The Harrowing

by James Aitcheson

  Nothing I could say, though, would stir him, so I had no choice but to do as he asked and leave him alone with his thoughts. The first couple of times a night’s rest was enough to see him right, and the next day he would rise with the cock’s first crow and be smiling and laughing once more. The third time, however, he failed to appear at dawn. At the second hour I went up to his chamber with what was left of the previous day’s bread and some slices of sausage and a jug of well water, to find him not sleeping but beneath the blankets, lying on his side in the same position he had been the night before, hollow-eyed as he stared at the wall. He didn’t look up as I came in, nor as I set down the victuals by his bedside and drew up a stool.

  I must have sat with him for an hour or more, not saying anything because it was impossible to get any sort of reply from him. He would talk if he wanted, and if he didn’t he wouldn’t. And so I stroked his wiry hair and noticed for the first time how there was a bald patch at the back of his head where the skin was discoloured, and I wondered whether that was a war scar from his younger days, and realised how much he had yet to tell me about his life. Was it because he simply didn’t want to bring those memories to mind, or because he thought I wasn’t interested? Either way it made me sad. And I ate some of the bread and poured myself a cup of water, and I closed my eyes and listened to the birdsong outside and the clink-clink-clink of the smith at his forge.

  He said, ‘They hate me.’

  He spoke quietly, but even so he startled me. It took me a while to find my voice. I asked him what he meant, but of course I already knew the answer.

  ‘Orm and Ketil,’ he said. ‘Ælfric too, but it’s my sons I care most about. They despise me. Orm especially.’

  ‘They don’t hate you,’ I said, trying to soothe him, and it was partly true. I was fairly sure that Ketil bore no grudge against his father, and if he sometimes appeared to it was only because, being younger, he tended to follow Orm’s example in everything.

  Skalpi, though, told me not to be foolish. He knew well what was happening, he said, and if I didn’t see it then I was either blind or lying, and that if I had taken to lying to him then that meant I hated him too.

  ‘No, Lord,’ I protested. ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Then you resent me at least. I know you do, before you try to deny it.’

  I supposed I did, in a small way, but not for anything he had done. He’d always been kind to me, after all, and had given me freedoms I’d never enjoyed at home, even while my father still lived. If there was anything I resented him for, it was for not being the husband I had hoped for, and there was nothing he could do about that.

  He knew from my silence that he was right.

  He said, ‘At least you’re honest with me. Not like the others.’

  And he told me everything. About his first wife, Ælfswith, and her faithlessness towards him. How he longed for the companionship that she had given him. Not the sort that his bed-warmers gave him, that wasn’t what he meant, before you say anything. He wanted a woman who was learned, who knew her letters and could read to him in the long winter evenings, whom he could engage in conversation and in the table games he liked to play, who shared his love of poetry and of music and perhaps had some skill with harp or flute. A wife who was pleasing to the eye and whom he could proudly show off. Yes, he wanted that too, of course he did, because every man does. But he had no desire for more children, not at his age, and besides he doubted that he could any more. If he lived another ten years he would be lucky, he told me. His health was not what it had once been; each winter was harder than the last. It was his intention to spend whatever time God allowed him in peace. He had enough woes with the two children he had, and wouldn’t want Orm and Ketil to think that he was trying to rob them of their inheritance.

  And as I listened I couldn’t help but feel guilty. All these weeks and months he had tried to please me and to show me his affection, and what had I done for him in return? No wonder he thought everyone was against him. He felt alone, he said, in a way he’d not felt since he was nine winters old and his father sent him to be fostered in the house of his uncle across the sea, where they spoke a tongue he didn’t properly understand and they laughed at him for his English ways.

  But it wasn’t just that which was troubling him. There was more, something that had been pressing on his mind and he was reluctant to tell anyone, even though we would probably have learned it soon enough.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  The foreigners were marching, he said. King Wilelm was coming north, and he didn’t know what was going to happen.

  ‘He’s coming north?’

  ‘He took Eoferwic,’ Skalpi explained, ‘a week ago. The towns­men didn’t even put up a struggle. They knew things would only go badly for them if they tried.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I could hardly believe it. All through that summer we’d been hearing how the foreigners were advancing through the midland shires, overrunning the country, crushing without mercy any who dared to stand in their path. Everywhere they went they built those strongholds they call castles to terrify the people and cow them into surrendering. Every week it seemed another town fell to their swords. Wærwic. Ledecestre. Deorbi. Snotingeham. Lincolne.

  ‘But we’re safe here,’ I said, ‘aren’t we?’

  That was what people had always said, ever since the Normans first crossed the sea. They had no interest in us or our lands north of the Humbre. Two years had come and gone since the foreigners had first set foot on these shores. So far we had remained untouched by the wars that had afflicted the rest of England. No Frenchman dared set foot in these parts nor held a single scrap of land, because they’d heard that the Northumbrians were a fierce people, a proud people, and they didn’t dare anger us. They had enough trouble in the south as it was; they didn’t want to spread themselves too thinly across the kingdom and so make it easier for their foes to attack them. And besides, it was said, King Wilelm knew we would never suffer a foreign lord. Not like the folk of Wessex, whose necks were easily bowed. He feared us and respected us in equal measure, and was content to leave us be as long as we paid the dues that we owed him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Skalpi murmured. ‘I don’t know.’

  And suddenly I saw those boasts for what they were. Lies we’d told ourselves, although for a long time they’d seemed true enough. The quiet times we’d enjoyed, which we should have known wouldn’t last, were gone. For Eoferwic had fallen. Eoferwic, the great city, only a couple of days’ ride from Heldeby.

  At any moment they might arrive, I thought. If I ran down the stairs and out into the yard, already I might spy the dust cloud rising in the distance, kicked up by their horses’ hooves as they pounded the road. They would come along the track, across the bridge, in their byrnies of mail and their helmets shining bright, bearing steel in one hand and a sealed writ from King Wilelm in the other. And they would bring with them a priest or a monk from the minster, one who spoke both tongues: an Englishman who would tell us, stuttering because he was nervous, that the king had granted our land to these foreigners and that they were now the rightful lords. That this manor, these barley fields and pastures, orchards, fish weirs and grain stores, this hall, the mill, the sheepfolds and the pigpens and the cowsheds – all of it now belonged to them.

  And Skalpi would protest. He would spit and curse, and when none of that made any difference he would fly into a rage, and Orm and Ketil too, and perhaps blood would be spilt and there would be screaming, and there would be children wailing, and the cottars and geburs and slaves would cower in their houses because they wouldn’t know what was happening, and there would be nothing anyone could do. And they would cast us out. If we were lucky they might give us until dusk to gather our belongings, one pack-full, maybe, and then we would be made to leave, and if still we refused then they would cut us down where we stood.

  That was wha
t I was thinking. I could see it so clearly. We’d all heard the stories coming out of the south, which had reached us on the tongues of exiles and pedlars and travelling priests. Always it was the same.

  When eventually I could speak, I asked, ‘What do we do?’

  He didn’t answer. But then what was I expecting him to say? What could he say? He knew just as well as I did how helpless we were if the Normans did come. There was nothing we could do. Only wait and hope.

  Outside a nightingale trilled gently, but I didn’t feel her joy. If only I had wings, I thought, then I would be able to fly away. That was the first time I’d ever felt truly afraid. You know what I mean: the sort of terror that clutches at your heart and steals the breath from your chest and seizes your limbs so that you can hardly move. The same that I feel now, sitting here with you, not knowing what’s going to happen or if we’re even going to survive this night. Knowing that they’re out there somewhere, and that at any moment they could find us . . .

  Anyway, I don’t know whether it was because I was frightened and cold, or because, like Skalpi, I too was looking for companionship, or because I was desperate to do something, anything, to raise him from his sorrow. Probably it was all of those things. I don’t remember any more, if I even knew at the time. I was confused, I know that much. It was like I had a hundred voices all shouting in my ear, trying to drown each other out, and nothing I could do would make them go away.

  Maybe it was one of those voices that told me what I needed to do then, because I found myself shedding my shoes, my dress, my undergown, and sliding under the coarse blankets into the warm bed beside him.

  *

  ‘And?’ Oslac asks with a smirk on his face that Tova doesn’t like. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I’ve just told you,’ says Merewyn indignantly. ‘If you can’t work it out for yourself then you’re more stupid than you look.’

  ‘I thought we might hear the rest of it, that’s all. It’ll be something to cheer us and keep us warm through the night.’

  She regards him with disgust. ‘What do you take me for?’

  ‘A good storyteller always gives his listeners what they want. That was one of the first lessons my father taught me.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got as much as I’m going to give you. And you can stop looking at me that way.’

  *

  After that things remained uneasy for a long time. We learned later that hardly had Eoferwic fallen than the king had marched back south to quell some disturbance or other. He’d left behind him some men to hold the city and the surrounding lands, and appointed as shire reeve a Frenchman born to an English mother, whose authority he thought we might accept.

  Despite my fears, peace of a kind prevailed, although it was an uneasy peace. From what little we heard, and it was only what we could gather second hand from such travellers who from time to time stayed as guests, the Normans seemed content to confine themselves to the city and the shores of the Humbre. I remember Orm saying that this only proved what men had been saying before: that the invaders feared the men of Northumbria. They were foolish words from someone who as far as I knew had never actually seen a fight in his life, as much as he loved his spear and shield practice, but he wasn’t the only one saying such things.

  Nevertheless I had the feeling that this wasn’t the end of it, and that either later in the year or else in the spring the king and his army would be back. The sparrowhawk was hovering, watching and waiting for the right moment to stoop and strike. That’s what I said to Skalpi, although he surely knew it already. His temper grew shorter and those grey moods of his ever darker as the harvest season passed, the slaughter month began, the trees shed their golden raiment and the first frosts came. He would ride with me and sit with me in the orchard and let me read or sing to him, but he also continued to spend much of his time alone, and in those moments when the gloom overtook him there was little I or anyone could do to stir him from it.

  In the meantime life at Heldeby continued much as it had done. As it had to, if we wanted to place food upon the table and have fuel and warm clothes to last us through the winter. I often confided in Tova, and she in me. We shared our worries and exchanged tales, and over the months I suppose we gradually became friends. I’d grown up surrounded by boys, you see. All my life when I was young I’d wanted a sister I could play with and whom I could confide in when I was feeling sad. Eadmer and I were close, but that was different. While our brothers were alive he was more interested in being with them and joining in their adventures. Exploring the woods near the house, stretching hides over wicker frames to make boats that they could use to see what was downstream. Wrestling with them, even though they were much bigger and stronger and so always bested him.

  I never had anyone I felt I could talk to. There’d been my mother, I suppose, but she hadn’t had much time for me. So I never had a friend, a true friend, until I came to Heldeby and until I met Tova.

  It helped, I think, that we had a lot in common, strange though that probably sounds. We both found ourselves in situations not of our choosing. We were both looking for companionship and both desperately needed an ally, in particular against Orm, whose father seemed to have given up trying to restrain him.

  It was about that time, as winter approached, that we first began to hear rumours of the rebellion, of a great host gathering somewhere beyond the old wall to drive the Normans from the kingdom and back across the Narrow Sea. And we heard as well that the ætheling, Eadgar, who had been deprived of the throne by Wilelm and kept as a hostage at his court, had managed to escape his captors and had fled. To join the rising, some said; others said to lead it. But there were so many rumours coming from all quarters in the weeks before and after Yule that it was hard to be sure which held any sort of truth at all and which were just wishful thinking.

  Orm, for his part, wanted to join the ætheling, to take up arms and fight. Skalpi, though, forbade it, insisting that the rebellion was nothing more than foolish hearsay, and in any case no army ever chose to march in winter, when the ground was hard and the weather foul and food scarce, when seasoned fighting men could drop dead of a chill while the enemy were safely ensconced behind the walls of their strongholds, keeping warm by their hearths, as all sensible folk did in the cold months. Orm sulked and lashed out, and managed to put out the eye of one of the neighbouring ceorls he often sparred with, and the longer it went on the worse he became, and Tova was worried, too, weren’t you? You didn’t know what he might do next and if he might threaten you again, or worse.

  You came to me, I remember, seeking my help because you didn’t know who else to go to, and I promised he wouldn’t touch you and that I would make sure of it, although at first I wasn’t sure how, but I’d given you my word, and so I went to Skalpi that afternoon – about a week before midwinter I think it was – and asked if he might grant you your freedom. I didn’t give him the real reason why, but said that we had more than enough slaves to work in the kitchen and in the dairy and in the fields, whereas I needed a maidservant, someone to help in the house and hall who could keep me company in the afternoons while I was at my stitching and my weaving. All of those things were true, of course, and I knew that as long as you were with me and a part of the household, Orm would never dare come near you.

  Of course he agreed, as I knew he would. More than anything he wanted to please me, and so he made the arrangements. Thorvald was heartened when he heard what Skalpi intended, because granting someone their freedom was the mark of a generous soul, and God would duly record such a worthy deed in his book and remember it when the end of days came. There was a ceremony of sorts, although it was only myself and Skalpi and his sons and Ælfric who witnessed it, together with maybe half a dozen men from nearby manors, with the priest there to preside.

  We went out on foot to the crossroads where our lands abutted our neighbours’, even though it was raining and the tracks were cl
ogged with mud. There my husband and I in turn clasped Tova’s hands while Thorvald spoke a prayer in Latin and Skalpi said the necessary words, and then when we returned to the hall he brought us forward one by one, to make our marks on the charter that Thorvald had prepared confirming Tova’s freedom. I was first to be called, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Orm scowling. I tried to ignore him, to put him from my mind, but I couldn’t help but smile at the victory I’d won over him, small though it might be.

  Thorvald pointed to the place where I was to place my cross, forgetting that I knew how to read and so could see my name already spelt out below Skalpi’s. Or close enough, anyway: the priest’s spindly letters were bunched up so tightly together that I wasn’t sure that they were all present, but they were recognisable, and I supposed that’s all they needed to be. After that I swore myself to keep and defend Tova, and you swore that you would serve me faithfully always. We both shed some tears, didn’t we? I even saw the old priest weeping a little too, and I hugged him and Skalpi and thanked them both.

  *

  ‘Forgive me,’ says Guthred, ‘but what does all this have to do with why you were running?’

  ‘I’m coming to that. I’m only telling you this because I don’t want you to think badly of me for what happened.’