The Reluctant Berserker (8 page)

Oh,
Leofgar thought, knowing that his burning face—hot with humiliation—would be interpreted as a slave-boy’s blush of womanly pleasure,
so now it is clear
. He was furious with himself that he had once imagined himself welcome because he was good at his calling—because his singing was sweet and his music full of power. Instead he had been welcomed as the beautiful daughter of an aged traveller might be welcomed, and vied for, and won at last by the strongest.

Yet he had promised Anna to do anything rather than be sent on the road again. Anything that would let his master stay and recover his strength, so that when he did escape this place in the middle of the night and torch it on the way out, his master would be hearty and hale beside him.

“I owe my master everything,” he said slowly, clinging to Anna even now as a lifeline thrown from a fairer riverbank. “I was a child when he took me in, and he has raised and fed and taught me, and given me everything that I am. We are bound together by obligations and gratitude that can never be undone.”

“This I understand,” Tatwine said kindly, “and I admire. It is a little like my wife and I—though she was scarcely more than a child herself, and I so much the elder, yet in a marriage these things count for little.”

He began to amble away from the jetty, letting the slaves who had been watching them both from the shadow of the trees drift back and take up their fishing places once more. Since he had not let go of Leofgar’s arm, sick and sore at heart or not, Leofgar had to follow, back up to the graveyard and the little wreath of holly like spilled blood on the ground.

“The hurt of her passing would have been greatly eased, for me, if you had been here,” said Tatwine. “And…” he sighed, “…you must be aware that your master is very old and not at all well. The time is coming fast when he will join the saints in glory. At that time, I will be to you the comfort I myself wished for, when death came ungently into my house.”

“I had thought…” Leofgar wrestled with the desire to kick the grave marker or to kick Tatwine or to pull his dagger and declare himself entitled to single combat to clear his name. All three were choices he could see leading to his own grave. “When that unhappy hour arrives, I had thought to go on pilgrimage after and offer the silver we have earned over the years in prayers for his soul. After that…I am a wanderer by inclination, lord. I hoped to cross the sea and visit the Emperor in Byzantium, to see the warm places and the wonders of the world.”

Tatwine laughed as though this were a child’s dream. “We will go together, perhaps, once you and your master have sworn fealty to me. This summer, should he still have the strength in him to travel. The heat would do him good.”

“Sworn fealty?” It was the ultimate prize for a scop—a place in the lord’s retinue—and Leofgar felt the impact of it as though it had been a punch to the throat. Only his surprise must have come across, not the dread, for Tatwine beamed, like one who sees a generous gift lavishly appreciated.

“Indeed. I spoke to your master about it before church, and he wept over my hands in gratitude. You need have no further fear of what may come, for your days without protection are over. You can swear to me tomorrow night, and henceforth you will both be mine.”

Chapter Three

Outside the shut door, the rains of Solmonath drizzled and trickled from the thatch, making a musical whispering that pleased Saewyn as she whispered words of power over the apple in her hand. Last of the winter store, the skin was as wrinkled as her own, but the sweetness of the thing would be that much greater for its age.

“It does seem smaller.” Beorthread the potter glanced up at her from his bed-shelf with hope and faith, and looked back again at the weeping sore that covered his right flank from armpit to hip.

“It will,” she said, serene in the knowledge that—unless God chose to take this man, which no one could forestall—the power of the chant and the salve would soon make him well. “These nine plants have might against powerful diseases, against the flying venom and the running venom, the red poison and the bright poison, and the pale. Now let me make the salve a second time, and you will see the sore flee away. By the third time it will be gone.”

With the hallowed apple in one hand, mortar on her knees and pestle in the other hand, she was in no position to stoop down and scrape up ash. Where was…

She tried not to sigh, disappointed, as—looking up—she found her son crowding the potter’s daughter into a corner. Cenred’s straw-straight hair looked golden in the light of the single oil lantern that hung flickering from the house’s central beam, and there was something about it, something about the hunched shape of his shoulders, the tensed arms and face turned away, that reminded her of his father.

A giggle from the girl told her it was flirtation she saw and not intimidation, but her own mouth dried and her heart rattled in her chest like the feet of a fleeing deer, even so. He had begun to resemble Cenwulf so much, and not just in the outer man. Less in flesh than in spirit, indeed.

“Son,” she said, as gently as she could manage, “I need your help. Rake me up a handful of these ashes and put them in the cauldron, with a little water and the fennel from my basket. Build up the fire so that the water boils. I may not put the apple down now.”

Cenred’s sigh was unrestrained. He rolled his eyes at the girl, as if to say,
I am beset about by interfering women, but see what a loyal son I am
, and took the four steps from the end wall of the house to the firepit with as much labour as though they were a hundred miles. “You should have put the ash on first.”

“As I would, if I had not brought an assistant to whom I wished to teach some of my lore before I grew too frail and it was too late. Cenred, I am trying to give you a gift. A gift of power.”

“Women’s power.” He shrugged as though a raven had landed on his shoulders and he could twitch it off.

“It is neither women’s power nor men’s power,” she replied, her voice calm, though it felt that the organs inside her had grown heavy with her sadness. “It is anyone’s power who has the gift of it, and you should have, by your blood. By
my
blood.”

“You know what they whisper about me.” His round face should not have been able to look so hard. Yet she remembered many times in the past when his eyes had been swollen shut and his cheeks purple with bruising, and thought that each time his father’s hands had touched him they drove hardness into his skin like stone. “That my blood is the blood of a coward. You would mend that by suggesting it would be better to be known for having the blood of a woman?”

It is a punishment, surely
, she thought,
because after him I took it into my hands to bear no more children for my husband. Bad enough that he should hurt this one in his heart, but no more. It is a punishment because—when Cenwulf died—I felt glad. The Holy Lord must not have finished teaching me the lesson Cenwulf was meant to teach, that now he repeats it with my son.

“If I die,” she said, bending her head over the mortar, working the herbs into a powder and mixing them with the ashes and the juice of the apple, “your lord’s household will have no healer. More warriors will die, more babes and their mothers, more of the common men who grow our food and more of their cattle will die for the lack, and we will all suffer together. Do you think the elves and the unfriendly spirits who surround us in this world of shadows will go away when I do? Who will defend us, if you will not?”

“I will defend my people with force of arms, like a man.” Cenred retreated to the far wall again, too angry as yet to look at the young girl he had been trying to charm. “The church will do the rest. There is no need for you and your heathen witchery in Ethelwulf’s England.”

Saewyn did not gasp, though the feeling of being pressed down from within grew harder to withstand. She arranged the folds of her wimple on her shoulders as an excuse to drop her son’s gaze and look away. It was a strange and ugly thought, but sometimes she wondered if his father’s dying spirit had found some way to stay on earth, to leech itself to her son’s body, drive out the sweet child he once had been.

No, she would not entertain it. Instead, she put a faggot of wood on the fire and watched the bubbles come up around the edges of the soot-dark liquid. When it boiled, she pulled the sleeve of her underdress down over her hand to protect it and lifted the cauldron off.

“I apologise,” she said to the potter, in what she was proud to say was an encouraging tone, “for bringing into your house the secrets of my own.”

Despite the pain of his wounded side, he laughed. “Children have a venom greater than that of any adder, and yet we are powerless to do aught but cherish them.”

“You are not meant to be healing me.” She helped him sit forwards, so that she could sing the charm of nine spikes into his mouth, and into both ears, and into the open wound. She could feel his laughter under her hands when she combined the herb and apple mix with the ash and fennel water and spread it on, pleasantly warm.

“…all weeds may now spring up as herbs. Seas and all salt water slip apart, while I blow this poison from you.”

A roar of laughter and the shriek of a girl genuinely in distress yanked her attention back to her son. The wide smile on his likable face would not have been out of place in the jaw of a wolf. Saewyn did not at first comprehend what it was he had in his hand, white as wool, and then she saw the girl with her arms over her head, her elbows sticking up like horns as she bent her face down into the thicker shadows beneath the house’s one table.

Cenred flourished the white cloth at her, snatching it back when she tried to take it, and laughed again.

The potter was trying to struggle to his feet. Saewyn leaped up instead and hauled up the skirts of her dress with a sooty hand so that she could run across the floorboards and wrench the poor child’s wimple from her son’s hand. The slap she landed on his cheek cut off his laughter like a seax blade, and he looked at her as though she were a stranger.

Shaking with anger, she didn’t care, but allowed the girl to take her covering and wind it back around her hair. “What?” she demanded, not recognising the bell-like iron tones of her own voice. “What do you think you… No, hush, I will hear your reasons at home. For now you
will
ask pardon of this young woman, before whom you have shamed your mother and your father and your own name.”

Soothed by her fury, the potter leaned back heavily on his ledge, but his spare, muscular hands clenched and unclenched beside him, and his breath came hard.

His daughter, decently covered once more, emerged out of the darkness with eyes tear-bright from shock. A tendril of brown hair curled out of the fabric and fell on her forehead, and it made the shame in Saewyn writhe like a nest of snakes. “I will, of course, not ask payment from you for any of your treatment henceforward Beorthread.”

“That will pay for having my daughter’s hair exposed to the sight of a man, will it?” The gentle old man was gone—he took the insult as hard as she did.

“Of course not. It will only express some of my regret that such a thing could have happened at the hands of my kin.”

“And a daughter’s honour is worth so little?”

“No!” Saewyn seized Cenred and pushed him further into the firelight. “Tell him you are sorry.”

Cenred’s mouth had settled into sullen lines, and his eyes were a blade-thin glimmer. “She provoked me,” he said. “She was flirting. She let me kiss her. I thought a girl as immodest as that deserved to be exposed. Why should she be allowed to go on pretending to be virtuous, when she is nothing of the kind?”

Saewyn and Beorthread were both silenced, and saw the same horror in one another’s eyes. As Saewyn wrestled with the thought that her own son could have so inherited his father’s meanness and cast about for something to do to make the situation less vile, a small voice spoke up from the shadow of the darkest corner.

“I… It’s true.” The girl hid her face in her hands, starting at the touch of the curl, hastily tucking it back in. “I did—I thought he liked me, I did let him… I’m sorry, Father.”

At once, the standoff crumbled. The potter sagged back onto his cushions, and he too covered his eyes. “I think perhaps you should go, Wise One. Shame has touched us all today, but if the fault was provoked, I shall not expect further geld for it. Sorrow is the spice of all our days once we grow old, but I did not think to find mine here. Go.”

Saewyn packed all her jars and simples into her basket in a hunted silence, and ushered her son out of the door before her with almost the same movements she would use to drive out demons. That was not a comforting thought.

Outside, the rain fell and mud-month was living up to its name. Rain slicked Cenred’s hair and dripped into the corners of those ungenerous eyes. It soaked through Saewyn’s wimple and began to trickle cold down the back of her neck.

As she shivered, scarcely needing this to make her more miserable, a change seemed to come over Cenred’s face—the lines of it eased. His eyes came out of hiding and showed themselves blue and concerned. He took off his leather cloak and swept it around her shoulders. Took off too the oiled leather hood that he had not bothered to raise, and placed it carefully over her head.

“I’m sorry.” He smiled, and it was the face of her young son, before the stones. “I don’t know what came over me. She was so…forward and lewd, it didn’t seem right for her to go about in the guise of one who was virtuous. It…offended me. Was that wrong?”