Dawn Wind (31 page)

It was a touching story, but somehow it failed to touch Owain.

‘We are Jutes, along this coast,’ said Aethelbert, fingering his beard, and Bishop Lindhard translated for him as he had translated for the stranger monk.

Augustine made a small inclination of the head. ‘Yet Jutes and Angles and Saxons, you have all the same need of the joy we have to bring. We come to you and not to the Angles, on the threshold of this great venture, for the sake of the Lady Bertha, your Queen, knowing that she is of our faith and has been free to follow her own ways of worship, here at your Court. Because of that, it has seemed to us, and to the Holy Father who sent us forth, that this is the place ordained for our coming at the outset.’

Aethelbert listened, still fingering his beard, and Owain knew how his eyes would be narrowed on the stranger’s face. ‘There is truth in what you say,’ he agreed, when Bishop Lindhard had translated again. ‘And for another reason, it may be that you have chosen wisely. Five Kings stand here with me today, five Kings and the Princes of the Welsh in the far west.’ (He used the Saxon term, and Bishop Lindhard stumbled over it, for there was no Latin equivalent, until Einon Hen moved out from the group about the High King’s chair and gave the British ‘The Princes of the Cymru, the Land of Brothers’.) ‘Five Kings, and the Princes of the Welsh in the far west,’ said Aethelbert of Kent, ‘and there is no Lord of the Angles nor yet of the Saxon kind who could make such a boast.’

Augustine bent his head again, and it seemed to Owain that there was a hint of irony in the way he did so. ‘Great and powerful is the royal line of the Oiscings. That also, we knew in Rome, Aethelbert the High King.’

‘And it seemed to this Holy Father of yours that a strong King with a Queen already of your faith might spread the shield of his protection over you; might stretch out his arm to help this work that you have at heart?’ Aethelbert’s voice suddenly became sharp as the bark of a fox on a frosty night. ‘Well, Holy Man, what would you have of me?’

‘No more than your goodwill at first,’ Augustine said. ‘Grant us leave to enter your kingdom, and give us a small plot of ground where we may raise a church and welcome those who come to join us in the Faith of Christ.’

Somewhere close behind Owain, a man growled behind his shield rim to his neighbour: ‘Are we to leave our own Gods, then, who were good enough for our fathers, and who led us to victory, and go running cap in hand to this God that the British worshipped, who stood by and let them go down into defeat? And all because a shaven-headed priest says so?’

And his friend replied with a smothered laugh, ‘There’s no accounting for the strange ideas that folk will get. My grandsire thought for fifteen years that he was an ash tree and could not sit down.’

Augustine heard the laugh, and his proud gaze, frowning a little, flicked towards the place from which it had come. For the first time he included the men behind the King in what he had to say, and Owain felt as he had not done until that moment the strange monk’s power and his magnetism. ‘There will be many who laugh at first, but we are come, my brethren and I, to relight the candle of the love of Christ in this land of Britain where it has so utterly perished into the dark; and though we seek to make but a small beginning, remember that a spark falling on tinder is a small beginning, yet it serves to kindle a fire that may light and warm a king’s Hall!’

‘The candle of the love of Christ, in the land of Britain where it has so utterly perished into the dark.’ Among those who stood about the High King, the Princes of Gwent and Powys glanced at each other. Owain remembered again the grey finger of the preaching cross and the little priest whose soul had seemed to be on fire, and Priscilla in her valiant Sunday necklace of blue beads; and he thought, ‘This is a great man, and he loves God, but he is without understanding and without humility.’ And in proportion to the joy of the shining moment he had known so short a time before, he was suddenly wretched.

Augustine was still speaking of the Faith and the Master he served, while the Jutes and Saxons muttered among themselves. But Owain was no longer listening with a whole heart; something had smudged the radiance, and there was growing on him the certainty that there was more to all this than showed on the surface.

But the stranger monk had done now, and Aethelbert was speaking. ‘I have listened to you, and heard what you have to tell, and what you have to ask. As to what you have to tell, I understand little of it. I do not understand your three Gods in one, nor do I see how this God of yours is better than our Woden and Thor of the Hammer, and Frey who brings our beasts to birth and our corn to harvest. But as to what you ask: for the sake of the Lady Bertha my Queen, who will grieve and doubtless make my life a burden if I send you away, you may come to Cantiisburg and build your church there, and welcome whatever men are fools enough to come to you, into the faith of this White Christ of yours. And I will hold back my priests from killing you, if that may be.’

Augustine seemed to grow taller yet, as the King’s words were translated; he flung back his head, and his hands went upward in a gesture that seemed at once triumph and supplication; and for a moment there was a light on his face that was not the cool daylight of the marshes. He cried out in a great voice, ‘Thanks be to the Lord our God!’ And behind him, the monks raised the paean that the soldier-bishop Germanus had raised for a war-cry against the Sea-Wolves of this very coast two hundred years before: ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’

Later, the cooking pits were opened and the carcasses of baked sheep and oxen dragged out, and Aethelbert of Kent feasted with his guests while the shadows of the ridge-tents and branch-woven cabins stretched out long and cool across the grass.

But Owain, who was in no mood for feasting, grew weary before the mead had gone round more than once. He threw the mutton-bone he had been chewing to the nearest dog, and getting up from his place beside one of the fires, turned away towards the dunes and the grey ramparts of the old fortress. Bryni, digging hot marrow out of an ox-bone with the point of his dagger, grinned up at him as he passed, and watched him go, but nobody called after him; he was always something of a lone wolf.

Behind him he heard the voices and the music of the harp falling further across the levels until it was no more than a dim wash of sound in his ears. He crossed the causeway, skirted the whale-backed hump of Rutupiae Island, and dropped down through the soft sand towards what had once been the harbour. There was nothing there now but an odd snout of rotten timber thrust here and there above the drifted sand to tell where busy wharves and slipways had been, and a long curb of worked stone below the watergate that must have formed the edge of the main jetty; and the water that had once been deep enough to take the war-galleys and the great troop-transports of the Empire had sunk away, shallow even now at high tide, as the harbour mouth silted up before the encroaching sand.

And there, below the crest of a long curved dune, he found Einon Hen sitting solitary, his great beaked nose towards the sea. He hesitated, ready to turn away without a word, but the old man looked round with a hint of a smile in his one golden eye, and the young one sat down beside him, knowing himself welcome.

‘I have been all day and for so many days past striving to make myself a bridge between two worlds. But the Saxons will never understand the ways of our people, and nor now will Rome, and I am very weary,’ said Einon Hen, after a companionable silence.

‘I thought it was in your mind that Saxon and Briton drew closer to each other,’ Owain said dully, looking out over the wet sand.

‘Closer yes, but always there will be a gulf and it is still a wide one.’

Another, longer silence followed. At last Owain said, ‘This that has happened today—it was what the Queen meant, when she said that soon we should be a multitude?’

The old man looked round at him quickly. ‘It is the beginning of what she meant.’

‘And Aethelbert knew?—Perhaps he sent for these men himself?’

‘You think that?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I—think so, yes,’ said Einon Hen, very quietly.

‘Einion Hen, what lies behind this that we have seen today?’

The Envoy had begun to draw careful patterns in the slope of the dune with a bony forefinger, but the loose sand ran into the traced lines and filled them up. ‘I do not know,’ he said at last, ‘but this is how I read the signs: I think that the thing has grown two-fold like the sides of an arch, and that what we saw today was the keystone where the two sides come together … Long ago, before even Artos’s time, Rome came crumbling down, and when it rose again from the ashes, all was changed. The power of the Legions was gone for ever, and in its place was another kind of power, the power of our Christian faith. All the provinces of the Western Empire were lost, but they might be won back still—into another kind of Empire; only now the work must be done by the Church, and not the Legions. So much for the first side. For the other—think back four years, to Wodensbeorg. Aethelbert of Kent has cleared his enemy from his path, he is Overlord of all the southern half of Britain, save for that which lies beyond Sabrina, and he is already linked through his Queen with the Frankish Kingdom, the great Christian Kingdom of Clovis. He is a wise man, and he comes to see that for such a ruler as he is, there is much to be gained by becoming one of this new Empire of the Christian faith. So—perhaps—he sends word to Rome, saying, “Come, and I will be converted to your faith, and bring my people with me.” And Rome sends back word, “Gladly we will come.”’ He drew two sweeping lines in the sand, and stabbed the bony finger with meticulous care into the exact place where they met. ‘The arch is complete, and what men may build upon it, God knows.’

Owain was watching a yellow horned poppy close to his foot as it swayed in the light sea wind. ‘And so, knowing the appointed time of this coming, Aethelbert gathers his lesser Kings under pretence of a frontier council, that he may make a worthy showing of his power before these emissaries of Rome. I never quite believed in that Council.’

‘No?’

‘No. But if it is as you say—’ Owain spoke slowly, thinking the thing out as he went. ‘If it is as you say, why did he greet them so grudgingly? Why not fall into an ecstasy and be converted on the spot?’

‘Because he is not a fool. He cannot be sure how his kings and chieftains will receive the faith of Christ, and he cannot afford to receive it while they hold without weakening to Frey and Woden. He must give the thing time to work, he must feel his way. He is a patient man; he waited more than twenty years to be revenged for Wibbendune. When he can be reasonably sure that it is safe, maybe in a year’s time, maybe more, he will listen to the Queen’s pleading and suffer a change of heart, and come to this Augustine, seeking baptism.’

The silence that fell between them was the longest yet. So long that the evening light across the marshes was beginning to fade when Einon Hen cocked his one bright eye at his companion, and said, ‘My friend, you look as though the taste of sloes was in your mouth.’

Owain laughed ruefully. ‘The taste of one’s own foolishness is just as sour. I thought this morning, just for a wing-beat of time, that—that something wonderful was happening. And all the while it was no more than a piece of statecraft being played out.’

Einon Hen said very quietly, ‘But even a piece of statecraft might hold your “something wonderful” at its heart.’

And Owain looked at him quickly, remembering that this was a man who knew the feel and balance of statecraft as doubtless he had known the feel and balance of a sword when he was young.

‘We spoke together a few days since—you remember?—of looking back through the storm and darkness of these years, to see the last gleam of a lantern far behind; and I said something to you then, I think, of the hope of other light as far ahead. For the space of two men’s lives at least, we have stood alone, we in Britain, cut off from all that Rome once stood for, from all that we thought worth dying for. And today we have joined hands with those days of the Long Wandering, before the Saxon-kind became the things again—a light clasp as yet, and easily broken, but surely it will strengthen, both by the ways of statecraft, and with every man and woman who comes—as they will come, though the time for the Queen’s multitude is not for a long while yet—to Augustine and the Christian Church.’ He abandoned the patterns he had been drawing in the sand, and sat for a few moments completely still, his head up and the breeze off the sea lifting the grey hair at his temples. ‘Not the dawn as yet, Owain, but I think the dawn wind stirring.’

I
T
was dusk when Owain came again over the lip of the dunes, and a faint mist had begun to smoke up from the ground. He saw the red flare of the camp-fires across the marsh, and the sound of voices and harp music came to meet him; but still, as he checked among the furze bushes, he could hear the soft long-drawn hushing of the tide beyond the dunes.

‘Not the dawn yet, but I think the dawn wind stirring.’ The old Envoy’s voice was lingering in his ears, as Uncle Widreth’s had lingered there. He thought suddenly that they would have liked each other, those two old men, if their ways had crossed. ‘Not the dawn yet, but the dawn wind stirring,’ and again, ‘Even a piece of statecraft might hold your “something wonderful” at its heart …’ The wry unhappy mood of the past few hours had fallen from him, and he felt quiet, as one feels after relief from pain; something else too: deep within him, almost below the level of his being aware of it, was a sense of change, like the change in the wind at winter’s end. Ever since the last stand, by Aquae Sulis, he had felt himself at the end of something. Now, standing among the dune furze bushes in the dusk, he knew all at once, that he was at a beginning.