TALL REED-BANKS SLID by under starless skies. A thick layer of cloud had come across that the waning moon’s milky light could barely penetrate, which made it all the easier for us to slip unnoticed through the shadows. A faint drizzle hung in the air and I felt its cold touch upon my face. All was still save for a gentle splash as I let the punting-pole slip into the black water, felt it strike the riverbed, pushed against the sucking mud and loose stones and heaved it out again, ready for the next stroke. My arms had grown heavy, my shoulders were aching, and I was starting to wonder whether this had been such a wise idea after all. Many miles of pasture and fen lay between us and the rest of the king’s army at Brandune, and I reckoned we couldn’t be far from Elyg itself.
I glanced at our guide, Baudri, who crouched by the prow of our small boat. A brusque man in his middle years, he was one of the king’s scouts: indeed one of the best, if the rumours were right, with sharp eyes and hearing and a keen awareness of strategy. We were relying on his knowledge of the main river-passages to bring us as close as possible to the rebel stronghold. I wasn’t planning to set foot on its shores, not this night, at any rate. What I had in mind was rather different. I only hoped that in the dark and with this mist surrounding us Baudri could still find his way, and that we didn’t end up wandering into an enemy patrol. Certainly he didn’t seem troubled, and I took that for a good sign. Nevertheless, I kept a close eye on each riverbank, expecting at any moment to spy the shadows of foemen following us, watching, or else to hear a sudden whistle of air as clusters of steel-tipped shafts flew from out of the gloom. But the enemy did not show themselves, nor were any arrows loosed upon us, and so I had to assume that we hadn’t been seen.
God was with us.
‘Remind me, lord,’ said Pons. ‘What are we doing here?’
I shot him a reproachful look. He was still angry at the loss of his destrier, which I could well understand, although he would do better to save that anger for use against the enemy, rather than turn it upon his friends.
‘We’re here because Robert ordered it,’ I replied sternly.
‘Because you suggested it, you mean,’ Eudo said. ‘Trust you to say something. If it weren’t for you, we could all be asleep in our tents right now. I could be tumbling with my Sewenna. Have I told you about her?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. He’d hardly stopped talking about her in the last two months, although both Wace and I considered her rather plain. Eudo’s eye for women tended to be less discriminating than those of most men. ‘Now, quiet.’
Eudo returned to keeping a lookout, while I passed the punting-pole to Serlo, whose arms were fresher than mine. Sitting down in the damp bilge where the silt-laden water soaked into my braies, I took up one of the paddles to steer us closer to the bank where we would be less easily seen, and hoped that Wace and Hamo in the two boats behind us did likewise. For my plan to work we would need to draw the enemy’s attention, but not yet. Not until our trap was set. And so we carried on, making our way up one of the many creeks and channels that I hoped would take us a little closer to the Isle.
‘I’m going to marry her,’ Eudo said suddenly, breaking the stillness, and I realised his mind was still on Sewenna.
‘You’re a fool,’ I said. ‘You’ve barely known her half a year.’
Nor was she the first he’d become besotted with of late. Before Sewenna his heart had been pledged to an English slave-woman named Censwith, who had served in a bawdy house in Sudwerca and who had died of a fever before he could buy her freedom. She’d been pretty, though, whereas the latest object of his affections had a face like a sow’s arse. She was young, probably no more than sixteen summers old, fierce in temper and lacking in humour. Why he had brought her with him on campaign I could not work out, especially since he could have had his pick from more than a hundred camp-followers, any one of whom would have made a better match for him.
‘She makes me happy,’ Eudo said. ‘What’s wrong with that? Besides, you weren’t with Oswynn for much longer than six months. Have you given up looking for her yet?’
‘No,’ I replied, and felt slightly embarrassed to admit it, for I knew what he would probably say. ‘I haven’t.’
Oswynn was my woman, or had been. Dark, beautiful, wild Oswynn, with her inviting eyes and her hair, the colour of pitch, falling loosely and unbound to her breasts, as I liked her to wear it. I had cared for her more than any other woman before or since: more, indeed, than I ever dared admit to myself at the time. Even though she was English and of low birth, the daughter of a village blacksmith, and even though we could speak only a few phrases in each other’s tongue, and even though our time together had been short, nevertheless I had loved her.
She had first been taken from me that fateful winter’s night at Dunholm, when the Northumbrians had ambushed us: the same night that my former lord, Robert de Commines, was murdered, burnt to death in the mead-hall. For over a year I’d thought her dead, but then at Beferlic last autumn I had glimpsed her alive and apparently well, as beautiful as I remembered, albeit a captive of one of the enemy’s leaders.