'But you are not Godgifu,' he said in English.
She thought that over. 'Are you sure?'
'You can't be. I saw her die.' No, his pitiless memory informed him. More than that. Orm had killed her, or his murderous machine of a body had, in the blood-lust on Senlac Ridge, during the slaughter men had come to refer to as the Battle of Hastings. Killed the woman he loved, without thinking. He had never forgiven himself, even though he had obtained absolution of a sort from Sihtric, Godgifu's priest-brother.
'Well, you're right. My name is Eadgyth. I wish I were your Godgifu, though.' Her voice was scratchy from disuse. She wasn't much older than twenty.
'Why do you wish that?'
'Because you would spare Godgifu. You will soon kill me.'
'Why are you here, Eadgyth?'
'I'm hiding.'
'From the Normans?'
'From the Normans, and my parents.'
'Why your parents?'
She shivered in her hole. 'I want to give my life to God. They want to give it to the Conqueror.'
He glanced around. The other troopers were busy with something they had found on the far side of the village, a cache of money, or a woman still alive. There was nobody near Orm, nobody watching. Orm squatted down, stiff in his grimy mail coat. 'Tell me.'
It was a familiar story. Under Harold and his predecessors Eadgyth's family had been land-owners, well-to- do. But more than three years after the Conquest, any vague intentions King William might have had for rapprochement with the old English aristocracy had been burned away by rebellion. All over the country there were wildmen operating from the woods and hills and marshland, places the heavily armoured Normans could not follow. The sons of dead King Harold had been raiding from Ireland. The Scottish King Malcolm had married his sister to Edgar the Atheling, the relative of Edward the Confessor who some argued had a better claim to the throne than even Harold had. And so on. As one rebellion after another was put down, very few of the native English nobility retained their positions.
Eadgyth's parents' intention was to survive under the new regime. And their main asset, as they saw it, was their only daughter.
'They brought me back from my convent. I was told I must marry the son of the Norman lord who now owns us. I met the boy. No more than seventeen. He tried to rape me before I told him my name. He's a bishop now.' She laughed, not bitter.
'So you ran away.'
'I've travelled from safe-house to safe-house, sheltered by the clergy and by the people of places like this.'
Orm had heard of this. For peasants stripped of custom and English law, hermits like Eadgyth were a reminder of the old days, the old English ways.
She said to him, 'And you-?'
'Orm. My name is Orm Egilsson.'
'Why are you here? You are not Norman, or English. This is not your home.'
'I am a mercenary. I fight for pay.'
She shifted in her cramped hole. 'You were at Hastings?'
'I was.'
'On such a day it was better to fight for the winner. Why have the Normans brought you here?'
'To put a stop to the rebellions.'
Eadgyth said, 'My own uncle is a wildman, in the fen country of the east.'
'Yes. The Normans call them silvarici. People of the woods.' All over England the wildmen had taught the Normans another new word: murdrum, furtive slaughter. 'The north has been worst, though. This country. And so it will suffer most grievously. Everywhere it is like this, from Durham to York – burned – uninhabited.' There would be no harvest this year, no lambs or calves; famine would follow the steel.
'So at last the Conqueror has come here,' Eadgyth whispered. 'From Hastings all the way to this remote place of farmers and sheep and cattle.'
Orm heard voices calling. 'We have no more time,' he said.
'Then you must earn your pay.'
He looked into her calm eyes, so like Godgifu's.
'What's this?' The voice was heavy, the accent crude French.
Orm was dismayed to see Roger fitz Gommery standing over him. Roger was a common soldier, a slab of hardened muscle from toe to brain, and an ardent rapist. The crotch of his leather trousers was already smeared with blood and ordure from his day's sport. 'Have I broken into your party, Orm Egilsson? Let's see what we've got.'
He closed his leather glove over Eadgyth's short hair, and dragged her to her feet. She screamed, and her legs flapped, too weak to support her weight.
'Roger-'
'You'll get your share, Orm.'
With his gloved hand Roger ripped at the neck of Eadgyth's habit. Old, much patched, the material gave easily. She was left naked save for pants of stained wool, which Roger pulled away. Her body was skeletal, her skin pocked by lesions, her breasts shrunken mounds behind hard nipples. She whimpered, her eyes closed, and she seemed to be praying:
And the Dove will fly east,
Wings strong, heart stout, mind clear.
God's Engines will burn our ocean
And flame across the lands of spices.
All this I have witnessed
I and my mothers…
As she gabbled these words, Roger looked her up and down, contemptuous. 'Skin and bone. Chicken legs. You know what, Dane? I can't be bothered; I've had my fill today. But we can still have a little sport. Have you ever carved a chicken?' He took a knife from his belt and, almost thoughtfully, drew it across Eadgyth's back. She jerked rigid at the pain, and warm blood poured.
And her eyes snapped open.
She stared directly at Orm. 'Egilsson,' she said. 'Orm Egilsson. Can you hear me? Are you there?' All the weakness had gone from her voice, despite the way Roger held her up by her hair, despite the wound that crossed her back. It didn't even sound like her voice any more, but deeper, heavier, the accent distorted. 'Are you there, Orm Egilsson?'
Roger gaped. 'Is she possessed?'
'Orm Egilsson. Listen to what I have to tell you. Listen, and remember, and let your sons and their sons remember too.' And again she began to intone her eerie, unfamiliar prayer.
In the last days
To the tail of the peacock
He will come:
The spider's spawn, the Christ-bearer
The Dove.
And the Dove will fly east…
Roger crossed himself. 'By God's wounds, she's a prophet.'
She spoke on in that clear alien voice, of fires consuming an ocean, of war.
