Hereward 03 - End of Days (16 page)

The two men watched in silence, letting the night settle on them.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

THE BODY SAGGED
on the pole beside the road. The empty eye-holes stared. The ravens had taken the nose and the lips and the fleshy part of the cheeks, and the stink of rot filled the chill night air. The grin was a grim warning to any who came this way.

Rowena shuddered and crossed herself. She wished the clouds had not cleared to let the moonlight illuminate such a grisly sight. The stark shadow of the hanging man fell across the silvery track in front of them as if barring their way. Ahead she could see more silhouettes of the dead on either side of the path leading to the camp at Belsar’s Hill. So many. No one could pass by without hearing the grave message of these silent sentinels – or the message of the grave.

‘We should not have come,’ Acha whispered beside her as if she had read her thoughts.

‘You did not have to come,’ Rowena replied. She winced as she recognized her unkindness. Softening her tone, she added, ‘I had no choice, you know that. The days rush away from me. Hereward is ready to strike, and when war begins, what hope then of finding my husband?’

‘But to go into the heart of the enemy’s camp – that is madness,’ the other woman hissed.

Aye, madness. Rowena felt sick from fear. Her hands shook and her chest was so tight she could barely breathe. Every part of her told her to flee back to Ely, but she could not abandon Elwin. She forced a laugh to try to lighten the dour mood. ‘Do you do Hereward’s bidding, to be my shadow and try to turn me back whenever I risk my neck? You should know by now that there is no harder work.’

Acha snorted. ‘Hereward does not tell me what to do.’

Rowena had long sensed that there was some past between the two of them, but she did not pry. ‘I will not turn back. Either leave now or walk with me.’

‘Through the gates of hell,’ the other woman spat. ‘If I die, it will be a stain on your soul.’

‘I accept my burden.’ Clasping her hand over her mouth and nose, Rowena set off along the road. The dead judged them as they passed. The two women kept their heads down, but Rowena could not resist glancing up into each face. As she passed the last one, she felt a flood of relief that she had not seen Elwin.

They had not gone far when they saw twin eyes of fire burning in the night. Rowena felt a chill run through her. Acha slowed her step, but only for a moment. She pushed her chin up and walked on. ‘We are not mice. We are …’

‘Rats?’ Rowena ventured. ‘Cats? Dogs?’

Both women laughed. They walked on and saw that the eyes were twin torches over the gate to the enemy camp. Belsar’s Hill loomed up from the flat landscape, the ridges of its ramparts silhouetted against the starry sky.

Rowena pushed aside her thoughts of what lay on the other side of those gates and said, ‘In Ely, some say that you are of the Cymri.’

After a moment, Acha replied, ‘Tostig Godwinson took me from my folk and made me his slave.’

‘And they say you have royal blood flowing through your veins.’

For a long time, the other woman said nothing. Then: ‘When
this war is done, Kraki has promised that he will take me home.’

‘He is a good man. You must hold him in your heart.’

Acha did not reply.

As they neared the gate, they smelled woodsmoke and the scents of the evening stews, and they could hear dim shouts and laughter. Two guards stood on the walkway looking down at them, their faces lost to shadow.

‘Who goes?’ one called in heavily accented English.

Rowena swirled the hem of her dress and gave a coquettish giggle. ‘Comfort for fighting men, that is who goes.’ She sensed Acha flinch at her side. Her companion would have no man take her for a whore. The two guards conversed between themselves in the harsh Norman tongue. Rowena sensed the discussion was not going well and called, ‘Haste! The night grows old. Your brothers will never forgive you if you deny them their pleasure.’

After a moment, the gates ground open and the two women hurried inside before the guards changed their minds.

Beyond the walls, many campfires lit the dense jumble of tents and newly built wooden dwellings. Paths wound among the houses, narrow and thick with deep mud from the autumn rains. Waste choked the tracks. Smoke billowed like fog across the camp. Rowena slowed her pace as she moved through it. She felt an oppressive sense of threat. Men roamed in packs, mostly drunk. They barked abuse at each other amid gales of raucous laughter. Many were Norman soldiers, but she also saw axes-for-hire, former huscarls and Northmen with scarred, leathery faces, their hands always a whisper from their weapons. A few were levied Englishmen. They looked out of place, carrying themselves like the farmers they were, and mostly they stayed away from the groups of seasoned warriors. And yet there were fewer than she would have expected.

‘Hereward was right,’ Acha whispered, seeing the same signs. ‘If this army is the best the king can do, this war will be over in no time.’

Rowena felt conspicuous. This was not a place for women.
The only ones she saw were whores, pock-marked, toothless, rake-thin, faces like winter fields. Through the open flaps of a tent they glimpsed two soldiers roughly taking one of the women between them. Naked, she had no shame, not caring that any might see what other women only did with their husbands in their beds. Rowena hurried on, only to find the way barred by another whore lying in the mud like a beast of the field, legs splayed for the grunting Northman atop of her.

‘You would have us be whores,’ Acha whispered with thick contempt as they turned along another narrow track. ‘I would rather cut my own throat than fall to these depths.’

Choking from the smoke and the stink of waste, Rowena blinked away stray tears. What had she hoped to accomplish by visiting this foul place? She had kept a little girl’s vision of walking through the gate to find Elwin waiting for her, and she would take his hand and lead him home. She was not prepared for this hard world.

Acha must have seen some of her thoughts in her face for she said in a gentle voice, ‘We will find him. You have the strength to see this through.’

Rowena nodded, wiping her eyes dry. She pushed aside her doubts and replied, ‘Let us keep looking. And if the men approach us, we must tell them we have been bought by one of the nobles. That will keep us safe, for a while.’

Through the choked camp they searched. Near the centre, they came up against another enclosure wall. Beyond it, they could see the outline of one of the Normans’ wooden castles. As they looked up at the tower, they heard a shout ring out from the walls. A clamour rushed over the tents and huts. The laughter and the drunken shouts died away, and they realized men were emerging from their homes to wait and watch.

‘What is this?’ Rowena asked. Acha gripped her wrist to silence her. In the distance, the sound of hoofbeats grew louder.

A hush fell over the entire camp. The main gates rattled open and the thunder of hooves drew nearer. Heads dropped one by one until all the men were bowing.

Rowena held her breath without knowing why.

The amber glow of the campfires lit a column of men riding towards the castle. Knights in helms and hauberks and noblemen in fine cloaks of purple and gold and blue. At the head of the procession was an oak of a man, broad-shouldered and powerful, his mail shirt a mountain of iron atop his stallion. His expression was fierce and he levelled his gaze across the men he passed as if he held their lives in his hand.

‘The king,’ Acha gasped. ‘It can be no other.’

As William the Bastard neared the castle gates, he turned his head and caught sight of the two women. He looked into Rowena’s eyes and held her gaze for a long moment until she realized what she was doing and bowed her head.

The castle gates ground open. The procession clattered through. And then the gates shut, and after a few moments of awed stillness the clamour of the camp rose up once more.

‘Then all that we heard was true,’ Acha said in a low, unsettled voice. ‘The king has come, and he will smite the east as he did the north. War can only be days away.’

‘I care little,’ Rowena said, turning back to the camp. ‘Let us find Elwin, and then we can be away.’

She strode out, following the line of the castle wall in the direction of the other, unexplored side of the camp. She had been right to worry that time was short. Her husband had to be found before Hereward and the Bastard started tearing bloody chunks off each other like starving dogs.

A quiet lay over the other side of the camp. No drunken soldiers lurched along the narrow tracks, but the stink of shit and piss was, if anything, even worse. The tents here were larger, the few huts more roughly built, little more than walls of peat blocks with planks laid across for a roof. Rowena peeped inside one of the tents. Row upon row of men lay upon beds of straw. They were filthy, their clothes near rags. They seemed to be sleeping fitfully, arms thrown over their faces as they tossed and turned. A few sat up, staring blankly into
space. Exhaustion had carved deep lines in their faces. ‘These are English,’ she whispered to Acha.

‘But not levied,’ Acha replied, ‘not fighting men. They look as though they have been working in the fields. The king’s army is smaller still.’

Rowena turned away from the tent, her brow knotted. She felt a weight of dread upon her shoulders although she did not know why. Acha felt it too, she could see.

‘We must leave here soon,’ the other woman murmured, looking around, ‘or we may never leave at all.’

As they searched the narrow paths, they caught sight of a few men straggling back to their beds from the direction of the camp gates. A fire lit the face of one and Rowena all but cried out.

She ran over and caught his arm. ‘Swefred,’ she hissed. ‘It is I, Rowena.’ He peered at her with dazed eyes, recognition slowly lighting in their depths. ‘He is from my village,’ she said, turning back to Acha. Her voice trembled with excitement. ‘He was taken with my husband.’

‘Rowena? What are you doing in this foul place?’ Suddenly animated, the man’s eyes darted around as if he was afraid the wrath of the Normans would fall upon him merely for speaking to this woman.

‘I search for Elwin. For all of you. To take you home.’

‘There is no hope of that.’ He bowed his head so she could not see his face.

‘There is always hope.’

He swallowed and steadied himself. ‘Leave now. This is not a place for you.’

‘Where is Elwin?’ she pressed.

‘I cannot say.’

Rowena stifled her frustration. She could see the man was near-delirious with exhaustion. ‘Why have the Normans brought you here?’

‘To be their slaves.’

Acha looked around. ‘The castle is built. The walls of the camp stand. Why do you still labour?’

Swefred began to stumble away, but Rowena grabbed him and shook him more roughly than she intended. She too felt they would be caught and dragged away at any moment. ‘Tell us what you know,’ she hissed.

‘Very well,’ he snapped. ‘But no good will come from it. Here.’

He marched among the tents until he reached the camp’s wall. Glancing around to make sure no guards were near, he clambered up the rickety ladder to the walkway. Rowena and Acha climbed after him. ‘See,’ he whispered, pointing over the palisade.

Rowena’s breath caught in her throat. For a moment, she thought she looked out across the fields of hell. Fires blazed everywhere. Sparks swirled up in banks of black smoke. In a natural bowl, shielded by trees, a vast city of tents stretched deep into the night. Standards fluttered from poles. Along the edge, workshops squatted, and the sound of smiths’ hammers rang out as if they were beating the drums of war. Rowena’s nose wrinkled at the stink of brimstone from the forges. Looming over the camp, wooden towers soared up almost to the stars. They rested on platforms that could be rolled on logs. In the gloom beyond, Rowena could just discern the silhouettes of great siege machines.

Caught in the ruddy glow of the bonfires, men sat around drinking, their shields and helms resting beside them. Everywhere she looked, warriors, ready for bloodshed. The camp on the hill contained only the guard who would protect the monarch if the rebels attacked, she realized. Here was the king’s true army, a mighty force that would crush the unwary English in no time.

‘We must warn Hereward,’ Acha said, her voice weak. ‘If he rides now, unprepared, all is lost.’

‘The Bastard is building a causeway to the east, a great road across the waters and the bogs that will lead his men up to the very walls of Ely,’ Swefred said. ‘We have laboured on it night and day. Foundations of good wood and reed, sand, peat, and
flint. Strong enough to take the siege machines and as many men as the king will send. Those towers will guard its edges.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘All is lost.’

As the two women gaped, he scrambled down the ladder and began to trudge back towards his bed. Rowena raced after him. ‘If you laboured on the causeway, Elwin must have worked beside you,’ she said, grabbing his arm. ‘Where is he? Tell me – I must see him now.’

‘I will tell you nothing,’ he snarled, trying to throw her off.

She held tight, her eyes blazing. ‘Tell me,’ she shouted.

Swefred flinched as her voice carried out across the camp. ‘Hold your tongue. You will bring the guards down upon us.’ He looked into her eyes and saw he had no choice. ‘Very well,’ he muttered. He turned and began to walk towards a long, low hut beside the wall. ‘Elwin – he always had a fire in his heart. The Normans treated us worse than dogs. They threw us scraps of food to fight over, and kicked us, and hit us with the flats of their swords to make us work harder. Days of that, and Elwin would take no more. He tried to get the English to fight back. He stood, and raged at the bastards, and yelled at the men to join him.’ His voice drained away and his head bowed. ‘But none stood with him. The guards dragged him away and beat him … beat him harder than I have seen a man beaten.’

‘Oh,’ Rowena said in a small voice, choking back her pain. Her voice fell to a whisper, but it was infused with hope. ‘Wherever they hold him, we must free him now. Will you aid me?’