Authors: F J Atkinson
They had been travelling for three hours when they came upon
the clearing. Here, bracken had colonised most of the area and offered little opportunity for the growth of other vegetation. The ponies had made slow but steady progress, and Egbert had fallen to the rear of the line of riders for the first time that morning, leaving a man named Cerdic at the front.
Cerdi
c was one of the three who had chased Martha and Simon into the forest. The lambasting he had received from Osric, as well as the enforced journey into the deep woods, had left him in a dejected and morose mood, and he had spoken to few of his companions since leaving the village. As he looked ahead, a movement caught his eye, alerting him to a man dropping to the ground with a small girl. He was about to inform the others when Dominic’s arrow hit him in the hollow of his neck, causing him to fall backwards and dead over his pony. Withred, who was directly behind, almost trampled Cerdic’s body as it hit the ground.
Egbert, seeing Cerdic fall, rode quickly to the front to see what was going on. The other men looked about the glade nervously, expecting to come under fire again. Egbert straightened after examining Cerdic, and urgently started to give out orders.
‘He’s dead, and killed by one man,’ he assessed, ‘otherwise there would’ve been more arrows. Withred take three men to search that corner of the lea, the rest of you come with me.’
The men were about to start their search when a piercing howl
ing froze them rigid. Looking over to the noise, they saw Dominic’s wolf head hat staring at them from behind a bank of bracken, sixty paces away.
One of the men, a stringy warrior named
Aelred, blanched at the sight. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he quavered, ‘the wolf God would have us pay for our deeds.’
Many of the men began to nod and murmur agreement as they gathered in a protective huddle.
Again, the blood-curdling howl came, but this time the man showed himself to the group and released another arrow. Aelred fell, hit in the left cheek, the arrow emerging through the back of his head.
Egbert looked down, astonished, at the dead
man, and immediately began to chivvy and slap the men out of their torpor as he realised what was happening. ‘That’s no wolf God you fucking rat brains—it’s a fucking wild man. Get on your ponies and deal with him NOW!’ He turned to Tomas. ‘Bring my mount now you little shit, and quickly before I forget my pledge to Osric!’
Egbert mounted, and galloped across the glade. He entered the thickets near to where they had seen Dominic.
‘See, there is his bolt hole. Dismount! The ponies will not go through the thorns so we must follow him on foot.’ He waved two of the men past him. ‘You two blockheads go ahead and hack a way through.’
Left alone in the clearing, Tomas once again considered his chances of escaping. He had come close to a
beating the previous night and knew it was a matter of time before the men vented their frustrations upon him. An unsuccessful pursuit of the wolf-man would almost certainly mean that a furious Egbert, regardless of Withred’s earlier warning, would hammer him.
He finally made up his mind when he saw the man in the wolf’s head hat return to the glade and run over to the rock face that reared up on its eastern side. Two other figures emerged from the pile of bracken that lay at the foot of the cliff, and the wolf-man, after conversing hurriedly with them, picked up the girl and ran into the forest with the other man running behind.
Knowing he had very little time to make up his mind, he decided to follow the departing figures and take his chance with them. If they were enemies of Egbert’s group, they stood a good chance of being friendly to him. The noise of the Barbarians in the wood as they shouted to each other finally spurred him into action. He ran into the forest following the small group, just as Egbert and some of the men entered the clearing. Quickly, he melted into the cover of the trees.
He kept a respectful distance behind the others, not wishing to reveal himself in the heat of the pursuit, knowing that the people ahead would
have no idea if he was friend or foe. After shadowing them for a short while, they abruptly stopped and he was compelled to hide behind a low shrub. He watched as they jumped into a hole beside a fallen tree.
He was in a colony of beech that had little undergrowth.
He looked frantically around, aware that there were few other places to hide if Egbert’s men were to come upon him now. His dismay deepened when he heard the sound of approaching riders—the noise sending him into a panic as he raced from tree to tree, cursing their scarcity in this part of the forest.
The oncoming crescendo from the riders told him his capture was imminent and unavoidable.
As he looked around him, close to panic, he saw that dead leaves filled one of the nearby hollows. Scrambling down into the depression, he was relieved to find that the leaf litter was at least an arms length in depth. He dragged a large scoop of leaves to one side, then jumped into the resulting hollow and roughly dragged the pile over him.
His
disappearance was barely in time as he heard the sound of voices alarmingly close to him. Only muffled snatches of conversation came through to him under the leaves, but he heard his name mentioned when Egbert called to the scattered members of his group to rally to him at once.
To his horror
, he realised they had broken off their search for the men and girl.
They were now looking for him!
He heard rustling around him as some of the men jumped into the hollow
They knew he was under the leaves!
Sensing that his discovery, by either wading feet or thrusting spear, was imminent, he prepared himself for capture. Again, a shouting came from above, and this time the volume was such that Tomas had no difficulty in understanding what was occurring.
It was Egbert
—his tone frenzied. He stood on the rim of the hollow, and pointed to the inner woods then looked towards the nearest man. ‘Eadmund, you stay here and find the boy, the rest of you come with me. Look who walks in the woods this day.’
After spending their first full night in the forest, Simon and Martha made good progress along the bank of the stream in the valley bottom. Simon seemed to be familiar with the surrounding woodland, but after a while, he stopped and sat on a rock beside the stream.
Concerned, Martha sat beside him. She was very fond of the old man. He had been a respected and popular figure in their village, but she was aware that he had lived a long life and that he must now be feeling his age. ‘It’s a good idea not pushing it too fast,’ she said. ‘I keep forgetting that many years separate our ages.’
Simon looked at Martha
and paused, then laughed for the first time since the raid. ‘You’ve a fair tongue on you lass … but no, it’s not old age, but uncertainty that persuaded me to sit down—I just need to think. I thought I knew this part of the forest, but I’ve slept a good few nights since I was last here.’ After a while, he looked up, and then looked at the stream. He slapped his knees and stood up. ‘We can do no worse than follow the water,’ he said. ‘It must lead to the track eventually.’
The
ir route beside the stream was overgrown, and in some places the vegetation was thick enough to force them to walk knee-high in the brown swirling water. By mid afternoon both of them had had enough and they sat down on a grassy bank by the streamside. They rested a while and drank from a clear brook that ran into the murky flow.
After their rest, they continued in the same manner until they came to a natural clearing in the trees where the ground fell away and the stream took a tumbling route down the incline before them. It provided them with a panoramic view of the forest, and for the first time Martha was aware of its enormity. Away to her right was the direction they had come from, and she could see a definite end to the line of trees where the cleared, arable land lay. She judged that they were now three or four miles into the forest’s interior. The trees entirely covered the rest of the land before them.
Turning to Simon, she was barely able to raise her voice above a whisper. ‘
How
are we supposed to get through that? There seems to be no end to it.’
Simon pointed to a linear slash that ran through the trees.
‘See that line there—that’s how we’ll get through. It has to be the track we’ve been looking for. What we can see down there proves we were right to follow the water course.’
They continued down the grassy hillside alongside the stream, grateful of the brief respite from the claustrophobic
gloom of the forest. Suddenly, Martha clutched Simon’s forearm. Looking towards her, he saw that she stared into the distance. Ahead of them, the resuming tree line indicated that their easy going was about to end, but something else had alarmed Martha. Through a rare gap in the trees, half a mile away, the bright sunshine was reflecting off what could only be metal, and this meant only one thing: the helmets or chainmail of unknown men.
Simon was confident that the group ahead could not see them, but signalled for Martha to kneel low to the ground after his example. ‘It seems we’ve company in this vastness girl—looks like a group of riders to me. We must really have maddened them if so many chase us.’ He considered this for a moment then shook his head. ‘No, they’re here for a something else, not for us. They’re probably looking for more land and people to raid.’
‘Then all the more urgent is our need to get before them,’ said Martha. ‘Our people need to be warned so they can prepare, even if it means risking our own lives.’
‘No haste today though,’ said Simon. ‘We need to let whoever is ahead put some miles between us; once we get into the trees again we must rest for the night.’
They spent the night
absent of rest, cold and hungry in a makeshift shelter, and at first light the next day they followed the descending stream to enter the forest.
Their discomfort of the previous night had done little to help their cause and they
tired quickly whilst still early into their trek—their progress becoming more hesitant and weary with every mile.
It was just after mid-day when they found the apple tree. It was not the native crab apple, but a different variety that owed its existence to a legionnaires discarded apple core many decades before. Its fruit were plump and ripening, and the tree swayed gently in the breeze as they approached it. It provided them with their first food for two days, and they sat in a shaft of warm sunlight
and ate their fill of the welcomed crop.
‘If ever a treat came from heaven at a better time then it must indeed have been welcomed by those who received it,’ said Simon as he threw a core into the pile before them. ‘The track must be near now; I reckon this tree is an accident created by a hungry Roman. Maybe he left the track to relieve himself after eating his apple. Looks like he then fertilized it.’
Martha laughed aloud
at the vision created by Simon—the first time
she
had laughed since the raid. The sound was a sweet melody to Simon’s ears and he could not help but laugh with her. They both laughed long and loud as the tensions of the last two days seeped out of their very pores.
After they had composed themselves, Simon scooped many of the wind-fallen apples into the bundle he carried. Martha smiled at Simon as he secured the bundle over his shoulders and was about to tell him what a fine pack pony he made, when the smile froze on her face as she saw a man, fifty yards away, pointing towards her.
As she watched, she observed more men gathering beside him. She grabbed Simon by the hand and pulled him to his feet. ‘Run!’ she screamed. ‘They’ve seen us! Quick, we must get away!’
Simon looked with despair at the approaching men but
didn’t move. He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s no use. It’s too late. There’s nowhere to hide and we can’t outrun them. There’s nothing we can do now.’
The men moved quickly, and
soon a laughing and mocking rabble surrounded them. She recognised one of the men as the fat leader of the raiders, and realised that their lives would soon be over. She knew there would be no mercy with him. His delight at slaughter and rape in the village had been beyond her comprehension. He was a monster, pure and simple.
Egbert spat in her face as he pulled her towards him, then slapped her hard across her head, knocking her to the ground. ‘The cause of my fucking hardship,’ he said, his voice quivering with rage. ‘I’ll take great delight in teaching
you
a lesson!’ As he loosened his tunic, he cast a mocking glance at Simon. ‘And who’s this that attends you, whore? An old cunt long overdue the grave by the look of him. But first things first. I’ll see to him at once.’
He beckoned impatiently to one of the men to give him his ax, and then walked over to Simon who was crouching on the ground looking up at him. Egbert turned laughing at the men.
‘See how the old rooster glares at me in protection of his hen.’ He cupped Simon’s chin in his hand and leaned close enough for Simon to smell his sour breath as he sneered into his face. ‘You’ve done well to survive the years, old one, but if you could do me the service of stretching out your scrawny neck so that I can remove your head with one swipe, I’ll be forever in your service.’ As Egbert stepped back a pace to deliver his blow, Simon merely looked up at him, unable to understand his Germanic tongue. Egbert looked at the men near to him and challenged them to a wager. ‘Who will bet a sheepskin bedroll that I can not remove the old goat’s head with one swipe?’