Conquest 03 - Knights of the Hawk

by James Aitcheson

  ‘Acwellath hi!’ Magnus roared in his own tongue, and the cry was taken up by the rest of his men. Kill them. He wasn’t about to forsake me, then. Not yet, anyway.

  By then the remaining rowers had realised they faced a struggle they could not win, and had hauled in their oars, abandoning them in favour of knives and axes and whatever other weapons were to hand. They rushed to form a line along Nihtegesa’s broadside, making ready to face the onslaught as the ship heaved and rolled in the swell. The deck was slippery and I almost fell, but managed to recover my balance in time.

  ‘To arms,’ I yelled at Serlo and Pons and Godric, thinking that perhaps they hadn’t heard me, then in English to Eithne: ‘Get below deck.’

  ‘I can fight,’ she protested. ‘Give me a knife and I’ll fight.’

  Having heard the tale of how she had resisted her captors in the battle for the Isle, I didn’t doubt her, but whatever others might believe, I held to the opinion that a battle was no place for a woman.

  ‘Do as I say,’ I roared. ‘Now!’

  Beneath the platforms at either end of the ship there were compartments where supplies were usually stored so as to keep them dry, each of them large enough for a person, or several people, to hide in. She scowled, but thankfully didn’t need telling again, which was as well, since I had no more time for her then.

  ‘What are you standing there for?’ I asked the others, who still hadn’t moved.

  ‘You want us to fight them, lord?’ Serlo asked, and his misgivings were clear in his tone. ‘Our own countrymen?’

  ‘Do you have something else in mind?’

  ‘We can’t win,’ Pons shouted as spray crashed over the prow. ‘There are too many of them.’

  ‘We’ve faced worse odds than these, haven’t we?’ I shot back. ‘We can hold them off, I know it.’

  ‘They’ve caught us, lord,’ Serlo said. ‘It’s over. There’s no shame in yielding.’

  ‘We don’t have any choice, lord,’ Pons added.

  My blood boiled. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My own knights, oath-sworn to my service, were turning against me.

  ‘Lord—’ Godric started, but I was in no mood to listen to their protests any longer, least of all from him, the runt on whose behalf I had fought and killed Guibert. He, ultimately, was the reason why we were here, and yet, in spite of everything I’d done for him and the protection I’d given him, he still had the nerve to question me.

  ‘No,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘I haven’t come this far to give up now. So tell me, are you with me, or against me?’

  It must have seemed to them as if a kind of madness had taken hold of me, that I’d taken leave of my senses, although it did not feel that way at the time. Rather, it seemed to me that everything had suddenly become clear. I could not let Robert and his men take me. I had come too far now to be steered from this course, to let this undertaking come to naught.

  ‘Lord!’

  ‘What?’ I demanded, as I turned to Godric, who was pointing eagerly out across the wide blue-grey expanse, his eyes bright, his voice filled not with alarm but with joy. For while we had been arguing, I realised, he had been watching Wyvern, and now I saw what he had spotted.

  For she wasn’t closing as if to attack us, as I’d expected. Her oarsmen had slackened their rhythm, and rather than drawing directly alongside us, as they would have done if they’d wanted to grapple and board us, they seemed to be keeping their distance. Instead of presenting a wall of painted leather and a forest of steel, the men aboard her were waving towards us, hailing us, although their cries were all but drowned out by Magnus and his men. They were still beating out the battle-thunder upon their shields, roaring insults and taunts at our pursuers, swearing death upon them. I could barely hear my own thoughts, let alone make out what those on the other ship were trying to say.

  But then, through the din of steel and limewood and jeers and curses, I heard what sounded like my name. The sun was behind the other ship, casting her crew in shadow, and the sea all around was flashing bright, so that for an instant I was blinded. With my free hand I shielded my eyes from the glare, and that was when I saw two figures standing at Wyvern’s prow. They were both waving, trying to catch our attention, one a little taller than the other, both with scabbards hanging from their waists.

  The taller of the two cupped his hands around his lips. ‘Tancred!’ he yelled, and this time he was close enough that I recognised his voice.

  ‘Eudo!’ I said, and no sooner had I done so than I realised who the second figure must be. ‘Wace!’

  The other ship drew closer still. The sun disappeared for a moment behind a wisp of cloud, and suddenly I was able to see them clearly.

  At first I thought my eyes had to be deceiving me. How long was it since I’d last seen them? Not since that night at Heia, more than a month ago, I reckoned, although I’d lost count of the days. All at once the battle-anger that until then had been coursing through my veins vanished. But surprised as I was to see them both here, to say I was overjoyed would be false. They were still sworn to Robert, after all. Wasn’t that why they had followed me?

  ‘Do you know these people?’ Magnus asked me as he made a sign to his huscarls, who ceased clattering their weapons against their shield-rims, although they continued to regard Wyvern and those aboard her warily.

  ‘I know them,’ I answered, but he didn’t look much reassured, and understandably so, as the other ship, easily within range of a javelin’s throw now, moved alongside us and it became clear just how much larger she was than Nihtegesa, and how many more men she carried. But still none of them were rushing to arms, as I might have expected.

  ‘God’s teeth, but you’re persistent, aren’t you?’ Eudo shouted across the water, laughing. ‘We were beginning to think we’d never catch up with you.’

  ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you going to let us come aboard, then?’ Wace asked. ‘Or are you and your new friends going to keep waving your weapons at us until we all perish of old age?’

  ‘That depends,’ I said, although what I meant by that exactly, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘On what?’

  They were my two oldest and most loyal friends in all the world, and I wasn’t about to take up arms against them. Unable to flee and unwilling to fight. What choices did that leave us with?

  ‘Is Robert with you?’ I asked, glancing along the length of their ship, looking for him. If he was there, however, he wasn’t showing his face, which was probably as well. As hard as I’d tried to bury my anger in the past few weeks, I still hadn’t forgiven him for driving me from Earnford, from the lands that I had striven hard first to earn and then to defend.

  ‘No,’ Eudo said. ‘We came alone.’

  ‘He sent you, did he?’

  ‘All this way? What makes you think he would do that?’

  Little more than a couple of oar’s lengths separated Nihtegesa and Wyvern now. ‘To take me back to Heia, so that he can further humiliate me,’ I said bitterly. ‘Has he not inflicted enough punishment on me already?’

  ‘Robert hasn’t forgiven you for what you did,’ said Wace. ‘He’s angrier now than he was then, too, since with you being gone, he’s the one who’s had to pay the blood-price to Guibert’s kin. But no, he didn’t send us.’

  ‘If he didn’t,’ I asked, ‘then what are you doing here, and in his ship?’

  ‘If you’ll tell your friends to sheathe their blades and let us come across, then we’ll tell you. We don’t want a fight any more than you do.’

  ‘If you want to come aboard, you talk to me, not him,’ Magnus called out in French. ‘I understand well enough what you’re saying, so don’t think that I don’t. This is my ship. I alone decide who’s allowed to tread her decks. No one else.’

  ‘And who are you?’ Eudo asked.

  ‘Magnus,’ he replied, not daring to give his full name to them as he had to me, and then, for want of anything else to say,
added, ‘This is Nihtegesa.’

  ‘Order your men to lay down their weapons, Magnus, and I promise you there won’t be any blood spilt this day.’

  He seemed to consider this for a few moments. He signalled to me and I jostled my way past his sweat-reeking huscarls towards him.

  ‘When you said you know these people,’ he said, keeping his voice low so that only he and I could hear, ‘does that mean you trust them?’

  ‘With my life,’ I replied. ‘And I know that they don’t make promises lightly. If they say there’ll be no bloodshed, they mean it.’

  His eyes were hard, his expression stony. ‘Before I met you I’d almost begun to believe that I’d never have to lay eyes upon a Frenchman again. Now it seems that wherever I go I find myself plagued by your kind.’

  ‘Do we have an answer, then?’ Wace called.

  Magnus let out an exasperated sigh and returned to the gunwale. ‘Do I have much choice?’ he shouted back with the weariness of one who was well used to defeat.

  ‘You get to choose whether you want to live or die,’ Eudo said. ‘Is that choice enough for you?’

  When the question was put to him that way, there was really only one answer the Englishman could give. Reluctantly he bade his retainers sheathe their swords and put down their spears and axes, while Nihtegesa and Wyvern steered closer to one another. The crews on both sides threw across coils of rope, which they used to lash them together. Timber thudded and scraped against timber as the two hulls met, and first Wace and then Eudo came aboard, both of them accompanied by their household knights.

  ‘So,’ I said, not even caring to greet them properly. ‘Now that you’ve travelled the length of Britain to hunt me down, perhaps you’ll tell me what it is you want.’

  Twenty-three

  AND SO THEY did, and it was exactly as I’d thought. They wanted me to return to England with them. ‘I thought you said Robert was still angry,’ I said. ‘That he hadn’t yet forgiven me.’

  ‘He is, and he hasn’t,’ said Wace. ‘You don’t know the storm you’ve stirred up. It’s not just that Robert’s been forced to pay the blood-price to Guibert’s widow; many of his vassals are saying he should have been quicker to act, and more severe in his punishment. They say he should never have allowed you to flee Heia, let alone England.’

  ‘You think that’s going to encourage me to come back with you?’ I scoffed.

  ‘All these quarrels can be settled in a single stroke, if you only show a little contrition,’ Eudo said. ‘If you return willingly, do the penance that the Church requires and recompense him for the money he paid out on your behalf, then all those barons can be satisfied that justice has been done in the proper manner. There’s no reason then why Robert shouldn’t accept your submission and restore you to your lands.’

  ‘Is that what he told you, or just what you believe?’ I asked, and I took the silence that greeted my question to mean that he had made no such assurances. ‘Anyway, if it were as simple as that, don’t you think I would have done it already?’

  ‘You killed a man,’ Wace said. ‘There is no disputing it. Many witnessed it happen. This matter will not be forgotten easily. Not unless you at least demonstrate some humility, so that people see you feel remorse for what you did.’

  I rounded on him. ‘Don’t think for a moment that I don’t regret what happened that night.’ Guibert had been a boor, but he hadn’t deserved to die, not by anyone’s estimation. The knowledge of what I’d done had hung like a shadow over me ever since.

  But remorse would not bring him back. Nor did I think that mere gestures would heal these wounds, though they might well restore Earnford to me. For I was tired. Tired of the obligations with which I’d long been burdened. Tired of risking my life time after time under the banner of a lord who could not provide, in the name of a king who was as cold-hearted as he was capricious, for a country that, a few good men and women aside, hated us and whose people would slaughter us in their beds if they had half a chance.

  ‘Even if I had the silver to pay him,’ I said, ‘I’m not about to prostrate myself before him and beg for the restitution of what by right is already mine.’

  ‘You have no right to that land,’ Eudo pointed out. ‘Not any more. Robert expelled you from his service, or have you forgotten that?’

  ‘You should count yourself lucky,’ Wace said. ‘If Guibert had been better liked while he lived, there might have been even more of an outcry. There’d be no hope of you returning in that case, and we wouldn’t have wasted the last two weeks pursuing you all this way across the sea.’

  ‘Why did you, anyway?’ I asked. ‘I thought Robert was leaving for Flanders, and both of you with him.’

  ‘He was,’ Eudo said. ‘But when the Flemish count heard rumour that King Guillaume was planning a foray against him, he quickly offered a truce. In return for peace, he agreed not to go raiding.’

  ‘You mean the expedition never went ahead?’

  Fate can at times be cruel, and never had it felt crueller than at that moment, as I thought back to my quarrel with Robert, in his solar at Heia all those weeks ago. A quarrel over nothing, as it now turned out.

  If only I could have known. For if we had not argued so bitterly that day, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been in such a foul mood that evening. Perhaps I wouldn’t have let my temper get the better of me, and Guibert’s blood wouldn’t be on my hands, and none of this would have happened.

  But then I wouldn’t have learnt about Haakon, or discovered the truth about what had happened at Dunholm. Was that knowledge worth the price I’d paid? Had it been worth Guibert’s life?

  ‘What brought you here to Yrland, then?’ I asked, trying to shake such thoughts from my mind.

  ‘Robert sent us across the Narrow Sea,’ Eudo said. ‘He wanted us to bear news of Malet’s death to his vassals in Normandy. But we decided to do otherwise.’

  ‘You seized his ship?’

  ‘Not exactly. When we told Aubert what we had in mind, he was only too willing to help. As soon as we were out of sight of land, we changed course.’

  ‘Aubert?’ I asked. ‘He’s here?’

  ‘Aye,’ I heard the shipmaster call, no doubt having heard his name. I looked up to see him waving from Wyvern’s deck, a broad grin upon his face. ‘You’ve been making trouble, or so your friends have been telling me.’

  I’d last seen him over two years ago, but he hadn’t changed much in that time, save for being a little greyer around the temples than I remembered, not to mention a little fuller in the stomach, too. He also hailed from Brittany, although, like me, it was some time since he’d been back to the place of his birth.

  ‘Robert told us you had it in your head to go to Dyflin, though he didn’t know why,’ Wace said. ‘We reckoned that was where we would most likely find you.’

  ‘And we nearly did,’ Eudo added. ‘But then you left that night.’

  ‘How did you know we’d be travelling north?’

  ‘The winds told us,’ Aubert said by way of explanation. ‘We followed where they took us.’

  ‘That’s our tale, anyway,’ Wace said. ‘Now maybe you’ll tell us yours.’

  I was in no mood to recount everything, not again, but I could hardly not tell them, and so I repeated exactly what Eithne had told me about Oswynn and Haakon, and how she’d helped set me on their trail.

  ‘We both wondered where she’d appeared from,’ Wace said, meaning the girl. ‘You never said anything, though, so I reckoned it was better not to ask.’

  Eudo shrugged. ‘I assumed she was helping to warm your bed, although I admit she seemed to me a bit fierce-looking for your tastes.’

  I glanced at Eithne, who had emerged from the compartment beneath the bow platform. Her mouth was once more twisted into her usual scowl. She must have guessed from the looks they were giving her that we were talking about her, even if she couldn’t know exactly what we were saying.

  Eudo laughed. ‘Even Oswynn never glowered
like that one does, and she wasn’t exactly an easy one to tame, from what I remember. And now you’re saying you know where to find her?’

  ‘I don’t, but he does,’ I said, gesturing at Magnus, and introduced him to them, saying merely that he was a ship’s captain from Dyflin, whom Haakon had wronged in the past, which the Englishman seemed to be content with. I also gave them the names of Ælfhelm and the rest of his huscarls, all of whom continued to regard the newcomers with suspicion. Not that I blamed them.

  ‘You understand, then, why I can’t go back,’ I said. ‘Not now. Not having come this far already.’

  ‘How do you expect to be able to mount an assault on this Haakon’s stronghold with a single ship’s crew?’ Wace asked.

  ‘Do you remember when we stole our way into the enemy camp at Beferlic last autumn? There were only nine of us then, and only six when we took the gates at Eoferwic the year before that.’

  ‘And both times we nearly got ourselves killed,’ Eudo reminded me.

  ‘No man ever won himself fame without taking any risks,’ I said, repeating the old proverb that was often spoken amongst warriors. ‘What do I stand to lose?’

  ‘Everything,’ Wace said, no longer caring to disguise his frustration. ‘And this has nothing to do with winning fame.’

  He had every right to be angry, I supposed. They both did. They had ventured all this way, hundreds of leagues from the manors they called home, in hope of talking some sense into me, and all for naught.

  ‘I’ve made my decision,’ I said, tight-lipped. ‘If Robert expects I’ll happily don a penitent’s robe and bend my knee before him, he’s wrong. Besides, you should be coming with me, not the other way around.’

  Eudo frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  And that was when I told them what Magnus had related to me only a few evenings ago. That it was Haakon who burnt the mead-hall that night at Dunholm. That he was to blame, not Eadgar Ætheling, for the death of our former lord, Robert de Commines, the man who had in so many ways been like a father to me, to us, who had provided for us and inspired us and trained us in the ways of war.