by James Wilde
Hereward stared at the faces of the corpses for a long moment, and then said under his breath, ‘The Norman bastards.’
CHAPTER FORTY — FOUR
‘Say nothing. Do not even breathe.’ Hereward unclamped his hand from Alric’s mouth and peered into the monk’s brown eyes to ensure the message was understood. Satisfied, the warrior pulled his companion back behind the spreading willow where Alric had been waiting for his friend to return with food for his empty belly. A cloth of red and gold leaves had been unfurled across the floor of the wood. Grey mist drifted among the trees, and the air was heavy with the brackish odour of the meandering watercourses. Rooks cawed in their tangled roosts high overhead.
The monk questioned with his eyes, then saw with bafflement that his friend was soaking wet.
Hereward mimed cupping a hand to his ears. Muffled, the insistent thud of hooves on soft ground emerged from the autumnal stillness, drawing nearer. When Alric continued to make questioning faces, the warrior slapped the man on the chest to stop him and then crawled away through the rustling leaves. The dry ground rose up a slight incline to a ridge marked by a long exposed net of roots.
Peering over the top, Hereward studied the group of three riders, easily identified as Norman knights from their dress: a conical helmet with a long nose-shield, a woollen cloak over a tunic and a linen shirt, baggy breeches, and bindings round the lower legs. Each man carried the long shields which tapered to a point at the bottom and offered more protection to the legs and flanks than the English shields. With envy, the warrior noted the double-edged, sharp-pointed swords that were so much more effective at ending a life than anything his own people wielded.
The knights reined in their mounts and conferred in quiet voices, all the time scanning among the trees. Hereward silently cursed himself for being overconfident. A winding journey from the coast through the wildest parts of East Anglia kept the two companions well away from villages and farms during daylight. But at each nightly camp, he had crept away to spy on the small communities. Steeling through the dark streets, he had listened at doors or to the men muttering as they lurched out of the taverns. It seemed that everything he had heard from the merchants arriving in Flanders had been correct: in all of England, only East Anglia had not yet wholly fallen to William the Bastard. Disturbing stories of terror had started to leak out of the north, but in the windswept, watery east the Normans had only started to exert their control over the larger trading centres. The hinterland remained as harsh and unwelcoming to invaders as it had for generations.
Hereward dug his fingers into the leaf mould and sensed the deep power of this inhospitable land. Alric had called it ‘the Devil’s land of mist and bogs’, and it was. Fed by a network of rivers and streams, water flooded along hidden courses to create an inland sea dotted with islands that could only be reached by the shell-shaped craft that the local people used, or by narrow causeways that became lethal traps after night had fallen. Even what appeared to be dry land was deceptively perilous. Swamps lurked everywhere beneath seemingly solid meadows, threatening the unwary traveller. One wrong step could see them sucked down to their deaths. With the bleak hills of West Mercia on one side, the swamps and sea to the north, and wild forests to the south and south-east, the fenland remained isolated behind its own natural defences.
Knowing the land as he did, he had allowed his guard to fall while he had been hunting waterfowl in the reed beds for that day’s meal. Crouching on the bank with his small bow and arrow, he had been listening to the voices made by the east wind moaning through the reeds and had not heard the knights ride up the track behind him. With a contemptuous demeanour, they had questioned him in faltering English and then attempted to take his bow and his sword. It might have been easier to give them what they wanted, he knew, but his instincts had taken control and he had resisted. The knights had drawn their swords, and he knew from the familiar look in their eyes that they had decided to kill him, dump his body in the icy water and take their loot anyway.
And so he had dived into the reed beds, sending the waterfowl flapping and screeching. Swimming through the shallows, he had stayed out of reach of the men on the bank and then had picked up the secret paths through the marshes that only someone raised in the fens would recognize. He thought he had lost them. But here the Normans were, as relentless as the stories about them always said.
Hereward weighed the option of stalking the knights and trying to kill them one by one, but his plan had been predicated on remaining invisible. If these three went missing, more would come searching for them, and more after that. That was the nature of the Normans.
From nearby, the baying of hounds pierced the folding mists. The three knights laughed.
The warrior cursed quietly once more. Another error of judgement. He had presumed the Normans were scouts exploring the deepest reaches of their last unclaimed land, but it seemed they were not alone. Were they outriders for a corps of reinforcements? Part of a hunting band of nobles? How many rode out there in the fog?
As the dogs drew nearer, he crawled back down the slope and ran to the monk. Grabbing him by his robes, the warrior hauled his companion in the direction of the camp they had made the previous night.
‘What have you done now?’ Alric wanted to know.
‘If you value your life, be quiet. Follow my lead.’
Alric glanced back, unsettled. He almost stumbled as Hereward propelled him through the draping sheets of willow.
‘The Normans came across me while I hunted. You see how they are. Not a people who will allow even the most harmless opposition to their word. Now they have decided I am better prey than birds or deer.’
‘Why do I let you go off on your own? I always know what the result will be.’
Hereward set his jaw. ‘Do you wish to have your own gibbet here?’
‘We could talk to them,’ Alric grumbled. ‘Tell them we are poor travellers who have lost our way-’
‘Monk, sometimes you are blind to what lies before your eyes, or else you wilfully ignore it. Either way, you will be the death of us both.’ On the edge of the camp, the warrior turned and grasped his friend’s shoulders. ‘If they catch us, they will kill us. Do you understand? You are in the land of the Normans now. Words mean nothing here.’
Uneasy, Alric looked back in the direction of the hounds. ‘The dogs will scent our trail.’
Hereward ran to the tethered horses, untied the leather straps and slapped their flanks to send them cantering off into the woods. He hoped they would be able to avoid the bogs on their own.
‘What are you doing?’ the monk protested. ‘They cost us good coin. And how will we travel-’
His eyes blazing, the warrior grabbed his friend with both hands in the neck of his robe. ‘Do what I say. This is my world now, not yours, and if you listen to me you may live through it.’ The excited barks echoed just beyond the low ridge of exposed roots. ‘Run!’
Turning, he ducked low beneath the trailing willow branches and sprinted without checking whether the monk was behind him. Soon the pounding of leather soles and ragged breathing sounded at his back. Before they had settled on the campsite, Hereward had scouted the lie of the land. He knew the location of the overgrown watercourses, the old tracks, the marshes. The barking of the dogs grew closer. The warrior imagined the curs snapping at their heels and the smirking knights encouraging their fellows to the hunt. He set his teeth, holding back the blood-rush.
‘We will not outrun them,’ Alric gasped, the fear in his voice palpable.
Bursting from the trees, Hereward skidded to a halt where the ground fell away before a sheet of bright green rippling under the grey mist. He snaked out an arm to grab his friend before he careered into the deadly marsh. Panic flared in Alric’s face.
Momentarily, Hereward held his companion with his eyes, reassuring him while the hounds’ baying raced nearer. When the monk gave a hesitant, trusting nod, the warrior grabbed the man’s robes and jumped with him into t
he swamp. Hereward felt arms of liquid mud encircle him and drag him inexorably down. Alric flailed in panic as his head dipped beneath the slimy surface. Snaking one hand up, the warrior caught hold of an exposed tree root beneath the overhanging lip of bank where the woodland floor had fallen away into the marsh. With his other hand he snatched his friend’s robes. The monk gulped and spluttered, his face smeared with filth. Hereward pressed one finger to his mouth. With an effort, Alric silenced himself, and the two men eased under the lip of hanging grass and crumbling brown soil just in time.
The curs’ barking resounded over the two mens’ heads as the dogs ran along the edge of the bog, snuffling in the undergrowth. A moment later, the thump of hooves reverberated through the soil. His eyes wide, the monk held the back of a hand against his mouth to stifle a moan of dread.
The sound of leather shoes hitting the turf; one of the knights had dismounted. Then another. Footsteps approached the edge and came to a halt directly over Hereward’s head. A curt command from further back. The hounds’ snuffling and yelping receded. Silence fell.
A bubble rose on the slimy surface of the swamp, then burst with a pop that sounded jarringly loud in the misty stillness. Alric grew fixed and still. Hereward felt the blood rumble in his head.
A hint of a shadow fell across the rippling green marsh-water. The knight was peering over the edge, looking where the bubble burst, listening.
Alric screwed his eyes shut tight.
Do not whimper. Do not cry out, Hereward thought.
A grunt from the knight, still hovering on the edge. A comment with a querying note. Laughter among the knight’s two companions. Had the dogs identified the fugitives’ location? Was the knight toying with them?
Hereward felt his muscles grow tense.
The rapid beat of more riders arriving. Voices raised, conversation flashing back and forth.
The warrior tried to estimate how many knights now stood a whisper away. For long moments the conversation ranged across the group, and then the knight barked something in his gruff tongue and returned to his horse. Someone else shouted an order and the dogs padded away. The thunder of hoofbeats disappearing into the quiet wood echoed across the marsh. The knights would be following the tracks of the horses he freed, Hereward hoped. It would buy time.
Alric sagged. Shaking with the release, he whispered, ‘Is this how it is to be now? Fear everywhere? English hunted like animals?’
Hereward felt a wave of respect for his friend. By no means a fighting man, the monk had endured much at the warrior’s side yet still continued to be a true companion. Silently, the warrior vowed to keep Alric safe, even at the cost of his own life. ‘Let us wait before we pass judgement,’ he replied, trying to raise the monk’s spirits but fearing the worst. ‘Now, hold tight. I will have you out before you drink too much of this stew.’ When Alric fumbled for the root, Hereward reached out to grab a handful of turf and hauled himself slowly out of the sucking mud.
Once they were on the bank, the shivering monk gasped, ‘If the roots had not been there to support us, we would have been sucked down to our deaths.’
‘I knew the roots were there.’
‘You knew?’
‘Yes.’
‘You searched the area for an escape from all possible encounters,’ Alric persisted, incredulous.
‘That is how I survive, monk.’
CHAPTER FORTY — FIVE
On weary feet, the two men pressed westwards for the rest of the morning. The mist lifted, treating Alric to the beauty of a world turned silver as the pale light glinted off sheets of water that reached almost to the horizon. Islands of green grass with dense orange, gold and brown copses splashed colour across the fens. A suffocating stillness lay hard on the land.
Hereward picked a path across a narrow causeway snaking only a hand’s width above a treacherous bog. Amid the stink of decaying vegetative matter, the warrior felt the exuberance of their escape dissipate and a familiar brooding descend upon him. ‘Monk,’ he called to the man trailing along the uneven path behind, ‘I would know God’s plan for us.’
For a moment, Alric held his tongue. ‘God’s plan is that we do God’s work.’
Hereward heard the dissatisfying uncertainty in his friend’s tone. ‘I was a man when you first met me, but I was not a man,’ he said. ‘I saw the world as a child would. You, and Vadir, have taught me things that my father never did. But the more I have learned, the less I feel I know. Is this right, monk? Why do I feel this emptiness… this disquiet? You told me I was more than a devil in human form, as I have been called time and again since I was a child. More than a feeder of ravens, leaving only sobbing widows and fatherless children in his wake. If what you say is true, then what is my purpose in life?’
‘The questions you ask… there are no easy answers,’ Alric began, choosing his words carefully. ‘I wish God had given me the skill to divine the purpose you need, but I am just a man, Hereward, with all the failings of men. I can reflect. I can offer guidance. But in the end, every man must look into his own heart to find the answers he seeks.’
‘In my own heart?’ the warrior murmured.
‘Yes.’
Hereward’s head dropped as he turned his thoughts in on himself. For a long while, he lost himself to the dark reaches inside him, and when he next looked round the causeway was far behind. Familiar landmarks rose up on every side: the field where he learned to hunt with his father’s falcon, the copse where he first lay with a woman, the fair Cengifu, the farm of his childhood friend Ailwin, who died when the sickness took him and his two brothers and sisters. Memories of happiness, pain and grief locked into the dark soil, the stark trees, the shimmering pools. For a moment, he stood and drank in his past.
‘Enjoy the view,’ Alric sniffed, ‘but I am cold and wet and filthy and I would know what you plan to do with us here.’
‘Once I know, I will tell you.’ Hereward sifted the strange feelings rising within him.
The old straight track knifed from the ancient stone marker post to the church tower dark against the pale sky. Growing silent, the two men followed it along the side of a watercourse edged with brown reeds rustling in the breeze. The day drew on. When they passed a row of skeletal willows, cheery voices rose up from the near bank.
Alric came to a halt, gaping. A stocky, ruddy-faced man floated through the air, his head and torso just visible above the treetops. ‘What is this place you have brought me to?’ the monk hissed.
Hereward roared with laughter at his friend’s expression, bending from the waist to steady himself with his hands on his thighs. When Alric backed away, still gripped by the frightening sight, the warrior grabbed his companion and dragged him along the track past the willows. The monk stopped, marvelling. The ‘floating’ man towered above them on a pair of stilts, which he was using to move across the watercourse and the treacherous pools that lay beyond.
Enjoying the respite from his brooding, Hereward watched the stilt-man’s familiar looping gait as he spun across the water with such skill that he appeared to be flying. ‘We are a people of the wetlands,’ the warrior explained to his entranced friend. ‘Our entire lives are lived on and around the water, learning ways to enjoy the bounties it offers and to navigate its hidden dangers.’
‘This is a wonder indeed,’ Alric muttered.
‘The Normans may have their fine swords and their maces and their archers, but they will struggle to thrive here. Only people who know the safe, secret routes through the fens can escape death by drowning. The water here is a living thing. It breathes and waits and hunts for prey, and claims the lives of many strangers. Land can be dry one day and a marsh or a lake the next.’
Half distracted by the stilt-man, Hereward felt the first stirrings of an idea, as yet unrealized. Before he could examine it further, a snowy-haired man burst from the long grass on the bank and stabbed a spear towards the two wanderers.
‘What do you want?’ the man barked. He wore a coat of
rabbit pelts smeared with lamb-fat to keep the elements at bay.
‘Holbert?’ Hereward could see the man was scared.
‘Who are you?’ The man leaned forward, squinting. The warrior grasped what a sight he and Alric looked, filthy with dried black mud from feet to neck and more of it splattered across their faces. Stepping closer but not lowering his spear, the white-haired man peered for a moment and then ventured, ‘Hereward Asketilson?’
The warrior nodded, remembering the time he stole a line of fish that Holbert had spent two days smoking. He felt a pang of guilt.
‘Are you here to steal from me again? Because I have little and I will fight till I die to keep it.’ Sensing danger, the stilt-man strode towards them, glowering.
‘I am not the man who tormented you, Holbert.’
‘You tormented everyone, you and your wild friends,’ the elderly man grumbled, the feelings still raw after so many years. ‘We heard you were outlaw.’
‘We heard you were dead.’ The ruddy-faced man leaned forward on his stilts and just at the point when he seemed on the brink of falling he dropped like a cat to his feet.
‘Then I am a ghost.’ Hereward smiled.
‘And what a time you picked to haunt your home grounds.’ Holbert lowered his spear. ‘There are worse things abroad in the fens these days. There must be, if I look on a bastard like Hereward Asketilson with something like fondness.’ He shrugged and turned to the stilt-man. ‘Sawin, get some ale. Let us welcome home this son of the fens with a moment of joy before he realizes what hell he has returned to.’
Sawin pushed through the waist-high, yellowing grass and skidded down the bank. Holbert, Hereward and Alric followed. Hidden among the undergrowth beside the willows and above the spring flood-line was a small shack with wattle walls and a roof of branches covered with turf. Scattered along the water’s edge lay the detritus of Holbert’s business. Wooden tubs of reeking fat. Hides drying over willow frames. Creamy curls of wood shavings. Mallets, bow-saws, adzes, wedges, planes and awls. Hereward remembered lying in the long grass, watching Holbert’s meticulous labour as he built the shell-like boats that the fenlanders used to traverse the watercourses, shaping the willow frames, stretching the hides and waterproofing them with the fat, cutting the short-handled paddles.
