Hereward 02 - The Devil's Army (3 page)

After a few moments the orange light began to ebb and the voices receded as the Normans retreated back into the willows. Alric let out the long sigh he had kept trapped in his throat. ‘God watches over us,’ he whispered.

When he was sure the king’s men had gone, Hereward uttered the order to continue. It rustled back along the line into the dark. He watched the torches wavering through the trees all around, like fireflies. The Normans had the scent of their prey. They would not give up until they had fresh heads to perch atop their gates.

As he advanced, he heard low voices behind him and he glanced back. Alric listened to the next warrior in line and then leaned in. ‘Swithun’s wounds were too great,’ he murmured. ‘The cold has sapped the last of the life from him.’

Hereward bowed his head for a moment, then said, ‘Let him go.’

‘We should take him home for a Christian burial—’

‘I will not risk another man’s life. Two is enough for this night.’

Alric hesitated, then nodded. He passed the order back. As the warriors released Swithun’s body to the mud, the monk intoned a brief, sombre prayer in the Roman tongue, adding in English that the warrior had finally escaped the suffering and would be welcomed in to the peace and plenty of heaven. That small comfort was welcomed by the other men, Hereward saw. The monk had done well.

They heaved on around another spur of land, and then finally the mud began to recede. Hereward glimpsed the familiar silhouette of the three broken ash trees where he knew the second stone marker stood. With a low hail to his men, he waded ashore.

The English collapsed on the dry bank, heaving in gulps of warm night air. Hereward allowed them a moment, but his gaze never left the constantly moving torches.

‘We can follow a track home from here, yes?’ Alric whispered as he wiped the mud from his face with a dock leaf.

The Mercian shook his head. ‘No home for us yet. Now we fight.’

Alric gaped in horror. ‘We barely escape from the enemy with our lives and now you would take the fight to them with a handful of weary men. You
are
mad. You will kill us all.’

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

THE MOON CREPT
from behind the clouds, painting the willows silver. Through the dark shadows pooling around the trees the English ran, spears held low. The sound of their feet was barely a whisper on the turf. All around, the torches of their enemies ranged. Alric could see no clear path through their ranks.

The monk struggled to keep up with Hereward’s loping gait. ‘Are you hell-bent on damning all of us?’ he hissed between gasps.

‘I told you: trust me.’

Alric scrabbled with his hands to fight his way through a curtain of hanging branches that his friend avoided with ease. He looked back at the other men, who trusted every word their leader uttered, and prayed they would be well.
Have faith
, he thought bitterly. If only Hereward knew how much faith he had shown on their long march together.

A waft of burnt wood made his nose wrinkle. He peered into the dark, searching for any sign of a settlement, and soon glimpsed the outline of buildings.

‘Where is this place?’ Alric gasped as they emerged into a circle of six thatched houses around a green in a clearing.

‘Norham,’ Hereward replied without glancing back. He kicked open the nearest door and peered inside. The hearth was dead, the ghost of woodsmoke lingering in the air. Alric glimpsed no sign of life within. Had the whole village fled the Normans?

‘Burn it down,’ Hereward yelled to his men. ‘All of it. Do it quickly and let us be away.’

‘Stop,’ the monk whispered in protest. ‘These are our people. You cannot destroy their homes.’ He threw himself in front of the Mercian, ducking from side to side to keep himself in between the warrior and the dwelling.

With a grunt of frustration, Hereward grabbed his friend’s tunic and dragged him around the back of the house where the air reeked of rot. Choking, the monk pressed the back of his hand across his mouth and nose. Rough hands propelled him towards a pile of cordwood. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw it wasn’t firewood at all. The bodies of the villagers had been piled up in a jumbled heap, men, women and children. The blood had long since dried brown, but the gaping wounds spoke of sharp swords.

‘They will no longer miss their homes,’ Hereward hissed.

‘How long have they been dead?’ Alric gasped.

‘Five days now,’ Hereward growled. ‘Word reached me before we set off north.’

‘What did they do to offend the Normans so?’

‘They helped our fight against the thieving king.’ The warrior spat. ‘Sometimes they offered shelter to those who travelled from afar to join us, or a bite of bread to the hungry.’ His voice lowered, but it remained iron-hard with anger.

Alric gaped at the heap of bodies. However many times he witnessed the brutality of their new masters, he never failed to be sickened.

Without another word, Hereward returned to the front of the crudely thatched building and snatched a newly lit brand from one of the other men. He hurled it on to the dirty reed thatch and within a moment the flames licked up. The crackle became
a roar, orange sparks whisking up into the night sky on the swirling black smoke. ‘Let this be their pyre,’ he bellowed into the dark, ‘and a beacon too.’

Alric stumbled over the rows of herbs growing beside the house and scrambled to his friend’s side. ‘What good is burning the village?’ he protested. ‘It will only draw the Normans to us.’

Hereward shielded his eyes against the glare from the conflagration and watched as his men set fire to the other houses. ‘Let those stinking curs come,’ he murmured. For a long moment, he seemed caught by the spectacle and then, as if waking from a dream, he thrust a fist towards the heavens. ‘Follow me,’ he yelled above the roar of the flames. ‘We have two more villages to burn. Let us lead those bastards on a dance before death comes.’

Alric felt queasy with worry. He gripped his friend’s arm and whispered, ‘Do not drag these good men down with you. If you see only doom here, let you and me face it alone.’

When Hereward turned to him, the monk recoiled. With the fires burning behind him and flames dancing in his eyes, Hereward looked like the devil himself.

A dark grin spread across the warrior’s face. ‘The Normans would sit in judgement of the English,’ he said. ‘Let them come and I will judge them.’

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

THE NIGHT WAS
filled with fire and fury. In the black gulf of the fenlands, the burning village glowed, torches flickering all around like sparks caught in the smoke-eddies. The warm breeze smelled of endings, sharp and tarry. Silhouetted against the orange luminescence, two men stood on the higher ground, watching the grey wave of Norman fighters wash towards their prey. At their feet, the hunched villager sobbed. Blood caked his face and soaked his tunic from the long beating he had received.

‘See, it was all for naught.’ William de Warenne had to shout to be heard over the roar and crackle of the fires, the drone of the war-chant. With cold contempt, the Norman noble looked down his nose at his captive. ‘The English warriors have decided to stand and die anyway. If you had told what you knew of them, you might have saved your worthless life.’ He was a fighting man, his brown hair cropped and shaved at the back like the mail-clad warriors he had battled alongside when the king had taken England. In a show of virility, he had thrown his purple cloak over his right shoulder to reveal the sword hanging at his hip.

Glowering from beneath a low brow, the other man kicked the captive in the side. He nodded in appreciation when he
heard the howl as another rib broke. Ivo Taillebois, now the sheriff, had gained his byname from King William himself:
the Butcher
. Dressed all in black like the men he commanded, he showed none of the flamboyance of his companion, nor the aristocratic profile. Swarthy-skinned, his heavy features spoke of generations of toil on the land. Yet through a strong right arm, animal cunning and a brutal nature, he had clawed his way to undreamed heights. ‘You betray the king, you pay the price,’ he grunted to the broken villager. ‘How hard is it for you English to learn this lesson?’ He turned and called into the dark.

A warrior ran up, his own tunic stained with blood. ‘I should have you whipped for letting the English take you captive,’ the Butcher said to the man Hereward had set free earlier that night. ‘But you guided us to the path these rebels took and we now have them in our grasp. So it seems I should reward you.’ He placed one foot upon the whimpering villager and shoved him down the mound. ‘Gut him and dump him in the bog. And you might find a skin of wine on your bed when we are back in Lincylene.’

The warrior grinned. He hooked a hand in the back of the captive’s tunic and dragged the screaming man away into the dark.

‘Bring Hereward to me alive,’ William de Warenne said once the screams had died away. ‘I would break him in front of the English, until he sobs like a child and pleads for his life. Then we shall see how many raise arms against us.’

‘You will get your wish. It was only ever a matter of time before he fell.’

The two turned to watch their men close on the English rabble.

All of this Harald Redteeth saw as he cloaked himself in the dark of a copse near by. The fires shimmered off his helmet and glowed from the black pools of the eye-holes. His wild hair and beard were stained red. And under his mail, he reeked of sweat, the smell of an honest man.

The Viking took the king’s coin as an axe-for-hire, but that didn’t mean he had any respect for his Norman masters. They knew no honour, only the value of things that they could take by force and covet like magpies, and honour, as his father had told him time and again, was everything. Though he had sold his axe to any who would pay since he had left the cold northern lands of his home as a boy, that had always been his code. Blood for blood above all.

And he knew that if anyone took Hereward’s head, it would be he.

More flames erupted further to the north, in a clearing among the woods. Another village set alight by the rebels. What possessed them? Were they demanding their own doom?

‘You will be avenged, Ivar,’ Redteeth muttered, plucking at the skulls of birds and rodents that hung from his hauberk. His gaze flickered towards the grey figure that followed him everywhere, unseen by any other man. He had grown used to the unblinking stare of his long-dead companion, burned alive by Hereward in the Northumbrian wastes all those years ago. The shade did not frighten him. It was a reminder of his duty, nothing more. ‘Hereward will fall under my axe, Grim, and I will take that monk for good measure. If he had submitted to the law, my law, I would not be here and you would not be dead,’ the Viking murmured. ‘The Mercian denied you the Hall of the Slain by the manner in which he took your life, Ivar, but I have vowed to break the shackles that bind you to this world, and so I will.’

He eyed William de Warenne and the Butcher as they discussed their tactics. Christians both, praying in their stone churches. Their lives were like those cold, dismal places. Where was the feast and the song? Where was the hot blood of life gushing over your chin?

‘You would speak with the old man now?’ Taillebois was saying in his rumbling voice.

William nodded, and the Butcher yelled into the night. A moment later a Norman guard escorted a stooping figure up
the mound. The man leaned on a gnarled staff, his skin ashen, his cheeks hollow, his body like a winter hawthorn beneath the frayed woollen cloak. His thinning, silvery hair and frail appearance suggested a man much older than his fifty summers.

‘Welcome Asketil Tokesune,’ William said in a cheery tone that made no attempt to hide the inherent mockery. ‘Though thegn no more, you still carry yourself as a man above men. That is good to see.’

‘What news?’ the old man croaked, his voice like pebbles on ice.

‘Your son is as good as dead,’ Taillebois grunted.

Despite the bluntness of the words, Asketil only nodded. ‘Then all is well.’

‘We are in your debt,’ William said, smiling. ‘Without your aid, we would not have learned the secret paths in these parts, nor would we have understood your son’s ways.’

‘Speak no more of my son. He should have been throttled at birth. Like a mad dog, he was, from the moment he clawed his way out of his mother’s cunt. He robbed his own, he fought, he killed, and there was nothing I could do to tame him.’ The old man’s knuckles grew white where he gripped the staff. ‘His own mother died because of him. He has been a stain on the honour of my kin. Let him be gone, and forgotten, and then I can hold my head high once more.’

‘You have been a good friend to us,’ William continued, ‘and our king has ordered that all friends among the English be welcomed. You will be well rewarded for this, Asketil.’

The old man grunted.

‘Take him back to the hall and feed him what is left of the goose,’ Taillebois said to the guard. William de Warenne and Ivo Taillebois did not even wait until the old man was out of sight before they laughed at his back.

Of all of them there, Redteeth despised Asketil the most. The old thegn had betrayed his own kin for some scant reward, even though the Normans had cut off the head of his youngest son, stolen his hall and all his gold. Even though they had stripped
him of all he had earned in his long life and tossed him into an existence of near-starvation, begging for scraps from his new masters’ table. Harald Redteeth spat. No honour had he.

A column of flames roared up from a third village, the spiral of golden sparks reaching up almost to the stars themselves. The Viking leaned on an oak and let his eyes drift across the three blazes. They were a strange people, these English under Hereward’s command. The Mercian had shaped those mud-spattered ceorls and soft-bellied merchants and all those spears-for-hire into a fighting force more rapidly than Redteeth would ever have imagined. But once he was dead the rebellion was over, and King William could sleep a little easier.