by Joan Wolf
Men's heads were turning and Niniane looked too in the direction of the princes' hall. Edwin was approaching, with Guthfrid beside him. The queen was as pale as Fara.
She is against this too, Niniane thought.
And, indeed, just before Edwin reached the circle of men, the queen put her hand on his arm and began to say something. He shook her off impatiently and strode forward to stand on his own cloak.
A light breeze was blowing, stirring the hair at Niniane's brow. She could smell the horses in the stable beyond them. The sun shone down on the two blond-haired princes. Gold and silver, Niniane thought, watching the two fair heads shining in the brilliant spring sun. Ceawlin was considerably taller than Edwin, but he was also more lightly made. Edwin was like a bull. Niniane stared at his neck and shoulders. She feared his strength would more than balance Ceawlin's superior height.
Cuthwulf began to recite the rules in a loud, important voice. His rather prominent blue eyes were vivid with pleasure. Cuthwulf loved a fight. After what seemed like a very long time he stepped back, and the two princes were left alone, facing each other, their feet firmly planted on their own cloaks.
It was Edwin who made the first move, raising his heavy sword and bringing it down straight at Ceawlin's unhelmeted head. Ceawlin took the blow on his shield and shook it off, his own sword already in motion. Edwin quickly covered his exposed side, but in so doing was forced to step to his right. Ceawlin pressed him, with a hammering of sword blows landing again and again on Edwin's raised shield. Edwin's shield held steady, but he was forced to give ground under the attack, stepping always to his right, coming closer and closer to the end of his cloak.
Niniane's fingernails bit into her palms. "Go on, Ceawlin!" she found herself saying under her breath. "Go on!"
Step by step, Edwin was being forced to the edge of his cloak. The golden-haired prince was breathing audibly, his lips drawn away from his teeth. Ceawlin followed, relentless, his own face hard and intent, all his concentration on his sword and on the man he was driving so mercilessly before him. He was making no attempt to reach his brother's flesh with his sword; plainly all he wanted was to force him off the cloak.
The power of those blows must be tremendous, Niniane thought. Edwin could not even get his own sword up, so intent was he on keeping his shield in place.
Cuthwulf was standing by the edge of the cloak, ready to make a call the minute Edwin's foot should touch the ground.
"Off!" he shouted, and a great sigh of disappointment went around the watching circle. It had happened too quickly, too easily. Ceawlin dropped his shield and turned to walk back to the center of his cloak. He would have to best Edwin one more time in order to be declared the victor.
Almost everyone present was watching Ceawlin, walking with bent head, sword and shield held by his side, but Niniane was watching Edwin. The snarl was still on his lips; his teeth looked white and canine in the bright sun. And as she watched, he lifted his sword and sprang at his unsuspecting brother's back.
"Ceawlin!" It was Niniane's cry that warned him, and he spun around, shield and sword instinctively lifting. Edwin's strike landed on his blade and not in his back. For a long moment the two swords held, locked together, then Ceawlin slowly began to press his brother's hand back. He must have amazingly strong wrists, Niniane thought with awe, as Edwin's grip began to loosen. Then, as the younger brother's fingers opened, he brought his shield down on Ceawlin's sword arm with a tremendous blow.
Both swords dropped to the ground at once.
Quick as lightning, Ceawlin bent and retrieved the one closest to him. Niniane saw that he had picked up Edwin's sword and not his own.
"Give me my sword!" Edwin's voice was harsh from lack of breath. Then, as Ceawlin stared at him out of narrowed eyes, "Give me my sword!"
Ceawlin bent, eyes still on Edwin's face, and picked up his own sword. It was the sword Cynric had presented to him, and now Ceawlin handed it to his brother. "You wanted it," he said. "Now you fight with it. Brother."
"No." Edwin began to back away, but Ceawlin raised his brother's sword and followed. The healing scar beside his eye stood out like a line of blood on his white face. Even from a distance Niniane could see the brilliant turquoise of his narrowed eyes. "You rotten little weasel," he said through shut teeth. "Come on. Fight me."
"No!"
"Stop it!" It was the queen's shrill voice, full of panic. "Cuthwulf! Part them. They are incensed."
The entire surrounding circle of men was shifting with uneasiness. As Cuthwulf stepped forward, a sword in his hand to forcibly part the two brothers, Ceawlin came in below Edwin's panic-stricken guard. The blade sliced the flesh on Edwin's bare sword hand.
"Aahh!" His sword clattered to the ground as the golden-haired prince grabbed for his hand.
"Come now," said Cuthwulf. "It is not that bad. You will survive it, my lord."
But Edwin was curled on the ground, moaning. A horrible suspicion began to form in Niniane's mind as she watched him grovel there.
"Edwin. My son." Guthfrid was kneeling beside him now. "What is the matter?"
He held his hand up to her. "Suck it out, Mother! He has killed me. Suck the poison out!"
Niniane pressed the back of her hand against her teeth. Ceawlin, standing alone in the middle of the two cloaks, was looking down at the queen and Edwin. Guthfrid had begun to raise her son's hand to her mouth when she was thrust aside by a man.
"You cannot take the chance. You are with child. Let me," said Edric and, bending his head, he sucked the blood from Edwin's hand and spat it on the ground.
Ceawlin stood like a statue, watching Edwin. Niniane found herself hoping that no one would ever look at her the way Ceawlin was looking at his brother now.
They got the prince back to the queen's hall where he could be tended to. By the time Cynric returned to Winchester, his younger son was dead.
* * *
Chapter 8
Guthfrid was beside herself with grief at the death of her son. After the burial she had a tremendous fire built on the dueling grounds and thereon she burned all of Edwin's clothing and possessions. When she called for his jewelry to be melted down by the flames as well, Edric tried to remonstrate with her.
"Leave me alone!" she screamed at him hysterically. "I want nothing of him left to remind me. Don't you see? I cannot bear to be reminded!"
First she had tried to get the king to have Ceawlin put to death. "I call for vengeance!" she cried, flinging herself at Cynric's feet in full view of all of Winchester as they stood together before Edwin's burial mound. "A life for a life, my lord. It is my right. I demand it."
"No vengeance," Cynric had replied in heavy voice. "Ceawlin is my son as well. No vengeance, Guthfrid."
"Then send him away. Banish him. Punish him."
"It was Edwin who tried to kill Ceawlin by treachery. He was killed with his own poison. Come," and Cynric had raised her to her feet. His voice was kind. "Come, Guthfrid. Let me take you back to your hall. You bear a new child. Remember that and let it comfort you."
But no thought of the coming child could comfort her. Nothing could comfort her. Only vengeance on the slayer of her son.
Cynric's grief was not so flamboyant as Guthfrid's, but the death of Edwin, and the manner of that death, had wounded him grievously. As the months went by, it could be seen by even the lowest slave in Winchester that the king was beginning to fail.
"He blames me," Ceawlin said to Fara one morning in the women's hall. He had come to see his mother, and all the rest of the women had quickly found errands that would take them out of Fara's way.
"There is nothing to blame," Fara replied. She ached to reach out and take him into her arms as she had done when he was a small boy and had come to her with his sorrows. He looked so bitterly weary, so alone. But she knew he would reject any attempt at comfort on her part. It was many years since he had deemed himself too old for his mother to hug. So she said instead, "The fault was Edwin's, not yours."
"I killed him."
"You had no choice, Ceawlin."
"Yes. I did. You were there, Mother. You saw. I did not have to wound Edwin with the sword. He was backing away from me. You can be sure that my father has been well-informed of exactly what happened. He blames me."
"If he does, he is wrong."
Ceawlin shrugged. Then he asked the question he had come to ask. "Has he said anything to you about the succession?"
Fara's heart ached for him. "No, my son. He has said nothing." She paused, then added carefully, "Under the circumstances, it is not a question I myself can raise."
"I understand that." He gave her a shadowy smile. "Well, I must be going. I told Cutha I would go into Venta with him this morning."
"Excellent. It will do you good to get away from Winchester for a few hours."
He met Niniane on the porch; she was coming in as he was leaving. There were two little girls with her, each holding to one of her hands. He stopped and looked at her for a long moment in silence. Her face was tanned to a pale golden color from all the time she spent outdoors, and the freckles on her small tilted nose were more noticeable. "You look remarkably happy for someone whose bridegroom lies under the earth," he said at last.
Her widely set eyes regarded him with serenity. "Good morning, Prince," was all she answered.
"Good morning, Prince," the two little girls piped. One of the children he recognized as Coenburg. Both children spoke in British. He looked down into the round, rosy child faces, and his own face, which seemed to look so much older than its seventeen years these days, softened.
"What are you up to, Coenburg?" he asked.
"Niniane is going to show us how to play a game, but we need some cups."
"And we are going to be very careful not to break those cups," Niniane added, looking at the children as well.
"Oh, yes," they chorused fervently. Niniane smiled faintly, looked up, and encountered Ceawlin's eyes. He smiled back, touched and amused as she had been by the little girls' innocence. Then, with a brief tap on the top of Coenburg's head, he was gone.
* * * *
High summer came and the harvest was brought in. Wagon loads of food and fodder were trekked into Winchester from the surrounding Saxon vils and British farms, tribute owed the king for his protection. The storehouses were stocked for the winter.
Summer passed and fall set in. Excess cattle were slaughtered and the meat salted and hung. The dying earth seemed to reflect the mood of all Winchester, or so Niniane thought as she sat one wet autumn night listening to Alric sing. Normally it gave her great pleasure to hear the scop, but the song he was singing tonight was a tale that they had all grown weary of hearing: the song of the accidental slaying of Herebeald, prince of the Geats, by his brother Haethcyn. The king was having supper in the women's hall this night, sitting at a trestle table before the fire. Fara sat on one side of him and Ceawlin on the other. Alric's voice rose over the sound of the harp:
Sad and bitter, the death of that brother, Wrongfully slain, by shot of arrow.
The target missed, the prince lay motionless, Bitterly struck, his friend and his lord:
The bloody arrowhead had slain a brother.
Niniane watched as Cynric drank the mead in his cup. His hand was trembling visibly as he raised it to his mouth. His cheeks and nose were a dull red in the flickering light from the wall sconces.
"A fatal fight," the scop sang, "without hope of recompense. The unlucky prince must die unavenged."
Niniane looked from Cynric to Ceawlin, but the prince's face, framed by its helmet of silver hair, was unreadable. The king knocked over his cup and the mead spilled on the table. He gestured for more. As the girl came to serve him, and Fara began to mop up the spill with a cloth, the scop fell silent. Cynric looked up.
"The rest," he said. "Let us have the rest of it."
"My lord." It was Ceawlin, speaking without looking at his father. "Enough."
The old man stared at his full cup, then raised a hand and brought it down upon the table, not with force or with anger, only with a kind of vague impatience. After a glance at Ceawlin, the scop began to sing again. "Swa bio geomorlic gomelum ceorle," he chanted.
Alric had told Niniane that this story of Herebeald and Haethcyn was well-known to all Anglo-Saxons. The West Saxon scop's version of it dwelt most affectingly on the grief suffered by the aged king whose son has been accidentally killed by his brother. The king's grief is doubly great because he cannot have revenge on the killer, who is also his son. The part Alric was singing now was an embellishment he had himself composed, comparing the father's plight with the suffering endured by an old man whose son has been hanged.
"So it is sad for an old man to endure that his son, as a young man, should hang on the gallows," sang Alric. "He laments his child, who is strung up as food for ravens; yet, being old, can do nothing to help. Always, each morning, his son's death is remembered. He does not care to wait for another heir in the dwelling when the first has felt death's sting. It breaks his heart to look upon his son's dwelling-place, the empty wine hall that is now cheerless and a home of winds. The riders sleep, warriors in darkness; the harp sounds no more in the joyless place."
Niniane looked at Fara. The friedlehe was watching the old king. There was pity on her face, and patience. Cynric was slumped now deep in his chair. Niniane thought he was still upright only because the chair's carved arms supported him. Fara waited as he lifted the cup once more to his mouth. His hand was shaking too much, and after a moment he put it down again. He bowed his head over the cup. Then Fara looked at her son.
Ceawlin put a hand on his father's arm and said something in too low a voice for Niniane to hear. Cynric raised his head slightly, then nodded. The prince rose and came around to his father's side, slid an arm under the king's shoulders, and helped him to rise.
Cynric was a heavy man, and he was leaning on his son like a deadweight, but Ceawlin supported him across the floor of the hall to the door. Watching the two of them, one so young and strong, the other so old and ravaged, Niniane felt none of Fara's pity or patience for the king. What she felt instead was anger. It was not fair of the king to subject his living son to this ordeal night after night. Nor did Edwin deserve this kind of mourning. He had been a treacherous, villainous prince. In Niniane's opinion, the West Saxons were well rid of him. He would have made a fatal king.
The question of who would be the next king was the riddle that was exercising most minds in Winchester these days. Cynric had not named a new heir, although all knew it must be either Ceawlin or the child Guthfrid carried, if that child was a son. Niniane thought that Cynric would be a fool to name a baby over his elder son, but so far Cynric had maintained his counsel. No one knew what he would do. The uncertainty was one of the reasons for the grim mood that seemed to reign now at Winchester all the time.
Fara came slowly back from the door. She had aged too these last months. She felt it deeply, the king's grief and the uncertainty about the future of her own much-loved son.
In fact, Niniane thought, she herself was probably the happiest person in all of Winchester. The king seemed to have forgotten all about her, which suited her very well. She played with the children, learned harping skills from Alric, and helped with the sewing and weaving in the women's hall. Her life had rarely been more pleasant. She had been far more lonely at Bryn Atha than she was at present in Winchester.
Her whole future depended upon who was named the next king. If it was Ceawlin, then she did not think she had to worry. Fara was very fond of her. Fara would see she was treated fairly. But if it was Guthfrid's child ... Then God alone knew what would happen to her. But God had taken care of her very well thus far. Niniane was content to trust herself to his goodness for the future.
* * * *
The last of the leaves dropped from the trees and the first frost came. At Winchester everyone waited, waited for a birth and for a death. There were few who did not pray, to whateve
r god they felt would listen, that the birth would come first. The entire future of Wessex hung on two things: would the queen's child be a boy, and if it was, would the king acknowledge it as his?
Guthfrid, great with child, had retired to the queen's hall at the beginning of November. She was due to give birth around the festival of Yule.
"With any luck," said Nola to Niniane as they were hanging evergreens around the women's hall one afternoon a few days before Yule, "the child will be born dead."
"Nola!" Niniane crossed herself. "That is a terrible thing to say."
"It is true," the other girl returned stubbornly. "Ceawlin should be king. Even if this baby were Cynric's, which I doubt, we do not need a child for a king."
"Well, of course I agree with you. But that does not mean I wish Guthfrid's child dead." Niniane bent her head to sniff the spray of pines she was holding in her arms. She looked again at Nola. "It will be enough if it is a girl," she said half-humorously.
"This is not a laughing matter." Nola put down the armload of evergreens she had just picked up. "I think it is the uncertainty that is the worst. Cynric refuses to talk about it at all, even to Fara. No one knows what he is going to do."
"Perhaps he does not know himself."
"Perhaps not. He might even refuse to recognize Guthfrid's child as his after all. There is scarcely a soul in Winchester who thinks it is."
Niniane arranged a spray of holly. "You know, Nola, whether Cynric recognizes the child or not, he cannot prevent the eorls from choosing their own king once Cynric is dead. They may very well decide they would prefer Ceawlin to a baby of questionable origin. There can be no doubt that Ceawlin is Cynric's son."
"Not with those eyes," Nola agreed.
"So it may turn out well no matter whom Cynric chooses."
Nola was looking at Niniane, an affectionate smile in her dark eyes. "You have the wonderful facility of always hoping for the best, Niniane."