Knights of the Hawk (32 page)

All was quiet, save for the tumbling of water over the fish-weirs and the lowing of cattle and the flapping and honking of a skein of geese as they rose from the water-meadows, taking up arrowhead formation as they flew towards the setting sun.

West, I noted. Not south, to Normandy and Flanders, but west, to Dyflin.

The churchmen and scholars who studied the holy texts all shared the opinion that any attempt to divine the future was sacrilege, whether it involved studying the flights of birds, or examining entrails, or scattering runesticks as the Danes were known to do. God’s design, as complex as it was mysterious, could not be determined by such crude methods, they said, and I was inclined to agree. I didn’t believe in portents, although if I did, those geese were probably the clearest sign I was likely to receive.

‘Here you are,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

Surprised, I fumbled the whetstone as, instinctively, my other hand clutched tight at the knife-hilt, and somehow in it all I managed to nick my finger, which began streaming with blood. Cursing at the pain, I shoved it in my mouth and began to suck hard, at the same time glancing up to see who this newcomer was.

It was Beatrice.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. ‘Is it bad?’

‘I’ll live, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘I’ve suffered worse injuries in my time.’

She smiled at that. When first we met she had not much liked me, I remembered, and it was a while before I ever saw such warmth from her. She sat down on the damp ground beside me, amidst the leaves and the windfalls. She wasn’t wearing a cloak, and I wondered that she wasn’t cold.

‘Your brother sent you, didn’t he?’ I asked.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘He means to convince me to join him on this expedition to Flanders.’

‘He tells me you have it in your head to go to Dyflin.’

That was neither a confirmation nor a denial, although, I thought, if he had told her that much, it meant that at least he had been listening.

‘Where’s your husband?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t he concerned about you seeking out the company of strange men?’

She gave me a wry look. ‘He went hawking in the woods with some of my father’s other vassals. He’s a keen falconer. Robert lent him his swiftest bird, Ligetsleht. He said they wouldn’t be back until dusk.’

‘All the same,’ I said, teasing her, ‘if he hears that you’ve been arranging secret meetings in the orchard while he’s away, he won’t be pleased.’

Guillaume d’Archis, for I’d learnt that was his name, seemed a humourless sort, although perhaps that was unfair, given that I had only met him properly for the first time that morning, after the funeral. To my mind he was rather cold, not easily approachable, and taciturn, too, with hard eyes that betrayed no feeling. Not the sort of husband I imagined being well suited to Beatrice, who was warm in heart and gentle in spirit.

Was there a touch of jealousy there? Perhaps, but only because it had been so long since I myself had last felt a woman’s touch. Whatever feelings Beatrice and I might once have shared, they were long buried.

‘My being here isn’t any secret,’ she said. ‘Robert asked if I would come and speak with you.’

There, finally, was my answer. ‘You mean he asked you to talk some sense into me.’

‘That’s not why I came, though.’

‘Then why?’

Beatrice picked up one of the dappled pears that lay beside her, looked it over for signs of worms before, satisfied, she took a bite out of it. ‘If Robert wants to follow the king on another expedition, that’s his business, and his alone. He doesn’t need you to always be there to defend him from the evils of the world.’

But what if he did? I remembered only too well what had happened to Fitz Osbern. Robert was a competent swordsman, but no more than that, and at times he could be, in his own way, every bit as reckless and headstrong as myself. If I and Eudo and Wace and all his other vassals allowed him to venture across the sea alone, with only a contingent of his hearth-troops for accompanying him, what was to say that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate?

‘Before I ever gave my oath to your brother,’ I said, ‘you made me pledge myself to his protection. I still remember that promise, even if you’ve forgotten.’

‘I remember,’ she said quietly. No doubt she remembered the kiss we’d shared then, too. ‘But Robert is a better knight now than he was then; older and wiser, too. He can take care of himself.’

‘I hope you’re right. For his sake.’

‘Why do you want to go to Dyflin, in any case?’

I inhaled deeply. Until now, I had kept everything Eithne had told me to myself.

‘Oswynn,’ I said simply.

‘Oswynn?’ Beatrice repeated, frowning. ‘Your woman? I don’t understand. I thought—’

She didn’t say it, but I knew what she meant. ‘So did I. But then at Beferlic last year I saw her. She was there, alive and as well as I’ve ever seen her, in the company of one of the Danish jarls, who goes by the name of Haakon, or so I’ve recently learnt. Dyflin is where he was last seen.’

‘So you mean to go after her?’

‘And to bring her back.’

‘What if you can’t find her? What if she’s no longer with this Haakon, or if he’s gone so far away that you can never catch up with him?’

Such doubts had been plaguing my mind ever since my meeting with Eithne, but I didn’t want to hear them from someone else’s lips as well.

‘I’ll find her,’ I said.

A magpie hopped close in front of us and nibbled for a brief moment at a fallen pear, before a crow descended, screeching, its jet-black wings outspread, and chased it off.

‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Are you happy? With him, I mean.’

She would not meet my eyes. ‘I am content,’ she said, but the set of her lips betrayed her.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Does it matter whether I am or not? The fate of women is not to be happy but merely to serve the wishes of our menfolk and to spit out children. My father made the arrangements earlier this year. It was hardly as if I had a voice in the matter.’

There was resentment there, clearly. ‘I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.’

She was quiet for a moment. ‘I am content,’ she repeated. ‘That is enough for me. Of course I wish that things were different, but if we spend our lives forever craving that which we don’t and can never have, then we condemn ourselves to years of misery, and we will never find happiness.’

There was good sense in that, I supposed. Father Erchembald was forever offering me similar pieces of wisdom, and he was usually right.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘in another few months I will have reason to be joyful again, for I will have a new life to take care of, to hold in my arms.’

‘You’re with child?’ I asked, surprised. It didn’t show – not yet, at any rate.

‘I think so,’ Beatrice said. ‘Don’t mention it to my husband, should you see him before I do. I want him to hear it from me first.’

‘You’re with his child but you haven’t told him?’

‘Not yet. He’ll be pleased with the news, won’t he?’

From the little I’d seen of him, I reckoned it would take more than news of his impending fatherhood to please that man, but it would be unkind of me to say so.

‘What husband wouldn’t be?’ I said instead. ‘Especially if the child turns out to be a son to whom he can teach the skills for battle and the pleasures of the hunt.’

We sat in silence for a while as the mist closed in. The sun’s rim was almost upon the horizon and the cold of dusk surrounded us.

‘It seems to me that an oath is much like a marriage,’ Beatrice mused after a while. A smile crossed her face and her golden hair glimmered in the evening light. ‘I am sworn to my husband, while you’re married to my brother.’

I laughed at the comparison, which had never before crossed my mind.

‘It’s true, though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘In their own way they bind us both, and prevent us from pursuing our own ambitions and desires.’

‘Only if we allow them to do so,’ I replied, although the words seemed hollow. For the purpose of oaths was to maintain order in the world. If men and women were free to do as they would and go wherever they pleased, all would quickly become ungovernable. Oaths help ensure that people follow the laws of the land; they offer protection and security to both parties. For just as a knight swears to defend his lord’s life with his own, so the lord in return pledges to furnish him with the arms and equipment to do so, a roof to sleep beneath and a stipend by which he may live, or else with lands and their rents sufficient to support him. Or so, at least, it went in principle.

‘When we first met you told me that you were married only to your sword,’ Beatrice said. ‘You should follow where it takes you.’

Indeed I remembered saying that, and I’d meant it too. In those weeks and months of despair after losing Oswynn and my former lord and so many of my brothers-in-arms in the ambush at Dunholm, I’d had no one to fight for, nothing to lose.

‘Things are different now,’ I said. ‘I have responsibilities. To Robert, to my own knights, to the people of Earnford. They depend on me.’

Beatrice was silent for a while, as if lost in thought.

‘Do what you think is right, not what Robert expects of you,’ she said eventually. ‘That is my advice. He’ll respect you all the more for it; if not at first, then in time.’

I nodded, though in truth I wasn’t entirely persuaded. ‘You came to give me comfort on the day that we buried your father,’ I said, and managed a smile. ‘I should be offering you words of consolation, not the other way around.’

‘We all knew his time was coming.’ She spoke softly, looking down at the ground. ‘He was so weak, and in such pain by the end. When he finally passed away I was as much relieved as I was saddened, because I knew then that he wouldn’t have to suffer any longer, but instead would be with God. Does that sound strange?’

‘Not at all.’

Beatrice nodded, and I hoped she was reassured. ‘There’s to be a feast tonight in his memory,’ she said after a while. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’

‘Perhaps,’ I replied, although it wasn’t as if I had much choice. To refuse the invitation would seem disrespectful. Despite our many differences and all the frustrations I’d felt in recent months, I still admired Robert as a lord and valued him as a friend, one of the few that it seemed I had in those days. The last thing I wanted was for that friendship to sour. Yet he could not forever ask these things of me and expect me to remain content.

Beatrice understood that. Why couldn’t he understand it, too?

Sixteen

THERE WAS FEASTING
that night, as Beatrice had promised, and there was drinking, too. Robert ordered the fattest hog from the pens slaughtered and we roasted it on the hearth-fire in the castle’s great hall, while barrels of ale and mead and wine were brought up from the cellars. Cups and horns were filled and raised in honour of Guillaume Malet and, afterwards, of his son as well, to whom all present now owed their allegiance. Cheers went up in Robert’s praise, but I did not join in, instead preferring to keep to the benches along the sides of the hall, where the shadows lingered, so he was less likely to notice me, and where I could quaff my ale in peace. I watched as he greeted and embraced those who had been his father’s vassals, who had come to Heia not just for the funeral and feast, but also to pay homage to their new lord and, most importantly of all, to seek confirmation of their land grants. Occasionally I glanced towards Beatrice, who sat at the high table on the dais together with her husband, her mother, the chaplain Dudo and other guests more esteemed than I. If she saw me, though, she gave no sign of it.

Eudo, ever fond of his drink, was already insensible and lay asleep on the bench beside me, snoring loudly, Wace had ventured outside for a piss, while Serlo and Pons were at the camp across the river, where most of Robert’s vassals and their retinues would be sleeping tonight. All of which meant that, not for the first time of late, I found myself on my own, with only my thoughts for company.

Elsewhere men were shouting and hollering out bawdy songs that I recognised by the tunes if not by the words, which were almost indistinct. One of Robert’s younger hearth-knights had climbed on to a long trestle table from where he proceeded to declaim his undying love for his sword-brothers. Some were holding contests to see who could drain a pitcher of wine the fastest, who could be spun around the most times in a circle without falling over, who could drink the most before emptying the contents of his stomach. Mice scurried along the roof-beams and in the shadows under the tables and stools, in search of crumbs of bread and cheese and anything else that had fallen amidst the rushes, and men were flinging chicken bones at them, seeing who could come closest to striking one. A few had brought dogs with them, which roamed the hall, eating scraps thrown to them, barking at one another and occasionally yelping when someone trod on a paw or tripped over them.

And then, above the singing and the yelling and the belching and the thumping of fists upon tables and the clatter of wooden wine-jugs and the sounds of someone spewing in the corner, I made out what sounded like Godric’s voice.

‘It’s the truth,’ he was saying loudly. ‘I’m telling you I killed him!’

I spotted him then, in the shadows on the other side of the hall. The lad was being pressed up against one of the timber posts that supported the roof. Surrounding him were three heavyset men I didn’t recognise, and one I did: Guibert, the rotund, ruddy-faced one who had spoken out against Lord Robert and the king that day at Brandune.

Sensing trouble, I rose and barged my way through the ale-stinking throng towards them.

‘You expect us to believe that a runt like you managed to kill the feared Hereward?’ Guibert asked. He glanced around at his companions and gave a laugh, but there was a hollowness to it that betrayed his lack of humour, and I knew then that this was no jest.

‘I swear it,’ Godric protested, but that was all he had a chance to utter before the other man grabbed his collar and forced his head back against the post.

‘You’re a liar,’ he said, leaning closer to the Englishman. ‘Do you know what I do to men who lie to me?’