Conqueror

XXV

The hours wore away.

It was an October day, and the sun, always low, swung around until it lay in the south, hanging over the Norman lines and glaring in the faces of the English like the eye of God. It looked down on a field increasingly littered with the dead and dying, both English and Norman, and the steaming carcasses of horses.

Still the battle was not done. The energy and the bravado of the morning were long gone, and only a few insults floated over the broken ground. And yet, when the time came and the trumpets blew, the weary Normans drove themselves up the slope, clambering over the bodies of the dead, to hurl themselves at the English. Over and over again. It was a collective madness, Godgifu thought, numbed, a madness that would not be done with until they were all dead, and only the ravens moved on the battlefield, pecking out eyes.

Sihtric came to stand with his sister. He still wore his chain mail, stiff and unbloodied. 'I have the prophecy with me,' he said feverishly. 'The Menologium. I hoped to stiffen the King's resolve with it. But Harold won't act. He broods on Edward's curse, that he would lose his brothers before he died. Even the promise of a northern empire, of a whole new world, doesn't matter to him as much as the pain of his brothers' loss, the fear of God's wrath. I think for Harold the day has become a trial by warfare, and in his grief and guilt he is letting God decide the outcome. I wonder if the Weaver thought of that.'

Godgifu said, 'The Weaver sees us as figures in a tapestry. The Weaver isn't fighting, here and now. We are. And yet, Sihtric, the wall holds firm.'

'Yes. If we can survive to dark, we can still win.'

She glanced across at the Norman lines, the ranks of men bristling with upraised spears. 'But,' she said, 'the Normans must know this too.'