When he sat down to his meal, he suspected he was barely recognizable from the filthy creature who had first walked in. The food was plain but abundant, and by the time he was ready to leave the inn, he felt like a new man.
As he rode the long route south, he tried not to dwell on those he had left behind who sought revenge. He did not allow himself to believe the danger was past: it was not and probably would never be. People had long memories, and, as he had once heard the king say, there was nothing else to do in the border country except pursue blood feuds and plan the next bout of rape, pillage and murder.
He told himself that he had increased his chances by changing his appearance and by keeping off the best-known and most commonly used tracks. Sometimes he barely saw a soul all day. It was lonely — he longed for company, even that of some fellow traveller with whom he had nothing at all in common — but the loneliness kept him safe.
Or so he hoped.
At length he came to the wide estuary of the Humber river. He and the mare were both exhausted. They had travelled perhaps a hundred and fifty miles since turning south, and the cold winter they had left behind in the country around the Wall had turned into a mild spring. They had covered at least five miles every day, and sometimes, when the roads were flat and straight, as much as thirty. Now both of them needed a rest. Rollo, in addition, needed some time in which to think about the next phase of his mission. Its appeal had lessened with each day and every mile that had taken him closer to it, but he knew there was no avoiding it. In his heart he knew that he feared what he had to do. He did not like feeling afraid.
He had been born into a family of tough fighters: men who had gone to the hot southern lands to carve out a kingdom for themselves. His father was a Norman knight, and his mother was equally fierce and fiery. From a young age, Rollo had been taught that the way to deal with fear was to stare it in the eye and shame it into submission. He wondered, with a wry private smile, just how well that advice was going to stand up as he set about carrying out the alarming and strange task his king had entrusted to him.
He found a place to stay — an inn in a small village a few miles inland, on the northern shore of the estuary — and made his plans. He needed more information, and he needed to find the right people to ask. He knew what sort of people they would be and where to find them. He thought as far ahead as he could — as he dared — and then he gave in to his fatigue and went to bed, where in warmth, comfort and peace, he slept dreamlessly from mid-afternoon of one day to mid-morning of the next. Then he rose, bathed, ate, settled his account with the innkeeper and went to fetch Strega from the stables. She was as well rested and restored as he was, and together they set off on the last and most perilous leg of their long journey.
The rumour that had so concerned the king spoke of a specific location, although it had not been given a name. Its description, the king had hoped, would be enough to identify it, once Rollo was in the vicinity. The location was on the coast and, now that Rollo had reached the right area, he made the decision to proceed by water. He found a long quayside on the river’s north shore, where ships of varying sizes were tied up. Others were arriving and departing and, as far as the eye could see, traders were busy. Rollo approached the captains of several vessels and eventually found one who was going in the direction Rollo wanted and was willing to take a paying passenger and his horse. The captain spat in his hand and the two of them shook on the deal, then coins changed hands and Rollo and his horse went aboard.
The ship sailed on the evening tide. She was a coastal vessel, not all that big, and usually plied along the east coast from the Humber to the Thames. Her crew were mainly old hands who had served with their captain for years. They knew their profession well and, to Rollo’s relief, most of them seemed willing to enliven the monotony of their daily life by chatting to a stranger.
On the morning of the first day out, as the ship commenced her voyage around the wide bulge of Lincolnshire, Rollo got into conversation with the mate and the lad who, as his shadow, was learning his job. The two were uncle and nephew, alone in the world except for each other. The lad’s parents — the mate’s late sister and her husband — had died with the rest of her family and most of her village in the floods of the previous autumn. Rollo would not have pressed them to speak of such a recent tragedy, but both man and boy seemed willing, even eager, to do so. Perhaps, he mused, they were trying to get the grief out of their minds by talking about it.
‘You’ve never seen seas like it,’ said the mate, eyes full of horror as he thought back. ‘The wind came howling down out of the north like some furious ice demon, and the waves rose up like — like — well, higher than the highest tree.’
Any man other than one from East Anglia, Rollo reflected, would have said higher than a mountain, but there weren’t any mountains in the fenland.
‘The tides were real high and all,’ put in the lad, ‘and what with the hurricane blowing and the sea pushing up with the swell of the tide, the water didn’t have anywhere else to go, so it flooded over the low-lying land.’
‘A storm surge,’ Rollo remarked. He had heard tell of such phenomena, although he had never experienced one himself.
‘We have funny old storms hereabouts,’ the mate went on with the voice of long experience, ‘and sometimes you’ll think they’re heading off out to sea and you can stop worrying about them, and then they have a change of heart and back they come and hit the land again.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no accounting for it,’ he muttered, ‘unless it’s magic.’ Both he and the lad made a surreptitious gesture with their right hands. Rollo thought he recognized the sign against the evil eye.
‘You get fogs and all,’ the lad piped up. ‘Real strange, they are, floating up out of nowhere like great white phantoms and then vanishing as quick as they came.’
‘Are there many shipwrecks?’ Rollo asked. He was pushing his luck, he knew, for sailors were a superstitious bunch, and he thought he could well be castigated for asking such a question when actually at sea.
The mate and his nephew exchanged a glance. Then the mate leaned closer to Rollo and, dropping his voice, said, ‘There’s sandbanks, see, and they shift around like living things.’ He gave a visible shudder. ‘Round the edges of the Wash, you just never know from one trip to the next where you’re going to find water deep enough for your boat’s draft and where you’re in for a nasty surprise because some stray wind, tide or current has piled up a mess of silt that wasn’t there before.’ He paused, nodding and slyly touching a forefinger to the side of his nose. ‘There’s captains I could mention who have come to grief because they didn’t allow for a sudden change in depth,’ he said softly. ‘Add a stiff wind to the picture, and before you know it, you’re blown on to a sandbank, your boat’s tipping over, your cargo is ruined and you’re like as not drowned, because out there — ’ he waved a vague hand — ‘there’s places where you think you’re on firm ground and then you realize too late that you’re sinking fast and you’re trapped in the quicksand. Why, only last-’
‘Uncle!’ hissed the lad, making the sign against evil frantically with both hands. Even the mate seemed to realize he had gone too far.