The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  The sixth night they stopped at Cheddar where there was a great feast of cheese and cider and some talk of subterranean chambers infested with witches a mile up the gorge but none knew the truth of it. There poor Aethelstan, Timor, had been forced to join the cadets, dragged screaming from his mother’s bosom, his step-father happy to see him go. The next day they climbed through the winding gorge up into the Mendips from which they could see the hill at Glastonbury where the infant Jesus walked with his merchant uncle, and where Arthur and Guinevere were buried. Also up there in the Mendips there were the hollow mounds where lead-bearing ore was dragged from the ground and smelted by a clan of idiots, diseased, deformed and mad and treated by their masters worse than brutes simply so the great new churches, abbeys and palaces just then beginning to be built could be roofed in material more weather proof and permanent than thatch or wooden shingles.

  On the afternoon of the ninth day, they came to Gloucester, a burgh snug within its Roman walls, huddled about its church and abbey, and there, not in the town but in the meadows on the eastern bank of its river, the River Severn, three miles away, they met up with Harold, Earl then of Kent, and all his troops and three others of his brothers with theirs. The whole company numbered some two thousand trained housecarls with perhaps another five thousand levied from the local peasantry, the fyrd. Most were camped in small huts made from hazel branches bent into hoops and covered with skins or spare cloaks, blankets, and so on, but the Earls themselves and their closest bodyguards were in big tents, almost as big as the halls they had left. In the very largest of these, hurriedly erected after their arrival, was that of Earl Godwin himself. And in it they feasted as though it was all a high holiday and not a serious matter of state likely to end in the greatest evil that can befall a commonwealth, a civil war.

  For on the other side of the river a host as large was gathered around the standard and tent of the King himself with all the housecarls of the Earls of Mercia, York, and Northumbria and with the King’s fyrd too.

  ‘Of course,’ said Walt, as Quint spread his quilted sack in front of a fire of pine cones and on a bed of pine needles and sand warm from the day’s sun, with the water of the Propontine Sea lapping twenty yards away with streaks of ghostly green phosphorus rippling along the crest of every wavelet, and the moon now half-full casting rippling wires of gold across the blackness and a nightingale pouring forth its liquid song from the thickets inland, ‘of course no one thought to tell us what it was all about. What I most remember is being called into the big tent to serve at the long table, carrying mead, wine and ale in big jugs, of being threatened with a beating if any great man’s cup or drinking horn remained empty for longer than the time it takes to count to ten. There were oxen roasted whole and sheep too and basketfuls of bread and fruit and the rich orange-coloured Gloucester cheeses of the neighbourhood and Godwin and the Godwinsons, all together in the one place.’

  ‘That must have been a sight. Few crimes known to man did not sit upon their shoulders. What did they look like? First, Godwin himself.’

  Walt was confused. These men had not then been nor were they now criminals for him, but heroes, but he did his best, though a memory seventeen, eighteen years old was not easy to conjure.

  ‘Godwin himself was, I believe, about fifty years old, big, tall and broad, thickening at the waist with arms like a smiths and thighs like a wild bull’s. His hair was dark but grizzled and his beard long and broad. He preferred a muttons leg to other meats though at that feast he ate two partridges and three quail as well. I personally filled his cup, a giant affair holding a quart, three times with mead. And then, as the feasting got less, the poets and harpers came on and sang and improvised grand epic lays in praise of the Godwins, and presently Harold himself took a harp and sang the Battle of Maldon, which all knew and joined in . . . and they were all in such finery, such finery as I had never seen. Their cloaks were scarlet, deep blue or saffron; all wore gold armlets and bracelets and circles in their hair and rings on their fingers, the men as much as the women, who were for the most part war-wives or mistresses - the real wives remaining at home to mind the children and their hearths --’

  ‘The Godwinsons?’ Quint reminded him.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’ Walt went on, ‘There was Sweyn. He was the tallest and the darkest, and, despite the pock-marks on his face, perhaps the most handsome. Then Harold. After Harold, Tostig. He was the fairest in colouring of them all, and then just twenty-six but with a bloom of lasting youth on him. He wore his hair long and fastened with a gold toggle so it fell down his back in ringlets below the toggle, and some of his brothers mocked him for his maidenly looks, indeed the second to youngest, Gyrth, had a blackened eye for saying so.’

  ‘So,’ said Quint, ‘we’re in Gloucester but not yet across the water in Wexford. And the year is still 1051?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Explain.’

  Clearly Quint already knew in broad outline the answers to the questions he posed. But curiosity was his passion; history, the past, and the future, too, were his obsessions. He knew many languages, and was lettered and well-read in several of them, but he preferred what he called the ‘horse’s mouth’. Wherever he went he questioned and listened, and it was now a fascination for him to speak with a man who had actually witnessed so much he had already heard of.

  ‘I’m not sure I can.’ Walt yawned. Always a doer, and by no means reflective, he could no longer recall the ins and out of it all. ‘There was a big dispute between the Godwins and the king, and the lords from the north took the king’s side. The upshot was we went first to London to settle it and then the Godwins were sent into exile. Godwin himself went across the Channel to Bruges but Harold to Wexford, and I was by then attached to Harold.’

  ‘And there you dug for clams and Harold saved your life. Twice.’

  But Walt was already asleep.

  Chapter Six

  At the end of their second day they came to the end of the Propontine Sea or rather to that point where the coast turns right round the compass and slices back to the west and south, and there, in the late afternoon, just as it was reawakening from the somnolence of the hottest part of the day, they entered the city of Nicomedia, a pleasant town set on a narrow isthmus between the sea and a fresh-water lake. Here Walt discovered one of the ways in which Quint supplemented or replaced his hidden store of gold. Entering the market place or forum they saw how three Frankish merchants moved about asking questions which few could understand while those that did replied in tongues the Franks were ignorant of.

  Quint asked them, in an approximation of the Frankish language they could grasp, if he could be of assistance. Their leader, a rough-looking man with an eye short of full eyesight and missing several teeth, explained to him how they had been commissioned by an Abbey close to Frankfurt itself to come to Constantinople to buy lapis lazuli. The retailers there had none of the stuff, or what they had was not good quality since all had been bought by icon painters attached to a monastery within the city walls. However, these advised the Franks that the principal wholesale dealer resided in Nicomedia. But they could not find him and did not have enough demotic Greek to seek out his address.

  Quint offered them his services. Walt noticed that his communication was more by free use of gesture, a winning smile, an easy manner and the same few words repeated often, slowly and loudly than by any facility with either language. Nevertheless he got through and soon a small flock of urchins led them out of the markets and into the alleys of the commercial quarter. On the way Quint explained that, while he was at home with the language of the Ancient Greeks, and with the baser variety used in the Gospels, the dialects spoken in Bithynia were not easy to follow.

  The traders in all manner of rare and valuable commodities turned out, as had been the case on the north side of the Golden Horn, to be Jews. The mystic signs of their persuasion were carved or painted on their walls next to their barred gates - the seven-fold candlestick, the interl
aced triangles that make up the Star of David and others more arcane. In most cases a small delightful courtyard filled with flowers lay behind a heavy gate, wrought iron or cast bronze, and that of Shimon ben-David, dealer in lapis lazuli and other rare stones, was no exception.

  An urchin had run on ahead, a circumstance which later seemed significant, and they were waited for. A slave, not a Jew, opened the creaking gate, took them down a short flagged path beside a small alabaster fountain and so to a door of silvered cedar-wood where a lady was waiting for them. About thirty, she was still strikingly beautiful with long black hair, piled on her head in coils and curls much like the wellborn ladies of Constantinople. She wore a thin but pleated cotton muslin robe which, although it reached her sandaled feet, revealed more than it concealed. Her eyes were almond-shaped beneath a high forehead and above prominent cheek-bones, her complexion and skin were the pale ochre of dried olive leaves, embellished with occasional moles. Her breasts were full, her waist clamoured for an arm to be set around it, her thighs pillars of perfection.

  Smiling modestly she turned and led them down a short passage on whose walls oil-lamps glowed brightly enough to show how the muslin shifted over her callipygian behind. She knocked on another wooden door and they, that is the three Frankish merchants together with Quint and Walt, heard a choked reply that presumably was an invitation to enter. The lady pushed open the door and stood aside to let them in.

  ‘Jessica, you may go now. I shall call you when it is time to let these gentlemen out.

  That was what Quint later said was said - in demotic Greek.

  ‘And it did not occur to you,’ Walt asked, ‘to wonder why a Jew should speak to his Jewish daughter in Greek?’

  ‘She was not his daughter.’

  ‘At the time we both thought so.’

  The room was not brightly lit. An old man, with a copious grey beard and long grey hair beneath a skull cap and the prominent drooping nose of his tribe, sat behind a large table on which most of what light there was fell. It came from a high, grated window, part curtained. He, swathed in a copious gabardine, appeared to be in some distress from an ague or fever. He coughed and snuffled a lot, and for all it was very hot in that room, wore woollen mittens that all but covered his hands. But these were not details his visitors paid much attention to. All eyes were on the table.

  The surface was filled with a pile of rubble. But such rubble! Stones as small as hen’s eggs, as big as small squashes but not regular in shape save for one, a rhombic dodecahedron, a good eighteen inches on its longest side. They were all blue, but blues shading from that of a clear sky, just as the afternoon turns to evening, to the deepest ultramarine, the deepest blue beyond sea blue. Some had a purplish tinge. The surfaces of many were dusted with tiny dots which lent them the appearance of miniature heavens at night - the night-sky inlaid with flecks of bright gold.

  ‘Mother of God,’ Quint muttered. He turned to the Franks. ‘These are worth . . . thousands. Their weight in bullion and more.’

  Walt was impatient.

  ‘How do you know that? What is this stuff anyway?’

  Quint took him to the back of the room, near the door, grasped his jerkin up near his throat.

  ‘This,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘is lapis lazuli. Azul stone, blue stone. But the best I have ever seen. No one knows for certain where it comes from. Some say Tartary, though it has been found in Persia. But the best, and this is the best, is said to come from Badakshan, in the valley of the river Kokcha which runs north into the Oxus. Many thousands of miles to the east, north of the Roof of the World. But the exact spot remains a secret.’

  ‘But what’s it for?’

  ‘What is it for? It is for itself. It is. It exists. But if ever you have seen a true deep blue in the margins of a text or admired the sky in a painting in a book of hours then a thimbleful of its dust has been ground down and mixed with Arabian gum. And now Arab pharmacists have introduced it into molten glass so they can make the lights in the domes of mosques look like heavenly light-shows to gull the credulous into believing paradise exists. Christians of both east and west are working towards similar ends to colour the windows of these new churches they are building. And of course princes and their consorts are not averse to mounting especially fine specimens in gold. It has also been used to colour enamels and faience . . .’

  But one of the Franks had plucked his sleeve and asked a question. ‘How much’. Quint hollered, ‘how much? Dolt! every last scruple of gold you have save what you need to get back to Frankfurt. Though if you go short you’ll surely be able to pay your way in Lazuli. But, before you buy, you pay me my interpreter’s fee.’

  The Franks spilled gold coins from bags and pockets and hidden places, thrusting one of them towards Quint. He asked for a second and got it. The bearded man with mittens scooped it all into a capacious leather bag. The Franks now filled their bags with the blue stones. All were panting somewhat with the effort and stress but at last straightened above the now bare table with the shamed conspiratorial half-smiles of those who believe they have won out handsomely on a crooked transaction, when plop, a large drop of thickening blood splashed in the middle of the spaces from which the azul stone and the gold had gone. All eyes to the ceiling. It was coffered and also made of cedar wood. A patch of red grew to a heaviness in a crack between two timbers and another plop dropped.

  The man behind the table took off his beard, hair, skull-cap and nose, they were all in one piece, a toy with which Jewish children like to frighten each other in sport or maybe it had been fashioned in mockery by anti-semitic gentiles, revealing himself to be a tall blond man more than twenty years old, perhaps less. His right hand dipped below the table and came up holding a long broad sword. His left hand did likewise and produced an axe, not a big one, the sort an Englishman or a Dane might throw. It was bloodstained.

  Walt, using his stump and his good left hand, tipped the heavy table and pinned the blond man against the wall behind him.

  ‘Fuck you, Oswald,’ he said, but one of the Franks had a better idea. Drawing a sharp knife from somewhere in his sleeve he reached across the top edge of the table and slit the blond man’s throat just below his ear, severing the jugular. Walt and the other Franks held the table in place. They watched till the pulse behind the blood-flow faded and stopped and his eyes grew dark with death. Then they righted the table and let him slither to the floor.

  ‘Who was this Oswald, then?’ Quint asked.

  ‘A Northumbrian. One of Morcar’s housecarls. I knew him by sight.’

  What to do now? The Franks, especially the one-eyed one, were all for getting off as quickly as possible with both gold and lazuli, but Quint said no. That would throw suspicion on them all. Presumably there was a dead man upstairs, certainly there was a dead man downstairs, the gold and stones gone, they would clearly be suspected and, since they had no horses and no doubt the constables of the town did, they would soon be caught. Much more sensible to go straight to the magistracy and tell the truth. They took the gold and stones with them.

  In all this they quite forgot Jessica’s dark beauty, until, that is, they returned with two magistrates and a guard of five foot-soldiers. And by then she had gone. There was no sign of her at all, nor indeed of her clothes or jewellery. Her husband, a man much younger than the dealer aped by Oswald, not in fact much above forty-five, lay on the floor of his bed-chamber dead from a single axe-blow delivered to the crook of his neck. It had smashed through collar bones, scapula and ribs and deep into his chest, a terrible blow and one which the Danes of Northumbria were noted for.

  The slave who had first answered the gate for them was encouraged by the sight of the magistrates’ fasces, which could be used to give him a beating, to fill in the background. A year previously thieves had broken into Shimon’s residence and made off with much of his stock and some gold. At about this time Oswald appeared in the market-place declaring he was willing to hire himself out as body-guard, guard, whatever. H
e had his full kit of helmet, chain-mail, sword and axe, but no shield. No one knew what his story was or how or why he had come to Nicomedia, though it was rumoured he had applied to join the Emperor’s guard in Constantinople, but English already there had told of his reputation for cowardice and deceit. At all events, Shimon employed him, and such was his stature and the way he exercised in public with his weapons, he had nothing to do -- no thief went near the place again.

  The Devil and idle hands. It was not long before Oswald had his on his master’s wife’s breasts and then elsewhere. And she found things of his, much younger and more virile than her husband’s, to toy with. Shimon had caught them at it that very afternoon, during the hot part of the day. He turned Oswald out and vowed to put Jessica away - already he was more than friendly with a rich widow much his own age.

  Oswald had hung about the market-place - there was nowhere else to go - where he heard how the Franks were seeking his ex-master. He hurried back, slew Shimon and he and Jessica set up the deception whereby they hoped to sell Shimon’s entire stock and make off with the proceeds and any other valuables they could carry.

  And that really was it, though Quint and Walt lost two days while all was wrapped up, statements made on oath and so on, before they could continue on their way, this time south and into the mountains, hoping to reach Nicaea in two days’ time. But first they spent some of one piece of the Frankish gold on salted meat, bread, grapes, peaches, and a leather bottle of wine, as much as they could reasonably carry without it all being more of a burden than it was worth, for, said Quint, we’ll go to Nicaea by the country route through mountain passes, thus avoiding the constant flow of traffic on the main road: there will be brooks and springs for water, but no crops to scrump.