Except that it seemed Eudo had it more right than Wace, for the word from our scouts was that the enemy were abandoning the place altogether, escaping by ship down the Use and by foot and horse into the north. We learnt a fire had spread through the entire eastern quarter of the city, destroying one of the castles and the minster of St Peter, before the wind had carried the ashes and the sparks across the river, where they had settled on the thatch of the houses, leaving almost no building standing. And so, with nothing left to defend, the Danes and the ?theling had quit the place.
Still I did not quite believe it, not until the following day when we arrived at the still-smouldering ruins and I could see everything with my own eyes: the toppled, blackened timbers where the palisades and gatehouses had been; the wisps of smoke rising from the foundations of the great church and the long merchants’ houses; the mottes without their towers; the fallen-in roof of the vicomte’s palace, where I had recovered from the injuries I’d suffered in the battle at Dunholm and where I had first become indebted to the Malet family and mired in their many struggles.
Seeing how Eoferwic had been ravaged only drove the king to greater fury. The rearguard was only just catching up with the rest of us when he began organising the first of the raiding-parties: conrois of forty or fifty men that he sent both north and south of the Use with orders to harry the surrounding land, pursue those who had fled and drive them out from their hiding places, burn the storehouses and the crops in every village that they came to, seize the people’s chattels and put their animals to the sword so that the enemy could find no forage anywhere, and kill every man, woman and child of Northumbria in retribution against all those who would take up arms against him. When the king’s own chaplain protested, saying that such wanton slaughter was not God’s will, he was promptly stripped of his robes and his cross, his ankle tied by means of a rope to a horse’s harness, and then he was dragged naked and howling through the mud for all the army to see.
‘He has taken leave of his senses,’ Wace said one afternoon while we were patrolling along the riverbank immediately to the south of the city. ‘If he destroys everything of worth in this land, why have we come all this way to fight for it?’
I shot him a glance, though he knew as well as I how dangerous such words were. But apart from myself there was no one close by who might hear, and even if they did, such sentiments were already commonplace, to the extent that on the fringes of the camp men were beginning to voice them openly.
‘He wants to face the ?theling and King Sweyn in open battle,’ I said. ‘Nothing else will satisfy him. He hopes that by laying everything waste he might enrage Eadgar and his supporters enough to lure them out.’
By then it was known that they had retreated to their ships amidst the streams and the marshlands of that nook of land by the Humbre known as Heldernesse, though no one could say exactly where they were quartering. Even if they could, the king was not prepared to lead his host into such difficult country. Far better to wait until they broke out, when we might face them on ground that was more advantageous to us. That was the only part of the king’s strategy in which I could find any merit.
We followed the river downstream as it wound its way through that flat land, searching for we knew not what. Still, it was better than staying with the rest of the army, where we could only sit on our arses and wait for instructions to arrive from the king, and in the meantime entertain ourselves as bitter scuffles broke out between rival lords and their knights. They had come to fight the enemy, and since they could not do that, they fought amongst themselves instead.
As the light began to fade, we headed back. The city and the encampment outside its broken walls had just come into sight when Wace stifled a cry.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
About a quarter of a mile off, on a slight rise to the south of the city and the camp, stood a small clump of trees to which Wace directed my gaze. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One of the enemy’s scouts, do you think?’
From the branches rose a flock of some dozen or so pigeons, and amidst the trunks and the gently falling orange-gold leaves I caught the faintest trace of movement. The sun was low in the sky and though I thought I could make out the shadowy shapes of a horse and its rider, I was not sure.
‘He’s adventurous, I’ll grant him that,’ said Wace. There was precious little cover, and he was so close to our camp that I imagined he must be able to smell the bubbling cooking-pots.
‘How long do you think he’s been there?’
‘All day, maybe. He could have arrived under cover of darkness. He’s probably waiting for night to fall before leaving again.’