Gradually the crowd began to return to their own campfires, and I turned back to Eudo. ‘How much do you trust these merchants?’
‘Not a lot,’ he admitted. ‘But some are more reliable than others, and we’ve been hearing much the same stories for weeks now, so there’s likely to be some truth in them.’
First the Northumbrians, then the Welsh, and now it sounded like the Danes as well. If what Eudo was saying turned out to be true, I didn’t see how we could fight them all. A shiver passed through me in spite of the warmth of the morning, and I had a hollow feeling in my stomach.
‘Not that any of this is likely to happen for some months yet,’ Eudo went on, more brightly. ‘If it happens at all. And anyway, in the meantime we have other battles to fight first.’
Other battles, other enemies. I glanced around us at the sea of tents, at the banners in all their colours fluttering as the wind rose, at the sheep and the cattle in their pens, at the chickens that some lords had brought to help feed their retinues, darting about in pursuit of the seed being thrown to them. At the many scores of men who had gathered with their swords and their shields, their spears and their helmets and their hauberks of mail, ready to test their sword-arms against the enemy.
Already it was a formidable host, and of course hundreds more would come in the days to follow as Hugues the Wolf and others responded to Fitz Osbern’s call to arms. Yet even as I gazed across the camp, I could not stop doubt from creeping into my mind. For the first time I began to wonder if it would be enough.
Nine
THE DAYS GREW hotter and tempers became ever more frayed as we waited for the rest of Fitz Osbern’s barons to respond to the summons, for the Wolf to arrive from Ceastre and Wace with him. Men always grow restive when they have nothing to do, and never was that more true than when speaking of men of the sword. Over the week that followed I could sense a growing agitation amongst our army. Almost every day fights broke out: by the wharves, on the streets, in the alehouses and even at times in the middle of the camp itself; sometimes between English and Norman but more often between Frenchmen themselves.
I often likened the March to a patchwork made from scraps of land from hundreds of different lordships, stitched together by grants made in charters and writs, by oaths and by a common desire to keep out the Welsh who threatened their lands. Such a patchwork, however, was only as strong as the threads that joined its various pieces, and since those threads were woven from words alone, they were easily broken. While many of the holdings belonged to newly endowed men like myself, who had won their lordships in the years since the invasion, by and large those who held greatest influence on the borderlands belonged to the old families of Normandy: lineages which in more than a few cases harked back as far as the days of Charlemagne, who had been king of the Franks some two and a half centuries before. They saw the newcomers as troublesome and ambitious upstarts, hungry for wealth and adventure and power, and as such not to be trusted. In return they were greeted with, if not hostility, then at the very least frosty indifference.
Now that both sides were brought together in one place, though, their petty squabbles and jealousies boiled over into open confrontation. A dozen men were killed in that week alone; on one particular morning three bodies were found floating face-down in the river, so bloated with water that their features were unrecognisable and no one was able to say who they were. Still more were injured: one man lost his hand when a brawl over a game of dice ended in swords being drawn; another was badly burnt when he was pushed into a brazier for lying with someone else’s woman; and others I had witnessed and heard of were missing ears and fingers in retribution for slights both real and imagined.