He held my gaze, his expression fixed in contempt, as if I were nothing more than a louse to him: an irritant, but one that could be easily crushed. There was a slight slur to his words, and I smelt wine on his breath: sour and pungent, faint but enough to be noticeable. How long had he been drinking before I arrived?
‘No?’ he said, raising his eyebrows in mock-surprise. ‘Very well.’ He began to pace around the room. ‘I am a patient man, Tancred, but not so patient that I readily forgive those who cross me. Consider yourself fortunate on this occasion, but do not presume that I will be nearly so lenient next time.’
‘No, lord.’
He nodded, seemingly satisfied, and when he spoke again it was in a milder tone: ‘Do not think, either, that I hold you responsible for what happened in Wales, or that I believe Hugues to be blameless in this matter either.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. That at least was some relief.
‘I am not looking for gratitude. I only tell you this for your own peace of mind.’ He sighed. ‘In any case, all that is behind us, and we have more pressing matters at hand. We must reserve our hatred for the enemy, not waste it on each other. It will do us no good to spread discord amongst our own ranks as long as the enemy is afield.’
‘Has there been any word of their movements?’
‘Not yet,’ Fitz Osbern said. ‘I have sent my fastest riders to keep watch along the valley of the Saverna, and had beacons erected between here and the dyke, the fires to be lit as soon as the enemy show themselves. Thus far, however, there has been no sign of them.’
Some of those beacons we’d seen as we had withdrawn back down the Saverna valley to Scrobbesburh. At best they might give us a couple of days’ warning of any approaching army: a few more hours, then, for us to spend waiting for the inevitable, for those banners and spearpoints to appear over the distant horizon.
‘They will come sooner rather than later,’ I said. ‘They know that we are weakened. They’ll want to press their advantage while they still can, before any reinforcements reach us from Lundene.’
Fitz Osbern shook his head and turned back towards the window. ‘There will be no reinforcements,’ he said quietly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Word reached us from the southern shires yesterday morning with the news that the people of Defnascir and Sumors?te are rising, and not only that, but sending messengers to foment rebellion throughout the rest of Wessex. Meanwhile across the sea our enemies in Maine and Brittany are said to be conspiring with the French king against us.’
He almost spat the name of the land of my birth. For longer than most could remember Normandy and Brittany had been warring, and while those wars had for the moment ceased, the enmity they had spawned between the two peoples had not entirely died. Perhaps Fitz Osbern had forgotten to whom he was speaking, or perhaps the slight was intentional, to remind me of my place. If I were to speak honestly, it was a long time since I had truly thought of myself as Breton, so many years had I spent fleeing the place of my youth, serving under lords who swore their fealty to the Norman duke. Not that that had ever stopped others from holding my parentage against me. I was well used to hearing such base insults upon my person, so much so that I no longer felt their force, though it was rare that they came from men as highborn and as learned as Guillaume fitz Osbern.
‘The Bretons and the Manceaux are always stirring up trouble, lord,’ I said. ‘That means nothing.’
‘Perhaps not,’ he replied. ‘But that is not all. As we speak the Danes are setting sail with a fleet of more than three hundred ships.’
‘Three hundred?’ I repeated. That was as large as our own fleet of four years ago.
‘So the traders who bring us this knowledge say, or at any rate the ones that we pay, since they are usually more trustworthy than the rest.’
Three hundred ships. The number seemed so large as to be scarcely believable. That could mean anywhere up to fifteen thousand men, at least half of whom we could expect to be warriors. It made our own force here in Scrobbesburh seem paltry by comparison. Nor was that the worst part, for in my experience every Dane was worth two Englishmen, hailing as they did from the cold and wind-battered lands across the German Sea, where food was scarce and men had to fight their neighbours for every crumb if they did not want to starve. They were renowned for their savagery in battle, feared throughout Christendom from the frozen isles that lay beyond Britain’s northernmost shores to the distant sun-parched lands of the eastern emperor, where some of their best warriors were reputed to serve as his personal guard. They had conquered this kingdom themselves more than once before. Now they were coming again: the invasion for which we had been waiting a year and more. Few had expected it would ever happen. All through the winter men had joked about the Danes and their king, Sweyn, and about his threats that always came to naught.
Now that it was happening, though, I found that doubts were creeping into my mind as to whether we could fight them off. Not while we had our own troubles to face here on the March. Nor was I forgetting that somewhere in the north there was also the?theling, whose plans could only be guessed, so little had been heard of him.
‘They will most probably land in the south and try to take Lundene, just as we did,’ Fitz Osbern went on. ‘King Guillaume himself has hastened back from Normandy and is now encamped at Westmynstre. He cannot allow the city to fall. He will need every able-bodied man of fighting age that he can marshal from the southern shires — every hauberk and helmet, every axe and pitchfork — if he is to prevent them taking it.’
‘Then we must do the same,’ I said. ‘We have to raise the fyrd not just from along the borderlands but from across the rest of Mercia too.’
The fyrd was the English peasant levy, raised by the reeves and the earls, organised according to the various shires and hundreds into which the kingdom was divided. The men who made it up were not warriors but farmers, most of whom could barely tell one end of a spear from the other, and it was foolish to rely upon them holding firm in the shield-wall. I was not suggesting calling upon the fyrd for their skill at arms, however, but simply for their numbers, for that was what we lacked.
‘We might call upon them, but that does not mean that they will come,’ Fitz Osbern said. ‘Nor do we have so many men that I can readily afford to send them out into the shires to enforce the summons, not when the enemy could march upon us any day now. In Wessex it is different, for the people there hate and fear the Danes. The Mercians will not fight their own kind. If they deign to lift their spears at all it will be under Eadric’s banner, alongside those of their countrymen who have already joined him.’
‘What then? If the king won’t send us men, how are we to defend Scrobbesburh, let alone the rest of the March?’
He did not answer. Of course he was known to be a close friend of the king, and one of his most trusted advisers, the two having known each other since they had grown up together at the ducal court in Normandy. That the king could not spare even his most loyal servant the forces he needed was a sign of how serious he considered the Danish threat to be.
There was a stool by the table and Fitz Osbern sat down upon it, burying his face in his palms and making a sound of frustration halfway between a sigh and a groan.
‘Are you unwell, lord?’ I asked.
‘The enemy are coming, and meanwhile all we do is quarrel and tear at each other’s throats in the manner of wild beasts.’ He shook his head and a grimace spread across his face. ‘Like packs of wolves,’ he muttered.
To my mind that last remark could refer to only one thing. Perhaps that was why he was in such a foul mood.
‘What of Earl Hugues?’ I asked. ‘I hear that he took himself back to Ceastre earlier this morning.’
He looked up sharply, as if I had been eavesdropping upon his thoughts. In truth the connection was not hard to make.