desperately to a floating log. A basket full of sodden wool bobbed past; a cooking pot. The steading was lost. Harold stood, one hand resting in offered comfort on his son’s shoulder, looking out over it all. Trees, buildings, all so rapidly half submerged. The mud and silt and debris that would lie foul and stinking, when the water receded.

  At least this building could be cleared and rebuilt. How much damage would his brother’s thirst for power cause? A mere trickle, a full flood—or annihilation? And Duke William? How much of a threat was he to England? If Edward lived and Edgar came of age, then none at all. But what if Edward fell ill,
or met with an accident while hunting? What then for England, should William rise and batter at the cracking, insubstantial banks?

  There was nothing more to be done in this part of the valley, save wait for the water to go down. Perhaps if they had been better prepared, if the banks had been strengthened earlier…perhaps.

  There is little I can do to divert Tostig from his track of madness, Harold thought as he and his son walked to where the horses waited. But I can keep an eye to Normandy. Wait and see whether the tide rises.

  ***

  That night, with the thick curtaining pulled close around the bed and with an iced wind beginning to moan through the thatch and rafters, Harold lay with Edyth, their bodies entwined after the giving and taking of shared love.

  “There will never be another woman that I love as much as you, Edyth,” Harold said into the darkness.

  Edyth snuggled herself closer to his firm solidity. “Love,” she said, her breath brushing his chest, “has little to do with marriage.”

  “Nothing at all,” he answered. A pause, a minute, two. Which takes precedence, he thought, echoing his words to Goddwin earlier in the day, danger to yourself and your immediate family, or…your country?

  The selfish choice of his family’s need was the obvious one to make, but he was responsible for a wider family, for Wessex and, perhaps, if God was not prepared to give them time, for all England. If Edward were to die before Edgar was old enough then, without doubt, William would make a bid for the throne. That Harold could not allow. Nor could he allow Tostig to unleash a civil war.

  With surprising calm, he said, “I do not intend, for the foreseeable future at least, to annul this betrothal with William’s daughter. He backed me into a corner, but that does not mean I am defeated. If I escape his trap by allying with him as son-in-law, then that is what I shall do. Although I intend to secure my position before any formal wedding may take place.”

  Edyth made no comment.

  “There is a chance,” he added, his words coming slowly as the thoughts formed more clearly in his mind, his hand gently stroking the softness of her chamomile-scented, unbound hair, “that I may decide to proffer myself to the Council as ætheling, should there be no suitable successor. I cannot let England stand vulnerable.”

  Edyth made no answer, no movement. Her only thought was that Harold had taken a damned long while to see the only possible path open to him.

  8

  Britford

  As the summer green had mellowed to autumn reds and golds, rebellion in Northumbria flared from a few feeble sparks into a full, wind-fanned blaze. Individual grievances varied but amounted, in the end, to much the same thing—a hatred of Tostig.

  Once too often had he used the law to claim land for himself from those who opposed him—it was not only the estates of Gamal Ormsson and Ulf Dolfinsson, of Gospatric Uhtredsson, that had been taken into the Earl’s private keeping. Settlements, farm-steadings, a few hides here, two or three more there…gradually Tostig was building his holding of land and wealth by taking what he could in forfeit of alleged crimes and supposedly unpaid debts, while more and more families found themselves destitute or outlawed.

  Taxes were to be collected at the end of the summer, the joyous time of harvest, but this year of the Lord 1065, there was little celebration north of the Humber river. By decree of Earl Tostig, the tax demand was, once again, to rise. The North, mistrustful of ambitious magpies from the South and already crippled beneath the financial burden, finally broke and refused to pay.

  Tostig Godwinesson’s heavy hand had become too much for it. The Earl cared as little for the northern land-folk as he did for the desolate land itself. He had no patience with the local dialects, which he found unintelligible and coarse; he sneered at the poverty; found no reason to endanger the lives of his housecarls in pointless reprisal against Scots raiders. As long as the troubles did not come uncomfortably close to his palace at York, Tostig reckoned there was little worth fighting over. If Malcolm of Scotland wanted a few more mangy sheep, had nothing better to do than burn a few peasants’ crofts, then let the fool waste his time and energy.

  Tostig rarely travelled further north than York—occasionally he visited Durham, where he was received well, but then he and his lady, Countess Judith, had always supported the cathedral with lavish gifts and donations—nor did he remain in his earldom any longer than he deemed necessary. Late spring to autumn sufficed. By mid-September he was riding south to join King Edward in Wiltshire, where the hunting was especially fine. Coincidence, of course, that his leaving occurred just as his tax gatherers set out with their neatly written documents, oxen-hauled wagons and swords hung loose at their sides in case of trouble.

  The rebellion began on an estate where a sudden skirmish led to the accidental slaying of a tax collector, and escalated rapidly. A few disgruntled thegns joined with aggrieved freemen—ah, it did not take long for one flame to become fire. They marched south, the band swelling into an army as with each mile more men—young, old, rich and poor, armed with axe, sword, hoe and pitchfork—gathered together in protest against southern tyranny. Their destination, York, Earl Tostig’s capital.

  He had misjudged the smouldering anger. Through the rain-wet summer his spies and scouts had not informed him of the growing discontent, for they too had northern blood. On the third day of October the rebel army reached their destination. The city threw open its gates in welcome, and all who supported the absent Earl were slaughtered without mercy, housecarls, retainers and servants. The heads of tax collectors were hoisted to feed the carrion crows above Micklagata, where criminals and rogues were ignominiously displayed—where, not so long past, Tostig had ordered the heads of Gamal Ormsson and Ulf Dolfinsson be put.

  The northern aristocracy of elders, thegns and nobles took possession of Tostig’s considerable arsenal and treasury and, seizing the opportunity to be permanently rid of the damned man, declared him outlaw and elected to continue south to take their grievances direct to the King.

  Northumbria had successfully risen against degradation and oppression, and in consequence a lord of high influence decided not to stand in the way of this flood-tide of anger. Eadwine of Mercia stepped quietly aside as the Northumbrians swept southward, making no attempt to bar the men from swathing a path through his earldom.

  But then, Eadwine had his own reason for supporting the rise of the North against Tostig of Wessex. Astutely, the noble-born who had raised the rebellion had invited Eadwine’s landless younger brother, Morkere, to lead them. Morkere, son of Ælfgar, grandson of Leofric of Mercia, the North had unanimously declared, would be the more suitable and acceptable earl.

  Edward, when he heard, was furious. Rarely did he concern himself with things that interrupted his hunting, but this, this would not be tolerated. That they were not rebelling against him, their king, made no difference. The North had insulted and condemned Tostig, his most favoured friend; the insult was as deeply thrust at himself. At his integrity, judgement and word of law.

  Clench-jawed, the King sat on his throne within the small timber-built Hall at his manor of Britford, a few miles from Salisbury. Before him stood two messengers sent by the Council of the North, as that rabble called itself. At his side was Tostig, his fingers clenched around his sword hilt, face suffused with rage. Twice, Edward had to restrain his earl’s arm, else the lad would have been down off the dais and slitting those two ignorant imbeciles’ traitorous throats.

  How they had the gall to stand there and make demands, Edward could not conceive. To reinstate the law-code of Cnut, that Tostig had reneged upon; to remove him from office forthwith, replace him with Earl Morkere, duly elected by themselves. Effectively, the Anglo-Scandinavian population of Northumbria had reasserted its ancient right to independent authority, had demanded self-government.

  Enraged, Edward had the messengers stripped of their clothing and thrown out of the gate
s of Britford. Let them ride naked back to Northampton where their scum friends waited. He sent no reply with them, his action taking the place of words.

  Harold ran his hand through his hair, exasperated. For several hours now had they talked around the same circle: Tostig being openly accused by the King’s hastily summoned Council of bringing the trouble on himself by his hard-fisted misgovernment; Tostig angrily countering by dismissing the rebellion as organised dissent by the Earl of Mercia and his cock-poxed brother.

  “They are the sons of Ælfgar!” he shouted, hammering his clenched fist on to the table. “And we all remember what a traitorous whoreson he was!”

  Nursing the remnants of a head-cold, Harold was bone-tired and resented being summoned from the comfort of his manor—and Edyth’s bed—by an accursed, imbecile brother.

  “Eadwine and Morkere are not like their father,” he interjected. “Eadwine has more sense in his little finger than Ælfgar possessed in his entire brain.”

  Tostig, his pride wounded, his confidence shaken, rounded on him. “Oh, aye, you would defend Eadwine! You were hunting with him not a month since—and more than your eyes have shown an interest in the sister, Alditha. You have always been sniffling round her Welsh-soiled skirts like a panting dog in search of a gutter bitch.”

  Controlling his temper with efficiency—but great difficulty—Harold considered allowing the absurd accusation to pass. His brother seemed incapable of listening to any voice that urged sense, but the untruth was too damning to let lie.

  “I remind you that I am already betrothed to Duke William’s daughter, Agatha. One such betrothal is sufficient. I do not especially want a wife of alliance, being content with the woman I already have; I most certainly do not want to court two of them!” He leant back in his chair, swallowing the burn of a sore throat and stuffed nose. The tankard of warm honey and wild garlic that he had sipped was empty. He could do with some more. “I was with Eadwine a month or so back, aye, but then so were our brothers, Earls Leofwine and Gyrth.” Harold indicated the two men sitting together on the opposite side of the table. “Do you accuse them of the same as you do me? And what exactly, brother Tostig, do you accuse me of?”