Sworn Brother (8 page)

The ealdorman and his party took their seats along one side of the high table, looking down at us. Then came a third horn blast, and from the left-hand side of the hall appeared a small procession of women. Leading them was Aelfgifu. I recognised her at once and felt a surge of pride. She had chosen to wear the same close-fitting sky-blue dress in which I had first seen her at Knut’s Easter assembly in London. Then her long hair had hung loose, held with a single gold fillet. Now her hair was coiled up on her head, to reveal the slender white neck I remembered so well. I could not keep my eyes from her. She walked forward at the head of the procession, looking demurely down at the ground and holding a silver jug. Stepping up to her uncle’s table, she filled the glass goblet of the chief guest, then her uncle’s glass and then the noble next in rank. Judging by the colour of the liquid she poured, their drink was also a luxurious import - red wine. Her formal duty done, Aelfgifu handed the jug to a servant and walked to take her own seat. To my chagrin she was placed at the far end of the high table, and from where I sat my neighbour blocked my line of sight.

The cooks had excelled themselves. Even I, who was used to eating Edgar’s game stews, was impressed by the variety and quality of the dishes. There were joints of pork and mutton, rounds of blood sausage and pies and pastes of freshwater fish - pike, perch, eel - with sweet pastries too. We were offered white bread, unlike the everyday rough bread, and of course there was the venison which Edgar had contributed, now brought in ceremonially on iron spits. I tried leaning forward and then back on my bench, attempting to get another glimpse of Aelfgifu. But my immediate neighbour on my right was a big, hulking man - the burh’s ironworker as it turned out — and he was soon irritated by my fidgeting.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘settle down and get on with the meal. Not often that you have a chance to eat such fine food —’ he belched happily — ‘or as much to drink.’

Of course, we were not offered wine, but on the table were heavy bowls made from local clay, which gave a deep grey sheen to the pottery. They contained a drink which I had not tasted before.

‘Cider,’ commented my burly neighbour as he enthusiastically used a wooden scoop to refill his wooden cup and mine. He had an enormous thirst and throughout the meal gulped cup after cup. I tried to avoid his friendly insistence to keep pace, but it proved difficult, even when I switched to drinking mead flavoured with myrtlewort in the hope that he would leave me alone. The leather mead bottle was in the hands of an overly efficient servant, and every time I put down my cup he topped it up again. Gradually, and for almost the first time in my life, I was getting drunk.

As the banquet progressed, the entertainers came on. A pair of jugglers skipped into the open space between the tables and began throwing batons and balls in the air and doing somersaults. It was uninspiring stuff, so there were catcalls and rude comments, and the jugglers left, looking cross. The audience perked up when the next act came on — a troop of performing dogs. They were dressed in coloured jackets and fancy collars and had been trained to scamper about in patterns, to duck and roll over, to walk on two feet and jump through hoops or over a bar. The audience shouted with approval as the bar rose higher and higher, and threw scraps of meat and chicken into the arena as rewards. Next it was the turn of the ealdorman’s scop to come forward. He was the Saxon version of our Norse skald, and his duty was to declaim verses in praise of his lord and compose poems in honour of the chief guest. Remembering my time as an apprentice skald, I listened carefully. But I was not overly impressed. The ealdorman’s scop had a mumbling delivery and I thought that his verses were mundane. I suspected they were stock lines which he changed to suit the particular individual at his lord’s table, filling in the names of whoever was present that day. When the scop had finished and the final lines of poetry died away, there was an awkward silence.

‘Where’s the gleeman?’ called down the ealdorman, and I saw the steward hurry up to the high table and say something to his master. The steward was looking unhappy.

‘The gleeman’s probably failed to show,’ slurred my neighbour. The cider was making him alternately cantankerous and genial. ‘He’s become very unreliable. Meant to travel from one festival to another, but often has too much of a hangover to remember his next engagement.’

The steward was heading towards a small crowd of onlookers standing at the back of the hall. They were mostly women, kitchen workers. I saw him approach one young woman at the front of the crowd, take her by the wrist and try to bring her forward. For a moment she resisted and then I saw a harp being passed to her from somewhere at the back of the room. She beckoned to a youth sitting at the far table and he got to his feet. By now an attendant had placed two stools in the middle of the cleared space and the young man and woman - I could see that they were brother and sister - came forward and, after paying their respects to the ealdorman, sat down. The young man produced a bone whistle from his tunic and fingered a few experimental notes.

The crowd fell silent as his sister began to tune her harp. It was different from the harps I had known in Ireland. The Irish instrument is strung with twenty or more wires of bronze, while the harp the girl was holding was lighter, smaller, and had only a dozen strings. When she plucked it I realised it was corded with gut. But the simpler instrument suited her voice, which was pure, untrained and clear. She sang a number of songs, while her brother accompanied her on his whistle. The songs were about love and war and travel, and were plain enough, and no worse for that. The ealdorman and his guests listened for most of the time, only occasionally talking among themselves, and I judged that the stand-in musicians had done well.

When they finished, the dancing began. The young man on the whistle was joined by other local musicians, playing pan pipes, shaking rattles and beating tambourines. People left their benches and started to dance in the centre of the hall. Determined to enjoy themselves, men coaxed women out of the crowd of onlookers, and the music became more cheerful and spirited and everyone began to clap and sing. None of the august guests danced, of course, they merely looked on. I could see that the dancing was uncomplicated, a few steps forward, a few steps back, a sideways shuffle. To escape from my drunken neighbour, whose head was beginning to loll heavily against my shoulder, I decided to try. A little fuddled, I rose from my bench and joined the dancers. Among the line of women and girls coming towards me, I realised, was the girl harpist. She was wearing a bodice of russet red and a skirt of contrasting brown, which showed off her figure, and with her brown hair cut short and lightly freckled skin, she was the picture of fresh womanhood. Each time we passed she gave my hand a little squeeze. Gradually the music grew faster and faster, and the circles whirled with increasing speed, until we were short of breath. The music rose to a crescendo and then stopped abruptly. Laughing and smiling, the dancers staggered to a halt and there in front of me was the harpist girl. She stood before me, triumphant with her evening’s success. Still intoxicated, I reached forward, took her in my arms and gave her a kiss. A heartbeat later, I heard a short, loud crash. It was a sound that few people in that gathering could have ever heard in their lives — the sound of expensive glass shattering. I looked up and there was Aelfgifu, standing up. She had flung her goblet on the table. As her uncle and his guests looked up in amazement, Aelfgifu stalked out of the hall, her back rigid with anger.

Swaying tipsily, I suddenly felt wretched. I knew that I had offended the woman I adored.

“W
ar, hunting and
love are as full of trouble as they are of pleasure.’ Edgar launched another of his proverbs at me next morning, as we were getting ready to visit the hawk shed, which he called the hack house, and feed the hawks.

“What do you mean?’ I asked, though I had a shrewd idea why he had mentioned love.

‘Our lady’s got a quick temper.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Come on, lad. I’ve known Aelfgifu since she was a skinny girl growing up. As a youngster she was always trying to get away from the stuffiness of the burh. Used to spend half her days with my wife and me down at the cottage. Playing around like any ordinary child, though she tended to get into more mischief than most. A real little vixen she could be when she was caught out. But she’s got a good heart and we love her still. And we were very proud when she was wed to Knut, though by then she had become a grand lady.’

‘What’s that got to do with her bad temper?’

Edgar paused with his hand on the door into the hack house, and there was a glint of amusement in his eyes as he looked straight at me. ‘Don’t think you’re the first young man she’s taken a fancy to,’ he said. ‘Soon after you arrived, it was clear that you were not cut out to be kennelman.
I
began wondering why you were brought all the way from London and
I
asked the steward, who told me that you had been included in my lady’s travelling party on her particular instructions. So
I
had my guess, but
I
wasn’t sure until
I
saw her tantrum last night. No harm in that,’ he went on, ‘Aelfgifu’s not been so well treated these past months, what with that other queen, Emma, and Knut being away all the time.
I
‘d say she has a right to her own life. And she’s been more than good to me and my wife. When our daughter was taken by the Danes, it was Aelfgifu who offered to pay her ransom if she was ever located. And she would still do so.’

The hawking season
was now upon us, and for the previous two months we had been preparing Edgar’s hunting birds as they emerged from their moult. The hack house contained three peregrine falcons, a merlin, and a pair of small sparrowhawks, as well as the costly gyrfalcon which had first got me into trouble. The gyrfalcon, Edgar pointed out, was worth its weight in pure silver or ‘the price of three male slaves or perhaps four useless kennelmen’. He and
I
would go into the hack house every day, to ‘man’ the birds as he put it. This meant picking them up and getting them used to being handled by humans while feeding them special titbits to increase their strength and condition as their new feathers grew. Edgar proved to be just as expert with birds as he was with hounds. He favoured a diet of goslings, eels and adders for the long-winged falcons and mice for the short-winged hawks. Now
I
learned why there was sandy floor beneath their perches: it allowed us to find and collect the droppings from each bird, which Edgar examined with close attention. He explained that hunting birds could suffer from almost-human ailments, including itch, rheum, worms, mouth ulcers and cough. When Edgar detected a suspicion of gout in one of the peregrines, an older bird, he sent me to find a hedgehog for it to eat, which he pronounced to be the only cure.

Most of the birds, with the exception of the gyrfalcon and one of the sparrowhawks, were already trained. When they had their new feathers, it was only necessary to reintroduce them to their hunting duties. But the gyrfalcon had recently arrived in the hack house when I first saw it. That was why its eyelids had been sewn shut. ‘It keeps the bird calm and quiet when it’s being transported,’ Edgar explained. ‘Once it arrives in its new home, I ease the thread little by little so that the bird looks out on its surroundings gradually and setdes in without stress. It may seem cruel, but the only other method is to enclose its head in a leather hood, and I don’t like to do that to a bird captured after it has learned to hunt in the wild. Putting on the hood too soon can cause chafing and distress.’

Edgar also had a warning. ‘A dog comes to depend upon its master, but a hunting bird keeps its independence,’ he said. ‘You may tame and train a bird to work with you, and there is no greater pleasure in any sport than to fly your bird and see it take its prey and then return to your hand. But always remember that the moment the bird takes to the air it has the choice of liberty. It may fly away and never return. Then you will suffer falconer’s heartbreak.’

Their free spirit attracted me to the hunting birds and I quickly found that I had a natural talent for handling them. Edgar started me off with one of the little sparrowhawks, the least valuable of his charges. He chose the one which had never yet been trained and showed me how to tie six-inch strips of leather to the bird’s ankles with a special knot, then slip a longer leash through the metal rings at their ends. He equipped me with a falconer’s protective glove, and each day I fed the hawk its diet of fresh mouse, encouraging it to leap from the perch to the warm carcass in my hand. The sparrowhawk was shrill and bad tempered when it first arrived - a sure sign, according to Edgar, that it had been taken from the nest as a fledgling and not caught after it had left the nest - yet within two weeks I had it hopping back and forth like a garden pet. Edgar confessed he had never seen a sparrowhawk tamed so fast. ‘You seem to have a way with women,’ he commented, slily because only the female sparrow-hawk is any use for hunting.