Born of the Sun (57 page)

Ceawlin looked at him for a moment in silence, then nodded. He turned to Bertred. “Is all arranged for tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Bertred. The two men discussed plans for a few minutes while Crida stood in silence, listening. Then Ceawlin turned to his son.

“Come,” he said. “You and I will go for a walk.”

The field was surrounded by a thicket of woods, all red and gold with autumn, and it was into the privacy of these that Ceawlin led his son. After they had walked a little way in silence, he said to Crida, his voice very steady, “Who conducted the funeral rite for Cerdic?”

“I did.” Crida’s voice was as carefully controlled as Ceawlin’s. “And Ceowulf helped me watch through the night.” He did not tell his father that Ceowulf had fallen asleep.

“I am glad,” Ceawlin said. Then, with obvious difficulty, “Crida, I know how close you and Cerdic were. I know how hard this must be for you.”

“Father.” Crida stopped and drew a long breath. His voice sounded constricted. “I feel I must tell you this. I
have
to tell you this. I loved Cerdic; you know I loved him. But … but …” Then the words came out in a guilty rush: “I am glad that I am going to be king.”

They had stopped walking and were standing under the flaming canopy of trees. The fire above them was only visual, however. It was cold in the woods, and damp. Ceawlin looked into his son’s face. Crida would not look back at him, was staring desperately at the ground. Ceawlin let out his own breath in what sounded very much like a sigh and said, “When I was seventeen years old I killed my brother so I could be king. At least you do not have that kind of blood guilt to live with.”

Crida’s eyes flew to his father’s face. There was a moment’s silence; then Crida said, “You killed your brother in a duel. He had poisoned his sword. You acted in self-defense. Mother told us all about it.”

“I did not have to kill him,” Ceawlin said. “But I hated him. And I wanted to be king.”

Crida searched his face with worried eyes. Ceawlin reached out and pushed the flyaway, newly washed hair off his son’s cheek with a gentle hand. “I am glad that you want to be king,” he said. “To be a good king, you must want it very much.”

“But …” Crida’s voice was anguished. “If I were given a choice to bring Cerdic back … Father! I don’t know what I would do!”

Ceawlin was tempted to speak words of comfort, to assure the boy that of course he would choose to bring his brother back. As Crida undoubtedly would. But it was the very possibility that he might consider choosing the other, the very real reluctance to give up what now he had won—that was what was causing Crida such agonizing guilt. Ceawlin would not help the boy by making light of this. “That is something you are going to have to live with, Crida,” he said. “It is part of the burden of being a man.”

There was a long silence. Ceawlin could hear the voices of his men in the camp. There was a rustling in the woods as a small animal scurried by. Overhead, a bird began to trill. Finally Crida spoke. “Yes,” he said. His eyes met his father’s and held them. “I understand.”

Ceawlin’s return to his capital the following day was a triumph. He and Crida rode at the head of his war band, followed by his eorls, also on horseback. The thanes and the ceorls marched behind. For many of the ceorls, that day of adulation and rejoicing was the high point of their lives.

The main street of Venta was lined with people. The road from Venta to Winchester was similarly packed with ceorls from the Winchester vils. Ceawlin’s name rang out in the cool, crisp autumn air, again and again and again as the war band progressed along its triumphant way.

Crida was flushed with excitement. A few times the path in front of them became clogged with people, but the eorls rode forward and cleared the way with their horses. Saxon and Briton together greeted Ceawlin as if he had been a god.

Crida’s eyes shone like stars. As they left the road to turn toward the open gates of Winchester, he said to his father, “You are the greatest warrior in the world, Father. That is why they cheer you so.”

Ceawlin’s returning smile was crooked. “I am not a god, Crida. Fate will turn against me someday. In the end, we all must die. It is well to remember that, my son, and not to let yourself be too swayed by the adoration of others.”

Then they were inside the gates, back in Winchester, back home. The steps of the great hall held a welcoming party. Niniane and all his sons. No … not all. One he would never see again.

He pushed that thought aside, pushed it down and away as he had done since first he heard the news of Cerdic’s death. The horses came closer and closer to the hall. Niniane had Sigurd and Eirik standing before her, so he could not see her below breast level. Her hair was dressed high with jewels; jewels glittered at her throat and shoulders and on the arms that encircled the boys. She had decked herself for victory.

“Mother looks splendid,” Crida said proudly.

“Yes,” said Ceawlin. “She does.”

They had reached the steps of the great hall and all the horsemen dismounted. Sigurd pulled away from Niniane and rushed to meet his father. Eirik came after, then Ceowulf, more aware of his dignity than the younger boys. Ceawlin looked from the children who surrounded him to his wife.

She wore a full blue cloak pinned with a great golden brooch. He would not have known she was pregnant if he had not been told. He left the boys and came forward to take her into his arms. Then he felt the baby. “I am very glad to see you,” she said, her voice shaking.

“And I you.” He released her, backed away from the emotion in her voice, and said to his eorls, “Let us go inside.”

There was a great banquet that evening. Alric, prepared by Bertred the previous day, was ready with a song of the Battle of Torfield. Crida sat in Cerdic’s old place, and for the first time Ceowulf attended a thanes’ banquet. Crida had asked that he be allowed to come.

Niniane retired immediately after Alric’s first series of songs. It was almost two more hours before Ceawlin left the banquet and walked with slow, almost reluctant steps toward the king’s hall.

The servants were asleep along the wall benches. The door to their bedroom was closed, but he could see a light shining in the crack between door and floor. Niniane was still awake.

She was sitting on the cushioned bench that ran under the window. Her hair was loose and she wore a cloak over her sleeping gown. She was looking out the window and did not turn her head when he came in. “Is the banquet over?” she asked.

“No. It is still roaring on.”

“I hope you sent Crida and Ceowulf to bed?”

“Yes. Shortly after you left.”

Finally she turned to face him. They had not been alone together for more than five minutes all day. He looked at her, at the small, delicate face, the great haunted eyes, the mouth curved with sorrow. The only person in the world, he thought, who understood what he had lost. For these last weeks he had been like a man standing with his back against a dam, utterly concentrated on nothing but holding back the flood that threatened to overwhelm him. He looked now at his wife, and the dam began to give way. He crossed the room, no longer trying to guard his face, and knelt in front of her. He put his hand on her swollen stomach. “I remember the night you bore him,” he said. “I remember how grievously you cried.”

She looked down at his hand and then covered it with both of her own, pressing its strong sinewy hardness against her. “Do you remember the day I told you I was expecting him?” she asked, her voice very low.

“Yes.” He turned his hand, easily grasping both her small hands within his own large clasp. “It was the day I learned of my mother’s death.” He closed his eyes, and the dam within him shattered. “Oh, Nan.” It was a cry of anguish. “Our beautiful boy!” And burying his face in her lap, he began to cry. Awkwardly at first, wrenchingly, in the way of one unused to tears, but finally with a flooding release of grief that eased at last to exhausted quiet.

Niniane held him, tears pouring down her own face, but the tears were more for Ceawlin than they were for Cerdic. Finally she got him into bed and he fell asleep still cradled in her arms.

The March day was unusually warm, and after Niniane had nursed her daughter, she took a horse and rode out of Winchester toward the woods. It was muddy underfoot but there was a woodland clearing she had been going to for the last month and it was usually drier there. That was her destination on this warm March day, the six-month anniversary of the death of Cerdic.

The sky was pale blue and cloudless. Niniane dismounted, tied her horse, and went to sit on the decaying trunk of an oak tree that had come down in some storm years before. The sun was warm on her head and back but she scarcely noticed. She sat and stared sightlessly at the small pool in the middle of the clearing. She sat so quietly and for so long that two deer, feeling themselves safe, appeared from the woods to drink from the pond’s clear fresh water.

The anniversaries were the worst, Niniane thought as she sat there motionless in the early-spring sun. Anniversaries, marking the inexorable flow of time, taking you further and further from the one you loved.

Today she could say: Six months ago he lived. Tomorrow she would not be able to say that anymore. Soon it would be seven months, eight months, a year. It was a fine day; she noticed it for almost the first time. A fine day for hunting. Cerdic had loved to hunt. And so, finally, she began to cry.

The deer fled as soon as she moved. After a while she struggled to gain control of herself and went to the pond to splash cold water on her eyes. She wet a corner of her cloak and laid it against them. She did not want to return to Winchester with swollen eyes, did not want Ceawlin to know she had been crying again.

He grieved too. She knew that. But after that one outburst on the night of his return to Winchester, he grieved in silence. He did not want to talk about Cerdic, not to her, not to anyone.

“Nan, I can’t,” he had said desperately once when she had tried to share her feelings with him. “I can’t keep going through it again and again. Don’t ask it of me. I just can’t.”

That was the difference between them, she thought now as she tightened her girth and prepared to mount from the log. He had accepted Cerdic’s death when it happened, had experienced it, had gone through it. She had not. She had been so strong, so brave, simply for that very reason: she had not accepted it.

And now she could not get over it. Ceawlin was coping, was going on with his life, but she could not. She was stuck in it, reliving it over and over and over in her mind.

The nights were the worst. She could not sleep, would lie there going over the possibilities of its not happening. Two scenes played themselves again and again in her mind.

In the first scene, she heard Cerdic getting up, heard him moving stealthily out of his sleeping-room door. In this scene she would get up herself and follow him, follow him and catch up to him just as he was going to try to climb over the wall. His blond hair was bright in the moonlight and he would smile at her and say, “What are you doing here, Mother?” And she would touch his arm and say, “Do not do this, Cerdic. Come back to the princes’ hall with me.” And he would come, so tall, so healthy, so full of life, back to the princes’ hall and safety.

In the other scene he was shot, but the wound was not fatal. She would take him back to the hall and nurse him. He would look up at her out of heavy blue eyes and say, “I’m sorry, Mother. Sorry I caused you such worry.”

She would think of these scenes so long and so hard that almost, it seemed to her, they were true. And then came the awful realization, the slow dawning that she could not stave off, that she was dreaming, that what she was thinking was not true, that it really had happened. Cerdic was dead.

Then she would begin to cry, holding herself very still, trying not to wake Ceawlin, weeping in silent anguish as the slow hours of the night slipped by.

She got back to Winchester in time for supper. Ceawlin gave her a long hard look and she knew he saw that she had been crying. He said nothing, but as he passed her chair he laid a gentle hand on the top of her head.

One of Niniane’s problems during this time was that it was so difficult for her to be alone. The halls in Winchester were arranged for communal living. The fires burned continually in the hearthplaces and there were always thanes or servants or family members underfoot. There was rarely privacy even in her own sleeping room; the baby was sharing the room with them these days, and Niniane feared to disturb her daughter’s sleep.

These were the living arrangements that had always prevailed in Winchester, nor had Niniane found them fretful in the past. But now she needed to be alone, and there was no place for her to go. This was why she had begun to ride out to the woodland clearing. She went as often as she could; the weather never stopped her. If she could get away from all the people who seemed constantly to claim her attention, she would take a horse and go. She had to have a place where she could be alone to think and to cry.

The baby comforted her more than anything. Her daughter. The small, fuzzy baby head, the little mouth pulling at the breast; when she was with Fara she was happy. But the baby slept for most of the day.

A week after Cerdic’s six-month anniversary Bertred and Meghan came to Winchester for a visit. Niniane was surprised. This was a busy time of year on the manors; rarely did they see the eorls in springtime. It was when Meghan sat talking with her around the hearthplace in the king’s hall the following afternoon that Niniane realized why they had come.

“I know how you are feeling, Niniane,” Bertred’s British wife said gently. “I also have lost a son.”

Niniane sat politely and let her talk. It was not that she belittled Meghan’s sorrow. Meghan’s son had been five years old when he died of fever, and obviously the hurt was still there. But it was not the same. Couldn’t Meghan understand that? Niniane knew that death was something that happened to everyone. She knew that other people’s children had died. But that was not what she
felt.
What she felt was that this was something that had happened only to her. To her and to Cerdic.