‘Bastards won’t get a smell of me, lord.’
The sky cleared as we walked southwards. The wind was dying, gusting occasionally to stir our borrowed cloaks. There was warmth in the sun, which glittered off the flooded pastures. We met a small girl, maybe eight or nine years old, driving three cows northwards. She shrank onto the road’s side as we passed, looking fearful. ‘Better weather today!’ Beornoth called cheerfully to her, but she just shivered and kept her eyes lowered. We passed orchards where trees had been felled by the storm and one stout trunk had been split and scorched by lightning. I shivered when I saw a dead swan, lying with a broken neck in a flooded ditch. It was not a good omen and I raised my eyes in hope of seeing a better sign, but saw only the storm’s ragged rear-guard of clouds. A woman was digging in the garden of a small reed-thatched cottage, but seeing us she went indoors and I heard the locking bar drop into place. Was this, I wondered, how folk had behaved when they saw Roman troops approaching? Or Danes? Fæfresham was nervous, fearful, a small town caught again at the crossroads of powerful men’s ambitions.
I was nervous too. If Wighelm had told me the truth then Æthelhelm’s men in Fæfresham outnumbered mine. If they were alert, if they were expecting trouble, then we would be swiftly overwhelmed. I had thought to use the captured cloaks and shields as a means of entering the town unsuspected, but Eadric returned to tell me that a dozen spearmen were guarding the road. ‘They’re not lazy buggers either,’ he said. ‘Wide awake, they are.’
‘Just twelve men?’
‘With plenty more to back them up, lord,’ Eadric said grimly.
We had left the road to hide behind the blackthorn hedge of a rain-soaked pasture. If Eadric was right then an assault on the twelve guards would bring more enemy running and I could find myself in a ragged fight far from the safety of Spearhafoc. ‘Can you get into the town?’ I asked Eadric.
He nodded. ‘Plenty of alleyways, lord.’ He was a middle-aged Saxon who could move through woodland like a ghost, but he was confident he could get past Æthelhelm’s sentries and use his cunning to stay undiscovered in the town. ‘I’m old, lord,’ he said, ‘and they don’t look at old men like young ones.’ He discarded his weapons, stripped off his mail, and, looking like a peasant, slipped through a gap in the blackthorn hedge that sheltered us. We waited. The last clouds were thinning and the sunlight offered welcome warmth. The smoke from Fæfresham’s cooking fires drifted upwards instead of being flayed sideways by the wind. Eadric did not return for a long time and I had begun to fear he had been captured and Finan feared the same. He sat beside me, fidgeting, then went very still as a band of red-cloaked horsemen appeared to the east. There were at least twenty of them and for a moment I thought they might be searching for us and I half drew Serpent-Breath, but then the horsemen turned back towards the town.
‘Just exercising the horses,’ I said, relieved.
‘They were good horses too,’ Finan said, ‘not cheap country nags.’
‘I’m sure they have good horses here,’ I said. ‘It’s good land once you’re off the marshes.’
‘But the bastards came by ship,’ Finan pointed out. ‘No one told us they brought horses with them.’
‘So they took them from the townsfolk.’
‘Or they’ve been reinforced,’ Finan said ominously. ‘It feels bad, lord. We should go back.’
Finan was no coward. I am ashamed even to have thought this. Of course he was no coward! He was among the two or three bravest men I have ever known, a swordsman of lightning speed and deadly skill, but that day he had an instinct of doom. It was a feeling of dread, a certainty based on nothing he could see or hear, but a certainty all the same. He claimed the Irish had a knowledge denied to the rest of us, that they could scent fate, and though he was a Christian I knew he believed the world to be seething with spirits and it seemed those unseen creatures had spoken to him. In the night he had tried to persuade me to board Spearhafoc and sail back north. We were too few, he had said, and our enemies too numerous. ‘And I saw you dead, lord,’ he had finished, sounding grieved to speak of such a thing.
‘Dead?’ I had asked.
‘Naked, blood-covered, lord, in a field of barley.’ He paused, but I said nothing. ‘We should go home, lord.’
I was tempted. And Finan’s vision or dream had almost convinced me. I touched my hammer amulet. ‘We’ve come this far,’ I told him, ‘but I need to speak to Eadgifu.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ We had been sitting on a bench beside the tavern’s hearth. All around us men snored. The wind still rattled the shutters and fretted at the reed thatch, and rain still fell through the roof-hole to hiss in the fire, but the storm had gone out to sea and only the remnants disturbed the night.
‘Because that’s what I came to do,’ I had answered stubbornly.
‘And she was supposed to raise a force of Centish men?’
‘That’s what the priest
