Wayland sensed crosscurrents swirling about the chamber. Drogo cocked his head in puzzlement.
‘For a moment I thought you were proposing to take up the challenge.’
‘God forbid. I lack both the qualities and the incentive.’
Margaret slapped the arm of her chair. ‘He’s a stranger. His words carry no weight.’
But Vallon’s intervention had tilted the balance. Olbec rapped his stick on the floor. ‘I’d hazard my fortune if I was sure that it would secure Walter’s release, but it seems to me that we’d lose the one without gaining the other. No, my lady, I’ve reached my decision. I’ll send an ambassador to Anatolia and frankly state my position, offering a ransom more in keeping with our station. What do you think, Vallon? You know the Emir; you say he holds Walter in affection. Surely he’s open to reason.’
‘He’s a rational man. I’m sure he’d consider your offer carefully.’
Margaret shot out of her chair, her arms rigid by her side. Her eyes raked around the room. ‘Since none of you will help, I’ll make my own arrangements.’ Gathering up her skirts, she ran out of the chamber.
Drogo clasped Olbec’s hand. ‘Well said, Father. Too many times you’ve let your lady’s passions cloud your judgement.’
Olbec looked up at him with curdled eyes. ‘Not so clouded that I can’t divine your motives.’
The screen parted and a soldier rushed in.
‘What’s wrong?’ Drogo demanded.
‘Guilbert went outside for a piss. Didn’t see the dog in the snow. Next moment he’s flat on his back with that hellhound at his throat.’
Drogo turned on Wayland. ‘I warned you.’
Wayland stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Nailed feet hammered on the floor and moments later the dog loped through the curtain like a creature out of myth or nightmare, its eyes sulphurous yellow, its steely hackles rimed with frost. When it saw Drogo’s threatening stance, its muzzle wrinkled in black corrugations. Wayland hissed. The dog made straight for him, lay down at his feet and began licking its paws.
Olbec held up his cup for another refill. ‘I’m not wrong, am I? The boy can enchant the beasts.’
*
Raul was waiting when Wayland left the hall. ‘Are they going to send an expedition?’ he demanded, trotting alongside. ‘Are you going on it? Is there a place for me?’
Wayland waved him away. There were too many things to think about. When Raul persisted, the dog rounded on him, grating its teeth in warning. Wayland went into his hut and Raul kicked the door behind him. ‘I thought we were friends.’
Wayland tied the goshawk to her perch and lay back on his pallet. He watched the hawk in the smoky light. She’d eaten most of the pigeon and her crop bulged. She stropped her beak on the perch, lifted one foot, extended her middle toe and delicately scratched her throat. The movement agitated the bell on one of her tail feathers. She twisted her head about to settle the contents of her crop. Her feathers relaxed and she drew one clenched foot up under a downy apron. She was asleep. Tomorrow he’d cut one stitch from each eyelid. In a week she would be feeding outdoors in daylight. Another three weeks and she would be flying free. He’d won.
Strange, Wayland thought, how quickly hunger and exhaustion mastered fear and hatred. He was neither jessed nor seeled, rarely went hungry, and could come and go as he pleased. Neither necessity nor affection bound him to the castle, yet at the end of each day, some weakness on his part made him turn his steps back towards the people he loathed. He fingered the cross at his neck. He would escape when spring came, he vowed. He would leave at the same time as the strangers, taking his own path. He blew out the lamp. Turning on his side, he grasped the dog’s ruff and wrapped it round his hand, unaware that he used to do the same with his mother’s hair.
The dog was his only tangible link with the past, a place he tried to block off. Sometimes, though, it erupted in dreams that woke him in a sweat of horror. And sometimes, like now, it rose up like a picture emerging from a dark pool.
His mother had sent him and his younger sister to gather mushrooms in the forest. He’d been fourteen, his sister ten, the dog just a clumsy overgrown pup. Three years had passed since King Harold’s defeat, but Wayland had seen his first Normans only in the last month. From a safe distance he’d watched the soldiers in their ringed armour supervising the construction of their castle on the Tyne.
The farm where he lived lay ten miles upriver, a few acres of clearing in a remnant of ancient wildwood cut by a deep ravine. There were seven in the family. His mother was English, his father a Danish freeman, the son of a Viking who’d sailed for England in the bodyguard of the great Cnut. Grandfather was still alive, a bedridden giant who called on the Norse gods and wore a Hammer of Thor amulet. Wayland had an older brother and sister, Thorkell and Hilda. His little sister was called Edith. At his mother’s insistence, all the children had been baptised, the girls taking English names, the boys Danish.
It was a good autumn for mushrooms. As Wayland picked, he could hear the rhythmic blows of his father’s axe, a sound as familiar as his heartbeat. When the basket was full, Edith said she wanted to look for a bear. Wayland knew there were no bears left in the forest. Grandfather had killed the last one himself and had one of its teeth to prove it. Wayland wasn’t convinced that the claim was true, but he liked the story and he often asked the old man to tell it. Grandpa told him other stories when his mother wasn’t around – thrilling, pagan tales about treacherous gods and monsters and the battle at the end of the world.
He found fresh deer slots and began following them to the river, the pup ranging ahead. They could hear water sliding down the ravine. The pup sat and tilted its head on one side, listening with such comic intensity that Edith laughed. The sound of the axe had stopped. Wayland thought he heard a cry. He waited for it to come again, but it didn’t. The dog whimpered.
Wayland sat his sister down under a tree and told her not to wander away or wolves would eat her up.
‘I’m not afraid of wolves. They only cross the river in winter.’
‘Trolls, then. Trolls live in the Pot.’
The Pot was the deepest pool in the ravine, a cauldron of black water walled in by dripping cliffs and overhung by trees that gripped the earth with roots like gnarled fingers. Edith looked towards it through the mossy gloom. She brushed at her cross. ‘Can the dog stay with me?’
‘You know he won’t leave my side. I’ll tell you what. While I’m gone, you can think of a name for him.’
‘I’ve already chosen one. It’s—’
‘Tell me when I get back,’ Wayland said, breaking into a run.
The pup thought it was a game and bounded ahead before crouching to spring up in mock ambush. Wayland began to feel a bit foolish. His mother would scold him for leaving Edith alone in the darkening wood.
As he approached the clearing he heard voices and the clinking of harness. He threw himself down, grabbed the pup by the scruff and wormed through the forest litter until he reached the treeline.
There was too much horror to take in at one glance. Two Norman soldiers held Hilda and his mother outside the house. Another pair had pinned his father face down over the chopping block. Thorkell lay on his back, his face a bloody mask. Then Wayland saw the mounted man at the far end of the clearing. He spurred his horse and charged, slashed down and half severed his father’s arm. Whooping, the rider galloped to the other end of the clearing, turned and pounded back. This time Wayland saw his father’s head roll off the stump and blood squirt from his neck.
His mother and sister were screaming. They were still screaming when the men dragged them into the house. Their screams grew muffled and then stopped. After a while the man who’d murdered his father came out, his face splattered with blood. He took a pitcher of water and poured it over his head. When he mounted his horse, he reeled in the saddle as if drunk. One by one the other men came out, tying up their breeches. Wayland prayed that his mother and sister would come out. After a while smoke coiled from the door. The killers didn’t leave. Flames began to lick up the thatch. The blaze grew and the Normans laughed and held out their hands to it. Even where Wayland lay he could feel the singeing gusts. The Normans left. One of them carried a deer carcass slung over his horse. Another was draped with live chickens. The others drove two cows, a horse and oxen before them.
Wayland ran towards the blaze. The heat frizzled his hair and blistered his face before it beat him back. He stood screaming as the roof dropped into the house and a ball of fire rolled into the sky. He watched the walls collapse and then he sank to the ground, his mind numbed by all he had seen.
He became aware of the dog pushing its head against his legs. His face and hands were scalded and peeling. He registered that it was dusk and remembered his sister. He tried to run, but his legs wouldn’t obey him. He reeled and tripped, staggered into trees.
The basket of mushrooms was still under the tree, but Edith was gone. He listened. There were only the sounds of the wood settling to rest. He called, softly at first, then louder. An owl shrieked. He found Edith’s trail wandering towards the gorge. The trees were thickest in this part of the wood, spreading twilight even on the sunniest days. The dog was too young and shocked to help. It sidled against him, getting under his feet, while he searched and called until it was too dark to see. He slid down with his back against a tree. A wind sprang up and rain began to spit. For a time he continued to call, his voice growing hoarse. Then he sat still, his eyes vacant, the dog pressed shivering against him as he relived one nightmare while anticipating the next.
In the dripping grey dawn he tracked his sister through a graveyard of windfallen giants along the edge of the ravine. Her trail stopped at a hole by the base of an old ash. For a moment he thought she might have fallen into an animal den. But when he peered down through the tangle of roots he saw water far below. Edith’s body floated into view, face down, turning in the current, her long blonde hair fanned about her. He climbed down and pulled her out, kissed her white face and held her tight against him. When he let go, he felt something wither and twist inside him. He removed her crucifix, threw back his head and howled at the gods or monsters that had inflicted such hideous cruelties.
From that day on he never spoke a word.
It snowed again and then froze. For a week winter held the country in a deadlock. It froze so hard that shelves of ice formed on the river-banks and trees split at night with sharp cracks. Inside the great hall the garrison huddled around the hearth like corpses in a prehistoric burial chamber. Fresh food grew short. Men’s teeth wobbled in their gums. Every day Wayland and his dog went out to check traps and snares, traipsing through the ice-encased woods like figures in a woodcut. Sometimes Raul accompanied them, his crossbow slung over his back, a knife tucked into loops at the front of his fox fur hat.
A week before Lent the wind shifted in the night and the garrison woke to find winter in retreat. Plates of ice spun down the river. By evening it had spilled over its banks and carried away one of the bridges. Next morning Hero saw an uprooted tree surging down the torrent, a hare clinging to one end of the trunk, a fox facing it at the other end.
Three days later Hero entered the hut to find Vallon lying just as he’d left him, brooding over their confinement.
Hero cleared his throat. ‘The waters are starting to subside. In a day or two conditions will be good enough for travel.’
Vallon grunted.
Hero tried again. ‘Olbec’s announced a hunt for the day after tomorrow.’
‘It isn’t the hunting season.’
‘We need the meat. There’ll be a feast in the evening. Drogo wanted you to take the field with him.’
Vallon snorted. ‘We know what quarry he’s after.’
‘Have no fear. Lady Margaret insisted that you accompany her party.’
Vallon’s eyes turned. ‘Will the Count be with her?’
Hero shook his head. ‘His wounds make it too painful to ride. He’ll stay behind and organise the festivities.’
Vallon stared off pensively for a moment, then swung his legs to the floor. ‘Tell the lady I’d be honoured to attend her.’
Before cock’s crow Wayland, with two huntsmen and a forester, left the castle to quest for a stag with at least ten tines on his antlers. The huntsmen were accompanied by lymers – big, heavyset hounds with drooping jowls and doleful expressions. Their function was to locate the stag and track it in silence to its covert. The hunt breakfast was in full swing when one of the huntsmen returned to report that they’d harboured a hart of twelve in a wood beyond the Roman wall. Gravely he uncapped his horn and rolled fumets on to the table. Drogo and his comrades passed the deer droppings about, sniffed them, rolled them between their fingers, and agreed that they belonged to no rascal but a warrantable beast.
Hero watched the hunting party sally out. Ahead went the huntsmen, leading hounds leashed in couples. Drogo led the field and
behind them rode the ladies, Margaret wrapped in furs and silks, Vallon at her side on a borrowed palfrey. His hair had been trimmed and fell in auburn waves to his shoulders. His bearing made Hero’s heart swell with pride. He waved and received a dignified acknowledgement. Last came the priest, borne along on an ox-drawn butcher’s cart, gripping the front rail like a mariner facing an oncoming storm.
The horses cantered away over the turf, throwing up green divots. Clouds sailed across a gentian sky. Snow still lay rotting in the shadows, but banks of primroses had flowered and from every thicket birds sang with pent-up energy. In the fields around the castle peasants followed the age-old rhythm of the plough. Hero closed his eyes, relishing the sun on his face, the smell of turned earth. Spring had arrived. The knot of dread in his guts relaxed. He felt an intense sense of well-being.
When the tableau had passed from sight, he returned to the guesthouse and laid out parchment and gall ink on the rough table. He dipped his quill and raised it like a wand, but the magic he expected to conjure wasn’t forthcoming. He knuckled his brow. He scratched his head. He sighed. Transferring thoughts onto parchment was no easy task. So many words to choose from, so many ways of arranging them. He sucked the end of his quill, trying to decide what rhetorical style was most appropriate for his subject.