Grudgingly Maredudd and Ithel made for their half of the camp, shouting to rouse their troops. Torches were lit as the message was passed from tent to tent, and one by one bleary-eyed faces began to emerge, angry at having been woken so early. I didn’t doubt that the brothers would blame me for that, but what else could I do? Earl Hugues had been relying on us to fulfil our part of the strategy, but since our raiding had failed to tempt the Welsh kings out, somehow we had to make sure that we could bring our small force to bear when the two sides clashed. For all that any of us knew, our five hundred men could make the difference between failure and triumph.
I turned to Eudo, who was fixing me with a stare as cold as I had ever seen from him. Only too well did I understand his exasperation, and feel for his tiredness. Didn’t he see, though, that the longer we delayed, the less chance we had of catching up with the enemy?
‘What more do you want from me?’ I asked.
His lips were set firm in disapproval, or disgust; I could not tell which. ‘This is unwise, Tancred,’ he said, keeping his voice low as he glanced towards the Welsh brothers, although they were far enough away by then that I doubted they would hear. ‘With every day we’re venturing further into unknown country. More and more we depend on what they tell us, and yet I trust them less and less.’
‘Fitz Osbern trusts them,’ I said, though I knew it wasn’t much of an answer.
Eudo knew it too, for he gave me a sardonic look. ‘They have as many spears under their banner on this expedition as we do. If they turn on us-’
‘They won’t.’ I tried to sound confident, as much to convince myself as him, for I was only too aware of how vulnerable we all were, and how much we needed the Welshmen. As, I hoped, they needed us too.
‘You can’t know that,’ he said. ‘They have something in mind, I’m sure of it.’
‘If they’d wanted to lead us into a trap, they could have done so long ago,’ I replied. ‘Why wait until now?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘And the not knowing is what I like least about it.’
Eudo was not the kind of man usually prone to such suspicions, and the fact that he would express his sentiments so openly suggested to me that I ought to take him seriously. Yet the time to voice those kinds of doubts had long passed. Whether we liked it or not, we had to trust Maredudd and Ithel. Not only that, but somehow I would have to repair the damage that had been wrought this night, to make sure that they would trust me in turn.
‘What else can we do but follow them?’ I asked. ‘If they’re leading us to our deaths, then we’ll know it soon enough. But if we start sowing mistrust between us and them, they’ll only turn on us all the sooner.’
It was scant consolation, and Eudo did not look satisfied by it, but I could offer him nothing better. If our years of friendship counted for anything then he would accept my judgement on this, as he had on countless occasions before.
Shaking his head, he said, ‘Fitz Osbern might have placed you in charge, but that doesn’t mean you have all the answers, Tancred. Remember that.’
‘Eudo-’
He didn’t give me the chance to reply as he swung up into the saddle and rode off.
A group of foot-warriors had stopped to see what was going on. ‘What are you looking at?’ I snapped at them. ‘Fetch your belongings and ready your horses. We ride as soon as we can.’
I made my way to the other side of the hill fort where the French tents stood. Already my thoughts were turning to other things: to the battle that lay ahead; to Rhiwallon and Bleddyn, whose men had raided my lands so many times this past year; and to Eadric and all the Englishmen who had joined them. To the conquest of the Marches, of the Welsh kingdoms, and to glory.
Fourteen
We came upon Mathrafal around mid-morning, skirting the fields to its west, keeping our distance in case Eudo and his patrol had been mistaken and there were more of them lying in wait than they had been able to see. The place was just as he and Haerarddur had described: a cluster of halls and storehouses within a square enclosure around one hundred paces on each side, with stout ramparts and a moat surrounding it, and a scattering of houses beyond that.
Hearth-smoke rose from the buildings; from our vantage on the hillside I spied flashes of movement within the fort as men rushed back and forth, climbing the ladders on to the catwalk behind the palisade. They had seen us, though they needn’t have feared, for I had no intention of approaching them. Their spearpoints and shield-bosses gleamed dully under overcast skies: I counted three dozen men at least, and those were just the ones I could see. Enough, probably, to hold the walls for hours, especially if they also had bows with arrows, and javelins that they could throw down at us. Even though we’d overwhelm them eventually, it would cost the lives of more men than we could spare.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ithel and Maredudd exchange a look, though they knew better than to try to challenge me again. My mind was set and they would not change it.
Leading away from that camp, following the river valley to the north, were several cart-tracks. Riding hard, we followed them, stopping only to give our horses drink, keeping well away from any sign of settlement where we could. I did not want the men to become distracted with ideas of plunder.
That didn’t stop the folk who lived in those places running like rabbits at the very sight of us, driving their animals and carrying those children who were too small to run towards the safety of the trees or the hills on the other side of the river. Once, I sent Serlo out with a handful of men to cut off a few of the stragglers. He returned having captured a family of five, all of them curly-haired and with a thin, wasted look about them. They told us of a great army that had marched through only the previous evening, whose vanguard had borne the banner of a scarlet lion with an azure tongue, upon a straw-coloured field.
‘The banner of the house of Cynfyn. Of Rhiwallon and Bleddyn,’ said Ithel, who was again translating for me. As the day had gone on his mood had lightened somewhat, though his brother still kept his distance, and regarded with me hostility whenever I happened to glance his way.
‘How many passed this way?’ I asked.
The question was put to the father of the family, a man of more than forty years with iron-grey hair. Gazing at his feet, shivering with fear, he mumbled something so quietly as to be incomprehensible.
‘Pa niuer ynt wy?’ Ithel barked. The man hesitated before speaking, and I saw the lump in his throat as he swallowed. Eventually he answered, more loudly this time, though still he could not muster the courage to look up from the ground.
‘Hundreds upon hundreds,’ Ithel said. ‘Two thousand, or possibly more.’
I swore under my breath. Were that true, they outnumbered Earl Hugues’s force by some margin, which made it all the more crucial that we found some way to add our men to his in the battle to come, either by reaching him beforehand or, failing that, by trailing the enemy until the fighting started, at which point we might catch them in the rear.
‘He doesn’t know for certain,’ Ithel said. ‘He begs that you have mercy upon him and his family.’
I glanced at the wretched man standing with his family gathered close around him. His two young daughters clutched at the skirts and the sleeves of their mother, who was doing her best to comfort them. I met her eyes, grey-blue like Leofrun’s. With all that had happened recently, I had thought little about her or my unborn child, who very soon would be making his way into this world. Guilt filled me, but it was a guilt tinged with anger. Anger at the Welsh and their English allies for having torn me away from them and from Earnford. At myself, too, for having abandoned them, for having allowed my foolish desire for respect and renown to get the better of me, to bring me to this point.