The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Yet, he understood what she meant.

  They clip-clopped on, past Iwerne village along the track they had had improved that linked it with Shroton, since once they were married the settlements would become one demesne. Starlight now, but plenty to show the familiar way through fields and then a beech-wood, the big trunks silvery in the darkness to which their eyes quickly became accustomed.

  ‘I am Harold’s man. But all this is his.’

  He sensed the possibility of equivocation here, but also more than a grain of truth.

  ‘And I will hold it for him. This and maybe much, much more.’

  The ring-giver, the giver of land. Harold would not take land from loyal neighbouring thegns, but . . . but Walt, already an ealdorman, a Companion of the King, empowered to raise the local fyrd and sit in the Witangemot, might well be made a full earl, the Earl of Dorset perhaps, and then the neighbouring thegns would hold their land through him rather than directly from the King or the Earl of Wessex. But Erica had not finished.

  ‘The land you hold for Harold, for the King, is not yours but lent. It is not even his, but lent by the people who work it in return for their lords’ protection. And this double lending demands you should husband it well.’

  ‘So,’ he said at last, and this time it was his hand went out to hers, ‘your question was no question at all. To fight for the King is to fight for the land and its people.’

  She smiled now, satisfied, almost, with his answer They had reached the gate to her farmstead.

  ‘When will the fighting start.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Who knows?’ He took a deep breath. ‘At any rate, let us be married first.’

  Chapter Forty-One

  He pushed his way through the big unbarred gate into the enclosure of the farmstead. Unbarred? Why should it be barred? The small amounts of coin, plate, jewellery the clothes made from finer furs, Kashmir wools, silks and fine cotton, were kept in locked chests. For the rest there was little he and his father owned that his villagers and those of surrounding settlements did not already have. No one thieved except in times of extreme want, and if they did would almost certainly be accused at the next moot by someone who knew their guilt.

  He did so with a heavy heart for all Erica had agreed marriage before the fighting got under way. He had not told her that his father was beyond the normal winter ailments that afflicted men of his age and was probably dying: partly because he had not wished to upset her, nor impose upon her duties beyond what she already bore; but also because he sensed that with his father there would be an end, an end to the old life that had once included his mother and siblings as well as his father. She had been on the periphery only of that old life, which was really his childhood, and it felt right to him that he should see it go on his own, without her.

  The hall was dark, save for one tallow candle that burned at the far end and the glow from a brazier nearby. His father lay on a pallet, his old white head pillowed, and with furs, mostly beaver, piled around him. Anna, an old woman, still with a lot of Celt in her, perhaps the oldest person on the farm, sat in a chair near his head and fumbled with needle and thread. There was no wool in the eye of the needle, and the framed linen patch she held in her left hand was almost blank.

  ‘How is he?’ Walt asked, shrugging off the coat of varied pelts he’d worn all

  ‘A little worse each hour,’ the old woman answered. ‘Reckon he’s sinking.’

  Walt leant over the old man’s face. The breath that issued from his open, spittle-lined mouth, was weak, but came in short, quick gasps, each clearly an effort.

  ‘Should we get the priest?’

  ‘No point. He’s made his peace. He’s ready to let go.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘At dusk he watched the sun sink over the trees beyond the brook. Just for a short time it showed - a great red ball. Then he had us close the doors and make up the fire. He asked for the pot, he pissed a thimblefull and passed a pea-sized piece of shit like a goat-dropping. Since then he’s had nothing to drink or eat. I’ve seen it often before. They know what they’re doing.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They want to leave no mess when they go.’

  Walt sat near Anna’s feet. He watched the swollen joints of her fingers pass back and forth like tired crabs across the webbing she held in her lap. He saw now that what she was doing was not the sad, sightless attempt of a failing mind to sew - rather she was, stitch by stitch, unpicking what had been there. She read his thoughts.

  ‘It was an old piece,’ she said, ‘the colours fading, the thread fraying. The backing’s still sound though. Perhaps, when she comes here, your Erica will fill it in again with something new.’

  They listened to the noisy silence. The old man’s breath, each gasp as short as a heart-beat; a coal falling in the brazier; mice or a roosting bird stirring in the thatch above them. A wisp of straw swung down.

  ‘It was not, ‘ she murmured, ‘a bad life.’

  She was not, he realised, sitting in judgement. It was inconceivable she should - not just because the dying man was the thegn and she the daughter of a freed serf, but because it was not in the nature of any of them, thegn or serf, to judge people. Actions, if they had to, but not people.

  ‘No. He was lucky to be born when he was.’

  By the time Edwin had been ten the wars between Dane and Saxon were over; Canute used the Danes from the Danelaw on his Scandinavian campaigns, all the West Saxons had to find was money. Yes, there had been famine and pestilence, yes, but not often and none had lasted more than a year.

  They sat on. The cold bit deeper, and Walt threw some more charcoal on the brazier.

  ‘I could warm you some milk.’

  ‘No. But what about him?’

  ‘I told you. He’s beyond all that.’

  Presently she began to talk and he had to lean closer to catch what she said.

  ‘When I was young, the monks who used to come here from Shaftesbury told a foolish old story. It went like this. In days gone by, a Roman priest was trying to make Christians of us. And an old man in the Witan said: look at that sparrow that has flown out of the storm and into the firelight. He will leave the firelight and go back into the storm. Before this Christian man came we were all like that sparrow - we did not know what lay beyond the firelight.’

  ‘And that’s a foolish story?’

  ‘Yes. It is foolish to think we shall ever know what lies beyond the firelight. But nevertheless the story teaches us something.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We should all share the firelight and the warmth while we have it. Help each other to make the best of it. It’s all we’ve got. There, that’s done.’ She set aside the linen square in its frame. Tiny holes still peppered it where the threads had been.

  Edwin died an hour or so before crock-crow. It was not, after all, as easy a death as Anna had seemed to suggest it might be. He wheezed and coughed, sat up with staring eyes in his hollowed grey face, sweat seamed down the valleys between the cords in his neck, he seemed to struggle to keep his lungs pumping. Anna and Walt held him up between them.

  ‘It’s not the man that makes him do this,’ the old woman called across the wild writhing head. ‘Just the body. The way water boils when you heat it. It can’t help itself.’

  A little later, with one last wretched spasm, the wilting body fell back, as unstrung as a bundle of twigs.

  Next day a priest came from Shaftesbury. He said prayers, and managed to get a thurifer going to cense the body, now washed and laid out on a bier in Edwin’s best saffron woollen robe. When asked where Edwin would be buried, they told him that he would be put, like everyone else, in the burial ground.

  ‘The ground, then, is sanctified?’ he demanded in his fruity well-fed voice.

  No one seemed to know. Certainly, there was no church or chapel.

  The question of burial goods arose. Edwin had a fine pewter cup with a ring of uncut carbuncles an
d a beaded base. It had always been his favourite at feasts. And in a chest they found his sword. Three feet of steel, a fine pommel, a scabbard of willow bark covered with crimson leather. Walt thought about it, drew it, made some passes with it. In the end he decided it was too light for him -- he was a good six inches taller than his father had ever been. He already had a sword he trusted -- it had served him well in the Welsh wars. Edwin should keep the sword he had never had to use in this life to fight whatever monsters he might find in the outer darkness beyond the light and warmth of the mead-hall fire.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Harold sat in the saddle of a chestnut stallion, a coronation gift from the Sultan of Granada, and looked down from Portsdown over the big harbour with the Roman castle of Portchester a league or so in front of him. Portsmouth harbour shone like a silver shield around the square tower and crenellated walls. The mud-flats that hemmed the almost landlocked sheet of water were dotted with slipways and boat sheds; behind them teams of horses ten or twelve-strong dragged vast trunks of giant oaks to the water’s edge, and in them carpenters and joiners worked away endlessly with twelve-foot two-handed saws in saw pits, some powered by water where a river or mill-stream was strong enough. Outside the saw-pits artisans with lesser tool - axes, adzes, borers, planes, augurs, hammers and iron nails brought down by the sack-load from the Forest of Dean -- hewed, shaped and pinned the sawn planks to the master ship- builders’ specifications.

  Out on the water finished long-boats of seventy feet, powered by thirty or forty oars, skimmed across the choppy but shallow water, canvas rattled up and down, the sun flashed from spear points and round or lanceolate shields as the crews practised the exercises of embarkation and disembarkation. The stiff breeze sent the striped and coloured sails flapping, straightened the swallow-tailed pennants. It all looked good, neat, orderly - he must remember to congratulate his brother Leofwine, who was in charge.

  In all there were already fifty war-boats commissioned, and another fifty or so almost ready, each crewed by thirty men captained and trained by the few veterans who had been kept on through the decades of peace or who had fought in the brief campaigns against the Welsh. They had rowed up the Usk and the Wye under Harold’s command to catch Griffith in the pincer movement Tostig had completed over the Brecon Beacons. And Tostig. Where was he now? In Bruges? The latest news said his men were already scraping the barnacles from the twenty or so ships he had, and that messengers, spies, whatever - scurriers was the word people used - had been seen moving through the manors and farmsteads that he once held in the southern counties, spreading rumour, stirring up ill-feeling.

  Harold sighed. He turned his gaze back to the harbour below. Angles, Danes, Jutes, Saxons and even, from the western shires and the Kentish forest, Celts. They were united as they had never been before and all called themselves English, after the Angles. There were fewer Angles than either Saxons or Danes, but no Dane would call himself Saxon, nor vice-versa, so they were all happy to be Angles or English. Yet there were still far too few under arms -- barely three thousand men here in the south trained and paid as housecarls and about as many again in the north. Fewer than the brent and barnacle geese, which swept up in great arced flocks in front of the long boats’ bow-waves, preparing for their annual migrations to the breeding grounds in Iceland and even furthest Novaya Zemlya, far away in the lands of the midnight sun the sagas sing of. The horses around him wheeled and stamped, harnesses jingled. In spite of the Spring sunshine, they were feeling the cold on the exposed hill-top. The breeze straightened the standard Walt, as usual, was holding amongst them -- the gold dragon on the purple ground, now faded to red, the standard of Wessex. Harold frowned. That banner, that very banner they said had been Edmund Ironside’s at the battle of Ashingdon exactly fifty years earlier -- Ironside’s Mercians had deserted him, Ironside himself became a fugitive. When he and Canute met again, a month or so later, the dispute between them was settled -- in the Dane’s favour. Ironside kept Wessex, Canute took the rest. Within two months Ironside was dead and Canute got it all.

  It had never occurred to Harold before that the standard might be ill- omened -- it was known, recognized, men turned out and doffed their hats when they saw it. In a battle they would rally to it as long as it was there. But the coincidences that now gathered like evil shadows about it could not be ignored. Fifty years. A foreign invasion. The desertion of the Mercians.

  A little further down the hill, on the sheltered landward side, a small group of mounted women also waited for him. Apart from checking out his growing fleet and army, Harold was conducting Edith Swan-Neck from Bosham to Weymouth. She would sail from there to Wexford to join their children and wait the outcome. But now another errand suggested itself to him which he could combine with the first. He called Walt over. Walt handed the standard to Daffydd and joined him.

  ‘Walt, we’ll stop at Cerne on the way to Weymouth. I want to see my Mother while I have the chance. There’s something she can do for me.’

  ‘A detour of ten miles or so and we could pass through Iwerne.’

  ‘We’ll see. We’ll see. At any rate, I can spare you for a day or so if you want to go there on your own.’

  He turned back to the south, shaded his eyes for a moment against the silvery glare that came off the Solent. Beyond lay the green hills of the Island and the doubts flooded back. Anywhere between Exeter and the Thames Estuary the hammer could fall. Though perhaps not. The Normans were Normans now, no longer Norsemen. It was a hundred years or more since their high-prowed dragon-headed black ships had forged down the Channel. Like so many before and after them they had brought no women with them and five or more generations breeding with farmers’ daughters had wiped out their sea-faring skills. They’d take the shortest route -- Harold felt sure of it. A landing anywhere west of the Island would need an easterly wind and they’d never risk that. They could be blown past the Fastnet Rock across the Ocean to Vineland. No, they’d come on a southerly or south-westerly, the shortest way they could. And once they’d sailed they’d have this fleet he was building behind them, up their arses, with the same wind in its sails. And the army with the fyrd in support waiting for them on the beach. We’ll fight them on the beaches, he thought. And if they do get any further inland then we’ll fight them in the fields and on the hills.

  Feeling better he touched his spurs to the big horse’s flanks and hacked down the slope to his love, not the only love of his life, but the only woman he loved.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ said William, and Lanfranc raised his eyebrows - his Lombard sensitivity still a touch repelled by his master’s brutishness.

  With Lanfranc there were present William’s half-brothers - Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Robert of Beaumont, as well as old Eustace of Boulogne, the Confessor’s brother-in-law. They had just heard how five more Norman barons had pulled out in the last three days, following two from the week before. They were, of course, as their oaths of loyalty, fealty and what-all required, perfectly ready to help their liege-lord with money and even some equipment, but with rumours of a possible alliance between France and Burgundy, they thought, by and large, it would be better if they stayed put, at least until next year -- this just was not the time for foreign ventures. Truth was - why risk a battle or two against odds when you’ve a snug castle, all the land you want, and your liege-lord has illusions of grandeur big enough to make you think he might be a penny piece short of a shilling?

  And that morning William had been down to Le Havre and watched two of his new long boats turned on their beams in a sudden but not severe squall.

  He loped round the oak table, kicked unused stools aside (all the seats were three-legged stools, apart from the big chair he used), and smacked his fists into his palms.

  ‘Totally fucked,’ he repeated. ‘From Sicily to Poland every fucking king and duke is waiting for me to slip on my arse, and that is what I am about to do. No army and ships that roll over like puppies if you breathe on them. I was a fool to th
ink I could take on this lot. Whose idea was it anyway?’

  He glared round the room. None of them dared meet his eye since none dared give the right answer.

  Robert cleared his throat. ‘Allies?’ he suggested. ‘The Welsh? The Scots? Harald Hardrada?’

  Odo ticked them off, thumb to fingers, one by one.

  ‘Harold’s already beaten the Welsh. He’s got hostages, they fear him. As for the Scots -- well, Edwin and Morcar may just still be dithering a bit until Harold gets their sister in the family way, but one thing that will bind them to Harold more even than that is if you come at them with the Scots on your side. Harald Hardrada? He’s old now but probably still the best leader of men in the world - I beg your pardon, second best - and if he lands in the north and wins, which he well might, since all the Norse in Northumbria will side with him, and maybe the Danes too, then he won’t stop there. You’ll end up fighting Norway as well as England.’

  ‘There’s another thing too.’ Eustace, whose memory was longer than that of the others, chipped in, ‘he’s got a reasonable sort of claim to the English throne himself. Not as good as yours,’ he hurried on, ‘but still . . .’

  A sad, evil sort of silence fell over the room. Then Lanfranc, who had been watching and listening with scarcely concealed scorn, cleared his throat.

  ‘Really, you know, I don’t know why you’re all making such a fuss.’

  ‘You don’t?’ William put his fists on the table in front of the Abbot. ‘Perhaps your holiness would like to share with us whatever reasons he might have for being so cheery. And before you begin, let me tell you they’d better be good ones. I’ve heard a thing or two about that place you run at Le Bec, buggery and so forth, and I might have to close it down.’