Frustration turning to anger, the earl followed Kraki out into the bitter night. He found the Viking in the woman’s house. Acha sprawled on the floor, teeth bared like a cornered wildcat, her cheek pink from the blow that had been struck.
Tostig stood over her. ‘Where is your man?’
Feigning deference, Acha stood and bowed her head, but her eyes flashed with defiance. The Viking grasped for her, but the earl held him back with one hand. He stroked his chin for a moment as he studied her and then said, ‘I understand you, woman. You are cunning and clever. I know you had standing among the Cymri and here you are as nothing. You secretly despise all around you and would seek to overturn the established order, if you could.’
Acha returned his gaze boldly, but said nothing.
‘You saw in this man… strength? Protection? Hope that he could help you achieve your aims? But you must now know that he cannot protect you, or serve any purpose that you hold dear. With him, your only future is an outlaw life, hunted and despised, and eventual death. A woman like you…’ Tostig shook his head, choosing his words, ‘would find no value in anything a man like that could offer.’
The space following the earl’s words was filled with the crackle of the fire and the howl of the wind outside. Acha let her gaze drift down to the floor and said in a bitter voice, ‘He has gone to the church to free the monk who is held prisoner there.’
Tostig nodded. Turning to Kraki, he ordered, ‘Bring the huscarls together. Find Hereward. Slaughter him as he slaughtered our guests. Leave no trace.’
The earl followed the Viking out, leaving Acha still seething, filled with murderous intent. Returning to the hall, he found Judith waiting for him, her troubled expression at odds with her festive emerald dress.
‘You will not harm him?’ she asked.
‘He is our enemy and he has committed terrible crimes.’
‘Hereward is a lost soul. Better to pray for him.’
‘It is too late for that.’ He would have turned away, but Judith caught his face between her hands and pulled his gaze back to her eyes.
‘You are a good man, husband. You will destroy yourself following your brother’s path.’
‘I am worth as much as Harold.’
‘You are. More.’
He kissed her hand, enjoying the fleeting moment of tenderness. His face fell when he heard Kraki’s barked orders outside the door. ‘I must go,’ he said, averting his eyes to hide his shame.
The Viking had lined up his men in the space beyond the hall’s doors. Each huscarl held a torch that guttered and snapped in the gale, the light casting monstrous shadows across their fierce faces. In their other hands, the warriors gripped their axes or spears, hungry for blood.
Kraki glanced at Tostig, who nodded his assent. With a battle cry in the old tongue, the Viking turned and loped into the blizzard. The earl watched the flickering torches move away into the dark and hoped the dawn would come soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY — FOUR
‘What is that?’ Shielding his eyes against the biting flakes, Alric pointed across the thatched roofs of the town. In the distance, dancing flames gleamed off the deepening snow.
‘Torches,’ Hereward replied. ‘They come for us. I had hoped we would have more time before my work was discovered. Still, this is our lot and we must deal with it.’
‘You have horses ready? We could ride away from Eoferwic before they find us.’ Shivering in his tunic, the monk wrapped his arms around himself. Despite the cold, he felt infused with a glow of mounting hope. All he had prayed for was coming to pass.
‘And freeze to death before sun-up,’ the warrior replied. ‘Besides, we must wait for another.’
Alric’s brow knitted. ‘Another?’ He studied Hereward for a moment, and when the warrior didn’t meet his gaze, he nodded. ‘A woman.’
Hereward silenced the monk with a glare. ‘I told you. No more talk.’ He watched the ebb and flow of the torches moving in their direction. ‘They head for the church,’ he muttered in a puzzled tone. ‘How do they know I am here?’
Grabbing Alric by the tunic, he propelled the monk into the narrow space between two houses. They waded through the knee-high snow, stumbled across the stinking spoil heap and over a low fence into a workshop yard. Skirting the well, they fought their way through a deep drift along the side of the workshop and emerged on to the next street.
Glancing down the white way, the warrior glimpsed the glow of two torches and cursed under his misting breath. ‘Kraki, the bastard.’
‘What is it?’ the monk gasped.
‘The Viking who leads the huscarls knows his work too well. He sends his men along every street leading to the church to stop us slipping by.’
‘We could hide until they pass.’
‘They will find our tracks soon enough in the torchlight, and they will lead them straight to us.’ Hereward looked round until he saw a cowshed. ‘In there,’ he urged. ‘Hide among the beasts until I come for you.’
Alric began to protest, but the warrior barked the order once more, with such a fierce gaze that the shivering monk ran to the shed and hid in the dung-scented dark. The cows stamped and shifted at the strange presence, their snorts so loud the young man was fearful the noise would draw unwanted attention. Creeping to the door, he peered out into the black and white night, and watched Hereward ease into a deep drift and pull the snow over him like a blanket. Alric wondered how the warrior could appear immune to the bitter cold; sometimes it seemed that nothing touched the man at all.
The two huscarls lurched up the street, heads down into the buffeting wind, torches guttering ahead of them. Their hoods remained low so that their faces were hidden, but their cloaks billowed behind them like bat-wings.
As the two men passed Hereward’s hiding place, the warrior burst from the snow like a churchyard revenant. The howl of the gale drowned the cries of shock. Gripped by the speed and fury of the attack, the monk crossed himself. The warrior’s sword flashed. Blood spurted across the drift from the first man’s throat. When he stumbled to his knees trying to stem the flow, Hereward leapt past him at the second man, who was struggling to whip his axe out from his flapping cloak. The warrior lopped off his head with one bone-juddering strike.
Alric felt horrified by the brutality, and entranced. He saw a poetry to the killing, the gleam of the dark blood against the white flakes, the glimmer of the blade in the torchlight, the speed and elegance of the warrior’s exquisitely balanced turns and thrusts. Hereward was moving away before his second victim had fallen, a fleeting shadow across the snow.
The monk knew he couldn’t hide any longer. He told himself he was concerned for his companion’s safety, but a part of him wanted to see more. Here were revelations of God’s work that were usually denied him, and he wanted to make sense of them. Stumbling across the street, he skirted the still-twitching bodies and entered a narrow path between two houses in the footsteps of the warrior. When he left the street, he heard a cry behind him. A man had stepped out of his house to investigate the disturbance and was now turning back with an anxious expression.
Although Alric moved as quickly as he could through the blizzard, he found he had lost sight of the Mercian. He grew uneasy, aware that he had abandoned a safe haven for a labyrinth where an attack could come from any direction. His heart pounding, he crept to the edge of the next street and peered round the corner of a small house. Another huscarl stalked up the incline towards the church.
A figure leapt from the edge of a low roof. Alric had not even noticed the dark shape hunched there in the swirling snow. Silently, Hereward fell, driving his sword down like a spike. The monk glimpsed the warrior’s face contorted in a bestial snarl, and then he ghosted away once again, leaving a body leaking steaming life.