The Harrowing

by James Aitcheson

  ‘It’s your choice,’ Beorn tells her. ‘It makes no difference to me.’

  She shakes her head. Slowly but decisively. Her eyes fixed on the steel in his hand.

  ‘Very well,’ he says with a shrug. He stands beside Tova. ‘This is a knife. A simple weapon. The simplest. But it’s no less deadly than a sword or spear or axe. It can be just as good, if you know how to use it properly. Show me yours. Show me how you hold it.’

  Hesitantly, she draws the blade from the sheath at her left side, placing her thumb along the side of the handle, like she would when cutting her food. That’s what it’s for; she has no idea if it’s sharp enough to do anyone any real harm. She’s never thought about it before. She glances across at Beorn’s hand, to see how he holds his, and is reassured to find he has the same grip.

  ‘Good.’ He turns to face her. ‘The first thing you have to know is that a knife’s no weapon for defending with. At best you can ward an attacker off for a while. You can’t block or parry. Your best chance if someone comes at you is to make sure you strike first. Now, you’re small, but that’s no bad thing, because it means you can be quick. Quicker than anyone will expect. And quickness is what matters. Be one move ahead of your attacker. Kill him before he kills you. Stay off your heels and keep your weight forward. Not all the way forward so that you’re on your toes, but so that you can easily step in whichever direction you need to go.’

  Attack, don’t defend, she repeats silently. Be quick. Stay forward. Strike first. Kill quickly.

  Beorn shows her how to stand when facing her foe, her right foot in front of the left, one shoulder back, offering him a narrower target while also presenting her blade edge. How to use her feet to back away when an attacker comes at her. How to cut circles through the air in front of her to ward him off and make him keep his distance. He gets her to try these things while he advances upon her. At first she doesn’t want to, thinking she might injure him by accident, but he laughs off her worries and tells her he’ll be fine.

  ‘Small movements,’ he urges. ‘Keep your elbows in, or else you leave yourself open. Little circles, like this.’

  Over and over they practise it. She protests that she doesn’t need to keep repeating the same thing, that she understands, but he refuses to teach her anything else until he’s satisfied that she really does.

  Their shadows in the firelight deepen as dusk quickly fades into night. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the others watching her: Guthred and Oslac in bemusement, her lady with her hand over her mouth in concern. Tova does her best to ignore them, but it isn’t easy. Every time she stumbles she feels her cheeks burning. She expects them to laugh at her, but they don’t. She expects Merewyn sooner or later to try to put a stop to things, but she doesn’t.

  ‘All right,’ says Beorn eventually. ‘Now you’re ready to try something harder.’

  Instead of getting her to back away when an attacker comes at her, this time he wants her to move to one side, so that she gets her body out of the path of his blade. He talks her through it, slowly to begin with, like showing her the steps of a dance: he comes at her, lunging forward, thrusting his knife point towards her chest; she moves neatly outside the line of his outstretched arm. Again they go through the same motions, and again, and again, gradually getting faster.

  Then he shows her how, as she moves to his flank, she can slice her blade down across the back of his wrist and use her free hand to force his weapon arm out of the way, leaving his chest exposed, ready for her to stab straight at his heart.

  ‘That’s how you make a killing blow,’ he says. ‘If you only wound your foe, he’s still dangerous. But if you strike him there, he won’t be getting up. You have to be quick, though, and you have to be sure of yourself. If you aren’t, you’re dead.’

  They keep on practising for the better part of an hour, until her brow is slick with sweat and her limbs are aching and her fingers can barely grip the hilt of her blade any longer. Her arms are tiring, her feet hurting, but she clenches her teeth and vows to keep going. She wanted this, she reminds herself. She mustn’t show weakness.

  Before long though she’s tripping over her own feet. He sees she’s struggling and says that’s enough for one night.

  He sheathes his borrowed knife, then throws his arm around her shoulder and tousles her hair. She squirms away, protesting as she brushes it out of her face, annoyed and yet at the same time quietly pleased because she knows he’s proud.

  *

  ‘They say you saved them from the Normans,’ Guthred says to Beorn when they’re sitting around the fire later.

  Beorn has tied a rope between two trees, and over it draped a large sheet made from hides stitched together, which he secures with pegs at each of the four corners to make a shelter. It’s open to the wind but at least it’ll keep the rain off.

  ‘They were alone,’ Beorn says. ‘Up on the moors. No one to protect them. The enemy had found them and so I did what I had to do.’

  ‘Five of them, all by yourself?’

  He doesn’t seem to hear, or else he doesn’t want to answer. Most men would relish the chance to brag about something like that. Orm certainly would, Tova thinks, had he ever managed such a feat. They’d never have heard the end of it.

  Oslac flicks his gaze between Tova and Merewyn. ‘Why were you alone, anyway? What happened to everyone else where you came from? Was there no one else left after the Normans came?’

  ‘We were on pilgrimage,’ Tova says quickly, glancing at her lady. She’s been quietly rehearsing their story, ready for when it’s needed. ‘We were on our way to Dunholm. To see St Cuthbert’s relics. We didn’t know the Normans were marching. We didn’t know anything until they came upon us that evening. Until Beorn told us what was happening.’

  Careful, she thinks. Don’t talk too much or too quickly, or they’ll be suspicious.

  ‘On pilgrimage alone?’ Oslac asks. ‘Wandering the moors in the middle of winter? Hadn’t you heard how dangerous it was?’

  ‘We’d heard rumours. But that was all. Nothing certain. We were lucky, I suppose. God was with us.’

  She looks again towards Merewyn, whose eyes are cast down towards her lap as she wrings her hands.

  Say something, Tova thinks desperately. I can’t be the one doing all the talking. If you don’t speak, they’re going to suspect something’s wrong. And then they’ll want to know.

  Too late.

  It’s the priest who notices first. ‘What’s going on? Why do you keep looking at her like that?’

  Tova opens her mouth, then closes it again when she realises she doesn’t know how to answer.

  ‘What is it?’ Oslac asks. Those eyes again, hard like granite. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Tova says, feigning indignation as best she can. ‘It’s just as I said. There’s nothing more to it.’

  ‘It’s all right, Tova,’ Merewyn says. ‘They might as well know.’

  Oslac frowns. ‘Know what?’

  She takes a deep breath and then says, ‘I too have a story to tell. Something I’m ashamed of. Something that, if I keep to myself any longer, will only eat away at me from the inside, as it has been for days already.’

  She mustn’t, thinks Tova. She can’t. She won’t. Will she?

  The look on the priest’s face is somewhere between puzzlement and concern. ‘Why? What did you do?’

  She’s trembling, Tova sees. Actually trembling. Suddenly Merewyn seems much younger than her twenty years, like she was when she first came to Heldeby. No longer as innocent but still as vulnerable.

  ‘We’re not pilgrims,’ her lady says. ‘When Beorn found us that evening, we were fleeing. Not from the Normans, though. From something else. Like you, Father, I’ve sinned, and I’m sorry.’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Guthred assures her, ‘you can tell us.’

&
nbsp; Don’t do it, Tova implores her silently.

  But the others are waiting. Expecting. She can hardly refuse.

  Oslac mutters, ‘It must be something terrible.’

  ‘Hold your tongue or I’ll make sure you never speak again,’ Beorn says sharply.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Merewyn says. ‘On one condition. Don’t judge me. Not, at least, until I’ve finished. That’s all I ask. Can you promise me that?’

  She’s going to do it. She’s going to tell them. When they hear what she’s done, God preserve us.

  ‘So,’ Merewyn says, with a deep sigh. ‘How much do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ says Oslac. ‘You might as well. I don’t suppose we’re going any further tonight.’

  ‘Everything?’ she echoes. ‘I don’t know how to start. Or where.’

  ‘How about at the beginning?’ Guthred suggests gently. ‘That’s often a good place.’

  Merewyn

  From the beginning, then.

  The best place to start, I suppose, is when I first came to Heldeby. That’s where we’re from, Tova and myself, not that you’re likely to have ever heard of it. Until that summer I hadn’t either. A modest manor on the northern slopes of a wide valley on the other side of the high moors, where the hills meet the river plain. A mile or so upstream from the fording place where the three streams come together. Nowhere especially rich, although it was prosperous enough as long as I lived there. It was home, odd though that seems when I think about it now, given that until about a year and a half ago I’d never even set eyes on it. But it’s true. Like a sapling torn from the earth where it sprouted, at first you yearn for what you know, what you can never go back to, but then you’re planted in new soil, given new skies under which to spread your limbs, and before you realise it you’ve taken root again and new shoots are beginning to emerge.

  That’s how it was with me. I didn’t know then how it was all going to end.

  Don’t look at me like that, Oslac. You wanted to hear our story, didn’t you? Well, this is it, and I’ll tell it just as I promised. Maybe I’m not as good at this as you are, but I’m going to do it my way.

  I was already in my nineteenth summer when I arrived at Heldeby, not that I wanted to go. My mother was the one who made the arrangements, or rather it was Eadmer really, since he was lord, but she was behind it all. I think he would have been content to let me live out my days however I chose. He was my only surviving sibling. Our elder brothers had both died when we were still young, one in a hunting accident and the other in a fall. Eadmer was five years younger than me, but we’d always been close, maybe because we had both survived when the others hadn’t. He enjoyed my company and my conversation, and I enjoyed his. But he was still coming to terms with what it meant to be a thegn and a master of men, a giver of silver and a receiver of oaths, and he was easily swayed. Our father had taken ill during the snows only a few months earlier, you see, and fallen into a fever so terrible that no one could do anything for him: not the wise woman nor the priest nor the pedlar who came with his mule and cart bearing ointments made from herbs and spices from distant lands to the east. None of us was expecting it; he’d always been strong, both in body and in spirit, and it was painful to see him laid so low. But day by day, hour by hour, his strength left him, until eventually during that night when the millpond froze he died, leaving Eadmer, fourteen and only just a man, to become lord in his place.

  The burden was too heavy for him, young as he was and weighed down with grief at our father’s passing. Our father, who had always been kind, who had always provided, who had vowed to do whatever was necessary to keep us safe from the Frenchmen and their so-called king, Wilelm. All those duties were now Eadmer’s. He had to learn to be a lord even as he was still learning to be a man, and the only person he could turn to for counsel and help was our mother. She’d hear the monthly pleas in the manor court and administer justice; she understood when to be firm and when it was better to show clemency. She knew how much grain we could expect to reap if the weather stayed fine throughout the summer and how much if it was wet, and how much we would have left over and how much we might sell that for at market, and which fields should be set aside next year. She was more than fifty in years by then, but had lost none of her vigour and was still as wilful as she had ever been. She was the one who made the decisions in those early months after our father’s death, and Eadmer was happy to let her.

  One of those decisions was that I should be married. Our father had indulged me too much, she said. By resisting her pleas to find me a husband and allowing me to remain unwed, she claimed he’d done me a disservice, making me lose sight of a woman’s place in the world. He’d always laughed off such remarks, and I knew this irked her. It was his wish that I should marry only when I felt I was ready and even then to a man I myself had chosen.

  Of course I realise now that she was only trying to do what she thought was best for me. She was thinking that so many young thegns had already lost their lives fighting against the Normans in the wars in the south of the kingdom; she was worried that if I waited much longer there might not be anyone left for me. She herself had been lucky, so she would tell me often, for she was past twenty-five when my father took her to their marriage bed. Almost turning grey, I remember he’d once joked, or maybe it wasn’t a joke, because even in my earliest memories I remember noticing in her hair a few strands behind her ear that were paler than the rest. I don’t suppose it could have mattered to him, because he always used to tell me that when he first laid eyes upon her he thought her as beautiful as any girl ten years younger, and he said that if I turned out anything like her then I needn’t worry about finding a good husband even if I was thirty before I decided I was ready. In the meantime he encouraged me to practise my letters and to read the teachings of the Church Fathers and to learn the different tongues of these isles. He found me a tutor, a young priest named Leofa who had travelled widely across Britain and had even been as far as Rome, and who was well known for the breadth of his learning.

  But then he died that winter – my father, I mean, not Leofa. He died and everything changed. My mother took it upon herself to find me a man, and Eadmer didn’t stop her. I think he was reluctant to get involved, in case he ended up upsetting either one of us. He had no wish to foist upon me a husband I didn’t want, but at the same time he needed our mother’s guidance. The last thing he wanted was to drive a wedge between them. In the end it was easier for him to give his consent and to let events take their course.

  I don’t blame him, I really don’t. I don’t blame my mother either, before you start thinking otherwise. Not any longer, anyway. It hurt at the time, but I forgive her now. As I said, she only wanted what she thought was right and proper.

  And I could have refused. It would have been easy. They couldn’t make me do anything against my will. But I didn’t want to make things harder than they already were or to be yet another burden on Eadmer, who had more important concerns than having to intervene in the squabble between myself and our mother, which only grew more bitter the longer it went on. I was tired too. I didn’t want to be arguing over my fate each and every day, and I didn’t want to keep on living there if it meant having to suffer her voice in my ear.

  And the truth was I could have done worse than Skalpi. He was the man my mother found for me, a thegn and the son of a thegn. A warrior too, who’d led men in the two great battles at Fuleford and Stanford Brycg, when the other Harold came to these shores a few years ago, but of course you know all about that.

  I was lucky, she kept telling me, because there weren’t many who wanted to marry a woman of nineteen whose best years were already behind her. The lord of Heldeby, he was a little older than me, or so I gathered, and had been married before. He wasn’t rich, although he did better than most. Better than us, at any rate. The bride price he’d offered was more than double what any other man had prom
ised. From that alone I realised, even before I’d met him, that he could give me a life better than I’d find with anyone else. That was why my mother chose him over the others, and that was why, much to her surprise and her delight, after months of arguing and shouting and cursing, I gave in and agreed to marry him.

  *

  ‘Wait,’ says Beorn. ‘Your husband’s name was Skalpi?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Merewyn replies. ‘Why?’

  ‘Skalpi Guthfrithsson?’

  Her frown softens into surprise. ‘How did you—?’

  ‘It isn’t a common name, is it?’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Knew him? Not exactly, although our paths did cross a handful of times when we were marching under Eadgar’s banner. Not a bad swordsman, I thought, the one time I saw him fight. Good with a spear and seax too. Quicker on his feet than you’d expect for someone his size, and his age. Always had a solemn look about him, I remember. He kept himself to himself.’

  That sounds like Skalpi, thinks Tova.

  ‘Do you know what happened to him?’ Merewyn asks, her eyes wide.

  ‘As I said, I only met him a few times, and only in passing. The last time I saw him was at Eoferwic during the battle. After that, I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  No sooner does hope begin to kindle in Merewyn’s eyes than it’s pinched out.

  Oslac says to her, ‘I thought you were about to tell us that you’d poisoned your husband, or something like that.’

  ‘Skalpi? You thought I killed him?’

  He shrugs. ‘It was a guess, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Let her speak, Oslac,’ says the priest. ‘That way you might find out.’ He gestures for Merewyn to continue.

  *

  Where was I? Oh, yes.

  You’re all probably thinking that it was a bad match. That a marriage should never be made in haste or to please others. But I suppose I was relieved more than anything. Relieved to be leaving my mother’s house at last. I’d grown up there, and it was a place of happy memories, but there was sadness as well because I knew those times had now passed and wouldn’t be returning. As it was, I didn’t really understand what I’d committed myself to until it was too late.