‘Ignore me if you wish, for I am only the bearer of news. Whether you choose to heed it or not is none of my concern. But let it be known that I have never sold you an untruth.’
I wasn’t so sure of that, and I was even less convinced by his rumours of a Welsh host gathering. Nevertheless I kept quiet, and talk soon moved on to other things. Of the rebels in the north or the Danes across the sea, Byrhtwald had nothing to relate. That worried me, for the less we heard, the more I began to wonder if Serlo had been right: if perhaps the enemy were biding their time as they gathered their forces for a bigger assault. Something was afoot, even if we did not yet know what.
Until the enemy showed themselves, though, we could do nothing. Nothing except wait, and that was the part of the warrior’s life I had always liked least. In the heat of the mêlée, with the clash of blades all around, the crash of shield-bosses ringing in one’s ears, there was no time for fear or doubt, but the hours and days before a battle were when those things crept into one’s mind. Every man who made his living by the sword felt the same, no matter how seasoned he was, how many campaigns he had fought or how many men he had killed. With every day that went by I grew ever more restless.
As it happened we didn’t have long to wait. By then just over a month had passed since the Welsh raid, though somehow it felt longer. Already the crops were growing tall in the fields, ripening under the summer sun, while new houses of wattle and cob were being built not far from where the old ones had been razed.
On the day that the news came, Pons and Turold had gone scouting with ?dda while I remained in Earnford, hearing the villagers’ grievances with one another and passing judgment. One of the swineherd’s boars had escaped its pen, knocked over his neighbour’s water-butt and uprooted half the vegetables in the garden behind his cottage, and for that he was to pay two piglets to the injured party. Gode the miller’s wife had been caught collecting armfuls of sticks and fallen timber from the woods without my permission, and she was forced to surrender the lot as well as give me three sacks of her finest flour. Since Lyfing’s death she and her husband, Nothmund, had been hard worked, having added their son’s share of the burden to their own. She had never been able to bear another child, for reasons that neither they nor Father Erchembald, who knew something of the various ailments that afflicted people, could fathom. Lyfing’s death had left them distraught and tired and desperate, especially as the dry weather continued and the river ran low, which meant that there were days when the flow was not enough to turn the mill-wheel. But none of that excused what she had done, and so justice had to be dispensed.
In the usual course of affairs much of this would have been left to my steward, Alberic, except that he had fled my service in the week before Easter. A boor of a man whom I had never taken to, he was guilty of having while drunk begun a brawl with one of the village men whose daughter he’d taken a fancy to. After beating the father to the ground and leaving him for dead, Alberic took one of my best stallions and as much silver as he could carry, riding away before anyone could stop him. That was the last that anyone had seen of him. We’d sent word out to the towns and markets nearby seeking his arrest, but he had never been caught. As a result his lands became forfeit to me and his tearful wife was forced to take another husband, but I had not yet found anyone to replace him as steward. And so the business of the manorial court was left to me.
It was late that afternoon when the horsemen, some two dozen or so in number, were first spotted in the distance. Their banner was divided into alternating stripes of black and yellow, and the yellow was trimmed with golden thread that caught the light. Those colours I knew well, for not so long ago I had fought under them myself. They were the colours of the Malet family, and of Robert, my lord. He was rarely seen in these parts; most of his estates lay on the other side of this island, in the shire of Suthfolc, and most of his time was spent there or else in Normandy, at his family home of Graville. Which meant that it was something of a surprise to find the black and gold flying there in the valley of Earnford that summer’s evening.