Shieldwall by Justin Hill

Author:Justin Hill [HILL, JUSTIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780748120000
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

The brothers fled from Sudsexe into Sudrie, Sudsexe again and then Cantware. Godwin followed them from camp to camp, relentless as a starving wolf.

At the end of a frustrating fortnight they caught the reavers red-handed, in a camp deep within the Weald. There were seventeen of them. A pitiful bunch, like servants tricked out in armour, no match for Godwin’s mailed and mounted and murderous retainers. There had been an argument and the two brothers had come to blows. Orm lay dead, but Orc was there. He was a short, thin man with dark hair and clear blue eyes. He had been wounded in the fight, and his face was pale, his arm cradled against his ribs, the sling stained with fresh blood.

Towards him strode Godwin. He was as grim as the Archangel Gabriel. He stood over the man and glared down at him.

‘You burnt my hall. Who put you to this evil work?’ he demanded.

‘No one,’ the bastard spat.

Godwin struck him.

‘Who put you to this?’

‘No one,’ the man said.

Godwin gripped his bleeding arm and his thumb dug in, as the nails had dug into Christ’s palms and fixed him to the wooden cross.

Orc ground his teeth in agony.

‘Is this Eadric’s work?’

‘Eadric who?’

‘Who was the flame-haired man?’

‘There was no flame-haired man.’

Godwin had no time for treacherous liars. He unsheathed his sword, grasped the man’s head and struck it from his shoulders, tossed it into the thicket, where it caught and snagged and hung: a gruesome witness.

Næling was bare and bloodied as Godwin walked towards Orc’s men. He was breathing heavily. The summer leaves were a wall of green behind his back. Gnats swirled in the air above his head.

He spoke in a quiet voice. ‘Tell me what have I done to you that you should bereave me so? Who put you up to this? Was it Eadric? Who was the man with the red hair?’

The men said that they had nothing to do with any of them. Godwin kicked one of the cringing men and lifted his face to look him in the eye.

‘You choose to bereave me?’ he demanded, but the man shrank back and clawed at his legs.

Another man blabbed, ‘I do not know of Eadric, but the red-haired man was named Offa.’

Godwin fixed that name in his heart. He let the man go and turned away.

‘Mercy! We were honest men once!’ they wept.

But they were outlaws and murderers and thieves, and he had no mercy. Honest men indeed!

‘And whores were virgins once!’ Godwin said, and spat into the ground and turned his back. ‘Hang the lot of them,’ he said in disgust. ‘Let Christ sort out the guilty.’

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