James Aitcheson - Knights of the Hawk

But only for an instant.

‘Lord!’ she cried again, as she beckoned me over, and this time there was no mistaking her tone, which was insistent rather than jubilant. With her, crowded close, were Godric and Ælfhelm, who was nursing a wound to his shoulder, his fellow huscarls Dweorg and Sceota, and Pons too. Of Oswynn, however, there was no sign.

And I knew.

My skin turned to ice. My heart all but stopped, and the breath caught in my chest. No longer were all those men shouting and rejoicing; or perhaps they were, but I did not hear them. Around me the whole world seemed to slow.

‘Lord!’ Eithne was shouting still, her voice desperate, as I pelted towards her as fast as my legs could carry me, nearly tripping over the corpses in my way but somehow managing to stay upright.

‘Where is she?’ I roared as I grew nearer. ‘What happened?’

She stared, terrified, at me, but though her mouth opened, no words came out. Instead, after a moment’s hesitation, she and the others simply stepped to one side, making way and allowing me to see for myself.

Oswynn, my Oswynn, lay on the ground, her head of pitch-black hair resting upon a bundle of folded cloaks, her eyes closed, her chest rising and falling. Her breath misted in front of her face, but there was so little of it, and it came only in stutters.

‘No,’ I said, barely able to manage even a whisper, so numb, so devoid of strength, so helpless did I feel. ‘No.’

Eanflæd, the English girl, knelt beside her, pressing a bloodied cloth against Oswynn’s lower torso, whilst at the same time stroking her brow. Her eyes were red and her cheeks wet with tears. No sooner had she noticed me approaching than she rose to her feet and made way.

‘She wanted to kill them all,’ I was dimly aware of Ælfhelm saying. ‘We tried to stop her, Tancred, but there was a fury in her, a fury such as I’ve never seen in a woman. We tried, but before we could even-’

He kept speaking, but whatever he said, I didn’t hear. My mind was running with a thousand thoughts and I was deaf to his explanations, blind to everything except for my woman as I fell to my knees by her side and took her cold hand in mine, squeezing it as I tried to coax her back to me. Her eyelids fluttered, and a drawn-out moan escaped her lips. Beneath the rag Eanflæd had been using to staunch the flow, Oswynn’s shift was torn where a spear or a seax had dealt its blow, and the linen around it was crimson-dark and sodden. I pressed the cloth firmly against the gash, refusing to admit to myself what my eyes and my heart were telling me, which was that it was no use, that the blood was burbling forth too freely to be stemmed. She was gut-stricken, wounded deep, beyond the ability of the best physician or leech-doctor in Christendom to help, and experience had taught me that no one who suffered such an injury ever lived long. With every trace of mist that escaped her lips, it seemed that a little more life went out of her. Breath by breath, she was slipping away. From the world. From me.

This couldn’t be happening. Not after everything we had done; after the many leagues we had travelled across field and marsh, river and storm-tossed sea; after the countless foes I’d laid low in order to find her and bring her back. Did all of that count for nothing?

‘Oswynn,’ I said desperately. This had to be some dream, some nihtegesa , I thought, except that I couldn’t find a way to wake from it.

At the sound of her name she stirred. Her eyes opened, just by a little, but enough to see me kneeling over her.

‘Tancred,’ she said, and she was weeping, her voice weak, little more than a whisper. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry-’

‘No,’ I said, and suddenly I was weeping as well. To hear her say such a thing was more than I could bear. She had no reason to apologise. If anyone was to blame, it was I, not her. ‘I should never have left you. I shouldn’t. It’s my fault.’

I wasn’t only thinking of that moment earlier this morning when I’d entrusted her protection to Godric and Ælfhelm. I was also thinking back to that night at Dunholm. If only I’d been there to defend her, none of this would have happened.

‘You came, though,’ she whispered, managing something like a smile, although there was such pain in it.

‘Of course,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure if she heard me. Her face was pale, her skin cold to the touch, her chest barely moving, her breathing light, and growing lighter. She closed her eyes and I gripped her hand more tightly, trying to hold on to her. To prevent from happening what I could not prevent; to stave off fate. To keep her with me a little longer.

‘Oswynn,’ I pleaded, as if that would help, as if it would change anything. ‘Don’t go.’

The smile had faded from her expression; her fingers grew limp in my grasp. Her eyelids trembled, and her mouth opened by the tiniest sliver. She was trying to say something, but whatever it was I couldn’t tell, for at the same time from somewhere close at hand a sudden cheer rose up, drowning out the sound of her voice. Doing my best to stifle my sobs, I leant closer, until my ear brushed against her lips.

‘-for me,’ she managed to say, and I thought I must have missed something, or else misheard, so quiet was she. But then she spoke again, and this time I did hear her. ‘You came for me.’

‘Yes,’ I said, unable to hold the tears back any longer. She gave a long, slow sigh, and through watery eyes I gazed down at her, waiting for her to say more, to say anything at all.

Her mouth was still. Her eyes were closed.

‘Oswynn!’ I said, but no matter how loudly and how many times I repeated her name, she could not hear me. Grief overtook me then, and I let it pour out, spilling down my cheeks as I hugged her close and sobbed into her hair and into her cheeks and her neck. Over and over I begged her to wake, to come back to me. But she would not wake, nor would she come back. Her soul had fled her body, fled this world for whatever place it is that souls are supposed to go.

The sun shone in a bright, clear sky, but a chill had descended upon me, a chill that seized my whole body and wrenched at my heart, and I could not stop trembling. I clung to Oswynn, the one woman in all the world that I had ever truly loved, and I did not want to let her go, or move, or even walk this earth any longer. All I wanted was to die, so that I could be with her.

For she was gone, and my world had grown dark.

We buried her.

A few miles from Jarnborg there was a tiny timber building, not much bigger than a cattle-shed, that passed for a chapel amongst the island folk. We laid her in the earth in its grounds, beneath the winter-green boughs of a hollow yew. The priest, a wrinkled greybeard with a lame leg who walked with the aid of a crutch, recited the necessary liturgy. He had no Latin learning and so spoke in his own tongue, but even if he had, the words would have meant nothing to me, so lost was I in thought, in regret, in sorrow.

Afterwards, when the earth had been placed over her body and everyone else had left, I alone lingered, kneeling by her graveside for how long I cannot say, only that it seemed like an eternity. Clouds scurried from the sea up the length of the fjord, thick and brooding. They billowed and tumbled and blotted out the sun, which grew ever lower in the west. A drizzle came and went; the wind rose and settled and rose once more, tugging at my cloak and buffeting my cheeks, brushing clear the tears that I did not care to wipe away. I thought of her, and remembered the times we had shared, short though they were, and the many happinesses of those times. I prayed for her soul, and prayed also that when the day of reckoning arrived we would be united again in the heavenly kingdom, small comfort though that was to me in those lonely hours, as I thought of all the years stretching ahead that I would have to spend without her. Everything that had seemed so certain in the wake of Haakon’s death, in the wake of our victory, was thrown into confusion. The future that I had hoped for, that I had dreamt of, was not to be.