A King's Comrade Part 30

Troubled enough I was in my mind at this time in all truth. For it lay heavily on me that I had promised the poor queen away in Thetford that I would watch her loved son and if need be die with him, and I had lost him and yet lived. I know now that I had no real need to blame myself in this; but the thing was so terrible, and had been wrought as it were but at arm's length from me, that for the time I did so bitterly, framing to myself all sorts of ways in which a little care might have prevented all. As if one can ever guard against such treachery!

And then there was the fear for Hilda, none the less troublous that I knew not what her need might be. One could believe aught of cruelty from Quendritha.

Only these two things remained to me--one, in some measure to redeem my word to the mother of the king by finding his body; and the other, to stay here and watch as well as I might for chance of helping this one who had suddenly grown to be the best part of my life, as it seemed to me. And these things I told Erling, for he was my comrade, and together we had been in danger, and so were even yet. Rough he was, but with that roughness which is somehow full of kindness. And I was glad I had told him, for he understood, and straightway planned for me.

Most of all the difficulty in this planning lay in the outrageous colour of my good steed. Once we thought of tarring him; but a tarred horse would be nearly as plain to be noticed as a skew-bald.

I think it says much for the steed that neither of us thought for a moment of parting with him. In the end we said that we would even take our chance, for if we were sought it would not be near the palace.

So we bent ourselves to plan the search for where the body of the king might be hidden, and that was to unravel a tangled skein indeed. All we knew was that the cart which had borne him from the end of the hidden pa.s.sage had gone northward along a riverside track. Beyond that, we guessed that it might not have gone far, whether for fear of meeting folk in the dawning, or because the slayers would not be willing to c.u.mber their flight for any distance with it. Moreover, Gymbert was in the palace, as Erling was certain.

We would ride northward and seek what we might till the time for meeting Selred came, working down the river toward the palace from far up stream. Sooner or later thus we should meet with the wheel tracks, and perhaps be able to follow them whither they went into the woodlands from the old stream-side way which Gymbert had at first taken.

CHAPTER XIV. HOW WILFRID HAD A FRESH CARE THRUST ON HIM.

Now we were just about to ride off the ancient road into the woods when we heard the m.u.f.fled sounds of a party coming along the way.

For a moment I thought that we were pursued, but then I knew that whoever came was bound in the direction of the palace. The causeway was straight as an arrow, as these old Roman roads will be, but the track men used on its crest was not so. Here and there a great tree had grown from acorn or beech nut, and had set wayfarers aside since it was a sapling, to root up which was no man's business. So we could not see who came, there being a tree and bushes at a swerve of the way. The horses heard, and p.r.i.c.ked up their ears, and told us in their way that more steeds were nearing us.

"Ho!" said Erling suddenly. "Mayhap it is just as well that these good folk should see us in flight eastward. Spur past them, and look not back, master."

I laughed, and let my horse have his head, and glad enough he was.

Round that bend of the track we went at a swinging gallop, and saw a dozen foresters ahead of us, bearing home some deer, left in the woodlands wounded, no doubt, after the great hunt, on ponies. They reined aside in haste as they saw us coming, while their beasts reared and plunged as the thundering hoofs of our horses minded them of liberty; and through the party we went, leaving them shouting abuse of us so long as they could see us. And so long as that was possible we galloped as in dire haste, nor did we draw rein for a good mile.

Then we leaped from the causeway, and went northward through the woodlands, sure that the chase for us would hear from the foresters whither we were heading, and would pa.s.s on for many a mile before they found that no other party had seen us. Whereon they would suppose that we had struck southward to pa.s.s Worcester by the other road, even as we had said in the hearing of the thrall in the house.

Then I thought that the chase for us was not likely to be kept up long, for it would grow difficult; but Erling shook his head. He had a deadly fear of Quendritha.

Now we rode for all the forenoon in a wide curve, northward and then westward, across the land which the long border wars had ravaged so that we saw no man save once or twice a swineherd. More than once we pa.s.sed burned farmsteads, over whose piled ruin the creepers were thriving; and all the old tracks were overgrown, and had never a wheel mark on them, save ancient ruts in which the water stood, thick with the growth of duckweed, which told of long disuse.

And at last we came to the valley of the little Lugg river which we sought, and then were perhaps ten miles north of Sutton and its palace stronghold. The day had grown dull, and now and then the rain swept up from the southwest and pa.s.sed in springtime showers, just enough to make us draw our cloaks round us for the moment, soft and sweet. In the river the trout leaped at the May flies that floated, fat and helpless, into their ready mouths, and the thrushes were singing everywhere above their nests.

Those were things that I was ever wont to take pleasure in, and the more since I had been beyond the sea. But today I had little heart to heed them, for the heaviness of all the trouble was on me.

Maybe, however, and that I do believe, I should have been more gloomy still had I been one of those who have no care for the things of the land they look on, lovely as they are. I dare say Erling the viking took pleasure in them, if he would have preferred the wild sea birds and the thunder of the sh.o.r.e breakers to all this quiet inland softness. At all events, he had no mind that I should brood on trouble overmuch, and strove to cheer me.

"Thane," he said presently, even as I began to quest hither and thither by the riverside for the track of the cart, which indeed I hardly thought would have come thus far, "it seems to me that food before search will be the better, an you please."

"Why," said I, having altogether forgotten that matter, "twice men have told me that when Quendritha is at a man's heels he had better not wait for aught. Yet I blame myself for having forgotten. It is not the way for a warrior to be heedless of the supplies."

"When the warrior is a seaman also he cannot forget," quoth Erling.

"Had you bided with Thorleif for another season, you had found that out. I have not forgotten. Dismount, and we will see what is hidden in the saddlebags."

We went into a sheltered nook among the water-side trees, and he brought out bread and venison enough for two meals each, and I was glad of the rest and food. He had helped himself at breakfast, he said, being sure that sooner or later we should have to fly the palace.

"Well, and if we had not had to fly?" I asked.

"Betimes I wax hungry in the night," he answered, smiling broadly.

"It would not have been wasted."

When that little meal was done I leaned myself against a tree trunk, and said naught for a time. Nor did Erling. The horses cropped the gra.s.s quietly at a little distance, and the sound of the water was very soothing.

The next thing that I knew was that Erling was bidding me wake, and I opened my eyes to see that the sun was not more than two hours from setting, and that therefore I had had a great sleep, which indeed I needed somewhat sorely after that last night. The sky had cleared, but here and there the rain drifted from the sky over the hills to the west. I sprang to my feet, somewhat angry.

"You should have waked me earlier," I said. "Now it grows late for our quest."

"About time to begin it, master," the Dane said, "if we do not want to run our heads into parties from the palace. Maybe they will be out also on the same business. What we seek cannot be far from thence."

Then we mounted and rode down stream, quickly at first, with a wary eye for any comers, searching the banks for traces of wheels, carelessly for a few miles, and afterward more closely. But we saw nothing more than old marks. The track ended, and we climbed the rising ground above the river, and sought it there, found it, and went back to the water, for no cart had newly pa.s.sed to it here.

And so we went until we were but a mile or two from the palace, and then we were fain to go carefully.

In an hour I was due in the copse to meet Selred, and then men would be gathered in the palace yards in readiness for supper, so that we might have little trouble in being unseen there. Now, on the other hand, men from the forest and fields might be making their way palaceward for the same reason.

"I would that we could find some place where we might hide the horses for a while," I said. "What is that yonder across the river?"

There was some sort of building there, more than half hidden in bushes and trees. Toward it a little cattle track crossed the water, showing that there was a ford.

"The track pa.s.ses the walls, and does not go thereto," said Erling.

"It may be worth while to see if there is a shelter there."

So across the ford we rode, with the trout flicking in and out among the horses' hoofs. The building, whatever it was, stood a hundred yards or more from the river on a little southern slope which had been once terraced carefully. Over the walls, which were ruinous, the weeds grew rankly, and among them a young tree had found a rooting. The place had been undisturbed for long years; and I thought that it seemed as if men shunned it as haunted, for of a certainty not a foot had gone within half arrowshot of it this spring.

We stood in the cattle track and looked at it, doubting, for no man cares to pa.s.s where others have feared to step for reasons not known.

"It is an uncanny place," said Erling; "which may be all the better for us. At any rate, we will go and look into it. Stay, though; no need to make a plain track to it hence."

The cattle tracks bent round and about it, and as we followed one it seemed at last to lead straight into the ruin. So we went with it, and found the entrance to the place. Last year the cattle had used it for a shelter, but not this, and there were no signs that any man had followed them into it. And then I knew what the place was, and wondered at its desertion little, for it was a Roman villa. Any Saxon knows that the old heathen G.o.ds those hard folk wors.h.i.+pped still hang about the walls where their images used to hold sway, not now in the fair shapes they feigned for them, but as the devils we know them to have been, horned and hoofed and tailed.

Minding which a fear came on me that the marks we took for those made by harmless kine were of those unearthly footsteps, and I reined back.

"What is there to fear?" said Erling--"fiends? Well, they make no footmarks like honest cattle, surely. Moreover, I suppose that a good Christian man need not fear them; and Odin's man will not, so long as the horses do not. The beasts would know if aught of that sort was about."

Whereon I made the holy sign on my breast, and rode to the gap in the white walls which had been the doorway, and looked in. I suppose that some half-Roman Briton had made the house after the pattern his lords had taught him, or else that it did indeed belong to the Roman commander of that force which kept the border, with the Sutton camp hard by for his men. If this was so, the Briton had kept the place up till Offa came and burnt the roof over it, for the black charcoal of the timbers lay on the floors. Only in one place the pavement of little square stones set in iron-hard cement still showed in bright patches of red and black and yellow patterning, where a rabbit had scratched aside the gathered rubbish. Across walls and floors the brambles trailed, and the yellow wallflower crowned the ruins of the stonework everywhere.

One could see that there had been many rooms and a courtyard, bits of wall still marking the plan of the place. And in this one corner there was shelter enough in a stone-floored room whose walls were more than a man's height. The cattle had used that for long.

"This is luck," said my comrade. "Here we can leave the horses, and if one does happen past here before dark and spies a pied skin, he will but deem that kine are sleeping here. After dark, who will come this way at all?"

"We shall have to," said I, somewhat doubtfully.

Erling leaped from his horse and laughed. "We may hide here for a week if we must," he said. "I think that the trolls have all gone to the old lands where men yet believe in them; and seeing that we are on a good errand, your fiends should not dare come near us. I care not if I have to come back here alone to fetch the horses when you will."

I dismounted also, for he shamed me, and I said so. Then we tied the steeds carefully, loosening the girths, and managed to get a sapling or two from the undergrowth set across the door to keep wandering cattle out. More than that we could not do, but at least the horses were safe till we needed them, and that would hardly be long, as we hoped. They had well fed as I slept.

Then we went away from the ruin, pa.s.sing behind it up the little slope on which it stood, meaning, if we were seen, to come down as if we had not been near the place. And from the top of that slope we could see the walls of the palace, with the white horse banner of Mercia floating over them. From the roof of his villa the Roman captain could have seen his camp, and maybe that deadly pa.s.sage into its midst was for his use. It led this way.

We waded through the ford again, and wandered down stream once more, looking as we went for the first sign of wheel marks. I was on the banks above the water by twenty yards, and Erling was at their foot, close to the stream, when we had the first hope of finding what we sought. I spied a rough farm cart standing idle and deserted fifty yards away from me and the river, in the brushwood, half hidden by it, as if thrust hastily there out of sight; and the very glimpse of the thing, with its rough-hewn wheels of rounded tree-trunk slices, iron bound, made my heart beat fast and thick, for I feared what I might see in it.

I called Erling, and as he ran to me I pointed, and together, without a word, we went to the cart and looked into it. It was empty, but on its rough floor were tokens, not to be mistaken, which told us that it was indeed the cart which Gymbert and his men had used. And so we knew that we could not be far from the place where they had hidden the king's body.