Around the fires are dozens of tents and crude shelters. Paddocks for the horses. Pens for sheep and cattle and pigs. Everywhere piles of broken timber for firewood and stacks of barrels. Paths and tracks where the snow has been cleared for carts. Most folk are huddled by the fires, trying to keep warm, but some are hauling sacks and carrying pails, while others chop wood, skin haunches of meat and lead oxen and horses to drink at the water’s edge.
There must be a hundred people, at least. Maybe twice that. More than ever lived at Heldeby, anyway. The last time Tova saw so many in one place was at Skardaborg. Some so old and frail and unsteady on their feet it seems a wonder they’ve made it this far. And not just men but women too, she notices as they grow closer. And children: running, shouting, chasing one another around the campfires, cupping snow in their mittened hands and hurling it at one another, shrieking and squealing in protest and delight, the sound of their voices and their laughter something Tova thought she might never hear again.
She wonders if they understand. If they have any idea, really, what’s been happening.
Lyfing calls out as they descend towards the camp. He gestures to one of his companions and again the horn is sounded. Three sharp blasts. Women rise from tending the fires; men put down their tools and turn to see what’s happening.
Shouldering his way through the gathering crowd of warriors and wives comes a young man. A boy, really – he can’t be any older than herself, Tova thinks. Tall, gangling and fair. Wide eyes stare out from underneath a tangled mass of hair. His tunic is stained, his face smeared with grime. One of his sleeves is rolled up to the elbow, and the end of his arm is bound and tied with cloth.
He sees them. He sees Merewyn. He lets out a cry and pelts towards them, up the slope, twice slipping in the mud and the snow and ending up on his front, but he manages to pick himself up despite his missing hand.
Tova is at Merewyn’s side, lending her hand in support as, shakily but as hurriedly as she can, she dismounts.
Eadmer is there already, waiting for her, his face streaming with tears, rubbing his eyes as if he can’t quite believe what they’re telling him, and Merewyn is weeping too as she flings her arms around him.
They stand without saying a word, brother and sister holding one another, as the sun disappears behind the hills.
*
Tova wanted to see Beorn before they buried him, so that she might have the chance to say farewell properly. But she’s too late.
Lyfing says he can show her the place where he lies, if she’d like. She tells him she’d like that very much. He takes her to a spot perhaps a hundred paces from the edge of the camp, on a slight rise where the snow has been cleared, in the shelter of a birch copse.
A carved wooden cross, no taller than her hand is wide, is the only thing to mark the spot – one of dozens that stand there.
‘He’d have hated that,’ she tells Lyfing as she kneels down and takes a handful of the damp earth.
‘He didn’t believe?’
‘No, he believed. But in something else, that’s all.’
For a while Lyfing is silent. Pensive. He doesn’t kneel down beside her, but stays standing out of respect.
‘We can take it away, I suppose,’ he says. ‘Though the priests won’t like the thought of a heathen being buried in consecrated ground.’
‘Then we don’t tell them.’
Lyfing nods. ‘We can do that. If it’s what he would have wanted.’
She thinks it is. Of course in ages past, she remembers from the songs, the heathens wouldn’t have laid him in the earth like this. They’d have built a pyre and let the flames take his body, and the roaring blaze would have drowned out the mourners’ weeping even as the smoke billowed and stung men’s eyes. Afterwards they’d have heaped earth over the ashes to make a grave mound, raising it until it stood taller than a person, and filling it with silver ingots and arm rings of twisted gold so that in the next life he could reward his followers as richly as they deserved. Twelve mail-clad warriors would have ridden three times around it, beating their shields and shouting praise for his deeds and challenging any man to deny them, raising such a noise that the gods themselves would be compelled to take notice.
But she knows he’d have hated that too.
To be remembered is all he would have wanted. Not for his deeds to be recounted in song or recorded in ink by monks in their books, but simply for someone to know his story, to know who he was. Who he really was. Someone to know what he’d done, and to go on and live happy and well so that all his striving didn’t turn out to have been for nothing.
That’s what he would have wanted. And so that’s what she’ll do.
*
Most of the people in the camp are survivors from nearby villages and manors, it seems. A few have fled from further south to seek refuge at Hagustaldesham, but none have come from as far afield as Merewyn and herself. When they hear how far they’ve travelled, they besiege her with questions. How did the two of them manage to survive, out there on their own, with the Normans everywhere? How did they find their way? Did they ever come face-to-face with the enemy? Was there ever a time when they gave up hope?