The Splintered Kingdom (46 page)

‘How long ago was this?’ I asked.

‘Six days ago,’ she replied. ‘My fellow sisters have been working by sun and by lantern-light since then to bury the dead.’

The wind gusted, bringing with it the reek of shit mixed with decaying flesh. Sæthryth lifted a small pouch to her nostrils, no doubt trying to mask the odour with herbs and so stave off the vaporous poisons that some said were carried upon the air. Whether that was true or not I was not knowledgeable enough to be able to judge, but a dozen years and more of breathing in such battle-smells had brought little ill effect upon me. As far as I was aware, at any rate.

With that the abbess left me, having clearly had enough of indulging my questions. Perhaps she thought that by ignoring me I would grow tired and leave her and the rest of the nuns to their work; if so she was wrong. From speaking to a few of the younger nuns I learnt that the king had left behind a small contingent commanded by his half-brother, the Bishop Odo, whom he had tasked with pursuing the Welshmen to the dyke and with relieving Fitz Osbern, who despite some of the rumours we’d heard still held out in the castle at Scrobbesburh. I asked whether any word of Earl Hugues had come from Ceastre, but none had heard anything.

‘Are you still here?’

I turned to see Abbess Sæthryth looking sternly upon me, plainly unimpressed by my questioning of her sisters. By then I had all the information I needed, however, and as the sun fell beneath the hills to the west and the light began to fade, I let them be.

Before returning to Fyrheard, I searched the field for anything
that might be of use to us that had not already been taken by the victors, and managed to find two sturdy round shields that with a little repair to the leather upon their faces would serve well, together with a pair of fine hunting knives and a mail hauberk that had once belonged to a fellow Frenchman. His body lay part hidden beneath a thorny bush, which was how I supposed such spoils had gone unnoticed. He was a stouter man than I, which meant the hauberk was a little larger than I would have liked, but it was better than no protection at all, and so I pulled it on and tightened the buckles as far as they would go.

With the skies darkening, then, I rode back to the others, eventually making it back some hours later. Father Erchembald chastised me for having been gone so long; he and the others had worried that some ill fate had befallen me, but when I showed them what goods I’d recovered from the place of battle, their moods soon lightened.

‘Where now, then?’ Ædda asked me after I had related the news of what had taken place close to Stæfford.

That same question had been on my mind as I was riding back, so I had no hesitation in answering it. To my mind there was nothing to be had in joining Bishop Odo’s forces in trying to pursue Bleddyn; the Welsh king could be anywhere, and was probably many leagues from here already. No, the main fighting would be in the north, against the ætheling and most likely Eadric too. If I was to have any chance of bringing my sword to bear upon them, that was where I had to be.

Twenty-six

WE SET OUT
by way of Licedfeld. I didn’t want to take the survivors from Earnford into the wilds of Northumbria, only those who could fight, and so I left behind the older ones, including Nothmund the miller and Beorn the brewer, along with the women and the children, entrusting them into Wigheard’s care. He promised he would find shelter for them at the monastery in the town until I returned.

We parted ways outside the gates of the town, where I handed the monk one of the two saddlebags filled with silver from my hoard.

‘Give this to your abbot,’ I told him.

I hadn’t had a chance to weigh or count how much was there exactly, but reckoned it was enough to ensure the monks stayed friendly and provided my people with adequate food and drink for as long as was necessary. As well it should, for it was fully half of all the wealth I had left in the world.

‘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: Ædda; Galfrid the steward; the three lads Ceawlin, Dægric 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 Ædda 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 Hæstinges, 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 Humbre, 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 Stæfford 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 ætheling 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 Hæstinges, 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.’