When I woke, the girl was still there, shivering beside me whilst other women's screams pierced the night. We sat in the darkness and after a while I took her hand and, perhaps because she was afraid and feared I would hurt her, her fingers curled round mine. I thought of Alwunn from Abbotsend, whom I had lain with once. But now I could not remember Alwunn's face, though I could remember Cynethryth's.
When the noise inside the fortress died down I gave the black-haired girl some smoked ham and cheese and led her through the darkness away from Caer Dyffryn. Once out of sight, I told her to go but she could not understand me, or perhaps she had nowhere to go. So I took three silver coins I had taken from a dead Welshman and put them in her hand. I turned my back on her and I did not hear her go, but when I eventually looked behind me there was no sign of her.
Finally, when his men had finished with them, Sigurd let the women run off into the night and I wondered how many Norsemen had planted their seed in Welsh bellies. I wondered if I had planted my own seed in the black-haired girl and I felt sick at the thought of what I had done. Added to this, the wound in my shin now stung like fire, though it was not enough to make me forget about the girl. Asgot smeared the cut with a poultice of herbs, then bound it tight with rough linen from a dress and when he was finished I sat alone in the darkness watching out for torches in the Welsh hills. And I was afraid because I did not know who I had become.
We burned the bodies of three Norsemen and two Wessexmen killed by the Welsh in their last struggle, and then we, along with the six remaining English, carried Weohstan into the fortress whose palisade stood mostly untouched by fire. Inside, we searched for food and ale by the light of the fires still burning and found plenty of both. We gorged on pork and beef too and it was not long before we dropped beside collapsed fires, our beards wet with ale and our ears full of song.
'Pagan or Christian, a man is never happier than when he has emptied his balls and drunk his fill,' Penda shouted, his words sliding into each other and his eyelids heavy. For a few hours at least, the Englishman would forget the friends who had died beside him.
Sigurd must have ordered men to stand watch that night, but if he did I was not aware of it. We saw no sign of the Welsh and I don't believe any of us thought they would come whilst the fires yet burned in the fortress of Caer Dyffryn. As for the Welsh dead, if their souls still clung to the place, deaf to the call of the next life, they would have thought their killers dead too, such was the stupor that lay over us. We were exhausted and drunk and relieved to be behind stout wooden walls for once, protected in a hostile land.
By dawn, Weohstan was conscious enough to eat the warm but dried out pottage Penda had found above a Welshman's hearth, and though the young man had suffered, he was safe now and would shortly be reunited with his father. As for us, we would soon be aboard our ships. I imagined Serpent and Fjord-Elk sitting low in the water, their bellies heavy with English silver as the wind filled their great sails and carried us across the sea.
It was strange to see Norsemen and Englishmen sharing the spoils of a beaten enemy and that night I learned that violence and slaughter can sometimes bind men, forging unseen chains. In blood and fear and chaos, these men had forgotten their differences, laid aside the shackles of faith and come together. Hah! Perhaps I am speaking words that were nowhere near my tongue or even in my mind at the time. I was young then and arrogant and blinded by blood. But is it not often the case that the old, having the advantage of experience, cast the spear of acquired truth into the heart of their memories? Am I alone in wishing I knew back then what I know now?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE WOKE AMONG THE SMOULDERING REMAINS OF THE FORTRESS village of Caer Dyffryn, holding our aching heads and rubbing our smoke-reddened eyes.
'How is your leg, Raven?' Sigurd asked. Even he looked weary, the creases around his eyes lined with black soot.
'It will be fine in a day or two,' I said, coughing and spitting sooty phlegm and pulling up my breeches after a lengthy morning piss.
Sigurd ran a hand through his hair and tilted his face to feel the new sun's warmth upon his closed eyelids. 'It always troubles me, you know,' he said, suddenly opening his eyes at the crack of a smouldering beam, 'how the world just goes on as though nothing has changed.' I looked at him questioningly, not wanting to interrupt as he gathered his thoughts. 'How many men did we send into the afterlife yesterday?' he asked.
'I don't know, lord. Many,' I said.
He nodded. 'Look around you, Raven. The birds still sing and the dogs still piss up trees. Even the women we took last night will wet their faces and pin on their brooches. They'll begin the new day and forget the last. If they can.'