The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  ‘It’s stuck there for ever. Leads to endless perversion, constant mangling, twisting, contorting of all relationship between the sexes.’

  ‘A sort of race memory?’

  ‘Bollocks, no. Not if you mean it’s literally in the blood. After all, the races are almost immediately mixed and both girl children and boy-children share the same blood. Just a pattern of behaviour handed on from father to son, mother to daughter. But no. That’s not quite right.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘Or rather not the whole story.’ Warming now to his theme: ‘Men learn as much from the lads they grow up with as they do from their fathers. The sub-culture of male adolescence endlessly renews itself wherever lads are lads. And it all goes back to rape and pillage. Women are cunts, slap them down and stick it in. Then comes the guilt. And finally the fear . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes. The fear!’ Taillefer exclaimed. ‘Fear they’ll get their own back. They gang up on us. In their kitchens, in the fields, in the stables as they gossip amongst the cows and sheep whose teats they pull, hiss- hiss, froths the milk in the pail, in the woods where they gather the night-shade, the fox-glove, the henbane and death-cap mushrooms, Amanita phalloides, they whisper and snigger. But it’s not only the Anglo-Saxons, you know? Not just the English who ravish their women and then feel bad about it . . . make monsters and witches out of the fragile flowers they first set on pedestals, dear me, no. Wherever the men have come from another land without their women, and taken those that were there, having first slain their husbands and sons, then this happens.’

  ‘And,’ added Quint, ‘there are precious few places where this has not been the case. Jews are different, though. When they came down into Cana they had their own women with them. They respect each other. Their men neither idolize nor brutalize, the women have nothing to revenge.’

  Walt, old memories stirred, drifted back into sleep, and dream - dreams that confused, melded and separated the Cornish girl beaten to death by Wulfric, then of Erica, his one true love, the daughter of the thegn of Shroton. In spite of Quint’s theorising it had been all right with her. All right? Bloody marvellous! He snuggled closer to Adeliza and slept more deeply and peacefully than he had before.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  His back was cold and he stirred. The cobbles of the inn-yard floor pushed into his side and buttocks. But his stomach was warm and slimily sticky. Struggling up through the fumes of the wine he discovered why. He was curled up and entangled with Adeliza. His left arm was under and round her back and his one good hand held her shoulder. Her small head was on his collar-bone. He could feel her dark hair about his mouth and nose, and her warm breath on his chest. Most of the lower part of her body was spread across his midriff and one knee was bent up higher than the other. With a sudden wave of embarrassment he realised that the stub where his right hand should be was between her legs. And there was a tingling in it, a raw sense of touch he had not felt for nearly two (or three?) years since the pain died and left the cold nothingness he used to try to penetrate by scratching and gnawing at it with nails and teeth.

  For a moment, still part drunk as he was, he wondered if it might not grow again, if a small baby’s fist might not push through the stump and slowly form a new right hand. He tried to pull it away but her hand closed on what had once been his forearm and insisted he remained where he was. Indeed she moved her inner thighs briefly along it and pressed it closer into her, giving a little sigh as she did so.

  With first light and cock crow, several cocks in fact, someone kicked some life into the embers of the fire, shivered and exclaimed at the thin powder of frost that lay over everything like dust. Others rose, stretched and yawned and went to the stables for a piss; a bucket was dropped into the well. Two girls moved among them, one with a tray of bread hot from the oven, the other with a churn of goat milk warm from the udder. An hour later the animals were led out into the open plain, the plump Greek settled his skull cap more securely on his head, his camel lurched forward, and all were on the move.

  They journeyed for three more days along a road that continued to wind through mountains, but the valleys wider and the heights not so precipitous as before with wide fields of stubble below. The small village huts made now from baked dung clung to the hillsides, built so much on top of each other that the flat roofs looked like irregular steps and indeed the inhabitants hung out their washing and enjoyed the afternoon sun, which was still very hot, above the ceilings of those who lived below. Not much of note happened, the weather remained fine, and, since they proceeded at a leisurely pace without too much jogging, it was only at night that Walter suffered from his teeth.

  Their patronness spent more time with them now, had perhaps had differences with her friends. She begged them to keep close, to have what weapons they had always ready for she feared robbers or worse as the country became wilder and the villages less frequent. She also engaged Quint in conversations of a philosophical nature and when they stopped to refresh the animals or for a midday meal she asked Taillefer to perform magical illusions. This he was loth to do but urged his children on to demonstrate their skills. It was, he said, good practice for them.

  At nights they slept as they had before, Walt always entangled with Adeliza in an embrace that was never quite innocent but brought neither of them harm. Indeed, a miracle was occurring: each morning the lumps and bumps on his stump seemed less and the skin became more sensitive, responding again with that warm tingling to the caresses she offered him beneath the cloaks and blankets they shared. But his mouth got worse. The outside scabs had cleared up and healed healthily enough but his broken teeth still ached and occasionally flamed into terrible pain.

  In the huge fields where wheat had been harvested long lines of orange flame advanced like armies across the plains beneath dense clouds of blueish white smoke. Field-workers walked like marshals behind with rakes and sheets of stiff leather mounted on sticks which they used to beat out flames that threatened to spread to the orchards and woods. Wheat was not the only crop. Many fields were filled with yellowish stalks that stood about as high as a woman’s waist and were crowned with brown, egg-shaped seed cases that rattled in the breeze and occasionally popped, scattering a thin dust of tiny black seeds. The cases were marked with neat, spiral incisions that had been cut into the flesh when it was still succulent and green but not into the chamber that held the seeds. Many of these incisions were still marked with traces of a brownish black paste where the exuded juices had dried. This tall stubble was also being burnt. The smoke had a sweet, unctuous smell and made many in the caravan feel drowsy, while others began to giggle for no particular reason.

  The third day from Dorylaeum ended, as always, in a caravansaray, but this time the town outside whose walls it stood was built up the side of an almost precipitous hill which ended in a crag that beetled over the plain that now spread itself to the east, for they had reached the plateau that lies in the centre of the sub-continent. The crag was crowned with a low black fortress which seemed to hug the rocks on which it stood and from which flew huge banners with the Chi-Rho and other emblems of the Christian religion emblazoned on them. At the foot of the hill, some half mile or so from the caravansaray, a huge camp had been pitched and from behind palisades they could hear the trumpet’s martial call and the neighing of countless horses.

  ‘The Black Castle of Opium,’ Quint added as they passed through the entrance to the caravansaray. ‘That’s what the locals call this place, though since Emperor Leo the Third defeated the Arabs here some three hundred years past, the Byzantines have called it Nicopolis.’

  ‘How do you know this stuff?’ Walt was more than irritable. At the end of a long day his broken teeth felt like pillars of white-hot steel, filling his mouth and brain with pain.

  Quint frowned, looked a touch hurt.

  ‘I seek things out,’ he said. ‘I have a curious mind and at the very least I like to know where I am at any given time. But to the point. Here, if anywher
e, we shall find what’s needed to alleviate the pain that still afflicts you.’

  They ate and drank as usual by a fire of flaming branches and again Theodora slipped in amongst them preferring, it seemed, their company to the solitariness of one of the upstairs rooms. Quint went scouting along the stalls that flanked the stables and soon returned with a small ball of black gunge wrapped in a brown and friable leaf. Hunkering in front of Walt he made him scoop a spoonful on to his finger.

  ‘Smear it,’ he said, ‘along the gums beneath your broken teeth, and then masticate the rest with your tongue, being sure to work in plenty of spittle before swallowing.’

  ‘What will it do?’

  ‘It will take away the pain.’

  ‘And give you dreams, such dreams,’ Taillefer added.

  ‘But first, as the pain goes but before you sleep, we must find a barber or, failing that, a smith.’

  Walt sat up.

  ‘You’re not pulling them. I’ll not have them pulled.’

  Adeliza knelt behind him, linked her fingers in front of his chest and put her cheek against his.

  ‘It’s the only way. Besides, your breath smells like a corpse left three days in the sun.’

  Alain appeared accompanied now by a huge man with a shaven head. He carried an assortment of tools in a pouch attached to the front of his leather apron. Seeming only to want to inspect the cause of Walt’s pain, he stooped over him, delved into his open mouth with a stubby finger - but he had palmed a pair of wicked forceps and, as Quint, Taillefer and Alain joined Adeliza and attached themselves to Walt’s head, shoulders and waist, he yanked out the first broken stump from the back of his mouth.

  Five remained, but the next time Walt was ready., He clamped his mouth shut, twisted and turned until the blood and pus bubbled up through his nose and he thought he might drown. The leathered giant’s fist was in again like a flash and out came the second. By now there was a crowd of onlookers, their faces lit grotesquely by the flames, who cheered and jeered until four more had gone, their shards clattering into a bowl Theodora held for them.

  At last it was done. Quint gave him wine to swill out his mouth, then water, then more wine, and finally when the bleeding seemed to have eased a little, another ball of the brown stuff to chew on. Finally he wrapped him in blankets and left him to sleep, while the rest of the party gathered round and, over bowls of chicken soup, continued the discussions that had occupied them on the previous evenings.

  ‘Life,’ murmured Taillefer, ‘is a phantasmagoria of transitory sensation over which our minds hover like the dove that moved upon the face of the waters. We strive to make some sense of it through words. But their meanings shift and they are as stable a foundation on which to build a structure that might explain the universe as the sands against which the Nazarene warned us.’

  ‘Hence,’ Quint replied wryly, jokingly, ‘his insistence that we should set our trust in the Holy Church and her teaching, built as she is upon a rock.’

  ‘But with what does she teach but words? And what are words? They are not things. They are signs. Merely signs.’

  ‘A rock is a rock is a rock,’ said Quint, plucking a large stone from a pile of rubble rejected by the builders, ‘and you’ll know it’s a rock if I hit you with it. But in what lies its rockiness? The word will do for the stone in my hand and for the great lump of stuff on which that black castle stands. I can hit you with one and push you off the other.’

  At this point Theodora intervened, her voice low but strong, first adjusting a lock of red hair that threatened to come adrift from the rest.

  ‘Is there not,’ she said, ‘a quality shared by the rock from which you would have him jump and the rock with which you would hit him? Is there not such a thing as rockiness?

  ‘Did not the great Pantocrater make rock with one hand and sand with the other? On, let me see . . .’ she continued, then muttered to herself and counted on her fingers, ‘yes. On the third day. But to return to rockiness. Surely there preceded in the Pantocrater’s Mind, before he set to work on the third day, an essence that was that rockiness which permeates all rocks and makes them what they are?’

  ‘Some rocks,’ Taillefer interjected, taking the nozzle of a wineskin from his lips and wiping it on his sleeve before passing it on, ‘are, I believe, impermeable. But that is by the way. I think.’

  ‘We should not,’ said Quint, ‘presume to look into God the Creator’s mind--’

  ‘Box of worms,’ Taillefer muttered. ‘Sort of rocky horror, really.’

  ‘. . . but, as you say, on the third day came rocks in all their forms, substances, sizes and types out of which man’s mind, on the sixth day, abstracted the idea of rockiness -- not the other way about.’

  ‘But man, Adam, when he invented the word rock, was responding to an essential idea of rockiness . . .’ Theodora was insistent.

  ‘Essences should not be invented except where necessity demands. Or, put it another way: If you can do without them, you don’t need them.’

  ‘Sharp,’ said Taillefer. ‘Oh, very sharp.’

  Walt, already asleep moaned a little. Adeliza bent over him and wiped a trickle of blood that leaked from the corner of his mouth with the hem of her cloak, then snuggled down next to him, and, after pulling as many covers as she could find around them both, assumed again the embrace she had held him in every night for nearly a week.

  He dreamed, but this time the dream was free of pain, the cradle of Adeliza’s arms seemed less equivocal, and wrapped in opiates rather than wine as he was, Mnemosyne joined hands again with Morpheus to lead him back into an enchanted past.

  Chapter Thirty

  She ran when she saw him, and he followed her along the side of the small field of barley, a foot or more high and emerald green, scaring a couple of larks from their nest, sending them skimming the green sea, over which blueish cloud-shadows chased each other. In the far corner, just where the great hill began to climb, there was a small, low copse of elder whose blossom was opening into crowded plates of tiny, white stars. They filled the warm air with their sweet but sharp scent.

  She? She was Erica, daughter of the thegn of Shroton, whose land marched with his father’s, with whose brothers and their followers he had fought stone-throwing battles up and down these grassy slopes or swum in the mill-pools of the Stour. She was just a year younger than he and he had watched her grow. The grubby waif in a smock who sucked her thumb had become a lean boyish figure who rallied her brothers with high whooping cries when Walt and the boys from Iwerne drove them along the turfy ramparts above. And then . . . Gloucester, Ireland, Cornwall, London, Tidworth Camp and the Welsh Marches, learning to be a housecarl, a comitatus, his Lord’s companion and final shield in battle, and he’d hardly seen her at all, just glimpses front a distance across fields or apple-picking in a neighbouring orchard when he came home for Christmas or to help with the harvests.

  Now he was sixteen, and carrying the first seax slash of a scar on his neck and left shoulder (not deep, it faded to a white line in a year or so). He’d got it, not in battle, but scouting ahead of Harold’s main army on the first campaign against Griffith in the Brecon Beacons, fought through a frozen Spring. Home now at the end of May he was welcomed as a hero by his family and all the manors around. And two days after his return his father had met her father who still mourned the death of his two sons two years earlier. They had gone mad and finally sunk into a distressed torpor, their brains addled through eating diseased meat during the cattle pestilence of 1054.

  Following the meeting between the fathers a brief betrothal ceremony was held in a bower built for the occasion and filled with the flowers of late spring and early summer, set up by the brook which was streaked with crow’s foot and fringed with king-cups and which marked a boundary between their lands. King-fishers, harbingers of summer, flitted above it. It was agreed the actual marriage would have to wait until Walt’s service to Harold was complete.

  And then, two days later, a
small boy from Shroton had slipped into the compound at Iwerne and sought him out in one of the sheds. There, with Bur, a churl skilled in building fences, Walt had been sharpening ash stakes with an axe, one, two, three blows to the base of each stake, leaving the exposed wood white like snow, supports for an extension of the deer fence. A better use for ash poles than the spears Walt was used to fashioning, Bur reckoned. Not if they are used to defend homesteads like this one, Walt had replied.

  ‘Master Walt,’ the small boy had piped, catching his sleeve, ‘my mistress says you will give me a penny if I give you her message.’

  ‘And who then is your mistress?’ Though he knew, his heart raced a little and a strange constriction grasped his throat so for a moment he could hardly breathe. She had kissed him at the betrothal - warmly on the lips, as was their custom. None of this frenchified dab on one cheek and then the other, but the real thing, English style.

  ‘The lady Erica course. Don’t you want to hear what she sent me to say?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Silence.

  Walt turned to Bur, who was not much older than he but already married with a small baby and another on the way.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a penny?’

  Bur shook his head.

  ‘I’ll have to get one then,’ and he put aside the axe.

  ‘It’s of no account,’ said the small boy, ‘she’s already given me one.’ And he held it up proudly for all to see. ‘You can give me yours next time I come. My mistress desires to make your better acquaintance and will wait for you in the corner of her father’s barley field, beneath the western end of Hambledon. Bring something to eat and drink.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘How should I know? Now? Tomorrow? This evening? I should try now.’

  And he scampered away, dodging the more or less playful swipe Walt aimed at him.