Shieldwall

by Justin Hill

  Yes, I am no child to kill in combat, Godwin smiled.

  As Ulf swaggered, Godwin’s confidence grew. He strained to keep it back, like a snapping dog. This is yours for the taking, he told himself. Yours for the losing. He threatened Ulf’s face. Ulf lifted his shield and Godwin saw his opportunity come again – and let it pass.

  I fought at Lundenburh, Godwin’s look said. Fate fortuned me.

  He threatened Ulf’s face again and almost laughed – it was too easy. When your shield is high, you are blind to the enemy’s weapon. Always keep the weapon in view, Godwin thought, and stepped forward again, made as if to swing high and Ulf’s shield went up again, but this time Godwin stepped to the side and swung his sword hard.

  It was a wild swing, but it caught Ulf a glancing blow behind his ear. It was hard to tell who was more excited or surprised, Ulf or the onlookers.

  There was a gasp as Godwin ducked back from Ulf’s return blow, which missed and spun him off his feet. Godwin paused for a moment, thinking Ulf would swing again, but instead he half fell and let out a dull grunt of shock and pain. The blow had stunned him. But if Godwin thought the battle was over, Ulf shocked him by pushing himself up and charging like a wounded boar, seeking to smash Godwin back with the boss of his shield.

  Godwin sprang to the side. He smashed the boss of his own shield into the side of Ulf’s head, knocked out his teeth and stunned him. This time Godwin kept on top of him. He stabbed his sword point over the edge of Ulf’s shield and drove it through cloth and skin; jammed against bone.

  A surer man would have slain Ulf then, but Godwin was still young and the blow did not strike true enough. Ulf started to crawl to safety. Godwin was over him. He put his foot on the small of Ulf’s back to hold him steady.

  Ulf’s hands clutched at his knees. ‘Mercy,’ he begged.

  ‘Do not fear. I shall make it quick,’ Godwin said, drove the blunt sword point into the gap between collarbone and neck. Ulf spasmed with the death blow. Blood ran from his mouth and nose and the corner of his eye, like a red tear.

  Godwin pulled the sword free and it came out with a great gout of hot gore.

  God had judged. Godwin was right.

  As news of the manslaying spread, doubting villagers crept out. Their faces were cold and pinched, hope almost extinguished. They held out their hands as if a single touch could heal the memories of the past five years. ‘Where have you been? And where is your father? We heard that he had died. It is a terrible shame. We remember him fondly. How could you leave us to the likes of Ulf ? Brihtric is greedier than the fattest sow! Lord help us, it was not right of your father to do this to us!’

  It was hard to answer, but it wasn’t answers they wanted as much as a chance to tell someone of their plight and their five years of suffering. At last they ran out of complaints and began to laugh and chatter, and Godwin shook hands and promised to right all the wrongs that had been done.

  They pushed him forward like a groom at his wedding.

  ‘Godwin, son of Wulfnoth, come and take back your father’s hall!’ a voice rang out. Under the old doorposts Arnbjorn, his father’s faithful steward, waited with a bowl of ale in his hands. The old man’s eyes were rheumy with age, but it was not age he wiped from his cheeks. ‘Wes tu hal!’ he said and presented the mead-bowl. ‘Thrice welcome, son of Wulfnoth! For no man is dearer to us than our own natural lord.’

  ‘In!’ the crowd urged him. ‘Come!’

  But he paused at the threshold and patted the heavy cob wall, as a man might pat a favourite horse’s neck. ‘So the old hall’s still standing, then.’

  Everyone laughed. They laughed at anything, they were so happy – and Godwin realised he was laughing too, and was surprised at the sound, because he had not remembered how happy life had once been. He looked at the faces around him: Agnes the ale-wife, Grond the bee-master, Dudoc the blacksmith, Hareth’s daughter – married now with a boy at the breast – and lads he used to kick around with in the yard. The last five years seemed to lie so lightly on them. It was a bittersweet moment. He envied them.

  They mistook Godwin’s delay for fear or modesty or indecision and they laid hold of him and pushed him over the sill and into the room.

  ‘Come, lord!’ Arnbjorn said.

  Godwin had dreamt of home for five long years, and as he stepped into the earth-floored hall, he stared in wonder. There lay the hearth; there was the place his father’s carved chair stood; there was where he had played with the hall cat; there was his seat for the feasting; the rafter where his banner of the Fighting Man used to hang. But a pair of old hams hung there now; in place of the chair an empty space; silence where his family used to talk. His family home stood empty and forgetful – like an old warrior who sits by the fire unable to remember his name.

  On that first night home after the killing of Ulf, Godwin left the drinking men and went to lie down in his old bed closet, a simple timber enclosure along the far side of the hall. It had been hung with old tapestries and cushioned with the finest hay mattress, but it smelt as if it had been used for drying bacon for the last five years; a smoky meat scent clung to the wood.

  Agnes had laid some fresh rye straw down and thrown a length of clean home-spun over the top of it and he wriggled back and forth till he made himself comfortable. He lay on his back and tried to remember the last night he had slept here. He lay and listened to the laughter of men in the hall, and the crackle of the fire slowly dying, and the plank-chinks of hall light grew thinner and paler. Godwin was dog-tired. Warm, sheltered and safe at last, in an instant he was asleep, and about him men lay down to their hall rest.

  Outside the hall a fox sniffed the air, and a distant owl screeched. A voice whispered in Godwin’s ear, very soft and gentle, and he ignored it at first, but it was soft and gentle and insistent. ‘Godwin! Wulfnothson! Awake!’

  Godwin turned and murmured in his sleep.

  ‘Keep not your oaths,’ the voice said, very distant but clear. ‘Follow not the House of Ethelred. Great you shall be when the Dane is king!’

  Those last words were like cold water and they shocked Godwin awake. Light showed through the cracks of the closet. It was morning.

  The manor of Contone ran to seasonal routines, to laws older and more immutable than those of Alfred or Ethelred, more ancient even than the coming of the English. The fields were ploughed in spring; livestock slaughtered in autumn; sheep were sheared at Lammastide. At Easter they gave their lord two ewes and two lambs; they delivered six large buckets of ale to their lord’s hall at Michaelmas, four cartloads of split firewood into his barns. One week in three they worked for their lord, and on nights of the full moon Agnes the Alewife still took food up to the unploughed elf mound for the night spirits to eat.

  Godwin and his father’s steward, Arnbjorn, found the pile of food, half-eaten by foxes. It was a high spot where the tall, dry grass whistled with wind. They paused their horses, looked out towards the sea, the breeze lifting their hair from their shoulders.

  Below them, Godmaer limped out to the fields with fresh oatcakes for the men. His club foot ached today, and his mother had promised to fetch more holy water. He gave the food to the men, and they sat and rested and saw Godwin silhouetted against the grey sky. They stared for a long time, and the man next to him put down his hoe and nodded in approval as he munched his oatcake.

  ‘Look! Our rightful lord has returned,’ he said, and Godmaer looked. He had come of age during Wulfnoth’s exile, a time of tumult and strange lights in the sky, weird faces in the clouds, but now at last it seemed that order was returning.

  In the abbey of Burne a roll of yellowed vellum recorded the bounds of Contone in the thin and angular minuscule writing of Alfred’s court scribe. The abbey kept all Wulfnoth’s charters safe from king and Dane and other religious establishments.

  Ego Alfred rex Anglorum huius donationis … the land-grant began. Ad nomen optimates …

  Godwin had only seen the charter three or four times,
but he knew enough letters to know the standard form and he and every man in Contone knew the bounds of the manor, for they had had them beaten into them when they were children. From the ancient oak to the ploughed headland, along fallow strip-marker stones to the ferny mound, where a giant was buried in former days. At the giant’s mound the boundaries followed a hedgerow and it was there they found Grond the Old, with both his teeth, lifting the ferny thatch to inspect his beehives. He put down the hive he was cleaning and sheltered his face, and grinned both teeth at them as he touched his forelock.

  ‘It’s a cold day to be working.’

  ‘That it is,’ Grond said. ‘But a bit of chill never killed, and it makes the home fire blaze so much warmer afterwards.’

  Grond and Godwin traded news; Grond had seen a fox bitch up here two mornings running. ‘And I’ll bet she’s thinking of a way to get into the dovecot. You’ll have to get the hounds out. Ulf was a braggart and a coward, and the dogs would not hunt for him. Nothing worse than a fox in a dovecot! It would be all right if they just took what they ate, but they make a terrible mess. They took a sheep last week, ripped her up from tail to ears. Foxes don’t kill nicely, that is for sure.’

  ‘How are your hives?’ Godwin asked, once Grond paused for a moment to wet his lips.

  ‘Bah!’ he said, and looked at the hive at his feet. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Though the bees did not produce for Brihtric as they did for your father.’

  ‘Well, make sure they know that I am returned.’

  The blacksmith’s hammer was ringing joyfully out as Godwin and Arnbjorn made their way back down to the hall. A file of villagers waited outside: a stray cow had broken into a field of fresh oats and ruined the crop; sheep had been stolen; a dog had mauled another man’s lambs. Godwin gave judgement, but after an hour of long-winded accounts he found his attention wandering. He should have a mass said for the soul of his father, a coat of mail, a new sword, a helmet and a bright new shield.

  Godwin poured himself a cup of warm buttermilk and let out a long sigh. Soon Brihtric would hear of his return. Godwin looked at the motley collection of farmhands and freemen sitting on the benches. He stared at them and tried to imagine them in mail and helm; the image was farcical.

  Godwin finished his buttermilk and set the bowl on the table. He did not need farmers; he needed a war band.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Feast of Candlemas

  It was a foul February night as a horseman picked his way along the road to Selesie. Sheets of rain lashed in from the sea, the road ran with water like a stream, and his cloak had long since stopped repelling the wet.

  Brihtric was staying in a small hall, outside the town, away from the tanners’ stink and the cattle market. At the hall, the door wards were tardy in opening the gates, but as soon as they heard, they brought the man straight into the hall where Brihtric sat, like a toad, in his carved wooden chair.

  ‘Who are you?’ Brihtric demanded. His single eye glared out with all the malevolence of two.

  The messenger gave his name, his birthplace and the names of his kin, and the alderman nodded.

  ‘From Peteorde, are you?’

  ‘I am, lord. I bring news of a manslaying at one of your manors.’

  ‘A manslaying?’ the alderman said, but in truth he was not that interested. ‘Well, report it to the Hundred Court and they will deal with it.’

  ‘I would, sir, but I fear the Hundred Court would not deal fairly with this question, for in this hundred live the friends and kinsfolk of the man who did the slaying.’

  ‘Do they?’ Alderman Brihtric said. ‘Who is this man?’

  ‘It is the son of Wulfnoth Cild,’ the messenger announced.

  Brihtric choked on his ale. ‘Wulfnoth Oath-Breaker’s son has returned?’

  A droplet of water ran down the man’s matted hair. He nodded glumly.

  ‘To Boseham?’

  ‘No, lord. Contone.’

  Brihtric nodded, but he was not a local man, and even though he had married a girl from Leomynstre, the Sudsexe men did not look kindly on him. ‘So the wolf’s cub has been set free,’ he whispered to himself, and his red cheeks were ugly and grease-smeared as he broadcast his laughter about the room. ‘Why is this news to disturb our feasting? A lad sneaks back to his robber lair. Does the hunter fear the cub when the sire is feathered? What would you have me do, flee back to Sciropescire? Ha! He is a thief and a son of a thief. They’re used to reavers up in the Downs – tell the shepherds to set a guard on their flocks, and send to Boseham for gibbet-timber. It’s been too long since a good hanging.’

  The long benches rang out with mocking laughter, but later, when the beer had stopped talking, Brihtric brooded on the old names the news had brought back to mind, five years unforgotten.

  In the hall the men were still laughing, but Brihtric’s mistress, a buxom Mercian girl he had brought south with him, said, ‘Have you seen the lad?’

  ‘I have,’ Brihtric said. ‘He was at court.’

  ‘Is he dangerous?’

  ‘Any son of Wulfnoth is dangerous,’ Brihtric said, and wondered on all that the messenger had told him, magnified Godwin from an inconvenience to a threat, a boy to a warrior and a leader of men.

  ‘Who was this Ulf that he slew?’

  Brihtric shrugged. What did he care.

  The girl said nothing. She looked at the confused lines of her palm and shook her head. If Wulfnoth’s son was like this when he was still green, what would he be like when he was seasoned?

  ‘Come,’ she said, and poured a little more hot water into the bowl to wash her master’s hairy white feet. ‘Kill him. A man does good work when he rids himself of shit,’ she told him, but that night as he lay in his bed, his girl under him, he remembered that morning when Wulfnoth’s twenty ship crews had come upon the moored ships at dawn.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ his girl asked, but he rolled away from her.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, but he could not regain his ardour. ‘I am tired,’ he said at last, and pushed her hands away from him.

  The image, like the shame, was not easily exorcised: a long line of charred wrecks moored along the strand, greedy tongues of flame chewing their painted timbers, the dark columns of smoke rising high into the Heavens.

  Forty days after Christ’s birth came the Feast of Candlemas. Brihtric declared that he would spend the feast in Selesie and leave the day after to deal with this Wulfnothson.

  The morning of the feast dawned clear and damp and unseasonably warm. The hall thatch steamed and through the walrus-snores of his men came the high sound of lambs bleating. Brihtric woke rested and calm. He dressed in his finest clothes, and all his retainers accompanied him to Cicestre Cathedral, an ancient building with foundations of great slabs of dressed stone.

  The church dated from Roman times. It had once been a temple to Jupiter Imperator, but four hundred years of Christianity obscured that pagan past. Banks of reed lights guttered with each draught of cathedral air, and the statues of holy men, graven in stone, stared with painted eyes. Christ adorned the brightly painted rood screen while the whale mouth of Hell swallowed the sinful.

  Brihtric closed his eyes and tried to erase all the tension. A dog pissed against a church column. One of Brihtric’s men shooed it out. Brihtric tried to ignore them. He imagined slow, brown river water; the ordered herb gardens of a monastery cloister; summer daybreak; first smoke rising from a hall chimney.

  ‘Kyrie,’ the hidden monks sang from behind the rood screen. ‘Kyrie eleison.’

  The moment came and Brihtric spoke the single word, ‘Amen.’

  He knew the Selesie crowd were gathering outside in the sea breeze, their pinched and hungry faces looking on with despair. Tax had ruined many of them; Fate had been cruel. Their hopelessness pricked Brihtric’s conscience for a moment, but he had more pressing worries upon him: the tax that he had to deliver to the Danish king, the oaths he had sworn and broken, the sense that Fate had offered him a cho
ice of hands, all bad.

  Eadric would know what to do, he told himself as he knelt down to pray.

  The monks’ voices rose in the Magnificat. Brihtric had made his appearance and strode out of the church. Et exsultavit spiritus meus, in Deo salvatore meo, quia respexit humilitatem ancillæ suæ. Brihtric paused at the cathedral steps and the expectant crowd shuffled forward.

  My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour

  He has put down the mighty from their thrones,

  and exalted those of low degree.

  He has filled the hungry with good things;

  and the rich He has sent empty away.

  Among those who watched Brihtric’s company leave the cathedral were a few men who wore their hoods low over their faces. They caught Brihtric’s attention for a moment, but there were other things to worry about, and he set his men to distribute bread and curds to the poor and soon forgot them.

  But the hooded men did not forget. They had broad shoulders, sharp blades and long memories. Brihtric, it was, who had sworn the oaths that had Wulfnoth exiled. And he was the hated brother of their hated foe.

  They waited until darkness fell, donned their steel-knit war shirts, remembered the many nights that they had boasted with ale, crossed themselves before mounting their horses, their hooves muffled with knotted rags, and they rode to where Brihtric’s hall stood, a little way from the north gates.

  Brihtric’s men had drunk a great brew of barley beer and slept deeply among the bones and the dogs, slept through unquiet dreams as the gibbous moon rose and began to set again. They slept as the horsemen dismounted and left their horses half a mile off, tethered among the low bushes of a copse, their noses deep in bags of oats. There were fifteen or more, but it was hard to tell in the darkness, and they passed like shades under the low hunting night clouds. The moon saw them scale the palisade and land softly inside. A cloud drew a veil across her face, as if she had turned away, like God, from the sinful.