Conquest 03 - Knights of the Hawk

by James Aitcheson

  He hardly needed to ask, for he had already worked out what my answer would be even before the words formed on my tongue.

  ‘I will do this, lord.’

  His smile broadened further. He knew me too well, I thought. Robert had a way of seeing into men’s hearts, of understanding their characters and desires and how he might use that knowledge to his advantage: a skill that his father also possessed. In that respect, if in few others, they were very much alike.

  With that we parted ways. Robert returned inside while I went to gather my men. Earlier, as the smell of stew bubbling in cooking-pots had wafted on the breeze, my mind had turned to thoughts of food, but it was hunger of a different kind that gripped me now. For this was the chance I’d been waiting for. At last I would be doing something more useful than guarding cartloads of grain. Perhaps this was how Robert sought to repay me for all those days spent riding back and forth on the road from Cantebrigia, or else he was merely indulging my restless spirit. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.

  What I did know was that we had to make the most of this opportunity, for otherwise it wouldn’t be long before the clash of steel upon steel would ring out across the marshes once again. At one time that prospect would have gladdened me, but not now. For as much as I longed to feel the heat of the mêlée, the rush of blood as I charged into the enemy battle-lines, I could not shake the doubt nagging at the back of my mind. A doubt that grew with every moment that I dwelt upon it, as I thought of Hereward and the rest of the rebels, ensconced in their impregnable fastness upon the Isle, and the king’s single-minded desire to crush them whatever the cost. By anyone’s estimation we faced a fight the likes of which we had not known since Hæstinges itself: a desperate struggle from which glory or death were the only two routes out. Even if, at the end of it, we emerged victorious, that victory would surely come at a tremendous price, of blood and limbs and life.

  And though I did my best to drive such thoughts away, I couldn’t help but wonder whether this battle would be my last.

  Five

  TALL REED-BANKS SLID by under starless skies. A thick layer of cloud had come across that the waning moon’s milky light could barely penetrate, which made it all the easier for us to slip unnoticed through the shadows. A faint drizzle hung in the air and I felt its cold touch upon my face. All was still save for a gentle splash as I let the punting-pole slip into the black water, felt it strike the riverbed, pushed against the sucking mud and loose stones and heaved it out again, ready for the next stroke. My arms had grown heavy, my shoulders were aching, and I was starting to wonder whether this had been such a wise idea after all. Many miles of pasture and fen lay between us and the rest of the king’s army at Brandune, and I reckoned we couldn’t be far from Elyg itself.

  I glanced at our guide, Baudri, who crouched by the prow of our small boat. A brusque man in his middle years, he was one of the king’s scouts: indeed one of the best, if the rumours were right, with sharp eyes and hearing and a keen awareness of strategy. We were relying on his knowledge of the main river-passages to bring us as close as possible to the rebel stronghold. I wasn’t planning to set foot on its shores, not this night, at any rate. What I had in mind was rather different. I only hoped that in the dark and with this mist surrounding us Baudri could still find his way, and that we didn’t end up wandering into an enemy patrol. Certainly he didn’t seem troubled, and I took that for a good sign. Nevertheless, I kept a close eye on each riverbank, expecting at any moment to spy the shadows of foemen following us, watching, or else to hear a sudden whistle of air as clusters of steel-tipped shafts flew from out of the gloom. But the enemy did not show themselves, nor were any arrows loosed upon us, and so I had to assume that we hadn’t been seen.

  God was with us.

  ‘Remind me, lord,’ said Pons. ‘What are we doing here?’

  I shot him a reproachful look. He was still angry at the loss of his destrier, which I could well understand, although he would do better to save that anger for use against the enemy, rather than turn it upon his friends.

  ‘We’re here because Robert ordered it,’ I replied sternly.

  ‘Because you suggested it, you mean,’ Eudo said. ‘Trust you to say something. If it weren’t for you, we could all be asleep in our tents right now. I could be tumbling with my Sewenna. Have I told you about her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. He’d hardly stopped talking about her in the last two months, although both Wace and I considered her rather plain. Eudo’s eye for women tended to be less discriminating than those of most men. ‘Now, quiet.’

  Eudo returned to keeping a lookout, while I passed the punting-pole to Serlo, whose arms were fresher than mine. Sitting down in the damp bilge where the silt-laden water soaked into my braies, I took up one of the paddles to steer us closer to the bank where we would be less easily seen, and hoped that Wace and Hamo in the two boats behind us did likewise. For my plan to work we would need to draw the enemy’s attention, but not yet. Not until our trap was set. And so we carried on, making our way up one of the many creeks and channels that I hoped would take us a little closer to the Isle.

  ‘I’m going to marry her,’ Eudo said suddenly, breaking the stillness, and I realised his mind was still on Sewenna.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ I said. ‘You’ve barely known her half a year.’

  Nor was she the first he’d become besotted with of late. Before Sewenna his heart had been pledged to an English slave-woman named Censwith, who had served in a bawdy house in Sudwerca and who had died of a fever before he could buy her freedom. She’d been pretty, though, whereas the latest object of his affections had a face like a sow’s arse. She was young, probably no more than sixteen summers old, fierce in temper and lacking in humour. Why he had brought her with him on campaign I could not work out, especially since he could have had his pick from more than a hundred camp-followers, any one of whom would have made a better match for him.

  ‘She makes me happy,’ Eudo said. ‘What’s wrong with that? Besides, you weren’t with Oswynn for much longer than six months. Have you given up looking for her yet?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, and felt slightly embarrassed to admit it, for I knew what he would probably say. ‘I haven’t.’

  Oswynn was my woman, or had been. Dark, beautiful, wild Oswynn, with her inviting eyes and her hair, the colour of pitch, falling loosely and unbound to her breasts, as I liked her to wear it. I had cared for her more than any other woman before or since: more, indeed, than I ever dared admit to myself at the time. Even though she was English and of low birth, the daughter of a village blacksmith, and even though we could speak only a few phrases in each other’s tongue, and even though our time together had been short, nevertheless I had loved her.

  She had first been taken from me that fateful winter’s night at Dunholm, when the Northumbrians had ambushed us: the same night that my former lord, Robert de Commines, was murdered, burnt to death in the mead-hall. For over a year I’d thought her dead, but then at Beferlic last autumn I had glimpsed her alive and apparently well, as beautiful as I remembered, albeit a captive of one of the enemy’s leaders.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Eudo said. ‘Even if you did see her at Beferlic, you said yourself that she’s with another man now. She could be a thousand leagues away. What hope do you think you have of ever finding her?’

  He didn’t mean it unkindly, but even so his words hurt. He still believed I was mistaken. Indeed for a while I had wondered whether what had happened was merely some kind of waking dream, so unreal had it seemed at the time. But it wasn’t just that I had seen her; she had seen me too. Our eyes had met and she had just enough time to call my name before she was taken from me a second time as the enemy fled the burning town. How could I have imagined all that?

  No, I had to keep believing that she was still out there somewhere. Her captor, like Eadgar and King Sweyn, had managed to escape the slaughter that night. I could picture him as easily as if he were standing before me now:
broad in the chest and with his hair, fair but greying, tied in the Danish style in a braid at his nape, mounted on a white stallion, with rings of twisted gold upon both his arms and a fiery-eyed dragon with an axe in its claws emblazoned on his shield. I didn’t know where he hailed from, or even his name, but through the winter and the spring I had paid spies to venture into the furthest reaches of Britain and bring me whatever they could learn about a Dane of that description and bearing such a device. Their help had cost me more silver than I could afford, but in my eyes it had been worth it, at the time if not in hindsight. In fact I might as well have tossed all those coins into the sea for all the good it had done me, since not one of those spies had brought me any useful information. The dragon and axe had recently been seen in Northumbria, some of them had told me, which was no help since I knew that already. Another claimed he had taken shelter at the court of the Flemish count, yet another that he had gone back across the sea with King Sweyn, and two more that he had travelled into the far north, to Ysland and the distant, frozen lands that lay beyond. Each one gave me a different name, and since none had been able to offer any more precise detail, I had sent them all away. They had gone to peddle their lies elsewhere, leaving me poorer and no wiser than before. But that did not stop me hoping.

  ‘If you want my advice, you should try to forget her,’ Eudo went on. ‘There are plenty of other women who’ll gladly help warm your bed. Women who won’t cost you as much, either.’

  He was, in his own way, trying to cheer me, not that it helped. He considered me a fool for wasting my silver on the tales of rogues and swindlers, none of whom he would trust as far the length of his sword-blade. But love makes a man desperate, and in those days my heart ruled over my head. Even though I had cared for and lain with other women since then, the truth was that I had never fully shaken her from my mind. Death had taken so many people who once were dear to me, and now that I knew that she was alive, I was determined to do everything possible to bring her back to me.

  ‘I’m going to find her,’ I said, sounding more confident than I felt. ‘I swear it.’

  ‘And how do you plan to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Not yet. But somehow I will.’

  Eudo sighed and shook his head sadly, and silence fell once more. The rain began to spit down more heavily. I gazed out beyond the stern, making sure that the following boats were still behind us, and was just able to spy their shadows. Like us, Wace and the men under his command had tied scraps of cloth around their spearheads, and put on dark cloaks to cover their mail, so as to hide the telltale glint of steel. There were six of us in each boat, making eighteen in total, and I hoped that would prove enough. By anyone’s estimation it was a dangerous plan that I had in mind, but the greatest rewards often came to those who battled the greatest dangers. Anyone who lived by the sword knew that well.

  ‘There,’ said Baudri suddenly. I followed the line of his outstretched finger to where a clump of trees stood upon the slightest of rises above the marshes, a few hundred paces ahead of us and slightly to our steerboard side. ‘Towards that thicket.’

  Setting down the paddle beside me, I scrambled forward. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, keeping my voice as low as possible.

  ‘Certain, lord.’

  Even in the darkness I could discern the grim look in his eyes. He wasn’t comfortable being out on the river by night, and I didn’t blame him, especially given how close we were to the enemy encampment. Indeed at first he’d refused to take us, but the sight of a pouch filled with coin, and the promise of more to come, had been enough to persuade him to lend his services. I only hoped that it turned out to be silver well spent, for I had precious little to spare. With each day that went by it seemed that I grew ever poorer.

  I nodded to Pons, who cupped his hands around his mouth and made a hoot like an owl’s so that Wace and the others in the following boats would know to stay close. It was important we didn’t lose one another now. After a moment’s pause the answering call came from both crews, and so, taking care to keep the sound of our paddles and punting-poles as quiet as possible, we carried on, making for that wooded rise: the islet of Litelport, which was the name of the small market town that had until recently stood upon it. It lay a little to the north of the larger Isle of Elyg, the two separated by a boggy channel less than an arrow’s flight wide at its narrowest point. The king had tried to occupy it in the early days of the siege, in order to establish a base from which to launch raids and to let our siege engines do their work, but the enemy attacked before he had been able to throw up any manner of earthwork or palisade. Repulsing his forces, they had laid waste the town together with its storehouses, jetties, slipways and the nearby steadings, preventing us from using it again as a staging-post.

  Until now, or so I wanted the enemy to think. No sooner had we landed on its shores, running our boats’ keels aground on the mud beside a row of blackened posts – all that remained of a landing stage – than we set to work. First we hauled our small craft up from the river’s edge into the thicket where they wouldn’t be seen, then while I set a grumbling Hamo and his men to gather firewood, the rest of us carried the tent-rolls and bundles of kindling and everything else we’d brought with us down to the islet’s southern side, where we could look out over the marshy channel in the direction of Elyg. From so far away and in the darkness it was, of course, impossible to make out anything of the monastery or the enemy encampment, but occasionally the mist would clear and in those moments I spied the glimmer of distant guard-fires, beside which sentries would be warming themselves while they watched out over the marshes. We would be lucky if we could draw any of them out, I thought, especially on a damp night like this. More likely the enemy would keep to their halls inside their stout palisades, where they could bed down by the embers of their hearth-fires and wrap themselves in thick cloaks of wool and fur. But I was determined not to give up yet. Not after coming so far.

  Working quickly, we laid and lit the fires, set up the tents around them, tossed bedrolls and coin-pouches inside and then across the ground we scattered leather bottles filled with wine, wooden cups, iron cooking-pots, handfuls of chicken bones and a few splintered shields that we had no use for, so that it looked as though there was a camp here. Hamo and his band of men brought armfuls of fallen branches down from the thicket and we cast them on to the fires, feeling the heat upon our faces as the twisting flames took hold and rose higher and higher, causing the green leaves to hiss as they shrivelled away to nothing. Great plumes of white smoke and orange-glowing sparks billowed up into the night, and even through the mist I reckoned they must be visible from the Isle. Once the enemy saw them, they would surely send a scouting-party to find out what was going on. Like moths to a candle they would, I hoped, be drawn in. As soon as I was satisfied that the fires were burning brightly enough, we retreated to the cover of the thicket, within easy arrowshot of our false camp. Our snare was set and we could only wait now for it to be sprung.

  In truth I was relying on a certain amount of good fortune that night. The fires had to be great enough in size and in number that they would be considered worthy of attention, but not so great as to invite their entire host upon us. A band of ten to thirty men we could probably fight, but more than that and we would be fortunate to escape with our lives. And therein lay the problem. If the rebels had any sense, they’d realise we wouldn’t be so foolish as to place a camp in clear sight of their own stronghold. They would suspect that something was amiss and so either ignore us entirely or else send so many men that we would stand no chance against them. The longer we crouched in silence in the damp undergrowth, watching the pyres flare as the wind gusted, the more such doubts crept into my mind. Much as I tried to remain patient, it was hard, for as soon as it was light, our plan would be revealed. The moment the first grey glimmer appeared in the eastern sky, we would have to leave, or else risk becoming trapped. The nights were growing longer these days as summer faded into autum
n, but even so, by my reckoning, we had only a couple of hours until dawn. A couple of hours for the enemy to show themselves.

  Tiredness pricked at my eyes like a thousand tiny pins. It seemed as if a week must have passed since we had left Cantebrigia, since we had met Hereward’s band by the edge of the fen, and yet it was only earlier that day. How long we must have waited there I do not know, but it felt like an age. Dawn crept ever nearer and I kept glancing towards the east, at the same time praying for night to keep the earth in its grip a little longer and for day to be delayed. Bowing my head, I closed my eyes, listening to the rising wind as it rustled the leaves above my head, feeling its touch upon my cheek as silently I implored the saints to bring us luck tonight. As if in answer there came the call of a moorhen, and I looked up to find the cloud clearing from the sky and the moon and stars emerging, casting their wan light upon the marsh-mist and the channel that separated the two islands.

  Where, at last, I saw the unmistakable glint of steel. A spearpoint, most likely. No sooner had it appeared than it was gone again, but it was enough to know that the enemy were on the march.

  ‘Make sure your men are ready with their bows,’ I whispered to Hamo, who was beside me. ‘Let fly as soon as I give the signal.’

  ‘They’ll be ready,’ he retorted. ‘Have no fear about that. Just make sure that your men do their part.’

  I didn’t care for his tone, but this was no time for us to argue. As much as we disliked each other, I needed him and he needed me. I was relying on his archers and their bows, since without them this ambush would not work, but equally it was in Hamo’s interest to help us, since if we died then there would be nobody left to pay him for his services tonight.

  ‘After you’ve weakened the enemy, I’ll lead the charge,’ I said. ‘You and your men will follow behind us. Do you understand?’