The Edge on the Sword (2 page)

Perhaps Wulf didn’t like the two of us raising our voices, Flæd reasoned uneasily, drawing her knees up again and pressing her cheek against the grey folds of her cloak. She and Edward hadn’t always spoken to each other in such a strained way. Edward had always been shy, but he used to laugh with her, and the two of them used to be comfortable together. That had been before things changed.

The trouble had started when her father decided that Flæd, his oldest child, should begin lessons in reading and writing. “If Flæd likes it,” she remembered him saying, “then we’ll let Edward try. Perhaps he’s old enough to begin lessons, too.” On her first day of lessons she had gone nervously to the scriptorium—the stone building where the monks sat to copy and decorate their pages, and where a number of valuable books were kept—brushing past Edward where he waited outside her door.

“Will we go to the meadow today?” her brother had wanted to know, but she had only shrugged, anxious not to keep her tutor waiting.

Abruptly, her daily rambles with Edward had ended. Flæd went to the scriptorium each day, and as days lengthened into weeks, her thoughts of
Edward grew more and more wistful. She had not realized on that first morning that she would hardly see her brother anymore, that the beginning of her lessons marked the end of their wandering together. Flæd’s hours in the scriptorium were often lonely. Her teacher, Bishop Asser, one of her father’s closest advisors, was a busy man who wasted no time. Usually he would leave Flæd as soon as he had assigned the day’s exercises. Surrounded by scribes who rarely said a word to her, Flæd would bend to her task. But she learned quickly in her isolation, and soon she was reading entire words and phrases in Latin as well as in English.

Edward himself had not disappeared. He haunted the scriptorium like an uneasy spirit. Often Flæd would catch sight of her brother passing the entrance of the room where she sat, his eyes seeking her out, then shifting away. Sometimes she would find him slouched outside the door when she emerged. Then he might join her as she walked, mumbling a few words about which animals he and Wulf had seen near the marsh that day. Flæd in turn would try to explain some detail of her day’s lesson, and although Edward rarely spoke in response to her descriptions of Latin verbs and English poetry, she saw the way he listened to her—his eyes intense, his mouth twisted quizzically.

“Edward is ready to learn letters, too.” That was what she told her father the next time he asked about her lessons. He scarcely speaks to anyone but me, and I am rarely with him, she had worried. King Alfred had looked at his daughter thoughtfully, then told her he would send Edward to the scriptorium, as well.

Flæd had a searing memory of the day when her brother met Bishop Asser. On Edward’s first morning Asser had sat down briskly beside his new student, taking up a wax tablet and bone stylus. With a deft hand he sketched a pair of letter shapes, explained them to Edward, and told him to make his own copies next to them. He watched, his sharp eyes on the boy who fumbled with the stylus, trying to match his teacher’s sure strokes. Again and again Edward’s hand wavered, and he tried to smooth the wax with his fingertip and draw the shapes again. The tutor observed a little longer without speaking, then rose with a gracious bow. He would leave Edward to work at the lesson until tomorrow, he said.

Bishop Asser spoke under his breath as he hurried past Flæd’s corner. “Not as quick as his sister,” he muttered. “No time for teaching a clumsy child.”

Embarrassment washed through Flæd’s body, hot and awful—she should not have heard those words. She raised her eyes and watched her brother still struggling over his work, scrubbing at the misshapen lines with his fist now in frustration. Did her teacher not understand that this
was Edward’s first attempt at writing?
If Edward would only go more slowly, a little patience
…Flæd came around the table to stand behind the hunched boy, looking over his shoulder at the ruined wax.

“I heard him.” Edward looked up at her and she saw the lines of tears on his face. “I can’t learn this.” He put down the tablet and stylus and blundered off his bench, hurrying to the door of the scriptorium. There Wulf rose like a smudge and thrust his muzzle into Edward’s empty hand, following him out toward the meadow.

Alone beside the deserted table, Flæd reached out for Edward’s things. Ruined, Flæd thought. What can I do? After a moment she carried the tablet to the low fire burning at one end of the large room. She held it to the heat until the wax melted smooth. Carefully she wrote the letter forms in the confident hand of the teacher, and beside each one she made three imperfect copies. Then she laid the stylus and tablet on Edward’s empty bench and returned to her own work.

Flæd’s deception had lasted only until the next day, when Edward dragged himself back to the scriptorium to sit woodenly in front of his teacher. Soon it was clear that he could not write the letters by himself, and Asser had sighed, holding the shoulder of the boy who would not meet his eye.

“Have you forgotten your skills so soon,” he wanted to know, “or do you simply choose not to write?” Edward made no reply. “Your father warned me that I might find you a reluctant student,” the bishop continued regretfully. “Yes, he quoted a maxim, I remember. He said, ‘A young man must be taught and encouraged until he is tamed.’ For now, I suppose you are still too wild for teaching, boy. Come back when you’re ready.”

With a shake of his head, Asser bent to view Flæd’s work. The girl shot a glance at Edward, who returned her look with a scowl of shame and relief, and then disappeared through the door with Wulf.

She had done the wrong thing, Flæd berated herself over and over, by urging Edward into the classroom so soon. And then she had made it worse when she had tried to help. I’ll bring him back to the lessons—I’ll think of a way, she told herself each day as she trudged to the scriptorium. But any mention of lessons would send Edward scuttling away like an uncovered beetle, back to the trees with his dog. Worst of all, he almost never spoke to her now, only listening when she occasionally found him at mealtimes and spoke softly of a story or a poem she thought he might like.

And yet here he is, she reminded herself there in the woods as she warmed her bare feet by their little fire. When I whispered that we could meet out here tonight, he came, and he waited for me, even when I was late.

So what should she say now, to put both of them at ease? She could tell him she’d read more from the book that she’d been describing to him for weeks, every time she ran into him in the kitchen and feasting hall. The story had brought a spark of interest to the remote expression her brother always wore. Tonight she had more of the story. She’d waited until her lesson was over, and hidden beneath the window ledge, waiting for the monks to leave. Then she had snatched down the book as soon as they had left.

“Edward,” she offered tentatively, “I did read something today, in a certain room full of old books….”

“You read some more of the story?” the boy guessed. In the light of the coals his face showed the dark eyebrows, narrow chin, and serious grey-blue eyes which matched Flæd’s. “Yes, you did,” he said quickly as he stared back at his sister in the glow. “Tell me, Flæd. I’ve been waiting for you to read some more.”

A smile touched Flæd’s grave face. She had chosen the right words, it seemed. Her brother’s voice held an undercurrent of eagerness, and he seemed less guarded. “I’ll tell you what I read,” she said, wanting to draw him out further, “but first you tell me what you remember.”

“Everyone lay asleep in the golden hall,” Edward said, rocking forward onto his knees, “and there came a monster—a horrible giant. He broke the hall doors and seized two of the sleeping warriors, and he ate them. He cracked their bones and drank their blood!” Edward shuddered happily, making Flæd grimace—she had thought he might remember the blood.

“And I remember some more,” the boy went on. “The greatest warrior was waiting there, awake. When the monster reached for another man, the hero grabbed him, and wouldn’t let go. The monster had to tear away his own arm to escape.”

“And the monster ran out into the dark, weeping and dying,” Flæd continued, still eyeing her brother’s bright expression. “And back at the hall they hung up his arm for a trophy, and they sang and celebrated. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” said Edward. “But then what, Flæd?” He touched her arm. “What did you read today?”

“All right.” Flæd’s voice grew low, more threatening. “A giant woman from the marshes creeps to the hall seeking vengeance—the monster’s mother.” Edward moved a little closer to his sister.

“The monster’s mother,” he repeated, clenching his teeth.

“The mother seizes one thane from the hall and carries him off to die at her dreadful pool in the marshes. She leaves his head on the shore for the king’s men to find. That,” Flæd declared, “is her revenge.”

“And then?” Edward pressed.

“And then the king summons the hero to him…and then I don’t know,” Flæd admitted. “I heard someone coming into the scriptorium, so I put the book away and crept outside to the meadow. It was getting too dark to see the letters, anyway.”

“It’s taking you a long time to read this poem,” Edward sighed, flopping backward onto the ground.

“And I haven’t seen half of it yet,” Flæd told him. Her thoughts were moving quickly. Until tonight she had not known just how much pleasure Edward took in this particular story. Nor had she told him that in order to bring him these few lines at a time, she had become a sort of thief. The poem she shared with Edward was part of a large and valuable book, a collection of the English poetry her father loved. Flæd was still a very junior scholar, and the great manuscript was usually forbidden to her, but one day Asser had given her the first lines of one of its poems to copy, and after she had done the work, she had thought of the poem again and again, wanting to read more.

So she had begun reading the poem secretly, studying in her corner until the scriptorium emptied for meals or prayers, and then glancing into the heavy volume’s pages to steal the next lines. Edward had snorted when she first repeated a few passages of the poem for him two weeks ago in the feasting hall. No hero could swim for seven days and kill nine water monsters, he had muttered. Several days later when she saw him in the kitchens, she had whispered a description of the giant’s attack, but Edward had said nothing at all that time. She hadn’t even been certain he was listening.

After that more than a week had passed before Flæd could snatch another glance at the great collection of poetry, which her tutor still had not invited her to touch again. It seemed, however, that all this while Edward had been waiting, remembering what she had told him, and wondering what would happen to the hero next. Tonight he had stayed here in the dark, perhaps even hoping that she might bring a few more words of the poem with her to their secret place. An idea had come to Flæd, but she knew she would have to put it to Edward with great care.

“If you could help me, Edward,” she said cautiously, “if both of us were in the scriptorium, watching, we might find more chances to…to open the book.”

Her brother turned his head away abruptly and scratched with a stick in the firelit dust. “Wulf and I have to hunt,” he mumbled from beneath his heavy fringe of hair. “Reading takes too much time.”

Flæd lowered her eyes in disappointment. Why should she have expected him to change his mind about coming to lessons just because of a poem he liked? She picked at the edge of her cloak. It had been stupid to mention lessons. Probably Edward would say nothing more to her for the rest of this evening.

A little murmuring sound caught her ear—Edward
was
saying something, very softly. Flæd held her breath. She heard her brother whispering, repeating a line of poetry she had once recited to him, a description of combat:”‘…when a bloodstained sword cuts through the crest of a helmet in battle…”’ I’ll try one more time, she resolved.

“Look, Edward,” she said, smoothing the dust and ash at the edge of the fire with her palm. “This is the first letter of your name.” She wrapped her hand around his on the stick he was stabbing into the ground and traced the vertical line and the three horizontal strokes at its top, middle, and lower right side. Startled, her brother let her draw the letter, and sat looking at the completed form. She reached down and brushed it away. “We’ll draw it again,” she said, and moved his hand and the bit of wood in the same pattern. “Now,” she said, “you try making one here.” She smoothed a firelit space next to the E.

Edward sat still for a moment. Then he leaned forward and drew the four lines, a little haltingly. “Good,” Flæd said, careful not to let her voice reveal surprise. “Do you want to see the other letters of your name?”

Edward nodded without looking at her. To his E she added D W A R D, and laid down the stick. After a pause Edward picked it up and added his own row of letters beneath the ones she had drawn. Imperfect letters, but recognizable.

“Have you…have you been thinking about your first lessons?” Flæd asked, hesitating to say the words.

Edward nodded. “But I couldn’t remember the shapes without yours.” He dropped the stick and hid his fingers in Wulf’s long hair.

Flæd sat silent for a moment, thinking. The fire fell in on itself as the wood burned through, sending sparks to glisten among the letters beside it. “A name can be a kind of word-puzzle,” she said at last. “A game to play with letters and meanings. Your name has two parts. The first part, E and D, is like the word
ead.
Can you think what that word means?”

“
Ead
,” Edward repeated. “
Ead
means happiness, it means to be happy and rich.”

“And the second part of your name, W, A, R, and D, is a form of our word
weard
—that means a guardian, a protector. See? Your name makes pictures in my mind. The first picture is of happiness and riches—I imagine a pile of coins saved to buy a new dagger, or a fine bow.” Flæd named objects she remembered Edward coveting once as they walked through the marketplace. “And the second picture,
weard
, is of a someone strong and watchful, someone who cares for people who count on him for protection. The two pictures together, they make me think of someone like Father perhaps, a happy and rich guardian of his people.”