The Reluctant Berserker (14 page)

At his signs of life, Tatwine dropped back from the head of the column to ride beside him. The lord laid a heavy hand, that was no doubt meant to be soothing, on the back of his head. “I might almost believe,” he said, in a conversational tone, his voice low enough to keep the words between the two of them, though loud enough to go through Leofgar’s ears like spits, “that you did that deliberately.”

He chuckled, and Leofgar—surprised at how easy it was to lie, once you had begun—gave a snort of amusement in return and groaned again at the throb it provoked. “Not such a fool.”

“I am glad to hear it. Tonight then, with a freshly filled mattress under you for softness.” Tatwine took his hand back, leaving a spot that felt cold by contrast on the back of Leofgar’s neck. His tone slipped easily from gentle to flinty. “Do not disappoint me a third time.”

“Lord,” Leofgar murmured, his face buried in the coarse black hair of his mount’s mane. He was very thankful for whatever sight made Tatwine curse under his breath and spur himself forward, not noticing that Leofgar had not added a “yes” to his acknowledgement.

He remained thankful only until Deala cried “No!” ahead of him. Hunlaf spat a curse that made someone behind Leofgar switch his horse with the ash shaft of a javelin. He was suddenly holding on with both hands, tears of agony blurring the still-too-bright world, as the warriors broke into a gallop and his steed tried to follow.

It wasn’t until they were within five hundred yards of the gates that he regained enough control of himself and his horse to look. When he did he felt the same sensation he had felt while falling—a weightlessness and then a jerk and shock. For there was no smoke over the burh and the gatehouses were empty. The gates themselves stood half-wide, neither opened nor closed. Beneath the gate on the right, wedged in-between muddy ground and oaken planks, lay the naked body of Edgar, son of Eadwulf, stripped of armour and garments alike by someone who had had time enough to do the job thoroughly and carry away the loot.

The gates were open and the defenders dead. Tatwine slowed and his companions did the like. No point in rushing now, they were already too late.

The tracks of a party of men coming from over the fields led back the same way towards the river, noticeably deeper on the return journey. There went with them the soft shoes of women and the small, forlorn footprints of children.

“They will have picked those who looked like they could work, or were pretty.” Hunlaf’s constant smugness seemed to have taken a beating, and he looked better for it as he peered down at the tracks. “Or would fetch a good price ransomed back to their parents.”

“I can.” Leofgar’s stomach shriveled further within him at the thought, but his mind insisted that he could not be any worse off in a group of Danes than he was here among his own countrymen. “I can go after them with a message—find out what they will take for ransom. They will honour the safe passage of a scop, for fear of the ill luck that will strike them down if they don’t. And…” painful though it was to say it, “…they will not see me as a threat.”

Tatwine’s whole body seemed to solidify for a moment. He wheeled and smacked Leofgar so hard across the face it almost dislodged his newly settled brains and made him fall off the horse again. His raw and aching nose began to bleed once more. “You know,” Tatwine hissed in his face, “what your job is. Now hush and let the men talk.”

To his eternal scalding humiliation, Leofgar felt his bottom lip tremble. He wrenched his head around and covered his face with both hands, but he couldn’t shake the conviction that Tatwine had seen, and that everything he thought had thus been confirmed. His horse, unguided, headed for its place of safety, its stable, and he let it take him along, crushed.

Wiping water and blood from his face, Leofgar dismounted by his hut. He had passed more corpses, but not so many as he had feared. The great bulk of folk seemed to merely be missing.

The leather hinges of his door had been torn and it gaped skewiff upon a rectangle of darkness. Inside, the cauldron was upended in a corner, the blankets slashed—pure meanness that. The ashes of the fire had been kicked across the packed earth floor, and Leofgar’s pottery jug and beaker were broken into smithereens.

The meanness of his belongings must have convinced them there was nothing else to find in here, for when he removed the logs that concealed the hollow in the woodpile—praying all the while—his questing hand found Lark’s deerskin bag, and the lyre, Hierting, leaning behind her, like frightened infants huddling together in hiding.

He clutched them to him, just as he would have done with children, racked with relief and misery both, as his head throbbed with pulses of pain that made their way into his eyes in the shape of stars.

Outside, folk had begun to trickle back in. Those who had been working in the fields, those who had heard the warning shout in time to run to the woods and hide, and had now seen their lord come back, earlier than could possibly have been hoped. These folk came walking through the gates, stiff and blank eyed as dead men moved by sorcery. Tatwine embraced each one with tears in his eyes, sent them away looking stronger.

The warriors were forming the folk into work gangs—one to pick up the bodies and carry them to the chapel, one to repair the walls. Others to check the stores of food, to haul waste out of the well. The oldest man—a cooper by the name of Beortwine—was sent where Leofgar should have gone, to follow the tracks to the Vikings’ ship and see what could be salvaged there.

Fast riders galloped out to the closest villages and settlements for aid, and for a tax of silver coins that might buy some of the lost ones back. There was hope they would be treated well until the raiders knew no more profit could be made from them. No one bought back ruined goods, after all.

Leofgar watched and was not given any task. So when Tatwine strode off to examine the broken palisade behind the hall, Leofgar settled his instruments on his back in their bags and went to visit Anna.

Already, weed-month had been at work in the graveyard, and the stark shape of turned earth was softening beneath a fur of green shoots. Hunkering down, Leofgar picked a rounded pebble from the black earth, brushed it off and held it in his hand for a while. “I can’t,” he told it. “How can I stay and praise him after this? He should have been here. Not pursuing me like some peasant’s daughter he can order around at will, but here, protecting his folk.

“The warriors, master. They are all…they are all such shit-fed, goat-buggering, raven fodder. I want to tell them what I see when I look at them, but if I did it would be Aegir’s feast all over again. I’m never going to be able to praise these men without the words tasting like piss in my mouth. I’m sorry, master. If Tatwine would only let me do something to help, but he… I know this was the life you hoped for for me, but I can’t. I can’t.”

Nor was this the heroic speech he would have composed for himself, had he not been injured, frightened and angry. It had only the merits of truth.

He waited a little longer, to give Anna a chance to answer if he was going to. But there was silence from the realm of the dead—the priest had done his job well. So Leofgar wiped his swollen nose again, composed his face, slipped the pebble down the neck of his overtunic, where it would ride tight, held snug by his belt, and made a slow and cautious way over to the stables, taking care not to be seen.

No one had unsaddled his horse yet, though it had found a manger of hay and sucked down most of the greenish water in the trough. It lifted its head with a look of idiot confusion and whickered softly at him, as if to say,
Everything is wrong today, but you at least I recognise.

“I won’t take you far,” he promised it, pulling up the hood from around his shoulders, letting its folds fall forward to shadow his face. Not much of a disguise, since every man in the burh knew the colour of it and that of his cloak underneath, but it made him feel better. “I will leave you with someone who knows your lord, so you will find your way home.”

Choosing a moment when the watchers on the palisade were all facing outwards, looking towards the river for news, when inside the enclosure everyone was head down and busy, he led the horse across the open space and out of the gate. Messengers on horseback had been coming and going all day, so he was not challenged when he scrambled into the saddle and set off at an innocent-looking trot for the cover of the woods.

Boughs closed over his head and briars behind him as he turned in the direction of Ely. “I will not take you from your lord,” he went on, reassuringly, though the horse seemed happier here, out of the bustle and the smell of blood. “I will not take anything from him except the silver I have earned. I am no thief.”

The horse snorted as if with laughter, and all around Leofgar the quiet whispery voices of the trees mocked his scruples. “Wolfshead, oathbreaker, outlaw,” they murmured at him, over and over, in time with his hoofbeats as he fled. “Man without honour. Foresworn. Faithless. Coward.” He tried to put them behind him, along with his home.

Chapter Six

Ecgbert sat in state on the dais, with the lawspeaker on his left hand and the priest on his right. On Wulfstan’s right and left hand stood Aelfsi and Offa, in full armour. Wulfstan himself was only in tunic and trousers, beltless. His head was bared and his sword laid out in its scabbard on the table in front of Ecgbert.

It was unclear from his friends’ expressions whether they were guarding or protecting him. He chose not to make that decision any harder for them, and did not attempt to rise from his knees or move his hands from where they lay, palm up and empty on his folded thighs. He did raise his head, though, to look into Ecgbert’s face and see the weariness there. The lord, so long a father to him, was beginning to look his age.

Wulfstan’s own father stood amongst the folk packed into the hall behind him. Wulfric had come on summons as fast as a change of horses could carry him from his own lands. He looked—from what Wulfstan could glimpse of him in snatched glances—as he ever did. Tall, proud, perfect, relentless. Wulfstan wished he had not troubled to come.

At the edge of the dais, surrounded by candles and held down by scattered shards of burnt and broken pottery, lay the white shrouded form of Cenred. It looked more like a strangely peeled tree trunk than a man in its tight, white wrappings, but the priest kept a beady eye on it, ready to deal with it at once if it stirred.

Cenred was there because he deserved to be present to confront his murderer. Also because his mother, who now knelt weeping by his swathed head, had screamed that she would curse every last man in Ecgbert’s service if Cenred was not allowed to see justice done.

Saewyn had called her witnesses to recount the death of her son to those who had not been present to see it for themselves. She had called three, but she might as easily have gone on to question a score more. There was no doubt about what had happened. The real question could be asked now she had stopped talking and was wetting her fingers with tears.

The priest dipped his quill. Ecgbert leaned forwards and asked Wulfstan. “Why?”

It was only then, after a day and a night spent sleepless, endlessly turning over his response in his mind, that Wulfstan knew clearly he could not tell the truth. Not in front of his father—both his fathers. Nor in front of Judith or Ecgfreda, who stood behind Ecgbert and watched Wulfstan with identical looks of mild puzzlement, too insipid for the condemnation of a friend-killing.

“He…” Wulfstan bit his lip and looked down—wished the anger would come at call, or that he could control it when it did. “He was laughing at me. Remembering that thing that Manna said, when we were in Uisebec.” Ecgbert’s expression cleared—just a little—some of the creases on his forehead and around his mouth smoothing. The shaft of blue light that slanted from the high window at the other end of the hall landed in a triangle of brilliance just where Ecgbert’s feet rested. It made his widened eyes gleam knowingly.

“It had been a cold night,” Wulfstan went on, his voice growing in strength as he committed himself to the sin. “And we shared our blankets. In the morning, when I was still half-asleep, Cenred laughed and said he would tell everyone that what Manna said was true, and that I had let him…”

“Let him what?” The growl came from Wulfric behind him.

The priest dipped his quill again and looked up mildly with the same question. “I cannot write it down if you do not say it.”

Wulfstan looked to Ecgbert and saw some compassion, some resignation. Ecgbert nodded.

“He was going to tell everyone I had let him use me like a woman. He…” The anger wouldn’t come, not in the face of the silent corpse. “He was my
friend.
Why would he betray me like that? So many times, so many men have spoken to me about his cruelty and said he could not be trusted, and I was the only one who didn’t believe them. So why would he turn on
me
?”

Saewyn lurched back to her feet, her stained fingers clenched and her lips drawn back from her teeth. “You have already
murdered
him. Now you besmirch his name too?”

Ecgbert held up a hand and she was stopped.

“Saewyn, you are his mother and you are upset. It is a hard thing for a man to be left childless, to live long enough to see her young in the grave. This I understand, but you will not fling about words such as murder. This is no such evil thing. It was done in the open with no attempt at concealment. There was nothing stealthy about it. It was an open quarrel among young men, such as happens in every household in every burh across the land.”