The Hallowed Isle Book Two (23 page)

Oesc leaned forward, striving to see behind the dirt and the dried blood and the wild grey-streaked hair.

“Is it Baldulf?” he asked, coming down from his high seat and opening his arms. “It must be! You stink too badly to be aught but a mortal man! Old friend, what has happened to bring you to my door like—” He shook his head, seeking words.

“Like a fugitive?” Baldulf sank down upon a bench, took the horn of ale the thrall-woman offered and drank it down. “That's what I am, boy—fleeing a lost battlefield and the wrath of your young high king.”

“You were in the north—” Oesc said, “were you with Icel?”

Baldulf grunted. “I was safe enough in my dale, until that smooth-talking Anglian sent messages around seeking allies in his campaign against Lindum. All went well for a time, but Artor came at last, and brought Icel to battle. Lad, I was lucky to survive that day, and luckier still not to be captured. The Anglians have taken oath to Artor, but the other prisoners were killed. If I never see another marsh I shall count myself happy!” He shuddered reminiscently and held out his horn to be refilled with ale.

“I won't give you up to him, if that's what you were wondering,” said Oesc, “but I can't keep you here.”

“Nor would I stay—help me to a ship and I'll be over the water to the Frisian lands.” He took another drink and reached out for a hunk of the bread which had been set before him. “There may be no Anglians left to replace those Icel lost, but there are still fighters on the coast who might be willing to try their luck in Britannia. Two men only survived from my warband—” He gestured towards his followers, who were being fed at a table by the door. “But I'll soon raise another. The Britons have not heard the last of me!”

Oesc nodded bemusedly. Listening to Baldulf was like stepping back into another time, to the days when Hengest and his father tore at Britannia like wolves. Things were different now. He understood why Icel had accepted Artor's peace. Now Britannia was his land, too. After a moment he realized that Baldulf had asked him a question.

“Come with you? No—all that I want is here—” He shook his head, smiling.

“All? What about a plump wife to warm your bed, and fair-haired children about your knee? Shall I look for the daughter of a Frisian chieftain, or maybe a Frankish princess, to be your queen?”

Oesc stared at him, all his frustration focusing suddenly into a single need. “I do need a wife,” he said then, “but not a woman from across the sea. I must marry into this land if my heirs are to hold it. . . .”

Suddenly Rigana's face filled his vision. Tomorrow, he thought, he would ride to the hut on the Downs. After that first encounter he had not touched her, but one way or another, he knew that she would be his queen.

T
ORCHES HAD BEEN SET INTO THE CRUMBLING CITY WALL AND
upon the green height of Hengest's mound. They flickered with pale fire in the last light of the soft summer day. The space before the mound had been cleared and spread with rushes to accommodate the tables for the wedding feast. The King's Hall had not room enough for so many, and in any case, this close to Midsummer it was far too warm to huddle indoors.

The sound of Andulf's chanting floated on the wind. He was old now, and his voice no longer as resonant as it once had been, but he still had the trick of pitching it to carry across the field.

Oesc, who had gone to consult with his steward about serving more mead, surveyed the scene and smiled. Two dozen tables rayed out in a semicircle from his own, where Rigana, draped in crimson silk and hung with gold, awaited him. Her features were half-hidden by the fall of her veil, but his pulse leaped at the sight of her all the same. In the month since he had brought her home to Cantuwaraburh, he had discovered that he could always sense her presence, and his pulse quickened at the mere brush of her hand.

But he had, in addition, a very different reason for feeling satisfaction. The Cantuware chieftains, nodding approvingly as Andulf began to recite Oesc's ancestry, had all turned out with their sworn men, but that, he had expected. It was their duty to witness the wedding of their lord to the woman who would give him his heir. But Ceretic had brought his West Saxons, and Aelle, his hair now entirely white but his frame still well-muscled, had journeyed up from the south coast to attend the celebration, and that was an honor on which Oesc had not dared to depend.

And beside Rigana, where her father, had he been living, would have had his place, sat Artor the High King, who had made time between campaigning against the Anglians and dealing with the new threat from Irish raiders in Demetia to come. He almost looked the part of a father, thought Oesc, watching them. In the past year or so Artor had broadened out—not with fat, but with the muscle that comes from wearing armor for long hours over an extended campaign. In Artor's eyes Oesc could still recognize the boy he had first faced across a battlefield sixteen years before, but the body was now emphatically that of a man, and a king.

It was with enthusiasm that Artor had accepted Oesc's invitation to stand for the family of the bride at the wedding. More eagerness, to tell the truth, than Rigana had shown when she heard about it. To be sure, it was Vitalinus the Vor-Tigernus who had given away her grandfather's princedom, not Uthir, but even though there was now no man of that line fit to hold Cantium, Rigana blamed the House of Ambrosius for not having won it back to British rule, and Artor for confirming Oesc as its lord.

It was no use to point out that if the Saxons had never come, she would most likely have been married off young to some lord living elsewhere in Britannia, whereas now she would be queen in her own country. Oesc was coming to understand the bride he had brought home from the hills. Courageous she was, as well as passionate, but logic was not one of her virtues.

Surely that must please her, thought Oesc. Artor had signed the marriage contract on her behalf, and now he was slicing meat from the joint that had been set before them, and as he transferred slices to her platter, she smiled. Should that make him uneasy, wondered Oesc?

Watching them, he saw in Rigana's face no coquetry, but it seemed to him that there was something wistful in Artor's eyes. The question of the high king's marriage had been often discussed, but although many maidens had been proposed for the honor, there had never been time, it seemed, for him to court one of them. But if Artor had found love of a more casual kind, no one had heard about it.

Oesc did not think the high king could have had a mistress in secret, but he was not a cold man. When he came to love, it would be deeply.

It is not my bride I should fear for
, Oesc thought then,
but my king.

He saw Ceretic's daughter Alfgifu approaching, bearing the great silver-mounted aurochs horn filled with mead. Andulf struck a last chord and finished his song.

Oesc strode quickly back to take his place at Rigana's side as Artor accepted the horn.

“It is my honor to be the first to offer a toast for the couple who sit before you. Any marriage is a harbinger of hope, for thus the race is renewed. But this wedding, more than most, gives me hope for the future, for the groom, who was once my enemy, has become a friend and ally, and the bride, a woman of my own people, is a living link between the old royal line and the new. It is always something of a miracle that two creatures so different as male and female can live in harmony—” He paused for the murmur of laughter. “But if Oesc and Rigana can do so, then there is hope that Britons and Saxons can live in peace as well.

“This, then, is my wish for the bridal couple—that as they join their lives, our peoples may be linked as well, and if they do not always manage to live in perfect accord—” again, he waited for the laughter “—then I wish that their differences may be quickly resolved, and that from their union new life shall spring!”

He turned the horn carefully so that its tip pointed down, and raised it to his lips, taking a long draught without spilling a drop. Then he handed it back to Alfgifu, who bore it to Aelle, and then to Ceretic and the other chieftains.

The other blessings were more conventional, with a heavy emphasis on the breeding of strong sons. Oesc scarcely heard them. His beating pulse reminded him that soon the feast would be finished, and it would be time to make Rigana his wife in fact as well as name.

When the toasts were completed, the women led Rigana off to the hall to be prepared for bed. As their singing faded, the sound of men's laughter grew louder as the male guests were released from such bonds of propriety as they had observed so far.

“Drink deep, my lord,” said Wulfhere, refilling his horn.

Oesc took it and drank, fighting not to cough as he realized that this was not the mild ale mead they had been drinking, but a brew whose heavy sweetness did not quite hide its strength. He swallowed, feeling his head swim as the fire began to burn in his belly, and handed the horn back to the other man.

“That's fine stuff, but I'd best go easy or I'll be no use to my bride—”

“You'll be no use either if you cannot relax,” said Ceretic with a grin, offering his own horn. “Drink up, man!”

“That's true,” answered Oesc. He reached for the horn.

Ceretic moved closer, bending as if to continue his teasing. “At your wedding feast, the high king of Britannia himself sits down with his Saxon enemies. Are you not honored?” He was still smiling, but there was something unexpectedly sardonic in his tone.

Oesc raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn't I be?”

Ceretic shrugged. “Artor sings a sweet song about peace between Briton and Saxon, but it is like trying to build an alliance between dogs and wolves.”

“You yourself are half Briton—” Oesc began.

Ceretic grunted. “But my heart is Saxon. The blood may mix, but the spirit must be singular. The Britons lick their wounds now, but they hate us still, especially Cataur, who has never forgiven us his brother's death at Portus Adurni. They say he protested making peace with Icel and left the army immediately afterward with all his men, nor will he take them to Artor's aid in Demetia. That man wants blood, and he'll not care where he gets it. I would put a guard upon your borders if I were you.”

“Artor will keep him leashed—”

Ceretic shook his head. “Artor may desire peace, but one day his princes will force him to turn against us. When he summons you to war against your own people, which will you choose?”

For a long moment Oesc frowned back at him, the mead growing cold in his belly. “I will choose my own land,” he said finally. “I will fight for Cantuware.”

Ceretic opened his mouth as if he would say more, then closed it without speaking. The torches flared suddenly in a gust of wind, and Oesc turned. Hæthwæge had come into the circle of light. Silence spread as men saw her standing there, and one or two made a surreptitious gesture of warding where they thought no one could see. It occurred to Oesc that Hæthwæge must be in her sixth decade by now, but as always when she put on the regalia of a priestess, she seemed beyond age.

The wisewoman looked around the circle, smiling slightly, then turned to Oesc. “This is a time of change, when the spindle twirls and new strands are woven into the web of Wyrd. Would you know, my king, what fates shall fall as a result of this marriage of yours?”

The men who stood nearest backed away uneasily. Oesc found himself abruptly sober once more.

“Are you afraid?” she asked then.

He shook his head. This was Hæthwæge, who had guided and guarded him since he was a child.

“I fear neither my fate nor you. Whether my Wyrd be good or bad, foreknowledge will enable me to face it well.”

The guests drew back to leave a space around them. Hæthwæge spread a square of linen on the ground and drew the bundle of runestaves from her pouch.

“Say, then, what it is you wish to know—”

For a moment Oesc stood in thought, choosing his words. “Tell me if this marriage will prosper, and whether my queen will bear a son to follow me in this land.”

Hæthwæge nodded. Her eyes closed, and she whispered a prayer he could not hear. Then she bent, and with a practiced flick of the wrist, scattered the runestaves across the cloth.

The yew wood sticks rattled faintly as they fell, bounced against one another, and then lay still. Oesc leaned forward, trying to make out the symbols incised and painted where the sides of the sticks had been planed smooth. It was quite dark now. In the flicker of torchlight the rune signs seemed to twist and bend.

Like any man of good blood he knew something of the runes, but their deeper meanings, especially in combination, were a mystery. The sticks the old woman had cast lay scattered across the cloth. Most of them had fallen near the edges; it was the ones that lay within the circle painted in the center that would provide the prophecy.

“
Ing
, the rune of the king who comes over the sea, the god in the royal mound—” Hæthwæge pointed to a rune of crossed angles that lay in the middle of the cloth. “Your seed will take root in the ground.” There was a murmur of appreciation from the other men.

“And there, near to it, are
Ethel,
for heritage and homeland, and
Ger,
the rune of good harvests. It means that you will bring luck to your land. But
Hægl
, the hailstone, lies close by them. Some violent upset threatens as well.”