‘Without a doubt, lord.’
That night we camped within the ruins of what I guessed must once have been a Roman house, an arrow’s flight from the road. The roof-tiles had long since fallen in, but there were new beams and a layer of thatch over the largest chamber, suggesting someone had been here not long ago, and from the droppings on the floor I guessed it had been used as a barn. We sheltered in there, making a fire close by the entrance where the smoke could escape, warming ourselves beside it and watching flickering light play across the walls with their crumbling plaster and the faded images of people and wild beasts that long ago had been daubed thereon. ?dda, Galfrid, Odgar and myself took it in turns to keep watch through the night, and in the morning we followed the old road for another few miles before, without warning, the tracks veered away to the right.
‘In that direction lies St?fford,’ said the monk Wigheard, who alone among all of us had any knowledge of these parts.
St?fford. According to some of the tales that was where Bleddyn had made for following his victory at Scrobbesburh. We were growing closer. Although if these tracks were a week old as ?dda said, that suggested the battle had already been fought and won without us. Or lost, said a small voice in the back of my mind, and I tried to silence that thought, but over the hours that followed it kept returning.
To that end I kept scouting, riding from copse to copse and ridge to rain-battered ridge, crossing thickly wooded valleys in search of any sign of friend or foe, covering so many miles that by evening my stallion was growing irritable. He was called Fyrheard, which meant ‘hardened by fire’. The name, it was said, had been given to him when he was a foal, after a stray spark from a groom’s lantern had happened to set the fresh straw in the stables alight. Fortunately the same groom had also neglected to bolt the doors and the young horse had managed to escape the blaze before it consumed the building entirely, though they said he was much changed by his ordeal, and afterwards grew ever more aggressive and wilder in spirit: qualities which made for a good warhorse. I had purchased him in case Nihtfeax should ever become injured or sick, and through the winter had begun to train him to the lance and the mêlée. He had much to learn and was still lacking in the stamina that a destrier needed, but he showed promise.
Now, however, as the sun burnt low in the western sky, Fyrheard was flagging. I coaxed him on, up to the brow of the next hill, promising myself that after this we would turn back. These were not the long evenings of summer, when the light lingered for many hours after sunset; the nights in late September had a way of setting in faster than one expected. I did not trust myself to be able to find the way back to the others in full darkness.
Each step was a struggle; Fyrheard was not in the mood for climbing, but I was determined not to let him have his way and so I urged him on, following a winding deer-track up the hill until we came to the top and I could gaze out over the river plains below—
Where the corpses of men and horses lay in their dozens and their scores and their hundreds, with the shreds of banners and pennons lying blood-stained in the dirt beside them. The dying sun cast a powerful reddish glow upon everything that put me in mind of the wastes of hell as Father Erchembald sometimes described them, and the putrid stench wafting on the breeze only helped to strengthen that impression.
I descended the slope towards the plains. Small fires, long since burnt out, and the remains of tents were scattered across the valley. There had been a camp here, though whether it had belonged to the king’s men or the enemy was not easy to discern. The corpses themselves offered little clue, so disfigured were they by wounds and the depredations of the carrion beasts. But as I grew closer to what must have been the heart of the camp I spied wooden plates and drinking cups lying abandoned beside the fires, some with scraps of food still left upon them, as well as a couple of tattered cloaks stitched together from various furs such as were favoured by the Welsh. The stricken banners and pennons were not ones that I recognised, and that I took for a good sign.
That was when I noticed the women – about a dozen of them – moving close to the edge of a copse that ran along the riverbank. Their dark robes marked them out as nuns, and at first I wondered what they were doing, until I saw the wagon piled high with bodies. A great ditch had been dug in one corner of the field, into which they tossed the dead without much ceremony. Elsewhere a pair of oxen had been yoked together, but they were dragging not a plough but the rigid body of a horse. Its side had been carved open by a spear, and out of the wound trailed what was left of its innards; flies swarmed around it.