Kate Sedley: The Wicked Winter

Almost immediately my wish was granted as the rattle of wheels and the clop of horse's hoofs sounded behind me. I turned my head to see a cart approaching, a solid brown cob harnessed between its shafts, carrying a load of firewood.

The driver was bunched forward over the reins, his head well down and concealed beneath its hood, his hands mottled red and blue by the cold. I stepped out almost into the middle of the track and hailed him, hoping for a fide, but either he did not hear me or he was too intent on getting home to stop and help a stranger. Whichever it was, he chose that moment to flick the reins and increase his speed, forcing me to step back hurriedly. I trod on a loose stone at the side of the path and went down heavily, twisting my left foot beneath me as I did so.

For several minutes I was unable to move, conscious of nothing but the pain in my ankle. When at last this was bearable enough for me to drag myself upright with the aid of my cudgel, which by the grace of God had fallen close to my hand, I let rip with all the blasphemies at my command, cursing the retreating form of the carter. Then having somewhat relieved my feelings, I gingerly put my left foot to the ground and tested my weight on the ankle. A searing pain shot up my leg, causing me to swear yet again with even greater fluency than before. I glanced wildly around me, wondering how far it was to the nearest habitation.

And then I saw it, a boulder house built into the steep bank on the right of the track some yards ahead of me, a thin wisp of smoke spiralling through the hole in the heather thatched roof. I dragged myself the short distance and had to stoop almost double, such was my height, to get my head beneath the lintel-stone of the narrow doorway. Inside, the hovel was so dark that even the single rushlight was momentarily invisible to me and I failed to realise that the floor was several inches below the level of the road.

Consequently I missed my footing and pitched forward on my face. As the bare, beaten earth came up to meet me, the red-hot pain once more shot up my leg and I lay there, writhing and groaning in agony.

I must have lost consciousness for a moment, because the next thing I knew I was lying on my back with a face swimming above me, illuminated by the pallid glow of a rushlight. It was a narrow, etiolated face, with very pale blue eyes and lashes so fair that they were almost white. The impression of the skull was very strong beneath the paperthin skin and a few tufts and strands of hair, as colourless as the eyelashes, grew from the balding pate. Yet those seemingly fleshless arms needed to have a greater strength than their appearance suggested in order to have shifted my bulk.

I lifted myself on to my elbows and tried to get up, but immediately my left leg protested and I sank back with a groan.

'Still! Still!' the man ordered in a hoarse voice which barely rose above a whisper. 'Wait.'

He turned, setting down the rushlight and its holder on the ground. Then with a little help from me, he pulled off my left boot and began gently to prod the ankle, grunting softly to himself as he did so. At last he raised his head.

'Swollen,' he said. 'Bone not broken. Rest two days. Maybe three. All right then.'

He picked up the rushlight again, holding it above his head, and so perilously close to birch boughs which supported the heather thatching that I cried out in alarm. He seemed unperturbed however, pointing with his free hand to the farther wall. I twisted my body to look behind me and, my eyes now having grown accustomed to the darkness, I saw a bed of dried straw in one part of the semi-circular embrasure dug out from the bank.

'You lie there,' my rescuer invited.

And while I dragged my painful way across the floor, he gathered up my pack and cudgel, placing them carefully in a corner. After that, he made his way to his storage shelves, three of them, also cut out of the bank, one above the other.

From the top one he took a small earthenware pot; then indicating to me that I should remove my jerkin and hose — a feat I was unable to accomplish without his assistance — he knelt beside me, dipped his fingers into the jar and began to rub some of its contents into my burning flesh. I instantly recognised the salve from its smell. My mother used to make it, a mixture of rue, borage and honey; an ointment invaluable for reducing swelling. My ankle began to feel better almost at once.

'What's your name?' I asked.

He did not answer immediately, and I was just beginning to wonder if he had heard me when he glanced up and muttered briefly, 'Ulnoth.'

'That's a Saxon name,' I said.

'Yes. Saxon,' he repeated.

'And what was your father's name?'

After another silence he grunted, 'Wolf. Me Ulnoth Wolfsson.'

I nodded. 'And do you have children?'

There was yet further delay before he answered, as if it took him a while to absorb and understand words. But at last he muttered, 'No. No kinder. No Ulnothsson. No Ulnothsdaughter.'

I had met one or two people like him before on my travels.

Although it was now many hundreds of years since our Norman masters had conquered us, and although in general Saxon and Norman blood had become so mixed that only the bastard word 'English' would do to describe our race, here and there, in isolated places, could still be found true descendants of the Saxon tribes.

When he had finished attending to my ankle, Ulnoth helped me back into my clothes before gathering up an armful of brushwood from a pile stacked against one of the outer stone walls. After rekindling the fire on the hearth, he erected an old and rickety tripod from which he suspended an equally ancient iron pot, seemingly already filled with water from the rill which trickled sluggishly down the bank outside. Into this he threw various dried herbs, which hung in branches from the ceiling, followed by the dismembered carcass of a rabbit taken from his larder, a hole in the freezing ground.

The resulting stew was delicious, and I swallowed it down along with any scruples I might have had about eating meat on a Friday. I suspected that my host did not even know which day of the week it was, but I was wrong. When we had both eaten our fill — in my case three bowls of stew to his one — Ulnoth took the dregs of home-brewed mead with which we had washed down our meal, and poured them as a libation on the threshold of the hut.

'For Frig,' he said, noticing my curious stare. 'Today Frig's day.'

Of course. Frig, mother of the Nordic gods. And the wife of Woden? I didn't know. I couldn't remember. Furthermore, I did not at that moment care. My eyes were beginning to close and my body felt heavy. The straw bed on which I lay, though verminous, was warm, and the salve had soothed away the worst of my pain. Before I knew it, I was sound asleep.

Ulnoth proved to be right. My ankle had sustained no serious injury; I had merely given it a bad wrench when I fell. Under his gentle ministrations it was better within two days, but that bringing us to the Sabbath, I waited until the following day and then lingered one more, in order to make sure that I was really fit to continue my joumey. But on Tuesday — or, as Ulnoth called it, Tiuw's day, Tiuw being the ancient god of war — I could tarry no longer. For one thing I was rapidly eating my host out of house and home, and for another the silence and inactivity were becoming oppressive.

The sparseness of Ulnoth's conversation, the fact that he was obviously unaccustomed to using words fluently, had at first made me believe him a simpleton, but as time wore on I realised that this was not so. One day, talking idly to him about my visit to the neighbouring village and not certain whether he were listening or no, he suddenly interrupted me with, 'Miller. You visit mill.'