The hapless Fulbert might have been the first to suggest the notion, but he was not the only one, for as October wore on and still our scouts had not found us a crossing over the river, many of the nobles started to offer the same counsel. If the Danes could be paid to depart before winter, the?theling would be left without allies and would have no choice but to retreat back whence he had come, into the wilds and the moors north of Dunholm. However, so determined was the king to crush his enemies outright, as he had crushed the usurper Harold at H?stinges, that he refused to listen to such advice. And so for another two weeks we waited for word to return from upriver, where they were looking for a ford by which we might bring our entire host across. By then it was getting late in the campaigning season. Autumn mists shrouded the land, the arms of the trees were growing bare and each day was colder than the last. The minds of the barons were turning to the unrest in the south that was threatening their manors, and beyond that to the gathering of firewood for their hearth-fires and the slaughtering of pigs and cattle in preparation for winter.
‘We would do better to let the enemy keep Eoferwic and Northumbria,’ said Galfrid one day when we were out on one of our regular foraging expeditions. ‘Let them spend the winter there and then in the spring march against them when the troubles elsewhere are settled and we can muster an even greater force.’
‘You’d do better to keep your mouth shut if you want your head to stay attached to your neck,’ I told him. ‘England belongs to King Guillaume and to him alone.’
Though in many ways it was good sense, such talk was close to treason, and if word ever got back to the king that men were openly suggesting he should surrender a part of his realm to pagans and rebels, he would have no hesitation in demanding their heads.
Thankfully Galfrid never discussed it again. Such moments of folly aside, I had begun to warm to him. Indeed, from training with him it was clear he was a far better swordsman than I had expected, if a little overconfident in his abilities. He would have to learn to restrain his excitement if he wanted to survive for long on the field of battle.
And he would have to learn quickly, for the time when our swords would be needed was soon. We returned to camp that same evening with three carts all loaded with supplies, and were greeted with the news that a baron named Lisois had discovered a crossing-place high upstream, some miles to the west. A hundred fyrdmen from the shire of Eoferwic had tried to hold it against him and his knights, but he had succeeded in killing a large number of them before driving the rest off. Even as we rode through the camp men were making ready their horses and donning mail and helmets, the vanguard forming up under the lion banner, even though night was fast falling. Soon the order to march was being passed down to every lord together with his retainers, to every knight and every servant. Only a few remained behind at the king’s direction, commanded by his other brother, the Count of Mortain, who was charged with holding the southern bank of the Yr in case the enemy should bring their ships up from the marshes of the Humbre where they lay and try to land on the Mercian side.
‘On the march again,’ Eudo said wryly as, under the light of the setting sun and rising moon, we mounted up.
‘Not a day too soon, either,’ I replied. No further news had come from Eoferwic, nor had there been any sign of Lord Robert and Beatrice, and to tell the truth I was growing ever more anxious. I hoped they hadn’t been in the city when it fell, and yet if they had escaped then it was strange that they had not made their way south.
The thought that they might be dead was not one that I wanted to entertain. Try as I might, however, I could not stop it preying on my mind, and each time it surfaced what small hope I held out only diminished further.
We reached the ford before the enemy could send any more of their men to hold it and prevent us making the crossing. We rode through the night and the dawn and for several hours into the following day, until our entire host was gathered on the Northumbrian side of the river. A formidable host it was by then, too, for the weeks we had been held at the Yr had allowed other barons to catch up with us. Among them were more than a few English thegns: those who had no love for Eadgar?theling, or whose families had suffered at the hands of the Danes in generations past, or who were too afraid to risk their king’s wrath by defying him. All of which meant that by the time we marched upon Eoferwic we were many thousands in number.
A few foemen came to stand against our progress and were quickly routed, but mostly they fled at the very sight of us, retreating to rejoin the main host, I didn’t doubt. We tried to pursue them, but these lands south of Eoferwic were flat and in many places boggy, not easily penetrable on horseback. They knew the paths through the marshes far better than we did, and it would have been folly to try to face them on unfamiliar ground, where they could easily draw us into ambushes. And so we left them, skirting around those low-lying lands, all the while expecting their banners and their shields to appear upon the ridges and across the fields ahead of us and for the battle-thunder to ring out. But they did not. We saw the evidence of their raiding all around us, but never their entire host.
‘They have to be planning something,’ Wace said on the second day after we crossed the river. ‘Otherwise they would have attacked us before now.’
‘Unless they’re too afraid to fight us,’ Eudo suggested.
He was joking, of course, but Wace had ever struggled to understand Eudo’s sense of humour. ‘When have the Danes ever been afraid of a fight?’ he asked with a snort. ‘No, they wouldn’t have come all this way if they didn’t want a battle. They’re drawing us towards Eoferwic, most likely holding out within its walls, inviting us to assault the city just like last year.’
Except that it seemed Eudo had it more right than Wace, for the word from our scouts was that the enemy were abandoning the place altogether, escaping by ship down the Use and by foot and horse into the north. We learnt a fire had spread through the entire eastern quarter of the city, destroying one of the castles and the minster of St Peter, before the wind had carried the ashes and the sparks across the river, where they had settled on the thatch of the houses, leaving almost no building standing. And so, with nothing left to defend, the Danes and the?theling had quit the place.
Still I did not quite believe it, not until the following day when we arrived at the still-smouldering ruins and I could see everything with my own eyes: the toppled, blackened timbers where the palisades and gatehouses had been; the wisps of smoke rising from the foundations of the great church and the long merchants’ houses; the mottes without their towers; the fallen-in roof of the vicomte’s palace, where I had recovered from the injuries I’d suffered in the battle at Dunholm and where I had first become indebted to the Malet family and mired in their many struggles.
Seeing how Eoferwic had been ravaged only drove the king to greater fury. The rearguard was only just catching up with the rest of us when he began organising the first of the raiding-parties: conrois of forty or fifty men that he sent both north and south of the Use with orders to harry the surrounding land, pursue those who had fled and drive them out from their hiding places, burn the storehouses and the crops in every village that they came to, seize the people’s chattels and put their animals to the sword so that the enemy could find no forage anywhere, and kill every man, woman and child of Northumbria in retribution against all those who would take up arms against him. When the king’s own chaplain protested, saying that such wanton slaughter was not God’s will, he was promptly stripped of his robes and his cross, his ankle tied by means of a rope to a horse’s harness, and then he was dragged naked and howling through the mud for all the army to see.