She didn’t mean to say it. The question had already slipped from her lips before she knew it. But it’s too late to take it back.
He stiffens in the saddle, ever so slightly. His gaze fixed on the way ahead. His jaw set firm.
‘Beorn?’
It’s the first time she’s seen him wrong-footed. Until now he’s always had an answer for everything.
‘Yes,’ he mutters without looking at her. ‘Once or twice, when my lord thought we could fetch a good price for them.’
‘You did?’
‘Only because if we didn’t, our families would starve that winter because we had no silver to buy food and clothing. Did we like it? No. But we had no choice. Understand?’
Tova clenches her teeth to stop the anger spilling over. She can’t look at him. She tries not to think about those helpless wide-eyed folk, in frayed clothes either too large or small for them, being led in chains to places at the edge of the world.
Like Ase, maybe. Like Gunnhild.
Just as she thought she was beginning to understand him. What else is there, she wonders, that he isn’t telling them?
Right now she isn’t sure that she wants to know.
*
They come to the old road around midday. Straight as a pole, it runs north as far as the eye can see, across the hills. Like a knife cut across the land. No sign of the Normans in either direction, but there’s no doubt they’ve been this way.
Hoofprints everywhere, too many to count. The way has been churned into a mire. Long stretches ankle-deep with dirty rainwater. In the ditch by the roadside an iron cloak pin, bent out of shape, tossed away. A shoe with a hole in the toe. An ale flask. A battered drinking horn, chipped at the rim. A helmet with a dent that nobody could be bothered to hammer out.
‘There must have been hundreds of them,’ says Oslac. ‘A whole army, by the look of it. And not that long ago, either.’
He looks at Beorn, who nods. It might be the first time the two of them have found themselves of the same mind on anything.
‘All the more reason to keep moving, then,’ says the priest.
Tova couldn’t agree more.
*
They find the man by a stream, curled up in a ball like a child, whimpering softly to himself. Not dead, but hardly moving. His cloak and his brown robe are plastered in dirt and sticks and leaves; he has no shoes.
No one else around. No other sound save for the birds.
‘Who’s that?’ he says in a shaky voice as they approach him. ‘Is there somebody there?’
He stirs, raising his head a little: not so they can see his face, but enough for Tova to catch a glimpse of his bald pate with its crown of trimmed brown hair.
A monk.
‘Someone you might know?’ Oslac murmurs to Guthred, who sits in his saddle as still as stone.
Whoever he is, he’s hurt, and badly. While the others just stand there, Tova hurries over, splashing through the stream, and kneels down on the damp ground beside him. She rests her hand upon his shoulder. He flinches at her touch, gentle though it is.
‘It’s all right,’ she says softly.
He lies on his side, his head turned away from her, hidden underneath his cloak. A bloodstained hand clutches glass, amber and jet prayer beads on a scarlet thread with a cross hanging from the loop, and a tiny glass phial filled with a golden liquid about half the length of her little finger.
Holy oil. She knows what it is because old Thorvald had one much the same, which he wore on a chain around his neck. She remembers him telling her how, many years earlier, he’d made the long pilgrimage to Cantwaraburg to fill it from the gilded reliquary that held the saint’s remains.
‘P-please,’ he says. ‘Have mercy.’
His voice sounds young, if strangely muffled. And he seems young, from what she can tell.
‘There’s no need to be afraid.’
She reaches a hand up and peels back his cloak slowly so as not to distress him— And recoils, shrieking. She stands up too quickly. Her feet don’t feel like they belong to her.
Blood everywhere, streaked across both his cheeks. An angry, crusted gash along his jawline. Where his nose ought to be there’s only a sticky mess. In place of his eyes, dark, hollow sockets.
‘Have m-mercy on me,’ the man says again as he turns to face her. ‘I beg of you, please.’
She thought she’d seen everything these last few days. She didn’t think there was anything the enemy could do that could be worse than what she’s already witnessed.
His eyes. They put out his eyes.
‘Oh, dear God,’ says Guthred as he raises his hands to his mouth and looks away quickly. ‘Sweet Christ.’
‘Who did this to you?’ Beorn asks. ‘Who? Was it the Normans?’
But the man isn’t listening. He has started whimpering again. She can’t begin to imagine the agony he must be in.
‘Ale,’ says Tova, when she finds her voice again. ‘We need to give him some ale, or some water. Something. Anything.’