Moyra Caldecott (12 page)
Authors: Etheldreda
‘Wulfhere!’ he shouted. ‘Wulfhere! Wulfhere!’
Others shouted other names but he heard nothing but the drumming hooves of the horses, the wild sweet sound of the horn still echoing in his head and the name of Wulfhere beating like a pulse through his whole being.
Someone shook his arm. ‘He has won,’ a voice told him. ‘You can stop shouting now!’
Egfrid looked up at the sky with a shout of triumph. Wulfhere might be able to race the gods and beat them, but one day he, Egfrid, ill thought of, pushed around, forgotten son of a powerless king, would win, and the shouting would be for him. He would bow, laughing, before the throne of Penda, and he would receive the reward of gold and the giant aurochs’ horn of mead! In his imagination he saw Wulfhere’s eyes meet his and acknowledge that he was the better man. But that was the future. Now there were still the competitions of skill to watch and enjoy… the gallop past while stooping from the saddle to retrieve small objects from the ground… the jumping over water and over logs. How the dust flew, the crowds roared, the sweating riders yelled.
Egfrid jumped up and down, his disappointment that his father had not come for him forgotten. Who wanted to go back to Christian Bernicia after all! Was there not more adventure at the court of heathen Penda than at all the other kingdoms in the land!
Prince Ethelhere’s eyes shone with excitement too. His ambitious nature had fretted under his brother’s steady, peaceful reign, and, at last, tired of waiting for something to happen that would extend his power and give him personal satisfaction, he decided to take the kingdom for himself. But for that he needed help – and to take East Anglia Penda also needed help.
Prince Ethelhere sat now on the raised platform with the Mercian royal family, watching the display of power and skill with admiration and some alarm. Penda had sworn to put him on his brother’s throne if he returned his kingdom to the heathen gods. This he would do without a qualm, but would Penda keep his side of the bargain and leave the ruling of East Anglia to him when the fighting was done?
He looked at the boy Egfrid, Oswy’s son. Penda had a long arm and a ruthless heart. What hostage would he demand of him? He had no wife, no children. He had no one he loved enough to fear to lose. He was free and no one could touch him.
He smiled. Perhaps he would be the first to deal with Penda and come off best.
Ely
Etheldreda decided to start building a church on the island of Ely to take the place of the one that had been destroyed, and spoke to her husband about the possibility of founding a religious community there. He did not demur, and she set about at once looking for an appropriate place. She found a little hill, with a stream at its foot, and surrounded by a forest so green and bright it was almost luminous. She stood on its summit and looked out over her land, her heart knowing that she had found the place. It seemed to her that it had been a holy place before… there was a feeling of continuity… of abiding purpose…
‘If God exists,’ she thought, ‘He has always existed and He has always been speaking to his people. He has spoken on this hill before in ancient times, before Saint Augustine, before the Romans, even before Ovin’s people came to this land.’
She told her husband that she herself would undertake the consecration of the place and would stay there, praying and fasting for forty days as was the custom, before the church was built. Tondbert and Heregyth protested at once and Ovin offered himself as proxy for the fast, but she would have none of it. She forbad any of them to set foot upon the hill until the time she had chosen had elapsed.
Tondbert secretly saw to it that Edgils, fully armed and with a few good men, was stationed out of sight in the forest nearby. Ovin and Heregyth insisted on staying with them, Ovin to be as near as he could be to Etheldreda, Heregyth to be as near as she could be to Edgils.
Etheldreda constructed with her own hands a small bower of branches and leaves against the rain and chose carefully the amount of food she would allow herself, storing it in one simple wooden chest on which she set up the small crucifix of gold and garnet she had inherited from her mother, the precious Psalter she had made herself at Dunwich, and a battered volume of the gospel of Saint John that she had received as a wedding present from her father. She had a small earthenware beaker she could use for fetching water from the stream and a thick cloak of harsh, unrefined wool against the cold.
She kissed her husband and her friends gently but firmly, and told them to go away, to return only after forty days had passed.
During the first few days, Heregyth, spying on her from the forest, saw that she moved about a great deal, pacing about on the hill top, walking round and round her small domain. Sometimes she rearranged the branches of her bower as though they did not satisfy her, and sometimes she stooped to clear pebbles away from where she intended to sit.
Heregyth reported back to Edgils and Ovin that their mistress was restless and she did not think it would be long before she would give in. But she was wrong.
On the hill the passing of time gradually became meaningless to Etheldreda. Days and nights passed, clouds, sunshine, wind and rain… and she scarcely noticed them. Her body’s presence on the hill was in a sense an irrelevance.
In the beginning it had been hard; weariness and hunger had bedevilled her and when she had tried to pray distractions had tormented her. During many of the early nights she had not been able to sleep at all, tossing and turning on the hard ground, trying to find a comfortable position and trying not to think about her comfortable mattress of duck feathers back in the house. Sometimes as the darkness of night grew heavier, and the sounds of birds and distant wood chopping that so often comforted her in the day ceased, she had felt very much alone and very much afraid.
One night after a fitful sleep full of doubts and bad dreams, she jerked awake, to find herself apparently surrounded by an almost tangible black cloud. She forced herself to keep her eyes open and to stare into the darkness, knowing that if only she could see the shape of her enemy, she would be less afraid. But there was no shape. There was only an overwhelming sense of the presence of evil.
Gasping for breath she pushed her way out of the bower and scrambled into the open air. She sensed the cloud was now behind her. She spun round to face it, but somehow it had moved and taken up its position at her back once again. Shuddering, she thought of returning to her husband and abandoning the hill to whatever or whoever haunted it. But then she stopped and her fighting spirit returned to her.
‘This is the Lord’s hill,’ she said firmly, ‘and no one shall take it from Him.’
She lifted her arms and called out in a loud, clear voice: ‘Help and strengthen me, invisible Lord, Holy Spirit! Mighty angels protect me!’
Fiercely and angrily she demanded that the shade should leave the place and never return. She felt strong. She felt confident. She knew that when she turned round once more there would be no shadow at her back – and she was right. She was alone upon the hill. With a deep sigh of relief she looked up to the sky with a prayer of gratitude on her lips. Did she see a shower of stars arc across the dome of darkness and sparks of light fall around her?
On another night it was as though she were above her own body, looking down upon herself. She saw ghostly shapes leaning over her as she slept. Terrified, she looked up and saw above the hill a tall figure of light. Now unafraid, she looked back at the place where she was sleeping and the shapes were no longer there. Her body looked peaceful, enclosed in a cocoon of light.
Gradually she gained confidence. The hunger that had at first been such a distraction no longer bothered her. In fact she had to force herself to eat the ration of leaves and nuts and roots that she had sworn to Tondbert that she would eat. She slipped deeper and deeper into periods of meditation where whole days were swallowed up without being noticed. The shadow of evil she had been so conscious of in the early days was gone. She slept clear, untroubled sleep for a few hours each night, spending the rest in prayer.
The hill became a place of almost unbearable beauty. By the day she rejoiced in the soaring lark and the green and leafy wood below her: by night she rejoiced in the huge stars, and the moon, silver-rich, and magical. She knew the evil in the world was too huge for her to fight. She prayed only that this little hill, this centre, would be so charged with selfless love that those who came there would leave strengthened and refreshed. If evil spread, growing as it spread, from each cruel and selfish act, surely good could spread in the same way, each loving and unselfish act calling forth others, multiplying in every direction, from the centre.
When the forty days had passed Tondbert came to the bottom of the hill and showed himself, and she, knowing this was the signal that they had arranged between them for the end of the purification period, ran to meet him, her face so full of light and joy that he was almost dazzled. She was thin beyond belief, her pale fine skin drawn tight about her bones, her eyes too large in her wasted face. But she was beautiful.
When others came to walk upon the hill they found to their surprise that her pacing feet had worn a complicated pattern of paths through the grass. In following it they found that it was a maze, leading slowly and inexorably to a centre in which the pilgrim could reach stillness and meditate, before starting the long, slow twisting journey back to the outside world.
Anna’s death and burial AD 654
Work was soon started on the new church at Ely, and Etheldreda returned to a normal diet and took her place at her husband’s side. But one day dark news reached them from her father’s kingdom. Penda had attacked again, skirting the southern reaches of the fenlands, storming the dykes across the Icknield Way and breaching the East Anglian defences that were under the control of Anna’s brother Ethelhere.
Tondbert called all the men he could reach together immediately and set off for the south, sending word to the more distant villages for help and putting Edgils in charge of those who were to follow on. Etheldreda tried to stop the thought, but could not, that it was Ethelhere’s treachery that had let the Mercians through. She had never trusted him.
Then messengers brought news that nearly broke her heart. King Anna was dead; the country lost to Penda. Dazed with sorrow she heard the voices of Edgils and the messenger as though they were speaking from a great distance.
‘Is Penda himself upon the throne?’ she heard Edgils ask.
‘No. He has appointed Prince Ethelhere as sub-king, to rule under his overlordship.’
‘Ethelhere?’ King Anna’s daughter heard her own voice shouting fiercely. ‘I knew it! He has betrayed his people.’
Edgils was startled by the ferocity of her expression.
‘My lady!’
‘I must go to Rendilsham.’
‘My lady, war is no place…’
‘The war is over. I must see my uncle and decide what can be done for the country.’
‘If he is as treacherous as you say, he’ll be cunning.’
‘I can be cunning too!’
Edgils looked upset. In the absence of Tondbert he did not know what to do for the best, but he was determined not to let Etheldreda ride into certain danger.
‘If the war is over, Prince Tondbert will return. It must be his decision if you go to your uncle or not.’
‘No, my lord Edgils, it must be my decision,’ Etheldreda said sternly.
On Heregyth’s suggestion, Etheldreda and her party travelled in disguise. The news they gleaned from the villagers and peasants as they travelled was conflicting. Some said that Tondbert had passed that way with an army and was well on the way to reclaiming the country for his wife’s family, but others said he had been defeated and was dead.
Etheldreda let nothing deter her.
At first she was puzzled that she saw so few signs of war’s devastation. Many villages seemed untouched by the events of the past few days. Gradually she became more and more confirmed in her belief that the country had been won for Mercia by treachery and not by war. But nearer the heart of the country ugly sights became more commonplace. Apart from the usual places of execution where the shrivelled bodies of criminals hung from gibbets, there were heads on stakes, arms and legs strung from trees. The grizzly presence of a conqueror who sacrificed to Woden became more and more apparent. Her heart ached, her stomach sickened, but she would not turn back.
At Rendilsham she found her husband and his men unharmed, Ethelhere installed as king and everything apparently peaceful. Penda’s lightning attack had achieved its object and most of the Mercian troops had withdrawn with him in case Oswy should take advantage of his absence and attack the Mercian homeland. He had left sufficient of his men to help support his vassal’s authority.
When Etheldreda entered the great hall and saw Ethelhere sprawling on her father’s throne, it was all that she could do to hold her tongue.
A shadow crossed his face as he recognised her, and in that instant Etheldreda knew that her life hung in the balance. But Ethelhere was no fool. He well knew how popular his predecessor’s beautiful daughter was, and to kill her now in front of everyone might well cost him the uneasy hold he had upon his brother’s kingdom.
Etheldreda was no fool either and she could see that Ethelhere had too much power to challenge from her present position. She bowed to him with dignity and allowed herself to be led forward by one of his thegns to stand before him.
Tondbert’s face was full of conflicting emotions. He was happy to see his wife, but he also feared for her. There was an underlying tension in the atmosphere that he could not understand. No one had accused Ethelhere of treachery and indeed there was no proof of it. But many were uneasy at the swiftness and easiness of Penda’s advance through Ethelhere’s territory and the promptness with which Penda placed him on Anna’s throne and left the country as though he trusted him.
‘I’m glad to see you, niece,’ Ethelhere said coldly to the princess. ‘Had you not come I would have sent for you.’