Alvar the Kingmaker Read online

  Alvar the Kingmaker

  In the West

  The Fairchild, king of England

  Alvar, earl of Mercia

  Brock, his brother, steward to the king

  Swytha (short for Alswytha), Brock’s wife

  Helmstan, Alvar’s friend *

  The Greybeard of Chester, Helmstan’s lord

  Káta, Helmstan’s wife

  Gytha, her servant *

  In the East

  The Half-king, powerful earl of East Anglia

  Elwood of Ramsey, his eldest son

  Lord Thetford, his second son

  Lord Brandon, the youngest son

  Alfreda, Elwood’s wife

  Prince Edgar, the Half-king’s foster-son, brother of the Fairchild. Heir to the throne

  The Churchmen

  Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury

  Athelwold, abbot of Abingdon

  The bishop of Winchester, father of Goodwin

  Oswald, a monk at Fleury, Frankia

  * denotes fictional characters. For original Anglo-Saxon names of non-fictional characters, see author’s notes

  Glossary

  Atheling: a potential heir to the throne, almost always of royal blood.

  Burh: a fortified town.

  Fyrd: Anglo-Saxon fighting force.

  Heriot: war gear, given by the lord to his man, returnable upon death.

  Hide: a unit of land, varying in acreage.

  Hundred: an administrative area of approximately 100 hides; a sub-division of a shire.

  Moot: meeting.

  Oxgang: a small unit of land; an eighth of a hide.

  Pallium: white vestment, worn by archbishops, presented by the pope.

  Reeve: an administrative official.

  Scop: poet.

  Ship-soke: land granted by the king where military service includes provision of ships.

  Thegn: a landholder and fighting man; also the title of those with specific duties on the royal estates.

  Wergild: man-price; payment for a killing, according to rank.

  Witan: the king’s council, made up of nobles, bishops and leading thegns.

  Witenagemot: the meeting of the witan.

  In AD937 the old kingdoms ~ Northumbria in the northeast, East Anglia in the southeast, Wessex in the southwest and Mercia in the midlands ~ were united under the name of England by King Athelstan. But he and his successors died young, childless, or both. Athelstan was succeeded by his half-brother, who sired two children: Edwy and Edgar. He died when these boys were infants and his brother, their uncle, became king before he, too, died prematurely. In AD955 the throne passed to the eldest of those two boys, Edwy, who was foolish, but handsome, and known as the Fairchild. His brother, Edgar, meanwhile, had been fostered by a noble family in East Anglia. They were brothers, but they were strangers. And they were young, with plenty of men jostling to win power and to influence them…

  Part I – Sāwung (The Sowing)

  Chapter One AD956

  Cheddar, Somerset

  Dunstan knocked shoulders with a reveller but did not apologise. He carried on, muttering, towards the sound of the laughter. For the first time in his life he thought to curse his monk’s habit, as it wrap-slapped against his ankles and would not let him run. Irritated to be sent on a mission easily left to a novice monk, he, the abbot of Glastonbury, would now spend all night on his knees, atoning for his prideful thought that such a mission was beneath him. Wrestling thus with his wounded dignity, he hurried on, ignoring the rumblings in his stomach that told him that he should still be at the feast table. As should the king, since it was, after all, his coronation feast. Abbot Dunstan lifted his robe and stepped around the party-goers who vomited and urinated where they stood when they should have hastened instead to the latrines. He stopped in the centre of the royal enclosure and released his hem, listening again. He had tried the stables and the cook-house as well as the two private chambers at the back of the great hall. This would not do, for he had neither the time nor the wish to chase around the whole manor. He thought for a moment, head still cocked to listen for clues. Perhaps he should look for a boy, not a king. After all, the newly crowned youth had performed the earlier ceremonies with barely concealed boredom. Dunstan had watched the youngster fidgeting and yawning openly as the nobles stepped up greedily to receive land-gifts and titles in return for their continued support, and had thought him not a fit successor to the old king. But there was no-one else who was throne-worthy. The king was young, yes, and so beautiful that he was known universally as the Fairchild, but his brother was younger still and had not even been brought up at the court. He, Dunstan, must be as a father to this young king, watch over him and guide him, and admonish him only in the interests of bringing him back to the righteous path. With that thought, he checked himself. His anger was misplaced, for the lad had much to learn. So, where would a sixteen-year-old boy think to go?

  Over by the gate, the newly arrived entertainers were laughing and joking with the guards. The harper was sitting cross-legged in the gateway, tuning his instrument. The tumblers, all clothed in yellow tunics, gave a preview warm-up performance, turning somersaults and coming upright to catch the knives and balls thrown by their partners. Some of the noblemen wandered over, and heckled the jugglers, hoping that by doing so they would witness a stumble or slip. A serving-girl came from the bake-house carrying a basket piled high with loaves. One of the tumblers danced over to her, kissed her cheek and snatched three of the flatbreads. He juggled with them before throwing them one by one to his partner, who turned and threw them in turn to land back in the girl’s basket. She, flushed but smiling, tucked her chin down and braved the throng to get to the gate. She side-stepped the harper, who looked up and blew her a kiss. Behind the great hall, the door of the women’s guest bower opened and the ladies of the royal court stepped out into the sunshine. Many had eschewed the wimple veil for a more elaborate head-cloth, the swathes of material wound round their heads and secured with pins. Their brightly coloured silk kirtles brought a rainbow swirl to the centre of the courtyard as they walked across the enclosure towards the hall.

  But the sound of laughter that had drawn Abbot Dunstan in this direction was still rising from the queen’s bower. Now that the others had moved away, he recognised the sound that was left behind as the twinkling, affected cadence of the king’s wife’s girlish giggling and he detected another, older, feminine chuckle. The chortling was punctuated by a loud shriek, followed by more giggling, then another less distinguishable sound. Dunstan held his breath, for he could not be sure that he had heard properly over the noise of the air whistling through his nostrils. No, there it was again; the low rumble of a youth’s teasing voice, the words indistinct but the meaning made manifest by the elicited responses from the females. Dunstan sucked in his breath, disapproval pulling him up tall, with his chest puffed out and his shoulders back, while he tried to make sense of what he was hearing. Too many voices. He was a pious man, chaste and celibate, but he knew what went on between men and women. And yet this assault on his ears made no sense. What kind of sin was this? He shook his head as the unwholesome sounds continued. There was only one possibility and he put his hand to the door latch, holding it there while he prepared his admonition. He would point first to the queen and denounce her as a fornicating whore. Then he would establish the identity of the man who dared to cuckold a boy-king in his own house. He lifted the latch. He would have to be quick; scan the room, pinpoint the queen’s whereabouts so that he could go straight to her, brand her with the fire of his words. They would be chastened; the whore-queen and her lover who dared to geld the king.

  But it was worse than he could have dreamed, even when he sat in the darkest part
of the night and tortured his spirit by imagining the worst excesses of sinful flesh which must be rooted out and destroyed, forcing his mind to consider every possible depravity and linger on it, the better to learn how to defeat it. What manner of abomination was this that went against all the teachings of Holy Scripture and all laws of nature? The abbot stared, fish-gaping, his tidy speech forgotten.

  Dunstan looked from person to person once more, in the same order as when he had first burst into the room, praying that this second scrutiny would prove the first one false.

  But no; the king’s wife did not even have the shame to cover her naked flesh and she remained reclining, one arm behind her head, her breasts exposed, the other hand somewhere under the covers, no doubt reaching to touch her lover in some unspeakable manner. He, meanwhile had his back to her, and lay on his side, locked in an embrace with the woman on the other side of bed. At the sound of the door crashing open, he had turned and met Dunstan’s gaze and he continued to stare now, as Dunstan’s eyes confirmed the scene. It was the king. The king was in bed with his wife. And her mother.

  The older woman frowned as if annoyed to be interrupted, while her daughter insouciantly pulled the covers up to her chest, writhing with her legs as she slid away, but not far, from the king. The king, meanwhile, continued to stare at the abbot.

  Dunstan’s hand was stuck on the open door, while his feet remained poised for either advancement or retreat. As the younger woman began a struggle against laughter, his pretty sermonising skills flew away into the yard, along with all notions of protocol. “S-Satan’s b-beasts! By the Christ and all his s-saints, you will all b-burn in hell.”

  The words were out, and his fire of bravery was suddenly quenched. The sound of the drunks in the enclosure pressed on his ears as it marched to fill the void of the frozen silence before him. In a minute, one would meet the other. More voices and now, footsteps, brought nearer by curiosity. They must not converge. He turned towards the open doorway. The noise must not collide with the silence of shame.

  But now the jezebel had lost her battle and her laughter filled the room. His cheeks burned and his palms oozed moisture. A press of people barred his way. The onlookers began to laugh and their bared teeth and distorted faces melded into one grotesque tormentor. Behind him, the king and the other woman snorted and guffawed. All. All of them are mocking me. Mocking God’s servant. And God’s laws. Images conflated in his mind and he shuddered at visions of the inhabitants of Gomorrah constructing the tower of Babel. He put his head down and butted through them, catapulting into the enclosure and landing on his knees. He remained on the ground, feeling the press of the earth on his permanently bruised knees, feeling closer to his God down here, even while physically lower than those who came forward to gawp. Here came another one now, jeering, sneering.

  The young man proffered a hand. “Need some help, Abbot?”

  Dunstan stared up at him, into grey eyes that crinkled around the corners and were surrounded by locks of wavy, unkempt and somehow ungodly gold-brown hair. The youth’s lean lips were stretched into a smile over straight teeth and his chin was stubbly. He was well past the age to shave, but didn’t. Another idle hell-spawn. But Dunstan could at least see this face. He knew this one.

  He ignored the outstretched hand and stood up, staring with what he hoped was obvious contempt at the young man. Alvar, newly made lord of lands in the province of Mercia, was one of those swaggering, easily bought young men who worshipped Bacchus and clung to the Fairchild’s tunic to catch any scraps which the king might drop for them, whilst encouraging him to forget his duty. Surely it was not to any divine purpose that England, with its defiled monasteries only now beginning to revive learning and literacy after the Viking onslaught, should fall instead under the rule of such a king as the Fairchild was revealing himself to be.

  He looked over his shoulder towards the bower of sin and shuddered to think what sort of children such a match would produce. Perhaps God would be merciful and refuse to grant them any issue. For was not Gomorrah destroyed, the tower of Babel collapsed? Then surely the kingship would pass to the Fairchild’s younger brother, who, by all accounts, was a fine and pious boy who would never place power and authority into the hands of irreligious upstarts. For Dunstan was in no doubt that these men were as morally bereft as the Fairchild had shown himself to be. Oh yes, he knew this man, who stood before him, still smiling. This one, he would not forget.

  Alvar’s smile had been stuck on his face since he knelt and received his earldom, and he had allowed himself a certain amount of ridiculous pride at his investiture, patting the arm ring, newly placed there by his lord King. But now he paused to consider as he watched the abbot shuffling away and he shook his head. It would always be his instinct to reach out and help a humiliated man, but he was particularly perturbed that the victim in this instance was an abbot, a man of the Church who should be respected, not disregarded. He looked towards the royal bower and listened for a moment to the bawdy laughter. It was easy to guess the nature of the spectacle that Dunstan had witnessed and Alvar wondered what kind of king had been crowned that day, who thought nothing of shaming an abbot in such a manner. Now he fiddled with the arm ring, pondering the loyalty which it had supposedly rewarded. Any man who refused a title was a fool and Alvar was not foolish, yet he had experienced shivers of doubt when he knelt to receive such riches from the boy-king. The day was still young and already those misgivings were growing.

  He sighed and looked up. Now that the carousers had gone inside, it was as if the incident had never happened. Folk on the royal estate went about their business as if today were the same as yesterday. On the other side of the enclosure, the huntsmen fed the Fairchild’s hounds, whilst nearby in the mews, the fowler and his boy attended to the king’s hunting birds. Outside the fowler’s hut, the geese flapped and hissed at the dairyman walking to the cook-house with two buckets of milk. A monk, not yet tonsured, was sitting on the ground outside the writing-house, his lithe young legs crossed. Sitting beside him, with a small hand resting on the brother’s knee, a village boy looked up as he listened to the monk’s tale, his basket of freshly gathered strawberries temporarily forgotten. Another boy was guarding a cartload of casks of wine from the vineyard at nearby Panborough while an older youth and a man unloaded them into the cook-house.

  In the corner of the courtyard, three men kept a regular beat as they threshed piles of wheat taken from the stores, winnowing it free of chaff as quickly as they could to keep the quern stones turning. Snorts and stamping emanated from the overcrowded stables as the groom arrived with another stallion, but the horse-thegns took the animal with orderly efficiency.

  Alvar turned to greet the man who had come to stand next to him.

  His brother, Brock, returned his smile and the two men stood side by side in comfortable silence, watching the scene as the players within it acted out the familiar daily routines.

  After a few moments Alvar said, “Out here, at least, everything is as it should be and that is thanks to you as king’s steward.”

  Brock laughed, running his hand through his hair and smoothing down the badger-stripe of premature grey that ran from his temple to his crown, the source of his nickname. “The business of running the kings’ halls changes little, even if they do keep giving me new kings to train.”

  Alvar let out a sardonic laugh. “From what I saw earlier, you would be mad even to try with this one. And it was not a mess that could be swept away with a besom.” Alvar shook his head and said, “I have taken an earldom from him and yet I cannot help but feel he is too shiftless to be a good king.”

  Brock said, “Then we must both teach him.” He clasped his younger brother by the shoulders and patted Alvar’s arm ring. “To me, he is a whelp who will need to be taught, but to you he is a great gift-giver, eh my lord?” Brock emphasised the last word and gave a mock bow.

  Alvar stroked the ring. He rubbed his finger over the smoothness of the inlaid garnets and trac
ed the pattern of the gold filigree. Would his father’s lands in the shires of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester, and the title that went with them, have even passed to him if his elder brother were not already richly rewarded and occupied in the role of steward? He said, “I have much to live up to. You have worked so hard and served three kings now and I have yet to…”

  “Make your mark?”

  Alvar raised his eyebrows as Brock once again finished his thought for him. Sixteen when Alvar was born, Brock seemed sometimes to know him better than he knew himself.

  Brock said, “Yes, I was the first to follow where our father trod and you think I have become rich and esteemed. You, on the other hand, never had to work for anything. One grin and our mother, God rest her soul, would look at your beseeching grey eyes and she would melt like butter in the sunshine.”

  Alvar laughed. It was true. Their mother often said that all he had to do was stare at her with eyes so like her own and she would believe his every tale. Brock, as the eldest, had to learn everything and all Alvar had to do was copy him. No wonder he felt that, even though he was now twenty years old, the earldom had come to him like a tame hound onto his lap. Their father was a man about whom hearth-tales were told, up and down the land. His boots were bigger than Alvar’s feet and Alvar wondered how he would ever fill them.

  Brock slapped him on the back. “Too much thinking addles the brain, little brother. You wield a sword better than any man I know. The Fairchild could not have picked a better man to protect the western marches and keep the Welsh away from our ale and women. Speaking of which, we should be away inside now.”

  Alvar squeezed the hilt of his new sword, reminded that now the ceremony was over, he would be obliged to hang the weapon up inside the hall. The hilt was decorated with the familiar threaded pattern that represented the winding and interwoven strands of life, unbroken between this world and the next. It was a trapping of his investiture that had quickly begun to hang heavily by his side, but its decoration represented continuity. Worthy or not, he should be prepared, as its new owner, to act accordingly and uphold the sovereignty of kingship, whoever the king might be.