‘How far have you come?’
The woman’s eyes were closed but suddenly she spoke with effort in a high, harsh voice. ‘Impertinence. Tell him. Mind his own business.’
The taller knight laughed suddenly, as if relieved to find she could talk at all.
The younger one smiled. ‘Better introduce ourselves. This is Mistress Mmm … Margaret. Fella over there is Master Alan and I’m Christopher. Three simple travellers, you see.’ His smile stretched into the triumphant grin of someone having overcome an obstacle. ‘You English?’
‘Will,’ said Gwil. He pointed at Penda: ‘My nephew, Peter. Two simple travellers.’ Damned if he was giving information when he wasn’t getting any. These men were Sir Somebodys of Somewhere; they reeked of privilege, or at least Christopher did; Alan had the look of an experienced campaigner. As for the woman, she was no more called Margaret than he was; Christopher had stumbled over the name.
Christopher beamed again. ‘Much obliged, Master Will, much obliged. God’s blessing on you.’ His head fell forward abruptly; he was asleep.
‘Better get out of those cloaks,’ Gwil said.
Alan was reluctant for a moment but nodded and accepted Penda’s help in divesting first the woman’s, then Christopher’s and finally his own.
All three were soaked through so that the clothes underneath were patched with wet – a condition that didn’t hide the quality of the woman’s velvet, nor the jewels round her neck, nor Christopher’s emblazoned surcoat and the ornate hilt of his sword in its gold-threaded baldric. Alan’s surcoat was less showy, though very fine, like his boots.
The way he hung up the cloaks by using the struts of the roof, spreading them wide so that they would dry the quicker and at the same time add another layer to the hut’s walls, was reminiscent of every soldier who’d camped in hard conditions without a squire to serve him.
Don’t know what you are now, but you were a mercenary once, Gwil decided. He watched the man settle down to sleep.
‘They ain’t simple travellers though, are they?’ Penda asked softly.
‘No, they ain’t.’
Alan’s eyes remained closed. ‘We mean you no harm,’ he said.
‘Don’t mean you any, neither,’ Gwil told him.
Yes, a mercenary for sure; always one ear open.
The storm outside became wilder, shrieking as if in fury that it hadn’t killed the five frail creatures in its path, shaking the hut to try and get at them, but the uninvited guests slept the impervious sleep of the exhausted.
During the course of the night, Gwil got up to push open the door every so often in order that its movement outwards would shovel away the snow that otherwise threatened to block them in. The blast of freezing air that came in each time was almost welcome; the fire and five close-packed bodies, as well as the insulation provided by snow piling up against the north wall where the crack was, created a toasting heat.
The third time he opened the door, he saw that he’d roused Mistress Margaret. She sat up.
Immediately Alan was awake. ‘Domina?’
‘Boots,’ she said. ‘Cloak.’
The process of passing her these things and helping her into them woke everybody up.
‘Shall I come with you, Lady?’ Christopher asked.
The woman said nothing, but her look quelled him into staying where he was. She pushed past Gwil, who was still by the door, and went out into the night.
‘Leave the door open,’ Penda said, beginning to get up. ‘I got to go too.’
‘When she’s back,’ Alan told her.
‘I ain’t going to go where she goes.’
‘When she’s back.’
‘She better be quick, I need to go.’
Moments passed in silence, Penda fidgeting and putting on her own boots to be ready. The men were tense until Mistress Margaret once more appeared in the doorway. Alan nodded at Penda; now she was free to enjoy the facilities afforded outside.
‘Thanks so much.’ Penda was all sarcasm before she bolted through the door.
In the morning all the cloaks were dry. Christopher collected them to make a bed and pillow for Mistress Margaret, who slept on.
And the hell with anyone else, Gwil thought, amused. But then, with Penda a supposed male, this must be what they called chivalry.
He went to fetch more charcoal. ‘We ain’t going anywhere for a bit,’ he announced, coming back. It had stopped snowing, but the world outside was swirled with drifts. Not far away, the last, low hills of the Chilterns encircled them on three sides, topped with forest like untidy lace against a grey and threatening sky.
Alan went to the door to check. ‘I’m confused. Which way is the Thames?’
Gwil pointed east to the river valley that was as indistinguishably snow-covered as every other treeless space. ‘Hard going,’ he said. ‘Storm might blow up again. I wouldn’t try it, not with a tired woman in tow. Not yet.’
Again Alan had to go and look for himself. On his return, he nodded. ‘We’ll have to wait it out.’
‘Where you heading for?’
‘South.’
Gwil shrugged. That didn’t tell him anything.
‘Mistress Margaret is going to need food. Apart from what you gave us she hasn’t eaten in two days,’ Alan said. ‘It’s time to go hunting.’
‘With swords?’
For the first time, the man smiled. ‘I hoped a couple of simple travelling archers might come with me.’
Christopher was to be left in charge of the still-sleeping woman. ‘Keep a good look-out,’ Alan told him.
Penda raised her eyebrows at Gwil. Look-out for what? The silence around them was absolute: no birds, no sound, just white desolation.
Gwil recognized the anxiety of all hunted things. Something was out there in the emptiness; these three were being pursued, just as he and Pen were, but more closely.
The war, bugger it, he thought; somebody’s after them, and me and Pen don’t want to be around when it catches up. Stephen’s soldiers or the Empress’s – nothing to do with us any more.
However, food was a necessity for them all. Booted and wrapped, they set out for the forest, three brown beetles against a white landscape, choosing wind-blown, erratic paths where they could, otherwise plunging through drifts on legs that sank in above the knee with each step.
‘You’d better go back, lad,’ Alan told Penda. Being shorter than the two men, she was panting with the struggle.
She shook her head, eyes lit at the prospect of using her bow.
As they entered the shelter of the forest, the going became easier. And now there were tracks, hundreds of criss-crosses made by birds, the padded, sharp-nailed print of squirrels, the four-toed imprint of a fox.
Deeper in, they came across the promise of a feast. A mass of slots in the snow and some damaged young beeches showed that a small herd of deer had stopped in its search for food in order to tear bark off the trees. The strips were fresh and Alan wagged a triumphant thumb in the air, almost immediately turning it downward as he looked again. Here and there, prints like those of big dogs were overlaying the slots.
Gwil knelt to examine them.
Wolves.
The number of prints was difficult to make out. He held up two fingers for the others to see, then three, to show that he wasn’t sure.
They began to hurry; there were four-footed predators ahead that could go faster and snatch prey away from them, scattering the rest in flight. They had two advantages: approaching from the south, as they were, they were downwind of the creatures they followed; and they didn’t have to watch their feet – the snow had covered any twigs liable to snap.
In silence, they began to lope, reduced to animals of the pack themselves by hunger and a concentration that discarded thought in favour of sight, sound and scent, the craft of wild things.
They heard the wolves first: a sudden loud growling and rending – not too far away either.
They ran; no need for caution
now, the wolves would be too intent on the kill to hear them. The noise was tremendous, not just the growling, but the cawing of a hundred disturbed rooks circling the sky in protest.
It was a deer calf. One wolf had it by the nose, the other two had their teeth into its rump, worrying it, shaking it. As Alan, Gwil and Penda crept nearer, they saw it give up the ghost. Its eyes went dull.
Behind a tree, Gwil put his foot in the stirrup of the crossbow and slotted a bolt into place. Penda reached for an arrow. She looked at Gwil: Which one’ll I take?
He gestured towards the two wolves growling and tearing at the calf’s rump. Scare them off. Mine’s the one at the head.
He stepped out into the open. The wolf he’d earmarked for his shot turned its amber eyes towards him but didn’t release its prey; it was too hungry to give it up for a two-legged intruder. Gwil aimed at the spot between its ears, and shot. It went down.
Penda, he saw, had got one of the other wolves in the side, the only angle presented to her. It whimpered and jumped round, trying to dislodge the arrow. Its companion realized its danger, but instead of running off, bounded towards her, growling, its beautiful teeth bared. It was big, as big as she was. Bless her, already she’d fitted another arrow in place and was aiming, but Alan stepped in front of her, sword raised so that the beast speared itself on it in the throat. The impetus threw the man backwards on to the snow, a dead wolf on top of him.
Everything had happened in seconds, a moment’s lifetime of killing and surviving. The air stank of wolf and blood, but they spent minutes breathing it in without moving, the terror of what had passed only coming to them now, when it was over.
The other wolf had gone off yelping, Penda’s arrow still stuck into its side, for which Gwil was sorry; somewhere it would die in pain. Bad hunting, that was; a dirty kill, but nothing to be done about it.
He strode off to Alan and helped him struggle out from beneath the great grey corpse. ‘Big un, ain’t he?’
‘Don’t I know it.’ Alan felt his ribs tenderly. ‘Good shooting, both of you.’
‘Didn’t do so bad yourself.’
They were still shaking, but triumph was taking over. They would eat because they were lords of the forest whom God had set in dominion over all beasts for their delectation.
Alan produced a poignard from beneath his cloak and bent over the calf to begin the gralloch. It was a male fallow deer; its face and rump were in tatters but the creamy brown hide of its body was untouched. Alan turned it on to its back and splayed its legs outwards as far as possible to expose the throat. He made an incision just below the windpipe and ran the knife carefully along the belly with a sound like tearing soft material, stopping before it reached the pizzle. Immediately, the stomach came bulging out. Alan wiped his poignard on his cloak before putting it away. He inserted his hands carefully into the long cut so as to ease out the rest of the stomach. It plopped out, milk-white and steaming, on to the whiter snow.
‘Innards?’ he asked, looking up.
‘Keep ’em in for now. We can roast the heart for the lady right away when we get back. Take the liver out, though.’
They must leave that as an offering to the god of the hunt and whichever of his creatures would feed off it.
He noticed that his opinion was asked for and listened to, a respect won for him by his archery. In return, he admired the man who’d stepped in front of Penda. A brave act, that one; and the way he gralloched the calf had been neatly done.
A considerable fellow, this. How old? In his thirties? Alan, eh? Alan of where? Both his English and his French, though fluent, were touched with a Germanic accent, which meant he could be German proper, a Frieslander, Hollander, Fleming or even from Lorraine; Gwil wasn’t expert enough to differentiate, but a suspicion was beginning to form that scared him.
Above them, the rooks continued to make a racket. ‘Oh, shut up,’ Penda shouted at them, which made Alan laugh.
With the deer lightened of its stomach, the two men took a hind leg each to begin the long haul home. At least, it was a home to them now; they were bonded by success; what they dragged was not just food for those left behind, it was a trophy.
As if to reward them, the sky had cleared, allowing the sun to turn the world into crystal. Penda began singing; not exactly a pleasant sound but it delighted Gwil because it was the first time he had ever heard her do it.
‘We been on a deer hunt, a deer hunt, a deer hunt,
We killed off the Frekies, the Frekies, the Frekies …’
Alan grinned at Gwil. ‘He knows the Scalds, does he?’
‘Scalds?’
‘Freki was Odin’s wolf.’
He hadn’t known, though he’d heard that fenlanders had Norse ancestors. In the first joy she’d known for a long time, Penda had reverted without thinking to the paganism of her forebears. A right little Viking, then; well, it accounted for her toughness, he supposed, and he was proud of her. Maybe the shutter was letting good memories filter in.
With a shock, he realized that if she remembered who she was, he’d lose her; she’d go back to her real parents and leave him in a loneliness he hadn’t known since his son died. He found himself swearing. Bugger it, he’d got used to her.
The day was drawing in by the time they came in sight of their hut. The light of the fire inside glowing through the hole in its roof and the cracks in its walls gave it the appearance of a giant lantern set down in the snow to guide passers-by.
‘Shit,’ Alan said. ‘It can be seen from the river.’
‘Who’s chasing you?’ Gwil asked.
Alan glanced at him. ‘Bad men,’ he said.
Gwil shrugged. ‘No help for it, though.’
‘No.’ Their two options – to put out the fire, or to set off into the freezing night – were no options at all; they wouldn’t survive either.
On the other hand … ‘These “bad men” of yours,’ Gwil said, ‘they ain’t likely to find you tonight, not after dark. They won’t be travelling by night, not in this weather.’
‘We found you after dark.’
‘You was desperate.’
‘So are they. Jesus, they might have got to her already. Stay here.’ He dropped the leg he was pulling so fast that the calf’s body skewed to one side. Gwil and Penda watched him go towards the hut, the snow forcing him to lollop, like a man trying to hurry through thigh-high water. He drew his sword as he went.
‘It’s her they’re after, then,’ Penda said. ‘Who is she?’
Gwil turned to look at her and saw the same amazing thought come into her mind as had been in his.
‘Can’t be,’ she said, ‘can’t be. Can it? She’s sieged in Oxford.’
‘Oxford’s north,’ Gwil said. ‘They came from the north.’
‘Sieged, though. A bloody great army round her. How’d she ever get out?’
‘They wore white. Remember? They had sheets over ’em. Satin sheets.’
‘Gor, bugger.’
They were both silent as images – very similar images – transfixed them. They saw three ghosts, unseen by the patrols, gliding through the surrounding enemy lines.
‘Gor, bugger,’ Pen said again. A grin of exquisite astonishment crossed her face as she remembered the incident in the night. ‘An’ she has to go out into the snow and piss like anybody else.’ She clutched at him. ‘An empress, Gwil. We got an empress in our bloody hut.’
‘We got a bloody danger in it. If Stephen’s found out she’s escaped on foot, he’s sent soldiers after her. That’s what’s gnawing Alan.’
They saw the man emerge from the hut and wave to them. All well.
Penda took the deer’s other hind leg and began pulling. ‘I like him. He was nifty with that wolf – not that I wouldn’t have got another shot in afore it got me. We sort of owe him.’
‘No we don’t.’ Gwil was emphatic. ‘We ain’t getting involved with their wars. Anyways, they owe us.’
‘An’ that Christopher’s nice. Soft, but nice
. Polite.’
‘We ain’t getting involved, Pen. Tomorrow they go their way an’ we go ours.’
The rest of the dragging was done without conversation, though Gwil could hear Pen whispering ‘an empress’ under her breath.
She bolted into the hut the moment they arrived, leaving Alan and Gwil to butcher the calf, a process that, for efficiency, required it to be hung up. Christopher came out to look and admire.
‘Got any string?’ Gwil wanted to know.
Alan was apologetic. ‘Sorry.’
Huffing with annoyance, Gwil went inside to fetch some from his pack. Didn’t even think to bring any bloody string with ’em. He knew he was being unreasonable; if these people were who he thought they were, and made the night escape from Oxford he thought they had, string hadn’t featured high on their list of requirements. But he was both overawed and frightened by them. They were high politics, the highest, in a trouble as extreme as troubles got. Me and Pen, we’ve enough of our own.
He wouldn’t look at the woman as he snatched up his pack and went back outside with it, but he was aware of Pen sitting opposite her, hands clasped, staring with voracious, eye-popping interest.
He tied the front hooves of the carcass together. Christopher helped him hook it to a branch of the nearest tree. They took the heart out to be roasted for ‘Mistress Margaret’ – it would give her some of the deer’s strength – and cut off both haunches to be cooked for the rest of them.
Christopher looked sadly at what remained. ‘If we leave it hanging out here, it’ll be gone in the morning.’
‘No room for it inside,’ Gwil said shortly. Anyway, venison went bad quickly when exposed to high heat.
They worked quickly in the extreme cold under a sky winking with stars and a rising moon that gave them long shadows.
A tripod for the cooking was the difficulty; branches of the trees were desiccated by frost and would burn faster than the food. In the end, Alan, with much reluctance, speared the meats on his sword blade and they took turns revolving it over the fire.
Christopher was suitably floundered by the story of the hunt. ‘Bolt right between the eyes, and that while the beast was moving. I call it handsome.’ He turned to Penda: ‘And you, Master Peter, composure under attack in one so young – handsome, very handsome. God’s blessings on you.’
Winter Siege Page 12