Storm of war, p.13
Storm of War, page 13
‘I can’t hear them,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘They will come, but they are not close. We can rest for a time.’ Her face has grown paler, looking like a fetch, with sunken eyes in the forest’s shadows. Beornoth placed a hand on her chest and snatched it away. She was cold and still.
‘Blaedswith,’ he said, his heart stopping. He knelt over her and listened for her breath, hoping to feel the lightness of it on his cheek, but there was nothing. Beornoth sank onto her, clutching her to him, his fingers digging into her back. She was dead. They had killed her. Beornoth should have protected her, he should have known they would come for her after he had rescued Eawynn from Osric’s hall. He should have taken Blaedswith south with him. Anger bloomed inside Beornoth, mixing with the deepest sorrow and pain to create something new, something visceral and powerful that charged his limbs with strength. He let out a cry, more a scream than a battle cry. It was feral and wild, and birds flew from the treetops, away from his crazed fury.
Beornoth pounded his fists into the black soil, its damp foulness flecking his face and chest to cover him in black, wet mud. He looked at his hands, and then around him. He would not run any more. Kneeling next to Blaedswith’s corpse, Beornoth was going to do the only thing he had ever been good at. He was going to kill. He was going to find Osric, and Thered, and White-Eye, and rip their lives from them. Beornoth slathered himself in black mud. He would become one with the forest and the darkness, like an ancient woodland demon, and strike at his pursuers with vengeance and fury.
The first voices came brash and flat, drifting through the snarl of wood and weed. Their numbers giving them the confidence to stomp through the forest without a hunter’s care and stealth. Boots crashed through the undergrowth, heavy and clumsy, as unconcerned with the noise they made as a drunk leaving a tavern. They came fast, the sound of their footsteps quick and getting closer. Beornoth huddled between a plume of ferns, green and brown and wider than him, and a tall pine. He crouched in the darkness, at one with the shadows.
‘This way,’ he heard a voice call, a gap-toothed lisp in the sound of it.
‘We’ve got him now; the Ealdorman will reward us if we catch him. Hates the bastard, he does.’
They referred to him, and he reciprocated that hatred. The boots came closer, crunching and sliding through the undergrowth, and Beornoth was still, his captured seax held low at his side. Waiting. He held himself still until he could hear their breathing, laboured and heavy, and when he saw a boot crash into the mulch a foot away, he attacked. Beornoth rose from his bunched crouch, slicing his seax up wool breeches and grasping a fistful of tunic with his free hand. The man cried out in pain, and Beornoth kept the seax moving, twisting and cutting until it reached the hunter’s belly, and Beornoth grunted as he drove the broken-backed blade deep, rending and tearing, feeling the hot wash of blood on his hand and wrist. Beornoth stood to his full height and stared down into the dying man’s eyes. They were blue and frenzied, panicked at death’s arrival. Beornoth ripped the blade free, and he pushed the dying man towards the warrior who appeared behind him, levelling a spear. The falling man fouled the spear, and the warrior tried to thrust his dying friend aside, but he was slow. Beornoth grabbed the spear just below the blade and pulled it wide and turned his seax so that he held it overhand, and drove its point into the warrior’s face, punching it through eye and skull, ripping it free in a gout of blood and eye jelly, and stabbing it into the warrior’s throat. Beornoth threw his head back and roared. He bellowed at the treetops like a blood-mad bear, feral and savage. Two men were dead, but it did not sate his anger. He knelt and took the spear and set off on the hunt again.
Beornoth heard boots crashing towards him through the forest, and he stopped and crouched beneath sprawling foliage. The bushes were heavy and spiky and scraped against his bare skin. He had only travelled twenty paces from the two dead warriors before he heard their comrades rushing towards their screams. Beornoth waited in the shadows. The mud covering his naked torso helped him to blend into the forest’s gloom. He had become one with the wood, and he felt like a creature from a folk tale, like a forest wight or demon lurking in the darkness. He heard voices drawing closer, and his heart leapt because one of those voices was White-Eye, confident with his drawl from the southern shires.
‘Careful now, spread out and we’ll surround the bastard,’ White-Eye said. Leather-clad bodies moved about Beornoth, appearing and disappearing between shafts of light and gaps in the heavy forest.
‘He’s killed Mani, oh Lord, help us, there’s blood everywhere,’ came a voice, quivering and unseen.
Beornoth charged from the undergrowth, growling. Spear in his left fist and seax in his right. He ran towards the voice, and a short man turned and howled in fear just in time to see Beornoth racing straight at him. The spear took him in the belly and Beornoth forced him backwards until the spear point drove right through his baked-leather breastplate and on through his body. The man came off the ground, hurtling backwards under Beornoth’s wrath until the spear pinned him against a tree trunk, the point having passed right through his body. He clutched at the spear and coughed up a gout of blood.
‘Help!’ he cried. ‘Help me, please, help!’ Beornoth crouched again and kept himself low amongst a clutch of dark brown ferns. The man groaned and wept. Soon, more of the enemy came to help their injured friend.
‘Get the spear out of him,’ said a balding man with a lisp. He tugged at the spear pinning his friend to the tree, but the injured man wailed from the pain. Beornoth sprang from the ferns, the lisping man spun and swung his seax, but his eyes were closed, and fear dripped from him like honey. Beornoth batted the seax aside and plunged his own weapon into his enemy’s chest and put his left hand on the hilt along with his right and ripped the man’s body open. The blade carved a terrible wound, opening him up from breast to navel
‘It’s not a man, help me!’ the second man wailed, and he fell to his knees, hands clasped together in front of his face in whispering prayer as the lisping man’s butchered corpse toppled beside him, slopping his purple and red insides into the brown-black leaves.
Beornoth stood over the praying man. His chest heaved from the exertion. He knelt and picked up the dead man’s seax in his left hand and smelt the pungent smell of urine as a dark patch spread across the praying enemy’s breeches. He was not a threat, and not a vessel with which Beornoth could slake his thirst for vengeance for Blaedswith’s death, so he turned and stalked through the wood, gore dripping from his weapons and his body dark with mud and the blood of his enemies.
‘Careful, boys. Watch him,’ came a familiar voice from Beornoth’s left. His stomach lifted, and he clenched his hands on the hilts of his weapons. It was White-Eye’s voice. Beornoth turned, bracing his feet in the undergrowth and raising his blades, a short seax held in each hand. White-Eye came from the shadows slowly, his lantern jaw set firm. He had Beornoth’s sword raised before him, and his byrnie slung across his back in a net sack. My heriot.
Beornoth sensed movement to his right and a sudden crashing erupted through the branches. He turned and luckily the attack came from the uninjured side of his face, because from Beornoth’s good eye, Leof raced towards him with a rope stretched between his hands. White-Eye and his men were trying to repeat the same trick they had used when capturing Beornoth the first time, and for a split second the pain and suffering of his capture scissored through his mind like the lash of a whip, each of the wounds he had taken pulsed, burning and aching. It would not happen a second time. Beornoth stepped into Leof and lowered his seax, allowing Leof to throw a rope over his head, and enjoying the momentary look of elation on his oafish face change to pain-wracked horror as Leof realised he had run into one of Beornoth’s seaxes. Beornoth stopped the weapon’s stab when only a hand’s breadth of its vicious broken-backed blade had entered Leof’s belly, and then he snapped it back and stabbed again, four times in short rapid bursts. Then, Beornoth leapt back and roared into Leof’s face, recalling each blow of his stinging branch whip across his back. Beornoth shrugged the rope from his neck and turned to face White-Eye, leaving Leof to fall into the decaying leaf mulch, mewing and dying from the punctures in his guts.
White-Eye licked his thin lips, and his eyes flicked around him, searching for support. ‘I have him. On me, lads,’ he shouted, and edged backwards, the tip of Beornoth’s sword wavering in his hand. ‘Lord Osric, I have him. Come to me, come now!’ White-Eye shrieked, and he turned, as though he would run away. But it was too late. Beornoth leapt upon him. The sword had lowered as White-Eye turned, and Beornoth surged at him, lunging with his leg to trip his captor. White-Eye yelped as he tripped and turned to strike at Beornoth as he fell to his back, his long face drawn back in a rictus of terror. Beornoth just stood on White-Eye’s sword arm, pinning it to the earth, and fell upon his chest, driving the air out of him as he sat upon him. White-Eye closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, waiting for the death blow.
‘Look at me,’ Beornoth growled, but White-Eye shook his head and kept his eyes scrunched closed. A tear rolling down his face. ‘Look at me!’ Beornoth shouted. The eyes snapped open, one brown and large, mottled with flecks of green, the other milk-white and dead.
‘I’m just following orders,’ said White-Eye.
‘Whose orders?’
‘Lady Ælfthryth, the King’s mother, she is my mistress, my ring-giver.’
‘She wants Byrhtnoth gone?’
‘She does, and you. Taking the shine away from her son, she said. Kill them both in the north, says she. Let the King be the hero of the Saxons. She has poets making songs of his victory at Watchet.’
‘I do not die so easy,’ Beornoth whispered, and he cut White-Eye’s throat, dragging the blade of his seax across his neck, leaning into the blow so that it severed his windpipe and cut down to the bone with a spurt of blood which washed over Beornoth’s face. Beornoth rose to his feet, but heavy breathing came from behind him, so Beornoth turned with a snarl and raised his blood-soaked weapons. White-Eye’s youngster, Kari, was there, staring at him with wide, frightened eyes. Blood dripped from Beornoth’s face, hands and blades, slapping into the forest floor as he stared at the boy.
‘I won’t hurt you, lad,’ Beornoth whispered, lowering his weapons. ‘You showed me kindness. Run, if you like. Or you can come with me, join my men.’ Kari had offered Beornoth drink and food on the road, and he seemed like a good lad. Also, he was a living testament to the betrayal of the King’s mother and her orders to White-Eye the cut-throat. Kari just nodded, staring at his former friends lying dead on the ground. Beornoth pulled his own sword from White-Eye’s dead hand and tugged the sack containing his byrnie from White-Eye’s back, slinging it across his own shoulder. ‘Take this and follow me,’ he said, handing the boy one of his seaxes.
Beornoth set off again through the wood, turning back on his tracks and making for the edge of the forest. The boy followed, and Beornoth heard no sound of Osric or his men as he stepped over branches and through thick ferns. The shafts of light punching through the heavy canopy increased, and the density of alder and birch decreased until he emerged from the treeline and felt the soft give of grass under his feet. Beornoth saw three men staring at him. They stood with a line of Osric’s horses, guarding them whilst the Ealdorman and his men had charged into the wood after Beornoth. Those warriors were still in the woods. The three men were open-mouthed and stunned as their eyes washed over the terrifying beast of blood and death stood before them. The filthy mud from the forest brook still caked Beornoth’s face and chest, mixed with the blood and gore of the dead, and he looked like a feral demon. He walked towards them and barked like a dog, clashing his sword against his seax, and the men ran. One of those men was Swidhelm, the man whom Beornoth had beaten at Knutsford, and whom Osric had brought to York to give evidence to support the charges against Beornoth. Swidhelm and the two men took one look at Beornoth, left the horses and ran across the pasture, fleeing from the filthy, blood-spattered and ungodly creature emerging from the forest’s depths. Beornoth did not hate Swidhelm. It had been Beornoth who had wronged him, not the other way around. He did not deserve to die.
Beornoth strode to the horses, and some of them stomped the earth and whinnied at the smell of blood on him. He chose a fine black mare with a burst of white on her nose and white socks on her hind legs. Beornoth stroked her nose and whispered in her ear that she should not be afraid. She was already saddled and Beornoth climbed onto her back. Kari stared from the horses to Beornoth.
‘Take one and come with me, if that is your choice,’ Beornoth said. The boy grinned and mounted a chestnut gelding, and they rode up the hillside and away from Osric and his warriors. Blaedswith’s body was still in the wood, and he could not leave her there to rot. She was a godly woman and needed a Christian burial. Osric would suffer for her death, and that vengeance burned in Beornoth’s chest like fire as he and the boy rode towards the pine-covered hills to the east. And as they reached the crest of the valley ahead, Beornoth laughed. The boy looked at him incredulously, but Beornoth threw his head back and laughed at the sky because riders approached. Their mail shone and glinted in the sun, and their spear points bristled above their heads so that the line of them looked like a great shining dragon snaking across the high hills between Northumbria and Cheshire. Beornoth laughed with joy because he saw Wulfhere and Alfgar, and Byrhtnoth. The Ealdorman and his war band had come for him.
15
Beornoth sagged in the saddle and allowed his horse to halt. The sight of his Lord and war band flooded Beornoth with relief, but that also quelled his fury and blood madness like a red-hot blade taken from the forge and plunged into a bucket of cool water. Beornoth closed his eyes and grimaced, pain suddenly searing at him from the bruises, scrapes and cuts which covered his body. Weariness washed over him and he shivered. The wind in the high hills whipped at his bare torso and the mud on his face, arms, chest and belly had dried and turned into hard flakes, constricting and itching his skin. Beornoth’s horse cropped at the short brown grass, and then it whinnied at the sound of so many horses approaching, the sound of their approach a rumble as though a God shook the earth from deep within the hill itself.
‘They will know I was with the others,’ said Kari, coming alongside Beornoth. ‘They will hurt me. I should go.’
‘They won’t hurt you. Just stay quiet.’
‘But they will know we rode north to harm you and the Ealdorman.’
‘They won’t care about you,’ Beornoth snapped. ‘There are greater things at stake here than your miserable life, boy. Stay, or go, the choice is yours.’
The riders came close, Wulfhere and Alfgar racing ahead of them to reach Beornoth first, their mounts galloping and reining in before Beornoth in a flurry of hooves and flying clods of earth. Brand was close behind them, the Viking’s golden hair bouncing in thick braids as he rode.
‘My God, Lord,’ said Alfgar, making the sign of the cross above his breast and staring with horror at Beornoth’s face and filth-covered body.
‘What did the bastards do to you?’ asked Wulfhere, the change from wide-eyed shock to grim anger playing out across his wide, flat face like a saga tale.
‘Osric is down there. If we ride now, we can take him,’ said Beornoth, his voice low and thin from exhaustion. Wulfhere and Alfgar looked at each other, and back to Beornoth.
‘I have a spare jerkin in my pack. Let’s get you looking like a Thegn again,’ said Wulfhere, and he leant over the rump of his horse to delve into a hemp sack tied to the back of his saddle.
‘Praise the Lord you are alive, Lord. We feared the worst,’ said Alfgar.
‘How did you know they had taken me?’
‘Godwin saw them take you during the ambush. And we tracked you here.’
The rest of the horsemen reached Beornoth at a canter, and he slid from his horse, grimacing at the throbbing pain of his injuries. He let the sack containing his byrnie fall to the ground, the iron inside clanking. The bruising on his face ached, and he opened his mouth wide to stretch it, the pain flashing for a moment but then fading. Beornoth fished around his mouth with his tongue and was relieved that he had lost no other teeth from Osric’s beating.
‘Here, Lord,’ said Wulfhere, tossing a brown wool jerkin to Beornoth. ‘Put this on before you talk to the Ealdorman.’ Beornoth caught it and slipped it over his head, just as the riders swirled around him.
‘We knew you were alive, Beo. I told the men that it would take more than a ragged band of cut-throats to kill a Thegn of the East Saxons,’ said Byrhtnoth, his voice loud and gruff above the ind’s whip. Beornoth nodded at his Ealdorman, thanks and relief in the gesture. ‘It looks like you freed yourself without our help,’ the Ealdorman continued. ‘Though not without feeling the wrath of their cowardly tortures, it seems. My God, man, but you look like a demon from the devil’s pit itself.’
‘Ealdorbana?’ asked Beornoth, his voice croaking and broken from the ordeal.
‘With us, safe and well. Some water, Lord,’ said Alfgar, and he handed Beornoth a skin. Beornoth took it and took a long drink to slake his thirst, and then lifted it to pour the contents over his hair and face before washing away what he could of the mud and blood caked into his skin, hair and beard.
‘They are running,’ a warrior shouted from along the line of horsemen, and Beornoth recognised the voice as Cwicca’s. Beornoth turned to see Osric and his men had returned from the wood, and were hastily retrieving their horses and galloping away at the sight of Byrhtnoth’s war band.
