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 gray ocean, the creak of timber, and the splash of dipping oars. At the prow of the Flemish warship that 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 inquired, distracted. He had not taken his eyes off the swell since daybreak. So grim was the mood afflicting 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 that 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 had 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 asked. 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 plowed 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 jumped 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 gray hooded cloak around him. Alric found his black woolen 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 whir 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. Rabbits’ 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 in the distance 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 odor 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, gray-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 gray-green, their bellies bloated, their eyes already food for the birds; poor souls left as a warning.

Hereward stared at the faces of the corpses for a long moment, and then said, under his breath, “The Norman bastards.”