Liam Guilar
MYSELF AS WITNESS
449 AD: A winter camp on the north west coast of Europe.
1
What credit do you give to the eyewitness,
what weight and value: ‘I was there’?
What adjustments for memory loss and bias,
for looking in the wrong direction,
for the deliberate, self-serving lie?
The grey sea slops over the ship’s side
soaks the bound and bundled figure
shivering in the bilge, too sick to care
or wonder how long it’s been
since the helmsman called out to the rowers
and turned towards the signal light.
They dragged me over shingle.
The slaver hauling me upright
to face blue eyes someone had painted on a megalith.
A blur of tattooed swirl.
Say where you are and what you see.
His hair was cropped,
even the obligatory moustaches were trim.
My answer pleased him.
He bought me for a piece of gold.
Helped up the rising beach
with the butt ends of spears,
past the signal fire, we dropped
into the slack where huts
huddled round the long hall
in a temporary camp.
Life returning to cramped limbs
but we rose again towards an isolated hut
ringed by heads and body parts
rotting on a palisade.
Despite the nudging spears, I stopped.
The air was brittle with bad magic,
crackling like frosted grass.
These people earn their reputation
for making painful death a form of art,
to please their gods,
or break a long and dreary winter.
What ugly rituals were practised in the hut?
What hag-driven sorcery?
Come! I promise, you will not be harmed.
Of course he lied. Behind that door
was something worse than many kinds of death.
But the spears for emphasis,
so I followed him inside.
The door hanging fell and cut the light behind us.
A single room, walls heavy with dark tapestries.
A single loom, a bed behind a curtain,
a tripod burning something fragrant.
A hag, slack-jowled and toothless
looked up from her spindle, unconcerned
and a woman, in profile by the central hearth
rose. I blinked. Words
acknowledging their limitations disappeared.
This is my daughter. You will teach her;
British, Latin, you were a Christian, you will
explain your god. The list had been rehearsed.
Though he spoke like a man treading a considered path,
scared as I was, his ambition seemed a little crazed.
You will sing her the songs of your people.
We sail for Britain in the spring.
If you live that long, I will take you with me.
Until then you will teach my daughter.
She will be a queen; my grandson will be king.
Repeat what I just said.
I did but failed to reproduce his certainty.
Now listen very carefully to what I say.
The heads and body parts you saw
belonged to men who tried to touch her.
The corpse you saw so perfectly impaled
got drunk and boasted what he’d do
so we did it to him with a greased and sharpened stake.
He was a bold and valued fighting man.
Imagine what we’d do with a worthless slave.
2
It was the cruelest winter I’ve survived
Llym awel llum brin. anhaut caffael clid.
llycrid rid reuhid llyn.
ry seiw gur ar un conin.[i]
A brutal wind, a bare hill. Hard to find shelter.
Bruised the ford, brittle the lake.
A man could stand on a frozen stalk.
Otid eiry tohid istrad.
diuryssint vy keduir y cad.
mi nid aw. anaw nim gad.
Snow falls, covers the valley.
Warriors hurry to the fray.
I do not go, a wound prevents me.
Snow didn’t just fall, it loitered,
refusing to commit itself to gravity
or collapsed the sky shredding vision.
Conscripted by the wind for its assault upon the vertical,
banked itself against the temporary shelters
where the warriors huddled,
in the stale fug of their stalled lives,
cursing the casual way they’d built their huts,
blaming each other for the shoddy walls
as the snow seeped in, melted, ran, then froze.
When there was no snow then there was rain,
or hail, or sleet. And the warriors round the fire,
cursing the weather, cursing each other
extroverts forced inwards, going sour in the long dark
with only her father to diffuse the simmering violence
with talk of spring and the softness of Britain.
And the winter was torture. Sleeping
with the slaves, wading
through the snow, trudging
to the hut, between the frozen
body parts, each day dreading
time spent with her. Dreaming
her, she slipped into my nights
gentle, loving, wild or crude,
curve and fall and flare invading
the liminal space where resistance
was impossible, repetitively rewriting
the same scene, in which, reaching
out to brush her hair, fumbling
the brooch, so her dress falling
as we stumbled to her bedding
in the corner behind the hangings.
She was everything superlative.
A possibility of gentled warmth
in a world the wind had anvilled
into iron shapes that only broke and never bent.
I thought I would go mad,
in the small hut, with its thick hangings
keeping the wind out and the warmth in.
Old Mother Gothel in the corner
flicking her gaze from me to spindle to girl.
It wasn’t fear that stopped me
reaching out and doing
all the things I’d dreamt we’d done.
I would have risked the asking price
for time spent on the bedding
behind the hangings in her room.
I was stonewalled
by the absolute conviction
she would laugh before she slit my throat.
When she dismissed me
I’d stumble back to sleep
in the straw with the slaves.
A gesture or a word
belonging to another time
reminding us how far we’d fallen.
Otid Eiry. guin goror mynit.
llum guit llog ar mor.
mecid llvwyr llauer kyghor.
Snow falls, white the hill side
bare the timbers of the ships at sea.
There are many good reasons for being a coward.
3
Rage shut her mouth and shook her hand.
Old Mother Gothel snapped a word
hands weaving the air, spinning the girl
and as she turned so Mother Gothel spat:
Ewch! Ewch nawr, nithing![ii]
Blundering back to the barn I waited for the executioner.
But all that day and all that night nobody came.
In the morning the usual lowly hall thane prodded me towards the hut.
Mother Gothel in her corner; the girl by the fire.
She’d never seen a book, had no idea what one might be
but she believed that she knew all there was to know
and everything she knew was true.
Her ignorance and arrogance were superlative.
History was a list of male names that traced her family back to Woden;
some confused and convoluted stories about Goths and Geats.
She knew nothing about Troy, or Rome,
Caesar’s wars across the Rhine, the Tutoberg.
Britain was a vague soft space ‘in that direction’.
She’d never seen a mountain, or a city,
never been inside a building made of stone
but she corrected me and called me stupid.
And God help me, I had forgotten who I was,
remembered who I was and laughed.
I didn’t have followers, or gold.
I couldn’t mutilate a man
because I woke up with a hangover
and wanted to. But I knew and they didn’t.
Without me they were cattle huddled in a barn against the wind.
Without me she was just another heifer waiting to be serviced.
Cold, pain, hunger, like the weather, can be borne
but I’d worked hard to learn the things I knew.
No pampered child was going to call me stupid.
Down on my knees I offered my apology.
She was young. She’d lived shut up in huts,
the smell of rotting flesh all summer long,
a hag for chaperone who taught her who knew what.
How could she not be ignorant?
She shrugged, then looked at Mother Gothel,
who nodded. Nithing, said the girl,
we will start again. What is your name?
4
While she practiced weaving, flicking the threads to Mother Gothel,
she’d demand a story. Horrified to discover the depths of her ignorance
her desire for information became a disease she didn’t want to cure.
I began with Troy, Aeneas, Brutus. She had no time for tears,
no sympathy for Dido, but she never tired of Locrin’s story.
Gwendoline appealed: Aestrild horrified.
Shut inside the earth house, waiting
for the door to open, for the rampant visitor
because whatever way you want to tell it,
in whatever language you are free to use,
something that should be freely offered or withheld
was taken repeatedly by threat and force.
The golden lady finally came ashore
dragging her terrible burden to the hut
where they took up residence in the shadows
corrupting everything.[iii]
Aestrild had been a queen, by right of husband.
The storytellers said she was the world’s desire.
Didn’t she have plans, or share her father’s schemes?
Look at her now, this drowned nightmare by the fire.
What ugly fate lurked on a wrong turn in the road.
She had been schooled for the parting of the curtain,
the expected revelation: this stranger is your lord.
But now she knew the door could be thrown open
and hers would be the no choice of her father’s killer
or his rancid blood-stained men, eager for their turn.
Wait: heb dan heb wely.[iv]
Without a fire, yes, and then, without a bed?
wylaf wers. tawaf wedy.
I will weep and then be silent?
We have a song. She prodded Mother Gothel.
Sing, and you, she said to me, your turn to translate.
Heht mec mon wunian on wuda bearwe,
under āctrēo in þām eorðscræfe.
Men banished me to the woods,
under this oak tree, in this earth cave?
She nodded. The chaperone continued
in a voice fibrous as smashed wood.
Þǣr iċ sittan mōt sumorlangne dæġ
þǣr iċ wēpan mæġ mīne wræcsīþas.
Before I could translate she said:
Enough of young men dead and women grieving.
There has to be a better song.
If a man abandons or betrays me
I will not lament, or tear my hair
I will hone my knife and hunt him down.
No one will ever lock me up again.
5
If anyone had asked me,
‘History’ is only, always, people
and the words they use
to satisfy their need
to rationalize the accident.
The oarsmen waited.
Three ships pulling at their tethers.
Three children on the beach
to watch their father leave.
Did he bet on the experiment?
Step mast to hoist a sail
or did he trust in his tradition;
in the four-beat grunt of his blistered rowers.
He hugs each one in turn.
He will remember his sons with pride;
his baffled admiration for his daughter.
They will remember him striding
towards a possibility.
A national myth, perhaps discarded,
has its foundation here. Paint it
to hang in the notional gallery
alongside Nelson dying at Trafalgar
Spitfires in September skies
Henry Five at Agincourt.
Remember what I told you.
Stack the clouds or clear the sky?
The sea is always busy.
Suggest an offshore breeze
dragging hair and cloak.
A man wades to a waiting ship.
String accident and coincidence
these rowing boats become the ancestor
of Golden Hind and Victory
and all the little boats of England
bombed and burning in the waters off Dunkirk.
‘Praise no day until evening,
no ice until crossed?’
He’s not the first to sell his sword arm to the Empire.
There’s ‘Germans’ buried on The Wall, in legionary kit.
Sunken houses and thatched huts multiplying their right angles
without defensive walls or boundary markers,
mingling with their British neighbors
marrying their sons and daughters (by what rite?)
speaking a mangled efficacious Britto-Latin-Anglsch
in marketplace and bed.
Your myth of racial purity’s a mongrel’s fantasy.
Talk to each other, openly.
Collect men, bind them to you, be
generous, discerning, honest.
You’ll have to wait two hundred years for Bede
to name this man and give this windy day
a date that doesn’t make the slightest sense.
The daughter has to wait six centuries
‘til Geoffrey gives a Saxon girl a British name.
Accept no insult, make no threat
you’re not prepared to carry through.
Above all, do not act alone.
How many others stepped off with such confidence
and fed the fish with their ambitions?
This man was nothing more than debris on the tide.
When things go wrong
don’t ask yourself, what would our father do?
Do what you think is best.
Consult, consider, act.
Send news, and I will send for you.
Together we will find a place
The Medieval Welsh in sections 2 and 4 is taken from Jenny Rowland’s Early Welsh Saga Poetry, (D.S.Brewer 1990). I have preserved Rowland’s punctuation and use of capitals. The translations are mine.
[i] The Welsh in this section is taken from ‘Llym awel’ (Rowland p. 454).
[ii] Go, go now! (Welsh). Nithing is Old English: wretch villain, coward, someone who is a nothing.
[iii] Aestrild’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2019). Her punishment for being a victim was to be bound to her daughter and thrown in the Severn.
[iv] The Welsh in this section is taken from ‘Canu Heledd’ (Rowland p. 431). Another woman laments the destruction of her world. The Old English is from ‘The Wife’s Lament’ and taken from http://www.oldenglishaerobics.net/wife.php
You can find more information about the story of Rowena, the unnamed girl in this poem, and The Legendary History of Britain, at www.liamguilar.com