It was no kind of life, Odo lad, let me tell you.” He glances up with his big dreamy eyes, his soft mouth caught in a half smile. “You would not last above three days.”
“I might be stronger than I look,” says he.
“And looks are ever deceiving,” I reply, and we go on . . .
Eventually, with winter coming on and the sheriff and his men growing wise to our ways, the few of us that had survived those many months broke company and drifted off to other parts. Some went north where the Harrowing had desolated the land; in those empty parts it was said honest folk might begin again. Trouble there was that too many dishonest folk had gathered up there, too, and it was fast becoming a killing ground of another kind.
Me, I decided to go west, to Wales—to Wallia, land of my mother’s birth.
I’d always wanted to see it, mind, but there was more to it than whim. For I had heard a tale that stirred my blood. A man, they said, had risen in defiance of the Norman overlords, a man who flew in the face of certain death to challenge King William himself, a man they called King Raven.
CHAPTER 3
Lundein
Cardinal Ranulf de Bayeux stepped from the small, flat-bottomed boat onto the landing stone set into the soft shore of the River Thames. The rank brown water was awash in dung and garbage, awaiting the estuary tide to rise and bear it away. Pressing the cloth of his wide sleeve against his nose, he motioned impatiently to his companions as they clambered from the boat.
Two men-at-arms had travelled down to Lundein with the cardinal and they followed his lead, remaining a few paces behind, the red pennants atop their spears fluttering in the breeze. Clutching the skirts of his scarlet satin robe to avoid the mud, Ranulf tiptoed up the embankment to the wooden walkway that led to the city street and passed the walls of the White Tower. The new stone of that magnificent fortress glowed in the full light of a warm sun, a blazing milky brilliance against the yellow leaves and dazzling blue autumn sky.
King William had returned from Normandie two days previous and had summoned his chief advisor straightaway—no doubt to review the accounts which Ranulf carried in a velvet pouch beneath his arm. It had been a good year, all things considered. The treasury was showing a small surplus, for a change, so Ranulf was to be congratulated. Thanks to his tirelessly inventive mind, the king would have money to pay his bribes and his troops, with a little more besides.
Oh, but it was becoming ever more difficult. The people were taxed to the teeth, the nobles likewise, and the chorus of grumbling was becoming a deafening din from some quarters, which is why Ranulf—a man of the cloth, after all—could no longer travel about the land alone, but went with an armed escort to protect him from any who felt themselves particularly aggrieved by his efforts on the king’s behalf.
William, of course, was ultimately to blame for the resentment festering throughout his realm. It was not that the king was a spendthrift. Common opinion to the contrary, William the Red was no more wastrel than his father—a man who lived well, to be sure, although far less so than many of his barons—but war was a costly business: much expenditure for piddling little gain. Even when William won the conflict, which he usually did, he almost always came away the poorer for it. And the warring was incessant. If it wasn’t the Scots, it was the Bretons; and if not foreign troublemakers it was his own brothers, Prince Henry and Duke Robert, fomenting rebellion.
Yet today, if only for today, the news from the treasury would please the king, and Ranulf was eager to share this good news and advance another step towards reaping a substantial reward for himself—the lucrative bishopric of Duresme, perhaps, which was empty now owing to the death of the previous incumbent.
Cardinal de Bayeux and his escort passed through the wide and handsome gate with but a nod to the porter. They quickly crossed the yard where the king’s baggage train still waited to be unloaded. Ranulf dismissed his soldiers and commanded them to remain ready outside, then entered the tower and climbed the stairs to the antechamber above, where he was admitted by the steward and informed that the king was at table and