‘I was hoping you wouldn’t,’ I replied.
‘Are you going to let us come aboard, then?’ Wace asked. ‘Or are you and your new friends going to keep waving your weapons at us until we all perish of old age?’
‘That depends,’ I said, although what I meant by that exactly, I wasn’t sure.
‘On what?’
They were my two oldest and most loyal friends in all the world, and I wasn’t about to take up arms against them. Unable to flee and unwilling to fight. What choices did that leave us with?
‘Is Robert with you?’ I asked, glancing along the length of their ship, looking for him. If he was there, however, he wasn’t showing his face, which was probably as well. As hard as I’d tried to bury my anger in the past few weeks, I still hadn’t forgiven him for driving me from Earnford, from the lands that I had striven hard first to earn and then to defend.
‘No,’ Eudo said. ‘We came alone.’
‘He sent you, did he?’
‘All this way? What makes you think he would do that?’
Little more than a couple of oar’s lengths separated Nihtegesa and Wyvern now. ‘To take me back to Heia, so that he can further humiliate me,’ I said bitterly. ‘Has he not inflicted enough punishment on me already?’
‘Robert hasn’t forgiven you for what you did,’ said Wace. ‘He’s angrier now than he was then, too, since with you being gone, he’s the one who’s had to pay the blood-price to Guibert’s kin. But no, he didn’t send us.’
‘If he didn’t,’ I asked, ‘then what are you doing here, and in his ship?’
‘If you’ll tell your friends to sheathe their blades and let us come across, then we’ll tell you. We don’t want a fight any more than you do.’
‘If you want to come aboard, you talk to me, not him,’ Magnus called out in French. ‘I understand well enough what you’re saying, so don’t think that I don’t. This is my ship. I alone decide who’s allowed to tread her decks. No one else.’
‘And who are you?’ Eudo asked.
‘Magnus,’ he replied, not daring to give his full name to them as he had to me, and then, for want of anything else to say, added, ‘This is Nihtegesa.’
‘Order your men to lay down their weapons, Magnus, and I promise you there won’t be any blood spilt this day.’
He seemed to consider this for a few moments. He signalled to me and I jostled my way past his sweat-reeking huscarls towards him.
‘When you said you know these people,’ he said, keeping his voice low so that only he and I could hear, ‘does that mean you trust them?’
‘With my life,’ I replied. ‘And I know that they don’t make promises lightly. If they say there’ll be no bloodshed, they mean it.’
His eyes were hard, his expression stony. ‘Before I met you I’d almost begun to believe that I’d never have to lay eyes upon a Frenchman again. Now it seems that wherever I go I find myself plagued by your kind.’
‘Do we have an answer, then?’ Wace called.
Magnus let out an exasperated sigh and returned to the gunwale. ‘Do I have much choice?’ he shouted back with the weariness of one who was well used to defeat.
‘You get to choose whether you want to live or die,’ Eudo said. ‘Is that choice enough for you?’
When the question was put to him that way, there was really only one answer the Englishman could give. Reluctantly he bade his retainers sheathe their swords and put down their spears and axes, while Nihtegesa and Wyvern steered closer to one another. The crews on both sides threw across coils of rope, which they used to lash them together. Timber thudded and scraped against timber as the two hulls met, and first Wace and then Eudo came aboard, both of them accompanied by their household knights.
‘So,’ I said, not even caring to greet them properly. ‘Now that you’ve travelled the length of Britain to hunt me down, perhaps you’ll tell me what it is you want.’
Twenty-three
AND SO THEY did, and it was exactly as I’d thought. They wanted me to return to England with them. ‘I thought you said Robert was still angry,’ I said. ‘That he hadn’t yet forgiven me.’
‘He is, and he hasn’t,’ said Wace. ‘You don’t know the storm you’ve stirred up. It’s not just that Robert’s been forced to pay the blood-price to Guibert’s widow; many of his vassals are saying he should have been quicker to act, and more severe in his punishment. They say he should never have allowed you to flee Heia, let alone England.’
‘You think that’s going to encourage me to come back with you?’ I scoffed.