Sauron Defeated (47 page)

It was ancient English, I think, but he didn't know himself: it faded from him almost as soon as he had spoken. But I had a sudden feeling that there was something important waiting for us there, and I made up my mind to take him back that way before the end of our journey, if there was time. So I did.

'We arrived in a small boat at Porlock Weir on Saturday, September 13th. We put up at The Ship, up in Porlock itself; but we felt drawn back shorewards, and as soon as we had fixed our rooms we went out and turned westward, going up onto the cliffs and along as far as Culbone and beyond. We saw the sun set, dull, hazy, and rather grim, about half past six, and then we turned back for supper.

'The twilight deepened quickly, and I remember that it seemed suddenly to grow very chilly; a cold wind sprang up from the land and blew out westward towards the dying sun; the sea was leaden. We both felt tired and anxious, for no clear reason: we had been feeling rather cheery. It was then that Arry turned away from the sea and took my arm, and he said quite clearly, and I heard him and understood him: Uton efstan nu, Treowine! Me ofthyncth thisses windes. Mycel wen is Deniscra manna to niht.(90) And that seemed to break my dreams. I began to remember, and piece together a whole lot of things as we walked back to the town; and that night I had a long series of dreams and remembered a good deal of them.'

'Yes,' said Lowdham, 'and something happened to me at that moment, too. I began to see as well as to hear. Treowine, that is Wilfrid Trewyn Jeremy, and I seemed to have got into the same dream together, even before we were asleep. The faces in the hotel looked pale and thin, and the walls and furniture only half real: other things and faces were vaguely moving behind them all. We were approaching the climax of some change that had begun last May, when we started to research together.

'Anyway, we went to bed, and we both dreamed; and we woke up and immediately compared notes; and we slept again and woke and did the same. And so it went on for several days, until we were quite exhausted. So at last we decided to go home; we made up our minds to come back to Oxford the next day, Thursday. That night, Wednesday, September 17th, something happened: the dreams coalesced, took shape, and came into the open, as you might say. It seemed impossible to believe when it was over that years had not slipped by, and that it was still Thursday, September 18th, 1987, and we could actually return here as we had planned. I remember staring incredulously round the dining-room, that seemed to have grown strangely solid again, half wondering if it was not some new dream-trick. And we went into the post-office and a bank to make sure of the date! Then we crept back here secretly, a week ago, and stayed in retreat until yesterday, conferring and putting together all we had got before we came out of hiding. I think I'll leave Trewyn to do the telling. He's better at it than I am; and he saw more, after the earlier scenes.'

'No!' said Jeremy. 'Alwin had better begin. The earlier part is his, more than mine. He remembers more of what was said by me than I do myself. Go on now, Arry!'

'Well', said Lowdham, 'it seemed to me like this. I woke with a start.(91) Evidently I had been dozing on a bench near the fire.

The voices seemed to pour over me like a stream. I felt that I had been dreaming, something very odd and vivid, but I could not catch it; and for a minute or two the familiar scene in the hall seemed strange, and the English speech about me sounded alien and remote, although the voices were for the most part using the soft speech of western Wessex that I knew so well. Here and there I caught the tones of the Marchers from up beyond Severn-mouth; and I heard a few speaking queerly, using uncouth words after the manner of those from the eastern shires.

'I looked down the hall, hoping to see my friend Treowine Ceolwulf's son. There was a great crowd in hall, for King Eadweard was there. The Danish ships were in the Severn Sea, and all the south shores were in arms. The heathen earls had been defeated away up in the west marches at Archenfield, but the pirates were still at large off the Welsh coast, trying to get food and supplies, and the Devenish men and Somersets (92) were on guard. There had been a bitter affray at Watchet a few nights before, but the Danish men had been driven off. Porlock's turn might come.

'I looked round at the faces of the men: some old and worn, some still young and keen; but they seemed dim, almost dreamlike in the wavering torches. The candles on the high table were guttering. A wind was blowing outside the great wooden hall, surging round the house; the timbers creaked. I felt tired.

Not only because Treowine and I had had a long spell of coastguard duty, and had had little sleep since the raid on Watchet; but I was tired of this woeful and dishevelled world, slipping slowly back into decay, as it seemed to me, with its petty but cruel wars, and all the ruin of the good and fair things there had been in my grandsires' days. The hangings on the wall behind the dais were faded and worn, and on the table there were but few vessels or candlesticks of gold and silver smithcraft that had survived the pillage of the heathen.

'The sound of the wind disturbed me and brought back to me old longings that I thought I had buried. I found myself thinking of my father, old Eadwine Oswine's son,(93) and the strange tales he had told me when I was a small lad and he a grizzled seaman of more than fifty winters: tales of the west coasts, and far islands, and of the deep sea, and of a land there was far away, where there was peace and fruitfulness among a fair folk that did not wither.

'But Eadwine had taken his ship, Earendel, out into the deep sea long ago, and he never returned. What haven received him no man under heaven could tell. That was in the black winter, when Alfred went into hiding (94) and so many men of Somerset fled over sea. My mother fled to her kindred among the West Welsh (95) for a while, and I had seen only nine winters in this world, for I was born just before the holy Eadmund was done to death by the heathen.(96) I learned the Welsh tongue and much craft upon the wild waters, before I came back in full manhood to Somerset and the service of the good king in his last wars.(97)

'I had been in Iraland more than once; and wherever I went I sought tales of the Great Sea and what lay out upon it, or beyond, if haply it had any further shore. Folk had not much to tell for certain,. but there was talk of one Maelduin (98) who had sailed to new lands, and of the holy Brendan and others. And some there were who said that there had been a land of Men away west in long days of yore, but that it had been cast down and those that escaped had come to Eriu (99) (so they called Iraland) in their ships, and their descendants lived on there, and in other lands about the shores of Garsecg. But they dwindled and forgot, and nought now was left of them but a wild strain in the blood of men of the West. "And you will know those that have it by the sea-longing that is on them," they said,. .

'And I thought that maybe the blood of such men ran in my father's veins and my own, for our kin had long been settled at Glastonbury, where there was rumour of strange comers out of the sea in days of old. And the sound of the winds and seas on the west beaches was ever a restless music to me, at once a pain and a desire; and the pain was keener in Spring, and the desire stronger in Autumn. And now it was Autumn, and the desire was scarcely to be borne; for I was growing old. And the seas were wide. So I mused, forgetting once again where I was, but not sleeping.

'I heard the crash of waves on the black cliffs, and sea-birds wailing; snow fell. Then the sea opened before me, pale and boundless. And now the sun shone above me, and the land and the sound of it and the smell of it fell far behind. Treowine was beside me, and we were alone, going west. And the sun came down and sank towards the sea before us, and still we sailed west, on towards the setting sun, and the longing in my heart drew me on against my fear and land-bound will. And so I passed into night in the midst of the deep waters, and I thought that a sweet fragrance was borne on the air.

'And suddenly I was brought back to Porlock and the hall of the king's thegn Odda. Men were calling out for a minstrel, and a minstrel I was, when the mood was on me. The king himself, stern Eadweard Alfred's son - tired before old age he looked -

sent to me, bidding me sing or speak. He was a stern man, as I say, but like his father in having an ear, when he had the time, for the sound of the old measures. I rose and walked to the steps of the dais, and bowed.

'"Westu hal, AElfwine!" said the king. "Sing me nu hwaet-wegu: sum eald leoth, gif thu wilt."

' "Ic can lyt on leothcraeft, hlaford," I said; "ac this geworht'ic unfyrn the to weorthmynde."

'And then I began, and let my voice roll out; but my mouth did not speak the words that I had purposed: of all that I had so carefully devised against the event, in the night watches or pacing on the cold cliffs, not a stave came out.

Hwaet! Eadweard cyning AElfredes sunu

beorna beaggifa on Brytenrice

aet Ircenfelda (100) ealdorlangne tir

geslog aet saecce sweorda ecgum *

and all the rest, of such sort as kings look for: not a word of it.

Instead I said this: (101)

Monath modes lust mid mereflode

forth to feran, thaet ic feor heonan

ofer garsecges grimme holmas

AElfwina eard ut gesece.

Nis me to hearpan hyge ne to hringthege,

ne to wife wynn, ne to worulde hyht,

ne ymb owiht elles, nefne ymb ytha gewealc.

Then I stopped suddenly, and stood confused. There was some laughter, from those not under the king's eye, and a few mocking calls. There were many folk in hall who knew me well, and they had long been pleased to make a jest of my talk of the Great Sea; and it now pleased them to pretend that I had spoken of AElfwines eard, as if I had a realm of my own out westward.

'"If England is not good enough, let him go find a better land!" they cried. "He need go no further than Iraland, if he longs for elves and uncouth wights, God save him! Or he can go with the heathen to the Land of Ice that they say they have found."

' "If he has no mind to sing for the raising of our hearts, let us find a scop who will."

' "We have had enough of the sea," shouted one of the Marchers. "A spell of Dane-hunting round the rim of Wales would cure him."

'But the king sat gravely and did not smile, and many besides were silent. I could see in his eyes that the words had touched him, though I doubt not, he had heard others like them often before.

'"Peace!" said old Odda of Portloca, master of the hall.

"AElfwine here has sailed more seas than you have heard of, and (* Lowdham provides the following translations 'for Philip's benefit'.

'Greetings, AElfwine,' said the king. 'Recite me something, some old poem if you like.' 'I have little skill in poetry, my lord,' I said, 'but I composed this in your honour a little while ago.'

'Lo! Eadweard the king, Alfred's scion, brave men's patron, in Britain's island at Archenfield undying fame in battle reaped him with reddened blades.'

For the translation of the next verses see Night 66, p. 244. N.G.) the lands of the Welsh and Irish are not strange to him. With the king's leave let him say what his mood bids him. It is no harm to turn from these sorry shores for a while and speak of marvels and strange lands, as the old verse-makers often did. Will you not speak us something by the elder poets, AElfwine?"

'"Not now, lord," I said; for I was abashed and weary, and I felt as a man in a dream who finds himself unclad in the market-place. "There are others in hall. Men of the Marches I hear by their speech; and they were used to boast of their songcraft, before the Danes came. With the king's leave I will sit."

'At that a man from among the Marchers leapt to his feet and got leave to speak; and lo! I saw it was my friend Treowine. A small dark man he was, but he had a good voice, if a strange way with his words. His father Ceolwulf, I had heard, claimed to come of the kin of the kings that sat at Tamworth (102) of old; but Treowine had come south many years before. Ere I had found a seat, he had a foot on the step and had begun.

'His verse was in the old style, indeed it was the work of some old poet, maybe, though I had not heard it before, and many words were dark to us of later times; but he gave them out strong and true, now loud, now soft, as the theme asked, without help of harp. Thus he began, and soon all the hall was stone-still:

Hwaet! we on geardagum of Garsecge

fyrn gefrugnon of feorwegum

to Longbeardna londgemaerum

tha hi aer heoldon, iglond micel

on North-theodum, nacan bundenne

scirtimbredne scrithan gangan...

'But if it was dark to some of our younger men of Wessex, it will be as night to you, who have passed so much further down the streams of time, since the old poets sang in Angel of the grey North-seas; so I have cast it into the speech of your age. And I have done so, for by chance, or more than chance, this song had a part in what befell after, and its theme was knit up with my own thoughts, and it whetted my longing the more.