Oswiu, King of Kings

by Edoardo Albert

  James stared at the young man looking earnestly at him. He searched the face, he looked deeply into his eyes, seeking sign of duplicity, but found none there. Then he turned his face away.

  “You… you would give me so much?”

  “Yes. Yes, I would,” said Oswine.

  “I will not deny that I have often prayed for this: for God to give me the chance to show that my coming here, to this far northern land, was more than a jest.” James stood up and turned, so that he looked out through the opening of his cell, out to the trees and the hint of river and the distant strips of ploughed earth marked out by the fresh green of new crops.

  “I remember… I remember all those years ago, when the pope sent word to our monastery that he sought men to go on mission. I was little more than a boy then, but with a child’s faith, and I went at once to the abbot and said I would go. I remember the abbot taking my hand and leading me out of St Andrew’s and onto the road, the Clivus Scauri – ha! I still remember its name – and pointing up to the Palatine and Caelian hills, at the Flavian Palace and the House of Tiberius. ‘Here,’ the abbot said, ‘we live among the great works of the past. If you come, you will be part of building the great work of the future.’” James made a sound, halfway between a laugh and a snort. “Of course I came. But I have done little building, and that only when the king, Edwin, lived. Since he died, I have skulked in my cave, as fearful of coming out as a mouse when the cat waits outside. Now you offer me all that I could have wished, and more. You would make of me a bishop, a shepherd of souls. Then my coming here might be more than the ambitions of a boy. I might call men to life, and restore the church that Paulinus began. I might… matter.”

  The deacon laughed. It was a short bark of a laugh, as much the sound of a dog as a man. “I do not matter.” The deacon glanced at the king, and making the sign of the cross muttered a phrase in Latin.

  Not understanding what James had said, Oswine asked him, “Will you accept my offer? Will you be my bishop and minister to my people?”

  James shook his head. “I will remain a deacon, and be James.”

  “Very well.” The king shuffled off the old cloak and began putting on his still-damp clothes. When he was dressed, he turned to James.

  “What did you say to me? Before you refused my offer.”

  “Oh, that. It was just a phrase in my language. It does not matter.”

  Oswine nodded. “If you should change your mind…”

  “I will not.”

  “…send word to me.” The king buckled his belt around his waist and settled his sword upon his hip, hand resting upon its hilt. He did not look at James as he spoke. “I go to war. If you will not give me your blessing, at least pray for me, that I not be lost.”

  At these words, James put his hand upon the king’s arm. “I pray for you always,” he said. “Always.”

  Chapter 3

  The weather was not right for a funeral. Oswiu squinted up at the sun as it glowered down at them from a cloudless, bronze sky, like a great, unforgiving eye. Holding his horse on track with his legs, he took his helmet off with one hand and swept the other over his forehead, flicking away the sweat that was trickling down into his eyes. Some of the people who had gathered, from field and hamlet and hill, to see the great procession go past pointed at the king, and whispers passed among the watchers.

  “The king weeps.”

  “See how he grieves.”

  But Oswiu, having wiped the sweat from brow and eyes, had put his great helmet back on and, with its burnished metal on his head, he could no longer hear the whispers of the crowd, nor see them other than as shadows, caught on the edges of sight.

  Although the watchers had seen sweat rather than tears, there had been tears, and there would be again, for Oswiu knew, as did all but the most blessed of his subjects, that grief was subject to tides, ebbing and receding as the sea, sometimes washing in and covering all; then receding, only to sweep in again. For now, the king felt the thickness of his parched tongue and the wet of his hair sticking to his helmet, and his legs, stuck with sweat, inside his leggings; the grief tide had receded.

  In its withdrawal, it left strange thoughts, popping unbidden into his mind.

  In this heat, would the body keep until it could be buried? They had been one day on the road already, with no sign of this summer drought breaking, and there would be another before the funeral procession might ascend the long steps to the great keep at Bamburgh. The sisters at the holy house had, he was sure, done what they could to prepare and preserve the body until its burial, but in this heat it was surely only a matter of time before it became putrid and started to stink.

  That was the thought that brought the tide of grief flooding back. She had always been so careful about how she smelled. Even in the desperate days of their early exile, she had always washed the mud and dirt of travel from her hands and arms, her face and feet. Then, when she had found a home, she had had the household slaves fill it with flowers and sweet-smelling plants when the machair was in bloom: thyme and heather.

  Oswiu, king, wept for his mother.

  The message had come three days past, the messenger finding him in the far north of his kingdom, at Stirling. He had at once taken ship, sailing with wind and every oar he and his men might wield down the River Forth and into the great firth, then around the coast to the holy house where his sister Æbbe ruled and his mother lived. The sun, in this blazing summer, had not relented as they went, but lay its hot breath down over the sea, suffocating the wind and forcing them to pull their way to Coldingham.

  They had made the journey in two days, arriving as the sun set, and before the boat had even beached Oswiu had leapt from it and gone climbing and scrambling up the steep path to the holy house. The look-out had seen them coming, and monks waited, answering yes to his first shouted question as to whether she yet lived, but hurrying him on so that he knew the time left to her must be short…

  There were tapers lit around the bed. They threw some light, but more came through the door from the last leavings of the setting sun. Seeing him standing as a shadow in the door, Æbbe rose from where she was sitting and came to him, taking his hand and leading him into the room while she spoke quietly of what had happened into his ear. Oswiu knew she spoke, and later the memory of her words came back to him, but for the moment the only sense given to him was sight: the sight of his mother lying upon the narrow bed.

  Now, riding with her body back to where it would rest, he remembered what his sister had said. The fit had come upon Acha two days before, striking her down and leaving her insensible at first, so that Æbbe had feared she would never wake. But while the messengers rode and sailed in search of the king, Acha had woken. But though she moved her lips, no words came from them, only sounds, and it seemed that her body was stricken, for she could move only a hand and arm. As swiftly as messengers were sent for the king, so they were sent for Bishop Aidan and, being but a short boat journey down the coast, he had arrived first and given her the viaticum, the only food that might carry her across the great gulf between the living and the dead. Then Aidan had waited, sending continuous volleys of prayer to the hearer of all prayer.

  Aidan was waiting still when Oswiu arrived, kneeling beside the bed, but the king did not see him – only the figure upon the bed. He went to her, knelt beside her, whispered her name, then spoke it and, at last, her eyes had opened and turned to him. Oswiu saw the recognition in her eyes as he leaned over her, for it seemed that she did not even have the strength to turn her head, and he saw her lips move as she tried to speak, but there were no intelligible words in the sounds she made. He laid his finger upon her lips, quietening her as he spoke himself, softly, continuously, while a stool was brought to him. But the king spurned the stool and remained kneeling beside Acha, with his sister upon her other side, and Aidan by the head of the bed, as night came down upon this middle-earth and his mother’s breathing grew more laboured, each intake a greater struggle, until, in the
deep dark of the night, the struggle ceased.

  “I did not think she would die.”

  While the sisters prepared Acha’s body for the journey south, readying it as much as possible for the fierce heat of this furnace summer, Oswiu spoke with his sister and Aidan, the three of them taking the cool of the dawn before the day.

  The king made no move to brush the tears from his face. Nor did Æbbe, nor Aidan, as they told the tale of their grief to each other, and the long years of shared memory that none but they knew.

  “I did not think she would ever die.” Oswiu shook his head. “I am a fool. Death comes to all.”

  Now, with the bronze sun beating down upon him and the funeral procession winding along the track that ran towards Bamburgh, Oswiu shook his head again. His mother had been old, very old – she must have known seventy summers or more, for her hair, when the sisters unbound it as they laid her out, was as white as a lily – and it seemed that she would endure, unchanging, as the hills. But she had died, and now he took her to rest beside her son in the church at Bamburgh. A daughter of Deira, an Yffing, she would lie with the Idings in their great stronghold and, by her presence there and in God’s great hall, help to keep it secure against all enemies, earthly and supernatural.

  But they needs must hurry, lest the heat make it impossible to carry her further and a burial be forced upon them in this wild and open country, scoured by the wind. Oswiu turned his horse’s head around and pulled it out of the procession, letting the solemn riders go past him as he waited for the ox-pulled wagon that bore his mother’s body. The monks and sisters had done all they could to keep the sun from Acha, swiftly building a willow hurdle over the flat wooden bed of the carriage and covering it with whitewashed cloth. In homage to their mother, Æbbe had set off walking behind the wagon, followed by many of her sisters, but as the day shrank beneath the sun’s weight, some had returned to the holy house, while Æbbe had sat upon the wagon, taking a place beside the driver, and leading the chanted prayer that flowed up from the procession.

  Oswiu waited until the wagon came level with him, then turned his horse so that it paced in time with the oxen. Leaning over to his sister, the king asked the question that had grown in his mind through the day’s heat.

  “Will… will she keep?”

  Æbbe did not have to ask further, for the same thought had grown in her mind too as the heat bore down upon them. But she could answer the king’s fears.

  “I went, just now, and then two hours before, into the wagon.” Æbbe turned to look at her brother and there was wonder in her eyes. “There is no smell.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. Or perhaps, though I wonder if this is memory, the scent, as if faint and borne from far away, of the machair in spring.”

  Oswiu nodded. “It would be. She loved the flowers of spring.” The king smiled at his sister. “You have eased my mind.”

  Æbbe smiled in turn. “I am glad.”

  “There… there is one other matter I would ask you of.”

  Æbbe nodded. “Rhieienmelth?”

  “Yes.”

  “She is well.”

  “That is not what I would know now.”

  “She asked me to ask your leave to attend the funeral. She wanted me to ask before we left, but I said I could not. Not then.” Æbbe turned to look at her brother. “But now, I ask on her behalf. Rhieienmelth would have leave to join us, that she may stand with her children and make farewell to Mother. What say you?”

  Oswiu shook his head. “No. I cannot have her there.”

  But from the wagon, his sister looked askance at him. “May you refuse her on this?”

  “I am the king.” Oswiu looked down at Æbbe. “Of course I can refuse her.”

  “But on this?” Æbbe persisted. “We go to pray our mother to God’s great hall. The enemy, we know, will set many of his devils to stop such a one as our mother ascending to God’s presence and taking her place in his hall – every prayer offered is protection for her.”

  “Rhieienmelth can send her prayers from your holy house – just not from Mother’s funeral.”

  “Ah.” Æbbe paused. “That is another reason I would have Rhieienmelth join us. Without me there, I fear that my house would not be very holy by the time I return – it is only with difficulty that I stop her turning it into a house of merrymaking and hunting when I am there.”

  “That is your task, not mine.” The king made to pull his horse’s head away so that he might again take his place near the front of the column. But Æbbe stopped him.

  “Wait,” she said. “There is one further reason for you to allow Rhieienmelth to attend the funeral.”

  Oswiu sighed and turned back to his sister.

  “It was Mother who made me promise that Rhieienmelth be allowed to attend her funeral. Before you came, Mother made sign to me in great distress and I could not tell that which she wished, for she had no longer the power of speech. But I thought it must surely be some person she wished to see, so I spoke names, the names of children and grandchildren, of faithful servants and old friends, thinking it were one of these she wished to take leave from. But looking in her eyes, I saw there… fear. Not the hope of last meeting, but fear of condemnation, of a debt left unpaid and an oath unfulfilled. And, seeing that, I spoke more widely, thinking that maybe she sought to make good a promise and, in the end, I spoke of Rhieienmelth, and her eyes widened, and her mouth filled with sound, so I knew whom she sought.” Æbbe turned her head away from her brother.

  “Since you sent me Rhieienmelth, I have sought to govern her, to mould her to our ways, but in truth she has more moulded us to her ways. She is ever out upon the hunt with her hounds, or calling scops to sing for her, so that our hall, which was before a place of quiet and prayer, is now more often a place of laughter and… and scandal. My sisters no longer attend the hall, but remain in their own cells, and I myself only go to it when I must. For many months we had spoken barely a riddle’s worth of words to each other, content to pass our lives separately, but with Mother’s wish, I sought her out.”

  Æbbe’s lips pressed together, squeezing the blood from them so they appeared a white line, like a healed scar, across her face. “She laughed at me. When I asked if she would come to speak to Mother, she laughed at me. ‘Come to the woman who made me give up the crown and live here? Why should I come to her?’ If it had been any other time, I would, I confess, have struck her. I asked her again, told her that this was Mother’s wish, that she see her, and… and that Mother was dying.” Æbbe looked up at her brother, and her eyes were bitter with memory. “She said, ‘Good.’ I left her then, before I disgraced my mother’s dying by attacking one of my own sisters – however ungovernable – and returned to tell Mother that Rhieienmelth would not come. When she heard the news I – I thought she might die then, so great was her distress. But there was naught I could do save offer words of scant comfort, for I knew not why Mother wished to see Rhieienmelth with such urgent need.” The abbess eyed her brother. “Do you know aught of this?”

  But the king made no answer to her question. Instead, he stared with narrow eyes and narrow lips into the mid-distance.

  “But later, in the dark hours of the night when I sat waiting with Mother and waiting for you, not knowing if she would live long enough for you to arrive, there came a sound from without. The sister I had left to keep watch and pray came in to speak with me: Rhieienmelth had come. Mother was sleeping, if such so close to death may be called sleep, and I went out to her. She was cloaked, with a hood over her head, as if she would not be seen acceding to the wish of a dying woman. ‘I will see her,’ she said to me. ‘But alone.’”

  “You didn’t let her go in to Mother alone?” asked Oswiu.

  “To see Rhieienmelth was Mother’s only wish other than to see you. If Rhieienmelth would only see her alone, I had to give her leave. But I stood where I could watch.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw her stand abo
ve our mother, looking down at her, and although Rhieienmelth’s back was to me, I could see how tightly she held herself. She was as a man drawing a bow and then holding it until every muscle in his body trembles. Then, whether through some sign that Rhieienmelth gave or by some gift from God, I saw, by the movement of her head, that our mother woke and I heard, from the sounds she made, that she was trying to speak to Rhieienmelth. I would have gone in then, but Rhieienmelth turned to me and shook her head, and I stopped. As Rhieienmelth turned back, I saw Mother begin to raise her hand, as if she would touch Rhieienmelth, but she had not the strength to do so. Then Rhieienmelth went down on her knees beside Mother. I saw her speak with her, whispering into Mother’s ear, but I could not hear what words she said.

  “‘Remember that I came,’ she said to me when she came forth. I went in to Mother and her eyes were filled with tears. But whether they were tears of hope or despair I could not say, for the blight that struck down our mother seemed to take away not only the power of speech, but also the gift of expression, so her face was as blank as stone.”

  “Did you ask her? Surely she might have made some reply, if only with her eyes?”

  Æbbe shook her head. “I should have done, but first I tried to settle her, and before I could try, Mother went to sleep again.”

  “So you do not know if Rhieienmelth brought comfort to Mother?”

  “No, not for sure. But my hope is that she did, and the tears Mother shed were tears of relief, of forgiveness given and received, that she might better face the great judge.”

  “But you do not know?”

  “No.”

  “Very well.” The king rode in silence for a while beside the wagon that bore his mother’s body for burial. “I would not see her, but if it is Mother’s wish, then I suppose she must be there.” Oswiu turned to his sister. “Send word to Rhieienmelth, but tell her that she is not to seek word with me, or the queen. Those are my terms. See that she agrees to them.”