Free Two Ravens by Cecelia Holland Page A

sailors as he could find to understand him, and they told him that a Danish ship could take him home. Most of the ships were Frisian, come to load English wool. He did not find a Danish ship.
    He walked back along the riverbank to the city. A great stone wall surrounded it, but the city itself had shrunk down to a few crooked streets in the middle, with a stone tower standing over them. Elsewhere were older houses, deserted and burned, and streets overgrown with brambles.
    Gifu said, “The Normans came here. That’s why the tower is there. To keep order. They burned everything. There were rebels and they hanged them.”
    She and Bjarni were walking along a cobbled street slimy with the excrement of dogs and goats. The buildings on either side were built out over the street, penning the air under them until it was too foul to breathe. Other people crowded by. He stretched his legs toward the place where the street widened.
    Her horse was grazing where they had left it, on a hillside near the wall. Bjarni sat down on the grass. The ruins of a house covered the flat ground below him. Lifting his head, he could see another on the slope above him. There were more ruins here than living houses. The wall was old and crumbling. This had been a great place once. He sat thinking of the Normans who had destroyed it.
    Gifu was rubbing down the horse with a handful of grass. She talked to it and sang to it. Bjarni rose and went over to her and said, “The sailors here tell me that I will find a ship in London to take me home.”
    Busily she scrubbed dried mud from the horse’s foreleg. “Where is London?”
    “At the other end of the Great Road.” He scratched the horse under the jaw and it groaned and pushed its head out, enjoying the caress. The girl crouched almost at Bjarni’s feet. He said, “You’ve come far enough, now, Gifu. You must go back to Fenby.”
    She shook her head. “I am never going home. I have told you that.”
    “I don’t know how far London is—I don’t know what I might find there. I can’t care for you. Go home. Take the horse.”
    “My father will switch me.”
    “He will only beat you once.”
    She was working over the horse’s leg. The back of her neck was grey with dirt. Lice crawled in her fuzzy red hair. She said, “He will switch me every day. When he finds out I am with child, he will whip me to death.”
    “By the nine howes,” he said.
    She turned on him like an animal, hooking her fingers into his clothes. “Take me with you. I can’t go home. I have no place to go except with you.”
    He recoiled. She smelled strongly of sweat and female humors. He pulled her hands out of his clothes and she caught hold of him again, and two dirty tears rolled down her cheeks.
    “Please,” she cried.
    “Gifu, I cannot take you with me.”
    She wept, clutching him, and when he backed away from her she let him drag her after. He stood still, afraid of stepping on her. She wept and rubbed her face against his thigh.
    “Gifu,” he said. “Stop.”
    She wailed. He relented; bending down into the ripe field of her smells he lifted her and put her on the horse. He took the horse by the bridle and led it down through York toward the Great Road. She snuffled, making a great display of wiping her eyes, but he caught a glimpse of her when she thought he could not see, and she was smiling. He wondered if she had gulled him. Uncertain, he led her on down the road toward London.
     
    * * *
     
    THEY LEFT THE FLAT MOORS behind and traveled through a forest that seemed endless. The sky was hemmed down to a narrow strip over his head, and when the wind blew the trees rubbed their branches together, squeaking and banging, with all the leaves rustling, in a racket that unsettled him. The day after they left York, they came on a river.
    Bjarni went along it away from the road. The river curved. A tree had fallen into the water just above the bend, and in its lee was a deep quiet pool. He took off his clothes