"We are all soaking wet. We should have made camp," Morcar said to Edwin. They were riding double file, and riding the handsome black Frisian stallions that they had bought from Klaes.
"Hereward says that we should ride until we hear a signal," replied his brother Edwin, "and then we will be led to a camp. Besides, we know we are being followed by a Norman patrol but we don't know by how many."
They had chosen not to take the direct route through Derbyshire to Chester because Regent Odo was hunting Edwin, and the streets and villages south of Nottingham were controlled by the Normans. Young Raynar was guiding them along a more northerly route that would take them through Sherwood Forest and then through the Peaks forest. It was longer but safer.
Their guard was twenty of Hereward’s Lincolnshire skirmishers, all mounted so they could move fast, and yet a small enough number that they could live off the land. Hereward's plan was to collect more skirmishers from Sherwood and the Peaks as they went. Once they were in Mercia, Edwin would put a call out for his earldom's huscarls to meet them in Chester.
Morcar sped his splendid horse and caught up to Raynar on his farm mare. "Any signal yet?"
"Ten minutes ago. A signal to keep moving," said Raynar.
"I heard nothing."
"You did not hear the owl?" asked Raynar.
"I did hear an owl."
"Owls don't call in the rain," stated Raynar.
"But... Oh, I see, or rather I hear. That was the signal."
"One of them." Raynar left the cartway and started following a rushing stream. "This way, single file, keep to mid stream and to the gravel bed."
Morcar passed the instructions to the man behind him, and the message moved down the line of riders.
They followed the stream for perhaps a half mile, then Raynar stopped and held his arm up to stop the rest of them. "We are expected!" he yelled out to the forest, "we are Hereward’s men!"
Morcar looked around but could see nothing except trees and bushes. He almost had heart failure when a man stood up out of the bushes right next to his horse. The man waved his strung longbow, and then other men appeared from nowhere along both banks of the stream, all with bows.
"Where is Hereward?" Morcar yelled at the forest men, "we sent him ahead to find you."
"You mean you sent him ahead to be found by us," said the man at his side. "He and some of the lads are back at the last highway cross counting how many Normans are following you. They want to have a little talk with them."
The man grabbed the reins and began leading the stallion. Within five minutes they were at a narrow pathway between two ancient and giant tree trunks. On the other side of the trees was a fortified camp. There was no one in sight. The forest man put his fingers in his lips and whistled a blackbird's call. Men and a few women suddenly appeared and he called out, "It's them, uncover the fires."
He held the stallion quiet while a tired, wet and hungry Morcar dismounted. "Welcome, the midden is that way, the wash place the other way. Get cleaned up and we will get some food into you."
The food, of course, was venison, or to be more exact, wild pig. There was also forest greens soup to drink, but no ale. Just clean spring water.
A quick tour of the camp showed storage and sleeping quarters inside a long low cave that had been shaped and smoothed by some ancient peoples. It even had a chimney so that a fire could be lit inside. The paddock was made from the ruins of another long cave that had collapsed to leave a small gorge. It had a wide gate made of lashed saplings.
There were also simple huts made by training the boughs of evergreens to hang low to the ground and then cutting out the boughs beneath them. This created a hut-like structure from the low branches of a living tree. Some of them were quite large, enough for twenty men to sleep dry and sit in comfort.
Everyone in the camp looked healthy enough and fed enough, but there was an air of desperation about their clothes. When Morcar asked the forest men about the clothes, a man replied that they don't do their daily chores in their church best. Another man replied that they couldn't just walk into a market and buy more, because they were outlaws.
That man led Morcar into the storage cave and showed him chests overfilled with clothing. "We have clothes a-plenty, but they were taken from Normans. Bloody useless for living in the forest or doing any real work. Perfect if we went to church.” Morcar suddenly felt self-conscious about the Norman look of his own clothing.
Most of the men slept under the tree huts rather than in the cave. The cave was good shelter from winter storms but it smelled strangely sour and of wet wool, and the floor was rock hard and slightly damp. The tree huts smelled of fresh air and pine, and the deep carpet of needles was soft and warm and dry to sleep on.
"Most of our band sleeps at their homes in the villages surrounding this forest. Only the ones that are outlawed must sleep here. It is a good reason not to show your face to a Norman, or to bring yourself to their notice by flashing coins," said the forest man, "or flash clothing."
"At first we thought it a lark to be outlawed. The life in the forest was comfortable enough and much less work than working for a land lord's rent. After a winter, you start to wish you could go home and have a normal life again. We knew what you gave up when you were outlawed, but we never understood how long 'forever' was. When you are outlawed, it is forever."
Morcar was interested. He would never tell these folks, but as an Earl he had outlawed many a man. "You are saying that you never understood what outlaw meant until you were one?"
"The words are small," said the forest man, "but the meaning is wide and it takes time to understand how wide. We had to learn to live as a band, else everyone takes advantage of you because you are outside the law. You will not be helped by the law if someone cheats you, or beats you. Rich folk can just leave the shire and buy a new life somewhere else. Poor folk end up living in the wilds as we do, or selling themselves as the lowest of slaves."
"See those two women. Not bad looking, eh? They came from good farming stock. A priest was their downfall. He paid them good coin for favours. Once they were ruined he paid them much less. He liked it best with both of them at the same time. One night they tied him up and cut off the end of his prick so that he couldn't ruin any other girls. He had them outlawed."
"It was his right, though I would not defend him," replied Morcar.
"They had no skills for the wild. We found them scratched, bitten, ragged and half-starved. They were trying to sell themselves but they looked so bad that no one was buying. "
"And now what?" asked Morcar.
"Now they are two of the most important members of the band."
"How so?" asked Morcar.
"We use them as bait to trap Normans. Them buggers can't resist a helpless woman."
"Why do you need bait?" asked Morcar.
"Well on open ground they will slaughter us, but in rugged ground we slaughter them. They have learned that lesson well. They stay well clear of rugged ground and the forests. The girls there pretend they are farm girls and scream and raise their skirts and run for the forest. Like I said. Most of them can't resist the chase."
"Got to be careful, though," said another forester. "Can't do it just anywhere. If we kill Normans close to a village, the Normans may slaughter the entire village. Can't do it to large patrols cause if any escape, we are for it."
"Do many of you get caught?" asked Morcar.
"Not in the forest. Most that get caught, are caught because they are trying to sell something Norman, or are wearing something Norman, or try to spend coins that are too big for their boots. The fastest way to get caught is to ride a Norman horse. Of course, these days, all horses are Norman horses."
Hereward reached the camp just before night fell. He crawled into the tree hut, and heard the complaints of those already settled for the night. He was soaking wet and his cloak was shedding water over everyone. He backed out, removed his cloak, and crawled in again. "Is there no fire?"
"There is a fire in the cave. Can't have a fire under one of these huts, else the whole tree would turn into a torch," was the answer from the back.
Hereward crawled out again, grabbed his cloak and hobbled over to the flickering glow that marked the cave's entrance. Raynar, Edwin, and Morcar crawled out of their cozy beds of needles and followed him.
The two women were in the cave curled together on some boughs against the furthest wall on the other side of the fire. There was a tall man talking to them. Raynar recognized him and pushed past Morcar and Hereward, so that he could wrap his arms around Rodor. He had ridden with Rodor at the battle at Stamford and they carried sister bows. They were composite bows brought from the grass plains beyond Constantinople by some of the mercenaries that were killed at Stamford.
Rodor was as wet as Hereward, as were five other men around the fire. They were building it back to life and it was better to sit and keep your head down out of the cloud of smoke. At least with the fire the men could remove their sodden wool cloaks and hang them to drip over the lines stretched across the cave for that very purpose.
One of the women threw a sack to the wet men, and inside was what was left of the meat from earlier. The men cut off strips of meat and wrapped them around green sticks and held them over the fire. One of the men lit a pine torch and used it to look inside the cooking pot. He lifted the heavy pot and put it down on flat stones at the side of the fire. The other men told him to leave the torch burning so he stuck the handle of it into a hole in the wall. The limestone above the hole was blackened from countless generations of torches.
Raynar was hungry again. They had been moving fast and it was cold and wet outside. But he did not reach for more food. This may be all the food that this poor camp had.
Rodor read his thoughts. "Eat, Raynar. There is no shortage of food in this camp, thanks to those Welsh bows you gave us."
Edwin looked up for an explanation. Rodor handed Edwin a choice bit of crackling. "Raynar here has the best adventures of any of us. Always ask him for a tale when you share a fire with him. He came through Sherwood a year past with a giant blacksmith and a Welsh fairie and a cartload of Welsh longbows and Yew bow staves.
They had half the sheriff's men on their tail, cause they had been running archery contests at all the village fetes, and were using the contests to spread the knowledge of the Welsh bow. As usual, he got into trouble saving a woman. You will notice that with all his tales. His epitaph will be: Died saving a woman."
The other men all laughed. They had all shared fires with Raynar before. They knew his tales.
"Which woman was it that time? Oh right. The Welsh fairie. She was a looker. A Norman priest was going to burn her as a witch, and you turned the fete against him and he barely escaped a scorching himself."
The other men threw in side stories about the evil that same priest had done since.
"Anyways, we were watching at the cross for a likely Norman purse, when this cart with a bowman, a fairie, and a giant, gallops by with cavalry on their track. We scared the buggers off, but to keep their archery business going would have tempted the fates, so they gifted us the cart and the load, and they split up to go home."
One of the other men spoke up. "The sheriff has regretted that his men let you escape with those bows. He keeps his men out of the forest now, and they don't use the short cuts through it. It's against his law to even carry one of those long bows, so we all have two. A Welsh bow for in the forest, and a normal ash selfbow for around the villages."
"You have done your work too well," Hereward said. "We could not take a prisoner from the patrol that followed us, because they shied from entering the forest. Instead they turned away towards Nottingham."
Rodor broke in. "If you lot are headed for Chester, you could send us some more bows. Our own staves are not fully seasoned yet, and we don't want to carve them before their time."
The soup was now hot and the men all pulled their bowls out of their packs and held them out for a scoop.
Raynar was heating some more meat on a stick. "Do you have enough silver to pay this end of the tally? If I send you a load of bows, I will have to pay half for them to start out, but you will have to pay the other half when they arrive."
"We have silver enough for as many bows as you can send," replied Rodor, "and the more of those bows we have, the more silver we will get."
"Take care you lot," said Raynar, "the Norman sheriffs are angry at the number of men they are losing, and the word is that the Norman foragers are killing all Danelaw men."
"You mean killing the warriors that fight them?"
"They've decided that every healthy Dane is a warrior," stated Raynar. "Well, it's true isn't it?"
"The buggers. We heard that the Sheriff of Peterburgh is dead. He didn't last long. Killed by a mat merchant."
"Which of us was selling mats that day?" laughed Hereward, and everyone laughed with him, and pointed fingers at each other in jest.
Edwin and Morcar both stared at these rough peasants who laughed about killing nobles, and were quiet.
"The lesson is, don't push your sheriff to the point that he strikes out at everyone, else all villages and all families will pay the price,” said Hereward.
"We already know that. Our trails always lead into the forest, never to a village. Those who are outlawed never go home in case they are seen. We always give those we ambush a chance to throw down everything of value and walk away. We never show our faces, and we wear common rags, so there is nothing to identify us by."
Rodor broke in. "We have become clever with the corpses as well. We make them look like accidents."
"Then you are using the Norman's own tactics against them," replied Hereward. "A lot of English sons-and-heirs died last year from accidents. Usually a fall from a horse."
"Ya, us too. We use lines, or slings, or traps to bring down the horse," Rodor explained. "The rider is hurt or at least stunned from the fall, and we finish him with a rock. We don't want to leave the marks of weapons or arrows. If the body is punctured with an arrow you can still make it look accidental, but a slash is hard to hide. Last month we covered an arrow wound by pushing the man onto the rack of a dead buck. A waste of good meat, but a killing would have cost us a village."
"Your attacks have no honour. I could not fight that way. I fight face to face, man on man." Edwin created a stony silence with his comment
It was embarrassing. Rodor finally said, "We fight like Normans. We will use every dirty trick to win, just as they do. It was forced on us, and we force it back onto them." Everyone save Edwin mumbled support for what Rodor had said, even Morcar.
"Edwin," said Morcar, "you have been blinded by the Norman culture of chivalry. Their chivalry is only extended to other Norman lords and knights. To all others, the Danes, the English, the Bretons, the Welsh, the Mussulmans, they offer only slaughter and pillage, slavery and rape."
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The Hoodsman - Frisians of the Fens by Skye Smith Copyright
2010-13