He sat back down upon his stool and buried his head in his hands. An anguished groan escaped his lips that spoke at one and the same time of grief and fury, loss and pain. His shoulders trembled as he spoke.
‘I am Magnus,’ he said, so quietly that I could barely hear him, ‘son of Harold.’
It took me a moment to comprehend what he was saying, a moment that stretched into an eternity as, dumbfounded, I stared at him.
‘Harold?’ I asked. Only one man by that name came immediately to mind, but surely it couldn’t be true. ‘You mean the—?’
The oath-breaker and usurper, was what I’d been about to say, but stopped myself in time. Even I was not so stupid as to deliver such an insult to the man’s own son, even if both charges were true.
‘Harold Godwineson, by God’s grace king of the English people,’ Magnus said, his voice rising. ‘I am his eldest surviving son, and the heir to his realm. The realm that your bastard duke, Guillaume, stole from us!’
He was almost in tears as he said this last. That was when I remembered where I had seen the design on his signet ring, so long ago that it could have been another life entirely, and yet it was not that long ago at all. That same dragon mark, or rather its reverse, I had seen imprinted in red sealing wax on a letter written by Magnus’s mother, Eadgyth, who had taken holy orders after the death of her husband, and retreated to an abbey in Wessex.
‘By rights you should call me king,’ Magnus said. ‘By rights Eadgar and all those who flock to his banner should be swearing themselves to my service and bending their knees before me. By rights England belongs to me, and yet here I am, king of nothing. Nothing!’
How many men had falsely laid claim to England’s crown in recent times? First there had been the oath-breaker Harold and his namesake, the King of Norway, and then, after each had perished to the sword, there had been young Eadgar. There was talk, as well, that Sweyn, the Danish king who last year led his raiding-fleet to Northumbria in support of the ?theling, had secretly been plotting to turn on his English ally and seize the kingdom for himself.
And now Magnus added himself to their number. Five false claimants in as many years, and those were just the ones of whom I’d heard. But where was his retinue? What host did he command?
The tavern-keeper was glancing nervously towards the door, I noticed, probably contemplating whether or not to go and fetch help. His look of confusion suggested he wasn’t familiar with the French tongue, and no doubt that ignorance was only adding to his alarm. It was as well that there was no one else in the alehouse at this hour to hear Magnus’s ravings, or surely our arguing would have spilt over into a brawl by now, and then the tavern-keeper would indeed have reason to be worried.
But the storm had passed. Magnus was weeping now, his hands covering his eyes and hiding his tears. ‘“Hu seo thrag gewat,”’ he said between sobs, ‘“genap under nihthelm, swa heo no w?re.”’
How that time has faded away, dark under night’s curtain, as if it had never been. I recognised the phrase from an old poem, one of many that ?dda, who was almost as fond of words and verses as he was of the horses in his care, had once recited to me. But I didn’t know what to say to it, and so for a long time we sat in silence.
Magnus Haroldson. Hard to believe that the usurper’s own flesh and blood was sitting here before me. I recalled having heard in passing about the raids that he and his two elder brothers had launched upon the coast of Wessex, whilst we were occupied fighting the king’s wars in Northumbria last summer. Nothing much had come of those raids, and they had been repelled with little difficulty and with great injury inflicted upon the invaders’ small band. Indeed, on one of those occasions the brothers’ own countrymen, the folk who lived in those parts, had stood against them and helped drive them out. If the object of those expeditions had been to reclaim the crown that their father had for a brief few months worn, then they served as an example of the low regard in which the English folk held the house of Godwine. Little wonder, then, that such bitterness lingered.
Eventually, I signalled to the tavern-keeper to bring us another jug of ale, which after a moment’s hesitation he did. It was thin and a little too bitter for my taste, but it was better than nothing.
‘Not so long ago I happened to cross paths with your mother, Eadgyth,’ I said, remembering that visit we had paid to the nunnery in Wessex a couple of years before.
To have any chance of confronting Haakon and claiming Oswynn back, I needed Magnus as an ally, and for us to set our differences aside, yet at this moment I was close to losing him. Somehow, I had to try to win back his confidence.
‘My mother?’ he asked, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that I met her, and spoke with her, too.’