Ahlfrith stopped. “Who are you?” he asked.
“M-my name is Drythelm,” said the boy. “My lord left me to look after the hall and I will. Keep back.” He pointed at the two bound men. “See, we’ve already taken your men. Come closer and I will kill them. I will.”
“How old are you, Drythelm?”
“Old enough. Near old as you, like as not.”
“You’ve done well, Drythelm. Your lord will have only praise for you when he hears of your bravery. But you have done enough. I have many men, awaiting my call. Too many for you, however brave you are. So go now. You have sent the women and girls into the wold already?” Ahlfrith searched for answer in the boy’s face, and received it. “Good. Know we will not follow after you – we are not slaving. Go now, and leave us to our work.”
“No!” Drythelm waved his seax. “You say you have more men – then show them to me. All I see is you, and these two we have captured. You tell me to go. Now it is my turn.” He glanced back at his two companions, boys his own age, who held bows in arms that trembled at the tension the stringed arrows were putting on their young muscles. “If he doesn’t go when I tell him, shoot his men, you hear? Put an arrow through their guts.” Drythelm turned back to Ahlfrith. He was still a boy, quivering with the nerves of this confrontation, with fear and bravery and the overmastering wish to do right by the charge his lord had laid upon him. So focused was Drythelm on the young man in front of him that he did not see the slow, steady movement, working around the outside of the hall. But Ahlfrith, looking past the boy, saw the warmaster with Gadd and the other man making their stealthy way closer to the small group clustered at the front of the hall.
Ahlfrith held out his hands so that the boy could see them.
“See, I have not drawn sword. You are brave. Someday, the scops will sing songs about your deeds. Go now. While there is still time. Before I call my men. Go, Drythelm, go.”
“He’s not leaving,” said Drythelm. “Do what I told you…” Half turning, he was in time to see the rush of movement, the thrust of shield and the swift slide of sword that sent one of the young bowmen tumbling from the hall and the other clutching his side. He was in time to see the warmaster, Æthelwin, plunge towards him. He was in time to raise his own seax to meet the charge – and to have it pushed aside with no more effort than a man pushes aside a thin branch that bars his way. He was in time to look down, with the eternal surprise of the young when seeing their death, to see the warmaster’s sword run into his chest, and then out again.
Slowly, Drythelm stumbled round. He had his hands pressed to his chest, trying to hold in the blood, but it spurted out past his fingers. He looked up and saw Ahlfrith staring at him.
“You had more men,” he whispered. And then he fell. He was a boy, with a boy’s lean body. His fall made barely a sound.
Ahlfrith stared at him. Æthelwin didn’t. He stepped over the corpse as if it was no more than a felled branch and, grasping the ætheling’s shoulders, looked him over.
“You are not hurt?”
Ahlfrith glanced at the warmaster, shaking his head, then looked back past him to the dead boy. “You killed him,” he said.
“Who?” asked Æthelwin, looking around, as if he did not know to whom Ahlfrith was referring.
“Him,” said Ahlfrith, pointing.
Æthelwin looked round. “Oh, him. Yes. Of course.” He looked back to the ætheling. “What would you have had me do?”
“You could have disarmed him.”
The warmaster sniffed. “He’d taken two of my men captive. He was armed.”
“He was a boy.”
Æthelwin shook his head. “Boys don’t take my men prisoner. Besides, you should be thanking me.” The warmaster essayed a grin, which served mainly to make his face even grimmer than before, and pointed past Ahlfrith. “You’d have had some explaining to do if the king had arrived to find you being held captive by some boys and two simpletons.”
Ahlfrith looked round to see his father emerging from the wold, with his retainers closely following. The column of men rode up to the hall, where ætheling and warmaster awaited them.
Oswiu reined his horse to a stop and looked down at them.
“What happened here?” he asked, his glance taking in the two bodies lying on the ground, and the three people held sullenly captive.
Ahlfrith looked up at his father. “I was foolish,” he said, “and headstrong, and two boys died.”
“Not our men?”
“No, not ours.”
“Very well then.” The king looked to his warmaster. “Strip the hall of anything of value, then fire it. We must leave –” he squinted south-east, over the trees, judging the sun’s rise in the sky – “by another hand’s span, or word may have time to travel too far.”
As the warmaster turned away, directing some of the men into the hall while setting others on watch, the king slowly dismounted. He handed his horse off to one of the men with word to see to it, then came to stand by his son. Ahlfrith still stood by Drythelm’s body. Oswiu did not look at the dead boy. Instead, he stared away, over the mantle of trees that closed this hall in a green embrace.
“Sometimes, war is as the scops sing: glorious battles, great warriors fighting each other. But just as often it’s like this and no one sings about that.”
“What can I do, Father?” Ahlfrith turned to look at his father and his eyes were full of tears.
“For him? Bury him, remember him, pray for him. For yourself?” The king turned to his son. He tapped a finger on his son’s forehead. “Remember this too. And don’t make the same mistake again.” As he did so, Oswiu saw framed in the remorse of the young man before him the image of the boy he had sent off to be fostered in Penda’s court, and he knew his son had truly come back to him.
So while the rest of the men ransacked the hall – and a mean haul it produced, little more than a reasonably rich brooch, two old and notched swords and some spearheads awaiting shafts – and then set flame to it, pushing burning tapers in under the thatch and between the timbers, Ahlfrith dug. Refusing help, he made a grave big enough to take the two dead boys: Drythelm and the other whose name he never knew. Then, as the fire took hold, he gave them over to the earth’s silent embrace, covering them over, so that the dark soil veiled the sky from their blank, bland stares. This done, Ahlfrith pushed Drythelm’s seax into the ground above his body and, for the other boy, he planted the lad’s bow into the earth, so that those coming later might know where their boys were, and do them right.
And while Ahlfrith did this, his father watched. Then, when all was done, and the hall had been given over to the flames, and the boy and two simpletons who had been taken captive were tied to trees, that they might not too quickly give word of their leaving, the king mounted his horse, and his son and his warmaster and the men did likewise, and they rode from the clearing, in under the green tree light, away from the yellow flame flowers.
Chapter 2
He had not been easy to find. Of a truth, everyone in these parts had heard tell of him: the priest from afar, the man with the nut skin, who had come with Queen Æthelburh and Bishop Paulinus. Wherever they stopped and asked, of the men working the fields or the women sat spinning and weaving outside their homes, even of the children, peering out at them from the treetops or running alongside the horses yelling questions and asking favours, everyone had answered yes, of course they knew James the Deacon. But whenever they asked whereaways he was, some would say this way and others that, so that they circled round in a welter of confused directions, seemingly coming no closer to the man they sought.
But in the end, the circles tightened, pulling in around Catterick, and people in the hamlet there, when asked, had seen James, some said, on the week, and some two days before, and some on the eve before. And then one said he would take them to him, though of a truth he knew James welcomed no visits from men with swords, but only ministered to the simple folk of the region.
The m
an, still chattering of the small doings of his village and his people, brought them to a small river, willow lined and clear, but with a rocky shore rising up on the far side. And from this side, he hailed across the river, but to no answer. He hailed again, and then once more, looking sidelong at the men, armed and increasingly grim, sitting on the high horses above him.
Then, at last, there was answer, in movement. From a place concealed behind alder and scrub willow, a coracle appeared, bobbing upon the river as a duck upon the water, and poling it across was a man with nut-brown skin and hair cut to a crown about his head. He stopped the coracle in mid stream, letting it slowly spin round as he sat within it and looked at the riders lined up along the far bank. He waited for them to speak.
One of the men pushed his horse forward, so that its hocks splashed in the river shallows.
“We have come seeking James the Deacon.”
The coracle, pulled by the current, turned its charge away and then, slowly, brought him back to face the riders again.
“Who is the ‘we’?” asked the man in the boat. His words moved with a different, rising pitch, so while their sound was familiar their tune was not and they were hard to hear.
The rider pointed to the man on his right. “It is the king who seeks James the Deacon.”
The coracle, still turning, turned the face of its occupant away and then brought him back.
“Which king?”
“Oswine, king of Deira, the Godfriend.”
At that, the man’s eyes widened. “Why does a friend of God come seeking me?”
“So you are James the Deacon?”
“Yes, yes, I am James. But I ask again: why does a friend of God seek me?”
But before the rider could answer, the man beside him held up his hand. “Peace, Hunwald. I will speak myself.” The king dismounted and stood beside his horse. Then, not minding the cold of the water, he stepped forward into the river until it came to his knees. “I am Oswine, whom some call Godfriend, and if you would know why I seek you out, then speak with me.”
Seeing the king walk into the river, James the Deacon poled the coracle rapidly towards him.
“Lord, lord, I had not meant you to come to me. Hold, hold, and I will come to you.”
But even as James spoke, Oswine stepped out further to him, not knowing that the riverbed dropped away, and he fell, plunging into the water.
The deacon pulled him forth. Reaching from his boat, he pulled the king from the water and held his face to the air, while the king’s men, scrambling from their horses, made a human chain to pull him back to land.
Dripping and coughing, Oswine looked to the deacon.
“Already you have saved me. I would ask you to save me again, by giving me your blessing.”
“I will give you my blessing, but now, if you will come across with me, I will give you something of much greater worth: a fire and somewhere to dry your clothes.” James pointed at the king’s men. “But I cannot take them too. This is a little boat, and my home is smaller.”
“I will come with you,” said Oswine, “and they will wait here.”
“Lord…” began Hunwald, but the king held up his hand.
“There is no danger here, Hunwald, other than in one too weighed down with finery and weapons to be able to swim. I will go with him. Besides, I would speak on these matters alone.”
“You know what I think, lord.”
“Yes, Hunwald, and I am of a mind with you. But I must know.” The king turned to James and signalled him closer. “Come. If you will carry me across, I would find somewhere to dry these clothes and hear your counsel.”
James poled the coracle to the bank and held it there, driving the pole into the soft river mud, while the king stepped carefully into it and sat down, still dripping. Then the deacon pushed the coracle from the bank and poled it carefully across the river, while the king’s men watched in anxious silence from the far bank.
The deacon pushed a trailing branch of scrub willow aside and poled the coracle into a small pool, marked from the river flow by a half-submerged alder that grew into the water before turning upwards to the sky.
Stepping from the coracle as easily as the king dismounted his horse, James held out his hand and Oswine took it – and it was as well, for when he attempted to follow James ashore the coracle jumped back as a skittish horse might and, but for the deacon’s grip, he would have fallen into the water again. But James held him and, with the grasp on his wrist, Oswine made the widening step to shore, while the coracle settled to bumping gently around its alder and willow harbour.
James led the king up a steep, rocky path, concealed by the birch and ferns that grew thickly on the river slope, to the lip of a small cave.
“My home,” he said, gesturing for Oswine to enter.
Within, there was a fire, its smoke pooling in the ceiling and coiling there before creeping out of the cave mouth, and a small shelf carved patiently from the rock and set as far back from the entrance and the wind and rain as was possible. On the shelf was a book and, coming into the cave after the king, the deacon went past and made homage to the book, pressing it to his forehead and heart before returning it to its rocky niche.
“The book of goodness,” James said, turning back to Oswine. “Bishop Paulinus left it for me when he took the queen and her children away. I wonder sometimes what became of them.” The deacon looked piercingly at the king, but Oswine could make no answer, for the memory of Queen Æthelburh’s visit still burned him.
“Here, warm yourself,” James continued. “I will bring a cloak that you might dry your clothes.”
Although there seemed nowhere in the small cave to hide anything away, yet James managed to retrieve an old and somewhat threadbare cloak from a dark niche that served as a store. Oswine pulled off his tunic and leggings, and gave them to James to dry before the fire, then wrapped the cloak round his shoulders.
“My men will fret if I am too long.” The king looked up from where he sat upon the cave’s one stool – a sawn short log – to where James stood, watching him.
“I have asked what I would of you. Now ask what you would of me.”
Oswine turned his face away from the deacon. He looked into the fire, seeing the fire sprites dancing upon the logs.
“Oswiu is bleeding us,” he said. “He rides into Deira, into my kingdom, and burns the halls of my thegns, taking whatever he finds. I thought at first it was an anger that would burn out, anger at… well, anger at something that happened. But the raids have not lessened in time but grown more frequent. Now summer does not pass without two or three of my thegns losing their halls to the red flower. Now, my thegns are no longer content to wait, as I counselled them, saying we must not raise hand in war against our neighbours and our kin, against fellow Christians. Now, my thegns whisper against me, saying it is no king who lets his kingdom burn. The truth is –” and here Oswine looked to James – “the truth is, I think that too. What sort of king will not fight for his throne? Therefore, I come to you to ask your counsel and your blessing. I would ride against Oswiu, that he may know he might not raid my kingdom without penalty and without fear. But I would know: may I do this before God and his church?”
“Why do you come to me to seek answer to this, when you have not sought me out before?”
“Aidan, Bishop Aidan, is my friend, and bishop of this land. But he is friend too, and for many years more, to Oswiu. It would be as if I asked a mother whether she would counsel me to take arms against her son. Besides, he is not here now, when I have need of this counsel, but away, and I know not when he will return to my kingdom.”
“But he has left others to guide your kingdom in his absence. Why do you not seek counsel from them?”
“All say Hild is the most holy and learned of the masters of the holy houses in my kingdom; but I would not ask war of a woman. Therefore, I come to you – for you were here before the others, and you have endured longest, through the year of fear when Cadwallon and
Penda ravaged the kingdom and killed my father, through to the present day.” King Oswine turned to look full upon James the Deacon. “Tell me I may do this thing.”
“You would cure war with war. You would stop raids by more raids. You would put out fires with more fires.” James the Deacon turned from the king. “There is reason I have sought to stay far from the dealings of kings and the men with swords: to them every question is answered in blood. I will have no part in it.”
The king rose to his feet, and his face was pulled with anger.
“Would you have me lose my throne?” he asked.
“A throne is but a little thing – a seat, like this.” And James sat upon the stool. “It is where you put your bottom. But your soul – your soul is God’s, and made by him, and it will not fail or break. But it may burn.”
“That is why I seek your blessing and the armour of your prayers. I do not want to burn.”
James the Deacon looked up at the young man standing in his cave home, and love leapt in his breast for the goodness of the king.
“If you would not burn, then put aside your throne and give away your riches, and you shall surely live.”
But at his words, Oswine’s face fell.
“If it were possible, I would do as you say, for I did not seek this throne. It was given to me, and what sort of ingrate would spurn a gift freely given?”
“A man might return a gift if it harms his soul.”
Oswine shook his head. “God has given this cup to me, and none other; I will not put it aside. But I have a gift for you.” The Godfriend squatted down upon his haunches, the old cloak wrapped around his shoulders, and looked into the nut-brown face of the deacon sat upon his log stool.
“What can you give me?” asked James. He gestured around the cave, his hand taking in fire and book and the place where he slept. “I have all I need.”
Oswine reached out and put his hand on the deacon’s shoulder. “You are blessed – I see that. But others might be blessed, through you, if you would but say yes. For, meeting you, I would give to you the church in York; I would make you master of all the holy houses in Deira. Then the word of hope you brought from so far away might be heard again, throughout my kingdom. If you will but say yes.”
Oswiu, King of Kings Page 24