Edin's embrace (4 page)

The other injured man was carried aboard white and groaning, with hardly more blood left in him than a finished flask, it seemed —only the dregs that cleave to the sides.

Suddenly the men on the ship and those still on the river bank began to clap their hands in rhythm and shout, "Jarl Thoryn! Jarl Thoryn!" Thus the grey-eyed giant came aboard. He made his way among them, indifferent to their tribute, even when they slapped him on the back with the flats of their swords.

When he was near the bow, the dragonship seemed so anxious to get away on the sucking ebb that she snapped her moorings. The last four Vikings had to swim to gain her. The jarl called out something in Norse. Immediately, half the men used their long oars like poles to push the ship away from the river's shoal margin; the other half leaned over the banked shields to give their swimming shipmates a hand.

There was much levering with the oars before they were clear of the clutching mud. At the same time the swimming men were being pulled aboard. With so many on the landward side of the shallow vessel, it listed until Edin felt sure they were all going to slide into the dark water. Her heels dug into the deck planking, and she pressed her back against the side. She closed her eyes and prayed in earnest. "Supreme and holy Grace, save us! Deliver us from the savage Northman who has laid waste our homes!"

The other Saxons took up her prayer: "Save us, oh God, from the fury of the Norseman."

How often had she heard that, Sunday after Sunday, as a regular part of the Mass?
"A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine"
Deliver us . . . save us . . . from the violence . . . from the fury . . . from the Norseman. The words had meant nothing to her. The swift summertime raids she'd always heard about had meant nothing to her. But now all her senses were acute as they had never been before, and she knew that the fury of the Norseman was very real, and very frightening.

Here was a race inured to violence, men who came down on the innocent as if borne on a tidal wave.

Eventually the Vikings hauled their wet fellows up, all of them dripping and moon-eyed with laughter. The ship entered the stream and lunged along. The leader roared a word — Oars! Edin guessed the Norse word meant, for the long, bladed oars were quickly thrust out the rowing ports and the Viking's backs bent to their work.

At the same moment the dawn broke. The river ran silver beneath full-leafed willow branches. Big white sea birds appeared and turned overhead. Edin's heart overflowed with all manner of feelings. She was squeezed into a corner with a stolen coffer chest and several of her folk,.who twittered like partridges disturbed from their nests. Arneld murmured, "I heard you defy him, my lady. Have a care."

"He's nothing but a heathen."

"Still, my lady," the chore-girl, Dessa, whispered, "have a care. You're all we have between us and them."

All they had? Then they had next to nothing. Still, their faith instilled a need for false bravado in her. "He's a heathen and that's that. A curse on him!"

They reached the mouth of the river, where, with the changing tide and the whim of the river wind, strong waters seemed to come from all directions at once. The ship breasted the countercurrents like a great jointed thing and advanced with slow purpose. Udith hugged her fat arms to her bosom. Edin clung to what handholds she could find —and at the same time twisted to get a last glimpse of her home.

She saw naught of the little village clustered about the manor house, naught of the low, one-room cottages of rough plaster, naught of the animals that had cropped the grass in the pasturelands. She saw nothing but a billow of smoke beyond the tree tops. Fair Hope, where she had thought to unwind the maypole of the years with Cedric. She couldn't see it, which was just as well. She knew that what the torch had not burned the axe had cut down. Little more was left of her home than what these Vikings had stowed here in their longship. Even she was being carried off. Everything else, the fields, the buildings, the golden hay piled to the rafters of the byres —everything!—was gone.

She recalled with bitterness that just last evening she'd felt dissatisfied with her too comfortable future. She hadn't realized that at that very hour she was like a tiny spider floating at the end of a silken thread above a chasm of flame.

Another bitter thought assailed her: All of this had transpired while other women were in their beds dreaming of the pleasant day to come, of wearing their best veils and tunics and richest ornaments, of the wedding of Lord Cedric and his Lady Edin, of the feast, the dancing, the laughter. Bitter, bitter was the thought of those still-innocent dreams.

She took one last look at the land she called home, before it could disappear from her sight forever. Something seemed to reach inside her and wrench, until her face grimaced. In the end she had to turn away from that last sight of England just gilded by the rising sun.

The longship, though heavy with booty, rode the sea like a nutshell. Its serpent-head and tail had, in that first moment in the dark, struck Edin as a grey thing of the sort that squats in the dark. The morning sun now showed both head and tail were richly cased in gold. Gold was beaten into the chiseled grooves of the wood, and rubies big as a man's thumb-knuckle were set in a mask for its eyes; its curling tongue-of-fire was hammered of rosy bronze.

The Viking jarl took the steerboard shaft himself and drove the vessel like a rider spurring a stallion. The ship's interior had impressed Edin at first as nothing but a wooden trough with that terrifying dragon's head on its stem. More study showed it was clinker-built of overlapping black oak planks, with places for sixteen pair of rowers. It was perhaps forty-five paces from stem to stern, and fifteen paces across the beam.

The captives consisted of four women, Udith's husband Lothere, and the boy Arneld. They continued to cry and fret. Udith stuttered out a story she'd heard about Danes: "After a battle, 'tis said they cook their food on spits stuck in the bodies of their victims."

Edin shushed her.

Only a moment later, however, Dessa said, "It's God's fulfillment: 'Out of the north, evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.' "

The group seemed bound to start up again and again, like anxious birds lifting and lighting, lifting and lighting. Lothere moved to find a better place for his lank legs, showing a set of knobbly toes beneath his long underpants; then he broke into a horrifying tale describing how Vikings reportedly broke open the backs of male captives and pulled their lungs out through their ribs — something called "carving the blood eagle," alluding to the lungs flopping like wings with the men's last gasps.

"Lothere!" Edin admonished sharply. The shocks she'd received, combined with the sleepless, heart-rent night, had exhausted her and left her with no patience.

But the dark-haired serving girl, Juliana, whispered irrepressibly, "And everyone knows they lust after women."

"Where are they taking us?"

"What will happen to us?"

Edin sighed. Goaded by their tears and terror, by their endlessly murmured fears and questions, she wanted to cry out from the depths of her misery Stop! Instead, she rose.

In an instant every Viking aboard turned his head to look at her. Not one spoke, not even as she began to make her way down the middle of the war galley. They let her pass without a single gesture or word. Naturally, rape was her keenest terror, much more horrible than mere abduction. She cringed to think of being served over to this shipful of crazed Vikings.

Yet somehow she kept walking and at last stood only a sword-length away from the jarl on the stern platform. She asked, formally, to hide her fear, "My people would know where we're bound for, Viking."

He took a long time to lower his gaze to her, and then seemed to look right through her.

She was all but trembling, feeling so many eyes on her, and she was intimidated by his indifference. She was afraid, so afraid, yet determined to show no weakness. She said, "I thought you understood Saxon," and added for emphasis, "Jarl of the swine."

He seemed to let that pass, too, almost as if he hadn't heard. But then, calmly, he gestured for another man to take the steerboard. His replacement's eyes shone in the morning light. The man's nose was like an axe blade; there were scars on his face, and his teeth were bared in a savage grin.

The jarl stepped down right in front of Edin, forcing her to back up in her bare feet. His bearing was frightening. Hints of danger blossomed.

He said softly, "I warned you, twice." His pale eyes glared with the light reflected off the water. " Jarl of the swine'?" His face was dark with the expression of a man with an unpleasant task before him. He said, in a tone as hard as a clenched fist, "For that you will die."

Her heart pounded up— while he seemed to think. "How shall I do it? Slowly, by cutting off your hands, then your feet, then your arms at the elbows, your legs at the knees?" He raised his blond brows, as if measuring her, calculating. "I must say I prefer not to soil the deck ... so mayhap I'll simply toss you overboard. Ah, that makes you blanch! You don't swim?"

She answered, eventually, since one of them had to stop the silence, "No."

"I thought not. Well, that is the way, then"

He put his hand out to touch the starboard railing, casually stroking the smooth oak as a soldier strokes his horse's side. "But not just this minute. I'll let you brood on it. Then, sometime when you aren't watching, when you're looking the other way or you've fallen asleep I'll pick you up and toss you in."

Here was a man as wild as a wolf, a man who indulged in orgies of butchery and destruction. What had she been thinking to bait such as him?

He let out a little contemptuous growl. "You seem surprised. It's a rather simple truth that he who attacks must foresee counterattack."

He thought, pulling the mouth corners of his beard. "If you can stay on the surface at all, we'll row around you, offering you the end of an oar —only to pull it back as you reach for it. That will amuse my axe-brothers, to watch you struggle until you're — " he bent a little nearer, reached down and lifted her face with a touch that was as fearful and thrilling as fire, then spoke ad-most in her ear —"until you're gone, Saxon. Just gone. In a swirl of sea fret."

Her fragile courage cracked. She felt dizzy. She turned her face away and tried to conceal its expression. He had so easily found out her worst fear. She could hardly meet his gaze, that mocking, jeering gaze.

"I would do it right now if any save me had understood what you said. No thrall can speak to her master as you do. But since only I speak your dog's tongue, I can prolong your punishment."

She closed her eyes —which seemed to make him more vicious. His voice got softer still, just audible above the hissing sea: "I suggest you go back to your place and think about your upcoming death, Saxon. Such a pity and a waste to be sure —you would have brought me a good price — but then much of life is pity and waste, is it not?"

She couldn't answer, couldn't speak. Her legs trembled as though she'd run a mile. All she could do was open her eyes. And when she did, on top of the fear he had instilled in her, she felt shame. She felt the drench of humiliation — because she could see his satisfaction in what he'd accomplished in her.

"And you said you couldn't be cowed" he scoffed. "You see how easy it is? How does it feel, Saxon? Do you know how it feels to me? Remember the feel of your little splinter of a blade striking bottom in Ragnarr's throat? Think of that and you'll know how I feel."

Ever afterward Edin would remember that journey north like a bad black dream. As the sun sailed high behind long banner-like clouds, she dared not take her eyes from the Viking jarl. Others abut her fell into exhausted dozes. Her eyelids were heavy, too, and she found herself nodding: but she repeatedly jerked herself awake.

Her body forced its needs however. The soft voluptuous pleasure of sleep crept over her limbs, through her body, and into her senses, and she drowsed, only for a few minutes, but long enough to dream of a shadow falling over her, two large hands reaching, catching her up, swinging her, and letting her go. She cried out as she dropped into the suffocating sea. The water closed over her head, and she strangled for air. The liquid silence stopped her ears and isolated her from all over the world.

She woke with her neck straining upward and her fettered arms reaching for a purchase that was not. Next to her, Arneld stirred in his sleep but didn't wake. She sat up. She was stiff and cramped, and her head ached from the banging it had received the night before. Her eyes darted frantically to find the man who was going to drown her. She couldn't at first locate him, and with a feeling of having wakened from one nightmare into another, she also realised that the steady stroke of the oars had stopped.

It took her a moment to see that what was going on had nothing to do with her. The Vikings were busy with the ship's walrus-hide cables, hoisting a red-and-white striped sail. Her senses now alert, she scanned their faces. Those who weren't working with the sail were lounging on the wooden chests that also served as their benches when they rowed. They were all gazing upward, watching the sail catch the wind. To her they all looked weatherworn and hard. Then, as the sail bellied and the long-bodied ship seemed to leap forward, Edin found the jarl.

He too had been looking up, but as he brought his eyes down, his gaze came directly to her. It moved on, shifting to inspect the sea. The lines about his eyes deepened into a squint. Without his helmet, the breeze puffed his beard and blew his straight, fair hair back from his shoulders. So indifferent and cold! She mustn't sleep again!

Daring to look away from him for little instants, she saw that they had come far from the land. Under sail, the ship seemed to snake through the water, as if with life of its own. The beast was carrying her away from England, away from the warm ashes of Fair Hope, away from any handhold she could cling to for safety.

Some of the Vikings began to examine the fruits of their brigandage. The one with the high, axe-blade nose turned in his hands a silver-gilt beaker that looked suspiciously to Edin like church plate. She wondered over him. Was he a man like other men? If so, how could he ravage and burn helpless towns, kill people and play jokes on corpses? Or was he, as Dessa said, a direct visitation of divine rage against the sins of England?

Edin watched a burly man curl in a sleeping bag on the deck. Two others got out a chess set. The board's squares had little holes drilled in them, and the game men had small pegs in their bases. They were made so the ship's pitching couldn't upset the game. Arneld had wakened, and being too young and too restless to stay put, he inched over to watch. After a while, one of the men made a move that lit his opponent's face with grins. Arneld smiled at them, the way one smiles at happy people. But when he innocently reached for one of the exquisitely carved, walrus-tusk ivory game pieces, the owner of the set shouted at him and reached for his belt knife. A breath of ice crossed Edin's soul. "Arneld!" She opened her arms to him, and he made a blind, scrambling dash for the shelter she offered. As he quaked with terror, she tried to comfort him, exchanging looks with the owner of the chess set, until the snap of the sail startled her back to her own concerns. Her eyes darted to find the jarl.

Again she concentrated on watching him, hearing only the wind hissing gently across the vast empty sea —until a new, rattling sound drew her weary attention. Her tired gaze slid to the two wounded men.

The housecarl's murderer was lying on his back. The rattle came from him, with each slow rise of his chest. Edin guessed he was not long for this world. The shoulder-injured one, he of the ashy blue eyes whom the jarl had called Sweyn, was sitting up glaring at nothing. As Edin's gaze slid past him, their stares collided. He grimaced, showing big yellow teeth. Even wounded, he was frightening. She saw the white scars of other wounds on his arms and face. He suffered her gaze a moment, then seemed to go purple with rage and shouted something at her, which she interpreted as "What are you looking at!"

Quickly she shifted her attention back to the jarl, who gave her no more than a brief frown, a glancing blow of a look, before he went back to studying the sea.

Meanwhile, the two slaughtered sheep were butchered. The two men in charge hung joints of it over the side, letting the meat trail in the water to keep it cool and salted for when it was needed. The rest they sliced with their bone-handled belt knives. The slices they either covered with hot ashes in a smoldering fire lit in a flat, iron pan on the fore-platform, or strung on a spit over the fire. It seemed these Vikings had a systematic way of doing just about everything. They were orderly and efficient as well as bold and reckless.

The crew ate the spit-roasted mutton as it was cooked, and drank from skin bottles of fresh water. Nothing was offered to the captives, most of whom were sleeping anyway.

The day passed. The sun's rays sliced thinly between breaks in the thickening clouds to the west. The ash-baked meat was tested and wrapped in greasy pieces of leather. One of the cooks lifted some deck planks near the mast-stepping and lowered the meat down into the dark over the keel, where the men had earlier stored their axes and spears.

Hunger and thirst began to take nips at Edin. Juliana sat up and gave a great yawn; she reveled in it without bothering to cover her mouth. One by one the others woke and took up their fretful murmuring. Now they were wondering if they were ever to be fed or given water.

Edin felt the burden of the responsibility that they placed on her. They still thought of her as their mistress and looked to her for succor in their distress. Guilt gnawed at her. She should ask for water for them, and food, and some kind of protection against the elements. But the jarl had unerringly found her worst fear; he had stripped her of her courage to do her duty. She hated him for that almost as much as for all the other horrors he had committed against her and hers.

However, hate was not the same thing as courage, and she did nothing as her people grew thirsty and famished.

The terrible surfeit of pain and shock and fear —and now thirst and hunger —by slow degrees benumbed her. She didn't even realize how engrossed she'd become in one Viking's casual slaking of his thirst, how she watched him swallow, and swallowed herself, hard enough to be heard. The man took a bite of meat. Her mouth moved with his as he chewed. Meanwhile she'd forgotten to watch the jarl. Her heart nearly stopped when she realized he'd moved down the ship and was now only a few paces away. Fear hit her right in the stomach like a knife. She leapt to her knees, prepared to make what defense she could.

He stopped, and stood looking at her, his face all iron, stunning in his size, backlighted by the sullen evening. After a moment, he laughed — if one could call that short bark a laugh. Her fear, her preparation to fight him even though her wrists were fettered, even though she was hardly half his size, seemed to amuse the cruelty in him.

He moved another step toward her—just to tease her, it seemed — then threw a skin of water and a package of meat on the deck at her knees. She didn't move, didn't even look at it. A gust of wind blew up, tossing her hair wildly about her face and arms. He waited, then said, "Eat, Saxon, and drink deeply. It may be the last time you taste anything but salt and fishes."

He walked away with all the ease and grace that came of great physical strength. To Edin he'd become the sum of evil. She felt ashamed to see her people looking at her, patiently waiting for her to apportion the food among them. So far she had done nothing for them. She wanted to cry with fear and tension and this awful sense of helplessness.

Instead, she shared out the food and ate the meat as daintily as she could with no utensils. Hungry as she was, she soon found she couldn't swallow her meat. Round and round it went in her mouth, the mutton fat getting colder and more congealed.

***

Though the
Blood Wing
danced easily enough on the wave tops, she could be contrary to handle, being so broad in the beam, and Thoryn preferred to handle the steerboard as much as he could.

The coast of Britain was just visible. As long as it was in sight, he could steer by the shoreline. On the open sea, he would navigate entirely by the sun and the stars. He'd learned early to recognize the Pole Star and 'to depend on it. But he always kept an eye out for portentious signs: A strange bird, a bit of floating wood, fish surfacing unaccountably, a cat's-paw of wind on the water —these all had meaning for the seawise.

The sun slipped down between a great slow-rolling cloudbank and the horizon, and stared at them across the open sea. The Vikings lay at their ease in the low-planing light, letting the wind belly the four-square sail and drive them homeward. They were weary from voyaging and sated with looting. Most of them had removed their battle dress and were back to wool trousers and shirts of linsey-woolsey. In most cases, the trousers were brown or grey and the shirts red or blue or green —though Hauk Haakonsson's was a definite mulberry color. Hauk, with his high, axe-blade nose, was fashion conscious. It wasn't cold, so no one had put anything more than a sleeveless leather vest over his shirt. With their helmets put away, they protected their heads with woolen caps. To a man, they stuck to beards and long hair. It took a good growth of hair to protect against the bitter winds and burning sun of the North Sea.

Some napped, sitting up on their sea chests with their arms folded, as motionless as flies in the last sun. Most of their personal property was stored in these chests. Thoryn, as captain and owner, was responsible for "finding" the ship, for furnishing all necessary equipment —lines, spare sails, buckets,
etc.
Each man brought his own warm sea clothes, his kit of needles and thread, weapons, and so forth, which he stowed in his chest and his allotted section called his "room."

One or two had climbed into their sleeping bags. Ottar Magnusson and Jamsgar Herjulsson, called the Copper-eye, were playing chess. A few others watched the game, trading coarse jibes. Several men were seeing to their weapons. Time at sea was often filled with wiping weapons dry against rust, and touching blades to whetstones.

Hauk, Jamsgar, and Ottar were among those in Thoryn's private hire. They lived on Thorynsteading in the longhouse in return for acting as his personal men-of-arms. They were men built to feast on other men, so brisk and strong and well armed that they had no enemies, men made of iron true enough to hold an edge. Sweyn the Berserk had been one of them.

Thoryn sighed. The darkening sky was full of enough high clouds that the breeze should last the night. That would put them nearly a third of the way home.

His ever-shifting gaze moved to the Saxons. He'd waited to feed them until he was sure none of them was going to hang miserably over the gunwales retching up his meal. The boy, lying by the shield-wall making little marks on the deck planks with a wet finger, would make a good shepherd. When he grew, he'd do for a field worker. The three servant women were for Inga, who needed more help in the longhouse as she got older. The man was a thin weedy type, and Thoryn wouldn't have brought him except that he was obviously a carpenter. Thoryn had a notion in his mind that was going to require carpenters.

One spear of rosy light picked out the maiden. Now, there was a prize. She was tilting the waterskin to drink and caught his stare with a sideways look —and nearly choked. He averted his face and schooled himself not to scowl.

He'd finally quelled her. One of his strengths was his unerring nose for frailty in others, and at first he'd been amused to see how thoroughly he'd ferreted out hers; but now the joke palled. She was too frightened. Her eyes burned for sleep, and her face was as pale as a linen shroud. He resisted the idea, yet felt mayhap he had done wrong.

Don't think about wrong. I have enough troubles without taking on "wrong" I don't even understand "wrong!"

After all, what had he done but show her the reality of her situation —that he had the power of life and death over her, right down to the power to decide what the quality of that life or death might be? She was sound, not harmed in any way except for that lump on her head; she could bear a well-deserved lesson in discipline.

But disciplined or not, with that hair like amber seaweed, and that skin as fresh and soft as a babe's, and those eyes, wide-set —and green!—and that mouth with its lilt at the corners that gave her a seductive expression capable of melting any man's metal, aye, even undisciplined he would get his price for her. He imagined her on the block, her shift stripped from her shoulders. . . .

Blood Wing
tugged hard on the steering oar and surged ahead. It was as though the dragonship had spoken aloud:
Keep awake and steer, Northman!
Thoryn felt the overlapped planks of the hull twist. She was like a live beast bucking the waves.

But even the dragonship couldn't keep all his attention right now. He soon fell back to thinking about the woman.

Mayhap it would be a mistake to sell her in Kaupang. It was the closest big mart to Thorynsteading, but he might get a much better price for her in Hedeby, where sometimes Rus traders visited in search of new faces and bodies to take down the Volga for the Arabian harems. The Arabs were said to crave fair women, and this one was certainly fair.

"You gloat, Thoryn?" Rolf Kali clapped him on the back as he joined him on the steering platform. The evening was cooling, and Rolf had his grey cloak on, held to his chest by twin gilt-bronze brooches.