‘Someone find the priest,’ I shouted to those who were watching. ‘Fetch him here now.’
Father Erchembald was the best-practised of anyone in the valley when it came to healing. In his house he often kept a store of herbs and draughts and other remedies. He would know what to do.
?dda groaned, and it seemed a pitiful sound from one so solidly built. His eyelids trembled and then his whole body convulsed as he spluttered. There was fresh blood on his lips and his mouth. His eyes opened, only slightly and only for a moment.
‘Lord?’ he managed to utter, as if he wasn’t quite sure it was me. He looked so weak: not at all like the man whose mere presence was often enough to make a room go silent.
I glanced up at Turold and Pons. ‘What happened?’
‘The Welshmen happened,’ Pons answered. ‘They came upon us by surprise in the next valley. We’d just turned for home when suddenly there were arrows flying at us from out of the woods. ?dda was struck and we fled straightaway.’
Another raiding-party, I suspected. ‘Do you know how many of them there were?’
‘We didn’t see, lord,’ said Turold. ‘It all happened too quickly. We didn’t stop to count. All we wanted to do was get away from there.’
?dda coughed again. His tunic stuck to his skin. I started to peel back the cloth around his wounded side, hoping to get a better look at where the arrow had struck. At my touch he recoiled, his face twisted in agony. Sensibly neither Turold nor Pons had tried to pull it free, which could have worsened his injury. Gripping it firmly, I snapped off the shaft so that only the steel head was left buried in his flesh.
I turned to Pons. ‘Bring me water.’
Much of my youth had been spent in a monastery, where the infirmarian had taught me a little about wounds and how to treat them. Among other things I knew how important it was to keep them clean to prevent them suppurating, and for that knowledge alone I was grateful, since it had saved not only others’ lives but also my own on more than one occasion.
‘Hold him still,’ I said to Turold.
I cut away part of the Englishman’s tunic with my knife so I could see his injury more clearly. The arrow had struck about halfway up his torso, just below his ribs. Thankfully it didn’t look as though it had penetrated all that deep; certainly I had seen worse. At the same time, however, I remembered losing comrades and friends to wounds which on first sight looked far less severe.
Pons returned with a pail of water and also a scrap of cloth, which I soaked and then pressed to the stableman’s wound, trying to dab away some of the blood and the dirt which had congealed around the gash. ?dda tried to pull away but Turold kept a firm hold on his shoulder, pinning him down until I’d cleared away as much of the blood as I could, though even as I did so I saw that more was flowing, dark and warm, clinging thickly to my fingers.
‘How is he?’ called a voice from behind, and I turned my head to see the stout figure of Father Erchembald hustling towards us.
‘Not good,’ I said and got to my feet, making way for him to have a closer look.
He knelt down and took the cloth from me, wringing it out and pressing it to the side of the big Englishman, trying to staunch the bleeding, before wrapping it around his torso to make a kind of bandage.
‘What do we do?’ I asked.
The priest rose to his feet. ‘First we need to get him back to my house,’ he replied. ‘I can’t do anything for him here.’
I didn’t need to be told twice. ‘Come on,’ I said to Turold. ‘Help me carry him.’
?dda was not a small man by any means, but even so he was heavier than I had expected, and straightaway I felt the strain upon my shoulders and back. Together, though, we managed to lift him up. He was barely conscious; there was no question of him being able to walk even with our help, and so we staggered forward across the yard and out of the gates, with Robert and the rest of my knights making sure that the villagers stayed out of our way. Some of Robert’s men must have heard the noise and had left their horses while they tried to find out what was happening, but someone else would have to tell them, for at that moment I was thinking only about getting ?dda to the priest’s house.
It was less than a hundred paces down the cart-track, but it felt much further. Erchembald was waiting when we arrived, with a stool beside him and an open box at his feet, inside which were all the implements leech-doctors use to weigh and crush and mix different remedies: pewter spoons, pestles made of bone and steel spatulas. He gestured towards a bed with a mattress of straw that stood against the wall on the other side of the room.
‘Lay him down there,’ he said.
I gritted my teeth. Turold and I managed to haul the stableman’s limp form across the room and on to the mattress. He groaned, and this time he sounded even weaker than before.