The Crown Unsettled

The fire had been going since before first light and the stones under the hearth held the heat the way old stones hold the heat — slowly, and for a long time. Widow Bertrada had set a pot of barley on the crane at the second hour and the steam from the pot climbed in a thin white rope to the rafters and lost itself there. Outside the shutter the Saarbrücken morning was gray and hard. Inside, it was warm.

Hugh sat at the kitchen table with his hands flat on the boards and the roll of parchment open in front of him. The roll had been weighted at the upper corners with a tin spoon and a cup. His cloak was over the back of the bench. His sword was leaned against the wall beside the door. He had taken his gloves off and laid them, one crossed over the other, at the edge of the table where Bertrada had set a wooden bowl of bread.

He came down from Metz on the eve of the Octave of Christmas with three horsemen only — Otbert the Saargau sergeant, a groom, and himself. The ride took two days at the pace a duke rides when he prefers not to be seen as a duke. He slept one night in the inn’s upper room at Forbach. The bishop and Fulk knew nothing of it. Only Roderic had been told; he had nodded and said he would answer for the solar during the duke’s absence.

Bertrada had not been surprised to see him. She made the sign of peace, stepped aside, pointed at the table, then went to set the barley on the fire and add a second pot of water for rinsing cups. She was fifty. She wore the dark woollen over-dress of a widow of the parish of Saint Arnual. Her hair was covered. Her hands, when she set the cups, were steady, and she put the cups down with the small care of a woman who has lost enough vessels to know the price of a cup.

“My lord duke,” she said, when she had set the second cup. “You will read it now?”

“I will read it now.”

“I have the bread.”

“Later.”

She sat on the bench across from him. She folded her hands on the table. She was not going to cry. He had known that, riding down. He had known it because he had read her letter of October, written in the parish priest’s hand but dictated by her in the words of a woman who has stopped crying and has learned to count. She had asked him, in that letter, for two things. The first was that the name of her son Ulmar be entered, when the duke next made the list of the dead of the field at Ennsburg, in the register of the Saargau cathedral. The second was that the duke, if it was possible, read the whole list aloud in her kitchen, from the first name to the last, with her son’s name in its place. She would hear it, she said, as the boys heard the Mass.

He had written back by the same courier. I will come in January. I will come before the Twelfth Night. I will bring the list.

He had brought the list. He had brought also, in the purse at his belt, a small leather bag with thirty-one pennies of the new Metz striking, each penny wrapped in a piece of waxed cloth. The pennies were not for Bertrada. The pennies were for the thirty-one.

He set his finger at the top of the roll.

“I will read them as they fell,” he said. “It is not the order of the muster. It is the order of the field.”

“My lord.”

“Wibald recorded it. His hand.”

“My lord.”

He began.

He read the first name slowly, because the first name must be read slowly or the reading becomes a count instead of a reading. He said the name of the man and he said the name of the village and he said the name of the company. He paused at the end of the three. He went to the next.

He had read the list twice before — once at the cathedral in Metz on All Souls’, and once at the mustering-field in October, to the survivors. He had not read it in a kitchen. The kitchen was a different reading. The kitchen was thirty-one names said in a room that had contained, in the years of the boy Ulmar’s growing, the naming of him at the font, and the first step he took across the floor, and the morning he had come home with his first wages from the smith, and the hour on the eve of Saint Walpurga when his mother had put his hand in the hand of the Saargau sergeant of the muster and said take him.

He read the eleventh name. He read the twelfth. The widow’s hands did not move.

At the fourteenth name he paused. The fourteenth was the name of a Saargau farrier, one who had been with the column from the first and whose wife lived on the next street over. Bertrada nodded once. He went on.

He read the twentieth. The twentieth was Ulmar.

Ulmar, son of Bertrada, of Saarbrücken, in the company of Adalhard of the archers.

He did not look up. He said the name as he had said the other nineteen. He said the company. He went on to the twenty-first.

Bertrada did not move. Her hands were folded. Her eyes were on the roll. The pot on the crane, behind her, made a soft small noise and she did not turn to it.

He read the last name at the eleventh minute. He rolled the parchment. He laid it at the edge of the table. He took the leather bag from his belt. He untied the string. He counted out the thirty-one pennies, each in its wax cloth, and set them in a line along the boards between his hands and hers.

“One for each name,” he said. “One for each of the thirty-one. It is not a payment. It is a sign. The thirty-one are carried in the treasury of the duchy, and the duchy remembers them with a coin for each. The coins are yours. You may give them to the church. You may give them to the families. You may give them to the fire.”

“I will give them to the church,” Bertrada said. “Not to the fire.”

“Yes.”

“My lord.”

“Your son’s name will be cut into the register at the cathedral on the Octave of the Epiphany. The canon has been paid. He will sit down on that day with the list and cut each name. He will cut Ulmar on the twentieth line as he was on the field.”

“My lord.”

“I will come again in a year. I will bring the list of the year.”

“You will bring a longer list next year.”

He looked at her then for the first time since he had begun to read.

“I will try not to.”

“You will bring a longer list next year,” she said again. “My lord. I am fifty. I have buried a husband and a boy. I know the year’s work.”

He had no answer to that. He had learned, in two winters of sitting at kitchen tables in the Saargau and the Metz and the edge-villages of the Moselle, that there are sentences spoken to a duke by a woman of fifty that cannot be answered. You sit. You let the sentence stand. You do not try to mend it with a second sentence of your own.

He sat. He let the sentence stand.

Bertrada poured the water. She cut the bread. She set a piece of the bread on a small wooden plate and pushed the plate across the boards to him. She cut a second piece for herself. They ate the bread. She did not speak again until the bread was eaten. When the bread was eaten she took the plate and the bowl to the basin by the hearth and washed them. She did not turn to look at him.

He rolled the parchment again. He tied it with the cord. He put it in the inner pocket of his coat. He put the pennies, one by one, back into the leather bag. He tied the bag. He set the bag at the center of the table. He did not give it to her hand. He left it on the table. She would take it when he was gone.

He was thinking, sitting at the table in the warm kitchen, of what remained of the year ahead. The first thought was the muster. The second thought was the charter that Arnulf had promised in speech at the Council of 901 and had not yet sealed. The third thought was the Enns and whether Ortlieb would have enough bows there before the thaw. He was also thinking, quietly, underneath these thoughts, about a letter he had not yet opened. The letter had come in from Bavaria on the last day of December. It was on his desk at the solar at Metz. It was sealed with the arms of a count Liutpold’s wife’s family he could not now recall the name of. He had left it sealed. He would open it when he returned. He was not in a hurry for Bavaria.

Bertrada finished the bowl. She turned.

“My lord duke.”

“Bertrada.”

“Do not answer me kindly.”

“I will not.”

“Is there a war coming?”

He thought about the question. He thought about Roderic’s face at the solar two weeks ago when the Saxon report had come in on the movements of Burchard’s men along the upper Rhine. He thought about Fulk’s stillness when the question of the oath had come up. He thought about the charter that had not been sealed. He thought about the Magyar east, where the treaty held but where no treaty held forever.

“There is,” he said. “I do not know yet which one.”

“Ah.”

“There may be more than one.”

“Ah.”

She sat down on the bench again. She folded her hands on the boards. The sun was coming up at last over the roofs of the far side of the street, and a thin yellow light was coming under the edge of the shutter and laying itself along the floor.

They did not speak for a while.

Then there was a sound in the street.

Hooves. Not many. Three horses, perhaps. The sound of a horse ridden at a cold-country gallop — quick, uneven, the animal blown. The hooves stopped at the door. A voice, a man’s voice, hoarse: Is the duke within? Otbert, in the yard: Who rides? The first voice again: The king’s courier. From Aachen.

Hugh put his hand flat on the table. He stood.

“Bertrada.”

“My lord.”

“I must go to the door.”

“Go.”

He took his cloak. He did not take the sword. He took the bag of pennies from the table — not to keep it, but to place it in her hand, because he found, at that moment, that he did not wish it to be lying on the boards when the news from Aachen was read in this kitchen. He pressed the bag into her palm. She closed her fingers on it. She did not speak.

He went to the door.

The courier was standing in the yard beside his horse. The horse was blown. Steam was coming off the animal’s neck in white drifts. The courier had not taken off his hood. He was perhaps twenty-five. His lips were blue. He was holding a sealed packet in his right hand. He took one step forward when he saw the duke. He took the hood back. His breath caught in his throat, a cough, and he put his fist against his chest to ease the cough, and he straightened, and he lowered his head as the household courtesy required. The cough came again. He mastered it.

He held out the packet.

“My lord.”

“The king’s courier.”

“My lord. The king.”

Hugh took the packet. The seal was the king’s seal. He did not break it at the door. He felt the weight of the parchment. He felt the shape of the news. He had felt the shape of news in a sealed packet many times now. He knew, before he had broken the seal, what the two words meant when a king’s courier came on a blown horse on the Octave of Christmas and said, at the door of a widow’s kitchen, my lord, the king.

He held the packet. He looked past the courier, at the gray street, at the low yellow sun coming up over the roofs.

Behind him, in the kitchen, the pot on the crane made its soft small noise.

The courier, his voice not yet steady: “My lord. The king.”

CHAPTER TWO

The King's Body

Aachen, the chapel royal — January 902

They rode through the night of the fifth day into Aachen by the Maastricht road and the moon was high and the frost on the fields stood up in hard small ridges that crunched under the horses. Five days from Saarbrücken at the pace a duke rides when a king is dead. Hugh had not slept more than the changes of watch. Otbert was behind him. The king’s courier, whose name was Ragnold and who had not slept since Aachen, rode between them because Hugh had said that he would not send the man ahead and let him fall from his horse on the road.

The bells of Aachen began in the fourth hour of the morning. They rang slowly. They rang at the pace that was the pace of a funeral and not the pace of a feast. Every bell in the city rang and each bell took its time between the strokes and the sound of it carried out over the frost and was answered by the bells of Jülich and by the bells of Maastricht further west and behind them the bells of the abbeys of the Meuse. It was the custom that all the bells of the king’s country rang together for the king’s body for seven days and this was the third day and the custom was holding.

They came in at the Cologne gate at the half of the fifth hour. The gate was open. The captain of the guard had been told by the chancellor to let the duke of Lotharingia through by any gate at any hour. The captain bowed at the horse’s neck and gave Hugh a short report of the city: the nine magnates who had reached Aachen, the disposition of their retinues, the lodging that had been kept for Hugh in the bishop’s palace. Hugh heard it and nodded and rode on.

He dismounted at the palace. He handed the reins to a groom. He did not go to his lodging. He went to the chapel royal.

The chapel royal at Aachen was the old chapel, the one Charles had built and had been buried in, and in the two hundred years since it had been darkened by candles and by incense and by the breath of four generations of royal mourning. It had a small cold at its center that came up out of the stones of the floor. Even in summer the stones were cold. On the Octave of Christmas with the bells ringing outside the stones were very cold.

The king’s body was on a bier in the center of the nave. Six candles at the head and six at the foot. A cloth of gold over the body to the shoulders. The face uncovered. The hands crossed at the sword-belt over the cloth. He was wearing the crown of state. Arnulf had died on the eve of the Feast of the Innocents — the twenty-seventh of December — of a fever that had begun on Christmas Eve and taken him within two days after Christmas. He had been fifty-two. He had been king for fourteen years and emperor for six.

Hugh stood at the foot of the bier.

Arnulf’s face had gone in these three days from the face of a man who had ruled to the face of a man who had been prepared. The lines at the corners of the mouth were smoothed. The cheeks had fallen a little. Someone had shaved him. He wore the short gray beard trimmed the way he had worn it at the Council of 901. The skin over the cheekbones was very white. The mouth was closed. The eyes were closed. The hands — Hugh looked at the hands — were the hands Arnulf had always had, the hands of a horseman of the Bavarian country, broad at the knuckle, square at the nail, marked in the back with the old scars. Someone had put a ring on the third finger of the right hand that Arnulf had not worn in his life. It would be the ring of his father. Ota would have done that.

Hugh stood for perhaps three minutes. He said a prayer he did not speak aloud. He was not good at prayer. He said the Our Father and he said it in Latin because the Latin of the Our Father was the prayer he had been taught at Saint Mary’s in Friuli before he had been old enough to question what he was saying, and he said it now with the same patient not-quite-understanding he had brought to it at six. He said it twice. At the end of the second time he added, in the plain German of his own speech, a sentence that was not a prayer but that he addressed to the man on the bier. You named me in speech. I heard it. I will stand where you set me.

He stepped back.

He crossed himself. He turned.

Ota was sitting at the side of the nave on a low bench against the wall with Louis beside her. She had been there, by the cut of her face and the stillness of her hands, for most of the night. She was not in full mourning. She was in dark blue, the color she had worn in the December council — the color that was half-mourning and half-queen — and she had a fine black veil over her hair but not drawn across her face. Her hands were folded in her lap. Louis, six years old, was sitting upright beside her with his feet not quite reaching the floor and his shoulders held the way she held hers. He had not been crying. He had the look of a boy who has been told, quietly and by a competent adult, that he may not cry today and that he may cry another day when there is a place for it.

Hugh went to them.

He did not kneel. He bowed at the hip — the deeper bow, the one owed to a queen who was a regent in all but the formal seal. He took Ota’s hand. He did not kiss it. He held it for the length of a breath and released it. He turned to Louis.