So Anglians came within Din Guardi’s walls, and the world went on. Oesa’s wife sat among the women of Coel’s household and sewed, and did not have much of a time of it until she learned a few words of Latin and the women learned how to pronounce her name. Her children, not subject to such constraints, rolled and played with the others in the dunes.
As for Oesa himself, he took a place of honour in the debating hall. For almost a week, he, Coel and Arthur thrashed out an agreement in principle by which the Anglian populations around Din Guardi would provide a militia in case of attack. Oesa knew what had happened in Vortigern’s kingdom, and serenely accepted the restraints Arthur suggested to prevent a repeat of the disaster. The settlers’ soldiers would act only in conjunction with equal numbers from among Coel’s men. They would hold no meetings on their own, and no-one in their villages would send messages, food or other support to arriving immigrants. Coel himself would provide for the newcomers, if he saw fit and they came to him in peace.
God knew there was plenty of land. Bryneich was empty and vast—a realm for settlers, not invaders. Oesa assured Coel that he understood the difference. Good service in defence of Bryneich’s shores would be richly rewarded: aware of Anglian practicality, Coel didn’t leave this promise in the air but called for his scribes to mark down on parchment how much and what for. The Hen Ogledd kings, disgusted that their quarrel had been shelved but not quite daring to leave, hung about in the debating hall, and after a few days began to be a little ashamed of themselves, that this foreigner could talk peace while they remained at daggers drawn.
In the evenings, Oesa made himself comfortable in the dining hall. Lance, concerned that Aedilthryd was left disregarded in the women’s quarters, suggested to Art that she join them, but soon learned that a thegn’s wife did not partake of his rank or even shine with his reflected light, and Art, shrugging at Lance to indicate he’d done his best, settled to talk with their exotic visitor.
There was much to learn. The settlers were a mystery no-one had cared to unravel. They were unenlightened heathens, and the Christian priests hadn’t dared enter their settlements to remedy that. They lived by blade and barter. Beyond attempts to stem the tide of their invasion, the Britons had taken no interest in them.
But for all their ferocity, once they had taken the lands they wanted, the villages they built there were extraordinarily peaceful. They didn’t seem to fight amongst themselves. Oesa, leaning his elbows on Coel’s table as if he owned it, told Arthur of the laws and customs the settlers had brought over with them from Anglia—a strange, simple, visceral set of societal restraints that bore no resemblance to the Roman legal system. They lived by the blood-feud. If one man killed another, the victim’s family were honour-bound to avenge his death by slaying the killer in his turn.
At home in Anglia, these cycles of murder and vengeance could roll majestically around the large communities, gathering tales and songs about them. Out in the new world of Britannia, however, the small groups of immigrants had soon realised the impracticality of their old ways. The blood-feud tradition remained in place, but nobody was keen to start one. Extinction would soon swallow up a tiny town at war with itself, and so they behaved. Some forward-thinking souls, Oesa said, had even tried to find a substitute for blood-vengeance, one that wouldn’t depopulate a settlement faster than children could be born into it. In a few places, the wergild had taken the place of the like-for-like killing. It literally meant the price of a man: you could pay with money, not with your life, for your crime.
Arthur was fascinated. There was no equivalent concept in the Celtic world, or even in the more prosaic Roman one which had swallowed it. He and Lance spent long hours discussing with Oesa the extraordinary idea of quantifying the value of a human life. Oesa was proud of the wergild, and didn’t seem to realise that his companions were incredulous as well as intrigued, and more than anything repelled. He talked on, explaining how the man-price could be changed to deal with lesser offences, how each body part—an arm, a toe, a tooth—could be assigned its own value. If you blinded a man, why, you could pay for the price of an eye.
It made sense to him. In practical terms, Lance and Art agreed that they too could see the use of it. Better to pay up than be blinded yourself in your turn. But who decided the price? How was the sacred gift of vision, or of life in your lungs, reductible to a fixed amount of gold pieces, or of sheep or goats or cows, which could also be bartered? Misinterpreting the thrust of their questions, Oesa explained that these ideas were only in their infancy. But for now, the state of suspended blood-feud worked well as a deterrent.
Art had to agree that it kept the peace. Wouldn’t the settlers be more inclined to do as they were told, for a price, if the Britons entered into their way of thinking, and rewarded and punished them as rigidly as they regulated themselves? Paid mercenaries… Yes, it could work. Art could see that Vortigern’s failure had largely been down to mismanagement.
His own army followed him from loyalty. He could be certain of that, he said, because although he paid them what he could afford, that sum was so tiny, they could have no other reason. He would trade glances with Coel, who was in his turn visibly remembering his own campaigns, his glory days beneath the golden standards of Rome, and the pair of them would look almost as grim as each other.
Nevertheless, Arthur summoned Garbonian, who had been keeping a discreet distance since his diplomatic triumph. Garb, delighted at his promotion from traitor to ambassador, eagerly set forth his plans to organise the militia. His father’s gaze on him was heavy with reproof, but there was nothing the old man could do, not while Garb had Art’s authority to speak. Garb tried, and failed, to conceal his enjoyment.
Lance watched it all, for the most part in silence. He spoke only when Arthur questioned him directly, or when he thought he saw flaws in Garb’s ideas of tactics or defence. For all he’d tried to divert Art’s blind rage against the settlers, he was uneasy about using them as soldiers on home turf. Perhaps, he reflected with shame, he was as bigoted as anyone else. He recalled his own childhood hatred for the whole race, his readiness to rush down a hill and kill the strangers approaching Vindolanda simply because they’d been fair-headed, not been Roman-Celtic dark.