Note: a short glossary is provided at the end of this chapter, for medieval-era terms used. If you hit a word or phrase you've never heard before, it may be worth checking there for it.


Chapter 2 - False Hopes

There's a difference between upholding the law, and upholding the right! An' you're dreamin' if you think none will ever now weigh one against t'other, an' ask which you preferred.

Well, the truth for Eric was that he had dreamed. What point now, after ten years' of Ravenna's poisonous rule, in saying anything to anyone past 'let bygones be bygones'? Let any who'd survived go forward and be judged as whoever they should prove to be hereafter. Too late for recrimination to mean much, Eric thought. But also too much to hope that none would prefer crying and recriminating to getting on with rebuilding their lives. It was enough to make him wish he could have refilled his flask with more than ale that morning. The thought of having to deal with the likes of Jeff and his likely friends, in this new world they'd made, was enough to make any man want stronger drink, who wasn't one of them. Strong enough to take the edges off, and blur memory past his ability to care about it. Even if it wasn't any answer.

He'd have to put it by and move on. There'd always be men of unstained morality in the world who'd feel they'd a right to lord it over all the rest, for no better reason than those rest not being them.

"If I've no better to hope for than that," he said aloud, "I'll do better alone."

But I promise, you look to make any who lived within the Queen's law pay for doing—as though it ever served us better than hiding behind Duke Hammond's skirts with you!—and it'll be a long time before this land knows peace.

Being truthful about it, he'd grant men like Jeff and his fellows did have some right to call themselves his betters. They'd taken up arms as best they could and at least looked to go to war, once they knew their rightful king had been killed and his position usurped by a witch. Even more so the wives who took to scarring both themselves and their children to protect themselves from her. Even he might call them better than those who like him in the day, had shrugged and called it all meaningless or else nothing they had any power to resist. Or felt the price of resistance in terms of communities razed and their loved ones killed could only be too high. Or felt themselves secure enough in their positions and property to be able to outlast Ravenna. Or even only hoped to secure themselves through her ignorance of them. That had been close enough to his hope, as the embittered old soldier he had been at twenty. Returning to their cursed and blighted land a whole five years into her dark reign, it had mattered little to him who sat on the throne. He'd no reason to believe that any who'd seek royal power should be trusted with anything.

But in the end, how fair was their condemnation? All well to cry for upholding the right, but facing a wrong with both magic on her side and an army, and the ability to mow down anything in her path, there was a point past which it wasn't fair to ask that anybody take on martyrdom with you. People had to be let free to run or hide, or make whatever peace they could with it.

The forest was thinning now, as he approached the top of the ridge he'd been climbing this past hour, and shortly he broke through from the trail onto its windswept crest. From here the trackway still ran clear along the top of the ridge towards the sea to the south, and on that firmer ground the going would be easier. By mid-afternoon he should reach the spring by the track that led down its other side to the west, towards the valley and home.

He could say to that place he was always bound to return. The heart of his grandfather's dreamed-of manor, that first hide of land stretching a quarter mile wide along the coast, most of a mile back along the little river that ran through it, and up into the woodlands that lined the hills to its eastern side. It had been his great-grandfather's reward as an armsman, granted as a freehold in fee simple from the king himself, for saving the life of that king's son in battle. Snow White's grandfather, in fact. An arresting thought, for a moment, that now she should be not only his queen, but his personal liege lord.

Well, it shouldn't make it that much harder to evade her interest, should time and distraction not suffice. She surely shouldn't have time to do business with any of her yeomanry herself, and if he went on paying his taxes using his father's name, none should easily see the connection.

Time had made little difference to the hard track along the ridge line, but once he began to work his way down the hillside into what was left of the first rutted trail leading down to the valley, it was a different matter. It was steeper than the better road closer to the farmstead, which they'd kept wide and gently sloped enough for both wagons and herds to pass. One might just have led a pack horse by this route in days when it was less overgrown; now it was all he could do to see it, knowing it was there. But it was a more direct route to the farm proper and this past two years, the path he knew best.

Sooner there, sooner he'd know how much was left.

He'd expect the farmhouse still to be standing. His grandfather's work, most of it, though the hall at the heart of it, with its high archbraced roof, had been built in his great-grandfather's time. Neither of those two had ever built anything, but to last. The same likely held for the kitchen and buttery his father had added in Eric's own boyhood, and the tile-floored dairy they'd made of the room which had originally adjoined the north end of the hall. A year and a half since he or anyone he knew had passed that way, the condition of any of it might be uncertain past 'standing', but that centre should hold.

Indeed, he wouldn't be surprised if most of it mightn't be as he'd left it, though surely the worse for weather. The big hay barn had been sound the year he'd left. The two older longhouses still with thatched roofs, one remade as the settlement's tithe shed and the other as the sheepcote, would be worse for wear. Could be beginning to leak by now, under the steady beating of the winter storms in from the south, across the saltmarsh. Nowhere could pass unscathed where a crack through shutters or around a door might offer entrance to the damp, or any sort of windblown litter, or small animals. Birds and mice would no doubt have had their way amidst any stores or possessions left.

He had to take things carefully through one stretch where a tall birch tree had fallen slantwise across the path, forcing him to slide and then climb a foot or three down it, clinging to its branches. Reason enough once down, to rest a little. He shed his coat and rolled it in its bundle, gave brief thought to the problem of trimming the thing enough to pull it free, and decided against it. However tempted he might be, for now this wasn't a job to tackle with his ax. He'd do better with a saw, and his side and shoulder less sore, later. Still it was as good a place as any to break bread and finish the ale in his flask, and then sit a while on a mossy bank beside the trail, watching and listening to the greenwood around him.

It mightn't in fact be the best idea to even think of trying to start over at the farmstead by himself. Considering how far the fields must be on their way to overgrown by now, he might do better to work it as forest rather than farm. He'd never lost his love for the land, but he'd always preferred the woodlands. Hunting in the forest, within the law or not. Walking for miles through its rustling, sun-dappled shelter, learning the paths of every stream and the shapes of great rocks that might offer protection against the wind and rain that blew regularly in off the coast to the south. He'd spent a good part of his boyhood there, trekking about with his grandfather. A lot of gathering wood, and learning to hunt and track. Later learning from the old man, in the privacy of a sunlit clearing, his more lethal skills with an ax.

By the time he made his way through to the meadow that lay beyond the woods, the wind had picked up enough to be tossing the treetops lightly. Coming out into the silt-and-pebbles path of the dry stream bed that traced along its edge, he stopped to get his bearings on what was left of the high ground.

Miles now, from the blighted land around the big castle and the Dark Forest, in a landscape coming back to life with spring it was harder than he'd thought to see much of the settlement. The trees were taller now, bushes and saplings grown in along the road that led to it, and across fields once cleared. But yes, he knew the place. The outlines of a substantial farm were clear, and those of handful of smaller fenced acreages grouped by its gate. Through the trees stretches of the dry stone wall surrounding the farmstead were still visible, and the red-tiled roof of the house, and the one that had been Reg Weaver's, first on the left outside the gate. Nearer, between him and the beginning of that cluster of buildings, older wattle fences still marked the gardens and orchards and the pens for tenants' animals, hiding the overgrowth and ruin he knew must be there.

Best to get on.

Peace had betrayed his grandfather's hopes for the farm. He had counted on war, and the opportunities for well-rewarded service as an armsman, to bring him money through plunder and hostages taken. That, he held, should have allowed him to build the estate he had believed in his whole life. There was certainly land here, across the valley and north into the hills, which had lain untenanted since the days of plague and famine two hundred years earlier. If his opportunities had ever matched his ambitions, Grandfather would have owned it all. The stubborn old yeoman could have built a manor here the equal of any belted knight's. But for him the call to arms had only come a time or two, when King Magnus' father had needed to settle border squabbles with the Welsh. For Eric's father, it had not come at all. His interest had always been more in bettering what they had, over seeking to build it greater than they could decently manage.

It had been a source of contention between the two of them down all their days together, that his father's dreams had never extended further than that land they already held. He had argued rightly enough that it was enough to keep five families such as theirs in prosperity. Time enough to look for more, only after they had made the best use of what they had.

The best of what they had, including Eric.

It had been clear enough from his boyhood, that each had regarded him in his own way as the family's last hope.

His grandfather having lost to death the first son to whom he expected to leave his estate, had never faced with grace that his land must someday be inherited by his second boy. It had forced him to reclaim Eric's father as a youth from the Church to which he had dedicated him as a child—no greater source of joy for the son, than the father—and see him promptly married, making clear his hope was now for grandsons to redeem his dreams. Matters had not been aided when Eric's parents saw their first son stillborn, and the second dead of a fever before Eric, third and last, had passed his fourth year. There had been one miscarriage later that had come close to killing his mother, before his father had dug in his heels and told the old man to give over wishing for the family to increase. Then they had settled to quarreling in earnest over what Eric's fate should be as the last of their line.

His father would have divided his days between the church school in the town and what, as a boy, he had only seen as the grinding routine of the farm.

His grandfather, seeing him last fit representative of the family, had argued for training him in arms and committing him to the king's service as he had been committed in his youth. Or, he argued, if their king had no need of the boy, he might seek out one of the great mercenary companies to find him opportunities for glory. Glory, and with it the money to build their property to match all his forefathers' dreams for it.

His father had scoffed, but Eric had dreamed with the old man. Dreamed and trained in his skills. It hadn't taken three months past his grandfather's death, the summer he turned fourteen, for him to slip away with his ax slung across his shoulders, in hopes of making those dreams come true.

It had taken two years to face that his father was right. Three more to find the desperation in himself, to come home. Not to any prodigal's welcome: his mother was now dead and his father inclined to blame him for it. It had taken a year and some for them both to accept that the place was his fate, and at least here he could make himself useful.

Now as he came closer he could see the long line of the farmstead's hard-packed flint and limestone walls still stood, visible through the coppiced stands of alder and hazel beyond the tenants' cottages. Above the low, square line of the wall, the red-tiled roof of the main house rose clear as ever, and the darker outline of the barns and outbuildings, and the soft green tops of the trees in the orchard.

Here too, either side of the overgrown track which led to its gate, most of the cottages seemed still in better order than he'd expected. All still stood, sheltered by their own lower fences and garden and orchard plots. The Weavers' stone-built longhouse, sitting sidelong on its larger plot with back wall facing south against the wind, seemed as though it might have fared the best, but when he came by it he saw the door stood open, and the shutters at one window hung askew.

The gate to the farmstead also stood half open now, and at that he stopped. That would have taken someone some doing. He'd left that gate barred from the inside when they'd left, November before last, climbing free at the last over the wall with Reg's help and a ladder. His last act had been to shove the ladder back inside to fall where it might. Then he'd swung himself round and dropped loosely, sliding down fast in the frost-slick grass into the dry ditch below. Not a trick he'd have tried sober. Reg had pulled him up then to join that group of the last few tenants setting out with their goods and their animals towards the castle town. For a moment he'd felt it then as not before that, with only one or two willing to even hint they might come back in the spring, the settlement's time was done.

Now he turned instead to see how he'd come. From the height of the grass in the hollow way, with no sign of any passage through it except his own, he'd guess it a good while since anyone had been here. The stillness said equally that no one was here now. No sound of anything stirring, no sounds of man or beast, nothing past the wind and snatches of birdsong. No smoke from any hearth-fire either, that he could see or scent from any direction.

He still tugged the bundle of his coat squarely between his shoulders, and settled his ax in his hand before crossing onto the graveled ramp that led to the gate.


Next: Eric faces 'home' as it was, and the site of his wife's murder.


Glossary

Freehold in fee simple - Very loosely, the sort of "it's yours and your heirs hereafter" ownership we think of as normal for property owners today. Most peasants in medieval times rented their lands from their manorial lords; being granted land from the king, on this basis, would be highly unusual. Its effect is to put Eric's family into the yeomanry, at the high end of the peasant class, as small landowners.

Hide (of land) - A measure of the amount of land needed to support a peasant family. Not a highly standardized measure of either area or value, but interpreted here as about 120 acres.


For anyone interested in a look at the sort of house I'm imagining for Eric's family, a map of the farmstead, and the story's imaginary world in general, my inspiration page for this is on Pinterest dot com. Add the string below to the basic URL that ffnet won't let me include here, and "enter", to see...

msplushbug/inspiration-board-for-the-long-road-home/