The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  The shore was sandy, a fine white sand, scalloped into small bays, the water shallow and calm so they could paddle along in it and keep their feet cool. Behind it lay aromatic woods of pines whose canopies were shaped like the ceremonial umbrellas carried by Nubian slaves above the heads of Viziers, Ambassadors, Counsellors and the like. A breeze nicked snowy scars from the blue-black wavelets and fleets of fishing boats dragged their nets through the teeming sea.

  ‘Quint,’ Walt said, after walking an hour in near silence, during which they had remarked only on the beauties about them, ‘I cannot continue to use and abuse your generosity. I have no money. I have no prospect of gaining any unless I take to brigandage. And a pretty poor brigand I’d be with only this,’ he raised his nobbly red stump, ‘and no other weapon.’

  Quint smiled at him, his lips lengthening beneath the sandy, thin, unkempt moustache. But he said nothing. They splashed on for five minutes and Walt felt his heart grow heavy and tears of frustration began to prick his eyes.

  ‘I am, when all is said and done, a useless thing, a tattered cloak upon a stick and good for nothing.’ His voice was bitter now, bitter and angry.

  ‘You’re company. Travel with no company is bread without salt. I like the way you talk. To hear a man talk of what he has done, where he has been, who he has known, who he has loved and who hated, of the passions that have possessed him, is worth a few coppers.’

  Quint’s head was up now, the strong almost beaky nose questing from under the brim of his hat, his eyes on far away places.

  ‘You see,’ he went on? ‘I have actually done nothing. Oh, I travel. I look at things. I learn languages - very easily - and I listen and sometimes I talk. But I do . . . nothing. I have no wife, no children. No occupation. I do not labour, I do not fight, I do not hate, I do not love.

  I have neither killed a man nor fucked a woman. I like to hear the tales of those who have.’

  Presently, shortly after noon, with the sun now hotter than was comfortable, they came upon a wider bay than the rest with a promontory of rocks and a ruined hermitage. As they walked the wet sand towards it both men noticed how small dark holes appeared every now and then in the surface, emitted a small bubble, and then closed again.

  ‘Clams,’ said Walt.

  ‘Yes.’

  Quint unslung his pack, delved in it and pulled up first a long wooden spoon, then a wooden bowl. Stooping he scooped in the sand with the spoon and presently came up with a handsome bi-valve, a good four inches across and coloured bright chestnut with mother of pearl at the join of the shells. The long pseudo-leg of the creature slipped inside and the shells clicked shut. He stooped again.

  ‘But how will we purge them?’ Walt asked. He knew about clams, had first dug for them in the sands of Wexford Bay some seventeen years before. He had learnt then that if they are not placed several times in fresh water, which the clam is forced to take in and spew out, the meat will be filled with unpalatable grit.

  Quint gestured towards the hermitage. ‘Anchorites are, if you ask me, the silliest of men, but even they do not set themselves up in sanctity without a reasonable supply of fresh water close at hand.’

  He continued to spoon away at the sand and, when they had four each, declared more would be greedy. A short causeway followed by a brief climb over rocks brought them to the tiny chapel and the even smaller cell abutting it. This had a shelf five feet long, two from the ground and a scant foot wide.

  ‘His Holiness’s bed,’ Quint remarked.

  ‘But where’s his water?’

  They scouted about but there was no sign of spring or well.

  ‘Perhaps he went up into the woods?’

  ‘No. Lazy bastards, hermits. That’s the point of being a hermit.’

  They went back into the chapel. It was now bereft of any moveable ornament, though the plastered walls were painted with remarkable representations of the Temptations of St Antony - the devils disguised as naked courtesans were especially life-like and painted with a natural vigour more in keeping with Roman than Byzantine art. Or so said Quint. Meanwhile Walt noticed how a flag-stone near the door rocked beneath his foot. Stooping he got his one set of finger ends in the crack and heaved. When Quint saw what he was doing he came to help him and together they lifted the stone. There was a ring on the underside and a rope attached to it, and sure enough a staved bucket at the other end. The water was sweet and cold.

  ‘You see,’ cried Quint, ‘already you have earned the coppers I paid for your ferry fare.’

  To anyone in a hurry the next hour or so would have been tedious. Seven times they changed the water in the bucket before they were satisfied that the clams had ceased to exude sand and grit, and then they had to collect stones to make a fireplace, enough wood to boil a pot of water, and enough tinder to light the wood. Quint’s capacious pack, of course, held flint, an iron lode to strike it on, and a pot -- the latter being tinned copper and just big enough to hold the bi-valves.

  ‘So,’ said Quint, at the outset of all this, ‘how was it you learnt the purging of clams?’

  A summer’s day, but unlike any he remembered from previous summers spent on or beneath Hambledon Hill. For a start he has never seen so much sky, not even from Hambledon’s highest rampart. Then there is the sea. A very different thing from the monstrous deep he crossed three days earlier from Porlock to Wexford. In the open boat he was terrified, drenched, and of course sea-sick. Now it is a matter of white breakers storming out of water grey-green where the sun shines, bruise-purple beneath the rolling clouds. They rush their swirls of foam up the sands, a great swathe of sand stretching as far as the eye can see, with a grassy dune behind it. Only to the south and behind him is there a break in it, the turreted mole of Wexford harbour hiding the small town, castle and port.

  There are four of them, all boys between the ages of eight and twelve, Walt being the second oldest at eleven. Dragged from their pallets in the stables before day-break, they have spent most of the morning in various forms of pre-martial exercise directed by an ancient Sergeant-at-Arms who bellows at them most horribly. He makes them fight each other with a variety of toy weapons which yet can leave a cut or nasty bruise, and he slashes the bare backs of their legs with a cane if their exchange of blows lacks conviction.

  At nine in the morning they are given a breakfast of rye bread soaked in milk still warm from the udder and told to wait in a corner of the castle yard until a Father Patrick comes to teach them their catechism. But that particular morning the reverend never came. They grew bored. They especially resented the way they were ignored. There was much bustle and toing and froing. Harold and his younger brother Leofwine came out of the great hall and mounted their horses . . .

  ‘Harold? Harold Godwinson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Already you were part of his household? So young?’

  ‘I was to be a housecarl . . .’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘One of a chosen group of warriors, closest to their lord, sworn to fight for him and defend him. Such men must be brave, loyal, well-skilled in all the arts of war, and, of course, fit for their duties in body and mind.’

  ‘So the training starts early?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How were you chosen?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I remember a retinue of people came through. We had a kitten. Called Wyn. Frightened by the horses she ran up an apple tree and would not come down. I went up after her and she jumped like a squirrel into the next tree and I followed her, caught her - a brindled little thing she was, all tiny claws and teeth and spitting - but I caught her and brought her down. The earl’s men praised my agility and courage and took me away with them.’

  Presently, the oldest of us, Wulfric, who knows about the sea since he was a Dane from Sandwich in the Earldom of Kent, says, ‘Bugger this, let’s go down the beach.’ And that’s where we are now and he is teaching us to dig for clams. We have perhaps a score or more, smaller than these, bluish in colour, an
d he has just finished explaining how they should be purged in fresh water before they are put in the pot when we hear the racing thudding of hooves through sand and water and looking back towards Wexford see nine or ten riders on horses thundering towards us, the sun behind them so they stand out black against the sea and sky, with the standards and pennants streaming above them, and these men, in cloaks and chain-mail, helmeted too as if for battle, wheel round and about us, herding us together, smacking at us with the flats of their swords, bumping us with the shoulders and rumps of their horses, and throwing back their heads in mocking laughter.

  But two stay apart from the rest and watch. One was Harold Godwinson . . .

  ‘What was he like? In appearance, I mean.’

  ‘Then? Then he was what? Thirty years old or thereabouts. He was . . . magnificent. He had long brown hair that shone with fire when the light caught it, moustache and beard which also he wore long but kept well-trimmed and curled. The English fashion for shaving beards came a few years later. His eyes, grey or blue according to the light, were kind when nothing angered him, but flashed bolts if something did. But mostly kind and laughing. Three things made him laugh. In battle he laughed like a trumpet, in wine he laughed like a river, and in bed, with a woman, or even if he saw a woman passing by in all her beauty, in a dance, or bearing a cup, or with a baby at her breast he laughed . . . like a god.’

  With him now he has a lady. She is young, perhaps no more than sixteen, mounted on a palfrey filly that is restless but she has a switch of willow which the filly is learning to respect though she continues to circle and kick the sand. The lady has long dark hair braided beneath a snood held in place with a gold circlet. Her cloak is purple but the robe beneath is white. She rides with both knees on one side, with a special saddle. Her hands are long and white, but strong on the reins. Her eyes smile and laugh like Harold’s, save when she shows temper at her mount, and her mouth, unpainted though it is, is full and red. But her most striking beauty is her neck which gives the name she is known by . . .

  ‘Edith Swan-Neck.’

  ‘Exactly so. The only woman he loved. She bore him a child seven months after he left Wexford.’

  ‘What happened then? These other men, who were teasing, goading, bullying you? Who were they?’

  ‘Housecarls. Harold never went anywhere without some in attendance -- as body-guards, messengers if need be, whatever . . .

  The taunting and railing, the blows and shoves and pushes, are now frightening, have become more than a game. One housecarl especially, a red-headed brute, seems determined to drive us into deeper water, drown us perhaps. He has us herded almost up to our waists to just the point where the waves break and he shouts with laughter at us or abuses us in foul language as he heads each off in turn who makes a break for the shore again. I can feel shingle beneath my feet, and the slimy embrace of great belts of sea-weed and I am almost ready to panic when one of my companions does just that.

  He is the youngest of us and has been snivelling and weeping ever since his step-father handed him over in a lordly hall in a place called Cheddar, one of the biggest and richest halls I have been in, where the King himself sometimes stays a week or even a month. Poor soul, he weeps for his mother openly, and since we all weep for our mothers, but secretly, we mock him for it. We call him Timor, though his name is Aethelstan, for every night before he sleeps he mumbles again and again in Latin ‘the Fear of Death distresses me’ - Timor mortis conturbat me.

  This poor lad, just eight years old, thin and shivering, with the waves breaking into his face, now lets go a long, long scream. Resolutely he turns his head to the east, to Cheddar perhaps, but more immediately the ocean, and pushes his way further in.

  I know he cannot swim. I can, albeit I learnt in the mill-ponds on the Stour on the further side of Hambledon and the only sea swimming I have done has been in the sheltered harbour of Wexford in the last week or so. Nevertheless I launch myself after him, but as I reach him he turns on me and seizes my throat, just as the undertow of the ebb scythes my feet under me, and down we go together, the salt tide flooding our lungs, the roaring in our heads, the certain knowledge of imminent death. Timor mortis indeed.

  But through the swirling foaming murk I mark just as the darkness of death begins to fill my head the massive breast of the great black gelding the son of Godwin rides and indeed his strong thighs and stirruped boots. To cut a long tale short my lord it is who rescues me, hauling me across the withers and banging my back to expel a bucketful of water from my lungs.

  This is wonderful in itself, but yet more wonderful is it that Timor’s saviour is the Lady Edith, although the red-headed house-carl who was the cause of all this has now seen the error of his ways and comes to help her.

  Soon we are all safe on the sands again and all crowd around us while the Lady Edith rubs our heads with borrowed cloaks and then wraps them round us, although her own dress and cloak are black with water to her waist. Then Harold pinches my cheek between his finger and thumb and pulls me round to face the rest.

  ‘Walt Edwinson,’ he says, ‘you owe me a life, I think. When will you repay me?’

  ‘As soon as the shrouded ones decree.’

  He frowns, perhaps at my allusion to the Fates of the old religion, then turns to Timor.

  ‘And you Aethelstan owe Walt a life.’

  The boy blubbers and nods.

  At that up speaks Wulfric who has been set to one side through all this, and that’s not a place Wulfric likes to be.

  ‘I think not,’ he calls. ‘I think Walt Edwinson was simply following Timor, was as frightened as he and wanted to get away.’

  A silence falls now broken only by the sighing of the wind which has freshened and blows stinging grains of sand against our legs.

  There’s nothing for it. I don’t wait. Hesitate or doubt and you’re done for, we’ve already been taught that lesson. I go straight for him and catching his jerkin in both hands head-butt his chest, just beneath the breast-bone. He’s well winded and for maybe half a minute I have the advantage and I pummel away at him at his chest and arms and face, but then he recovers and smacks me to the sand, and turns my face in it, then wrenches me round and begins to beat my eyes and nose and mouth with his fists. At last he reaches out and finds a hefty pebble, a smoothed flint core, just uncovered by the receding sea. He raises it above his shoulder, and . . . my Lord is there again to catch his wrist.

  Again he sets me on my feet.

  ‘Two lives now Walt Edwinson, and that’s enough for one day,’ and he laughs -- like a trumpet.

  By now they had finished the clams. Quint had two small loaves in his pack which served well to mop the broth. He hauled up one more bucketful of water, rinsed the bowl, the wooden spoon and the small copper cooking-pot, before packing them away again.

  ‘You tell a good story,’ he said as he did all this. ‘Three lives saved but not paid for. I sense a sequel. An ongoing narration. At all events, I am more obliged to you than you to me for the meal we shared.’

  Soon they were striding along the strand again, savouring the odours of the pines and the sea.

  ‘Surely very different,’ Quint remarked, ‘to the wide and stormy vastness of the Irish ocean. But tell me,’ and he paused in mid-stride, ‘just why were you there in Wexford, in Ireland?’

  Chapter Five

  At the time Walt had had very little idea indeed of the answer to this question. All he knew was that he had been plucked out of the bowers, the warm and barmy nests of mother, sisters, aunts; out of a farm-yard where calves butted their mothers for milk, where the pain of seeing the slaughter of an eighteen-month-old hog, who had become a bit of a friend, was outweighed by the succulent meat and crisp crackling that came after, together with smoked hams and smoked sausages through to Lent; away from his gang of boys, the sons of freemen, whose leader he naturally was since his aging dad was the thegn, a gang which marauded about the orchards, the forests edge, swam in the mill-pools and fought
the gang from Shroton, slinging and throwing flint cores up and down the ramparts of Hambledon.

  All this gone in a day! And simply because he had shown some agility and courage in rescuing a kitten called Wyn. The first pain was quickly swamped by the wonder of it all: five hundred mounted housecarls, and a couple of hundred from the fyrd - the levy of freemen a lord can take for a limited time - armourers too, sutlers, cooks, smiths and a wagon filled it was said with coin so each could be paid his daily hire, administered by a tonsured cleric who carried, just, a huge bound and clasped book of vellum under his arm wherever he went and noted every item of expenditure in it. And in the midst, but always near the front, not Harold, but his father, Godwin himself, Earl of Wessex, mounted on a big bay gelding with tufts of fur about its fetlocks and a nose longer and broader than most horses have, a real brute of a beast, with his standard bearer beside him, the standard a gold dragon on a red background, the gold real gold, and closest to him the most trusted of his housecarls.

  There were Roman roads for much of the way, and older tracks where these did not lead where they wanted to go. They passed through village after village, past farmstead after farmstead, and the people turned out as Godwin and two of his younger sons went past. They cheered, danced and even knelt by the roadside, piglets, fruit, garlands of flowers. In one place the Earl would stop and praise a thegn for the good upkeep of a bridge (for that was a condition of his book-right, the written charter which confirmed on him the rights of the land he held and of his heirs); or, in another, fined the local lordling for letting a fort lapse into disrepair.