The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

Quint stopped in his tracks and caught Walt’s sleeve. His eyes gleamed with intellectual excitement.

  ‘In one phrase,’ he cried, ‘one sentence, you have slashed through whole libraries of disputation as to the nature of law and justice.’

  ‘Not I,’ replied Walt robustly. ‘The English.’

  A pragmatic nation, Quint thought to himself, but capable of self-deception to an extraordinary degree. Perhaps that is the true definition of pragmatism -- an ability to deceive oneself and so turn one’s back on principle, law or custom if they stand in the way of what one wants. Meanwhile, Walt went on.

  ‘At all events no one challenged their oath-swearing on that occasion and Godwin and the Godwinsons got all their titles back and all their lands. The Norman Robert, Archbishop of Canterbury was sent packing and many other Normans with him. The Englishman Stigand, a married man and already Bishop of Winchester, took his place. The only concession the Godwins made was to agree Sweyn should make a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He set off but died on the way.’

  Quint continued to shake his head and mutter. ‘What a nation, what a nation of hypocrisy! A lord’s men are bound by oaths they are taught from the womb not to break yet in reality they hope for lands for their service. They go through complicated rituals in the name of justice and law but in reality what counts is the number of helmets a lord has behind him.’

  Fortunately ‘hypocrisy’ was a word 'Walt had not come across.

  By now they were perambulating the grassy bank of a pleasant stream which quite suddenly cut its way into a narrow rocky gorge where it tumbled in waterfalls from pool to pool.

  Quint unshouldered his pack, delved in it and pulled out a shapeless lump of lardy soap made from goat’s tallow and beech ash.

  ‘You shared my bag last night,’ he said, ‘and I could not help wondering, now that we are away from the noisome smells of towns and cities, when you last washed your clothes. Or indeed yourself.’

  ‘I really c-c-can’t remember.’

  The stutter signified very well that he could. It was not far off a full two (or three?) years -- in Waltham Abbey on the way from Stamford Bridge to Senlac Hill. No. That was wrong. He no longer had the leather jerkin he wore then -- he remembered as if it were a dream the widow he had worked for in the fens of the Nether Lands, who had given him the cloak and the deadman’s shoes he still wore. They had held up well.

  ‘A long time, at all events. Now what I propose is that as soon as we find a pool big enough to bathe in, we will first wash our clothes, and then, while they dry, wash ourselves.’

  Walt blenched at the thought. Too much washing smacked of femininity. After all, women have to wash at least once a month, they would be impure if they did not. But men need not wash much and only for important occasions. And how could their clothes be washed with no women there to do it?

  They continued downwards and, as Quint predicted, the pools became bigger, but surrounded too by thickets of crimson-stemmed dogwood beneath willows, alders and poplars through which soft breezes whispered, setting the sibilous leaves to chatter. As they clambered down a rockfall to such a pool they heard a sudden heavy splash, which Walt thought might be an otter, but almost instantly, through a gap in the branches below, they saw the naked form of a woman haul herself on to a smooth boulder, then with a flash of creamy thigh and buttock she was gone into the thickets on the further side.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Quint exclaimed, ‘what the devil was that?’

  ‘The devil, perhaps,’ Walt cried, rigid now like a statue. ‘He can assume many seductive shapes to tempt us to evil.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Quint replied, with some force. ‘Either it was a shepherdess - ’

  ‘I see no sheep.’

  ‘Or perhaps an antique survival of the distant past.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A pagan naiad, the spirit or fairy of this stream.’

  ‘All that vanished on the day of Christ’s Nativity.’

  ‘I doubt it. No Christian came here for two or three hundred years after Our Lord’s Birth. Perhaps we are the first ever to pause beside this pool. Anyway, there was a lot to be said for a tradition that invented nymphs of the wood and stream to gladden our hearts with their beauty and their dancing. Often in such places as this I feel their presence.’

  He fell silent and became very still, his eyes misted. When he spoke again it was in the solemn privileged voice poets use when they wish you to be moved by what they have to say.

  “‘The sighing nymphs depart from their haunts by spring and pool, edged with pale poplar. With flower-woven tresses spoiled, and unreconciled in the twilight shade of tangled thickets, they mourn.’”

  ‘You might have rhymed.’

  ‘I might. Come on, let’s go down there.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Whatever we saw, it was nothing that could harm us.’

  They pushed through the dogwood and came to the mossy boulders at the water’s edge. There Quint stripped off his garments without shame or embarrassment, though kept his hat on, and plunged them one by one into the swirling water, hauled them out, scrubbed them with his soap and then rubbed and rolled and beat them on the rock on which he squatted much in the way Walt remembered women did in the villages back home where there was a stream or walled-in fountain.

  Quint’s body was very thin and scrawny but muscled too. A rubiginous rash spread across his shoulders and below it his back was scarred with white lines and nobbles which here and there still wept a colourless ichor. At the sight of this and of his meagre but slightly floppy buttocks, legs thinly covered in a light red hair, and white misshapen feet, Walt was suddenly overcome by an entirely unexpected and to him inexplicable wave of tenderness. Quint looked up at him, over his shoulder.

  ‘Come on. You must do the same.’

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘If you wish to remain in my company, yes.’

  ‘Very well. But I have pins and fastenings below I cannot manage one-handed. And I doubt I’ll make as much of a job as you do of washing them.’

  ‘I’ll help.’

  When both had spread their now clean clothes across some low bushes of bog-myrtle, the leaves of which Walt recalled are called ‘gale’ in Wessex and are used to add a piquant flavour to ale, they climbed down into the pool, and soaped themselves but not each other, even though Walt let the soap slip several times and Quint had to retrieve it for him. Walt’s body was quite heavily tattooed -- a barbaric habit learnt from their Germanic forbears that the English, the men anyway, have not forgotten.

  Then Quint removed his hat and they swam and splashed and generally carried on like little boys playing in the stream. But it was cold, and Walt was first out, but again, one-handed as he was, he slipped on the mossy rock and could not get a purchase with his knee until Quint got a hand under his buttock and bunked him up.

  Perhaps feeling awkward at this mild intimacy Quint, still up to his waist in water, turned away, leaving Walt looking down on the top of his head. The water had pulled his sparse but long hair down evenly all round exposing what Walt had never noticed before (for Quint kept his hat on almost all the time) a large round, unnaturally round, patch of much shorter hair no longer than the hair on a donkey’s pelt. Since he was feeling piqued and a touch humiliated at having been made to wash, and embarrassed too by the way he had rather liked the feel of Quint’s hand on his bottom, he took the opportunity to get his own back.

  ‘Quint, you rogue,’ he shouted, ‘you’re a priest, a vicar or a fucking monk. A By-Our-Lady renegade!’

  ‘I was,’ said Quint, turning and looking up at him through eyes squinted against the sun behind, ‘indeed a monk. But as I told you before, never a fucking monk.’

  Walt was abashed.

  ‘Oh, it’s just a word. English housecarls use it all the time.’

  Quint continued his counterattack, trying to deflect Walt from pursuing the subject of holy orders.

&
nbsp; ‘And your tattoos. All over your arms and legs and on your chest. That’s hardly a civilised habit, you know?’

  He hauled himself out of the water and his finger flashed over Walt’s body but without touching it.

  ’A dragon here, an eagle there, “Harold Rules, All Right?” inscribed within a scroll, and here’s another dagger, with wings this time, and a legend beneath I cannot quite read, it’s in Danish runes, is it not? What does it say?’

  ‘“Winners dare” I had it done in Hereford.’

  ‘And this. “Walt 4 Erica.” What does that mean?’

  ‘Walt for Erica.’

  ‘Oh, very droll. And who is Erica?’

  ‘None of your business. Quint, why are you a fucking monk? A monk on the run?’

  This was a question Quint was still not disposed to answer. He turned their clothes over.

  ‘They’re not as dry as I should like,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat now and press on when they are.’

  He turned to his bag, pulled out some oddments, rummaged, and then began to swear, but in Greek and Latin for the most part and other languages, too. What it came down to was that all their remaining food had gone and possibly a gold piece or two, though he did not keep count as carefully as he should and he wasn’t sure how many.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘A fox,’ suggested Walt as they set off again, but hungry and, on Quint’s part, ill-tempered, ‘or a beaver? I’ve known very cheeky beavers on the River Stour near Iwerne, where I was born.’

  ‘No. It was that . . . er, bothersome woman.’

  ‘Not a nymph, then, sighing in the thickets.’

  Quint stopped, made Walt stop, too, faced him and swung a finger in his face.

  ‘Walt,’ he said, and his blue eyes narrowed and a frown line creased the space between his brows, ‘I like you. But you can go off people, you know?’

  Walt shrugged; they walked on, side by side for a league or so, saying nothing. The track undulated, passed through woods and then signs of cultivation. Sheep and goats nibbled short, dry grass or reached to browse the lower branches. They were guarded by small boys who hallooed and threw stones to head them off if they strayed towards a crop. Presently they came to a low escarpment with a gentle slope beneath it and there, two leagues or so beyond them, was a shanty town, then battlemented walls of brick and within, just discernible above the walls, the roofs and domes of a considerable city.

  ‘Nicaea,’ Quint proclaimed. ‘The birth-place of modern Christianity, albeit it took place seven hundred years ago.’

  ‘The birth place of Our Lord and therefore of our faith was Bethlehem,’ Walt said, but timidly, not wishing to raise Quint’s anger again.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Quint in a voice already loaded with concealed sarcasm, ‘the circumstances that surround the conception and birth of our Lord, in so far as you understand them.’

  ‘There’s no difficulty about them that I can see,’ Walt maintained staunchly. ‘I was taught all that first by my mother who was a good lady, wise and virtuous, then by the priest who came specially from Shaftesbury to teach the young of our manor and prepare us for Mass.’ ‘Go on then.’

  ‘The Holy Spirit came to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the likeness of a dove, and she conceived, and bore a son, who was Jesus, Our Lord and Saviour. Is this not right?’

  ‘And who sent the dove. From whom did the dove . . . proceed?’

  ‘From God the Father.’

  ‘And what is He like?’

  ‘I’ve seen Him pictured often enough. He sits on a throne in heaven and he has a white beard.’ He remembered something. ‘But in the Church of Holy Wisdom he did not have a beard.’

  By now their track had made a junction with the main road from Nicomedia and Constantinople and they joined a stream of traffic, of convoys of camels, of herds of sheep brought into town for the next day’s market, carts filled with vegetables and fruit, and a squadron of cavalry, the men not in full armour but with mules in the rear carrying it for them. Quint paid no attention to all this but, eyes almost closed, began to chant, somewhat in the style of a monk, but derisively:

  We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity

  Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance

  For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost

  The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate and the Holy Ghost uncreate

  The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible

  The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal

  And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal

  And also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated but one uncreated and one incomprehensible . . .

  Walt broke in - he had had enough.

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ he cried.

  ‘You might well ask. Not a lot to do with a Father God in the Sky, the likeness of a dove, and a baby in a manger, than which I find it difficult to imagine three more different, un-unified entities.’

  ‘So where did all this come front?’

  Quint waved a flowing arm to the battlements now a scant mile off.

  ‘Here,’ he proclaimed, ‘the year of Our Lord three hundred and twenty-five the newly converted Christian Emperor, Constantine, called a council of all the bishops, doctors and teachers of the church to meet in Nicaea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘First you must understand that Constantine’s conversion was a political act. More than half the Empire was by then Christian and mostly drawn from the better sort of people, hard-working, law-abiding and so on, including a very large part of his army. But there was a problem. Although most people were united in the faith the church itself was split. And what Constantine wanted was peace, and tranquillity, and, above all, agreement about the exact nature of the religion he had embraced. So he called this council and told them to sit down and get on with it and not give up until they were agreed. I’m hungry and thirsty.’

  They were approaching the northern gate, threading their way through a ribbon of small inns and eating-places where men hawked meat ground, grilled and set in small loaves of bread smothered with anchovy sauce, or triangles of flat round loaves baked in ovens with a topping of anchovy sauce, onion, garlic and chopped olives. Quint bought two of each and had his leather wine bottle refilled with red wine. The purse he kept on his belt did not yield quite enough in coppers and he had to delve in his pack before he could pay.

  ‘Bitch!’ he mumbled, ‘I’m sure she took at least two pieces of gold as well as our lunch.’ But he found one at last and took a couple of handfuls of bronze from the vendor in change as well as two meat-filled buns.

  There was a small crowd near the gate happy to be entertained by a couple of mountebanks, one who ate flames and spewed them back again, another who twanged away at a tuneless lute and wailed nasally above the noise he extracted from it. A sad ditty about how the answer to everything was blowing in the breeze. None of this was to Quint’s liking. Away from the road and in shadow cast by the walls they found a small gymnasium, open air, where young men wrestled, practised sword drill with wooden swords, threw javelins, lifted weights and so on. There was a low, grassy bank from which they could watch the youths at their exercise.

  Through mouthfuls of bread and meat, with the brown salty spiced sauce dripping occasionally down his wrist, Quint continued his dissertation on the Council of Nicaea.

  ‘The main split was between the Arians, led by Arius, and Athanasius, a clever young man, who wrote the words I sang to you and which started us off. And what they argued most about was the status of the Son of God. Pass the wine.’

  Skilfully he raised the leather bottle above his face and by squeezing directed into his mouth a stream of it which he lapped down, much in the way a dog copes with a jet of milk or water.

  ‘That’s better. Arius argued that the Son of God was necessarily, if he was to be called a
Son, created by God the Father. That is, there was a time when God the Father was and God the Son wasn’t. Athanasius said they were both equally God and uncreated. Constantine, being tidy-minded, slightly favoured Arius, but accepted the Council’s decision to back Athanasius --’

  ‘But what has all this got to do with the things that matter?’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘The Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Redemption of us all?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all. But it had a lot to do with allying a unified church with a unified state, giving the all-powerful state the legitimacy to interfere with our lives at any point and whenever it chooses. Come on. Let’s find ourselves an inn.’

  ‘Can we afford one?’

  Quint stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘We must shift about a bit, then. A night in the open is one thing, a night on the streets is quite another. In the open we were robbed. In the streets our throats might be slit.’ He wiped his hands on the broad chestnut leaf his meal had been served in, crumpled it and threw it. ‘More wine, please. I need to lose a few inhibitions.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Loosen up my soul. So I can make a fool of myself.’

  They walked back to the great northern gate and edged through the crowd. There was only one busker there now, a tall but compact man with very dark balding hair and a neat beard which did not conceal the deep creases that ran from cheek-bones to the corners of his mouth, and lent his face a look of unconsolable melancholy. His eyes too were tired and pained. Walt felt sure he had seen him before, but could not remember where -- perhaps he had come across him in those months or years during which he had traversed Europe, the memories of which were confused and dream-like.

  He was a magician. An old woman in the forefront of the crowd had a basket of fruit with three eggs on top. He took one egg, opened the empty hand that had taken it, plucked it from the air with his other hand, let it drop and break at the old woman’s feet. She screamed with rage until he pointed to her basket. Not three eggs there now, but four.