‘Yf,’ she said, kneeling beside me and proffering it to me. I took it in shaky hands, clasping it firmly so as not to drop it or spill any over myself. In the thin mixture I saw cabbage and leek, and some other small vegetables chopped finely so that I could not say what they were.
I raised the bowl to my lips and sipped at it, tentatively at first for it was still hot. It was not exactly what I would have called flavoursome, although perhaps had my tongue not been so fuzzy I would have considered it as good as the most lavish of feasts, for it was the first proper food to pass my lips in days.
‘Thank you,’ I said, forgetting for a moment where I was and that the chance of her being able to speak any French was slight at best.
‘Annest wyf i,’ she said, pointing at her chest. ‘Annest. Pa enw yssyd iti?’
Annest. I supposed that was her name. I was about to give her mine in return when a thought occurred to me. If Eadric and his men were still out searching for me, they might well ask folk nearby if they had heard or seen of anyone calling himself Tancred. Better in that case to give her a false name, or better still none at all. I chose the latter.
‘Seis?’ she asked, her expression earnest. That word was familiar for it meant an Englishman; one of the few bits of Welsh that I had learnt in my time on the Marches.
I shook my head. How to say I was a Frenchman, a Norman or a Breton, all of which I considered myself from time to time, was beyond my knowledge, but then that was probably just as well, for I was unlikely to have volunteered even that much anyway.
‘Estrawn,’ she said. ‘Mi ath alwaf Estrawn.’
Whatever she was trying to tell me was lost upon my ears. Certainly my inability to speak her tongue seemed to frustrate or disappoint her, or both. While I took another sip of the broth she stood abruptly and disappeared outside, calling presumably to the man who was her husband or father. The rain still fell, pooling in the rut that had been worn in the doorway. In all my travels I had never known a country as wet and as miserable as this.
Alone, I tried to summon the strength to get up. One thing was for certain: I could not stay here. Where I might go I didn’t know, only that the further it was from Mathrafal and from Eadric and Bleddyn’s men, the less likely they were to find me. Unfortunately my legs were reluctant to do as they were told, my feet uncertain of their grounding. At the same time a sudden dizziness overcame me and I staggered sideways, colliding with the chest and cursing loudly.
At once Annest came back in, with the greying man behind her. Together they helped me sit back down upon the bed, bringing me a second, tattered blanket that they wrapped around my shivering shoulders. My forehead still ached and I held my palm against it, rubbing the place where the pain seemed to be coming from to try to relieve it.
Annest fetched more wood from outside and added it to the fire-pit, building it up until I could feel the warmth of the flames upon my skin. While she did so, the man went to the chest and produced what looked like a strip of bark, grey in colour. With his knife he carved off a portion about the size of my thumb, which he pressed gently into my hand. When I looked at him questioningly, he cut another piece, which he placed in his mouth and began to chew upon, exaggerating the movements of his jaw so as to demonstrate what I was supposed to do. Finally understanding, I did as he had showed me, grimacing at the bitter taste and the rough feel of it against my teeth and tongue. Father Erchembald sometimes gave a concoction of dried willow-bark boiled in water to those who came seeking remedies for fevers, swellings and other ailments, and I supposed that this was much the same.
Having chewed upon the strip until my jaw was tired, I lay back down. Soon my headache receded, and my last thought before I drifted into sleep was that willow-bark must be good for treating that too.
They took good care of me over the couple of weeks that followed: Annest and her father, as I decided he must be, who it seemed went by the name of Cadell. To begin with I grew worse, with bouts of sickness coupled with a burning ague. In my few moments of wakefulness I struggled, and failed, to recall the last time I’d felt so ill. Within a few days, however, the sweating and the shivering had subsided and my appetite returned. The more I ate of their food and drank of their ale, the more my strength was restored to me, until after perhaps a week my fever had lifted and I was able to venture outside once more, to help gather and carry in wood for the fire and water for the pot. I was still not as fit as I would have liked, and prone to fits of coughing, but simply being on my feet did me some good.