what he knew he would soon be losing for ever. ‘Why have you brought me here?’ he whispered.
‘A kindness,’ Harald Redteeth replied bluntly.
‘A cruelty,’ the monk snapped back. ‘Dangling food before a starving man.’
The Viking shrugged. ‘A cruelty. A kindness. Your choice.’
Alric held his head up defiantly. ‘I will not betray Hereward.’
‘He died long ago,’ the mercenary replied, echoing the words he had first spoken beside the fires of Gedley. ‘His spirit does not yet know that his life is over. He is a ghost who feasts and drinks and walks.’ He glanced at Ivar, cold and grey against the tower’s wall. ‘The Mercian thinks himself safe behind the palisade of Tostig’s enclosure. He is not.’
The monk flinched. ‘The men who came into the church with you, they were not Northmen. They are the ones who have been hunting Hereward.’
Harald nodded slowly. The music in his head grew louder still. ‘While I teetered on the block with a noose round my neck, we reached an agreement. The Mercian’s enemies need him slain quietly, in a manner that will not draw attention to him or the secrets he holds. Though I am told he has escaped two such attempts on his life. Your friend is hard to kill, eh?’
‘What agreement?’ Alric flashed an unsettled glance.
Redteeth grinned. ‘Those four men will capture the Mercian on the Feast of Fools when all order is turned on its head. And they will bring him to me.’
Harald felt a sly pleasure when he saw the monk blanch. On the shores of the great black sea, the Viking had been told that he would be feared, as Death himself, in these final days the Christians called the End-Times and his people knew as Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods, when the world would be consumed in flames. And it would be good.
‘You think this feast day belongs to your own God, Christian man,’ Redteeth continued, prowling around the tower wall. ‘But it is far older and darker than you know. This is a time for the dead, and for ghosts. It is a time of madness. It is the time of the Wild Hunt, when Odin rides eight-legged Sleipnir in pursuit of men.’ The Viking pointed an accusing finger at Alric. ‘Men who have turned their face against my people and the old ways.’
‘It is a time for peace now,’ the monk said. ‘Your ways are gone.’
Harald Redteeth shook his head. ‘My tradition is alive, in me. It has been passed down from father to son as long as man has walked this earth. In Yule, a sacrifice must be made. A blood sacrifice, which my people call hlaut.’
Gulls flying overhead called back to him, Hlaut, hlaut!
‘Sometimes it is cattle, sometimes horses, and sometimes men. We smear ourselves with the blood and raise our mead-cups to great Odin, for victory and power to the king. Your friend, Hereward, shall be my sacrifice, and I will slake myself in his blood. In his final hours, he will know such agonies that he will plead with me to pluck out his heart. And then the final days will begin. Your friend does not know what he has unleashed.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Christmas Day, 1062
The sword slashed down with one swift stroke. Hot blood gushed across the snow. Earl Tostig stepped back and grinned, resting the tip of his dripping blade on the frozen ground as the cheers rang out around him. In the centre of the circle of men and women, the goat squealed, jumping and slipping in the reddening slush. Hereward watched the beast’s death throes from the ranks of the small crowd of guests invited to attend the annual ritual. The slaughter of the goat, they all hoped, would signal a prosperous new year to come, but Hereward struggled with darker thoughts. He looked from the dying animal to the wind-chapped faces gathered around, searching for any sign that would reveal his enemy: an unguarded look, a shared glance, a tremor on hard features like the first cracks on the ice covering the river’s tributaries. He tried to find within him some of the warmth and hope he had felt when he first arrived in Eoferwic, but only a thin gruel remained. Deep in his bones, he could feel the threat mounting. Soon it would break, and then his sword would be drawn. It could not be sheathed again until it had tasted blood.
When the goat’s eyes rolled back, its convulsions stilled, another cheer rose up. The jubilant sound wafted through the cold morning to mingle with the music of men and women travelling from house to house wassailing. Every full-throated song ended with the cheerful cry of waes thu hael!
Beyond the hall’s enclosure, Eoferwic rested beneath a cloudless blue sky. Bright sunshine glared off the snow-swathed streets and houses. Not far away, the stark church tower soared from the jumbled rooftops, the bells now silent. The succulent aroma of roasting boar drifted from the hall, almost obscuring the pervasive scent of woodsmoke from the fires. Hereward’s mouth watered. The feast would be good, and when his belly was full he would be ready for whatever was to come.
He caught Acha’s eye. She was wrapped in a dark grey cloak so that with her gleaming hair and black eyes she looked like a raven in human form. The woman kept a sullen face — he had never seen her give an honest smile — but in her glance he saw a recognition of the night they had shared. Hereward felt warmed by the memory. The wound of his grief over Tidhild had not been erased, but to caress soft flesh, to feel the closeness of a kindred spirit, had soothed his turbulent thoughts. He yearned for that peace again.
The huscarls stamped their feet for warmth, and when Tostig and Judith led the way into the hall the fighting men followed, eager to fall upon the feast. Under festoons of holly and mistletoe, the guests raised cups of fruity Christmas ale and roared the oath to God and the earl. The serving women heaved in platter after platter laden with goose and beef, bread, salt-fish and smoked fish, blood pudding, cheese, honey and almond cakes and the centrepiece, a boar’s head with an apple tucked into the mouth.
With the Yule log blazing in the hearth, the hall soon rang with song and jokes bellowed in increasingly drunken voices. When the food was consumed, the harp-playing began and then the Christmas masque was performed by talented players from the town. Amid the din, Hereward sat at the end of the table, drinking steadily while he observed the other men.
Fresh from doling out alms to the poor, Archbishop Ealdred entered, red-cheeked and misty-breathed, stamping the snow from his shoes. Tostig, who had seen the cleric only hours earlier at the morning service, greeted the man like a long-lost friend. The cleric joined the earl and his wife at the top table and was soon devouring a plate of boar meat washed down with ale.
Hereward watched the two men lean together, talking intimately and with great seriousness, and at one point they both glanced towards him. They looked away when they saw he had noticed their attention, but by then the warrior’s suspicions had been raised.
The feast day drew on.
The drunken singing rolled out, more raucous with each passing hour, and men slumped across ale-puddled tables. When the guests were distracted by a Nativity performance by three men dressed as the Magi, Hereward caught Acha’s eye once again and they slipped out unseen into the cold afternoon.
After a long kiss stolen round the corner of the hall, he asked her what she had overheard when she served ale to the top table.
‘I heard no discussion about you,’ she replied, her hands folded round his waist. ‘Why would there be?’
‘I saw how they looked at me.’
‘You see plots everywhere.’
‘The earl and Ealdred were discussing more than the Christmas ale. Their expressions were grave, their talk intense.’
Acha sighed. ‘The archbishop told Tostig about a monk newly arrived in Eoferwic who worked at the church. He has been accused of murdering a woman.’
Hereward reeled. Surely it could only be Alric?
‘What is wrong?’ Acha asked, concerned by what she saw in his face.
‘The monk killed the woman here?’
Acha flinched at the fire she saw in his eyes. ‘No… before. Her family demanded blood and paid Viking mercenaries to hunt the monk down.’
