The Hallowed Isle Book Two (3 page)

“So, it has begun. . . .”

Oesc peered through the door to the great hall, which only this morning had seemed so huge and empty. Now it was filled with men clad in well-worn war-gear and battered finery, with a liberal splashing of mud over all. The folk who served the hall were bustling around them, taking wet cloaks away and bringing beakers of heated ale.

“May Freo bring you blessings,” said their leader, accepting a horn of mead from Æbbe, the king's widowed sister, who had ruled his household as long as Oesc could remember. He must have been handsome once, thought the boy, but now one eyelid drooped and the left side of his face was stiffened by a long scar.

“But where is your neice, Æbbe? Should it not be she who gives the welcome?”

“There is no other Lady in this hall,” said the woman, taking a step backward. “And what unholy wight has taught you my name?”

The stranger frowned. “Did Hildeguth remarry, then? I suppose she thought I was dead—I've thought I was dead a few times myself, these past years!” His hand moved to touch his scar. “Have I changed so much, Æbbe, that even you don't know me?”

“It is my daughter who is dead,” came a harsh voice from the far end of the hall, “killed by the seed you planted in her belly, and if you had not already claimed guest-right I would drive you from my door!” Leaning on his staff, Eadguth limped forward to his high seat and took his place there.

Oesc stared from one to the other, aware of every heartbeat that shook his chest, understanding without quite believing who the newcomer must be.

Octha, son of Hengest . . . his father.

Octha straightened, the muscles of his face stiffening into a battle-mask. “And the child?” he asked in a still voice. “Did it die too?”

“Shall I tell you it died in the womb?” Eadguth spat, “or that I set it out upon the heath for the wolves?”

“You shall tell him the truth, old man,” said Hæthwæge, gripping Oesc by the shoulder and pushing him before her into the light of the fire. “Sore though it grieved you, you have reared up his son!”

For a moment longer the warrior's glance clashed with that of the king. Then Octha turned, his face changing as he looked at the boy.

“Come here—”

With feet that did not seem his own Oesc stepped forward. Octha knelt and gripped the boy's face between callused hands. After a moment he swallowed.

“You have your mother's eyes . . .”

Oesc nodded. Hæthwæge had told him so.

“But I see Hengest in your brow . . . What do they call you?”

“I am Oesc, son of Octha—” His voice wavered only a little.

“My son!”

Powerful arms closed around him; Oesc smelled horse, and wet wool, and the strong scent of the man. It was very strange. Not so long ago, Woden had also called him son—from being fatherless he seemed suddenly over-supplied with kin. He took a deep breath as Octha let him go.

“I am going back to Britannia, where the cows grow fat in green pastures and apples hang heavy on the bough. Will you come with me?”

Soon, Woden had told him, he would have to choose. Oesc looked into his father's storm-grey eyes, but when he spoke, he knew he was answering the god.

“Yes, father, I will come.”

Since Octha's arrival three days had passed. The storm had moved on, but on the Field of Assembly scattered pools mirrored the blue sky. Only a few rags of cloud still clung to the southeastern heavens. As the people gathered, the green grass was being trampled to a muddy brown. But perhaps it would not matter, thought Oesc as he watched them from his place at his father's side. If the moot voted to follow Octha over the sea, the cattle would be slaughtered or sold and there would be no need for pastureland.

The thought awakened an anxious flutter in his belly. He knew there were other lands, for he had heard the shopes and gleemen sing of them, but Eadguth's hall was the center of his world. Most of the Myrgings had gathered, women and children forming a larger ring around the chieftains and heads of families. He looked around him for Hæthwæge, then remembered that the wicce had told him she had no need to watch. She had already seen this wyrd when she cast the runes.

Why did she not inform Eadguth, then, and save us all the trouble of deciding?
he wondered, but as the wisewoman had often told him, you might predict the sun's rising, but you had to wait for it to happen just the same.

A bench had been placed for the king beneath the oak tree. His
witan,
the tribal elders, sat around him. Sunlight glowing through the young leaves dappled his white hair. Eadguth Gamol, they called him, Eadguth the Old, for of all the kings of the north, only Healfdene of Sillende had reigned longer.

His other grandfather, Hengest, was old too, thought Oesc. But he ruled a confederation of war-bands, like the sea-kings of Frisia. Eadguth was bred and bound through many fathers to his kingship and his land.

A murmur ran through the crowd as Geflaf, leader of the king's sword-thanes, stepped forward. He raised a great silver-mounted horn to his lips and blew, and as its echoes faded, the people also became still.

“Hear, ye chieftains and people of the Myrgings here assembled. A stranger, Octha son of Hengest, has come among us. The witan has called you to hear and consider his words.”

“He is an Anglian of royal kin, and our enemy!” cried the chieftain of one of the older Myrging clans.

“He is not of the kin of Offa the king-slayer, but a lesser line, and has never borne arms against us,” came the reply.

“Our kin serve in his father's war-band,” said one of the Jutes who had settled among the Myrgings, taking up farmsteads left vacant after the Anglian wars. “Let us hear what he has to say.”

For a little longer the clamor continued, but eventually it became clear that the mood of the moot was in Octha's favor.

Another murmur arose as he stepped forward, Oesc at his side. By now, of course, everyone had heard the rumors that the mysterious father of their Lady's son had reappeared. Oesc hung back as he realized that they were staring at him as well, but Octha's grip was firm.

He is using me to show them he is not an enemy,
the boy realized suddenly, and allowed himself to be pulled along. For most of his short life he had been at best an embarrassment to his mother's kin; to stand forth before the people as one with a right to honor seemed very strange. For the first time, it came to him that he too might one day be a king.

“Men of the Myrgings!” cried Octha, “and all of you—be you Jute or Saxon or Frank, who by marriage or alliance have become part of this tribe. I come here as your ally, for it was a princess of your people who gave me my son!”

Someone started a cheer, and Oesc felt the hot color rise in his cheeks.

“Then why have you waited till now to claim him?” came another voice.

“There's many a man who goes off to war childless and returns to learn he has an heir. For ten winters I have battled in Britannia; I have slain many princes of their people, and cut down those who thought themselves the heirs of Rome. At first we fought for treasure, but now we fight for land. The British have little strength to resist us—their king is a sick man, and he has no son. The land lies undefended, ripe for the taking. To hold that earth men must till it, and so I come to you.

“Follow me to Britannia—bring your wives and your children. Bring your axes and your ploughs.”

“Why should we abandon the hearths of our mothers and the howes where our fathers lie?” came the cry.

“Because this land is drowning!” responded Octha. “Look around you—the fields are blighted by bad weather and your cattle are dying. Each year more of your shores are eaten by the sea. In Britannia there are wide fields, fruitful and flourishing—good harvests of oat crops and broad barley-crops, white fields of wheat-crops and all that grows in Middle Earth.”

“But they are not
our
fields. Will they bear for us if we do not know the names of the wights that dwell there?”

“Those fields have borne fruit for all the tribes the Romans settled in that land,” said Octha. “Warriors from Iberia and Sarmatia and Gallia and other lands who took up farming after their time in the legions was done. Our cousins the Franks get good crops from the lands they have won in Gallia. Till the fields and make the offerings, and when your time comes, lay your bones in the soil. By blood and toil shall we claim Britannia and make it our own.”

“We will go!” said one of the Jutish chieftains, a man called Hæsta. “There are men of my blood already in Hengest's war-band. They have said that Cantuware is a land of good soil and good grazing, where the cows give milk thrice a day at this time of year.”

“And it breeds good fighters—” an older man spoke up, lifting an arm scarred and twisted by an old wound. “In my youth I too have been to Britannia, but all I got there was steel. It is well enough for warriors to take such chances, but I will not risk my family in a land whose native folk are awakening at last, determined to get back their own.”

“Better to die by steel than starvation!” exclaimed another, and suddenly everyone was arguing.

“What says Eadguth?” someone cried at last. “What is the word of the Myrging king?”

Slowly, silence fell. When it was quite still, the thrall Cubba, who was even older than the king, assisted Eadguth to unfold his gaunt frame from the chair. The king came forward, leaning on his staff. For a few moments he looked around him, and those who had cried the loudest for emigration found it hard to meet his eyes.

“The gods have given me long life. For more than forty winters I have been your king. . . .” His voice did not seem loud, but it carried.

“In those years I have seen many things. I have seen five summers when the rains were so scant that the river sank down till its banks gaped like toothless jaws. That time ended. So will this. I have seen blizzards that heaped snow halfway up the walls and held us prisoner from one moon to the next. That time ended—this will too. And I have seen harvests so plentiful we had not the barns to store it all. And those times also came to an end. You cry out now like children who cannot go out to play because of the rain. And I say to you, neither will this time last.”

He spoke slowly, a kindly grandfather chiding willful boys, and here and there a man would hang his head with a shamefaced grin.

“A man's mood changes, sometimes happy and sometimes sorrowful. Our holy mother earth has also her moods and changes. Will you desert her because now she is weeping? For men who have been uprooted from their homelands perhaps it is true that one land is as good as the next. But the Myrgings have been here since Mannus himself walked the earth. We are a free land and a free people, bound only to this soil.”

Carefully, Eadguth bent and grasped a handful of muddy earth. He held it high, and the water squeezed out between his fingers and ran like brown blood down his hand.

My mother's bones lie in this earth,
thought Oesc.
If I leave here, I will have lost her entirely.
But his father still stood beside him, and his bones were clad in warm and living flesh.

“Will you leave this holy earth, blessed by the blood of your fathers, for an alien land? Perhaps, as Octha says, in time it will accept you. But I say this—it will not be in your time, nor in that of your children. Stay, men of the Myrgings and those whom we have welcomed here. Stay, and defend the land that has nourished you.”

Some of the men knelt in reverence and set their hands on the wet grass, but others were still standing, brows bent in thought.

Geflaf stepped forward once more. “The Myrging-king has spoken. Go now, carls and eorls, free men of our nation. Speak together, and when the sun is sinking toward the sea, return and say what your decision will be.”

He turned away, and the men drew into knots and clusters as they began their debate.

“What now?” asked Octha, watching King Eadguth make his way slowly back toward the hall.

“Now we wait,” answered Geflaf. He also was watching his king, and Oesc saw sorrow in his gaze.

That day seemed very long to Oesc, longer even than the day before the Midsummer festival. He tried to fill it by showing his father where Hildeguth was buried, and the best place to catch fish below the whirlpool, and even the god-images in the sacred bog, but he could tell that Octha's attention was elsewhere. And as the sun drove her wain across the fields of the sky his distraction grew, until the time came to turn their steps back toward the great oak tree.

Away to the west the sky was glowing in shades of amber and rose. Broad bands of light rayed out from the setting sun as if showing the way to Britannia. But a great peace lay on the Myrging lands. Even the sea lay still, its waters a lucent blue, and each leaf and blade of grass seemed to have caught the sunset's gold. Did it seem so fair, wondered Oesc, because he might soon be leaving it? Then he looked again and thought,
But perhaps we will not be going. It is too beautiful. On such an evening, no one could make the choice to go.