Chapter 3 #2
“They’re unloading food, barrels, equipment, horses. Men who mean to steal what they can and leave don’t bring that much with them. Those men crossed the sea prepared to stay. At least, that’s what it looked like to me.”
Wulfric’s gaze held mine.
“We know this.”
I nodded. That was what I’d missed from the hill. They weren’t panicking because they had no idea what to do. They were preparing because they knew exactly what was coming.
“Then you know they’ll push inland.”
“Aye.”
“How many roads lead here?”
The older man answered. “Three.”
“Which can horses use fastest?”
His eyes narrowed. “The south road.”
“Who’s watching it?”
“Men are there already,” Wulfric said.
Right. Stop treating medieval people as though nobody had invented common sense until fluorescent safety jackets.
I looked toward the village again. People were moving quickly, but not randomly. A woman handed a sack of grain to a boy and pointed toward one of the houses. Two men carried a chest toward the larger hall. An elderly woman shouted at someone I couldn’t see.
They had a plan. The question was whether the plan would survive frightened people. That was territory I understood.
“I saw children.”
Wulfric’s face hardened. “They will be moved if need be.”
“If?”
The temperature seemed to drop several degrees.
The boy with the spear suddenly became fascinated by the mud as Wulfric stepped closer.
He was even larger up close. Fantastic.
“Take care, stranger.”
“I am taking care.”
“Then take more.”
I should have been frightened, and I was frightened, but fear was familiar. Fear was useful when you gave it work.
“I’ve watched people wait too long to leave a burning building because they didn’t believe the fire would reach them,” I said.
No one moved.
“I’ve watched parents run back inside because they thought one of their children was still there when the child had already been taken out another way. I’ve seen people crushed in doorways because nobody told them where else to go.”
The woman’s grip tightened on the little girl’s shoulder.
I pointed toward the village. “You know war. I don’t.”
That surprised them. Good. The truth often did.
“You know the land, the roads, the men coming against you, and where you can fight them. I don’t. But I know frightened people. I know what happens when smoke gets thick, fire comes, and everyone decides to move at once.”
Wulfric stared at me.
The older man’s expression had shifted from suspicion to something more thoughtful.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Difficult question. At the moment, damp, hungry, and possibly, if I was right, which I still desperately hoped I wasn’t, hundreds of years from home.
“I’m someone who goes into burning buildings. It’s how I...” I hesitated. “Make my trade.”
The boy blinked as woman crossed herself again, and little girl stared at me, eyes huge.
I sighed.
“That sounded less alarming in my head.”
A large man stepped from behind Wulfric. I hadn’t noticed him until then, which told me exactly how rattled I was.
He was built like a barn door, with iron-gray threaded through a plaited beard and one ear notched as though something had once tried to take more than his manners.
“Bind her,” he said. “She walks out of the wood in sorcerer’s cloth and speaks of fire and death. Mayhap she leads the Normans to us.”
“I do not.”
His eyes snapped to me.
“You understand our speech well enough.”
“Enough to know I don’t care for being called a spy this early in the day.”
Wulfric looked like he wanted to smile but held it back. I saw it, and because I was exhausted, wet, terrified, and possibly trapped in another century, that tiny almost-smile annoyed me more than the spear.
“You find this amusing?”
“No. Only odd.”
“Join the club.”
His brows drew together. “What club?”
“Never mind.”
The gray-bearded man glanced toward the village. “My lord, the bell has rung. The council gathers.”
“Then she comes before them,” Wulfric said.
The barn-door man snorted. “And if she curses us all before sunset?”
“If she means to curse us, Leofric, she has shown poor timing. We are already beset by the Normans.”
A murmur went through the growing crowd.
Some of it was laughter. Dark and rough, but laughter all the same. People needed it. Fear with nowhere to go was like smoke with no opening. It found a way out eventually, and never a good one.
Leofric scowled. “I do not trust her.”
“I did not ask you to.”
I looked at Wulfric. “No one ever does, and yet I speak sense.”
This time the almost-smile touched his eyes. Briefly, then it vanished, tucked away wherever he kept such things.
“You will give your warning before the council,” he said. “You will answer what is asked. Until we know what you are, you will be guarded.”
“What I am is wet, hungry, and extremely tired of being pointed at.”
The boy’s ears turned scarlet.
Wulfric looked at him. “Wystan, lower the spear before you skewer our guest with your trembling.”
“I was not trembling.”
The woman beside him made a soft, disbelieving sound.
“Guest,” Leofric said. “Is that what we call strays now?”
“If she bites, we shall amend it,” Wulfric said.
I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but the sound escaped cracked and rusty, startling me more than anyone else. I hadn’t laughed properly in months. Not since Brian.
The thought struck hard enough to steal the air from my chest. Then the little girl hiding behind the woman’s skirts smiled at me, and for one second the ache loosened.
Wulfric gestured toward the village.
“Come.”
I followed him down the slope as the mud sucked at my boots with every step, and every person in Ashford turned to stare.
I couldn’t blame them. I was a soaking wet woman in strange clothes arriving alone from the direction of an invading army. I’d have stared too.
Up close, the village was louder than it had looked from the hill. Axes struck wood. Chickens complained. Someone hammered metal. A baby wailed inside one of the houses.
The air smelled of woodsmoke, ale, damp earth, dung, baking bread, wet wool, and people who lived in a world without deodorant.
Underneath it all lay fear. Sharp. Familiar.
A woman passed carrying a basket of flat loaves and stared at me so hard she nearly stepped on a chicken. The chicken objected loudly. The goat followed us at a distance, still judging.
“Your animal dislikes me,” I said.
Wulfric glanced back.
“The goat dislikes all equally. Do not take it to heart.”
The meeting house stood near the center of the village, larger than the cottages around it but still smaller than the engine bay back at the station. Smoke leaked from a hole in the roof.
Inside, shadows clung to low timber beams. Rushes covered the packed-earth floor. A central hearth burned low, and the smoke rose toward the roof opening, changed its mind halfway there, and went directly into my eyes instead.
Benches lined the walls. Someone had set out a clay jug of ale beside a round brown loaf and a wedge of cheese that looked hard enough to repair the masonry.
So this was a war council. I’d always wondered what one looked like.
Wulfric motioned me forward as every gaze in the room fastened on me.
My pulse kicked once, hard. Panic later. Survive now.
Wulfric took his place near the hearth.
“This woman brings word from the shore.”
Leofric folded his arms.
The older man, Godwin, I heard someone call him, watched me with tired, intelligent eyes.
Wystan remained near the door, trying very hard not to look like a boy who had nearly stabbed a strange woman out of nerves.
I took a breath.
“I don’t know your enemies. I don’t know your roads, your stores, how many men you can put into a fight, or where you’d make a stand.”
Wulfric watched me through the smoke.
“But I know what fire does. I know what fear does. I know how quickly a plan falls apart when people panic, and how to move children, old people, and the injured before that happens.”
The room went very quiet.
“I can’t tell you how to fight your war.”
I looked around at the weathered faces, the callused hands, the men carrying scars they’d earned long before I arrived.
“But I can help you keep fear from fighting it for you.”