Englishman; one of the few bits of Welsh that I had learnt in my time on the Marches.
I shook my head. How to say I was a Frenchman, a Norman or a Breton, all of which I considered myself from time to time, was beyond my knowledge, but then that was probably just as well, for I was unlikely to have volunteered even that much anyway.
‘
Whatever she was trying to tell me was lost upon my ears. Certainly my inability to speak her tongue seemed to frustrate or disappoint her, or both. While I took another sip of the broth she stood abruptly and disappeared outside, calling presumably to the man who was her husband or father. The rain still fell, pooling in the rut that had been worn in the doorway. In all my travels I had never known a country as wet and as miserable as this.
Alone, I tried to summon the strength to get up. One thing was for certain: I could not stay here. Where I might go I didn’t know, only that the further it was from Mathrafal and from Eadric and Bleddyn’s men, the less likely they were to find me. Unfortunately my legs were reluctant to do as they were told, my feet uncertain of their grounding. At the same time a sudden dizziness overcame me and I staggered sideways, colliding with the chest and cursing loudly.
At once Annest came back in, with the greying man behind her. Together they helped me sit back down upon the bed, bringing me a second, tattered blanket that they wrapped around my shivering shoulders. My forehead still ached and I held my palm against it, rubbing the place where the pain seemed to be coming from to try to relieve it.
Annest fetched more wood from outside and added it to the fire-pit, building it up until I could feel the warmth of the flames upon my skin. While she did so, the man went to the chest and produced what looked like a strip of bark, grey in colour. With his knife he carved off a portion about the size of my thumb, which he pressed gently into my hand. When I looked at him questioningly, he cut another piece, which he placed in his mouth and began to chew upon, exaggerating the movements of his jaw so as to demonstrate what I was supposed to do. Finally understanding, I did as he had showed me, grimacing at the bitter taste and the rough feel of it against my teeth and tongue. Father Erchembald sometimes gave a concoction of dried willow-bark boiled in water to those who came seeking remedies for fevers, swellings and other ailments, and I supposed that this was much the same.
Having chewed upon the strip until my jaw was tired, I lay back down. Soon my headache receded, and my last thought before I drifted into sleep was that willow-bark must be good for treating that too.
They took good care of me over the couple of weeks that followed: Annest and her father, as I decided he must be, who it seemed went by the name of Cadell. To begin with I grew worse, with bouts of sickness coupled with a burning ague. In my few moments of wakefulness I struggled, and failed, to recall the last time I’d felt so ill. Within a few days, however, the sweating and the shivering had subsided and my appetite returned. The more I ate of their food and drank of their ale, the more my strength was restored to me, until after perhaps a week my fever had lifted and I was able to venture outside once more, to help gather and carry in wood for the fire and water for the pot. I was still not as fit as I would have liked, and prone to fits of coughing, but simply being on my feet did me some good.
As well as my dried braies they found me a linen shirt, frayed at the hems, and a tattered deerskin cloak that might well have belonged to the man’s father, if not his grandfather too, so many times had it been patched and restitched. Neither Cadell nor Annest wore any shoes and so they had none spare to offer me, but I was content to go barefoot, my blisters and sores being close to healed by then.
And so I gathered my strength, until the morning came when I knew it was time for me to leave. To say that I was fully recovered would have been a lie, but I’d tarried in this place long enough already. As long as there were battles to be fought and the fate of the kingdom remained at stake, I could not rest. Somewhere my brothers in arms, my lord and my king needed me, and it was my duty to do what I could to help them. And so I had to return.
The Welshman and his daughter knew it too; they had seen me growing restless over the days and they did not try to stop me — as if they could. At first I’d been hoping to leave without disturbing either of them, while they still dreamt, but the girl was a light sleeper and woke at the first sound of my rising. I’d hardly made it halfway to the door when she shook her father awake.
‘Estrawn,’ Cadell said as he rubbed his bleary eyes. That was the name by which they had come to know me.
‘I must go,’ I replied, feeling that I ought to say something even if they could not understand me. ‘I need to get back to my people.’
‘
‘
A parting gift. As if he and Annest hadn’t already shown me enough kindness. Lesser folk might have left me to die, but they had troubled to shelter, feed and clothe me, and it wasn’t right that their compassion should go unrewarded. I wished I had silver or something more useful to give them in return, by which I could show my gratitude. Save for the clothes on my person, however, I had nothing. Guilt made my throat stick and I had to choke it back.
I accepted the stick with the food bundle. Both smiled warmly; Annest threw her arms around me; her father clasped my hand. In that way we bade each other farewell, and I stepped beyond their door into the breaking dawn. Their house stood alone, sheltered from the wind in a shallow cleft between two rises, overlooking a pasture where goats grazed. Of any other cottages, a church or a lord’s hall nearby, there was no sign, and the same was true of any road or track that I might follow. The sun was rising so I knew at least which direction was east, which was good, since from what I recalled of my flight in that rough direction lay Mathrafal, and I had no intention of walking back into the lions’ den if I could possibly avoid it. If Scrobbesburh had fallen or lay under siege then it was pointless trying to seek refuge there, while to the west was nothing but a bleak land of mountains upon mountains, or so I had heard from those who had ventured into those parts, with the sea beyond them. With that in mind I headed south, knowing that somewhere that way was Earnford.
I turned to gaze back just once. The house was by then nearly out of sight, a mere speck of brown upon the green hillside. Cadell and Annest still stood outside the door, and I waved to them, hoping they would see me. Whether they did and whether they waved in return, I was too far away to be sure, but I liked to imagine that they did before I turned and was on my way.
If Eadric’s men had been looking for me this past fortnight, there had been no sign of them in the valley where Cadell and Annest lived. Unless they planned to scour the entire land this side of the dyke I reckoned they must surely have given up the hunt by now. With luck and with God’s grace that meant I would find myself in no trouble on my travels.
And so it proved as I struck out across the country. Or rather there was no trouble of the hostile kind, although with only my instincts to guide me the going was slow and frustrating. Quickly I began to appreciate how much I had relied upon Ithel and Maredudd’s knowledge of the country the last time I had been in these parts. Several times I was forced to turn back or change my course when faced with slopes to steep to climb or descend, streams that were too fast to swim or too deep to wade across: when that happened I often had to go several miles out of my way to find a ford or, on occasion, a bridge. But having lived through the battle at Mechain, having survived imprisonment by the Welsh, I was not prepared to risk my neck without good reason. I was determined to make it back home, to Earnford and to Leofrun, and to do so whole, not to die from my own recklessness in this empty and godforsaken land.
There was little forage to be found and so I was careful not to eat all my bread and cheese at once.?dda had once taught me something of the various berries and mushrooms that grew in the woods, namely which ones a man could eat without killing himself or causing him to empty the contents of his stomach. Still, I did not trust my memory and so I preferred to go hungry rather than take a chance. Nor for the most part did I venture near the few villages and manors that I came across; I couldn’t rely on those there being as friendly as Cadell and Annest had, to one who by his speech was clearly a foreigner.
On my travels I met few people: a shepherd with his flock upon the hills; a wandering priest with a wooden cross around his neck, riding on a donkey; peasants out gathering armfuls of firewood from the copses on their
