There’s no sign of its owners either. Not until they venture another hundred paces along the rutted track and they see the body lying in the dirt. His face is buried in the mud; his white-grey hair is a bloody, tangled mess where a blade of some sort has felled him.
She ought to be sickened, she knows. But she isn’t. In the last few days she must have seen almost every way there is of killing a man. Now there’s nothing more that can shock her. She crouches down beside the old man. Tentatively she reaches for his hand, which is dry and wrinkled. Stiff. He’s older than Guthred, she reckons. Maybe even as old as Thorvald.
‘Cold,’ she says under her breath. She lets the man’s fingers fall from her grasp with a shudder.
Beorn glances about again, quickly. Is it just her imagination or has everything suddenly gone still?
‘No,’ says Guthred from a short way further up the track. ‘Oh no. Oh Lord.’
He’s kneeling down by the side of what looks like another body. He’s sobbing as he throws his arms around its neck and presses his cheek against the figure’s chest.
‘No, no, no, no,’ he says through his tears.
They gather around him but he doesn’t look up. His face is buried in the boy’s bloodstained cloak and tunic. A boy, not a man. Twelve years old perhaps, no more than that. His face and neck are covered in red blotches and tiny yellow pustules. He lies on his back, eyes open but unseeing.
‘I’m so sorry, Hedda,’ says Guthred. ‘For everything. I failed you. Please, God, forgive me.’
That name. Hedda. Wasn’t one of his students called Hedda? It can’t be, surely. What is he doing here, this far from Rypum?
‘Look,’ says Beorn. ‘There are more of them.’
He’s found the others: Hedda’s fellow students. She recognises them at once, for they’re just as Guthred described them. They managed to get a little further before they too were struck down. As soon as they can prise the distraught priest away from Hedda’s limp body, they lead him first to the chubby-faced and fat-fingered Wiglaf, and then to Plegmund: taller, dark-haired, with thick eyebrows that meet in the middle.
On seeing them the priest’s legs give way. Fresh floods of tears break forth, until eventually he has no more to give. He can barely stand, barely even raise his head.
In all there are eight bodies: the three students, the old man, whom Guthred says was Father Osbert, and four others – Dean Deorwald and three more of the Rypum canons. Guthred says there used to be ten of them, or there were when he last lived there. Something must have happened to the others. God only knows what.
‘They were trying to get north, like us,’ the priest says, sniffing. His eyes are puffy and he looks ready to collapse at any moment. He takes deep breaths. ‘That’s all they were doing. Trying to escape the Normans, to take the minster’s treasures somewhere they’d be safe. For that he killed them. He killed all of them.’
*
She is afraid. Truly afraid, like never before.
She has spent these last few days glancing over her shoulder, jumping at the slightest noise, tensing whenever birds flock up from a distant thicket, worrying whether that glint of light could be a spear point. But that was a different sort of fear, a constant, simmering, back-of-her-mind fear. In all that time she never felt as she feels now: that death could come at any moment, without warning.
Their enemies are close. She knows it. Beorn knows it. They all know it. No one says it, but they do.
How much more of this she can endure, she isn’t sure. They can’t keep running for ever. They can’t live like this, on whatever scraps of food they can scavenge, in clothes that aren’t even their own, sleeping on the hard ground, in tents or amid the hay in half-ruined laithes. They’ve been lucky so far, but for how much longer?
‘I can’t do this,’ she says to Merewyn the next time they’re alone. ‘I can’t.’
‘We have to.’
‘What’s the point? We’re going to die, aren’t we? Maybe it won’t be today or tomorrow, but it’s going to happen.’
‘We’re not going to die. Everything will be all right.’
Tova feels like she could burst. ‘You keep saying that! You keep saying it like you know it, but you don’t. You don’t know it at all.’
‘But we’re so close now. Another day or two and we’ll be there, you’ll see.’
Hagustaldesham, she thinks bitterly. It seems as far away now as it ever did. And even if we do manage to get there, what will we find? There’ll be no friends and kin to give us comfort. No hall and hearth fire and music and revels. Only sorrow.
‘What about afterwards?’ she asks her lady. ‘When the Normans have finally gone, what will we do then?’
‘We’ll work that out when the time comes. But we can’t abandon hope yet, not—’
‘What hope? What’s left for us? There isn’t going to be a home for us to go back to, because they’ll have destroyed everything. Everyone’s dead. Everyone.’