The Guests of Odin by Gavin Chappell Page A

head in disgust at this apparent nonsense.
    Now Feng was certain that his stepson was full of guile and treachery, and he wished to slay him, but did not dare do this openly for fear of his wife. Instead, he decided to ask his old friend the King of England to kill him, so that he could claim ignorance of the deed.
    Before Amlodi went, he went to his mother in secret. “Hang the hall with woven knots,” he told her enigmatically. “And if I do not return after a year, perform obsequies for me. Then will I return.”
    Two of Feng’s thanes went with him, taking with them a runic message to the King of England, asking him to execute their charge. On board ship, while his two companions were sleeping, Amlodi searched them, found the message, and read the runes. Then he scratched clean the stave, and cut his own message to the effect that his companions should be put to death, not he. In a postscript he asked that the King of England give his daughter in marriage to “a youth of great judgement” who he was sending. He signed it with his uncle’s signature.
    When they reached England, the envoys went to the ruler, and gave him the rune-stave. The king read it, and then gave them good entertainment. But when Amlodi had the meat and drink of the feast placed before him, he rejected it.
    “How incredible,” people were heard to murmur, “that a foreign lad should turn his nose up at the dainties of the royal table as if it were some peasant’s stew.”
    When the feast was over, and the king was bidding goodnight to his friends, he sent a man to the quarters assigned to Amlodi and his companions to listen to their speech.
    “Why did you act as if the king’s meat was poisoned?” asked one of the thanes.
    “Blood flecked the bread,” replied Amlodi. “Did you not see it? And there was a tang of iron in the mead. As for the meat, it smelled like rotting flesh. Besides, the king has the eyes of a thrall, and in three ways the queen acted like a bondmaid.”
    His companions jeered at him for his words.
    Meanwhile, the king heard all this from his spy. “He who could say such things,” the king remarked, “must possess either more than mortal wisdom, or more than mortal folly.”
    He summoned his reeve, and asked him where he the bread came from. “It was made by your own baker, my lord,” replied the reeve.
    “Where did the corn of which it was made grow?” asked the king. “Are there any signs of carnage in the vicinity?”
    The reeve replied. “Nearby is a field where men fought in former days,” he said. “I planted this field with grain in spring, thinking it more fruitful than the others.” He shrugged. “Maybe this affected the bread’s flavour.”
    Hearing this, the king assumed that Amlodi had spoken truly. “And where did the meat come from?
    “My pigs strayed from their keeper,” the reeve admitted. “And they were found eating the corpse of a robber. Perhaps it was this that the youth could taste.”
    “And of what liquor did you mix the mead?”
    “It was brewed of water and meal,” replied the reeve. “I could show you the spring from which the water came.”
    He did so, and when the king had it dug deep down, he found there several rusted swords.
    After this, the king went to speak with his mother. “Who was my real father?” he asked.
    “I submitted to no man but the king your father,” she replied.
    He threatened to have the truth out of her with a trial, and she relented. “Very well,” she replied. “If you must know, your real father was a thrall.”
    By this, the king understood Amlodi’s words. Although ashamed of his lowly origins, the king was so amazed by Amlodi’s cleverness that he asked him to his face why he had said the queen behaved like a bondmaid. But then he found that her mother had indeed been a thrall.
    Amlodi told the king that he had seen three faults in her behaviour. “To begin with,” he said, ‘she muffles her head in her mantle like a handmaid.