These delights I would never know. All my hopes, my ambitions and my desires – everything I had striven for – had come to naught.
Once in a while my captors would bring me something to eat and drink. Sometimes it would be a bowl of half-warm beans mixed with some kind of smoked fish, but on the whole I considered myself lucky to receive anything more than a miserly half-cup of ale and a scrap of mouldy bread. A pair of guards would release my hands so I could eat, and they would stand over me as I did so, waiting until I’d finished before snapping the manacles back around my wrists and leaving me alone once more. Occasionally I was asleep when they came, whereupon they would kick me hard in the ribs or spit in my face to rouse me, and when they found me awake they would often taunt me by passing the dishes beneath my nose repeatedly, torturing me with the smell and the promise of food until, after what seemed like hours, they would at last unchain my hands. Such were the games that they played.
By night I bedded down upon piles of damp straw and huddled beneath the rough linen blanket they had given me. Clearly they had no wish for me to perish through cold any more than they wanted me to starve, although at the same time they weren’t going to make it comfortable for me either. The only time they freed me from my chains was when I needed to relieve myself, when they took me to the privy across the yard. Even then they kept me closely guarded, with an escort of two or sometimes three guards. Once I managed to evade them, making it as far as the stables before a pair of well-set men wrestled me to the ground. And in truth there was nowhere I could have gone. Most of the time the gates were kept closed and, so far as I could see, there was no other way in or out of the fort. Perhaps they were being over-cautious, since they did not take me to the privy after that. Instead they made me relieve myself in my small prison, so that when I lay down to sleep it was with the stench of my own piss and shit around me.
Days slipped by, each one the same, so that I quickly lost count of them. Weeks must have passed since I’d first arrived, I thought, although how many I could no longer say. I wondered if the enemy had begun their siege of Scrobbesburh, whether Fitz Osbern still held out in the castle, whether the Danish fleet had yet arrived upon these shores. From time to time I prayed, hoping that God had not forsaken me altogether, that He would still hear me and bring me some hope. In all that time, however, I never received an answer.
And so I sought refuge in my dreams, where the faces of my friends and companions could return to me and for a while at least I could believe that I was elsewhere.
I woke to the sound of raised voices outside. Men called to one another in urgent tones, though I had no way of knowing what they were saying. Mail chinked as heavy footsteps made their way around the side of the storehouse. Through the crack between the door and the frame shone the orange glow of a torch or lantern. I must have been asleep for some while, for the last I could remember it had still been day, but now it was full dark. What hour was it?
I sat up, too fast as it turned out, since straightaway I felt light-headed. Until now Mathrafal had remained quiet. This was the first time that there had been any sign of anything happening. Had Bleddyn returned from Scrobbesburh, and if he had, did that mean he was victorious or defeated?
These thoughts were running through my head when the door was flung open and a cold breeze flooded into the room. Dyfnwal stood in the doorway, his bald pate flickering with reflected torchlight. Buckled upon his waist as before was my sword-belt.
‘Time for you to go,’ he said. ‘Eadric has arrived.’
‘He’s here?’
The Welshman grunted. ‘Sooner than expected, too. He’s waiting for you.’
Wild Eadric. The man I had heard so much about in recent weeks.
Dyfnwal made way for two other men. The taller of them had in his hand a ring of keys, from which he selected one and used it to release me from my chains. For the first time in what seemed like an age both my wrists and ankles were free, though they no longer had to worry about me struggling or being able to escape. My feet had by then recovered from their march across the dyke but were not nearly as steady as they should have been. A sharp ache ran through my neck, which felt barely able to support my head.
Out in the yard were gathered close to two dozen warriors, I reckoned, each with a spear in one hand and a round painted shield in the other. At their head were the men of Bleddyn’s teulu – the ones who had brought me here – mounted and armed as if ready for war. Dogs were barking; somewhere a cockerel had been woken by the commotion and was crowing, though there was no sign yet of the approaching dawn. Nor was there any sign of Eadric, though the gates to the fort lay open. Blackness lay beyond; cloud veiled the stars and the moon so that not even the river could be seen.