“There’s something strange here tonight,” Beatrice whispered as they walked. “Usually they’d be sitting in front of their houses or perhaps gathered in circles laughing and talking. And the children would be following us by now asking a hundred questions and wondering if to call us names or be our friends. Everything’s eerily still and it makes me uneasy.”
“Are we lost, princess, or are we still going toward the place they’ll be sheltering us?”
“I’d been thinking we’d visit first the woman about the medicines. But with things the way they are, we may be better going straight to the old longhouse and keeping out of harm’s way.”
“Are we far from the medicine lady’s house?”
“As I remember it, not far at all now.”
“Then let’s see if she’s there. Even if your pain’s a trivial thing, as we know it to be, there’s no sense in feeling it at all if it can be taken away.”
“It can wait till the morning, Axl. It’s not even a pain I notice till we’re speaking of it.”
“Even so, princess, now we’re here, why not go and see the wise woman?”
“We’ll do so if you particularly wish it, Axl. Though I’d have happily left it for the morning or maybe the next time I’m passing through this place.”
Even as they were talking, they turned a corner into what appeared to be the village square. There was a bonfire blazing at its centre, and all around it, illuminated by its light, a large crowd. There were Saxons of all ages, even tiny children in their parents’ arms, and Axl’s first thought was that they had stumbled upon a pagan ceremony. But as they stopped to consider the scene before them, he saw there was no focus to the crowd’s attention. The faces he could see were solemn, perhaps frightened. Voices were lowered, and collectively came through the air as a worried murmur. A dog barked at Axl and Beatrice and was promptly chased away by shadowy figures. Those among the crowd who noticed the visitors stared their way blankly before losing interest.
“Who knows what concerns them here, Axl,” Beatrice said. “I’d walk away except the medicine woman’s house is somewhere near. Let me see if I can still find my way to it.”
As they moved towards a row of huts to their right, they became aware of many more people in the shadows, silently watching the crowd around the fire. Beatrice stopped to talk to one of them, a woman standing in front of her own door, and after a while Axl realised this was the medicine woman herself. He could not see her well in the near-darkness, but made out the straight-backed figure of a tall woman, probably in her middle years, clutching a shawl around her arms and shoulders. She and Beatrice went on conferring in low voices, sometimes glancing towards the crowd, sometimes at Axl. Eventually the woman gestured for them to enter her hut, but Beatrice, coming up to him, said softly:
“Let me speak with her alone, Axl. Help me take off this bundle and wait out here for me.”
“Can’t I be with you, princess, even if I hardly understand this Saxon tongue?”
“These are women’s matters, husband. Let me talk with her alone, and she’s saying she’ll examine my old body carefully.”
“I’m sorry, princess, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Let me take your bundle from you and I’ll be waiting here as long as you wish.”
After the two women had gone inside, Axl felt a great weariness, especially in his shoulders and legs. Removing his own burden, he leaned against the turf wall behind him and gazed over at the crowd. There was now a growing restlessness: people would stride from the darkness around him to join the crowd while others hurried away from the fire, only to return a moment later. The blaze illuminated some faces sharply, while leaving others in shadow, but after a time, Axl came to the conclusion these people were all waiting, in a state of some anxiety, for someone or something to emerge from the timber hall to the left of the fire. This building, probably some meeting place for the Saxons, must have had a fire of its own burning inside, for its windows flickered between blackness and light.
He was on the verge of nodding off, his back to the wall, the muffled voices of Beatrice and the medicine woman somewhere behind him, when the crowd surged and shifted, letting out a soft collective growl. Several men had emerged from the timber hall and were walking towards the fire. The crowd parted and quietened for them, as though in expectation of an announcement, but none came, and soon people were pressing around the newcomers, their voices building again. Axl noticed that attention was focused almost entirely on the man who had come out last from the hall. He was probably no more than thirty but had about him a natural authority. Although he was dressed simply, as a farmer might be, he did not look like anyone else in the village. It was not just the way he had swept his cloak over one shoulder, revealing his belt and the handle of his sword. Nor was it simply that his hair was longer than any of the villagers’—it hung almost down to his shoulders and he had tied some of it with a thong to prevent it swaying over his eyes. In fact the actual thought that crossed Axl’s mind was that this man had tied his hair to stop it falling across his vision during combat. This thought had come to Axl quite naturally, and only on reflection did it startle him, for it had carried with it an element of recognition. Moreover, when the stranger, striding into the midst of the crowd, allowed his hand to fall and rest on the sword handle, Axl had felt, almost tangibly, the peculiar mix of comfort, excitement and fear such a movement could bring. Telling himself he would return to these curious sensations at some later point, he shut them out of his mind and concentrated on the scene unfolding before him.
It was the bearing of the man, the way he moved and held himself, that so set him apart from those around him. “No matter that he tries to pass himself off as an ordinary Saxon,” Axl thought, “this man is a warrior. And perhaps one capable of wreaking great devastation when he wishes it.”
Two of the other men who had emerged from the hall were hovering nervously behind him, and whenever the warrior drifted further into the crowd, both men tried their best to stay near him, like children anxious not to be left behind by a parent. The two men, who were both young, also wore swords, and in addition, each was clutching a spear, but it was evident they were quite unaccustomed to such weapons. They were, moreover, stiff with fear and seemed unable to respond to the words of encouragement their fellow villagers were giving them. Their gazes darted about in panic even as hands patted their backs or squeezed their shoulders.
“The long-haired fellow is a stranger arrived only an hour or two before us,” Beatrice’s voice said close to his ear. “A Saxon, but one from a distant country. The fenlands in the east, so he says, where he’s lately been fighting sea raiders.”