Smoke in the Wind by Peter Tremayne Read Free Book Online

Powys and he had spent time trying to learn their language. He was keenly aware of the antagonism that existed between the Britons and his own people. In moments of calm reflection, Eadulf could clearly understand the roots of the enmity between them.
    In his father’s day, the British kingdom of Elmet had been destroyed when Ceretic, its king, had been slain and the population driven westward by a Saxon war chieftain named Snot who had built his township or ham on the west bank of the river that had marked the tiny kingdom’s border. Now Snotingaham was a thriving Saxon town where once Britons had flourished. Of course, he could understand why Britons hated Saxons. And did not most Saxons return that hatred? The conversion of the Saxons to Christianity had, if anything, pushed Briton and Saxon even further apart instead of joining them together.
    Eadulf had heard the stories from the old ones of how, just over sixty years before, the Roman cleric Augustine, with forty monks from that city, had settled in the kingdom of Kent to help in the Christianising of it. He found only Irish missionaries, mainly in the north, trying to bring the Faith to the pagan Saxons, teaching them how to read and write. At Canterbury he found a church dedicated to St Martin of Tours, originally built by the Britons before the Jutes drove them out. The Frankish Christian wife of the king of Kent and her chaplain were worshipping there. Knowing that the Britons had been Christian from the time of the Roman occupation, Augustine demanded a meeting with their bishops on the borders between their remaining territories and the Saxons.
    By all the accounts which Eadulf had heard, Augustine was a Roman who was still full of the old Roman arrogance. He viewed the Britons in the same manner as had the generals of the Roman legions in the old days of the empire. To him they were worthless barbarians. He had demanded of Deniol, the bishop of Bangor, why the clergy of the Britons had failed in their duty to the Faith by not bothering to convert the Saxons. Deniol had sarcastically pointed out that it was hard to preach love and forgiveness to a man when he was in the process of slaughtering one’s wife and children. Augustine had gone further in his arrogance and blustered that if the Britons did not accept his authority and that of Rome, then he would bless the Saxon arms and they would suffer vengeance. It was a fact that some years later, Bishop Deniol was one of the thousand clerics who died during the wholesale slaughter of monks at Bangor.
    Eadulf stirred uncomfortably from his reflections as a tall Briton, clad in the robes of a religious, walked by and greeted him with a smile and some unintelligible word. Eadulf automatically returned the smile and gave such greeting as he could remember in the language. Eadulf had no wish to be an enemy to anyone, but what was the proverb of his people which came to mind? There is no safety in trying to make a friend of one’s enemy. Surely that could not be right? There were the teachings of the Faith to take account of. What was it that the Blessed James had written? ‘What causes conflicts and quarrels among you? Do they not spring from the aggressiveness of your bodily desires? You want something which you cannot have, and so you are bent on murder; you are envious, and cannot attain your ambition, and so you quarrel and fight.’ Was that the main reason behind the last two centuries of war and bloodshed since the Saxons had landed in Britain? He shuddered. What was it that Christ had said? ‘I give you a new commandment; love one another.’ Well, so far as the decision rested with him, that is what he was prepared to do. However, it did not calm his mind; calm his fears of being in a strange land surrounded by a people whom he mistrusted.
    Some hours later, when Fidelma came to find him and ask him if he thought himself fit to accompany her on the walk to the abbey of Dewi Sant, he found that the few hours