Anyway, I don’t know whether it was because I was frightened and cold, or because, like Skalpi, I too was looking for companionship, or because I was desperate to do something, anything, to raise him from his sorrow. Probably it was all of those things. I don’t remember any more, if I even knew at the time. I was confused, I know that much. It was like I had a hundred voices all shouting in my ear, trying to drown each other out, and nothing I could do would make them go away.
Maybe it was one of those voices that told me what I needed to do then, because I found myself shedding my shoes, my dress, my undergown, and sliding under the coarse blankets into the warm bed beside him.
*
‘And?’ Oslac asks with a smirk on his face that Tova doesn’t like. ‘What happened next?’
‘I’ve just told you,’ says Merewyn indignantly. ‘If you can’t work it out for yourself then you’re more stupid than you look.’
‘I thought we might hear the rest of it, that’s all. It’ll be something to cheer us and keep us warm through the night.’
She regards him with disgust. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘A good storyteller always gives his listeners what they want. That was one of the first lessons my father taught me.’
‘Well, you’ve got as much as I’m going to give you. And you can stop looking at me that way.’
*
After that things remained uneasy for a long time. We learned later that hardly had Eoferwic fallen than the king had marched back south to quell some disturbance or other. He’d left behind him some men to hold the city and the surrounding lands, and appointed as shire reeve a Frenchman born to an English mother, whose authority he thought we might accept.
Despite my fears, peace of a kind prevailed, although it was an uneasy peace. From what little we heard, and it was only what we could gather second hand from such travellers who from time to time stayed as guests, the Normans seemed content to confine themselves to the city and the shores of the Humbre. I remember Orm saying that this only proved what men had been saying before: that the invaders feared the men of Northumbria. They were foolish words from someone who as far as I knew had never actually seen a fight in his life, as much as he loved his spear and shield practice, but he wasn’t the only one saying such things.
Nevertheless I had the feeling that this wasn’t the end of it, and that either later in the year or else in the spring the king and his army would be back. The sparrowhawk was hovering, watching and waiting for the right moment to stoop and strike. That’s what I said to Skalpi, although he surely knew it already. His temper grew shorter and those grey moods of his ever darker as the harvest season passed, the slaughter month began, the trees shed their golden raiment and the first frosts came. He would ride with me and sit with me in the orchard and let me read or sing to him, but he also continued to spend much of his time alone, and in those moments when the gloom overtook him there was little I or anyone could do to stir him from it.
In the meantime life at Heldeby continued much as it had done. As it had to, if we wanted to place food upon the table and have fuel and warm clothes to last us through the winter. I often confided in Tova, and she in me. We shared our worries and exchanged tales, and over the months I suppose we gradually became friends. I’d grown up surrounded by boys, you see. All my life when I was young I’d wanted a sister I could play with and whom I could confide in when I was feeling sad. Eadmer and I were close, but that was different. While our brothers were alive he was more interested in being with them and joining in their adventures. Exploring the woods near the house, stretching hides over wicker frames to make boats that they could use to see what was downstream. Wrestling with them, even though they were much bigger and stronger and so always bested him.
I never had anyone I felt I could talk to. There’d been my mother, I suppose, but she hadn’t had much time for me. So I never had a friend, a true friend, until I came to Heldeby and until I met Tova.
It helped, I think, that we had a lot in common, strange though that probably sounds. We both found ourselves in situations not of our choosing. We were both looking for companionship and both desperately needed an ally, in particular against Orm, whose father seemed to have given up trying to restrain him.