The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘Amen to that. But that is why I sent for you. I can clearly see what I must do. I must see to it that Duke William is my successor. Otherwise the Godwinsons will put the Atheling on the throne and rule through him, or even get Harold himself elected.’

  ‘Right. Absolutely right.’

  ‘William will see Stigand off and his -- your -- churchmen will reform the church, and he’ll crush the Godwinson . . . But I would not want to see Harold murdered for I have come to see he is a good man and his blood on my hands would be a stain St Peter might choose not to ignore--’

  ‘Pah!’

  ‘Besides, he has so many brothers . . . No. We must think of something more clever than murder.’

  Once more the bishop took a turn round the room, this time with head bent and hands behind his back. He too had a string of the new-fangled prayer beads which clicked rapidly through his fingers. Like Edward he found fiddling with them a great aid to cogitation. And, he had to admit, he was impressed with Edward’s grasp of the situation. His body might be going, but his mind appeared to remain lucid and even sharp.

  ‘I think I’ve got it --’

  ‘How about if we --’

  They spoke together. The bishop, mindful after all of rank, insisted: ‘You first!’

  ‘Somehow,’ Edward said, ‘we must get Harold to promise to support Duke William’s rightful claim. But how?’

  ‘If we could get him to Normandy . . .’

  ‘If we could get him to Normandy . . ?’

  ‘I have it.’ The king sat up against his pillows and beamed. ‘Duke William has in his court two kinsmen of Harold, close kinsmen, held as hostages. One is his nephew Wulfnoth, the other his cousin Hakon. Harold has often asked me if they could not be replaced by some other surety. I’ll tell him he can go to Rouen and plead personally with the Duke for their release . . . But how to make him swear allegiance to William once he’s there?’

  ‘That will be up to the Duke. The thing might be to put Harold in a situation where he owes a serious debt of honour to the Duke. If the Duke could save his life . . . something of that sort.’ The bishop stuffed the beads in behind the heavy belt that held in his cassock and bit his nails instead. Then, presently: ‘I have it, I think I have it. I shall have to write some letters ... to my brother in Christ at Rouen . . .’

  ‘Encrypted,’ Edward suggested nervously.

  ‘Of course encrypted,’ the bishop was irritated by the needless interruption, ‘and he can pass them on to Duke William, yes, yes, it’s falling into place. What’s the matter?’

  Edward had cleared his throat. His head had now drooped a bit, and he looked ill at ease.

  ‘The fact is,’ he muttered, ‘that I am now feeling, urn, feelings of delight and satisfaction at all this - there’s a Germanic word for what I - scaden-something . . .’

  ‘Why not? So you should, so you should. This is God’s work we are doing . . .’

  ‘But is it not a sin that I should feel so pleased that at last I may deny the Godwins their final ambition?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’

  The bishop looked down at the picture of penitence that was the king. All right, a man nearing death should look to avoid all occasions of sin, but this was taking sanctity a step too far.

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he repeated. ‘Get your house in order, that’s the thing.’

  He gave the king his blessing, offered him his episcopal ring to kiss, and promised to return to say mass with him in a day or two.

  As he got to the bottom of the steps he called over a young boy who was standing around, apparently with time on his hands.

  ‘Your master,’ he said, ‘needs a wash and a change of bed-linen.’ Edgar Athling, who had more right to Edward’s throne as far as lineage went than either Harold, William, or Edward himself, gave the finger to the bishop’s broad, retreating back. Then, he went and found someone more suitably low-born to carry out the bishop’s commission.

  PART III: The Oath

  Chapter Twenty

  All of which clears the way for an explanation of why Walt, semiconscious on a bed outside Niciea, was trying to piece together in his confused mind just how it was he, and Harold’s closest companions, had sat listening to Taillefer singing the Chanson de Roland in the court of Duke William some years before. There had been a dreadful outcome, for which Taillefer himself had been responsible. Taillefer? A busking magician whose blasphemous tricks had landed him and Quint in jail? Whose children were now looking after him. Walt groaned. He must be mad. But the harp - the harp had been real enough.

  His first recollection of the trip to Normandy was of the quayside at Bosham which lies at the head of the various islands and tidal waterways that make up Chichester harbour. It was late summer, with a stiff breeze from the west rolling bundles of white cloud across the sky. A daughter of Canute was buried in the crypt of the church behind him and the seawall, strengthened with chair-like buttresses, had given rise to the story that he had sat in a throne and bad the tide come no further. A spring tide followed and washed away the original wall and he had built another a few yards back, thicker and higher.

  Walt was troubled, then and now as he remembered it all, by the recollection that what was about to follow was a sea-voyage and he was finding it difficult to conceal his terror. Especially since the wind was strong enough to rock the boughs of the elms that hid the hall and bowers nearby. At least their ship, moored against the quay, with a proper crew of real sailors who were busy checking tackle and caulking seams in the deck with hot coal-tar, was a proper boat, at least ten feet broad in the beam, and forty from prow to stem with a castled focs’l and a high poop.

  Around him were his seven closest companions: together they made up the inner core, the comitati, of Harold’s bodyguard. They hardly ever strayed very far from each other nor any great distance from Harold himself. Lean, tough, tattooed, they now sat or stood around in a small group, each with a couple of large, heavy sacks or bags made out of stout hessian, containing their chain-mail byrnies, helmets, axes and swords. Although all were in their mid-twenties, all but one had been with Walt since late boyhood. Daffydd was the new-comer, a Welsh princeling, nephew of Griffith who had claimed kingship not only over Wales but the fertile marches along the valleys of the Wye, the Lugg and the Dee.

  Wulfric, still the largest and meanest of them, though now totally reliable in the shield wall or covering you as you scouted through a copse on the Welsh border, was their leader; Aethelstan, known as Timor, still the slightest but filled now with the cunning only the persecuted know how to develop, was Walt’s closest friend.

  They had learnt their trade, not only from Eric, the ancient Sergeant-at-Arms, but on Harold’s Welsh campaigns. Harold, Tostig and a small army of which these lads were the kernel, had trapped Griffith like a nut in a cracker, since Harold came by sea and river, and Tostig across the Brecon Beacons. He’d slipped away but only as far as a stronghold deep in the Cambrian mountains. There, in the Welsh fastnesses, his own brothers, sick of the trouble their older brother constantly brought upon them, cut off his head and sent it to Harold. Harold in turn demanded hostages and Daffydd was one of these.

  He was a dark whippet of a youth and tricksy with it. He now sidled up to Walt, holding a shabby leather purse in his hand.

  ‘Walt bach,’ he murmured in his lilting voice, ‘I have here a most efficacious charm against drowning and I would cheerfully give it to you, but it came from my aunt so I am afraid I cannot.’

  ‘If it’s yours you can give it where you like.’

  ‘It’s not so simp-le, see. My aunt Blodeuwedd made me give her gold for it, for that is the secret of its mag-ic. It loses all its potency if it changes hands without gold is passed for it. I am sorree for this since I know you fear death by drowning.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  Daffydd drew a brown wrinkled sack from the purse. It was no more than six inches long and three deep and seemed to be made of some dried animal matte
r.

  ‘It is the maw,’ he said, ‘by that I mean the stom-ach, of a ravin’d salt- sea shark.’

  ‘How ravin’d. What means ravin’d?’

  ‘Why, by ravin’d you must understand devoured, eat-en.’

  ‘If this shark was eaten, how come the stomach remains?’

  ‘The stomach or maw of your salt-sea shark is renowned, on account of the bile within, as being inedible.’

  ‘It must have been a very small shark.’

  ‘You must understand that this is a very ancient re-lic and is somewhat shrivelled. If you have no gold about you a silver shilling will probably serve. Like gold, it is a noble metal.'

  Walt fished out a shilling but, as he put it in the Welsh youth’s palm and took the doubtful object he was offered, the rest, led by Wulfric, burst into howls of laughter they could no longer contain.

  Walt hurled whatever it was he had bought as far out into the water as he could and a gull swooped on it and carried it off. Instantly he felt a pang of sheer angst -- now, for though he knew he had been tricked, he was certain he would drown, certain as could be.

  ‘Where’s the boss then?’ he turned and asked, masking his discomfiture, and he saw as he turned how the ship’s master, a fat man whose linen clothes were greased with dried pig-fat, took a heavy purse from a postulant in minor orders. They were standing on the poop of the ship and all but Walt had their backs to them. Walt thought nothing of it - the ship’s master was receiving his due for ferrying them all across the Channel, nothing more. ‘We’ll miss the tide if he doesn’t show up soon.’

  ‘Who knows where he is?’ crowed Wulfric, ‘but I know where his prick is.’

  Long arms, shapely like the boughs of a slender poplar, tightened behind Harold’s neck, long thighs spread and rose on either side of his waist while below shapely knees calves angled inwards so the soles of long feet met in the cleft between his buttocks. They too tightened, pressed him into her. She clenched her own buttocks, contrived to contract the still pulsing muscles deep inside her, did all she could to hold him there for as long as she could.

  ‘Oh, yes, oh Jesus, oh yes.’

  He grinned. He couldn’t help it. She frowned, relaxed and his member slipped out of her. Then, as she straightened her legs along his, he rolled off her. He turned on his back and slipped an arm beneath her shoulder, so the side of her head lay below his cheek. Like that they caressed each other gently and dozed for half an hour or so as the sun’s beams strengthened between the cracks in the shutters and the room was filled with morning light.

  Presently she murmured: ‘Don’t go. All you need is here, within these four walls. ‘

  ‘The king bids me. I am the king’s man.’

  ‘The king is your enemy. Only a fool goes where his enemy sends him.’

  His voice lightened.

  ‘It won’t take long, a month at most. Wulfnoth and Hakon have been too long in Normandy. They should come home and learn to be English again. Else they’ll become little Edwards.’

  ‘It doesn’t need you to get them. Why you? Why go to your enemy on the bidding of your enemy.’

  ‘Duke William is no enemy of mine.’

  ‘He wants to be king.’

  ‘So? If that is the will of the Witan when Edward dies, he shall have my support. If they choose me I shall expect him to support me.’

  Edith Swan-Neck sighed. He would not give in, nor change his mind, nor listen to reason or intuition. He would argue black was white rather than concede she might be right. All done gently of course, without loss of temper, but firmly.

  Presently she sat up and then swung herself round so she could sit astride his thighs and look down at him. She saw a head of long curling dark hair with streaks of lighter red, but grizzled at the temples, a glossy full moustache but strong chin, clean-shaven now, a mouth whose corners still tilted up a little and which revealed, when opened, two badly chipped teeth to the left and a scar that ran into the moustache above them. His chest was broad and deep with a matt of russet hair, his stomach flat and solid beneath a midriff ridged when he tensed it. Only his eyes had changed over the years - although they still laughed when she wanted them to, they were often weary in repose with crow’s feet spreading from the corners and bruise-like shadows in the skin below his brows.

  He saw a woman strong like him and lean. Her skin was no longer the translucent white it had been when she was fifteen but creamy now and with here and there a mole. Beneath it well-toned muscle had replaced the softness of puppy-fat. Her breasts were still full and he delighted in the used look they had, nipples broader and browner than they had been, the skin about them slightly puckered. She had borne him three children and suckled all of them. Her waist was long, her stomach flat and, while she cursed them for what she called their ugliness, he adored the stretch-marks below. But her neck was still the feature that made her the person she, was and always would be -- Edith Swan-Neck.

  A Danish princess, she had been married at fourteen to an Irish thegn, Cuthbert, as part of an attempt to ally a small Danish kingdom, little more than an enclave, with the local Irish chieftains. He had been an old man, and already impotent. When Harold visited in 1047 she had fallen in love with him and quickly bore him two sons. A daughter came later. When Cuthbert died, Harold had wanted to marry her but the rest of the Godwin family had forbad it: marriage for him should be saved until the time it could be played like a counter to bolster up an alliance, make a friend of an enemy. Nevertheless, he had so far managed to avoid it and lived with Edith whenever he could.

  Leaning forward so her breasts swung above him and shadowed her torso her finger began a journey that started in his scalp, moved to the chipped teeth and the scar that ran from his mouth, and so down his right arm to the deepest scar of all, a gash six inches long, roughly sewn and still occasionally enflamed as shards of bone worked their way out. The Welsh axe that had caused it might have done much worse had Walt not been at hand to deflect it.

  She lifted it to her lips and let her tongue run along its length then her head dropped to his chest and found the smallest scar of all, just below his rib-cage where a Welsh arrow had pierced his mail, but only just. She kissed that, too, then, with her head now almost on a level with his, lifted her face and murmured: ‘Come back as you are, please? I want no more of these. I shall stop loving you if there are any more.’

  Not the laughter of men nor the sweetness of mead

  Gladden the seafarer’s heart

  But call of the curlew, cry of the gannet . . .

  Though he be gift-giving and bold, daring in deeds

  Graced with a Lord who is gracious

  There lives not a man but he fears seafaring.

  Yet nor harp-heartening, ring-having, nor rapture with woman

  Can smother his lust for wind-spray and wave-slash . . .

  As she rounded the mudflats off West Wittering, where the grey seals basked and the terns arrowed like lightning bolts into the sea, the westerly breeze filled the big sail and sent the boat lolloping on as the rush of waves blue-black beneath their snowy crests chased, caught, and overtook her. Down in the waist of the ship Helgrim the Golden, the only Norseman in Harold’s guard, and the only one with much pretension to musicianship, raised his voice in the nasal long-drawn melodies which seemed, to Harold, to be the same no matter what the song.

  Black porpoises raced alongside them, leaping arch-backed clear of the water or flitting like shadows beneath the surface. Wulfric tried to put together a harpoon but his efforts were clumsy and anyway shortly a shoal of mackerel glittered above the wave crests towards the shore and the porpoises were off after them. Gulls cruised on the wind behind them, scarcely moving their wings at all, and suddenly up in the prow a lookout hollered: ‘There she blows,’ and again and yet again he shouted, as a family of humpbacks, a half-mile away on the starboard prow, spouted in turn, their backs and dorsal flippers black crescents against the luminescent sea. It was all so rich, so teeming, so cr
owded with life, Harold felt his heart swell, in him at the joy, the fecundity of it all.

  He marked off his eight men, each in turn: Daffydd and Timor played with dice, pitching wits in some silly game of bluff and chance; two Hampshire brothers, ruddy-faced and dark-haired, whose names were Rip and Shir -- their old Germanic blood untouched with Danish red or Viking gold, they came from a Jutish hamlet called Thornig Hill, Thor’s Hill; Wulfric -- the cruel killer, but that was no bad thing, he’d not hesitate out of squeamishness or mistaken generosity to give the final blow to a wounded man who might yet have the strength left in him for one last thrust; Albert, a Kentishman, small and gnarled before his age but the toughest when the wood-mist froze in your beard and there had been no food for a week, built like an ancient apple-tree; and Walt. Poor Walt, right now, since he had heaved and retched his stomach out as soon as they left the estuary - but good Walt, utterly reliable Walt, who back in fifty-six, on the second campaign against Griffith, had paid back the first of the lives he owed, leaving Harold with a scarred forearm instead of a heart or lungs smashed by an axe.

  They were good lads, all of them, wild as young cats at play, always ready for japes, crazy acts of daring, stupid wagers, ready to drink each other insensible rather than be the first to give up, whoremongers and wastrels -- but once in the shield-wall as solid as rocks, utterly dauntless when faced with an adversary ready to trade blow for blow, until the red blood ran and the shattered bone showed through.

  Heart bursts from breast-lock - soul skims spume-crest

  Mind rides waves in the whales’ acre - wanders afar

  Earth-stranded unsatisfied, the shrill gull shrieks to me

  Singing of sea-space along whales’ way . . .

  And Helgrim too, the Norseman with a harp.