And there was Wulfnoth. I wondered how a man of thegnly birth like him had ended up as a brigand and a common thief. One evening after a successful day’s scavenging he told me. We’d brought back ale, lots of it, so his tongue was loose and the story came spilling out. His father was so disappointed in him for being expelled from the school that he all but disowned him. When the old man died of a fever the following winter, he left nothing in his will for Wulfnoth. All the land the boy should have received was divided up instead between his two elder half-brothers. They let him stay because he had nowhere else to go, and gave him a house and a scrap of pasture, but made him pay rent as if he were a lowly ceorl – rent that only grew more onerous when, years later, they in their turn died and their sons inherited the land, until it was more than he could pay and they threw him out.
That was ten years ago, he told me. After that he became an outcast, wandering from place to place, living on what he could scrounge and steal, all the while cursing God for having failed him. Eventually his path crossed with others to whom fate had been similarly unkind: Halfdan and Sihtric and a couple more who had since perished. They banded together, with Wulfnoth as their leader, and that was that.
‘The Lord never cared anything for us,’ he said bitterly. ‘He’s never looked after us, so we’ve had to look after ourselves.’
As I listened I couldn’t help but think that all his misfortunes, all his troubles, had begun when I got him thrown out of the cathedral school.
It was my fault, all of it.
My face must have turned as pale as snow, and it was a good thing that it was dark and he was drunk, for otherwise he would surely have noticed.
Anyway, I don’t want you to think that I’m making excuses for what they did . . . what I did—
*
‘It sounds like you are,’ Oslac says, interrupting.
‘Well, I’m not. Yes, they could be cold-hearted and pitiless, but they were also in their way a sorry lot, who felt they deserved better. That’s all. As I told you, they weren’t warriors. Doubtless they could handle themselves in a scrap, but they rarely went looking for one. They carried weapons to intimidate, not for killing. If danger threatened they would rather run than fight.’
Beorn says, ‘And yet they attacked you, didn’t they?’
‘Because we were easy prey, as I’ve said. All the time I was with them, we only attacked anyone if we thought they were unlikely to fight back, and even then only if we thought they might be carrying something valuable. There was no sense in taking risks if we didn’t have to. Most of the time we didn’t even go that far. We’d lurk on the edges of manors and steadings, taking a pig here, a few chickens or ducks there; we’d raid a storehouse for cheese and eggs and salted fish and fresh bread, or cloaks and blankets and firewood and pots and pans that we could use. If we could get away with it, we might try stealing a horse to take to market and sell on. It was wrong, I know, but the things we took were rarely worth that much and so it wasn’t harming anyone. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
‘Yes, I did make excuses then. But not now.’
*
From those pickings we were able to live. Not well, I should say, but we survived. We had enough to keep ourselves warm and our stomachs full, and we always had dry clothes and were never short of shoes. We were comfortable, but I don’t want you to imagine that we dined every night like kings, or that we had a great hoard of gold buried in the woods, like the robber lords you sometimes hear stories about. It wasn’t like that.
Christmas came and went. We heard the bells ringing out from some faraway church and so we knew folk were celebrating Our Lord’s birth, but we didn’t mark it, except to share out some bottles of mead that we’d pilfered on one of our recent raids. We needed it to warm us, for it was a particularly bitter day, and the frost lay thick that morning, I remember giving a thought to Rypum and the festivities that would be happening there. They’d be laying out the feast and lighting a great fire in the dean’s hall; there’d be wine aplenty, and sweetmeats spiced with pepper and ginger and cinnamon. I felt a pang of regret for having left all that behind, but I pushed it away quickly, before it could grow.
It was after Christmas that things changed. For several weeks we’d been hearing rumours that the king was sending bands into the marshes of Heldernesse and the wolds around Eoferwic to stamp out the final embers of the rebellion. Then for a while things went quiet. About two weeks after the holy day was when we realised that something was wrong. We always kept a lookout over the road, in case any easy targets came our way. It was Halfdan who was on watch that morning; towards midday he came running back to camp, flustered and red-faced and waving his arms. It was some while before he calmed down and Wulfnoth could get any sense out of him. Using his signs, which the others translated for my benefit, Halfdan told us that there were dozens of travellers on the road: many, many more than there would normally be on a cold winter’s morning. And all of them, every single one, going north. One group he’d seen numbered more than thirty: it looked like an entire village, he said.