Edin's embrace (8 page)

There he held her. She felt the sword point keenly. She became aware of her ribs beneath it, of how delicate the bones were, how easily they could be pierced.

He said, "I'm waiting, thrall! What say you now?"

She whispered, "I-I am free, a nobleman's daughter."

Why
was she doing this? He had no scruples against murder —he'd already murdered Cedric before her very eyes!

"You suffer from an unnatural belief in your own immortality," he answered softly.

He spoke to Rolf again, without looking at him. Quickly another sword appeared. Rolf's face behind his red whiskers seemed to offer Edin a warning. She looked from him to the sword he held out to her.

"Take it!" The jarl stepped back a half-pace, removing his sword point from her breast yet not lowering it.

Rolf's red brows beetled as she took the sword from him with both hands. Even so, as soon as he released it, its point fell almost to the floor. She struggled to bring it up again, but couldn't raise it even to the height of her waist. It felt as if the weapon had unseen roots anchoring it to the floor. Possibly the same roots that anchored mountains. She heard murmurs and felt the Vikings' amusement.

"Lift it!" the jarl said. He waved his own weapon as if it were a twig. "All it takes is a good arm." She saw the sinews in his forearm, the muscles rippling. "It's Rolf's own sword, that," he said, "a good killing blade. Its name is
Tickler.
If you aren't my thrall, you'll lift it and defend your claim. I say you're mine, my property to dispose of as I see fit. Prove to me I'm wrong."

She stood as she was, her arms and shoulders and back trembling in the effort of keeping the heavy sword point from falling to the floor completely. She couldn't look at him now, but gazed unseeing at his steady damascened blade.

"
Well?
" He was like a dragon in his fury, rending and unreasonable. Those who resisted, he would always mercilessly overcome, if not with his muscles then with the tremendous strength of his mind and purpose.

"You know I can't fight you."

"Because the weapon is too unwomanly," he said crisply. "Very well." He spoke in Norse, and again Rolf appeared, this time with a dagger. He took his sword back and held the knife out to her, but she shook her head.

"Come," the jarl said dryly, lowering his sword, "take it; charge me with it. I know you can kill if you want to."

"I can't."

"You killed Ragnarr."

"I can't."

He made a sound of contempt. "You are a race of slaves, you Saxons."

Her gaze dropped to somewhere near his feet. She wanted to cry, but somehow kept her sobs held in.

"I'm challenging you —fight me,
my lady
"

"I can't fight you, Viking, as well you know."

"Aye," he said slowly, lowering his weapon at last, "as well I know."

Her gaze lifted again, all the way to his face. "But I will never be a slave," she said stubbornly.

This time he reacted with immediate anger, the most parlous kind of anger, the kind born of frustration. The jerk of his head told her of his ire, and her breath froze at the cold flare of temper in his eyes. In an instant he became fearsome, furious,
mad
. His mighty sword swung up again, and he closed in. There was an ice storm rampaging in his eyes. The flat of his sword lifted her chin, until she was looking at him down its long, gilt-and-silver length. All he said now was "Slave or sword point?"

The flames snapped in the firepit behind her. The cold, steel point pricking her throat never moved the slightest. For an immeasurable extent of time she stood perfectly still, living in a state of strain. She searched for some answer. And impaled on his gaze, feeling all those wild and hungry eyes on her, something of her pride broke inside her. In the end she could only whisper: "Slave."

It seemed an eternity before she felt the metal leave her skin. He slowly dropped his weapon and stepped back onto the dais, lowering himself into his chair. The storm in his eyes had settled to rime-ice. At last he said, "My mother will teach you and the others what you need to know. The first thing she will teach
you
is that you are to be silent —or I shall see you can't be anything else"

Then, more quiet than ever before: "Saxon, for your own sake, don't struggle against your destiny. There is no mercy for the subjugated. I warn you I shall not put my anger aside again. Next time . . .

"Next time I will fall on you like an avalanche."

Banished back to her corner, all Edin wanted to do was pour out her terror in an orgy of tears; but she found she couldn't think of herself and her great humiliation yet, for she discovered Arneld was to be separated from them. Another thrall, a shepherd by the looks of him, had come to take the boy outside. He made gestures that it was going to be all right, yet Arneld cried.

"He probably means for you to sleep in the byre, just like at home," Edin soothed.

"I'm afraid!"

I'm afraid, too! "I'm sorry, Arneld, but . . . there's nothing I can do about it." The bitterness of those words.

The Vikings who didn't live in the hall gathered their possessions to go, and those who did live there headed for their beds. The Saxons were given fur sleeping bags. The fire was banked, leaving the torches alone to cast flickering shadows. In the mill of the closing evening, Edin was subjected to several kinds of quick and shocking touches. Juliana was treated even worse. One man claimed a hearty kiss of her, insistently shaping and fitting her young lips to his own and even plunging his tongue into her soft mouth—until he was stopped by the jarl's mother. Snapping, she showed the women where to bed down in one of the cubbies along the wall.

Juliana was put in with Olga, and Edin and Dessa were given a tiny "room" to share. This was furnished only with a wide wall-bench covered with a layer of straw. It was separated from the hall by nothing but a thin curtain, through which any Viking might walk at any time. Even so, Edin fell quickly into an exhausted sleep.

She dreamed, however, and woke with a gasp in the middle of the night. In the next hour she hit the very bottom of the matter: She was a slave in this strange cold place; she was caught in bondage to heathens. Forever. There in her bed, alone, she entered her soul's night.

Memories rose like a tide, higher, higher, swamping her now that she wasn't distracted by anything else, now that she was completely vulnerable to every loss. In her mind, Cedric died once more, and once more she regretted that she hadn't had the courage to die with him. In her mind she saw her home, saw it all as a dream, composed and calm, full of beauty, a place where honeysuckle grew in lush drifts calling the somnolent bees in the summer afternoons. Her heart had been so innocent, so unaware.

. . . my property which I can dispose of as I please.

The Viking's words rang in her head. Again she felt all those men's eyes on her, intent on her degradation.

Cold crept into the hollows of her bones. She didn't want to be their victim. She didn't want to be here. But what she wanted was no longer of any importance to anyone.

It seemed only minutes after she'd finally fallen asleep again that she was roughly wakened. The Viking woman was giving her a good shaking. If the jarl was a dragon, then his mother was a dragonette. She struck Edin as a fierce, bitter, violent person.

Dessa was already up, but evidently had been afraid to wake Edin, whom she still thought of as "my lady." She seemed embarrassed to see Edin treated so rudely —yet her simple mind didn't fail to take in that Inga was now the one to be obeyed.

In the hall, Juliana waited. She muttered to Dessa, "Her ladyship has to get up like the rest of us now, despite her airs and graces." Edin's pride ached like an open wound.

Although Inga spoke no Saxon, she managed to show each woman what her duties were. Edin saw that she was a careful manager —a little too careful. Edin, who was light-fingered in the preparations of such delicacies as partridges and doves, helped cook a heavy, grainy barley porridge. She set the table with loaves of rye and oatbread. Then, at the first of the two meals of the day, she was given the task of keeping the men's mugs full of buttermilk.

They drank a great deal of buttermilk as they sat on their benches and let the women serve them. Edin, still in her undershift and nothing else, was mortified when early on Ottar Magnusson pointed out to his table-mates that the little points of her breasts could be seen beneath the thin linen fabric. After that, they drank twice as much buttermilk, drank it hard, threw it back, and placed their empty mugs where she had to reach to fill them, causing her shift to draw tightly over her breasts. The jarl refrained from this sport, but the others —not a hand touched her, yet their taunting was remorseless.

It confused her. If her body was desirable, she'd never known it. She'd been respected by the men in her life, and consequently had preserved the sweetness, the innocence of a sheltered girl. She had an unhardened mind and an open heart and no defense against this kind of male coarseness. She suffered their stares, but they sickened her. The sound of their chuckling cut her.

Nor had she ever been criticized or reviled, but it seemed she was reviled now. The Viking woman, Inga, hated her, and for what reason? Edin couldn't say. But whatever she did was not done quickly enough, or well enough, or in the right way. This was like an injury, a new wound made in the old, this feeling of being utterly despised.

When at last she and the other thralls were allowed to eat, she had no appetite. She had to force herself to drink her own buttermilk.

An hour later she learned that milk does not appear from nowhere, and that a dairy is always in need of extra hands. Inga instructed her in unfamiliar words and a voice like cracking ice.

While carrying buckets of milk from the dairy to the longhouse, she came upon Juliana and the young copper-eyed Jamsgar. The man had taken the girl into his arms, and even Edin could see that she was making no more than a sham protest. He kissed her and held her tightly around the waist. And then he slid his hand up her skirt —with scarcely any resistance. Edin slipped away, more troubled than ever.

The Viking household regularly consisted of twenty to thirty people, and the work was endless. By late afternoon, Edin was filled with hopeless, unshed tears. That was when Inga led her into her own sleeping chamber near the entrance to the hall. The room was the size of a lockable closet, but at least it was private. Inga reached under her ornately carved bed to pull out a chest. Rummaging, she cast gauging eyes on Edin, and finally tossed her a doubtful-looking, formless garment of faded grey-purple material.

The neck was suitable only for a cowherd —and a much stouter woman at that. If Edin weren't ashamed of being half-naked, she would have refused to put it on. Or so she told herself. As it was, she threw the thing over her head, over her filthy undershift, and fastened it. It had long loose sleeves and no belt. When she looked down, she was struck again by her position. In this gross garment, she seemed to have nothing in common with that young bride-to-be of Fair Hope Manor, she had looked forward to being a mistress of servants, a revered wife and mother, a gentlewoman of grace and generosity.

Inga seemed satisfied. She said something in her barbaric language, her voice as tart, as stone-chilled, as the buttermilk the Vikings liked so well. Edin said nothing, could have said nothing with her throat burning as it was, making it so difficult to swallow. She exited the chamber just as the jarl was passing on his way outside. She tried to fasten him with her gaze, but her stare slid off. He in turn took one look at her, then lowered his head and strode on.

She found later that Inga had unwittingly done her a kindness. At the evening meal the Vikings seemed to notice her much less. The ugly dress had its advantages. At least now she wasn't a target for every male eye in the hall.

The evening passed. And so did the night, which at that time of year in the north was so short Edin didn't think a person could cook a joint of meat in it. Verily it seemed the minute she lay down she was awakened. Yet there was enough time for her to dream, and awaken with a start, enough time for that sense of horror to come to her, that absolute, sickening terror that rose from her stomach, and that feeling of total desolation.

Her heart put up a struggle inside her, but gradually the heaped shocks settled onto her and seemed to separate her from everyone around her. When she burned her fingers while cooking, she wondered,
Why don't I feel pain?
When Juliana continued to treat her with contempt and encourage the other thralls to do the same, she thought,
My life is destroyed, everything is lost, and I don't feel anything.
There was too much to bear, and gradually her mind stopped paying attention, and her heart stopped fumbling; everything around her blurred. . . .

For the hundredth time, Edin threw her hair back out of her way. The longhall was quiet. Olga was midway between the clean-up of breakfast and the starting of dinner, Dessa was working at the standing loom, and Juliana was busy with a set of wooden pressing irons. Edin had been set to the lowest job, plucking a brace of wild ducks that long-bearded Fafnir Danrsson had left hanging in the kitchen. She was in that daze, that dullness bordering on despair which had sealed her off from her surroundings. Only now and then did anything break through to fix itself in her consciousness anymore, some distinctive scene, or the occasional pang of some real, physical pain.

The pain was usually caused by Inga's wooden spoon, used whenever Edin stopped her work to go into a moment's trance. Then Inga would poke or rap her, and Edin would obediently return to what she was supposed to be doing.

She was ankle-deep in feathers when she heard Inga's word for her, a Norse word that seemed to be the Saxon equivalent of "You!" She looked up to see the woman in the door, her expression full of cold effrontery. No wonder, since Dessa and Juliana were already there, evidently having been summoned without Edin even being aware that they'd left their work. Dessa beckoned her timidly.

Edin stood and brushed the feathers from her hands as she followed them out into the light of the fine, luculent late-summer noon, a truly golden noon, though to Edin there seemed to be an undertone of grief in the sunlight. Two thrall-men met them. One was Blackhair, he of the wormy smile. Inga spoke to the other one, and he in turn spoke to the women: "I'm Snorri. I'm from England, too—twenty-five winters ago." He was a well-muscled fellow, though only a few inches taller than Edin. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands without a spade or barrow or pitchfork.

Blackhair stood grinning at the women. Edin didn't care; she didn't even wonder why they'd been called outside. She watched passively while Blackhair and Snorri took tools from their belts, the kind used to shear sheep. Dessa and Juliana, following some order, went to their knees before the men, who started to trim their hair. Edin had noticed that the thralls wore their hair short here. Olga's, for instance, barely reached the tips of her ears.

Juliana's hair hadn't been long to begin with, and as Blackhair snipped blithely, only short dark curls dropped to the ground around her. Dessa's longer, soft brown locks fell and fell. Snorri's face held an expression of pained concentration. Edin lost interest.

She looked at Inga, who was intent on the "shearing." The older woman had her own hair bound in its usual knot. She was without a cape today. Her dress was pleated, a dress of light blue with touches of black and four rows of yellow beads across the chest. It was wrapped and pinned in some exotic Viking style.

Edin's attention wandered. Under the nearby shade tree, Hauk Haakonsson, the one with the high, hooked nose, was sitting on the grass, plaiting leashes for some hounds lying about him. He'd pulled his tunic off in the heat, and Edin saw the great snake etched on his long back. Several of the Vikings had tattoos: wolves, bears, dragons. . . .

In the corral, Laag, the stable-thrall, was trimming the mane of a horse. He was a tall, always slightly frowning man with an absent manner. The dark glossy horse hair dropped and dropped.

Edin looked out at the fields visible between the dairy byre and the longhouse, stubble fields from which the barley had already been cut. There were three cots in the distance, the houses of married thralls and their families. From one of the chimneys smoke rose into the still air.

Farther up, the heat of the day had gathered the moisture out of the land to make a faint haze around the heights.

When Dessa and Juliana stood, their hands to their heads, they looked . . . different, Edin thought from where she had escaped to, a safe place a thousand miles or more from Norway. She was slow to realize that everyone was looking at her. "Your turn, lass," Snorri said. Blackhair again broke into that really cruel grin.

Her turn? Looking at the sheers in Blackhair's hand, the situation finally penetrated her understanding. Her hands went to the thick, wavy, amber hair hanging down her back and over her shoulders. Not this, too. She'd never realized she had a vanity until now. They wouldn't take even this from her . . . would they?

They would. She woke, with a punched, gasping feeling. They meant to cut her hair. She came back to awareness with a lurch. And she was appalled.

She took a step back.

"Come on, lass," Snorri said, not unkindly. The look on Blackhair's face was gleeful. His eyes were small and stony and full of evil. Inga looked smug. Snorri said, "It could be worse. In some districts thralls are branded."

Edin took another step backward. "Not my hair. It's rather pretty when I can comb it. If I had a comb — " she looked about her as if hoping to find one hidden nearby. "I have no comb," she said again, distractedly. "Mayhap I could just put it up?"

Snorri gave her a sad look. She glanced at Inga, whose look said Edin was beneath contempt. She uttered something sharp and impatient.

"Sorry, lass," Snorri said, "we have to cut it. We do what we're told, whether or not we like the doing."

Edin, suddenly awake and aware of just how close to the edge of everything she was, felt she had to make a stand. Snorri sighed. Then, as she'd expected, Blackhair made a grab for her. She side-stepped him, turned, picked up her ugly skirts, and fled.

Having surprised them, she got something of a head start. Her hair, judged too ornamental for a common slave, streamed and rippled behind her. She hadn't been allowed to look about the steading, and she had no idea where she would be led by the path she chose. It wasn't the dead-end path that went to the dock, she knew, though it went up over the lip of the valley and started down toward the fjord just as that other did. From the top, she saw the longship at anchor a bowshot out in the water, its sail furled, its timbers dry. Halfway along, the path turned around a bluff, beyond which she couldn't see.

Seagulls mewed; heavy footsteps beat the hard earth behind her. Her heart slugged up in her throat.
What are you doing?
It was unlikely she'd find a hiding place, and when caught, that ice-hearted Inga would have her shorn bald.

And when the jarl heard she'd been disobedient again. . . !

A little whimper escaped her as she plunged headlong around the blind turn in the path.

***

The shipyard was redolent with wood shavings and pitch. Like the dock area, it occupied a shelf of land just above the water. Much of the available space was taken up by stocks, which could hold a longship being repaired or a fishing boat being built. Thoryn was telling young Starkad Herjulsson about a type of ship he'd seen out of Kaupang. "It's called a
knorr
broader and larger than the
Blood Wing
, with higher gunwales to hold back the waves, and the mast fixed solidly in the hull."

Starkad was several years younger than his brother Jamsgar, but he was one of those who had the genius. When he built even a little fishing boat, he paid complete attention to each plank he cut, its breadth, its thickness. Like Jamsgar, his face was broad and brown as leather, and his eyes were as blue as the summer sky; but where Jamsgar had two handsome blond plaits of hair, Starkad's hair was a rust color, and his square-trimmed beard jutted as stiffly as though carved from rustred whalebone.

Thoryn heard a commotion coming down the path and lost his concentration. "What now?" he muttered, stalking out of the yard. Just as he set foot on the path, the Saxon maiden rounded the bluff. Running headlong downhill, she didn't see him until it was too late to avoid a collision. She crashed into him with enough impact to force a deep
"Huh!"
from him. His arms automatically closed about her—and with the same surge of muscles, he lifted her and swung her around, presenting his back to Blackhair, who was no more than two paces behind her, a pair of sheep shears in his hand. He ran into Thoryn's back. Thoryn bent forward a little, bearing this second collision, which brought his head down into the maiden's fragrant hair.

He straightened as Blackhair ricocheted off him and fell in a sprawl. He felt the maiden fighting for breath in his arms, yet continued to hold her tightly.

Snorri arrived just then. He paused, panted, then reached to help Blackhair to his feet. Thoryn's first thought was that they'd been attempting to molest the maiden, and his stomach clenched with ready anger. He turned to face them, still keeping her in his arms. "What fool trick is this? Speak or, by Odin, I'll skewer you both!"

Snorri tried to answer, but could only speak in infrequent words: "Master . . . she . . . we. . . ." He was too winded.

Inga now appeared on the path, her face flushed with exertion and fury. The maiden began to squirm in his arms, seeking her freedom. But he wasn't ready to let her go, not yet. He had no purpose; but he did have a good hold on her, and he decided to keep it, at least until he found out what was going on.

"Peace be with you, Master," Blackhair wheezed, "but the mistress told us to clip this thrall's hair, and we were going to — except she ran away. She doesn't know her place yet, but she will. She—"

"Mother!"

" — thinks she's too good to do what she'd told like the rest of us —" Blackhair continued in a bullying voice.

"Mother, what's going on?"

The maiden managed to twist her head back enough to say to Blackhair in her native Saxon, "You disgusting worm!"

Thoryn let her slide down his chest, still keeping one arm around her and now clamping his free hand over her mouth. "Silence!" he said, prevailing over everyone at once. He turned to Inga. "You told this . . .
worm
to sheer her head?"

Inga met his glare with a defensive stiffening. "You told me to supervise her. For five days I've watched her flinging that hair about. It's in the way of her work."

"But it will
not
be in the way of her work with the man who buys her."

Inga snapped her mouth shut on whatever she'd been about to say.

"When a man gives eight half-marks of gold for a bed-thrall, he doesn't want a bald woman "

"Hair grows. By spring—"

"By spring she
might
have as much hair as I do." He was having to use some strength to hold her now, which increased his irritation, and without thinking, he caught his fist in her mane to emphasize his point. He gave her head a firm shake. "A man buys a
woman
for his bed, not a shorn ewe."

Inga retreated into the refuge of silence. Her eyes could have iced over the fjord. Without another word she turned and started up the path. The two thrall-men, heads down, promptly followed her.

Thoryn watched them go, fuming. It wasn't until he heard a strained and feminine voice speaking in Saxon —"Please!" —that he looked down to see he still had the maiden gripped against his chest. His hand in her hair was pulling her head back so far that her throat was taut, her chin pointed skyward. The sight of her face tilted so vulnerably up to his hit him like a fist blow. Her beauty was more poignant than spring, a beauty to humble the world. . . .

He heard a chuckle and realized that Starkad had witnessed the whole scene, and the sensations which had struck him as a thunderbolt were immediately twisted into chagrin. It must have shown on his face, for Starkad made a great show of turning back to his own business.