Idmaer made the courtesy and urged his horse back up the column, past the riders who went as vanguard and who now sat patiently, talking among themselves. Penda watched him go, noting those among his men, his wolves, who saw the steward’s passing and those who did not. He had spent long days and weeks and months training his retainers to fight and act as a wolf pack: together, always together, in service of the pack leader. But he also wanted them like wolves in their alertness to danger and, its first presage, to difference.
The shepherd, giving up all attempt to keep his flock together, simply scattered them, hoping that way he would find more lost sheep than the royal party would leave him uneaten sheep, and Idmaer called the column into motion once more. The sun now stood three and a half hands’ breadths from the horizon. Penda gentled his horse into a walk, using his knees to set it moving, and sat easy, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun on his face.
The last time he had been this way was winter, when he rode, huddled in cloak and fur against the cold, to the trap he had laid for Oswald. And his own brother.
Swaying upon the horse’s back, Penda fell into memory. He had buried Eowa well, with riches and weapons fit for a king to present to Woden’s door warden. They had laid him out, and left him, and left Penda with him, alone.
And he remembered…
There was no ghost. No shade of the man who had been his brother. Just white flesh and dead bones. And if Eowa heard, he gave no sign.
But whether his brother heard or not, Penda spoke, once and never again, in the silence of the grave.
“You did well, my brother. You kept silence, you kept faith, and you brought my enemy to me. Little thanks, you think, I gave you – only the sword, and your blood swallowed by the grass. But know you now, a throne is not shared: one man takes it, one man sits upon it, one man keeps it. So long as you lived, there was another who might claim the throne. Now, while my sons are young, there is no one. I sit secure. Mayhap, if the weavers had woven differently, it were me who lies listening, and you who speaks. But they cut your life; luck failed you, Eowa, in the end.” Penda held up some dice. “Remember these? I was always the lucky one, you thought.” Penda shook the dice in his hand and rolled them, sending the stones tumbling across the beaten earth floor of the burial chamber. “You were right.”
The dice turned twin sixes upwards.
Penda, riding the royal road west, felt at his belt and took out the dice. He held them in his hand, turning one against the other, rolling them between his fingers. They were nearly as familiar to him as his sword, and more so than any woman, more even than his wife. Two pairs, identical in all ways save one. If he threw the pair he held in his right hand, he knew which numbers would roll. If he threw the pair in his left hand, then he did not.
Warriors might dedicate themselves to the Lord of Battles, or the thunder god, or Tiw One Hand, but Penda knew their great god, grasped before each battle, was luck. The fortune of the warrior.
He held luck in his hand. It had cost him a gold armband, the finest he had, and a horse, but it had been worth it…
The merchant sat, fat bellied, in the lee of his boat, pulled up on the strand. His slaves bustled around, laying out pots and salves and trinkets and jewels: the gleanings and leavings of the people of warmer climes, brought north and upriver, riding the tide of the Thames, past the pilings and ruins of the Roman bridge and city to the new town, the new London, made of wood and thatch rather than brick and tile. It was the biggest town the young Penda had ever seen: there must have been hundreds of people crammed into the houses that straggled along the river’s shallow bank. He had made his way through the paths that threaded between the houses, slipping and cursing the mud and ordure, down to where the river ran, brown and sinuous and broad. The old city, the city of the emperors, still lowered at this wooden interloper upstream, but what really impressed Penda, as it impressed all who saw it, was the remains of the bridge. Though it was broken in two places now, many spans still remained, arches leaping from piling to piling, the river swirling impotently around them.
But it was not the boat that had brought Penda to London, but the market: boats, many boats, lay beached upon the shallow bank, pulled up just beyond the reach of the high tide. The river breathed broad with the tides, first sending brown fingers up well-worn channels, then overflowing them and washing out the rubbish the people of the town abandoned to the river’s embrace, from the entrails of butchered animals, which the circling red kites waited upon, through the shavings of horn and the effluvium of tanneries. London, Penda thought as he made his way through it, was a stinking place.
On the river bank, the breeze cleared some of the smell of the town, but it was replaced by the scents of the goods on display: incense, perfumes, foods that Penda could not even name. He wandered among the merchants, fending off importunate hands pulling him to inspect wares laid out on display. But the fat merchant simply sat on his stool, fanning his face.
Penda stopped. Laid out beside the merchant upon the ground were gleaming trinkets and milk-white pearls; glazed jugs, gleaming red with the captured heat of their firing; bronze bowls filled with the sun.
“You like?” the merchant asked, squinting up at Penda.
“You speak my language?” Penda was surprised. The merchant clearly came from a distant, southern land. Elsewhere in the market, slaves – some bought for the purpose – did the selling.
The merchant stopped fanning and smiled broadly. “I speak good, no?”
“No,” said Penda.
“No. But I speak more good than them.” And the merchant pointed at his fellow traders.
“Yes.”
The merchant nodded. “Few words. That is good. Better for me to understand. I speak good because I sell good. You want?” He spread his hands over the display beside him.
Penda shook his head and turned to go, his hand, as it often did, going without thought to rest upon his sword hilt.
“Wait.” The merchant put hand to Penda’s arm, pulling him back. “I have something for you. Something all men with swords want. You good with sword?”
“Yes,” said Penda. His hand still rested upon the sword hilt. If the merchant touched him again without his leave, the hand would rest no longer.
“Yes, I tell. Come, come here.” The merchant gestured Penda closer. “This too good for others to hear.” When Penda leaned to him, the merchant looked around, making sure no one could overhear, then said, “You want luck.”
“Luck?”
“Yes, luck. Fortuna. All men with swords want luck, no?”
“Y-yes.”
The merchant’s eyes gleamed. “I have luck. I sell it you. You buy, yes?”
“How can you sell me luck?” asked Penda.
The merchant reached into his robe, then thrust his hands, fat fingers closed, in front of Penda’s face.
“Here is luck,” said the merchant, and he opened his hands. In each palm nestled a pair of dice. He handed one pair to Penda. “Here is your luck,” he said, and he pointed to the leather tarpaulin where his wares lay. “Throw.”
Penda flicked his wrist. The dice bounced over the leather, then came to rest. Three and five.
“My luck,” said the merchant, and he flicked the remaining pair of dice.
Six and six.
“Throw again.”
Penda threw four and six. The merchant flicked his wrist.
Six and six.
“Throw again.”
Two and one.
Then six and six. “My luck,” said the merchant.
“How much?” asked Penda.
The merchant pointed at the gold arm ring, thick and richly worked, that wound around Penda’s upper arm. Penda made to take it off, but the merchant held up his hand. “And horse,” he said.
So it was that Penda started the journey home from London on foot. But after a day’s march, his luck won him a horse. Over the years, his luck had won him much more. And, in the end, his luck had won him the throne.
Returning from the halls of memory, Penda rolled the familiar dice over his palm. His luck.
The great god.
Eowa had never understood. In the end, he had simply stopped playing dice with his brother. But the luck still remained with Penda. It had delivered Oswald to him – and Eowa. It had given him the throne, with none now left in Mercia – or any of the other kingdoms – to contest it.
Oh, he knew other kings would rise up. Penda smiled. He was looking forward to it. Let them rise: the richer the pickings when he rode against them, harvesting gold and glory.
Penda had realized that he, as king, was like a farmer. Of course, this thought he kept to his own counsels: the witan, that garrulous meeting of men more interested in recounting past glories and the list of their supposed ancestors – in most cases, as invented as his own – would not wish its lustre tarnished with the mud of the growers. But Penda had grown up among farmers, men scraping a living in the marcher lands between Mercia and Powys, and he knew how carefully they husbanded and how closely they reaped. As ruler of Mercia, he would let the other kingdoms grow, their kings waxing great in gold and treasure, and then he would reap them.
Mercia was different from the other kingdoms. It was the heartland – it was all land. Northumbria, Kent, the West Saxons and the East Saxons, the North Folk and the South Folk, Lindsey: they each, in their own way, turned their faces to sea, travelling by boat more readily and easily than by land. But Mercia sat at the heart of all these kingdoms: surrounded, but also in a position to strike, swiftly, to north and east and south. Only to the west would he stay his hand, for Gywnedd and Powys were bound to him in alliance, fruit of the blood that ran in him through his mother.
Penda kept this also to himself, but he was the great spider, sitting at the centre of the web of kingdoms that made up this land. Like a spider, he remained, still, waiting, until the moment a fly flew into his web. Then he would strike, as the spider wrapped the fly in its web more quickly than the eye could follow.
The dice clicked between his fingers. Penda smiled in his reverie. Not bad for the son of a whore. Though now, in the king lists his scop recited, his mother was a whore no more, but a princess of the Iclingas and he a descendant of Woden. Penda smiled again.
“Lord?”
Penda looked up, still smiling. Idmaer the steward, prepared for his king’s wrath at the length of time this journey was taking, brightened at once.
“Lord, Brandnoth, thegn of High Cross, would speak with you.”
“Bring him.”
Idmaer pulled his horse’s head away, but before he could heel him back down the column, Penda spoke.
“This journey takes too long, Idmaer.”
“Yes. Yes, I know, lord.”
“I will ride on with the queen and my children. I leave it to you to bring the rest.”
“Yes, lord. I will.”
“Tell the queen, and keep enough men to guard: there are rich pickings here, and I would not have them lost to some passing carrion crows.”
“But you will need men to guard you, lord.”
“We will ride to our hall in Shrewsbury, and fast. Catch up with us there.”
Idmaer made the courtesy. “Yes, lord.”
“Then send me Brandnoth. I will hear what he wishes…”
*
“Lord, I ask your favour and protection.” Brandnoth rode beside the king.
Penda looked askance at the thegn. “We are bare out of your land and you ask me for protection?”
“Not for me, lord, but for four travellers I have taken under my protection. A thegn of Lindsey and his companions, and they travel to seek healing; they go in search of miracles at Maserfield and Woden’s tree. They wish only to travel under your protection so far as they might, afore they continue to the field of slaughter which, men say, has become a field of healing.”
“They seek healing from where Oswald fell?”
“Yes, lord, they do.”
“I have heard of this – but you say the fame of this place has spread already to Lindsey? Bring them to me. I would speak with this thegn of Lindsey, for I travel to the tree and the field where I killed Oswald also, to see for myself if these tales be true.”
While Brandnoth rode back to fetch the pilgrims to the king, Penda trotted his horse along the outside of the column to the queen’s wagons.
“Cynewisse!” he called, slapping the palm of his hand against the waxed leather tarpaulin that guarded the queen as they made the slow journey from one royal estate to another.
There was a sudden flurry, and excited voices, from the wagon, before the flap was pulled back to reveal his wife and his queen, still hurriedly adjusting her scarf.
“My lord,” she exclaimed. And in her surprise, there was a trace of the uncouth sound of her upbringing. Cynewisse was of no noble stock, let alone royal. She was the daughter of a man little more than a ceorl, with bare land and holding enough to rank as a thegn; but Kenward had taken the son of a whore, a boy barely old enough and scarce strong enough to hold a sword, as his retainer. And Kenward’s daughter had not laughed at him when she saw Penda practising, apart from the other boys, with a stick for his sword, over and over and over again. Instead, she had brought him, unasked for, bread and beer from the kitchen, leaving it without a word for him to find when he turned from his relentless practice. Seeing the bread, still warm, and the cup of beer, Penda had known for the first time that he had a friend in this middle-earth, although he knew not who the friend was. He did not find out for a year or more – not until, finally, he laid trap and caught Kenward’s daughter, and lifted her, grave and smiling at once, from the net he had strung for her.
“My lady,” Penda said. “We ride ahead to Shrewsbury for this night, and onwards the day after. Make yourself ready, and what women you will have for the journey, and the children. They should come too.”
Cynewisse smiled. “Too long we’ve gone at the pace of barley growing.”
“Growing poorly at that,” said Penda.
“I will be glad to ride with you, lord.”
Penda nodded, then pulled his horse away. Cynewisse, suddenly urgent, turned back to her women, gathered in the wagon.
“Get the children ready, and my clothes and jewels. And, Edith, bring one of the slave girls, the fair one we bought at the last market: a ride such as this always sets the king’s blood to fire.”
As the queen’s wagons boiled into activity, Penda made his way down the column, selecting the men he wanted to accompany him ahead. The rumour spread faster than he rode, sending ripples through the line of horsemen as the riders sat straighter to attract their king’s attention. As he rode past, Penda tapped those men he wanted to accompany him. He did not need to look behind to know they rode on with their heads high, joshing their fellows left to the long, slow job of guarding the rest of the royal caravan.
Penda saw Brandnoth approaching, leading four riders, and he reined his horse to a stop, looking carefully at the men approaching.
“My lord.” Brandnoth made the courtesy. “These are the men of whom I spoke, that I ask you to take under your protection for so long as you will, while they journey to Woden’s tree.”
Penda nodded.
“Who are you, and what do you seek?”
There was silence, a silence longer than a king was wont to keep, before the man in the centre, the man whose eyes Penda could not see for the bandages wrapped around his face, spoke.
“I – I am Nothelm the Blind, thegn of Bardney, and I ask the favour and protection of Penda the Great, king of Mercia, king of kings.”
Penda pushed his horse closer to the group of men. “Where do you go, Nothelm the Blind, passing through my kingdom?”
The thegn held his hand up to his face.
“I go to seek sight, lord. The Ælf kin poured milk into my eyes. Where once I could tell a crow from a raven even on cliff top when I rode at the bottom, now I cannot tell whether it be day or night, for all looks white as fo
g to me. I sat in my hall, waiting to die, when I heard of the miracles wrought at this site in Mercia, where King Penda slew King Oswald: the very dirt where the old High King fell, when mixed with water, has brought healing to men with fever and with palsy, to women in childbirth and children with the sweating sickness, and horses too. Others, they say, have been healed where Oswald hangs, before Woden’s tree. We go there, lord, if thou will, to seek healing, to seek sight. May we ride with thee, so far as our paths match?”
“Our paths will match all the way, Nothelm the Blind, for I go to Woden’s tree as well. I would see for myself these wonders whereof you speak, and I would speak with those who have been healed, and learn by whose power these wonders are worked: whether it be by the power of the blood of him whom I slew, or through the blessing of the Lord of the Slain, to whose honour I gave Oswald’s head and arms.”
“For my part, I care little by whose power these wonders are worked, only that they work on me.”
“You are not a king,” said Penda. “It is a king’s business to know by whose power such things come to pass in his kingdom.” He pushed his horse closer to the blind man. “We ride for Shrewsbury, leaving the wagon train to follow, then on to Woden’s tree on the morrow. Match our pace, and you will be under our protection. Fall behind, then ask the gods for theirs.”
The blind thegn made the courtesy. “I thank you, lord.”
“You have a priest with you?” Penda looked towards Coifi, sitting uncomfortably upon his horse, raven-feather cloak pulled tight around his thin shoulders.
“Yes, lord. A priest of the All-Father.”
Penda nodded. “Have him speak with mine: his name is Wihtrun. He is ever miserable, bewailing men’s falling from the ways of our fathers. It will be a mercy to me that he should have another to spread his gloom upon – and, like enough, they agree. Do you?” Penda spoke to Coifi.
The priest started, his eyes, rolling towards a glimpsed movement through the clouds, pulled back towards the man looking to him. Then Coifi’s eyes flicked away, seeking Acca for some sign as to what question he had missed, but the scop, by the slightest motion of his eyes, told him that he could not say.
Oswiu, King of Kings Page 9