Read Online The Reluctant Berserker by Alex Beecroft - Free Book Online

old age. He could not be sure he had just been insulted. Hunlaf could simply be one of those men who must crowd close and touch everyone with whom they talked. Besides, he was one man, and easy enough to avoid.
    Nevertheless, noticing Tatwine’s disapproving eye on him, Leofgar cut the conversation short after that, and went to speak to Lady Edith, the lord’s mother, from whom he was learning the history of Tatwine’s family—their generations back to Scild and through him back to Woden. In payment for this lavish hospitality, he could at least make an account of his host’s line, something that would make the dry subject matter stick in the mind and let all Tatwine’s tenants know of his connection to royalty.
    Edith was happy to reminisce for an hour, with her distaff tucked under her elbow. Her spindle lowered like a spider towards the ground, climbed back up as she wound the new thread on, lowered again as she spun, her movements so practiced they carried on flawlessly while her mind ranged back over years and miles, back into the old days on their distant homeland, into forests pregnant with gods.
    Leofgar made himself useful, transferring wool from a full spindle to a niddy-noddy and thence into balls, and gradually he found himself in the centre of the lady’s women, all peacefully sewing or spinning together, taking up the stories like dropped stitches from their lady’s hands and spinning them out, correcting or elaborating.
    After a little while they began disappearing to the bower house, searching through chests and coming back with tapestries that told other stories, half-remembered. They would puzzle over them together, and he would commit to mind what they agreed was the closest truth, and wind it into poetry as they worked.
    It was so comfortable and useful a thing that, after seeing his master tended to—neither better nor worse, able to rise from his bed only to sit by the fire an hour and then return—Leofgar came back the next day, and the day after that.
    On Sunday, after a morning in the small wooden church, packed in and warmed by many bodies, Tatwine captured him, still with the smell of attar of roses in his nostrils, and prevented him from going back. Leofgar looked at the painting, on the far wall, of the tree of life that was Christ, and thought many things—chiefly that Tatwine had come to ask them to leave, as was long, long overdue. He wondered how he could beg the man to at least let Anna stay.
    Over the past days, winter had eased its grip a little, and long slanting spears of rain had washed away most of the snow, softening the ground beneath. It had been dim and cheerless and bleak. Today, though, the rain had dried and a wintery sun was making the wet earth gleam. The paintings of vine scroll around the door were so very green they almost hurt his eyes, and the purple grapes looked full of wine.
    “Walk with me,” said Tatwine, “while we may. There is something I want you to see.”
    Tatwine’s holding lay in the gentle hills near Lachesslei, with common forest bordering it to the north, and everywhere else the prosperous signs of good husbandry. Coming out of the gates, they turned west and walked clockwise around the partly frozen moat. A swathe of grass and scrubby trees led down to the graveyard. Here a fleet of graves lay like upturned boats with long grass growing over them. Most floated in the stream of the sun’s passage, facing from east to west, but faint discolourations in the grass, so old they were no longer mounded at all, faced north to south. Amid these, either in challenge or in hope of doing them good, a preaching cross had been erected, and in a landscape of faded grasses, dun mud, dun trees against an off-white sky, the cross looked like a window into a better world, scarlet, azure and gold with gilt and paint.
    Tatwine led him—slowly, as though he supposed Leofgar not fully recovered, or perhaps as though he was gathering his thoughts—to the side of