A King's Comrade: A Story of Old Hereford

by Charles W. Whistler

"This is luck," said my comrade. "Here we can leave the horses, and if one does happen past here before dark and spies a pied skin, he will but deem that kine are sleeping here. After dark, who will come this way at all?"

"We shall have to," said I, somewhat doubtfully.

Erling leaped from his horse and laughed. "We may hide here for a week if we must," he said. "I think that the trolls have all gone to the old lands where men yet believe in them; and seeing that we are on a good errand, your fiends should not dare come near us. I care not if I have to come back here alone to fetch the horses when you will."

I dismounted also, for he shamed me, and I said so. Then we tied the steeds carefully, loosening the girths, and managed to get a sapling or two from the undergrowth set across the door to keep wandering cattle out. More than that we could not do, but at least the horses were safe till we needed them, and that would hardly be long, as we hoped. They had well fed as I slept.

Then we went away from the ruin, passing behind it up the little slope on which it stood, meaning, if we were seen, to come down as if we had not been near the place. And from the top of that slope we could see the walls of the palace, with the white horse banner of Mercia floating over them. From the roof of his villa the Roman captain could have seen his camp, and maybe that deadly passage into its midst was for his use. It led this way.

We waded through the ford again, and wandered down stream once more, looking as we went for the first sign of wheel marks. I was on the banks above the water by twenty yards, and Erling was at their foot, close to the stream, when we had the first hope of finding what we sought. I spied a rough farm cart standing idle and deserted fifty yards away from me and the river, in the brushwood, half hidden by it, as if thrust hastily there out of sight; and the very glimpse of the thing, with its rough-hewn wheels of rounded tree-trunk slices, iron bound, made my heart beat fast and thick, for I feared what I might see in it.

I called Erling, and as he ran to me I pointed, and together, without a word, we went to the cart and looked into it. It was empty, but on its rough floor were tokens, not to be mistaken, which told us that it was indeed the cart which Gymbert and his men had used. And so we knew that we could not be far from the place where they had hidden the king's body.

Now, if there had been traces of that burden which would once have led us to its hiding place, the rain had washed them away, and we had naught to guide us. The turf held no footmarks of men, and it was not plain how the cart had come to this place; for men had been hauling timber and fagots hence, so that tracks were many, and some new. All round us was wooded, and it seemed most likely that somewhere among the bushes they had found a place; and so for half an hour we went to and fro, but never a sign of upturned ground did we see.

"They brought the cart far from the place," said I presently.

And at that moment from the palace courtyard the horns called men to their supper, and I started to find how near we were to the walls. We had wandered onward as we searched, and it is a wonder we had seen no man. But perhaps it was because this place was mostly deserted, being out of the way to anywhere, that Gymbert chose it. The traffic of the palace went along the road to Fernlea and the ford of the host there, away from here. The carting of the wood cut during winter was over now, and it was too near the palace for the deer to be sought in these woods.