The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician

by Edwin Lester Arnold

Without a word I took the vellum and crammed it into my bosom and spun round on my heels and fled down the hillside, and breasted the dewy tangles of fern and brambles, and glided through the thickets, and flying from ridge to ridge, and leaping and running as though the silver wings of Mercury were on my heels, in an hour I dashed up the far hillside, and, panting and exhausted, threw down the missive under the tawny beard of the great Earl himself.

That scion of Saxon royalty was, as the monk had foreseen, absorbed in the first meal of the day, but he was too much of a soldier, though, like all his race, a desperate good trencherman, to let such a matter as my errand grow cold, and no sooner had he read the scroll and put me a shrewd question or two than the order went forth for his detachments to arm and march at once. But only a captain of many fights knows how slow reluctant troops can be in such case. Surely, I thought, as I stood by with crossed arms watching the preparations it was none of my business to help—surely a nation, though gallant enough, which quits its breakfast board so tardily, and takes such a perilous time to cross-garter its legs, and buckle on its blades, and peak its beard, and tag out its baldric so nicely, when the invader is on foot—surely such a nation is ripe to the fall! And these comely English troops were doubly weary this morning, for they were fresh, as one of them told me, from a hard fight in the far north of the kingdom, where Harold had just overthrown and slain Hardrada, King of Norway, and the unduteous Tosti, Harold’s own brother. Less wonder, then, I found them travel-stained and weary, no marvel for the once they were so slow to my fatal invitation.

It was noon before the English Earl led off the van of his men, and an hour later before I had seen the last of them out of the camp and followed reflective in the rear—a place that never yet sorted with my mood—wondering, with the happy impartiality of my circumstances, whether it were best this morning to be invader or invaded.

When we had gone a mile or two through the leafy tangles, a hush fell upon the troop with which I rode, and then with a shout we burst into a run, for up from the valley beyond came the unmistakable sound of conflict and turmoil. We breasted the last ridge, I and two hundred men, and there, suddenly emerging into the open, was the bloody valley of Senlac beneath us, and the sunny autumn sea beyond, and at our feet right and left the wail and glitter and dust of nearly finished battle—Harold had fought without us, and we saw the quick-coming forfeit he had to pay.

The unhappy Saxons down there on the pleasant grassy undulations and among the yellow gorse and ling stood to it like warriors of good mettle, but already the day was lost. The Earl and his tardy troops had been merged into the general catastrophe, and my handful would have been of naught avail. The English array was broken and formless, galled by the swarming Norman bowmen, the twang of whose strings we could mark even up here, and fiercely assailed by foot and horsemen. In the center alone the English stood stubbornly shoulder to shoulder around the peaked flag, at whose foot Harold himself was grimly repelling the ceaseless onset of the foeman.

But alas for Harold, alas for the curly-headed son of Ethelwulf, and all the Princes and Peers with him!

We saw a mighty mass of foreign cavalry creeping round the shoulder of the hill, like the shadow of a raincloud upon a sunny landscape: we saw the thousand gonfalons of the spoilers fluttering in the wind: we saw the glitter on the great throng of northern chivalry that crowded after the black charger of William of Normandy and the sacred flag—accursed ensign—that Toustain held aloft: we saw their sweeping charge, and then when it was passed, the battle was gone and done, the Saxon power was a hundred little groups dying bravely in different corners of the field.

The men with me that luckless afternoon melted away into the woods, and I turned my steps once more to the little hill above Senlac and my hermit’s cell.

There the ill news had been brought by a wounded soldier, and the women were filling the evening air with cries and weeping. All that night they wept and wailed, Harold’s wife leading them, and when dawning came nothing would serve but she must go and find her husband’s body. Much the good monk tried to dissuade her, but to no purpose, and swathing herself in a man’s long cloak, with one fair maiden likewise disguised, and me for a guide, before there was yet any light in the sky the brave Norman girl set out.

And sorry was our errand and grim our success. The field of battle was deserted, save of dead and dying men. On the dark wind of the night went up to heaven from it a great fitful groan, as all the wounded groaned in unison to their unseen miseries. Alas! those tender charges of mine had never seen till now the harvest field of war laid out with its swaths of dead and dying! Often they hesitated on that gloomy walk and hid their faces as the fitful clouds drifted over the scene, and the changing light and shadows seemed to put a struggling ghastly life into the heaps of mangled corpses. Everywhere, as we threaded the mazes of destruction or stepped unwitting in the darkness into pools of blood and mire, were dead warriors in every shape and contortion, lying all asprawl, or piled up one on top of another, or sleeping pleasantly in dreamless dissolution against the red sides of stricken horses. And many were the pale, blood-besmeared faces of Princes and chiefs my white-faced ladies turned up to the starlight, and many were the sodden yellow curls they lifted with icy fingers from the dead faces of thanes and franklins, until in an hour the Norman girl, who had gone a little apart from us, suddenly stood still, and then up to the clear, black vault of heaven there went such a clear, piercing shriek as hushed even the very midnight sorrows of the battlefield itself.