Hereward Read online

  Hereward

  James Wilde

  James Wilde

  Hereward

  CHAPTER ONE

  29 November 1062

  It was the beginning of the End-Times.

  Black snow stung the face of the young man. Skidding knee-deep down the white-blanketed slope, he squinted in the face of the blizzard as he struggled to discern a path through the wild countryside of high hills and dense forest. On his tongue, the bitter taste confirmed his fears: ashes, caught up in the swirling white flakes. He was too late. Beneath the howl of the gale, he could hear the roar of the fires ahead and he glimpsed the billowing dark cloud just above the ridge, while at his back came the bestial call and response of the hunting party, drawing closer as he tired. From hell into hell.

  With numb fingers, Alric pulled his coarse woollen cloak tightly over his black cowled habit, but his teeth still rattled, as much from fear as from cold. He was barely into his eighteenth year, his face as yet unlined by life’s strife. Hazel-coloured hair hung wet and lank against his thin face, his tonsure already growing out, and black rings lay under his hollow eyes. At that moment, the security and peace of the monastery at Jarrow seemed to belong in the memory of another, more innocent person, one uncorrupted by searing despair. He thought of his mother and father who had sent him to the monastery as a child for a life in service to God. What would they think if they knew how badly he had let them down?

  Shrieking like lost souls, the ravens rose in one jet-black cloud from the spindly trees as he staggered up the next slope. His breath burned in his chest and his joints ached, but he drove himself on, grabbing on to branches to drag himself through the drifts. As the blizzard eased, he saw there was no way to hide his path. Across the desolate white landscape, his footprints trailed behind him for three miles, leading the raiders directly to him.

  At the top of the ridge, he made the mistake of glancing back. Silhouetted against the lowering grey sky on the hilltop a half-mile behind him was Death, the battleaxe Grim gripped in his right hand, a spear in his left. Harald Redteeth paused only briefly, the wind whipping his cloak, before plunging down the hillside into the trees. Like a pack of wolves, his men swept over the hilltop behind him, silent now, sensing their prey was close.

  Frantically, Alric crested the ridge, only to fall to his knees in the snow in shock when he saw the devastation heaped upon the village he had made his home.

  A black pall covered the clearing in the forest as scarlet and gold flames blazed from every timber-and-thatch dwelling in Gedley. Only the crackle of the fire and the hungry cawing of the birds could be heard; no pleas for help, no cries from mothers searching for children, or defiant men raging against their suffering. Nor was there any sign of the ones Harald Redteeth had sent on ahead.

  My fault, Alric thought, before angry self-loathing overwhelmed his guilt. All my fault!

  Throwing himself down the incline, he picked up speed, his weary legs pumping out of control until he stumbled and fell, crashing against the boundary post next to the stream.

  Hair, clothes and eyelashes white, he hauled himself to his feet and ran into the trees, calling the names of every inhabitant of Gedley one after the other. There was no response.

  He might as well have set fire to the houses himself, plunged a spear into the chest of every man, woman and child. Could God forgive him? Could he ever forgive himself? Lost in the choking smoke, he wondered if he should stop running, let Harald Redteeth kill him too. He deserved his fate.

  The monk cried out in shock as the floating figure of a man loomed out of the acrid fog, arms outstretched like the Lord upon the cross, eyes wide and staring. A moment later, Alric realized the man was dead, and one stumbling step forward revealed that the body was suspended in the thorny branches of a hawthorn tree. Wild hair and beard, both stained a deep blue, formed a fierce halo above a rusted hauberk that bore the marks of many strikes. Pink scars from battles past crisscrossed the arms and face. Alric’s gaze skittered to a vision of butchery and he reeled backwards, sickened: the carcass had been ripped from sternum to groin and the throat slashed, as if one killing had not been enough. Blood spattered the snow at the foot of the tree.

  The slaughtered man was not one of the Gedley villagers, the monk saw. For six months, Alric had broken bread with every one of them while ministering to their needs, and this was a fighting man, not a farmer. He could only guess it was one of Harald Redteeth’s raiders.

  But who had taken his life? The men of Gedley were not warriors.

  Baffled, he fought to order his thoughts, and stumbled on through the smoke. Fifty paces further on, he cried out again. A severed head had been rammed on to the top of a boundary post, the neck cut clean across. A raven gripped the thick brown hair and pecked at one of the white eyes. Alric felt his throat tighten in mounting panic. Could this be another of the Viking’s men? Northumbria was a lawless place, but never had he witnessed such brutality. Dizzy, he recalled the villagers’ hearthside tales of the wicked wuduwasa that roamed the haunted woods gnawing on raw bones, and the shadow-spirits that waited among the trees for the unwary traveller. The monk crossed himself to ward off any watching evil.

  But then the roar of the inferno wrenched him back to Gedley, and he blinked back hot tears of shame. Let the Viking and his men come; his own life no longer mattered if he could save just one survivor. But even though he shielded his face, the inferno seared his throat and drove him back. Falling to his knees in frustration, he began to sob.

  When the racking had subsided, he raised his eyes to heaven and began to mutter a prayer for forgiveness. He caught a flash of movement on the periphery of his vision, but the smoke swallowed up whatever was there almost as quickly as it had appeared. His heart pattered. Another fleeting movement followed, and then another.

  The instinct for self-preservation finally overcame him. Scrambling to his feet, he staggered away from the fire towards, he hoped, the path that led deep into the shadowy safety of the forest.

  A cry rang out, followed by a response further away.

  Alric blanched. They had found him.

  Running wildly, he tripped over a tree root and sprawled across the frozen ground, cracking his head and grazing his cheek. He knew he did not deserve to live, but he did not want to die. The conundrum brought another bout of sobs, but they died in his throat when he raised himself up from the snow.

  The dew-pond on the edge of the village was now a lake of blood.

  On the far side of the hollow lay the bodies of the villagers, hacked to death and heaped high as if they were firewood, their blood draining into the churned-up slush. Appalled, Alric gazed at the hellish scene until a sound behind him made him spin round; too late. Brandishing a bloodstained spear, one of the hunting band loomed out of the smoke, his wiry hair and thick beard frosted with snow. His hate-filled eyes blazed.

  ‘Who are you?’ Alric croaked.

  ‘You know,’ the Viking said with a broken-toothed grin.

  Alric did: the one the ravens followed, the bony figure with the scythe who cut down all men; his own personal end.

  Thrusting his hand into the monk’s cloak, the warrior hauled him up and cuffed him so hard that Alric saw stars. When his head cleared, he found himself back on the frozen ground staring into the lake of blood.

  Something moved just beneath the surface.

  At first he thought it was just ripples caused by the icy wind, but then a bubble broke the sticky surface and then another. A wild-eyed figure rose from the depths, slaked red from head to toe.

  ‘The Devil!’ Alric gasped.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘No devil.’ the bloody apparition grinned at the monk, who recoiled from whatever he saw in the gore-stained face. ‘I am Hereward.’

 
; As he emerged from his hiding place, the warrior swept his sword in an arc that sent scarlet droplets showering across the snow. The Viking hesitated, his lips curling back from his teeth, and raised his own weapon. Hereward felt a rush of euphoria. Too slow, he thought. He could see the questions turning over in the other warrior’s face, the hint of unease in his eyes. Still trying to make sense of what he was seeing, the Northman swayed off balance, awkwardly preparing to thrust his spear.

  Stepping over the whimpering monk, Hereward cleaved the haft in two, and followed through with another two-handed slice. At the last moment, the Viking lurched back a step so that the sword merely raised a trail of golden sparks from his mail shirt instead of carving him open. Losing his balance, he crashed down to one knee.

  ‘He is defenceless,’ the monk stuttered.

  ‘Good.’ Hereward angled his sword above the mail shirt and drove it into the man’s chest until the tip protruded from his back. The Northman gurgled, eyes frozen wide in shock. When Hereward withdrew the blade, hot blood trailed from the body where it had been opened to the air.

  ‘You did not have to kill him,’ the monk said, aghast.

  ‘He would have killed you without a second thought. And he helped slaughter all of them.’ Hereward nodded to the pile of villagers’ bodies.

  Croaking, the dying warrior tried to call out to his comrades. Hereward hacked off his head with one blow and picked it up by the hair, studying it with contempt for a moment before hurling it deep into the forest.

  ‘What are you?’ the monk said in disgust.

  ‘Your saviour.’ Hereward felt the ecstasy of the kill already begin to ebb, and the resonant voice inside him called out for more blood. It throbbed in his head, in his very bones, the hungry urging of the thing that had lived with him since he was a boy. For a moment, he listened for the sound of approaching feet. They were hard and cold like their northern home, these mercenaries, he thought, and seasoned by battle. They would not be deterred by sentiment or fear. He had ghosted out of the trees to kill the stragglers when they put the village to the torch, glimpsed by the others only in passing, and he knew that one on one was no contest. But if they came in force he would be at a disadvantage. ‘They’ll find us soon,’ he murmured, trying to pierce the dense smoke. ‘I counted another four here. Probably more on the way.’

  ‘Yes… there are.’

  ‘Then you have a choice: stay here and be food for the ravens, or come with me.’ He could see that the monk thought both options equally abhorrent, and with a shrug he prowled into the frozen wood. He hadn’t gone far when he heard the sound of the monk scrambling to catch up.

  ‘Tell me you did not murder any of the villagers.’ Anger laced the monk’s voice, but he was fighting back tears of grief.

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You are not from Gedley. What fight do you have with Redteeth’s band?’

  ‘Redteeth? That is their leader’s name?’ Hereward shrugged, wiping the sticky drips from his brow. ‘I am a man of Mercia. I was resting here in the village on my journey to Eoferwic. When the Northmen started their slaughtering, they made the error of trying to kill me too.’ Hereward thought back to the moment when, bleary-eyed from sleep, he had emerged from the house into the din of the attack. The raiding party roamed among the blazing houses, cutting down anyone who crossed their path. His first thought had been that the men who had pursued him from the court in London had finally caught up with him. Then, as he prepared to run, he had glimpsed a sight that turned a knife in the open wounds in his heart. A woman crying out as an axe split her skull, a small child sobbing at her side. The warrior winced. The vision had disinterred memories of two other women lying at his feet, their dead eyes staring blankly up at him. In an instant, his murderous rage had boiled up and after that he remembered only the iron scent of blood, the crack of bone and the throat-rending screams that followed the dance of his sword.

  Away in the fog of burning echoed the sound of running feet and a cry of alarm, quickly answered. The Viking’s headless body had been discovered, Hereward surmised. He grabbed the monk by the arm and hauled him on. ‘Battle with your conscience when you are not in danger of having your head removed.’

  The man stumbled along behind Hereward on weary legs. ‘They will not give up until they find us. Harald Redteeth can track a man through woodland far thicker than this-’

  ‘Quiet,’ Hereward snapped. ‘If you are planning to babble all the time, I will leave you behind.’

  The monk glared at him. ‘Harald Redteeth will not rest until we are dead.’

  ‘And I will not rest until he is dead. Choose your side now. Only one of us will be left standing when this business is done.’

  With the angry bellows of the raiders drawing closer, Hereward darted among the tangle of oaks and ash trees without waiting for a response. Cutting round a rocky outcrop that would hide them from their pursuers for a while, he plunged down a bank into a freezing stream, the exhausted monk struggling along close behind. The warrior felt his feet turn to ice in his leather shoes, but the discomfort was a small price to pay to ensure that no trail would be left to mark their passage.

  As they splashed along, the monk gasped, ‘My name is Alric. My home is the monastery at Jarrow, but I have journeyed far and wide to spread God’s word.’

  ‘God seems to have forsaken this place.’ Hereward could see that the monk would be a burden in the coming battle. And his chatter was as irritating as the incessant drone of a horsefly. Hereward weighed the advantages of clouting the cleric unconscious and leaving him for the hunting party to find.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Alric wheezed.

  ‘Ask me in a little while.’

  Where the stream cascaded down a tumble of rocks, the warrior grasped a branch to lever himself out of the water. He hesitated, studying Alric for a moment before reaching out to help the monk. Stooping to cup his hands in the icy water, he swilled some of the blood away to reveal streaks of long blond hair, and a strong jaw. His eyes were a piercing pale blue. As the caked gore sluiced off, the blue-black marks of the warrior were uncovered on his upper arms, spirals and circles made by punching ashes into the skin with an awl. He saw the monk eyeing the gold rings of a man of status round his forearms and biceps, but he was not about to satisfy the curiosity he discerned in his companion’s eyes.

  The monk relaxed a little when he could see that Hereward was not the devil he had first perceived. ‘You are not a common thief. You have had some tutoring,’ he remarked. ‘I can hear it in your voice.’

  ‘No questions.’

  ‘I would know what monster I accompany,’ Alric said defiantly.

  Hereward turned and pressed his blade against the monk’s neck. ‘Any more and I will gut you with my sword Brainbiter.’

  ‘You would kill a man of God?’

  ‘I would kill anyone.’ The Mercian fixed his pale eyes on Alric, and saw something that surprised him: a deep, dark part of the monk wanted to die.

  ‘You do not scare me,’ Alric said, blinking away tears.

  Ignoring him, Hereward glanced back along the stream. He absorbed the thinning light and the intensifying blizzard and knew that without shelter they would soon freeze to death. ‘They will be here soon,’ he said, turning to look into the darkening depths of the forest ahead. ‘How far to the next village?’

  ‘Half a day, at least. We will never survive the night.’

  ‘Is there any other shelter?’

  Alric hesitated. ‘There is a woman who lives alone near here. She is wicce.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘No!’ Alric protested. ‘She carries out necromancies and enchantments and divinations. She is a heathen who denies the Paternoster and the Creed.’

  As the shouts of their pursuers began to follow the path of the stream, Hereward grabbed Alric’s shoulders and shook him. ‘We do what we do to survive. You would rather die than break bread with a heathen?’

  Snapping from the s
train, Alric launched himself at the warrior, punching and kicking, spittle flying from his mouth as he raged. ‘None of this matters. They will pursue us until we drop from exhaustion! We are already dead!’

  ‘Yes. We are. All of us.’ Hereward swung his fist into the monk’s jaw and knocked him cold.

  Dragging his companion across the snow and rocks to a broad oak tree, the warrior stripped off his own blood-sodden woollen tunic and leggings and used them to bind the monk to the bole. Once he was done, he tucked his leather pouch containing coin and a knife behind a rock. Naked, he flexed his muscles so that the blue whorls that covered his torso rippled in the fading light, and then he bellowed. A moment of silence ended in an abrupt crashing in the frozen undergrowth as Redteeth’s men raced towards the sound.

  Hereward bounded off into the growing gloom.

  The monk must have come round in time to see him disappear into the trees, for the warrior heard Alric roar, ‘Monster! You are the Devil!’

  From his hiding place, Hereward watched two of the Viking mercenaries skid down the snowy bank to arrive beside Alric, one clutching an axe, the other a spear. Two more followed, wearing helmets and well-worn mail. ‘It is only the monk,’ the one with the axe said. ‘The other has fled.’

  ‘He left me here to slow you down!’ Alric shouted. ‘Pursue him! He is only a moment or two ahead!’

  Hereward spied the two helmeted raiders following his trail; their time would come first. The Viking with the spear turned to Alric. ‘Your debt can only be repaid with blood.’

  ‘Harald will want to take that payment himself!’ Alric replied bitterly.

  ‘I will take your head back to him. He will be pleased with that… and reward me fully.’

  Hereward saw Alric close his eyes and call on the Lord to save his soul. As the prayer whispered out on the wind, the Mercian was already circling round the two men trudging along his trail. When they separated to widen their search, he struck, allowing one blood-chilling scream to echo among the trees.