‘If he raises any objections, mention my name and tell him whatever you must,’ I said. ‘Say that I’ll build him a new church, or give my eldest child into the service of the Lord, and that if I return he may hold me to those promises.’
‘Yes, lord,’ Wigheard replied solemnly.
I did not make such oaths lightly, although I sincerely hoped it would not come to such measures. Even before Earnford had been sacked I’d hardly been a rich man, and I was far poorer now. Not only that, but having lost one son before I had even known him, the last thing I wanted was to have to give up my next into holy orders. But having protected these people thus far, I couldn’t abandon them now, not while armies ravaged and plundered and burnt their way across this kingdom, and I was resolved to do whatever it took to ensure their safety.
Providing, that was, that I returned. Providing that the Danes and the rebels in Northumbria didn’t overrun the kingdom, slaughtering everything in their path. For while the Welsh might have been defeated, Eadgar and King Sweyn and their men were still fresh and eager for battle and glory.
And for Norman blood.
We finally caught up with King Guillaume’s army by the banks of the fast-flowing river called by some the Yr, which I was told marked the traditional boundary between the old kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. So far he had been unable to effect a crossing, for the enemy had destroyed all the bridges along that stretch and now held the northern side all the way to the Humbre, into which the river emptied some miles to the east.
Raiding-parties patrolled the opposite bank, taunting us from across the water, marked out as Danes by their banners, which displayed runes and skulls, bloodied daggers and wolves’ heads, ravens and fire-breathing dragons. While their king purported to be a Christian, many of their kind were godless men, and those were for the most part pagan symbols.
Occasionally some of their horsemen would come within bowshot, and a handful of our archers would try their luck, but the wind usually took their arrows, which only invited yet more jeering and made our men waste even more shafts. And a waste it was, for those scouts were no threat to us and even if we killed them it would be but a small victory. All they wanted was to assess our numbers and try to judge the condition of our men, and it was difficult to stop them for the simple reason that an army as large as ours is almost impossible to hide.
It was a very different host to the one that had marched upon Eoferwic last year: fewer in numbers but for the most part better equipped and better trained, with many more knights and archers and fewer men of the fyrd. To that army I added the six men I’d brought with me:?dda; Galfrid the steward; the three lads Ceawlin, D?gric and Odgar from Earnford, all of whom had on occasion trained with me and my knights in the yard and thus knew something of fighting, even if it was not much; and Father Erchembald. Reluctant though he’d been to leave those in Licedfeld, I needed him, not for his fighting skills of course, but for his wisdom and advice, which I valued and trusted more than that of anyone else in the world. Nor was there another priest to whom I would rather confess my sins before battle than he, who had come to know me so well over the past year and more. If I died his were the prayers that I wished sent to intercede on my behalf.
There were some faces that I recognised among that army, either because they had been there the last time we had marched on Eoferwic, or because they were influential noblemen and I remembered them from the few times I had attended the king’s courts. But those men whom I knew personally or who recognised me were few in number. An oddly despondent feeling came over me as I realised I was no longer the one to whom everyone else looked for instructions, the one who inspired confidence and instilled respect. Instead I was once more merely one stranger among many, with nothing to mark me out as a lord and a leader of men: not a banner or pennon to fly; nor a single household knight to command; nor, apart from the six who were with me, any man there I could even call my friend.
Or so I thought, until that evening as we were setting up camp, when I heard my name being called from a distance. Jolted from my thoughts, I turned and saw two familiar faces I had not expected to see.
‘Pons!’ I said. ‘Serlo!’
We embraced like long-lost siblings. It couldn’t have been much more than two months since I had last seen them, but it felt far longer.
‘We didn’t think we’d see you again, lord,’ Pons said. ‘We thought you were dead.’
‘Well, here I am,’ I replied. ‘Alive, if only just.’
They had survived the ambush in which I’d been captured, and made it together with Robert to Eoferwic. But as soon as it was heard that the enemy had entered the Humbre and were headed for the city, Robert and his father the vicomte had sent them south to bear the news to King Guillaume, little knowing that he was already on the way at the head of an army.
‘Only a few days later we heard that the city had fallen,’ Serlo said. ‘It was fortunate that they did send us, or else we would have been there when it happened.’
Sometimes God’s favour wanes and at other times it shines upon us for reasons we cannot always understand, but it was clear He had chosen to spare them. I could but hope that He had extended the same favour to the Malets themselves.
Still, to add to the unexpected sight of Serlo and Pons came another piece of good fortune in the form of the arrival two days later of Eudo and Wace, who had ridden north from Robert’s estates in Suthfolc.
‘We thought you had gone with Lord Robert and his sister to Eoferwic,’ Wace said. ‘When we heard what happened, we feared the worst.’
‘Who are these men?’ Eudo asked, frowning as he gestured at those seated around our campfire.
To that question there was no simple answer, and so I told them the tale, just as I had told Father Erchembald and?dda before. Of course Eudo and Wace knew nothing of what had happened to me, and why should they? They had been on the other side of the kingdom entirely, defending Heia and its surrounding manors against King Sweyn.
‘Or at least we were, until the Danes brought their fleet up the river,’ said Wace. ‘Then your countryman Earl Ralph called us to Noruic where we had to fight them off.’
Ralph Guader was the Earl of East Anglia, a man of an age with myself, known as much for his iron will and his lack of humour as for his skill at arms. He had led a contingent of Bretons in the great battle at H?stinges, and performed his duties admirably from what I’d heard; this battle, however, would have been a sterner test of his abilities for the Danes were determined and unforgiving warriors, who would often rather die than suffer defeat. I had faced them before, and did not much relish the thought of having to do so again.
‘I’ve never known such fighting,’ Eudo said. ‘We battled them street by street all the way from the walls to the quays, until there was not an inch of mud in the city that was not covered in blood. They throw themselves into the fray without care for their lives, and even when they are surrounded they will not stop.’
He shook his head, unable to say any more. Something in their expressions told me they had both seen things in the past month that they could not bring themselves to relate, not even amongst friends. As had I.
In that moment I understood that the close companionship we once had would never be regained, or at least not in the same form. Before, we had always lived as we had fought, sharing the same tales and the same songs of battle across the feasting-table, bedding down on sodden rushes in distant halls, riding shoulder to shoulder in the charge. Everything that had happened had happened to all of us together. Now, however, we had grown too different; our lives had taken us in separate directions and there would forever be a distance between us that could never be crossed.
‘What brought you here?’ I asked.
‘After we had beaten the Danes off, they sailed on up the coast,’ Wace said. ‘Earl Ralph thought they might land elsewhere in East Anglia and kept us in Noruic for a while in case they marched overland, but when reports came that they’d gone into the H
umbre, he sent some of us north to join the king. We expected to catch up with him some days ago; he must have ridden quickly if he had time to defeat the Welsh at St?fford first.’
Indeed the word from those close to him was that the king was in a fouler mood than anyone had ever known him. The longer the enemy held us at the Yr and the blacker and thicker grew the smears of smoke on the northern horizon, the worse his temper became. He would lash out at his retainers, one of whom, a manservant by the name of Fulbert, was said to have died after the king had struck him a blow around the head for suggesting that it would be better simply to pay King Sweyn to leave these shores. For the Danes loved gold and silver even more than they did the blood-rush of battle, and nothing pleased them more than obtaining such riches without having to draw steel and risk their lives in its pursuit.
The hapless Fulbert might have been the first to suggest the notion, but he was not the only one, for as October wore on and still our scouts had not found us a crossing over the river, many of the nobles started to offer the same counsel. If the Danes could be paid to depart before winter, the?theling would be left without allies and would have no choice but to retreat back whence he had come, into the wilds and the moors north of Dunholm. However, so determined was the king to crush his enemies outright, as he had crushed the usurper Harold at H?stinges, that he refused to listen to such advice. And so for another two weeks we waited for word to return from upriver, where they were looking for a ford by which we might bring our entire host across. By then it was getting late in the campaigning season. Autumn mists shrouded the land, the arms of the trees were growing bare and each day was colder than the last. The minds of the barons were turning to the unrest in the south that was threatening their manors, and beyond that to the gathering of firewood for their hearth-fires and the slaughtering of pigs and cattle in preparation for winter.
‘We would do better to let the enemy keep Eoferwic and Northumbria,’ said Galfrid one day when we were out on one of our regular foraging expeditions. ‘Let them spend the winter there and then in the spring march against them when the troubles elsewhere are settled and we can muster an even greater force.’
‘You’d do better to keep your mouth shut if you want your head to stay attached to your neck,’ I told him. ‘England belongs to King Guillaume and to him alone.’
Though in many ways it was good sense, such talk was close to treason, and if word ever got back to the king that men were openly suggesting he should surrender a part of his realm to pagans and rebels, he would have no hesitation in demanding their heads.
Thankfully Galfrid never discussed it again. Such moments of folly aside, I had begun to warm to him. Indeed, from training with him it was clear he was a far better swordsman than I had expected, if a little overconfident in his abilities. He would have to learn to restrain his excitement if he wanted to survive for long on the field of battle.
And he would have to learn quickly, for the time when our swords would be needed was soon. We returned to camp that same evening with three carts all loaded with supplies, and were greeted with the news that a baron named Lisois had discovered a crossing-place high upstream, some miles to the west. A hundred fyrdmen from the shire of Eoferwic had tried to hold it against him and his knights, but he had succeeded in killing a large number of them before driving the rest off. Even as we rode through the camp men were making ready their horses and donning mail and helmets, the vanguard forming up under the lion banner, even though night was fast falling. Soon the order to march was being passed down to every lord together with his retainers, to every knight and every servant. Only a few remained behind at the king’s direction, commanded by his other brother, the Count of Mortain, who was charged with holding the southern bank of the Yr in case the enemy should bring their ships up from the marshes of the Humbre where they lay and try to land on the Mercian side.
‘On the march again,’ Eudo said wryly as, under the light of the setting sun and rising moon, we mounted up.
‘Not a day too soon, either,’ I replied. No further news had come from Eoferwic, nor had there been any sign of Lord Robert and Beatrice, and to tell the truth I was growing ever more anxious. I hoped they hadn’t been in the city when it fell, and yet if they had escaped then it was strange that they had not made their way south.
The thought that they might be dead was not one that I wanted to entertain. Try as I might, however, I could not stop it preying on my mind, and each time it surfaced what small hope I held out only diminished further.
We reached the ford before the enemy could send any more of their men to hold it and prevent us making the crossing. We rode through the night and the dawn and for several hours into the following day, until our entire host was gathered on the Northumbrian side of the river. A formidable host it was by then, too, for the weeks we had been held at the Yr had allowed other barons to catch up with us. Among them were more than a few English thegns: those who had no love for Eadgar?theling, or whose families had suffered at the hands of the Danes in generations past, or who were too afraid to risk their king’s wrath by defying him. All of which meant that by the time we marched upon Eoferwic we were many thousands in number.
A few foemen came to stand against our progress and were quickly routed, but mostly they fled at the very sight of us, retreating to rejoin the main host, I didn’t doubt. We tried to pursue them, but these lands south of Eoferwic were flat and in many places boggy, not easily penetrable on horseback. They knew the paths through the marshes far better than we did, and it would have been folly to try to face them on unfamiliar ground, where they could easily draw us into ambushes. And so we left them, skirting around those low-lying lands, all the while expecting their banners and their shields to appear upon the ridges and across the fields ahead of us and for the battle-thunder to ring out. But they did not. We saw the evidence of their raiding all around us, but never their entire host.
‘They have to be planning something,’ Wace said on the second day after we crossed the river. ‘Otherwise they would have attacked us before now.’
‘Unless they’re too afraid to fight us,’ Eudo suggested.
He was joking, of course, but Wace had ever struggled to understand Eudo’s sense of humour. ‘When have the Danes ever been afraid of a fight?’ he asked with a snort. ‘No, they wouldn’t have come all this way if they didn’t want a battle. They’re drawing us towards Eoferwic, most likely holding out within its walls, inviting us to assault the city just like last year.’
Except that it seemed Eudo had it more right than Wace, for the word from our scouts was that the enemy were abandoning the place altogether, escaping by ship down the Use and by foot and horse into the north. We learnt a fire had spread through the entire eastern quarter of the city, destroying one of the castles and the minster of St Peter, before the wind had carried the ashes and the sparks across the river, where they had settled on the thatch of the houses, leaving almost no building standing. And so, with nothing left to defend, the Danes and the?theling had quit the place.
Still I did not quite believe it, not until the following day when we arrived at the still-smouldering ruins and I could see everything with my own eyes: the toppled, blackened timbers where the palisades and gatehouses had been; the wisps of smoke rising from the foundations of the great church and the long merchants’ houses; the mottes without their towers; the fallen-in roof of the vicomte’s palace, where I had recovered from the injuries I’d suffered in the battle at Dunholm and where I had first become indebted to the Malet family and mired in their many struggles.
Seeing how Eoferwic had been ravaged only drove the king to greater fury. The rearguard was only just catching up with the rest of us when he began organising the first of the raiding-parties: conrois of forty or fifty men that he sent both north and south of the Use with orders to harry the surrounding land, pursue those who had fled and drive them out from their hiding places, burn the storehouses and the crops in every village that they came to,
seize the people’s chattels and put their animals to the sword so that the enemy could find no forage anywhere, and kill every man, woman and child of Northumbria in retribution against all those who would take up arms against him. When the king’s own chaplain protested, saying that such wanton slaughter was not God’s will, he was promptly stripped of his robes and his cross, his ankle tied by means of a rope to a horse’s harness, and then he was dragged naked and howling through the mud for all the army to see.
‘He has taken leave of his senses,’ Wace said one afternoon while we were patrolling along the riverbank immediately to the south of the city. ‘If he destroys everything of worth in this land, why have we come all this way to fight for it?’
I shot him a glance, though he knew as well as I how dangerous such words were. But apart from myself there was no one close by who might hear, and even if they did, such sentiments were already commonplace, to the extent that on the fringes of the camp men were beginning to voice them openly.
‘He wants to face the?theling and King Sweyn in open battle,’ I said. ‘Nothing else will satisfy him. He hopes that by laying everything waste he might enrage Eadgar and his supporters enough to lure them out.’
By then it was known that they had retreated to their ships amidst the streams and the marshlands of that nook of land by the Humbre known as Heldernesse, though no one could say exactly where they were quartering. Even if they could, the king was not prepared to lead his host into such difficult country. Far better to wait until they broke out, when we might face them on ground that was more advantageous to us. That was the only part of the king’s strategy in which I could find any merit.
We followed the river downstream as it wound its way through that flat land, searching for we knew not what. Still, it was better than staying with the rest of the army, where we could only sit on our arses and wait for instructions to arrive from the king, and in the meantime entertain ourselves as bitter scuffles broke out between rival lords and their knights. They had come to fight the enemy, and since they could not do that, they fought amongst themselves instead.
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