All right. I'm sick of writing disclaimers. If the lawyers want a disclaimer, they can write one. However... (wince) I did want to apologize for the heinous error in the last chapter. Vespers takes place at six in the evening—what I wanted was Matins, the morning service.
FYI: There are several historical/poetical/cultural references in this chapter you may or may not catch. So you might want to read the note at the bottom before the story, or you may not—it is your choice.
The castle was drafty, despite the heavy, dense tapestries on the walls. It was customary for Eleanor and her father to sit as close as possible to the fire until they retired, and so they were engaged.
"It's been a month," said Eleanor, to no one in particular. She was embroidering a mantle, and glared at the slip-shod stitches that had resulted from her worries.
"He hasn't left Normandy yet," grunted her father. "All he's doing is sitting about, eating, drinking, spending my gold..."
"Yes," she interrupted, acknowledging his presence. "But...shouldn't he be coming home? A month is a month—the Duke surely must know there's no chance of getting to England this year."
"The Duke knows what the Duke wants to know. If the Duke wants to sail to England, then he will sail to England if he doesn't get the proper wind until January."
Eleanor stabbed at the embroidery. If she was to send this to Stephen, it would need to be at least decent. Though she hoped that the Duke might not be so stubborn as her father claimed, and she'd see Stephen before winter set in. To her father, she said,
"But won't he run out of supplies?" she asked.
Her father did not deign to answer.
Eleanor and her father were mistaken: it hadn't been a month. It was a week short of a month—and the army was beginning to feel very cynical about the flags that had blown southwards for two solid weeks. A very strong sentiment of angering Heaven was running through the camp—and if Heaven was indeed angry, it was probably because of people like Alain.
"We're laying bets," said Alain professionally, smiling at Robert and Stephen. "Care to join us?"
"Oh, please," muttered Stephen. "This situation is bad enough without your... Your... Usury," he managed. Alain raised a corrective finger.
"Usury," he reprimanded, "is charging things at interest. Am I charging at interest? No. I am merely offering the chance to invest money and sporting blood. Will the flags blow south? Or will they allow us to undertake our most holy war against England? It's a battle of wits, a battle of skill—"
"It takes no skill whatsoever. Or wits."
Robert flopped onto the ground and waited for them to finish arguing. He reminded himself that the blatant inactivity was annoying all the soldiers—allowance, he thought, must be made for their nerves. Robert amused himself by spinning his puzzle around in a circle. Around and around and around, until the puzzle made a blurred golden circle in the air.
There were eyes in the circle, staring out...
Robert nearly dropped his puzzle in surprise, and looked again. Nothing—it must have been his reflection.
The woods were quiet, and the rabbit foolishly decided it was safe. Poking its head from the safety of the underbrush, it heard a furious, sharp cry—
King Harold's favorite hunting hawk was stooping from the sky. The rabbit, who was regrettably a very stupid rabbit, immediately ran away from the bushes and into the open forest. The hawk fell upon it without mercy and bore the rabbit, squeaking indignantly, into the sky.
King Harold received the dead animal and rewarded the hawk with meat, then sent it back into the sky. He loved hunting—especially hunting at Boseham, his home. And in a week, he would be leaving Boseham for London. He had finally sent the two boys away, back to their homes.
The hawk shot up again, into the sky. This time the prey was another bird—again delivered to Harold, for which the hawk was rewarded. Eventually members of the hunting group departed, and it came down to four: Harold; his brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine; and the almost invisible Cyneheard watching from a distance.
"...home?" Gyrth was asking. Harold stroked the hawk, and nodded.
"Yes. We need to prepare for London—and for the spring," he added, quietly. Leofwine laughed.
"The spring? Come on, Harold, it's only September..."
They turned their horses around, Cyneheard still following invisibly. Harold paused, apparently to look for any dead game accidently dropped in the forest. If Gyrth and Leofwine noticed, they did not pause in returning. But the house-carl stopped—it was his job.
Harold suddenly and almost violently sent the hawk into the air, and then turned his horse, for the last time, towards home. Cyneheard was not looking at the horse or Harold, but at Harold's hand, and the small pieces of leather dangling from it. Under his breath, Harold was chanting,
"....Þa þæt Offan mæg ærest onfunde,
þæt se eorl nolde yrhðo geþolian,
he let him þa of handon leofne fleogan
hafoc wið þæs holtes, and to hilde stop..."
Scarborough was unimportant, quiet, and almost forgotten. If ever there was a town made to be that way, it was Scarborough, the Northumbrian fishing village. By it there was a very steep hill, and the people beneath the hill moved sleepily and contentedly through the dark night.
Yet this night wasn't very dark—in fact, it was growing lighter. A man looked up and stared at the fire on the tall hill that towered above them. It grew greater and greater—and then it hopped. Or lurched, perhaps, but at any rate, it moved near to the edge of hill.
The man looked dumbly at the moving fire, and through the fire saw dimly forms of men—strange men, dressed like the English and yet not; wilder, less comfortable. And he realized that the fire was not hopping, was not lurching, but that the fire was being pushed. Before the man could scream, it all came down—flaring wood and ash hurtling towards his upturned face—crazy laughter falling with it.
Harald had arrived.
"King Harold," snapped Cyneheard, "is not to be disturbed."
"It's urgent," said the fidgeting messenger. "Very urgent."
"He's ill," growled Cyneheard. "In case you didn't have the brains to take note of that fact, King Harold has been lying down in pain ever since we arrived in London. That would be three days—you're from Northumbria, aren't you?"
"Y-es," answered the messenger.
"Then take it to Morkere. It's his problem. Not Harold's."
"We did," the messenger replied, "but they were...disinclined to help," he finished lamely. "Please, let me talk to the king..."
Cyneheard finally let the other through, then resumed his post. He glared murderously at everyone that came by, daring them to come near the door. Just try it, he thought, leaning against the wall. Just try to get through.
The messenger reappeared, and ran away from Cyneheard like a frightened rabbit. The house-carl hesitated, then went into Harold's room. The king was up and apparently getting ready to set out yet again.
"King Harold?"
"Ever heard of Scarborough?" asked Harold, looking over at Cyneheard. At the shake he received, the king continued, "It's a fishing village. Was a fishing village—the entire place was just burned."
"The Danes," said Cyneheard, automatically.
"The Danes" was a phrase powerful enough to bring kings to a halt, to freeze soldiers in their tracks, to send villages into chaos. A hundred years of peace would never erase the memory of the Danes, and everything that they had destroyed. No one had forgotten the humiliation of Aethelney, nor did anyone forget that England had swung by one thread...the thread of a dissolute, irresponsible young man called Ælfræd...
"Harald Hardrada," corrected Harold. "Of Norway—spread the order to march, Cyneheard. I don't want any delay..." He paused. "Your young friends will be sad to miss this, won't they?"
My young...my young...oh, thought Cyneheard. "The two would have died, anyway," he said flatly, attempting to look sympathetic to the plight of his "young friends". But after he had left the room, he could have sworn he heard Harold laughing.
The first house-carl he found was older than Cyneheard, and happened to owe him money. Cyneheard started to smirk—this was going to be fun.
"Cyneheard! Yes, Cyneheard—I wanted to ask you—"
"Get ready to march," barked Cyneheard. "Now. We're going to Northumbria."
Cyneheard had a moment of pure satisfaction at the look of bewilderment, dawning horror, and then finally of nervous confusion that passed over the other house-carl's face. It would, Cyneheard thought wistfully, be a very long time before he was able to see something such as that again.
"We're going...to march?" croaked the house-carl. "Where are we going?"
"Northumbria," stated Cyneheard.
"...Northumbria?"
"Spread the news," continued Cyneheard. "There is to be no delay."
He continued towards the next house-carl, leaving the first staring after him, thinking about the long, long road to Northumbria.
In the history of England (nay, of the world) there are many brave men, who fought furiously against all odds to keep their people safe—the young man named Ælfræd, Edmund, Thegn Byrhtnoth—all men who would do anything to keep their people from harm, even if it meant dying or hiding in swampland. But the brothers Edwin (Earl of Mercia) and Morkere (Earl of Northumbria) were not among that number during 1066, and from all appearances, they would not have reached it by 1266.
"Danes," Morkere was saying. He looked nervously at sheep, as if it concealed Danes.
"Baaaaaa," muttered the sheep, looking for somewhere else to graze.
"Danes..." repeated Morkere. "Why, oh why did they have to come now? I'd just gotten over the William scare, and now these Danes are coming. I can't handle Danes!"
Edwin ignored him. It wasn't as if the Danes were in his earldom, anyway. He was just here because Morkere insisted he come. Pfff. Where was Harold? This was his job, anyway, not insisting that the big scary William was coming with big scary horses. And what was England coming to, he asked himself patriotically, if the kings didn't do their job?
"And the townsfolk," Morkere continued to whine, "aren't any comfort at all. They just look at me and say things like 'Do your duty, Morkere'. Why should it be my duty? Why can't we just pay the Danes to leave like we did before?"
Must...ignore...younger...brother... Edwin chanted to himself.
The army behind him was doing much the same thing—actually, it was barely an army. It consisted mainly of farmers who had been dragged off by the two earls to fight The Danes, and most of them were terrified. They had no false hopes of Edwin or Morkere turning suddenly into a Byrhtnoth who would stand by them until death.
In a short time, the farmland started to turn to marsh, and eventually the army came face to face with The Danes. The imaginations of Edwin, Morkere, and the soldiers had prepared them for what the foreigners would look like. Nothing had prepared them for the man with the foreigners.
Tostig looked scornfully at the little army of Northumbria—made up mainly of people he had known. But he couldn't quite place their names...it didn't matter, though. They were all traitors. But he knew Morkere—he would know Morkere if Morkere had been burnt to a charred, twisted lump. Morkere had taken Tostig's earldom.
With a scream of fury, he attacked—and the tiny band of English farmers was slaughtered by the Raven of Norway. A few escaped (not surprisingly, Edwin and Morkere were among them), but most had not. It was a complete victory over Northumbria—York surrendered without a fight, and in a few days, five hundred hostages would be given up to the Norsemen at Stamford Bridge.
But Harald made a mistake—he left York. And after he had left York, a different Harold, three thousand house-carls strong, (plus the few odd farmers that had join the march) rode into the city. They had made it to York—two hundred odd miles—in five days.
"People of York!" rang the voice of the king. He gazed at the people before him—tired, hurt, and afraid. He could also see his army—slightly uneasy, but full of bravado and recklessness. The people appeared not to hear him, so he called out again:
"People of York!" The call rang around the church where the people were gathered, ricocheting from the ceiling to the floor and up again to the windows, echoing over and over again: "of York... York... York..."
They looked up at him, and listened.
"I will not hide the truth from you," Harold continued. "The enemy we face is an old and dangerous one, but an enemy that we have always conquered! We shall not, and we shall never, give into the power of a heathen Danish warlord. We shall never give five hundred men to him without exacting their price in blood. We will not bow our heads to the banner of the Raven—the Golden Dragon shall rise before the Raven and send it back to the graveyard, as it always has.
"But I cannot fight the enemy alone. You, people of York, you have lain long under Danish power, and now that you are free, a new overlord rises up to enslave you. Stand up and fight him—fight Harald Hardrada and his men, fight for your homes and your lives and your children. Fight against the man named Tostig who has twice betrayed you. Fight to show that, whatever your Earl may be, the men of Northumbria are not cowards! Remember who you are—remember the men who have died for this before you."
He looked out at the crowd, which was still staring at him, intent—and silent. There was a taut pause, and Harold felt he had lost York.
He was never sure who started it—whether it was one of his house-carls trying to help him or one of the frightened men who was tired of being frightened, but someone near the back of the cathedral yelled;
"Holy Cross!"
Someone else took it up.
"Holy Cross!"
Half the building was chanting "Holy Cross", and Harold stood bewildered as a flood of pent-up anger at Harald, at Morkere, at Tostig, and above all at themselves, burst out in the furious chanting of the English battle cry;
"Holy Cross! Holy Cross!"
"For England!"
"Holy Cross! Holy Cross!"
"For Northumbria!"
"Holy Cross! Holy Cross!"
"For York!"
"Holy Cross! Holy Cross!"
"For this very church!"
"Holy Cross! Holy Cross! HOLY CROSS!"
.
"Are you certain?" Harold asked, frowning. The encouraging of the people of York being done, he was now talking to some of the more influential people within the city.
The man from York nodded. "He was not a good earl—with all due respect, of course. But he was a better one than Morkere."
"Tostig," Harold said, slowly, "will probably refuse your offer. And there will be Harald to be rid of...there's going to be death, no matter what you do."
"Yes, your Grace," the other responded. "But we can't have Morkere any longer."
"I'll have him told," Harold said. "But now I need to leave for Stamford Bridge. Godspeed."
"Godspeed," responded the man from York. Three thousand house-carls, mounted on their ponies, trotted off to Stamford Bridge, alongside farmers and townsfolk. On the coast, Harald and his men set off to claim the five hundred hostages. The Norsemen arrived first, and then the glitter of steel told Harald and Tostig that England would not give up Northumbria easily.
The armies drew up before each other, and a short, brown-haired man rode out on a pony, and asked to speak to the Earl Tostig.
The Anglo-Saxon phrase for "goodbye" is god þe mid sie, which literally translates to something like "God be with thee". Godspeed caries the same connotation, and since it is short than "God be with thee", and Harold probably would have been speaking quickly, I used it.
The poetry that Harold recites is from the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Battle of Maldon" (sound familiar?), and according to the translation by Michael Alexander, in modern English it would run something like this:
…Whereat one of Offa's kin, knowing the Earl
Would not suffer slack-heartedness,
loosed from his wrist his loved hawk;
over the wood it stooped: he stepped to battle…
Ælfræd is Alfred is modern English—Alfred the Great, that is. The story of Alfred is very long, very important, and happens to be one of the best in history. So I can't repeat it here; however, there are many websites out there.
Edmund was an English general. Byrhtnoth is the Earl mentioned above, and the hero of "The Battle of Maldon".
The Golden Dragon was the banner of England; the Raven was the banner of the Norsemen. (Note: while Harald Hardrada was from Norway, he would have been called a Dane, so Harold refers to him as a Dane through most of the text.)
When Morkere mentions paying the Danes off, he's talking about Danegeld—the practice of paying the Danes to leave the English alone. It didn't work, but it did produce a great poem by Ruyard Kipling.
As that's all the Cultural-Historical-Poetical references I can remember, I'll just thank my beta and get on with the replies. Geez, this a long A/N…
LittleChildOfTheWestWind: Okay. Writing…writing…
Chibi Kita: Cyneheard and Cynewulf; the loving brother who are named after people who tried to kill each other. Bwahaha.
Tuulikki: Comedy's good—and I won't tell him that. I want you to live, too. Anyway, I hope this chapter worked as well… And that using this new "Quick Edit" device will allow centering of text. And that story…is quite fluffy. (grin) Now, to review it… And, yesh, that should be Harald... (feels a bit foolish)
B/k: …Gollum can. [Note: if this makes absolutely no sense to you, it is because you are not B/k. If you are B/k and it makes no sense, well…we have a problem.]
Tamara Raymond: Thanks!
Flaming Tigress Mage: Mkay. (marks this down) I don't know if the wyvern would fit with the plot, though… Well, ve shall see…
Silver Dragon Golden Dragon: Thanks! (It's said Edg-hay-tay, I believe. Annoyingly, right after naming him I discovered a name that means "thief of darkness" or something like that… (sweatdrop)
Angelkohaku: Kaiba brothers fluff… Well, that will come in. Later, though—but thank you for your honesty! (grin) It made me feel better, oddly…
Meat Locker: Because.
Unrealistic: Ecghete may try to interfere, but when no one will allow your host into the army, it's going to be hard. (grin) I'm really glad you liked it so far, and I hope this chapter worked out well.
Kiita: Drawing is certainly healthier for the characters. Though…breaking the bones of a house-carl might be hard, what with the chain mail and all. (grin…without emoticons, typing "grin" over and over again starts to wear off)