‘I came as soon as Vadir told me.’
‘Ah, Vadir.’ It seemed to Owain as though the man’s name was linked in some way with whatever it was that Beornwulf wanted him for. But for a while he did not speak again, and between them and the tumult of the camp, he heard the swish and patter of the rain, and then far off the low growl of thunder along the hills. ‘It is growing dark,’ Beornwulf said. ‘I cannot see you clearly.’
‘That’s the storm coming.’
‘That as well,’ Beornwulf said with a grim quirk of laughter on his lips that were straight with pain. He seemed to gather himself together for a great effort and when his voice came again it had a hoarse urgency. ‘Owain, when I set out for the Kentish Court last year, I left all things in your keeping at Beornstead. I shall go to Valhalla before morning—and I—should go with a quieter heart if I might know that I left Beornstead to lie in your hands again.’
Owain was silent, not sure of his meaning, but knowing that it was a threat to all that he had hoped for, all that he had been thinking of beside the stream.
‘It goes ill with a household that has no one but a woman at its head—a woman and a boy; and you know what manner of boy Bryni is—a wild young colt that will be running into trouble if he is given his head thus early.’ He made as though to raise himself in his desperate urgency, and fell back, coughing blood. ‘Stay with him and his mother until he is fifteen and a man,’ he said, as soon as he could speak again. ‘I would not ask it of you if I had a kinsman to turn to, but you know—how it is with me, that I am the only son of an only son, and—have only one son in my turn.’
Still Owain was silent, turned a little to look out over the dark distances, sloe-purple now under the storm-clouds that dropped away from the turf ramparts. Bryni was eleven now; that meant four years. Four more years, when he had thought to go free before the summer’s end. It was too much to ask of anyone. There was Regina, too, but like enough she had no more need of him, and Beornwulf’s eyes were clinging to his face like the eyes of a sick dog. He turned his head slowly, as though it was stiff on his shoulders, and looked down at the dying Saxon. ‘Go with a quiet heart, Beornwulf; I will stay by the boy until he is fifteen.’
Beornwulf snatched a small sigh. ‘So. Take my sword when they build the death-pyres tomorrow, and give it to him when the time comes. It should go with me, but it is a fine blade, and the boy will need a sword … Helga is spoken for already: Lilla will be ripe for marrying in two or three more summers—it was in my mind to arrange it with Brand the Smith that young Horn should have her. Tell her mother so. Edmund Whitefang owes me something still, for his share of the boat last herring season, but—you know that …’ He broke off and began to cough again. Owain bent quickly and wiped the blood out of his beard, and after a while he struggled on once more. ‘Have a care to anything that—has Vadir’s hand in it. Nay, I’ve no cause, but I have—never trusted him, and—the boy hates him. You know why. There may be—trouble between them one day … For the rest—do as—best you can until the boy—comes to his manhood and—can take all into his own hands.’
‘I understand,’ Owain said, roughly because his throat was aching. ‘Be quiet now; there’ll be no harm come to Beornstead or to the Beornstead folk, if I can hold it off.’
‘I always—reckoned I’d made a good bargain with that gold piece,’ said Beornwulf, and with that last attempt at a jest, closed his eyes.
The rain was teeming down now, and as Owain leaned forward to spread his cloak further across the dying Saxon, the first jagged lightning leapt between sky and earth, and while the white blaze of it still hung before his sight, earth and sky together shuddered to the crack and the hollow roar of the thunder.
Beornwulf opened his eyes once more. ‘Hark to Thor’s Hammer splitting the clouds asunder, as we split the might of Ceawlin and his sons,’ he said; and the sound of his voice was the sound of triumph, though the breath rattled in his throat.
Beornwulf died before morning, and Owain took his sword as he had bidden him, and since he did not want to be charged with robbing the dead, carried it to Haegel and showed him that he had done so.
Haegel was standing to watch them build the death-pyres of thorn and furze over a heart of ash logs, and merely nodded when he saw his foster brother’s sword, saying, ‘Aye, it must go to the boy of course. His dagger will serve him well enough for the journey,’ and turned away to bid them build this end of the pyre less steeply.
Owain went away with a rush of hot anger in his heart. But later when he saw Beornwulf laid with the other dead ready for the pyre, there was a sword at his feet, after all, waiting to be laid with his ashes when the burning was over; a great sword with a grip formed of twisted serpents that he had surely seen before, and when he looked at it more closely, he knew that it was the King’s.
And when next Owain saw Haegel of the South Saxons, he was wearing a sword drawn from the common war-kist, plainer if possible than his own, for it had not even silver flowers inlaid on the shoulders.
17
The Bride-Race
CEAWLIN had escaped with his sons, and a kind of running warfare dragged on with skirmishes here and there, until late summer came, and it was time to turn back from the war-trail, and go home to get the harvest in. But all men knew that however many summers passed before he was hunted down at last, the thing was finished. Coel and not Ceawlin wore the crown of Wessex, and Aethelbert of Kent had had his revenge.
On a day of quivering heat haze with the corn-lands ripe for the sickle, Haegel and his war-host returned to the King’s farm by Cissa’s Caester. They had been shedding war-bands at every settlement, at every track that branched from the old paved road, since they crossed the border into their own South Saxon Lands; and by the time they straggled into the wide garth of the royal farm, they numbered few more than the men of Maen Wood and Seals’ Island, beside the household warriors.
Women and dogs greeted them, and that night there was feasting in Haegel’s Hall, and men sang triumphant songs to the bright music of the harp, though a few women wept and a few dogs pattered among the warriors, looking for masters who had not returned. Owain grew tired of the feasting before it was over, and wandered out by himself to get a mouthful of cool air and see that all was well with Wagtail in the great meadow below the King’s Place where they had picketed the horses. His way back to the steading led through the apple garth; the King’s trees were taller and better shaped than the Beornstead ones, for the wind did not have its way with them quite as it did out on the Seals’ Island; and in the white light of the moon, the ripening apples were silver among the leaves. And just within the gate he found Einon Hen leaning against a mossy trunk and gazing up with his one fierce old eye into the branches. ‘I have found in the course of a long life that there is nothing like the air that blows through apple trees for clearing a man’s head from the fumes of overmuch mead,’ said the old Envoy, when he saw him. ‘So you also have had enough of Haegel’s Mead Hall.’
‘The rest seem to have struck root to the drinking-benches,’ Owain said moodily, and checked beside him.
‘Ah well, the long marches are done; we can all sleep off frowsy heads against the pig-sty wall in the morning.’
‘Not me. I must be on my way before first light. The morning tide will serve for me to get Wagtail across the creek about sunrise, and—if I wait for the rest, the news may get to Beornstead in some garbled and roundabout way before I come.’
Einon Hen was silent for a moment, and then he said, ‘Aye, and such news is heavy carrying.’ He pushed off from his apple-trunk and turned back towards the steading, Owain walking miserably beside him through the rough grass. They had come nearly to the steading gate when he spoke again. ‘And so the thing is finished, and the war-oath has run out. In a few days I shall turn my face again to the north-westward and my own hills—And you?’
Owain stopped dead in his tracks. He had not told Einon Hen of his promise to Beornwulf, he had not been able
to bear to speak of it to anyone, but the old man had turned, surprised that he did not answer. He must answer. ‘I bide at Beornstead a while yet,’ he said, as though it were a small thing.
‘So? I thought your heart was set to go back to your own kind, when your freedom came.’
‘Beornwulf was a man without near kin. He—when he had his death-wound he asked me to stay by the boy till he is fifteen.’
‘You having once been his thrall,’ said Einon Hen after a pause, to the night in general.
‘It was not so that he asked it. If it had been, maybe I could have refused.’
‘Maybe,’ said the old man, musingly. ‘And the boy is—how old?’
‘He was eleven in the spring.’
‘So. Something under four years.’
‘It will pass.’
‘Ah, it will pass,’ agreed Einon Hen. ‘I shall think of you as it passes—now and then. God be with you in the meanwhile, Owain.’
He turned about with a whisk of his chequered cloak behind him, and went in through the steading gate.
Owain turned back to the solitude under the apple trees, and walked up and down for a while. Then he too went in, and joined the young men who were spilling out now into the moonlit forecourt, and lay down to sleep with his cloak wrapped round him, against the pig-sty wall.
He was up again well before first light, and heading down to the picket lines. He tended and saddled Wagtail with only the last of the sinking moon to help him, and in the dawn twilight he rode out through the gate of the King’s Place, and turned southward down the old half-lost road that led to the Seals’ Island.
There had been a heavy dew, and the wetness scattered like spray as he rode by. But by the time the creek was safely behind him and he came out of the woods at the edge of the familiar Intake, the sun was up, and the open levels shone tawny beyond the paler gold of the corn-land.
The morning smoke rose blue from the house-place roof as he turned off the road towards it, and the steading was awake and going about its morning work. Gunhilda the bondwoman was coming up from the pasture with a pail of milk as he rode in through the gate—they milked in the open at this time of year—and the smell of baking barley-bannock came out to him through the house-place door. No news had reached them yet, then. Odd how it seemed as though one could be sure of that from the fact that the hearth smoke still rose upward and there was barley-bread for the morning meal. The dogs were clamouring about him as he swung down from the saddle and dropped Wagtail’s bridle over the hitching-post. The horse had not been ridden hard, and it would not hurt him to wait a little before being watered and rubbed down.
And then Athelis was in the doorway, looking towards him with a smear of barley-meal across her hot forehead; the girls crowded behind her, and Bryni came running out into the early sunlight with a couple of new puppies at his heels, while Gunhilda broke into a clumsy trot towards them, slopping milk over the rim of her pail.
‘Owain! You are back just in time for the harvest,’ Athelis said, thrusting wisps of hair back under her kerchief with a floury finger. ‘We heard that the war-host had returned to the King’s Hall. Did the master send you ahead to tell us of his coming?’ And then her eyes went past him and took in the horse standing riderless at the hitching-post, and returned to his face with a quick unspoken question, and he saw the colour drain out of her face.
‘Come back into the house,’ he said. He did not know why, but he felt that it would be better to tell her indoors—as though the roof and walls would give her some kind of shelter for her grief.
She turned without a word, and went back to the fire, the others trailing behind her; and beside the great upright beam of the king-post, swung round to him again. ‘Is he dead?’
Owain nodded. ‘Almost two months ago, at a place called Wodensbeorg, where we broke Ceawlin’s power.’
‘What do I care for Ceawlin’s breaking?’ she said, softly fierce.
She looked old—old as she had done that day last year when they brought the master of the house home drowned to all outward seeming, and laid him by the fire—the bones of her thin face all at once so sharp that it seemed as though they must cut through the tightened skin. But he saw that she was not going to make any outcry, as she had made none last year. If she wept, it would be later, and alone, and he was thankful. ‘Little enough, I make no doubt,’ he said, in answer to her question, ‘but Beornwulf cared.’
‘He knew, then? He was not killed outright?’
‘He lived the better part of the night,’ Owain told her, ‘but I do not think he suffered more than his kind reckon fair payment for Valhalla.’
The bondwoman had begun to snivel and wail, and Helga and Lilla were huddling close to their mother, though she seemed for the moment not to know that they were there. But Bryni stood apart from the rest, his eyes on Owain’s face and the green of them swallowed up in black. He said in a small steady voice, ‘Did they burn my father’s sword with him?’
It sounded wickedly callous, but Owain, who knew Bryni, knew that it was not. ‘No, he bade me take it when the death-pyres were built, for you when you are of age to carry it.’
‘Give it to me now, just—just for today.’
Owain hesitated an instant, then brought the well worn weapon from under his cloak, and gave it to him without a word; and the boy stood for a moment looking at it in the firelight, then with a defiant scowl at the rest of his family, in case any of them thought of following him, he turned, holding it close against him, and ran from the house-place. One sob tore itself free of him before he was quite through the doorway, and that was all.
The bannocks on the hearth were scorching, but nobody noticed them.
A white and silent Bryni brought back his father’s sword at supper-time, and it was laid by at the bottom of the great kist to wait until he was a man. Owain hung up his sword and his dinted buckler above the place where he slept, and the life of the farm took him back as though the wind had never risen and he had never gone with Haegel’s war-host. But his place in the life of Beornstead was a much more difficult one to hold, than it had been before. Save that he no longer carried the weight of a thrall-ring about his neck, he was just what he had always been, one of the farm men, along with Gyrth and Caedman. And yet in many ways the burden of the household and the farm, of advising Athelis and trying to keep Bryni out of serious scrapes, rested as squarely on his shoulders as though he had been the master of the house. Sometimes it made him laugh, when he stopped to think of it, though there was a bitter twist to the laughter. It was a strange trick of fate that he, Owain, son of a Roman and a British house, should find himself shouldering the care of a Saxon family and a Saxon farm, but there was not much time for thinking, except at night, and by then he was generally too tired.
They got the harvest in, and it was time to put the three lean pigs out to fatten on acorns; time for the autumn slaughtering, the smoking and the curing and the salting down. Then winter was upon them, with the dykes a constant headache, and a young colt to be broken, and whenever he could snatch a day from the ditching and dyking, Owain took the dogs and sometimes Bryni and went hunting for fresh meat. If one lived entirely on the salt stuff, which had maggots in it anyway by the spring, one got the scurvy, and if the household got the scurvy he would have betrayed Beornwulf’s trust.
Lambing came, and spring ploughing, and early summer with hay harvest and the hot smelly business of sheep-shearing. Fitful warfare had broken out again in Wessex, as soon as the winter was over, but it was only between Ceawlin and his kin, and Haegel did not call out his war-host. The barley grew white for harvest in the cornlands of the Seals’ Island, and the first of the four years that Owain had given to Beornwulf was accomplished.
News always took a long time to seep down through the Wealden forests, and reach the tongue of land between the Downs and the Seals’ Island, and it was autumn when a wandering harper—always it was a harper or a merchant who carried the tidings of the world from one
settlement to another—brought word that Ceawlin was dead, and two of his four sons with him. Ceawlin, whose shadow had fallen across South Britain like the shadow of a giant; dead in some already half-lost skirmish; the harper did not even know the name of the place, all that he was sure of was that Ceawlin was dead.
But the last coasting ship to make the Windy Haven, before the autumn gales closed the sea-ways, brought later news. The news that Ceawlin’s two surviving sons had made their peace with the new King of the West Saxons, and been rewarded with a fair-sized lump of their father’s old conquests, to hold under him. Aethelbert had taken the territories of Norrey and Surrey for his share of the spoils; the thing was over and paid for, tidied up and bundled away. And Owain, standing among the little crowd that had gathered to hear the ship-master holding forth, could not help feeling that the men who made the best showing in the confused and bloody story were Ceawlin and the two sons who had died with him. It was a bitter thing to have to admit, and he went back to the steading in a vile bad temper.
Another winter passed, and another, and Owain began to look about him with a queer mixture of eagerness and regret, thinking, ‘Only once more I shall see the sheep-shearing here in the Seals’ Island, one more harvest to get in, one more winter I shall struggle with the dykes.’ And also, ‘If Beornwulf were to come back, he would see that the land and the beasts are in good heart—and that young fool Bryni has not broken his own neck or anybody else’s.’
That summer Helga was hand-fasted to the grandson of old Gamal Witterson, the Headman of the settlement, a good match for any girl, though she seemed not particularly interested.
Only the folk of the two households witnessed the actual hand-fasting over the hearth, but afterwards, when the feasting started, folk came from half over Seals’ Island. And knowing that it would be so, Athelis had made her preparations accordingly. The trestle boards were set up before the house-place door, and loaded with great piles of barley-bread, bowls of dried fish, curds and cheese and golden-dripping honeycomb, and huge jugs of the spiced bride-ale from which the feast took its name. There was even meat, for Haegel the King had sent them a young ox.