I don’t doubt that it was a more difficult decision for them than it was for me. Although I was no longer oath-bound to Robert, they still were. Already in coming here they had defied his wishes. What would he say if he discovered not only that they had taken his ship away into the north for their own ends, but then that they had joined forces with me, the murderer he had so recently cast out from his service, to pursue our own feud, our own private war?
Whether by choice or by necessity, we had taken different paths. Our loyalties, our obligations, which for so long had been the same, were now opposed. I might have nothing more to lose, but they did.
Wace gave a shrug of resignation as he glanced at Eudo, who sighed through clenched teeth. Suddenly I felt a stirring of hope.
‘We’ll do this. For Robert,’ Eudo said, by which he meant, of course, not Malet’s son but our former lord: he who had led us on so many campaigns across the length and breadth of Christendom. And now, one final time, we would fight in his name.
‘For Robert,’ Wace agreed, albeit not without some reluctance. Stern-faced, he came to clasp my hand at last. ‘You owe us. You realise that, don’t you?’
That was a phrase I’d grown all too used to hearing. ‘I know.’
I did not for a heartbeat think our task would be easy, but with the two of them by my side, we stood a far better chance than if Magnus and I were to do this by ourselves. Not for the first time it struck me how fortunate I was to have friends as faithful as they.
‘What about you?’ I called to Aubert, who had been watching on. ‘Will you join us?’
The shipmaster looked apprehensive, and I didn’t blame him. This wasn’t his battle. He had done Eudo and Wace a favour out of friendship, but the prospect of risking his lord’s prized longship on a voyage far beyond familiar shores was another thing entirely.
‘I’ll have to ask my men,’ he said. ‘They’re honour-bound to follow my orders, but I also have a responsibility towards them. Bear in mind as well that many of them didn’t even want to come this far.’
‘I understand,’ I said, and waited while he went and spoke with the members of his crew, some of whom I recognised from the last time I’d set foot on Wyvern’s deck, and several more that I didn’t. I saw lots of shaking heads and heard snorts that I took for disapproval, until one, older and more weather-worn than the others, whose name, if I remembered correctly, was Oylard, stepped forward. He began remonstrating with them, calling them cowards, saying they were unfit to call themselves Normans, and that their fathers and their grandfathers would be ashamed to see them shrink from such a challenge.
He pushed his way through the throng towards us. ‘Is it true?’ he called across from Wyvern. ‘Is it true that this Haakon was responsible for what happened at Dunholm?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told,’ I replied, raising my voice for the benefit of the others, who were watching, listening. ‘He was in the vanguard. He was the one who stormed the fastness and set fire to the mead-hall.’
Close to two thousand Normans had met their deaths that night when Eadgar and his allies had attacked. Men, women and children alike been cut down without mercy; the streets had run with their blood. No army of ours had ever suffered such a reverse on English soil. It was a humiliation that most of us would rather have forgotten, and yet how could we forget it? Even now, three entire campaigning seasons later, Northumbria remained unconquered; the king’s efforts to scour that land last winter had not made him its master nor brought the instigators of the rebellion to justice. And so the stain of that defeat lingered, while those who had inflicted it continued to live.
‘My cousin was at Dunholm,’ Oylard said as he turned to address his fellow boatmen. ‘A farrier’s apprentice, he was, no more than a boy. I later found out that he never came back. Dead at only thirteen summers old.’
They couldn’t fail to have heard about what happened that night three years ago. Many had probably heard it firsthand, from those like Eudo and Wace and myself who had been there and who had survived, although such had been the slaughter the enemy had wrought that we were few in number. No doubt Oylard was not the only one to have lost a friend or relative to the enemy’s sword at Dunholm, or at the very least knew someone who had.
One of the others, bald and thick-necked, spoke up. ‘I don’t know about you, Oylard, or any of the rest of you, but I for one won’t be risking my neck unless there’s the chance of reward at the end of it.’
‘There’ll be spoils enough to go around,’ I said. ‘From what I hear—’
‘From what you hear? What kind of an assurance is that?’
‘You have my word,’ Magnus interjected before I could answer. ‘He stole from me, as he has stolen from many others over the years. His treasure-chests brim with silver and gold, so rich has he grown profiting from the triumphs of others. I can promise that there’ll be no shortage of plunder should we succeed.’