“If you do that I will miss meeting with my brethren, awaiting me in two days’ time. In just a few days Ælfred will learn of my disappearance, and Guthrum too. And that it happened on Hord’s lands.”
He turned in his saddle and slipped the leathern tube in his near-side saddle bag.
“Then there is the matter of my horse. You would need to explain how you came by it. My weapons too, which Guthrum marked well at our feasting. You could of course carry all to Hord as tribute to your chieftain. But when Guthrum and his men come asking why I vanished on his lands, horse and weapons both must be hidden. He will order a search. It would all be – awkward.”
The silence that followed was marked only by Raedwulf’s steady gaze at the three.
“Give us silver and we will let you go,” insisted the youngest. It was over, but he did not yet know it.
“I will give you nothing,” Raedwulf returned. His hand was on his sword-hilt now. “My death will mean your own. Turn now and ride before I go to Hord myself.”
One of the brothers reached his hand towards the rein of the yellow-haired youngster. The youngster scowled, then spat upon the ground beneath his horse’s dancing feet. The three turned as Raedwulf stood his horse, watching their dusty retreat.
Once at Kilton Raedwulf’s daughter saw him almost at once. A light drizzle was falling, and Wilgyfu, with many of the other women of Kilton, was in the great hall at hand-work, her youngest son in a willow basket at her feet, her older boy romping with the other toddling children. After their kiss and his assurance that Worr was well she took her father’s wet wool mantle, and handed him the linen towelling she was hemming so he might dry face and hands. He lifted the boys in turn as she ran to the bower-house to alert Modwynn of his coming. Father and daughter would have the night to visit; first he must attend to duty.
Holding his wet mantle over his head he walked past the pleasure-garden. The rain had picked up and was now steady, the afternoon sky leaden in hue yet strangely bright, as that metal is when molten. The sea beyond the garden was active; he heard the booming crash as waves struck the root of the cliff. Rolls of soft grey mist unfurled themselves as they rose from the surface of the water.
The Lady of Kilton welcomed him, pouring out ale into a cup of silver. He had already assured her that the journey to Four Stones with Ceric had gone smoothly.
“And of your return?” They were seated across from each other at the small round table.
He paused a moment. “Other than a beggar asking for silver, all went well.”
She smiled at this, knowing it for far more than it sounded.
“And of Ceric’s return?” she asked next.
“That I do not know. He seemed unwilling to name a date. One month at least, he told me.”
“Unwilling until he learns what he wishes to learn,” Modwynn surmised.
“That may be, my lady.” His tone was flat enough that she could read nothing into it.
“And of Ashild?”
“She is a maid to be remarked upon.”
“As lovely as that?”
“Forgive me. Not exactly that. She is well-formed, pleasing, certainly. Not a beauty to my eye, perhaps. But she possesses – ” His eyes had shifted, considering his memory of the maid.
“What?” Modwynn was finally forced to ask.
“Herself. She is self-possessed, to a rare degree in a young woman.”
A confident nature would be greatly desired in the next Lady of Kilton. Modwynn nodded her head in approval.
“But not head-strong,” she asked.
He let out a breath with a laugh. “I think she is, that. And it is one of her charms. At least in the eyes of Ceric.”
“His gift – the golden gown. How was it received?”
“Gratefully, I am sure. She wore it at our welcome feast.”
Modwynn paused, considering the fine effect the glowing silk would have by torch light in a crowded hall. She pictured all looking on Ashild in approval, and how her grandson must have regarded her, so richly dressed, and by the gift of his own hand.
“Ceric had told me there is another maid of the hall,” she went on, “a small sister.”
“Yes, Ealhswith, most charming. A shy and diffident maid, of perhaps ten or twelve years.”
Modwynn rose to pour her guest another cup. “Tell me of their mother,” she prompted.
His silence lasted long enough that she glanced at him as she finished filling their cups.
“Ashild is unlike her mother,” he said at last. “Hrald and Ealhswith more resemble the Lady Ælfwyn.”
“Ælfwyn came here when the two children, Ceric and Ashild, were but babes,” she recounted. “I recall her beauty, her gentleness, and, I think, her true sense of duty.”
“She has changed in none of those things,” he said. He was looking off, to where her loom stood against the wall. A length of creamy linen lay stretched there, held by the clay warp-weights that dangled above the floorboards.
“Her mother would welcome Ashild’s union with Kilton?”
“That she was clear on. The lady would welcome Ceric as her son-in-law.”
Modwynn need not ask if a self-possessed maid of seventeen years would consider waiting two years to wed the far-younger Edwin. Ashild sounded as if she would wait for little. She began to wish she had encouraged Ceric to ask her outright, and had enabled Raedwulf to bargain for the girl while he was there.
“And Ashild – will she wed Ceric?”
“She gave no hint of her feelings to her mother.”
Modwynn was silent some time. The rain had steadily increased. A splatter of drops was lashing the glass casements, and the rising wind causing them to rattle uneasily in their frames. Modwynn found her eyes resting on her hands, curving around the base of her cup.
“The maid of Four Stones will have many suitors to choose from,” she observed, before looking up. “We will see what Ceric has to say on his return. It may be a tale written only by the two of them.”
At Four Stones Ælfwyn presided over a table with one less guest. Not a few men had sat at her side for a night or two, and the King of the Danes, Guthrum, had been one of them. All of them had known her as the lady of that place, had recalled her as Peace-weaver for Yrling, or wife to Sidroc, or mother to Hrald. The guest lately gone was the only one who knew her before her arrival in this conquered land. Now the place at which he had sat at her elbow was restored to Wilgot, the priest. There was nothing for it but to put Raedwulf, and the memories he had briefly kindled, out of her mind.
The demands of each day crowded in, needing as ever to be met: the cooks and butchers and bakers in the kitchen yard to be marshalled, their work overseen, waste avoided, remnants to be parceled out to the poorest of the villagers. For several hours each day she joined the women of the hall at the endless task of cloth-making, spinning, weaving, and sewing, that all might be clothed. There were grudges and jealousies she must discern and avert; and her own and others’ children to be taught the rudiments of sums and letters, by her own hand, and for those with promise, by Wilgot too. Her sheep were always a matter of concern and pride to her, and whenever she could she spent time amongst her flocks, and the men and women who cared for them.
There were satisfactions as well: the quiet and sustaining knowledge that Oundle existed, and that her mother knew contentment in her life there as a professed nun. The daily joy and worry of her children as they grew and changed. And the rare pleasure of Ceric’s presence, and the memory of his mother, which had never failed to comfort her.
At day’s end all returned to the hall where Ælfwyn presided. There was fellowship and feasting awaiting them there, the bronze oil cressets lit and glowing, glinting light from the silver necklets and wrist-cuffs of the men and women moving within, gleaming upon the polished points of the massed spears standing upright, flanking the treasure room door. When the emptied bowls had been cleared away Wilgot would rise, and
tell of the works of Christ from the Holy Book; and then – if the ale had opened their throats – one or more of the men might stand and share a well-remembered Saga-tale of the older Gods.
Ceric and Hrald were always together, through every full day. They were walking in the kitchen yard one fore-noon, hearing the shrill whine of the grindstone being turned as a cleaver was being held against it. Ceric had noticed the old man, bald of head and bent of back, who sat before the whirling wheel, spending part of each day grinding and sharpening knives. The screeching came to an end as the man pulled back the honed edge and tested it with the pad of his finger. Then the man looked up over the wheel to where Ceric stood with Hrald. His eyes seemed fixed upon Ceric, and it was not for the first time. Ceric recalled him from the months spent here as a boy, and that the man looked at him then too.
“Who is that old man?” he asked Hrald. “The one who sits all day at his grindstone?”
Hrald looked surprised. “His name is Eomer. He has been here a long time, all his life almost. His wife died a while back, she was the old cook.”
“I wonder why he looks at me.”
Eomer was indeed still looking upon him. “Let us go and ask him,” Hrald laughed.
The old man nodded as they came up to him. On a table to his right was a range of knives and tools he had yet to sharpen, or vessels to polish. His thin lips cracked into a smile.
Ceric did not need to ask, for the man spoke first, and to him.
“You are like your young mother.” The man’s watery blue eyes were fast upon Ceric’s face.
Ceric looked quickly to Hrald; some old men went daft. But Eomer’s eyes had shifted now, to a door set at the base of the hall.
“I carried your father out of that hole, put him on a horse.”
Ceric felt his chest tighten. He knew this yard was not always one of well-fed and justly ruled folk. He knew too that the folk of the hall had aided his mother when she ran off with the maimed Gyric.
“You helped save my father,” he said.
“Aye,” Eomer nodded. “But the maid – your mother – she did, most of all.”
Ceric did not know what else to say. This kitchen man had carried to safety the son of the great Godwulf of Kilton, taken him from where he had been thrust to die, and helped give him a chance to live. He knew his mother had been a maid of less than sixteen years when it had happened, but it was hard to think of her like that.
He found himself fumbling in his belt, digging at the fat store of coinage there.
Eomer’s watery eyes were following him.
“I will take no silver,” the old man answered, lifting his hand in refusal. “Seeing you grown a fine man is enough.” The old man looked now at the weapon that spanned Ceric’s waist. “And seeing you wear with pride the seax of my dead Lord Merewala.”
“So it is his seax,” Ceric answered. It had been considered such at Kilton, but no one had known for certain. Merewala had been a famed warrior, and his father, the builder of Four Stones.
For answer Eomer nodded. “’Twas Dobbe, my wife, who saved it, took it from my lord’s body, kept it hid. When the maid set out she packed it in the kit she carried.
“’Twas those two women, my old wife, and the maid who would be your mother, who made it so.”
“My father always wore it,” Ceric was able to tell him.
And one day the son I shall have with Ashild will do so, he thought, further bonding these two halls together.
Ceric took full part in the needful activities of Four Stones. Hrald had been for years at the side of his uncle, Asberg, or his mother as they dealt with matters of village and hall. With Ceric at his side even commonplace tasks took on a new savour and interest. They rode out with Asberg to oversee the mending of the long wooden fences that spanned the paddocks penning the beasts at the valley of horses, and attended the yearly tallying of sheep and cattle. They worked with Jari, who had a head for such things, as he led a group of villagers and men in the digging of a new drainage ditch, channeling off the groundwater that yearly turned the common pasture nearest the palisade wall into a bog. Worr and the thegns lent their backs to this as well, and Hrald and Ceric took up spades and worked themselves into a sweat alongside the ranks of cottar folk and warriors striving for a common good.
Over a series of days they rode to the greensward edging the forest by the stream, where men had gathered to undertake the cutting and hauling of the coming year’s wood for the making of fire, and for building. Oxcart after oxcart was filled, and the steady and strong beasts hauled bundles of saplings and whole mighty trunks back to the hall yard to be seasoned and sawn. Riding back at the end of one such train put Hrald in mind of earlier wood-gathering.
“All the wood we stacked at Tyrsborg,” he remembered aloud.
“Right up to the eaves,” Ceric agreed.
“The Northern Lights – how green they were.”
They went on, naming things that stood in memory of their time with Hrald’s father and Ceric’s mother.
“Gunnvor’s honey cakes.”
“The stags Tindr took; those big harts.”
They fell silent for a while. Ceric knew Hrald still had the bow Tindr had made him; he had seen it, with the leathern quiver full of arrows, hanging on the wall of the treasure room. Ceric saw that a few of the arrows were missing, proof that Hrald had used them hunting, or at least lost them shooting after game.
“I have mine too,” Ceric had told him, as they grinned at each other. But he had never used it after returning to Kilton.
Hrald’s bow and quiver hung by the boy-sized shield Sidroc asked the nearby weapon-smith on the island to make; Ceric still had that made for him, as well. Those shields bore the marks of the boys’ avid sparring, facing each other in the stable yard of Tyrsborg.
“The little ones…Yrling and Eirian. I wonder how they are,” Hrald hazarded.
Ceric glanced over to Hrald. They were nearly back to the palisade wall. The waggons in front of them had slowed as they climbed the rise around to the front where the broad gates stood.
Ceric only nodded, and looked down at the mane of his horse. It was hard to think of his mother’s twinned children, and of her. Now he was older he felt shame at how he had at times spoken to her at Tyrsborg. He had made her cry more than once, and her tears, and the things she wept at, had confused him as well. He regretted most of all his parting from her, telling her he would never see her again, then almost begging her to come with him.
His thoughts returned to the day before that parting, when he had ridden off from Tyrsborg alone. He went along the trading road to his uncle’s grave, aware of his mounting anger, knowing with every step of his horse that it would be his final visit there. A bitter taste was rising in his mouth, and he knew he held his reins in clenched hands. When he came to the grave he almost flung himself from the saddle. He felt he must stand there and make some kind of vow, a bloody vow, over the ground that marked the earthly resting place of Godwin of Kilton. But once at the spot, he knew not what to swear. He stood mute, seeing the fresh sprouts of green grass and white wild flowers, looking upon the weather-stained wooden cross he had driven into the stony soil.
Could he swear revenge? For what? The laws of the place made his uncle’s killing lawful. He saw with his own eyes, heard with his own ears, that his mother did not want to return to Angle-land, was not in fact being held captive. And he had heard and seen his uncle’s killer offer him his life in return for his departure. Godwin would not agree, wanted to fight. Now he was dead and buried far from the haven of home, or even the sanctity of a church or priest. And Ceric’s mother was part of his death, the biggest part of it, which only confused him more.
There was no vow he could make, bloody or otherwise. He had dropped to his knees. He bowed his head and tried to pray. He remembered his first visit to the grave and how Hrald had come up beside him and began saying the Lord’s Prayer, and wished he had brought Hral
d with him.
Now Hrald spoke, breaking into his thoughts. “I will go back, someday,” he told Ceric.
Again Ceric said nothing. He could not imagine going back.
“Strike to the chest,” Jari was urging. “My heart is open to you.”
He was speaking to Ceric, who was facing him with raised sword and shield. They were standing on a grassy patch not far from the Place of Offering, sparring. Ceric and Hrald had wanted to try their weapons and their skill, and had been joined in the effort by Jari, Worr, and a number of others.
As the days of Ceric's stay at Four Stones stretched into a fortnight, Worr took note of signs of restlessness amongst the thegns of Kilton. The five he had chosen for the trip had been carefully selected; good fighters, all, but steady and cool-headed ones. All were wed, with not only wives but young children at home, and all were devout in their Christian faith. The last thing Worr wished to face was friction arising from entanglements with any women of Four Stones.
The troop had been a congenial one on the road, and the rest afforded by the first few days after arriving had been welcome. Now after many days away from Kilton and the demands of everyday life they were become restive. A bout of friendly sparring amongst themselves and the lead men of the place would expend energy. And Worr wanted to see for himself the skill of the men of Four Stones, and how his own ability, and that of his men, would measure up. Charged as he was with Ceric's welfare he also wanted to witness the lad's efforts, and guard against injury.
The sparring was held much as it would have been at Kilton: a more practiced warrior against a younger, so that the latter might learn; blunt-ended staffs instead of iron-tipped spears; sword blades sheathed in narrow casings of thick leather. A sleeveless leathern tunic, such as those worn under a ring tunic, for body protection. War-hammers and the Dane’s deadly battle-axe, the skeggox, were laid aside in such sparring. For the heat, no helmets would be worn, thus no blows to the head or neck allowed. One could be battered and bruised, but no blood drawn, with such precautions.
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