Not before time, I thought, although I did not say it. Instead I nodded and turned my back, splashing cool water into my face.
‘Without delay,’ the messenger added, perhaps thinking that I hadn’t heard him properly. ‘He’s waiting for you in his hall at the castle.’
He was the sort of man, I decided, who enjoyed the sound of his own voice; one who was accustomed to being listened to, and who did not take kindly to being ignored.
‘I heard you,’ I replied, rubbing my armpits with a wet scrap of cloth. ‘You can tell your lord I will be there as soon as I can.’
He gave me a disapproving look, although if he thought that would hasten me he was disappointed. Shortly he rode off, probably to inform his master of my insolence.
If Fitz Osbern wanted to speak with me then he would have to be patient. He had kept me waiting this long; now he in his turn would have to wait a little longer. In any case, it wouldn’t do for me to meet with the second most powerful man in the kingdom soaked to the skin and with hair drenched like a water vole’s. Fortunately the morning was warm, the sky cloudless and the sun bright, and I soon dried. Hanging my still-wet clothes to dry over the canvas of my tent, I dressed in my spare tunic and trews, and, as always, buckled my sword-belt upon my waist.
Not much later I was riding through the castle gates. Above them flew streamers of cloth decorated in Fitz Osbern’s colours of white and crimson, signifying that he had formally taken over command of the castle from its appointed guardian Roger de Montgommeri.
I left Nihtfeax in the care of one of the castle’s stable-hands and made my way around the training yard to the far side of the bailey, where the great hall stood. Servants were rolling barrels from one of the storehouses to the kitchens; others had been less lucky in the tasks given them and were shovelling heaps of horse shit on to the back of a cart while clouds of flies swarmed about them. The steady hammering of iron upon iron rang out from the farrier’s workshop; in the yard oak cudgels clashed against limewood shields; from beyond the walls oxen bellowed and snorted as they were driven through the streets.
‘Lord Guillaume is in his solar,’ said the door-ward when I arrived at the hall and gave him my name. ‘He is not accustomed to being made to wait. He was expecting you a half-hour ago, and I should tell you that he is in a foul temper.’
I thanked the man for his kind warning as he led me to the stairs, where he left me. Along the length of the up-floor ran a hallway, at the end of which the door to the solar lay ajar. I knocked and entered.
The shutters lay open but even so the chamber was stifling. Thick rugs covered the floorboards, while richly coloured embroideries decorated the walls, displaying scenes from what I could only assume was a marriage feast. Within a long hall stood a long table replete with all manner of dishes, behind which were seated the lord, his arms outstretched as if in greeting, and beside him his bride, dressed in a blue gown. Around them servants bore bowls of soup, platters of wildfowl and gilded wine-cups, while a fool danced and a minstrel played upon a harp.
Fitz Osbern stood at the far end of the room, gazing out of the open window, his hands clasped behind him. Beside him was a round table and upon it stood an earthenware pitcher together with a goblet of green glass, elaborately decorated with a golden lattice pattern and half filled with what I presumed was wine. He showed no sign of having heard me come in.
‘My lord,’ I said. ‘You wished to see me.’
‘You’re late.’ His tone as usual was curt.
‘I came as soon as I was able,’ I replied just as flatly.
He did not turn from the window. ‘When I summon you to my presence, you do not hesitate but simply do as you are bid. Do you understand?’
I kept my mouth shut, knowing that if I opened it then all the frustration and ill feeling that had been building within me would let itself out. Fitz Osbern did not repeat himself; instead he waited for my answer. When it was clear that none was forthcoming, he turned to face me.
‘I wonder if Malet’s son has indulged you rather too much. A better lord would see that his vassals learnt the meaning of obedience. A true leader would make sure that they knew their place. But then the Malets have always struggled to win the respect of their followers. Or, for that matter, of anyone else.’
This last he muttered almost under his breath. What did he mean by it?
‘Lord-’ I began.
‘Let me warn you, Tancred a Dinant,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘You do not want to make an enemy of me. I have King Guillaume’s ear. If I so wished, I could have you stripped of your lands, expelled from the realm, or worse. So whatever you mean to say, you would be wise to think first, and choose your words with care.’
He held my gaze, his expression fixed in contempt, as if I were nothing more than a louse to him: an irritant, but one that could be easily crushed. There was a slight slur to his words, and I smelt wine on his breath: sour and pungent, faint but enough to be noticeable. How long had he been drinking before I arrived?
‘No?’ he said, raising his eyebrows in mock-surprise. ‘Very well.’ He began to pace around the room. ‘I am a patient man, Tancred, but not so patient that I readily forgive those who cross me. Consider yourself fortunate on this occasion, but do not presume that I will be nearly so lenient next time.’
‘No, lord.’
He nodded, seemingly satisfied, and when he spoke again it was in a milder tone: ‘Do not think, either, that I hold you responsible for what happened in Wales, or that I believe Hugues to be blameless in this matter either.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. That at least was some relief.
‘I am not looking for gratitude. I only tell you this for your own peace of mind.’ He sighed. ‘In any case, all that is behind us, and we have more pressing matters at hand. We must reserve our hatred for the enemy, not waste it on each other. It will do us no good to spread discord amongst our own ranks as long as the enemy is afield.’
‘Has there been any word of their movements?’
‘Not yet,’ Fitz Osbern said. ‘I have sent my fastest riders to keep watch along the valley of the Saverna, and had beacons erected between here and the dyke, the fires to be lit as soon as the enemy show themselves. Thus far, however, there has been no sign of them.’
Some of those beacons we’d seen as we had withdrawn back down the Saverna valley to Scrobbesburh. At best they might give us a couple of days’ warning of any approaching army: a few more hours, then, for us to spend waiting for the inevitable, for those banners and spearpoints to appear over the distant horizon.
‘They will come sooner rather than later,’ I said. ‘They know that we are weakened. They’ll want to press their advantage while they still can, before any reinforcements reach us from Lundene.’
Fitz Osbern shook his head and turned back towards the window. ‘There will be no reinforcements,’ he said quietly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Word reached us from the southern shires yesterday morning with the news that the people of Defnascir and Sumors?te are rising, and not only that, but sending messengers to foment rebellion throughout the rest of Wessex. Meanwhile across the sea our enemies in Maine and Brittany are said to be conspiring with the French king against us.’
He almost spat the name of the land of my birth. For longer than most could remember Normandy and Brittany had been warring, and while those wars had for the moment ceased, the enmity they had spawned between the two peoples had not entirely died. Perhaps Fitz Osbern had forgotten to whom he was speaking, or perhaps the slight was intentional, to remind me of my place. If I were to speak honestly, it was a long time since I had truly thought of myself as Breton, so many years had I spent fleeing the place of my youth, serving under lords who swore their fealty to the Norman duke. Not that that had ever stopped others from holding my parentage against me. I was well used to hearing such base insults upon my person, so much so that I no longer felt their force, though it was rare that they came from men
as highborn and as learned as Guillaume fitz Osbern.
‘The Bretons and the Manceaux are always stirring up trouble, lord,’ I said. ‘That means nothing.’
‘Perhaps not,’ he replied. ‘But that is not all. As we speak the Danes are setting sail with a fleet of more than three hundred ships.’
‘Three hundred?’ I repeated. That was as large as our own fleet of four years ago.
‘So the traders who bring us this knowledge say, or at any rate the ones that we pay, since they are usually more trustworthy than the rest.’
Three hundred ships. The number seemed so large as to be scarcely believable. That could mean anywhere up to fifteen thousand men, at least half of whom we could expect to be warriors. It made our own force here in Scrobbesburh seem paltry by comparison. Nor was that the worst part, for in my experience every Dane was worth two Englishmen, hailing as they did from the cold and wind-battered lands across the German Sea, where food was scarce and men had to fight their neighbours for every crumb if they did not want to starve. They were renowned for their savagery in battle, feared throughout Christendom from the frozen isles that lay beyond Britain’s northernmost shores to the distant sun-parched lands of the eastern emperor, where some of their best warriors were reputed to serve as his personal guard. They had conquered this kingdom themselves more than once before. Now they were coming again: the invasion for which we had been waiting a year and more. Few had expected it would ever happen. All through the winter men had joked about the Danes and their king, Sweyn, and about his threats that always came to naught.
Now that it was happening, though, I found that doubts were creeping into my mind as to whether we could fight them off. Not while we had our own troubles to face here on the March. Nor was I forgetting that somewhere in the north there was also the?theling, whose plans could only be guessed, so little had been heard of him.
‘They will most probably land in the south and try to take Lundene, just as we did,’ Fitz Osbern went on. ‘King Guillaume himself has hastened back from Normandy and is now encamped at Westmynstre. He cannot allow the city to fall. He will need every able-bodied man of fighting age that he can marshal from the southern shires — every hauberk and helmet, every axe and pitchfork — if he is to prevent them taking it.’
‘Then we must do the same,’ I said. ‘We have to raise the fyrd not just from along the borderlands but from across the rest of Mercia too.’
The fyrd was the English peasant levy, raised by the reeves and the earls, organised according to the various shires and hundreds into which the kingdom was divided. The men who made it up were not warriors but farmers, most of whom could barely tell one end of a spear from the other, and it was foolish to rely upon them holding firm in the shield-wall. I was not suggesting calling upon the fyrd for their skill at arms, however, but simply for their numbers, for that was what we lacked.
‘We might call upon them, but that does not mean that they will come,’ Fitz Osbern said. ‘Nor do we have so many men that I can readily afford to send them out into the shires to enforce the summons, not when the enemy could march upon us any day now. In Wessex it is different, for the people there hate and fear the Danes. The Mercians will not fight their own kind. If they deign to lift their spears at all it will be under Eadric’s banner, alongside those of their countrymen who have already joined him.’
‘What then? If the king won’t send us men, how are we to defend Scrobbesburh, let alone the rest of the March?’
He did not answer. Of course he was known to be a close friend of the king, and one of his most trusted advisers, the two having known each other since they had grown up together at the ducal court in Normandy. That the king could not spare even his most loyal servant the forces he needed was a sign of how serious he considered the Danish threat to be.
There was a stool by the table and Fitz Osbern sat down upon it, burying his face in his palms and making a sound of frustration halfway between a sigh and a groan.
‘Are you unwell, lord?’ I asked.
‘The enemy are coming, and meanwhile all we do is quarrel and tear at each other’s throats in the manner of wild beasts.’ He shook his head and a grimace spread across his face. ‘Like packs of wolves,’ he muttered.
To my mind that last remark could refer to only one thing. Perhaps that was why he was in such a foul mood.
‘What of Earl Hugues?’ I asked. ‘I hear that he took himself back to Ceastre earlier this morning.’
He looked up sharply, as if I had been eavesdropping upon his thoughts. In truth the connection was not hard to make.
‘Hugues,’ he said as his expression grew hard. ‘He has his own battles to fight. All his arrogance and belief in his own self-importance do not disguise the fact that, at only twenty years, he is little more than a child, with a temper to match. He must always do his own thing; he takes neither instruction nor advice from anyone. And always it is to the detriment of others, just as now as he leaves us short of four hundred spears that we might otherwise have usefully employed.’
‘They say that some of the other barons are looking to follow the Wolf’s example,’ I said, remembering the rumours Beatrice had spoken of. ‘They plan to desert and return to their own manors.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think that I don’t have my own people within the camp, that I must rely on whatever scraps of news you choose to bring me?’
‘I didn’t mean to presume-’
‘No, of course you didn’t,’ he said, with more than a hint of sarcasm. ‘Fortunately I am well aware who those barons are, and they will know it soon enough, too.’
‘Surely, lord,’ I said, trying to restrain my frustration, ‘punishing them will only give them further cause to abandon us. Instead wouldn’t it be better to assuage them with promises of gold and silver and whatever else is necessary to keep them happy?’
‘I will deal with them how I choose,’ he snapped. ‘I do not need advice from one such as you!’
Why, then, had he called me here, if not to chastise me or ask what I thought? I wondered whether he himself had forgotten.
‘All this could so easily have been avoided,’ he said bitterly. His fingers clenched into a fist, his knuckles turning white. ‘I thought that by sending a raiding-army across the dyke Eadric and the Welsh might be quelled before they could bring their might to bear. Instead we can only wait for them to come to us, and pray to God that when they do we have the strength to fight them off.’
‘We will find a way,’ I said, doing my best to sound confident. ‘When the time comes we will send them running back across the dyke with their tails between their legs. We will show them slaughter such as they have never before seen.’
I might as well have been speaking to myself, since Fitz Osbern wasn’t listening. Instead he seemed lost in his own world as he went on: ‘Our enemies circle around us, taunting us, preparing themselves to descend and strike, and meanwhile we are powerless to do anything at all!’
His eyes were filled with fury as he brought his fist down upon the table beside him with such vehemence that the glass goblet toppled. His jaw clenched, with the back of his hand he swept the drinking vessel and jug from the surface, sending them flying against the wall, where they smashed, scattering shards across the floor, spraying scarlet droplets everywhere.
None of which was enough to satisfy him. He rose sharply, grabbing the edge of the table and upending it with a crash before, swearing, he turned to face once more out the window.
Over the years I’d had dealings with many powerful barons, but never had I known any of them lose control so completely in front of men of lower rank than themselves. And while I’d heard tales of Fitz Osbern’s fierce temper before, this was the first time I had witnessed it. For the second time I found myself wondering how much wine had passed his lips that morning. Naturally he was angry at the situation in which we found ourselves, but I wondered if some of that anger he reserved for himself too, for having misjud
ged the enemy’s strength so gravely, for having sent us on the expedition in the first place. And yet I couldn’t help but feel that on a different day, that battle in Mechain could so easily have turned the other way. If Ithel had not let his desire for vengeance get the better of him, and if his brother had not gone after him, then their lives and those of their men need not have been wasted in a hopeless cause. That in itself might have been enough to save us from the rout that had ensued. In such moments of folly, courage and desperation rested the fate of entire kingdoms, difficult though it was to see it at the time.
All this I kept to myself as I waited for Fitz Osbern to break the silence. When eventually he did speak, it was in more muted tones, and I wondered whether that meant the storm had passed.
‘Everything is falling into ruin,’ he said. ‘Everything we have toiled these last four years to build is collapsing: the kingdom like a house whose posts are rotten, whose thatch is being torn from the roof-timbers. We strive to repair it, but it is all in vain. The winds only howl more fiercely and the rains lash down more heavily, and there is nothing we can do to keep them out.’
Not for the first time I was unsure what to reply, if indeed he expected me to say anything at all. His back was turned and I wasn’t entirely convinced that he knew I was still there.
Outside I heard knights training in the yard as well as the sounds of sawing and hammering as builders and labourers worked to strengthen the castle’s defences. On my way here I had seen them driving pointed stakes into the ditch to deter any attackers who might try to assault the walls. Nothing was being left to chance. Of course Fitz Osbern would recall what had happened at Eoferwic last year, when Malet had thought the city’s walls sufficient to keep out the besiegers, only for the Northumbrians to storm the gates with the townsmen’s aid and force him back to the castle, in the process killing a large number of the Norman garrison. We could not afford to make the same mistake this time, nor allow ourselves to feel too secure, which was why so much effort was being expended to further fortify the town.
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