The Betrothed Sister (24 page)

He nodded and said, ‘Try me.'

‘
I bring joy to the men who dwell in towns. When I sing out with my flexible tones they sit at home silent. Tell me my name who brightly imitates professional singers and loudly foretells many welcome tidings.
' Do you know it?'

‘If I don't think too hard, I shall know it.' He tapped his fingers in the air as if playing a tune on a pipe. ‘No, it does not come to my mind. “Welcome tidings”.'

‘You must think on it.'

So you like to sing and play music, my lady?'

‘Indeed, my lord, and tell stories.' She shifted closer to him, just a tiny bit. ‘But which creature is this? Guess now. I think you do not know the answer,' she teased.

He could not tell her. Delighted that she had won the contest she said, ‘Then I must tell you some other time.' She looked pointedly at his glossy black hair again and still he did not pick up a clue. ‘I shall tell you on our wedding night.'

He lifted her hand and studied her countenance. ‘You are a tease. But another time is good. It might give me time to consult the skald Padar when he returns.'

‘Tell me this, when are we to be married? My uncle will call me back to Denmark with my dowry if I must wait much longer for our nuptials.'

‘Not this summer as I had hoped but my father now says it will be next spring. We have just secured Kiev. There is still much to arrange there. We intend bringing the bones of our founding fathers Dimitri and Gleb to Kiev for the translation of their relics to St Sophia.'

‘Translation. What's this? ‘

‘The movement of their bones to a new resting place before they are beatified and are created saints. These saints are Russian, not Armenian, Roman, nor Greek. They are ours so it is to be an important ceremony. Everyone who is anyone will be there. So …' he paused and lifted her hand and kissed it through her glove.

She shuddered. She did not like this talk of moving bones and sainthood attached to her wedding. She said quietly, ‘What “so”?'

‘So, because it is such a grand occasion and every important noble in the land will be in Kiev, our wedding will follow within a week. Everyone will be present.'

‘When will this be, Vladimir?'

‘Next Eastertide.'

‘It's a long time away. More than a whole year.'

‘It is, but afterwards we shall have a very long time together and many children.'

He lifted her right hand and removed her mitten. ‘You are wearing my ring, the one I sent for our betrothal,' he said. He turned her hand over and kissed her palm. ‘And the waiting is exciting because you are brave and clever. Longing to know you makes you even more desirable.' He reached over and planted a feather-light kiss on her lips. She felt her lips parting. His tongue explored her mouth and touched her own. The sensation almost made her want to swoon with desire. Just in time he released her. She caught her breath. So this was what it was like. She was confused. Prince Vladimir touched her hand. ‘I should not have perhaps, not yet.'

What could she say? What dared she say? ‘The priest,' was all she could say. ‘I must go.'

The priest was hustling forward to collect her. ‘The day will be darkening, Princess. You must not be discovered here. Come.' The prince helped Thea to her feet. She almost fainted as he held onto her hand a moment longer than was necessary. ‘I shall see you again soon, little bride.' He whispered into her ear, ‘My beautiful swan, keep searching for me in our wall niche.'

The priest rushed Thea and Katya back through the church. Using the key hanging from his belt he slid open the door's barrel lock. No one had yet arrived for Vespers but a group of priests were approaching the church from the opposite side of the tiny square. Father Sebastian passed a bundle to her. It was a prayer rug wrapped in plain linen. ‘Take it, my lady. Take turns carrying it. When you get it into the terem you must give it over to Sabrina. She will understand.'

As they set out of the church and stepped into the small square, Thea shivered and stared up at the sky. Clouds hung there like leaden sacks. The temperature had dropped further. It was bitterly cold. Thea hoped that Gudrun who had remained behind to guard her door would keep the wolfish Olga from her chamber.

The hunting season always began in November with the first snow falls. Already Padar and Earl Connor had shipped their early consignments to Denmark. By late December that year the rivers had frozen and ice flows floated down into the Danish seas. Padar's return had been delayed. Earl Connor returned a week before and had moved into the fortress where he would negotiate with the steward over which furs he wanted to purchase. When Padar arrived back in Novgorod on the very same day that Thea met with Prince Vladimir, he took up residence in the warehouse ready to sort through and grade the consignment of furs he had brought by sleigh down from the forest lands west of Lake Onega. Padar's boys excitedly lifted lids off the half-dozen basket coffers to reveal piles of glistening pelts – the skins of martens, beavers, hares, squirrels and foxes. Padar laughed his delight as he looked through them. These would make him a fortune. He scratched his beard as he thought of where he could sell them. The kremlin steward would purchase much of Earl Connor's share but there would still be plenty more to sell. Winter was deep in the Rus lands but now the snow was melting perhaps he should trade south into Germany.

Padar lifted up a stretch of grey skin that had been taken from a reindeer, thinking how it would make Gudrun a fine pair of slippers. All she needed to do was to line them with soft wool. He set the deer pelt aside. How he longed to see Gudrun. Thinking about it, this grey reindeer skin made a perfect excuse to take him right to the doors of the terem.

When it was possible for Gudrun to leave her mistress they would marry and set up their own home. Lady Thea's marriage had been delayed and delayed. He had travelled back to Denmark and returned again and still not a word of it. Earl Connor had said
he
could not understand why the marriage had been delayed. He hoped that Prince Vsevolod was not looking for a reason to send Thea back whence she had come.

‘No,' Padar had reasoned back to the earl. ‘He needs the Danish king's support. He wants taxes from Danish merchants who pass through his lands. The prince just has to see her to want her.'

‘But he cannot see her. She is veiled in his presence.'

‘Ummph,' Padar grunted. ‘He will not be disappointed when he does see her face.'

Padar glanced about the narrow hall room that smelled of wax-polished birch wood furniture, candles, oil and charcoal. He wondered at what he had accomplished since he had visited Russia to broker Thea's betrothal. At long last he had a place to call his own. He smiled to see six Russian boys working under his carefully chosen English foreman. He clapped his hands with joy to see the braziers that made his trading hall warm and dry, glow, and that on a damp day prevented his furs from decaying. I am settling down for the first time in my life, he told himself. Life is good to me.Yet, and he sighed at the thought,
Yet Lady Thea still remains betrothed and unwed. And this means I shall remain unmarried too.

He gnawed at the problem. Why had there been such long delay to her wedding? The prince was fighting on the Steppes, in the forests that bordered Bohemia, helping his father and his uncle keep peace in Kiev in case the wandering scoundrel, the so-called sorcerer, Prince Vsevslav of Polotsk, returned to cause trouble. That was surely why, and meantime Thea had to wait, just wait and wait.

Padar plucked a pine marten pelt from his heap of furs. It would be a beautiful addition to a mantle, as a hood lining with enough left over to edge the cloak, a gift to raise Lady Thea's spirits, with Prince Vladimir galloping around the family's many fortresses demanding loyalty to his uncles and father.

There were great cities scattered about the Rus lands, towns with odd names that sounded distant to his ear. Padar knew not where these cities lay, but, as he held the soft pine marten pelt in his hand, he determined to break into their trading communities.

One day, he promised himself, Gudrun would be wife to a great merchant and they would have many children.
How could he advance his plan?
Possibly he could join a caravan travelling south-west towards the German lands. He tugged at his beard, deep in thought. He could take those furs even into Flanders. If he did this he could try to see Countess Gytha again one last time, for she was, without doubt, approaching her end years.

He pushed the thought into the recesses of his mind. Today he would make a visit to the fortress. He would bring Thea the pine marten fur and Gudrun the reindeer skin for new slippers.

He carefully wrapped the furs in oiled linen. He looked, with meaning in his eyes, at the boys he had set to unpack the baskets of furs. ‘By the time I return I want all those pelts packed again,' he said to Dirk, his foreman. ‘Make sure they are hidden in chests safely underneath the copper pots.' He rubbed his hands together. ‘We do not wish to risk thievery. Goodness knows what mischief lurks around the corner. They have to be sold before the competition gets an edge on us.' He scratched his head and added, ‘We shall be making a journey soon.'

The boys stopped sorting, their eyes opened wide. ‘Are we coming too, Master?' one ventured.

Dirk laughed. ‘Those of you fit to use a sword when we are attacked.'

Padar said, ‘You will come with me, Dirk, you, you and you.' He pointed to the boys one by one. ‘And the best band of English mercenaries we can find to protect us from here to Mechlenberg.' With those words Padar stuffed his package into a leather sack and pulled on his sheepskin-lined leather boots. He tied up the woven laces over his woollen leggings, tugged his long tunic down and lifted his old sealskin cloak from its peg. Grabbing the sack with the pelts, he pushed out of his entrance door into his slippery courtyard.

He hurried past the guards he employed and who were walking about his yard with stamping feet and exhaling white puffs of breath that seemed to hang as if frozen in the air before vanishing. He called to one, ‘Bring a torch. Walk with me. We are off to the castle.'

A few moments later accompanied by a burly guard, an exile who limped along behind brandishing a flaming torch, Padar sped forward as if he was a sinner being prodded across the frozen landscape of his courtyard by a devil's spear. He hurried to his gateway, yelled up to an elderly English warrior who now resided in the gatehouse above Padar's gates. The old thane opened his shutters and poked his head through the opening. ‘Unlock the gates, lads,' he shouted. ‘The master needs to pass through.'

Two gatekeepers appeared from the shelter of the gatehouse and battled for a moment with a bulky barrel lock that secured it.

‘Lock it behind me.' Padar swept through followed by his torch-bearing companion.

The sun was setting and patches of frozen slush appeared reddened by its glow. Padar loved this city. On a torch-lit, snow-filled evening it was an ice-trimmed gleaming Valhalla. Carvings on door posts appeared like goblins, trolls and elves guarding the kingdoms that lay behind their entrances.

Many shopkeepers had already pulled down shutters and were padlocking them for the night. He was far too late for dinner but if he hurried he might make supper in the great fortress hall. He passed through the goldsmith's quarter, not far from the kremlin, when he saw a shortcut through the square by the church of St Nicholias.

As he neared the church, a priest and two women were emerging from the church entrance. The church door was set low into the church wall and their hoods brushed against the top of the lintel. He watched them turn towards the door and draw up their hoods again to cover their faces. Why were they familiar? The thought slipped into his mind and out as he hurried on towards the castle path.

A moment after he noticed the women he heard a crowd's shouts. A figure came fleeing along the street, sliding, slipping and righting himself again, his scanty mantle flying behind him. Observant as ever, Padar saw he was a youth. The fleeing boy hurtled by him pursued by a mob. Padar flattened himself against a wall. He saw from the corner of his eye that the cloaked and hooded women across the track were frozen in fear by the church door. Padar peered at them again. Though they had drawn their hoods close over their wimples, Padar was sure that he recognised Katya, and the other was surely Lady Thea. Before he could cross over to them, they hurried away from the mob towards the river path below the kremlin. They were apparently chaperoned by a tall priest who seemed to push them onwards towards a track that paralleled that which the mob had raced along.

Gudrun was not with them. He was puzzled. Perhaps he was wrong. Something was surely amiss. What would Lady Thea be doing at the church of St Nicholias with Katya and a priest? He shouted at his lantern carrier to hurry and chose another short cut amongst the warren of narrow streets, one he knew could bring him to the kremlin gate closest to St Sophia.

Padar and his limping lantern bearer entered the inner courtyard as the bells rang for Vespers. He heard the stamping of horses. A party of noblemen had gathered in front of the great hall's entrance door. Pennants emblazoned with bears and snow leopards, reindeers and moose, animals that lived in the northern folds of the world, flew on long poles held aloft by pages. The band of richly clad nobles were handing over their horses to stableboys.

Before he could move aside, the patriarch's low wagon pulled by two fine grey horses came rushing into the courtyard, knocking him and his lantern bearer into a wall. The vehicle skidded to a halt. Dogs straining on leashes pinned to stakes began barking fiercely. Servants kicked the dogs and helped the patriarch dismount. The elderly cleric rushed forward towards the nobles carrying his staff high. ‘I was only intending to conduct Vespers for Princess Anya and her ladies.' His staff bobbed up and down like a puppet on a stick as he bowed. ‘And here you are, my lords, returned to us at last.'