‘Yes, I thought this was supposed to be your story,’ Oslac mutters.
‘I was serving in the household guard of my lord, Cynehelm,’ Beorn says. ‘He was no one of any particular standing or wealth, just a merchant who’d prospered through many years’ trading, until he’d earned the rights and rank of a thegn. He had a manor a short way downriver of Snotingeham, where we spent our winters between sea voyages, at least until it was burned by the Normans and his lands stolen from him while we were overseas. When we returned from our travels we found our home gone and our wives and children too. Some slain, we were told; the rest taken away to be sold at far-off markets. After that he vowed to take up arms until not a single Frenchman remained this side of the Narrow Sea, and the rest of us joined him.’
‘You had a wife?’ Merewyn asks.
‘I did. Ingeborg, her name was. More beautiful than any creature I’ve ever seen, before or since. Kind in spirit, although stern when she had a mind to be.’
‘Was she killed by the Normans?’
‘No, she wasn’t killed, although many were. She left this world three years ago. She was charged by a bull that had escaped his field while she was out milking. Her ribs were crushed and both her legs broken. She died soon after.’
He speaks the words, Tova thinks, offhandedly, without any feeling behind them, like he has said the same thing many times before and has grown tired of repeating it. If she was being unkind, she might say he’d rehearsed it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Merewyn says.
Beorn begins again: ‘As I was saying—’
‘Wait,’ says Oslac before he can go on. ‘You said some folk had been taken away to be sold. The Normans don’t keep or sell slaves.’
‘And what would you know of it?’
Oslac shrugs. ‘It’s what I’ve been told. Their bishops forbid it.’
‘He’s right,’ Guthred says. ‘I remember hearing that the dean once entertained a monk from France who happened to stop at Rypum overnight on his way to Lindisfarena. He denounced the dean for keeping so many unfree labourers to work the canonry’s lands, especially when he and his fellow priests lived in such luxury. The monk grew quite angry, I heard, and said that they weren’t fit to call themselves men of God.’
‘Well, you weren’t there,’ Beorn says. ‘I was. That’s what I saw, and what I heard.’
‘Maybe you were misinformed,’ Oslac suggests, ‘because if what you say is true it couldn’t have been the Normans who burned your lord’s manor.’
‘Or maybe you’re the one who was misinformed. Have you thought about that? Because that’s what happened. Now, are you going to let me carry on with my story?’
The younger man scowls but says nothing, and that’s probably just as well.
*
When the rebellion crumbled, it crumbled quickly. After the Danes, the next to abandon the cause were the swords-for-hire who had flocked from across these isles to the ?theling’s banner. Once they realised the campaign was stalling and there would be no easy plunder, they took to their ships and sailed back to Orkaneya, the Suthreyjar, Mann and Yrland and wherever else they’d come from. Not long after that a number of the leading thegns began to slip away, some to renew their submission to the king and plead his forgiveness, others to skulk back to their manors, seeking the comforts of the hearth fire and the mead cup.
No one worried too much about them. Most of us were glad to see the back of weak-willed men who had no stomach for a winter campaign, men who didn’t deserve to call themselves warriors. But the rot had taken hold, and now it spread to the heartwood.
Maybe Eadgar had already sensed the inevitable. Maybe he was thinking that the longer he held out and the more of his spearmen and fyrdmen deserted him, the closer the Normans grew to overcoming us entirely. Maybe he feared what might happen if he fell into their hands.
I don’t know. None of us knew. The princeling kept his own counsel. He didn’t let anyone into his chamber who wasn’t one of his trusted retainers or advisers. Even men like Earl Gospatric, without whom he’d never have got as far as he had, were no longer welcome.
In the end the rebellion was finished by a rumour. The days were growing short and winter was almost upon us when one afternoon a story spread through the camp that the enemy were on their way. Their entire army. Thousands of Normans. They knew we were weakened, and now they were coming in force, only a few hours away from destroying us utterly.