Paths of Exile

by Carla Nayland

  Eadwine threaded his way into the heart of the most heavily built-up part of the old city, now a maze of collapsed walls, blocked streets, fallen columns and shattered tiles. No-one herded animals here, and no-one had bothered to try to clear the rubble to grow crops or make a vegetable garden. It was a crumbling desert, inhabited – so popular folklore said – by malevolent ghosts who crushed unwelcome intruders to death and ate their flesh. Such tales had been attraction rather than deterrent to a curious child, and Eadwine had found the ruins fascinating, despite the disappointing absence of ghosts. Who built them, and what for, and why did everyone he asked give a different answer? Then, later, the ruins had been his refuge, a safe haven where he could be sure of being completely alone. He had never shared this particular secret even with Treowin. No-one would ever guess that if you climbed through a hole in a wall here and scrambled over a fallen arch here and skirted a collapsed roof here and went through another hole in another wall here – you emerged in a colonnaded courtyard with a fountain trickling into a pool in the centre and a gigantic wild rose bush covering the whole of one side.

  Eadwine stopped sharp, nostrils flaring. The smell was faint but it was there, the unmistakable metallic whiff of human waste. And, yes, a shallow latrine pit had been inexpertly dug, very recently. His hand went to the hilt of his sword. The intruder was not in the courtyard, for the central part of the courtyard was carpeted with thick moss, the weeds around the edges were too low to conceal a man, and there was clearly nobody hiding in the thorny space behind the leafless rose bush. That left the surrounding ranges. The one under and behind the rose was no more than a heap of rubble, and the two side ranges were dangerous with rotten floors and sagging walls, but part of the range opposite the rose bush was intact. A wide doorway, its doors long gone, opened from the colonnade into a large room with a colourful floor made of thousands of tiny tiles. Eadwine held his breath. Something was moving inside, something much bigger than the usual mice or roosting owls. He drew his sword very quietly. Was he not safe even here, in this courtyard that was known to only one other person in the world?

  He sprang through the doorway.

  “Rhonwen –!”

  She had shrunk back into the furthest corner when he burst in, and now crouched there whimpering, wide-eyed with terror. Eadwine sheathed his sword and let his pack drop to the floor, conscious that his knees were weak with relief. Not a thief, not an enemy, just Rhonwen. He was guiltily aware that he had not given her a thought since he left. How changed she was! Could four months do that to someone? Ragged dress, ragged cloak, dirty bare feet, hair in lank rats’ tails, and that rictus of terror.

  “Rhona?” He held out his hands. “Do you know me? I won’t hurt you –”

  She did not get up. Instead, she half-scrambled, half-crawled across the floor and grovelled at his feet, sobbing incoherently.

  Eadwine was beginning to fear she was mad. He kneeled down and put his arms round her, and she seemed to understand that, clinging to him as a drowning man might cling to a floating scrap of wreckage. She was shaking with cold and painfully thin, every bone sharply defined under the shabby clothes. He unpinned his cloak and draped it around her shoulders, then disentangled one arm from her clutching hands and groped for his pack.

  “Are you hungry, Rhona? Eat? Food?”

  She snatched at the first thing he fished out, a chunk of garlic sausage, and devoured it in two bites. The stale end of a loaf went the same way, though with a little more trouble, giving Eadwine time to rummage for the rest of his provisions – dried meat, cheese and biscuit – and spread them on a cloth on the floor.

  “Eat,” he said, though she was already grabbing for the cheese. “Take what you want. There’s plenty.”

  He propped his sword against the wall and retreated into the courtyard to drink from the trickling fountain. The water was cold and pure as ever, and he wondered again where it came from and where it went after it left the overflow channel and disappeared somewhere under the side range. He had tried to find out once, but that particular exploration had ended ignominiously in a rotten floorboard, a fall into a dark cellar, a sprained ankle, a couple of rat bites and some nasty splinters in his hands by the time he had climbed out. This time he was much more careful, and successfully garnered some not-too-rotten floorboards and some of the smaller struts from the collapsed colonnade roof behind the rose bush.

  Rhonwen was still eating when he returned with his armful of wood, though not quite so desperately, so he averted his gaze and busied himself with making a fire. Mosaic floors were hopeless for building fires on – proving that whoever built this place either did not live here in the winter or knew nothing about heating – but previous experience had shown him that a hearth of carefully stacked bricks and tiles allowed enough air to circulate underneath to keep a small fire going. The smoke would find its way up through the gaps between the ceiling boards into the room above, and from there it would eventually filter out through the windows of the upper storey and the missing tiles in the roof, far too slowly to be seen from outside. There was a heap of dry bracken in one corner, presumably serving as a bed, which furnished him with a handful of kindling, and patient work with flint and steel eventually persuaded a tiny tongue of flame to lick along the driest piece of wood. He sat back on his heels, and risked another glance across at Rhonwen.

  She had consumed more than Drust would get through in two sittings and was licking the crumbs from her fingers and regarding him with an embarrassed expression. To his relief, for if she was embarrassed she could not be mad.

  “I’m so sorry,” she managed to say, speaking with exaggerated care as if she had only just learned to talk. She wiped her hands and face on the edge of her cloak, and looked at the grimy cloth with distaste. “You must think me disgusting.”

  “I am sorry to see you like this,” he said, truthfully. “What are you doing here? I know I said it would be a good place to hide, but not for four months.”

  “Is that how long it’s been?” Rhonwen seemed genuinely surprised. “All the days are alike here. Fear and hunger, hunger and fear. Never a kind word. You can’t imagine how glad I am to see a friendly face! Something to remind me that I’m human.” She shuddered. “The Twister’s men caught me, after the battle. He knows I was your – that we used to be – he made me look for you among the bodies –”

  “Oh, Rhona –”

  “I ran away that night. They were all looking for you. I came here because it always felt safe here, when you used to bring me here. I knew they wouldn’t find me.”

  “But how have you been living?”

  She shrugged, and looked at the floor. “I beg. I steal. I scavenge scraps out of pig troughs. Once or twice I – I – I – sold myself –” She bit her lip, and looked up with a desperate plea in her eyes. “But only once or twice! When I was so hungry I thought I would die of it! Please – please don’t hate me for it!”

  “Hush,” Eadwine soothed. “You have more reason to hate me. But truly I never thought you would come to this. I thought you would have gone back to your uncle’s.”

  “He’ll sell me back to the Twister. I’d rather starve.”

  “You are starving,” Eadwine said gently, glancing at the meagre remains of three days’ rations, “and you can’t go on living like this, Rhona.”

  Another shrug. “I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  “Heledd would take you in. She was truly fond of you, Rhona.”

  “I know,” Rhonwen said dully. “She gave me some of her jewellery. But what use is gold? You can’t eat it. You can’t buy a loaf of bread with it – all it does is make you worth robbing –”

  “She wouldn’t have known that. Look, you could go to her now. It’s only a day’s walk to Calcacaster, even if you’re not used to it, and then two more to her new home in Wharfedale.”

  Hope flared and then died. “How am I to get there? I don’t know the way. I never went outside Eboracum in my life. And the roads are full
of beggars and thieves and the Twister’s spearmen. You know what would happen to a woman on her own.” She shuddered again. “At least here they pay me for it –”

  “Oh, Rhona.” He sprang to his feet, pacing up and down the room. “Look – I’ll take you to safety, if I can. But I have things to do first. I must know how my brother died. I must avenge him. I can’t delay, though it breaks my heart to see you like this –” Another turn of the room. “I should have done better for you!”

  Rhonwen stared at him, startled. “What could you have done? You were exhausted. You’d fought a battle, you’d been browbeaten by the Council, you’d just heard about your brother. It’s a miracle that you managed to send Princess Heledd and the boy to safety. There was nothing more you could do. Why, you couldn’t get your betrothed out of the city, let alone me –”

  “Aethelind!” Eadwine stopped pacing as if struck, a great dread rising in him. “What happened to her?”

  Rhonwen bit her lip and looked down at the floor. So it was bad news. All his nightmares came flooding back. “What happened to her? Is she – is she dead?”

  “No, no! She’s at Eoforwic – but –”

  The dread turned to joy with a speed that left him dizzy. All his stern resolutions were swept away. Aethelind alive! And so close! He could find her, save her, keep one promise at least.

  Common sense reasserted itself somewhere on the bridge, and Eadwine slowed from a run to a walk. Less likely to attract attention, though he was already the target of some idly curious stares. Fortunately he had left cloak, sword and pack in the courtyard, and his stained and mended clothes were not so far out of the ordinary. He kept his head bowed and shoulders hunched to shield his face.

  No-one challenged him. There were no guards on the bridge, and the fortress was closed and barred. Neither king must be in residence. No great surprise there, for Aethelric shared the normal Anglian distrust of stone buildings and detested the city as much as Aelle had. He would be wintering at his hall on the family estate on the Humber, and Aethelferth would have left only a skeleton garrison to guard his new possession. Little point even in collecting tolls, for there was not much traffic in winter at the best of times, and even less than usual now. The wharves on the west bank had been rebuilt, probably by Finn Lousebeard, who could recognise a monopoly when he saw one and had stayed when his compatriots moved down to the Aire, but no-one had bothered to repair the damage on the east bank. The strip between the river and the fortress walls was still scarred and blackened by fire, and the high tide did not quite cover the charred skeletons of ships littering the foreshore.

  Eadwine turned downstream from the end of the bridge. The last time he had trodden this path had been with Hereric, on the way back from his brother’s funeral pyre a lifetime ago. He passed the south corner of the fortress, passed the burial ground, and looked ahead to Aethelind’s hall, dreading what he might see.

  But Aethelind’s hall looked untouched. More, it looked prosperous. The barn was undamaged. The yard was tidy. The fences were in good repair and the ditches clear. The pigs snuffled and grunted in their pen. The chickens were plump, glossy and well-feathered. A large hound dozed placidly in the hall doorway. A woman, one of Aethelind’s old servants, stooped over a laundry tub near the well. Two men, strangers to Eadwine, were skinning a sheep’s carcass, and two more were chopping wood. Smoke curled gently from the opening in the hall roof, and a faint smell of roasting pork and fresh bread wafted over the scene.

  Eadwine stepped smartly behind the hedge as one of the wood-choppers glanced in his direction. One of the Twister’s thanes must have taken the hall, kept Aethelind as a servant or a slave – or worse. How to find her? But if it was washing day, and someone else was working the tub –

  He made his way cautiously along the outside of the hedge, on the narrow strip between hedge and river bank. The property occupied all the land between the burial ground and the point where the Foss flowed in from the north-east to meet the Ouse, but before it reached the confluence the hedge faded out into clumps of hawthorn and hazel and scattered weeping willows, giving Aethelind’s family their own private river frontage. A few sheep were allowed to graze it in summer, keeping the grass short and sweet. Aethelind’s father used to fish from the bank. And Aethelind always hung laundry here to dry, where it was open to the sun in the south and there was no risk of anything being stolen.

  Eadwine peered cautiously out from between two hazel bushes. She was there. Aethelind as he had first seen her and fallen in love with her, hanging a tunic to dry on a thorn bush. Dimpled arms and curvaceous figure and that wonderful cascade of golden hair glittering in the sunlight. He expected his heart to leap at the sight of her. Strangely, there was not the least response. Instead, he had a vivid, disturbing memory of a cloud of shadowy hair and sparkling green eyes and a small lithe body and a clever cat’s face. The vision sparked first a sharp pang of loss, and then another of annoyance. He had no business thinking of Severa. Aethelind was his true love, his betrothed, the woman he was bound to by a solemn promise. He stepped out from hiding.

  “Aethelind!”

  She swung round, biting back a startled gasp, and recognised him in the space of a heartbeat. For a long moment there was silence. Aethelind was thinking: I remembered him as handsome! And Eadwine was thinking: Did I ever really find her attractive? So fair and plump and placid, like a dairy cow.

  But promises were made to be kept. He held out his hands to her.

  “Aethelind – my love –”

  She did not rush into his arms. Instead she made a fluttering gesture, as if she were swatting away a wasp.

  “Go away! The King wants you dead!”

  Her voice grated on his ears, high-pitched and strangely lacking in expression, like a little girl’s. But she was still his Aethelind.

  “As you can see, he hasn’t succeeded,” he said, smiling, but she did not seem at all delighted. She looked around anxiously, even guiltily, and made another flapping gesture.

  “What are you doing here? Go away, quickly!”

  “I came to rescue you.”

  She did not seem delighted at that either.

  “But I’m in the middle of the washing!”

  His smile was long gone. This was not funny. Every moment he remained here his life was in peril, and she was worried about her laundry?

  “Leave it,” he ordered. “Come with me now, quickly.”

  “I – I can’t! You don’t understand -”

  She laid her hands on her girdle and smoothed her gown over her swelling stomach. Eadwine stared, horrified. She was pregnant, four or five months gone by the look of it, and that could only mean one thing.

  “Oh, Aethelind – what you must have endured! But it’s over now, it’s over. They’ll never touch you again – and I swear to you, I’ll care for the child as if it were mine –”

  “No,” she said, backing away. “No. You don’t understand. Hereward – ”

  “He did this to you? He’s the rapist?”

  Aethelind had reached the bushes and could back away no further. “He’s my husband.”

  Eadwine could hardly have been more shocked if she had thrown a knife at his head. It was some moments before he could speak, and when he did his voice was shaking.

  “A – a forced marriage – it doesn’t count. You can leave him – come away with me –”

  She folded her arms. “I don’t want to. I want to stay here.”

  “With him?”

  “I like him,” she said obstinately. “He does what I tell him and he never says things I can’t understand. I have a home and a household and I’m going to have his baby.”

  “Is that all you want?”

  “What did you think I wanted?”

  “I see,” he said, and his voice was a dead calm. “Then I wish you every happiness, lady.”

  Aethelind felt a hot blush stain her cheeks. How dare he speak to her as if he despised her, as if she had done something wrong!
/>
  “Eadwine –!” she hissed.

  He turned back.

  “You do understand?”

  But she never knew what he would have said, for at that moment four of Hereward’s spearmen came from the direction of the hall.

  “Him?” one of them sneered. “Nah, he’s only some beggar, nuffink to worry about –”

  “Lord Hereward said the King wanted anybody what come near the lady,” protested one of the others.

  “Nah, not some foreign tramp, just kick him out –”

  Eadwine judged he could talk his way out of it. They were doubtful, only one showing any enthusiasm. Used to be a servant of the lady’s, down on his luck, hard times, hoping for a day’s work – all Aethelind had to do was agree with whatever he said.

  But Aethelind did what she always did in a crisis. She screamed.