The keening cry echoed through the small house next to the great church of Saint-Omer. Startled from his duties, Alric hushed the frightened children and instructed them to continue repeating the Latin he had taught them. Racing into the sun-dappled street, the monk found Turfrida clutching her arms around her, her face streaked with tears.
‘You are hurt?’ he asked, concerned.
Racked with silent sobs, the woman couldn’t speak for a moment, and then she gasped only, ‘Hereward…’
Alric felt a pang in his heart. He had learned to trust in God whenever his friend marched off to fight, but he always knew that sooner or later Hereward’s battle prowess would fail him. ‘You have had word back from the Scheldt?’
Turfrida shook her head. Wiping the snot from her nose with the back of her hand, she stuttered, ‘A vision came to me as I stood on the hill where my husband and I always walk… a raven, falling from the sky. And when I looked at my feet, the bird lay there, crawling with white maggots.’
‘You think God speaks through this vision?’
‘The raven is Hereward, I know it. He has met death.’
Alric forced a comforting smile and said softly, ‘Your husband has met death many times. Indeed, the two are close friends, and he has introduced death to others.’
‘Perhaps that is it,’ the woman replied, her chest heaving. She took long, deep breaths until she calmed and then she allowed the monk to lead her back to her house, where she sat by the hearth with her uncompleted sewing. But a dark cloud hung over her that no comforting words could dispel. Her sadness would only ease when she held her husband in her arms once more. Alric hoped that time would come, and soon.
He returned to the children, but he was in no mood for any more teaching and sent them all home. For the rest of the day, he prayed in front of the church’s plain wooden altar, seeking solace among his troubled thoughts. He followed the contours of his mismatched friendship with the Mercian, from the suspicion and dislike of that first frozen night in Northumbria to the ease with which they spent time together in Saint-Omer. The monk realized he’d grown to like the surly warrior, for all his many flaws. Perhaps he even admired some of the qualities he found lacking in so many others: courage, loyalty, love, even honour, something the monk had thought to be entirely absent during their early days together. Their destinies had seemed entwined, both seeking salvation from a bloody past, both unable to achieve it without the help of the other. Now he wondered if he had been mistaken.
For some reason that Alric couldn’t understand, he woke at dawn the next day and felt the urge to go to the road out of Saint-Omer and look to the horizon. He stayed there until midmorning, and returned again near sunset.
The next day he did the same.
And on the third day, not long after sunrise, he glimpsed a lone figure riding towards Saint-Omer at a funereal pace. The monk waited, his heart pattering.
When the figure neared, Alric saw that it was Hereward. Yet his friend looked quite different, as if worn down by a terrible weight upon his shoulders. Even when the warrior saw the monk waiting, he didn’t increase the pace of his mount.
Finally, he reined the horse to a halt. A bloody strip of linen had been tied across his bare chest, and there was dirt under his fingernails from, although the monk didn’t know it then, the grave he had dug with his bare hands. He was filthy and he smelled of the road, but Alric was shocked when he saw the fire burning in his friend’s glowering eyes.
‘Say your goodbyes among the children and the churchmen, monk,’ Hereward said in a cold, flat voice. ‘Our time here is done. We sail for England.’
CHAPTER FORTY — THREE
5 October 1067
The gulls shrieked in an iron sky. Spray salted the wind, and the morning throbbed with the roar of the grey ocean, the creak of timber and the splash of dipping oars. At the prow of the Flemish warship Turfrida’s father had arranged to transport them home, Hereward and Alric felt the first lick of autumn in the air.
Unable to hide his anxiety, the monk gripped the bowpost until his knuckles grew white. Memories of icy water closing over his head still haunted him. ‘Let me soon feel dry land under my feet,’ he muttered.
‘Were yesterday’s constant prayers not enough?’ Hereward enquired, distracted. He had not taken his eyes off the swell since daybreak. Such a grim mood afflicted the warrior that it seemed he would never know joy again.
Suddenly a shaft of sunlight punched through the dense cloud cover, illuminating a hazy band of green across the horizon. Pointing at the sunbeam, Alric forced his first smile of the day. ‘God looks down upon England.’
‘And what does he see awaiting us in William the Bastard’s newly forged realm?’ Hereward’s eyes narrowed. He let his lamb-fat-lined furs fall open, already thinking of setting foot upon the quay.
‘You always fear the worst,’ Alric said. He thought of making light of it until he saw Hereward’s darkening expression. Following the warrior’s gaze, he glimpsed columns of smoke rising here and there across the coast. ‘Burning off the crop stubble,’ the monk said without conviction.
No more words passed between them for the remainder of the sea journey.
As his relief rose with the proximity to land, Alric thought back over the last few days. When Hereward returned from the expedition to the islands in the Scheldt estuary, he had seemed a broken man. For two days he slept, and for two days after that he barely spoke, apart from demanding food and ale and sending Alric away to make arrangements for the coming crossing. Turfrida had been so overjoyed to see her husband alive, she made no attempt to question him. ‘He will speak in his own time,’ she had whispered on the third morn. But she had disappeared to the woods where the alfar walked, and she had listened to the tongues of the birds and the foxes, and communed with the trees, and when she had returned her mood had darkened once more. ‘The shadow is rising within him again,’ she said. ‘We must work together or we could lose him.’
Alric chewed a nail. He had tried to maintain a calm disposition, but it was not within his nature. He feared for his friend. One night beside the hearth, the words had tumbled out of him as he pleaded to know what was wrong. Hereward had glared at him in such a way that at first he thought his friend might strike him dead. But then he said simply, ‘Vadir is dead,’ and returned his attention to the fire. The monk recalled waking with a start the next morning and finding the warrior looming over him. Hereward’s face was like the statues the Normans carved on their churches, but his eyes swam with grief. In flat, halting words, the warrior had described the older man’s death, and Harald Redteeth’s triumph, and how Hereward believed it to have been a plot long in the making; revenge for what transpired on that frozen night all those winters ago when they had first met.
Once again the monk felt the guilt that had consumed him that morning. If not for him, Hereward would never have encountered the mad Viking, or attracted his wild attention, and Vadir would still be alive. Hereward had pressed a cup of ale in Alric’s hand, and ordered him to drink up — it felt like an oath, though no words had been spoken — and then told the monk not to blame himself. Turfrida had spoken to him of the wyrd; who was to know the schemes of God, he had said. But as he walked back to the fire, he had added something like, ‘That does not mean I cannot make amends,’ but what he meant by that he would not say. Turfrida had pleaded with her husband to stay. He had earned himself a new life of peace and love. Why would he risk all that for the uncertainty of a journey to England? But he would speak no more on the matter.
The ship ploughed a white-rimmed furrow through the waves. Alric knew they had skirted the south because of William’s strength around London, and the vessel had been making its way up the whale road to the east coast. Hereward had set his sights on the place he knew best: Mercia.
When the ship put in to Yernemuth, Hereward leapt to the quay before the ruddy-faced sailors had even tied up. Urging Alric to follow, the warrior threw off his sea-furs and flapped his grey hooded cloak around him. Alric found his black woollen habit disguise enough. No one gave monks a second glance at the best of times. Along the quay, merchants haggled over boxes and barrels and sailors argued with shipwrights. Men with arms as hard as iron hauled bales from the seagoing ships to the smaller vessels that would carry the goods along the rivers inland. All appeared as it should at the port; bustling, focused upon the day-to-day activity of trade. But Alric thought he could
