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  THE VIEW FROM THE CART

  An imagined account of the life of St Cuthman in the Dark Ages

  REBECCA TOPE

  Praxis Books. Herefordshire.

  © Rebecca Tope 2014

  ISBN 978 09559517 32

  For Luke

  With thanks for being a most gratifying grandson.

  THE VIEW FROM THE CART

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE RUNE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART TWO CROW

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART THREE ACORN

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  PART FOUR CHURCH

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  PART ONE

  RUNE

  Chapter One

  This story begins with a birth, as perhaps every story should. A tangled, tearing business it was, bone on bone, the struggle lasting from first light to first light; a whole day’s cycle lost in that frenzy of pain and terror. I felt sure that one or other of us must die - perhaps both. My man, poor Edd, crouched close by, chewing his lips, his face the colour of a mushroom. I threw at him everything I could lay hands on. A plate caught his ear, so blood dripped through his hair and onto his neck.

  My own blood flowed fitfully. I saw myself, great lumpen object, legs twisting first one way, then another, as I knelt, squatted, rocked, all over the hut, desperate to expel the thing inside me, pushing down at myself, heaving, shouting at him to come out. Our first child had fled outside on her stout little legs, to huddle with the dogs, or so I supposed when I missed her, sometime in the day. She came back when the sun sank, and retreated to her corner with a hunk of bread. She always knew what was good for her, that little woman. In my few moments of clarity I caught sight of a sun-filled sky to the west, bare trees sinister against the deepening blue of late afternoon. I could smell smoke and the midden and the hot sharp stink of my own body.

  No battle was harder fought than that birth. It reached its wild crisis in the darkest hours of the night. I felt the infant twist and push, breaking something inside, bringing pure agony for a few moments, but still refusing to be born. I clawed at myself, like an injured dog or rat, attacking my own pain.

  Not until I was exhausted into making my peace did I feel a change. The child’s fight had ceased. It was as if it merely waited now for the strength to tackle the final stage of its entry into life. Lying curled like a cat on the filthy skins, my thumb in my mouth, sweat cold on my skin, I gave a great sigh and prepared for whatever might yet come - even death. ‘No more,’ I said aloud. ‘Let me die, then. I did all I could.’ The lamp guttered, making the huddled shape that was my daughter flicker and move in the shadows. Edd brought another light, using the last of our oil to better illumine my struggles. The blood on his face had dried, giving him a look of violence and reproach, both together. He put his hand on mine, and I felt how he was shaking.

  Then something touched me. A warm thing, like a great hand, smoothing along the whole length of me. My breasts tingled, my legs lay straight and wide-parted. My frenzy was over and I could accept my fate. Almost I could see the loving thing that had come to me, as the angel came to Mary before she had her child. Almost I could hear it telling me that I had done everything any woman could. I had no strength now; even endurance was too much to ask.

  For an age, nothing happened. I rested, despite the pain rooted so deep within me. The dark sky I had stared at for so long turned paler, as if a layer had been peeled away from it. My son came forth at last. First an arm, outstretched, packed close against his head, fist tightly clenched. I took hold of him by the shoulders none too gently, even though the anger and resistance had long since drained out of me. Another great clenching of my body finished the task, and the wet grey thing was born. Expecting it to be dead, I barely allowed myself to look. When it made no sound, I was sure, and laid myself back, weary and miserable, hot tears soaking my face. The pain inside me was still there, I noted dimly. When Wynn had been born, all discomfort vanished with her delivery. Something was badly different this time.

  Edd crept closer, a bucket of glowing peat in his hand, from the banked fire he had been tending throughout my labours, knowing the child would need warmth. A bowl sat on the embers, full of warm water urgent for my washing. I knew he would not bear malice for the wound on his head. He and I had made the child; he must share the anguish of bringing it into life.

  ‘A lad,’ he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. ‘A fine little lad.’

  I opened my eyes, but could see little in the dawn light. Edd had extinguished the lamp and the fire was smoking. Besides, my vision was never good. From childhood I had been conscious that other people saw more refined detail than I ever did. I tried to sit up to look, but was laid flat again by a sharp sting low in my back. I waited, certain that it would go away in a moment. The baby began to snuffle and mew in a pool of water between my legs. I had obligations. Once more, I pushed myself up. The pain flared like fire, many times worse than the birth pangs had been. I cried out, as much in fear as bodily hurt. ‘Help me!’ I shouted.

  Unknowing, the child’s father plucked him up, awkward and glad, and tried to give him to me. ‘I can’t,’ I gasped. ‘Wrap him and lay him close to me. Bring new covers. And find Wynn, if you can.’ The child had gone out again at some unnoticed point, escaping from my trouble that she could not help or understand. Edd skittered about trying to obey me, worried now, not daring to ask for reasons. Every little while, I moved - first from side to side, then raising my head and shoulders. Each time the flames roared through me, consuming me. Only by remaining rigidly still, scarcely breathing, could I endure. Finally, I had to voice it.

  ‘I am crippled,’ I said. ‘Something is broken in my back. Better I had died than this.’ I recall little after those words. It seems I swooned from the pain, and then slipped into a sleep of pure extinction for an hour. When I woke, little Wynn’s hand was fluttering across my face, her eyes wide with curiosity.

  ‘Ah, Wynn,’ I murmured. ‘If only you were older.’ She was not yet two years in the world, but on that morning, she made a great leap into a new life.

  Still suckled herself from time to time, she knew what the baby most needed. With a few deft gestures, she brought the infant’s mouth within reach of my nipple, without for a moment hurting me, and thus arranged his first vital sustenance.

  The child lived and grew. My agony abated into a stiffness which only stabbed me if I tried to make a sudden move. My Imbolc babe watched the spring creep over the moors, his wits maturing with the year. The first primroses and early lambs provided his entertainment when his father took him out of the hut for some air.

  Gradually, I forced myself to endure a sitting posture, propped with a board inside our south-facing wall, where some warmth came through on sunny days. I worked clumsily: unable to use a spindle properly, I devised a peculiar system of stretching the yarn across the hut, showing Wynn how to wind it up, as I twisted it from the fleece. Preparing food was simpler, so long as it was brought to me. Fe
eding the baby was easiest of all. Somehow his presence always soothed me; his eager mouth sucking so rhythmically eased my rigid back. Many a time I drifted away into a daytime dreaming, where I could run around the tors and take my due place in the outdoor work.

  We were visited, of course. Spenna, my lifelong friend, could not conceal her shock at my disablement, when she arrived three days after the birth. Carefully, she examined the hurting place, stroking her fingertips over the skin, watching my expression with her sharp black eyes. ‘Tell me just what you did,’ she said. ‘You felt something break inside?’

  ‘Not break,’ I corrected. ‘Not quite that. But he twisted, and something stabbed me inside. Or, tore. He had his arm up - so - ‘ and I demonstrated. ‘That did the damage, I reckon.’

  ‘Should mend,’ she said, dubiously. ‘With time. Here - does this feel better?’ And she stroked again, humming softly, giving attention to the wound inside me. Spenna had five children herself, and I trusted her skill and experience.

  Something warm welled up and I felt a sudden hope. But then I moved slightly, to ease myself away from a hard thing underneath my hip, and the old pain screamed through me, worse than before. ‘Aagh!’ I groaned. ‘No, Spenna. Let it be. ‘Tis too early. It needs time to heal.’

  She moved back a little and nodded, trying to hide the concern on her face. ‘You could be right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come again, a sennight from now.’

  But she left me alone for longer than that, as even good friends will when the distance between is a morning’s walk and her own life filled to overflowing. And I found I could carry on as I was, with Edd tending to my needs in much the same way as I took care of the baby’s soiling. Lifting my lower self was impossible. Edd rolled me over, little by little, to change my rags and pack soft quilting underneath me. My bed was raised only a hand’s breadth from the floor, forcing him to kneel beside me. We scarcely spoke in those days, both perhaps afraid of inviting the gods’ attention to me as I hovered between health and crippledom.

  Instead, he brought me tokens and charms to help the healing. Twigs of yellow furze, the lambs’ tails from the hazel, and finally a sprig of sacred mistletoe, for which he had to search most of the day when he should have been sowing the corn. ‘I climbed the tree for it,’ he said proudly, ‘and used my teeth to cut it through. This will heal you, my lover.’ His gentleness touched me, and I chewed the bitter leaf almost as hopeful as he had been when he plucked it.

  That night, I thought I detected some improvement. The child was restless, bleating tetchily to himself, as he lay between us. Somehow he rolled himself close against me, wedged in the crook of my arm as I lay face down. Every night I would painfully turn over onto my face, finding it the most comfortable position for sleep. But now the baby was seeking my breast, and I could feel the milk leaking into the bedding. Holding my breath, I pushed myself over onto my side, scooping the child to me, not wishing to wake Edd or Wynn. The expected pain did not come. The sucking baby sent me back to sleep, in a position which would have been impossible two days before.

  But next morning I was stiff and ungainly again. Edd changed my rags, and we noted that there was no longer any bleeding or discharge from the birth. He brought me porridge and an apple from the store. It was wrinkled and brown but tasted sweet. I could tell Edd was waiting for me to announce an improvement. Mistletoe is powerful medicine; impossible that it should have no effect. Almost I opened my mouth to say ‘I did feel easier in the night. Perhaps the cure has begun.’ But something stopped me as I squinted up at him.

  Instead, I stared down at my legs, thin and white, sticking out from me as if made of peeled elder rather than living flesh. We had not been sure whether their use was lost. Cautiously, I tried to move one foot, nodding to Edd to watch me.

  Slowly, the foot inscribed a small circle. Edd smiled. ‘That shows!’ he cried. ‘You’ll soon walk the moors again.’

  ‘And be the shepherd, too?’ I was teasing him, knowing his distaste for shepherding work.

  ‘And be the shepherd,’ he agreed, his face all grin and good cheer.

  I moved my foot again. The whole leg felt weak and reluctant, but there was no pain. I tried the other, with the same result. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ I told him, as if conferring a great gift.

  ‘There!’ he said, as if everything was settled and right again.

  That day, I pulled myself onto the pisspot, when Edd was out of the hut. Before that morning, he had lifted me on and off it, willing and strong, concerned for my helplessness. We had a length of sacking as screen, but when he tried to leave me alone, I wobbled and wrenched my back, crying out for him to stay with me.

  Then I dragged myself halfway across the floor to add a stick to the fire, using my arms, my legs barely part of me yet.

  Wynn trotted in and saw me, clapping her congratulation. I paused and reached out an arm to her, to draw her close for a quick embrace. She had made no complaint at the loss of the games we had played together, the solemn walks we had taken over the moors, up to the day before the baby had been born. Under her gaze, I struggled back to the bed, arranging myself against the backboard, reaching for my loom. The new babe needed clouts, and Wynn was growing so fast her smock scarcely covered her buttocks.

  Spenna returned at last, her youngest tied on her back and another little thing holding her skirts, and scrutinised me carefully. Her black hair fell across her face, whipped by the March winds, her cheeks red and chapped. Having questioned me, she sighed deeply. ‘You be on the mend,’ she pronounced. ‘But it’ll take some work from you. It’s all stiffness now, from lying still so long. Your legs have forgot how to move.’

  I bowed my head before her shrewd gaze and shuffled my feet. If I could simply have stood up and run outside, I would gladly have done so. But slow work, little by little, stretching sore limbs, testing the frail parts of my back, brought me no joy to contemplate.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said. Then I turned to my baby. ‘See how big he is!’ I boasted. ‘He don’t care that I have no use in my legs.’

  ‘He will, if you make no progress,’ she warned me. She looked out of the open door at Wynn, squatting in the mud, shaping pies with cold little hands. ‘And so will she. It isn’t right for you to be leaving her to herself so much — or for her to be doing your work. She’ll hate you for it later, see if she don’t.’

  ‘Wynn will never hate me,’ I said. ‘She understands how it is.’ I needed no telling that I was cheating my little daughter, and Spenna, with her yowling scrapping brood was not the one to speak of it, wise as she may have been. Anyone who could give birth year after year and lose not a single one to accident or sickness undoubtedly possessed special powers; I would never deny that. But all our lives, she had told me more about myself than I wished to hear and I had developed a way of answering her that told her to be silent.

  Easter began, as it always seems to, with steady drenching rain. God’s tears for his lost son, said Edd, until I reminded him that the lost Son lived again. ‘Tears for his pain on the Cross, then,’ Edd maintained. I let him have the last word for once. Church doctrine was not something I liked to argue on, then or afterwards.

  The fowls had been laying well for a few weeks, so we had painted eggs, red from the powdery sandstone and a deep yellow from a vein of clay in the riverbank. When the rain eased off, Wynn took three and rolled them around in the barnyard, laughing and chirping with an unaccustomed delight. They had been hard-baked, and wouldn’t break, no matter what she did with them. One of the young dogs joined her game, until he crunched an egg hard enough to shatter it. Edd beat him with a leather strap, to show him that eggs were not for his taking.

  I was able to squat with fair comfort by that time. The baby balanced beside me, leaning against my arm, and watched his sister. He’d begun to coo and gurgle, showing merriment and other passions. Edd came to us, and squatted square on, face to face. ‘‘Tis a cuthie little tacker,’ he remarked.

  ‘Cuthie?’ I looked
down at the child, as yet unnamed. The word seemed to fit him, as he gazed so wisely up at his sire. A word for someone especially knowing, quick-witted, possessing a full understanding. ‘A little Cuthman, is he?’

  It was not a name we’d heard before, and yet it came easily to our lips.

  We decided to have him blessed by the priest in the brief quiet between the final days of the corn harvest and the killing of a sheep and a hog, gathering of apples, and the many other preparations for winter. The matter demanded much debate and trouble, before it was settled. A heavy boy Cuthie was by then, bouncing on his father’s arm, squealing with excitement at the antics of the dogs or the birds. My damaged back, much easier though it was by then, would not allow me to walk as far as the church. I was part sorry, part uncaring. I had sore girlhood memories of the dreary Sabbaths spent listening to the priest in the Church of St Brigid in the village; being pinched and sneered at by the other girls for my restlessness and my tendency to piss myself if not allowed outside for hours. But my little son had to be blessed and his soul promised to God, and the priest would note any failure in our obligation.

  He was a good man, that priest, who called himself Brendan, as did many others. He replaced the sour fellow we’d had in my childhood days, and was a great improvement. There was a holiness to him, a glow about him which made him pleasing to be with. His talk was all of love and heaven and forgiveness of sins. He marked the festivals with conviction, and visited the sick and dying with a willing sympathy.

  When he first heard of my difficulties, he had come to the hut and offered to give me some healing, some weeks after Edd had given me the mistletoe, and I already felt I was mending. As Spenna had done, he laid warm gentle hands on the place, and invoked his great and powerful God to help him heal me. This time, I remained utterly still afterwards, before testing the effects with caution. It was undoubtedly a little better for his ministrations. Day by day, after that, I could manage more movement, with less pain.