The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘What’s he up to then?’

  ‘I reckon it’s a meeting place. The levy are coming out of the forest to join him, there must be more troops on the way from the north. He’ll stay there till all are up and then he’ll move on down -’

  ‘What do you think he expects us to do?’

  ‘That depends on how many more men he’ll get in the next few days. If he gets enough he’ll expect us to parley with him for safe passage home . . .’

  ‘Well, then. Let’s get moving, bustle, and get at him.’

  ‘My lord . . .?’

  ‘Sire.’

  ‘Sire. It really is a very strong position he’s in. I don’t think we can get him out of it --’

  ‘Fuck that, Roger. We march, the moment we’re ready to go. No we don’t. First, I shall give the men a short chat and then we’ll be off. Yes, Taillefer? What is it?’

  For yes indeed, I now tried to get in my two-pennyworth. This plan to give the men a chat before they started had made me realise that the Bastard had gone over the top. He was seeing it all in theatrical terms, already writing the history of what would happen, tarting it up to make sure it impressed the world beyond, the empires, the Pope, posterity. I reckoned I could play my part in this.

  ‘Sire,’ I began, ‘let me go ahead of the very first rank of your men as they march up the hill. Let me take my rebec. Let me sing to them of ancient deeds of valour unsurpassed until this very day, of glory and sacrifice, of how their names will be recorded in history to the last syllable of recorded time.’

  ‘All right, but make sure they know they’re on to a good thing too when they’ve won.’

  He turned to his valet and signalled to him to bring his hauberk of mail from its cruciform hangar. He was in a tearing hurry now and got the thing on the wrong way round so Normandy’s lion pranced across his back. Of course he was livid, mad with rage when Montgomery pointed out the error. I felt sure the day’s first casualty would not be yours truly, as I had planned, but the poor valet.

  ‘Sire,’ I cried, as he shrugged himself out of the thing, reversed it and put it back on again, ‘what a good omen this is of the great change-about you will go through today, from being a duke to a king no less.’

  And arrant fool as he could be, he swallowed it, roared with laughter, and banged the poor valet on the back.

  Of course very few actually heard his pre-battle speech. They weren’t particularly meant to. It was for my ears mainly, so, as I said, it would figure in the epic I was to write and perform.

  The front ranks of knights were drawn up in column of four down the road out of Hastings, with their pennants fluttering from their lances under a cold, grey sky, with just a thumb nail of red sun showing in the east beneath a long black cloud and the moon in its last quarter setting in the west with the morning star almost sitting on its higher point. There was a snuffling of horses, a champing on bits, a jangle of armour, so even those in earshot heard only snatches. He rode, walking and trotting up and down the vanguard division of four hundred. Since they occupied the road he had to use a chalky bank above the road on which his horse kept slipping. A couple of times it nearly dumped him.

  ‘Normans, countrymen,’ he began, and of course chaps from other parts as well. We are gathered here today not to praise Harold but to bury him. Make no mistake though. He is a worthy foe and no push-over.

  What I mean is this: some of us will fall in the coming hours and they shall be honoured. Their names shall be recorded. And remember - every loss we suffer means just that bit more for the survivors in the carve-up that will come afterwards.

  ‘But that is not the point. Not the point at all. We are here today to initial ... to begin a new chapter in world history. Make no mistake about that. Today this little off-shore island with its barbaric folk will be drawn into the wider world of continental Europe, will enter the mainstream of history, setting aside the barbaric squalor of its humble way of life and becoming cultured, yes cultured, like, as indeed, we are already. And if you can’t keep that fucking banner upright I’ll have your balls off.

  ‘Where was I? Harold calls himself king of this fair sceptred isle. Why? Because a bunch of old men said so, with his sword at their throats. That is, the swords of him and his brood of brothers. Yes, brood of brothers. Snakes in the grass. Not grass-snakes but vipers. But many of you saw how, a year ago, he swore to be my man, to serve me as his king and liege lord, yes swear it on these very relics, these holy relics that you see . . . Where the fuck are they? Roger, they must be in my tent, be a good chap and get them for me. Lanfranc said I should wear them round my neck.

  ‘So. All I want to say is this: right is on our side; might is on our side. Let’s let loose the famished hounds of leashed-in war and let them have it where it hurts. Cry God for William, England and Saint. . . Who’s the patron saint of England, Odo? You’re a fucking bishop, aren’t you, you ought to know . . .?

  ‘St George? Who’s he? All right, then. God for William, England, Normandy -- and St George!’

  Taillefer scraped out the last of his sherbert.

  ‘There you go, then,’ he said, and his face was pale, sheened with a slight sweat, ‘that was it. Quick march and off we went. Is there a drop more of that wine left?’

  ‘But St George came from round these parts. Yes, of course. Help yourself. Killed dragons and such-like. Saved princesses. He was nothing to do with Normandy or England.’

  ‘Cappadocia, I believe,’ suggested Quint.

  ‘Wherever.’ Taillefer poured wine and drank off a glassful in one. ‘It was the first saint came into Odo’s head. I doubt it’ll catch on.’

  Chapter Fifty

  As Walt approached his room along a marble-floored verandah which looked out, not over the harbour but the sea, rather choppy tonight beneath a half-moon intermittently shadowed by flitting clouds, a hand reached out from the darkness of an empty recess and closed on his fore-arm above his stump.

  ‘Walt?’ murmured Adeliza, and she eased him gently into the space beside her. It had been designed to hold a statue, but at that particular time Sidé was ruled by a bishop who relied on the support of the devout artisan class and the commandment against graven images was quite ruthlessly enforced (though apparently the nymphaeum in the forum had escaped his attention). Consequently Amaranta had had all the statues in her villa that were visible to the outside world put in the basement and the mosaics whitewashed.

  The moonlight penetrated hardly at all into the niche and Walt was aware of the young girl’s presence more from her warmth and the odours of her body than from what little he could see.

  ‘Walt,’ she repeated, having made sure that it was indeed him by cupping the end of his stump in her palm, Daddy would like you to know the circumstances under which he performed the trick which made Earl Harold swear allegiance to William.’

  ‘Can he not tell me himself?’

  ‘He would rather it came from me.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘There is no real magic in my father’s performances. He relies on machinery, on falsifying appearances, on making the day-to-day laws that govern natural objects work in hidden, unusual but perfectly explicable ways. But above all, he uses or abuses the willingness of his audience to be duped. In most cases they have paid to see wonders and what one has paid for one is usually determined to get.’

  Bemused though he was by her fragrant closeness, Walt was not bereft of reason.

  ‘On that occasion,’ he said, ‘Harold had every reason not to be duped and was a most unwilling subject.’

  ‘Exactly so. Which is why on that occasion the illusion was devilishly tricky to organize. You will recall the central, deciding factor was the presence of two figures, standing on a gallery rail many feet above the body of the hall, with nooses round their necks, the ends of which were attached to the beam above their heads.’

  ‘Yes. They appeared to be Harold’s young cousin and his even younger nephew.

  ‘They w
ere nothing of the sort. They were in fact Alain and myself, dressed and made-up to fit the parts. Harold, you remember, had not actually seen them for many, many years, the hall was poorly lit and smoky, so it was not at all difficult to suggest to him that he was about to look on the death by hanging of his close kin, the very people he had come to Normandy to protect. . .’

  Sensing another interruption from Walt she hurried on.

  ‘So, they, that is we, were corporeally real enough and no illusion, and neither were those nooses.’

  Her hand caressed her neck -- he could see the whiteness of it now as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

  ‘And the threat was real enough. William had warned Daddy that we would hang there and then if Harold did not give his oath. What else could he do?’

  What else indeed? No father could have done otherwise. Of course, in the general calculus of good and bad, far more, far worse things had followed this deception than the deaths of a young girl and a young boy, but at the time --

  Walt sighed, deeply, heavily.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it was beyond mending then and it is beyond mending now.’

  She raised her self on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and fleetingly he felt the pressure of her young body against his groin, but it was not a desire to prolong the embrace that made him catch her hand with his one good one as she made to leave him.

  ‘But why has he never told me this before?’

  She hesitated and turned back.

  ‘Quint is always with us,’ she replied, ‘and Daddy knew that, with his questioning, sceptical turn of mind, he would have cast doubt on Daddy’s account. To be precise, he believed Quint would find the revelation which made you and Taillefer good friends an example of a narrative that followed the logic not of the real world, where unpredictable chance and contingency always rule, but rather that of conventional story-telling. Daddy feared that Quint would fail to see that the actual events were themselves a sort of fiction and that therefore it was proper, indeed predictable that the logic of fiction would prevail. Anyway, he hopes that you may now be truly friends and that you will not hold it against him anymore.’

  Walt made little of this, but one thing still puzzled him.

  ‘Was it guilt, then, that prompted him to lead the Normans into battle and be the first to fall!’

  ‘Oh no. He is sorry. But not that sorry. No, he foresaw a battle. People get killed in battles, but usually only once. Therefore the safest thing to be in a battle is dead. And dead early on, at the outset. He had a bladder of pig’s blood in the sound box of his rebec, and as soon as the English started throwing things at him, he squirted it in his face and fell over. There were other things too. He’d had enough of William and reckoned this was the best way of leaving him.’

  And with that she broke away with a last kiss and was gone.

  Walt took with him to his own bed not the questions that were prompted by a certain untidiness in her tale, but the memory she had stimulated of other warmths, other friendships, of happier times he had for some years now pushed away whenever they threatened to cross the threshold of consciousness. No memory of pain is as unbearable as the actual pain of remembering the happiness one has lost.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Followed by the vast crowd of guests from Iwerne and the surrounding settlements, Walt crossed the sun-drenched grass, climbed the rise on to Shroton’s playing field. Dressed in white pleated cotton, Erica stood on the far side of it with her bridesmaids in green about her, framed in a hoop of apple-bearing boughs. Behind her, amongst and in front of oak and ash-trees, he could see the thatched roofs of her bowers and barns, the shingled ridge of her hall and church. And beyond that the ground climbed gently at first through stubbled fields and then steeply through hawthorn and blackthorn to the grassy ramparts of Hambledon. Blue smoke spiralled from her farmstead and hazed the air between. The round field was already ringed with trestle tables, small make-shift tents, braziers filled with as yet unlit charcoal. On the edge furthest from the village men had begun to build a bonfire big enough to roast an ox for the evening feast and provide light and warmth deep into the night beyond.

  But now the morning, even in early August during a long dry spell, was still fresh though what dew there was had gone. This freshness extended to everything and everybody -- the scrubbed faces of the children, the new or newly washed clothes, the light spring in the way the grown-ups walked, the ambience created by bustle and greeting and chat, with odd snatches of song already breaking out, the confident air that everyone had that today at least there was a good time ahead, a good time to be enjoyed by everybody.

  Erica exemplified this mood. Twenty-four years old, she had taken on a perfection that yet remained unused but ready. It was not just a physical perfection though no one there would question that, nor was it merely or entirely sexual. Tall, but not lanky, strong but not overtly muscled, with a skin that had on it the fresh bloom of youth without the plumpness of adolescence, she stood like a goddess in her pleated cotton shift which came below her knees, with a fine wool cloak, russet in colour, over her shoulders. Her long, blonde hair was tied up and dewed with fresh-water pearls, revealing her high forehead. Beneath brown lashes, her pale blue eyes held a serene but lively smile that was echoed by the upturned corners of an angel’s lips. But there was an earnestness about her, too, tiny lines in the corners of her eyes and lightly etched above them that spoke responsibilities already taken on and carried through, of decisions made, of grief at early bereavements, of an understanding of and the ability to work with and make the best of whatever was around her or chance might bring.

  When Walt was five paces from her, and already in his face revealing anxiety as to how the situation should be handled, she passed the posy she was carrying to one of her companions, and almost ran across the small space between to throw her arms round his neck. With his hands firm in the small of her back, she kissed him warmly and not briefly on the lips. A small cheer circled the field. Breaking away, and with a touch more colour in her cheeks and across her breast-bone than there had been before, she took his hand and led him through the arched apple-boughs.

  Shroton, unlike Iwerne, had its church - recently built out of flint cores bound with mortar filling a timbered frame, it even had a tiny steeple with a bell which was not rung at festive occasions but only at funerals or to warn the people in the fields of danger. The closest surviving relatives on both sides, with also the oldest and most respected of the freemen, now formed up behind the couple and followed them into it. Though small it was a bright, airy place lit by unstained arched windows and with no furniture apart from the small altar -- a slab of Portland stone set on four oak trunks. It was filled with flowers and greenery taken from the cottagers’ gardens and the woods as well - roses in abundance, lavender, and big meadow daisies, and fruit as well -- apples, pears, strawberries and sheaves of nodding barley.

  The priest listened to their brief, extemporised but formal vows, witnessed their exchange of rings, blessed their union. It was over in ten minutes.

  Back out on the field, they sat for half an hour or so on chairs placed on the floor of the largest cart to be found in either village, surrounded again by flowers and beneath a canopy of thatched straw, while almost everybody there came in no particular order to offer gifts, pledges of loyalty, blessings and hopes for long lives and many children.

  After a while Erica showed signs of impatience.

  ‘Let’s enjoy ourselves. Everyone else is. But first take off all that gold -- it’s far too showy for the likes of us.’

  He handed her down on to the turf and immediately she span away, twisting and dancing with her maids, followed by the drums and pipes that quickly whistled up a frantic jig, weaving in and out the tables until all the women there joined in with them.

  They feasted and played until dusk by when the roasted ox was ready for anyone who still had room for it. Already they had eaten kid stuffed with apples and roasted ove
r hazel twigs (the traditional meal for the beginning of the Apple and Hazel month), cheeses, chickens, geese, mountains of bread and freshly churned butter, cakes larded with clotted cream, hazel nuts with shells still soft and green, the flesh white and yielding, and apples fresh from the tree or cored, stuffed with cloves and cinnamon dipped in honey, skewered on hazel sticks and charred over the many small fires that circled the field. And they drank too, by the hogshead, countless gallons of last year’s cider and beers brewed from last year’s barley: the new harvest was in, the old had to be finished to make room for it!

  As well as feasting and drinking there had been the games for prizes donated by Walt. Three wooden balls carved from the boles of elm trees were trundled rumbling down a long row of wide planks to knock down nine skittles at the tar end. Everybody had a go, though everyone knew that it would come down to two experts, one from Shroton itself and one from Childe Okeford who could knock down all nine with one bowl each to score twenty-seven each time. They would go on doing so until one of them left a single skittle standing. The usual prize, the eighteen-month-old pig, was duly awarded to the Childe Okeford man. There were horse races round and round the field with hurdles for obstacles; archery contests with arrows fired not at targets but at mock hares and birds pulled across the ground or whirled through the air. There was a ploughing competition over the stubbled fields which every freeman who had his own team of oxen entered -- points awarded more for the straightness and depth of the furrow than for the speed with which it was cut. Fred’s uncle with Fred riding on the beam above the coulter was the winner. His widowed mother, assured that land tenure would remain with her and hers, had survived her post-natal illness, though the surviving twin had died within a week of birth.

  There were many other contests. Men chopped wood to fireside lengths (one of Bran’s men won that one), tossed leather boots to see who could throw furthest, marked with pegs where they thought a tethered cow would dump first, cut and wove withers into hurdles (Bur won this one). Erica, with Walt somewhat sheepishly behind her, judged straw dolls made by the children, cakes, home-brewed liquors and possets to be kept for winter illnesses (old Anna who had sat with him through his father’s death took this one with a tarry embrocation made from pine sap), spinning, weaving, dyeing and embroidery, wood-carving, joinery and furniture.