She returned in short order with a wooden bowl into which she’d ladled some sort of broth. At the very smell of food I thought myself about to vomit again, but somehow I managed to hold it down.
‘Yf,’ she said, kneeling beside me and proffering it to me. I took it in shaky hands, clasping it firmly so as not to drop it or spill any over myself. In the thin mixture I saw cabbage and leek, and some other small vegetables chopped finely so that I could not say what they were.
I raised the bowl to my lips and sipped at it, tentatively at first for it was still hot. It was not exactly what I would have called flavoursome, although perhaps had my tongue not been so fuzzy I would have considered it as good as the most lavish of feasts, for it was the first proper food to pass my lips in days.
‘Thank you,’ I said, forgetting for a moment where I was and that the chance of her being able to speak any French was slight at best.
‘Annest wyf i,’ she said, pointing at her chest. ‘Annest. Pa enw yssyd iti?’
Annest. I supposed that was her name. I was about to give her mine in return when a thought occurred to me. If Eadric and his men were still out searching for me, they might well ask folk nearby if they had heard or seen of anyone calling himself Tancred. Better in that case to give her a false name, or better still none at all. I chose the latter.
‘Seis?’ she asked, her expression earnest. That word was familiar for it meant an Englishman; one of the few bits of Welsh that I had learnt in my time on the Marches.
I shook my head. How to say I was a Frenchman, a Norman or a Breton, all of which I considered myself from time to time, was beyond my knowledge, but then that was probably just as well, for I was unlikely to have volunteered even that much anyway.
‘Estrawn,’ she said. ‘Mi ath alwaf Estrawn.’
Whatever she was trying to tell me was lost upon my ears. Certainly my inability to speak her tongue seemed to frustrate or disappoint her, or both. While I took another sip of the broth she stood abruptly and disappeared outside, calling presumably to the man who was her husband or father. The rain still fell, pooling in the rut that had been worn in the doorway. In all my travels I had never known a country as wet and as miserable as this.
Alone, I tried to summon the strength to get up. One thing was for certain: I could not stay here. Where I might go I didn’t know, only that the further it was from Mathrafal and from Eadric and Bleddyn’s men, the less likely they were to find me. Unfortunately my legs were reluctant to do as they were told, my feet uncertain of their grounding. At the same time a sudden dizziness overcame me and I staggered sideways, colliding with the chest and cursing loudly.
At once Annest came back in, with the greying man behind her. Together they helped me sit back down upon the bed, bringing me a second, tattered blanket that they wrapped around my shivering shoulders. My forehead still ached and I held my palm against it, rubbing the place where the pain seemed to be coming from to try to relieve it.
Annest fetched more wood from outside and added it to the fire-pit, building it up until I could feel the warmth of the flames upon my skin. While she did so, the man went to the chest and produced what looked like a strip of bark, grey in colour. With his knife he carved off a portion about the size of my thumb, which he pressed gently into my hand. When I looked at him questioningly, he cut another piece, which he placed in his mouth and began to chew upon, exaggerating the movements of his jaw so as to demonstrate what I was supposed to do. Finally understanding, I did as he had showed me, grimacing at the bitter taste and the rough feel of it against my teeth and tongue. Father Erchembald sometimes gave a concoction of dried willow-bark boiled in water to those who came seeking remedies for fevers, swellings and other ailments, and I supposed that this was much the same.
Having chewed upon the strip until my jaw was tired, I lay back down. Soon my headache receded, and my last thought before I drifted into sleep was that willow-bark must be good for treating that too.
They took good care of me over the couple of weeks that followed: Annest and her father, as I decided he must be, who it seemed went by the name of Cadell. To begin with I grew worse, with bouts of sickness coupled with a burning ague. In my few moments of wakefulness I struggled, and failed, to recall the last time I’d felt so ill. Within a few days, however, the sweating and the shivering had subsided and my appetite returned. The more I ate of their food and drank of their ale, the more my strength was restored to me, until after perhaps a week my fever had lifted and I was able to venture outside once more, to help gather and carry in wood for the fire and water for the pot. I was still not as fit as I would have liked, and prone to fits of coughing, but simply being on my feet did me some good.
As well as my dried braies they found me a linen shirt, frayed at the hems, and a tattered deerskin cloak that might well have belonged to the man’s father, if not his grandfather too, so many times had it been patched and restitched. Neither Cadell nor Annest wore any shoes and so they had none spare to offer me, but I was content to go barefoot, my blisters and sores being close to healed by then.
And so I gathered my strength, until the morning came when I knew it was time for me to leave. To say that I was fully recovered would have been a lie, but I’d tarried in this place long enough already. As long as there were battles to be fought and the fate of the kingdom remained at stake, I could not rest. Somewhere my brothers in arms, my lord and my king needed me, and it was my duty to do what I could to help them. And so I had to return.
The Welshman and his daughter knew it too; they had seen me growing restless over the days and they did not try to stop me — as if they could. At first I’d been hoping to leave without disturbing either of them, while they still dreamt, but the girl was a light sleeper and woke at the first sound of my rising. I’d hardly made it halfway to the door when she shook her father awake.
‘Estrawn,’ Cadell said as he rubbed his bleary eyes. That was the name by which they had come to know me.
‘I must go,’ I replied, feeling that I ought to say something even if they could not understand me. ‘I need to get back to my people.’
‘Aros titheu,’ he said, pointing a finger sharply at me as he cast off the blanket covering him and climbed from his bed, making for the trestle table that stood against the wall. He gathered some of the crumbling cheese and a few ends of bread from the previous evening’s meal into a scrap of cloth and tied it to the end of a sturdy stick that rested by the door.
‘Dos ragot a Duw ath gatwo.’ His face was solemn as he held it out to me.
A parting gift. As if he and Annest hadn’t already shown me enough kindness. Lesser folk might have left me to die, but they had troubled to shelter, feed and clothe me, and it wasn’t right that their compassion should go unrewarded. I wished I had silver or something more useful to give them in return, by which I could show my gratitude. Save for the clothes on my person, however, I had nothing. Guilt made my throat stick and I had to choke it back.
I accepted the stick with the food bundle. Both smiled warmly; Annest threw her arms around me; her father clasped my hand. In that way we bade each other farewell, and I stepped beyond their door into the breaking dawn. Their house stood alone, sheltered from the wind in a shallow cleft between two rises, overlooking a pasture where goats grazed. Of any other cottages, a church or a lord’s hall nearby, there was no sign, and the same was true of any road or track that I might follow. The sun was rising so I knew at least which direction was east, which was good, since from what I recalled of my flight in that rough direction lay Mathrafal, and I had no intention of walking back into the lions’ den if I could possibly avoid it. If Scrobbesburh had fallen or lay under siege then it was pointless trying to seek refuge there, while to the west was nothing but a bleak land of mountains upon mountains, or so I had heard from those who had ventured into those parts, with the sea beyond them. With that in mind I headed south, knowing that somewhere that way was Earnford.