‘Does Tostig know that you are outlaw?’
Hereward shook his head. ‘Not yet. I hoped the earl would persuade the king of the plot before the truth came out. There is still hope. Word has been sent to London. If the throne can be made safe, then this hardship will have been worthwhile.’
‘You are a puzzling man.’ Acha leaned back and surveyed her lover. ‘You fight without any sign of honour, yet you act only honourably in your sacrifices to protect the throne. You kill men as if they were nothing, yet risk your own life to save a woman. You show yourself to the world like the rocks along the coast, yet this night you have revealed only tenderness.’
Keen to lock the past behind him, Hereward rolled her on to her back and kissed her deeply. But shadows still moved across his mind. He thought of his mother, and Tidhild, and his father’s blind fury, and he feared what the future held.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘No one will hear your cries, monk. If death is what you want, it can be arranged quickly and silently.’ With a black-toothed grin, Harald Redteeth shook his axe a finger’s width from Alric’s defiant face. The younger man slumped on the cold stone steps of the church tower where he had fallen.
‘Archbishop Ealdred would never condone my murder within the minster,’ he spat.
The Viking surveyed his prisoner’s pale face and saw the fear behind the bravado. ‘You think that old churchman cares one whit about you? His thoughts are on greater matters — power and glory, and who will soon be sitting on England’s throne and whether that new king will have need of an even newer archbishop. Now walk, or die.’
Alric resisted for only a moment, and then dragged himself to his feet and continued up the tower steps. The monk still had some fire in him, Redteeth thought, but it would do him little good. He would have to endure the agony of one of the church’s ordeals — water or iron — but the outcome was not in doubt. Death was the only sentence for his crime. Harald plucked at his freshly dyed red beard in brooding rumination. The Mercian was the one he really wanted. It was Hereward who had left the Viking to a shameful death with a noose round his neck. And it would have come about if the men pursuing the English warrior had not followed the tracks through the woods from Gedley and chanced upon his hanging form. Unconsciously, his hand went to the pink welt where the rope had bitten into his neck. If it had been left to him, Hereward would already be dead, butchered and fed to the pigs. But his revenge would come soon enough, and all the more keen for being savoured.
As he hummed a lilting tune, the mercenary felt the last feathery fingers of the toadstools pluck at his thoughts. He glanced back at his second in command climbing the steps a few paces behind him. Ivar’s skin was as grey as the stone of the tower walls, his blue beard bedraggled.
‘Why do you haunt me still?’ Harald asked.
‘Valhalla is denied me, for I died trapped and screaming in fire, not in glorious battle,’ the shade responded in a tone like cracking ice. ‘I must walk the shores of the vast black sea for ever. No rest for me, Harald Redteeth, not until blood has been spilled.’
‘And no rest for me until you have been set free,’ the mercenary replied, understanding his responsibility. ‘Not until blood has been spilled.’
Ahead, the monk flashed a puzzled glance back.
The two men emerged on to the flat roof of the tower in the bright of a Christmas sunrise. Eoferwic tumbled away from the minster into the white river plain, a black smudge misted with smoke from the homefires.
Alric shielded his eyes against the sun as he looked out over the landscape, his chest heaving in sadness at what he knew he would soon be losing for ever. ‘Why have you brought me here?’ he whispered.
‘A kindness,’ Harald Redteeth replied bluntly.
‘A cruelty,’ the monk snapped back. ‘Dangling food before a starving man.’
The Viking shrugged. ‘A cruelty. A kindness. Your choice.’
Alric held his head up defiantly. ‘I will not betray Hereward.’
‘He died long ago,’ the mercenary replied, echoing the words he had first spoken beside the fires of Gedley. ‘His spirit does not yet know that his life is over. He is a ghost who feasts and drinks and walks.’ He glanced at Ivar, cold and grey against the tower’s wall. ‘The Mercian thinks himself safe behind the palisade of Tostig’s enclosure. He is not.’
The monk flinched. ‘The men who came into the church with you, they were not Northmen. They are the ones who have been hunting Hereward.’
Harald nodded slowly. The music in his head grew louder still. ‘While I teetered on the block with a noose round my neck, we reached an agreement. The Mercian’s enemies need him slain quietly, in a manner that will not draw attention to him or the secrets he holds. Though I am told he has escaped two such attempts on his life. Your friend is hard to kill, eh?’
‘What agreement?’ Alric flashed an unsettled glance.
Redteeth grinned. ‘Those four men will capture the Mercian on the Feast of Fools when all order is turned on its head. And they will bring him to me.’
Harald felt a sly pleasure when he saw the monk blanch. On the shores of the great black sea, the Viking had been told that he would be feared, as Death himself, in these final days the Christians called the End-Times and his people knew as Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods, when the world would be consumed in flames. And it would be good.
‘You think this feast day belongs to your own God, Christian man,’ Redteeth continued, prowling around the tower wall. ‘But it is far older and darker than you know. This is a time for the dead, and for ghosts. It is a time of madness. It is the time of the Wild Hunt, when Odin rides eight-legged Sleipnir in pursuit of men.’ The Viking pointed an accusing finger at Alric. ‘Men who have turned their face against my people and the old ways.’
‘It is a time for peace now,’ the monk said. ‘Your ways are gone.’
Harald Redteeth shook his head. ‘My tradition is alive, in me. It has been passed down from father to son as long as man has walked this earth. In Yule, a sacrifice must be made. A blood sacrifice, which my people call hlaut.’
Gulls flying overhead called back to him, Hlaut, hlaut!
‘Sometimes it is cattle, sometimes horses, and sometimes men. We smear ourselves with the blood and raise our mead-cups to great Odin, for victory and power to the king. Your friend, Hereward, shall be my sacrifice, and I will slake myself in his blood. In his final hours, he will know such agonies that he will plead with me to pluck out his heart. And then the final days will begin. Your friend does not know what he has unleashed.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Christmas Day, 1062
The sword slashed down with one swift stroke. Hot blood gushed across the snow. Earl Tostig stepped back and grinned, resting the tip of his dripping blade on the frozen ground as the cheers rang out around him. In the centre of the circle of men and women, the goat squealed, jumping and slipping in the reddening slush. Hereward watched the beast’s death throes from the ranks of the small crowd of guests invited to attend the annual ritual. The slaughter of the goat, they all hoped, would signal a prosperous new year to come, but Hereward struggled with darker thoughts. He looked from the dying animal to the wind-chapped faces gathered around, searching for any sign that would reveal his enemy: an unguarded look, a shared glance, a tremor on hard features like the first cracks on the ice covering the river’s tributaries. He tried to find within him some of the warmth and hope he had felt when he first arrived in Eoferwic, but only a thin gruel remained. Deep in his bones, he could feel the threat mounting. Soon it would break, and then his sword would be drawn. It could not be sheathed again until it had tasted blood.