Read Hereward 03 - End of Days for Free Online Page A

out of their way by several miles, but then they could take another hidden track that would lead them north to Ely. Alric prayed it would help them avoid the Normans.
    They climbed back on to their ponies and set off across the fields. Alric’s stomach was growling by the time they reached the woods. From his sack he pulled a knob of bread to gnaw on as he rode. His mood grew darker with each passing hour.
    The sun had passed its highest point by the time they neared a village. He frowned. No sound of mallets or axes. No children at play. No voices of women gossiping with their neighbours. Puzzled, Alric took in the empty fields and the half-cut tree near the firewood pile. He chewed a nail in thought. The atmosphere felt strained, haunted. The abbot feltit too, for he raised himself up on his mount, his shoulders tense.
    ‘Should we pass this village by?’ Alric asked.
    Barely had the words left his lips before figures began to stagger from the cluster of homes. All of them were women, he saw. They stood beside their doors, staring at the two clerics on their ponies as if they could not believe their eyes. A few children ventured out into the light, but hovered near their mothers as if they were afraid to stand on their own. No men, anywhere. Then, as one, the women picked up their skirts and scrambled towards them through the long grass. Unsettled by the sight, Alric and Thurstan brought their horses to a halt.
    As the women neared, Alric saw their faces were drawn and their cheeks flushed. And as they gathered around the two men, he recognized eyes red from hard tears. Despair, that was what he sensed in all of them.
    ‘Help us,’ one of the woman pleaded, ‘oh, help us,’ and that seemed to release a deluge. All the women cried out as one, pent-up emotions releasing a torrent of words, all fighting to be heard. Alric could not understand a single thing they were saying. The women reached out to him in desperation and clawed at the abbot’s tunic with trembling fingers, until Thurstan held up his hands.
    ‘Daughters, hold your tongues!’ he commanded. ‘Let one speak, one only!’
    The women fell silent. Then one stepped forward. Alric thought she seemed about his age. She wore no headdress. Her brown hair was pulled back and tied with a ribbon and she was not unattractive, he saw; her eyes were large and dark and filled with emotion. Yet she showed a face that was filled with more defiance than all the other women’s put together.
    ‘Speak, daughter, if you would,’ Thurstan said. ‘What is your name?’
    ‘Rowena,’ she replied. Her voice did not waver.
    ‘What is amiss here?’
    ‘We are lost,’ one of the other women cried. Rowena gave her a rough shove before turning back to the abbot.
    ‘The Normans came at dawn. They took our men from their beds and marched them away across the fields.’
    ‘To their deaths?’ Thurstan asked, too harshly, Alric thought.
    ‘I … I think not,’ Rowena replied. ‘I have seen the Normans take out their anger on the English before, and they cut off their heads in front of their wives and children, or slit their throats and hang them from a gibbet beside their homes.’ Her voice trembled now, but with anger, not misery, Alric noted. ‘No, our husbands were taken for some other reason,’ she continued, wiping away one hot tear with the back of her hand, ‘but though we pleaded we were not told why, or when or if they would be back.’
    Thurstan looked to Alric. There was mystery here.
    ‘Our village is not the first to suffer,’ Rowena said. ‘Two others have been so afflicted, to my knowledge. More, perhaps.’ She clenched her teeth. ‘We have agreed to go into the fields to carry on the work, and do our own duties too, but there are not enough of us. If our husbands do not return by the time the snows come, we will starve.’
    Alric looked around the desperate, tear-stained faces and felt a wave of pity. Stories of the miseries the Normans had inflicted