Knights of the Hawk

Seventeen

Serlo, Pons and Eithne were waiting at the crossroads for me. No doubt they had heard all about what had happened from Godric, but although I felt my hearth-knights’ cold stares upon me, they did not say anything, and that was probably for the best. The Englishman was there too, having decided that he was coming with me after all, and I was too tired to argue any further. We had no time to spare. Every hour that passed was another few miles that we put between us and Heia, and another few miles closer to safety.

We didn’t stop until morning, and only then because we needed to give the horses a chance to rest and to eat. There were no stars that night and so in the darkness we kept to drove roads and ancient trackways, which tended to be better kept and where the footing was more assured. We rode on through the rain and the wind, until, a couple of hours after sunrise, with heavy limbs and bleary eyes, we arrived in a miserable river town by the name of Gipeswic, which I remembered had been raided by the Danes when they came last year. There was nothing much left of it now, save for the wharves and the slipways, a few warehouses and cottages that had escaped the fire, and a larger, two-storeyed hall that might have belonged to the port-reeve, but among those ramshackle buildings we managed to find an alehouse close by the river where we could stable the animals, rest our saddlesore arses, sup at the thin broth that the tavern-keeper brought us, and work out what to do next.

We sat in silence around a table close by the common room’s hearth. At this hour the fire wasn’t lit, but the alehouse’s walls were thin, the cob crumbling away from the wattle-work, and that was the only place where the draught didn’t seem to reach.

‘I never thanked you, lord,’ Godric said, in between mouthfuls.

‘Thanked me for what?’ I asked.

‘For vouching for me,’ Godric said. ‘Again.’

Not that it had done me much good. Because of his reckless boastings and my own foolish sense of honour we now found ourselves here, cast out and wandering the bleak, flat lands of East Anglia.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘For whatever that might be worth.’

As well he should be. I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps I’d have done better to leave him to whatever fate Guibert might have dealt him. Straightaway I castigated myself for the thought. The boy had saved my life, and for that I owed him. What else could I have done?

My head ached. I rubbed at the lump that had formed, though it did nothing to relieve the pain. Serlo lifted his bowl to his lips and drained what was left of its contents. My own was going cold in front of me. There was cabbage in it, and leek as well, and the smell of both was enough to make me wrinkle my nose, but it was the whiff of salted eel that made me want to spew. For weeks in the marshes we had lived on almost nothing but eel stew, and I was sick of it.

Serlo nodded towards it. ‘Are you going to eat that?’

‘It’s yours if you want it,’ I replied.

The big man needed no second invitation. He reached across the table, slid the bowl towards himself and began ladling it into his mouth, so quickly that some failed to reach his mouth, spilling instead down his beard and the neck of his tunic.

He paused when he saw us all looking at him. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t eaten since last night.’

‘You can have mine too,’ Eithne muttered in English, scowling as usual. She pushed her own bowl towards Serlo. Like me, she had barely touched hers. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘You’ll eat what you’re given and be glad for it,’ I told the girl, and placed it back in front of her. ‘I paid good silver for it, and I’m not letting you waste away. You’re thin enough as it is.’

‘You don’t have to speak to me as if I’m a child,’ she said, with that same scowl as before. ‘I’m fifteen summers old.’

‘So is Godric, but he’s under my protection just as you are.’

‘You’re telling me he’s the same age as me?’ Eithne asked. She gazed doubtfully at Godric, looking him up and down as if appraising a horse. ‘He doesn’t look it.’

Insulted, Godric frowned. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You think yourself a warrior?’ she scoffed. ‘I could probably best you in a fight, if it came to it.’

‘I wouldn’t fight you,’ said Godric.

‘Why not? Because I’d win, you mean?’

‘No-’

‘Because you’re afraid of getting hurt?’

Godric’s cheeks flushed red. ‘I’m not afraid.’

‘Prove it, then.’ Eithne rose from her stool and stood over him. ‘If you’re the fighter you claim to be, prove it to me.’

He glanced uncertainly at me. ‘Lord?’ he asked, clearly at a loss as to what to do, though what help he thought I might offer, I wasn’t sure. In my time I had known many strong-willed women, none more so than Oswynn, but for all that experience, still I hadn’t worked out how best to manage them, or if it were possible at all.

‘Sit down,’ I said, pointing at the girl. ‘And eat. No one’s doing any fighting today.’

My head was hurting enough as it was, and I didn’t need their squabbling adding to my woes.

‘What was that about?’ asked Pons. He, like his sword-brother Serlo, had yet to learn much of the English tongue.

‘Godric’s learning his place,’ I said. The old saying came to mind. Men might govern the world, but it is women who govern those men. So it had always been, and so it would continue to be.

Having finished my bowl as well as his own, Serlo leant back and gave a loud belch. ‘What do we do now, then, lord?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘If I did, don’t you think we’d be doing it, instead of sitting here in this dank place?’

We had, as I saw it, two choices. The first of those was to hole up here for a few more days while tempers in the Malet household cooled, and then return to Heia with heads bowed once Robert’s mood had had a chance to soften.

‘How long might that take, though?’ Pons asked when I suggested this. ‘Even with Lords Eudo and Wace interceding on your behalf?’

‘If you think about it, Robert’s done you a favour,’ Serlo added.

‘A favour?’ I echoed. ‘How is this a favour?’

‘How many men saw you strike Guibert down, lord?’

I shrugged. ‘Fifty? Sixty? More even than that, maybe.’

‘And how many of those would have been willing to swear oaths to the same effect, had Robert made you stand trial for his killing?’

I saw what the big man was getting at. While undoubtedly a few of them would argue on my behalf, most were no friends of mine and would probably take great pleasure in bringing about my demise, not least Elise.

‘In your absence they’ll all be clamouring for your head, lord, and not just Guibert’s companions and hearth-knights, but also his kin, once news of what happened reaches them.’

Pons nodded. ‘By letting you walk free, Robert has denied them justice. Unless he’s willing to recompense them by paying the blood-price from his own treasure chests, he’ll come under ever more pressure in the coming days to seek you out and bring you before the shire court.’

I groaned and buried my face in my palms. I’d almost come to terms with the idea of prostrating myself before Robert and begging his forgiveness, much though it grated with me. But Pons and Serlo were right. Were I to return to Heia, I would be delivering myself into the hands of those who sought to destroy me.

‘I’m not saying that Lord Robert can’t be won round, but it will take some time, if it happens at all,’ Pons said. ‘Weeks, perhaps.’

Patience had never been one of my virtues, and I wasn’t prepared to stay here that long while we waited for news to arrive, even if funds would allow it. For my coin-pouch was growing lighter by the day. Altogether the stabling, lodgings and broth had cost me five of the little silver pennies — far more than it should have done, but this seemed to be the only alehouse in this mud-ridden town, and so it had been a choice between meeting the innkeeper’s price or else sleeping in a ditch. I had barely a fistful of silver left, some in ingots and small pieces broken off from arm-rings, and the rest in the form of coins, although many of those had already been clipped to pay for food and horseshoes and other small items over the past few months.

Fortunately Godric had had enough wit about him to gather, as well as his own pack, the saddlebags that contained most of my belongings, including the drinking horn that Malet had gifted me, so I was not quite reduced to the clothes on my back. Not yet, at least. But in the rush to leave Heia we’d been forced to leave behind our tents and our sumpter ponies and anything else we could not gather quickly. That included my sword, which I’d left in the safekeeping of the door-ward at Robert’s hall, although Godric had managed to bring my mail and helmet as well as his own, as had the others. Still, once divested of our hauberks and chausses, we didn’t much look like a noble lord and his retinue but more like a band of ragged pilgrims. My clothes were torn from the fight, my trews and boots, themselves desperately in need of repair, were caked in mud and filth, while a bright bruise had blossomed high on my cheek, or so the others told me, although I had no idea how that had happened.

‘In the meantime I suppose there’s only one place we can go,’ I said, and both Serlo and Pons nodded. I sighed. ‘With any luck all this uproar will have died down by the time we get there.’

‘We can but pray, lord,’ said Pons.

‘Where are we going?’ Godric asked.

‘Home,’ I replied, by which, of course, I meant Earnford. We’d been away so long. The barley was still green in the fields when we’d ridden out to answer the king’s summons more than three months ago. Now the harvest would be in. I yearned to be back there, to see its hills and the river winding between the wide pastures, to sleep under my own roof, in my own hall.

I only hoped that Robert’s men didn’t get there first.

That worry continued to plague me over the following days, as we made the long journey from East Anglia to the Marches. Assuming that Robert didn’t go back on his decision to expel me from his service, then sooner or later he would come to take back possession of his lands. For the truth was that, for all that I’d come to think of Earnford as my own, I only held it as his tenant. My hall, my home, belonged by right to him. Without his lordship, I had nothing.

With that in mind we rode hard, or as hard as we could, given both the state of the roads, which were clogged with mud after the recent rains, and the poor directions offered by other travellers and field labourers whom we passed. From Gipeswic we sought out the old Roman way that led to Lundene, where the talk was of the king’s victory over the rebels at Elyg and the fleet he was said to be assembling for the expedition to Flanders. We stayed the night in an inn outside the walls, so as to avoid the murage and pavage that all travellers entering the city were now required to pay. Even so, I had to argue at length with the innkeeper before he would finally agree upon a sensible price. Probably he took us for bandits or outlaws, which I supposed was fair considering our unkempt, dirt-stained clothes, our unshaven chins and the weapons we carried, and that was why at first he demanded so much, but eventually I was able to secure us beds for the night. At least the place was in slightly better repair than the inn at Gipeswic, with solid timber walls that kept out the cold and a roof that didn’t leak, which meant that when we left the next morning we were a little more rested.

From Lundene we made west along the valley of the Temes as far as Oxeneford, after which we struck out along winding paths in the direction of the market town of Wirecestre, where we crossed the wide Saverna River and obtained directions to Leomynstre from a travelling monk who knew the country well. Day after day we woke at dawn and travelled until dusk, spending the nights in alehouses, in the guest houses of monasteries where they would take us, and, when there was no other shelter to be found, in abandoned cattle barns. And so it was that, on the tenth day after we had first set out from that draughty alehouse in Gipeswic, on the edge of the grey German Sea, we found ourselves, tired and cold and sodden and hungry, riding the familiar tracks that would bring us home, at last, to Earnford.

We rode through a land wrought in bronze and gold. The woodland paths were thick with leaves that rustled beneath our mounts’ hooves, while beneath us through the swaying boughs I could make out the river sparkling silver in the afternoon sun, showing us the way. The skies were clear, the day bright, and I hoped that was a happy portent, though of course I didn’t believe in such things.

Before long we were able to spy the turning wheel of the mill, which marked the eastern edge of my lands. Sheep grazed contentedly by the riverbanks, and a broad-shouldered man who could only be Nothmund the miller was busily hauling sacks of grain down from the back of a cart and in through the wide doors. So far there was no sign of anything amiss.

We kicked on down the slope and across the ford by the rickety wooden bridge that, with all the rebuilding elsewhere, no one had found the time to repair, towards the mill and towards Nothmund. At the sound of our hoofbeats he stopped in his tracks, letting the sack he was carrying fall to the ground as he regarded us warily, and it was only right that he did so, for it wasn’t often that mounted men came to Earnford.

‘Lord!’ he exclaimed when we grew closer and he saw who we were, and there was both relief and joy in his voice. He shouted into the mill-house, in his own tongue: ‘Gode, get out here, woman!’

His plump wife appeared at the doorway, the sleeves of her dress rolled up to her elbows, her round face creased in indignation, but her expression changed the moment that her gaze settled upon me.

‘Is it you, lord?’ she asked, as if she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. ‘Is it really you?’

‘It’s me, Gode,’ I said, and managed a smile, though it wasn’t nearly as broad as the grin upon Nothmund’s face.

‘It’s been too long, lord,’ he said as he reached up to clasp first my hand, then those of Serlo and Pons. He glanced in the direction of Godric and Eithne, who rode behind us, but if he was curious at all about them, he said nothing. Indeed he couldn’t stop smiling. ‘We thought you would be coming, but we didn’t know when exactly it would be.’

At once I tensed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we didn’t know for certain, but we reckoned you must be on your way here when they said-’

‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who said?’

‘They did, lord,’ he replied. ‘The ones who came a few days ago, asking for you. When Galfrid told them that you had been gone these past three months, they said to keep a lookout for you, and that they would return soon.’

It was as I’d feared. News had travelled before us. Robert’s messengers must have overtaken us on the road, or else taken a different route across the kingdom.

‘Did they say what they wanted?’ I asked, though I could readily guess.

‘If they did, lord, we never heard it,’ Gode put in. ‘Fierce men, they were, and unpleasant, too, lacking in all manners or Christian grace. Lord knows they put the fear into poor Galfrid.’

I could think of only one reason those men might have come looking for me, and that was to drag me back to Heia.

‘They didn’t say when they would be back?’ I asked.

Nothmund shook his head. ‘They asked Galfrid if they might stay here until you returned from campaign, but he refused and eventually they were forced to go away.’

That suggested they weren’t any of Robert’s men, for if they had been then they wouldn’t have needed even to ask. Perhaps he had sent word to the local shire-reeve or else to Roger de Montgommeri, the newly appointed Earl of Scrobbesburh, and he in turn had sent his own oathmen to pay me a visit. That would explain how they had been able to arrive before us. A lone messenger could make the journey across the kingdom far more quickly than a tired and bedraggled band of five, especially if he could change steeds and obtain provisions at friendly castles and manors along the way.

‘Who were they, lord?’ Gode asked. ‘Were they friends of yours, do you suppose?’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘Not friends.’

They might have been at one time, but now I wasn’t so sure. I gave my thanks to Nothmund and Gode and then we left them, continuing on our way past the thicket where the pigs foraged, until the village and the church and my hall upon the mound, overlooking the river-crossing, came into sight. The Welsh had completely done for this place, as they had for many estates this side of the great dyke, when they brought their great raiding-army into England around this time last year. In some places one could still make out the fire-blackened outlines where cottages and sheds had once stood. It had taken the full year to recover from that devastation, though the manor was still not as prosperous as once it had been. Even now as we approached I could see men bending withies into wattle for walls, thatching fresh roofs on recently erected cottages, sawing timbers for the new church that was being raised on the foundation stones of the old. But there were also folk working the fields, tilling the earth with oxen and plough, sowing seed, keeping watch over the flocks of sheep, carrying pails of water from the stream to the kitchens across the yard from the hall. For the first time in many months, life in Earnford seemed to be almost restored to what it had been before. Not quite, for I hadn’t forgotten how many families had lost their lives to the Welsh attack. Their loss was still keenly felt.

One of the younger lads, Brunic by name, saw us approaching along the rutted track and scurried away to fetch the steward, Galfrid, who was busy overseeing the construction of a new fish-weir a little way upstream. As soon as the lad pointed us out to him, though, he left the men to their work and strode over to meet us. He had never been a cheery sort; he was certainly not happy now.

‘I see you’re back, then,’ he said. ‘Not a day too soon, if you ask me. I thought you’d abandoned us altogether.’

‘It’s good to see you, too, Galfrid,’ I said.

‘Now that you’re here, perhaps you can explain why I’ve had strangers knocking at our gates, demanding to see you, and threatening our folk with violence if you don’t show yourself.’

It was hardly the greeting I’d been hoping for, given how long we’d been gone, although in the circumstances I wasn’t wholly surprised. Were I in Galfrid’s place, no doubt I’d be asking the same questions. He was responsible not just for managing my household, but also, in my absence, defending the manor against the marauders who from time to time came across the dyke from Wales. I’d first met him the previous year, after his lord had been killed and the manor where he had been steward put to the torch by Welsh raiders, which gave us more than one thing in common. He’d joined me on the campaign in the north that autumn, and afterwards I’d accepted his oath and installed him at Earnford, where I was in need of a man of his qualities, my old steward having absconded some months previously, taking with him a large portion of my silver and one of the finest stallions from my stables.

He was perhaps a little too fond of the sound of his own voice, but that was the worst that could be said about Galfrid. A more than competent swordsman, he was also a lot sharper of mind than at first people often took him for, and loyal besides, which was the most important thing.

‘They threatened the village folk?’ I asked him. Nothmund and Gode hadn’t mentioned that.

‘They reckoned you were hiding away in the hall, although why they thought that, I have no idea. I told them you were away with the king’s army, but they didn’t believe me. They demanded I let them in so that they could search the place, swearing they would run me through and leave my corpse for the crows if I didn’t. When I continued to refuse, though, they changed their minds, saying instead that they would be back in a few days’ time, with more men. They told me that if you didn’t willingly give yourself up then, they would set fire to the hall and all the cottages.’

‘When was this?’

‘Three days ago, lord.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Half a dozen,’ he replied. ‘All of them armed and ready for a fight. I had some of the village lads for support, but even so, it was something close to a miracle that they went away as readily as they did.’

Whoever these men were, they had clearly hoped that intimidation would be enough to get them what they wanted. Even if Earl Roger was the one who sent them, as I half suspected, he wouldn’t have wanted them to shed blood on lands that didn’t belong to him, especially if that blood happened to be French. That, rather than the miracle Galfrid suggested, was probably why they had baulked at the thought of carrying out their threats, and why they had, in the end, gone away. Nevertheless, I wanted to be sure.

‘Were any of Robert’s knights among them? Did they come bearing the black-and-gold banner?’

‘I think I’d have noticed if they had,’ he said. ‘Why would Robert’s men be wanting you, anyway? The last I heard, you were with him fighting the rebels in the Fens.’

‘I was,’ I said, and gave a weary sigh as I hesitated, trying to work out how I was to explain everything that had happened.

He eyed Eithne and Godric. ‘Who are they? You’re not bringing in waifs and orphans, are you? The harvest was barely large enough to fill our storehouses. We’ll struggle to keep ourselves fed through the winter as it is without another two hungry young mouths eating our bread and guzzling our ale.’

‘Peace, Galfrid,’ I assured him. ‘I’ll give you all my news in time, just as soon as we’ve stabled our horses and had something to eat. We’ve been on the road for ten days and we’re famished.’

‘Tancred!’

I turned to find Erchembald, the priest, hustling towards us, raising the hem of his robe so that it didn’t trail in the mud. He was stoutly built but not fat, with hair that was greying at the temples and a youthful face that belied his years, of which he reckoned he had nearly forty behind him. I slid down from the saddle and embraced him.

‘God be praised that you’re here at last, and unharmed too,’ he said. ‘We feared some ill fate might have befallen you, or was about to. Did Galfrid tell you-?’

‘He did,’ I said.

‘What does it all mean?’ he asked, his brow furrowed. ‘What business did those knights have with you, and what’s happened to you? You look like someone dragged you backwards through a briar patch. Where have you been?’

I felt the weight of their questioning gazes resting upon me, and realised that this could not wait. They deserved answers, and I was the only one who could give them.

I took a deep breath, and then slowly, starting from the very beginning, I told them everything.