The Last English King

by Julian Rathbone

  Half an hour later Walt pushed through the brittle elder twigs and lower branches, knowing how unlucky it is to snap the wood from which the Cross was made and from which Judas hanged himself, and that slowed him. When he came out the other side she’d gone -- but where?

  Shading his eyes he scanned the steep slopes above, which climbed all of two hundred feet or more to grassy ramparts. The slopes themselves were too steep to support more than grass and stunted shrubs -- blackthorn whose blossom had shrivelled, browned and dropped a fortnight before, and hawthorn already in fresh green leaf and with its tiny clustered globes of white buds just bursting. The grass too was not just grass but filled with the small flowers that grow on chalk. And then he saw her, up on the crest of the first turf rampart, her lithe brown limbs, long straw-coloured hair, a white shift or smock.

  He hurled himself at the slope, hands dragging at the thick tussocks of coarse grass, feet scrabbling. Soon, he was panting for breath and cursing the small bag of bread and cheese and the cured sheep’s stomach full of cider. They kept swinging off his back and dangling like udders between his legs. And of course as he hauled himself upright on the crest she was again nowhere to be seen. Should he call for her? She had chosen to hide herself - let her call for him.

  There was heat in the deep hollow, the turfed fosse the ancients had left between their ramparts, a heavy buzzing of bees, also the tangy smell of fresh sheep-droppings. In front of him the Vale of the White Hart stretched into blue distances. It was approaching the hottest part of the day and nothing seemed to move, although he could hear the bells of her father's cows in the meadows below.

  ‘Erica!’

  Her name bubbled out from between his lips after all, though he had not consciously willed it. He was answered by a rippling laugh from much nearer than he had expected. He turned and caught the movement of her shift beyond or in a low clump of hawthorn only ten or so paces from him and just below the ridge. He rounded the clump and found her sitting, knees pulled up, the hem of her shift about her ankles, a grass in her mouth, looking up over her shoulder at him.

  ‘Did you bring us our snap?’ she asked and she shook a tress of the long blonde hair off her cheek as she spoke. Her voice was soft and gentle but with laughter in it. She flirted a bit over the cider, pretending to grumble over the lack of cups and claiming the container it came in had imparted a muttony flavour, not the sort of thing you offer a lady. She recognised the blue-veined cheese as a chunk off the one her father had brought to the betrothal and praised it accordingly.

  Awkward with each other at first they began by reminiscing about childhood. Do you remember when? What did your mum say when you got home? I wasn’t crying because one of your stones hit me but because I’d fallen in some nettles.

  I’m sorry about your brothers.

  I’m sorry about your mother.

  She was old, she’d had a good life, but your brothers . . .

  She wept a little and he comforted her, his hands on the warm, milky skin of her shoulder, his face in the fragrance of her hair.

  I must go now. Can you come tomorrow? At the same time?

  Meet you here.

  This time he brought the cider in a pottery jug with two cups and she had barley cakes filled with honey and wrapped in sweet chestnut leaves. It was the devil of a job to get the cider up the hill without spilling it.

  How many children shall we have? she asked, wiping honey from the corner of her mouth.

  As many as God sends, he answered.

  Don’t be stupid, I’m not the Virgin Mary, you know.

  Filled with a sudden flower-burst of joy he turned her towards him, and licked the dark, brown honey from her chin.

  She pushed him away with a giggle but left her hand on his knee.

  When you finish your service as a housecarl what will Harold give you?

  All the lands between the Stour and the Avon. He meant the Hampshire Avon that rises near Stonehenge.

  Silly, that would be enough to make you an earl.

  Some of them, anyway. Enough to make a proper lady of you.

  Do you mind? I’m a proper lady already, thank you very much.

  Of course you are.

  She lay back against the grassy slope with her hands joined above her eyes. Her smock was above her knees.

  Do you think I’m beautiful?

  Like apple-blossom in April, like a cornfield in July, like cream in a dish, like the woods in October when all the leaves are red and gold, like snow in February.

  My cousins over in Childe Okeford say I’m ugly, but that’s because they thought one of them should be your wife, not me.

  ‘Young love is a powerful thing. I could lock you up, but like a tom-cat when there’s a queen in heat within a league, you’d find a way out.’

  He and his old father, white hair unkempt since Walt’s mother died, sat alone in the mead-hall at the big table, just the one candle, and all the churls and freemen long gone back to their family bowers.

  ‘And anyway it’s right you should see her, get to know her. It’s a bad thing when strangers marry.’

  He drank, wiped his straggly beard, which, Walt noted, was none too clean.

  ‘I wish your mother was alive. She could tell you things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘About women, and their ways.’

  Walt had a dim understanding of what he meant. The monthlies, he supposed. That sort of thing.

  They drank some more.

  ‘You’ll be off again soon.’

  ‘St John’s Day. At Winchester. I have to be there. I told you.’

  ‘You did. I forgot. Often I forget things.’

  Walt covered his father’s knobbled knuckles with his own hand and squeezed.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. This place needs a proper man in charge.’

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘You’d better.’

  They drank some more, crumbled some bread, ate it.

  ‘Mind, you’re not to leave her with a brat on the way. Not if you can’t come back and be a proper father.’

  Walt thought about that. Thought about how she’d lain back against the slope and smiled up at him from corn-flower eyes. With a sudden, disturbing flash of perception he realised that what his father was telling him might not be too easy to observe. Not if she had as much a mind for it as he did, and he rather thought she had.

  It was disconcerting to find that such carnal impulses ran so closely hand-in-hand with the apparently more spiritual longing the thought of her filled him with. But his father had not finished.

  ‘There are ways . . .’ his old fingers writhed on the table, his face was suffused, ‘you can . . . make . . . oh, damn it, your mother would have been be able to tell you so much better . . .’ He was confused, did not know how to say the things he wanted to’

  Finally, he looked up at his son.

  ‘Just, do . . . just, oh, make yourself happy and her, but don’t land her and us with a bastard. All right?’

  The Thegn of Iwerne reached forward, clawed Walt’s shoulder, drained his cup and stumped off to his lonely bed.

  Perhaps Erica had been talking to her mother. Or an aunt. Certainly, along with all the other children of her age, she had watched and laughed raucously at the antics the animals sometimes got up to, how bulls sometimes licked their cows’ vulvae, instead of getting on with it properly, that sort of thing. They drank their cider, ate wrinkled apples, the last from the previous autumn kept in the hay lofts above the barns (it was about all they did keep hay for, feeding the best breeding stock on more nutritious fodder through the winter and killing the rest for food when winter came). Then, with no more questioning she pulled him down on top of her and made him kiss her face, her lips, her neck, her shoulders. He lifted her smock over her shoulders and she shook her head and wonderful hair free of it. For a moment he was shattered by the soft, rounded, milky whiteness of her, the globes of her breasts, the nipples
like pale raspberries, the rounded tummy and its blue shadowed navel, the full hips and the fair reddish brush, redder than her hair (foxy lady), between and her long, smooth strong legs. He bent his head, took her nipples between his lips.

  After a moment or two of this she sat up to pull at his leggings and jerkin until he was as naked beneath the sun and the larks as she was. She took hold of his throbbing prick with one hand and with the other arm over his lean, muscled shoulders pulled him down but carefully so his member lay between their stomachs. When, driven by impulses stronger than earthquakes and tempests, he tried to wriggle a little lower, find his way in, she seized his buttocks and with nails tearing into them ground her stomach against him until he came before he could get there. Gasping, almost retching with the uncompleted agony of it, he pulled up and back and looked down at her, spread like a universe of potential joy beneath him.

  Her hands reached up his arms and on to his shoulders.

  ‘You’re not done yet, oh no Walt, you’re not done yet,’ and shifting a hand to his sweating forehead she pushed him down across her stomach streaked with viscous pearl as it was, right down to where she was moist too and filled with fragrances. She opened her knees and put her legs over his shoulders forcing his mouth into her. His body slipped on the grassy slope beneath them, the wild thyme prickled his stomach and his balls, and he had to scrabble again with his feet to gain a purchase and push himself upwards, and again gather handfuls of grass on either side of her waist.

  She pushed with her hands at the back of his head, his neck, twisting them and herself, and once got hold of his hair and yanked his head upwards so his lips and tongue were where she wanted them to be and he felt the small hardness within swell and throb until suddenly she was writhing and moaning as he sucked the rush of wetness into his mouth -- sea without the harshness of salt, honey without its cloying sweetness.

  And when that was done and the hot flush spread across her breast bone was fading and her head ceased to rock from side to side, when that was over they lay face to face and kissed and gently played with their fingers until it all happened again less urgently but even more sweetly than before. And, of course she found his tattoos. The winged dagger: Winners dare. And Walt 4 Erica inscribed within a heart. That pleased her like anything, because now she knew he had fancied her all along, well before the betrothal.

  At last she said: ‘Wait here. I don’t want to be seen leaving with you.’

  And she pulled the smock back on over her head.

  He watched her -- part walking, sometimes driven by the steepness of the slope to run a little, once slithering and almost slipping onto her backside so she looked back with a grin and a wave. His heart burst with a happiness which enveloped all he could see and smell and touch. The whole landscape from the plants around him, some it must be said a little the worse for being lain on, to the distant hills was hers, was subsumed into her. She was the spirit whose corporeality infused it all.

  The grass was a garden, a chalk garden filled with wild flowers, thyme, vetches, clovers, wild flaxes, cranesbills, spurges, borages, mallow, forget- me-nots and harebells. The hawthorn blossom was full and out now and the scent of it, the most sensuous odour that any blossom has and the why of that was something he had discovered first on his tongue and still on his fingers, hung about his head. He looked down and out across a rolling plain framed with the blue hills on which Shaftesbury stood six miles to the north and on the right by downs which lay like a woman upon the earth, contoured so their shape echoed the line that climbs a thigh, dips from hip to waist, then swells into a breast. Below, the coombes were hazed with bosky woods.

  Filling the air, making a space rather than an emptiness of it, martins wove cat’s cradles of delight so fast all he could follow was the white speck of their rumps above the trees and fields. Higher still, swifts racketed on alternate wing-beats mewing like kittens as they scoured the skies. A scattering of crows chased a merlin from their rookery, and while a male cuckoo made the air ring his mate slipped in and laid intrusive eggs.

  It was all one thing, one living thing, bound into one. Even the farms and enclosures, built from the earth and what grew out of it, mingled with it all, were neither alien nor intrusive, adding harmony to what would have been savage without them.

  Again he savoured the hawthorn flavour on his lips and saw how the girl, the woman, yellow hair falling on honey-coloured shoulders above the white but grass-stained shift, crossed a meadow where three horses grazed and came to the fence that circled her fathers homestead. One step up and there she was astride the topmost pole. She knew he watched for her and she raised an arm and waved. Wild thing. His heart was singing.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Tumble-weed and dust devils. Ochre grit, dried-up riverbeds, and distant mountains mauve on the horizon - that’s what the great central plain of Asia Minor looks like now as you cross it from Afion or Ankara to Konya, ancient Iconium. But not then, not in the late 1060s. Then it was oak forest, was partially farmed for timber, charcoal, tannin and so forth and pigs both wild and domestic fed sumptuously from the acorns to produce a thick, almost fat-free, dark-red meat. The acorns, those that escaped the pigs, would not germinate beneath the boughs of the parent tree: nothing mystical in this -- just that not enough light or moisture got through to them. The forest thus needed very little attention to transform it into regulated park-land open enough for horsemen, hunters or soldiers, to gallop through, or, near villages, for the peasants to grow wheat and vines beneath the trees without clearing them.

  Why is it now a semi-desert? Because of what Walt and his companions witnessed from a foothill of the Taurus mountains to the south and west of Iconium a few days after they had left the Black Castle of Opium: a battle between the armies of the Seljuk Turks and the Emperor of Byzantium. The plain was spread below them, in the far distance they could see the white walls and towers of Iconium, where St Paul had preached in the market place one thousand and twenty years earlier, and between it and them, trotting, slow-galloping and marching in tight formations, wheeling, deploying in solid phalanxes, some twenty or thirty thousand soldiers. The Cross against the Crescent. Banners fluttering from spears in the spaces between the oaks, levelled for the charge. Quick-firing archers with small bows, mounted on ponies on the Turks’ side, crossbowmen cranking up their steel-leafed engines on the other Trumpets and horns, some curving above the leopard-skinned heads of the bandsmen beneath the Chi-Rhos, standards hung with bells and horses’ tails beneath the silver crescents. Alla Turca. Syncopated drums. It was quite a sight. The ones with turbans round their helmets won. After three hours or so of galloping hither and thither and for no particular reason that the watchers could identify, the ones on the western side of the panorama below them broke ranks and began to flee through the oaks towards the west, leaving a great train of baggage, camp-followers, animals, stores, slaves and women behind them.

  Taillefer asserted that this was intentional. By interposing such considerable booty between them the Christian soldiers reckoned to escape their pursuers. And now, from the east, came the women, children and slaves of the Seljuks, filling the spaces left by their victorious army. Ignoring the city, which presently began to burn beneath clouds of black smoke, the main body pitched a thousand black tents amongst the oaks, whilst all around them tens of thousands of russet and black goats moved through the forest.

  Goats love oak more than any other food. They will browse every leaf they can reach and they can strip the bark from all but the most mature trees. Their herdsmen, of course, relying on their milk, yoghurt, cheese, meat, wool and hides for all of life’s essentials, assist the destruction by cutting down the boughs the goats can’t reach. Thus, within a generation or two, the great indigenous oak forests not only of Asia Minor but Central Asia too, were destroyed.

  Quint especially had been impressed.

  ‘That is the future and it’s unbeatable,’ he carolled as he beat the rump of his mule with a stick and urge
d it up the steep part of a bend.

  The woman Walt called Theodora looked at him over the shoulder of her peacock-coloured gown from the back of her white palfrey, whose dainty black hoofs were scrambling at the grit and shingle of the road.

  ‘The Turks?’ she exclaimed with some incredulity

  ‘Not just the Turks,’ cried Quint. ‘Islam. The crescent.’ He warmed to it. ‘Truly a crescent. Think of it - the western horn, the Moorish Arabs strike up through Spain, the Pyrenees alone stand between them and Paris. And here on the eastern point the Turks threaten Constantinople and all the lands beyond. Mark my words. Europe is theirs.’

  Taillefer followed him on his big pack-horse with Adeliza clinging to his waist behind him and his saddle-bags filled with the machinery that created his illusions thumping the horse’s flanks below his knees.

  ‘One thing I don’t like about them though,’ Adeliza called out. ‘Their Holy Book forbids the use of wine.’

  ‘Until, dear girl, you get to Paradise. Then you can drink all you want. There are even scantily clad ladies there to do the honours.’

  Adeliza pouted: ‘Personally,’ she said, ‘I’d rather be served by naked Ganymedes.’

  Theodora turned her dark and sensuous eyes on Quint.

  ‘A book of verse, a flask of wine and thou beside me sitting in the wilderness is paradise enough,’ she called above the noise of the caravan. ‘Why wait for an unearthly heaven?’

  Five years later Quint met a poet called Omar, quoted what she had said, and, with a minor improvement or two, the young man incorporated it in a book he was writing.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Quint called again and urged his reluctant mule into a trot which he hoped would bring him abreast with the lady, but she, sensing his intention, shook her reins and urged her game little pony into a trot that took him out of reach. ‘From dust we come, to dust we go. The flower of the field and all that. But the Ancients had it right, had the answer: tomorrow and her works defy, lay hold upon the present hour and snatch the pleasures passing by, nor love, nor love’s delights disdain - whate’re thou gets today is gain . . . You see, it’s what I was saying the other night -- it’s the THING that matters, the here and now of it. . .’ She turned on him again, looking down from the path above the next bend so she seemed to be going in the opposite direction, meeting and passing him but on different levels.