None answered: but Torfrida, as she laid her head upon her husband’s bosom, felt the great tears running down from his cheek on to her own.
None spoke a word. The men were awe-stricken. There was something despairing and ill-omened in the deed. And yet there was a savage grandeur in it, which bound their savage hearts still closer to their chief.
And so mare Swallow’s bones lie somewhere in the peat unto this day.
They got to Well; they sent out spies to find the men who had been “wasting Cissham with fire and sword”; and at last brought them in. Ill news, as usual, had travelled fast. They had heard of the fall of Ely, and hidden themselves “in a certain very small island which is called Stimtench,” where, thinking that the friends in search of them were Frenchmen in pursuit, they hid themselves among the high reeds. There two of them—one Starkwolf by name, the other Broher—hiding near each other, “thought that, as they were monks, it might conduce to their safety if they had shaven crowns; and set to work with their swords to shave each other’s heads as well as they could. But at last, by their war-cries and their speech, recognizing each other, they left off fighting,” and went after Hereward.
So jokes, grimly enough, Leofric the Deacon, who must have seen them come in the next morning, with bleeding coxcombs, and could laugh over the thing in after years. But he was in no humor for jesting in the days in which they lay at Well. Nor was he in jesting humor when, a week afterwards, hunted by the Normans from Well, and forced too take to meres and waterways known only to them, and too shallow and narrow for the Norman ships, they found their way across into the old Nene, and so by Thorney on toward Crowland, leaving Peterborough far on the left. For as they neared Crowland, they saw before them, rowing slowly, a barge full of men. And as they neared that barge, behold, all they who rowed were blind of both their eyes; and all they who sat and guided them were maimed of both their hands. And as they came alongside, there was not a man in all that ghastly crew but was an ancient friend, by whose side they had fought full many a day, and with whom they had drunk deep full many a night. They were the first-fruits of William’s vengeance; thrust into that boat, to tell the rest of the fen-men what those had to expect who dared oppose the Norman. And they were going, by some by-stream, to Crowland, to the sanctuary of the Danish fen-men, that they might cast themselves down before St. Guthlac, and ask of him that mercy for their souls which the conqueror had denied to their bodies. Alas for them! they were but a handful among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mutilated cripples, who swarmed all over England, and especially in the north and east, throughout the reign of the Norman conquerors. They told their comrades’ fate, slaughtered in the first attack, or hanged afterwards as rebels and traitors to a foreigner whom they had never seen, and to whom they owed no fealty by law of God or man.
“And Ranald Sigtrygsson?”
None knew aught of him. He never got home again to his Irish princess.
“And the poor women?” asked Torfrida.
But she received no answer.
And the men swore a great oath, and kept it, never to give quarter to a Norman, as long as there was one left on English ground.