She took the dead Saxon’s long knife and thrust it into her belt, then moved back to the man whose throat she had ripped open with one of her deadly arrows.
‘That arrow was surely guided by God,’ I said, hearing a shiver in my words, the same trembling that gripped my hands and the muscles in my legs, as the young woman went down on one knee and set about trying to pull the arrow from the ruined flesh.
She put her head on one side, frowning at me. ‘Your god?’ she asked. ‘The Christ god?’
I nodded. I could not have spoken sensibly of the mysteries of the Holy Trinity then even if I’d wanted to. I saw one copper eyebrow lift behind the errant strands of damp hair which fell across her face and could hear the gristle tearing as she twisted the shaft this way and that. Could see the young man’s head jerking horribly.
My stomach lurched and I retched, but nothing came up. With one final effort the arrow came free, but only the shaft. The iron head clung on somewhere in the mess of the wound.
‘Then your god owes me an arrow, monk.’ She wiped her bloody hands on the dead man’s tunic and stood.
I made the sign of the Thorn in case she had meant any impiety, my tongue questing into the raw, stinging split in my bottom lip. I saw that she held the little hammer amulet which had hung at the Saxon’s neck. A dedication to his god Thunor. Somewhere a raven croaked, and I looked up, expecting to see more Saxons coming over the rise.
‘We should go,’ she said.
I looked back at her. I was staring. My tongue felt too big for my mouth. She had killed three men. She had taken rings and buckles, the brooches from their cloaks and their knives, and now she pulled the scabbard from the one who had owned a sword.
‘Bring me the sword, monk.’ She nodded towards a clump of wind-stirred grass in which I could just see the dull gleam of the long blade.
I looked down at the man, at the blood-pooled hole of his eye, hearing in my mind a faint echo of his last words. Woden! Woden! Woden!
‘The chief of their gods has one eye,’ the young woman said. I wondered how she knew such things, but I did not ask, and I bent, for a moment afraid to touch the dead man’s sword. But this strange young woman was watching me and so I wrapped my hand around the sweat-stained leather of the hilt and lifted the sword into the day.
‘They make good blades. Better than ours,’ she said, looping the bow over her shoulder.
I tilted the sword this way and that, trying to catch the weak daylight in the blade, in which a watery pattern had been trapped during its forging. Or perhaps it looked more like smoke than water. I had heard Father Yvain speak in awe of the breath in the blade, almost as though a warrior’s sword were a living thing, hungry for blood.
‘Here.’ I handed the sword over, relieved to be rid of it, but gazed at my own hand as if it remembered something which I did not.
She stepped back and slashed that iron and steel blade through the fetid air. Testing its balance, though for the thrill of it too, I thought. Then she thrust it into the leather scabbard. ‘We should go,’ she said again, lifting her chin.
I looked behind me to where the coracle sat among the reeds. The shroud-wrapped corpse of Eudaf the cobbler still lay there. Assuming his spirit had not yet flown from his body, I wondered if Eudaf had any understanding of what had just taken place on this mist-wreathed embankment in the marsh. Had the cobbler’s spirit heard the souls of those Saxons shrieking in terror and perhaps even disbelief, at their lives being unexpectedly cut short that winter day?
‘We should go?’ I asked. She was close. I could smell the wood smoke in her clothes. I could smell her sweat too, which was unlike that of the brothers. Sharper but not unpleasant.
She pointed the sheathed sword northward towards a swirl of rooks that were flying back to their roosts. ‘These Saxons were scouts.’ She pulled a fur hood onto her head. Our breath was fogging in the air. It would be getting dark soon. ‘There are raiding parties everywhere. I’ve seen them.’ She turned her head and spat in disgust. ‘They are like rats crawling over a corpse.’
I put two fingers to my mouth, feeling the swollen lips which throbbed with pain, though at least the bleeding had slowed. ‘I don’t need you to protect me,’ I said, wanting to know the colour of her eyes. Impossible now with that hood.
‘You cannot protect yourself,’ she replied, walking over to where one of the dead men’s spears lay. She burrowed a foot beneath the shaft and lifted the spear into the air, catching it with ease.
‘God will protect me,’ I said, watching her.
‘You know what those men were going to do to you?’ she asked.
I did not answer that and felt my cheeks flush with heat and shame despite the cold.
She looked past me to the coracle and shrugged. ‘I knew Eudaf. He made some shoes for my mother.’
I looked down at her own boots, which were sturdy and well made, and somehow I knew that they were not Eudaf’s work but rather that she had taken them from a young Saxon whom she had killed with that bow of hers.
‘He was a good man,’ she said. This young woman who was out here in the marsh, a bow on her back, two long knives in her belt, a spear in one hand and a Saxon sword in the other. ‘Why are you taking him to Ynys Wydryn?’ I did not answer. She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll see that he gets there.’
‘I don’t need your help,’ I said. Just moments ago, I had been lying in the mud, helpless and terrified. I knew what the Saxons would have done to me, just as this woman knew it, and the shame of it swamped me.
‘You know the ways?’ she asked, pointing the spear at the water, which was flat and dark and still, though the reeds bristled gently in a thin breeze. ‘You are not very skilled in that boat.’ It was almost raining now, a fine mizzle hanging in the air.
‘You’ve been watching me?’ I asked, appalled to think that she had followed me through the marsh without my knowing.
‘I wanted to see if you’d fall in,’ she grinned.
I looked at the coracle hedged in by the reeds, then at the eastern skyline where huge flocks of starlings moved like smoke. Really, I was trying to summon a reply the way a warrior might counter a spear thrust. But it would be dark soon. And I did not know the marsh well. And even those who did sometimes vanished, never to be seen again.
‘God will protect me,’ I said again, thinking of the corpses I had seen hanging above the old causeway, watching me though their eyes were long gone. The memory put a bad taste in my mouth, a sourness mixing with the coppery tang of blood.
‘Good, because my bow will not shoot when the string is wet,’ she said, walking past me down the bank to where Eudaf and the little boat waited.
‘What is your name?’ I asked.
‘Iselle,’ she answered, giving it to the breeze as much as to me, as if names were unimportant.
‘I’m Galahad,’ I called after her. Not that she had asked. A moment’s hesitation, and then I followed her down to the water.
Rain came. Vengeful and cold, shafting into the water and hissing amongst the reeds. It lashed us in our little boat and soaked through Eudaf’s shroud so that his face appeared through the worn wool, the mouth open but the eyes closed. I tried not to look back at him, keeping my eyes on the channels ahead, looking for signs of the ancient causeway, searching the bank for a willow or alder whose shape I recognized, or the lightning-struck oak I had seen earlier. Anything that would suggest we were going the right way.