The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  The Last English King

  Julian Rathbone

  Copyright ©Julian Rathbone 1994

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 0 316 64139 1

  Julian Rathbone is the author of many books, including Joseph and King Fisher Lives, both of which were shortlisted for the Booker prize. He lives in Dorset.

  On the field of battle it is a disgrace to the chief to be surpassed in valour by his companions, a disgrace to the companions not to come up to the valour of their chief. As for leaving a battle alive after your chief has fallen, that means lifelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, to put down one’s acts of heroism to his credit - that is really what they mean by allegiance. The chiefs fight for victory, the companions for their chief.

  Tacitus, Germania

  Author’s Note

  Anachronisms and Historical Accuracy

  The reader will find three sorts of anachronism in this book. The first group are those that are unintentional and of which, at the time of going to press, I was not aware. They are fair game for swats, letter-writers, anoraks and so on. I don’t think there are any serious enough nor are they frequent enough to spoil the ordinary reader’s enjoyment.

  The other two types are intentional. The Last English King is written, dialogue as well as narrative, in modern prose. It may be thought I have gone too far in this direction, allowing dialogue especially to be unreconstructedly modern. Thus, for example, royalty are allowed to use bad language much as they do today. But why not? Assuming, and I am sure it was the case, that Anglo-Saxon lords were as quick with the odd expletive as their modern counterparts, and bearing in mind that, apart from Edward the Confessor, most of them were pretty rough types, why not make their expletives as modern as the rest of their speech? The fact that most of the vocabulary of profanity and obscenity is what is jokingly, though often accurately, called Anglo-Saxon, makes it doubly absurd to deny them the odd ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’.

  For similar reasons I have used modern versions of proper names wherever they exist. Why bother the reader with Cnut instead of Canute, Wintanceaster for Winchester?

  The third type of anachronism may be a touch more problematic.

  Occasionally characters, and even the narrator, let slip quotations or near quotations of later writers or make oblique references to later times. Better writers than I have followed the same pattern: Heller, for example, in God Knows. Some will find this irritating. For reasons I find difficult to explain, it amuses me, and may amuse others. But it also serves a more serious purpose -- to place the few years spanned by the book in a continuum that leads forward as well as back, to remind readers, especially English readers, that it was out of all this that we came.

  I have tried to be accurate with historical personages, events and dates in so far as these are known through the few and often contradictory sources available, though, of course, I have put my own interpretation on them in a way that is disallowed to historians. This is, after all, a novel. Thus an important Part covers the relations between Edward the Confessor and the Godwinson family. It seems clear to me what they were -- and it is my privilege as a novelist to say so. A historian must be more circumspect. And another factor that should be kept in mind is that William, like most successful bastards with guilty consciences, saw to it that history was written the way he wanted it to be written.

  I have made only one conscious alteration to actual events for artistic reasons -- historians ‘surmise’ (their word) that Harold was in Normandy in 1064. I’ve moved the trip to 1065. And, of course, I’ve left things out where they got in the way of my main story-line, and, where no source I could find covered a particular theme or span of time, I have felt free to invent.

  Prologue

  1070

  The Wanderer stepped over the side into shallow clear sunlit water. His feet stirred fine glittering sand into brief swirling clouds above a shingle of small smoothed fragmented sea-shell and flint. He gave the small black coracle a push and waved a farewell at the oarsman who had ferried him from the tubby cargo boat that lay anchored a hundred paces out in the horse-shoe bay. With his face set to the land, he climbed to the top of the shingle bank and walked along it to a point where a steep chalk track climbed to a saddle of grass between the white headland and the country inland. Salmon-coloured valerian still bloomed in spikes above its waxy leaves, choughs wheeled against the cliff faces.

  In his left hand he grasped a staff of hazel he had cut more than two thousand miles and a year away on the southern slopes of Asia Minor’s Taurus Mountains. From a strap over his right shoulder hung a small bag or large wallet in which there was some bread and cheese, both now stale. He kept the strap in place with the smooth, rounded stump which was all that was left of his right hand and wrist. He was wearing a natural-colour woollen jerkin held in by a belt which supported a smaller wallet holding three gold coins and a handful of bronze above woollen leggings with leather-thong cross-gartering. His old shoes were made from cow-hide but sound, though the stitching had begun to unravel.

  He was of middling height, deeply sun-tanned beneath fairish hair, fit, but looked a lot older than his twenty-six years -- his more or less handsome face was marked with lines of pain and grief.

  The sun went in. He glanced up at the dark clouds that were gathering in the west and north, then, as he reached the saddle between the two headlands, he looked back over the sea. The sun still shone on the boat that had brought him; its sail was now up again, the coracle safely lifted and stowed in board. The sea gleamed silver to the high horizon beyond but, even as he watched, the white cliffs turned grey and purple cloud shadow slid across the waters in pursuit of the ship. The Wanderer turned his face inland again, and followed the track down into the woodland and scrub on the northern side. A host of starlings whirled like dust motes over the valley ahead, gathering for an autumn moot. Summer was fading.

  As he walked on, following the track round the shoulders of the downs, through coombes and valleys nothing of what he saw looked right. Fences made from hurdles had been put up where none had been before, closing off what he knew had once been common land or deer-forest open to all; in other places fences had gone, so sheep and cattle grazed and browsed across vegetable lots and through deserted, unkempt orchards.

  Worst of all, the stench and the howling buzz of a thousand flies led him to the bodies of a man, a youth, a woman and a baby, lying in a ditch with the man and the youth on their backs, the spear thrusts and sword slashes that had killed them in their chests, throats and stomachs. They had been dead, what, a couple of days? Carrion birds had gouged their bodies for the softer, richer parts, the livers, hearts, eyes, but not the men’s testicles, which remained where their killers had left them -- in their mouths.

  The woman’s clothes had been pulled round her head, leaving her naked and exposed first to the men who had killed her then to beaks and claws. What shocked was not the wrecked and raped cadavers -- the Wanderer had seen many such before -- but the fact that here, in Wessex, no one had seen fit to give them a decent burial.

  He pressed on and a flurry of cold rain swept down the hill-side and briefly soaked him. He made no attempt to find shelter.

  A distant clatter of clip-clopping hooves came up the hill behind him. Mindful of the bodies he’d seen, he bundled himself over a low stone wall and into a thicket of bramble. Swearing, because the suddenness of the movement and the awkwardness of managing it with only one hand had caused him to twist his ankle, he crouched down and waited.

  There were ten of them. All wore uniform plate-mail hauberks beneath high cylindrical helmets with cone-shaped tops. Their nose pieces almost ob
scured their faces. The mail came most of the way down their thighs, leaving polished leather boots with pointed toes and wicked sharp spurs. Big shields shaped like pointed leaves swung aslant from their backs, long scabbarded swords slapped their thighs, their lances were eight feet long. Small, scarlet swallow-tailed pennons fluttered below the polished steel of flanged spear-heads.

  Their horses were big, bay or black, glossy, well-fed. They were well-shod and sparks flew as they clattered over the flints in the metalled track which climbed to a ridge a hundred yards above the briars. There was a solid coalescence about them all, the men welded to the horses to make fighting machines, the machines joined to each other by discipline and the invisible threads of a common cause.

  They paused at the top, and for a moment milled about, horses snorting, stamping, steam rising from the rain that ran down their flanks. The Wanderer could hear the jangle of their accoutrements, marked the way cold, dark eyes scanned the countryside around -- not warily but with arrogance. Then one of them barked an order, raised a mailed fist and in a flurry of hooves they turned away. Stones and chalky mud flew up behind them, and, tails lashing, lances and pennons swinging across the iron sky and the rain, they were gone.

  For a full five minutes the Wanderer shook as if with fever, gasping, retching from an empty stomach so his rib-cage felt it would burst. He was filled with anger, hate, fear, and, worst of all, despair. At last he clambered back over the wall and scouted up to the ridge, careful not to raise his head above the sky-line. From the top he looked down into what had once been a pleasantly bosky vale with fields and orchards in the clearings and a slight eminence between higher hills at the far end. A small village had nestled round a mead-hall and a daub and wattle chapel with a rush roof. Corfe, the gate to the Isle of Purbeck. On the top of the hill there had been an earthwork with a small stone keep not more than twenty feet high -- enough to protect the villagers if pirates or Danes came harrying inland from the coves and bays on the coast or across the marshes of Poole harbour.

  All gone now. The woods had been cleared, fences broken down, the small individual lots of land split into unfenced narrow strips, the orchards clear-felled, the common pasture ploughed, too, but in one wide expanse. Charred stakes and burnt ground were all that was left of the village and manor though a handful of twenty round hovels huddled together in a hollow below. Not all was destruction, however -- there had been building too.

  The stone baillie that had taken the place of the earthwork was three times the size in circumference and was as high as the old keep. There was a deep dry moat all round it. A huge stone structure had been begun on the highest point of the hill where it perched above a small natural cliff. Already the highest point was sixty feet above the raised ground below and looked, because of its unevenly unfinished state, like a huge broken tooth. The soldiers who had passed him were just crossing the bridge over the moat and more patrolled the crest of the baillie. Men and women laboured all round, carrying stones in huge sacks, mixing mortar, climbing ladders with filled hods, hoisting larger, shaped rocks on rickety derricks perched on a wooden frame of scaffolding.

  There was a gallows at the gate. Eight bodies slowly turned in the rain or swung more sharply as a carrion crow or raven flapped onto a shoulder or perched on a head, so its heavy wedge of a grey beak could tear at a mouth or a neck.

  The Wanderer took a wide circle round the settlement and headed inland, crossing rivers not by bridges but by fords, where he remembered they existed, or wading through up to his chest or neck. He guessed the bridges would be guarded by the fighting machines. After the rivers there were more downs to be climbed and deep valleys to be followed, most of which were still forested as they always had been, the birch just turning to bright yellow, the oak and beech still heavy with the tired green of mid-autumn. He avoided all dwellings and villages. Once his bread and cheese had gone he fed off hazel-nuts, blackberries, already over-ripe and fly-blown, acorns and beech kernels carefully separated from the mast. These gave him painful stomach cramps as well as some nourishment.

  Late on the second day he came to a wider, deeper river that threaded for a time a narrow valley whose wooded sides were almost steep enough to form a gorge. Running roughly north to south it took a wide ninety-degree bend round two hills that stood out on account of their isolation from the rest. One was low and almost square, Hod Hill, the site, it was said, of a Roman camp. The other was much higher, longer and crowned with turfed ramparts that snaked a long ellipse enclosing the whale-back top. Hambledon. He climbed the southern side through hawthorn whose red berries looked like drops of newly-shed blood, came over the switch-back of the ramparts, crossed the crown and at last looked down into the Vale of the White Hart.

  Rain swept across the fields and coppices, and beyond them the charred timbers, where the roof-tree of the mead-hall had fallen, his mead-hall, and the bowers of the women were roofless shells. Flattened by the rain a few wisps of smoke rose above the hovels and cottages that were all that remained of the village that had stood a hundred yards or so outside the broken fences of the manor. His gaze moved to the right, to the foot of the hill, to another, nearer settlement. The story here was the same except that a large barn made from mortared flint had been raised beneath a shingled roof and the tiny church where he had been married had been pulled down to make way for it. He had seen such fortified barns in Normandy and knew what they meant: riches and over-abundance for the lord, short commons for the men and women who worked the land -- mules and horses were treated better.

  A small flint core landed in the turf by his feet and skittered on down across the sheep-grazed grass. Heart pounding, staff raised to defend himself, he turned. On the rise above him, silhouetted against the grey sky, there stood a youth, a grown boy about thirteen years old. His dark brown hair was unkempt and long, he was dressed in animal skins above his thighs but wore patched woollen leggings below. He was barefoot and held a short spear. A small bow and a quiver were slung across his back.

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  ‘Fred.’

  The boy tried to kneel, to grasp his thighs, but Walt lifted him up, embraced him, slapped the boy’s shoulders with his stump on one side, his left hand on the other.

  ‘Fred,’ he repeated. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘We heard they never found your body. You should have come back sooner. We needed you.’

  Rage, sorrow and despair flooded through Walt’s brain and chest.

  ‘How could I come back? I should have died there.’

  ‘You should have been killed. If no one bothered to kill you then that’s not your fault. Did you lose your hand there?’ Fred nodded down to the stump.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was enough. You should have come back.’

  Walt longed to explain -- his right hand had not been enough. If he had put his whole body in the way of the blow and died as a result, then that would have been enough.

  ‘It’s been bad?’

  ‘You cannot believe how bad.’ The boy laughed, high, hysterical, then stuffed his fist in his mouth. ‘I’ll show you.’

  He pushed on beyond Walt, down the switch-back of the iron age ramparts, threading through hawthorn, briar and mountain ash, all splashed with bloody droplets of fruits that clung to black twigs. At the bottom there was a clump of elder, leaves and berries now gone, just the twisted thickly textured boughs against the agate clouds.

  For two miles or so they pushed their way across a mixed landscape of copses, small fields, hedges and low wilderness where, especially close to small brooks that fed the bigger river to the west, nature in the shape of dogwood thickets and alder and willow left unpollarded for three or four seasons was slipping back over land that had been farmed for five hundred years. They passed the skeleton of a cow.

  A gentle slope, an overgrown track led them towards a second ridge of downs, riven with wooded coombes. Presently they passed the ruined huts and cottages and came to the broken fence o
f what had been a farmstead, a small manor. The buildings here had been more substantial -- a mead-hall for feasts and folk-moots, five bowers, three with two rooms or more and a second floor, a well into which the rotting cadaver of a pig had been thrust so what was left of its trotters and tail still stuck above the low stone drum, barns and an oast-house for malting barley.

  All had been fired but much of the centuries-old seasoned oak framework, deeply charred though it was, had survived.

  In the largest bower, nearest the mead-hall, sitting right in the centre, on an ancient blackened chair, two figures sat, a woman and a child, burnt down to an armature of blistered, black clinker. Hair and clothes had gone, though traces of swaddling bands could be seen round the baby’s torso. On the woman’s head someone, Fred himself perhaps, had placed a small chaplet of Spring flowers, hellebore, Christmas Rose. They were withered now, but kept their shape and something of their greenish white hue. Erica -- the Wanderer’s wife, and the child conceived before the battle.

  Walt was home again, at last. He stooped, picked up an oak-twig. The three or four leaves were brown and crumbly. There were three acorn-cases on it, but the acorns had dropped.

  PART I: The Wanderer

  Chapter One

  He had travelled for three years, or was it four? At first he had not known where he went and did not care. First, after crossing the water (ill, probably dying, friends had paid a boatman for his passage across the Channel), he went into barren, frozen fens where people lived in stilted houses above the rushes, and beneath them too, for their homes were roofed with them. They fished through holes in the ice, snared the wintering wild fowl, skated with marvellous agility and speed on skates carved from the shoulder-blades of cattle. Their Germanic language shared with his English enough basic vocabulary for him to get by.