the lads. Both bishops then soaked Brunna’s hair and pronounced her new Christian name, ?thelbrun. Alfred beamed with delight. The three Danes stood shivering as a choir of white-robed children sang an endless song. I remember Haesten turning slowly to catch my eye. He raised an eyebrow and had a hard time suppressing a grin and I suspected he had enjoyed the watery humiliation of his plain-looking wife.
Alfred talked with Haesten after the ceremony, and then the Danes left, laden down with gifts. Alfred gave them coins in a chest, a great silver crucifix, a gospel book, and a reliquary which held a finger bone of Saint ?thelburg, a saint who had apparently been drawn up to heaven by golden chains, but must have left at least one finger behind. The rain was pouring down even harder as
That night there was a feast to celebrate the great day’s events. Haesten, it seemed, had begged to be excused from the meal, which was discourteous of him as the food and ale were in his honor, but it was probably a wise decision. Men may not carry weapons in a royal hall, but the ale would doubtless have started fights between Haesten’s men and the Saxons. Alfred, anyway, took no offense. He was simply too happy. He might have seen his own death approaching, but he reckoned his god had granted him great gifts. He had seen Harald utterly defeated and watched as Haesten brought his family for baptism. “I will leave Wessex safe,” he told Bishop Erkenwald in my hearing.
“I trust you will not leave us for many years to come, lord,” Erkenwald replied piously.
Alfred patted the bishop’s shoulder. “That is in God’s hands, bishop.”
“And God listens to his people’s prayers, lord.”
“Then pray for my son,” Alfred said, turning to look at Edward, who sat uneasily at the top table.
“I never cease to pray,” the bishop said.
“Then pray now,” Alfred said happily, “and ask God to bless our feast!”
Erkenwald waited for the king to seat himself at the high table, then he prayed loud and long, beseeching his god’s blessing on the food that was getting cold, and then thanking his god for the peace that now ensured the future of Wessex.
But his god was not listening.
It was the feast that started the trouble. I suppose the gods were bored with us; they looked down and saw Alfred’s happiness and decided, as the gods will, that it was time to roll the dice.
We were in the great Roman palace, a building of brick and marble patched with Saxon thatch and wattle. There was a dais on which a throne usually sat, but now had a long trestle table hung with green linen cloths. Alfred sat in the center of the table’s long side, flanked by ?lswith, his wife, and ?thelfl?d, his daughter. They were the only women present, other than servants. ?thelred sat beside ?thelfl?d, while Edward sat beside his mother. The other six places at the high table were occupied by Bishop Erkenwald, Bishop Asser, and the most important envoys from other countries. A harpist sat to one side of the dais and chanted a long hymn of praise to Alfred’s god.
Beneath the dais, between the hall’s pillars, were four more trestle tables where the guests ate. Those guests were a mixture of churchmen and warriors. I sat between Finan and Steapa in the darkest corner of the hall, and I confess I was in a foul temper. It seemed plain to me that Haesten had fooled Alfred. The king was one of the wisest men I ever knew, yet he had a weakness for his god, and it never occurred to him that there might have been a political calculation behind Haesten’s apparent concessions. To Alfred it simply seemed that his god had worked a miracle. He knew, of course, from his son-in-law and from his own spies, that Haesten had an ambition to take the throne of East Anglia, but that did not worry him because he had already conceded that country to Danish rule. He dreamed of recovering it, but he knew what was possible and what was just aspiration. In those last years of his life Alfred always referred to himself as the King of the An gelcynn, King of the English folk, and by that he meant all the land in Britain where the Saxon languages were spoken, but he knew that title was a hope, not a reality. It had fallen to Alfred to make Wessex secure and to extend its authority over much of Mercia, but the rest of the Angelcynn were under Danish rule, and Alfred could do little about that. Yet he was proud that he had made Wessex strong enough to destroy Harald’s great army and to force Haesten to seek baptism for his family.
I brooded on those things. Steapa growled conversation, which I hardly heard, and Finan made sour jokes at which I dutifully smiled, but all I wanted was to get out of that hall. Alfred’s feasts were never festive. The ale was in short supply and the entertainment was pious. Three monks chanted a long Latin prayer, then the children’s choir sang a ditty about being lambs of god, which made Alfred beam with pleasure. “Beautiful!” he exclaimed when the grubby-robed infants had finished their caterwauling. “Truly beautiful!” I thought he was about to demand another song from the children, but Bishop Asser leaned behind ?lswith and evidently suggested something that made Alfred’s eyes light up. “Brother Godwin,” he called down to the blind monk, “you haven’t sung for us in many weeks!”
The young monk looked startled, but a table companion took him by the elbow and led him to the open space as the children, shepherded by a nun, were taken away. Brother Godwin stood alone as the harpist struck a series of chords on his horsehair strings. I thought the blind monk was not going to sing at all, because he made no sounds, but then he started to jerk his head backward and forward as the chords became swooping and eerie. Some men crossed themselves, then Brother Godwin began to make small whimpering noises. “He’s moon mad,” I muttered to Finan.
“No, lord,” Finan whispered, “he’s possessed.” He fingered the cross which always hung from his neck. “I’ve seen holy men in Ireland,” he went on softly, “just like him.”
“The spirit talks through him,” Steapa said in awe. Alfred must have heard our low voices because he turned an irritated face on us. We went silent, and suddenly Godwin began to writhe and then he let out a great shout that echoed in the hall. Smoke from the braziers wreathed around him before vanishing through the smoke-hole ripped in the Roman roof.
I learned much later that Brother Godwin had been discovered by Bishop Asser, who had found the young, blind monk locked in a cell at the monastery of ?theling?g. He was kept locked away because the abbot believed Godwin to be mad as a bat, but Bishop Asser decided Godwin really did hear his god’s voice and so had brought the monk to Alfred who, of course, believed that anything from ?theling?g was auspicious because that was where he had survived the greatest crisis of his reign.
Godwin began to yelp. The sound was of a man in great pain and the harpist took his hands from the strings. Dogs responded to the sounds, howling in the dark back rooms of the palace. “The holy spirit comes,” Finan whispered reverently, and Godwin let out a great scream as if his bowels were being torn from him.
“Praise God,” Alfred said. He and his family were gazing at the monk who now stood as though crucified, then he relaxed his outspread arms and began speaking. He shivered as he spoke and his voice meandered up and down, now shrill, then almost too low to hear. If it was singing, then it was the strangest noise I ever heard. At first his words sounded like nonsense, or else were being chanted in an unknown language, but slowly, from the jabber, coherent sentences emerged. Alfred was the chosen of God. Wessex was the promised land. Milk and honey abounded. Women brought sin into the world. God’s bright angels had spread their wings over us. The Lord most high is terrible. The waters of Israel were turned to blood. The whore of Babylon was among us.
He stopped after chanting that. The harpist had detected a rhythm in Godwin’s words and was playing softly, but his hands checked on the strings again as the monk turned his blind face about the hall with a look of puzzlement. “The whore!” he suddenly started shouting over and over. “The whore! The whore! The whore! She is among us!” He made a mewing sound and twisted down to his knees and began sobbing.
No one spoke, no one moved. I heard the wind in the smoke-hole and I thought of my children somewhere in ?thelfl?d’s quarters and wondered if they were listening to this craziness.
“The whore,” Godwin said, drawing the word “whore” into a long throbbing howl. Then he stood and looked quite sane. “The whore is among us, lord,” he said toward Alfred, in a perfectly normal voice.
“The whore?” Alfred asked uncertainly.
“The whore!” Godwin screamed again, then once again reverted to sanity. “The whore, lord, is the maggot in the fruit, the rat in the granary, the locust in the wheatfield, the disease in the child of God. It saddens God, lord,” he said, and began weeping.
I touched Thor’s hammer. Godwin was mad beyond help, I thought, but all the Christians in that hall gazed at him as though he had been sent from heaven. “Where’s Babylon?” I whispered to Finan.
“Somewhere a long way off, lord,” he answered softly, “maybe beyond Rome even?”
