Hoodsman: The Second Invasion

by Smith, Skye

  It turned into a busy morning in the castle at Avranches. More than half of the castle was being used as a dungeon, not just for the Viscount and his men, but for other lords from all around who were being held there as hostages. Hostages not for ransom, but rather to gain control of their estates and their sons and their men.

  The hostages were all in a bad way. The dungeons were filthy, the prisoners sick and abused, and everyone was hungry. The ten year old Viscount was too weak to walk, as were many of the other prisoners. The women of the castle had been separated from the men into one large room. Though at first it seemed that they had been treated more kindly because the room was clean and had proper beds with linen, it was soon evident that the comfort was in truth for their captors, and the women were simply a part of the comforts.

  The priest sent word to the cathedral school for everyone to come and help with the tending of the wounded. Meanwhile the wolfpacks locked up their own prisoners in the first dungeon room that was emptied of hostages. Once the walls were secured, then every able man was set to work carrying the sick and abused out into the fresh air so that the learned men of the school could care for them.

  Raynar stilled the battle energy that was coursing through his veins. The released hostages were in poor health and his healing touch would be more useful right now than his killing instinct. Since being around children always aided the switch between the two energies, he went in search of children to help. The child who needed the most help was the young Viscount.

  "Thank you for saving us," the emaciated child said as the big blond Englishman gently pulled away his clothing from his oozing sores. "Were you oathed to my father?"

  "No lad, but I met your father a few times in England when he was an Earl." Raynar didn't mention that the lad's father was a vicious son of a bitch who was more like Belleme and Mortain than he wanted to point out to the half dead child. He was still for a moment while he tried to remember if had ever met the Earl in the wonderful days of anarchy after the Conqueror had imprisoned Odo.

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  The Hoodsman - The Second Invasion by Skye Smith

  Chapter 10 - Home again in Huntingdon in spring 1083

  What a peaceful winter this has been, Raynar thought as the ship pulled up to Huntingdon docks and men leaped ashore with lines. Judy was waiting on the dock with the other wives. Her youngest, Adelise, now ten, was holding her hand, while her son Uchtred was helping the oarsmen to tie off the ship, and Maud was already scrambling aboard so she could be first to give him a hug. She hugged three of the crew before she reached him.

  He swung Maud around, almost knocking two men overboard as he did so, and then set her down gently. "How's your mom?" he asked her. She was getting big, ugh, as in maturing, for compared to the local Frisian lasses she was petite.

  "She's being a bitch," Maud replied. "Can I go with Lucy to the Midsummer festival?"

  He knew enough about children to know when he was being set up. One parent had said no, so she was asking the other one. "Hmm, Lucy is a few years older than you. Perhaps next year. What did your mother say?" Lucy was Beatrice of Spalding's daughter, and since her mother's death two months ago, she had been hell on wheels, or rather, a shield maiden on a stallion.

  "Oh you," she let go of him. "I hate you," she shrieked and then leaped over the gunnels and down to the dock and went and sat on a chest to mope.

  Judith climbed the ramp and the crew reached forward to steady her. She was pleased that they were clean and barbered, very unlike men who had been at sea for months. They must have stopped at one of the river pools to wash. The best present of all for their wives and lovers.

  "Welcome home, Ray," Judith said with a smirk, but with her face turned so that Maud would not see the smirk. She kissed his cheek formally. After all, she was forbidden to marry by her uncle, King William, because she had refused to marry the man of his choice, Simon de St. Liz. And just what did he expect her to say of the match. Simon was already old. Their agreement was that Simon could not claim her honors, or rather, her widow's honors from her first husband, Waltheof, so long as she remained a widow.

  In public they tried to remember to treat each other as business partners and nothing more. Judith ran the land, while Raynar ran the ships. It was a profitable arrangement with fringe benefits, for in the privacy of her house she and Raynar lived as man and wife. He was the closest thing to a father that her children had ever known.

  "Did you bring me anything?" Adelise asked. Raynar handed her a package wrapped in sacking cloth and she said "thanks" and ran away to sit with Maud and open it.

  "How was Scotland?" Judith asked.

  "Someday, Judy love, I will take you there. This time of year is best up there because it is not so damp and not so cold, and there is no dark of night. The sun goes down, but the twilight remains until the sun came up again." Raynar didn't meet her eyes. He knew this was not the Scotland she was asking about.

  "I see, so you want to spend your first day back arguing, do you?" She hissed.

  "She is fine, Judy. The Queen of Scotland is fine. Margaret is older, plumper, but still a kind and loving mother to her folk."

  "Did you?" It came out as a hoarse whisper so she cleared her throat and asked it again.

  "Yes. Malcolm was away in Denmark and..." He watched her stomp away from him, down the gang plank pushing men out of her way, and then continued stomping down the dock. It had been a no win situation. If he didn't speak of it, she would bitch at him until he did. So he spoke of it, and she had flown into a jealous rage. He ran to catch up to her. "Forgive me ... us. She wanted another child and you know that Malcolm cannot."

  "She wanted you."

  "Well at least someone does," He stopped walking not believing that he had just said that. Now he was for it. This was not going to be pleasant. Judith had a quick and nasty temper, and carried a grudge longer than most women. She always got even.

  She turned and stared daggers at him, but then her face softened and she ran into his arms and kissed him properly. "Oh how I miss you when you go away. How long can you stay this time? No, don't tell me. Tell me that tomorrow."

  As they walked side by side, but not touching, he waved in recognition to the folks he knew. The folk of Huntingdon looked fit and happy. It was the same up and down the coast of the North Sea. The folk all looked fit and happy. No one had starved last winter, and the spring lambing had gone will. Warm weather had come early and so harvest would also be early. There were lots of fish in the nets, as if the years of emptiness since the great harrowing had replenished the rivers with them.

  Most importantly, there were no Normans. Well, almost no Normans. There were still army garrisons in Dun Holme, York, Lincoln, and Nottingham, but they were too small to do anything but keep the locals from pulling down the castles. Vacant Norman manor houses had been turned into longhouses for village use. Vacant churches were still used for prayer, and for preaching but there were no Norman priests. Lay men or monks led the prayers.

  With the Norman landlords gone, now what a family planted and harvested was all theirs to do with as they pleased. "You know how angry I was last year that Canute did not invade the Danelaw to keep the Normans from coming back. Well now I wonder if that weren't for the best. Without anyone's armies tramping around, the land has bloomed with villages and farms. New ones all up and down the coast. New settlers coming every day from all around the North Sea."

  "What about the Norse raiders you so feared would come?"

  "Oh they have come, the Norse have, but as settlers not as raiders. The land of England has a longer growing season than the land of Norway."

  "But what if the Normans do come back?" she asked. It was difficult for her to speak of Normans as if they were some strange foreigners, seeing as she was a Norman, and a royal Norman at that.

  "They are not fools, love. They throw up temporary shelters close to their ships, and return to sleep in them every night. At the first si
gn of armed men, anyone’s armed men, they will be into the ships and casting off to watch from the water. I was just mapping the new villages for Canute's fleet map. There were twenty villages along the Yorkshire coast that are new since winter, and ten more along the Lincolnshire coast. There were ships pulled up at all of them."

  "So Canute has invaded then," she pulled him along by the had to hurry him up. "Just not with an army or a fleet."

  He didn't correct her to say that every young male settler was an axeman, and that the ships of the villages along the Danelaw coast would now number in the hundreds. The men were logging and farming and herding and fishing, but they were also an army and a fleet for the rallying.

  "Canute is a wise man. He knows that the elders of the Danelaw did not survive the Conqueror's harrowings, so he has encouraged elders of both sexes to sail with the new settlers. With them comes the knowledge of Knute's law and moot courts and the knowledge of healing. Very wise. Very wise indeed."

  Finally they reached her manor. Huntingdon had a burgh wall around the town, with a crude motte and bailey castle at one end. Her house was inside the outer pale wall of the castle, just high enough up the hill to see over that wall and the burgh wall and along the river. She dragged him through the door, yelled at her women to leave the house, and then had her way with him.

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  "Before you leave again," Judith said while stroking the blond hairs on his bare chest, "you must do something about Lucy. Beatrice has been dead two months now, and Ivo Taillebois has sent polite messages to her inviting her to Lincoln to make the wedding vows." Ivo was the Norman sheriff of Lincolnshire, and Beatrice had promised him Lucy's hand once she turned seventeen. That was this year.

  "Time passes too quickly," Raynar moaned. "I know that Beatrice promised Lucy to him in return for her keeping her lands and villages and her title of Countess, but I never expected Ivo to live so long, or for Beatrice to die so soon, or for Lucy to grow up so quickly." He had been like a father to Lucy after Beatrice was widowed. Not her only father of course, for every child from a Frisian village had two or three.

  "Lucy is riding wild with her gang of maidens. They spend all of their time practicing with their weapons rather than doing chores. Always the same excuse. We must exercise the horses." Lucy had been born to the saddle. She rode better than most men, and cursed better than most too. "Someone must go and explain to Ivo. She hasn't saved herself for him. She doesn't want an old Norman as a husband."

  "By someone you mean me."

  "Well he can't travel here. Not these days. He still controls the town of Lincoln, but he no longer controls Lincolnshire. There are many roads and villages that would cost him his life to visit. He sits in that grand fortress and walks the walls while worrying about what the Danes will do next."

  "The Danes will do nothing next, at least not this year. The Conqueror has been separated from a good portion of Odo's treasure to pay a Danegeld to Canute. Gold in return for his fleet not invading the North or raiding the South."

  "Will you go and meet with Ivo?" she asked.

  "I suppose. When I leave here I must go and find little John. He is in Derbyshire, somewhere. I can go by way of Lincoln. Meanwhile Lucy is safer here with you than she would be in Lincoln. Here she is now a Countess, and every village and ship that she inherited will do murder to protect her. Ivo cannot rule her lands, but she can, you can, we can. Ivo would sprout arrows within a day."

  "Why John?" she asked suddenly fearful. John and Ray together always meant trouble for the Normans. Big trouble. Deadly trouble.

  "It's nothing like what you think," he replied softly. "Canute needs to know what is really going on in Wessex. Because of the settlers we have no shortage of news from the Danelaw. Because all North Sea trading ships side with Denmark and Flanders, we have no shortage of news from Anglia and Kent and London. The little we hear from Wessex is from a few ships from Montreuil that do some trading there.

  Even that news is all about what has just happened, and nothing about the why of it, or about what is likely to happen. We need to understand the temper of the folk, the changes since the Norman lords withdrew, what are the folk up to, what do they need, what would they welcome. Not what is happening so much as why, and where is it all leading to."

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  Before leaving for Lincoln to meet with Ivo, Raynar needed to chat with Lucy. My she was big and handsome, in the way of a young lad, not a young lass. She always wore a lasses pretty frock over a lads useful clothing, so that she could run and ride with the men, and yet still be recognized as a woman.

  He found her practicing at riding her Frisian stallion at a canter while standing in the saddle and throwing a light spear at a target. After hitting the target, she dropped down into the saddle and turned the fast horse on a shilling to ride up to where he was standing and watching. Before the horse had even stopped she did a running dismount and threw herself into his arms, knocking him to the ground under her.

  "Ray, you're back. Did you come to get me. You promised that one day I could travel with you."

  "Not this time love, for I must start out with a trip to Lincoln, and that is the last place that you may go if you don't want to be forced into a wedding bed."

  "Yuck," she sneered and rolled off him so he could sit up. "Ivo is so old. He must be over forty. I will never bed him, never mind marry him. Give me a sign though, and I will crawl into bed with you."

  "Don't be naughty, you are my daughter. Besides, I don't do virgins. They always wind up hating their first man."

  "Well there's no problem then," she smiled wickedly at him.

  "Did you enjoy it, or do you now hate your first man?"

  "It didn't really count. We were both virgins so it was kind of clumsy and fast. And no, I don't want him again. I want a skillful lover." She sighed and her eyes closed and she drifted off into sweet daydreams.

  "Which means a married man. Don't you dare. You are a Countess now. You have to be more careful than the island girls that you ride with." She still had her eyes closed thinking about someone, so he changed subjects. "Where did you learn that trick with the spear? It is familiar."

  "Anske used to do it. I want to be just like her. A shield maiden and then a Valkyrie."

  Mention of his first wife brought dark clouds into the conversation. "Don't tempt the Wyred sisters, daughter. Anske died young and violently before our first child was born. That is why she is a Valkyrie."

  She opened her eyes, sat up and reached out and softly stroked his cheek. Her hand came back damp. "I'm sorry Ray. I didn't mean it that way." She wriggled in her twisted clothes so that her breasts fell back into their proper place, and then brushed the grass from her leggings. "If I don't brush off the grass, Judith will accuse me of romping in the hay."

  She stood and used her strong arm and strong grip to help Raynar to his feet. "Tell Ivo that I choose to live here in the Fens until all this trouble between King William and King Canute is settled. Tell him that he is most welcome to come and live with me here."

  "You foxy wench," Raynar laughed aloud and ran his fingers through her 'too short for a girl' thatch of straw-like hair. "You know that he fears to leave his castle. Of course. That is exactly what I will tell him. You have not refused him, so he will have to refuse you."

  "Maud says you are going to visit little John."

  "You take good care of Maud. She wants to be wild like you but she is too small and delicate to follow you. You must be more of a mother to her, than a big sister."

  "Don't change the subject. And don't worry about Maud. No one will hump her while I am around, not even at the Midsummer fair. Now tell me about John."

  "John is a good friend and it has been too long since we have shared ale together." He saw by the frown she threw him that this was not enough. "I need to borrow a disguise from him so I can ride through Wessex without being killed."

  "Not a monk this time?" she asked. Raynar often traveled disguised as a monk.r />
  "Not this time. Priests are being burned as witches, so a monks garb may not ensure my safety. I have decided to travel as a carter."

  "Ah, I see. So you need John to create a peasant cart for you that can fly like the wind."

  "Exactly." Again he was amazed at her cunning. She was a little fox. Well not so little actually. Not anymore, not at seventeen, despite her attempts to flatten her breasts against her chest to hide her figure.

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  The Hoodsman - The Second Invasion by Skye Smith

  Chapter 11 - Finding John in Peaks Arse in June 1083

  "His name is Sleepy," said Lucy as she handed the reins to Raynar, "and I could think of no more fitting a present for you."

  Sleepy was perhaps the ugliest farm nag that Raynar had ever seen. He was mottled black and gray, with a big head and big legs, but short and with a very long back. It was a horse that could be used for nothing else but pulling a small cart or for horsemeat because the long back would soon sway down with the weight of any load as heavy as a rider. Raynar did not mind riding a horse so ugly that no one would steal him so long as it had stamina, but the extra long back of this stallion made him shake his head. He began to refuse the gift.

  "Ray, you know about as much about horses as you do about riding," Lucy clucked, disappointed that her elected father was not appreciating the gift. "Do you know how rare this horse is. Watch me." With that she mounted the unusual saddle, unusual because there were no posts, and she rode the horse in a circle to warm him up. After some circles she pointed the horse across the open meadow and let him run. As he was running she almost lay along his back with half her weight therefore directly above the front legs.

  Just when the horse had reached a full gallop something amazing happened. It was as if the back was double jointed, because the horse was able to extend the back to lengthen it's pace by a yard. The horse seemed to float across the meadow in giant leaps like a deer at a full run. Lucy pulled it back under control, and down from it's float, and circled around to come back.