The Fabulous Beast

by Garry Kilworth

  The following day King Penda set out to teach Oswald a lesson. The kings of Dal Riata and Pictland might recognise Oswald’s supremacy, but not Penda. Penda was the scourge of Bernicia and any upstart ruler of that kingdom who had ambitions, especially if he was a Christian, had to deal with the force and might of Penda

  ~

  The army is led by a regiment of foul witches, whose snarled and sagging paps are protected by breastplates fashioned from human pelvises and whose bony hips are padded with badger-skin. Following these scrawny grey-haired hags are cohorts of slave-warriors from Dumnonia: stalwarts from the south west with long straw-coloured hair and drawn-out vowels. Then the limb-weary conscripts from the tiny midland kingdom of Lindsey, whose bumbling, overwrought ruler had once been a cook in the wine-halls of King Cynegils of Wessex, and who longed for those glee-bough days to return, when he was praised for his goose pies by a regent with a discerning palate.

  Finally the main army of wealth-greedy Mercians, tramping on foot, or riding tough little curly-maned ponies, led by their king-warlord. They carry leather shields three-feet in diameter, mounted with a central boss. The shields are inlaid with copper and silver ornamentation: magical birds shapes, such as hawks and falcons; enchanted animals, like the fox, the wolf, the dragon; bewitching reptiles in the form of snakes and lizards. They are for the most part armed with throwing spears, war axes and dagger-swords they call seaxes, but the gesiths, the king-warlord’s hearth companions, wield a magnificent long sword. These swords are imbibed with mystical power, covered in gold trappings, and have a blade so strong and sharp it will in an instance slice through a man from the crown of his head to his tender crotch, splitting him in two halves, each half with one ear and one eye, a single leg and an arm – but only on the left section, a bared heart still pumping.

  In front, and on the flanks, and bringing up the rear, are the military musicians: hell-fiends howling on horns, bellowing on trumpets, whirling their bullroarers, clashing their cymbals and beating their drums. Such a terrible sound they make, a cacophony of noise, that a sea of wildlife flees before them: terrified rabbits, weasels, stoats, badgers, rats, voles, mice – and wheeling and swooping above, the wild land birds. Evil dwarves and fairies too, are cowering in hollow trunks. Marsh demons and forest phantoms hide under their own shadows. In their peat-hag lairs the ogres of bog and swamp believe the sky is falling down.

  King Oswald, Christian ruler of the Bernicians and Deirans, has been told by envoys and his own spies that Penda is coming. Oswald, nephew of the slain King Edwin, waits for his enemy on a high curving field of flowing grass. God is on the side of Oswald, who is His servant and follower. Oswald has spoken to his men, who have big hearts and steadfast spirits. Oswald too is a ruthless king, who has taken the lives of subjects and enemies without compunction, but he has had his moments of justness and fairness: moments which have escaped his enemy.

  Still, they are much alike, these two kings, one fighting under old gods, the other for a new one. They each believed in their right to rule, they both desired empire, they both hated each other with equal venom.

  At noon, the slaughter-place is found. The dark-haired hordes of Penda hurl themselves into the battle-hedge of the realm of Bernicia. The toothless, horrible heads of witches roll in the grass, staining green to red. The hapless vanguards of slave-warriors from both sides batter each other’s shields without enthusiasm and fall over easily, closing their eyes in a pretence of death. The conscripts from neighbouring kingdoms whirl their slingshots and fire their arrows, then scatter like field mice.

  Grooms and squires still run by their mounted lords, brushing and combing last-minute touches to the sheen of a stallion’s flank, or replaiting the fine blonde tail of a high-stepping mare. Stewards are retrieving precious wine goblets from the hands of their householders. Servants are taking cumbersome cloaks from the backs of their masters.

  Warriors come together. Swords bite with iron edges on thin helmets. Shields crack together. Spears pierce neck and naval, breast and belly, and enter the backs of running cowards. Battleaxe blades swoop like swallows to lop off ears and noses, split skulls in various places, lop off hands, and legs. Daggers, those secret, cryptic weapons, surreptitiously enter spleens. Expressions of utter surprise and horror appear on the faces of those who slip to the ground, dying.

  Penda the pagan, solidly backed and flanked by his hearth-companions, hacks his way contemptuously through a human wall of Oswald’s gesiths and when he reaches the Christian king, drives his great sword through the Bernician’s heart.

  ‘Where is your Christ at this moment?’ cries the triumphant Penda, the reeking blood running down his puissant blade. ‘Where is this lover of the meek and humble?’

  ‘I am with him now,’ sighs Oswald, and dies.

  ~

  Penda took a number of North Umbrian slaves and hostages, slaughtered those of the Bernicians who had not the forethought to vacate the battlefield once the day was lost, and set off home. On the way back the night was full of portents and omens in the shape of bright gems which slid across the stone sky. The one remaining witch interpreted these signs as foretelling good, rather than evil, for the conquering king. Penda took Oswald’s body with him and once back in Mercia ritually dismembered the corpse, tearing the limbs from their sockets with teams of horses, and cutting through the neck with a woodman’s axe. Men, even kings, not buried whole with weapon to hand, and other accoutrements and trappings, would find a difficult to tackle the monsters of the Otherworld.

  The head and limbs were hung like trophies from the branches of an oak, an offering to Woden as the Hanging God of the Gallows. Oswald’s right hand still held his sword, his finger-grip proving impossible to unclench, and the blade was left dangling on the end of the severed arm. The night winds blew through the cords that held Oswald’s remains and sang songs of lament. Penda grew angry on hearing the wind’s dirge, since he did not believe Oswald deserved the sorrow of the elements. He cursed the wind for its compassion. The wind’s answer was to increase in volume and is songs hummed and thrummed through the ropes, growing louder and louder. To escape this outrage Penda went on a hunt for boar deep in the forest, out of earshot.

  The hunt found a great boar, a brute with a mane as black as charcoal and eyes like flints. They chased it through the brush with wild cries and excited yells, cornering it under the dark greenness of a live oak. Orodin, the broadaxe-wielder, suggested they leave this strong giant to father more wild pigs, but Penda would hear none of it. He ordered the beast to be slaughtered, driving the first lance home himself.

  ‘We hunt to kill,’ he said. ‘Only a lordless weakling returns to camp without bloodied hands.’

  Penda then returned to camp, strangely exhausted.

  The wind had abated and an eerie silence hovered about the remains of Oswald. Penda brooded, staring at his erstwhile enemy, then shrugged and went to his bed. He camped near to the hanging tree for several days, resting his body, spirit and mind.

  At the end of the first day, Oswald’s sword arm disappeared.

  On the second day the left arm vanished.

  On the third day the head went missing.

  The fourth day saw the loss of the right leg.

  Finally, at the going down of the sun on the fifth day, the tree was empty of the last of Oswald’s body parts.

  Penda, having rested, left his tent in a great fury, threatening to boil the thief in a vat of pig lard. He was certain, he said, that one of the Bernician hostages must have stolen back their king. But severe torture, normally quite effective, resulted only the death of the victim. No further information was forthcoming. There was a rumour in the camp that Oswald’s god had put him back together again. He was a corpse, it was true, but he was whole and a kind of other-life was in him. Someone had seen him, walking the ridge above the camp, pointing a rotting finger at Penda’s tent, and mouthing a curse. The witness had heard no words, but had the feeling that the warlord Penda was to
be haunted for the rest of his days by the king he had slain upon the grassy hill.

  ‘They say,’ Aedan told his lord, ‘that this Christ-god is able to raise men from the dead.’

  King Penda brooded on this suggestion.

  He remained at the site for a second week, hoping either to find the body parts, or for them to reappear in some way. When each day came to an end, a disguised Penda would prowl the camp, the ash-wood spear of a common warrior in hand, walking from fire to fire, hoping to catch some piece of unguarded talk. He was still convinced that someone – a rival to his kingship, or one of the enemy hostages – was responsible for this theft from the hanging tree. But he heard nothing, only the mindless chatter of his shield-bearers and their camp followers.

  When he was in the proximity of a campfire he smelt the ash and woodsmoke and bubbling sap, but back in his own tent there was a peculiar stench of rotting meat overriding all the other smells of a camped army: odours from the latrines and the stink of man and horse sweat.

  Penda was convinced he could smell decaying flesh.

  Twice during the third night he rushed out of his tent, frightening his faithful body-servant, as the flesh-stink overpowered him during his fitful dozing. His half-asleep guards were startled into leaping to attention, as he blundered through the tent flaps, then peered into the darkness, wondering whether there was a corpse out there wandering between the tents. Still there was no clue as to the source of the smell of putrefaction. His sword-bearers all proclaimed their innocence, though every seventh man was soundly whipped with willow wands. The hostages were broken one by one, and either died or ended a cripple for life. Still no idea of the whereabouts of Oswald’s remains came to Penda.

  What was more, when he visited his gesiths in their tents they swore they could scent nothing – swore an oath on their swords, and later on the heads of their sons – that they could not smell what their treasure-giver did. How infuriating this was to King Penda, as it is to anyone who catches something faint in the air which others cannot or will not verify. He inhaled through his nose continually, prowling the camp like a dog, sniffing here, there and everyplace, trying to track down the spot from which the stink emanated. Sometimes the stench was strong and overpowering, at other times it was simply a hint, a suggestion of an odour, carried by the breeze.

  Dark of mouth and mind, Penda broke camp and he and his retinue, his army, went back to his capital. There he stalked the halls of his residence, the stink still caught in his nostrils, heavy in damp corners, or hovering lightly by the throne in the Great Hall. Sometimes he would whirl quickly, as if to catch a walking corpse off guard. Othertimes he leapt from his bed, snatching a burning brand from an iron holder, and rushed down the passageways seeking, seeking, seeking.

  His hearth-companions believed he was turning mad.

  On his birthday Penda rose up with tears of frustration in his eyes, crying, ‘Oswald, Oswald – for pity’s sake leave me alone.’ Later in the day he begged forgiveness of Woden, the SkyFather, Lord of the Wild Hunt, for his weakness. ‘There is no walking dead,’ he told his great Lord in the temple, ‘it is all my imagination. I have developed a frail mind. I will make it strong again by my own strength of will!’

  Yet, even in the dead of that same night, his hunched figure was seen roaming various rooms, looking in corners, peering up chimneys, opening doors and staring, lifting the lids of chests, his anxious body-servant three paces behind. His powerful shoulders now drooped and his back was bent. Sallow cheeks were hollowed beneath the dark furrowed brow. Penda’s eyes were bright though – fever bright – darting here and there, quickly, urgently. A trembling had entered the hands which continually fidgeted with his sword hilt. He had a tendency to cry out, unintelligibly, without being conscious of it.

  His gesiths were convinced that what their king needed was another war, to wipe his mind clean of this obsession. There is nothing like a slaughter-field, said Aedan, to distract a man from dark wild imaginings. So his warriors called for him to attack Bernicia once again, the kingdom which had been responsible for their king’s dread madness. A new king was in place there: Oswui, brother of Oswald. Oswui had consolidated his dead brother’s kingdom once more, and had defeated and killed their cousin, Oswine, who had attempted to take Deira back to paganism. This was a crime in the eyes of the Mercians and they urged their king, the great warlord Penda, favoured of Woden, to punish this Oswui in the same way they had dealt with his brother Oswald.

  ‘Oswui is but a priestling, better suited for the work of a scribe rather than a warrior,’ said Aedan. ‘A thin, wan figure his fist made to hold a goose-quill, not a sword.’

  And Aedan had momentous news for his lord.

  ‘Sire, there are also reports of a great grey wolf roaming the forests to the north – they say it is huge and its cowl is the colour of Cumbrian stone.’

  Thus it was then that the great ring-giver, the pagan King Penda, mighty in battle, undefeated by any puny Christian king, set forth to destroy Oswui of the North Umbrians. It was not the season for campaigning, for the snow was thick upon the ground and hung white and heavy in the branches of bare black trees. It was the season of ice, when the wolf walks with an empty belly and the raven seeks the blood-red berries of the holly tree. Penda’s army trudged through the bleak countryside of Mercia to the borders of North Umbria, where a forewarned Oswui waited to meet his traditional foe.

  ~

  With a great round leather shield on his arm and in his hand his sword, a wonderful weapon crafted by smiths said to have been apprentices of the god Wayland, Penda is almost his old self again. His speech-bearers follow him with praise on their lips. Around his shoulders is the scarlet cloak once worn by his grandfather and Penda feels a man again. The odour of death and decay has gone and he is no longer haunted by it. The smell vanished when King Penda’s body-servant, ever-present to attend to his master’s needs, recently died. The cause of death was a limb with creeping rot, the result of an accident kept secret from his master. Penda convinces himself that his servant’s wound was responsible for the stink of death, though there is still the mystery of the disappearing Oswald to solve.

  The march through winter countryside is gruelling. Men fall by the wayside and are left to freeze to death. Lone farms and hovels are locked up tight against the invading army, the snow piled high against their doors, protecting the inhabitants from incursion. But Penda’s gesiths are full of optimism, happy to see their ring-giver in battle mood once more. Priests and sorcerers report that there have been sightings of the cloaked and hooded one-eyed god, Lord Woden. In the day he has been witnessed striding the rolling downland in his masked form of Grim, pausing at crossroads to smile at murderers dangling from his gallows: at night hurtling across the sky as leader of lost and boisterous souls in the wild hunt. These are encouraging signs and Penda is lifted in spirit, ready to crush the enemy who waits for him on a distant hill.

  As they near a border river a giant wolf is seen prowling the stark and leafless forests nearby. Penda recalls the words of the sorcerer, who has since left his kingdom for the green misty isle to the west of Wales. It is really for this creature that he is out campaigning in the worst weather of the year. War alone would not have roused him from his lodge in such inclement conditions. Ahead of him Penda can see the army of Oswui: thousands of dark figures lining the crest of a snow white ridge, their torches like small suns. But the Mercian king is thinking only of a night hunt. With his immortality ensured he need have no fear of the living or the dead. He would not have to continually look behind him for the corpse of his old enemy coming upon him.

  ‘Bring me this great wolf,’ is all he says.

  And so the night before the battle the hunt goes out with flaming brands, out on a wild hunt in the snow-covered forests, the hooves of their ponies flinging ice-clods high into the branches of the trees. And they find the starving beast and slay him easily, and bring his huge carcass to Penda on a bier.

  Penda
rushes to the beast and lifts one of its eyelids, staring in the light of a burning torch. But any runes or symbols that might have been written there have faded with the brute’s death. The secret of everlasting life has been lost for all eternity.

  ’Why?’ cries the distraught Penda, his spirit crushed. ‘Why did you kill this magical creature, my gesiths?’

  ‘But my noble lord,’ replies a puzzled Aedan, ‘you have taught us to kill everything.’

  Penda’s rage at being thwarted of this priceless treasure is unleashed upon his hearth-companions. Aedan is summarily slain. Aedan’s brothers and cousins are sent home under sentence of banishment. Even the hunt’s other riders, and there are many gesiths among them, are stripped of their status and made to march with the kitchen boys at the rear of the army. None dare speak to the king during that long hour as they approach the borders of Bernicia where King Oswui waits in reflective mood.

  Still hot with fury, his head a storm of black thoughts that dwell on secretive body servants and stupid theigns, for the first time Penda attacks without a battle plan. His great anger allows no pause for details of strategy or tactics: blazing passion will surely be enough to carry the day against a weakling like Oswui. There stands the young brother of the slain King Oswald, on the snow-covered banks of the River Winwaed, a pale young figure with a sword as slim as a stylus in his hand.

  And indeed wrath and ire might easily have been enough to win, had he all his faithful gesiths at his side. But these protectors of the armring-giver, their gracious lord, have been swept away. Aedan is dead, his kin exiled, his friends milling helplessly behind wide-eyed, greasy boys wielding carving knives and meat cleavers. Penda’s hearth-companions are now so few they cannot cluster about their king and Oswui’s own faithful gesiths slaughter them to a man. Penda finally stands alone, a figure of frenzy, screaming and cursing his enemies as weaklings and sword-haters, unworthy to wield a blade. At a crucial moment, just as he is about to kill his enemy, Penda is distracted. A shape crosses a ridge in his eye's sight. A wolf. A she-wolf.