by Justin Hill
They reached Contone on the second evening. Kendra ran out as soon as she learnt that Godwin had returned.
‘We heard the fyrd would not march,’ she said, as she hurried down the hill, ‘and that no one will fight!’
‘Hush!’ Godwin said. ‘I have the king with me.’
Kendra took a moment to understand what he was saying, but she followed his gaze. She put her hand to her mouth. She had heard so much about Ethelred, but here was a scrawny and unwashed old man, with Godwin’s cap pulled tight on his head, with a long scarf knotted about his neck.
‘That is the king?’ she said.
Since Contone had first been given to Godwin’s family, no king had ever visited. The fact did not escape Godwin as he helped Ethelred down and led him into the hall. It was late in the day. Most had long since sought their household fires. The weakening light failed as the troop dismounted, stretched their stiff limbs and filed into the hall.
Serving men were busy stacking the fire, and although the hearth flames were already licking the air, the hall was still cold.
‘It is the king,’ men said, and the cauldron of broth had hardly boiled before people began to appear like shadows in the night. Even though Ethelred’s name had been a byword for stupidity and cruelty and injustice, the common folk of Contone greeted him with wonder and respect.
They took away his dirty clothes and the women set water to warm. ‘Come,’ they said, ‘we’ll warm your marrow in the vat. Nothing is so warming as a bath.’
Ethelred was unwilling, but Agnes and Kendra led him to the side chamber, where men were emptying the last of the hot water into the tub. Godwin came in to check on the king. He sat like a Bible saint – grey hair plastered to his unhappy head – as Agnes and Kendra washed and scrubbed him.
‘How is he?’ Godwin asked.
‘He is better now,’ Kendra said. Her sleeves were rolled up, her skirts wet.
‘How are you?’
The brightness of her smile surprised him. ‘I am well,’ she said. ‘Much better for seeing you. We have worried so. We were all worried. It has been weeks since the beacons were lit, and we feared that Knut would ride over the hill at any time. I buried everything, as you said. The boys have been set to watch, and I’ve brought the livestock into the lower fields.’
Godwin put his hand to her cheek. ‘You have done well,’ he said.
She took his wrist in her hand and winced. Dirt was engrained in his skin. ‘When he is done, you shall be next!’
And as she washed him, Kendra laughed. ‘I would never have thought – such dark days and you appear! I am overjoyed to see you again, Godwin.’
But later, as he dried and dressed, and the fact that he was soon to leave again sunk in, she frowned.
‘Are you sure you should take the king to Lundenburh tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ Godwin said. ‘Why?’
She didn’t like to say.
‘Why?’ he said, as he buttoned his kirtle.
She seemed to clench up, as if to force the words out.
‘Godwin, the king’s cause is doomed. All men say so.’
‘Who?’
She half laughed. ‘All men.’
Godwin stood up. ‘I do not fight for the king. I fight for Edmund.’
‘And how can Edmund succeed where his father has not?’
‘He will fight!’
Kendra’s eyes were sad. She held her words back, but her eyes were imploring. Godwin held her gaze for a long time. ‘I have to go to Lundenburh,’ he said, as she helped him with his brooch. ‘I have sworn to him. I swore an oath, and it is more than that. It is something I said of Eadric. I am who I am. I cannot be other. I have made my choices, and if it is God’s will to go against us, then what can we do against the Almighty?’
She paused for a long while, unconvinced.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘Your men are waiting.’
Godwin kissed her. She seemed a little cheered.
‘To each his own way of earning fame,’ he said.
She smiled, though he thought there were tears in her eyes, gleaming with candlelight. ‘You have made your choice,’ she said.
‘We have made our choices,’ he told her.
Later that evening all of the men who wanted took turns in the bath water. It was black by the time they were finished and Agnes tipped it out on to the herb garden. Ethelred’s humour rose as he sat by the fire. The blaze put colour in his cheeks and the hall was crammed with people who had hurried through the gloom to see him, as if he were a saint.
‘You are my good and loyal subjects,’ he told them. ‘I am blessed to see you all. If only I had so many good men in my court, then things would not have gone so badly.’
As the night darkened, more and more astonished locals came to see their king, and it wasn’t long before the sick appeared, begging for the king to heal them. They were a pathetic lot: a woman with a growth on her neck, a boy with a twisted leg, a shepherd who had been bitten by an adder, and whose foot had swollen up to twice its normal size, and an old man whose legs were covered in running sores. They crept to the door and waited silently.
Godwin did not have the heart to let them wait in vain. ‘My brothers,’ he said, ‘the king is ill and old. Go home and pray and the Lord will have mercy upon you all.’
‘No!’ Ethelred called. ‘No, let them in. Come, my children. Do not be shy. I am your anointed king, Ethelred Edgarson.’
Ethelred insisted on seeing them. They waited patiently as he laid hands on their wounds and prayed to God on their behalf.
Godwin looked around and caught Kendra’s eye.
See, her look seemed to say, he is curing them.
The devotion of the sick did more to heal Ethelred than anything else. As each one sat and shuddered at the king’s touch, he seemed to draw extra life out of them, and that evening as he drank his posset he was in better spirits than Godwin could remember.
Godwin slept like a stone and Kendra lay next to him, her head on his chest and her arm about him as she listened to his heart beating. It was slow and steady. She kissed his side and lay for a long time as the hall timbers creaked over their heads, and the hall fire crumbled and cooled to low-burning embers, red in the darkness.
‘They stand unnoticed who stand dry in a storm,’ her mother used to say, and Kendra had never quite worked out what she meant. But that night she willed that for Godwin the storm might pass over him and leave him dry.
Godwin and his company were away with the dawn. He said farewell to Kendra at the door. ‘I will send word,’ he said, and squeezed her hand one last time.
The people of Contone gathered in the damp morning to watch the king depart. Ethelred sat straight and proud in his saddle, put his hands on them and they looked up at him with awe and love and loyalty.
‘God speed!’ they called out, man, woman and snotty-nosed child. They stood, immovable, it seemed, like figures carved from stone, and watched their king depart – a fugitive among his own people.
Godwin led the company across the North Downs. The first night at the fireside Ethelred’s mood was bewildered, as if he had stumbled from another world, and aged from twelve to fifty in the blink of an eye. ‘They murdered my brother, and made me king. In my youth I was wayward,’ he said and there was a long pause. ‘Bad men led me astray, and they took much land from the Church. But good men came to my aid. My mother, Ethelmar; Ordulf and Wulfric. We made amends. Restored lands to the Church. And Byrthnoth was a good man. He should not have died the way he did.’
‘Why did you not fight?’ Godwin said.
The old man looked at him as if bewildered.
‘Why did you never fight? I grew up in terror of the Danes, and all men wanted was for you to lead the English to battle. But you never did.’
Ethelred stared at him. His expression changed from anger to irritation, to a wicked light, as if he was thinking of punishing Godwin for this question.
Godwin sat and stared at him. It was
hard trying to resist the urge to be cruel, but Ethelred pulled his cloak over his head. It was the gesture a child might make, who refuses to talk any more.
On the third day they descended into the prosperous farmlands along the banks of the meandering Temese. On the fourth day they came to Chingestune, the ancient seat of the Wessex kings.
When they reached the king’s hall, Godwin spoke gently to the old king, supported his arm as they entered. It had been looted and ravaged. Tapestries had been ripped from the walls. Grain stores had been smashed as men searched for gold, and holes had been dug in the floor and walls.
‘This was a fine hall once,’ Ethelred said as he looked at the destruction.
Godwin pitied the old man. ‘Why should men do this?’
Godwin picked through the shattered benches and tables. He had nothing to say. The destruction was senseless, and it had been done by English.
‘Set a guard on the walls. Find some servants. Let’s get a fire started,’ he told his men.
They found unbroken benches and fed the rest to the hearth flames. Just then the sound of shouting came from outside.
Godwin strode out. It was not so much a delegation as an angry mob.
Their leader was a local monk, a fat and worked-up man with striking blue eyes and a curiously smooth-skinned face. ‘The people have asked me to come,’ he said. The crowd jeered in support. ‘We do not want the king here!’
Godwin let him speak. His eyes roamed over the crowd. They were cold and pinched. He could feel their mood wavering between fear and anger, terror and violence. He let the monk have his say; having someone listen to him seemed to calm the man.
‘We shall leave,’ Godwin said, ‘but not because you come here to demand it.’
There were jeers and insults but Godwin faced them down, and as he picked out the troublemakers, they fell silent.
‘Tomorrow we shall take boats to Lundenburh. The king intends to make his peace with the Lord at his palace of West Minster. Edmund will raise the fyrds of all the shires. Do not come here and jeer me. I am not your enemy. Knut is your enemy, and his Spear-Danes. Save your jeers for them. Save your anger and your fear for the day you meet them in battle. If you were so brave, you would not come here to berate an old man who will meet the Maker soon enough and pay for his sins in Purgatory, but you would look to the future. When winter passes there will be a great struggle. What would you rather – Danes’ Rule again, or the return of a good and honest king?’
‘Who would that be?’
‘Edmund Atheling, who has hunted Danes for as many years as I have known him!’
The crowd seemed unimpressed. What did they know of Edmund? But Godwin spoke proudly and firmly, and the people listened. He told them what to do and they followed. ‘It is a cold and bleak day and no time to be standing in a muddy street. Take word back to your homes and your families and spread the news that Ethelred is dying and that his son stands ready to lead us all. Edmund Atheling! Descended from a long line of kings. Remember your histories! Remember how kings used to act. Edmund is like the kings of old. Come spring, he shall lead the English against our enemies, and he requires the prayers of all the people. Be gone! Good folk, do not trouble your dying king’s rest. God will judge him harshly enough.’
Winter set in. Campaigning ended. Knut rode all about Wessex, feasting and distributing the law, as if he was already king.
‘He does not have to fight,’ Edmund said. ‘All he has to do is sit and wait until there’s just thee and me to fight for England.’
Edmund and Godwin rode as far north as Tanshelf, on the borders of Northymbria, and found men who said they would ride if others would too. That February was the bleakest that men could remember. Snow fell, sleet lashed the watchmen on the walls, and the weeks seemed to drag slowly as they waited for the campaigning season to begin. Edmund and Godwin crossed the Temese into Cantware and went from hall to hall, but the men hid behind their oaths.
‘When Ethelred calls us, we will come,’ they said.
Edmund lost his temper with them, and then the real reasons came out. ‘I came out for the great fyrd and rode all the way to the Hymbre and we did not see battle, so I came home without so much as a penny or even a goose to give to my men. They are still grumbling about that ride,’ one man said.
‘I came to the last summons, but no one else did. We were sent home and all my neighbours laughed at me. My wife berated me, and my best men left.’
No battle, no plunder, no hope, no reason to summon men and ride out to war.
Edmund listened in disgust. ‘To each his own way of earning fame.’
Meanwhile, the king lay at West Minster, alone with his wife and his chaplain. His favourite hunting hounds lay sprawled along the side of his bed, twitching in their sleep. His time was close. Everyone knew it, waiting in the hall shadows.
Queen Emma opened the psalter to the page with the blue-and-red illumination. She read badly and Ethelred closed his eyes and pretended to doze, but she kept reading the words, stopping at times to ask the chaplain’s help.
‘Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic,’ the chaplain read.
Emma tried again, then at last put the book down with a sigh.
He could tell that she was watching him and half opened an eye, as if to check.
‘Intercede for us,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Wulfric,’ he croaked, and the chaplain came forward.
‘Mass,’ he said.
It was an hour before vespers, but the monk took out his gold-embroidered stole and hung it about his neck, muttered a blessing as he washed and dried his hands, took up the Holy Book, assumed his Holy Book voice and sang the mass.
Wulfric had the sweetest voice of any cleric and Ethelred closed his eyes and almost forgot the world and its millstone cares.
Benedictus! Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel;
quia visitavit et fecit redemptionem plebis suæ:
Et erexit cornu salutis nobis.
The palace fires burnt themselves hollow, their colour fading to yellow and then red, then black and finally ember grey. Unseen in the darkness; the half-moon rose late in the night, cast a thin light on the rain-pitted river. Dawn came slowly, a sliver of light on the eastern rim, gradually growing to a strange half-light, neither light nor dark: an indecisive start to the Feast of St George. From the king’s chamber word spread like ripples to his family and the court, the palace stables and workshops, the fields between West Minster and the palace, quickly along the streets, across the river to the market at Sudwerca, then further afield into the shires: Ethelred was dead.
Two Witans met. One in Hantone. Another in West Minster.
In Hantone Knut was crowned with Alfred’s ancient crown: a narrow band of gold with six prongs, each one set with great garnet roundels. There was a vast crowd of Danes and English in all their finery and they were in glad mood at the feast that followed, where Knut presented the abbot of the New Minster with a golden cross.
At West Minster Edmund’s coronation was a much more sombre and religious affair. Archbishop Wulfstan led a hastily formed Witan of abbots and aldermen, followed by the assembled warriors and Ethelred’s chaplain and his widow, Emma. Edmund knelt in mail and sword and prayed. It was a rushed and shabby coronation, as urgent as the ancient German tribes who met to elect a war chief on the eve of battle.
At the end Edmund was dressed and anointed, and stood before God for the English nation.
‘Amen,’ sang the monks in quavering voices.
Godwin closed his eyes and crossed himself. ‘Amen,’ he said.
Two days later Godwin and Edmund stood at the isle of West Minster as the lapping currents recalled another drowned body from the Temese. This one did not drift past, but snagged and stayed, nudging against the evening reed beds as the ebb tide turned. The two men ignored it at first, but it refused to go away. It lay pale and limp in the water, the blond hair rooting it to the anchor of rank weeds.
‘An
other girl,’ Edmund said to Godwin, as one of his retainers splashed into the water and turned the body over. Another girl, naked except for the water and the weeds, and a leech-dark frog that slipped over the pale wet skin. The Danish noose was drawing closed.
Godwin and Edmund stood for a long time, silhouetted against the silver evening river water. A swan pushed out from the far bank. The sweet smell of wet reeds hung in the air. Spring insects were beginning to swarm over the river. A lone fish jumped and broke the glittering surface for a moment.
‘This is the hour, Godwin, that we knew would come. Let us see how strong our hand is. Pick your best men. Let us ride out. The loyal take word to the loyal.’
‘But who will stay here?’
‘Eadwig,’ Edmund said, ‘and Queen Emma. Her men will put backbone into the defence. And it will keep her out of trouble.’
Godwin picked out ten of his men to come with him, one of whom was Beorn. Godwin had a feeling that he was the kind of big and fearsome man he needed at his shoulder. The rest were to stay behind to repel the Danes. Caerl was chief among them. Godwin did not want to leave him, but he could think of no better man to add heart and courage to all around him.
‘Be here when I come back,’ Godwin said.
‘Come back,’ Caerl laughed, ‘and I will be here.’
The two men hugged. Neither man wanted to let go.
‘Be off with you!’ Caerl said, then hugged Beorn. Make sure he comes back, Caerl’s look said.
Beorn grinned and winked.
Next morning Edmund left all the men he could spare to hold Lundenburh and rode out with just fifty men. Some rode north and east, but most rode south, to avoid the approach of Knut’s army. Half a hundred to raise a war host from a broken nation. The size of the task overawed them all. Few thought they had any chance.
When they reached the borders of Midelsexe, Edmund turned east towards Canturburie and Godwin turned his horse south towards Sudsexe. They paused to say farewell. Godwin held Edmund for a long time.