Born of the Sun (12 page)

“I understand that.” He gave her a shadowy smile. “Well, I must be going. I told Cutha I would go into Venta with him this morning.”

“Excellent. It will do you good to get away from Winchester for a few hours.”

He met Niniane on the porch; she was coming in as he was leaving. There were two little girls with her, each holding to one of her hands. He stopped and looked at her for a long moment in silence. Her face was tanned to a pale golden color from all the time she spent outdoors, and the freckles on her small tilted nose were more noticeable. “You look remarkably happy for someone whose bridegroom lies under the earth,” he said at last.

Her widely set eyes regarded him with serenity. “Good morning, Prince,” was all she answered.

“Good morning, Prince,” the two little girls piped. One of the children he recognized as Coenburg. Both children spoke in British. He looked down into the round, rosy child faces, and his own face, which seemed to look so much older than its seventeen years these days, softened.

“What are you up to, Coenburg?” he asked.

“Niniane is going to show us how to play a game, but we need some cups.”

“And we are going to be very careful not to break those cups,” Niniane added, looking at the children as well.

“Oh, yes,” they chorused fervently. Niniane smiled faintly, looked up, and encountered Ceawlin’s eyes. He smiled back, touched and amused as she had been by the little girls’ innocence. Then, with a brief tap on the top of Coenburg’s head, he was gone.

High summer came and the harvest was brought in. Wagon loads of food and fodder were trekked into Winchester from the surrounding Saxon vils and British farms, tribute owed the king for his protection. The storehouses were stocked for the winter.

Summer passed and fall set in. Excess cattle were slaughtered and the meat salted and hung. The dying earth seemed to reflect the mood of all Winchester, or so Niniane thought as she sat one wet autumn night listening to Alric sing. Normally it gave her great pleasure to hear the scop, but the song he was singing tonight was a tale that they had all grown weary of hearing: the song of the accidental slaying of Herebeald, prince of the Geats, by his brother Haethcyn. The king was having supper in the women’s hall this night, sitting at a trestle table before the fire. Fara sat on one side of him and Ceawlin on the other. Alric’s voice rose over the sound of the harp:

Sad and bitter, the death of that brother, Wrongfully slain, by shot of arrow.

The target missed, the prince lay motionless, Bitterly struck, his friend and his lord:

The bloody arrowhead had slain a brother.

Niniane watched as Cynric drank the mead in his cup. His hand was trembling visibly as he raised it to his mouth. His cheeks and nose were a dull red in the flickering light from the wall sconces.

“A fatal fight,” the scop sang, “without hope of recompense. The unlucky prince must die unavenged.”

Niniane looked from Cynric to Ceawlin, but the prince’s face, framed by its helmet of silver hair, was unreadable. The king knocked over his cup and the mead spilled on the table. He gestured for more. As the girl came to serve him, and Fara began to mop up the spill with a cloth, the scop fell silent. Cynric looked up.

“The rest,” he said. “Let us have the rest of it.”

“My lord.” It was Ceawlin, speaking without looking at his father. “Enough.”

The old man stared at his full cup, then raised a hand and brought it down upon the table, not with force or with anger, only with a kind of vague impatience. After a glance at Ceawlin, the scop began to sing again. “Swa bio geomorlic gomelum ceorle,” he chanted.

Alric had told Niniane that this story of Herebeald and Haethcyn was well-known to all Anglo-Saxons. The West Saxon scop’s version of it dwelt most affectingly on the grief suffered by the aged king whose son has been accidentally killed by his brother. The king’s grief is doubly great because he cannot have revenge on the killer, who is also his son. The part Alric was singing now was an embellishment he had himself composed, comparing the father’s plight with the suffering endured by an old man whose son has been hanged.

“So it is sad for an old man to endure that his son, as a young man, should hang on the gallows,” sang Alric. “He laments his child, who is strung up as food for ravens; yet, being old, can do nothing to help. Always, each morning, his son’s death is remembered. He does not care to wait for another heir in the dwelling when the first has felt death’s sting. It breaks his heart to look upon his son’s dwelling-place, the empty wine hall that is now cheerless and a home of winds. The riders sleep, warriors in darkness; the harp sounds no more in the joyless place.”

Niniane looked at Fara. The friedlehe was watching the old king. There was pity on her face, and patience. Cynric was slumped now deep in his chair. Niniane thought he was still upright only because the chair’s carved arms supported him. Fara waited as he lifted the cup once more to his mouth. His hand was shaking too much, and after a moment he put it down again. He bowed his head over the cup. Then Fara looked at her son.

Ceawlin put a hand on his father’s arm and said something in too low a voice for Niniane to hear. Cynric raised his head slightly, then nodded. The prince rose and came around to his father’s side, slid an arm under the king’s shoulders, and helped him to rise.

Cynric was a heavy man, and he was leaning on his son like a deadweight, but Ceawlin supported him across the floor of the hall to the door. Watching the two of them, one so young and strong, the other so old and ravaged, Niniane felt none of Fara’s pity or patience for the king. What she felt instead was anger. It was not fair of the king to subject his living son to this ordeal night after night. Nor did Edwin deserve this kind of mourning. He had been a treacherous, villainous prince. In Niniane’s opinion, the West Saxons were well rid of him. He would have made a fatal king.

The question of who would be the next king was the riddle that was exercising most minds in Winchester these days. Cynric had not named a new heir, although all knew it must be either Ceawlin or the child Guthfrid carried, if that child was a son. Niniane thought that Cynric would be a fool to name a baby over his elder son, but so far Cynric had maintained his counsel. No one knew what he would do. The uncertainty was one of the reasons for the grim mood that seemed to reign now at Winchester all the time.

Fara came slowly back from the door. She had aged too these last months. She felt it deeply, the king’s grief and the uncertainty about the future of her own much-loved son.

In fact, Niniane thought, she herself was probably the happiest person in all of Winchester. The king seemed to have forgotten all about her, which suited her very well. She played with the children, learned harping skills from Alric, and helped with the sewing and weaving in the women’s hall. Her life had rarely been more pleasant. She had been far more lonely at Bryn Atha than she was at present in Winchester.

Her whole future depended upon who was named the next king. If it was Ceawlin, then she did not think she had to worry. Fara was very fond of her. Fara would see she was treated fairly. But if it was Guthfrid’s child … Then God alone knew what would happen to her. But God had taken care of her very well thus far. Niniane was content to trust herself to his goodness for the future.

The last of the leaves dropped from the trees and the first frost came. At Winchester everyone waited, waited for a birth and for a death. There were few who did not pray, to whatever god they felt would listen, that the birth would come first. The entire future of Wessex hung on two things: would the queen’s child be a boy, and if it was, would the king acknowledge it as his?

Guthfrid, great with child, had retired to the queen’s hall at the beginning of November. She was due to give birth around the festival of Yule.

“With any luck,” said Nola to Niniane as they were hanging evergreens around the women’s hall one afternoon a few days before Yule, “the child will be born dead.”

“Nola!” Niniane crossed herself. “That is a terrible thing to say.”

“It is true,” the other girl returned stubbornly. “Ceawlin should be king. Even if this baby were Cynric’s, which I doubt, we do not need a child for a king.”

“Well, of course I agree with you. But that does not mean I wish Guthfrid’s child dead.” Niniane bent her head to sniff the spray of pines she was holding in her arms. She looked again at Nola. “It will be enough if it is a girl,” she said half-humorously.

“This is not a laughing matter.” Nola put down the armload of evergreens she had just picked up. “I think it is the uncertainty that is the worst. Cynric refuses to talk about it at all, even to Fara. No one knows what he is going to do.”

“Perhaps he does not know himself.”

“Perhaps not. He might even refuse to recognize Guthfrid’s child as his after all. There is scarcely a soul in Winchester who thinks it is.”

Niniane arranged a spray of holly. “You know, Nola, whether Cynric recognizes the child or not, he cannot prevent the eorls from choosing their own king once Cynric is dead. They may very well decide they would prefer Ceawlin to a baby of questionable origin. There can be no doubt that Ceawlin is Cynric’s son.”

“Not with those eyes,” Nola agreed.

“So it may turn out well no matter whom Cynric chooses.”

Nola was looking at Niniane, an affectionate smile in her dark eyes. “You have the wonderful facility of always hoping for the best, Niniane.”

“It is much better to hope for the best than it is to hope for the worst,” Niniane answered, and Nola laughed in acknowledgment.

It was bitterly cold the day the festival of Yule was celebrated. Niniane was glad to come into the great hall, all freshly decorated with evergreens and with the Yule log burning and crackling on the immense fireplace. Yule was a feast dedicated to the god Frey, the Saxon god of fertility, and the centerpiece of the feast was a great boar’s head, prominently displayed and surrounded with fresh evergreens and berries. Frey was certainly the appropriate god of the day, for as the feast got underway, word came to the hall that the queen had gone into labor.

The news from the queen’s hall brought added zest to the feast. The smoke from the Yule log rose up to the rafters and hovered there, slowly escaping out the smoke vents; the drinking horns went around and around; platters of well-cooked boar’s meat were served and trenchers were filled. Outside, the winter night was cold and dark, but here, in the warm hall, fragrant with pine, there was life and companionship and hope that soon the uncertainties that had been plaguing Winchester these last months would be resolved.

Fara ate nothing. Niniane tried to coax her to take a little meat, but the older woman merely smiled and shook her head. She had grown much thinner this last month. The strain of watching the failing king and wondering about the future of her son had taken its toll. There were hollows at her temples that had not been there before. Her cheekbones were sharper and her wrists too bony.

I hope to God it is a girl, Niniane thought. She looked from Fara down the table toward Ceawlin. All she could see of him over the intervening people was the top of his fair head. As she slowly looked away, her eyes were caught by Sigurd’s. He smiled at her faintly and she smiled back. She liked Sigurd. She had seen quite a bit of him lately; he was fond of his little sister, Coenburg, and would often come to join in their play. Niniane, who loved children, instinctively liked anyone who shared that feeling. And she thought that Sigurd was missing the companionship of Ceawlin, who had been spending more and more time in attendance on his father. In consequence of all this, she and Sigurd had become quite friendly these last months.

Alric was preparing to sing when there came a hammering
at the
door of the hall, as if someone were trying to get it open and it was sticking. A thane seated nearby rose and went to pull it ajar. In the doorway a woman was standing, with a bundle of fur in her arms. Niniane recognized her as one of Guthfrid’s handmaids. The baby’s cry was loud in the sudden quiet of the hall.

The girl advanced slowly across the polished wooden floor. Niniane thought she looked as if she was enjoying her position as the center of the drama. She stopped when she reached Cynric. “My lord king,” she said in a voice clearly audible to every corner of the hall. “I bring you your son.”

Niniane saw Fara’s knuckles whiten as she closed her hand hard around the handle of her meat knife. The only sound in the hall was the crackling of the Yule log on the fireplace. Even the baby was silent.

Niniane could feel her heart hammering all the way up in her head. She had learned but recently the full meaning of the Saxon ritual of presentation. If the king accepted the child from the handmaid, it would mean that he recognized the baby as his. If he waved it away, however, then the child was rejected and would be taken out and exposed.

“Exposed!” Niniane had cried in horror to Fara when this had been explained to her. “Do you mean left to die?”

“I am afraid so, my dear.”

“But that is horrible! He cannot be so cruel as to do that.”

“The alternative is even worse,” the friedlehe had replied with a bitterness that was unusual. Then, more gently, “We must all pray it is a girl.”

And now the moment had come, and the child was a boy. In the tense silence of the hall, the baby cried again.

Take him! Niniane thought fiercely. She did not care what it might mean for the future, for her or for Fara or for Fara’s son. She only cared that this tiny newborn baby, wrapped so lovingly in his fur bunting, should not die.
Take him, Cynric. Take him!

For a long moment the tableau before her seemed to be frozen in time: the handmaid, the baby, the father and king. Then Cynric held out his arms.

Niniane felt herself go limp. Her eyes closed with relief. When they opened again it was to see the handmaid, a brilliant smile on her face, handing the child to the king. Cynric held it a little gingerly and Niniane sniffled. Then Cutha was on his feet, coming around to stand before the king and his new son. Someone brought a drinking horn to him and he raised it high. Cynric held the baby a little away from him and Cutha poured the contents of the horn over the child’s head. The baby screamed.