But I didn’t. In Anderida I had always been able to get my way with any peasant-girl that I fancied, though of course I was helped by my position as the King’s son; and I thought it rather insulting that this priggish young woman should treat me as though I were a eunuch. I was as bored as any other warrior in peace time and I thought it would be amusing to wake her up, and see if she had any of the usual human passions.
Gertrude was certainly a very strange sort of person. That is how everyone thought of her, as a person and not as a young virgin; in itself that shows how extraordinary she was. Actually she was not unattractive in a physical sense; she was much too big for Roman taste, but everything was correctly in proportion, and a good hairdresser with a box of face-paint could have made her an excellent statue of Minerva. She had yellow hair and blue eyes, of course, like all well-born German ladies, and her face was of the type that gets redder and redder from exposure to the weather, never settling down to an attractive brown; though I discovered later that her skin, where it was normally covered by her clothes, was very white and fine. Her hands also were bright red, and much too large, and her feet looked enormous in thick woollen stockings and shapeless Saxon shoes. But her tall body curved in and out in the correct places, and when my eyes grew accustomed to her scale I saw that she moved gracefully.
I remember the day when things came to a climax. It was June, and Gertrude sent a message that I was to take her out after dinner to walk in the meadows; such a message from the King’s sister was of course a command, though I would have preferred to rest in the shade after the midday meal. Accordingly I went round to the entrance of the women’s quarters while the sun was still high, and she joined me at once, without keeping me waiting as a Roman lady would have done; she liked to keep appointments punctually, because she thought that made her more like a man, and she made very little difference in her appearance whether she was in the women’s quarters or out in the fields. I remember how she was dressed, in a sleeveless blue woollen gown and a battered hat of straw with a broad brim; below the short skirt of the gown her legs were clothed in the usual thick stockings, and on her feet were colossal leather shoes. It always struck me as odd that these Germans, though they felt the heat extremely, always thought it correct to swaddle their legs. The women were as sensitive about their knees as Roman ladies are about their breasts.
You will gather that on this occasion Gertrude’s appearance was not in the least enhanced by art; but the thin blue gown, caught in at the waist by an embroidered leather belt, enabled me to follow all the movements of her healthy young body, and in any case I had not seen a decent complexion since I left home. As soon as we were in the sweet-smelling hay-meadows she turned to me her serious gaunt face, and prepared to imbibe instruction. She had not come out to be amused, and first she laid down the scope of the lesson:
‘Cerdic Elesing, on our last walk you told me all that you could remember about the countries of the eastern part of the world, and the peoples who live there. Now we come to the third of the three parts into which the world is divided. Tell me about that third part, in the far south.’
‘Very well, my lady. The third division of the world is called Africa, though as far as I know there is no reason for the name, no story about a lady and a God. You will understand that I have never been there, and that I am only telling you what was told to me.’ (This I said because the Saxons consider it disgraceful to tell a lie when they are supposed to be teaching, though in the ordinary affairs of life they will lie like a horse-coper.) ‘It lies south of the great central sea that is a highway for all civilized men, and because it lies to the south the climate is warmer than that of other lands. Don’t ask me why, it is a general rule that sailors will confirm from experience. The land is very fruitful. The chief city is called Carthage, and it is one of the greatest cities in the world. There are no enemies living near, for a great desert stretches to the south, and the Ocean bounds it on the west; so it is not an important command, though enormous taxes are collected. It has very little history; the Romans conquered it five hundred years ago, after three great wars. It is not nearly such an interesting subject as the east, and that is all I learned about it in my youth.’
I was getting rather bored with these lessons in elementary geography, and most of what I had read about Africa had been concerned with the heresies that flourished there, and the rebellions that had followed them; things that I really could not explain to a pagan barbarian. But Gertrude had a naturally inquiring mind, and she wanted a picture of the world she was living in. My little exposition at the beginning of the walk was only a framework that she would fill in by asking a great many questions.
‘You learnt that by heart when you were a small boy,’ she said. ‘Now tell me what you have heard about this great country since, and whether everything is going as smoothly for the Romans at the present time as it was then. I am not interested in the past.’
‘Certainly, lady. Of course things have altered for the worse in the last twenty years; is there any part of the world where they have not? What I have just told you was true until not very long ago; now Africa has been overrun by barbarians, or rather I should say by a race of noble Germans. They are called the Vandals, and they originally came from the north of Germany, somewhere to the east of the noble Saxons, of whom the noblest are the Jutes. These Vandals now live in great splendour, and grow rich by piracy in the central sea. They have become Christians, though I believe of the wrong sort, and they oppress the native church. I have heard all this from the Roman priests in Britain, and I gather they are very worried about it.’
This was the sort of story that Gertrude liked to hear, and she pressed me for more details. When she at last understood that I had never learned the pedigrees of the Vandal Kings, so that she could not find out in what degree they were her cousins (for all noble Germans are related if you go back far enough among their ancestors, a hobby that noble Germans pursue with enthusiasm), she turned to asking more questions about the land itself. Accounts of the Roman world she found rather dull, for civilization seemed to her a boring routine, instead of the exciting and precarious adventure it really is; but the idea of a desert that no man had ever crossed fired her imagination, and she questioned me eagerly about the far south.
‘What is the matter with this desert, that no man has ever crossed it? Are you sure there is no way round? Even if there is no water for travellers to drink, the same thing is true of the sea, and we cross it in all directions. I can’t believe it is really too hot for human beings to live. If the people just to the north find the weather cool enough to work in the fields, a man should be able to walk gently to the south. I don’t think your Roman friends are very brave explorers.’
‘Perhaps not, noble lady. But I imagine the real reason why no one has made the attempt is that there seems nothing to be gained by it. In any case, the fame of the Empire as a good place to trade in, or to plunder for that matter, is very widely spread, and if nobody comes to us from the south across the desert, it must be because there is no one living there.’
‘This is very interesting. I like discussing difficult journeys; it is one of the best deeds a noble German can perform to accomplish them, and I don’t see why a woman should not do it as well as a man. Sit down here in the shade. Now tell me, has anyone tried going round by sea?’
She turned and stared at me with a puzzled frown on her weather-beaten forehead, as though we were seriously discussing a possible plan of campaign. We were sitting on the ground, our shoulders almost touching, yet she seemed only to be aware of me as a voice. Damn it all, this was not the way the girls of the Regni used to look into my eyes; I cast round for some way to wake her up and make the conversation more interesting.
‘My dear Gertrude,’ I began, which was in itself a new departure, for up to now I had never called her anything more intimate than noble lady. ‘Those Romans are not a seafaring people. They think it impious to tempt Fate by sailing out upon the boundles
s Ocean, and have written several excellent poems to that effect. The tradition has been handed down that Africa is surrounded by the Ocean, and that you can sail round it if you try hard enough, but the Romans have had other things to think about in the last few years.’
‘Then that is the way I shall win immortal fame, which is such a difficult thing for a woman to achieve,’ said this earnest and ridiculous young barbarian. ‘I know my brother will give me a ship if I ask him, for he is always longing to get rid of me. Will you come with me as shipmaster? I don’t think you have much of a future here.’
‘Of course, my dear; there is nothing I would like better than to follow you to the ends of the earth,’ I answered, gazing at her with all the fervour I could assume. ‘We will go on until we find a stretch of fertile ground, ringed round by the desert and the sea, and there we will build a hall where no enemies can reach us, and no King can summon us to follow him in war. We shall live as they did in the Golden Age, when our grandfather Woden travelled the earth, and rewarded those who showed him hospitality.’
She moved closer to me, until we were touching.
‘Do you think we could start this journey quite soon?’ this grown woman asked in the voice of a child. ‘You know that I am older than most virgins; it is important to do your great deeds when you are young, so that you have plenty of time to enjoy fame before you die. We must remember to take a good poet with us, and arrange to send him back when we are settled in our new land.’
‘You and I can make plans for ourselves, and that is a thing I shall look forward to doing, but I don’t think we should tell anyone else just yet. Summer has begun already, and by the time we got a ship loaded it would be too late to start a voyage. Let it be a secret between the two of us; we can discuss it together during our walks, if we go into the woods alone.’
After that it was pretty easy. We went off nearly every day to some thicket where we could be unobserved, and there Gertrude would babble to me about her wonderful new enterprise; a shared secret is a wonderfully intimate bond. Please don’t think that I was deeply in love with her; I have never been attracted by earnest young women, even if they are properly educated, and her total ignorance of what she was talking about made her a formidable bore. But she had an excellent body under that plain and serious face, and of course it was a great triumph, and a good score over all the men of Kent, to seduce the King’s sister. Every night when I lay down to sleep in the crowded and noisy hall of the comitatus I could feel my self-esteem growing in a most comforting manner. I am enough of a German to find plenty of self-esteem necessary to my happiness.
One day in the middle of October Gertrude told me that she was expecting a child. This was very disturbing news, and I had no plan ready for the emergency. But she tried to persuade me that all would come right in the end, if we were tactful with King Oisc.
‘Let us catch him in a good mood, and tell him everything. You are only a poor comrade, but you are also Woden-born; the child will be Woden-born on both sides. When we sail away to our new country, people will remember your noble descent, not your present position. We can have a solemn marriage when the winter feasts begin, and it ought to make my brother all the more eager to give us a ship, so that he can get rid of us. I will watch him to-night after supper, and when he has drunk the right amount I shall tell him the whole story.’
This would never do at all. The King did not like or trust me, and he had always been against his sister marrying anyone, for fear she should produce a family to compete with his own children for the succession to the throne. In any case, after supper was the worst time to approach him, for he was one of those unfortunate people whom drink renders more bad-tempered than they were when they sat down.
‘Look here, my little darling,’ I said in my most winning voice, looking into that earnest and crimson face. ‘You know how angry guardians feel when the virgins in their keeping are seduced. The King will order you to be cut down before he even bothers to find out the father. Particularly at supper-time you will not have a chance to explain the excellent reasons why it all happened. By the way, why did it happen? You always told me you knew something that had been told you by your old nurse. It isn’t like you to be careless and slapdash.’
‘Oh, Cerdic, my darling, I wanted to bear your child. I could have stopped it earlier on, but I deliberately didn’t. Just think what a son of ours will be like; we are the two most intelligent people in Kent, so he is bound to be marvellously wise. Then you are beautiful and brave, and you always tell me that I am quite well-built, so he ought to be as handsome as Baldur. Furthermore, he will be Woden-born on both sides, and a fitting chief for any race of the noble Germans. It would be a shame and a waste to end his existence before he is born.’
‘I quite see your point, my darling, though of course he may turn out to be a girl. The trouble is that the King will probably see it too; a fitting leader for any race of the noble Germans, and the men of Kent in particular, is just what he doesn’t want you to produce. We shall have to keep this a secret, and arrange for a loyal and trustworthy foster-mother as soon as the child is secretly born. Can you think of any good excuse to go away and hide, before your figure becomes noticeable?’
Though I spoke as pleasantly as I knew how, inwardly I was boiling with rage. I had given a pleasant time to an extremely plain girl, who would never have had the slightest chance of a lover if I had not volunteered, and who knew perfectly well that the King did not want her ever to give birth to a son. Instead of appreciating my efforts to give her a little fun the silly fool had taken the whole thing much too seriously, as though it was an eternal passion and the main business of our lives. She was quite prepared to risk a horrible death for herself; that was her own affair, and I did not greatly care whether she was welcomed as the prospective mother of a wonder-child, or carved into a disgusting mess before all the comrades. But when the King learned that she was pregnant his second idea, after taking a suitable revenge on her, would be to find the man responsible for her plight. The news threw me into such a state of nerves that I could think of nothing but gaining time. I persuaded Gertrude to keep things quiet for the present, while I tried desperately to work out some scheme that would ensure my own safety, and if it was feasible, hers as well.
It was not easy to think of a really safe plan, and all the time this confounded baby was growing inside her. The obvious thing to do was to run away, but where was I to run to? If I went back to any Roman city the ruler would soon find out that I had been serving the barbarians, and naturally the penalty for that was death. There were other scattered settlements of Germans to the north of the estuary of the Thames, and I believe all the way up the east coast of Britain, but most of them were based on ties of kindred, and I was not their kin; they would hand me over to the vengeance of King Oisc as soon as he asked for my body. Still, unless I had a very ready tongue, it would certainly come to a flight; I began to take precautions, as secretly as I could in that crowded and inquisitive environment. I marked down a little shed outside the city where a farmer was accustomed to shut up a fairly good horse, and bit by bit I smuggled out my valuables and buried them in the earth near by. I would have liked to hide my weapons in the same place, but all the comrades kept them in the hall, and spent a lot of time cleaning them and fussing over them generally; they would soon have noticed if I had no equipment to look after.
An added trouble was that Gertrude had no reliable women friends, who might have kept her in some retired spot on the excuse that she was ill with an infectious disease, and then farmed out the baby if she would not allow it to be destroyed. She had been so busy all her life posing as the most intelligent girl in Kent that she was thoroughly unpopular; her contemporaries would be delighted to learn that this female who knew everything, and frequently told them so, was as much the slave of her passions as any peasant woman.
It was in the middle of December that the long-expected blow at last fell. There was going to be a great feast that nig
ht, in honour of some German god whose name I forget, and to help us to get through the long dark evenings. In the afternoon Gertrude took me aside, and told me that she had made up her mind to confess everything to the King at the feast. There was nothing I could do to stop her, but at least I had several hours’warning, and could make a few preparations; I hid a little food by my secret stable, and stowed my valuables where I could pick them up quickly. The afternoons were short, and work in the fields would stop early on account of the feast, so my horse should be fairly fresh; also, on such a night I would have a good excuse to wear all my silver armlets.
I was deliberately a little late for supper, and entered the hall when the tables were already full; this gave me a chance to take a lower seat than I was entitled to, and the lowest seats were conveniently near the door. It promised to be a rowdy party later on, and many comrades had put away their weapons which normally hung on the wall, for fear they might be damaged; I said I didn’t want to go out again after I had come in so late, so I put my sword, shield, and helmet underneath the bench I was sitting on. This was technically against the rules of the King’s court, but nobody minded in the least; the rule had been made so that drunken men should not find their weapons handy if they wanted to fight, but they all knew that I seldom got drunk, and even then was never quarrelsome. Why did I go there at all, instead of getting a good start while everyone was feasting? Because there was, after all, a chance that King Oisc would be won over by his sister’s plea, and I should look very silly if I was missing when they sought me to be married to the daughter of King Hengist.
There was the usual gala-day supper, great rounds of half-roasted beef and pork, swimming in grease, and an unlimited flow of muddy beer, unstrained and full of barley-husks. This suited me well enough, for the comrades could not chase me very fast when they were full; I myself ate very little, giving the excuse that I was suffering from toothache.
Conscience of the King Page 11