The young man dropped his eyes. “That is why my stepfather hates me and wants to make me a slave, why my half brother Alfgar has everything, and I nothing.”
He had not told the full story: How Wulfgar had pressed and pressed his pregnant wife to take birthwort, to kill the rapist’s child in her womb. How he himself had only been saved by the intervention of Father Andreas, who had denounced fiercely the sin of child-murder, even of a Viking’s child. How Wulfgar in his rage and jealousy had taken a concubine, and bred on her Godive the beautiful, so that in the end there had been three children growing up in Emneth: Alfgar the trueborn; Godive, child of Wulfgar and his slave-lemman; Shef, child of Thryth and the Viking.
The king’s thane passed back the hand-forged blade in silence. Still a mystery, he thought. How had the woman escaped? Viking slavers were not usually so careless.
“What was the name of this jarl?” he asked. “Of your…”
“Of my father? My mother says his name was Sigvarth. The jarl of the Small Isles. Wherever they are.”
They sat for a while in silence, then stretched out for sleep.
It was late the next day when Shef and Edrich walked cautiously out of the reeds. Well-fed and unharmed, they approached what they could already see were the ruins of Emneth.
All the buildings were burnt, some mere heaps of ash, others with blackened timbers protruding. The thane’s house and stockade were gone, the church, the smithy, the huddle of wattle-and-daub houses for the freemen, the lean-tos and sandpit-houses of the slaves. A few people still moved, stumbling haphazardly here and there, poking in the ashes or joining those already clustered round the well.
As they came into the village area, Shef called to one of the survivors, one of his mother’s maids.
“Truda. Tell me what happened. Are there more…?”
She was shaking, gaping up at him with horror and amazement, looking at him unharmed, his shield, sword. “You better… come see your mother.”
“My mother’s still here?” Shef felt a slight lift of hope at his heart. Maybe the others would be there too. Could Alfgar have got away? And Godive? What of Godive?
They followed the maid as she hobbled clumsily along.
“Why does she walk like that?” muttered Shef, looking at her painful limp.
“Been raped,” said Edrich briefly.
“But… But Truda’s no virgin.”
Edrich answered the unspoken question. “Rape’s different. If you have four men hauling at you while another does it, all of them excited, tear sinews, breaks bones sometimes. Even worse if the woman tries to fight them.”
Shef thought of Godive again, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the inside of his shield-boss. It was not only the menfolk who paid for lost battles.
They followed Truda in silence as she limped before them to a makeshift shelter, a collection of planks propped on half-burnt timbers and leaning against a fragment of stockade saved from the flames. She reached the shelter, looked inside, muttered a few words, and waved them in.
The lady Thryth lay inside, on a heap of old sacking. From the grim look of pain on her face and the awkward way she sprawled, it was obvious that she too had been through Truda’s experience. Shef knelt beside her and felt for her hand.
Her voice was just a whisper, weakened by terrible memory. “We had no warning, no time to prepare. No one seemed to know what to do. The men rode straight here after the battle. They couldn’t make up their minds. Those pigs caught us while they were still arguing. They were all round us before anyone knew that they had come.”
She grew silent, writhed a bit in pain, looked up at her son with empty eyes.
“They are beasts. They killed everyone who showed fight. Then they gathered the rest of us together outside the church. It was beginning to rain by then. First they picked out the young girls and the pretty girls, and some of the boys. For the slave markets. And then… then they brought out their prisoners from the battle and then…”