by James Wilde
When he passed the third house, a shout rang out, and another — Vadir, he was sure. The clang of iron upon iron resounded across the rooftops.
Hereward ran. His friend must not have all the fun.
Following the hound’s barking, he charged on to a green next to the church. Hoibrict waited there with the second man, who had drawn an arrow from a pouch on his back. This time the Flemish nobleman was grinning as he unsheathed his sword. A poor trap, Hereward thought, already searching for cover from the arrows. It was then that he saw Vadir. Beyond the church, on the edge of the village, his friend lay on the turf, blood seeping from gaping wounds on his arms and neck. Hereward felt his thoughts burn slow as he struggled to comprehend the scene and the identity of the man standing over his fallen friend.
Harald Redteeth.
As the Viking raised his axe over his head for the killing blow, he began to sing a jaunty song. He paused when his weapon reached its highest point and grinned at Hereward. The Mercian could almost read his enemy’s thoughts. I have travelled across land and sea with only the heat of my yearning to drive my legs on. I have hunted through wild woods and empty grassland, past rushing rivers and in the reeking depths of towns to find your trail. And now that I have found you I will take my revenge — by stealing the life of your friend as you took the lives of my men. By driving guilt into your heart as you brought shame to mine.
Guilt, Hereward thought, because he had let down Vadir: he couldn’t reach his friend in time to prevent the fall of the axe.
If only he had realized the lengths Harald Redteeth would go to achieve his vengeance. If only he had watched the path behind him instead of the road ahead. If only he had killed his enemy outright when he had the chance.
Hereward refused to submit to this destiny. He hurled himself at the archer with a roar. The man loosed his arrow, but his arm trembled in shock at the ferocity of the attack and the shaft sped by. Hereward drove his sword through the archer’s gut so hard the tip ripped out of his back. Snatching up the bow and arrow, the English warrior cast one lowering glare at the advancing Hoibrict. Whatever the Flemish man saw in that look, his features drained of blood and he turned and ran.
Harald Redteeth grasped the badly wounded Vadir’s hair and yanked it up, exposing the man’s neck. Holding his axe high, the Viking cast one final taunting look towards his hated rival.
Hold steady, Hereward thought, trying to calm the blood rushing through his head. Be strong. He notched an arrow, took aim and fired. Harald Redteeth stared back at his enemy, unruffled.
The shaft sped past its target by a hand’s width.
Cursing, Hereward flashed back to the wasted moment on the snowy field outside Saint-Omer when Vadir urged him to learn to use the bow.
You may need this skill one day.
Sickened, he drew another arrow.
Harald Redteeth swung his axe down.
Silence closed around the Mercian, and filled his head. It rang with regrets. With trembling hands, he let the bow fall.
The Viking was laughing and dancing, a comical, soundless performance. And from his raised left hand, Vadir’s head swung by the hair, dripping blood. Once, twice, the wild man swung the thing around his own head, and on the third circuit he let go. Vadir’s head landed on the thatch of the nearest house, bounced and rolled down to fall in the dirt.
Hereward felt overwhelmed by a rush of grief so powerful he thought his legs would fail him. Vadir had been more than friend, more than guide; he had felt almost kin. In an instant, fury supplanted the grief, a long-suppressed rage that drove all civilized thoughts from his head. Hurling the bow and arrow aside, he ran towards the Viking. Harald Redteeth braced himself, whistling that unsettling tune as he gripped his weapon.
As the Mercian neared his prey, he glimpsed movement on either side. Ahead, he saw the Viking’s expression darken. Victorious in battle, the remnants of Robert’s men were sweeping into the village. Redteeth sensed any advantage he might have had was gone, and he turned on his heel and ran from the village. Consumed by passion, Hereward pursued him, over the ramparts and across the fields to the trees lining the hillside.
Nothing could have stopped him, not mountains, nor sea. His vision closed in on the fleeing Viking, and only death would free him from the bloodlust that now gripped him.
On the edge of the shadowy woodland Vadir’s killer slowed and glanced back. His satisfied grin sprang back to his lips when he saw that only one pursued him, the man who had haunted his thoughts for nigh on five years.
Tearing off his helmet and throwing it aside as he ran, Hereward drew his sword without slowing his step.
His pupils so wide and black they appeared to be tunnels into his head, Harald Redteeth swung his axe with a grunt. With a yell, Hereward clashed his sword against the Viking’s weapon, for a moment fearing his blade would shatter. The impact threw both men off their feet. The Mercian scrambled up first and launched himself at his enemy. His head rammed into the Viking’s stomach and both warriors pitched down the slope. Initially they rolled in unison, bouncing off outcropping rocks and careering off trees. Gathering speed, they flew apart. Hereward cracked his head, saw stars, but somehow kept hold of his sword. Skidding through fern, he glimpsed blue sky ahead.
Bursting from beneath the verdant canopy, his legs swung over the edge of a cliff. The grey sea churned far below. One hand caught hold of an exposed tree root, almost wrenching his arm from its socket. For a moment, he dangled above the dizzying drop, and then his leather shoe found purchase and he eased his way back up to solid ground.
Dazed, he drew himself upright. A flash of reflected light dazzled him. Harald Redteeth burst from the shadows beneath the trees, his axe already in flight.
Instincts afire, Hereward threw himself back, but not far enough. The axe ripped through his mail into the flesh of his chest. The force of the blow propelled him back over the cliff.
Wind tearing at his hair, he felt guilt that at the last he had failed Vadir, and he had failed himself. The final thing Hereward saw was the Viking’s grinning face before the cold sea claimed him.
CHAPTER FORTY — TWO
The keening cry echoed through the small house next to the great church of Saint-Omer. Startled from his duties, Alric hushed the frightened children and instructed them to continue repeating the Latin he had taught them. Racing into the sun-dappled street, the monk found Turfrida clutching her arms around her, her face streaked with tears.
‘You are hurt?’ he asked, concerned.
Racked with silent sobs, the woman couldn’t speak for a moment, and then she gasped only, ‘Hereward…’
Alric felt a pang in his heart. He had learned to trust in God whenever his friend marched off to fight, but he always knew that sooner or later Hereward’s battle prowess would fail him. ‘You have had word back from the Scheldt?’
Turfrida shook her head. Wiping the snot from her nose with the back of her hand, she stuttered, ‘A vision came to me as I stood on the hill where my husband and I always walk… a raven, falling from the sky. And when I looked at my feet, the bird lay there, crawling with white maggots.’
‘You think God speaks through this vision?’
‘The raven is Hereward, I know it. He has met death.’
Alric forced a comforting smile and said softly, ‘Your husband has met death many times. Indeed, the two are close friends, and he has introduced death to others.’
‘Perhaps that is it,’ the woman replied, her chest heaving. She took long, deep breaths until she calmed and then she allowed the monk to lead her back to her house, where she sat by the hearth with her uncompleted sewing. But a dark cloud hung over her that no comforting words could dispel. Her sadness would only ease when she held her husband in her arms once more. Alric hoped that time would come, and soon.
He returned to the children, but he was in no mood for any more teaching and sent them all home. For the rest of the day, he prayed in front of the church’s plain wooden altar,
seeking solace among his troubled thoughts. He followed the contours of his mismatched friendship with the Mercian, from the suspicion and dislike of that first frozen night in Northumbria to the ease with which they spent time together in Saint-Omer. The monk realized he’d grown to like the surly warrior, for all his many flaws. Perhaps he even admired some of the qualities he found lacking in so many others: courage, loyalty, love, even honour, something the monk had thought to be entirely absent during their early days together. Their destinies had seemed entwined, both seeking salvation from a bloody past, both unable to achieve it without the help of the other. Now he wondered if he had been mistaken.
For some reason that Alric couldn’t understand, he woke at dawn the next day and felt the urge to go to the road out of Saint-Omer and look to the horizon. He stayed there until midmorning, and returned again near sunset.
The next day he did the same.
And on the third day, not long after sunrise, he glimpsed a lone figure riding towards Saint-Omer at a funereal pace. The monk waited, his heart pattering.
When the figure neared, Alric saw that it was Hereward. Yet his friend looked quite different, as if worn down by a terrible weight upon his shoulders. Even when the warrior saw the monk waiting, he didn’t increase the pace of his mount.
Finally, he reined the horse to a halt. A bloody strip of linen had been tied across his bare chest, and there was dirt under his fingernails from, although the monk didn’t know it then, the grave he had dug with his bare hands. He was filthy and he smelled of the road, but Alric was shocked when he saw the fire burning in his friend’s glowering eyes.
‘Say your goodbyes among the children and the churchmen, monk,’ Hereward said in a cold, flat voice. ‘Our time here is done. We sail for England.’
CHAPTER FORTY — THREE
5 October 1067
The gulls shrieked in an iron sky. Spray salted the wind, and the morning throbbed with the roar of the grey ocean, the creak of timber and the splash of dipping oars. At the prow of the Flemish warship Turfrida’s father had arranged to transport them home, Hereward and Alric felt the first lick of autumn in the air.
Unable to hide his anxiety, the monk gripped the bowpost until his knuckles grew white. Memories of icy water closing over his head still haunted him. ‘Let me soon feel dry land under my feet,’ he muttered.
‘Were yesterday’s constant prayers not enough?’ Hereward enquired, distracted. He had not taken his eyes off the swell since daybreak. Such a grim mood afflicted the warrior that it seemed he would never know joy again.
Suddenly a shaft of sunlight punched through the dense cloud cover, illuminating a hazy band of green across the horizon. Pointing at the sunbeam, Alric forced his first smile of the day. ‘God looks down upon England.’
‘And what does he see awaiting us in William the Bastard’s newly forged realm?’ Hereward’s eyes narrowed. He let his lamb-fat-lined furs fall open, already thinking of setting foot upon the quay.
‘You always fear the worst,’ Alric said. He thought of making light of it until he saw Hereward’s darkening expression. Following the warrior’s gaze, he glimpsed columns of smoke rising here and there across the coast. ‘Burning off the crop stubble,’ the monk said without conviction.
No more words passed between them for the remainder of the sea journey.
As his relief rose with the proximity to land, Alric thought back over the last few days. When Hereward returned from the expedition to the islands in the Scheldt estuary, he had seemed a broken man. For two days he slept, and for two days after that he barely spoke, apart from demanding food and ale and sending Alric away to make arrangements for the coming crossing. Turfrida had been so overjoyed to see her husband alive, she made no attempt to question him. ‘He will speak in his own time,’ she had whispered on the third morn. But she had disappeared to the woods where the alfar walked, and she had listened to the tongues of the birds and the foxes, and communed with the trees, and when she had returned her mood had darkened once more. ‘The shadow is rising within him again,’ she said. ‘We must work together or we could lose him.’
Alric chewed a nail. He had tried to maintain a calm disposition, but it was not within his nature. He feared for his friend. One night beside the hearth, the words had tumbled out of him as he pleaded to know what was wrong. Hereward had glared at him in such a way that at first he thought his friend might strike him dead. But then he said simply, ‘Vadir is dead,’ and returned his attention to the fire. The monk recalled waking with a start the next morning and finding the warrior looming over him. Hereward’s face was like the statues the Normans carved on their churches, but his eyes swam with grief. In flat, halting words, the warrior had described the older man’s death, and Harald Redteeth’s triumph, and how Hereward believed it to have been a plot long in the making; revenge for what transpired on that frozen night all those winters ago when they had first met.
Once again the monk felt the guilt that had consumed him that morning. If not for him, Hereward would never have encountered the mad Viking, or attracted his wild attention, and Vadir would still be alive. Hereward had pressed a cup of ale in Alric’s hand, and ordered him to drink up — it felt like an oath, though no words had been spoken — and then told the monk not to blame himself. Turfrida had spoken to him of the wyrd; who was to know the schemes of God, he had said. But as he walked back to the fire, he had added something like, ‘That does not mean I cannot make amends,’ but what he meant by that he would not say. Turfrida had pleaded with her husband to stay. He had earned himself a new life of peace and love. Why would he risk all that for the uncertainty of a journey to England? But he would speak no more on the matter.
The ship ploughed a white-rimmed furrow through the waves. Alric knew they had skirted the south because of William’s strength around London, and the vessel had been making its way up the whale road to the east coast. Hereward had set his sights on the place he knew best: Mercia.
When the ship put in to Yernemuth, Hereward leapt to the quay before the ruddy-faced sailors had even tied up. Urging Alric to follow, the warrior threw off his sea-furs and flapped his grey hooded cloak around him. Alric found his black woollen habit disguise enough. No one gave monks a second glance at the best of times. Along the quay, merchants haggled over boxes and barrels and sailors argued with shipwrights. Men with arms as hard as iron hauled bales from the seagoing ships to the smaller vessels that would carry the goods along the rivers inland. All appeared as it should at the port; bustling, focused upon the day-to-day activity of trade. But Alric thought he could already see signs of the Norman occupation. Faces everywhere looked beaten, eyes downcast or suspicious. Children ran from trader to trader begging for food or coin.
Pushing through the crowd at the waterside, the two companions forged into the narrow streets amid the sound of hammers and the whirr and rattle of looms. Hens scratched in the mud. Donkeys trudged under piles of wood for the workshop fires. Women carried baskets of fresh-baked bread covered with a sheet of white linen. Alric let his attention drift over the scene, searching for whatever was causing the knot deep in his belly. Then he had it.
‘Look at them,’ he whispered to Hereward. ‘Everyone carries an amulet, a token, to ward off misfortune.’ A woman grasped a roughly made wooden cross. Rabbit’s feet hung from leather wristbands and bracelets. Others wore small, flat stones hanging round their necks, each one bearing a symbol. The monk noted the runes that the Northmen still used, and the horned circle that he knew represented the old heathen god Woden. Fingers fumbled for the amulets every moment or two, fluttering, unconscious actions once inspired by prayer, Alric guessed, but which had become second nature by constant use. ‘They are scared,’ he said. ‘All of them.’
Hereward said nothing. The monk realized his companion had long since noticed the signs.
Asking around, the two men took directions to a merchant who had horses to sell, and some bread, blankets and a bow for hunting. Soon they were
riding west along the narrow paths through the flat, green land.
‘When do you plan to tell me where we are going?’ the monk asked.
‘I did not ask you to come with me.’
‘You did not ask me to stay behind with your wife,’ Alric snapped.
His words must have touched something in his companion, for after a moment Hereward pointed to one of the columns of smoke and said, ‘First, we go there.’
When they neared their destination, Alric could smell that it was not crop stubble burning. The smoke caught the back of his throat with a bitter edge, and underneath the odour lay something sourer still.
Emerging from the wood into a clearing, the two men fought to control their skittish horses. In a vast circle of blackened grass and burnt mud, grey-white clouds drifted up from blackened stumps of timber punching up from the ground like the carcass of a long-dead beast.
‘An entire village, burned to the ground,’ Alric gasped. ‘What wretched fate.’
‘Not fate,’ Hereward replied, his voice free of all emotion. ‘This is the work of men.’
Raising one arm, the warrior gestured through the folds of smoke. Alric squinted, trying to see what had caught his companion’s eye, but all he could make out was the dark line of trees on the far side of the clearing. When Hereward urged his mount to skirt the blackened area to get a clearer look, the monk felt his chest tighten with apprehension. On the other side of the destroyed village, he understood what he had sensed, and recognized the source of the sour smell caught on the wind.
A makeshift gibbet stretched between two elms. From the line hung not foxes and crows, but human remains. Six men and a woman swung in the gentle breeze, their skin grey-green, their bellies bloated, their eyes already food for the birds; poor souls left as a warning.