‘Hlaford Tancred!’ ?dda cried out loud, raising his fist to the sky. His words were taken up by the rest of the men, until they were all chanting as if with one voice: ‘Hlaford Tancred!’
And then through the midst of the crowd, I glimpsed Leofrun. Her auburn hair fell loosely across her shoulders as I liked her to wear it, shining in the late sun. She smiled softly, and there was a tear of gladness in her eye. I left the reins of my horse for someone else to take as she rushed towards me. Taking her in my arms, I held her close.
‘You were gone so long,’ she said in French. ‘I thought—’ She stopped herself. ‘I’m glad you’re safe.’
‘Me too,’ I replied with a grin.
Her cheeks glowed. Her belly looked even more swollen than I remembered, even though we’d been gone but two days. Already she was several months with child, and I reckoned it could not be long now before her time: another couple of months at most. I was nervous, as I knew she was herself. Although I think she cared for me more than I did for her, she made me happy enough, and I did not want to lose her. She was strong both in body and in mind, with wide hips that would make the birth easier, but even so I was uneasy.
Placing one hand on her belly, and with the other wiping the tear that had rolled down her soft cheek, I kissed her.
‘Those men who came,’ she said. ‘Are they—?’
‘Yes.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them.’
She nodded, as if contemplating this fact, then closed her eyes and threw her arms around me. ‘I’m glad you’re safe.’
Before all else we buried the three who had been killed in the Welsh attack: a father and both his sons. We laid them in the ground in the same place where his wife also lay, having died of the pox last autumn. Erchembald the priest performed the rites while the villagers watched, and afterwards he spoke a few words for Lyfing, offering consolation to Nothmund the miller, to his wife Gode and to Hild, for all that it was worth. It would not bring him back to them.
While it was only right that we remembered those who had died, however, there was also reason to be happy. And so as day turned to dusk, the rest of Earnford celebrated our safe return. A great fire was built by the banks of the river, and everyone gathered around it. I had a haunch of salted beef brought down from the hall and laid out on a long trestle table, along with platters of smoked fish caught at the weir, rounds of cheese, loaves of that day’s bread, pots of honey from the beehives on my demesne, pitchers of ale and mead, casks of cider brought across from Normandy and barrels of wine from Burgundy. Thus we feasted, filling the air with our laughter and the joy of hard-earned victory.
Children chased each other around the flames, wrestled upon the ground and played in the ford, splashing water in each other’s faces, soaking their clothes and their hair. Men danced with their women as a cheerful song sounded out across the valley, led by the aged swineherd Garwulf on a kind of lyre known as a crwth, which his Welsh father had taught him how to play. His fingers darted furiously up and down the strings; with every stroke of his bow he stamped his foot upon the ground. Shortly he was joined by another man on a wooden flute, who added soft flourishes and flurries to the swineherd’s rhythms, and then someone else brought out a drum and began to beat a steady time on it. Their music rose to the heavens and I led my smiling Leofrun by the hand beneath the arches made by the others’ arms, holding her gaze all the while, looking deep into those grey-blue eyes and thinking that I did not deserve a woman so devoted and caring as she.
Ale flowed and spirits soared. But I could not keep from my mind those who were not there: the miller and his wife and their three younger children, not to mention those the Welsh had slain. As the dance quickened and men took different partners, I slipped away from Leofrun and all those people into the shadows. It had grown dark by then and so no one saw me retreat to the grassy slopes beneath the stockade. For a long while I simply sat there, swigging from the flagon I’d brought with me as I watched the flames writhing into the sky. Two of the field labourers – Odgar and R?dwulf – cast another log on to the pile, throwing up plumes of dark smoke that twisted about each other and billowed with thick clouds of sparks.