The Hallowed Isle Book Two Page 5

  At his feet sat the shope Andulf, head bent as he tuned his harp. Firelight glistened on the silver strands threading his brown hair. As Oesc approached, the shope straightened, and the murmur of conversation began to still. Once, and then again, he struck the strings, then, in a voice with the honey of sweet mead and the bite of its fire, he began to sing.

  Eormanaric, noblest of Amalings,

  Great king of Goths, who got much glory,

  Fought many folk and fed his people,

  Lost land and life to Hunnish horse-lords.

  Hengest beckoned, and Oesc joined him on the broad bench. In a few moments one of the thralls brought him a wooden bowl filled with savory stew, and he began to gobble it down. The first bowl took the edge off his hunger. He held it out to be refilled, able to listen now to the mingled honey and gall of the tale of the great king who a century earlier had led the Goths to create an empire, and when the Huns invaded, lost it. From the Pontus Euxinus to the Northern Sea he had ruled, and from the Wistla to the great steppes, conquering tribes whose names were lost in legend. He had defeated Alaric, king of the Heruli who had made a kingdom north of the Maiotis, and controlled the trade routes to the western lands.

  Mightiest among his warriors, Eormanaric had been a man of evil temper, who had the young wife of a chieftain who had deserted him torn apart by tying her limbs to four wild stallions. Her brothers sought to avenge her, splitting the Gothic forces at the moment when they most needed unity. And so the Huns had rolled over them and the Goths who survived fled westward, some to cross the Danuvius and seek service with Rome, and some to push all the way to Iberia, where now they ruled.

  Fierce to his foes and to the faithless,

  Betrayed by trampled traitors’ kin,

  In old age he embraced his ending,

  His blood in blessing fed the ground. . . .

  In the end, ran the tale, Eormanaric had taken his own life, seeking by the offering of his own blood to placate the gods.

  “It is said that one should not praise a day until it is ended,” said Hengest, when the last note had faded to silence. “I suppose that the same is true of a king. He lost his empire, but perhaps his blood bought some protection for his people, since they have prospered in their new land. At least his death had meaning. . . .”

  “That is what King Gundohar said—” answered the shope.

  “You knew him?” exclaimed Oesc. He had been aware that the man was a Burgund, his accent worn smooth by years of wandering, but he had thought that everyone close to the royal clan died when the Huns attacked them a quarter-century before.

  “He taught me how to play the harp,” said Andulf, his voice tightening with old pain. “It is he who wrote this song.”

  “But you don’t look old enough—” Oesc broke off, flushing, as the men began to laugh.

  “I was a boy, younger than you,” said Andulf smiling, “serving in his hall.”

  “And now the Niflungar themselves are becoming a legend,” added Hengest, shaking his head. “And yet I myself saw Sigfrid when he was only a child and I scarcely older. Who, I wonder, will the heroes of this time be?”

  “The deeds of your youth are meat for the bards already, lord,” said Byrhtwold.

  “Do you mean the fight at Finnesburgh?” growled Hengest. “To keep one oath I was forced to break another, but it is not something I remember with pride.”

  “You will be remembered as the leader who brought our people to this good land!” said one of the other men.

  “If we can hold it . . .” someone said softly.

  “Does that matter?” asked Byrhtwold. “Hunnish horses pasture now in the land where Eormanaric died, and the heirs of Gundohar have found refuge in Raetia. Sigfrid left only his name behind him. But in death they triumphed, and they are remembered.”

  “Do you mean that if we succeed in winning all this island it will be Uthir and Ambrosius about whom men make the stories?” Guthlaf, one of the younger warriors, laughed disbelievingly.

  “It may be so,” said Andulf, frowning, “for the winners will belong not to legend, but to history.” He began to slide his harp into its sealskin case.

  The conversation turned to other matters, and as the drinking horns were refilled, grew louder. Oesc leaned against the hard back of the high seat, exhaustion dragging like a sea-anchor at his limbs.

  “Send the boy to bed, Hengest, before he falls asleep where he sits,” Byrhtwold said presently.

  “I’m not sleepy!” Oesc jerked upright, rubbing his eyes. “Grandfather, Octha was a hero, was he not?”

  The old man nodded, his eyes dark with shared pain, and the boy knew that he too was thinking of the lonely mound just within the wall.

  “Do we have to choose?” he said then. “Do we have to choose between a glorious death and living for our people?” He waited, realizing that his grandfather was taking him seriously.

  “Many men fall and are not remembered . . .” Hengest said slowly. “It is because they died for a reason that we honor heroes, because they never gave up, but fought to the end. Death is not a failure, Oesc, if a man has truly lived.”

  “Then he didn’t fail . . .” whispered the boy. “We lost the battle and they killed him, but Octha had his victory. . . .”

  “Boy, is that what has troubled you?” Hengest set his gnarled hand on Oesc’s shoulder. “Your father waits for us even now in Woden’s hall. You must strive to live so that you will be worthy to see him again.”

  The ache in Oesc’s throat made it hard to breathe. He sucked in air with a harsh gasp, and awkwardly, his grandfather began to pat his back, then seeing his face, gathered him against his bony breast. And there, breathing in the scents of leather and horses and the old man’s flesh, Oesc found at last the release of tears.

  III

  HOLY GROUND

  A.D. 475

  EVERY FALL, WHEN THE RAIDING SEASON HAD ENDED AND THE crops were gathered in, it was Hengest’s custom to travel around the territory that the Vor-Tigernus had given him. At this time of year, when the quarrels of the summer were still fresh in memory, the king heard complaints and rendered judgment, lest resentment, festering through the dark days of winter, should erupt into bloodfeud and destroy the peace of the land. In the second year after Verulamium, Hengest took his grandson Oesc with him on the journey, that he might learn the land and its law.

  That fall the first of the winter storms came early, soaking the stubbled fields. But it was succeeded by a season of smiling peace, and the king and his escort rode through a landscape as rich in autumn color as heaped amber, splashed with the vivid scarlet berries of rowan and holly and the varied crimsons of the vine.

  Their way first led south to the coast, where the Roman fortress of Lemanis still guarded the Saxon shore. They travelled by short stages, for the king’s age would not allow him to do more. In the mornings, when he stretched stiff joints, swearing, he would say that next year, surely, he would let Oesc do it all. But by evening he was smiling, and the cold knot of anxiety in Oesc’s belly would disappear.

  From Lemanis, they worked their way back north and east along the shoreline to Dubris, where the high chalk cliffs looked out across the sea. Their next stop was Rutupiae, where the Vor-Tigernus’s son had once driven Hengest into the sea. The fortress was in ruins now, only the great triumphal arch still proclaiming the vanished glory of Rome. Here, the rich lands by the shore were thickly settled, and the cases being brought for judgment mostly quarrels over boundaries or complaints about strayed stock.

  They passed through Durovernum once more and then made their way eastward along the straight line of the Roman road that led to Londinium. To their left the land rose in gentle slopes to the North Downs, scattered with ruined villas and new Saxon farmsteads. To their right the green fields stretched down to the estuary of the Tamesis, sparkling in the sun. Where the ribbon of the road passed, habitations, or their remains, were most thickly clustered, and as they neared Durobrivae, the Roman t
own that guarded the crossings of the Meduwege and the western half of Cantuware, the land became more populous still.

  “The British have got themselves a high king!” Red-faced and perspiring, Hrofe Guthereson shouted out the words even before he greeted his king. He had come out with his houseguard to escort them into the city, but with his news the whole party had come to a halt in the road.

  “Who?” barked Hengest. “Has Leudonus finally got the southern princes to accept him?”

  “No—” Hrofe shook his head, eyes sparkling. “It’s a fifteen-year-old boy! Uthir had a son!”

  Fifteen! thought Oesc. My age. . . . How strange to think that the battle in which he had lost his own father had so deprived another boy as well.

  “Legitimate?” asked Byrhtwold.

  Hrofe shrugged. “That’s not clear, but Queen Igierne has claimed him as her child by the king.”

  “I remember hearing talk of a babe,” Hengest said, frowning, “but I thought it died. . . .” Slowly they had begun to move forward again.

  “They say he was sent away to the west country for safety, so secretly that even the folk that fostered him did not know who he really was.”

  Hengest smiled sourly. “Well perhaps they had some reason. When you are trying to get rid of a family of bears, you should attack the den.”

  “Well this one is a bear cub, right enough,” said Hrofe. “Arktos, they call him, or Artor.”

  Artor . . . To Oesc’s ears, that name rang like the clash of steel.

  “And they accepted him on the queen’s say-so?” Hengest said dubiously. “I know the British princes, and they would be hard put to agree that the sun sets in the west without nine days of arguing.”

  The walls were quite close now.

  “It was not the queen’s word that convinced them,” said Hrofe, with the air of one who has saved the best for last. “It was because the boy could handle the Sword!”

  The sword that killed Octha. . . . Oesc’s stricken gaze met that of his grandfather, and he saw Hengest’s face grow grim.

  “I had hoped that accursed weapon would go with Uthir to his grave.”

  “Oh no—” Hrofe babbled on with hateful cheer.

  Unable to bear it any longer, Oesc dug his heels into his mare’s flank and pushed past the king and through the shadowed arch of the eastern gate into Durobrivae.

  Shaded by an awning of canvas, Hengest sat in judgment in the forum for five long days. Oesc fidgeted beside him, the arguments half-heard, dreaming of the hunting he was missing while the weather held fair. His other grandfather used to spend a lot of time listening to men complain against each other too. Why, he wondered resentfully, would anyone want to be a king? But even the master of a farmstead had to settle disputes among his people, he supposed. The men the king judged were more powerful, that was all.

  “And how would you decide this matter, Oesc—” Hengest said suddenly.

  Blinking, the boy tried to remember what the man before them had just said. He was a big, fair, fellow with the lines of habitual ill-temper graven deeply around his mouth and on his brow.

  “He says,” the king repeated, “that his neighbor deliberately burned down his woodlot, and nearly destroyed his house as well.”

  “It is not so!” exclaimed the accused, glaring. “I only meant to burn the stubble from my fields.”

  “But you burned my woods!”

  “Is it my fault if Thunor turns the wind? Blame the gods, not me!”

  Oesc gazed from one man to the other, frowning, as he tried to remember the law. “Was it a large wood?” he asked finally. Hengest began to smile, and the boy continued more boldly. “Were there many big trees?”

  “A very fine wood,” said the plaintiff, “with noble oak trees!”

  “Untrue! Untrue! There was one tree of some size, and around it nought but hazels!” The accused pointed at an older man in the front row of the crowd. “Tell them! You know the place—tell them what was there!”

  Oesc stood up, having remembered the relevant traditions now. He cast a quick glance at this grandfather, who nodded reassurance, then held up one hand and waited until silence fell.

  “It is the law of our people that compensation shall be paid for deeds, not thoughts. It does not matter why you started the fire,” he told the accused man. “If you were so foolish as to burn stubble on a day of wind, and it did damage to the property of another, you must pay for it. The fine for damage to a wood is thirty shillings, and five shillings for every great tree, and five pence for each of the smaller.”

  “It is his word against mine as to what was there . . .” the man said sullenly.

  “Your word, and that of your witnesses,” agreed the boy. “Let each of you call those who will take oath to support your assertion, and so the fine shall be set according to the decision of your peers.”

  “Unjust!” cried the plaintiff, but the men in the crowd were nodding and murmuring their approval of the plan. Clearly the fair-haired man’s taste for contention had not endeared him to his neighbors, for only two men came to his support, while the accused could choose from a dozen or more.

  “Did I do right?” asked Oesc when the oaths had been sworn and the fine paid over.

  “You did very well,” answered the king. “That man is a trouble-maker whom I have seen in court before. A more reasonable man might have settled the matter with his neighbor privately, and not burdened us with it, but he got his recompense, and will not, one hopes, feel compelled to get satisfaction by burning the other man’s hall.”

  “I know it is law that the man who set the fire should be held responsible, but it does seem unfair when he intended no harm,” said Oesc thoughtfully.

  “Do you think our laws were made to do justice? No, child, if my decisions keep our hot-headed tribesmen from killing each other I will be satisfied. It is each man’s wyrd, not I, that will give him the doom that he deserves.”

  Oesc was glad when they left Durobrivae behind them and took the road once more. Now they moved southward, climbing the tree-clad slopes where the valley of the Meduwege cut through the North Downs. From time to time the trees would part and he could glimpse the river below them, carrying the waters that drained from the Weald, the great forest that covered the central part of the Cantuware lands.

  As the day drew to its ending, the road dropped downward into the valley, and he saw the red-tiled roofs of a cluster of Roman buildings set on an oval mound, and beyond them the thatching of a Saxon farmstead amid the water meadows by the stream. Closer still, he realized that the structures on the mound were temples, and that the farm had been built on the foundations of a Roman villa. Here the Meduwege broadened, running chuckling over the stones of a ford.

  “Who holds this place?” he asked as they came to a halt in the yard.

  “An Anglian called Ægele who sailed in one of the first three keels that came with me across the sea. He lost a leg in the fight at Rutupiae, and I settled him here,” his grandfather answered him.

  “And who lives up there?” Oesc pointed toward a small square building with a peaked roof, surrounded by a covered porch on all four sides. Some of the tiles were loose, and in places the white plaster was flaking from the stones of the wall, but someone had recently raked the path.

  “Ah—that is the other reason we have stopped here. I am not the only one who will find in this place a friend.”

  But it was not until the following morning that Oesc found out what Hengest had meant, when together they climbed the temple hill.

  She could hear them coming up the pathway, the old man’s tread heavy and halting on the gravel and the boy’s footsteps a quick brush against the stones, his rapid questions abruptly cut off as they paused in the shadow of the porch. A breath of air set the lamp flames to leaping, lending life to the carven eyes of the figures carved on the altar, and elongating her shadow across the wall. Oesc stopped in the doorway and she put back her shawl, smiling as his eyes adjusted to the dim light
and he saw her sitting there.

  “Hæthwæge!” The delight on his face was like another lamp in the room. “Where did you come from?”

  “Where have I not been?” She patted the bench that ran around the wall and the boy sat down. Hengest eased down on the opposite bench and sat with his veined hands crossed on the head of his staff, watching them. “I have been going up and down, searching out the holy places of this land.”

  Brought back to awareness of where they were, his eyes flicked uneasily around the small room. He had grown, she thought, since she had last seen him. At fifteen he was leggy as a colt, with the promise of strength in his bony shoulders and character in the line of his jaw, where the first fuzz of manhood was beginning to appear.

  “And who did the Romans worship here?”

  “That is their image of them—” She gestured toward the altar.

  Waist-high, the edges of its flat top were scrolled and fluted, forming a canopy for a bas-relief that showed a seated goddess in a wide sleeved, pleated garment, and three standing figures in cloaks with hoods. The goddess held something, possibly a spindle, in her hand. Below the figures there had been a Latin inscription, but the stone was too worn to make out the words.

  “But who are they?” he asked again.

  “They are not Roman, though they are figured in the Roman style,” Hæthwæge said slowly. “This is an old place, where the track that runs along the downs crosses the river. It was here before Rome, maybe even before the British came. I have sat out all night upon a barrow beside that trackway and listened to those whose bones lie there.”

  She shivered a little, remembering voices in the windy darkness. She still limped where her knee had stiffened after that night’s out-sitting, but she did not grudge it. The Romans, she gathered, had not bothered to listen, but had fastened their own names onto the native divinities and confined them in new temples, ignoring the old powers of the hills. The ancient ones had been pleased, she thought, that someone was paying attention to them at last.