Oswiu, King of Kings

by Edoardo Albert

  Oswine looked at the bright, feverish eyes of his thegn. They shone with the glory light, the glow he had seen in men’s eyes in hall, when they recounted a tale of courage and strength such that all those present listened, in silent awe, and then, when the tale was over, raised such a cheer that the dead themselves might hear. He felt the glory lust tighten within him. That he might be free of the shame Penda heaped upon him, the constant demands for gold that left his chests empty and his warriors bare armed. It was true – the possibilities opened up before him. Keep Edwin’s daughter from Oswiu, and soon all the thrones would know that the king of Bernicia was not able to bring his betrothed safely to his court. Then the ravens, the wandering æthelings who roamed the land searching for the pickings of weakness and the meat of the fallen, would turn their black gaze on Oswiu. They would converge upon Bernicia, as flies drawn to a carcass. Such constant attack would leave Oswiu unable to push his claim upon Deira. In the end, it might weaken him enough for Oswine Godfriend to challenge him in open battle.

  Then Oswine’s eyes too began to glow with the glory lust. With the men of Bernicia he could make alliance with the East Angles and the West Saxons, the North Folk and the South Folk, pulling tight the ring around Penda, threat to them all, until the noose choked him to death. That would end the shame of the gold wagons, the annual tribute that Penda extracted from Deira in exchange for the promise that he would not raise his hand against the kingdom. So far, Penda had kept that promise – but the demands for gold were becoming more frequent.

  Yes, he could take this girl, stop her getting to Oswiu, keep her…

  What was he going to do with her? He had a wife, and though she had produced no child, yet he would not put her aside, for her belly had swelled, once, twice, three times, only for the child to be lost ere it could be delivered. Besides, he had asked Bishop Aidan on this, and Brother James, when he went to visit the Roman at his hermitage near Catterick, and both had told the same: to God, marriage was an oath sworn, as man to lord, and thegn to king. To forswear it was to break faith, as if a man turned from his lord. It was to call down vengeance from heaven.

  Oswine shook his head. He would have no part of that. Yet if he did not take the girl as wife himself, what was he to do with her?

  “It would not be meet for me to take Edwin’s daughter for my own wife, not while I yet have a wife. But what counsel have you, Hunwald? If we keep her, what should we do with her?”

  “Lord, all know that sometimes kings put aside wives for another; there is no shame in that.”

  “No,” said Oswine and, when Hunwald began to remonstrate further, he put up his hand. “I said no, friend. I know you have ever been loyal to me, and wish the best for the realm, but on this matter I will hear no more. But tell me, what think you if we keep Edwin’s daughter, this Eanflæd? What may we do with her?”

  Hunwald looked at the king. “What would any king do?” The thegn’s brow began to furrow as he saw no nod of unspoken acknowledgment from Oswine. “You know. It is not what we would wish, of course. But the messenger told us she had come by boat into Humbermouth. The waters there are treacherous – many ships founder if their masters do not know the shift of shoal and sandbank. It would be very sad, but no blame could be attached to you, lord.”

  “Kill her?”

  Hunwald looked around, making sure no one was near enough to hear. “Lord,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper as he drove his horse next to the king’s, “please, speak softly. Such matters are best left unspoken, even among your own.”

  Oswine sat back upon his horse. He felt, around him, the swirl of things that might be. No. He felt the shift of who he might be. A great king, the High King, the king of kings, to whom all bowed. Had not the messenger said that the princess and her mother had come to York because their boat had only just ridden out one great storm? Who was to say it would not founder in another?

  The princess and her mother.

  Eanflæd, daughter of Edwin and cousin to him, and Æthelburh, queen to Edwin – the woman who had first brought to his people the news of life, the life he had himself entered when Paulinus had drawn the waters of the River Ouse over his head, once, twice, thrice, and pulled him forth as one new born. Shivering, crying, like a babe he had been; but the tears were of joy and the cold was the leaving of his old life.

  This little thing Hunwald asked of him would leave the queen also dead. How would he answer to the door warden of the new life, when he asked of this? How would he answer for Eanflæd, or the priests that travelled with them, or even the ship’s crew? How would he answer for any of them? That they were but small things in the way of his becoming the king of kings?

  “No.” Oswine looked to Hunwald. “I know you give this counsel in your love for me, but I will not take it. For it seems to me that a man comes into this middle-earth as a babe, but he might leave it as many things: as a wolf, ravening after the shepherd’s sheep; as a fox, slipping into the coop; as a crow, feasting on the dead. But I would leave this world as a man, Hunwald, and to do as you have bid would be to change my skin: I would be a man no longer.” The king grasped his counsellor’s forearm. “You do understand?”

  Hunwald looked long upon his king; he looked as one seeing clearly for the first time. Then he nodded.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said.

  “Good.” Oswine Godfriend released his hold upon his thegn and signalled to his huntsmen. “The boar will have to wait. We ride to York, to see the queen. Queen Æthelburh!”

  And, taking his cry, the hunt turned back to the city.

  “Æthelburh!” they cried. “Æthelburh!”

  *

  “I am a fool!”

  Eanflæd looked up from where she knelt in prayer, to see her mother coming quickly down the church towards her.

  “Mother?” she asked, getting to her feet.

  Æthelburh took her arm and signalled to their men to follow.

  “I am a fool, daughter,” the queen said as she walked beside Eanflæd down the nave. “We should never have sent word to the king of our arrival; I could have come here as a pilgrim, without notice and unnoticed. Now, Oswine knows you are here, daughter. Like as not news has reached him of your betrothal. If we cannot get away from here before his return, Oswine will seek to stop it.”

  The queen spoke these final words as she was reaching to open the doors to the church. But the doors opened before she could touch them.

  “Oswine will seek to stop what?”

  Standing without the church was the king of Deira, Oswine Godfriend.

  Queen Æthelburh stopped. She took in the man in front of her in one single, sweeping glance. Then she turned to her daughter.

  “Eanflæd, I am a fool twice over, for I feared that King Oswine Godfriend would be a man without honour or truth; a man who might seek to stop you fulfilling the pledge of betrothal you entered into before God. But now –” and here the queen turned back to the man standing in front of them – “I see that my fears were baseless. This man, this king, would not stand between you and the marriage pledge you have given. Is that not true?” The queen looked upon the young man, and to him it seemed as if she saw all too clearly how close his soul struggle had been.

  “Th-that is true, Queen Æthelburh. I will not make you break the pledges you have given, nor the oaths you have sworn, but rather will do all that I may to help you in your journey.”

  “Good, good.” Queen Æthelburh smiled brightly. “In that case, you may feed us.”

  The queen took Oswine’s arm as they walked from the church to the king’s hall – the only wooden building standing amid the brick and stone of York – regaling him, as they went, with tales of Edwin, and a pointed retelling of her own journey north as a bride-to-be, when she was waylaid by King Cadwallon of Gwynedd, Edwin’s sworn enemy. He too had let her go, although Cadwallon had taken the treasure that was meant to form part of the wedding settlement for himself.

  Bishop Aidan walked with Eanflæd
, but his tales were tales of woe: of his own haplessness with curragh and coracle, his gradual demotion, when he lived on the Holy Island of Iona, from working in the scriptorium, through preparing paints and colours, to, finally, the dirtiest, smelliest job on the island: curing and preparing animal skins to turn into vellum, for the writing and making of books. As he walked, the people who scurried after the king would run to him, and many would touch him or ask his blessing, so that every story was interrupted while Aidan laid his hands upon a man with sores all over his body, or a woman with a weeping wound; all the ills to which the people of middle-earth are prey.

  As they approached the hall, the great building rising above the broken-down brick houses that surrounded it, the king looked back to Aidan.

  “We missed you on the hunt, Bishop Aidan. Next time, you must come with us.”

  “To hunt, you need a horse, lord,” said Aidan, “and I do not have one.”

  “But you do.” Oswine stopped. “I gave you one.”

  “I do not have it any longer,” said Aidan.

  “It was a fine animal. Did it break a leg?”

  “No, no. I am sure it lives yet. No, I gave it to a poor man who asked alms of me.”

  “What?” Oswine stared at the bishop. “You gave it away?”

  “Yes,” said Aidan. “Of course.” He made to go on towards the hall, but the king stopped him.

  “I gave you the finest animal I had, so that you could have use of it when travelling in my kingdom. If you wanted to give alms, I had many poorer horses, or other belongings, which you could have given to a beggar, rather than this horse that I chose especially for you.”

  Aidan shook his head. “Think on what you say, lord. Do you really believe the son of a mare to be more valuable than the son of Adam to whom I gave it?” The bishop looked square at the king. “For that is what you are saying. But come, let us go in to eat, for we are keeping Queen Æthelburh and Princess Eanflæd waiting.”

  With that, the bishop continued on and, a moment later, the king followed. But Oswine was caught in thought, so that he offered only the shortest answers to the queen’s questions as they went into the hall, and while Æthelburh and Eanflæd were shown to their places at the high table, Oswine Godfriend went to warm himself by the fire, for the hunt had been long and fruitless, and he had had no chance to warm himself since his return to York.

  Holding his hands to the fire, Oswine slowly felt the warmth of it enter his fingers. And, in sudden memory, he saw again the hands of a woman, a young woman with a babe that slept in a sling at her breast, who stood outside her rude house in winter, washing the babe’s swaddling clothes in water that clinked with ice. He remembered the sight of her hands, red raw, and pointing them out to his father as they rode past, returning from hunting to their hall.

  “The poor get used to cold hands,” his father had said, ruffling his hair. “They have to,” he’d added, laughing. And Oswine, not wanting to seem foolish in the eyes of his father, had laughed too.

  The king looked down at his own hands. They were warm now. The king unbuckled his sword and gave it into a servant’s keeping. Then, Oswine Godfriend went to where Bishop Aidan sat at the high table and went down before him upon his knees.

  “Bishop Aidan, I promise you this: never again will I question you over how much of mine you give away to God’s children.”

  The hall fell into silence. Servants, seeing the king kneel, stopped in mid step. Thegns and retainers, engaged in games of dice, let them fall without seeing. Even the dogs stopped squabbling.

  “You must not kneel to me, lord. Please.” Aidan took the king’s hands and raised him to his feet. “I know you to be a good man and a good king. Please, do not kneel to me.”

  But Oswine smiled at the bishop. “If not you, then who? The hardest part of being king is having no one to kneel to.” Oswine clapped his hands. “Come, let us eat in honour of our visitors: Bishop Aidan, who visits us again, and, especially, in honour of Queen Æthelburh and Princess Eanflæd! You will tell your children and your children’s children of this day, when the queen, Edwin wife, came back to us!”

  There was great joy at that feast. Some among the king’s servants remembered the queen, having served Edwin many years before, and they came before her, to ask her blessing and her memory, and Æthelburh gave both gladly. Others passed before Eanflæd, gazing in wonder at the young woman who had left them as a child. One came forward, a woman of middle years, who put her hand to Eanflæd’s cheek and stroked it, as a mother strokes the cheek of a sleeping child. And Eanflæd, feeling that touch, started, and looked at her anew, and saw her with the years stripped away.

  “Matilda! My nurse!” She looked to her mother for confirmation, and the queen nodded the truth of it. And, rising from the table, Eanflæd took the woman in her arms, returning some small part of the warmth she had been given as a child.

  But as the feast continued in joy, Aidan fell into deeper and deeper silence. Amid such excitement, his quiet was not noticed, save only by Utta, who made his way to the bishop’s side under the guise of bringing small beer to him – for Aidan would not drink wine or any rich drink, even at feast in a king’s hall.

  Bending down to fill Aidan’s cup, Utta saw that his bishop’s eyes were filled with tears, but he could see no cause.

  “Father Abbot, why do you weep?” Utta asked, speaking in the language of the islands, which only he and Aidan, of the people at the feast, understood.

  “I weep for the king. He is good and he is humble. Such a man will not survive long as king in this middle-earth.”

  Utta took his father abbot’s hand. “We will pray for him,” he said, “that he may live.”

  Aidan shook his head. “I do not think God will hear this prayer, although I cannot see when or where death will come to him.”

  “Then we will pray for him when he is dead,” said Utta.

  “Yes. Yes, you must.” The bishop took his monk’s hand. “And pray for me also, for my soul tells me I will not live long after.”

  “What are you talking of?” The queen looked over to Aidan, and the monk standing beside him.

  “Of the goodness of the king,” said Aidan.

  “He has indeed been kind to us,” said Eanflæd. She felt the king’s gaze upon her and smiled to him. “If he were not already wed…”

  “But he is,” said the queen, “while the king of Bernicia is not.”

  “Not any more,” said Eanflæd. “But he was married, was he not, Bishop Aidan?” She smiled at the bishop. “Do you know aught of this? How could he put aside his wife? She gave him two children, I believe. Surely, he must have sought guidance from you on this matter?”

  Bishop Aidan blushed. “Yes, yes, he sought guidance,” he mumbled.

  “The king brought us the relic of his brother, Oswald,” said Utta. “His head.”

  Eanflæd raised her eyebrows. “You have his head?”

  “I-I knew Oswald of old,” said Aidan. “He wished to enter the new life and become a monk on the Holy Isle. Now he has entered the new life of heaven, I thought to give his earthly remains the dearest wish of his heart, and to take them to Lindisfarne.”

  Eanflæd nodded. “As an old friend, of course you would want to grant his wish in death, even if you could not in life.” The princess smiled brightly at the abbot. “Have you given thought to all the pilgrims who will come to the Holy Island seeking his blessing?”

  “Pilgrims?”

  “Surely you heard of the miracles worked from the very earth upon which the High King fell, and that took his life blood? We heard tell of them, even in Kent. And the messengers from my future husband told me of how he went, disguised as a blind pilgrim, into Mercia to bring his brother home. That sounds very brave, don’t you think?”

  “It was,” agreed Aidan. “It must have been through Oswald’s protection that he succeeded, for it was beyond the strength of mortal men to do as King Oswiu did.”

  “Then Oswald’s protect
ion and blessing must be great indeed. And you really haven’t thought of all the pilgrims who will now come to the Holy Island, seeking his blessing?”

  “No. No, I hadn’t.” Aidan looked at the princess. She looked blandly back at him. “Do you – do you think I accepted Oswald’s relics for the riches the pilgrims might bring?”

  “Oh, no. I’m sure it did not enter your mind,” said Eanflæd.

  “No. No, it didn’t.” Aidan began to flush, but this blush was not from the embarrassment that plagued him, but from anger. “You did not know him, princess. I did. Through all his life, Oswald had no rest, for always, always people wanted from him: strength, courage, hope most of all. Now, in death, I would give him that rest. We will not even tell of his presence with us, but pray always for the repose of his soul. Do you understand?”

  The princess nodded, a small grave smile playing over her lips. “Yes, I understand. But I would ask one other question of you, if I may. What guidance did you give King Oswiu when he asked to put aside his wife? I ask because, after all, if he has done this once, he might do so again, and then I will be the wife he will be seeking to put aside.”

  “He told me the request came from the queen: she wished to lay aside the cares and temptations of this world and seek the new life in a holy house. Thus, the greater pledge, the oath we must make to the lord of all when we face him, took precedence over the smaller pledge that wife gives to husband when they wed.”

  “I see,” said Eanflæd. “So one oath cancelled out the other.”

  “No, not cancelled.” Aidan flushed again. “An oath may not be broken. B-but it may be subsumed in another. Queen Rhieienmelth goes to the new life with God, not to the same life with another man.”