Augustine bent his head again, and it seemed to Owain that there was a hint of irony in the way he did so. ‘Great and powerful is the royal line of the Oiscings. That also, we knew in Rome, Aethelbert the High King.’
‘And it seemed to this Holy Father of yours that a strong King with a Queen already of your faith might spread the shield of his protection over you; might stretch out his arm to help this work that you have at heart?’ Aethelbert’s voice suddenly became sharp as the bark of a fox on a frosty night. ‘Well, Holy Man, what would you have of me?’
‘No more than your goodwill at first,’ Augustine said. ‘Grant us leave to enter your kingdom, and give us a small plot of ground where we may raise a church and welcome those who come to join us in the Faith of Christ.’
Somewhere close behind Owain, a man growled behind his shield rim to his neighbour: ‘Are we to leave our own Gods, then, who were good enough for our fathers, and who led us to victory, and go running cap in hand to this God that the British worshipped, who stood by and let them go down into defeat? And all because a shaven-headed priest says so?’
And his friend replied with a smothered laugh, ‘There’s no accounting for the strange ideas that folk will get. My grandsire thought for fifteen years that he was an ash tree and could not sit down.’
Augustine heard the laugh, and his proud gaze, frowning a little, flicked towards the place from which it had come. For the first time he included the men behind the King in what he had to say, and Owain felt as he had not done until that moment the strange monk’s power and his magnetism. ‘There will be many who laugh at first, but we are come, my brethren and I, to relight the candle of the love of Christ in this land of Britain where it has so utterly perished into the dark; and though we seek to make but a small beginning, remember that a spark falling on tinder is a small beginning, yet it serves to kindle a fire that may light and warm a king’s Hall!’
‘The candle of the love of Christ, in the land of Britain where it has so utterly perished into the dark.’ Among those who stood about the High King, the Princes of Gwent and Powys glanced at each other. Owain remembered again the grey finger of the preaching cross and the little priest whose soul had seemed to be on fire, and Priscilla in her valiant Sunday necklace of blue beads; and he thought, ‘This is a great man, and he loves God, but he is without understanding and without humility.’ And in proportion to the joy of the shining moment he had known so short a time before, he was suddenly wretched.
Augustine was still speaking of the Faith and the Master he served, while the Jutes and Saxons muttered among themselves. But Owain was no longer listening with a whole heart; something had smudged the radiance, and there was growing on him the certainty that there was more to all this than showed on the surface.
But the stranger monk had done now, and Aethelbert was speaking. ‘I have listened to you, and heard what you have to tell, and what you have to ask. As to what you have to tell, I understand little of it. I do not understand your three Gods in one, nor do I see how this God of yours is better than our Woden and Thor of the Hammer, and Frey who brings our beasts to birth and our corn to harvest. But as to what you ask: for the sake of the Lady Bertha my Queen, who will grieve and doubtless make my life a burden if I send you away, you may come to Cantiisburg and build your church there, and welcome whatever men are fools enough to come to you, into the faith of this White Christ of yours. And I will hold back my priests from killing you, if that may be.’
Augustine seemed to grow taller yet, as the King’s words were translated; he flung back his head, and his hands went upward in a gesture that seemed at once triumph and supplication; and for a moment there was a light on his face that was not the cool daylight of the marshes. He cried out in a great voice, ‘Thanks be to the Lord our God!’ And behind him, the monks raised the paean that the soldier-bishop Germanus had raised for a war-cry against the Sea-Wolves of this very coast two hundred years before: ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’
Later, the cooking pits were opened and the carcasses of baked sheep and oxen dragged out, and Aethelbert of Kent feasted with his guests while the shadows of the ridge-tents and branch-woven cabins stretched out long and cool across the grass.
But Owain, who was in no mood for feasting, grew weary before the mead had gone round more than once. He threw the mutton-bone he had been chewing to the nearest dog, and getting up from his place beside one of the fires, turned away towards the dunes and the grey ramparts of the old fortress. Bryni, digging hot marrow out of an ox-bone with the point of his dagger, grinned up at him as he passed, and watched him go, but nobody called after him; he was always something of a lone wolf.
Behind him he heard the voices and the music of the harp falling further across the levels until it was no more than a dim wash of sound in his ears. He crossed the causeway, skirted the whale-backed hump of Rutupiae Island, and dropped down through the soft sand towards what had once been the harbour. There was nothing there now but an odd snout of rotten timber thrust here and there above the drifted sand to tell where busy wharves and slipways had been, and a long curb of worked stone below the watergate that must have formed the edge of the main jetty; and the water that had once been deep enough to take the war-galleys and the great troop-transports of the Empire had sunk away, shallow even now at high tide, as the harbour mouth silted up before the encroaching sand.
And there, below the crest of a long curved dune, he found Einon Hen sitting solitary, his great beaked nose towards the sea. He hesitated, ready to turn away without a word, but the old man looked round with a hint of a smile in his one golden eye, and the young one sat down beside him, knowing himself welcome.
‘I have been all day and for so many days past striving to make myself a bridge between two worlds. But the Saxons will never understand the ways of our people, and nor now will Rome, and I am very weary,’ said Einon Hen, after a companionable silence.
‘I thought it was in your mind that Saxon and Briton drew closer to each other,’ Owain said dully, looking out over the wet sand.
‘Closer yes, but always there will be a gulf and it is still a wide one.’
Another, longer silence followed. At last Owain said, ‘This that has happened today—it was what the Queen meant, when she said that soon we should be a multitude?’
The old man looked round at him quickly. ‘It is the beginning of what she meant.’
‘And Aethelbert knew?—Perhaps he sent for these men himself?’
‘You think that?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I—think so, yes,’ said Einon Hen, very quietly.
‘Einion Hen, what lies behind this that we have seen today?’
The Envoy had begun to draw careful patterns in the slope of the dune with a bony forefinger, but the loose sand ran into the traced lines and filled them up. ‘I do not know,’ he said at last, ‘but this is how I read the signs: I think that the thing has grown two-fold like the sides of an arch, and that what we saw today was the keystone where the two sides come together … Long ago, before even Artos’s time, Rome came crumbling down, and when it rose again from the ashes, all was changed. The power of the Legions was gone for ever, and in its place was another kind of power, the power of our Christian faith. All the provinces of the Western Empire were lost, but they might be won back still—into another kind of Empire; only now the work must be done by the Church, and not the Legions. So much for the first side. For the other—think back four years, to Wodensbeorg. Aethelbert of Kent has cleared his enemy from his path, he is Overlord of all the southern half of Britain, save for that which lies beyond Sabrina, and he is already linked through his Queen with the Frankish Kingdom, the great Christian Kingdom of Clovis. He is a wise man, and he comes to see that for such a ruler as he is, there is much to be gained by becoming one of this new Empire of the Christian faith. So—perhaps—he sends word to Rome, saying, “Come, and I will be converted to your faith, and bring my people with me.” And Rome sends back word,
“Gladly we will come.”’ He drew two sweeping lines in the sand, and stabbed the bony finger with meticulous care into the exact place where they met. ‘The arch is complete, and what men may build upon it, God knows.’
Owain was watching a yellow horned poppy close to his foot as it swayed in the light sea wind. ‘And so, knowing the appointed time of this coming, Aethelbert gathers his lesser Kings under pretence of a frontier council, that he may make a worthy showing of his power before these emissaries of Rome. I never quite believed in that Council.’
‘No?’
‘No. But if it is as you say—’ Owain spoke slowly, thinking the thing out as he went. ‘If it is as you say, why did he greet them so grudgingly? Why not fall into an ecstasy and be converted on the spot?’
‘Because he is not a fool. He cannot be sure how his kings and chieftains will receive the faith of Christ, and he cannot afford to receive it while they hold without weakening to Frey and Woden. He must give the thing time to work, he must feel his way. He is a patient man; he waited more than twenty years to be revenged for Wibbendune. When he can be reasonably sure that it is safe, maybe in a year’s time, maybe more, he will listen to the Queen’s pleading and suffer a change of heart, and come to this Augustine, seeking baptism.’
The silence that fell between them was the longest yet. So long that the evening light across the marshes was beginning to fade when Einon Hen cocked his one bright eye at his companion, and said, ‘My friend, you look as though the taste of sloes was in your mouth.’
Owain laughed ruefully. ‘The taste of one’s own foolishness is just as sour. I thought this morning, just for a wing-beat of time, that—that something wonderful was happening. And all the while it was no more than a piece of statecraft being played out.’
Einon Hen said very quietly, ‘But even a piece of statecraft might hold your “something wonderful” at its heart.’
And Owain looked at him quickly, remembering that this was a man who knew the feel and balance of statecraft as doubtless he had known the feel and balance of a sword when he was young.
‘We spoke together a few days since—you remember?—of looking back through the storm and darkness of these years, to see the last gleam of a lantern far behind; and I said something to you then, I think, of the hope of other light as far ahead. For the space of two men’s lives at least, we have stood alone, we in Britain, cut off from all that Rome once stood for, from all that we thought worth dying for. And today we have joined hands with those days of the Long Wandering, before the Saxon-kind became the things again—a light clasp as yet, and easily broken, but surely it will strengthen, both by the ways of statecraft, and with every man and woman who comes—as they will come, though the time for the Queen’s multitude is not for a long while yet—to Augustine and the Christian Church.’ He abandoned the patterns he had been drawing in the sand, and sat for a few moments completely still, his head up and the breeze off the sea lifting the grey hair at his temples. ‘Not the dawn as yet, Owain, but I think the dawn wind stirring.’
22
Frey’s Horse
IT was dusk when Owain came again over the lip of the dunes, and a faint mist had begun to smoke up from the ground. He saw the red flare of the camp-fires across the marsh, and the sound of voices and harp music came to meet him; but still, as he checked among the furze bushes, he could hear the soft long-drawn hushing of the tide beyond the dunes.
‘Not the dawn yet, but I think the dawn wind stirring.’ The old Envoy’s voice was lingering in his ears, as Uncle Widreth’s had lingered there. He thought suddenly that they would have liked each other, those two old men, if their ways had crossed. ‘Not the dawn yet, but the dawn wind stirring,’ and again, ‘Even a piece of statecraft might hold your “something wonderful” at its heart …’ The wry unhappy mood of the past few hours had fallen from him, and he felt quiet, as one feels after relief from pain; something else too: deep within him, almost below the level of his being aware of it, was a sense of change, like the change in the wind at winter’s end. Ever since the last stand, by Aquae Sulis, he had felt himself at the end of something. Now, standing among the dune furze bushes in the dusk, he knew all at once, that he was at a beginning.
Scarcely aware of moving forward again, he walked on towards the camp-fires.
The royal fire burned before Aethelbert’s great ridge-tent in the midst of the camp, and there the High King sat in his chair, his white boarhounds at his feet and his kings and councillors and the black-robed holy men about him; while Ingwy his harper knelt beside the flames, chanting to his harp the high and far-off deeds of Scyld the Father of his People when the world was young.
At the lower fires where the young warriors gathered, they were making their own more uproarious amusement. They also had a harp, belonging to one of their number, and were passing it from hand to hand as they passed the mead jars, beating out the rhythm of their thoughts as they asked each other the long elaborate riddles beloved of the Saxon folk.
A tow-headed young man with a strong merry voice had the harp when Owain came up, and was ranting out his riddle to a circle of laughing listeners.
White of throat am I, fallow grey my head;
Fallow are my flanks, and my feet are swift;
Battle weapons bear I! Bristles on my back
Like a boar’s stand up. With my pointed toes
Through the green grass step I—
‘A badger!’ somebody shouted. ‘It’s a badger!’
‘A badger’s head isn’t fallow, it’s striped,’ someone else objected, ‘striped black and white like the holy men at the King’s fire yonder.’
‘I say it’s a badger for all that—isn’t it, Osric?’
‘You’re too sharp, you are,’ said Osric, grinning. ‘I wonder you don’t cut yourself!’
And Bryni, who had been sitting beside him, staring idly across the fire at a couple of dark-haired Britons of Gerontius’s bodyguard, sprang up, putting out his hand for the harp in his turn. ‘I’ve made a cunning one—listen!’ His eyes were very bright, and his voice was thick and a good deal louder than usual.
Swifter than swallows, darting through blue air,
Winged I am, mightily, but no bird am I.
Battle-sark I wear, many-scaled, shining,
But no fish spawned me, in green depths under foam.
Flame is my breathing—
Vadir Cedricson yawned and did not trouble to hide it. ‘If you sing in honour of our western strangers, remember to make your dragon red.’
Bryni broke off between one word and the next, and glowered towards him. ‘You said, Vadir Cedricson?’
The other smiled. ‘I said if you sing in honour of the western strangers, remember to make your dragon red.’
‘Are you sure that I was not going to?’
Vadir raised pale brows. ‘My grandsire never did, so far as I remember. He used to ask that riddle after supper, at least twenty times a year.’
‘That’s a lie, for I made it up myself, since supper!’
‘Maybe if you had made it up before supper, you would have remembered where it came from.’
‘I’m drunk, am I?’ Bryni said furiously, and flung the harp aside so that it fell with a jangle of jarred strings. ‘So then—I’ll be drunk as a hero by moonrise, if I choose, but you shan’t tell me of it!’
‘No?’ said Vadir, in a voice as smooth as silk.
‘No!’ shouted Bryni.
The thing had flared up before Owain was well aware of it. Now he cut in. ‘Don’t be a fool, Bryni, you are drunk, and so is he. Let it go.’ But the boy did not seem even to hear him; the blood was burning scarlet along his cheekbones, and his eyes were stormy. ‘No one tells Bryni Beornwulfson when he’s drunk, not even his nearest kin; and thanks be to all the Gods in high Valhalla, you are no kinsman of mine, Vadir.’
Vadir got slowly to his feet; he could move quickly enough when he chose, despite his lame foot, but at the moment he did not choose. Slownes
s could be more maddening. He was as drunk as Bryni, but he showed it less, and he could always goad the boy to madness.
Yet now, maybe for the first time in his life, he said a thing which Owain, watching him, was fairly sure that he had not meant to say. ‘Not yet,’ said Vadir Cedricson.
While the words still hung on the air in the hush that had fallen about the fire, his pale eyes flickered, as though he would have called them back if he could. But the pride which had made him hide from his world the fact that he could want any girl badly enough to wait a year for her, forbade him to deny the thing now that it was said.
In the silence, Bryni took a long menacing step towards him. ‘And what is it that you mean by that?’
Smoothly, deliberately, Vadir told him.
‘That’s another lie!’ Bryni said, when he had finished.
‘No, just something that maybe the women did not trust you to know.’
‘It will be a long time before Lilla comes to your hearth, Vadir.’
‘Ah, I hope not. Your mother thought her too young last year, but by the time for the autumn slaughtering--’
Until then it had been no more than a wordy quarrel. Now, quite suddenly it became deadly. Bryni turned from hot to cold. He said, through shut teeth, ‘Slaughter month is a good choice, Vadir. But men can die as well as cattle. Do you think I’d let you have Lilla, you crooked little man?’
The hush about the fire became a tingling stillness, and in the stillness Owain saw a devil looking out of Vadir’s eyes. He made no sound, but he moved with the swiftness of a striking adder, and something flashed in the firelight, in his hand that had been empty the instant before. Bryni’s knife was out in the same instant, and they sprang together. Blade rang on blade and the sparks flew up. Then Owain had leapt in from behind and caught the boy’s knife-wrist and dragged it down, while other men fell on Vadir, and between them they dragged the two apart.