by James Wilde
‘The Normans swagger, showing off their strength with ships to stop supplies reaching us,’ the Mercian said, grinning. ‘But these smaller vessels can speed through William’s sail-wall, under the noses of his men, without being noticed.’
The monk pointed at the boat. ‘How much can they carry? One ham-hock?’
‘We take what we can get.’
‘It is good. Forgive me. My mood is dark. Any food helps ease the worries of the folk here, and if we must send out a fleet of those strange boats to fill bellies, so be it.’
‘This battle will be long and hard, and like all battles there will be times when the tide turns—’
‘And we fear we might drown?’ Alric felt all his worries rush up through him, and he could not contain them any more. He reached out his arms, pleading to his friend. ‘Turn back from this madness. We are making our allies into our enemies. When the folk of Ely start to fear us as much as they fear William’s men, then we are in a deal of trouble.’
‘We are a long way off being feared as much as the Bastard’s invaders,’ Hereward snapped, his eyes narrowing. ‘Have we slaughtered women and children? Have we burned villages to the ground? No, we cuff ears, as we would with unruly children.’
‘Cuff ears?’ Alric exclaimed. ‘I have just watched the weaver kneeling in a pool of his own blood.’
Hereward glowered, but only for a moment. He sucked in a deep breath, softening, and said, ‘You are a godly man, a good man, and you see only heaven and hell around you. But there is a long road we must all travel between the two. Would I wish harm upon these folk who have taken us in and shown us kindness? No, never. Nor would I wish to see them harmed by their own failings. I know some grow to hate me. I care little. My work here is to give them back what has been stolen from them by the Normans – all the riches of England from the years gone by, still there for days yet to come.’
‘There must be an easier way.’
‘There is no easy way for anything in this life. It is a hard road with death at the end, but we do what we can. Come, let us break some bread.’ He held out an arm to guide Alric back up the slope.
The monk shook his head. ‘I am not hungry.’
Hereward held his gaze for a moment, perhaps seeing the gulf that had appeared between them. Then he nodded and repeated, ‘You are a good man, monk,’ before climbing up the track after the others.
Alric sat on the end of the jetty and dangled his legs over the edge. He muttered a prayer for his friend and asked God to guide that lost soul to better days. He worried about the Mercian, as he had for so long now. Hereward’s demons were fierce, his suffering great. He deserved some respite from his struggles.
Once he had found some peace in his own soul, Alric wandered back up the track towards Ely. Hereward needed his counsel, he saw that now, and he had been remiss in allowing less level-headed advisors to whisper in his friend’s ear. As he neared the ramparts, he glanced along the wooden palisade and felt surprised to see no sentries on duty. He shrugged. Who would wish to stand out there in the midday heat? he thought. Though he would not care to be one of those guards if Hereward discovered their absence.
The gate stood ajar and he eased inside the fence.
The steady chok of someone cutting wood echoed from the direction of the minster. A dog barked. The smell of bread baking in a clay oven drifted through the open door of one of the houses. Ely sweltered under summer’s blanket, but the monk felt no peace in the stillness. Unable to decide what troubled him, he wrinkled his brow and looked around. Two men, barely more than shadows in the glaring light, moved past a gap between two dwellings. The hairs at the nape of his neck prickled, though he was still unsure what it was he had seen.
He wiped the sweat from his brow, and, leaving the path, made his way through the jumble of houses. Easing past heaps of rotting waste and piles of shavings from the wood-workers, he stepped on to the back track. The two men were entering a small hut near the palisade. Only glimpsing their backs, Alric felt unsure of their names. They were not guards, though, or Hereward’s men, he knew that, and so the spears they gripped as they slipped through the door troubled him.
For an instant, he frowned. He should warn Hereward, or Guthrinc, or one of the other leaders, but then he might be consigning more innocent souls to a savage beating. Setting his jaw, he strode down the track with determination to investigate this matter for himself. At the hut door, he paused and listened. Low voices murmured within, the words unclear. Alric pressed his ear to the crack. The rough wood grated against his cheek.
The blow came from nowhere. As fire flared through his head, he crashed on to the hard-baked track. Groaning, he rolled on to his back. Two figures loomed over him, silhouetted against the silver sun. Hands grabbed his tunic. Before he could call out he was dragged into the smoky, dark hut.
A ruddy glow from the embers in the hearth lit the faces of the four men clustered around him.
‘It is the monk, Hereward’s man,’ one of them growled.
A large figure stepped forward, shaking his spear at Alric. He had shaggy black hair and a mass of scar tissue running the length of his right arm from a wolf attack. The monk recognized him now. His name was Saba, a leatherworker who had come to Ely from Earith when the Normans had started to terrorize the local folk. He was a sullen man with a temper made worse whenever he had drunk a skinful of ale.
‘I mean you no harm,’ Alric protested.
Saba’s humourless laugh cut him dead. ‘One word from you of our meet here is harm enough.’
The monk took stock of the spears and the fierce expressions, his blood growing cold. ‘What do you want?’ he asked in a quiet voice.
Saba bent down until his face was only a hand’s-width from Alric’s nose. ‘Blood, that is what we want. The blood of your master. By the end of this day, Ely will be free and Hereward will be dead.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE ICY WINDS blew across the great black ocean. High overhead, white gulls wheeled against a slate sky, calling out in the voices of children. Harald Redteeth crunched across the pebbles on the shore. Ivar, cold and grey and silent and dead, wandered four paces at his back. His father walked at his side, furs wrapped over his gleaming hauberk, his hair and beard wild in celebration of his ancestors. He was telling Harald of Ragnarok and of the end of the world in flames – a tale of the last days of the gods and men that the Viking had heard once long before, as a boy sitting by the fire while the sun set over the snow-blasted mountains in a blaze of scarlet and gold. This second hearing stirred him just as much.
His father’s voice croaked as if he had not spoken in many a day:
‘Brothers will fight and kill each other,
sisters’ children will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world, whoredom rife
– an axe age, a sword age
– shields are riven –
A wind age, a wolf age –
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have mercy on another.’
Harald nodded, understanding. ‘I will have no mercy.’
The gulls called ‘mercy’ in the tongue of his ancestors. ‘Eir, eir.’
He turned to look at his father, but he could no longer see his face. Shadows swallowed it, and all of them, and the world.
No longer was it cold, but hot and sticky and reeking of sour sweat. The dark still closed around him, but he could feel the rough straw under his back and the stinging of his wounds. He felt overwhelmed by a deep yearning to return to the shores of the great black ocean and walk with his father a while longer. He ached for the comfort of those simpler times. The old man’s stories of the traditions of his kind summoned a warm sense of belonging to something greater than himself. Defend the old ways unto death, his father had insisted. Without them you are nothing. And he had kept them in his heart always, though wave upon wave of Christian men broke upon the rocks of his northern homeland.
He squinted, but the gloom of
the dusty hut crushed down still. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the red embers in the hearth, twin eyes watching him with hunger, waiting for him to loosen his grip on life. How many winters had he lain there? Ten? Or more? He recalled the fierce cold that had left him shaking and his teeth rattling. Then the burning heat that had slicked him in sweat from head to toe. His skin still felt seared where the flames had touched it on that night of the battle, and his side was afire from where the English spear had stabbed him.
Once again he had failed to slay Hereward. He could not stumble away from life while his vow remained unfulfilled and Ivar unavenged, though they whittled him down limb by limb. Honour demanded that he did not die, and honour was all, and if Death came for him, he would clamp his hands around its throat and squeeze until he had crushed it.
Time passed.
He swam in a sea of memories of the old days, of the blood-sacrifices to Woden in the grove on the hillside, and the mead-cups raised in oath. Of battle! And in his delirium, he felt that he rose, or his spirit did, and he padded from that hut and through the twilit enclosure, watching the glowering Normans as they still counted their dead, while they ran the stones along the edges of their blades. They were a proud race, but the English had whipped them. The invaders would not take that, Harald Redteeth saw. The Normans understood honour too, for some of his own blood flowed in their veins.
And his shade drifted on, to the great hall that stood in the shadow of the keep, and to William de Warenne and Ivo Taillebois, sitting by the hearth, drinking blood-red wine. He hovered there in the shadows, listening.
‘I miss my home,’ William muttered, peering with dismal eyes into the low flame. ‘This God-forsaken place of rain and mist and marsh. Is the land we have claimed worth this hardship?’
‘It is worth it if the king says it is,’ the Butcher grunted. ‘He has lusted after this place for so many years now, he will never loosen his grip on it. If the English understood that, they would not waste their breath fighting.’
‘And in the meantime they carve through our numbers and we can do naught but take their spears. Is this the Norman way?’
Taillebois drained his cup. ‘They are cunning, these English. We never gave them the respect they deserved. We thought them slow and ale-addled, with mud for wits. We will not make that mistake again.’
‘You believe our plan will work?’
Ivo nodded.
‘You have chosen wisely?’
The other man nodded again.
‘Two prongs to our attack?’
The Butcher smiled.
‘Then let us hope there will be a quick end to this.’
Though it was still warm, the Butcher tossed another log into the hearth, sending the golden sparks swirling upwards. ‘It will be quick or it will be slow. It matters little as long as we have an end. And there will be one. We have our eyes and ears within the camp at Ely. They send back word of everything those bastard English do. And soon we will cut the heart out of that Devil’s Army. The rest will be easy.’
‘Without their leader—’
‘They will fall apart. Hereward has given them shape and fire. Once we have his head upon a spike, the rest will come meek as sheep. We will fall on them like wolves. Never will there have been a slaughter like it. And then none of these English will dare raise their faces to us again.’
All this Harald heard as his spirit floated in the shadows on the edge of the hall. Though ghosts were silent, he must have made some noise for William and Taillebois wrenched their heads towards him. What they saw, he did not know, but the expressions on their faces suggested it was some hellish thing. But then his wounds called to him, and he found himself back upon his dirty straw, every fibre of him on fire. He sweated and he moaned, and then he drifted back into the dark.
And as he receded from the light, only one thought glowed in the depths of his skull: that for the first time he felt pity for that Devil’s Army, and for Hereward.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SMOKE SWIRLED UP into the dark. The slender shoots and green leaves crackled and crisped brown in the flames as Turfrida hunched over the hearth. She inhaled the sour fumes and then threw her head back, her eyes wide and dark. Sweat glistened on her forehead. Hereward glowered from the other side of the fire. The orange glow lit lines of worry in his face.
From the rafters, mouse and bird skulls and iron trinkets hung. They clinked in the breeze as if brushed by invisible fingers. The Mercian raised his head to watch the stirring. Were these the spirits with which his wife communicated?
‘Tell me,’ he murmured, ‘what do you see?’
Her eyes rolled back so that he could see only white. The foul-smelling smoke from the plants she had selected in the woods that day swept her to another place, he knew, where the birds and the beasts of fields spoke to her.
More ravens? More death? Defeat? Should any other dare suggest only failure lay ahead, he would deny it to the heavens. But if that claim were made by Turfrida, he knew it would tear the heart out of him. He watched the tremors run through her features, and thought of his mother, beaten to death by his father’s hands. He would never see his wife hurt, or any woman. She had become a strength to him, like any spear-brother, and he could no longer imagine life without her counsel. That, too, surprised him. Turfrida, Alric and Redwald: his three lights in the dark of this bitter war.
‘I see …’ Rustling like old parchment, her voice drained away until he felt she had forgotten he was there. He studied the line of her high cheekbones. Her cheeks seemed hollower, her eyes darker ringed, since she had begun her ritual. A shadow crossed her face and she continued in a soft, rolling tone, ‘Fire … a wall of flames … and you stand against it, with your sword raised high. And there is fire in your eyes too. And everywhere lie the bones of men, English and Norman.’
He flinched as she spoke. This was a vision he had dreamed himself. He tried to recall if he had ever told it to her. How long had it haunted him now, this fear that he would start as saviour and end as destroyer, a pattern that had repeated time and again since the days of his childhood? ‘I need no portents of days yet to come,’ he said as gently as he could muster. ‘Tell me of here … now … in Ely. Is this course the right one? Or do I risk losing the few allies we have in this battle?’
‘I hear whispers only,’ she croaked, cocking her head on one side as if listening. Her fingers fluttered to the necklace of small bones around her neck that she always wore under her dress. ‘My ancestors speak to me,’ she murmured, distracted. She raised part of a finger-bone. ‘My grandmother calls out. And her mother before her, and her mother too. My own mother is here, and when I die, my bone will join them and I will speak wise words to my daughter, should we have one.’
‘What do they say?’ he pressed. In his experience, these spirits often talked a great deal and said nothing.
‘They speak of the Normans …’
‘An attack?’
She shook her head. ‘They make their plans and bide their time.’
Hereward gritted his teeth. Would that the spirits told him something tangible, that would put his mind at rest or give him guidance.
‘A man will ride here, to the fens,’ Turfrida continued. ‘A man who wears the cloth of God, but carries a sword.’
‘A Norman priest.’ He spat in the fire. ‘Their churchmen cannot decide if they should pray or kill.’
‘The threat is growing, husband. A tide of blood washing across these fens.’ She held her hands over the fire until he feared she would burn. Not once did she waver. She was stronger than any woman.
Hereward peered into the flames, feeling both a sense of urgency and frustration. ‘Then I must turn my gaze outwards once again.’
Turfrida flopped back from the fire, seeming weakened. Her breathing was shallow and sweat now stained her amber dress. The Mercian jumped to his feet and hurried to her, helping her up and holding her in his arms. ‘You have done enough,’ he murmured. ‘You must re
st now. I would not see you made ill by my demands.’
‘I worry for you, husband,’ she muttered. ‘So many threats all around. I would keep you safe.’
‘And you do.’ He held her face in his hands and kissed her. She felt too hot. ‘Lie down a while,’ he murmured, ‘and drink a little. I will not be gone long.’ She nodded, forcing a wan smile. She looked so troubled that he did not want to leave her, but he could not ignore the burden of his leadership. With reluctance, he stepped out into the warm evening. The moon was bright and the stars gleamed against the blue-black sky. It was a good night. He could have been drinking mead with friends in the tavern in Barholme, or walking in the woods with Turfrida as they had done many a night in Flanders. And yet here he was, despised and feared by allies and enemies alike. He shrugged, trying to put such thoughts from his mind, though they came to him too often these days.
Three boys and a girl ran past chasing a moth. They laughed, the boys tumbling as the girl tripped each one in turn. Outside his home, old Offa sat on a log, swilling down his ale. He looked drunk already, his eyes slow and his belly wobbling under his tunic with every movement. He nodded and grinned as Hereward passed. From open doors echoed the sound of wives scolding their husbands, or singing lullabies to their babies, or men bellowing the bawdy songs they usually reserved for the tavern. A good night, he thought, and good people, who deserved more than he could give them.
In the minster enclosure, the refectory loomed up, a scruffy timber-framed building with a thatch that was bare in parts and would let the rains in during the heavy storms. The door was open and the hearth-fire cast a light across the baked track. The rebels had come to call it home. Every day they sat cheek by jowl with the monks, raucous conversation in conflict with quiet reflection, their armoury of looted Norman double-edged swords, axes, spears, shields, helms and hauberks looming over the sober clerics. Two walls had been given over to this weaponry; the other two were lined with tapestries, which, though not grand, had been executed with some artistry. Hereward remembered the tapestries in his father’s hall, ones that had comforted the Normans who occupied it until he had burned the place to the ground.
