Hereward 03 - End of Days (44 page)

Redwald bucked and clawed at the monk’s arms and face. Alric gritted his teeth. His enemy was too weakened now to offer much resistance. He squeezed tighter still, feeling the throat close under his fingers. ‘See what you have done to us all,’ he sobbed.

Redwald flapped ineffectual hands against the monk’s shoulders. He wheezed, his bulging eyes filled with a hellish plea for mercy.

Alric’s tears streamed down his cheeks and splashed on the dying man’s face. ‘I have damned myself this night,’ he croaked. ‘But I do it willingly, for the sake of my friend.’

Sobs racked him for a moment, and he bowed his head. When he next looked up, he realized Redwald was no longer moving. Still he could not stop choking this man, as if he could squeeze him off the face of the earth and out of the memories of all who had ever encountered him.

Finally, he let go.

Alric looked deep into Redwald’s eyes. They looked the same as when he was alive. A stare filled with nothing. A life the same.

The monk clambered to his feet. His chest burned from his sobs. It seemed they would never end, he thought. He wrenched himself away from his terrible crime, but he could
not resist one last backward glance. Redwald lay dead, his face still as innocent as a babe’s, apple-cheeked, full-lipped.

Broken, the churchman dragged himself out into the street. A figure was wandering down from the palace gates. Alric blinked away his tears and saw that it was Hereward.

The warrior greeted him with a grin. ‘All is well, monk,’ he called. ‘All is well.’

‘Aye,’ the cleric said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘ ’Tis.’

As he neared, the Mercian furrowed his brow. ‘Monk? Why do you cry?’

‘From joy,’ Alric replied and realized he meant it, ‘for a new day is dawning.’

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY
-N
INE

THE ASH TREES
moaned in the wind. Stark against the vast fenlands sky, they seemed to be calling to the woman who peered to the blue horizon. The sun felt warm upon her face. Spring had returned in force. Bluebells bloomed along the edge of the wood, and for the first time that year the birdsong had been loud enough to wake her. The winter had been raw, with skies like ashes and the snows drifting near to the top of her door. The cold had reached deep into her bones, echoing the frost she had long felt in her heart. But now the world was waking.

After a moment or two, she shrugged and turned away. On the green, where the hens scratched, the boys were fighting with swords, shouting and laughing. The king always died. Hereward always won. She fetched that morning’s bread and wrapped it in linen, and took it to blind Rimilda who could no longer cook for herself. For a while, she sat by the hearth, and smiled as she listened to tales of the old woman’s husband and his clumsy wooing. Only afterwards did she realize these stories pleased her. She nodded and wondered. Later, she poured a pail of swill into the pig’s pen, and cut wood for the fire, and took her bow and hunted for waterfowl but caught
none. In the midday sun, she sat on a stool outside her door and sewed a tear in the hem of her best dress. Yet still she could not settle.

Something was coming. Rowena could feel it in her bones.

Looking up, she glimpsed a smudge in the distance on the north road. Her neck prickled. Putting her needle and her dress away, she walked out beyond the village and stood beside the road, watching.

As it neared, the smudge took on shape and became a man upon a horse. She waited.

When the rider passed the milestone, she finally accepted that she had stopped dwelling on days gone by and for the first time since Elwin died had started to think of days yet to come.

A spear’s throw away, the man brought his mount to a halt and leaned over the neck and smiled at her. ‘I would have my answer,’ Deda the knight said.

Rowena smiled back.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTY

7 May 1072

UNDER A SILVER
sky, the crimson-sailed ship strained at its mooring on the swelling tide. Shrieking gulls wheeled across the heavens, and the salty breeze moaned over the throbbing waves. Yet the harbour at Yernemuth was unnaturally still. Sacks of salt, barrels of wine and oil, quernstones, and chests of silk and pottery littered the quayside, unguarded. Baskets of fish from that morning’s catch still waited to be delivered to the merchants. Here and there, meals of bread and cheese wrapped in linen lay half eaten. Shipwrights’ hammers had been abandoned on the ballast heaps. The world seemed to be holding its breath.

Aboard the ship, the men stood in silence, looking out across Yernemuth’s thatched roofs, remembering. They were a rag-tag band, their clothes threadbare and stained with the green and brown of life in the forest, their splintered shields faded and in need of a new lick of paint, their mail shirts rusted and blood-spattered. On their arms and faces, scars mapped lives of struggle.

Not one of them eyed the iron wall of Norman warriors
lining the harbour, keeping the prying eyes of the Yernemuth folk away from what was happening at the waterside. The king’s men were dressed for war, in hauberks and helms, their long shields upon their arms, and their hands upon the hilts of their swords or the hafts of their axes. Here was William the Bastard’s final show of strength, Hereward thought as he leaned against the mast, a message with clear meaning.

‘Where is the monk?’ Kraki growled. ‘This waiting fills me with fury.’

‘Are you so keen to leave our home behind?’ Sighard said, sullen eyes lowered. ‘You may never see these forests and fields again.’

‘Wherever I lay my axe, that is my home,’ the Viking snorted. ‘You would do well to remember that, you red-headed dog, or you will be whining for the rest of your days.’ He eyed the other man askance and softened a little. ‘Be sure that wherever we wash up, there will be women with soft skin, and mead and ale and wine. And you will always have good drinking brothers to share them with. What more could you want?’

Sighard sighed, but the Viking’s words seemed to have eased his melancholy a little, Hereward noted. That was good. Hard times lay ahead, a battle of a different kind, and they would only find victory shoulder to shoulder. He felt proud of how well his men had taken the news of the king’s demands. None of them wanted to leave behind the land they knew, their friends, their kin. But they understood. Once you had taken the life of the spear, the days became ones of hard choices. They could never go back to the fields, or the hearthside, the loom or the smithy. They had given themselves up to death, to blood, to honour, and there was no place for men like that in this new England that William the Bastard was making. Turning, he shielded his eyes from the sun and looked out to sea. If they were to find a place for themselves, it would be out there, beyond the horizon.

Guthrinc loomed over him, sucking on the last shred of meat on a chicken bone. ‘Still time to change your mind,’ he said. He
examined the bone, then tossed it over his shoulder into the waves.

‘I have made my choice.’

‘It is a brave man who can walk away, knowing that his name will be torn down and pissed upon.’ Guthrinc eyed him, trying to hide his concern behind a facade of disinterest. Good Guthrinc, he thought, watching out for him still, as he always had.

‘I have been called worse things than coward. If I remember, you called me worse things, back in Barholme when I robbed you.’

The big man laughed silently and clapped a hand on his old friend’s shoulder. But then he tapped his nose and pointed towards Kraki standing gloomily by the side, looking towards the west. Hereward nodded. It was not only England they were leaving behind.

‘Kraki,’ he called. When the Viking came over, scowling, Hereward asked, ‘I have a mind not to end our voyage in Flanders. Greater spoils lie out there for men like us. Tell me your thoughts – where should we go?’

The Viking looked taken aback that his opinion had been solicited, but then he grinned. ‘About time. I thought you had grown weak since Ely and set your sights low.’

Guthrinc feigned a weary shake of his head. ‘I smell misery.’

‘Gold, that is what you smell. Riches beyond imagining.’ Kraki’s eyes gleamed. He leaned in and said in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Constantinople.’

Hereward’s eyes narrowed. ‘The richest city in the world.’

‘Aye,’ Guthrinc muttered, ‘and the most dangerous. They say every man plots against the other there, and they smile to your face while they slip a knife in your back.’

‘Yes!’ Kraki said, animated now. He jabbed a finger into the tall man’s chest. ‘And what it needs is men who know how to wield an axe to cut through all that sly dealing.’

‘You think there is a place for us there?’ Hereward asked.

‘Aye, in the Varangian Guard. The emperor’s own army. The best, the fiercest fighting men in all the world. They pay good coin for a strong right arm. And for a man like the great Hereward, whose name crosses the whale road faster than any ocean-stallion, that would be coin whose like we have never seen afore.’

Guthrinc fingered his chin. He eyed Hereward. The Mercian looked back. After a moment, they both smiled. Kraki punched a fist into a palm. ‘This is not fleeing, now. This is battle-sport.’

At the prow, Hengist broke away from tormenting Herrig the Rat and gave a shrill whistle. On the quayside, the wall of Normans parted as Alric strode to the water’s edge.

‘At last,’ Kraki growled. ‘Now we can be away to better days.’

Hereward eyed the monk. Since they had left Wincestre, he had been worried about his friend. It seemed as if a shadow hung over him, but he would not talk about what ailed him. ‘Do not be hard on him,’ he whispered to the Viking. ‘In heart, he is as much a warrior as any man here.’

Kraki nodded. ‘He is a spear-brother. But I can still kick his arse.’

When Alric climbed aboard, Hereward thought he seemed brighter than he had done in days. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked, suspicious.

‘Teaching the children at the church,’ the monk replied with a faint smile.

‘You and the children,’ Kraki snorted. ‘What ruin have you set in their minds?’

‘Ruin?’ This time the monk grinned. ‘The ruin of William the Bastard, perhaps.’ Wiping his forehead, he flopped down on a bench. The others gathered around him. ‘I told the children a tale of the true king, Hereward, who will wait across the waves until the hour of greatest need, when he will sail back and stand by his folk. William may spread his poison throughout the land, but given time it will fade. The children, though, will remember my tale for all time, and it will grow in the
telling and spread across all England. Hereward, and all that he fought for, will never be forgotten.’

For a long moment, silence hung over the ship, and then the men cheered as one, and slapped the monk’s back. Alric flushed, surprised by the acclamation.

‘I told you we needed a man with some wits,’ Kraki boomed. ‘Now we are well set for the riches that await us. To Constantinople, brothers,’ he roared, ‘and to glory!’

Soon after, the ship set sail. As it ploughed through the grey waves, Hereward stood astern and watched the land of his youth slip over the horizon. He thought of the suffering, and the deaths, of the victories and the feasts, of Turfrida, and of his son who would grow without a father to ruin his days. And then he turned and looked to the east, and he grinned.

‘To Constantinople,’ he murmured. ‘To glory.’

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

James Wilde
is a man of Mercia. Raised in a world of books, he went on to study economic history at university before travelling the world in search of adventure. Unable to forget a childhood encounter – in the pages of a comic – with the great English warrior Hereward, Wilde returned to the haunted fenlands of Eastern England, Hereward’s ancestral home, where he became convinced that this near-forgotten hero should be the subject of his first novel.
Hereward
was a bestseller. Wilde indulges his love of history and the high life in the home his family have owned for several generations in the heart of a Mercian forest.

Also by James Wilde

HEREWARD
HEREWARD: THE DEVIL’S ARMY

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HEREWARD: END OF DAYS
A BANTAM PRESS BOOK: 9780593065020
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409043607

First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © James Wilde 2013

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