Hereward (17 page)

Fresh from doling out alms to the poor, Archbishop Ealdred entered, red-cheeked and misty-breathed, stamping the snow from his shoes. Tostig, who had seen the cleric only hours earlier at the morning service, greeted the man like a long-lost friend. The cleric joined the earl and his wife at the top table and was soon devouring a plate of boar meat washed down with ale.

Hereward watched the two men lean together, talking intimately and with great seriousness, and at one point they both glanced towards him. They looked away when they saw he had noticed their attention, but by then the warrior’s suspicions had been raised.

The feast day drew on.

The drunken singing rolled out, more raucous with each passing hour, and men slumped across ale-puddled tables. When the guests were distracted by a Nativity performance by three men dressed as the Magi, Hereward caught Acha’s eye once again and they slipped out unseen into the cold afternoon.

After a long kiss stolen round the corner of the hall, he asked her what she had overheard when she served ale to the top table.

‘I heard no discussion about you,’ she replied, her hands folded round his waist. ‘Why would there be?’

‘I saw how they looked at me.’

‘You see plots everywhere.’

‘The earl and Ealdred were discussing more than the Christmas ale. Their expressions were grave, their talk intense.’

Acha sighed. ‘The archbishop told Tostig about a monk newly arrived in Eoferwic who worked at the church. He has been accused of murdering a woman.’

Hereward reeled. Surely it could only be Alric?

‘What is wrong?’ Acha asked, concerned by what she saw in his face.

‘The monk killed the woman here?’

Acha flinched at the fire she saw in his eyes. ‘No … before. Her family demanded blood and paid Viking mercenaries to hunt the monk down.’

In his mind’s eye, the warrior saw Harald Redteeth and the bloody pile of his victims in the burning village. If this were true, every lost life rested on Alric’s shoulders. Now he understood why the monk always looked so haunted, and whined about making amends at every turn.

It seemed he had been too trusting. He sensed his anger begin to rise at the monk’s deception. Pretending to be a man of God, allowing the warrior to save his life, while in truth he really was no better than the bastards Hereward had slaughtered in Gedley.

Crying out, Acha wrenched away and he realized that in his anger he had been tightening his grip on her arm. Apologizing, he fought to control his simmering rage and asked, ‘What now? He is to be brought before the hundred court? He will pay the weregild? Or will they throw him to those Viking dogs and be done with it?’

‘The monk pleads his innocence. I overheard some talk of trial by ordeal. But for now, as he is a churchman, the archbishop aims to keep this matter secret while a decision is taken.’

‘Innocence, you say?’ Hereward brooded; perhaps the matter was not as clear-cut as it seemed. ‘Where is he being kept?’

‘They have him imprisoned at the minster, under the eye of the churchmen who pray for his soul.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘I met him at the minster. He is your friend?’

‘I care less for him than the rats that run over the spoil heaps,’ the warrior spat. ‘Let him burn his hands to the bone with the glowing iron rod to try to prove his innocence. I will lose no sleep over him.’

Kraki lurched round the corner and paused when he saw them. Swaying, he tried to focus his eyes, then shrugged and pulled his member out of his tunic, spraying urine in a wide arc. ‘You tamed her, then?’ he grunted.

Hereward felt Acha grow tense in his arms. Her expression became murderous. At that moment, the warrior thought she was capable of anything. Just as he was.

In the hall, the feasting and revelry continued long into the night. The archbishop left early with Tostig and his wife for the evening mass, accompanied by some of the guests, but not all, for though everyone there claimed to pray to the Christian God Hereward had heard some of the Vikings invoke their old deities. By the end of the festivities, the huscarls were slumped on the benches, the timber floor and the tables, soaked in ale and sweat. The servants nibbled on scraps of food, and only snoring and the crackling of the fire disturbed the quiet.

Hereward took Acha to her bed and they lay together, lost to their passion. But when he made his way to his own bed not long before dawn on the feast of St Stephen, he found his meagre possessions, his shield and his axe had been moved. The bed had been shifted to one side, as though it had been lifted to see if he hid beneath it. If he had been sleeping there, would he ever have woken, he wondered? Would he have been found in the morning in blood, like the man slain by the abbey in London?

His enemies were as close as he feared, and they had already made their first move against him.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

1 January 1063

THE WOLF HOWLED to the rooftops. Red eyes shone in the sunlight as the man in the predator’s mask prowled at the head of the crowd. Ducking down, he leapt up suddenly, howling once more, the delicately carved wood of the wolf head making the illusion complete. He whirled, sweeping one arm towards a boy of about twelve perched on the shoulders of a man in a boar mask. ‘Here then is the Abbot of Unreason! Now let us turn this world on its head!’ Someone tossed the boy a red cap and he slapped it proudly on his head. The crowd cheered loudly in response.

Shrieking with laughter, the throng surged through the streets of Eoferwic towards the church. More lovingly carved masks bobbed in the flow: horses, cows, ravens, salmon. Strips of colourfully dyed wool fluttered from wrists, waists and ankles. In the centre of the mass, swaying on the shoulders of his mount, the red-capped boy waved to his followers with the unspoken promise that chaos would rule.

Keeping his head down, Hereward allowed himself to be washed along by the rush of bodies. He ignored the horns of mead thrust in his direction by the drunken revellers. He wanted his wits clear.

The morning was crisp and bright, a perfect day for the Feast of Fools. The throng swept through the gate of the minster enclosure and milled among the halls, the barns and the school in front of the church’s western door. For a moment, he watched the man in the wolf mask bound and frolic. ‘Follow me now, good men and women,’ the wolf called, ‘into this stone house so that we may consecrate our boy pope. And when we are done, he will rule over an upside-down kingdom. The Lord of Misrule!’

Hereward pushed his way towards the edge of the crowd.

‘Let the deacons, the priests, even the archbishop himself, keep well away from this festival,’ the wolf-man continued loudly, ‘or be prepared to pay the full price. A drenching in freezing meltwater. Let that wash their pious faces!’ The crowd laughed. Hereward could sense the hope that one of the clerics would accidentally stumble out to get a soaking. The mockery served its purpose, he knew: release from the burdens of a straitened life, if only for a while. A moment when the lowest in the land could be the highest and dream the world their way before power was torn back from their fingers. The warrior saw true value in that disordered world. There were times when he felt every one of the highest in the land plotted only to their own ends. Where was concern for the weak, the innocent, the women? In this land of wolves, where was the strong protector? Perhaps the world
should
be turned on its head. And perhaps he should be its Lord of Misrule.

With raucous cries, the crowd thundered into the church. Few paid attention to the glory of the soaring stone tower as its builders had intended. When most were inside, the man in the boar’s mask carried the boy in and approached the altar. Two men dressed in the white tunics of clerics followed, each wearing a mask with the nose and mouth shaped like human private parts, one male, one female. The mock-clerics intoned words in a made-up language that echoed the solemn Latin tones of the priests. The profane consecration of the Abbot of Unreason would have sickened the churchmen if they had not been in hiding, Hereward knew, but the throng laughed more loudly at each new mockery in the fake ritual.

Seizing his moment, he pulled up his hood and crunched through the deep snow from house to shack to hut in the jumble of ecclesiastical structures surrounding the stone church. Some were the dwellings of the churchmen, and he kept away from those, as he did Archbishop Ealdred’s grand hall. But he searched the stores and the scriptorium and the school and all the other buildings where the churchmen organized their lives.

At the back of a room thick with a dusting of white flour where the daily bread was made, he found Alric slumped on dirty straw. Fettered, the monk looked miserable and exhausted, but his face lit up when he saw Hereward. His joy faded quickly.

‘I should kill you where you lie,’ the warrior spat. ‘It would be a mercy, compared to what lies ahead for you.’

‘You know, then.’ The monk hung his head.

‘That you live a lie? That you pretend to be a man of God, but are no more than a common killer of women? It is no surprise that you kept your filthy secret when I saved your life.’

Alric looked up with a fierce expression, his eyes bright with tears. ‘Do not judge me. You do not know the truth. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems in the telling.’

Leaning against the wall, Hereward folded his arms, his face cold and accusatory. ‘Enlighten me, then.’

Kneading his hands, Alric looked as if the strain of keeping his secret was finally about to tear him apart. ‘I had taken the word of God to a village not far from where we met. They had no church, no priest, not even a stone cross where I could preach. It felt a godless place, and a lawless one too, with too many still worshipping the old ways, even now in this Christian land. It was a place where I could do good works. Or so I believed.’ The young monk fell silent for a moment, and then wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. ‘I did my duty well. I was a good monk, hard-working, visiting every home, preaching whenever I could, teaching the children what I knew. The men and women accepted me, liked me even, I think. They kept me fed. There was one man, a merchant, who asked me to tutor his son and he would send payment to my monastery in return. And the merchant had a daughter.’

‘You fell in love with her.’

‘Yes. I am a fool. It should be me out there, made king of this feast.’

Hereward saw the remorse in the monk’s face. ‘And you murdered her because she gave you ungodly thoughts.’

‘No!’ Alric brushed the tears from his eyes. ‘I … I followed the wishes of my father and mother. I had given myself to God. I was content with my path, dedicated. I wanted nothing else. But then the daughter and I talked about my mission, and God’s plan, and she paid more heed to my teaching than her brother. And we laughed, and we walked together, and from nowhere feelings rose. Love, a pure love, of the kind I had never felt before for any human, only for my …’ The word choked in his throat, and he almost spat it out. ‘God.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Sunnild.’ The monk swallowed. ‘The force of that passion, it almost drove my wits from me. Something that powerful could only come from God.’ He looked to the warrior for approval, and then hung his head again when he saw none. ‘I fought against my feelings. Time and again I could have taken advantage of her. She made her own feelings for me clear. But I resisted, even though my heart was breaking. And then, one evening before the snows came, we walked in the woods and I became consumed by madness. I could hold my feelings in check no longer. And I kissed her.’

‘That is all?’

‘Yes, I swear. And, Hereward, though God strike me down, I felt as though I had been transported to heaven.’

‘From one kiss?’ the warrior asked with wry disbelief.

‘But then her brother found us in the midst of our embrace.’ Alric’s face darkened. ‘He flew into a rage, accusing me of deceiving him and his father. He acted as though all I had done in that place had only been a ploy to steal Sunnild’s honour. And he drew the knife he used for carving toys for the children, and attacked me to defend that honour.’

Hereward listened to the squeals of delight from the women and the drunken bellows echoing from the church. Time was short. Soon the ritual would be over and the people would rush back into Eoferwic to continue their celebrations.

‘We fought,’ the monk continued in a flat tone. The warrior guessed Alric had played the moment over so many times that all life and emotion had been sucked from it. ‘There was no time to reason. I was struggling for my life. Sunnild was in tears, pleading with her brother to spare me. She claimed that she was to blame. Even then, when other women would have protected themselves, her love for me was clear. As the brother and I fell around the wood, she came between us to try to separate us. Somehow I had the knife in my hands. And I struck out, in panic, and the blade plunged into her heart.’

Alric held out his hands as if he could still see the blood upon them.

‘She died instantly. In shock, I ran, with her brother’s cries of vengeance ringing in my ears.’

‘And her kin set those Viking pirates upon your trail. A blood-feud.’

‘Believe me or not, Hereward, but in that moment I wanted to die too, so I could be with Sunnild, and for a while I considered taking my own life, to my shame.’ The monk began to cry silently. After some moments, he steadied himself and added, ‘But I would never reach heaven or Sunnild’s side if I wasted what God had given me. I have to make amends in this world if I am ever to scrub the stain from my soul.’