CHAPTER FIFTY

THE TORCHES GUTTERED AND SPAT IN THE BREEZE. SMOKE stinking of pitch swirled in the thin light breaking through the branches where a few gold and copper leaves still clung. Holding aloft the burning brands, the Norman knights waited on the edge of the green. They were dressed for war, in helmets and hauberks, double-edged swords hanging at their sides. In front of them, the village men knelt on the turf, their heads bowed. They still wore the thin tunics they had been dressed in when they rose from their beds at first light, before the Normans had hauled them from their homes. Whimpering, the women huddled against the wall of one house, casting fearful glances at their menfolk as they wrapped their arms around their sobbing children.

Aldous Wyvill felt only contempt for the cowardly English. They had brought this upon themselves. “One final time,” he said, his eyes moving over the sullen peasants. “What do you know of the outlaw Hereward?”

Only the wind answered him.

Grim-faced, the Norman commander nodded to his knights. He would brook no resistance. In response to his silent order, each knight raised a sizzling torch toward the thatch that roofed the eight dwellings ringing the green. The village men looked up, their faces drained of blood, but still they remained defiant. The commander sighed inwardly.

“Wait.” A young, thin-faced man with straggly blond hair and unsettlingly pale eyes lurched to his feet. The men about him cursed him, insisting he hold his tongue. A woman—the man’s wife, Aldous guessed—begged him to stay strong.

Aldous held up his hand to stay the burning. He looked the man in the face with as respectful a stare as he could muster. “You know something of this Hereward?”

The man nodded.

“Then speak, and know that you do an honorable thing in trying to save your village.”

“We have all heard talk of him, in the market and the inn. He has returned to defend us in our time of need.”

The commander snorted. “He will be the death of you all. What do you know of him?”

“That he is more than man. That he is filled with the spirit of a bear, which he killed with his bare hands in the north, or so the stories say.”

“He is a man, be sure of that, and a weak one too.”

“You say. But that is not what the English hear. Already the stories are reaching out beyond the fens, and a steady stream of men and women draws toward this place.”

“To join the rebellion?”

“Some. Others to seek protection from the grip of your king.” Burning insolence flared in the man’s eyes.

Aldous struck him across the face with the back of his hand, splitting his lip and raising blood. “He is your king,” he hissed. “Show respect or you will lose your head, here, in front of your woman and your neighbors.”

The man flashed an affectionate look toward his tearful wife.

“One more thing I would know,” the commander continued. “Where does this Hereward make camp?”

With one voice, the village men roared their opposition, shouting threats of violence to their young neighbor.

“For your village,” Aldous whispered. “For your women and children.”

Looking down, the man swallowed. In a quiet voice almost drowned out by the clamor, he described the location of the outlaw’s camp.

Once he was done, Aldous allowed himself a triumphant grin. He would begin making his plans immediately to attack the rebel. This Hereward would not know he was doomed until it was too late. Striding back to his men, he nodded curtly. “Burn it down. Then kill the men.”