The stream ran cloudy with mud stirred by clerics wading down into the waters. Still more men of the cloth guided prisoners cut loose by the guards to participate in the sacrament of the Church and satisfy the terms of their parole, terms that had been set to prevent these beaten warriors from fleeing over the forested hills to take up the fight yet again. The captives stretched in a line back toward the ancient trees that at the start of this day had hosted worship to the Germanic gods—one-eyed Wodin and thundering Thor. Standing with their Saxon and Dane charges in the shallows, the priests muttered mechanically in Latin then they pushed the prisoners under the water and pulled them dripping back up, before leading them to the far bank where soldiers awaited them. On the muddy shore, they knelt before Bishop Turpin who recited the words to their oath:
“… And before God and these witnesses do you swear to never again take up arms against Charles and his people …”
The prisoners, as had the group before them, replied in a single word, “Yes.”
The soldiers then dragged them to their feet and goaded them to still more clergymen, who supplied them with simple homespun clothes and hard bread. In the shade of the ancient trees, they were finally allowed respite to tear hungrily into the small loaves and shake the water from their hair. Armed Franks prowled the area to ensure continued compliance as another group was led down into the water.
Otun stood tall among the flowing line of prisoners ambling slowly forward to the river, stripped to the waist, hands bound and feet hobbled. Yet he held his head high, his beard bristling defiantly. Before him, his brothers, cousins, and friends took upon themselves the promises of the Christian god who dwelt in a far-off city and swore to keep faith with the Franks. He strained at the bonds around his wrists, digging the cord deeper into his already raw flesh. From a knot of men nearby, the young knight Roland, his last adversary on the battlefield, watched the proceedings with apparent interest. Otun held his head defiantly higher.
At the lapping edge of the river, a guard shoved him forward.
“Get in. It’ll be over soon, and you’ll be off to your hovel and your pigs—including your wife!”
The man guffawed at his own wit. Otun balled up his fists and swung, smashing him in the face and sending his helmet flying over the heads of his fellows. Another soldier grabbed at him until a jab from the Dane’s powerful elbow knocked the wind from him. The guard reeled into the other prisoners who grappled for his weapons. More soldiers rushed in and beat the prisoners down with fists and pommels.
“Wodin’s eye be damned!” Otun roared, facing the naked blade of a Frank with murder in his eyes.
“This is the one,” the Frank snarled. “The instigator!”
From out of the mix of brawling Danes and Franks, Roland pushed his way forward. He grabbed the guard’s arm, halting the man’s sword inches from Otun’s bared chest.
“What’s going on here?” Roland demanded.
Otun’s breath hissed through his teeth.
A cleric, shivering and cold in the stream, piped up helpfully. “This man,” he said, pointing at Otun. “This heathen profanes a sacrament of God!”
Otun held his bound fists before Roland. “This is too much to ask! If I do this thing, my soul will be exiled from the halls of Valhalla!”
Roland nodded, but his words held little comfort for the Dane. “Terms of parole, I’m afraid. I can’t countermand King Charles’s own order. All will be baptized. That is his word.”
Otun spat at Roland’s feet. “Your god was weak. I’ve heard your mewling priests tell the tale of him strung up on a tree!”
“Yet it is He who strengthens my arm,” Roland countered. “He who is my shield.”
“Thor’s wrath makes the heavens and earth shake with fear!”
“And yet for all his rumbling,” Roland said quietly, “your god didn’t grant you victory.”
Otun glanced around at the line of prisoners, his own Danish comrades from distant villages of the north. They watched their champion carefully, awaiting his next move. After a heartbeat, his shoulders sagged.
“It is true. I cannot deny it.” He lowered his hands. “But I would serve a warrior. I would be an arm of the gods. Not …” he nodded scathingly at the priest in the river, “not one of these.”
Abruptly the giant Dane fell to his knees before Roland.
“Your God will grant me strength in battle?” Otun demanded.
“Yes,” Roland said warily. Then, with conviction, “Yes, He will. Both in body and in spirit. But only—” he held out a warning hand, “only if you truly give yourself to Him.”
Otun considered this. He could feel the eyes of his countrymen on his back. Then, making his decision, he twisted his palms together as a supplicant and reached out to Roland.
“I watched your priests do this with a squire and a knight,” he said. “Before I make promises to your God, I swear to you first.”
Roland considered this great warrior beast that had laid so many low but a short time ago. “This isn’t in the terms. Do you know what it means to be a vassal? To be my sworn man?”
“You are the champion, are you not? I hear your heralds proclaim it. And the Franks are a mighty people, are they not?” From his knees, he straightened his back and puffed out his chest. “I would serve you, Roland, champion of the Franks.” From beneath strands of blood-matted hair, his beard cracked into a grin. “Even if it meant feeding that ugly Frank nag of yours!”
Marking the effect of Otun’s words on the gaggle of prisoners, Roland clasped the Dane’s brutish hands between his own and bowed his head.
“My horse and I are honored. We accept.”
Roland drew his dagger and sliced through Otun’s ropes. As if a dam burst, other Danish prisoners clambered forward, straining against their own bonds to follow in Otun’s footsteps and speak the words binding them to the Frank champion.
The morning sun chased away nightmarish shadows from the battlefield, but the cleansing rays of light could not remove the stench of death. Throughout the night, Franks and Saxons had ranged across the fields to comfort those who struggled for life and take away those who had succumbed. The bodies were separated—the noblemen worthy of transport to their homeland for proper burial were laid aside from the commoners who would be interred in a mass grave where Saxon parolees even now bent their backs to deepen the pit.
Another stone clacked into place as two clerics completed a rough field altar for the service later in the day. They paused and stretched their sore backs as Roland approached. One, the abbot of a local monastery, tonsure as gray as the mist rising from the fields, bowed gratefully and pronounced blessings upon the champion for his service to God’s kingdom on earth. The other, a layman in sagging homespun that billowed from the cinch at his waist, likewise bowed and backed away from their crude handiwork.
“Please, only if you’re done,” Roland said.
The two holy men stammered an inarticulate response and left the knight to his meditations.
Roland sank to his knees, burying his head in his hands.
“I begin here, Lord. I just pray you will guide me along this path.”
Weariness bore heavily on his shoulders. He hadn’t slept well the night before amid the groans of the wounded and the maimed that drifted through the thin canvas walls of the tent he shared with Oliver. Robbed of sleep, he had crept from the tent to labor with the camp surgeons. The earliest rays of dawn had found him covered in dark stains and still seeking out his men.
Now, with this moment of peace, he recalled a long-ago day when as a lad of nine or ten he’d burst from the stables in a flurry of sobs and tears. A stable boy tending his father’s steed had just taunted him about the preparations for the spring campaign to Italy that would leave the youth with the other children. He ran to the courtyard where William directed the marchmen. Roland remembered him a giant standing head and shoulders above those he commanded, exuding boundless energy in his preparations for war. He was Apollo in the sky of his youthful son. It did not matter that he was the right hand of the king and, as champion, the right hand of God himself, for to Roland, William held a much simpler title—that of father.
Seeing the outburst, he caught his son by the arm and knelt down to meet the lad’s eye.
“What is it, boy?” William asked, brushing tears from Roland’s cheeks.
The lad puffed out his chest and straightened up, a young soldier bucking up under inspection of his commanding officer. But that wasn’t all William saw in Roland’s eyes.
“You’re sending me to the vale to page. And then you leave too. Why must you leave me?”
“Well,” said William, a man known for his few words, “it’s my duty.”
“But it will be such a long time!” Roland sniffled. “Who will take care of Mother?”
William smiled then, no longer the champion but the husband and father. “Sometimes we are asked to do hard things. Even your mother will miss both of us while we are away. But our calling is to serve. And Charles is God’s anointed, so we are engaged in a cause for our family, the march, and the kingdom.”
Roland clutched his father, burying his face against his chest, arms straining to encompass the whole of the man. “Then take me! Don’t send me away. I can fight! Father, tell God I will serve Charles! Just take me with you!”
“This is not your time, son,” William said, kissing the lad on the cheek. “Nor is it my place to tell God what He should do. Your chance will come, I promise. You will serve Charles.”
Roland pushed away from his father’s embrace. “But when? I can use a sword. You know I can!”
William laughed and ruffled the lad’s hair. “Yes, I do, and I still have the bruises to prove it. God will show you when it is time. And when that moment comes, you must not just use the sword. You must be the sword. You must be the sword of God.”
“My lord!” The voice broke into Roland’s thoughts, and he lifted his head, blinking in the light that had grown since he knelt. A squire panted nearby, waving his hand toward the camp. “My lord, Oliver has sent for you. You must come now. You must hurry back to camp!”
Roland jumped to his feet and rushed through the Frank encampment to the march’s enclave, all the way dodging men who stepped in his path to congratulate him on his new office. His breath clouded in the chill morning air, leaving a trail of mist in his wake. When he approached his square of tents, he could see Ganelon flanked by his personal escort. The count of Tournai emphatically gestured with his hands while he stomped back and forth before the assembled troopers. Kennick stood at their head, shoulders back and head high, bearing the harangue in stoic silence. Unoccupied soldiers started to gather at a safe distance to watch.
“You disobeyed your liege lord!” Ganelon’s voice rang out.
Oliver placed himself between the grizzled veteran and the red-faced count.
“The heir of the march entered harm’s way,” Kennick responded evenly. “I knew my lord would want him protected.”
“Protected from his own foolishness!” Ganelon fumed. “I commanded that none leave the march!”
Roland pushed through a knot of onlookers to Kennick’s side. “What game is this?” he snarled. “This man did both you and the king a great service!”
Ganelon pointed a finger at Kennick then swept that same hand over the marchmen. “And broke his oath, stepson! This man holds rank! He bears trust for all these men. For that there must be account! Do you hear me? He will receive seventy-five lashes and shall consider himself lucky. I pray when you are count in the march they will have learned to not be so surly!”
“You’ve no cause!” Roland stood his ground. “I gave the order in the face of new information that you couldn’t have known about.”
“I have every cause,” Ganelon snarled back. “I hold Breton March under Charles’s own writ. My word is law until I am relieved.”
“And not a day too soon!”
“And yet today my will be done!” Ganelon snapped.
Gothard stepped forward, smugly directing Tournai men to take Kennick and drag him to a nearby hitching post. Armed men blocked Roland. Marchmen rumbled with displeasure. A threat of blood hung in the air.
Ganelon’s men stripped Kennick to the waist and stretched him on the post. A heavily muscled trooper tugged a knotted whip from his belt and snapped it with a crack.
“Wait!” Roland shouted. He lunged into the cluster of troopers between him and Kennick, dropping one with a blow across the jaw and twisting past the others. Marchmen surged toward Ganelon, but Roland spun back and held up a warning hand. “Hold!” They stumbled to a halt, confusion on their faces.
Roland snapped back to Ganelon once more. “For Christ’s sake, if this man is to be punished for coming to my aid, punish me instead!”
Ganelon drew himself up, a shrewd look on his face. “Intriguing—the champion of the realm torn under the lash for a broken vow? No man may strike the champion and go without retribution from the king himself.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “But this is my right and my justice. Not even Charles can fault the exercise of my duty. This man must bear the weight of his own crime!”
Roland threw his body before the lash, and Ganelon’s man pulled the whip short.
“My lord,” Kennick growled to Roland, “you must not. My honor requires this. I broke my word. By God, I’d break it a hundred times over to fight by your side. But break it I did. We can choose our actions. But we must accept the consequences.”
“Kennick—” Roland began.
“I always pay my debts, boy.”
“Father, he stops you from discharging your duty!” Gothard whined. “This cannot be tolerated!”
Roland straightened and snatched the whip from Ganelon’s man.
“This man is mine,” he shouted. Then he raised his voice above the growing discontent among the marchmen. “This man is mine! Be still, marchmen! I command you to stand down!” Roland lifted the whip and waved it at Ganelon’s face. Behind him courtiers and nobles gravitated to the commotion. “This man will be mine when I am confirmed in my inheritance. As such, I demand the right to punish him. No man will exact punishment on any of my men but me!”
The marchmen pounded the ground with their feet, affirmation that they stood with William’s son. Ganelon’s face darkened, his brows knitting together while the bystanders grew in number and crowded closer.
“Carry out the punishment, and honor is satisfied,” he growled.
Roland faced Kennick’s back and hefted the whip, the knotted length falling about his feet. By his own hand, the leather lashed across Kennick’s flesh, each stroke tearing a raw mark. Gothard loudly barked a grim count with satisfaction. The veteran clenched his jaws as his skin was flayed over and over. In time his knees buckled, but he struggled to regain his feet and to keep his already scarred body erect. His eyes stared ahead at his men, no cry escaping his lips.
Ganelon stood with arms folded and grim, watching with wicked contentment the blood spattering the air. Many of the crowd turned away from the gore before the whip fell for the last time and Roland dropped it to the ground. A breathless groan accompanied Roland when he rushed to cut Kennick loose. The veteran collapsed into his arms, and the marchmen broke ranks, surrounding their own in an iron embrace.