by Justin Hill
‘Why would King Ethelred do such a thing?’ Godwin asked.
Wulfnoth did not know, but his mood was grim, and he set a guard on his land. For if the highest cannot claim recompense, then what hope have small men when the storm blows?
Godwin and Leofwine knew enough of their letters to read a charter or a list of laws, and they knew murder went against all the laws of the land, both written and unwritten. It was as if the nation’s mast had broken and England wallowed dangerously in the swells, and instead of drawing together the great families struggled against each other, like a shieldwall that fragments as each man turns his back and runs – and is cut down from behind.
There was a gloomy air as Wulfnoth and his men sat around and discussed the news. It was almost all bad. Distant slave markets thronged with English voices; whole swathes of Oxenefordscire and Hamtunscir were waste; while along the coast corn rotted in the autumn fields, wind whistled through the charred roof slats, and abandoned doors banged angrily in the sea breeze.
At harvest time Godwin and Leofwine spent the day winnowing the wheat so the chaff was carried away on the wind. There were husks in their hair and clothes. Their faces were freckled with sun. They stole a jug of ale and hurried out into the half-light of the summer evening. It was approaching Lammas Eve 1006, and the evening sky was a pale green ribbed with darkening clouds. They drank and stretched their toes out and sighed.
Far off, by the coast, a light caught their eye.
‘Look!’ Godwin said.
Leofwine looked.
The beacons had been lit. The wind was blowing the smoke inland and the columns curved as they rose. The two boys stared and there was no mistaking: the darker the evening grew, the brighter the flames.
Wulfnoth nodded. Yes, it was the beacons. He cuffed the boys ahead of him and then turned and saw the twinkling fires growing brighter. ‘The more silver we give, the quicker they return. As if our troubles are not enough,’ he cursed, ‘the Army chooses this moment to return.’
The hall soon filled with excited warriors. They talked of where the Army might land, who their leaders might be and where the king would muster the English forces to meet them. The fires were piled up, and ale brought out, and a supper of oats and bacon was served in bowls while the harp was passed from hand to hand, rose late the next morning and sat in the hall rubbing their heads and looking to their weapons.
Wulfnoth did not wait for the shire summons to call out his retainers. He had the horses brought in from the fields and their manes braided, and he summoned all the men who owed him service. He was grim and determined and warlike as he dressed in steel-knit shirt and helmet, took ash spear, grasped shield of linden and spoke brave words: he would pay a tribute of spears, stand toe to toe with the Army, and see who fell first.
CHAPTER THREE
The Hall Stands Empty
It was six weeks before Wulfnoth returned. Half the horses were riderless; Wulfnoth’s face was sour. The campaign had been a shambles. Kites and crows now picked at the stubbled fields of English dead.
When one man tried to chant a poem to honour the dead Wulfnoth grew angry. ‘Hush! We sing too much of defeat. Let no song be sung till we drive the Army back into the surf and send the hated longships back hollow to their homelands.’
‘How did you lose?’ Godwin asked when he found Beorn sitting in the smithy. ‘They only had a hundred and twenty ships. Didn’t we outnumber the Army?’
‘We did,’ Beorn said, ‘but it takes more than numbers to win a battle. The Danes are united and determined. When their king speaks, all the men listen to him and obey because he brings them to victory.’
Godwin swung his legs and screwed up his face.
‘So what now?’
‘If your father was king he would summon all fighting men into a great fyrd and give the Army battle. They dislike battle. It is a dangerous place for any man, Dane or no. But King Ethelred sends other men, and they ask themselves why should they die for him. And they refuse, or feign illness, and then their men think, Why should we fight when our lords do not? And they go home to their farms and pray the Army does not come.’
‘There must be something we can do,’ Godwin said, and Beorn laughed bitterly.
‘Yes, Wulfnothson. Pray.’
When they saw that the will to resist had been crushed, the Army broke up into raiding parties that rode about the valleys and exhorted food and coin and women. A few brave men tried to defy the Danes and their homes were burnt, their wives seized, and they were left cut down.
Wulfnoth had buried his silver and sent his womenfolk under his wife’s command deep into the Weald. The boys refused to go.
Wulfnoth glared at them. ‘Go with your mother,’ he repeated.
‘No, Father, we want to stay and fight,’ Godwin squeaked.
Wulfnoth was furious. His look silenced him.
‘Father,’ Leofwine said, ‘I am older. Let me stay.’
‘And what would you do?’
‘Stand by you,’ Leofwine said, ‘when the Army comes.’
Wulfnoth was angry and trapped between duty and his oaths to the king, and the combination was too much and he roared with sudden anger, ‘Why have I been given fools as sons? Listen, both of you! We are not going to fight,’ Wulfnoth said. ‘No! There will be no killing. That is the last thing we need. The Danes will come and pray God they will leave when they have what they want.’
‘And what do they want?’
‘Silver, food and ale,’ Wulfnoth said.
‘So why are the women being sent away?’
‘Out!’ Wulfnoth shouted.
Wulfnoth was in a furious mood. He feared his wrath when the looting Danes came, feared that he would be unable to contain his pride, and would strike out in anger, and be cut down in turn, and leave his sons, like wolf cubs, to raise themselves. The Devil preyed on each man’s weakness. Wulfnoth would endure the Danes. He would protect his people.
Gytha saw the look in his eye. ‘Come with us,’ she said.
‘I shall not.’
‘You are in a dangerous mood.’
Wulfnoth said nothing.
She took his hand. ‘I am worried. Husband, I am fearful.’
‘You have spear and knife. I will send what men I can spare. Take the dogs as well. They will keep animals away.’
‘No,’ she said, and took his other hand so that he had to look her in the eye. ‘We do not need noble corpses. A blind man is better than a corpse. You are the shepherd of the folk. We need you, Wulfnoth.’
Wulfnoth had no words for her, but he held her gaze and nodded solemnly.
Godwin took his father’s hand and squeezed it.
Wulfnoth could not look at them. His voice trembled. ‘When it is safe to return I will send word.’
They had never been so deep into the woods before. It was full of pits and mounds, all overgrown with nettles and weeds, and the trees were thick and unmanaged, although a few ancient pollards showed that men had once lived up here.
The deeper they went, the darker and more tangled the forest and the narrower the deer-paths. In the heart of the Weald there were more and more lime trees. They trailed long beards of moss and lichen, and it was in the centre of this woodland fortress that they camped, in a wide and marshy clearing ringed with alders. They penned the livestock with wattle fences, and the dogs spent a long time warily sniffing the air. The boys helped gather firewood. There was plenty of it about, and they could hear the redbreast and the song thrush in the trees above their heads.
They kept to the dry land and built a great fire to keep wild beasts away, but at night they could hear wolves howling, and the dogs barked. Gytha set a watch each night on the horses and milch goats. The fringes of the Weald were home to charcoal-burners and men who still worked the ore pits and smelted pig iron. But the deeper tracts had a reputation as a haunt for monsters and outlaws, so they avoided all strangers until it became clear that the strangers were other refugees. Then they visite
d each other’s camps and traded tales of horror and rape and violence, as if they were at the market and were chatting about the weather and the coming fair.
Godwin and Leofwine found a spot a bowshot from the camp, where they liked to sit and talk. They were changing from children into young men, and the world about them was changing too.
‘We shall stand with Father when he next meets the Army,’ Leofwine said as he chewed on a stalk of wild grass.
‘You will hold his standard, and I will hold your shield,’ Godwin said.
When the time to return came, the boys were almost sad to leave. In Contone the people seemed altered, the fields empty.
But it was better not to talk about it. The paddocks were empty, the milch cows had gone, and all that was left of Wulfnoth’s prize bull was the skin that hung in the hall and the four hooves that waited to be boiled up for glue or paint for a shield.
The only time the Danes were mentioned was almost a year later, when one of the freemen’s daughters lower down the valley had a child. She had married in the spring, and there was nothing uncommon about betrothals after the fact. But Godwin was in the dairy as the women were talking of the birth.
‘It’s dead,’ one of them said.
‘Not surprised,’ another girl said.
‘In the stream, poor mite,’ said another.
‘What’s a “poor mite”?’ Godwin asked, but they all fell silent.
‘A baby died,’ his mother told him as she shooed him back outside. ‘Now off with you.’ And as Godwin went outside, he heard her say, ‘Poor Danish bastard.’
One day a tall, blond thick-set man was standing by the hall door. His feet were bound with rags, and his cloak was muddied and weather-stained. He fell to his knees when Wulfnoth came out, and begged for food and shelter.
Wulfnoth took him in; he looked like a good man. ‘Can you wield a sword?’
‘Yes.’
‘And are you content to do farm work?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is your old lord?’
‘Dead.’
‘You survived him?’
‘Alas I did. And I have been punished by the North Wind and Jack Frost, and I wish that I had died with him. But he fell to a feud while I was at market and we hunted down his killers and killed them as they staggered from a feast.’
‘What was your lord’s name, and who did he feud with?’
‘His name was Little Helm, on account of his size – he was a big man. But his foe was one of Eadric’s retainers. An ugly man with ginger hair and orange freckles. A giant of a man, with a sneering manner.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Hemming.’
Wulfnoth did not ask any more questions, but put out his hand and pulled the man up. ‘Well, Hemming, fetch yourself a bowl of soup. See if we have a better cloak for you. You sleep in the hall with the other retainers.’
Hemming ate like a horse, and when Gytha saw the lice eggs – small, dark grey pebbles in the hems of his clothing – she had the man stripped and those of his clothes that could be mended were boiled in the cauldron that hung from the roof-beam. His hair and beard were combed, and even though he was dressed in borrowed clothes he looked like a retainer, not any common fellow.
‘Why don’t the kings of the Army kill Ethelred?’ Godwin asked that night as the fire dwindled to a red and baleful glow.
Wulfnoth laughed. ‘He is the ring through the bull’s nose.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They need him. He is their milch cow. Have you seen Ethelred’s eldest son, Athelstan?’ Wulfnoth laughed and Godwin understood, he thought, something more about his father. He had seen Athelstan Aetheling fleetingly. He was older than Leofwine, and proud and warlike, like a king of legend.
‘Athelstan is come of age this year and he is champing at the bit. King Ethelred cannot die soon enough. Do you think his son will sit at home while the Army kills his people? He is eager for glory. So the Army are content to leave Ethelred alone, and we are led a merry dance, like a ringed bull is led to the slaughterer’s axe.’
Throughout the autumn of 1006 the Army rode about unhindered. Wulfnoth’s hall stood silent and empty, and their stomachs ached as they licked their bowls clean of nettle and field-grass gruel and the cook chased the boys out when they came to filch.
They sat on a rock and groaned with hunger.
That evening Godwin devoured his meal, and there was nothing left but an empty bowl. He licked it out. Twice. In the end Godwin started crying. Leofwine looked at him and sighed. Then he reached out and took Godwin’s bowl and gave him his own.
In the summer of 1007, the king announced yet another tax, of thirty thousand pounds of silver. Wulfnoth went pale, because he had given so much already, and he could not look his people in the face.
But he, and the rest of the country, paid, and the Army went home, but before the wheat could be brought in heavy rain and blight ruined much of the crop. November came with heavy snows that killed many sheep and left the people shivering in their beds.
‘We have seen the backs of the Danes, but it is not the end of our troubles,’ Wulfnoth said as he poked at the fire with a charred stick. ‘Fetch your spears. It is time to hunt.’
That winter was the coldest that men could remember and, after the long year of hunger, made the people weak. The old went first, then the sick and the weak, and men prayed. When the young and the healthy and the beautiful went too, men tugged their beards and wept.
Leofwine began to cough, but he refused to stay home. The people needed him. They needed deer and meat and fat and the thin brown broth that the marrow bones brought, and Wulfnoth needed his elder son’s help.
The hounds were as lean and listless as the rest of them, but when they got the scent they were as vicious as starving men. One day Leofwine and Godwin caught their first wolf. It was old and grey and lame in one leg, but they cornered it in one of the high fields and killed it with stabs to the heart.
Wulfnoth was proud of them. ‘Come, let’s skin it before it freezes.’
Leofwine and Godwin refused to stay in the hall, and Godwin, determined to show he was as big a boy as his brother, insisted on riding and hunting and hawking. Each evening his energy was spent and he fell asleep at the benches and had to be carried to bed.
Leofwine’s cough failed to get better once the frosts had passed. Days turned to weeks and one day Leofwine coughed and then looked at his hand and said, ‘Look – blood!’
He was bemused more than shocked, but when Gytha saw the blood at dinner that night her face went pale.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘sit by the fire. No more running wild for you. Rest, child.’
‘I cannot,’ Leofwine said.
‘Your father will have to do without you for the moment.’
Leofwine argued, but she refused to listen.
‘Godwin will have to help,’ she said. ‘And I shall fetch the priest to come and bless you.’
Gytha gathered all manner of herbs, brewed up coltsfoot with honey and held the bowl for Leofwine to sip.
Godwin was jealous of all the attention his brother got and wished he could cough up blood too.
‘Don’t be silly,’ his mother told him. ‘Now out you go and make yourself useful!’
‘Useful’ meant keeping out of her way, and Godwin went about the manor looking for trouble, or something that might snag his attention. When he came back to the hall, Leofwine made faces at him as the women rubbed goose fat into his chest.
‘I would gladly swap places,’ Leofwine said as he buttoned his kirtle, ‘but Mother says I must stay here till the weather warms. Tell me, has anyone caught the white hart yet?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Go and see for me. We can’t let our neighbour snag him. He’ll mount the antlers over his chair and we’ll have to sit there while he gloats that he caught him and not us!’
Leofwine started coughing and the cough wouldn’t stop and Godwin wa
s shooed out of the door.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked as the door was shut behind him.
‘Your brother is sick,’ one of the women said. ‘Now off with you and don’t let in any more draughts.’
Godwin found himself standing on the doorstep looking out into the world. The sun was just starting to break through the clouds. It stabbed down and lit up strip fields and hedgerows, pasture and hall, church and glebe, and the far-off acres of blue water. Godwin pursed his lips. It was a day he and Leofwine would have disappeared together over the distant hedge, and come back at dinnertime, dirty and ravenous. He set off alone, with stick and knife, into the fringes of the forest. He saw nothing, not a white hart or a brown hind, nor elf or goblin, friend or foe.
He picked up stones and tossed them out into the sunlight.
The day faded and he shivered.
When summer came he would bring Leofwine up here and share this spot with him, he thought. They would sit here and laugh at the time when Leofwine was sick. Maybe they would return as old men, when they had sons of their own and great victories to remember.
These thoughts made Godwin cheerful again, and as the day began to fail, he pushed himself up and started back down the narrow sheep track of trodden grass, half whistling odd notes.
‘I’m going down to Cicestre,’ his mother announced that evening, ‘to fetch holy water.’
‘Can I come?’ Godwin said.
‘No,’ she said.
The holy water came in a red clay pot stamped with a cross and a little image of a pair of angels looking up into the clouds. It cost his mother ten shillings.
‘It was drawn from the Saints’ Well and blessed by nuns and monks of the highest purity,’ Gytha said.
‘Can I try some?’
‘Godwin,’ she said. ‘Please!’
Godwin waited till Leofwine had been given the water to drink before he dipped his finger to see what this holy water tasted like.
It wasn’t like the water in Contone, and he guessed it was the holiness he could taste and dipped his finger in again.
‘Godwin!’ his mother said, and he jumped at the sound. ‘Will you please stop!’
