Erinsong (26 page)

He made love to her with as
much tenderness as he
could, all the while
feeling so desperate it was all he
could
do not to take her like a rutting beast. To claim
her as his own, finally and forever.

Then morning would dawn and
they’d be one day
nearer to Dublin. One
day nearer to the truth.

“Look ye, yonder there,”
Brenna said from the
prow. “Smoke. Could
your Dublin be burning?”

“No,” he said morosely. “That’s just cooking
fires.”

“But, are there so many?”

He grimaced. “I’d
forgotten. You’ve never been to
a town
before. There are many people in Dublin.
Probably more than five hundred souls.”

He glanced down into the dark brown river,
thick with sediment from its peat bed, and would have known the
settlement was near even without the fires. This silt-laden river
was as familiar to him as the curve of Brenna’s waist, but without
any of the sweetness. He dropped the woolen sail and stepped nimbly
to the steering oar, turning the prow toward the grassy bank.

“We’ll camp here tonight,” he announced.

“But we’re so close, and
there’s yet some daylight
to travel by.
The sooner we get to Dublin, the sooner
we
learn if the man we seek is there. Then we’ll take
the Skellig-Michael Codex back from him and be
done with the cursed place.”

“As easy as that, you think?”

She sighed. “Probably not.”

“Certainly not,” he assured
her. “Something you need to understand about Northmen is that we
don’t believe in turning the other cheek. What a man has, he must
hold. The monks at Clonmacnoise didn’t
fight to keep the book. Kolgrim believes the Codex is
his by right. Even if he’s in Dublin, he’ll not
part with
it willingly.”

“I know. I just keep hoping
that somehow, some
thing will turn out
easy for us.”

A
small pang streaked through his chest at the way
her shoulders sagged. He felt her weariness as if
it were a stone around his own neck.

“Besides, I was looking
forward to a hot bath and
more of a roof
over me head than a fir bough.” Brenna
shot one more wistful glance upstream. “We’ve come
so far and ‘tis only a little way
farther.”

That was precisely what he was afraid of.

“Brenna,” he said, his tone
commanding enough that she jerked her gaze toward him sharply. “We
need to camp here tonight. I’ll explain it all to you,
but for now and for the next few days, I’m asking
you
to trust me.”

“I think I know what ye’re
trying to say. ‘Tis going
to be difficult
for me, being in Dublin amongst ... your people.”

“I just want to be sure you
understand a few things.” The hull of his boat grated against the
river bottom when the prow nosed its way up the bank.
“First, very few of my countrymen speak your
tongue.
Our customs are different. You may
find them a bit
rough, but don’t be
afraid. You’re my wife. I’ll take care of you.”

“Ye make it sound as if we’re entering a bear
cave.”

“In some ways, we are.” He
stepped over the side of
the boat and
splashed to shore, tugging on the end
of
the coracle’s tether. “This particular bear’s name is
Thorkill. Five years ago he led a force of sixty
long-
ships up the Liffey. He’s the founder
of Dublin, a strong leader, and not one to delay either judgment or
punishment.”

He tied off the boat and
went back to lift Brenna
out and carry her
to shore. No need for both of them
to have
wet feet. She was as light as a child in his arms, but as his hand
brushed the soft underside of one of her breasts, he knew she was
all woman.

“But how do you know so much about this
Thorkill?” A sudden light dawned in her eyes. “Oh! Ye
remembered.”

“I did.”

She hugged his neck hard before he set her
lightly down. “Has it all come back to ye then?”

“
Ja,
I think so.” His gut twisted in knots.

“But that’s wonderful. Ye must tell me
everything,” she said as she began to cut slices of peat for their
small fire. “Why is it ye are looking so glum?”

He sank down on a gray-speckled rock and
avoided meeting her gaze, studying instead his own long-fingered
hands. “Because it’s not all good.”

“And how does that make ye different from
anyone else?” Brenna ruffled his hair with one hand, then stooped
to brush her lips across his forehead. Her small palm cupped his
chin, and he looked up at her. He saw at once the strain behind her
smile and realized that despite her forced cheer, she was afraid.
“Start at the beginning and when it gets difficult, perhaps the
stew will be fit to eat by then and ye can take a rest.”

The beginning. That was at least safe.

“I was born in Sognefjord,”
he said. He told her the hazy memory of his parents’ death at sea
when he was barely old enough to heft a water bucket. Jorand’s
older brother Eirick took him in for a season, but Eirick’s wife
didn’t like the thought of a rival heir to the family holding of
tillable acreage so close at hand. So Jorand was fostered out to
the
jarl,
the
acknowledged leader of the fjord.

“Harald and his lady were
good to me,” he said. “Seems Orn, my father, had saved Harald’s
life in
battle, so I was treated like
family, more or less.”

In fact, Jorand had thrived
under the slightly negli
gent care of
the
jarl,
growing
up wild as a wolf cub in
the great
longhouse. Gunnar, eldest son of Harald and heir to all of Sogna,
couldn’t be bothered with a
twig of a
fosterling except to play sly, cruel tricks on Jorand as often as
he could. Bjorn, the
jarl’s
younger
son, was only a
few years Jorand’s senior, but he stood solidly with the bewildered
child and protected him as much as he was able. Bjorn immediately
became the principal god in young Jorand’s private
pantheon.

“Bjorn was brother to me in
ways my own kin never were,” Jorand said. “When we came of age
to
go to sea, he became my captain. Bjorn
was a natural
leader. I’d have followed
him to Hel with a light heart.”

“Then ye have gone viking, haven’t ye?”

“
Ja,”
he said, fixing his mouth in a hard line. “I have
been on raids of neighboring fjords. Usually in retaliation for an
encroachment on their part, but sometimes not.”

She waited, a question in
her eyes as she added a
bit of wild celery
and onion to the cooking pot hang
ing over
the smoky fire. His stomach growled at the
aroma, even as his nerves balled his innards in
knots.

“Then ye ... ye have done as was done to me
sister,” she choked the words out.

“No, never that,” he
protested. “I never forced a
woman, or
killed one either. Though I have killed my
share of men on raids. The northlands are beautiful but
unforgiving. The growing season is short and farmable land scarce.
Second sons have no other
choice but to
sell their blades and pledge to one
jarl
or
another. By going viking, we earn our place with the wealth
we can hold and bring back to the fjord.”

She sighed. “When ye put
that face on it, I suppose
‘tis not unlike
the cattle rustling me Da and the Con
nacht
regularly practice on each other’s borders.
Still, Father Michael would likely name it a sin.”

“Most likely,” he agreed.
Funny how he’d never
thought of viking as
wrong. It was just the way of his
world.
People needed to eat and the fjord could only
provide so much. If he brought back a hoard of silver
or a bony kine or a sow heavy with a litter of
piglets,
he was a hero. He helped his
settlement survive the
harsh northern
winter. That was as right as it got.

“But my life wasn’t all
raiding.” He went on to tell her of walrus hunts in the frostlands
and learning the
shipwright’s trade. Her
gray eyes sparkled when he
told her of his
wild trip down the rivers of the conti
nent to the Black Sea and the fabulous city of Miklagard
straddling the narrow opening to Middle Earth’s
great inland sea.

“Miklagard? Oh, ye mean
Byzantium surely,” she said with a rush of understanding. “I’ve
read tales of
that great city, but never
believed the half of it. Oh, to
see it,
truly. What a wonderment.”

The wonder of it was that
they ever escaped with
their skins intact,
but Jorand wouldn’t burst her illusions.

“So how, after traveling
the wide, wide world, did
ye ever end up
on the beach of Donegal Bay?”

Now they were on boggier
footing and Jorand felt
the grasping
undertow sucking him down. He was about to be lost and he knew
it.

“Is the stew done yet?” He sniffed at it.

“Aye,” she said, ladling up a bowlful and
handing it to him. “And ye can have it, but only if ye can eat and
talk at the self-same time.”

His appetite fled, but he
forced himself to swallow
a mouthful and
make appreciative noises.

“When Bjorn was settled in
Sognefjord, I realized I
didn’t want to
stay put. After all my travels, it didn’t seem like home anymore.
And the more I thought
about it, the more
I realized that
the
jarlhof
in
Sogna
wasn’t my home. Would never
truly be my home. Even the family who raised me wasn’t really
my
family. So I left my friend with his
new wife and went
in search of a place of
my own.”

Brenna rested a hand on his knee. “And have
ye found it, then?”

He put down the wooden bowl
and cupped her
face with both hands. “I
never knew what home was
till I met you,
Brenna. But I think something inside
me
knew the first time you called me Keefe Murphy
that you’d help me find myself and my place in the world. You
are my snug harbor.” He kissed her
deeply.
“And I hope never to go viking again.”

“Never tell a woman that,
man,” a voice said from
the darkness. “At
least not until you’re so old your pecker’s ready to fall
off.”

Jorand leaped to his feet,
knife to hand. He shoved
Brenna behind him
and crouched to meet the newcomer who’d crept up on
them.

Idiot!

This close to Dublin, he should have expected
an outlying patrol. Why had he not been on guard?

There were four of them,
all fully his match for
weight and height,
and bristling with weaponry. When
they
stepped into the circle of light, Jorand realized
with a start that he knew the leader.

The big man wielded a
hobnailed club, brandishing it over his head. He made a sound, a
cross between a growl and an evil-sounding chuckle, then
stopped and blinked twice. Suddenly, he let the
club
drop.

“Loki strike me blind!” he
swore. “It
is
you, Jorand. We thought you dead.”

“Not yet,” Jorand said grimly.

The leader strode forward, baring his teeth
in a wolfish grin and clasped forearms with Jorand.

“Welcome home,” the man
said, then turned his
attention to Brenna.
Even in the flickering firelight,
Jorand
saw she’d gone white as a fish belly. “Who’ve
you brought with you?”

“This is my wife, Brenna,”
Jorand said evenly.
“Brenna, this is
Thorkill. My father-in-law.”

Brenna released the breath
she’d been holding since the four Northmen invaded their camp. She
shook her head, certain lack of air had led her to imagine
things. The sweet green night stole into her
lungs.

“Your what?” Her tongue felt thick as a
sausage in her mouth. “What did ye say?”

“Thorkill is my
father-in-law,” Jorand repeated
evenly.
“His daughter Solveig is my wife.”

The words pierced her ears
and swirled around her brain, nonsense sounds to which she was
unable
to attach any meaning. Then the
truth jolted through her. Swift as an arrow, it impaled her
heart.

Thorkill appraised her
frankly, his gaze raking her form, as if she were no more than a
new brood mare
Jorand had added to his
herd. Then the older man’s
ice blue eyes
took on a lascivious gleam. It was a look
she’d seen on a Northman’s face before. Her gut churned, but
she didn’t feel fear.