grave.
‘You were right to be concerned.’ Wulfhere squatted by the hearth, using the fingers of his good hand to balance himself. ‘Your enemies have the protection of the earl. He has sheltered them in a house not far from his hall, where they have been hiding by day but emerge when dark falls. You fear some plot against your life?’
Hereward grunted. Rising to his feet, he took directions to the house and thanked Wulfhere for his help, stripping one of the golden rings from his arm to be given to his informant.
Beneath the howl of the icy gale, drunken singing rolled out from the doorways of the houses he passed. The Feast of Fools would continue until sleep came. Grim-faced in the depths of his hood, the warrior wondered why Tostig was sheltering his four enemies. There was no love lost between the Godwins and the Earl of Mercia and his kin. Perhaps Tostig was simply being cunning, he mused. Good hospitality after the long trek could lower the four men’s guard. The earl could be hoping to draw out of them more information about the plot. Or he could be holding them as a bargaining tool once news of the conspiracy came into the open. Hereward felt unsure, but he could not risk his pursuers persuading the earl that he alone was the true enemy.
When he reached the earl’s enclosure, the snow was swirling in a wall of white. He could barely see a sword-length ahead of him. Wild music and drunken singing boomed from the hall. The huscarls were in full throat, the ale flowing freely. Tostig knew how to buy his men’s loyalty, Hereward thought. Head down, he forged into the gale through the calf-deep snow. The house Wulfhere had identified lay on the edge of the enclosure. It stood silent, a trail of grey smoke from the roof-hole whipped away in the wind.
He gripped his axe, enjoying the comforting weight in his hand. In response, his body flickered alight, every fibre burning, the blood thundering in his head. He was alive. He was the lightning and the oak. He was the feeder of ravens.
Hereward pushed into the house.
The howl of the snowstorm faded and for a moment there was only silence. The four men sat around the hearth staring at him, held fast by surprise. Hereward saw that his enemies were rough men, with faces like the cliffs of the Northumbrian coast and patchworks of scars that told long tales of lives lived in violence. Their hair was lank and greasy, their tunics stained with the road.
When they grasped who had burst into their midst, the four men lunged for their weapons. With a lupine grin, Hereward strode across the timber floor in four swift paces and swung his axe. The blade severed the top of the nearest opponent’s head midway down his nose. As the skull-cap flew through the air, a gush of scarlet sizzled in the fire. A cloud of acrid smoke whooshed up. The second man half rose on one knee, his fingers closing round the hilt of his scabbarded sword. Hereward’s axe came down again, lopping off his arm at the shoulder. The victim screamed and pitched forward, clutching at the stump.
The warrior felt as though he were floating across the face of the earth, untouchable, immaculate. He watched the blood drain from the faces of the two remaining men, noted the familiar shift of expressions like moonshadows on snow: shock, disbelief, dread. The world was silent, the air swathing him with the sumptuous muffling of goose-down. His grin broadened. Joy filled him. Euphoria. He floated across the timber boards and swung his axe a third time. To him, the weapon flowed like honey, but the third man moved even slower. The blade sliced through the chest and down towards the right hip, opening up his innards. And hard as the horrified man tried to hold them in, he could not.
And then there was only the fourth.
The ruddy-faced man threw away his sword and pressed his palms together in a prayer for mercy, as if that could turn back time. But in Hereward’s mind, the man was already dead.
Yet the warrior dropped his axe, while still striding forward, and the relief in the fourth man’s face was almost comical. A fist, driven hard, into bone and gristle. A resounding crack. And spatters of blood, a miserable amount.
Hereward caught one hand in his victim’s tunic before the unconscious man hit the boards. Dragging him away from the spreading pool of gore and the dimly heard cries of the dying, the warrior stripped him and bound his wrists and ankles. Then he strung him up by the feet with a rope looped over a beam as he had done many a deer.
Hereward waited patiently, feeling the glow diminish and his wits return. The man came round soon enough, a reedy cry rising from his lips when he realized his predicament. The warrior pricked his knife beneath his victim’s eye and whispered, ‘Quiet.’
The man looked into his captor’s face and fell silent.
‘We will talk like men,’ Hereward continued, ‘and you will tell me all you know.’
‘I cannot,’ the man whimpered. ‘I am sworn to silence, and God will damn me to hell if I break my vow.’
‘You are a godly man. I admire that.’ The warrior turned his knife so it glinted in the firelight. ‘But we have different aims, you and I. We must see whose will is stronger.’
Hereward proceeded to cut the man’s torso. The screams rang out, but the warrior knew they would be drowned by the storm and the revelry in the earl’s hall. Their back and forth continued for a while, but Hereward whittled down his victim’s resistance by degrees. Soon they were both so sticky with blood it was nigh-on impossible to tell them apart.
‘Now.’ Hereward leaned in close and whispered in the man’s ear like a priest hearing the final confession. ‘It is hell in this world or hell in the next. You may find peace, and a quick end, by answering me.’
The man muttered something unintelligible, his eyes rolling.
‘What do you know of Edwin’s plot against the king?’ the warrior asked one final time.
‘Edwin?’ Blood bubbled over the dying man’s lips. ‘Not… not Edwin. I was sent by Harold Godwinson, who would have you dead and the memory of you defamed so that all who speak your name will curse you to hell.’
Hereward felt as if he had been speared through the stomach.
Harold Godwinson, the great protector, the brave warrior, admired by all Englishmen, who prayed he would take the throne once Edward was gone and lead them to an age of prosperity and peace.
Leader, protector… betrayer.
The warrior’s blood burned. He had been betrayed once again, first by his father, now by the man who had the ear of Edward, the man who would be king. Betrayed and despised by all the powers above him. He was alone, as he always had been, and he would no longer bow down to any man. ‘Then warn the Devil that I am on my way,’ he growled, ‘for you will be in hell afore me.’
CHAPTER TWENTY — ONE
Far from Eoferwic’s streets, in the south-west, the night was just as cold, and just as bloody. The torches roared in the bitter wind. Song floated out from the king’s hall where the Christmas court had gathered, yet beyond the palisade the dark over Gloucester was deeper and more threatening than it ever had been in London, Redwald thought.
Pressing his hand against his mouth in horror, he watched Harold Godwinson grab the Mercian’s hair from behind and yank the head back. With one fluid move, the Earl of Wessex ripped the tip of his knife across the exposed neck. Drunken laughter from the hall drowned out the victim’s bubbling cry. As the terrified man’s hands went to stem the flood of blood, Harold rammed the head down to the ground and held the face against the frozen earth until the snow was stained crimson and the body had stopped convulsing.
‘A lesson for you. This is how you survive, and grasp hold of power: by not being afraid to do the dirty tasks with your own hands,’ the older man said with an unsettling calmness. In that one moment when Harold had held life in his hands, Redwald had seen his employer’s face alter; the humour, the nobility, the wisdom, all of it fell away as if it were a mask. The young man felt chilled by what he saw rise up to replace it in the cold face and glittering black eyes. ‘Do you see?’ Harold’s voice cracked with anger. ‘ Do you see? ’
Redwald nodded furiously.
‘Good. Learn. Now help me.’ Harold rolled the bloody body on to its back and wrapped it in its grey woollen cloak. For a moment, Redwald froze. The man’s death might as well have been by his hand. At the Palace of Westminster, he had observed this Mercian, one of Edwin’s men, following Harold as he rode out into London with his attendants. The young man had feared an attempt would be made upon his master’s life and had informed the
