times I had attended the king’s courts. But those men whom I knew personally or who recognised me were few in number. An oddly despondent feeling came over me as I realised I was no longer the one to whom everyone else looked for instructions, the one who inspired confidence and instilled respect. Instead I was once more merely one stranger among many, with nothing to mark me out as a lord and a leader of men: not a banner or pennon to fly; nor a single household knight to command; nor, apart from the six who were with me, any man there I could even call my friend.
Or so I thought, until that evening as we were setting up camp, when I heard my name being called from a distance. Jolted from my thoughts, I turned and saw two familiar faces I had not expected to see.
‘Pons!’ I said. ‘Serlo!’
We embraced like long-lost siblings. It couldn’t have been much more than two months since I had last seen them, but it felt far longer.
‘We didn’t think we’d see you again, lord,’ Pons said. ‘We thought you were dead.’
‘Well, here I am,’ I replied. ‘Alive, if only just.’
They had survived the ambush in which I’d been captured, and made it together with Robert to Eoferwic. But as soon as it was heard that the enemy had entered the Humbre and were headed for the city, Robert and his father the vicomte had sent them south to bear the news to King Guillaume, little knowing that he was already on the way at the head of an army.
‘Only a few days later we heard that the city had fallen,’ Serlo said. ‘It was fortunate that they did send us, or else we would have been there when it happened.’
Sometimes God’s favour wanes and at other times it shines upon us for reasons we cannot always understand, but it was clear He had chosen to spare them. I could but hope that He had extended the same favour to the Malets themselves.
Still, to add to the unexpected sight of Serlo and Pons came another piece of good fortune in the form of the arrival two days later of Eudo and Wace, who had ridden north from Robert’s estates in Suthfolc.
‘We thought you had gone with Lord Robert and his sister to Eoferwic,’ Wace said. ‘When we heard what happened, we feared the worst.’
‘Who are these men?’ Eudo asked, frowning as he gestured at those seated around our campfire.
To that question there was no simple answer, and so I told them the tale, just as I had told Father Erchembald and?dda before. Of course Eudo and Wace knew nothing of what had happened to me, and why should they? They had been on the other side of the kingdom entirely, defending Heia and its surrounding manors against King Sweyn.
‘Or at least we were, until the Danes brought their fleet up the river,’ said Wace. ‘Then your countryman Earl Ralph called us to Noruic where we had to fight them off.’
Ralph Guader was the Earl of East Anglia, a man of an age with myself, known as much for his iron will and his lack of humour as for his skill at arms. He had led a contingent of Bretons in the great battle at H?stinges, and performed his duties admirably from what I’d heard; this battle, however, would have been a sterner test of his abilities for the Danes were determined and unforgiving warriors, who would often rather die than suffer defeat. I had faced them before, and did not much relish the thought of having to do so again.
‘I’ve never known such fighting,’ Eudo said. ‘We battled them street by street all the way from the walls to the quays, until there was not an inch of mud in the city that was not covered in blood. They throw themselves into the fray without care for their lives, and even when they are surrounded they will not stop.’
He shook his head, unable to say any more. Something in their expressions told me they had both seen things in the past month that they could not bring themselves to relate, not even amongst friends. As had I.
In that moment I understood that the close companionship we once had would never be regained, or at least not in the same form. Before, we had always lived as we had fought, sharing the same tales and the same songs of battle across the feasting-table, bedding down on sodden rushes in distant halls, riding shoulder to shoulder in the charge. Everything that had happened had happened to all of us together. Now, however, we had grown too different; our lives had taken us in separate directions and there would forever be a distance between us that could never be crossed.
‘What brought you here?’ I asked.
‘After we had beaten the Danes off, they sailed on up the coast,’ Wace said. ‘Earl Ralph thought they might land elsewhere in East Anglia and kept us in Noruic for a while in case they marched overland, but when reports came that they’d gone into the Humbre, he sent some of us north to join the king. We expected to catch up with him some days ago; he must have ridden quickly if he had time to defeat the Welsh at St?fford first.’
Indeed the word from those close to him was that the king was in a fouler mood than anyone had ever known him. The longer the enemy held us at the Yr and the blacker and thicker grew the smears of smoke on the northern horizon, the worse his temper became. He would lash out at his retainers, one of whom, a manservant by the name of Fulbert, was said to have died after the king had struck him a blow around the head for suggesting that it would be better simply to pay King Sweyn to leave these shores. For the Danes loved gold and silver even more than they did the blood-rush of battle, and nothing pleased them more than obtaining such riches without having to draw steel and risk their lives in its pursuit.
The hapless Fulbert might have been the first to suggest the notion, but he was not the only one, for as October wore on and still our scouts had not found us a crossing over the river, many of the nobles started to offer the same counsel. If the Danes could be paid to depart before winter, the?theling would be left without allies and would have no choice but to retreat back whence he had come, into the wilds and the moors north of Dunholm. However, so determined was the king to crush his enemies outright, as he had crushed the usurper Harold at H? stinges, that he refused to listen to such advice. And so for another two weeks we waited for word to return from upriver, where they were looking for a ford by which we might bring our entire host across. By then it was getting late in the campaigning season. Autumn mists shrouded the land, the arms of the trees were growing bare and each day was colder than the last. The minds of the barons were turning to the unrest in the south that was threatening their manors, and beyond that to the gathering of firewood for their hearth-fires and the slaughtering of pigs and cattle in preparation for winter.
‘We would do better to let the enemy keep Eoferwic and Northumbria,’ said Galfrid one day when we were out on one of our regular foraging expeditions. ‘Let them spend the winter there and then in the spring march against them when the troubles elsewhere are settled and we can muster an even greater force.’
‘You’d do better to keep your mouth shut if you want your head to stay attached to your neck,’ I told him. ‘England belongs to King Guillaume and to him alone.’
Though in many ways it was good sense, such talk was close to treason, and if word ever got back to the king that men were openly suggesting he should surrender a part of his realm to pagans and rebels, he would have no hesitation in demanding their heads.
Thankfully Galfrid never discussed it again. Such moments of folly aside, I had begun to warm to him. Indeed, from training with him it was clear he was a far better swordsman than I had expected, if a little overconfident in his abilities. He would have to learn to restrain his excitement if he wanted to survive for long on the field of battle.
And he would have to learn quickly, for the time when our swords would be needed was soon. We returned to camp that same evening with three carts all loaded with supplies, and were greeted with the news that a baron named Lisois had discovered a crossing-place high upstream, some miles to the west. A hundred fyrdmen from the shire of Eoferwic had tried to hold it against him and his knights, but he had succeeded in killing a large number of them before driving the rest off. Even as we rode through the camp men were making ready their horses and donning mail and helmets, the vanguard forming up under the lion banner, even though night was fast falling. Soon the order to march was being passed down to every lord together with his retainers, to every knight and every servant. Only a few remained behind at the king’s direction, commanded by his other brother, the Count of Mortain, who was charged with holding the southern bank of the Yr in case the enemy should bring their ships up from the marshes of the Humbre where they lay and try to land on the Mercian side.
‘On the march again,’ Eudo said wryly as, under the light of the setting sun and rising moon, we mounted up.
‘Not a day too soon, either,’ I replied. No further news had come from Eoferwic, nor had there been any sign of Lord Robert and Beatrice, and to tell the truth I was growing ever more anxious. I hoped they hadn’t been in the city when it fell, and yet if they had escaped then it was strange that they had not made their way south.
