The Harrowing

by James Aitcheson

  Tova hefts the book in her lap. What’s left of it, anyway. Already more than a third of the pages have gone. Beorn couldn’t find much by way of dry wood in the dark last night, and they needed the parchment to help feed the flames, to keep them going. A good thing she didn’t leave it behind, she thinks bitterly, although she doesn’t think Beorn appreciates the irony.

  She protested, of course, but he asked her impatiently if she wanted to die of cold, and in the end she had no choice. She made him wait, though, while she leafed through the pages, picking out those without pictures on either side, making sure he took those first. He said nothing as he ripped them from the binding, one by one, and twisted them and crumpled them into balls, and placed them atop the flames, then cupped his hands over them and blew gently.

  At first nothing happened. Tova wondered if maybe the holy words couldn’t be destroyed, that they were somehow protected by God. But then the edges began to curl, going first yellow and then brown and then black, and that blackness spread slowly across the surface, which shrivelled and hissed and smoked, until suddenly it all went up in a mass of writhing orange tongues: line after line of intricate ink curls dissolving into searing brightness, vanishing into smoke and ash.

  One sheet, then another. Then another. Hours and days some poor monk spent hunched over his writing desk, copying out by candlelight, slaving through summer heat and frosty winter. Gone in moments.

  What would Guthred say if he knew they were burning his precious book? Would he be consoled by the fact that the word of God was granting warmth and life? She hopes so.

  Carefully now, trying not to make a sound so as not to disturb her lady, she opens the book’s cover. The gold panels are dented, and a couple of the garnets are missing from its setting.

  The first page shows the Christ figure with his halo. She doesn’t like his dark eyes staring back at her, judging her, and so she turns past it quickly, past the writing that Guthred called the preface, until she comes to some large letters surrounded by flowers and angels decked in green and red robes and blowing trumpets.

  ‘In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram,’ her lady murmurs as she raises her head. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’

  ‘Is that what it says?’

  Merewyn nods. ‘That’s what it says.’ She leans forward, turns the page and carries on reading, her brow furrowed in concentration as she traces her finger back and forth along the lines. ‘“And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: may light be made. And light was made. And God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. He called the light Day and the darkness Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”’

  There are more pictures on the facing page, these ones less brightly coloured. A naked man with only leaves to preserve his modesty, who must be Adam, surrounded by all manner of animals: horses and dogs and stags and fish and birds, and what she supposes must be some kind of cow except that it has a long neck and spindly legs and two great humps upon its back.

  She has never seen anything like it. The creature is so strange she can’t help but laugh, for a moment forgetting where they are, and how hungry and cold she is. ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

  ‘I think they call it a camel. Leofa, my tutor, told me about them once. He said you find them in Egypt and other faraway places in the east. They’re a bit like horses, I think, but they can go for days, weeks even, without having to drink.’

  ‘Weeks?’

  ‘That’s what he said. I think he must have been wrong, or else he was teasing me.’

  ‘Will you read me some more?’

  Merewyn sighs. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t practised my Latin in so long. I’m not sure I can.’

  ‘Please?’

  *

  Merewyn is asleep again by the time Beorn returns with armfuls of bracken and branches, some of it dry, some of it less so. He sets it all down in the corner, then comes and joins Tova by the fire. Still limping. A dusting of snow upon his lank hair, upon his shoulders and his sleeves.

  He winces in pain as he sits down gingerly beside her, clutching at a spot just below his ribs.

  ‘It happened during the fight,’ he explains. ‘A graze, that’s all.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘I’ve cleaned it out with snow as best I can. There’s nothing more to be done. I’ll live. Believe me, I’ve suffered far worse in my time. Don’t worry for my sake.’

  He doesn’t look at her as he speaks, she notices.

  ‘So what now?’ she asks.

  ‘We wait. That’s all we can do. We can’t go anywhere, although at the same time neither can the enemy. We’re safe for today at least.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do for food?’

  ‘Try not to think about it. Just keep as warm as you can. That’s what we did when we were camped in the woods near Stedehamm. After a while you forget about your stomach growling.’

  ‘And what if it keeps on snowing? What if we’re stuck here until it thaws?’

  ‘I don’t know. You ask too many questions, girl.’

  ‘Stop calling me that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Girl. Stop calling me “girl”. I don’t like it. I’m not a child any more. And my name is Tova. You know that.’

  Beorn sits for a long time without saying anything. Just watches Merewyn buried under their cloaks, with the altar cloth and one of the torn-down wall hangings on top. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Mostly she’s just been sleeping. I tried to get her to sit up, the last time she woke, but she was too tired. She keeps coughing and sneezing. I don’t know what more to do for her.’

  For a long while they listen to the sound of her breathing. In, out. In, out.

  ‘Was Oslac telling the truth about Hagustaldesham, do you think?’ Tova asks him eventually. ‘When he said that the Normans had been and—’

  ‘No. It was just another of his lies. He only said it to spite me, and to try to confuse us.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because what?’

  ‘Just because.’

  ‘What about Earl Gospatric? He seemed sure about him.’

  Beorn takes a clutch of sticks and arranges them on the fire. ‘Gospatric,’ he mutters, shaking his head. ‘He deserved better allies than us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Without him the rebellion would never have happened. It would have failed before it had even started. He raised our spirits. He made us believe. When the rest of us let despair get the better of us, he berated us all for our weak stomachs. He told us we should be ashamed to call ourselves Englishmen.’

  ‘Not you, surely?’ Tova asks. ‘I thought you said you were one of his strongest supporters.’

  Beorn cups his hands and blows through them, coaxing the flames higher. ‘I told you before that the rebellion was finished by a rumour. That when Eadgar heard the Normans were only a few hours away and coming for him, he panicked and took flight. But that isn’t the whole story.’

  He carries on building the fire up with pieces of dead bracken. Tova senses there’s more to come, but she knows better than to rush him, and so she sits patiently until she can feel a flicker of heat upon her cheeks. When at last it’s burning steadily, he sits down next to her.

  She hasn’t been this close to him before. So close she can smell the sweat upon his skin, sharp and warm, mixed with blood and grime – weeks of it. How did she never notice before? Then she supposes that after so many days without washing, she must reek too.

  To think that he used to be a thegn, like Skalpi, with land and a hall and a ship and a wife, fine clothes and food and mead. And now here he is.

 
‘Soon after word came,’ he explains in a low voice so as not to wake Merewyn, ‘we were called to the ætheling’s tent to offer him our counsel. All his leading nobles were there: Earl Gospatric, his cousin Waltheof, Siward, Mærleswein. Many others whose names I don’t remember. And then there was me. Compared with them, I was no one: a thegn of low birth who’d earned his rank not by blood right but through hard toil. Maybe my reputation went before me. I don’t know. Certainly I’d never gone bragging about the number of foemen I’d killed. I wasn’t interested in anyone’s praise. But I did have their respect.’

  ‘You never mentioned that you were known to Eadgar.’

  ‘That’s because I wasn’t. Not really.’

  ‘But you were a part of his council of war.’

  ‘It was Gospatric who wanted me there, as an example to the rest, I think. I’d stood in the front rank of the shield wall and rallied our spearmen and withstood the enemy’s swords. Most of the others hadn’t, at least not without their hearth warriors to protect them. Yes, they’d fought, but I alone had the scars to prove it. Now, will you let me speak and stop interrupting me, girl?’

  ‘I told you to stop calling me that.’

  ‘When the news came,’ he says, going on as if he hasn’t heard, ‘Gospatric was all for standing our ground and meeting the enemy in battle. He said this was the moment we’d been waiting for. The moment of fate. Shouting him down were his cousin Waltheof and others, who tried to persuade Eadgar that we should flee, saying that if the enemy captured him they’d have his head. The ætheling’s face was ashen. The boy feared for his life, and who could blame him? He was only seventeen years old. He knew little of war. Eventually he turned to me. It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me directly. Eadgar looked straight at me and asked me whether or not, if it came to a battle with King Wilelm and his army, I believed that we could win.’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘Until I opened my mouth I thought I knew exactly what I’d say. That Gospatric was right. That we should go out and fight, and if our fate was to fall in the fray then at least we would have gone to our deaths with pride. But then I met Eadgar’s gaze and saw how frightened and desperate the boy was. And something changed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As I stood there with all those people looking at me, I realised that I didn’t want to risk my life for them any longer. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t believe any more. In the war and our cause, yes. Not in that bickering band of nobles. Even less in the boy they wanted to make their king. I didn’t want to fight for them, and I didn’t want to die for them. It was as simple as that: I didn’t want to die.’

  His voice is almost a whisper. His head is bowed; his hair hangs like a curtain across his face.

  She asks, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him flatly that I didn’t believe we could. At once Gospatric roared that I was a coward, that we were all cowards. He cursed me in front of everyone for turning my back on him. I couldn’t even look at him because I knew he was right. As for everyone else, they saw one of the last and staunchest of the earl’s allies abandoning him. That’s how Eadgar saw it. After that, there was nothing more to say. The meeting was over, and that was it. The rest you know.’

  ‘But all you did was what you were asked to do. You spoke your mind.’

  ‘I gave in to fear. At the one time when it really mattered, I backed down from a fight.’

  ‘The rebellion didn’t fail because of you,’ Tova says, trying to reassure him. ‘The pyre was already built. The wood was dry. One spark was all it needed, from the sound of it. It could have gone up at any time. You said as much yourself.’

  ‘I know,’ he growls. ‘That’s not why I’m telling you this.’

  ‘Why, then?’

  He closes his eyes as he wrings his hands. ‘Because I don’t want you to think that any of those things that Oslac said about me were true. And because I want you to understand. Why afterwards I swore to carry on the war, even though it was hopeless. Why I became so determined to kill Malger, for all the good that it did. Why, when I heard about Hagustaldesham, I knew I needed to be there. It wasn’t about seeking revenge on the Normans for what they’d done, or rather that was only a part of it. I’ve never taken any pleasure, any thrill from killing. I happen to be good at it, but I’ve never enjoyed it. So that wasn’t the reason. Those months I spent raiding and burning after the rebellion’s collapse, I didn’t do it out of hatred. I did it to make amends for my cravenness, the only way I knew how.’

  ‘You wanted to atone. Like Guthred.’

  ‘Like the priest, yes. I suppose we had more in common than I cared to admit. Not that any of it matters now. If Oslac was right then it’s too late. If even Gospatric has given in to King Wilelm, then all is lost. England belongs to the foreigners. I’ve done everything I can, but it isn’t enough.’

  Tova gets to her feet. ‘No,’ she says, suddenly angry. ‘You’re wrong. Remember what you told Oslac last night? As long as there’s someone left who’s willing to carry on the fight, it isn’t over.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’m not sure if—’

  ‘Don’t you dare say it,’ she says, cutting him off, using the same tone that Merewyn sometimes uses when speaking to her. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not sure if you believe that any more. You do. Of course you do. You’re Beorn.’

  He stares at her. She wonders when the last time was that anyone dared speak to him like this. Too long, obviously. But she can’t just sit here and watch while he sinks ever deeper into despair. She has to do something. It’s up to her. There’s no one else.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she says, just as he has said to them so many times these past few days. ‘This is what we’re going to do. They want to kill us, don’t they? They want to ravage this land and everything in it. So we don’t let them. We survive, and then we come back and rebuild everything they’ve destroyed. We live our lives. That’s how we carry on the fight. That’s how we win.’

  He shouldn’t need her to tell him these things. Hasn’t he been the one always urging them on through everything? Single-minded. Determined. He’s supposed to be telling her this, not the other way round. He can’t give up hope. He, of everyone, should know better.

  He looks up at her, those wolf eyes more like cub eyes. He could be a child being scolded by his mother.

  She says, ‘If we give in, if we tell ourselves they’ve won and that’s the end and there’s no point any more, then we become like Oslac. Is that what you want? He told himself he was doing a good thing when really he just didn’t want to admit he was taking the easy path.’

  ‘I’ve been fighting for too long,’ Beorn says. ‘I can’t keep on doing it.’

  Not so long ago she thought like he did. But not any longer. She’s come too far and seen too much. She’s not going to lie down and wait for death to take her. And she’s not going to let him either.

  ‘Don’t just sit there,’ she says. ‘Get up.’

  He looks sharply at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need you to teach me some more.’

  *

  For the better part of an hour while Merewyn sleeps, he shows her how to thrust and how to cut, how to move her feet so that she doesn’t overreach and leave herself off balance and open to attack. He shows her different ways opponents might attack and how to anticipate them. The places she should aim for. How she can twist the blade in a wound to inflict more pain and kill a man all the more quickly.

  He challenges her to come at him. Like before, she’s worried about hurting him; he’s already injured, moving stiffly. The last thing she wants to do is add a knife wound to his woes, but it’s soon clear there’s no danger of that. For all that she lunges and charges, he dances easily out of the way of her knife, again and again, circling around her, until they’re both laughing and she’s out of breath.

 
She sits back down next to the fire. Her cheeks are hot, and her heart is pounding, but with delight rather than fear. She feels exhausted and yet at the same time stronger and more alive than at any time she can remember in days. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like to smile.

  Beorn tosses some more sticks on to the flames, then reaches inside a pouch at his belt and produces two lumps of cheese, each half the size of his fist.

  ‘Here,’ he says, offering them to her, closing her hands around them. ‘I didn’t want us to eat what little food we had all at once, so I was keeping these until we really needed them. Well, soon it’ll be that time. And you need to keep your strength up. You and your lady both.’

  ‘Don’t you want any?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nods. ‘There’s something else I want you to have.’

  He holds out the scabbard that contains his seax. She stares first at it and then at him. He doesn’t mean it, surely?

  ‘Take it,’ he says.

  ‘But it’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t want it any more.’

  Still uncertain, she places the cheese down beside her, then lifts the sheathed weapon from his outstretched hands. It’s lighter than she might have expected, even though it’s longer than her forearm. Plain leather, scuffed and worn. Unadorned by jewels or gold fittings. The cross guard and handle are just as simple: no inlay or twisted threads of silver.

  It’s exactly his kind of blade, she thinks. Not showy. Made for a task and nothing more.

  She takes hold of the corded grip and pulls gently. The blade slides out easily, without a noise. He must keep the lining well oiled. Now that she sees it up close she can make out the swirling patterns in the steel, like eddies in a stream when it’s in spate.

  ‘I had it made as a hunting knife,’ he says, ‘although I never did get a chance to use it for that.’