Medi-Evil 2

by Paul Finch

  Eric felt the sweat-sodden hair prickle inside his helmet; felt chills run down his spine despite the immense heat under his ring-mail hauberk. He’d seen much atrocity this day, and the day before, and the day before that, though even the most horrible events now tended to bleed into each other, leaving a vague crimson blur in his mind’s eye. However, some moments were distinct, and would remain so for the rest of his life: two horses breaking from a burning stable and galloping pell-mell across a field, both blazing from nose to tail; a fish-pond poisoned by having the offal and innards of disemboweled children thrown into it; an old man, his hands and feet severed, his eyes put out, his tongue torn from its roots – stuffed with straw and set up as a living scarecrow.

  And perhaps because of all that, proud though he was not to have participated, yet guilt-stricken merely for being a witness – perhaps also because the army was still only a week into the king’s revenge mission, because it was still nowhere near Durham or Richmond or even York, where the rebels were centred, and because already every road and meadow behind it was rank with gore and strewn with carcasses, animals alongside humans, and every mill torched and every crop ripped up, and every fair and fertile acre despoiled and trampled and sewn with salt – perhaps because of all that, this incident was one incident too many.

  When Eric spoke, it was a raw, smoke-strangled growl: “Get … off her!”

  The Breton engaged at the girl’s spread thighs didn’t so much as glance at him. “Get your own whore, Norman!”

  Eric reached down, and with one mail-gauntleted fist took the Breton by the mop of rat-tails that passed for his hair and dragged him up onto his knees. His other fist, he swung around and smashed into the side of the Breton’s head. The mercenary went sprawling, but was quickly up in a tigerish crouch. He touched his right temple, where the flesh had split, and glared at Eric with blue-murder in his eyes. Ordinarily no mercenary would dare take on a fully-fledged knight. But this occasion was an exception. This occasion involved shame – for the mercenary’s crooked member still stuck out at the front of his breeches, ludicrously small and under-formed; this occasion involved pain – for he was bleeding freely down his wolfish face; this occasion involved loss – for the girl still lay there ripe for the plucking, and the Breton assumed Eric would now fall upon her himself, having jumped the queue.

  “You fucking whoreson!” the mercenary snarled, sliding his scramasax from its sheathe.

  Eric drew his longsword.

  The mercenary charged, howling. Eric stepped aside and slashed him with a single, two-handed blow. With a thunk, the Breton’s head was struck from his shoulders. The decapitated corpse staggered forwards, bright arterial jets spurting from the neatly-hewn stump, then fell chest-first to the ground.

  The other two rapists stood in mulish bewilderment. It was several moments before the first sought vengeance. With a scream of rage, a pock-marked, grey-haired fellow dragged a hand-axe from his belt and turned on the knight, only for Eric’s steel to strike him cleanly through the breast. The last one hurled a javelin. Eric ducked the missile, and hacked the assailant’s legs from beneath him, more blood spraying the air as the severed limbs went spinning.

  “What’s this?” an outraged voice cried. “What’s this!”

  Eric spun around. Count Hugh de Valognes was approaching on horseback. He was always a distinctive figure, renowned throughout northern Francia and now England as well as ‘Hugh the Red’ – mainly for his flaming locks, which unlike other Norman barons he had allowed to grow long and rich, but also for his devilish ways.

  “Are my retainers now fighting among themselves,” the nobleman said, peering with disbelief at this knight who he had welcomed into his war-band not a week since.

  “A private quarrel, my lord,” Eric said.

  Count Hugh swung down from his saddle, his own sword drawn. “A private quarrel? In a time of war!” He kicked at the bodies of the trio Eric had just slain. “You rogue! Any loot taken here is mine. I have first call on everything. Are you trying to oust me, sir knight?”

  “My lord ... they were … ” Eric pointed at the young girl, lying curled amid the carnage of her butchered family, still weeping, hugging her knees to her chest. “They were ravishing that child, my lord ...”

  “Which child?” Hugh the Red demanded. “This one?”

  He raised his iron-shod foot and stamped hard on the side of the girl’s head, not once, but three or four times, until with a wet crunch her skull gave way.

  “Well?” he wondered. “You meant that one, I take it? That harlot, whose pox-ridden hole will trouble the world no longer?”

  Before Eric knew what he was doing, he’d raised his sword and aimed a blow at his overlord. Stunned, Hugh the Red only just managed to parry it. A second blow followed, and a third, and suddenly the arrogant baron realised that he was fighting for his life.

  On the nearby road, Norman knights wheeled their horses around to watch, thinking at first that they were witnessing play-acting.

  But this misconception didn’t last for long. Eric’s all-possessing rage was too much for Hugh the Red, who screamed incoherently as he tried to fend off the attack, only to have his sword knocked from his grasp and be struck on the temple by Eric’s pommel. As the nobleman fell, several of his knights cantered from the road, leaping from their saddles, but they were still too startled to actually intervene. Eric sheathed his steel, grabbed Hugh the Red by the shoulder of his cloak and dragged him across the blood-soaked ground, finally hauling him to his feet and forcing him backwards against a twisted tree trunk.

  “For God’s sake, I yield,” Hugh jabbered, but Eric ignored him.

  With clenched teeth and sweating brow, he drew his dagger and rammed it through his captive’s neck. Hugh’s eyes goggled, crimson bubbles bursting from his mouth.

  Eric slammed the hilt repeatedly with the flat of his hand. Bone finally cracked, and the blade slid all the way through, pinning Hugh to the tree-trunk. The nobleman gargled and groped at the immovable object set under his chin, but it was a futile gesture. Within seconds, he hung there lifeless.

  Eric now twirled around to face those of Hugh’s retainers who’d dared to approach. They looked aghast at the heinous crime they’d just witnessed – the murder of a lord by his servant.

  “Hugh the Red,” Eric said with a crazy laugh. “Now … Hugh the Dead!”

  In that moment something struck at the very heart of their victory-fuelled courage. Maybe the background of hellish flames and smoke, and everywhere the corpses and the rivers of blood, and the stench in the air as thick as fog – and in the midst of all this a strange, demented knight steeped to his chest with the bile of his own colleagues. And there beside him, their overlord – merciless master of all the lands between the Bresle and the Seine, seneschal and chief-marshal of their lord, the king, holder of the royal writ in every shape and form, now skewered to a tree like a trophy of the hunt.

  And then something else struck them, something even more hideous. They swore and shouted as one, and fell over each other as they scrambled back to their saddles and galloped madly away without looking back. Eric removed his helm and pulled back the leather coif underneath, and then he too heard the shuffling of feet, and he turned – and beheld an abomination.

  The raped English girl had risen upright and was coming towards him at a stumbling gait, her ruined head lolling on her shoulder, red streams running from her nose, her ears, her mouth, even leaking from her eyes, great crimson droplets hanging on every lash.

  Mesmerised, Eric couldn’t retreat, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even raise his weapons to fend her off. When she stood directly in front of him, the white orbs beneath those bloody lashes rolled in their shattered sockets and fixed on him, and the dead, twisted claws came up and reached out for him. And only then was the spell broken, and only then did the violated creature crumple to the ground, though not without first drawing ten carmine finger-trails down his sweating, ashen face …

&
nbsp; Eric woke with a start.

  At first he was puzzled by the dank dimness around him. Then he felt the manacles on his wrists and the damp straw under his buttocks. He shifted position, resting his back against the bricks and his head against the bars to his left – only to be surprised when someone spoke to him from close by.

  “Eric … I’ve brought you something to eat.”

  Faint candle-light shone down the dungeon steps, but it was sufficient to glimmer on Ella’s flaxen hair. She was kneeling beyond the bars, wrapped in a heavy shawl. He sat up as she pushed a roll of bread and a block of cheese towards him.

  “Thank God,” he said. “I didn’t make father’s birthday banquet after all.”

  “Nobody did,” she replied. “There hasn’t been one. The castle’s like a tomb.”

  Eric had already bitten off a morsel of cheese, but now it soured in his mouth. “Did you see him, Ella?” he said slowly. “Did you see father’s face? He went grey in the cheeks … like an old man. At first he didn’t believe it, but …”

  “You couldn’t have expected him to be happy about it.”

  “No. But I’d have preferred to have told him in my own way.”

  “You’d have told him?”

  “Of course.” Eric started eating again “That’s the real reason I’m here.”

  She knelt backwards. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You ought to,” he said, his mouth full. “It’s your people who are being abused out there, who have lost their land, who are enslaved by foreign masters …”

  She shook her head, and in the dimness he saw a sad smile on her lips. “Eric … England was no land of the free even before your Duke William came here. The great nobles fought each other. There was ambition, scheming, murder … the poor ceorls, they struggled to survive just as they do now …” She let her words tail off.

  He gazed at her, recalling the many things she’d said to him when they had first come to know each other, about the England she’d lost: a land of plenty, of woods teeming with game, where any man could hunt and hawk and take pieces of firewood without fear of the noose or branding-iron; of churches and abbeys that were repositories not just of wealth and craftsmanship, but of learning and knowledge; of fairs and feasts and saints’ days, many fantastical in origin; of folk-moots where the nobility could be judged by the mass of the people; of the Witan, wherein the great men of the realm might counsel the king himself. All gone now, expunged, vanquished, crushed by the invader’s leaden boot. When the new Archbishop of Canterbury was appointed later in the year – an ascetic, Eric had heard, with a zeal for reform and control – one of his very first duties would be to denounce many of England’s antiquated yet unique religious observances, calling them heretical, maybe even pagan. More trials and executions were expected to follow.

  “You are confused?” she said, intruding on his thoughts.

  “Somewhat.”

  She sighed. “It pains me to admit this, Eric, but what do you think Hereward fights for in the fens … if not the restoration of his own power? Do you think Waltheof cares about the common folk? Do the Vikings prowl our coast to restore our lost liberties?”

  “What are you saying, Ella?”

  “It’s all ruin.” Her shoulders sagged; tears glinted in her lovely eyes. “Death, destruction, ruin … the ruinous whims of angry, violent men.”

  “And you tar me with the same brush?” he said.

  “What else am I to think? They are saying you joined the English rebels.”

  “That is untrue.”

  “They also say you murdered a great baron of the realm.”

  “He deserved nothing less.”

  “Even so … a great baron. They’ll punish you terribly.”

  “It’s only what I deserve,” he said, “but not because of Hugh the Red.”

  He then told her what had happened – about how he’d joined the royal army in the late autumn of the year, and had marched north to punish the rebels who had captured York. How he hadn’t wanted to go, but had been errant for too long and had needed to make his name. How he’d fallen in with the mesnie of Hugh the Red, but how the battle had never actually come. How the enemy had always retreated ahead of them, and how – under the express orders of the king – they had punished the people instead. And how his own epiphany had finally arrived in a village that no longer existed, the very name of which had been scorched from the maps.

  When he’d finished, he was almost breathless. He hung his head, tears making trails through the dirt on his bruised cheeks.

  “But you know,” he said, “there’s no solace in killing. To save someone maybe, but to avenge them … when they’re already dead? What good does that do? You can’t bring them back. You can’t right the wrong you permitted to happen in the first place.”

  Ella was strangely, almost icily calm when she finally stood up. “I have to get you out of here, Eric.”

  “And put yourself in danger? Don’t be a fool!”

  “From the minute I became your father’s chattel I’ve been in danger. When Earl Hereward is defeated, and he will be, all resistance will end. The Normans will rule without challenge. There’ll be no reason for my continued existence.”

  “Father isn’t like that. He won’t cast you out.”

  “Your father is fifty. He won’t always be in control here.”

  “Ella … there’s no escape for me now. Reynald’s guards are at the end of the passage.

  Tomorrow they take me to the king’s new fortress on the Thames. It’s hopeless.”

  “Did King Harold say it was hopeless?” she said. “When the Pope turned against him. When his own brother turned against him. When he had to march north in a week, fight a battle against the Vikings, and march all the way south again.”

  “Ella … King Harold lost.”

  “You were lucky that day.” She peered coldly down through the bars. “You Normans have always been lucky. Well … now it’s time to test your luck again. Be ready, Eric.”

  Before he could say more, she had disappeared along the passage, her skirts rustling on the damp flagstones.

  9

  Bron Trograin was our late-summer festival, held in honour of Trograin the Long-Armed, our god of laws and justice. This great occasion marked the commencement of the harvest, and was a time of games, feasting and fairs. It was also a time when legal matters were attended to by the tribe. It was customary for the king to renew his vows of protection and to make new offerings to the goddess of sovereignity, thus binding himself more closely to the land. Young warriors would pass or fail their initiation tests dependant on their courage, and trial-marriages were held when lovers would dedicate themselves to each other for a year yet were required to make no legal commitment until this period of probation was complete. From the first sheaf of wheat harvested at Bron Trograin, a doll would be fashioned, or a ‘Cailleach’ as we knew it. This would be suspended above the table in the family home and honoured throughout the period of reaping. Only when the final bushel had been gathered was the Cailleach returned to the soil, buried in a solemn ceremony in the field from whence it came.

  “And those are the full facts?” Dagobert asked.

  He sat stiffly at the head of his table, Bishop Anselm standing close behind him. Darkness stole in through the keep’s many slit-windows. The flames in the hearth had been allowed to burn low. No candles or torches had yet been lit. There was a deep stillness throughout the great stone edifice.

  “As far as we know,” Reynald said. “Obviously we’d like to know more. But I don’t need to tell you that murdering a great nobleman constitutes treason ...”

  “You’re right. You don’t need to tell me.”

  “And you won’t object if we speak to your son tonight?”

  “I don’t care what you do,” Dagobert said, staring into the gloom. “Just keep him out of my sight. I never want to see him again.”

  Reynald nodded. “As you wish. Your cooperation wo
n’t go unrewarded, Count Dagobert. I’m quite convinced that you knew nothing about your son’s treachery.”

  “Just take him away from here,” Dagobert replied. “And Reynald …” He pointed at the Korred’s cage, now draped in canvas again. “Remove that monstrosity. Take it outside the walls of my castle. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I still command at Wulfbury, and I will not have it frightening my family.”

  Reynald inclined his head. “As soon as possible, my lord.”

  He closed the main door behind him, leaving Dagobert and Anselm alone.

  “Lithe as a cat, that one,” Dagobert grunted.

  “I don’t know who’s the more dangerous,” Anselm said. “Him or his monster.”

  “It hardly matters. Has Trewan come back yet?”

  “Come back?”

  Dagobert glanced at him. “You mean you didn’t notice?” His voice rose. “How could you not have noticed? He ran shrieking through the castle like a banshee! WHAT IN GOD’S NAME WERE YOU …”

  “Father!”

  The count struggled to restore his self-control When he spoke again, he was calmer but only just. “It would help if I lost only one son tonight. Two would be rather inconvenient.”

  “I’ll have the servants look for him,” Anselm said.

  Dagobert nodded and poured himself a goblet of wine.

  “Father, getting drunk won’t help.”

  “How would you know, monk?”