‘You don’t need to say anything,’ she said, cutting me off. Perhaps she guessed what I was about to say. ‘No matter what once passed between us, I understand that it cannot be. I accept that.’
She smiled gently as if to show that she felt no ill will towards me, but her eyes betrayed her pain. I wished there were some words of solace I could offer, some way of easing the hurt in her heart, but knew that anything I tried to say would only make things more difficult, and so I could only smile back.
At least after all this time we understood one another, and that, I supposed, was something.
Rather than kill Wild Eadric we brought him back with us as our hostage. No sooner had we arrived back at Eoferwic than Berengar as the leader of the expedition, together with Robert as the most senior lord among us, took the Englishman to King Guillaume’s pavilion to present him in person. The man that Byrhtwald had once described to me as the most unrelenting, cunning and dangerous man I would meet now trembled with dread as he was led away. As one of the rebels’ leaders, he had been responsible for the deaths of many Frenchmen in the years since the invasion. I wondered what his fate would be.
At the same time I sought out leech-doctors to tend to Malet and to Wace, whose injury was more serious than at first I’d thought. The same sword that had opened the gash in his side had also smashed more than one of his ribs, driving fragments of bone into his chest, and every breath he took seemed laboured.
‘He’ll survive,’ said Father Erchembald, who was the first to see to him. He sounded confident, and I took that for a good sign. ‘He may not be able to fight quite as well as before, but he will live.’
Indeed over the next few days Wace began to recover. He remained in considerable pain, however, and weaker than I had ever known him; while he could walk and even with some difficulty manage to ride a horse, anything more strenuous was beyond him.
‘I shouldn’t have expected you to come with me,’ I said when next I saw him. ‘I should never have asked that of you.’
‘I knew it would be dangerous,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘If you were going, though, then so were we. Eudo and I would never have let you go alone. Not after everything we’ve been through. I only hoped that if anyone was to fall along the way, it wouldn’t be me.’
As did we all. No man ever knows whether any given fight will be his last. All he can do is pray, and trust in his resolve and his skill at arms to see him through.
‘I don’t blame you for what happened, Tancred,’ he said. ‘And I promise you’ll see me wielding a sword and shield again before long.’
So it proved over the weeks to follow as his strength returned, although not entirely. He was slower on his feet than he had been, and more tentative in his sword-strokes, but that was only to be expected and in spite of that he kept in good spirits as October passed into November, and bright autumn faded into biting winter.