Rough and Ready (3 page)

Despite the condition, Deer Haven was a welcome sight. "This will do as our new home," Hilda pronounced. Astrid, Elise, and Frida dropped to their knees and said prayers of thanks. Dagne wept with relief. But Inge, ever the one to have a sense of humor, chuckled. "By your leave, milady," she said, but without waiting for a response, picked up a sharp rock, which she used to carve runic symbols onto a short plank, which she propped against the edge of the drawbridge.

It read: "Any man who dares enter here uninvited will leave with a shriveled manpart."

"Well said!" Hilda clapped her hands in appreciation.

They all laughed then, even Dagne.

We will be all right now, Hilda decided. If we can see mirth in the midst of our tragedy, we have the mettle to survive. This will be our sanctuary. In fact, she stepped forth and took the stone from Inge, adding two words. Later, the same plaque would be nailed into the restored fortress, and it would read: THE SANCTUARY

Any man who dares enter here uninvited

will leave with a shriveled manpart.

Tsk, tsk, tsk! You couldn't take them anywhere!…

"AViking we will go, aViking we will go, heigh-ho the dairy-o, aViking we will go."

"I for one am in the mood for a little pillaging."

"Where ate all those buxom, blonde-haired Scandinavian women we were promised?

With names like Ingrid or Ursula?"

"I want a battle-axe. Forget an AK-47, I want a big-ass, friggin' battle-axe."

"Hot damn, it's cold. Pass me my fur mantle. Ha, ha, ha!"

"Where the hell's my plunder? Did you take my plunder?"

"I think I'll do my hair in war braids today."

"Who says Vikings didn't wear horned helmets? I really, really want a horned helmet."

"What's the name of your sword?"

"Johnson."

"What's yours?"

"Mr. Big."

All this ribbing was being delivered to Torolf by his four teammates as they stood on a reproduction of a Viking dragonship on a godforsaken fjord in Norway.

A tourist trap, to be sure.

"No kidding, Max, let's go get a mug of beer… uh, mead… and forget this time-travel crap."

I wish I could.

"Yeah. You need to get your ashes hauled, if you ask me."

Nobody asked you. "Getting laid isn't the answer to everything."

Four sets of eyes turned to look at him.

He grinned and shook his head at the hopelessness of arguing with the blockheads. There were close to two hundred members of SEAL Team Thirteen, but these guys had gone through BUD/S training with him. When down range, these were the guys he wanted watching his six. But when they were inactive—as they were now after five days in western Norway—all that energy had to be directed somewhere. Unfortunately, he was the chosen target.

They were pissing him off big-time, and they knew it. So, he saluted them with his middle finger.

They just laughed. No surprise there.

The wind had died down about a half hour ago, and the longboat had pretty much stopped moving. So, the red and white striped sails had been lowered.

"Out oars!" Svein Olafsson, the pretend captain of this tourist longship, yelled out. Picking up their oars, twelve sets of pretend Viking sailors came to attention. They looked like idiots, probably college students, in their pseudo-Viking duds, designed by some dingbat Calvin Klinesson, no doubt.

Sitting

on sea chests, they began to row in unison. They may have been dressed like no Vikings he'd ever known, with belt buckles that would rival a rodeo rider's and tunics and braies made of ultrasuede, but the rhythmic sound of oars creaking in oarlocks was not unfamiliar to Torolf.

As the longship plied easily through Freyjafjord, Torolf looked for familiar landmarks, to no avail, even though he'd traveled here with his father and brother Ragnor when they were youthlings. Everything looked different now.

Even

worse, two days past, Torolf had stood on the very spot where Norstead, his family estates, had once been located. There was a shopping mall there now.

Even

so, Torolf had dropped to his knees in the parking lot, praying for deliverance back to the past, much to the amusement of passersby. JAM had helped by sprinkling some holy water on the concrete. Who knew that JAM carried holy water around, just in case there was an emergency!

"Pssst," Cage whispered, elbowing him to draw his attention back to the present.

"The good captain, he is throwin' eye daggers our way."

Hah! Everyone was looking at them funny, Cage most of all, with his shoulder-length hair, little gold loop earring, and stupid cowboy hat and cowboy boots. You'd think he was from Texas… or Forty-second Street… not Louisiana.

On

the other hand, maybe it was JAM in cammies and an olive-drab T-shirt with the logo "Navy SEAL" on it who was drawing all the looks; that logo was always a chick magnet, not that the good captain would care about that. Pretty Boy wore his NASCAR jacket, also a chick magnet. He and Geek were dressed normally in jeans.

Captain Svein, as he'd told them to call him, even though his real job was a professor at an Oslo university, frowned at him and his SEAL buddies for standing apart from the rest of the tourist group. "The Norsemen were masters of the seas during the Viking age. With good cause, they were called sea wolves."

Pretty Boy made a wolf howling noise.

A mug of mead was beginning to sound good to Torolf, too.

"With fair winds on the open seas, the high-riding longships could travel at incredible speeds with sails, called 'cloaks of the wind,' unfurled. But, when the wind went down, as it has now, the Viking sailors needed to start rowing the vessels, which were so light they were able to travel easily on shallow fjords."

On and on Olafsson droned, and Torolf scanned the passing fjord shoreline, searching for clues. The landscape and geographical boundaries had been different long ago. In fact, ancient Norway had been twice as large as it was today. And, yet, they were the same. His heart and his memory told him so.

"Norway is a land of snow-capped mountains and great, barren plateaus," the tour guide pointed out. "Its coastline is broken by hundreds of fjords, each with its own personality. They were carved out by glaciers in prehistoric times.

Despite

its bleakness, there are picturesque bays and moorlands. Some contend the most beauty is in the forbidding terrain."

Torolf nodded in agreement.

"Although the Scandinavians all spoke different dialects, they could apparently understand each other," Olafsson explained, after a question from one of the visitors. "And, actually, Old Norse, which in no way resembles modern Norwegian, was very similar to the English of that time."

Blah, blah, blah. Let's go back to port. I might as well accept that reverse time travel just isn't going to happen.

"Were they really vicious rapers and pillagers?" one elderly gentleman asked.

"The early histories were written by clerics who had a prejudiced view of the non-Christian invaders. In fact, Vikings were adventurers, settlers, artisans, and traders. Their law codes were the basis for our modern judicial system.

Their sagas bespoke a great love of storytelling and humor."

"I heard they were hunks," one young woman commented, probably a girlfriend of one of the college boy rowers. She wasn't blonde or buxom, but she wasn't unattractive, despite the tongue piercing. He noticed Pretty Boy watching her, too. He would probably be hitting on her before they were back on land.

The professor/captain smiled at her question. "Actually, the Viking men were taller and better looking than the average men of that time."

Torolf smirked at his friends.

"Plus, they bathed more often than other folks. No wonder so many women of so many different lands welcomed them into their beds! There's no doubt that they enriched the races of the countries where they settled."

"Did you bathe a lot?" Cage asked.

"How many races did you enrich?" Pretty Boy wanted to know.

"This is really interesting," Geek said. He was soaking up the touristy lecture like a sailor at his first strip show.

What a… geek!

"Ya know, we Cajuns are a lot like Vikings," Cage said.

"I'll bite," Torolf said. "How are Cajuns like Vikings?"

"They're both drop-dead gorgeous, sexy as sin, have a great sense of humor, and women love 'em."

His remark was met with snickers.

"Besides, like my maw maw always says, 'The truth is in the roux.'"

"What the hell does roux have to do with Vikings and Cajuns?" Torolf would undoubtedly regret asking the question.

"Roux is the heart of most Cajun dishes. At heart, Vikings and Cajuns are good lovers, husbands, fathers, sons."

"That is the most half-assed logic I've ever heard." JAM liked there to be an explanation for everything. It was probably why he was no longer a Jesuit wannabe.

Just then, Torolf noticed something. "Oh, my God!" He shoved his friends aside so he could see better over the side of the longboat. Like a well-oiled machine, his teammates went on immediate alert, joining him in a search for danger, scanning the ship and the quickly passing landscape. They knew what to do in a crisis and how to work together without words. In a situation like this, explanations took precious time away from action.

Torolf shouted to the tour guide, "Hey! Watch yourselves. We're entering shallow waters, and there's a bend or obstruction up ahead." He rushed to the helmsman manning the rudder, and the idiot wouldn't let go. Quickly, he clipped him on the chin, knocking him out, and tried desperately to turn the rudder in the other direction.

Cage and Geek grabbed oars from some stunned "Vikings" and attempted to reach the front of the ship to forestall a crash.

JAM and Pretty Boy were perched on a gunwale, about to dive overboard and secure the anchor.

But it was too late.

There was a loud crashing noise, and everyone standing was thrown off their feet by the impact.

He glanced up from his prone position, and as if in slow motion, he felt the longboat teeter from side to side in its now dry-docked state and then tip over.

Before he could react to that catastrophe, something even worse happened. The heavy yardarm and mast came crashing down over them. Under the massive, heavy sails, he heard screams, cracking wood, cursing, more screams, piercing pain in his head and shoulders…

And then silence.

So, this is how it ends, he thought. In death.

Men... can't live with them, can't live without them...

"We need men!" shouted Britta the Big, chief archer of The Sanctuary and head of its guard.

Truth to tell, they had only ten axes, one broadsword, which hardly anyone could lift, fifteen shepherd's crooks converted into lances, long-handled cooking ladles, pokers, wooden clubs, slingshots, and bows and arrows. Every woman practiced weaponry regularly, in case of an attack, under Britta's supervision.

"Not for me," Britta explained in an aside to Hilda. "I speak for the others."

Britta's chant was taken up by the sixty other women in the inner courtyard of The Sanctuary. "We need men! We need men!"

Hilda put her face in her hands, counted to ten silently, then said with forced patience, "Men are scurvy curs…" Stig and his new bitch growled at her feet with doggie consternation. "We have flourished these past five years without men."

"It matters not. Now they need men," Britta asserted.

Hilda flung her hands out with disbelief. "Truly, Britta? Must needs we cower under a man's shield for protection?"

Britta, who was as tall as a man, with wide shoulders and muscled arms, stiffened. "Nay, not for our defenses."

All of the women sat on the ground in a five-deep circle under the warm autumn sun. The law speaker, Kelda Sigundottir, had already recited the Thing law codes of their female community, calling on Forseti, god of justice, for guidance.

A

Thing was held to discuss problems and settle disputes. Minor quarrels had already been resolved today by the debating of both sides of the issues. Two women fighting over a fox fur pelt. A girl negligent in her kitchen duties.

An

argument over which was the best recipe for curing cheese curds for skyr. A game of hnefatafl that went badly, resulting in one black eye and a bloody shin.

Weevils in a sack of flour. A smelly garderobe.

It had been five years since Hilda arrived at Deer Haven, now The Sanctuary.

The

first year had been brutal. Often they had feared either freezing to death in the cold fortress or starving to death or being discovered by Steinolf and his comrades-in-cruelty. More escapees had made their way to safety, increasing their numbers. Only occasionally did they have to fend off invaders, small bands of errant knaves. Steinolf was busy grabbing lands in surrounding countries.

Hilda acted as head of this community, much like an abbess in a nunnery or a chief crone in a witches' coven, which was the word they had spread to keep men away. But, really, everyone was equal here, all assigned duties for which they were best suited.

Now, after all this healing and prosperity, they want men here? Hah! I will become a Valkyrie afore that happens! "Frida, do our hunters not bring you enough woodcock, grouse, geese, hares, foxes, reindeer, duck, plover, and the occasional boar? Do the fisherwomen not catch you enough pike, roach, rudd, sea bream, perch, eel, herring, cod, haddock, ling, mackerel, smelt, and lampreys?"

A blush crept over the cook's face. And speaking of bounty, Frida was now the size of a small warhorse due to that bounty.

"Inge, will the goats produce more milk or the rams swive more sheep to increase our flocks if a man were tending them?"

"You know they will not," Inge replied with a touch of affront. Inge, who was the same age as Hilda at twenty and eight, was in charge of all the animals, her original flock of one ram and two ewes having multiplied into four rams, twenty ewes, and twenty-five lambs, not to mention the ten goats they kept for milk.

"Dost envision Viking men tending your gardens, Dagne? Or playing your lute on a long winter's eve?"