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fowlers and fishermen, but Etheldreda liked him. He treated her with gruff respect as though she were an equal instead of still a child.
    Ovin was in the boat that closely followed them and it was he who lifted her out onto the bank when at last they reached firm land. The excitement of the journey through the marshes had brought high colour to her cheeks and her eyes were sparkling. For the moment she had forgotten the reason for their mission, but it soon came back to her as they came upon the refugee encampment. The sights that she had tried so hard to forget from Penda’s attack on her own country came welling back and she turned to Ovin with a sob.
    Tentatively, remembering her father’s words, he put his arms about her. ‘Don’t cry, lady,’ he said softly against her hair. ‘These people need our help, not our tears.’
    She tried to pull herself together at this and look at the children with thin bones and dark-ringed eyes, the women with dirty, blood-soaked bandages, the pathetic collection of bits and pieces they had brought from their homes. She wiped her tears on his tunic, drew away from him and walked firmly towards the ragged crowd. Within minutes she was completely in control of herself and, child as she still was in body if not in spirit, she took command and with grace and dignity organised the distribution of the food that they had brought with them and the administering of herbal potions. She dressed wounds and listened with a pale but calm face to women telling of what they had seen.
    But, all the time, at the back of her mind, a voice kept saying over and over again with the insistence of a drum beat: ‘This is not all there is. Remember – this is not all there is.’
    And then, almost as confirmation of what she was thinking, one of the refugees told her about the death of King Oswald.
    ‘With his very last breath he prayed for the souls of his enemies. All who were near saw a light hover over the place where he fell and, as they looked at it, they felt no pain over his death nor our defeat.’
    Etheldreda watched and listened intently, beginning to grasp the importance of what was being said. In realising that his enemies were, like his friends, all the sons of God, all eternal souls, she understood he had gained something more valuable than the life and lands Penda took away from him. He had won the only victory worth winning.
    There were tears in her eyes as she turned suddenly to Ovin, her friend, her comforter, her rock.
    ‘You see, there is something more,’ she whispered.
    He nodded, smiling broadly.
    And then there was no more time to be thinking of these wonders. One of the pack-horses started to slip on the slimy mud of the riverbank and everyone had to rush to his assistance.
    At the end, laughing and covered in mud, they collapsed exhausted – the immediate distracting them from the eternal. But, behind the horse’s desperate floundering and their clumsy but energetic attempts to rescue it, the eternal was still there.

    On the way back they rested again at Ely and Etheldreda, tired as she was, insisted on walking round the island.
    ‘I love this place,’ she said to Prince Tondbert. ‘I feel at home here.’ He could see that the cares of her recent experience were almost gone from her face.
    He smiled at her. ‘It’s yours, my lady.’
    She looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t tease me, my lord.’
    He opened his mouth to confirm his gift, but was interrupted by the arrival of Etheldreda’s mother and one of Oswald’s men. They were talking of what would become of Northumbria now that Oswald was dead.
    ‘His brother Oswy should by rights be king,’ the man was saying, ‘but he’ll have to win his kingdom back from Penda, and there are many in his own country who hate him and wouldn’t like to see him king.’
    ‘Why is that?’ the queen asked mildly. ‘Wasn’t he brought up by the monks of Iona in the same way as his brother Oswald?’
    ‘Aye… but…’ The man