The thought that they might be dead was not one that I wanted to entertain. Try as I might, however, I could not stop it preying on my mind, and each time it surfaced what small hope I held out only diminished further.
We reached the ford before the enemy could send any more of their men to hold it and prevent us making the crossing. We rode through the night and the dawn and for several hours into the following day, until our entire host was gathered on the Northumbrian side of the river. A formidable host it was by then, too, for the weeks we had been held at the Yr had allowed other barons to catch up with us. Among them were more than a few English thegns: those who had no love for Eadgar?theling, or whose families had suffered at the hands of the Danes in generations past, or who were too afraid to risk their king’s wrath by defying him. All of which meant that by the time we marched upon Eoferwic we were many thousands in number.
A few foemen came to stand against our progress and were quickly routed, but mostly they fled at the very sight of us, retreating to rejoin the main host, I didn’t doubt. We tried to pursue them, but these lands south of Eoferwic were flat and in many places boggy, not easily penetrable on horseback. They knew the paths through the marshes far better than we did, and it would have been folly to try to face them on unfamiliar ground, where they could easily draw us into ambushes. And so we left them, skirting around those low-lying lands, all the while expecting their banners and their shields to appear upon the ridges and across the fields ahead of us and for the battle-thunder to ring out. But they did not. We saw the evidence of their raiding all around us, but never their entire host.
‘They have to be planning something,’ Wace said on the second day after we crossed the river. ‘Otherwise they would have attacked us before now.’
‘Unless they’re too afraid to fight us,’ Eudo suggested.
He was joking, of course, but Wace had ever struggled to understand Eudo’s sense of humour. ‘When have the Danes ever been afraid of a fight?’ he asked with a snort. ‘No, they wouldn’t have come all this way if they didn’t want a battle. They’re drawing us towards Eoferwic, most likely holding out within its walls, inviting us to assault the city just like last year.’
Except that it seemed Eudo had it more right than Wace, for the word from our scouts was that the enemy were abandoning the place altogether, escaping by ship down the Use and by foot and horse into the north. We learnt a fire had spread through the entire eastern quarter of the city, destroying one of the castles and the minster of St Peter, before the wind had carried the ashes and the sparks across the river, where they had settled on the thatch of the houses, leaving almost no building standing. And so, with nothing left to defend, the Danes and the? theling had quit the place.
Still I did not quite believe it, not until the following day when we arrived at the still-smouldering ruins and I could see everything with my own eyes: the toppled, blackened timbers where the palisades and gatehouses had been; the wisps of smoke rising from the foundations of the great church and the long merchants’ houses; the mottes without their towers; the fallen-in roof of the vicomte’s palace, where I had recovered from the injuries I’d suffered in the battle at Dunholm and where I had first become indebted to the Malet family and mired in their many struggles.
Seeing how Eoferwic had been ravaged only drove the king to greater fury. The rearguard was only just catching up with the rest of us when he began organising the first of the raiding-parties: conrois of forty or fifty men that he sent both north and south of the Use with orders to harry the surrounding land, pursue those who had fled and drive them out from their hiding places, burn the storehouses and the crops in every village that they came to, seize the people’s chattels and put their animals to the sword so that the enemy could find no forage anywhere, and kill every man, woman and child of Northumbria in retribution against all those who would take up arms against him. When the king’s own chaplain protested, saying that such wanton slaughter was not God’s will, he was promptly stripped of his robes and his cross, his ankle tied by means of a rope to a horse’s harness, and then he was dragged naked and howling through the mud for all the army to see.
‘He has taken leave of his senses,’ Wace said one afternoon while we were patrolling along the riverbank immediately to the south of the city. ‘If he destroys everything of worth in this land, why have we come all this way to fight for it?’
I shot him a glance, though he knew as well as I how dangerous such words were. But apart from myself there was no one close by who might hear, and even if they did, such sentiments were already commonplace, to the extent that on the fringes of the camp men were beginning to voice them openly.
‘He wants to face the?theling and King Sweyn in open battle,’ I said. ‘Nothing else will satisfy him. He hopes that by laying everything waste he might enrage Eadgar and his supporters enough to lure them out.’
By then it was known that they had retreated to their ships amidst the streams and the marshlands of that nook of land by the Humbre known as Heldernesse, though no one could say exactly where they were quartering. Even if they could, the king was not prepared to lead his host into such difficult country. Far better to wait until they broke out, when we might face them on ground that was more advantageous to us. That was the only part of the king’s strategy in which I could find any merit.
We followed the river downstream as it wound its way through that flat land, searching for we knew not what. Still, it was better than staying with the rest of the army, where we could only sit on our arses and wait for instructions to arrive from the king, and in the meantime entertain ourselves as bitter scuffles broke out between rival lords and their knights. They had come to fight the enemy, and since they could not do that, they fought amongst themselves instead.
As the light began to fade, we headed back. The city and the encampment outside its broken walls had just come into sight when Wace stifled a cry.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
About a quarter of a mile off, on a slight rise to the south of the city and the camp, stood a small clump of trees to which Wace directed my gaze. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One of the enemy’s scouts, do you think?’
From the branches rose a flock of some dozen or so pigeons, and amidst the trunks and the gently falling orange-gold leaves I caught the faintest trace of movement. The sun was low in the sky and though I thought I could make out the shadowy shapes of a horse and its rider, I was not sure.
‘He’s adventurous, I’ll grant him that,’ said Wace. There was precious little cover, and he was so close to our camp that I imagined he must be able to smell the bubbling cooking-pots.
‘How long do you think he’s been there?’
‘All day, maybe. He could have arrived under cover of darkness. He’s probably waiting for night to fall before leaving again.’
It didn’t seem that he had spotted us, or if he had he clearly did not consider us a threat, for otherwise he would surely not have risked venturing so close. All the same it made sense not to attract attention if we could avoid it, and so, pretending we hadn’t seen him, we turned around and rode back along the banks of the Use as if we were patrolling according to a determined pattern. But as soon as that clump was out of sight we left the riverbank, circling around until we had found what we reckoned was the path that he would follow away from there.
There we hid, and waited. Night fell, the stars emerged and still we waited, growing ever more impatient. I was beginning to think this had been a waste of time, that our quarry had somehow slipped away without our noticing, when about an hour past dark I heard the sound of galloping not far away and saw a single horseman, his black cloak flying behind him, riding hard in our direction.
At either side of the path were low bushes, and Wace and I lay low behind them, keeping as still as possible, having already tethered our horses some way off where they would not be easily spotted. Slowly I drew my blade from its scabbard. I did not dare raise my head in case the rider should see us, but as the sound of hooves grew louder I could imagine him approaching ever closer, oblivious, until he was almost on top of us-
‘Now!’ I shouted to Wace. I burst out from the cover of the brambles and swung my sword into the path of the oncoming horse. The rider had no time to swerve or halt; my blade struck the animal high on the foreleg, slicing through sinew and finding bone and bringing it crashing with a shriek to the ground. Its eyes were white as, unable to stand, it writhed upon the dirt, screaming in pain, blood bubbling from the open wound. At the same time Wace dragged the rider from the saddle, drew the man’s knife from its sheath and flung it far into the long grass where he could not reach it. The man gave a shout and tried to struggle, but Wace was much stronger than he, and soon had him pinned with his face against the ground.
‘Shut up,’ Wace barked at the man, who was whimpering what sounded like a prayer, or else a plea: he spoke too quietly and too quickly for me to make out the words.
