The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Harold realised that his audience was at an end. He rose, managed a slight nod of his head, and walked off down the hall. Once he was out of hearing, William caught Lanfranc by the sleeve and pulled him down on to the stool Harold had vacated.

  ‘Bast . . . Bulgar still won’t play ball. Tried twice now. Says he’s only my man where I rule by right. And in England that requires the Witan’s say so, and he’s got the Witan in his pocket.’

  Lanfranc laced his thick fingers.

  ‘There’s a higher authority, an authority that overrules a gaggle of old men in an island on the fringe of civilisation.’

  ‘Rome. The Pope.’

  ‘Right. So how do we get him on board?’

  ‘Send a delegation. I’ll lead it, if you like. Get Alexander to bless your enterprise, give you a token, papal banner, some relics, that sort of thing . . .’

  ‘He’ll want a quid pro quo!

  ‘Of course. But nothing you can’t provide with little cost to yourself. A promise to bring the English church in line, enforce the Cluniac reforms, bow to Rome in all things ecclesiastical.’

  ‘You mean increase the church’s power within the state.’

  ‘But only as a force to uphold the state - a counterbalance to the barons, which you lack here in Normandy.’

  ‘We’ll need a strong man in charge to enforce these reforms.’ A sly look came into William’s cold eyes. ‘Have you anyone in mind.’

  The Lombard blushed a little; he gave a little shrug which in a big man looked a touch coy. His face, however, remained expressionless.

  ‘Canterbury?’ William urged with the slightly spiteful teasing tone that was the nearest he ever got to camaraderie.

  Again the shrug.

  ‘You’ll have to shift Stigand first,’ the schoolmaster of Le Bec murmured.

  ‘No problem.’

  A moment’s silence.

  ‘There’s still that damned Witan,’ William grumbled.

  The schoolmaster’s voice sank to a whisper, and he looked over his shoulder to make sure none of the clerks was listening.

  ‘It can be arranged,’ he hissed. ‘It will be at least a couple of days before Wulfnoth and Hakon can be brought here from Le Bec, plenty of time for that rogue Taillefer to set something up.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Harold, with Walt, Helmric, Daffydd and Timor, walked down from the castle to the nuns’ abbey. A pair of monks escorted them to a pleasant area of slender pillars and rounded arches leading to a double door with a Judas-window. Already in front of it a long piece of fabric had been laid out, about sixty feet long and twenty-inches wide. Apparently it told, in what we now call comic-strip style, the Miracles of the Virgin as experienced by pilgrims on the Milky Way, the pilgrims’ road to Santiago de Compostela.

  In almost no time the five Englishmen were exclaiming with great hilarity at the comic crudeness of the figures, the lack of characterization, the primitive embellishments and so on, finally holding on to each other when Daffydd pointed out that the uniform expression on all the faces suggested the strain one sees on a face attempting to relieve constipation of the bowels. Timor drew their attention to the solecisms in the dog Latin that provided the commentary at the top of each episode, while Harold, who had watched Edith Swan-neck at her needle-work through many a long candle-lit evening, pronounced that what they were looking at was not tapestry at all, but embroidery, and not very accomplished embroidery at that.

  'Segnurs barons,’ dist li empere Carles,

  'Veez les porz e les destreiz passages:

  Kar me jugez ki ert en la rereguard . . .

  ‘He’s very good,’ muttered Helgrim, ‘very good.’

  ‘Nice harp too,’ remarked Timor.

  Down in the hall below them, a central square rostrum was occupied by a dark figure with a high broad forehead, black but balding hair, who crouched over a magnificent instrument, his face twisted in concentration as between each strophe he improvised an intermezzo echoing the sentiments or content of what he had just sung. The harp was built like a ship of slats of seasoned hardwood, fastened to a hidden frame by copper or brass pins, the body or hull of it inlaid with mother-of-pearl and gold filigree. The beam, curved like a wave, projecting almost two feet from the top, was of some dark wood, highly polished and seemingly so hard that inlay was not possible though of course it had been bored to take the pegs that tightened and tuned the strings.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ whispered Walt. ‘Blessed if I can get my head round this jangling Norman.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Wulfric.

  ‘Song of Roland,’ Helmric whispered, his mouth close now to Walt’s ear. ‘New version. Tale of treachery. Ganelon puts Charlemagne on the spot -- makes him appoint Roland to lead the rear-guard as they pull out of Spain. Listen . . .’

  Quant ot Rollant qit’il ert an la rereguarde

  Ireenient parlat a sun parastre

  'Alii! Culvert, malvais hom de put aire . . .

  ‘What’s he on about?’ Walt whined in despair.

  ‘Now Roland’s abusing his father-in-law, that’s Ganelon, for sticking him with command of the rear-guard detail . . .’

  At the far end of the hall a long table had been set on the larger dais, and behind it, in the middle, William and his duchess Matilda were throned. William was six feet tall, and his queen, who moreover had a wizened monkeyish face, worn out no doubt by far too many pregnancies, was a mere four foot.

  ‘If,’ Wulfric remarked, ‘she sat on his shoulder . . .’

  ‘Then,’ Alfred responded, ‘he could pass for a Latin pedlar with one of they new-fangled hurdy-gurdies.’

  On the other side of Matilda, as guest of honour, Harold. Food was passed around, mostly served in white blanc-manges or sauces, and later there were syllabubs and custards sweetened with crystals from the cane the Moors grew on the coast in the sultanate of Malaga. It was all wishy-washy stuff, over-spiced or over-sweet, and, in contrast to the beef or mutton joints that would have graced an English feast, like to give you the squits, said Wulfric.

  But Walt noted how, while the Normans at the high table drank little and watered their wine, Harold drank a lot, and the stewards were at pains to keep his goblet charged.

  What happened next was surely illusion. Hypnotism may have had something to do with it, even mass-hypnotism. First the minstrel with the harp, Taillefer himself, concluded the first part of the Chanson to great, if somewhat relieved applause -- the whole thing is very long. His place was taken by two Moorish dancing girls, slaves sent up from Sicily where there was already a strong Norman presence and, for Harold and Walt too at the other end of the hall it was the same, the hall seemed to darken and fill with smoke as if some of the burning brands had been extinguished, though this was not actually the case.

  Harold was not much interested in the slave-girls, except in so far as some of their more sinuous movements put him in mind of Edith Swan-Neck and filled him with an empty sense of longing. To counter it he drank deeply again. The wine this time was apparently Rhenish, sweeter, heavier, and certainly stronger than the thin sweet fizzy stuff from Rheims which the Normans usually drank.

  ‘Slips down like a dear woman’s milk does it not?’ the count on his left remarked and refilled his goblet for him.

  Then, as he peered down the hall over the rim of the silver vessel, it began to happen.

  For him, possibly for many people there, the dancers turned into the figures of two young men: instinctively he knew they were his cousin Wulfnoth and his nephew Hakon, son of Swein. They were standing on the dais with heads bowed, hands roped behind their backs, and nooses round their necks. They lifted their heads and looked across the hall at him with looks of unmistakeable appeal.

  Harold started up, leapt on to the table scattering cups and platters. Shouts and protests but Duke William stood and signalled that all should be silent, not interfere, but wait to see what would happen. Harold shouldered his way through knights, ran along the
top of a long table that stretched between him and the central dais, scattering more food and cutlery, but just as he reached the gap between the table and the dais the figures disappeared and were replaced by Taillefer, who now stood facing him holding a large white folded linen cloth. He held a finger to his lips. Harold stopped in his tracks and the whole hall fell silent. Then, holding the cloth by two corners, Taillefer flapped it out so momentarily it floated horizontally like a flying carpet between their faces.

  Then it sank but only to waist height where it took the form of a table-cloth, neatly spread so the edges and corners hung down, but the main body was smooth and flat, as if it were indeed spread across a table. But no table was there. All in the hall gasped, some crossed themselves and some cheered and clapped.

  Taillefer now pointed over his shoulder directing Harold’s gaze to the gallery above and behind him. The youths again but this time standing on the balustrade, blindfolded. The nooses were still round their necks but attached to a beam in the roof.

  Taillefer grinned, showing white even teeth between his beard and small moustache.

  ‘Swear,’ he said. ‘Swear, or else. Put your palms on the table and swear.’

  Harold did so.

  ‘I am Duke William’s man,’ he said. ‘I swear it.’

  ‘More!’

  ‘I will support his right, with all my might, to be the next King of England.’

  The walls of the hall billowed this way and that and he had to steady himself on the cloth which was as solid as a rock.

  ‘Again. Louder. So all can hear.’

  ‘I am the Duke’s man and I will support his right, with all my might, to be the next King of England.’

  The torches suddenly burned bright again, the figures of the doomed young men faded before his sight, the whole hall, apart from his eight companions, cheered and banged their goblets, platters, whatever on the tables.

  Taillefer whipped away the cloth, and there on a table that had not been there before were two jewelled reliquaries. The illusionist lifted one then the other. And from the top table behind him the deep voice of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half-brother to William, boomed out.

  ‘The toe,’ he cried, ‘of St Louis. And the ear of St Denis.’ He pursed his lips. ‘No need to tell you, Earl Harold, that an oath sworn on such holy objects cannot be foresworn or forgotten.’

  And Harold crashed insensible to the floor.

  Yes. That’s how it had been. Something like that anyway. Walt stirred on his cot, Taillefer’s cot, in an inn outside Nicaea. Taillefer. Bastard.

  It was dawn and cock-crow. But more close at hand the gentle and mellifluous strumming of that noble harp. He opened his eyes. The girl, Adeliza, was dancing -- a slow oriental dance like the houris in his dream of Bayeux, while Alain accompanied

  PART IV: A Short Ride Across Asia Minor

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  She was so beautiful, so appealing, that for a time he forgot who her father was, what he had done. Her muslin gown, the only thing she wore apart from some pearls in her hair, was diaphanous and though the light was dim he could see the twisting curve of her torso, the shifting tilt of her tiny breasts, the shadowy cleft between her buttocks and the haze of pubic hair, still sparse, as she turned, especially when she moved so she was not between him and the small window but let the light from it play on her. The lilting rise and fall of the harp had a rhythm behind it achieved or marked by the occasional slaps Alain contrived to give the hull of the sound-box, and it echoed and enhanced the self-conscious and simulated eroticism of her dance.

  Walt lifted his head and immediately fell back. Pain shrieked down the side of his face and coalesced on a handful of shattered molars. It made him cry out, a gasping, high-pitched moan. The harp broke off and Adeliza hunkered beside him, knees spread. The muslin gown slowly floated down around her. Her head was so close that her long hair hanging forward almost brushed his brow, and he could see her sweet honey-coloured breasts, small and firm but hanging now, showing their weight, below. She had a small mole on her neck.

  ‘Dear person,’ she murmured, ‘how do you feel? We do so much want you to get better. You and your friend were so brave and kind. Trying to help Daddy.’

  I wasn’t trying to help your Dad. I was trying to save Quint. He leant over the edge of the bed and spat out a handful of congealing blood, broken teeth, saliva and pus. Her brother plucked the strings again, and she twisted away, stretching her neck, making wanton eyes, walking and mincing on feet that tinkled beneath the gauze of her robe. There were tiny silver bells around her ankles.

  Apart from deep dreams which he instantly forgot Walt had not had an erotic impulse, let alone experience, for . . . two years? Anyway, since the summer before the battle.

  He stammered through the dried blood and pain.

  ‘Does your father know you dance like that?’

  She span away with some petulance.

  ‘Of course he does. He taught me.’

  ‘He taught you?’

  ‘Yes. We are on our way to the Orient. And in the Orient men pay much to see girls doing these sorts of dances. It will be a useful supplement to what my father earns with his illusions.’

  He remembered: her dad’s fucking illusions.

  Alain placed the harp against the wall - hummed a high note as if upset not to be played any more.

  ‘We should get ready, you know,’ he said. ‘Dad and your friend will be arraigned in an hour or so.’

  He was a slim youth, almost as tall as his sister, but different in appearance and manner -- his colouring was fairer and he was altogether quieter, apparently more subdued, less flamboyant. Outside, in a crowd, he attracted no attention at all, especially when ‘Taillefer or Adeliza were performing. But now, younger than her though he was, he took charge.

  ‘We’ll leave the animals and the baggage here and walk. See what happens. Walt can keep an eye on things.’

  Walt started up, clutched his head, almost sat down again but stayed on his feet.

  ‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘I must come too. Quint will need me.’

  Alain shrugged.

  ‘Very well, we’ll just have to lock up as best we can, as we did before. Come on now. We’ve not much time.’

  Adeliza had already lifted the muslin over her head and was washing herself down with water from the ewer she had brought up from the well the night before. She crouched in a shallow round cooking pan, big enough to make a very large paella in, and endeavoured to reach over her shoulder with a golden sponge in her right hand.

  Down below the inn-yard filled with the cries of muleteers and grooms, the neighing and ee-aws of the beasts, the clatter of hooves on cobbles as a caravan assembled, prepared to leave the town, but, in spite of such signifiers of impending departure, Walt could not take his eyes off her.

  ‘No need to stare,’ she murmured and slipped on a dun and shapeless cotton gown, pushing her hair back inside the hood as she raised it. She brushed her eyebrows in towards the centre to make them appear bushy and unkempt and suddenly she looked as modest as a nun: not a hint of the houri about her now, nor even of the Blessed Virgin she had been the evening before -- just a country girl in from the fields, visiting the city’s market. Meanwhile Alain had been out and returned with three small loaves straight from the oven and a pitcher of milk on which they quickly breakfasted. Walt could eat no bread until Adeliza showed him how to soften it in the milk.

  The law-courts dated back to pre-Nicaean Council times, which was to say that the central atrium was open to the sky and surrounded by Corinthian colonnades. Much of the marble had fallen away exposing brick-work; weeds and plants grew in the gutters and from between the roof tiles.

  An immense flock of swallows on their way from the steppes beyond the Black Sea had descended into the spaces above, mixing with the vastly increased families of those already in residence. They squealed up a mewling storm so it was not easy to make out what was being said beneath them.

&nbs
p; As the three of them joined the crowd of onlookers in the main body of the courtyard, the colonnade at the far end filled with judges and clerks. Some wore ceremonial robes that recalled the togas worn by ancient dignitaries, whose likenesses, carved in bas-relief, many now noseless or missing a, hand or foot, graced the tympanum above their heads. The chief justice stood in the middle, was short, fat, balding, and, unlike those figured in stone above him, had a nose like a strawberry and eyes that did not always look in the same direction as each other. He huffed and puffed and was clearly anxious not to be late for some more important appointment - a visit to the baths, perhaps.

  A cracked bell was struck and with a clanking and clinking of arms and chains a squad of prison guards led in twenty or so manacled prisoners. A young boy who had stolen a chicken in the market early the previous morning was identified and taken away to be flogged with cane rods. Presently his screams mingled with those of the swallows. A beggar whose apparently legless state was revealed to be a hoax had three fingers chopped off. A fishmonger caught selling stinking fish lost his market license for six months.

  As each case was dealt with witnesses and connections drifted away and by the time Quint and Taillefer were called there were only five or six people, including Walt, Adeliza and Alain, still left. And one of them was the mysterious tall woman with red hair, an emerald-green silk scarf and peacock-blue cloak over a silky and pleated white shift, who had been by when Quint and Taillefer were arrested.

  Neither of the accused looked much the worse for wear following their night in prison. Walt looked long and close at Taillefer and decided that, yes, it was he, the same man who had tricked his lord into a forced yet binding oath. His breast filled with rage and a longing for revenge.