After a while, he floated free of the shackles of the world. The voices around him receded and he was in the fens, a boy, catching fish on a sun-drenched afternoon. He was stealing a gold cup from the abbot’s room to sell to buy mead with his friends. He was looking down on the torn body of Tidhild, her hand so pale against the blood.
Icy water crashed against his face, shocking him alert.
‘Look at him,’ Alric said. ‘He is not human to suffer in silence so.’
‘We have only just begun,’ Redteeth replied. The Viking paced the house, flashing glances into the corners as if things waited there that no one else could see.
When two of the men had stoked the hot embers in the hearth, Ivar placed a pair of iron tongs, a poker and his long knife in the flames. While they absorbed the heat, Redteeth addressed Alric, who was slumped in one corner, his head in his hands. ‘Christian man. You have converted many of my people to the Creed. They no longer talk of Odin hanging on Yggdrasil, but of Jesus on the Cross. You build churches in the old stone circles and in the sacred groves, and by the wells and the springs. That is how you lure them. I have heard your kind say your God is better than mine. Is that so?’
Alric nodded.
‘Your ways are better?’
‘Yes.’
Redteeth nodded slowly. ‘So a Christian man should not break a vow sworn in his God’s name?’
Alric bowed his head.
‘Will your God forgive such a transgression? Will he wash away the stain of blood caused by such a crime? So many innocent deaths?’ Redteeth stepped forward and kicked the monk hard in the stomach. ‘If you had not run like a coward I would not have had to slaughter the people who sheltered you. Think on this in your final moments.’
‘Leave him,’ Hereward croaked.
‘You would prefer your own pain to his?’ Redteeth said. ‘Why, you must be a Christian too.’ The warriors all laughed loudly.
At the Viking commander’s order, Ivar removed the poker from the fire and held it close to Hereward’s ribs. The Mercian gritted his teeth as his flesh bloomed under the searing heat. When Redteeth leaned in to whisper, Hereward could smell his enemy’s meaty breath and the vinegar reek of his sweat. ‘Why would you dare to risk offending me? What lies in your head?’
Hereward looked Redteeth in the eye and grinned. ‘You will never know.’
Responding to a nod from his leader, Ivar pressed the hot poker to Hereward’s side. Pain lanced through him, and the stink of his own sizzling flesh rose up to his nose. His roar tore his throat, but it was the sound of triumph, not defeat.
‘Look at his eyes!’ Alric shouted. ‘You waste your time! I tell you, he is not a man — he is the Devil!’
‘He is a man,’ Redteeth replied with a shrug. ‘And we will find his humanity, given time. Perhaps when we cut his skin from him, as he did to my own man Askold.’ He pointed to the blade in the embers.
Wrapping his woollen cloak around his fingers, Ivar plucked the glowing knife from the fire, its heat so intense the mercenary flinched even through the covering.
‘Begin with his right arm,’ the Viking commander ordered. ‘Start with the skin. Then remove the flesh and muscle down to the bone.’ He added to Hereward, ‘We will carve you like the wild boar at our Yule feast.’
As the Northmen jeered and laughed, Hereward hid his thoughts behind a blank expression. He had noticed that Ivar had leaned in close when he brandished the poker, closer than he would ever have risked if the Mercian’s arms were not pinned. As the second in command approached with the red-tipped knife, Hereward waited for the opening to materialize and then lunged forward. Clamping his teeth on Ivar’s cheek, the English warrior bit down to the bone and ripped away the chunk of flesh with a twist of his head.
Howling, Ivar lurched back, dropping the knife on to the old woman’s bed. Amid the crackle of straw, grey smoke curled up. When the Mercian felt his two captors loosen their grip in the confusion, he wrenched his arms free, jabbing his right elbow into one throat and driving his forehead into the face of the second man.
He felt the thing inside him rise up, the other Hereward, born of rage and bloodlust, unconstrained by human values, and he welcomed it. The pain of his wounds vanished. As strength flooded into his weary limbs, he reacted with a speed that made the mercenaries seem lead-footed in comparison. Snatching up the poker, he lashed it across Redteeth’s face. From the corner of his eye, he saw the monk wriggle out from among their captors and wrench open the door. Good, Hereward thought. He planted one leather sole in the Viking commander’s gut and propelled him out into the snowy morning.
The mercenary band began to gather their wits; too late. As flames licked up from the hearthside bed, Hereward snatched up his sword, hacking one man in the face, then whirling to lop off the right hand of another. With a flick of his shoe, he kicked the burning straw across the room to the other straw at the back. The fire rushed up the timber frame to the thatched roof.
As a sheet of flame spread over their heads, panic erupted in the dense smoke. Hereward darted outside before the Vikings could react. Grabbing Redteeth’s axe from where the mercenary sprawled in a daze, he slammed the door and embedded the weapon in the splintering jamb to seal it shut. The roaring of the fire drowned out the terrified shouts from within, which turned to screams as the burning roof began to fall in.
Through the throbbing of the blood in his head, Hereward heard Alric cry out. The Viking commander was struggling to his feet. Whirling, Hereward kicked Redteeth in the face with such brutal force that the mercenary pitched backwards, unconscious. His fury spent, Hereward’s euphoria faded. The world suddenly looked too brittle, cold and bright. Lurching from the pain seeping back into his battered body, he attempted to lift Redteeth. ‘Help me,’ he croaked.
‘You are badly injured,’ Alric said as he shouldered the Viking’s bulk. ‘You will not reach Eoferwic alone.’
‘I have survived worse.’
‘Sooner or later your luck will run out.’
The screams of the trapped warriors died amid the roar of the fire as the walls caught light and the flames soared up high into the sky. Hereward thought of Gedley and felt proud.
When Redteeth came round, confusion flickered across his face, then uneasy awareness, then simmering rage. Hereward watched the play of emotions with cold satisfaction. The noose was tight round the Viking’s neck and his hands were bound as he wavered precariously on the chopping block. Alric turned away as the mercenary fought to keep his balance, no doubt remembering his own ordeal.
‘This is not an ending,’ Redteeth growled.
‘It is the end of your story,’ Hereward replied. ‘Except for the part where the ravens feast on your remains.’
‘You should have left well alone,’ Alric added.
‘Good Christian man,’ Redteeth spat.
The monk was a strange man, Hereward thought, but he might have his uses. Turning his back on the glowering Viking, he said, ‘You are a free man now. What will you do? Return to your monastery?’
Alric hung his head. ‘I am not free. If Harald Redteeth does not return with my head, another will come in his place, and another after that, until this matter is done.’ His eyes flickered in the direction of Gedley. ‘I will never be free.’
‘I have business in Eoferwic… grim business,’ Hereward said, searching the other’s face for even the barest hint that betrayal lay ahead, ‘and I cannot risk becoming food for the wolves.’
The monk’s eyes narrowed. ‘What manner of business?’
Hereward hesitated. How could he tell the younger man that it involved murder, conspiracy and the security of the very throne of England itself when he had no idea who could be trusted or how far the plot reached? ‘There are lives at stake,’ he said. ‘More, perhaps, than died in Gedley.’