Hereward (16 page)

‘Would you have married her?’ Acha ventured.

‘That question means nothing now.’

‘I am sorry. I did not wish to stir up bitter memories.’

‘I have hardened myself to it. I left Aedilred’s and crept through the night like a thief. Tidhild’s father was away and I knew she would be alone, but I felt something was wrong before I reached the door to her house. Some say we see the darkness ahead of us in our minds. That we all carry around with us the portents of the terrible things that will be.’ He brought his arm round her back, finding comfort in the softness of her skin. ‘I found Tidhild dead, her blood still warm. She had been stabbed with a knife many times.’

Acha leaned up on her elbow and searched his face. ‘Did you slay her?’

‘No!’ Hereward exclaimed, his body snapping upright.

‘I have seen the way you lose yourself to the bloodlust. You had been drinking ale—’

‘I would never harm a woman.’ The warrior lay back and closed his eyes. ‘It was not the first time I had seen such a sight.’

Though he didn’t want to revisit that time, another part of him demanded that he set free the memories. ‘My mother. Murdered too.’ He hesitated, a cold weight growing in his chest. ‘By my father. He did not mean to do it, but his rage consumed him. He beat her with his fists until she was gone. When I looked at Tidhild, I saw my mother … I saw me, there, both times …’

‘You were not responsible.’

‘I was. It was clear the murderer went to Tidhild searching for me. Someone who wanted me silenced before I could reveal what I had learned that night. Tidhild was killed, perhaps as a warning to me, perhaps because she was there, and no reason beyond that. But her death lies upon me. I can never leave it behind.’

The sound of raven wings filled his head, and he thought he saw shadows flying across the wall of the room.

‘I ran to my father. He is one of the king’s thegns and had Edward’s ear on Mercian matters for many years.’

‘A thegn? After he murdered your mother?’ Acha’s furrowed brow revealed her incredulity.

‘I was a child. Despite the horrors I witnessed, I kept my mother’s murder a secret, out of duty to my kin. But there was little love between my father and me after that time. He despised me, because I reminded him of the crime he had committed. Because I reminded him of his weakness. And though I tried to earn his respect …’ His words died in his throat. Shaking his head, he steadied himself. ‘I went to my father and told him about Tidhild. I was afraid his life was at risk as well. But he was sure I had slain her, and was lying to save myself. He thought me like him.’ Hereward hammered a fist on the bed. Acha folded her smaller hand over it. ‘My father betrayed me. He ran to the king and raised the alarm. He accused me of murder.’

He fell silent for a moment and then said in a cold voice, ‘And all who knew me at court thought me capable of Tidhild’s murder, for they knew my rage, and my savagery. They knew my love of blood. No one would believe my account of the stranger’s slaying. They would think it more lies to cover my tracks. And if I was arrested it would only be a matter of time before my life was taken by whoever ordered the killing of Edward Aetheling, the king’s chosen heir. I had no choice but to run. And as I collected my sword, my axe and my shield, my brother, my loyal brother Redwald, told me that my own father had asked that I be declared outlaw.’ He felt the cold in his heart spread throughout his body.

‘Does Tostig know that you are outlaw?’

Hereward shook his head. ‘Not yet. I hoped the earl would persuade the king of the plot before the truth came out. There is still hope. Word has been sent to London. If the throne can be made safe, then this hardship will have been worthwhile.’

‘You are a puzzling man.’ Acha leaned back and surveyed her lover. ‘You fight without any sign of honour, yet you act only honourably in your sacrifices to protect the throne. You kill men as if they were nothing, yet risk your own life to save a woman. You show yourself to the world like the rocks along the coast, yet this night you have revealed only tenderness.’

Keen to lock the past behind him, Hereward rolled her on to her back and kissed her deeply. But shadows still moved across his mind. He thought of his mother, and Tidhild, and his father’s blind fury, and he feared what the future held.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

‘NO ONE WILL hear your cries, monk. If death is what you want, it can be arranged quickly and silently.’ With a black-toothed grin, Harald Redteeth shook his axe a finger’s width from Alric’s defiant face. The younger man slumped on the cold stone steps of the church tower where he had fallen.

‘Archbishop Ealdred would never condone my murder within the minster,’ he spat.

The Viking surveyed his prisoner’s pale face and saw the fear behind the bravado. ‘You think that old churchman cares one whit about you? His thoughts are on greater matters – power and glory, and who will soon be sitting on England’s throne and whether that new king will have need of an even newer archbishop. Now walk, or die.’

Alric resisted for only a moment, and then dragged himself to his feet and continued up the tower steps. The monk still had some fire in him, Redteeth thought, but it would do him little good. He would have to endure the agony of one of the church’s ordeals – water or iron – but the outcome was not in doubt. Death was the only sentence for his crime. Harald plucked at his freshly dyed red beard in brooding rumination. The Mercian was the one he really wanted. It was Hereward who had left the Viking to a shameful death with a noose round his neck. And it would have come about if the men pursuing the English warrior had not followed the tracks through the woods from Gedley and chanced upon his hanging form. Unconsciously, his hand went to the pink welt where the rope had bitten into his neck. If it had been left to him, Hereward would already be dead, butchered and fed to the pigs. But his revenge would come soon enough, and all the more keen for being savoured.

As he hummed a lilting tune, the mercenary felt the last feathery fingers of the toadstools pluck at his thoughts. He glanced back at his second in command climbing the steps a few paces behind him. Ivar’s skin was as grey as the stone of the tower walls, his blue beard bedraggled.

‘Why do you haunt me still?’ Harald asked.

‘Valhalla is denied me, for I died trapped and screaming in fire, not in glorious battle,’ the shade responded in a tone like cracking ice. ‘I must walk the shores of the vast black sea for ever. No rest for me, Harald Redteeth, not until blood has been spilled.’

‘And no rest for me until you have been set free,’ the mercenary replied, understanding his responsibility. ‘Not until blood has been spilled.’

Ahead, the monk flashed a puzzled glance back.

The two men emerged on to the flat roof of the tower in the bright of a Christmas sunrise. Eoferwic tumbled away from the minster into the white river plain, a black smudge misted with smoke from the homefires.

Alric shielded his eyes against the sun as he looked out over the landscape, his chest heaving in sadness at what he knew he would soon be losing for ever. ‘Why have you brought me here?’ he whispered.

‘A kindness,’ Harald Redteeth replied bluntly.

‘A cruelty,’ the monk snapped back. ‘Dangling food before a starving man.’

The Viking shrugged. ‘A cruelty. A kindness. Your choice.’

Alric held his head up defiantly. ‘I will not betray Hereward.’

‘He died long ago,’ the mercenary replied, echoing the words he had first spoken beside the fires of Gedley. ‘His spirit does not yet know that his life is over. He is a ghost who feasts and drinks and walks.’ He glanced at Ivar, cold and grey against the tower’s wall. ‘The Mercian thinks himself safe behind the palisade of Tostig’s enclosure. He is not.’

The monk flinched. ‘The men who came into the church with you, they were not Northmen. They are the ones who have been hunting Hereward.’

Harald nodded slowly. The music in his head grew louder still. ‘While I teetered on the block with a noose round my neck, we reached an agreement. The Mercian’s enemies need him slain quietly, in a manner that will not draw attention to him or the secrets he holds. Though I am told he has escaped two such attempts on his life. Your friend is hard to kill, eh?’

‘What agreement?’ Alric flashed an unsettled glance.

Redteeth grinned. ‘Those four men will capture the Mercian on the Feast of Fools when all order is turned on its head. And they will bring him to me.’

Harald felt a sly pleasure when he saw the monk blanch. On the shores of the great black sea, the Viking had been told that he would be feared, as Death himself, in these final days the Christians called the End-Times and his people knew as Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods, when the world would be consumed in flames. And it would be good.

‘You think this feast day belongs to your own God, Christian man,’ Redteeth continued, prowling around the tower wall. ‘But it is far older and darker than you know. This is a time for the dead, and for ghosts. It is a time of madness. It is the time of the Wild Hunt, when Odin rides eight-legged Sleipnir in pursuit of men.’ The Viking pointed an accusing finger at Alric. ‘Men who have turned their face against my people and the old ways.’

‘It is a time for peace now,’ the monk said. ‘Your ways are gone.’

Harald Redteeth shook his head. ‘My tradition is alive, in me. It has been passed down from father to son as long as man has walked this earth. In Yule, a sacrifice must be made. A blood sacrifice, which my people call
hlaut
.’

Gulls flying overhead called back to him,
Hlaut, hlaut!

‘Sometimes it is cattle, sometimes horses, and sometimes men. We smear ourselves with the blood and raise our mead-cups to great Odin, for victory and power to the king. Your friend, Hereward, shall be my sacrifice, and I will slake myself in his blood. In his final hours, he will know such agonies that he will plead with me to pluck out his heart. And then the final days will begin. Your friend does not know what he has unleashed.’

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

Christmas Day, 1062

THE SWORD SLASHED down with one swift stroke. Hot blood gushed across the snow. Earl Tostig stepped back and grinned, resting the tip of his dripping blade on the frozen ground as the cheers rang out around him. In the centre of the circle of men and women, the goat squealed, jumping and slipping in the reddening slush. Hereward watched the beast’s death throes from the ranks of the small crowd of guests invited to attend the annual ritual. The slaughter of the goat, they all hoped, would signal a prosperous new year to come, but Hereward struggled with darker thoughts. He looked from the dying animal to the wind-chapped faces gathered around, searching for any sign that would reveal his enemy: an unguarded look, a shared glance, a tremor on hard features like the first cracks on the ice covering the river’s tributaries. He tried to find within him some of the warmth and hope he had felt when he first arrived in Eoferwic, but only a thin gruel remained. Deep in his bones, he could feel the threat mounting. Soon it would break, and then his sword would be drawn. It could not be sheathed again until it had tasted blood.

When the goat’s eyes rolled back, its convulsions stilled, another cheer rose up. The jubilant sound wafted through the cold morning to mingle with the music of men and women travelling from house to house wassailing. Every full-throated song ended with the cheerful cry of
waes thu hael!

Beyond the hall’s enclosure, Eoferwic rested beneath a cloudless blue sky. Bright sunshine glared off the snow-swathed streets and houses. Not far away, the stark church tower soared from the jumbled rooftops, the bells now silent. The succulent aroma of roasting boar drifted from the hall, almost obscuring the pervasive scent of woodsmoke from the fires. Hereward’s mouth watered. The feast would be good, and when his belly was full he would be ready for whatever was to come.

He caught Acha’s eye. She was wrapped in a dark grey cloak so that with her gleaming hair and black eyes she looked like a raven in human form. The woman kept a sullen face – he had never seen her give an honest smile – but in her glance he saw a recognition of the night they had shared. Hereward felt warmed by the memory. The wound of his grief over Tidhild had not been erased, but to caress soft flesh, to feel the closeness of a kindred spirit, had soothed his turbulent thoughts. He yearned for that peace again.

The huscarls stamped their feet for warmth, and when Tostig and Judith led the way into the hall the fighting men followed, eager to fall upon the feast. Under festoons of holly and mistletoe, the guests raised cups of fruity Christmas ale and roared the oath to God and the earl. The serving women heaved in platter after platter laden with goose and beef, bread, salt-fish and smoked fish, blood pudding, cheese, honey and almond cakes and the centrepiece, a boar’s head with an apple tucked into the mouth.

With the Yule log blazing in the hearth, the hall soon rang with song and jokes bellowed in increasingly drunken voices. When the food was consumed, the harp-playing began and then the Christmas masque was performed by talented players from the town. Amid the din, Hereward sat at the end of the table, drinking steadily while he observed the other men.