‘Speak,’ he said, his breath foul upon my face, but I was too frightened and couldn’t find my voice. Some way away, I could hear Hedda and Plegmund and Wiglaf. Had they been caught?
The fiend shoved me hard. I landed on my backside, and they all laughed.
That’s when he arrived, shouldering his way past the others: this grey-haired man with sharp eyes. He walked with a limp and yet with purpose. From the way the others moved aside to let him pass I guessed he must be their leader. Belted around his waist was a sheath for a long knife or short sword. He stared at me for a long time, and I wondered if he planned to kill me. But he didn’t draw his blade. Instead he stood still as stone. A quizzical look came across his face.
He said, ‘Guthred?’
*
‘It was him, wasn’t it?’ Merewyn says.
‘Yes, it was him. Not that I recognised him. Not at first, anyway. But then it had been nearly forty years. We were little more than children when we last knew one another. I’d forgotten he even existed. After his expulsion, that was it. I never heard any more about him, and I didn’t care.’
‘He recognised you, though,’ Oslac says.
*
Yes, he did. How he did, I don’t know. For the longest time I said nothing but gawped at him. I still had no idea who this stranger was.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ he asked. He was grinning by then. ‘After all these years, who would have believed it?’
Eventually I found my voice, and asked him how he knew my name.
‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Wulfnoth.’
I hadn’t heard that name in so long. It took me a moment to remember where I knew it from. My memory isn’t what it used to be, you see. But I quickly saw the resemblance.
The years had changed him, of course. His hair was thinner, longer, greyer; half his teeth were either missing or broken, and there was a bearing about him that was different. But then I noticed those ears sticking out, those thick brows, that pockmarked face overlaid with scars small and large.
It was him.
He turned to the others, laughing. ‘It’s all right. He’s an old friend of mine.’
‘What do you mean, a friend?’ the woman asked as Wulfnoth extended a hand.
Still numb with surprise, I took it as he helped me to my feet. He was as short as I remembered, which was to say about half a head shorter than me, although he was no longer the scrawny soul he’d been back then. His hand was rough, his grip crushingly strong.
He grinned, gap-toothed, at me and threw an arm around my shoulder. ‘We know each other from long ago. A different life, eh?’
I nodded but didn’t answer. I was still so confused. I saw Plegmund and Wiglaf, and spotty-faced Hedda being held firm by the others, and I met their fear-filled eyes.
He looked me up and down. ‘After all this time, who’d have thought our paths would cross again? And you a priest! What brings you here? Who are these others?’
I could have asked him the same things, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers. Whoever these people were, they were dangerous.
I replied that these were my students, and that we had left Rypum that morning, and that we didn’t have any treasure to give them. I was babbling, I realised, but I still didn’t know what to make of these people and whether or not we could trust them, or what they planned to do with us.
He laughed again, told me not to worry and that he had no intention of robbing an old friend.
‘If we’re not going to rob them,’ said the foul-smelling one who’d threatened me, ‘then what are we going to do with them?’
‘We’re going to let them go,’ Wulfnoth said to a chorus of groans and protests from the others. ‘Yes, that’s what we’re going to do. But first Guthred and I have much catching-up to do. Isn’t that right?’
He tossed me a leather flask from his pack and asked me how it was I came to be in these parts. I didn’t know what to say. I still couldn’t quite believe somehow that this was the same Wulfnoth I’d known all those years ago. I knew he was almost the same age as me, yet whereas a few hours in the saddle these days often leaves me stiff and creaking, he moved with the ease of someone half as old.