It was a victory of sorts, I suppose, but it didn’t feel like one. The fire raged all day. When the flames died we realised the damage they’d done. Where the great minster church had stood, there was nothing but ash. The enemy’s stronghold was a smouldering wreck; of the city’s walls there was barely a stretch left standing that we could defend. As we picked our way through the ruins, it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to hold the city, and that there was nothing left worth defending in any case. We’d heard by then that King Wilelm was on his way from the south at the head of a great army of barons and oath men, and we knew we had little time before he was upon us.
We retrieved what little we could from the smoking town; the Danes under Jarl Osbjorn carried their share to their ships. And then, by boat and by land, we retreated as swiftly as we could downriver to that marshy nook of land called Heldernesse, which lies between the wolds and the German Sea. And there we waited while our leaders tried to decide what to do next and how best to take the war to the foreigners.
Gospatric wanted to march forth and meet King Wilelm in battle in one last throw of the dice, but Osbjorn was more cautious. Having already braved a long sea voyage, his warriors weren’t about to risk everything unless it was on ground of their choosing and on terms that suited them. Some had come hoping to win land, but more had come in the hope of plunder that they could take back with them to their homes across the sea. No amount of silver and gold would be worth anything if they were dead.
*
‘What did you do, then?’ Guthred asks.
‘Nothing,’ says Beorn. ‘We did nothing.’
*
For weeks we waited.
Eadgar and Gospatric and Osbjorn each sent out their scouts, men like myself, to keep an eye on the enemy’s movements. We rode out and saw the king’s army; we came back and reported what we’d seen, which was that the Normans showed no sign of seeking battle, but were content to wait while our provisions and spirits ran low.
And running low they were. We heard that the enemy had sent out raiding parties both sides of the Humbre. Groups of twenty, thirty, forty horsemen, who stripped granaries and storehouses everywhere so that the supplies we so desperately needed didn’t fall into our hands. Not just food and ale but also firewood and lantern oil, things like that: all the things an army needed to keep warm and fed as the days grew shorter and the nights colder. And the less we were able to forage, the more had to be rationed, the hungrier grew our stomachs, and the more tempers flared. Men grew irritable; squabbles erupted over half-heard insults. Old wounds were reopened; long-standing feuds between families broke out afresh. There was fighting. Some were injured. Some died. Others swore vengeance. And so it went on.
And still we did nothing. The leaves began to fall and the first frosts arrived, earlier than expected; the land was becoming bare, and we all knew we’d struggle to support ourselves through the winter to come. Sickness was spreading through our camp, not helped by the foul marsh air. Every second man was suffering from flux, it seemed. Some of the Danes talked about making for home before the weather worsened and the seas grew too difficult for sailing, so that they could be back for Yule. They said it laughingly, or so we thought. Meanwhile Eadgar and Osbjorn quarrelled about the best course of action, and quarrelled some more, until they refused to speak to one another. Gospatric and some others tried to forge some sort of agreement, but it was no use.
We should have seen the inevitable coming. Instead we kept going, kept telling ourselves that we would march again soon. But we knew that the king was mustering more men by the week from other parts of the kingdom. His ranks were swelling while ours were dwindling.
It started with the Danes. One day they were there; the next they weren’t. They left without a word, simply abandoned their camp overnight, took to their ships in the murky light of dawn and were gone, as if they had never been. We later learned that King Wilelm had been sending them secret messengers, promising them shiploads of silver and gold, as much as they could carry back with them and more besides, if they broke their compact with Eadgar. Like the grasping craven that he was, Osbjorn accepted.
After that, things only got worse. Shorn of allies and with no real expectation of victory, many in our own army began to question why we were continuing the fight, what we could hope to gain. Whether it was better to desert and beg the king’s mercy. And so, riven by grievances, confined to the marsh country, without anything to strive for, with our leadership in disarray, spirits failing and hopes ground to dust, the rebellion crumbled.
*
‘And what about you?’ asks Merewyn. ‘You haven’t said what you were doing while all this was happening.’
‘Yes, I thought this was supposed to be your story,’ Oslac mutters.
‘I was serving in the household guard of my lord, Cynehelm,’ Beorn says. ‘He was no one of any particular standing or wealth, just a merchant who’d prospered through many years’ trading, until he’d earned the rights and rank of a thegn. He had a manor a short way downriver of Snotingeham, where we spent our winters between sea voyages, at least until it was burned by the Normans and his lands stolen from him while we were overseas. When we returned from our travels we found our home gone and our wives and children too. Some slain, we were told; the rest taken away to be sold at far-off markets. After that he vowed to take up arms until not a single Frenchman remained this side of the Narrow Sea, and the rest of us joined him.’
‘You had a wife?’ Merewyn asks.
‘I did. Ingeborg, her name was. More beautiful than any creature I’ve ever seen, before or since. Kind in spirit, although stern when she had a mind to be.’
‘Was she killed by the Normans?’
‘No, she wasn’t killed, although many were. She left this world three years ago. She was charged by a bull that had escaped his field while she was out milking. Her ribs were crushed and both her legs broken. She died soon after.’
He speaks the words, Tova thinks, offhandedly, without any feeling behind them, like he has said the same thing many times before and has grown tired of repeating it. If she was being unkind, she might say he’d rehearsed it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Merewyn says.
Beorn begins again: ‘As I was saying—’
‘Wait,’ says Oslac before he can go on. ‘You said some folk had been taken away to be sold. The Normans don’t keep or sell slaves.’
‘And what would you know of it?’
Oslac shrugs. ‘It’s what I’ve been told. Their bishops forbid it.’
‘He’s right,’ Guthred says. ‘I remember hearing that the dean once entertained a monk from France who happened to stop at Rypum overnight on his way to Lindisfarena. He denounced the dean for keeping so many unfree labourers to work the canonry’s lands, especially when he and his fellow priests lived in such luxury. The monk grew quite angry, I heard, and said that they weren’t fit to call themselves men of God.’
‘Well, you weren’t there,’ Beorn says. ‘I was. That’s what I saw, and what I heard.’
‘Maybe you were misinformed,’ Oslac suggests, ‘because if what you say is true it couldn’t have been the Normans who burned your lord’s manor.’
‘Or maybe you’re the one who was misinformed. Have you thought about that? Because that’s what happened. Now, are you going to let me carry on with my story?’
The younger man scowls but says nothing, and that’s probably just as well.
*
When the rebellion crumbled, it crumbled quickly. After the Danes, the next to abandon the cause were the swords-for-hire who had flocked from across these isles to the ætheling’s banner. Once they realised the campaign was stalling and there would be no easy plunder, they took to their ships and sailed back to Orkaneya, the Suthreyjar, Mann and Yrland and wherever else they’d come from. Not long after that a number of the leading thegns began to slip awa
y, some to renew their submission to the king and plead his forgiveness, others to skulk back to their manors, seeking the comforts of the hearth fire and the mead cup.
No one worried too much about them. Most of us were glad to see the back of weak-willed men who had no stomach for a winter campaign, men who didn’t deserve to call themselves warriors. But the rot had taken hold, and now it spread to the heartwood.
Maybe Eadgar had already sensed the inevitable. Maybe he was thinking that the longer he held out and the more of his spearmen and fyrdmen deserted him, the closer the Normans grew to overcoming us entirely. Maybe he feared what might happen if he fell into their hands.
I don’t know. None of us knew. The princeling kept his own counsel. He didn’t let anyone into his chamber who wasn’t one of his trusted retainers or advisers. Even men like Earl Gospatric, without whom he’d never have got as far as he had, were no longer welcome.
In the end the rebellion was finished by a rumour. The days were growing short and winter was almost upon us when one afternoon a story spread through the camp that the enemy were on their way. Their entire army. Thousands of Normans. They knew we were weakened, and now they were coming in force, only a few hours away from destroying us utterly.
Where the rumour came from, if it was true at all, or if the whole thing was just an enemy ruse, I have no idea. It hardly matters now. The end was near. It would have happened sooner or later.
It didn’t matter then, either. No one wanted to wait to find out whether or not it was true, least of all Eadgar. I saw him and his huscarls, mailed and helmeted, with banners flying, mounting their horses and marshalling their men to ride out. I watched his servants emerge from his great tent carrying armfuls of clothes, cooking pots, weapons and helmets, with cloaks over their shoulders and ale flasks hanging from their belts and leather scrips slung across their chests. Four of them dragged out an immense chest that they must have found in the ruins of the enemy castle at Eoferwic, since I didn’t know where else it could have come from, and stuffed silver chains and pouches of coins into their lord’s packs and saddlebags.
Within the hour the ætheling was gone, despite the protests of Gospatric and everyone else who’d placed their faith in him, who’d pledged their swords and their spears and their shields in his support and were willing to fight to the last. He fled back into the north with his retainers, his clerks and his servants, his shield bearers and his stable hands. Into exile.
And that was that. After he left all was chaos. You heard how it was from those who returned. Men gathered their things and made ready to flee. We were so few by then; what had once been an army ten thousand strong was reduced to mere fragments. Those thegns who’d remained, who had stayed loyal to the cause through everything, rode back to the halls and the strongholds that they called home. I don’t blame them. There was nothing more they could have done. Not by then.
And so our proud host broke apart, its various parts each going their separate ways, like a spear shaft shearing into so many splinters.
For us, though, that was just the start.
*
‘Why?’ Tova asks. ‘What did you do then?’
*
Most, as I said, fled back to their halls and their homes. But we, Cynehelm and his men, had no home to go back to. There were others like us too: men who had stood in the shield walls at Fuleford and Stanford Brycg, who had given everything for this land, and who weren’t ready to suffer under the rule of foreigners. We all knew that submitting to the king would be futile. There would be no mercy. Not after we’d twice risen against him. And so we bound ourselves by oaths, pledged our blades to each other’s service, and swore to continue the fight by whatever means we could. By whatever means we had to.
In all there were perhaps two dozen of us, never more than that. We were men of all ages, some barely out of boyhood while others were in their fortieth winter, and we hailed from all quarters of Britain. Honest men, noble men, fierce men, scoundrels. The one thing we had in common was that, for whatever reason, we could not or did not want to go home.
And Cynehelm was the one who led us. He didn’t think himself much of a warrior, not really, although by anyone else’s estimation he was more than competent. But then that was true of everyone who chose to ply their trade, as he did, upon the dangerous waters of the German Sea, where the sea wolves roam in search of vessels that ride heavy across the waves, laden with goods for distant markets.
He wasn’t the easiest of men to like. He could be cold and sour-tempered at times. Cynehelm Caldheort, he was sometimes called, although never to his face and only by those who didn’t know him. Cynehelm the Unfeeling. Those who were as close to him as I was, though, knew that he was a fair and generous lord, who always tried to do right by those who depended on him.
He wasn’t much to look at either. He took little pride in his appearance. He didn’t care for glittering arm rings or jewelled weapon hilts, fine-spun cloaks and ornamented sword belts, as some men did. He’d risen to his rank in life not through birthright but through his own hard toil, and he never felt the need for the trappings of wealth that others so adored. He preferred to let his deeds speak for him. Maybe that’s why men sometimes underestimated him. He was patient, or tried to be, anyway. Only fools ever mocked him, and they never did so twice. To his followers, he was someone who knew how to command respect and how to win confidence.
He was a good lord, in spite of everything.
*
‘Was?’ asks Merewyn.
‘He isn’t any more.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘He’s dead. But I’m coming to that.’
*
When you’re out on the open sea and a storm blows up around you, you don’t try to fight the waves. Not if you want to live. No, you ride them, even if that means they end up taking you far from where you were intending to go. As the wind changes, you have to change with it. And that’s what we did.
For everyone else the war was over. For us it was only beginning.
Even as the rest of the army was fleeing into the north, we ventured south, into the midland shires and what used to be known as the territory of the Five Boroughs, which the Normans had already brought under their heel. We abandoned our horses, going on foot so as to be less easily noticed, keeping off the main roads and tracks. We took to travelling by night, stealing our way through the shadows. By day we slept in ditches and in copses, though always with one eye open and with weapons close to hand.
Over the next month we lived off the land, surviving by our wits and our swords, laying ambushes for the enemy on woodland paths, slaying any French-speakers we came across, attacking supply trains that were poorly guarded, killing those we could and then emptying the contents of their carts into the nearest river. Barrels of salted pork and pickled herring, casks of ale or wine or butter – all of it. We took just enough to slake our hunger and thirst, and then in it went, the bodies as well.
But that wasn’t enough. Not for Cynehelm. His home, our home, had been destroyed by the foreigners. He wanted vengeance. From waylaying convoys and scouting parties, we soon turned to more ambitious undertakings. We set the torch to mills and barns, stables and churches and even halls, barring the doors from the outside so that no one could escape, then watching from afar as the thatch smouldered and sparked into light and the flames swept across the roof until the whole thing was seething with flame. Then would come the screaming, as those inside realised what was happening, screaming that only grew louder when they tried the doors only to discover they were trapped. After that, the coughing and the choking, quickly drowned out by the roar as the beams and the wall timbers caught, and the building became one bright-blazing, twisting column: a beacon and a warning.
*
‘But that’s horrible,’ says Tova.
‘That’s war. If you think it’s anything like the tales that
the poets and skalds sing, you’re wrong.’ He glares at Oslac. ‘They know nothing. It isn’t about heroes and kings. It’s not about mighty shield walls clashing, the clatter of steel upon lime wood, the sword song ringing out or the glory of the kill. The man who claims it is hasn’t seen battle. He has never been in a real fight, nor probably ever hefted a blade longer than a carving knife. Certainly he has never plunged it into a man’s belly, driving deeper, twisting until the blood gushes thick and fast all over his arm, then stood bellowing in triumph, watching for the moment when the light goes out from his enemy’s eyes and he voids himself all over the ground at his feet. They don’t sing long into the winter nights about the joy of wading ankle-deep in pools of vomit and shit and piss and mud, do they?’
‘No,’ Tova says quietly.
‘Well, that’s what war is like, girl. It’s about ambushes and raids. Looting. Seizing goods, cattle and sheep. Taking your enemy by surprise; striking when he least expects it. Letting him know that, as long as you live, you won’t let him sleep quietly in his bed. And it wasn’t just the foreigners. Many thegns, in the midland shires especially, had given their oaths to King Wilelm and marched under his banner. Marched with the foreigners. It makes me angry to think about it even now. Englishmen who’d turned against their people, who had even killed their own kinsfolk. Who had begun drinking wine and were learning to speak the French tongue, who had set aside their wives so that they could take Norman brides, all to win favour.’
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