For now, though, they have to wait. She shuts her eyes tight and listens to the sound of her heart. Still racing. Thump, thump, thump, thump. Like the hammer at the smith’s anvil. There’s more shouting, but it’s far away now. The breeze stirs the undergrowth. When it dies down again there’s no sound of anyone.
‘I think they’ve gone,’ Tova whispers after a while longer.
Merewyn doesn’t say anything, just nods.
All the same they don’t move. Not yet. Not until they can be sure. What if the Normans come this way, or Wulfnoth?
No sooner has the thought crossed her mind than she hears a rustling in the undergrowth, close by, in the direction of the river. She tenses, holding her breath. She glances at her lady and they shrink back behind the tree. Is that them?
Stay still, she thinks. As long as they don’t make a sound, there’s no reason whoever it is should find them.
A voice calls out: ‘Tova! Merewyn! Guthred!’
It’s Oslac.
Should they shout back? What if the enemy are out there as well? What if they hear?
He calls again. There is a muffled sound like something suddenly hitting the ground. He curses loudly, then moments later calls again, only his voice is fainter this time. He’s moving away, Tova thinks.
‘We’re here,’ she calls as she gets to her feet, rubbing her arms against the chill of the night. ‘Oslac!’
‘Tova?’
‘Over here!’
‘Where?’
At last he finds them, emerging from the trees, covered in thorns and bits of leaves, with twigs sticking out of his hair.
‘Oh, thank God,’ he says when he sees them. ‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’
Tova throws her arms around him, surprising him, and herself. This was the man who, after all, deserted them only a few hours ago. She breaks away, feeling suddenly awkward. But he’s back with them now, and he still has the priest’s scrip.
‘Is Guthred with you?’ Merewyn asks.
‘I thought he was with you. He’s not here?’
‘No. We don’t know what happened to him.’
Oh, no, Tova thinks. She has a terrible feeling in her gut. ‘Do you think . . . ?’
‘I don’t know,’ Oslac says.
‘What about Beorn?’
‘The last I saw, he was still fighting, but they had him surrounded. Then they started after me, three of them. I had no choice but to run. I didn’t see any more than that. I think the Normans went back the other way; I didn’t hear them after that.’
Not Beorn as well. He can’t be dead. He can’t be.
‘He’ll be all right,’ Merewyn says, still shivering. She looks a sorry sight. ‘He’ll have managed, somehow. Won’t he? He’ll have got away. He must have.’
Oslac nods. ‘I hope so.’
Tova asks, ‘What happened to you? Where did you come from?’
He stands, catching his breath for a moment. ‘I don’t know where to start. This whole day . . . After I left you, I walked for a couple of hours and then ran into a Norman raiding band. They took me captive. I thought they’d kill me there and then, but they didn’t. They were searching for some rebels on their way to Hagustaldesham. One of the Frenchmen spoke our tongue; he asked me if I knew anything about them. I said I didn’t, but I think he could tell I was hiding something. He said that unless I told them, they’d kill me, and they’d do it slowly so that before long I would be begging them to let me die. They made me tell. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice. Please, understand. I was frightened for my life. I said there was a band of four – two men and two women – heading in that direction across the hills. I thought they would let me go after that, but they took me with them so that I could lead them to you. This one who spoke English, he said that if it turned out I was trying to trick them they would kill me anyway. They’d slice open my belly and leave me as food for the—’
‘Lies.’
Tova looks up. She knows that voice. She would know it anywhere.
‘Beorn!’
He doesn’t look at her. Instead he makes straight for Oslac, who retreats, but not quickly enough.
Beorn hurls his fist towards the poet’s face, striking him on the jaw. Oslac reels back, shouting out in protest and in pain.
‘What are you doing?’ Merewyn shrieks.
But Beorn’s eyes are fixed on Oslac. ‘You led them to us.’
The poet turns to run, but he’s barely taken two steps when he slips. He flounders and falls, landing on his back.
‘They made him,’ Tova says, grabbing at the warrior’s arm. ‘Didn’t you just hear what he said? He didn’t have a choice.’
Beorn shakes her off as he advances and spits at Oslac. The poet turns his head, and it lands upon his cheek.
‘They didn’t make him do anything,’ Beorn says sharply, and then to Oslac: ‘Who are you really?’
Merewyn says, ‘Beorn, this is nonsense.’
‘Shut up. Shut up, both of you, and let me speak. Answer me, wretch. Tell me why it is that our friend the priest is now dead.’
‘He’s dead?’ Tova echoes.
Merewyn gasps. ‘No.’
Beorn swallows. His voice quakes ever so slightly as he says, ‘He is. I tried to stop them. I did my best, but there were too many of them. They ran him through in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything, and now he’s dead, and it’s all because of him.’
He draws his seax and points it at Oslac, who flinches back.
‘It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,’ the poet blurts. ‘He wasn’t meant to die!’
‘How was it supposed to happen, then?’
Oslac is silent.
‘Speak,’ Beorn says. He kicks the younger man hard in the side.
The poet puts out a hand to defend himself, to no avail, and cries out.
‘How much did they offer you?’
‘What’s he talking about, Oslac?’ asks Tova.
The poet doesn’t lift his eyes, but keeps watching the point of the seax, as if expecting the killing thrust to come at any point. Out of the collar of his tunic hangs the gold chain she spotted him fingering the other day. There’s something attached to it, she sees.
‘What’s this?’ Beorn reaches down and snatches at it, tearing it from the poet’s neck before he can raise a hand. He examines it closely. ‘They gave you this, didn’t they?’
Oslac says nothing. Beorn tosses it to Tova. She isn’t expecting it, but somehow she manages to catch it in clumsy, unfeeling fingers.
A thin disc of gold is suspended from the chain. Like a coin, only larger: if she put the tip of her forefinger to that of her thumb, it would just about fit through the hole. Embossed upon its face, she can make out in the moonlight, is a depiction of a rider at full gallop, with a sword in one hand and a pointed shield in the other. Writing around the edge.
‘Look at the other side,’ Beorn says.
She turns it over. Stretched across the middle of the disc is an animal. She squints, trying to work out what she’s looking at. A long tail that doubles back on itself. Four legs, claws. A mane.
A lion, she thinks. The lion of Normandy. But why would he have—?
Oh.
Her cheeks flush hot. Angry that he has managed to trick them. Angry at him. Angry at herself for not seeing it.
‘Oslac?’ she asks uncertainly as she gives the chain to her lady to look at. ‘Is it true?’
His voice, when he speaks, is cold. ‘It’s true.’
‘You led the Normans to us?’
He nods.
‘You deceived us,’ Merewyn says. ‘We trusted you!’
Beorn stands over him, stopping him from getting up. ‘Who are you really?’
‘Who am I?’ he asks. ‘I should be asking you that question.’<
br />
Tova frowns. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Ask him. Ask him what his real name is.’
She turns to the warrior, whose teeth are clenched. He looks as if he might kill Oslac at any moment. ‘Beorn?’
Beorn doesn’t answer. He’s shaking his head, slowly. The blade pointed at the poet’s throat trembles.
‘You thought no one would work it out, didn’t you?’ Oslac says to him. ‘Well, I did. For a long time I wasn’t sure, but as soon as I was, I knew I couldn’t—’
‘This isn’t about me,’ Beorn says, cutting him off. ‘This is about you and your lies.’
‘My lies? What about yours?’
‘I’m not the one who gave us away to our enemies. Everything I told you was the truth.’
‘Not everything. You told us Cynehelm was dead.’
‘He is. He died that day, in the fight.’
‘What does this have to do with anything?’ Merewyn asks.
But Oslac’s attention is on Beorn, and him alone. ‘Are you going to tell them, or should I?’
‘I should just kill you now,’ the warrior says.
‘You mean like you slaughtered all those others? You killed them in their beds. You burned them alive inside their own feasting halls. Yes, I heard the tales, long before I heard them from you.’
‘I’m warning you, whelp. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t just bury this blade in your gut.’
‘Do it. If that’s what you want to do, I can’t stop you. But it won’t change anything. They’ll still want to know. If they haven’t already guessed it by now. They’ll still want to hear it from your own mouth.’
‘Hear what?’ Merewyn asks.
But Tova knows. She has worked it out, even if her lady hasn’t. She turns to face Beorn – the man whom she has known as Beorn, at any rate.
‘You’re Cynehelm,’ she says. ‘He wasn’t your lord, was he? He was you.’
Cynehelm Caldheort. Cynehelm the Unfeeling. It’s him. But why would he change his name? Why pretend to be someone else?
‘Cynehelm is gone, girl,’ Beorn says. ‘He set out to kill Malger that morning and he didn’t come back, and that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing left of him now.’
‘I don’t understand,’ says Merewyn, glancing at Oslac. ‘What does it matter?’
But Oslac isn’t paying her any attention. ‘You see now why I did it, don’t you? I didn’t mean for anyone else to be caught up in it. I didn’t mean for Guthred to get hurt, or any of you. That’s why, when I saw you this morning, Tova, I urged you to leave while you still had the chance. To leave and to run as fast and as far away from him as you could.’
‘You tried to get me killed,’ Beorn says.
‘I only did what I had to do,’ Oslac answers. ‘What my heart and my head were telling me was right. I didn’t mean for Guthred to die, I really didn’t. You have to believe me.’
‘I believe you’re a worthless worm that doesn’t deserve to live.’
Beorn brings the blade closer to Oslac’s face, so close that the point is almost touching his skin.
‘No!’ Tova says.
The warrior stops. ‘What?’
‘We should let him speak. It’s only right.’
‘And suffer him to live another moment? Why should we, when he’s already as good as admitted everything?’
‘Because . . . because that’s not what we do. That’s not who we are. We don’t kill for the sake of it. We don’t murder out of hand. We’re not them.’
‘She’s right,’ Merewyn says. ‘We had the chance to tell our tales, didn’t we? Well, now it’s his turn. And I for one want to hear what he has to say for himself.’
‘And when he’s finished telling, what then?’
‘Then we can decide, all of us together. We can decide if he should die, or if we ought to let him go.’
Beorn doesn’t speak for a long time; his seax remains at the poet’s throat. Oslac watches it warily, taking shallow, quick breaths, expecting his death to arrive at any moment. He looks terrified, as well he should. Like a small child, defenceless. A wretched creature.
‘All right,’ Beorn says at last. ‘Whatever it is you have to say, spew it out. This is your one chance, you understand? So make it quick. And you can give the lady your cloak too. She looks as though she’s about to freeze.’
Oslac
This is how it’s going to be then, is it? You let me speak and then you judge me? Why should I bother? You’re not going to show me any mercy. You, of all people, Cynehelm.
All right, all right. You want to know who I am? Well, I’ll tell you. My name is Oslac, and that’s the truth. Oslac, son of Osferth, son of Oswald. I won’t bore you with tales of my childhood. As if you cared, anyway.
I was in my eighteenth summer when my father was killed. Not by the Normans, before you ask. By rebels. Fellow English folk. He was reeve of Suthperetune, the manor where I grew up. One of the king’s manors, it was. He’d been the reeve there for as long as almost anyone could remember: he’d been there in King Eadward’s time, long before the foreigners ever set foot on these shores, and he continued to serve after Wilelm took the crown. When all the nobles of the southern shires came together to offer their surrender to the new king after his victory at Hæstinges, Osferth was among them.
Go ahead. Call him a traitor if you like, but remember that it was either that or else exile or death. That was the choice he had to make.
*
‘I know what I’d have chosen,’ Beorn mutters.
‘We’re not asking you, though, are we?’ Merewyn says. She gestures for Oslac to go on.
*
Almost a year after the foreigners first came across the sea was when it happened. One night some men raided the manor, our home, and burned it to the ground; four of them armed with swords burst into the chamber where my father slept and dragged him into the open and slew him in front of my eyes. They let me say my last farewell to him and then they made me watch while they ran him through. They left everyone else alive. He was the one they were after, simply because he’d chosen to make his peace with the Normans.
I was his only surviving child; there was no one else to share my sorrow with and there was nothing else left for me there, so I gathered the few belongings I had and took to the road with my harp and songs and tales I’d learned from him, thinking to make my living as a storyteller while I tracked down the men who had murdered him. I had no idea then what I planned to do if and when I did somehow manage to find them; my head was so full of anger and grief and I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.
In the end it was easier than I expected. As I travelled the shire, I heard tales of similar attacks. All I had to do was follow the trail of blood they’d left in their wake. Within two weeks of my father’s death, I’d tracked them to their camp on the edge of the marshes, in a nook of land that could be reached only by a single narrow path. There were fewer of them than I’d first thought – only eight men in all, it turned out. From speaking with various people on my wanderings, I’d already managed to find out the names of half of them. Mostly local folk, they were, who’d run away to take up arms when they heard that the invaders were seizing the land. I found a hiding place amid the reeds and I watched them for the better part of an afternoon, slipping away as the sun was setting. They’d seemed like terrifying, towering giants that night, but by day, I saw how unimposing they were, some so thin that they were almost wasting away; as young as me and some even younger.
These were the men who had murdered Osferth.
There were too many of them for me to do anything alone, much as I would have liked to kill them myself. So I did the next best thing. There was a castle a few miles away, built by a Norman who was determined to root out all the rebels in the shire so that he could win favour with the king. So that’s where I went. To
begin with I was refused an audience, but I persisted and eventually his men agreed to take me to his writing room, where he was composing a letter. Once there I told him what had happened to my father, the king’s reeve, how I’d been seeking out his killers and how I’d been able to track them to their camp. He listened patiently and sent for food and wine to be brought to me, and as soon as I’d finished saying what I had to, he rode out with his retinue.
Three hours later he returned full of cheer, carrying a bloody sack with eight heads that he tipped out into the yard. He ordered his men to impale them on stakes for all to see, while he came and put his arm around my shoulder and placed a leather purse filled with silver in my hand. In broken English he told me that if I ever heard any more news of rebels hiding in the marshes and the hills then I should come to him with what I’d been able to learn, and there would be further rewards.
You’re already judging me, I can see. But I tell you this: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I did the right thing. Did I feel guilty? Never for a moment. I wasn’t shocked when I saw those men’s bruised and scarred faces, with eyes glazed and mouths hanging open. My heart didn’t sink; I didn’t feel as though my soul had been stained by sin. No, I was overjoyed.
My father was worth all those eight men put together, and more besides. If it had been fifty men, it still wouldn’t have been enough. They had no right to take his life.
And that’s how it started.
Afterwards, it didn’t even cross my mind to go home. I wanted to get as far away from there as I could, and to forget everything that had happened. That was my life for the next year: I’d travel from place to place, playing my harp and singing for a penny here, a warm bed or a hot meal and a flagon of mead there. I left Sumorsæte and made my way to Lundene, and from there north into Mercia. Most of the time I travelled alone, although sometimes I would meet a monk or a pedlar or someone driving their livestock to market, and I would walk with them and listen to what they had to say.
As much as I wanted to, though, I couldn’t forget. Everywhere I went, I heard news of cattle thefts or church raids or burnings or roadside killings. Almost every alewife and dairymaid I spoke to had a story to tell of husbands and brothers and cousins who had gone away to join the wild men, whose numbers seemed to be swelling as the months passed.
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