Moyra Caldecott (13 page)

She bent her head in acknowledgement.

He did not see her eyes.

‘You are in time for your father’s burial.’

She looked up at once, relieved that she was not too late.

‘My lord, have you sent for Archbishop Honorius to come from Kent to speak at his grave? I know my father would have wished it.’

‘No.’

‘Bishop Thomas then, from Dunwich?’

‘Neither, princess.’

‘Who then, my lord?’

‘Have you not heard that your father renounced the Christian god before he died? He will be buried as his ancestors were, under the protection of the real gods.’

Etheldreda was horrified. She looked from the sly face of her uncle as he said these words to her friends at court. It was only then she noticed that there was no Christian priest present, none of her father’s closest companions, no one who could stand up to her uncle and give him the lie on this.

She swallowed.

‘I had not heard this, sir. Was it witnessed?’

She stood very still and straight, looking him in the eye.

‘Aye, it was witnessed.’

‘Who witnessed it?’

‘These men here.’ He indicated a group of his closest friends.

‘I would like to know exactly what he said,’ she said, trembling, anger almost choking her, but knowing that she was dead if she showed it.

‘He vowed when he went into battle that if his god gave him the victory he would build three churches to him, the finest in the world, but if he was defeated he would take it as a sign he had not been heard and he would never pray to him again.’

Etheldreda was silent. She knew for sure now that Ethelhere was lying. King Anna had discussed just this very type of bargaining with God with her on several occasions and she knew that he so disapproved of it he would never resort to it himself no matter how hard pressed he was. ‘What! Threaten God that you will withdraw your favours from Him if He does not obey you! Offer Him presents if He helps you!’ The thing was so ridiculous to him he had laughed aloud. No matter how many misunderstood God’s nature and man’s relationship to Him that they made such vows, Anna would not be one of them.

She looked around her carefully. She felt like flinging herself upon Ethelhere, seizing his own dagger and plunging it into his heart before he could do any more damage. She looked at her husband and his men. They were unarmed and placed separately amongst Ethelhere’s armed men. Ethelhere was smiling, but being very, very careful.

Something of her old training at court stayed with her. She knew that she must smile and bow and show nothing of her true feelings lest they be used against her. She must bide her time, plan her action, making no aggressive move unless she were covered from every side by companions who could support her. In her father’s days she had hated these lessons in hypocrisy and had spoken out against them, but now they saved her life.

Quietly and calmly she reminded herself of other lessons she had learned. Every act of violence brings with it more problems than it solves. To plunge a knife into another’s heart wounds the soul of the aggressor more than the body of the victim.

‘It surprises me, my lord,’ she said at last, holding her voice steady. ‘My father’s works throughout his life are surely greater witness to his love of the true God, than a few words spoken in fear just before a battle.’

‘If his god were “true” as you say,’ Ethelhere said with an ill disguised sneer, ‘why did he give a pagan victory over him?’

‘The battles the Lord supports are not fought with swords and spears. Christ came to tell us that. Who are we to say he did not win a victory after all? The loom of the Lord is vast. No one can see the whole pattern of the weave.’

Ethelhere’s face darkened and he rose from his chair impatiently.

‘I have been gentle with you, niece, because of the sorrow you must be feeling for your father’s death, but I have no time to sit and argue. Your father was a much respected man and I loved him as a brother. It is because I loved him I now rejoice that he has returned to the old and faithful gods, and I will see that he gets the burial he desired. If you wish to attend the ceremony you may, but I must demand that you speak no words blasphemous to the true gods. If you do not wish to attend, I will say nothing, but wish you well on your return to your own country.’

He stressed the words ‘your own’ as though reminding her that she was no longer of this country and consequently had no right to interfere.

She bowed.

‘I will stay, my lord, and see my father buried.’

‘And keep silence on pain of death?’ He looked at her hard and menacingly.

‘And keep silence,’ she agreed.

‘Good. We will waste no more time then.’ He started to move briskly towards the door.

‘My lord…’

‘What is it now?’ He paused impatiently to look at her. She knew that this was the last time he would listen to her.

‘Is it to be a full pagan burial? My father to lie with all his war accoutrements and the treasures of his house.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have I your permission to bring a few of his personal things to lay beside him? Things I know he loved, though they were not of great value in the world’s eyes.’

‘You may do so, but you may say no words when you lay them down.’

‘Thank you, my lord,’ she said, and bent her knee to him as he strode past her and out through the door.

Ethelhere had planned the whole thing well.

In order to return the country to the old gods to please Penda, and to ensure that he would be allowed to keep the limited power he had, he had to discredit the Christian God and show the people in one flamboyant, memorable act that even the man who had been so long a champion of Christianity had at last abandoned it.

The burial was to be spectacular, the site chosen among the burial mounds of their forefathers overlooking the estuary of the River Deben up which Anna’s own pagan grandfather had sailed.
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It was to be a ship burial harking back to the heroic days when men were under the protection of the old gods as they crossed the wild and stormy seas.

Ethelhere had had difficulty in finding priests capable of conducting the burial ceremony in the old grand way, for they had been long out of favour, living in secret, peddling only charms and curses to the superstitious peasants and villagers. But even when he had overcome this difficulty he was faced with others even more serious.

At the very last moment, when most of the crowds were already gathered, he was told that King Anna’s body had disappeared.

‘What?’ he screamed. But rant or rage as he may he could not bring it back.

His first thought was that it was some mischief of his niece Etheldreda, but she was in his entourage and had been under observation ever since her arrival. He tried to think clearly. It was vitally important to his own grasp of power that Anna should be seen to have accepted the old gods.

It was too late to postpone the burial until the body was found, and unwise to let the people know that it was missing.

Indeed, if it were known the body were in the hands of the Christians to be given a Christian burial, it would be a mighty rallying point for all the dissidents in the country, and they were many.

He looked at Etheldreda, but her face showed nothing. ‘She will pay for this,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I should have killed her when she first walked through my door!’ He was certain that somehow she was responsible for the abduction. She had been a clever child, and as a woman she was accepted as equal by scholars and by kings. She had always made him feel uneasy, looking at him with those clear eyes, as though she could see into his very soul. But he was clever too, and this time he believed he would outsmart her. He mastered the outward signs of his discomfiture, took those aside who had brought the message and those who had heard it, swore them to secrecy, and sent them to organise a discreet search. His instructions were that if they were to find the king’s body they were to kill all who had anything to do with its theft and hide it in a place only they would know, later to be revealed only to him.

He then took his most trusted thegns aside and some of the Mercian captains and ordered all that he could spare to disperse across the land, waiting for his signal to begin a purge of Christians and a punishment of dissidents if there were any sign of an uprising.

He then proceeded with the funeral procession as though nothing was wrong.

There were huge crowds gathered for the burial in the sandy heathland beside the royal mounds.

For most people it did not seem strange that a Christian king should have a pagan burial. They were gullible and believed it when his brother, whom they had no reason to distrust, said that it had been his last wish. With some of them belief in the old gods had never really died, and bubbled easily to the surface again. With others Christianity was merely a convention, having no proper roots, easily abandoned. For such people a spectacle, a show of power and riches, was enough to influence allegiance, as the Roman Church had realised when it dressed its bishops in fine clothes and copes embroidered lavishly with gold thread. Ethelhere understood this too when he ordered the immense ship burial with full ceremony.

The new king was dressed magnificently as he climbed to the top of the huge mound of earth that had been excavated to take the hull of the ship. From the four directions of the wind mighty horns were blown to call the people’s attention to him. When all was quiet Ethelhere raised his arms in greeting.

‘My brother, King Anna, hero of our people…’ He paused for the cheering to die down, and then resumed.

‘King Anna prayed to his Christian god,’ he said loudly and clearly, and there was scorn in the way he said the word Christian. ‘…prayed for deliverance from his enemies. He vowed to his Christian god that if he won the battle against Penda he would build three churches in stone that would last forever, the greatest in the world. But if he were defeated he would know his prayer had not been heard and he would pay homage to Penda’s gods, the ancient gods of our people!’ He suddenly raised his voice on these last words and the sound of his voice carried with tremendous power across the listening crowd. There was a murmur which he stilled with a gesture of his hand. ‘He vowed before witnesses,’ and here the men who claimed to be witnesses stepped forward and were pointed out triumphantly by Ethelhere, ‘that he would have no Christian burial, but would be buried in the manner of his ancestors, under the protection of his father’s gods. And this duty…’ he shouted again, ‘he charged me to carry out!’ Again he paused for the murmuring to die down.

‘He fought as a hero fights, but his god gave him no help. He died, chopped to pieces by his enemies, his members scattered across the fields… not even a body left for us to bury!’

The people swayed and keened. Anna had been greatly loved.

Ethelhere wept.

The people wept.

Etheldreda stood, dry eyed, angry.

Gradually the ceremony unfolded. Dirges were sung, and bards recited the heroic deeds of the hero king and one by one Anna’s old companions brought treasures from his personal store and placed them where the priests dictated, within the burial chamber, amidships. Meanwhile the priests intoned invocations to Woden and Thunor and Saxnet for protection for the dead hero, stressing his repentance that he had left their service for so long, and promising that his people would make amends for him now that he was dead.

Etheldreda did not move from where she had been told to stand.

At last Ethelhere gestured for her to move forward. His eyes gleamed dangerously into hers as she passed close to him, but, as before, her face was expressionless.

She had a few silver things of her father’s wrapped in her shawl and she placed them carefully in the place where her father’s heart would have been had his body been laid in the ship. There were ten silver bowls and two spoons her father had been given at the time of his baptism. She spoke no words aloud, but in her heart prayers to the Christian God for the protection of her father were deep and fervent.

No one noticed the words that were engraved on the silver spoons. Even if they had, no one present would have understood them. The writing was Greek and even Ethelhere was illiterate. One spoon had the name Saul engraved upon it, the other Paul. She placed them there as a secret token for anyone who might disturb the burial mound no matter how many millennia hence, that her father had been a pagan, but had been converted to the service of Christ, and died as Paul had done, still in that service.

The bowls she placed in two piles, upside-down, each fitting within the other, the Christian message of the flowering cross invisible, biding its time.

Gradually the burial chamber filled up. Her father’s standard and his rod of office were laid to rest, his helmet and his shoes. His personal accoutrements were laid as though still upon his body.

She could not restrain the tears that came to her eyes when his belt was laid down and she saw the purse she had often seen him fondle containing a collection of Merovingian coins gathered by Sigbert during his long sojourn in the Frankish kingdom. It had been one of her pleasures as a child to be allowed to play with them, and he had promised her once that one day he would have a goldsmith make a necklace of them for her, and she had longed for it, spending much happy time visualising herself wearing the exotic foreign currency around her neck. But Ethelhere had decided to use the coins in the burial as symbolic payment for the forty spirit oarsmen who would row her father to the world his ancestors now inhabited, and had made the number up with three gold blanks, including two gold ingots for the steersman.

The huge drinking horns that Redwald, the great Bretwalder, had been so proud of and that had come from their homeland, won by a heroic ancestor from the rare and mighty aurochs, were carried in. Ethelhere was determined that no man would be able to fault him in the funeral arrangements or suspect him of collusion in his brother’s death.

When it came time for Anna’s sword to be placed in the chamber Ethelhere raised his arms theatrically and all chanting and music died down. He stood with his arms raised until there was complete silence in the huge crowd, those near enough to see and hear whispering to those behind them to be still.