Edin's embrace (2 page)

"We're honored, Ceolwulf," she said respectfully, battling the shyness that overcame her when any stranger must be met. She'd become the mistress of the house since Aunt Bertra's death, not a small matter considering the baking, spinning, and weaving to be done, and shy or not it was she who must attend to the requirements of important guests.

The man was not handsome. He had a forehead crossed with wrinkles, great bags of skin lay under his jet eyes, and one corner of his mouth drooped pitifully. At the moment he also seemed beyond speech. "Honor's mine . . . marriage of a scion of a noble Wessex family . . . King Alfred couldn't come. . . ."

She studied him. A stranger was always a curiosity. He smelled of leather, which told her that he'd come by horse along the old Roman roads. He was dressed in a dull-green, belted tunic that stretched to his knees and woolen leggings. His sword was silver-hiked. Over his shoulders lay a four-cornered woolen cloak, brown, held at the front by a large silver brooch.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Cedric had come near and was touching her in a possessive way, smiling with a new and quiet ferocity as if to say:
Mine
.

Embarrassed, Edin sought to make conversation. "Did I hear you say there were Vikings in East Anglia?"

"Danes." He nodded. "All last winter, my lady."

She was unamazed that Fair Hope had heard nothing of this. They were an out of the way place, and news spread very slowly. Fair Hope always seemed to exist in a state of grace. It was a green and pleasant spot, peaceful in an era of turbulence, and apparently secure. While kings fought and kings went down, Fair Hope prospered; the farmland produced. This news of Danes elsewhere seemed not to have anything to do with Edin.

"And they're still keeping men from their sleep at night with sea raids," Ceolwulf added, eyeing Cedric. "A thane's remiss not to build a wall, or at least post lookouts."

"This is no talk for a bride," Cedric chided. "We've always been safe here. Our nights are quiet."

The man grumbled into his bowl, "It's usually quiet before the storm breaks." He tilted his head back to drink. His prominent Adam's apple bobbed as in three deep draughts he emptied the bowl.

The ale seemed to affect him quickly, for by the time he wiped his mouth, he was grinning. "You're right —no talk for a bride. And this luscious fruit is ripening fast, eh? Do you think she'll keep till the morrow?"

Edin blushed, and as she did so, even then, with awful inevitability, the savagery of the times was reaching its claws toward her.

***

As the afternoon waned, and the late darkness fell, the dragonship nosed into the mouth of the river. The moon was only a silver crescent in the midnight sky, casting down barely enough light for the Norsemen to navigate by. The only sound, besides the endless sound of the sea, was the slight plop of oar blades as they sliced the water. The ship was beautifully made, high at stem and stern, with low-swept gunwales. As she rode the bore of the tide up the channel, two of her shipmen hauled down her striped sail and folded it carefully. They unstepped her mast as well and laid it on the deck so that it could not be seen from the river's high banks.

They were well practiced in stealth. Already this season they had fallen hungrily upon two monasteries, for that was where the fortune of this land was gathered, in the gold figures of saints, in sapphire-encrusted crosiers and exquisitely wrought caskets —enough wealth to make any Norseman's grasping heart sing. And everything was easily stripped from the submissive monastic communities.

As the ship continued up the river, every man slipped a cloak and hood over his helmet and iron-mesh war shirt, so that the starlight wouldn't glint on the metals. A pair at a time, they wrapped their oar blades in old sheepskins to prevent the water from clapping on the wood.

Like a silent reptile, the dragonship continued up the flood-tiding waters. The never-ending hiss of the sea grew distant and disappeared. The river flowed placidly through a quiet valley between wooded hillocks. The banks stood still and deserted. No smoke plumed over the treetops. Saxon peasants knew better than to put their huts near a river's mouth. They usually built well upstream where they felt less exposed to those who raided from the sea.

The ship rounded a bend; the river narrowed. On for another mile. When she scraped her keel in shoal water, her rudder was lifted by pulling on a rope. Here paths along the banks signaled that a village must be close by.

On the ship's prow platform, beside her dragon's head, stood the giant Viking. Over his fair hair he wore a helmet now, bearing the insignia of a hammer. Thoryn the Hammer, he was called by some. He was known to be an amazingly strong man. He could swim across Dainjerfjord and back without pause; he could wrestle down the best of the best. From his dull iron helmet to the gold jewelry on his arms and fingers and the decorated sword hanging in his scabbard, he looked Olympian. He stood by the dragon's head as still as a runestone, his features never moving. Only his pewter-grey eyes moved, and his hand, which he lifted in a single mute signal.

The longship slithered parallel to the riverbank, where she was quickly tied fore and aft with plaited hide ropes. She tugged at these moorings like a serpent that smells blood, while thirty-two sea warriors eased over her waist.

Now came the small sounds of men drawing swords, feeling for war axes. They were a mixed party, with new-bearded youths on their first sailing, tempered warriors who had fought countless battles, and a handful of older men whose beards and hair were streaked with grey. Each carried a round wooden shield, and they were variously armed with knives, clubs, axes, spears, and broadswords. Silver edges glinted in the starlight. Bearded, leathern faces grinned with anticipation. Unlit torches appeared, as did horns of strong ale, for the men would drink before climbing to the village.

"All is ready," Thoryn was told as he joined his men. Over his tunic he wore a shirt of mail, and over that, a sweeping cloak of grey, the cowl raised. Most of the men wore round or conical helmets of metal or heavy leather. His had the hammer insignia and a protecting nosepiece that divided his gaze. In his hand was his father's damascened sword,
Raunija
, The Tester. The blade carried a runic inscription: "Let Raunija spare no man."

The broad-faced, surly man was the only one who wore no helmet on his big shaggy head. He'd drunk twice as much ale as any of the others, and now, as he spoke, a furious white froth came from his mouth. "My axe sings with thirst!"

Sweyn Elendsson was called the Berserk. In battle, he sometimes seemed overcome with a berserk fury, the sudden insanity that legend said gave a double portion of might and took away all sense of pain. He surged into a fight rolling his eyes and howling. He would rush toward his adversaries without apparent thought of danger. He was both feared and greatly looked up to for this. But, berserk or not, he was Thoryn's sworn man, bound to obey his jarl, which he had barely been doing for some time now. Thoryn said to him, "You will let your blade suffer a little thirst, I trust. Dead people bring very little profit in any marketplace."

Thoryn smiled like winter as he looked from Sweyn to the others. "We have come for treasure. Of captives, only the most likely will be taken. We will not slaughter those we don't want. And — " he paused, looking particularly at the deeply rutted and weatherbeaten face of Ragnarr — "and there will be no sport with the children." Ragnarr had been known to throw an infant up to see if he could catch it on the point of his spear. Thoryn asked him softly, "Do you hear me, Norseman?

The river made its liquid sound nearby; then "Aye,
Barknakarl
" came Ragnarr's whispered response.

Barknakarl,
the children's friend. Ragnarr said it with grudging respect.

He was not sworn to Thoryn. He was the jarl's neighbor at home, a
bondi
, a small landowner and a free man. His allegiance to Thoryn was based on respect, not on an oath such as Sweyn had sworn. Which meant that he wouldn't follow Thoryn blindly to the world's edge, where the mermaids played and the seahorses whinnied on the waters. Still, if Thoryn told him, "No sport with the children," then he more or less obeyed, knowing that if he didn't he would be challenging Thoryn's rule, which would mean personal combat with him.

A jarl had to prove himself over and over. A Norseman never admitted to fear —but there were men they treated with extreme caution. Their jarl had to be one of these. And Thoryn was.

Following his lead now, they said a prayer. A pattering of gruff voices rose as each man made his own, it not being the Norse way to pray in harmony like a herd of lowing Christian cattle. They asked Odin for the might of thunderbolts forged in fires, and asked Thor for the stealth of lightning hammered bright.

At last Thoryn said, "The time has come." They set off in a line up through the riverside growth, leaving the dragonship to wait impatiently on the dark glimmering water.

No one spoke. Leaves formed a billowing canopy over their path, through which the late starlight and scant moonlight barely sifted down. The shipload of men surged like a sinuous snake through the dark shadows. When they came upon an outlying hut, a dog started to bark. A pair of small red eyes burned. Ragnarr quickly faded from the group with his war club. There came a
chop
sound, like two jaws snapping together, then all was quiet again. Ragnarr returned, grinning, and the invaders continued.

They stopped on a mound an arrow's flight from the dark village. Before them was a small cluster of cottages, byres, and outbuildings. The shepherd had spoken truthfully in that there were no walls, other than here and there a low stone pen: small fences for Norsemen to leap. In the nearest, sheep bleated quietly and shuffled about.

"Child's play," muttered Beornwold Isleifsson, who wore his yellow hair in four thick plaits bound with copper wire.

Beside him, Fafnir Danrsson — nicknamed Longbeard for his pale silky beard -- gave Beornwold a comradely slap on the shoulder —and a warning: "The wise man never praises the night before the coming of the morning."

The largest building was a hall of oak with a steep thatched roof. Sweyn the Berserk lifted his bronze-and silver-inlaid axe and grinned, showing big horse's teeth. A mad light had grown in his ashy blue eyes. "That will be the chiefs hall; there the treasure resides, and the fairest women, and there Sweyn will be at the fighting's end!"

Thoryn stared ahead. The cords of his neck straightened and fell, straightened and fell. At last he threw off his cloak and raised his sword. He gripped the silver mount of his wooden shield and cried out as he lunged forward into a battle run. His deep voice was like the fog, like winter wind, like a metal sea on an iron-cold shore.

Those behind him began to bellow likewise: "Norsemen, would you live forever?" "May Thunder-Voice bring us victory!" Other cries of ferocious challenge resonated against the walls of silence. Flint struck iron, and torches flared. Faces went livid, eyes blazed with light, and throats pumped. They advanced in a wedge, Thoryn at the point, his men fanned out behind him. The village dogs clamored into hysterical barking as the Norse ran between the grey huts of the sleeping community, wreaking havoc.

Edin brought her slow and barefoot pacing in a pause. The flame of a small rushlight that lit her chamber was guttering. She replaced it with another and turned, throwing her waist-long hair over her shoulders. The silence of Fair Hope seemed to be concentrated in her room tonight, a silence so thick it was all but sound. It was long past time for her to be abed, but she feared sleep, feared the swift passage of time that sleep brought. The whole of her future yawned before her, and she felt a need to watch the passing of these last few hours of her girlhood.

She went again to the dress hanging against the wall, her wedding gown, made from treasured lengths of brocade and satin. The dark peacock-blue kirtle fell to the ground and had long sleeves with billowing cuffs; over it, the lighter blue tunic was short-sleeved and knee-length. She was rightly proud of its splendid embroidery, which she and the chore-girl Dessa had produced, working silently, patiently, for hours. Over the tunic, went a creamy yellow mantle to be held by brooches, one on each shoulder. For her feet, elegant slippers of soft yellow leather. She would also wear a necklet, and a diadem to keep her hair neat and in loose waves down her back.

She knew what Cedric was going to wear as well: grey-blue trousers and a green knee-length tunic held by a belt with richly ornamented clasps and mounts. His red mantle would be fastened by a brooch of beautiful workmanship and great size.

The ceremony was to be held at noon in the small pasture that lay between the hall and the village, where a wooden cross stood. This served as the open church for the people of Fair Hope. Afterward, everyone would feast in the great hall, where the smell of lowers and thyme would rise up from the fresh green rushes. The room could accommodate one hundred people at the trestle tables arranged in a line down each side. And the feast would be splendid. Beef and venison and huge plates of fish from the river. And, of course, lots of thickly scented ale. The fire would leap on the hearth, and candles would throw shadows. No doubt the feasting would be prolonged far into the night. At the single table across the head, where the thane's wife would sit with her husband, they would be served mead and precious imported wine and —

Everything would be perfect if only Cedric hadn't changed so! If only he didn't seem such a stranger suddenly. His proposal hadn't been a surprise; his parents had always voiced the desire to see him wed Edin. But this unbrotherly intensity had been completely unforeseen.

She tried to force a mental picture of lying in the same bed with him, granting him what his affection demanded, but again her mind skipped away. She must picture it! She must search inside herself for acceptance.
Imagine
, she ordered herself,
you and Cedric naked beneath the bedclothes, the rushlight blown out, the soft summer darkness. . . .,

"I have to get some rest!" she murmured, pulling open the blankets of her bed. Already undressed down to her shift, she now bent to blow out the little tallowy light. Before she could, however, a terrible noise caused her to straighten. The night's silence cracked with harsh cries, and the noise of wood shrieking, splintering, giving way —the tall double doors of the hall below. Then came men's voices, screaming like animals. What . . . who . . . ?

Her stomach filled with a sick sense of disaster:
Vikings!
Her mind caught on the word. To her it meant man-beasts from the cold and foggy north, hateful, reeking scavengers. Thieves . . .rapists. . . killers! Giants swinging razor-sharp battle-axes! It couldn't be. Not here at Fair Hope! Surely not!

But the demonic roar swelled.

Her door had no bar, nothing but a flimsy latch. She raced to fasten it. Then hurried to the carved cedar-wood chest at the foot of her bed to find her dagger, the pretty jeweled ornament she often wore at her waist. Then . . . she could think of nothing more to do. She sensed these minutes were priceless, but one after the other they escaped hen Frozen with fear, she clutched her little blade to her breast with both hands. Her fingers clasped around it until her knuckles went white. Could she use it on an enemy —or should she use it on herself? She felt a strange gnawing at her insides, as if she'd swallowed something cold and hungry.

The shouting got nearer, her door was tried —then abruptly there came a blow to it. She started violently. Fear moved in more tightly. She flinched as the stout wood was kicked again and finally flew back on its hinges.

A huge man lurched through, blood slicking the club in his hand. He paused to let his eyes search. Edin took him in all of a piece, his war shirt and leggings, his club and shield. She could almost see his savage mind working:
No one to fight here. Just this unprotected creature.
His pale eyes gleamed like lake ice, and he grinned.

She no longer heard the war shouts and death screams of the battle below. She heard nothing but the heavy breathing of the barbarian approaching her. She saw nothing but his sweat-reddened face. He loomed sinister, malevolent, his eyes brimming with ugly desire.

She retreated, until her back came up against the wall. He tossed down his club and shield and reached for her with arms as big as tree branches. She was too frightened to scream. She saw his hands, big, bloodstained. She knew he hadn't seen the dagger clutched in her fists, or mayhap he'd thought the jeweled hilt was the top of a crucifix. The blade, though slim, would never penetrate the fine iron mesh of his war shirt. Her eyes frantically sought —and found in his bare throat — a place where a blue vein stood swollen. She took the hilt in a new two-handed gasp, raised it, and jabbed it into the soft flesh behind his collar bone. She shoved it down, praying the blade was long enough to pierce his heart.

His eyes fluttered wide. His face went dark and strange, a face from a nightmare, expressionless yet ominous. His arms dropped like dead weights and he took a step back. She saw blood oozing over the jewels studding the dagger's hilt. He stumbled on his own club as he clutched the side of his neck.

Yet, for all that, he still seemed very much alive. Edin thought, as in a dream,
I suppose I couldn't expect to kill him. I hurt him, though; he can't feel very good.
A trembling nausea came over her, a sick terror.

With a bull-like roar, another Viking pitched into the room: a huge body, a hard, steeled iron head above a thick neck, a round shield, and a long, broad, ornate sword. Edin's attacker cautiously turned to face him. The new man rose from his ready crouch. He was larger, even fiercer-looking, and Edin couldn't find a trace of gentleness or kindness anywhere about his partially masked and bearded face. He watched as his fellow monster fingered the hilt of the dagger then yanked it from his throat. Blood spouted immediately, staining the covers of Edin's bed a yard away.

Seeing that bright scarlet spurting, her hands went to her mouth. The man took no notice; he looked at his own blood on the dagger's blade as though he couldn't imagine how it had gotten there. When he tried to speak, nothing came but a gurgling sound. He sagged to his knees. With faithful-dog eyes, he seemed to entreat his companion, but then, to Edin's surprise, he fell face forward, like a huge timber put to the axe.

The newcomer lifted his gaze from his fallen comrade. Caught by the warm light spilling from the rushlight, his face seemed as bitter and cold as the face of a thousand winters. The helmet he wore and the glittering sword in his hand added to his terrifying appearance. Yet as their eyes met, Edin was fascinated. He had a sinister quality as he stared steadily back at her. He seemed sharply intelligent. And exquisitely dangerous.

Squatting, he took the dagger from his axe-brother's lifeless hand and said a few gruff words in Norse.

He looked up at Edin again, and looked her over in a way she'd never experienced before. She lost all sense of where she was. She heard mere blurs of sound from far away, but she and the Viking seemed to exist alone together in isolation. His eyes reminded her of dark grey clouds tumbled low in a sky as cold as pewter. That trembling sensation came again, more violently

She bent to reach for the dead man's club. It was heavier than she expected, and as she struggled to bring it up, the newcomer stood. With a negligent flick of his sword, he knocked the club away from her. Her fingers burned with numbness: One instant she was gripping the heavy club with all her strength, and the next it was flying from her hands.

He stepped forward, forward again, until he towered over her. She turned her face away a little, as she would turn from the glare of a too-bright, overcast sky

He put down his shield, and his freed left hand came up to her throat. It seemed nearly to encircle it entirely, so that she could feel his hard fingers beneath her ear and his raspy palm under the hair at the nape of her neck, his broad thumb barely touching her windpipe. She swallowed convulsively. The hand smoothed down, hooking the wide, round neckline of her shift and pulling it off her shoulder, so that her right breast was bared. Her hands fluttered upward, then fell to her sides again. Her eyes sidled to his, and then away. The indecency seemed to her less ghastly than the coolness of his stare fastened on her breast.

At last he grazed the tip of it with his middle finger. She had the hazed nightmare feeling that this was a check, nothing more, the way a man checks equipment he intends to use. She felt the beginnings of sexual terror. Her stomach pounded like a second heart; panic pounded through her veins.

Just as she felt herself growing weak with the piling up of horror, a further movement came at the door. There Cedric stood, with his sword out of its scabbard at last. He held the weapon awkwardly, with the hilt gripped in both fists. Upon seeing one dead Viking in the room and another looming over Edin, he paused. His eyes met hers.

That intense, large-eyed stare was much too weighty and sustained. Her understanding rebelled for a moment against what she saw in it —no deep cunning thoughts, just his sense of helplessness, his fear. And his desire to simply leave her to whatever fate was in store for her. She saw him as he was then, unmarked by experience, decision, or impact. She had been willing to become his wife, to give herself to him, her body, her heart, her life. From a young age, there had existed in her mind a set of expectations and hopes, an aggregation of conceptions picked up from remarks, descriptions, reveries, all of which sheltered under the word love, and now in her bridegroom's eyes she saw that there was . . . fondness, certainly . . . and desire . . . but not love.

Whether he would have quietly stepped back and fled for his own life she was never to know, for the Viking lifted his eyes from her breast and saw the direction of her gaze. He whirled, his sword coming up reflexively. Everything seemed slowed down as Edin watched. The length of his sword added to the length of his arm gave him such a long, killing reach. Cedric saw the broad, keen blade coming. He moved his own sword with desperate ineptness. He shouted; the Viking made not a sound. The blade sliced horizontally Cedric's mouth opened wider, though only a gasping sound came from him now. He seemed to fold at the waist, over that damascened blade, then he crumpled to the floor.

Edin screamed. She struggled against the Viking's grip on her arm which kept her where she was. Cedric's face was a terrible thing. Clearly he was in mortal agony. His legs moved, and his mouth still gaped silently, as though there was not enough strength in him to give voice to his pain.

The barbarian muttered something, glanced at Edin with those coolish eyes, then frowned, shook his head, and suddenly plunged his sword into the young thane's heart.

Edin felt something in her slip. Her pulse slowed to half its rate. She swayed on her feet; her vision darkened. She hardly noticed that the Viking had let go of her. She sagged to her knees and crawled to Cedric's side. "My lord?" She reached for the tatters of his blood-soaked shirt and tried to close them over his wounds. "My lord . . . Cedric . . . you've ruined your shirt. I could try to sew it, but ... oh, Cedric, you should have fled."

She felt a hand on her arm again and looked at it, at the twiglike scars that started at the fingers and went up the wrist until they disappeared beneath the sleeve, scars of innumerable blade cuts. She looked up into those pewter eyes that were divided by the iron nosepiece of the helmet. A Viking. She ought to be terrified, she understood that distinctly. His appearance there above her was violent and impossible. For a moment more she was uncomprehending; then anger such as she'd never known flooded her. Everything savage in her surfaced at once. She yanked away from his grip and stood, facing this man who had in the space of minutes stolen her future. Her heart turned bitter inside her. She raised her hands over her head, joined them into one fist, and went for him, went for his bearded face with all her strength.

He merely lifted his free hand and caught her doubled fists in fingers of steel. At the same time he jerked her forward so that she fell against him. It was like falling against a stone wall. There was no give in his stance, no give in his hard chest beneath his metal war shirt. She tried to arch away from the shocking contact, but now his hand was around her waist. Her face lifted beneath his chin. She shook her head to throw the wisps of her hair out of her eyes and saw him staring down the nosepiece of his helmet at her. She felt her will waver, then crumble into fear.

His smile was thin, his voice soft, soft: "Even the dullest thrall knows never to strike her master."

Part of her mind absorbed that he'd spoken this in Saxon, and part of it absorbed what the words meant. She struggled again, now with strength born of terror. Her hand went to his face, really hoping to scratch his eyes out so that she might escape him.

As if impatient with such puny resistance he simply shoved her away. She stumbled back, tripped over the dead Viking's legs, and fell. For a moment she was wrapped in her hair. When she got it out of her eyes, she paused. She dared not look at Cedric, at that open dark hole his mouth made in his dead face. Nor did she dare look at the standing Viking. She felt relieved when he turned his grey, unflinching gaze to the door. He bellowed, "Rolf Kali!"