Halfdan hurried along the corridor amid the buzz of urgency. The news was all over the castle – and indeed the town, too. A rebel army was closing on Falaise. The duke’s home was about to come under attack. William had called a council, and Halfdan had been invited as the leader of a mercenary unit in the castle, but he had first taken a side trip to Gunnhild’s chamber. As he reached her open door, he swung in through it and gestured to her.
‘Tell me the time is right to leave.’
She shook her head, and he felt his nerves jump. Time was very short, if they wanted to avoid being part of the duke’s war.
‘The enemy are coming, Gunnhild. If we don’t leave before they arrive, we’ll be trapped here, under siege. I don’t think anyone wants that.’
Her gaze was filled with steel as she locked her eyes on his. ‘Why do you make me repeat myself time and again, Halfdan. We are not done here. The white thread I saw bind to our weaving here I suspect is your new friend, the archbishop, and a dragon yet rears in our future.’ She sighed, and her expression changed to one that a parent might wear while trying to explain necessity to a recalcitrant child. ‘And simple practicality says we wait for Ulfr, unless you intend to leave without him?’
‘Of course not,’ Halfdan said, defensively. ‘But we could ride for Pirou and join him there.’
‘And if we miss him? If he has finished his work and sails for Falaise while we arrive at an empty Pirou? Think, Halfdan. All is as it must be. Accept your part in the weaving.’
It was Halfdan’s turn to sigh and sag, nodding his acceptance. ‘All right. But every day we stay now binds us to the duke and his cause and drags us deeper into this trouble. I just remember how we stayed too long at Miklagarðr and almost lost everything.’
‘And I might remind you that it was you, not I, who kept us there.’
That shut him up. He could think of nothing to say that did not make him sound like a fool, and so he took his leave swiftly, and hurried back across the keep and down the stairs. The duke’s hall was protected by his guards, but they stepped aside to allow him entrance. His visit to Gunnhild had made him late, and the council had begun without him. He listened as he crossed to a free seat at a table filled with barons and lords and priests.
‘If we are besieged, we risk everything,’ one of the lords was saying. ‘Better to withdraw than be trapped. Rumour has it that the French king has turned sympathetic to your cause. I suspect Henri sees you as young enough to be malleable, controlled, while he will know that your enemies, should they take the throne, will be less so. Let us flee to the arms of Henri and safety.’
‘Henri begins to favour me,’ William replied in an acid tone, ‘because I have offered him land and gold for his aid. Nothing more. And his army still gathers near our borders undecided, but until I have an agreement with him, sealed by the Church, I will not walk into his grasp, for there I may find myself more a prisoner than I could ever be to Cotentin and Bessin. No, I make my stand here, at my home. And when we fight them off, then we will have shown our strength and can ally with Henri on more level terms.’
He thumped the table with a balled fist in a warlike manner. Again, Halfdan was struck by how impressive he was for such a young man. He showed considerably more strength and gumption at all times than any of the others at the table.
‘There is something to be said for the path of peace, however,’ Archbishop Ælfric said in the silence that followed.
‘Peace in captivity is not a thing to be sought, no matter how peaceful it might be,’ the duke countered. ‘And I am aware that your place here is peripheral at best. I imagine you would like nothing more than to leave, to flee back to your Angle-land. You are welcome to do so, good Archbishop, though I cannot supply you with escort or goods for your journey, nor can I guarantee you a ship for passage when you reach the coast. I’m sure you understand my position.’
Ælfric nodded sharply, and sat back. He had come to Falaise with the entourage of a senior churchman, from what Halfdan understood, but without a military escort. That had been provided on his landing in Nordmandi by the duke. Halfdan could imagine how reluctant the priest would be to leave Falaise and try the thirty-mile journey to the coast through potential hostile territory without a military escort.
‘What of the enemy?’ the duke asked. ‘Their composition?’
‘The colours of six enemy barons have been identified, my lord duke,’ a noble said, leaning forward on the table and steepling his fingers. ‘Mostly from the western regions, and including Cotentin and Bessin. Outlying pickets at Uxeium count their numbers at just under two thousand, including three hundred or so riders, two units of archers, and carts that carry siege engines, as well as the expected baggage train.’
‘They mean business, then.’
‘Quite, my lord duke.’
‘I, on the other hand, have but six hundred men,’ William countered, ‘which is poor odds, admittedly, but I also have the strongest walls in the region. With a little care, we can hold Falaise almost indefinitely, and do not forget that winter is upon us. A besieging enemy will find no comfort or ease in the coming months. Frostbite and starvation will do half our work for us. No, I think a siege will actually work in our favour. We will hold, and we will break them by Christmas, whereupon I will put my ultimatum to King Henri. When he sees our strength he will join with us, and then it will be our time. We will turn upon these rebels and bring them to heel.’
‘We have supplies for two months stored in the castle, my lord duke,’ another man put in.
‘Not enough,’ William replied swiftly. ‘Though I intend to break my enemies by Christmas, only a fool would not prepare for longer. I want those supplies doubled, and every weapon, shield, hauberk, bow and arrow to be found in the area all brought into the castle. The enemy close rapidly, so there will be something of a race to bring in the supplies while we can.’
‘And the town?’ a senior priest put in.
‘My Lord?’
‘The people of Falaise, my lord duke?’
William straightened. ‘I would love nothing more than to protect my people, but this is not the time for such considerations. Every mouth inside these walls that eats our supplies has to be attached to an arm that wields a sword. The people of Falaise will have to decide whether to stay and trust that the enemy will not wage a war against civilians, or to leave and seek safety elsewhere.’
‘That is not a Christian approach,’ the bishop admonished.
‘But it is a practical one,’ William replied archly. ‘I will allow men of God to remain, for the preservation of our souls remains of importance, but every man will carry a cross or a weapon – or both – or they will leave.’
At a call from the duke, two men brought a huge map of the region and spread it across the table, the vellum rippling as it was smoothed out.
‘Very well. Let us look at supply sources.’
Halfdan sat back and let the discussion wash over him. He held no real importance in this meeting, and no knowledge of the area anyway. He was silently musing over the possibility of getting a message to Ulfr back in Pirou when he became aware of a presence at his shoulder.
‘What?’
‘Why do you remain at Falaise?’ Ælfric murmured.
‘A question I have asked more than once myself. Gunnhild counsels patience. She is of the opinion that we are not ready to leave.’ He turned a knowing smile on the archbishop. ‘You, of course, are.’
‘Your friend Leif tells me that you have a ship.’
‘We will have a ship,’ Halfdan corrected him. ‘Ulfr remained at Pirou, constructing a new longship. We wait for news.’
‘And when you receive your news, you will leave?’
Halfdan nodded. He assumed so. He hoped so.
‘Then when you leave, I ask for passage with you.’
‘We do not know where we are going yet. It may be Daneland, or even back home.’
‘If it is north of here, it is a step in the right direction.’
Halfdan shrugged. ‘I see no reason why not. You have gold, of course?’
Ælfric chuckled. ‘I can compensate you, yes.’
With that the archbishop returned to take part in the discussion. Halfdan simply sat silent and half-listened. Before long, lists had been drawn up and plans made. Halfdan accepted a part in the gathering of supplies. The Wolves numbered eleven in total, and every party being sent out was of six men with a cart, each set a village or two to rob of goods. Halfdan noted the name of the village assigned to them and its position on the map. The place was a few miles north-east, far from the direction of the approaching army, which suited him just fine. As they were finishing up, the duke put up a hand and waved Halfdan over.
‘Your destination, Jarl Halfdan, is the village of Spanei.’
Halfdan nodded. He knew that.
‘It lies just four miles away.’
Another nod.
‘The village lies within the territory of Falaise, but is subject to two local religious houses: the abbey at Ouche and the priory of Perreriae. There will therefore be a tithe barn in the village filled with goods destined for the monks, as well as granaries for the village itself. We need grain, but taking the monks’ goods will not be popular. You will have to be forceful, but also respectful and persuasive.’
Halfdan nodded again. It was clearly no accident that the duke had assigned that particular village to the only group in the castle who did not kneel to the nailed god.
Leaving the duke and his hall, Halfdan returned to his friends and assigned roles. He would take Bjorn and Ketil, Leif, Gunnhild and Thurstan to the village, while the others were to stay at Falaise and protect their interests there.
The adventurers convened in the bailey a short while later, where they were given a cart and horses, four of the party mounting the beasts, the other two climbing up into the cart. Everyone was kitted for war, with the exception of Gunnhild, who carried her staff; she was clad in her favourite green dress, her confidence an armour in itself.
The journey was chilly, but dry, the air crisp and the sky a pale grey as they rolled and clopped along the road from Falaise. The journey was not a long one, even with a cart slowing them, for the road was good, flat and well travelled, and their destination close. Reaching the edge of Spanei, Halfdan peered off ahead. The place was quiet, rural and pretty. Timber houses stretched out along five roads that led off variously to outlying farms or other villages, and the centre clustered around a pond, the ubiquitous White Christ church, and what could only be the tithe barn. It was the only structure in the village of a size to match the church, and was, in fact, slightly larger. A long, single-storey place of heavy stone with no windows, beneath a tiled apex roof, it was of a far higher quality than the houses around it. It lay close to the church, at the edge of a green graveyard, with one other house beside it, on the other side, the whole encircled by a low wall, with three gates, one allowing access to each building.
As they approached, Halfdan trotted ahead and dismounted, then pulled open the wide timber gate. He did not miss the nailed god cross carved into each leaf of the gate, marking the place as the property of priests. As he stepped aside and the cart rolled through into the yard between wall, barn and smaller building, the jarl looked about them. Troubled eyes were watching from doors and windows around the village, a dog barked from behind another gate, incessantly, and a pair of young children emerged from a garden, only to be grabbed by their mother and escorted back inside hurriedly. Presumably word of the approaching army had spread throughout the countryside, too. The nerves of the people of Spanei were tangible, a crackle in the air.
The cart approached the larger door in the barn’s side and rumbled to a halt, its occupants climbing down, while Halfdan and Leif approached the door. The handles of the twin doors were secured with a chain of iron links, that itself held firm with a padlock that immediately fascinated Halfdan, for the main lock was formed of iron in the shape of a wolf.
If ever there had been an omen…
‘Bjorn, can you open this without damaging the lock?’
The big man grunted, wandered over, and looked down. For a moment he fumbled in one of the big pouches at his belt, and then produced an iron spike as long as his hand.
‘Where did you get that?’
The big albino shrugged. ‘Dunno. I pick stuff up.’
And with that uninformative answer, he jammed the spike through the same link in the chain as the lock, then turned it and wedged the tip of the spike in the tiny gap between the doors. Halfdan watched in fascination as Bjorn took a step back, then drew his huge axe from his belt and readied it, reversed, the butt facing the lock.
He swung. Hard.
The iron butt of the axe slammed into the head of the spike with the force only Bjorn could manage, and the result was spectacular. Halfdan winced, realising he should have predicted this. The blow was indeed sufficient to drive the spike through the link, forcing it open so that the chain fell apart, slithering through the handles and falling, hitting the dusty ground just after the padlock, now also free.
The side effect, however, was that the spike had been driven deep between the two doors, followed by the reverse blow of the axe, and the area of the door handles exploded in a shower of broken timber and splinters, the doors jerking inwards.
‘I said, just the chain,’ Halfdan snapped, irritably.
‘No,’ Bjorn said with an air of confidence. ‘You said “without damaging the lock”. You never mentioned the doors. You need to be clearer.’
Halfdan sighed and crouched, sweeping up the wolf-shaped lock. What use it could ever be without the key, he did not know, but its very form seemed to be saying that the jarl should have it. Rising and slipping it into his pouch before fastening it, he pushed the doors wide and stepped inside. The place was huge and musty, with that smell that only hundreds of dry sacks of grain in an enclosed space can issue.
One glance told him that there was more grain than would fit on the cart. Still, they’d only been told to fill the cart, so that would be enough.
‘Start loading up,’ he called to the others.
Bjorn and Thurstan began lifting grain sacks and carrying them outside on their shoulders, dropping them into the cart, where Leif and Gunnhild would stack them carefully to best utilise the space. Halfdan glanced across to see Ketil moving toward that other house. As he did so, the house’s door opened and a man emerged, stumbling out into the light of the yard.
‘You can’t take that,’ he shouted.
Brave, Halfdan thought, given who he was shouting it at.
‘Your duke, William of Nordmandi, has requisitioned this grain,’ Leif called back from the cart.
‘It’s not his to take.’
‘Nor is it yours,’ Leif countered. ‘This grain is for the monks. Yours is in granaries.’
‘But when they come for their tithe and we cannot fulfil it, where do you think the shortfall will come from?’
Leif shrugged. ‘It’s a poor deal. You have my sympathy.’
‘And children, who will starve. Put it back.’
‘That cannot happen, I’m afraid.’
‘I will fetch the priest. He will damn you all.’
‘Do we look like we give a shit, old man?’ Ketil said suddenly, close to the man, and took a single step forward.
Before Halfdan could shout an order to the contrary, the lanky Icelander threw a punch that landed dead centre in the man’s face, sending him sprawling into the dust. Just to be sure, then, Ketil gave him a good kick in the side to make sure he stayed down. Behind Halfdan, the others resumed their work, ferrying sacks from the barn and stacking them in the cart. The local lay unconscious in the dirt, and Ketil crouched, looking him over, then rose with the man’s purse in one hand and a reasonable quality sax in the other.
‘Look at this?’ he called, holding up the knife. ‘What else is he hiding?’ With that, the giant strode toward the house.
‘Stop,’ Halfdan called back. ‘We’re here for the grain.’
‘And any weapons and armour we can find, from what I heard,’ Ketil replied, as he disappeared through the man’s door.
Halfdan bit his lip. Strictly speaking, that was true, though the general understanding was impounding the goods from stores and smiths, not ransacking the houses of commoners. But he knew better than to try and stop the Icelander. Ketil had calmed a lot since his little adventure in the east, and rarely leapt into trouble without thinking it through, but that Icelandic impulsiveness always lay just below the surface and would never be fully exorcised.
Halfdan left him to it, watching the ferrying of sacks to the rapidly filling cart.
That was when he heard the new noise.
Hooves. Pounding hooves, and those of several horses. He cocked his head, trying to isolate the sound from those in the yard, and decided they were coming from the other direction, off to the north. Hurrying across to the boundary wall, he leaned over it, beside the corner of the barn, looking past the church, along the shady, tree-lined street.
Half a dozen horsemen were coming their way. He couldn’t see their colours yet, but they were armoured and with spears, and there was about their pace and their manner only threat. He turned.
‘Stop. We have trouble.’
Bjorn and Thurstan paused in their work, halfway between door and cart, the latter dropping his sack, where it burst and started issuing a steady stream of grain with a hissing sound as the man drew his sword. Leif and Gunnhild stopped arranging sacks, picking up their weapons and turning to face the perimeter wall.
Damn Ketil. The man was somewhere in the house, robbing the owner. Halfdan could probably shout loudly enough for the man to hear, but that would also undoubtedly alert the approaching riders. He fumed over the decision, but reasoned that these new men were probably coming for them. If they were riding for Falaise, surely they would be moving slower, saving their horses. They were riding hard, which meant riding to something urgent.
‘Ready yourselves,’ he called to the others, and then ducked below the line of the wall, crawling along it toward the gate. Thurstan stepped back into the darkness of the tithe barn’s interior, while Bjorn ambled across to the cart, still carrying his sack.
The riders rounded the corner mere moments later. Halfdan couldn’t see them from where he was, hidden below the wall, but he heard the six horses slow and then stop near the gate. There was a strange momentary silence, filled only by the shush of chain shirts, the jingling of harnesses and the breathing of horses, then finally a rider spoke, in thick Norman tones.
‘Who are you?’
Leif was the one to respond – with his ear for accents, he had the best Norman speech of them all. ‘Duke William of Falaise has called for supplies against a siege by rebels. This is now his grain.’
‘No,’ the rider said. ‘This is the property of the Abbey of Saint-Évroult at Ouche. You will replace those sacks in the barn.’
‘No,’ Leif replied.
Halfdan heard spears being moved, grips changing. He left his sword sheathed, but pulled his sax free.
‘Last warning,’ the Norman called. ‘We carry the authority of the Abbot of Ouche, who recognises no lord but God above, and his pope in Rome.’
‘Fuck off,’ called Bjorn dismissively, which made Halfdan smile. Some people never changed.
‘You resist?’ The man called.
‘Up your shitter,’ Bjorn said airily.
Halfdan braced himself, and half a dozen spears suddenly sailed out over the wall above his head. It was more of a warning volley than an attack, and four fell short, clattering across the yard. A fifth became tangled in the cart’s rear wheel, and the sixth hit one of the grain sacks in the vehicle, causing an explosion of tiny granules as grain poured out into the cart base and then to the yard.
He heard the drawing of swords.
‘Last chance,’ the rider called.
‘I thought your last warning was your last warning,’ Leif called lightly.
At a cry from the leader, the horsemen rode through the gate, swords out, shields on arms, meaning true violence. Halfdan waited until the first five passed and then sprang from his hiding place. His arms went round the waist of the rearmost rider, behind his shield. While his left arm gripped the man tight, his right hand – blade held in a reverse grip – sought that divide in the hem of a Norman hauberk that allowed an armoured man to sit astride a horse, and the blade slid up into the man’s groin and upper thigh inside the chain protection. He stabbed three times in quick succession, not careful with his aim, for he was being dragged alongside the horse, but the blows were clearly enough, for he felt warm blood cascade over his hand in a torrent. The man gave a high-pitched shriek, and his sword fell as he let go of the reins, shook his shield free, and both his hands went to his ruined groin.
Halfdan let go of the man and fell away, staggering to stay upright, as the dying rider veered off to the corner of the yard, yelling in horror, blood sheeting down over his legs and the horse. He was done for; he would be gone in minutes.
Halfdan turned in time to see Bjorn throw his burden. A sack of grain is a very heavy thing, and the impromptu missile hit the lead rider full in the upper chest, slamming him back in the saddle. What happened as a result Halfdan was unsure, but there were bony cracks, and the man gave a mighty cry of pain and then lolled in the saddle at an unnatural angle, shield falling to his side, sword dropping from shaky hand.
Leif’s throwing axe took another rider in the torso. The Norman chain hauberk was sufficient to stop the blade driving deep into his chest, but the sheer weight and power of the blow was sufficient to smash ribs even through the coat, and that rider was out of the fight in an instant. Another horseman had made the mistake of trying to round the cart to come at it from the other side, but as he passed the open doors of the barn, Thurstan, until then unnoticed, stepped into the open and swung in one move. His long Norman sword slammed across the rider’s back as he passed, and the man slumped forward in his saddle, broken in an instant, his horse wandering off into a corner.
Two left, and that was about to narrow to one. A rider reached the side of the cart and swung with his sword, shield held up in front of him. Leif had to drop into the bed of the cart to avoid being struck, but Gunnhild simply leaned back casually, lifting her staff, double grip all at the top end, and then lanced out with it, suddenly and in a single blow. The butt of the staff hit the rider in the face – one weapon lengthy enough to reach him from the cart.
Halfdan was about to go for the last rider when some instinct stopped him. He looked past the man to see Bjorn, a towering mass of Thor-driven rage, leap from the cart, throwing himself at the remaining attacker. It was neither graceful, nor strategic. It was simply a mindless attack. The great, white-haired and pink-eyed monster hit the Norman in the saddle, and the pair went tumbling from the horse in a heap, the Norman’s ankle broken by the stirrup as it was pulled from it.
Halfdan stopped paying attention then, for the man was doomed even before he landed, winded, on his back in the dirt, with a massive insane warrior crying violent curses atop him. The six riders were gone, swiftly, thanks largely to the surprise of half the Wolves being hidden.
Ketil chose that moment to emerge from the house with an armful of loot, from a pewter candlestick to a sharp-looking kitchen knife, the unconscious owner’s wife following with harangues as she smacked him repeatedly with a twig broom.
‘I missed it,’ the Icelander complained as he emerged into the yard.
‘That will teach you to leave us to the hard work while you loot the locals,’ Halfdan said with a smirk.
Ketil, tired of his pursuit, suddenly turned, yelling ‘Shut up, woman,’ and hit the wife with the candlestick, resulting in half a dozen dropped pieces of loot and an unconscious woman.
Without needing to be told, Bjorn and Thurstan returned to ferrying grain sacks from the barn, while Gunnhild pushed the broken bag from the cart, roughly sweeping the worst spill away, and Ketil stowed his poor haul for the return journey. As Leif waited for the next sacks to arrive, Halfdan crossed to the clever Rus.
‘This abbey… How far is it from here, d’you think?’
Leif shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘But these men,’ Halfdan replied, thinking back. ‘They said, “This is the property of the Abbey of Saint-Évroult at Ouche,” as though they were monks. Do the abbeys around here have soldiers of their own?’
‘It’s possible. Or another lord connected with the abbey sent them.’
‘But whatever the case, we can safely assume they’re not from this village.’
‘I’d say so, yes.’
Halfdan looked at the six horses. They were not exhausted, but they were definitely weary, and more so than riding into a fight across a village warranted.
‘I thought they were coming for us, but now I think I was wrong. They’ve come a distance, and they’re riding in the direction of Falaise. Any lord who intends to stand under the duke’s flag from this region is already at the castle?’
‘I would say so, yes.’
‘Then these are enemies, from another lord, coming to join the fight. The army from the west is not the only one. The duke may have badly miscalculated the odds.’
Leif said nothing, though his face spoke volumes. Halfdan turned to the cart.
‘Load up those last sacks and then go. We ride back to Falaise, and as fast as we can.’
‘Why?’ Thurstan called, carrying another sack across from the barn.
‘Because those riders weren’t sent for us. They were the vanguard, scouts who just bumped into us on the way to attack Falaise. And if six men armed for war are coming, then there’ll be plenty of others on their heels.’
At those words, efforts were doubled with this last journey. The sacks were thrown aboard and not even settled into place before Leif and Gunnhild were slapping the reins and getting the horse moving with encouraging calls. The cart rumbled out of the gate, picking up pace as it swung wildly into the road and turned for Falaise as fast as the beast could pull it. It would be exhausted, but it only had to make four miles and they would be safe. The others mounted up, and the jarl sent his friends ahead with the vehicle as they left the village, trundling out into the open road, heading south-west for the duke’s fortress.
Halfdan, on the other hand, did not mount or leave. Instead, he spent precious moments grabbing the various bodies of fallen soldiers, and of the man and his wife, and dragging them into the tithe barn. This done, he went around the yard, grabbing the reins of the various milling Norman horses and led them, too, inside. Happy that all clear evidence of the scuffle was hidden, he closed up the tithe barn’s doors and the door to the adjacent house, then led his horse out of the yard and closed the outer gates, with their little incised crosses, too. He looked over his handiwork. A near-empty grain sack blew and slithered around in the breeze, and the yard was a scattered patchwork of bloodstains and fallen grain, but anyone riding past with a purpose would probably not notice anything amiss. It was all he could do. A passing army would move on to Falaise at a steady pace, but if they knew they were close behind raiders with a cart full of supplies, they might well pick up their pace to intercept.
He caught up with the cart a mile from the village, and together they rode on for Falaise and what passed for safety.
It was only as they crossed the fields and moved into the edge of the town of Falaise that Halfdan, habitually looking over his shoulder every few minutes, saw the lead riders of the main enemy force emerge around a small woodland behind.
They had made it back, but they had brought war with them.