Edin's embrace (32 page)

Such a flat and callous denial of all her pain! His eyes were like the sharp reflection of stars shimmering on water. She felt very young, too young to be a wife to such a man.

He went on, "I don't
want
to leave you, you know. But I'm a Norseman. A seafarer. And my people's jarl. You don't want me to raid, so I have proposed another occupation. I don't know what more I can do to satisfy you."

What more could he do? Why, nothing more than to share his life with her, his every day and night, to be always available to her. Why couldn't she have that?

A door seemed to open. A light slowly sifted through the gloom in her thinking. Why
couldn't
she have that? The answer flooded her like sudden sun. A wild, impossible answer— but when had her life not been filled with wild and impossible things?

In an instant her mind accepted it and turned to the problem of how to convince him of its Tightness. She looked at him. Fear of a new kind made her sight acute, immediate, as if no distance separated them; each line of him was definite.
I love you, I love you!
her heart shouted. He would never agree. A hand clenched inside her, stopping her breath. He
had
to agree! She had to
make
him agree.

No, a small voice whispered, he has to believe it is his own notion.

But she had so little time for so convoluted a method!

Then you must start immediately.

She laid down her babe, very gently, and turned and advanced on her husband, her head dropped to one side. Her anger was gone, replaced by something infinitely more feminine and wily. "You could satisfy me —if you would only look in more than one direction." She went up on her toes to kiss his lips, and went on softly, "I do recall you once told me that you are master here, that your word is law."

He took hold of her waist. "What . . . ?"

But she knew she must not say more. She knew his obstinate nature. Instead, she took his bearded face between her hands. "Lean down, Viking. You are too tall for a small Saxon to kiss well on her tiptoes."

His eyes narrowed. "Why do you look so foxy-faced of a sudden? If you're asking me to give up the sea, woman, to be what I'm not, have a caution, for it will destroy everything we have together."

"I'm not asking you to give up anything. Indeed, that is my point. Give up nothing, Viking, not me, not Bodvar, not even your precious
Miklagardur
"

He frowned as his hands tightened about her, drawing her close against him. But now she pushed away from him, and as he watched, removed her clothing, a layer at a time, slowly. She reclined on the bed, not even trying to conceal her stiff little pink nipples with her arms. She arched her back, posed like a wanton. "Come to me," she said. "It has been far too long and I need you so."

He stood looking at her, then began to remove his swordbelt. His eyes were mingled frost and fire. Keeping his gaze on her, he put his clothes aside, less slowly than she had. In less than a minute he was beside her, firmly taking her provocative breasts in his hands.

It had been a long while, however, and she'd sensed his pent passion. He seemed ready to ravish her, this large and formidable Viking. The knuckles of his hands on her sensitive breasts were covered with scars and cuts; the palms were smooth and bone-hard from hefting death-dealing weapons. He could be a violent spirit, a kind of fury. Her will faltered; her hands went to his chest.

Her momentary misgiving must have shown on her face, for he paused, and then smiled down at her. His fingers, thick and strong, closed around hers and slid her hands from his chest to the back of his neck. "Are you frightened of me again, Shieldmaiden?" he murmured, feeding on her trembling lips. "I know you've had a babe and must be taken tenderly for a while. Hagna drummed as much into my head. Mmm, your breath is so sweet." His hands went around her, felt the smooth flesh of her back, then her breasts again. "Look at your white shoulders, burnished and succulent as fruit. And your stomach, all flat again." In another moment she was surging toward him as his fingers stroked the moisture of the softest and most intimate part of her.

She'd always loved the anticipation, and he drew it out until it was the thinnest, tightest thread, until her want was almost like pain, until she was in an agony of delight. Even then he went on teasing her desire and spinning out his own. She called his name until she was one calling cry. She felt like a Messalina. Wildly, she pulled his head to hers and kissed him, her eyes closed.

Then suddenly he was over her and nudging himself into her, hard but not violent. Once buried, he held her firmly and moved slowly, languorously, like water lapping the hull of a ship. It built, and built, to pure ecstasy, pure bliss.

Afterward they slept, side by side and face to face.
Please God
, she prayed,
let us always sleep so.

***

Inga opened her eyes. It was time. She'd been saving herself, feeling her hatred and bitterness swell within her, but now, without mistake, her hate was ready. She knew it, opened her eyes knowing it.

The thrall girl was cooking their first meal. Her back was to Inga, who sat up quietly in her pallet bed, lifting the covers off without a sound. The girl cooked on, stirring a small iron cauldron of smoking porridge, oblivious.

But then she heard something and turned. "Oh! You startled — "

Inga took three quick steps around her to the firepit and lifted the iron cauldron from its hook. All the fetters that had held her back snapped. Smiling hugely, she swung the cauldron, at the same time giving an awful scream.

The first swing broke the thrall's forearm; her white face went open-mouthed with pain. The second swing caught the side of her head. She fell back, unconscious. Inside Inga was a cyclone. She shielded her eyes, as if from a great light, and swung the cauldron away. It slammed into the wall; porridge splattered everywhere as she turned for the door.

She had nothing to eat all that day, and she had a long way to walk, first through pines and great soars of spruce that stood silently knifing the rainy spring sky, then through a meadow, and finally through ploughed fields ready for planting. The air meanwhile had grown heavy, oppressive, purple. Occasionally she turned and gave a full, strict look behind her, as if she suspected Juliana of getting up off the stamped dirt floor of the hut and following her. But mostly she walked and walked, with nothing to eat. Oddly, though she was hungry, she felt strong, felt she had the strength and energy often men.

***

All this miserable dark day Thoryn had been moody. Something was afoot with his wife, and he didn't understand it. Out on the open sea he could draw meaning from cloud formations, from wind and wave patterns, from ocean currents and ground swells, from sea fogs and the water's color. He could read the movements of the sea birds and certain land birds and the activity of the fish. But he couldn't seem to read his own wife.

The day after he'd resumed their married life, she came down to the shipyard, which she'd done only once before —the time she'd come to make sure he didn't punish Starkad. Suspicious, he left it to the shipwright to show her the
knorr
. And she praised it! "I see it will be a neat, uncluttered ship." Starkad was flattered. Seeing her there with the young man, Thoryn thought that no male lived who could resist the green and moving waters of her eyes. She asked the shipwright questions about every aspect of it, particularly about the little box of a room in the bow that Thoryn would exchange for his bedchamber in the longhouse. "Could you not make it just a bit larger?" she told Starkad. "I would like to think my husband is comfortable while he is away from me. And he will be away so long."

That was two days ago. Tonight, as she fed Bodvar, Thoryn waited in the bed for her. He was even suspicious of her newly aggressive desire for him, the way she turned into his slightest touch with eagerness and drew him into her embrace that was like distilled desire. The way she'd uncovered him this morning and rested her lips against the burning sword his passionate dreams of her had built. His suspicion didn't make him want her less, yet he was rankled to think she was up to some sort of manipulation.

Knowing he was waiting to examine her beauties and make love to her, she seemed purposely to linger and cluck and sing songs to the babe. At last she put him in his cradle, saying just loud enough for Thoryn to hear, "Good night, my gentle Christian son."

She took off her gown and for a moment stood in all her revealed beauty, then blew out the lamp and found her side of the bed. She settled, quiet as embers, and lay with her back to him. For a moment he considered ignoring her. But her sexual pull was so large it conquered him. He moved behind her; his mouth nuzzled the tip of her bare shoulder. "Gentle Christian son?"

"Why not?" she answered. "Why shouldn't I raise him to be Christian, and gentle? As I see it, you'll be gone throughout much of his youth. If Thoryn Kirkynsson says something is to be, there are few men to oppose him — but when he is away, it is his wife's word that will be law. Why shouldn't I teach my son of the Christ child and the Madonna? I'll make him into a man with an open, generous nature, a man imbued with mercy and kindness, a man steady and fair and even-tempered."

"In other words, a man not like his father." He pulled her onto her back. "You'll not start putting up your crosses in this land, or have my folk praying all the time. Whenever a fold takes the priests to be their law-givers, they get to be so gentle it's almost a shame. Even the men are like women then, fainting off every time you shake an axe at them."

"Have I ever fainted at having an axe shaken at — " She stopped speaking to grab his wandering hands. "I think not, my lord, not after the way you've been grumbling at me.

The words had absolutely the opposite effect she intended —assuming he knew what she intended. He pulled her into the center of the bed, exactly where he preferred her, and his hands went exactly where they wanted.

"No"
she said more firmly, brushing him away.

"No?" He reared back. "You say no to me? By Odin the Evil-doer, how soon the wife forgets she was once caught and made a thrall! How soon her face becomes saucy and she forgets! Mayhap a reminder of that is in store."

Edin struggled in earnest now, trying to keep Thoryn from capturing her wrists. As he caught one, she punched at him with the other hand, hitting the solid meat of his upper arm. He could tell the blow hurt her, much more than it hurt him. And then, in spite of her struggle, he had that wrist anyway and forced both her arms over her head to be held in his left hand.

He felt raw and ferocious. In vain did she resist him as he opened her legs with one of his knees, and opened her further with his free hand.

"You have the manners of an untamed animal!"

"I
am
an untamed animal."

But then, within minutes, she was moving to the urging of his fingers.

He was not content. He tormented her, touching her with one fingertip until she seemed as agitated as he was. She tried to move closer to him, tried to encourage him to give better than the scant touch he was permitting her. He could almost see the flames rising in her, forcing her to writhe, to moan.

"You appear to be excited, my lovely thrall-wife," he muttered, his tongue making a broad upward sweep between her breasts. "Can it mean that you wish to serve me again as you used to?" He ran his tongue around one breast, then the other. "I think I will taste the milk of your kindness. Mayhap it will make me a gentle Christian, too" He sucked her yielding flesh into his avid mouth. She pressed herself up into his lips.

"Ah, what a lovely, obedient thrall, to think only of the service due her master. I would have you at once, but your wriggling is giving me so much satisfaction I think I'll wait a while longer."

His fingertip touched her again, and again. He watched her fruitless struggles, listened to her moans swell into cries. If only his hands could get to her soul as easily!

"Thoryn!"

"Have you suffered enough?" He moved over her, releasing her wrists.

"You're a monster."

"You think I'm treating you badly? Well then, let me wind about you and drink all the bad memories from your body's goblet."

He surged into her. She cried out as she welcomed all she could of him into her, saying, "I am a fool come to her senses; I obey you in all matters, I am your thrall."

He kissed her, and kissed her again. "Edin, you drive me crazy. You make me want to ravish you."

She leaned up, her mouth seeking his. "Ravish me, take me, Viking, never release me!"

***

The longhall was dark when Inga entered it, darker than the night without, where the low sky was finally giving way. Raindrops, like glass beads, had fastened to her clothes.

As she moved along the endmost table, she was brought to perfect attention several times by this or that sound of Kirkyn's hand-picked warriors moving in their beds. Each time she stood for agonizing minutes, her heart stalled. But then she gathered her shreds of courage about her and dared to move forward again.

Long familiarity guided her to the kitchen area.

Wood smoke hung in the air. She reached for her favorite knife —and found that someone had moved another knife to that easily-reached position. Someone had been reorganizing her tools, her knives, her kitchen! Let that -one feel the blade in her heart, then!

The knife she found was thinner bladed than her old favorite. It was not the right one, not her knife, which was hiked with ancient walrus-ivory, lustrous black from ages in the deep sea, such as sometimes washed up on the beaches. Well, this one would have to do. With it in her hand, she walked silently over the rushes toward Kirkyn's chamber.

She held back, feeling for a brief sane moment all her desolation and emptiness and terror, then the madness shut down over her once again. The taste of copper filled her mouth. She remembered this all so clearly, this thing she'd dreamed, remembered it as vividly as if she'd actually gone through these motions before.

She slipped the blade between the door and its frame and, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, lifted the heavy bar. Then, just as slowly, holding up what she'd raised, she pushed the door open.

The room was dark. She heard something moving. It was Kirkyn, her Kirkyn, surging over the demon. She gazed in dismay —they were coupling! This was not the way it had been in her dream. Heart-frozen, she stole toward them. Her eyes could just make them out, Kirkyn's broad shoulders above the thrall's smaller frame, his hands sliding from her ribs to her breasts.
Oh, beloved, there is no help for you now
. Inga had tried to warn him that she was a witch, but she had her magic cord wrapped all about him. Inga could see that he was struggling to get free, but the more he strained and struggled, the tighter his fetters became. No, there was no help for him now. She'd have to kill him first, as in the dream, so he couldn't help the Saxon.

The heat of their coupling ignited her own passions. She hesitated a moment only, a dim figure in the dark doorway, then stepped forward and raised the knife high over her husband's moving back.

Edin cried out with Thoryn's next thrust, and in that same instant, to the north of the longhouse, platinum forks of lightning leapt from the sky. In the sudden flash, Edin's eyes flew open, and she saw the shadow of an upraised arm holding a knife over Thoryn's shoulder. As the sound of the great electrical crunch boomed, the knife glinted downward. She reacted at a deeper level than mere thought. With strength she had no idea she owned, she rolled, taking Thoryn with her. The knife plunged into the feather mattress a scant inch from her own back.

"Mother!"

Inga began to scream wildly, shattering the deep silence of the sleeping hall. Her hair was white and wild as she pulled the knife back to drive it down again.

Rolf was there suddenly, behind her. He caught her shoulder. In an instant she turned, and her knife sank into his heart.

She laughed, releasing her hold on the knife handle and stepping back. Rolf stood staring at her. Slowly he sank to his knees. Thoryn caught him before he fell forward and eased him to his side.

"Avenge me, brother," Rolf said, and then he was dead.

Inga had flattened herself against the wall. Thoryn scrambled to light a lamp and pull on his trousers. At the door crowded a clutch of unbelieving Vikings. Edin crouched where she was, clutching the bedcovers to her naked breasts, shaking from having witnessed things so alien as murder and madness. She stared from Rolf to Inga, whose chin was flecked with froth. Another thunderbolt broke nearby, and Edin started in the flash of its uncanny white light. Thoryn bent over his friend again as the long roll of thunder sounded.

Inga's eyes were open wider than any sane woman's eyes ought to be. Her hands kept clenching and unclenching. "Thoryn?" she said. Then said his name again, more matter-of-factly, as if only now recognizing him. "How I loved your father. But he never loved me." Her fingers looked like roots knotted in agony as they fretted in her hair, at her mouth, over her breasts. Her face grimaced. "He never cared. Even you loved her more than me."

"Aye" he said in a voice Edin had never heard before, "I did." He took the hilt of the blade in Rolf's chest in his palm, his knuckles growing white around it; then quickly he pulled it out. He stood, paused for no more than a heartbeat, then stepped forward. "Let us finish this matter as it should be finished." And with an underhanded jab, he plunged the knife into his mother's breast.

"I did love Margaret better," he repeated, so that that was the last thing she heard.

Everything about her drooped —her long white hair, her eyelids, her cheeks, her shoulders, her loose gown. As she sank to the floor, an expression of acceptance fell over her face.

On Thoryn's face was no such look

***

The sea gulls were crying, and Edin could hear the mumble of the ocean as six fierce-bearded shieldmen carried Rolf's body down to the fjord and laid it aboard the longship
Blood Wing
. In the middle of the ship the Vikings had fashioned a pavilion of four posts covered with fabric beneath which was Rolf's couch. His rusty head was pillowed; his hands rested on his chest. In repose, his scarred face had none of the mindless, fanatical ferocity of the Vikings who had burst into Fair Hope Manor so long ago.

The dead man was given everything to make his afterlife comfortable and honorable: utensils, personal articles, adornments, even food. Women went aboard to place around him different kinds of blossoms and fragrant plants. Men piled resinous wood high over all. Thoryn was last aboard. Yellow-bearded, massive of build, he hoisted the sail with his enormously strong hands and, before he leapt onto the dock, laid on the pyre a gold arm ring.

The sun was sinking. Jamsgar, Starkad, and Ottar, three golden chessmen in their swords, helmets, and battle harness, took up tarry torches which they lit at a fire on the strand. They flung these among the dry wood as the lines holding the longship were cast off. The Blood Wing had her anchor aboard, ready to be dropped at the end of Rolf's voyage. The wind of the rising heat ballooned her sail. The sight affected Edin profoundly.

Flames ungulfed the wood, the pavilion, Rolf's body, everything aboard. A breeze began to blow, and the flames grew fiercer. Someone muttered, "Odin has sent a wind to carry him away." The fire raged skyward. The Vikings began to beat their swords and axes upon their shields. The
Blood Wing
sailed blazing toward the savage sea.

She was twenty bowshots away when the red flames leapt the length of her mast and ate up the wool and leather sail; she was thirty bowshots away when the flames licked greedily at the fanged figurehead.

As the burning timbers hissed and sparked into the waters of the fjord, Edin stood with Thoryn. He was dressed in a black sable tunic with his cloak swagged from gilt-silver brooches at his shoulders. His horned helmet was on his head, and Thor's sacred hammer was in his belt. He was the Hammer of Dainjerfjord. Yet he appeared diminished. Some of the aura of largeness was gone out of him.

The dragonship moved on, the fire now ravening down to her waterline. The warrior aboard her was nothing but cinders and ashes, yet the
Blood Wing
still flared like a stupendous furnace. She had seen wars and wounds, hard deeds and death; she seemed to scream,
I was not made for defeat!
Even so, she began to wallow, a welter of fire and smoke and sizzling steam. And at last she slipped below the surface, just as the distant sun slipped from sight. The charred, embering sea dragon swooped down into her true domain with Rolf Kali's corpse in the scales of her wings.

The falls cascaded along the sides of the fjord. The men in their conical helmets, and the women in their finery listened and were silent. Finally someone coughed, mayhap feeling the smoke from the longship hanging bitterly in his throat. That sound seemed to set the others free. For a while there would be nothing worth saying; they knew that well enough, yet they came to Thoryn and said what it was suitable to say, in voices deferentially subdued. Then one by one, they drifted away, until only Thoryn and Edin stood on the dock in the purple dusk.

When it was full dark, she turned to her husband. He was shadow-edged, his beard stroked by the silver of the new-risen moon. He was without sleep, which gave his face an edge of roughened grief. She knew in that moment what he would look like in old age. And she loved him unbearably. She said, "My lord, you have done the duty of friendship. Now you must go inside and eat and rest."

A heavy shudder shook him. The breeze that smelled of ashes and salt lifted his hair. He said at last, "Had I done my duty sooner, my ship-brother would be alive." He stood quite still, like a big cat listening, then went on. "Had I acted as I should have from the beginning, I would have killed my mother when first I learned she was my father's murderess. That heinous crime cried for revenge. But I had a thrall, a gentle creature who wanted me to be a gentler man." He glanced down at her; his eyes looked at her as though from a great distance inside his head. "I was in love with her, and wanted her to love me in return. So I changed myself, I questioned my ways, and ignored my duty. And because of it my friend, who was only trying to serve me as he was sworn to do, will not travel to
Miklagardur
at my side."

Edin saw that he'd worked out what had taken place, and none of it was in his, or her, favor.

"What have you wrought in me, wife? Am I a Norseman anymore? A Norseman doesn't question when he should act. His courage doesn't hesitate to do what must be done."

"Then a Norseman must be more than mortal."

He turned away abruptly. "He must be more than what you would have me be —you who have tried to teach me naught but southern gentleness and Christian passivity and good conscience."

"And love."

"It was love that killed my father and Margaret, and Rolf— and even my mother."

"That was madness and mayhem, not love. The habit of love cuts through confusion and somehow, somehow, contrives a way out of every difficulty."

He said scornfully, "Even now trying to teach me, Saxon?"

"He who will not be taught can never learn."

He shrugged dismissively. "I am a barbarian. You surely cannot expect much from me along those lines."

She stiffened herself. "You can be barbaric. I myself have seen such bloody-mindedness in you that I have been appalled. Yet there is strength, determination, and pride among your basic traits. And these are things to build upon. There is hope for you."

"Hope," he said scornfully. "Hope."

***

There are moments in a man's life when he welcomes folk about him, so that they may comfort him. But there are other moments when he wants no one but himself. Thoryn was such a man come up against such a moment. He stood quite alone for many days after Rolf's fiery funeral. For the first time since he'd become a man, he went without a sword, without any sign that he'd ever been a fighting man.

Mostly he walked the edges of the fjord that late spring, the warm sun beating down on him. He stayed near the water, the same water upon which, in a cockleshell of a longship, he'd often ventured out. He wondered now where he'd ever found the courage. He certainly felt no courage anymore. Rolf's death seemed to have opened a curtain behind which he now saw that he too could die. The knowledge filled him with more fear than he'd ever known.