The Lost Tales of Mercia (20 page)

But now was not the time to wonder how these
young men dared cheer against him. He would have to ponder that
later.

Tosti continued to dash about the field,
hopping from one spot to the next as if he would win by dizzying
his opponent. Canute just glared, eyes flicking along with Tosti’s
movements, and waited for him to make a real advance. He took slow
and steady breaths, intent on gathering his energy while Tosti
wasted his.

A bird flew through the sky, slicing the
glaring sunshine into pieces. Birds were often a sign from the
gods.

Canute looked up.

While Canute was distracted, Tosti struck
again—this time on Canute’s shoulder. Canute cried out, more from
rage than from pain, for the blow was not very hard. Tosti drew
back just as Canute tried to swipe back at him. This left him in a
vulnerable position.

Tosti smacked Canute’s rump with the flat of
his wooden sword, as if with a paddle, then hopped quickly
away.

Canute was so shocked by the humiliation of
the blow that he stood petrified for a moment, red flushing his
torso and face as if he’d been sunburned in a matter of seconds.
Tosti had just …
spanked
him! He could have done it for no
other reason than to make fun of Canute. To win the spar, one of
them had to knock the other over. So Tosti had nothing to gain from
such a ridiculous move.

Meanwhile, the small crowd exploded with
laughter and jeers.

“Oh, look at the great Sweynsson now!”

“Where’s Thorkell the Tall when you need
him, Canute?”

Seeing through a haze of red, Canute looked
dizzily at the faces around him. Is that what they really believed?
Did they truly think that without his great fathers and guardians,
he was a nobody?

A shout of rage ripped out of his throat, so
strong it silenced most of the laughter. Canute didn’t notice, for
at last he was advancing on his opponent. He lifted his sword high,
pulling his feet from the mud at last to run towards Tosti. The
look on his face must have been frightening enough, for Tosti froze
with terror. At the last moment, he lifted his sword to block
Canute’s onslaught, but his stance was not ample; Canute’s sword
knocked Tosti’s aside, then it smacked him hard across the side of
the head.

Tosti’s eyes rolled and he crumpled to the
earth, his energy cut off like a waterfall dammed from above.

Everyone around Canute grew quiet. Soon he
heard nothing but his own heart thumping in his chest, increasing
in tempo. He had not meant to hit Tosti quite so hard. Why didn’t
he get up?

He felt the unfamiliar feeling of guilt
flowing through him. Before today, he had looked up to Tosti,
secretly. He had been excited about getting this chance to spar
with him. He had anticipated an exciting and enlightening
competition. This … this was certainly not what he’d had in mind.
The possibility that Tosti might not get up filled Canute with
dread. He wanted Tosti’s respect, not Tosti’s death.

Unable to help himself, he knelt down and
shook Tosti’s clammy shoulder. “Hey,” he said. He felt the intense
stares of the other Jomsvikings bearing down on him, but he tried
his best to ignore them. “Hey, wake up!”

Slowly, Tosti’s eyes came open. He looked
dazed. As his lids parted, Canute studied his deep gray irises for
signs of consciousness. His eyes were a strange color, like stones
sparkling with silver grains in the sunlight. But that mattered
not. Canute gave him another hard shake.

“Are you alive or aren’t you?” the Viking
prince demanded.

Tosti reached up suddenly and thrust
Canute’s hand away from his shoulder. “I’m fine, no thanks to you,
you clumsy oaf.”

Canute clenched his jaws and stood up.
Everyone was still staring at him, waiting for some sort of
response. Well let them have it, he thought as his lip curled. “Let
that be a lesson to you all,” he snapped. In the silence, he was
all too aware of how high-pitched his own voice seemed. His voice
did not boom like his father’s or Thorkell the Tall’s. But it had
its own strength, its own tenor. “Insult me again, and I’ll pay you
in kind.”

He threw his wooden sword into the grass,
then turned and stormed away.

For a reason he could not explain, he felt
even more humiliated now than he had before.

*

At the night meal, a great number of
aspiring young warriors sat near Canute, but very few spoke to him.
He chewed angrily on his meat as he surveyed the faces around him.
The only young men sitting here were the ones who wanted to sap
from his power and renown. None of them cared to engage in
conversation with him, nor ask him how his day had gone. They only
seemed to exchange such trivialities with one
another
.

One of them bragged that on a recent trip to
Jom, the nearby town that the fortress of Jomsborg protected, he
had lain with an eager woman. Women were not generally allowed into
the Jomsborg stronghold, so encounters with the opposite sex were
rare. All the other young warriors hung on his every word. Canute
scoffed.

The sound drew some furious glances. The
young man, Fromund, who had been the one to lie with a woman in
Jom, dared to speak. “What’s wrong, Canute?” he said. “Not lain
with a woman yet?”

“Lain? No.” He threw his meat-stripped bone
into the center of the table. “Any woman I have, I will
take
. And that should go for the rest of you, as well. If
you want sighing maidens as your bedfellows, you have chosen the
wrong profession.”

A few of the boys laughed nervously. More of
them stared at him with incredulous looks on their faces. Fromund,
meanwhile, outright frowned. “I guess that means you haven’t,” he
said. “You obviously don’t know what I’m talking about.” Some of
the other boys snickered.

“Like hell!” snarled Canute. His voice was
harsher than he intended, and everyone flinched as he dropped his
fist on the table with a loud thump. His blood roared in his ears.
Even he didn’t know why he was so upset. Why was everything today
going so wrong? He stared in a panic at the faces around him,
feeling as if they were all disgusted. Why should they be? “I, uh …
I kissed a girl once, in Jom, after she winked at me. It was … nice
enough.” In truth, as he recalled, it had been quite awkward.

The stares on him did not relent; they only
blinked a few times, to return even fiercer than before.

“You’re all a bunch of dimwitted idiots,” he
growled, and stood up. Even though he had a few bones on his plate
left to clean up, he walked away. He’d lost his appetite.

On his way out of the hall, he glimpsed
Tosti a few tables away. Even more unexpectedly, Tosti looked up
and stared back at him. Canute felt a physical jolt go through him
as their gazes locked. Then he shivered and hurried out even faster
than before.

Outside, he leaned against the walls of the
hall, listening to the muffled echoes of the laughter and
camaraderie through the wood. His fingers pulled angrily at his own
tunic, the red fabric soft and tight-woven, heavily embroidered
with golden thread and far more beautiful than the tunics of any
other Jomsvikings. But for some reason, he wished that he could rip
it off. His teeth ground against each other as he reflected upon
how the other young men had treated him today, and how their
behavior grew worse and worse the longer Thorkell the Tall was away
in Engla-lond.

His heart ached as he thought of Thorkell,
for he missed his foster-father terribly. What would Thorkell have
to say about today’s events? Would he be pleased by the way Canute
had handled Tosti’s insult? Or would he have disapproved of
Canute’s wild “temper?” He reprimanded Canute often for his temper,
saying that no leader should be prone to rash decisions.

Perhaps Thorkell would comfort him, at
least, with the reminder that kings were not meant to mingle with
all the other boys like one of their friends. It was his place to
stand apart, to remind them all of their place, and thus his
own.

“Hey.”

He jolted and turned to face the intruder.
Under the bright glare of a yellow moon stood Tosti, his gray eyes
unreadable in the dark light. He swayed slightly, his body ever
moving, his long braids swishing back and forth across his lithe
shoulders.

“Hello,” said Canute. He forced a thick
swallow down his throat. Why did he feel nervous? He had nothing to
apologize for, and yet he fought the urge to say
I’m sorry
,
nonetheless. “Good spar today,” he managed at last. It was a
lie.

“You think so?” A strange laugh came out of
Tosti’s throat, chiming and carefree. “Don’t think I’ve ever been
hit in the head that hard before. Totally blacked out for a few
seconds.”

Once again, Canute bit back an apology.
“You’re lucky you experienced it when you did, then. It might
happen to you a lot in battle, when your life is on the line.”

“Hah.” The sound from Tosti’s throat was not
quite so pleasant this time. A long silence followed it.

Canute felt unexpectedly awkward. Tosti must
have come out here and addressed him for a reason. But what? If
he’d intended to say something, he must have lost his courage, for
his swaying had turned to fidgeting, and he glanced all around
himself as if he didn’t know what to focus on. Whatever the case,
Canute felt as if it was his responsibility to fill the
silence.

“You’re ... you’re quite good, you know.”
His own words surprised him.

“What’s that?”

“I said: you’re a very good fighter. You
move quickly, and you’re difficult to predict.” Canute forced
himself to look Tosti in the eyes. At last the testy youth stilled
somewhat. His face looked surprisingly elegant right now, the lines
of his lips and jaws glowing in the moonlight. “We should practice
together more often.”

“Oh? So you can hit me in the head
again?”

“Only if you let me get away with it.”

It was a challenge, and for a moment he was
not sure how Tosti would take it. But then his cheeks lifted with a
smile. “Not a chance.”

“We’ll see, then.”

“Yes we will, Sweynsson.”

Canute repressed an “oomph” as Tosti reached
out and jabbed his shoulder; but the gesture was playful. As Tosti
turned and scampered away, he sent a whoop of unrestrained joy into
the darkness. Canute found a smile on his own face.

*

The next day they roamed the land beyond the
fortress together.

The woods were sparse, full of old pines and
white stones. But the dappled shade held golden surprises as Canute
ran through the undergrowth. He felt every rock through the leather
of his shoes, sharp and tingling; his short, thick hair lashed his
face until it stung; his breath began to burn in his chest, and yet
he felt invigorated. Tosti had challenged him to a race, and of
course he could not say no.

Out of the corner of his eyes he could see
Tosti, flitting through the trees like a bird’s flapping wings,
pulling ahead step by step. But this only pushed Canute to run
harder, and a determined sneer went up his face. He drew an
estimate in his head of Tosti’s strengths and weaknesses. Tosti was
faster now, but he would tire soon, and then Canute would pull
ahead.

Tosti did not let it come to that, however.
With a howl of victory, he topped the next rise and stopped there,
as if deciding this was the finish line.

Canute caught up to him soon, glaring. He
struggled to breathe amply through his nose, though his nostrils
flared with the strain, while Tosti gasped freely through his
grinning mouth.

“Did you wake up with stones in your ankles,
Sweynsson?”

Canute ignored him and glanced at the new
landscape beneath them. The water level was high in the land below
the slope; long flat stones stretched over the earth, smoothed by
the shallow streams flowing around them, gleaming as if with a
permanent layer of water. It was difficult to discern what was
solid and what was not. “This is a poor choice for a playing
field.”

“I pick this one, you pick the next
one.”

“No.” Tosti looked at Canute with
irritation, his curvy lips drooping with an uncharacteristic frown.
Canute did not like it when Tosti frowned as much as when he
smiled. He lightened his tone. “Let’s do it the other way around.
We fight here first.”

“On this hill?”

“Yes.” Canute was pleased with himself. He
thought this would be another chance to teach Tosti a lesson.

And as soon that they began fighting, he
confirmed his suspicions. Tosti struggled to maintain his unbounded
energy while on either side of him, a slope threatened to drop him.
He hopped and poked at Canute with his wooden sword, but every
large movement made him struggle to regain his balance. Often he
had to look down in order to find stable footing, and at these
moments Canute struck at him, again and again and again.

At last he plunged the blunt tip of his
wooden weapon against Tosti’s midriff, who promptly tipped
backwards.

Tosti dropped his sword, hands lifting and
flapping desperately in a last attempt to right himself. But it was
too late: he was about to fall down the slope.

As he fell, he reached out and grabbed
Canute’s outstretched sword, gripping until he no doubt acquired
several splinters. Stubbornly, Canute refused to let go, even as
all of Tosti’s weight transferred to its tip.

“You—son of a—
bitch!
” cried the
Viking prince, as at last he lost his own balance and plunged
headlong down the slope next to Tosti.

The slope was not particularly steep, but
they rolled in the hopes of slowing their falls to a stop. Worst of
all, sharp stones lay interspersed along the soil, which jabbed and
pulled at their tunics while littering their flesh with bruises. By
the time he came to a stop at the base Canute’s blood roared with
fiery fury; as soon as he made it to his feet he looked over at
Tosti and resisted the urge to kick him while he was down.