He set off to hurry after the beasts. Dunston sighed and pushed his weight into the cart, getting it rolling again. His knee ached and a fresh pain lanced down his back. He grimaced, but said nothing. He would be there soon and he could be done with this burden and the troublesome child. Let her talk to the idiot drover all she liked.
But Ceolwald had only walked a few paces when he halted and came back to Dunston.
“Let me help you with that,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ll still be pushing it down the path come nightfall and all the kine’ve been milked.”
And you would have missed the gossip about the dead man and his daughter, thought Dunston. He offered the drover a thin smile of thanks and moved to one side to allow him room to add his weight behind the cart. With the two men shoving the creaking cart along, the going was much smoother and Dunston was pleased for the easing of the pressure on his joints.
After a brief spell, Ceolwald asked, “Well, are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Taking him,” he indicated with his chin at the shrouded corpse on the cart, “to Godrum? It’s a good time for a burial. The ground is soft and easily dug.”
Dunston glanced over at Aedwen and noted her downcast gaze. Her eyes shone.
“Have care with your words,” he snapped. “You are talking about the child’s father.”
“I beg pardon,” Ceolwald replied, bobbing his head and swallowing. “Well, are you?”
Dunston sighed. He rarely visited Briuuetone and when he did he barely spoke to its inhabitants. Save for Rothulf and his family, he had no friends in the village. They liked him well enough to accept his furs and knives in trade, but he didn’t think they missed him when he went back to his solitary life in the forest. At times, when the winter wind bit the skin, and food was scarce; when the nights were long and the days short and brittle with ice and snow, Dunston would ask himself if he had chosen the right path for his life. Wouldn’t he have been better off finding a new wife to tend to his needs? At moments like that he yearned for the company of others. Now, listening to Ceolwald’s inane and incessant chatter, he was sure he had chosen wisely when he had made his home amongst the trees of Sealhwudu.
They pushed the cart along and Dunston did not reply. Perhaps it would have been better to have pushed the cart alone.
“Well?” Ceolwald asked again.
At last, Dunston capitulated.
“He will need a Christian burial,” he said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Ceolwald nodded, as though he had been proven right in his answer to a particularly twisted riddle. “But,” continued Dunston, finding himself increasingly irritated by the drover’s demeanour, “I do not plan to take him to the church first.”
“Well, you’ll not be burying him anywhere else than in holy ground,” he laughed at the idea, before growing suddenly grave. “Or is he such a sinner that he cannot be laid to rest with the good folk of Briuuetone?”
“My father was a sinner, like all men,” said Aedwen, wheeling on the drover, her eyes ablaze. “But he was a good man and he will be given a Christian burial.”
Ceolwald swallowed, unable to meet Aedwen’s glare. Again Dunston thought how the girl reminded him of Eawynn.
“Of course, maid,” Ceolwald said, “I meant nothing by it.” They walked along in silence for a few moments before he spoke again. “So what is it you plan for him?”
“I am taking both Aedwen and her father to Rothulf, that he may determine the correct course of action. The girl is without kin now, and her father was slain most cruelly. The killers will need to be caught and brought before the moot.”
Ceolwald was looking at him with a strange expression. He opened his mouth to speak and then snapped it shut once more.
“What is it, man?” asked Dunston.
Again the drover made as if to speak, but then hesitated.
“Speak, man,” growled Dunston. “You want to say something, so say it. God knows until now nothing has stopped you from uttering the first thing that pops into your thought-cage.”
“Well,” said Ceolwald, his voice uncertain now, sweat beading his brow, “it’s just that you won’t be taking him to Rothulf.”
Dunston gave the man a sharp look. He felt a scratch of unease down his spine.
“Why is that?” he asked.
Ceolwald’s throat bobbed as he swallowed.
“He is dead. That’s why.”
Six
Aedwen could see the tidings of the reeve’s death had rocked Dunston. Tears welled in her own eyes. She was angry that he had not chosen to do her bidding and seek revenge on her father’s killers, but in that very act of defiance to her, Dunston had shown her he was in control. He had a plan and she had fallen into step with him, allowing him to lead. She had argued at first and then shown him her displeasure with her stubborn silence, and yet she had been comforted by his commanding presence. In response to her ill temper, the old man had ignored her, marking a fast pace through the forest without offering her a word. She could cope with his brooding silence. But now, she saw his face contorted in confusion and grief and this show of weakness frightened her.
The sun was touching the top of the trees across the river now. The thatch of the buildings was aglow with the golden light, stark shadows heightening the details in everything in the last rays of the day.
“How?” Dunston asked.
“It was the damnedest thing,” Ceolwald said, seemingly torn between the need to maintain a dour expression at the dire news he was imparting, and wishing to grin at bearing that most compelling of gossip: a death. “He was drowned.”
“Drowned?” asked Dunston, his tone incredulous.
“Yes, sir,” Ceolwald said, again tugging off his cap and screwing it up in his bony hands. “They found him in the river, down by the mill. White as a fish, he was. Nobody saw what happened, but there had been a frost that morning. It seems he must have slipped, maybe banged his head. Still, when God calls your name, it’s your time, and that’s that.”
Dunston frowned and Aedwen could see him thinking hard, pushing the dismay at his friend’s death to one side and fighting to understand what had happened; regaining control.
“When did this happen?” he asked.
“Not two months ago.”
“And he was alone? Nobody saw him fall?”
“No. But it was just his time. Bad luck, that’s all. We held a hall-moot with the new reeve and all these questions were asked, and answered.”
“New reeve?”
“Oh yes, Lord Ælfgar appointed one not a week after Rutholf’s passing. Can’t be long without someone to uphold the law, he said.”
Dunston, face devoid of emotion now, started pushing the cart again. After a moment, Ceolwald joined him and they continued along the path in the last warm rays of sunshine.
Aedwen was silent. Odin padded close to her and she placed a hand on his head, running her fingers through the warm fur of his neck and ears. Despite the warmth of the sun on her skin, and the peaceful gold-licked beauty of the village before them, she pulled her cloak about her and shivered. The river flowed deep and fast beside the road. Its dark waters were high, lapping halfway up the trunks of some sallows that grew on the river’s banks. In the distance she could make out a watermill, its great wheel still now, but able to revolve with the power of the water alone. To think that those same chill waters could grind corn for life-giving bread and also drown a man, pulling him down away from the air and the light until he was forced to take in great lungfuls of liquid, slaying him as surely as a knife to the heart. For a moment, she fancied that she had been caught in the swirl of some invisible river’s flow. Her life had careened away from all she had known and now, here she was, in a village she barely knew, surrounded by strangers.