A faint movement from the old man beside him recalled him to the present moment. The priest had gone, and he saw that the women had risen and were coming towards the door, two of them dropping back a little into place behind the third. And looking at the third woman, Owain knew who she was, for he had seen her last night from his place far down the High King’s Hall. Her place had been as high as his was low, and there had been many women gathered about her and the gleam of a Queen’s gold circlet about her head. She wore a plain gown now, and her head-rail was held by a circlet of blue silk. A woman with a face like a horse, but a very gentle horse.
She was at the foot of the steps when she saw them in the shadow of the doorway, and checking, she turned to them with a gesture of her outspread hands. ‘Ah, Einon Hen! God’s Greeting to you!’ and her voice made Owain forget that she looked like a horse. It was a beautiful voice, low-pitched and vibrant.
‘God’s Greeting to you, Madam,’ said the old man, bending his head.
‘And this? You have brought a friend to us?’
‘I have brought a friend. A Briton like myself, and his name is Owain.’
‘Owain,’ said the woman, in her low voice. ‘If this were my house, I would make you most joyfully welcome to it, as I would have made Einon Hen long ago. But it is God’s, and so the welcome is surely His.’ Her whole face was soft with joy, and suddenly she held out her hands to them, and to the women beside her, as though gathering them all in. ‘See, we are a growing company! There are six of us now, with good Bishop Lindhard my chaplain—and soon, so soon now, surely we shall be a multitude!’
And smiling at them like a mother, and gathering up the trailing skirts of her kirtle, she went on up the steps, her women behind her; and they heard the steps of the three across the courtyard, and a door which Owain had not noticed behind the mulberry tree opened and shut.
Alone now in the empty church with the altar candles out, Owain said, ‘I did not know that the Queen was a Christian.’
‘And has always been free to follow her own faith, here in Aethelbert’s Court. That was in the bond, when Aethelbert went asking for a Princess of the Frankish Kingdom, to be his Queen.’
‘And what did she mean when she said that soon we should be a multitude? I have seen no sign that the Jutes and Saxons are weary of their own gods.’
But Einon Hen did not answer directly; at least not then. He was still looking after the Queen, very kindly, as a man might look after a child he was fond of. ‘Poor simple woman,’ he said, and turned and led the way up the little church towards the sanctuary.
After they had made the morning prayer they went out again into the courtyard, and sat on the raised stone curb about the foot of the mulberry tree in companionable silence as though they had been friends all their lives. Presently Owain found that the old man was looking at him questioningly. ‘If you did not think to see me here in Cantiisburg,’ said Einon Hen, ‘assuredly I did not think to see you. Have I miscounted? It has been in my mind all the while that this spring was the time of your freedom.’
‘No, you have not miscounted,’ Owain said. ‘The boy turned fifteen before the blackthorn flowered.’
‘So you are free now?’ The question within a question was so quietly spoken that Owain could pretend not to have heard it, if he wanted to.
‘Not yet,’ he said. He sat quite still, looking down at his hard brown hands lying across his knees; and then he found that he was telling Einon Hen the whole story, about Lilla and Vadir Cedricson and his promise to Athelis her mother in return for a year’s respite. ‘I don’t know that it was any good. The year is almost up now—he might have asked again by now, but that he also sailed with the King. God knows what will happen when he does ask, and—God knows when I shall see my freedom. I have waited for it so long that sometimes my heart grows sick with waiting; and when it comes—if it comes—I sometimes wonder if I shall know what to do with it.’ Suddenly he turned to the old man beside him, and stretched out his hands in an oddly pleading gesture, as though he were afraid that the other might blame him for turning so long from his own people. ‘But what else could I do?’
Einon Hen was silent for a long while, considering him out of that one fierce falcon’s eye, and his silence seemed to fill the little courtyard. ‘You could have broken your faith with Beornwulf and taken the freedom that was yours by right,’ he said at last. And then quickly, before Owain could answer, he went on, leaning forward, his arms across his knees: ‘Owain, has it ever seemed to you that a strange thing is happening between the British and the Saxon kind? It is three generations since Artos died, and the years between have been lost and dark and very bloody, so that if one looks backward it is as though one peered through night and storm, to catch the last brave glimmer of a lantern very far behind. You who were at the last fight by Aquae Sulis saw the last-light go out. Yet I remember how we spoke once, you and I, of the Truce of the Spear; I believe that there are other kinds of truce, more binding, and some that may change and grow and strengthen …’ He had been watching the play of the sun spots through the mulberry leaves, in the dust at his feet; but he turned his head abruptly, and fixed Owain with a glare. ‘Now this Beornwulf turns to you, a Briton, in his last and sorest need of a friend, and for four years of your life, and maybe more to come, you have shouldered the weight of a Saxon household, and you sit there and ask me, as you asked me once before, “What else could I do?”—And that, do you know, is a thing that I find more filled with promise than any treaty between Aethelbert and the Princes of the Cymru. Almost it is as though, looking forward this time, one might perhaps make out another gleam of light—very far ahead.’
Owain looked at him, frowning a little and scratching at the old scar, questing after his exact meaning and waiting for what he would say next. But the silence lengthened and the old man had returned to watching the sun spots in the dust; and there was nothing more after all, that could be put into words. Owain went back to the still unanswered question that he had asked earlier. ‘What did she mean—the Queen—when she said that now there were six of us and soon we should be a multitude?’ For she had meant something; it had been no mere pious hope.
Einon Hen advanced one foot and with great care and exactitude trod on a sun spot as though he expected it to remain under-foot like a yellow leaf. ‘I have no idea,’ he said.
And with that, Owain knew that for the present at all events, he must be content.
The days went by and the gathering was complete, and the Council met in Aethelbert’s great Mead Hall, while the young men, left to their own devices, wrestled together and borrowed horses to race against each other, and got bored. One day the Council met, two, three, the talking and arguing dragging on around the table at whose head sat the tall stooping man with eyes that one could not see into, who was Aethelbert of Kent. But little seemed to be accomplished, and Owain, standing behind Haegel’s seat, his gaze moving from Coel of Wessex to Redwald of the East Angles, to the Princes of Gwent and Powys, to Einon Hen in his place beside the High King, had a strong feeling that all these vague questions of laws and frontiers were no more than an excuse to gather the Rulers together for some other purpose. He wondered what it could be. Not war: a handful of Kings each with his bodyguard behind him did not make a war-host.
At evening, when the business of the day was over, Aethelbert’s Mead Hall returned to its proper use, and the Kings and the Elders feasted on the long benches, while the young warriors gathered about the great fire in the forecourt, making merry on their own account, drinking deep, and tussling with each other like puppies, or thronging the foreporch doorway to listen to the songs and sagas of the harper sitting at Aethelbert’s feet.
On the third evening—Owain never forgot it—it turned wet at twilight, and they had crowded up into the lower end of the Hall, packing the beggars’ bench and squatting with the hounds about the lowest of three long fires. The smell of the wet earth breathed in at the doorway to mingle with the tang of wood sm
oke and the smells of men and hounds and mead. Ingwy, Aethelbert’s harper, had taken up his harp when they called for it, and plunged into the great Saga of Beowa the Sun-Hero, and how he slew the Winter-Fiend; and the Hall that had been loud with voices and laughter had grown hushed to listen, for it was the best beloved of all the sagas that Hengest’s folk had brought with them across the North Seas. Only from time to time as the excitement and the splendour mounted, the warriors joined in, thumping fists and ale horns on their knees in time to the leaping rhythm that Ingwy beat out upon his harp as a swordsmith beats a bright blade on his anvil.
Even Owain, whose ear was not tuned to the Saxon way of music and story-telling, felt his heart quicken and the hair lift on the back of his neck as the crisis of the saga drew near and the Winter-Fiend came padding closer through the dark.
Ingwy swept a discordant crash of notes from his harp, to herald the Monster’s arrival—and in the same instant, as though the ancient story had called it up, there loomed into the open doorway of Aethelbert’s Mead Hall, a huge shapeless Thing.
The hounds sprang up baying, and a long gasp ran up the Hall, men’s hands leaping to their weapons. The harper fell silent between word and word, and for a long moment a hush that prickled in one’s marrow held the Great Hall.
Then the Thing in the doorway strode forward into the light of the fires and torches, and a gale of laughter roared up to the rafters as the men on the crowded benches saw in their midst no fiend from the Twilight World, but only a big man in a wolfskin cloak with a hood that he had pulled well forward against the wet.
Other men loomed behind him in the dark of the foreporch. He strode on up the Hall, drops from his wet cloak spitting in the fires as he came, the hounds sniffing about his heels. He kneeled at the High King’s feet, stiffly, as a man who has been long in the saddle. And Aethelbert leaned forward in his great raised seat, his hands on the snarling dragon-heads of the front posts, and looked down at him with those curiously veiled eyes. ‘Edwulf the Coast Warden—you bring me news of some sort by your seeming. What is it, then?’
The Coast Warden was a bull-necked man with a bull voice, and his answer boomed clear to the far ends of the Hall. ‘Aethelbert the King, I bring news that a party of holy men, Christians out of the Frank-lands, have come to shore at Ebbesfleet. They were but two score of them, unarmed and seemingly no harm in them, so we let them come to land. Their leader sends you greeting in the name of their God and of their Holy Father in Romeburg, and begs your leave that they may come before you.’
‘So.’ Aethelbert bent his head, but Owain, watching, had a feeling that he had known what the man would say. ‘And this leader, what like is he? And by what name is he called?’
‘A tall proud man with cold eyes,’ said the Coast Warden. ‘I should judge him strong in his own esteem. His name is Augustine.’
21
Dawn Wind
EARLIER that morning there had been mist across the marshes, but it had blown away now, and the levels lay clear and pale under a high drifting sky. And the crumbling rampart walls of the old coastal fortress stood up, staunch and menacing even now, against the winding waterways that cut Tanatus Island from the mainland.
Owain stood with Bryni among the half-moon of warriors about the great chair of carved black oak in which the High King sat, enthroned amid the emptiness of the marshes as though he were in the High Seat in his own Hall. They had had to get the chair there on mule-back, and it had given the men in charge of it more trouble than almost all the rest of the Camp together. But since Aethelbert had chosen to hold his first meeting with the holy men here, close to where they had landed, before allowing them any further into his kingdom, and had determined that the meeting must be out of doors where it would be harder for them to work any enchantment on him, there had been no help for it. Only one thing had given more trouble on the road from Cantiisburg, and that was Frey’s Horse, which Aethelbert had also determined to bring to the meeting place, that he might have the strength of his Gods with him in case of need. Owain could hear him now, neighing and trampling in a burst of fury at his picket ropes; he had not been near the white stallion again since the morning at the horse farm, but he knew Teitri’s voice among all the other horses of the Camp.
He looked away past the waiting figure of the High King to the harsh grey mass of the fortress. Rutupiae, his own people had called it; it had no name now, it was just the Romans’ Burg. How much it had seen, the old fortress: the first invading waves of the Sea Wolves, the last Roman troops in Britain; and now … ?
The faint sound of chanting reached his ears, carried on the light sea wind; and there was an answering stir among the waiting Saxons. Beyond the old land-gate, something was moving and he saw the blink of polished metal. And slowly, winding into view through the gates of the ruined fortress where they had lodged while they waited for the King, came a long line of figures, pied black and white like plover. At their head walked a man carrying a tall silver cross, and behind him another, bearing aloft a picture or a standard of some kind, on which even at that distance the colours shone like jewels and behind again, leading all the rest, walked a very tall man who carried himself like an Emperor. ‘A tall proud man with cold eyes and strong in his own esteem,’ the Coast Warden had said; and even if he had taken last place in the line of monks, Owain would have known that he was Augustine, the leader.
The chanting swelled louder as the company wound out over the bridge and causeway, and drew slowly nearer along the paved road. Words began to take shape out of the rise and fall of the chanting; the stately words of the Litany: ‘Kyrie eleison,’ Owain heard, ‘Kyrie eleison …’
He saw Aethelbert beckon to Bishop Lindhard, the Queen’s chaplain, who stood beside him in golden alb and white and green dalmatica, and ask a question. He saw the Bishop shake his head, making some low-voiced answer, and knew as clearly as though he had heard the exchange, that the King had asked, ‘This singing—is it a spell?’
Standing there among the Saxon warriors, Owain had all at once a strange sensation, a kind of weeping in his breast. His faith had meant a lot to him when he was a boy; it had been bound up with the Britain that had stood sword in hand against the inflowing Barbarian hordes; but later, it had worn thin, even as his memory of Regina had worn thin. The only time he had prayed with power since he came to manhood, had been to Silvanus, on the day he buried Dog. But now it seemed to him that a glorious and a shining thing was happening; he had a feeling of great wonder, and the shadows of the clouds over the marsh were the shadows of vast wings.
The foremost of the band of monks, he who carried the cross, had reached the place where Aethelbert of Kent sat with his Kings and councillors about him, astride the road into Britain. The chanting had fallen silent. The cross-bearer moved to the left, he with the great many-coloured banner of Christ in Glory moved to the right, and the tall man came between them with hand upraised in blessing, and walked to the footstool of Aethelbert’s chair, without waiting for Bishop Lindhard who had stepped forward to bring him to the King.
For a long moment nothing moved save that the silken standard with its gold-wrought figure rippled in the light sea wind. The two men looked at each other, eye into eye; and Augustine did not kneel. Then Aethelbert rose to give the other man the courtesy of a host to the guest within his gates.
But somehow, as he watched the scene that followed, Owain’s winged moment slipped away from him, and the shadows drifting across the levels were only cloud shadows again.
Augustine had begun to speak in clear measured Latin, Bishop Lindhard translating for him as he went along. His voice was hard and strong as a sword-blade, but not so flexible. The monks had gathered in a great curve behind him, just as the warriors stood behind the Kentish King, and the King’s white boarhounds sniffed distrustfully at the hem of Augustine’s habit as he spoke.
‘The Greeting of God be to you, and the Peace of God be upon you, Aethelbert the King. We are come to you from our Holy
Father in Rome, from the blessed Gregory himself, to bring you his word and his greeting under God …’ It was a friendly speech and a long one. Owain had enough Latin left to understand most of it, without Bishop Lindhard’s stumbling translation. Now he was telling them how, years before, when the Holy Father was only a simple monk, he had seen in the slave market in Rome, some Anglian boys who had been carried off by pirates, and hearing that they came from a people who did not know the Lord God nor His Son, had held it in his heart ever since to bring them into the Fold of the Faith.
It was a touching story, but somehow it failed to touch Owain.
‘We are Jutes, along this coast,’ said Aethelbert, fingering his beard, and Bishop Lindhard translated for him as he had translated for the stranger monk.
Augustine made a small inclination of the head. ‘Yet Jutes and Angles and Saxons, you have all the same need of the joy we have to bring. We come to you and not to the Angles, on the threshold of this great venture, for the sake of the Lady Bertha, your Queen, knowing that she is of our faith and has been free to follow her own ways of worship, here at your Court. Because of that, it has seemed to us, and to the Holy Father who sent us forth, that this is the place ordained for our coming at the outset.’
Aethelbert listened, still fingering his beard, and Owain knew how his eyes would be narrowed on the stranger’s face. ‘There is truth in what you say,’ he agreed, when Bishop Lindhard had translated again. ‘And for another reason, it may be that you have chosen wisely. Five Kings stand here with me today, five Kings and the Princes of the Welsh in the far west.’ (He used the Saxon term, and Bishop Lindhard stumbled over it, for there was no Latin equivalent, until Einon Hen moved out from the group about the High King’s chair and gave the British ‘The Princes of the Cymru, the Land of Brothers’.) ‘Five Kings, and the Princes of the Welsh in the far west,’ said Aethelbert of Kent, ‘and there is no Lord of the Angles nor yet of the Saxon kind who could make such a boast.’