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

one of the larger mounds. There, a sprig of holly with bright red berries had been laid down, and so Leofgar knew that whoever was inside had been beloved and was remembered.
    “She was but a girl when we wed,” said Tatwine, looking down with his hard face rueful. The lines at the corners of his mouth stood out like gashes, and his hands were clenched around belt and sword.
    “Your wife?” Leofgar encouraged him in a soft voice, because it was clear enough to him that this was something the lord needed to say, and it was some small measure of repayment to help him say it.
    Tatwine smiled, tilting his head towards Leofgar without taking his eyes off the grave. “Her father and I arranged it.” He waved towards the distant hills, where ox teams had almost finished ploughing the narrow strips of fields. “Her dowry would include the arable land my steading had so badly needed. She did not wish to come. I was not to her fancy, this old man her father’s age, boiled hard by life like a leather cup. Yet she did as her father asked, and I was as good to her as I knew how. For a time I believe we were both happy. I was, at least.”
    Silence, and Leofgar came in on the beat. “What happened?”
    “She died giving birth to our first child. The child died also.”
    So Leofgar knew that the folds of Tatwine’s face did not conceal fury, but grief. “The weary spirit cannot withstand fate. Nor does a rough or sorrowful mind do any good. So I, often wretched and sorrowful, far from noble kinsmen, have had to bind in fetters my inmost thoughts, since long years ago I hid my lord in the darkness of the earth,” he chanted, part of him caught up in Tatwine’s sorrow, part thinking of Anna and the fate he was finding increasingly hard to ignore.
    “Indeed.” Tatwine unclenched his hands with clear effort, frowning at them as though he had not meant to display so much unseemly emotion. “It has been a hard year, with this like a stone on my back, and a hungry winter. My days and my nights have been like wounds, one atop the other. So I take your coming here, on the holy feast, as a gift from God. I have prayed for a friend to whom I might unbind my thoughts. Here you are.”
    Leofgar caught himself in the act of stepping backwards, turned it into a fidget he hoped would look more like one innocently surprised by intense words than like a man preparing to flee. Why should he flee? What was there in this that touched his skin like fire and made him recoil? Why was he, as Anna often lamented, so cursed to think ill of all?
    He composed his face into a smile. “I am…overwhelmed, my lord. You do me too much honour. I am nothing but an itinerant musician. Not worthy to speak to you except through intermediaries, and only to tell you how grateful I am for your kindness. I am not of a quality that could ever hope for friendship with such as you.”
    Tatwine smiled. “That, I think, is for me to decide.” He seized Leofgar by the elbow, his strong fingers almost crushing the whistle that Leofgar routinely carried up his sleeve—it was for that reason, and for that reason alone, that Leofgar flinched.
    Tatwine steered him further downhill, to where the river that fed the moat emerged and spread into a wide, still pond, full of the sinuous shadows of grey fish. There they came out onto a short boarded quay. The slaves who had been fishing on their church-enforced Sunday afternoon of freedom gathered their rods and baskets and fled silently from their approach.
    “Look,” said Tatwine, and gestured to Leofgar to lean over and look into the dark water. He saw fins gleaming faintly silver on the humped backs of swirling trout, old leaves and stones at the bottom, sifted over by the slime that was the common destiny of all that perished in this impermanent world.
    “What am I looking at, my lord?”
    Tatwine laughed, surprised and seemingly confirmed in his thoughts. “I do not think that you know what you look like, Harper. I am