by James Wilde
And he knew that if anyone took Hereward’s head, it would be he.
More flames erupted further to the north, in a clearing among the woods. Another village set alight by the rebels. What possessed them? Were they demanding their own doom?
‘You will be avenged, Ivar,’ Redteeth muttered, plucking at the skulls of birds and rodents that hung from his hauberk. His gaze flickered towards the grey figure that followed him everywhere, unseen by any other man. He had grown used to the unblinking stare of his long-dead companion, burned alive by Hereward in the Northumbrian wastes all those years ago. The shade did not frighten him. It was a reminder of his duty, nothing more. ‘Hereward will fall under my axe, Grim, and I will take that monk for good measure. If he had submitted to the law, my law, I would not be here and you would not be dead,’ the Viking murmured. ‘The Mercian denied you the Hall of the Slain by the manner in which he took your life, Ivar, but I have vowed to break the shackles that bind you to this world, and so I will.’
He eyed William de Warenne and the Butcher as they discussed their tactics. Christians both, praying in their stone churches. Their lives were like those cold, dismal places. Where was the feast and the song? Where was the hot blood of life gushing over your chin?
‘You would speak with the old man now?’ Taillebois was saying in his rumbling voice.
William nodded, and the Butcher yelled into the night. A moment later a Norman guard escorted a stooping figure up the mound. The man leaned on a gnarled staff, his skin ashen, his cheeks hollow, his body like a winter hawthorn beneath the frayed woollen cloak. His thinning, silvery hair and frail appearance suggested a man much older than his fifty summers.
‘Welcome Asketil Tokesune,’ William said in a cheery tone that made no attempt to hide the inherent mockery. ‘Though thegn no more, you still carry yourself as a man above men. That is good to see.’
‘What news?’ the old man croaked, his voice like pebbles on ice.
‘Your son is as good as dead,’ Taillebois grunted.
Despite the bluntness of the words, Asketil only nodded. ‘Then all is well.’
‘We are in your debt,’ William said, smiling. ‘Without your aid, we would not have learned the secret paths in these parts, nor would we have understood your son’s ways.’
‘Speak no more of my son. He should have been throttled at birth. Like a mad dog, he was, from the moment he clawed his way out of his mother’s cunt. He robbed his own, he fought, he killed, and there was nothing I could do to tame him.’ The old man’s knuckles grew white where he gripped the staff. ‘His own mother died because of him. He has been a stain on the honour of my kin. Let him be gone, and forgotten, and then I can hold my head high once more.’
‘You have been a good friend to us,’ William continued, ‘and our king has ordered that all friends among the English be welcomed. You will be well rewarded for this, Asketil.’
The old man grunted.
‘Take him back to the hall and feed him what is left of the goose,’ Taillebois said to the guard. William de Warenne and Ivo Taillebois did not even wait until the old man was out of sight before they laughed at his back.
Of all of them there, Redteeth despised Asketil the most. The old thegn had betrayed his own kin for some scant reward, even though the Normans had cut off the head of his youngest son, stolen his hall and all his gold. Even though they had stripped him of all he had earned in his long life and tossed him into an existence of near-starvation, begging for scraps from his new masters’ table. Harald Redteeth spat. No honour had he.
A column of flames roared up from a third village, the spiral of golden sparks reaching up almost to the stars themselves. The Viking leaned on an oak and let his eyes drift across the three blazes. They were a strange people, these English under Hereward’s command. The Mercian had shaped those mud-spattered ceorls and soft-bellied merchants and all those spears-for-hire into a fighting force more rapidly than Redteeth would ever have imagined. But once he was dead the rebellion was over, and King William could sleep a little easier.
While William and Taillebois laughed and schemed, the Viking crept out of the copse and slipped through the swaying willows to the edge of a still pool. Among the brown reeds, he squatted, and then pulled a handful of leathery dried toadstools from the pouch at his waist. The creamy gills of the white-dotted scarlet caps seemed to glow in the gloom. He popped two toadstools in his mouth, wrinkling his nose at the bitter iron taste. Soon he would be walking along the shores of the great black sea, and, if the gods were willing, he would return with the knowledge he gained there.
‘Walk with me there, Ivar,’ he whispered to the rustling reeds. ‘And I will make my vow to you again. Vengeance and blood, to free you from the shackles of this world.’
As the night drew on, Harald Redteeth felt the familiar nausea churn his stomach, and then the tremors and the sweat. Finally, peace descended on him. He sensed the alfar stirring in the willows all around him. Their eyes burned away in the dark as they judged him. The beating of wings enveloped him, and he took flight with the ravens, soaring high above those black fenlands, with their gleaming, dark mirrors that gave passage to other worlds. He looked down on those three burning villages where the fugitives cowered. He saw the tide of iron washing towards them. And higher he climbed, and higher still, and across the land and across the sea.
Months passed, years, and though he did not see his father, he spoke long with Ivar and the others he met on that silent shore, until he felt the pull of home.
As if swimming up through dark waters, he emerged into his hunched body among the rushes, his stomach as raw as if he had eaten sour apples. He had learned much that would serve him in the days and weeks to come. But as his senses settled upon him, he realized something was amiss. Shouts in the Norman tongue rang out through the trees from all sides.
His pupils so dilated his eyes seemed all-black, Harald Redteeth hauled himself out of the reeds and strode back up the slope. He gripped his axe, Grim, and allowed Death to fill his skin.
On the higher ground, he looked across the night-cloaked marshes and ditches to where the three burning villages shimmered. The roar of the fire filled his ears. Out in the dark, something was stirring. He wondered briefly if he had left the doors to the otherworld open and the dead were marching through to reclaim the life they once knew. Apparitions rose from the watercourses and the bogs. Skull-faced they were, the shrieking hordes of Hel here to drag all men back down into eternal torment. The supernatural force swept out of the night, their death’s-heads glowing in the gloom.
Beware, the alfar cried. Beware!
CHAPTER FIVE
OUT OF THE woods, the deathly figures ghosted. From the ditches, and the marsh, and the still, silent pools where they had been waiting. Across a landscape that had seemed empty only moments before, the wraiths swarmed. Their features were smeared white with ash, their eyes dark-ringed, and the black mud of the fenlands caked their arms and legs and bare chests so that they bound the night around them. The Normans came to a lumbering halt. Gazes flickered across the apparitions. No mortal army, this. A Devil’s Army, that came with the night and the mists and left only bones in its wake.
As they advanced, the English rebels were backlit by the flames leaping up through the trees, a hellish sight that no man there could ever forget.
An axe-blade sang. A head leapt from its shoulders. A spear driven with ferocious force plunged through mail and squelched into the soft flesh beneath. Blood sprayed in a glistening arc.
Hereward smeared wet ashes on his own face, grinning as he watched the horror etched into the Norman features. Their advance had stalled and now they milled in confusion. As he had long planned, the fires and the released captive had drawn his enemy to the place where he needed them to be. The English had kept their hiding places well, settled deep into the ditches and the woods, silent and watchful, until the final ravaged village had gone up in flames.
He unsheathed his sword
. As he glanced at Alric, lit orange by the blaze, a smile flickered across his lips at the monk’s look of astonishment. He had revealed his plans to no one, not even his closest companion. Too many lives were at stake for even the faintest risk.
Throwing back his head, he bellowed a battle-cry that would curdle the blood of his foes. Then he bounded away from the crackle and roar and heat into the marsh-reeking night.
His eyes quickly grew accustomed to the dark. The king’s men were milling around among the reed-beds and willows. Some stumbled into the bogs, screaming as the mud sucked them down to their deaths. Others splashed into unseen flood-lakes or tumbled into ditches and watercourses, made easy targets for spears by their slow-witted response. Yet surprise would work its magic only for a short while. The Normans were too seasoned, too well trained, to be wrong-footed for long.
He sprinted down a narrow track and threw himself from a bank with a cry. Beneath him, a Norman recoiled at this phantasm falling from the night. As the king’s man struggled to bring up his long shield, Hereward swung Brainbiter in an arc. It hacked into his foe’s exposed neck. The head flew.
Sparks glittered as he clashed swords with the next warrior. When his enemy staggered back, his helm dislodged, Hereward smashed his forehead into the man’s face. The cheek shattered. With a snarl, he cleaved the man’s head in two.
The thing inside him cried out in glee at the killing. He allowed that blood-lust to rise a little further.
He raced along the track and out of the trees to where fingers of land probed the edges of lethal marsh. He knew every furrow, every bog, every pool, as did all his men. At his orders, they had spent the last days studying the lie of the land while they waited for him to arrive. His gaze roved over the weaving gleams of Norman torches and their glinting reflections in the water. Though the light saved their necks from the hostile territory, it made them easy prey for the stealthy English.
Through the din of battle, he heard the Butcher’s furious orders ring out. They were having some effect. The bobbing brands began to draw together along a narrow line of grassy ground between the edge of the marsh and the wood. Hereward grinned. The Normans still thought they were on the broad downs of Wessex. When the commander barked the order to retreat and regroup, the iron-clad invaders stumbled back into the trees. But the undergrowth was too dense, the trunks too tightly packed for easy progress.
‘Bows!’ Hereward called.
The men he had trained with their hunting bows nocked their shafts. Grey shapes in the night, they steadied themselves against the back foot and raised their weapons as he had seen time and again on the battlefields of Flanders. The torches wavered along the tree-line as the Normans struggled into the wood.
‘Loose your arrows!’
The first flight whistled through the air. With grim satisfaction, Hereward listened to the cries as the shafts drove home. Brands fell, setting alight the dry grass and underbrush. As the flames licked up, he yelled the order for his men to advance. The Normans had slaughtered the best of England. Now it was the time for vengeance. When the echoes of this night rolled out, the king would have no choice but to take notice.
The skull-faced English warriors raced forward, driving a wedge through the centre of the king’s men. Hereward looked to the far side of the marsh where the right flank of the enemy was being herded towards an area of bog that appeared to be dry land. In the woods, the remainder of the force had realized their error. They turned to engage the rebels, but their ability to fight back was hampered by the trees.
Hereward shouldered his way through his men to reach the heart of the battle. Some were still but boys, others grey-haired and hollow-chested, yet all had a fierce gleam in their eyes. Familiar faces loomed out of the night on each side. There was Guthrinc, more bear than man, ramming his ham-like fist into a Norman face and laughing as he felt bone shatter. There was Hengist, his pale eyes as cold as ice, his ash-streaked face filled with the bitterness of a man who had seen his family and neighbours cut down by the invaders. Kraki the Viking, once the most feared warrior among the huscarls of Earl Tostig of Northumbria, gritted his teeth and swung his axe. No humour lit his features; battle, like life, was a serious business.
And then Hereward glimpsed apple-cheeks and a mop of curly brown hair, an innocence that even gritted teeth could not mask. Redwald, his brother in all but blood. Though he was not a fighting man, he stabbed his spear as furiously as any other there. For a moment, their gazes locked. Caught in the fury of battle, Redwald appeared oddly blank. But as he looked into Hereward’s eyes, he grinned, making a show of grinding his spear-tip into a Norman face.
A wall of flame crackled along the tree-line. Panic flared in the faces of the king’s men. The higher ground was tinder-dry, and Hereward saw his enemies start to realize that if the woods caught alight, they would be caught between two different kinds of hell.
The heat brought a bloom to his flesh and his breath quickened. At that moment he wanted to see the conflagration consume them all, perhaps all England, burning away the darkness and the misery in the fires of purification. He stood calm for long moments, caught in the flames’ spell as the battle raged around him. He heard no clash of iron, no screams of the dying. He saw nothing but the gold and amber and scarlet.
Then dimly he heard a voice calling his name. He stirred from his dream and glimpsed Kraki pointing past the milling bodies. Silhouetted against the sheet of gold stood a familiar figure, axe raised high in its right hand, the left clenched in a fist of defiance.
Death, he thought.
Distracted, he hacked his blade into the neck of a foe without a second thought. With a snarl he kicked the dying Norman out of the way and pushed on through the melee. All his men knew to alert him to any sign of the hated mercenary Harald Redteeth. Never would he forget how the Viking had taken the head of his friend Vadir, across the whale road in Flanders, and never would he forgive. Only death could end their blood-feud.
Rage flooded him. His sword whirled over his head, never slowing. Two more Normans fell, gouting blood. Hengist finished them off with thrusts of his spear. Only when no one stood between him and his prey did he slow. ‘Redteeth,’ he bellowed above the deafening roar of the fire.
The Viking turned towards him, unconcerned by the searing heat. Charred twigs flickering with tiny flames showered all around him from the burning branches overhead. His eyes appeared all-black as if he were possessed by some devil. Amid his dyed-red beard a gash appeared, broken, stained teeth showing in a satisfied grin. He lowered his shoulders and let out a bestial snarl.
The two men flew at each other. Harald Redteeth swung his chipped and blood-stained axe for the Mercian’s neck. Hereward ducked and thrust with Brainbiter. The sword only glanced off the rusted hauberk in a trail of golden sparks. Pivoting on the ball of his right foot, he allowed his weight to carry him through and spun behind the heavier, shorter mercenary. Whisking his blade up, he drove it down towards the back of the Viking’s neck.
Harald Redteeth seemed to sense the strike. He lowered his head as the sword rammed down. It gashed a clean line across his tarnished helm. Without glancing back, the Viking whipped his axe around behind him. Hereward danced back at the last instant. The blade swept by, a whisker away from opening up his guts.
For long moments they battled like wolves trying to tear out each other’s throat. Sweat soaked through Hereward’s breeches and his skin burned a fiery red from the furnace heat. Thin trails of smoke rose from his hair where burning twigs had fallen on him. Wounds bloomed on both their bodies and blood spatters sizzled on flaming fallen branches. Hereward gritted his teeth against the pain of a gash above his eye. The Viking wiped away the sticky gore from the slash that had opened up his left cheek.
A crack like thunder resounded through the wood’s edge. In a torrent of burning branches, an ash tree splintered and fell. Hereward wrenched his head up. A firestorm hurtled towards them. If Harald Redteeth was aware of the danger, he cared littl
e. His black eyes narrowed, and with a lupine pounce he swung his axe for Hereward’s neck.
Golden fire rained down as the blade swept in. Hereward closed his eyes, accepting that his moment had come. The roaring faded away. The heat no longer seared his skin. Time seemed to stand still as peace filled his heart. But the blow never struck home.
Instead, the full weight of Harald Redteeth slammed into him and the two men flew backwards. The burning ash tree crashed only a spear-length away. The ground shook. Flaming branches engulfed Hereward. Heat seared his lungs.
As he fought to free himself from the inferno, someone grabbed his arms and dragged him out. Choking, he looked up into Redwald’s face. He scrambled to his feet and searched around for his enemy. Through the wall of flame, he glimpsed the Viking with Redwald’s spear protruding from his side. His beard and hair were afire. With eerie detachment, he gritted his teeth, grasped the shaft with both hands and snapped the spear in two.
More burning branches crashed down, and the fire surged towards the heavens. As a thick cloud of smoke swirled through the woods, the last thing Hereward glimpsed was Harald Redteeth’s black eyes glinting.
Hereward lurched in the Viking’s direction, but Redwald grabbed his arm. ‘Would you roast yourself like a Christmas ox?’ he demanded, concerned. ‘That bastard’s wounds are too great for him to live.’
‘He will live,’ Hereward snarled as the other man dragged him away. ‘Only I can kill him.’
The two men stumbled out of the burning woods into the relief of the night-breeze. The inferno lit up the battlefield. The wetlands beyond glowed a hellish red in the reflected light. Hereward blinked sweat from his eyes, feeling his throat and chest burn. ‘I owe you my thanks, brother,’ he grinned, clapping a hand on the other man’s shoulder.
‘I look out for you, as I always have.’ Redwald smiled shyly.
