‘Start, by telling us of Harold’s preparations. The coronation was at the Epiphany, the invasion over nine months later. Your Harold had plenty of time to lay on a welcome. If he were as good a general as you say, he must have had all in readiness.’
Walt looked up at him, dabbing with a napkin at his nose which still bled from where Adeliza had hit him with a goblet.
‘You were there,’ he growled. ‘You tell them.’
‘Well, yes and no,’ said Taillefer.
‘Explain yourself.’
‘Some other time. Right now it’s your turn. But I tell you one thing: by May your Harold’s preparations were so well advanced, William was in two minds about the whole venture. I really do believe if he could have done so without losing face, he would have backed off then. What went wrong?’
At last Walt sighed.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you really want to know, I’ll tell you.’ He held his cup out for Adeliza to fill. ‘But I doubt the true story you’ll hear from me chimes that well with what the Bastard’s been putting about since. But first you must know you are quite right. By the end of April, yes, we were ready. For as soon as the coronation was done we were all sent back to our own shires to raise men, train and arm them . . .’
Chapter Forty
‘Wait outside.’ Erica dismounted from her pony, a small russet animal with a white belly and a big head. She slung the reins over a low apple bough, covered with silver and yellowish green lichen. A couple of withered yellow fruits still clung to it.
She unhitched a soft leather bag from the pommel of her saddle and, scarcely sparing Walt a glance over her shoulder, walked across frosted dried grass towards the hut. Her pointed boots left prints in the crackling grass amongst those of hens, a dog and a small boy, none of whom had worn shoes.
Tall, straight, she wore a belt with an intricate silver buckle which pulled in her long, dark, woad-blue woollen gown just enough to give an outline to her waist and hips. A brindled, half-starved cat arched its back at her, spat and hissed, but, as Erica stooped and murmured to her, pushed her tail in the air and rubbed her cheeks against her ankles. She pushed open the low board door, ducked her head, and was gone.
Walt was relieved. Women’s business. Something to do with a reluctant after-birth. He could hear the new-born baby mewling like a kitten, and then a sharp cry, presumably from its mother.
He had seen men’s arms lopped off in battle, heads shattered with an axe or sword blow spilling brains and teeth, but he turned away squeamishly at the thought of placentas and birth cords. Elis horse snuffled and one of its back hoofs clicked on frozen earth or a flint and he too dismounted and hitched up to the old apple-tree. He walked over to a fence made of wattle hurdles that ringed the hut and its acre or two of land. It was flimsy, in need of repair, just enough to keep fowl in and foxes out, so he decided not to lean on it while he looked out and over it.
There was a blue-to-violet stillness in the air, a deep quietness of heavy frost jewelling the trees nearby and whitening the woods that climbed the hill out of the bottom they were in. Nothing stirred, no crows in the patches of field or wheeling above the trees, not even a robin on the thatch -- it was that cold. He breathed out vapour and some of it settled in his moustache, the droplets freezing instantly. It bit into him in spite of the patchwork coat of mixed furs he was wearing -- weasel, badger, polecat for the most part - and his stout cow-hide boots. His hands were warm though, deep inside fur mittens, glossy and black, cut from a bear-pelt - one of many the King of Poland had sent Harold as a coronation present.
Worse than the cold was the knowledge that back at Iwerne his father was ill, almost certainly dying. He would have stayed there with him, but for the duties Harold had laid on him and which, once this business of a difficult childbirth was over, he would have to spend the rest of the day dealing with.
More cries and moans from the hut made him turn back, but then too the crack of broken twigs and presently a thin mist of white smoke gathered above the point of the roof. The door opened again and a small boy came out, batting aside the smoke that came with him. He was about eight years old, with a grubby face and gap-toothed grin, sandy hair claggy with dirt. He looked fat, but his face and legs were very thin - the plumpness came from the fact he had put on or tied round his body every scrap of cloth and skin he could find.
‘She says you’re to go back and get milk and fresh bread and some cheese,’ he piped.
‘She?’
‘The Lady Erica. And in the store in your aunt’s bower there should be some dried penny-royal, maybe, she said, some fresh in a pot if the frost hasn’t got to it. She says we’re to be quick.’
‘We?
‘She says you’re to take me too, in case you forget what she sent you for.’
‘Bread, cheese and penny-royal.’
‘And milk.’
Pleased to have something to do, Walt hoisted him on to his horse’s withers, in front of the pommel, and swung up behind him, putting his arm round the boy’s waist.
‘Take a good grip on his mane. What’s your name?’
‘Fred.’
‘Alfred?’
‘No. Fred. What’s yours?’
‘Walt.’
‘Waltheof?’
‘No, just Walt.’
‘The penny-royal because the herb is a strong abortient. The rest because there was no food in the hut at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘Her husband, Wink, was a fool. He cut his ankle with a sickle at harvest, it went bad, and he died two months ago. Frieda had to sell her cow and rather stupidly they ate the calf. The last food in the hut is the broth from the bones.’
‘Is she all right. I mean, as far as the . . .’
He was squeamish over even using words like after-birth.
Erica sighed, her knuckles tightened on the reins, and she shook her head. Two hours later and they were moving now at a steady walk up a chalk track that led into the woods and their next call, a clan of charcoal-burners Walt needed to talk to. She turned to him and her pale, blue eyes found his across the space between them. A lock of straw-coloured hair had fallen across her forehead from beneath her hood, and he wanted to reach across and touch it.
‘Yes . . . and no. It wasn’t the after-birth at all. She had twins. The second was still-born. I doubt the other, a girl, will survive. I’m not at all sure Frieda will either.’
‘They should be moved, shouldn’t they? Into the farm?’
He meant his father’s farm - the enclosure round the hall and bowers. ‘Where they can be properly cared for,’ he added.
‘Yes. But she’s afraid to do that.’
‘Why?’
‘Dear Walt. You’ll have a lot to learn, when you finally take it all on.
Wink was a churl, a freeman. That scrap of land round the hut was his and a couple of hides over on the north side of the village. They should be Fred’s now, and Frieda’s. She’s afraid if she moves off the land and into the farm you’ll take it over in return for the security you can give them, but they’ll lose their freedom.’
‘What should we do then?’
‘Promise she and Fred and the infant, if it lives, can stay in the farm until they can look after themselves. But to convince her the land stays hers you’ll have to give your oath on it at the next folk-moot. She’ll not move until you have.’
He remembered the moot was in two days time. He hoped Fred’s mother would live that long. Erica said she would - or die within six hours. If the latter then she’d die wherever she was.
Presently the track broke out of the beech woods that filled the side of the coombe and on to the long sinuous ridge that ran above the Vale of the White Hart right up to Shaftesbury. They paused for a moment and looked back the way they had come, to Iwerne and Shroton and the whale back of Hambledon and the rolling plain, grey and white, forest and fields, with here and there a haze of blueish smoke above the scattered settlements. When Harold released him W
alt knew most of what he could see would be his. Hers and his. But now it seemed there was more to being a great thegn, even an earl, than feasting in the big hall and hunting.
They pushed down the other side into much deeper forest, with oak, ash and holly slowly taking over from the beech. The even deeper silence of the woods folded about them so the clip of their horses’ hooves and the occasional snort and jangle of harness seemed like a blasphemy. Soon they left the track at a point where an axe blow had sliced a white slash into the dark grey bark of an ash tree - a sign Erica had been looking for.
The slope became steeper and broken with churned mud and mast frozen solid so that they feared it could cause one of the horses to stumble and do itself an injury. They dismounted and led them. The holly, the berries long since eaten by thrushes and red-wings, had been browsed to a consistent line just above the height of a tall man’s shoulder and presently they saw why. A group of red deer two hundred paces away looked round at them from where they had been reaching up into the glossy leaves. One of them even had its front hooves on the silvery trunk. There was a moment of frozen animation then they were off -- and totally silent - not a twig cracked, not a leaf rustled, not even though they all leapt a shallow but quite wide frozen brook, each in turn, heads down as they approached, searching out the right footing for both take-off and landing before lifting them for the actual jump. You felt that with their necks stretched out like that they could grow wings and soar up through the branches above.
‘Not far now,’ Erica murmured. Then distantly, from half a mile away or more, they heard a dog bark, then another.
They found six huts in a clearing, even lower than Frieda’s, no more than circular twig and turf tents above pits dug into the forest floor, and five charcoal kilns, tall, thin tent-like pyramids of oak boughs covered with turf. The air bent with the heat above them.
The charcoal burners gathered round, but at a distance, wary, ready to fight or run, carrying axes and machete-like seaxes, the normal tools of their trade. They spoke a variant of the Gaelic the Cornish used, but some churchmen and their own traditions claimed they preceded even the Celts, were in fact the last descendants of the flint-workers the bronze-workers had driven into the virgin forests. They moved often, disappeared if threatened, lived off the birds and animals they could hunt and trap, and sold or bartered charcoal for whatever else they needed.
They had a Chief, and a Queen they honoured above the Chief, but it was the Chief who dealt with matters concerning the world beyond their world. His name was Bran. He was a big man, built like a smith, clad in furs and wearing on his head a stags mask with seven-tined antlers. Beneath it a huge black beard, which had not been touched since the day it began to sprout, filled his face. He spoke English, but simply, brokenly, with few verbs and many gestures of his hands and fingers, especially when it came to totting up numbers and amounts. When he could not find the English word he wanted, Erica found it for him.
Walt needed a thousand bushels in excess of what was normally traded for or bought from the burners, and all by the fifteenth of April, the first day of the fifth of the ancient calendar months, the one dedicated to the Willow-Tree, following that of the Alder, which is the best tree for charcoal - the very battle-witch of all woods, tree that is hottest in the fight.’
Bran was the King of the Charcoal-Burners between the river Stour to the west and the Amesbury Avon to the east, the two rivers that meet at Twyneham harbour before flowing out into the sea through a fearsome run by Hengistbury Head. Rich iron deposits had been found on the long flat summit of the promontory of Hengistbury and Walt’s idea was that the charcoal could be boated down to the new workings, smiths could be moved in, and new forges set up.
The schedule was tight. In the Seine estuary a great fleet had been begun and the Bastard looked like getting together an army bigger than any English King had put in the field since the days of Ironside. The invasion could come as early as late April, as soon as the Spring gales were over.
So now they needed arms and armour not for hundreds but thousands, and in the heart of Cranbourne Chase in early February, Bran was driving a hard bargain. He asked for three times the normal price. Not out of greed, he assured Walt, but because they would have to deplete stocks of growing timber and it could be three years before the normal economy of the forest re-asserted itself. He would want hogsheads of ale and wine thrown in (mead was a net export from the oak-forest), salted pork, salt too, and so on.
But his final demand was more fundamental.
‘Every year,’ he growled, and by now he was sitting on the trunk of a fallen ash, and occasionally picking his teeth with the point of his seax and spitting, while the elders of his tribe, women as well as men stood around and nodded agreement with him, ‘every year of peace in this land brings greater prosperity, more infants grow to maturity, the villages and the towns get bigger, you need more land for your wheat and barley and for your orchards, and the forest is cleared, slashed and burnt, driven back. Without wars and battles you need no new weapons or armour. Already the waterlands on either side of the Avon have been cleared of the alder you need now
‘These are not things in the power of one man to control. Not even a King,’ Walt replied.
‘Perhaps not,’ Bran replied. ‘But for every five hides of forest cleared, your king or his ealdormen could give us one hide for our own. He could also guarantee our rights to hunt over what is left for as long as it lasts. Give us your word, and the word of King Harold on this, and I and the five tribes that live between the Stour and the Avon, and the same for our kin between the Avon and the Itchen, and you’ll get your thousand bushels.’
They bargained on, through noon when the low, blood-orange sun of winter barely grazed the tops of the trees before reddening and sinking to the west. Erica came out of the largest of the hovels, where she had been entertained by the Queen of the burners, and urged them to agree. They were three hours’ ride from Iwerne and Shroton and there was barely that much daylight left. Walt promised that by Shrove Tuesday he would get from Winchester the charters and book-right Bran demanded, and Bran undertook to send the first boat-loads the very next day, down the Stour to Twyneham, taking the charcoal from existing stocks.
Walt clasped Bran’s shoulder before remounting.
‘You would do well, old man,’ he said, ‘to keep your side of this bargain. If Harold fails for lack of good weaponry and the Bastard becomes king, there will be little left for you.’
‘How’s that then? A war-lord needs all the ironwork he can get.’
‘There’ll be no more wars if the Bastard wins - and he loves to hunt.’
‘Room for us both.’
‘Not so. First, he’ll round you up, then have you made Christians, then slaves. William does not like to share the deer he hunts.’
They re-crossed the ridge that separated the Chase from the Vale of the White Hart with the setting sun actually below them on the distant horizon and casting huge purple shadows across the frost and thin snow, sending transverse beams through the smoke of the stoked-up fires above their respective farmsteads. Erica reined in for a moment, reached across and touched his hand.
‘Their Queen,’ she said, ‘gave me gifts. In return for a brooch I gave her that belonged to my mother.’
‘What were they?’ he asked.
She handed across to him a flint core, rounded, with a blue and white patina. The significance of its natural shape was clear enough -- small though it was, hardly filling the palm of her small hand, it was rounded in such a way as to suggest a pregnant torso with enlarged breasts. There was also a twig with oak-leaves the soft brown-gold of late autumn, and three chestnut-coloured acorns still in their cups.
He sensed she took them seriously.
‘Keep them,’ he said. ‘For good luck charms and three strong children.’
She grinned and put them back in her purse.
‘You did well back there, with the charcoal-burners,’ she went on.
‘And with Frieda, too.’
Hambledon?
He blushed a little but remained silent.
‘You’ve grown up in the last five years.’
Was she remembering their love play between the hot summer ramparts of Hambledon?
‘You’re a man now.’
He wanted to say, as their horses began to clip down the chalk and flint track between the beech woods, ‘and you are a woman too,’ but sensed a possible banality in the reply, even a bullying assertion of his manhood.
‘The problem is,’ she went on, ‘are you Harold’s man, or the King’s?’
This was a puzzle, a riddle. The English love riddles.
‘How can I be one and not the other?’
‘I mean . . . when the fighting starts, will you fight for Harold or for all this?’
He did not answer because he knew the answer would not please her. For most of fifteen years he had lived away from ‘all this’, though he had thought of the hearth often, with deep homesickness, then nostalgia. Now he viewed it all with a touch of irritation. The daily round of checking out fences against deer, barns against rodents, that the harrowing-tackle shared by the cottars and gebors was in good nick ready for the Spring sowing, that a joiner had been sent for to fix an old woman’s loom, that a dispute over land had been settled at the folk-moot, and that he had at his finger-tips the rights and wrongs of a case of the accidental killing of a swineherd by a lad out with a bow and arrow. The lad had been on the heath, where he had no business to be, after red-legged partridge. It would all have to be settled at the hundreds-moot in a month’s time with the right assessment of wergild made if the swineherd’s kin demanded it . . . and so on.
It was very different from the training, the comradeship, the actual fighting and clash of arms, the feasting and boasting in the mead-halls, the pomp of coronation and the knowledge that he was Harold’s man to the death, to the very death, that that was what it meant to be a house-carl, not just a housecarl but a member of the innermost circle of a great lord’s bodyguard, a companion, a comitatus, one of the last eight in the shield wall who would die with him if need be.
The Last English King Page 30