‘Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Before he comes back. Quickly.’
‘But he can help us. He’ll take us to Hagustaldesham.’
‘I don’t want to go to Hagustaldesham.’
Neither does Tova, not really, but that’s where he’s going, and she doesn’t have any better ideas. They’ve seen with their own eyes what he can do. She doesn’t know much about the ways of war, except for what she’s overheard in the feasting hall and what she’s glimpsed of Ælfric and Orm and sometimes Skalpi sparring in the training yard. But none of them ever moved like he does. None were ever as light on their feet or as quick to strike. They never made it look as easy.
‘Don’t you think we’ll be safer if we stay with him?’ she asks.
‘He’s no different from the others,’ Merewyn protests. ‘He’s a killer.’
And so are you, Tova almost says, but holds her tongue. Surely Merewyn of all people realises that blood on a person’s hands isn’t necessarily a mark of evil?
‘So what if he is?’ she asks. ‘He saved our lives.’
‘We don’t know the slightest thing about him.’
‘He’s on our side,’ Tova insists.
‘You’d have us entrust our lives to a stranger.’
‘What choice do we have?’
Merewyn bites her lip. She must see that Tova speaks sense, even if, like so many times before, she won’t admit it. ‘If you’re wrong about him . . .’
Then God help us both, Tova thinks, and she prays silently for both their sakes.
*
They sit on fleeces laid upon the damp floor, around the lantern that is their only light, listening to the rustling of mice in the thatch, eating in silence. Nuts and mouldy cheese and stale ends of bread, which Beorn has given them from his own pack. He’s elsewhere: finding more provisions, she thinks. He didn’t say where he was going or what he was doing. Wherever it is, it can’t be far, since he’s left his bow and his pack here with them.
They huddle in their cloaks, she and Merewyn, in this rough hovel with the crumbling walls, a far cry from the hall at home, with its fire and its benches and its embroidered many-coloured wall hangings that keep out the draughts. The night is cold, but Beorn has forbidden any fire. He says the smoke will draw unwanted attention, and he’s probably right. The last thing they want is for another horde of Normans to descend upon them. Or indeed the folk whose home this is. If they were to find them sitting here, Tova doesn’t think they would be pleased.
‘What if they come back?’ she asked Beorn earlier, when he brought them here. He’d chosen this place because it was hidden halfway up a hillside in the lee of some woods, an arrow’s flight with a good wind from the hall and the village, and because it offered a good view across the dale so they’d be able to spy anyone approaching.
‘They won’t come back,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’re probably dead already.’
‘Dead?’
‘How many families were there living in this valley, do you think? A dozen? More? There aren’t many places you can hide that many people. Not when they have all their sheep and their cattle with them as well. No, believe me, they won’t be coming back.’
Maybe he’s right, Tova thinks. But we’re still intruders here. We’ve stolen into someone else’s home. Now we’re making use of their blankets and oil and lantern. Even if it’s true that they’re dead, and so don’t have any more use for them, that doesn’t mean we can just take whatever we want. That doesn’t make it right. Does it?
Perhaps when they go, they can leave behind some token of their gratitude, although she isn’t quite sure what. They left this morning in such a hurry. Aside from their clothes and the horses, what do they have that they could offer?
She glances towards her lady, sitting opposite, her knees drawn up in front of her as she rubs at the ankle she hurt earlier. That ermine cloak, maybe, or the ivory comb she always carries with her wherever she goes, or the brooch of interlaced silver that Skalpi gave her before he went away all those months ago. She’ll never part with those things, Tova thinks, not because they’re precious in their own right. Not just because of that, anyway, but because without them how is anyone to know she’s a woman of means, of noble stock, someone worthy of respect? They’re all she has left to prove who she is. All she has left of her pride.
Not that Tova blames her. She fingers the ribbon tied around her left wrist, one of the few belongings she had time to gather before they left. The green silk glimmers softly in the firelight. She supposes Merewyn feels the same way about her cloak and comb and brooch.
Footsteps outside; a screech of iron hinges as the door swings open. Tova’s breath catches in her chest. A shadow appears in the entrance.
But it’s only Beorn. With his shoulder he nudges the door closed behind him to keep in the warmth. There’s no lock, presumably because whoever lived here reckoned they had nothing worth stealing. Under each arm he carries a roll of folded cloth that he lays down between them, next to the lantern. He opens them out, revealing a collection of smaller bundles that he unwraps to reveal a clutch of candles, some clay pots, leather flasks, wooden bowls and spoons, three drinking cups, a handful of shrivelled apples, half a dozen small loaves, bunches of parsnips and leeks, and four round cheeses wrapped and tied with string.
‘Some for tonight,’ he says. ‘The rest for the journey. There should be enough to keep us fed for a few days at least.’ He glances at Merewyn’s ankle. ‘Is it swollen? Can you walk on it?’
‘I twisted it when I fell, that’s all,’ she says as she rubs at it. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘If you want, I can look at it for you.’
‘No,’ she says sharply, scowling. One of her favourite expressions. Tova has often thought that if she does it too much, her face will become stuck that way. ‘I don’t need your help. I told you. I’ll be fine.’
He shrugs, then sits down on the floor, snatches up one of the apples that he has brought and sinks his teeth into it, more like an animal than a man.
Tova clears her throat. Straight away Beorn looks up.
‘Why are the Normans doing this?’ she asks. ‘For three years they’ve left us alone. Why are they coming now?’
‘Because they’re Hell creatures, bent on spreading suffering wherever they go,’ he says, spitting the words as if he cannot stand the taste of them. ‘They know no kindness or pity. All they know is how to kill. They want to scour us from the face of this earth once and for all, to make sure we can never again take up arms against them. So that we’ll never again threaten King Wilelm’s grip upon his kingdom.’
‘But the rebellion was defeated. He crushed it.’
She remembers all too well when the men came back after the war. Weary, hobbling. Broken inside as well as out. Their dreams shattered. Missing friends and brothers. The hope gone from their eyes. Everyone knew then that their best chance was gone.
‘The rebellion isn’t defeated. Not as long as there are some of us still willing to fight. The war isn’t over, and don’t listen to anyone who tells you that it is.’
‘But so many have died at their hands already,’ Merewyn says. ‘Eadgar has fled back to Scotland, hasn’t he? What more does King Wilelm want from us?’
Beorn sighs. ‘What do I have to say before you understand? He doesn’t want anything that you or I or anyone can give him. He doesn’t want our surrender, our silver or our homes. He doesn’t want to bargain with us. He isn’t coming to take possession of this land. He’s coming to lay it waste.’
His eyes bore into her, as if daring her to say that he speaks false. But Tova’s throat is dry. It’s like something out of one of her darkest fear-dreams.
He’s wrong. He has to be. He must be confused in his head or else simply mad. Has he really seen all these things happening?
&nb
sp; He can’t be right, she tells herself. He can’t be. It isn’t possible.
And yet what if he is?
He turns away from them and goes back to his apple. Who is he? Where has he come from? Men like him don’t often travel alone, do they? If he’s a warrior, then where’s the rest of his band? Did they die in the rebellion?
The way he moves, the way he fights: they mark him out as still a young man, although he has to be older than Merewyn, who has only twenty winters behind her. How much older, she’s not sure. The scars that decorate his cheeks, his weather-worn appearance, his curt manner, the haunted look in his eyes: these are things that she has usually seen only in men Skalpi’s age. Men who have known loss, who have known hardship, who have known all the ills that the world has to throw at them and are tired of it all. And there’s an aloofness to him that she can’t account for. Hearing him speak and watching him sitting hunched over as he is now, lost in his own thoughts, she sees someone who has travelled and who has loved, who has lived but who at the same time has also died a little inside himself.
His eyes are open again. Open and fixed upon her. ‘What?’
She asks, ‘How long have you been on your own?’
He frowns. She imagines he is asking himself what sort of a question that is.
‘Longer than I would have liked,’ he says.
‘Were there others? Like you, I mean. Fighting men.’
He nods.
‘What happened to them?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Were they killed by the Normans, the ones we met tonight? Were you lying in wait for them?’
‘Tova,’ Merewyn says warningly.
But he was. Of course he was. It makes sense now. Otherwise, was it mere coincidence that he was there just when they needed him?
He snatches up one of the ale flasks and gets to his feet. ‘I said I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Where are you going now?’ Merewyn asks.
‘To keep watch.’ He slings his bow and arrow bag over his shoulder, slides the haft of his axe inside his belt loop and makes for the door. ‘Eat what you can, then get some sleep. It’s late and we have many miles ahead of us. I don’t want to spend any longer here than we have to.’
He wrenches open the door and ventures outside. Frigid air sweeps in once more, disturbing the rushes and causing the lantern flame briefly to flicker.
And then he’s gone, and they’re alone again.
*
‘Are you still awake?’ she hears Merewyn whisper later. How much later, Tova doesn’t know. The lantern has burned itself out. Somewhere out in the night the kew-wick of an owl out hunting. Otherwise, silence.
They lie back to back, huddled together on the wooden boards and bundles of straw that pass for a bed, rolled up in layers of wool and linen to guard against the cold that creeps in through the cracks in the walls and seeps up from the ground.
‘I’m awake,’ Tova replies, though she wishes she weren’t. She could hardly eat and now she can’t sleep either. Every time she closes her eyes she is back in that woodshed with the tall Norman standing over her. She feels his rough hands on her as he tries to haul her to her feet, and she feels the panic rising, the sickness brewing in her gut.
‘Tova?’
Merewyn must have been dozing; her words sound slurred. At least one of them has been able to get some sleep.
Tova asks, ‘Yes?’
‘Do you think he’s telling the truth?’
‘About what?’
‘About the Normans. About what they’re doing.’
What can she say? She knows only what Merewyn knows, after all: no more and no less. She doesn’t want to believe it, but that’s not the same thing.
Instead she says, ‘Why would he lie to us?’
If it’s all true, she supposes, it might explain one thing. It would explain how they’ve been able to get this far, and why nobody from Heldeby has come after them.
A numbness spreads through her. If the enemy arrived in force this morning, not long after she and her lady fled . . .
Then what?
She can hardly bear to let the thought form in her mind. She never cared for Ælfric, or for Ceolred or Hæsta or Saba either for that matter, but what about everyone else? What about red-faced Ulf the cook, or Leofric the swineherd’s son, who always had a smile for her, with whom she shared a drunken kiss beneath the willows after the Christmas feast and who was too shy to even speak to her for a week afterwards? What about timid Eda the alewife, more gentle a soul than anyone else she has known, or hoary-haired Thorvald the priest, reckoned by everyone to be easily a hundred in years? Are they all dead as well?
She’s already accepted they can’t go back, but what if there’s nothing now to go back to, even if they wanted? Everyone she knew, everyone with whom she once lived and worked and feasted and fasted—
No. She mustn’t think that way. She doesn’t want to believe it. They’ll have got away, she decides, fled up on to the moors, high up the valleys, where the enemy won’t find them.
‘Merewyn?’ she whispers, wondering if the same thought has occurred to her too, but all she hears is the sound of her lady’s breathing, soft and slow. ‘Merewyn?’
Her lady stirs but doesn’t wake. Tova doesn’t have the heart to disturb her. She shifts, trying to make herself more comfortable on the hard boards.
Will Beorn be as good as his word? Will he still be here, she wonders, when dawn comes, to take us to Hagustaldesham? Or will he take the chance while we’re sleeping to slip away unnoticed?
She doesn’t know, and the longer she lies there asking herself such questions, the less sure she is what exactly she’s hoping for.
Second Day
‘Girl.’
She wakes with a start. Still dark. A figure looming over her – a creature of the night, a shadow-walker, come to claim her. To carry her off. Her heart leaps and her stomach sinks and she’s about to let out a scream when something clamps across her mouth. A leathery hand that smells of horse dung and something sharper that can only be blood. She struggles, trying to free herself, but she can’t.
‘It’s me, girl,’ the shadow says. Insistent, impatient. ‘It’s me. Beorn.’
She recognises the name but doesn’t know how. For a moment she can’t work out where she is or what she’s doing here, why she isn’t in her usual bed at home, with Cene curled at her feet, and why her bones feel so chilled.
The moment passes quickly. She remembers. How they came to be here. Why they’re running. The Normans. Everything.
Beorn.
She blinks to clear her watery eyes. The scars on his face, those deep-set eyes. Tentatively, as if afraid she might still let out a cry, he lifts his hand away.
‘What?’ she asks between breaths. She sits up, trying to escape sleep’s clutches. ‘Are they here?’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s time for us to go. Wake your lady. I’ll gather what we need. Eat what you can; once we’re on our way I don’t intend to stop. We leave as soon as it’s light.’
With that he is gone again, as swiftly as he arrived. Tova blinks as she sits up. Morning can’t be far off; a faint half-light glimmers through the finger’s gap beneath the door where the passage of feet has worn a groove in the earth. Everything has taken on a grey hue.
How she managed to sleep with so many thoughts dancing inside her head, she isn’t sure. She doesn’t feel well rested. Her limbs are stiff from lying on the hard boards and the old, flattened straw; her neck is paining her, and there’s a pounding in her head and she doesn’t know why. Beside her, Merewyn continues to sleep, as serene as ever, curled in a ball with the blankets drawn up around her face, murmuring something that Tova can’t understand. Gently she lays a hand on her lady’s shoulder to rouse her. She wakes with a start, her expre
ssion putting Tova in mind of a deer that has just heard the sound of the hunting horn.
They find some hard bread on which to break their fast and have just finished washing that down with the remains of the ale when Beorn returns. He’s saddled their palfreys, which spent the night in a shed behind the hovel together with his own grey, snorting stallion. Although maybe not his own. Maybe he stole it from the Normans.
Tied to panniers across the two palfreys’ backs are bundles of kindling, a coil of rope, leather flasks, small iron cooking pots, thick winter blankets. Fastened on either side of his saddle is a roll of linen and what look like wolf pelts. He unbuckles the leather straps holding them in place and tosses one to Merewyn and another to Tova.
It’s heavier than it looks, and Tova almost fumbles hers.
‘What’s this?’ Merewyn asks.
‘A gift,’ he says in a way that makes it hard to know whether or not he’s joking.
‘A gift?’
‘Dry clothes. I thought you might appreciate them.’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘Where do you think?’
‘They aren’t ours to take. They don’t belong to us.’
‘They do now. Whoever they belonged to would have wanted us to have them. Now, put them on and be quick about it. Or leave them here if you prefer, but in that case don’t complain to me later if you’re shivering and there’s snot dripping from your nose.’
Tova can’t remember the last time anyone dared speak to Merewyn in such a manner. Her husband, of course, but only rarely and, besides, that’s different.
Merewyn stands there, open-mouthed, clearly not knowing quite what to do or how to respond. She isn’t happy, that much is sure, and she’s even less happy once they’re inside and unwrapping the rolls to see what Beorn has found for them. Rough-spun dresses of grey wool cloth, thick but plain. Linen undershifts, frayed a little at the hems and worn thin in places but serviceable. Wolf-pelt cloaks, with cord for belts, and gloves as well. Gloves! Tova tugs them on over her pink knuckles, her chilled, cracked hands, delighting in the feeling of the wool against her fingertips, then takes a closer look at the rest of the clothes, turning them over in her hands. Dry, free from holes and, as far as she can tell from a quick inspection, no lice either. She sheds her damp, slept-in overgown and is about to peel off her old much-worn shift when she sees Merewyn marching outside, her dress clutched in one hand.
The Harrowing Page 4