All right, all right. You want to know who I am? Well, I’ll tell you. My name is Oslac, and that’s the truth. Oslac, son of Osferth, son of Oswald. I won’t bore you with tales of my childhood. As if you cared, anyway.
I was in my eighteenth summer when my father was killed. Not by the Normans, before you ask. By rebels. Fellow English folk. He was reeve of Suthperetune, the manor where I grew up. One of the king’s manors, it was. He’d been the reeve there for as long as almost anyone could remember: he’d been there in King Eadward’s time, long before the foreigners ever set foot on these shores, and he continued to serve after Wilelm took the crown. When all the nobles of the southern shires came together to offer their surrender to the new king after his victory at H?stinges, Osferth was among them.
Go ahead. Call him a traitor if you like, but remember that it was either that or else exile or death. That was the choice he had to make.
*
‘I know what I’d have chosen,’ Beorn mutters.
‘We’re not asking you, though, are we?’ Merewyn says. She gestures for Oslac to go on.
*
Almost a year after the foreigners first came across the sea was when it happened. One night some men raided the manor, our home, and burned it to the ground; four of them armed with swords burst into the chamber where my father slept and dragged him into the open and slew him in front of my eyes. They let me say my last farewell to him and then they made me watch while they ran him through. They left everyone else alive. He was the one they were after, simply because he’d chosen to make his peace with the Normans.
I was his only surviving child; there was no one else to share my sorrow with and there was nothing else left for me there, so I gathered the few belongings I had and took to the road with my harp and songs and tales I’d learned from him, thinking to make my living as a storyteller while I tracked down the men who had murdered him. I had no idea then what I planned to do if and when I did somehow manage to find them; my head was so full of anger and grief and I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.
In the end it was easier than I expected. As I travelled the shire, I heard tales of similar attacks. All I had to do was follow the trail of blood they’d left in their wake. Within two weeks of my father’s death, I’d tracked them to their camp on the edge of the marshes, in a nook of land that could be reached only by a single narrow path. There were fewer of them than I’d first thought – only eight men in all, it turned out. From speaking with various people on my wanderings, I’d already managed to find out the names of half of them. Mostly local folk, they were, who’d run away to take up arms when they heard that the invaders were seizing the land. I found a hiding place amid the reeds and I watched them for the better part of an afternoon, slipping away as the sun was setting. They’d seemed like terrifying, towering giants that night, but by day, I saw how unimposing they were, some so thin that they were almost wasting away; as young as me and some even younger.
These were the men who had murdered Osferth.
There were too many of them for me to do anything alone, much as I would have liked to kill them myself. So I did the next best thing. There was a castle a few miles away, built by a Norman who was determined to root out all the rebels in the shire so that he could win favour with the king. So that’s where I went. To begin with I was refused an audience, but I persisted and eventually his men agreed to take me to his writing room, where he was composing a letter. Once there I told him what had happened to my father, the king’s reeve, how I’d been seeking out his killers and how I’d been able to track them to their camp. He listened patiently and sent for food and wine to be brought to me, and as soon as I’d finished saying what I had to, he rode out with his retinue.
Three hours later he returned full of cheer, carrying a bloody sack with eight heads that he tipped out into the yard. He ordered his men to impale them on stakes for all to see, while he came and put his arm around my shoulder and placed a leather purse filled with silver in my hand. In broken English he told me that if I ever heard any more news of rebels hiding in the marshes and the hills then I should come to him with what I’d been able to learn, and there would be further rewards.
You’re already judging me, I can see. But I tell you this: there’s not a doubt in my mind that I did the right thing. Did I feel guilty? Never for a moment. I wasn’t shocked when I saw those men’s bruised and scarred faces, with eyes glazed and mouths hanging open. My heart didn’t sink; I didn’t feel as though my soul had been stained by sin. No, I was overjoyed.
My father was worth all those eight men put together, and more besides. If it had been fifty men, it still wouldn’t have been enough. They had no right to take his life.