Heorot

These are the opening chapters of the prequel to all the Lares novels, provisionally called “Heorot.” The story is based on the Beowulf legend, in which Heorot (Heart/Hart) is the great hall that comes under attack from the man-monster Grendel. The original was in Denmark, but I’ve re-built it on the ruins of the Villa Corvo.

“Heorot” has just been voted into the Best Sellers Chart on YouWriteOn, the Arts Council sponsored website for new writers. This means I shall be getting a professional critique on it in about six weeks time, from the Random House Literary Agency. If it isn’t too scathing, I’ll post it at the end of these chapters!

HEOROT

CHAPTER ONE  

A.D. 412 

When they murdered my half-sister Vera Alauda, I turned my back on her, and ran. 

So many times I've wondered, since that terrible dawn … Should I have stayed?  Should I have tried to save her?  

The answer is always no. I was thirteen years old, unarmed, and completely unpractised in fighting. The Master had painful ways of discouraging his slaves, even me, his privileged slave-son, from inflicting expensive injuries upon each other. We never fought, and of course as slaves we never had access to weapons of any kind, let alone any training in using them. So what could I have done against a force of heavily-armed barbarians, except give up my own life without the slightest hope of saving hers?  

If I hadn't run, we would all have died: me, and Grendel, and Beppo, we would certainly have perished. So I ran, and I made them run as well, and we all survived; but life was never again as sweet as it used to be.  

The day had begun like any other. The skies above the grey wolds were slowly lightening to pearl and buttermilk and rose, and a light ground-mist hovered over the lower-lying fields; but I was in no mood to appreciate the beauty of the morning, for I had been up all night with Grendel, tending a sick cow. He and I were always entrusted with the difficult births, he for his strength and his deep, instinctive knowledge of all beasts and whatever might ail them, and I because I was the only person not afraid to work with him. Grendel was a strange, wild creature even then. He could speak no more than a few simple words, and he had only the haziest understanding of anything except the sheep, pigs and cattle that he cared for. Most folk called him a half-wit, and he would long ago have been made outcast and driven away if I had not taken his part, and persuaded my lady half-sister to do the same. 

After a long, weary struggle the cow had dropped her calf in the small hours of the morning. We delivered it safely, but it was a cross-birth, and it took all our skills, and the ropes, and Grendel’s massive strength to bring it forth alive. Afterwards the calf was well enough, but the cow sickened, and we were sitting up with her as dawn began to break over the eastern wolds. Across the fields I caught sight of the little kitchen slave, Beppo, coming out of the villa with our morning rations, and then I saw him suddenly turn aside and break into a run, waving with his free hand, and calling out in a voice of happy excitement.

Coming up the road towards the villa was a horse and rider, an unusual occurrence since the Master and his wife and sons had abandoned their country estate some weeks back. As rumours of barbarian invaders grew stronger, they had all decamped to the greater security of the nearby garrison town, leaving behind just a handful of us slaves to mind the villa and tend the livestock.

I narrowed my eyes, and it was the horse I recognised first, an elegant little mare, grey as the morning mist, trotting briskly and tossing her neat, pretty head - Nebula! And then of course I knew the rider: my lady half-sister, Vera Alauda, slender and straight in the saddle, her white stola gleaming in the dawn light and a fine blue cloak billowing about her. She had left us on her marriage some six months before, and we had not seen her since. She had not gone happily, for she had loved her family and her home in the high wolds. I still wonder sometimes what brought her back that day. Was it simple homesickness? I shall never know.  

Beppo reached her and she reined in and slipped down from the horse’s back to give the little boy a hug. I shook Grendel to rouse him, and pointed to where the two stood together, no more than a quarter of a mile from us. He recognised Vera Alauda, and smiled his slack-mouthed smile as he grunted her name. She raised a hand to us in greeting, then we saw her lift Beppo into the saddle, and send him cantering in our direction. 

'Welcome home, Alauda!' I called out, and she waved again in acknowledgement. Then she walked on up the road towards the villa, and I wondered if she knew the family was gone, and she would find no one there but a handful of slaves.  

Beppo reached us, flushed with pride to be on Nebula's back. He loved animals, horses especially, and it was typically kind of Vera Alauda to give him the treat of this ride.  

That kindness cost her life. 

A magpie's sudden harsh alarm call startled us, and sent Nebula skittering and prancing. Beppo clung to her mane as Grendel caught her bridle and subdued her by his sheer strength, while I stroked her nose and gentled her and told her she was a foolish creature, so she was, to be afraid of a silly bird. Then I walked her round to calm her, as Beppo slid off her back and opened up his pack to give us our rations; but suddenly she threw up her head, tearing the bridle from my hand. As I reached out to catch it again, she reared up with a scream of terror and whirled away from me. Then she was gone, bolting as if the fiends of hell were at her heels. 

Fiends of hell there were, but Nebula was not their quarry. 

Wild yelling and the clashing of sword on shield shattered the morning stillness, and we spun around to face the eastern wolds. Twenty or thirty barbarian warriors, brandishing swords and spears and flaming torches, hurtled down the slope at terrifying speed towards the villa, and the small slender figure of Vera Alauda.  

'Run, Alauda, run!' I screamed. Grendel clenched his enormous fists and threw back his shaggy head.  

'They come with swords!' he howled, confused and uncomprehending, but even in his half-witted dullness knowing that something was terribly wrong. 

'Run!' I yelled again, and grabbed Beppo as he started back towards his mistress. She was nearly a quarter of a mile away, the target of a dozen or more of the racing, yelling mob. On Nebula, she might have got away, if she could have controlled the horse's terror. More likely she would have been thrown, and the outcome would have been the same. 

'Run!' I shouted uselessly, for how could she hope to outrun that terrible tide of death? Then some of the warriors checked their pace: they had heard my cries, and three of them broke away from the main body and started in our direction. I barely paused to think then, although I have thought since, over and over again, about the decision I made in that moment. I grabbed Beppo by the wrist and dragged him after me, calling to Grendel to follow me close. We ran. 

Behind us I heard my half-sister scream my name, and I think my heart broke in that moment. But I still ran. 

We buried her shortly before the next day's dawn, Grendel and I, as the raiders lay in a drunken stupor up at the villa, having found and plundered the Master’s wine store. Beppo watched beside us, crying silently, trembling like an aspen leaf. Poor scrap, he was terrified, but nothing would keep him from seeing his lady one last time. They had stripped her of everything of value before they stripped her of her life, but one thing they left: close beside her in the long, bloody grass lay a little stone figurine, one of the Lares, the household gods of the villa. From her earliest childhood he had been her talisman: she had named him Fidelis, Faithful One, and kept him with her always. His name and his sightless eyes reproached me as we filled in the shallow grave, so I set him above her head as a grave-mark, then we left her to lie forever in the place she had loved so well. The first larks of the morning were rising as we crept away in the growing light. We had lingered far longer than was safe, but it was hard to leave her alone there in the cold ground. But leave her we did, as we had left her to die, and the larks sang sweetly over her head.


The Saxon raiders stayed two days, and after they had wrecked the villa they plundered the native settlement in the valley bottom. We three kept in hiding, down by the river in the rough shack where Grendel's mother lived. We were safe enough. Hidden in the reeds and the willows, it was too poor and wretched a place to be worth sacking, even if the raiders could have found it. Still, we dared not light a fire, and our only food was a few small raw fish from the river, and the remains of the Master’s last charitable dole to Grendel's mother, a stale loaf and a handful of wizened apples.  

On the third dawn after the raiders came, I woke abruptly to the smell of smoke and the sight of flames leaping from the villa up on the ridge. Beppo and the old woman were still sleeping fitfully in a heap of rags and reeds. There was no sign of Grendel. 

I watched the distant raging of the fire, and as the blazing roofs caved in and the walls crumbled, I finally understood that my life had changed forever. No longer was I a privileged slave of a fine house, bastard son of the Master, reared well and kindly to a good craft. In eighteen years, when I reached thirty, I could have expected to receive my freedom and a home of my own on the vast Corvo estates: I would have been Libertus Obustus Corvo, with a good living and the protection of my noble family. My father and my half-sister had promised me that, and I in turn had promised the same one day to Beppo, though he was no kin of mine. Now Vera Alauda was dead, the villa was razed to the ground, and I knew the Master would never return. 

I had the gift of my freedom eighteen years early, and a bitter gift it was. When the barbarians moved on, I would make my way to whatever was left of the native village, and offer my youth and strength and skills to those who had survived the raid. I knew they would welcome me. They would take every able-bodied man and boy they could find to help rebuild their shattered homes and lives, even a half-Roman like me, son of a native slave and a foreign lord who had been little loved by the village people. I would make a place there for myself, and for Beppo too, but life would never again be sweet. For me the dawn would always break with the smell of smoke and the flash of bright swords, and the voice of my dear half-sister calling my name in vain.

My name … the name my slave mother Hobbe gave me. They said she had the Sight, and now I knew what she had seen when she called me Obustus. I used to think she chose it as a masculine, Romanised version of her own name. Now I knew better: Obustus means “hardened by fire,” and so I was that day, as I watched my old life collapse into the flames.  

Grendel came out of the mist, slipping through the reeds, silent in spite of his great bulk. There was blood around his mouth from the ragged piece of meat that he was gnawing as he came. He hunkered down beside me and offered me a share, and I was so hungry I would have eaten it, raw and bloody as it was. But when I reached out to take it, I saw that it was a human arm.


That summer was a bitter one, endlessly cold and wet. Beppo and I were accepted in the native village, but Grendel stayed in the reed shack by the river, and I rarely saw him. The villagers feared him for his strangeness and his huge strength, and he shunned them.  

We planted a few crops with what seed we could find, but they mostly rotted in the wet fields, and no help came from the Master. He never returned to the ruins of the villa. I never saw him again, and as the winter set in, the cold and the hunger and the grief took from me the very last of my old life, when little Beppo died in my arms. 

CHAPTER TWO 

A.D. 414  

Two years later 

“Run! Run for your lives!” 

That is really not something you want to hear when you are lying helpless in bed with a broken leg splinted from ankle to groin. I struggled to sit upright, grimacing at the pain, and made a feeble attempt to crawl towards the doorway of the boys’ hut. I fell back almost immediately. I was not going anywhere.

“Saxons! Saxons are coming! Run for your lives!” 

Outside I could hear all the sounds of hasty departure: men yelling orders, women screaming for their children, children shrieking with excitement, dogs barking hysterically, hens squawking, geese honking, terrified sheep bleating. One thing I couldn’t hear, though, was any sound of the Saxons. It was just two years since the dawn raid in which my half-sister had perished, when the barbarians came down from the hills in a howling mob, brandishing swords and flaming torches. There was none of that now. The Saxons might indeed be coming, but they were doing it very quietly. 

The village swiftly emptied. Within a couple of minutes, there were no more people noises, just the occasional nervous yelp of a stray dog. 

Then I heard them: footsteps, voices … but the footsteps were unhurried and the voices were not raised, and they weren’t only men’s: I could hear women and children too. I began to wonder if perhaps I was not going to die, and made another attempt to crawl towards the hut doorway. My ears rang and my eyes clouded with the pain of it, but this time I got there. I lifted a corner of the rough fabric that hung over the entrance, and peeped out. 

Whoever had raised the alarm was right: these were certainly Saxons. My field of vision was limited, but I could see two men, immensely tall and thickset, with long blond hair and untrimmed beards, and a woman, tall as the men and even broader, flanked by two boys no more than eight or nine years old. To me they all looked dirty and unkempt, and they moved warily, staring about them, pointing at things and talking in a harsh, guttural language that I could not understand. 

The situation was still alarming, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. These people hadn’t come to plunder and burn, that was clear enough. At least, not yet. 

Another man, much more finely dressed than the others, appeared suddenly from around the side of the Great Roundhouse, and gestured at its doorway. The woman lifted the door curtain, and cautiously peered in. A small dog ran out yapping, and the woman leapt back with a startled shriek. The men all laughed, and she looked abashed. The finely-dressed man ducked in under the door curtain, and the woman followed him. The two other men took up places either side of the entrance, like guards, while the little boys began to wander in my direction. I ducked back, but not quickly enough. One of them gave a shout, and I knew he had seen me. 

I heard the sound of running feet, and dragged myself away from the entrance, and just as well, for the curtain was pulled roughly back and a spear thrust in. If I hadn’t moved it might have spitted me; instead it halted inches from my chest. I raised my hands in a somewhat redundant gesture of surrender, and looked up fearfully into the face of the spear-carrier, who laughed and shouted something over his shoulder. Clearly he did not consider me a threat, for he allowed the two little boys to squeeze past him into the hut, where they stood looking solemnly down at me. 

The elder boy gestured at my splinted leg, and asked a question, and I replied with a shrug and a grimace. The smaller boy stretched out his right arm, and rubbed it as if it hurt, then he copied my grimace: from which I deduced that he had once broken his arm, and was sympathising with me. This was promising: I appeared to have the good will of at least one of the Saxons, albeit the smallest and most insignificant. The older boy rolled his eyes at the younger one: his expression clearly said “What a fuss about nothing.” The younger boy kicked him sharply on the shin, and within moments they were grappling on the floor, yelling, rolling about and punching each other. I hastily drew my leg back out of harm’s way. Seconds later, the finely-dressed man burst through the doorway, cast a grim look at the two wrestling children, then reached down and seized them by the scruff of their necks. He hauled them upright as easily as a man picking up a couple of puppies, and shook them vigorously. A single, sharp word, and they stopped wriggling in his grip. He let them go, and they stood silent, eyes downcast, meek as milk. The man looked at me and raised his eyes to heaven like a man driven to exasperation by his unruly offspring. I took the risk of giving him a sympathetic grin. 

Abruptly he turned away, and gestured everyone out of the hut. He gave a brief string of words that sounded like an order, and then I heard a strange, rumbling sound like – cartwheels? I dragged myself back to the doorway, and looked out. 

Two massive, lumbering carts came into view, both piled high with an odd assortment of goods – what looked like tents, blankets, bundles of household items, and, on top of the first cart, three magnificent bronze bowls and a clutch of spears. The carts, each drawn by two weary-looking ponies, rumbled through the village and on up the grassy slope towards a flat open field, currently lying fallow. The Saxons followed, some forty of them in all, mostly men, but there were at least five women and half a dozen children among them, including the two boys I had already encountered. At a shout from the finely-dressed man, whom I took to be the headman, the carts halted, and the women began to unload their contents. 

Clearly the Saxons planned to stay a while. I watched as they began to raise their tents of tanned leather, and two men started to dig what I guessed was to be a fire pit for cooking. Not a short stay, then. The women unloaded a big bundle of blankets, and shook them out. Even from several hundred yards away, I could see their expressions of disgust. A fine rain had been falling on and off all morning, and clearly the blankets were damp. One of the women, the massive one with the two small boys, gestured to a group of men who were standing about doing nothing, and pointed towards the village. Four of them set off purposefully back down the slope.  

I watched them as they went from hut to hut, emerging from each with blankets and cloaks and other items of clothing left behind by the villagers in their haste to get away. Inevitably one appeared at the entrance to the boys’ hut where I lay helpless, and started to gather up bedding. He looked down at me, and my guts turned to water. For a moment I thought he would knife me and take my blanket too, but instead he gave a small grin of sympathy, and turned away. In a moment I was alone again, breathing hard and wondering why I was still alive.  

It was a kindly gesture, to leave me my blanket when he could have taken it and left me shivering or dead. From that moment, Saxons to me were not necessarily the ruthless marauders who had raped and murdered my sister. These Saxons at least were people just like us: they would help themselves to whatever of ours they fancied, but they were not above a gesture of kindness to a helpless invalid. 

So I was not entirely astonished when the same man returned at evening, bringing me a hunk of fresh-baked bread and a lump of cheese. I had had nothing since the morning meal, and I ate it ravenously to the last crumb. Then I looked up to thank him with a smile, and realised that his intentions were not entirely generous. To avoid a painful and ultimately pointless struggle, I carefully eased myself onto my front, and accepted the inevitable. There were not many women amongst the Saxons. I would be lucky of this was my only night visitor.  

I wasn’t lucky. Three more of them turned up in the end. I bit hard on the corner of my blanket to stifle any sound, as they all raped me in turn, not violently, thank heavens, but certainly very thoroughly. When the last one had finally finished, he slapped my bare backside and muttered something that might even have been a thank you, then he left me sore and bleeding in the dark, dreading the possible arrival of more. 

There was nothing I could do about it, and in any case, it was hardly a new experience. Any good-looking slave of either sex has to expect these things, especially in a household where the master is often away, and has five lusty unmarried sons and a wife who prefers to turn a blind eye. Over the years I had suffered a great deal of abuse from two of my half-brothers, until Vera Alauda had found me one day, bleeding and crying, and got the truth from me. She had gone straight to the master, and thereafter my half-brothers had chosen other slaves to rape. 

I lay back in the dark, hot tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. There was nothing I could do. There was no sweet sister now to protect me from the consequences of being beautiful and powerless. 

Another and much more welcome visitor arrived around midnight, an hour or so after moon-set. Unlike the Saxons, he came stealthily, and in fact I wasn’t even aware of his presence until a soft voice breathed in my ear. I stifled a yelp of alarm, and peered up at the dark shadow looming over me.

“Ronan?” I whispered. “Is that you, Ronan?” 

“Yes, worse luck,” came the gloomy response. “As soon as Galla remembered we'd left you behind, he made us draw lots for who was to come and see if you were still alive. I lost.” 

I was not much inclined to sympathise. I had been abandoned by the villagers, and felt no particular concern for any of them at that moment, not even Ronan, who in happier times was almost a friend. “I’m still alive. So what now?” 

“I go and report back to Galla.” Galla was the village headman. “He wants to know what the Saxons are up to.” 

“I think they’re planning to stay put,” I told him. “They’ve set up camp on the fallow field, and helped themselves to whatever they fancy from village. No one’s threatened me so far, but then I’m no threat to them. They’ve even fed me.” Which is more than can be said for you, I thought: Ronan had come empty-handed. “It might even be safe for everyone to come back,” I went on. “They don’t seem unfriendly. If they were just a band of marauders, I’d be dead and the whole place would be in flames by now.” 

“We’ll wait out the night at least,” Ronan said, sounding unconvinced. “If we start creeping back in under cover of dark, there’s no saying what could happen.”

“True,” I said. “They’re bound to have set guards around their camp.” 

“All right then, maybe I’ll see you in the morning,” Ronan said awkwardly, backing out of the hut. “Good luck.” 

“Good luck yourself,” I responded, without much sincerity. I thought of asking Ronan to take me with him, but I knew he wouldn’t. I would be too much of a liability. In the dark, on his own, he would get away easily enough to wherever Galla had the rest of the villagers in hiding. With me in tow, he stood a fair chance of being spitted on the spear of a Saxon watchman.

I lay alone in the dark, and wondered, in a detached sort of way, what would happen in the morning if any of the villagers decided to return to their homes. The Saxons might simply kill them all, so that they could take the whole place over; but I didn’t think they would. They obviously hadn’t even considered moving in to the dozen huts and roundhouses that made up our little settlement: clearly they preferred their tents on the hillside. They might even move on, but I doubted it. The fact that there were women and children in the group suggested that these were migrants, not a raiding band. They would settle, I was sure of it. And then what? Could we all live side- by-side?

I knew that was already happening elsewhere. Wave upon wave of Saxons were moving steadily westward, slowly taking over the land for their own. Mostly they let the original inhabitants alone, provided they showed no opposition. Some Britons moved on further west themselves, but many stayed to live alongside the Saxon incomers, and I guessed this might happen here too. The Saxons would want some of our women, of course: they had too few with them to create a viable settlement. Would they simply kill the men, and take them? Yes, I thought, if they were opposed. I wondered if Galla too was thinking like this, and whether he would be able to control his people when the Saxons helped themselves to whatever they wanted. Certainly there was no hope of successful opposition: we had too few menfolk, and none of us were warriors. 

We would have to put up with whatever the Saxons chose to do, for any man who stood up against them was as good as dead. 

CHAPTER THREE 

In the early dawn my first visitor of the previous night arrived to bring me more bread and cheese and a beaker of sour ale. He made an obscene gesture and grinned broadly at me, from which I understood that he intended to be back later, and not just to bring me more food. Then he was gone with the growing light, and I dared to hope that none of the others would show up again with the same idea. I was in luck: as full daylight arrived, so did a diversion, in the shape of Galla and four others of our menfolk, striding openly towards the Great Roundhouse in the centre of the village. Up on the hillside I could see all the Saxons watching, the men clutching spears or swords, and looking mildly bemused. Galla and his companions were unarmed, which struck me as wise, if something of a gamble. But what else could they sensibly do? The villagers had neither the force nor the skill to challenge the Saxons, and Galla was clearly intending to do nothing to provoke aggression. He ducked under the lintel of the Great Roundhouse, and his companions followed him in. The Saxons looked at each other, clearly uncertain what to make of this. N othing happened for a full five minutes, and the Saxon women began to drift away to various domestic tasks around their encampment, while the men continued to watch the Great Roundhouse, occasionally exchanging glances. 

Eventually one of Galla’s men, Bryn the swineherd, came out, and strode across to the boys’ hut where I lay on my belly in the doorway, watching events.

“Here, Hob,” Bryn said abruptly, using the shortened form of Obustus by which the villagers always called me. “Galla wants to talk to you. You’re to come with me.”

“You’ll have to carry me, then, or get me some crutches,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be easier if he came to me?” 

Bryn gave a grunt of exasperation, reached down and grabbed me around the waist, then swung me up over his shoulder. I couldn’t help a small squeal of pain as he jarred my broken leg, then I gritted my teeth and hoped he wouldn’t dump me as carelessly as he had lifted me up. He would have done, I think, but another of the men, Heva the potter, stepped forward as we passed into the dark entrance way of the roundhouse, and eased me down onto the rough packed-earth floor. I propped myself up on my elbows as Galla crouched down beside me. Grey as a badger now and bent with age, he was still a figure of great authority. It was he who had kept the villagers together and alive through the Saxon raid, and he who had brought us through the dreadful famine that followed. There was no one in the village who did not owe him their lives and their respect. 

“Well, boy,” he said, “Tell me about the Saxons. Ronan said they fed you. That sounds hopeful.” 

“They did,” I told him, “last night and again this morning. They’re not like the raiders who burned down the villa. In fact, I think they’re probably settlers more than warriors. But they’ve taken whatever they fancied from the huts and roundhouses, and I wouldn’t like to say no to any of them.” 

Galla sat back on his heels. “Well, things could be worse,” he said. “Have they said anything? Are they planning to stay?” 

“I don’t know,” I said. “They talked a lot, but nothing I could understand. They haven’t shown any signs of breaking their camp today. I think they’re staying.”

Bryn made an impatient gesture. “So what do we do about it?” he demanded. 

Galla looked at him under his heavy brows. “We do nothing,” he said simply. “We just wait.”  

Bryn snorted. “I say we fight!” 

Galla gave a short bark of laughter, like a winter fox. “I always thought you were an even bigger fool than you look, Bryn,” he said, and turned his back on him. “Our women and girls and the younger children had better stay away for now. Heva, go and tell the rest of the men and the older boys to come back. They’re to come quietly but openly, and they’re to ignore the Saxons. Then we wait for the next move.” 

Heva left on his errand, and we watched him out of sight. The Saxon men watched too, silent on the hillside. 

“If all goes well, Hob,” Galla said, “I’ll be wanting you to talk to the Saxons for me.” 

“Me? But I don’t speak any of their language!” I objected. Galla shrugged. 

“You’ll manage,” he said. “You speak our tongue, and you speak Latin – that’s one more language than the rest of us have. Just do your best, boy, when the time comes.” 

I regarded him hopelessly, and wondered how on earth he imagined I would be able to communicate with the Saxons. But I had to admit, as a go-between I was quite a good choice. No one could see me as a threat – I was only fourteen, after all, crippled by injury, and obviously an insignificant member of the community. If I got things badly wrong, Galla could simply brush me aside, and try again with a different tactic. 

But I wasn’t going to get things wrong. This was my chance to shine in my adoptive home. I was Galla’s appointed spokesman, and I was going to do him proud. 

CHAPTER FOUR 

After a whole day of uneasy peace, during which everyone watched everyone else and no one made any threatening moves, on the following morning the Saxon chief came down into the village with a small delegation, and I found myself spokesman for the apprehensive native community.  

Things worked out surprisingly well. The Saxons gibbed at entering the Great Roundhouse, perhaps fearing a trap, so instead we all stood in the open space in front of it. I balanced myself awkwardly on a pair of crutches, facing the big, finely-dressed man who, as I had guessed, was the Saxon chief. Everyone else on both sides watched our proceedings from a cautious ten paces or so back. 

The leader of the Saxons was tall and broad-shouldered, with sea-grey eyes and masses of wild, grizzled-blond hair partly confined in two long untidy pigtails: a fine old man, or at least he seemed old to me, although I suppose he was about thirty-five or forty then, to my fourteen. I welcomed him formally, first in Latin and then in the Celtic tongue, neither of which could he understand, and in turn I listened as he spoke to me in the harsh, guttural language that was to mellow and sweeten over the years under the influence of our more melodious Celtic speech, into the softer Saxon dialect that you hear in these parts today. 

Having both said our piece, and understood not a word of each other’s, we announced our names. He thumped his fist on his massive chest, and said “Hrothgar.” He made a fearsome face and said “Hroth,” then he snatched a spear from one of his men and brandished it (I admit I flinched), and said “Gar.” From this I deduced that his name meant something like “Angry Spear.” Then he pointed to me, and I decided to assert myself a little. As the son, albeit the bastard son, of Caius Pugnax Corvo, I was entitled to call myself Obustus Pugnax Corvo. Miming Obustus was beyond me, but the other two were easy. For the first, which means “warlike,” I simply mimicked Hrothgar’s own ferocious grimace. For Corvo, I put my hands on my shoulders and waggled my elbows up and down, whilst making a raucous cawing noise. Then I pointed at a conveniently passing crow. I settled back on my crutches just in time to avoid falling flat on my face. 

As I had intended, Hrothgar and his people found all this hilarious. The half-dozen massive warriors of Hrothgar’s bodyguard all put their hands to their shoulders and ran around mimicking my flapping and cawing, until tears of mirth ran down their faces. The success of the whole encounter was assured. Good-humoured mockery is a great facilitator of general good will, and heaven knew we needed the Saxons’ good will, for we had no possible defence against their hostility. 

Over beakers of carefully diluted mead, Hrothgar and I sat down to hammer out a form of basic communication. It wasn’t too difficult. Point at something, and name it. Repeat as often as necessary. Remember it if you can. Understand? Not always. When Hrothgar pointed to his jerkin, and growled a word in Saxon, did he mean “jerkin” … or “brown” … or “leather”? Maybe he meant “chest,” or even just “me”? When he pointed to one of the womenfolk watching avidly at a distance, the possibilities were legion and the potential pitfalls far greater. 

In spite of inevitable ambiguities, I very quickly picked up the rudiments of the Saxon tongue, but Hrothgar never really absorbed much of my language, either that day or afterwards. This may have been intentional. He and his people had the upper hand, after all, and had no need of words to get whatever they wanted. Fortunately I proved a good student, and so, of necessity, did the village people. During the course of our first language lesson, I grasped that Hrothgar wished me to join him in feasting that night. He in turn grasped that I was honoured to accept, and by pointing at the skies indicated a time that I understood to be around sunset. We parted on a warm, bone-crushing handclasp, and from that time to this there has been good will between us, and even friendship of a sort. 

Meanwhile, encouraged by this obviously satisfactory encounter, by the end of that day many of the huge Saxons were wandering around the village, curiously inspecting our homes and admiring our beasts, while a few of our bolder youngsters were venturing up to the encampment to marvel at the Saxons’ fearsome weaponry and gaudy trappings. Hrothgar had two young sons, Hrethric and Hrothmund, the two boys I had already encountered. By happy chance they too were both bold and curious, and soon took it upon themselves to welcome the village lads to the Saxon encampment with wordless overtures of friendship.  

All things considered, if you had to put up with a hoard of barbarians helping themselves to several acres of your best land - well, things could have been a lot worse. 

My success with Hrothgar produced quite a change in my status. From being a useful and hard-working pair of alien hands, I became, in spite of my age, a valued member of the village elders, and a valued adviser to Hrothgar. He even gave me a Saxon name, a direct translation of one of my Roman names. With their ponderous sense of humour, Saxons loved nicknames that were as inappropriate as possible: a very tall man would inevitably be called Shorty, and a short man could rarely avoid being known as Lofty. Since I was the appointed mediator for my people, it amused Hrothgar enormously that Pugnax meant “warlike,” and he soon translated this to the Saxon “Unferth.” Whether out of habit, or as a mild protest, the villagers all continued to call me Hob. 

As only to be expected, things were not always easy between Saxon and Briton in the two years that followed. The worst time came some ten months after the Saxons arrived, when Bryn’s wife Fledde disappeared. Bryn accused the Saxons of taking her, but Hrothgar denied it, and Galla believed him. In any case, we all knew Bryn was a violent man who regularly abused his wife. The general feeling in the village was that either the poor woman had run away, and good luck to her, or Bryn had killed her and hidden her body somewhere in the hills – or even disposed of it by feeding it to his pigs. It had been a testing time, but Galla and Hrothgar were both wise and pragmatic, and after a few days the crisis passed. 

Hrothgar was a wise man – but more important to his own people, he was a generous one. Saxons set great store by the constant giving and receiving of gifts, and a leader of Hrothgar’s stature was required to keep his subjects sweet with regular presents of gold and other precious but ultimately useless things. Gold had never been seen in our village before, and we found it baffling that such a thing should hold so much importance for the Saxons. Give a peasant Briton a ring of gold, and he would immediately exchange it for something of use – a cloak, a pair of shoes, a pot of corn; but a Saxon would rather lose his whole hand than part with a single gold finger-ring bestowed upon him by his lord. A strange people, we thought, to set such store by something that will neither keep a man warm at night nor fill his children’s hungry bellies. 

For two years Hrothgar and his followers lived peacefully in the field on the hillside. The villagers grew used to them, and even those who had most resented them came in the end to a grudging acceptance. After all, with Hrothgar on our doorstep, we were safe from all the other marauding bands of Saxons who wandered the countryside, looking for plunder or a place to settle. For all their fearsome appearance, Hrothgar’s men were farmers as much as warriors, and they willingly joined ours in watching through the ice-hard winter nights, when the wolves came down from the hills to prey upon our beasts. Likewise our men joined his to feast around the fire and hear the travelling harpers, and our goodwives and the Saxon women pooled the ancient knowledge of women everywhere, to drive away sickness and bring the newborn safe into the world. They were good times, those, before Hrothgar over-reached himself, and brought upon us all the terrible malice of the Mark Stepper. 

CHAPTER FIVE 

“Hey, Hob!  Hrothgar wants to see you!” 

I looked up from my hoeing to see Frida, son of one of the village elders, waving at me from the edge of my garden plot. 

“I’ll come at once,” I responded, and the youngster turned and darted away, swift as a deer, reminding me that I could no longer run. Once I was fleet as a hare on the hills, but my broken leg had not healed straight, and it ached if I tried for a faster pace than a walk. I wiped my hands on the sides of my overshirt, and rubbed the toes of my shoes against my leggings to remove the worst of the clinging soil. Then I straightened my shoulders and set off up the hill to Hrothgar’s dwelling. 

Soon I was picking my way through the Saxon encampment.  Even after two years, you could hardly call it a village.  Most of the dwellings were little more than tents, with a few crude huts around a huge outdoor hearth.  Upslope of the hearth was Hrothgar’s sleeping quarters, a small, dark wooden structure with a roughly thatched roof.  As usual, Hrothgar was sitting on a raised bench outside his doorway, at the higher end of the fire-pit:  an imposing figure, four-square with his feet firmly planted on the ground and his hands clasping his knees.  Two of his housecarls stood behind him, grasping their long spears and staring straight ahead.  It wasn’t particularly impressive, but the general air was unquestionably one of authority and power.  At the other end of the fire-pit, Hrothgar’s wife Wealtheow, a fearsome stone-faced woman with a plait of dirty blonde hair almost as thick as my arm, was supervising the preparation of the evening’s communal meal.   

“Welcome, Unferth!’ said Hrothgar solemnly, and I approached to a respectful three paces and bowed my head.  ‘Today will be a great day for my people and yours!” 

I have to say my heart did sink a little at this pronouncement.  Hrothgar’s idea of what constituted a great day did not always coincide with mine or those of my people.  The last time the Saxon chief had declared a great day, two Saxons and three villagers were seriously injured in a barbaric mock battle intended to foster friendship and mutual respect, and most of our surviving young menfolk were unfit for work for several days afterwards, as the result of an even more barbaric drinking contest that followed.  

Hrothgar saw my ambivalent expression, and chose to take it in good part. 

“Why so glum, Unferth?’ he bellowed at me.  “Wealtheow, woman, some ale for our guest!” 

I tried for an expression of delight and gratitude as Hrothgar’s massive consort thrust a brimming beaker of pungent Saxon ale into my hands.  It was surely only in my imagination that the earth trembled as she stalked back to her end of the fire-pit.  Reluctantly I bought myself a little time by taking a swig of the sour, watery brew.  But it was no use.  Convention required me to ask. 

“What has my lord Hrothgar in mind for this great day?” 

In reply, the old man heaved himself to his feet and turned to point up the hillside towards the ruins of the villa.   

“The time has come, Unferth, to abandon these wretched huts of ours, and make a hall worthy of my people!” Hrothgar announced.  “There, high on the hillside where the Romans lived:  there I shall build a great hall to be seen far and wide across the land, and on the gable end I shall set the head of the great hart I slew last winter.”  He paused, and turned to check on my reaction.  I managed blank face.  It was the best I could do.  “he antlers shall be covered in gold, and I shall call the place Heorot, where the hart shall guard the heart of my people!” 

Sooner or later, I had always known, Hrothgar would want a hall that befitted his status, to replace the crude huts and the open hearth.  It was bound to happen, but I had never dreamed he would choose that place of all places upon which to build.  The revulsion I felt took me by surprise and twisted my guts.  It was Saxons who destroyed the villa and murdered my lady half-sister, but it was not Hrothgar.  The bitter hatred I felt for his countrymen who had raped and murdered and burned had not been transferred to Hrothgar and his people:  I, too, was a pragmatist.  But the thought of Saxons invading those burned-out ruins brought a rush of acid to my throat.   

Until now, Hrothgar and his people had largely shunned the villa site.  The remains of the great stone walls intimidated them, for Saxons did not build in stone, and I had often heard them whisper that the place must be the work of giants.  This was a belief I had done nothing to dispel:  after all, it gave me status.  Hrothgar and his Saxons knew that I was the son of the man – the giant! – who had built the villa.   

But now it seemed that Hrothgar had overcome his superstitions.  Perhaps he thought he too was a giant – a giant among men.  And on the practical side, it was undoubtedly a very good site for a villa, or for a Saxon hall.  Set on a ridge half way to the top of the Cotswold escarpment, it faced north, and dominated all the land around.  It was sheltered from the east and west by the high wolds, and to the south the rising hillside was clothed in dense beech woodland, good for shelter, and for firewood, and for domestic pigs to forage.  Just like Romans, the Saxons loved their pork, well fattened on beech-mast, ready for the winter feastings.  A good stream of pure water came down from a spring in the hills, although that would have been a much lesser consideration to Hrothgar than it was to my Roman master.  The concept of bathing was not one that came naturally to Saxons, although they would sometimes drink water if they could get nothing else. 

They were going to build a hall.  They were going to build on the ruins of my home.  There, that was what burned in my throat.  The villa had been my home, and the home of my dear, dead half-sister Vera Alauda.  Sometimes I used to go up there and listen to the larks for which she was named, for Alauda means “lark” in the Roman tongue.  There I would sit and remember the lost days of peace and contentment, and I would remember the others, too – my friends and fellow-slaves, especially Beppo, who was like a little brother to me, and the Master who was my natural father, and my beloved mother, his beloved slave.  I did not want the site of those quiet ruins filled with Saxon carousing.  I did not want to go there as Hrothgar’s friend and adviser, and remember how his countrymen raped and murdered my sister.  I did not want to remember that I had betrayed her once by running away, and continued to betray her every day by living in peace with men of the race that killed her. 

“I shall need more hands from the village, Unferth,” rothgar announced. “here are trees to be felled, dozens of them, before we can start to build.”  He was looking at me closely as he spoke:  he could sense that my heart was not with him on this matter.  It clearly troubled him, but it was not sufficiently important to deter him from proceeding.  Hrothgar was going to build a great golden hall, and call it Heorot.   

I was first to arrive that evening at the Great Roundhouse in the centre of the village.  I pushed aside the cowhide door-curtain and ducked under the lintel, then made for the best seat, on the far side of the central hearth, facing the doorway.  Sitting there, I was furthest from the inevitable draft from the entrance, and other people wouldn’t have to clamber over me to find a space to sit.  I made myself comfortable on the hard-packed earth floor, and poked at the embers with one booted toe, sending up a shower of sparks.  

A sudden gust of wind from the door way sent more sparks flying and briefly fanned a few small flames into life.  In their dancing light I saw Ronan, one of my fellow elders, straighten up inside the entrance and peer about him to see who else had arrived. 

“Hob, is it?” he asked doubtfully.  Ronan’s eyes were beginning to go, and by firelight he was already more than half-blind.  “It was you called the meeting, wasn’t it?  Don’t tell me:  Hrothgar has dreamed up some daft new plan, and he wants us to do all the hard work for him?” 

“How did you guess?” 

Ronan snorted. “What is it this time?  What does he want now?” he demanded, sitting down next to me and making himself comfortable.  He was a tall, rangy man of about thirty, with straight greying hair that sprang back from his brow, and a pleasant, open face. 

“Let’s wait until the rest get here,” I said. “I don’t want to tell it more than once.” 

“Who’s this?” Ronan asked, as the door curtain was again thrust aside to let in a rush of chilly evening air, together with the burly figure of Bryn the swineherd. 

“That bloody Grendel’s been at it again!  One of my best piglets is dead,” Bryn announced, and glanced around to see who was here ahead of him. “Hob.  Ronan.  I tell you, we need to do something about him, and his old witch of a mother.” 

Because of our association in my days of slavery, I always felt I had to speak up for Grendel. “So you always say, whenever a wolf takes one of your beasts,” I said. 

“This weren’t no wolf,” Bryn said sullenly. “Wolves rip and tear and feast, then they carries away what’s left.” 

“So what happened to your piglet?” 

“Bastard bit its head off. Bit its head clean off,” said Bryn, with dour satisfaction. I winced. “Don’t you tell me no wolf could do that. That was Grendel.” 

“It does sound like Grendel,” I admitted. “But you know he hasn’t touched one of our beasts for a long time now. Maybe he thought it was a Saxon piglet.” 

“He shouldn’t be killing them, neither,” said Ronan. “Let him take too many o’ them, and Hrothgar will be down on us for – for piglet-gild.” 

I grinned at him. In Saxon law, if you killed a man, deliberately or even accidentally, his relatives could demand wer-gild, man-money, as the price of settling the matter without further bloodshed.  It was quite a civilised system to my mind, and infinitely preferable to the interminable blood-feuds that were the Celtic alternative.  

“I never heard of piglet-gild,” I said to Ronan. “Who would you pay it to, the sow?  In acorns, maybe?” 

“Trust you to make a joke of it, Hob,” Bryn said sourly. “It’s no joking matter. We should never have let that Grendel stay in these parts, nor his mother neither.” 

“Grendel’s kin have been here as long as yours, Bryn, and they have as much right-“ I broke off as the door curtain was drawn back once again, and the fire flared more brightly.  Galla came in, and I stood up to acknowledge his arrival – a Roman courtesy, not copied by Ronan or Bryn, but one that I knew Galla appreciated.  He greeted me with a nod and a grunt, and sat himself down on the little wooden stool that he always brought with him to village meetings.  It set him a little higher than everyone else: and, I suspected, it made rising up again that bit easier and less painful. Galla’s thick grizzled beard hid most of the signs of the anguish I guessed he felt in his bones, now twisted and bowed with age. 

“So, Bryn, what are you whining about this evening?” Galla asked.  He liked the man no more than I did, and made much less of a secret of his dislike.  Bryn scowled, and said nothing. 

“He wants to claim piglet-gild from Grendel,” I said solemnly, and Galla gave his short bark of a laugh.

TO BE CONTINUED