Five
Tall reed-banks slid by under starless skies. A thick layer of cloud had come across that the waning moon’s milky light could barely penetrate, which made it all the easier for us to slip unnoticed through the shadows. A faint drizzle hung in the air and I felt its cold touch upon my face. All was still save for a gentle splash as I let the punting-pole slip into the black water, felt it strike the riverbed, pushed against the sucking mud and loose stones and heaved it out again, ready for the next stroke. My arms had grown heavy, my shoulders were aching, and I was starting to wonder whether this had been such a wise idea after all. Many miles of pasture and fen lay between us and the rest of the king’s army at Brandune, and I reckoned we couldn’t be far from Elyg itself.
I glanced at our guide, Baudri, who crouched by the prow of our small boat. A brusque man in his middle years, he was one of the king’s scouts: indeed one of the best, if the rumours were right, with sharp eyes and hearing and a keen awareness of strategy. We were relying on his knowledge of the main river-passages to bring us as close as possible to the rebel stronghold. I wasn’t planning to set foot on its shores, not this night, at any rate. What I had in mind was rather different. I only hoped that in the dark and with this mist surrounding us Baudri could still find his way, and that we didn’t end up wandering into an enemy patrol. Certainly he didn’t seem troubled, and I took that for a good sign. Nevertheless, I kept a close eye on each riverbank, expecting at any moment to spy the shadows of foemen following us, watching, or else to hear a sudden whistle of air as clusters of steel-tipped shafts flew from out of the gloom. But the enemy did not show themselves, nor were any arrows loosed upon us, and so I had to assume that we hadn’t been seen.
God was with us.
‘Remind me, lord,’ said Pons. ‘What are we doing here?’
I shot him a reproachful look. He was still angry at the loss of his destrier, which I could well understand, although he would do better to save that anger for use against the enemy, rather than turn it upon his friends.
‘We’re here because Robert ordered it,’ I replied sternly.
‘Because you suggested it, you mean,’ Eudo said. ‘Trust you to say something. If it weren’t for you, we could all be asleep in our tents right now. I could be tumbling with my Sewenna. Have I told you about her?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. He’d hardly stopped talking about her in the last two months, although both Wace and I considered her rather plain. Eudo’s eye for women tended to be less discriminating than those of most men. ‘Now, quiet.’
Eudo returned to keeping a lookout, while I passed the punting-pole to Serlo, whose arms were fresher than mine. Sitting down in the damp bilge where the silt-laden water soaked into my braies, I took up one of the paddles to steer us closer to the bank where we would be less easily seen, and hoped that Wace and Hamo in the two boats behind us did likewise. For my plan to work we would need to draw the enemy’s attention, but not yet. Not until our trap was set. And so we carried on, making our way up one of the many creeks and channels that I hoped would take us a little closer to the Isle.
‘I’m going to marry her,’ Eudo said suddenly, breaking the stillness, and I realised his mind was still on Sewenna.
‘You’re a fool,’ I said. ‘You’ve barely known her half a year.’
Nor was she the first he’d become besotted with of late. Before Sewenna his heart had been pledged to an English slave-woman named Censwith, who had served in a bawdy house in Sudwerca and who had died of a fever before he could buy her freedom. She’d been pretty, though, whereas the latest object of his affections had a face like a sow’s arse. She was young, probably no more than sixteen summers old, fierce in temper and lacking in humour. Why he had brought her with him on campaign I could not work out, especially since he could have had his pick from more than a hundred camp-followers, any one of whom would have made a better match for him.
‘She makes me happy,’ Eudo said. ‘What’s wrong with that? Besides, you weren’t with Oswynn for much longer than six months. Have you given up looking for her yet?’
‘No,’ I replied, and felt slightly embarrassed to admit it, for I knew what he would probably say. ‘I haven’t.’
Oswynn was my woman, or had been. Dark, beautiful, wild Oswynn, with her inviting eyes and her hair, the colour of pitch, falling loosely and unbound to her breasts, as I liked her to wear it. I had cared for her more than any other woman before or since: more, indeed, than I ever dared admit to myself at the time. Even though she was English and of low birth, the daughter of a village blacksmith, and even though we could speak only a few phrases in each other’s tongue, and even though our time together had been short, nevertheless I had loved her.
She had first been taken from me that fateful winter’s night at Dunholm, when the Northumbrians had ambushed us: the same night that my former lord, Robert de Commines, was murdered, burnt to death in the mead-hall. For over a year I’d thought her dead, but then at Beferlic last autumn I had glimpsed her alive and apparently well, as beautiful as I remembered, albeit a captive of one of the enemy’s leaders.
‘She’s gone,’ Eudo said. ‘Even if you did see her at Beferlic, you said yourself that she’s with another man now. She could be a thousand leagues away. What hope do you think you have of ever finding her?’
He didn’t mean it unkindly, but even so his words hurt. He still believed I was mistaken. Indeed for a while I had wondered whether what had happened was merely some kind of waking dream, so unreal had it seemed at the time. But it wasn’t just that I had seen her; she had seen me too. Our eyes had met and she had just enough time to call my name before she was taken from me a second time as the enemy fled the burning town. How could I have imagined all that?
No, I had to keep believing that she was still out there somewhere. Her captor, like Eadgar and King Sweyn, had managed to escape the slaughter that night. I could picture him as easily as if he were standing before me now: broad in the chest and with his hair, fair but greying, tied in the Danish style in a braid at his nape, mounted on a white stallion, with rings of twisted gold upon both his arms and a fiery-eyed dragon with an axe in its claws emblazoned on his shield. I didn’t know where he hailed from, or even his name, but through the winter and the spring I had paid spies to venture into the furthest reaches of Britain and bring me whatever they could learn about a Dane of that description and bearing such a device. Their help had cost me more silver than I could afford, but in my eyes it had been worth it, at the time if not in hindsight. In fact I might as well have tossed all those coins into the sea for all the good it had done me, since not one of those spies had brought me any useful information. The dragon and axe had recently been seen in Northumbria, some of them had told me, which was no help since I knew that already. Another claimed he had taken shelter at the court of the Flemish count, yet another that he had gone back across the sea with King Sweyn, and two more that he had travelled into the far north, to Ysland and the distant, frozen lands that lay beyond. Each one gave me a different name, and since none had been able to offer any more precise detail, I had sent them all away. They had gone to peddle their lies elsewhere, leaving me poorer and no wiser than before. But that did not stop me hoping.
‘If you want my advice, you should try to forget her,’ Eudo went on. ‘There are plenty of other women who’ll gladly help warm your bed. Women who won’t cost you as much, either.’
He was, in his own way, trying to cheer me, not that it helped. He considered me a fool for wasting my silver on the tales of rogues and swindlers, none of whom he would trust as far the length of his sword-blade. But love makes a man desperate, and in those days my heart ruled over my head. Even though I had cared for and lain with other women since then, the truth was that I had never fully shaken her from my mind. Death had taken so many people who once were dear to me, and now that I knew that she was alive, I was determined to do everything possible to bring her back to me.
‘I’m going to find her,’ I said, sounding more confident than I felt. ‘I swear it.’
‘And how do you plan to do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Not yet. But somehow I will.’
Eudo sighed and shook his head sadly, and silence fell once more. The rain began to spit down more heavily. I gazed out beyond the stern, making sure that the following boats were still behind us, and was just able to spy their shadows. Like us, Wace and the men under his command had tied scraps of cloth around their spearheads, and put on dark cloaks to cover their mail, so as to hide the telltale glint of steel. There were six of us in each boat, making eighteen in total, and I hoped that would prove enough. By anyone’s estimation it was a
