[Roger the Chapman 06] - The Wicked Winter Read Online Free PDF

my painful way across the floor, he gathered up my pack and cudgel, placing them carefully in a corner. After that, he made his way to his storage shelves, three of them, also cut out of the bank, one above the other.
    From the top one he took a small earthenware pot; then indicating to me that I should remove my jerkin and hose - a feat I was unable to accomplish without his assistance - he knelt beside me, dipped his fingers into the jar and began to rub some of its contents into my burning flesh. I instantly recognised the salve from its smell. My mother used to make it, a mixture of rue, borage and honey; an ointment invaluable for reducing swelling. My ankle began to feel better almost at once.
    'What's your name?' I asked.
    He did not answer immediately, and I was just beginning to wonder if he had heard me when he glanced up and muttered briefly, 'Ulnoth.'
    'That's a Saxon name,' I said.
    'Yes. Saxon,' he repeated.
    'And what was your father's name?'
    After another silence he grunted, 'Wolf. Me Ulnoth Wolfsson.'
    I nodded. 'And do you have children?'
    There was yet further delay before he answered, as if it took him a while to absorb and understand words. But at last he muttered, 'No. No kinder. No Ulnothsson. No Ulnothsdaughter.'
    I had met one or two people like him before on my travels.
    Although it was now many hundreds of years since our Norman masters had conquered us, and although in general Saxon and Norman blood had become so mixed that only the bastard word 'English' would do to describe our race, here and there, in isolated places, could still be found true descendants of the Saxon tribes.
    When he had finished attending to my ankle, Ulnoth helped me back into my clothes before gathering up an armful of brushwood from a pile stacked against one of the outer stone walls. After rekindling the fire on the hearth, he erected an old and rickety tripod from which he suspended an equally ancient iron pot, seemingly already filled with water from the rill which trickled sluggishly down the bank outside. Into this he threw various dried herbs, which hung in branches from the ceiling, followed by the dismembered carcass of a rabbit taken from his larder, a hole in the freezing ground.
    The resulting stew was delicious, and I swallowed it down along with any scruples I might have had about eating meat on a Friday. I suspected that my host did not even know which day of the week it was, but I was wrong. When we had both eaten our fill - in my case three bowls of stew to his one - Ulnoth took the dregs of home-brewed mead with which we had washed down our meal, and poured them as a libation on the threshold of the hut.
    'For Frig,' he said, noticing my curious stare. 'Today Frig's day.'
    Of course. Frig, mother of the Nordic gods. And the wife of Woden? I didn't know. I couldn't remember. Furthermore, I did not at that moment care. My eyes were beginning to close and my body felt heavy. The straw bed on which I lay, though verminous, was warm, and the salve had soothed away the worst of my pain. Before I knew it, I was sound asleep.

    Ulnoth proved to be right. My ankle had sustained no serious injury; I had merely given it a bad wrench when I fell. Under his gentle ministrations it was better within two days, but that bringing us to the Sabbath, I waited until the following day and then lingered one more, in order to make sure that I was really fit to continue my joumey. But on Tuesday - or, as Ulnoth called it, Tiuw's day, Tiuw being the ancient god of war - I could tarry no longer. For one thing I was rapidly eating my host out of house and home, and for another the silence and inactivity were becoming oppressive.
    The sparseness of Ulnoth's conversation, the fact that he was obviously unaccustomed to using words fluently, had at first made me believe him a simpleton, but as time wore on I realised that this was not so. One day, talking idly to him about my visit to the neighbouring village and not certain whether he