The Reluctant Berserker (7 page)

A hand tugged weakly at his hair. “Up,” said Anna, “and get in. It must be late afternoon—you can sleep for two hours or more before they’ll need you, and nothing to be gained by doing it on your knees.”

So Leofgar took off everything that was wet and, rolling into the nest of blankets, put an arm around Anna’s hips, tucked his face into his master’s flank, ignored the brief opening and closing of the door behind him, and fell asleep, determined to wake up as a better man.

The feast passed in a blur of topaz candlelight and deep, rich colour. Leofgar’s sleep had not been nearly enough to relieve his bone-deep tiredness, but it was enough to give the evening a dreamlike quality, in which only the music felt solid. Had the walls of the hall trembled and dissolved into chiselled stone, showing him entombed in an elvish mound, he would not have been surprised. Indeed, they did shimmer in his sight like a lady’s veil in a breeze, but so too did the floor, and his own hands, and anything on which he tried to turn his eye.

The night was a long swirl of mead and inquiring eyes. He lost track of the friendly faces of warriors and maidens both. One red-headed fellow stuck in his mind only for having the same colouring as the fire, and for handing him cup after cup of beer until the carved roof beams seemed to come alive and the wolves on the rafters started leaning down and watching him. If any of his listeners noticed his flubbed notes and trembling fingers, or—worse than that—the absurd tears of exhaustion and gratitude he had to keep blinking from his eyes, they were too courteous to mention it.

The hastily embroidered praise song for Tatwine prompted a banging on the tables so loud he almost thought it thundered, and it was the lord himself who did him the honour of supporting him back to his master’s side. Unwinding his bracelet of plaited silver, Tatwine fastened it around his wrist. Dimly, Leofgar realized this was a momentous thing—the first time he had been the evening’s master, the first time he had been given the reward, rather than having it, and the compliments, go to Anna. The thought had a sweet taste at first, but soon turned so bitter he wished he could spit it out.

At some time in the evening, a servant had brought Anna a platter of good things from the feast, buttered worts, meats and bread, and king cake rich with fruit. It sat untasted beside the bed, for the old man was asleep. Silently as he could, Leofgar joined him.

It took two weeks before the overwhelming kindness began to trouble Leofgar. A glad welcome, he was used to—though not always one as wholehearted as this. What he was not used to were the hints that they should stay. “When this frost eases,” said the red-headed man, whose name he had now learned was Hunlaf, “in the spring, you should come with us to catch the early geese. I’ve heard that a skillful piper can call down the birds to the hunters, isn’t that so?”

Leofgar was sitting by the fire with him, helping—with his dextrous fingers—the other man to wind cord around the fletchings of his arrows. He shifted, so that the friendly hand the warrior dropped on his thigh landed on his knee instead, and said, “I would be glad to.”

He had promised Anna, after all, to cause no more trouble, told himself that this would be the refuge his master dreamed of in his old age. He could not be sure he had just been insulted. Hunlaf could simply be one of those men who must crowd close and touch everyone with whom they talked. Besides, he was one man, and easy enough to avoid.

Nevertheless, noticing Tatwine’s disapproving eye on him, Leofgar cut the conversation short after that, and went to speak to Lady Edith, the lord’s mother, from whom he was learning the history of Tatwine’s family—their generations back to Scild and through him back to Woden. In payment for this lavish hospitality, he could at least make an account of his host’s line, something that would make the dry subject matter stick in the mind and let all Tatwine’s tenants know of his connection to royalty.

Edith was happy to reminisce for an hour, with her distaff tucked under her elbow. Her spindle lowered like a spider towards the ground, climbed back up as she wound the new thread on, lowered again as she spun, her movements so practiced they carried on flawlessly while her mind ranged back over years and miles, back into the old days on their distant homeland, into forests pregnant with gods.

Leofgar made himself useful, transferring wool from a full spindle to a niddy-noddy and thence into balls, and gradually he found himself in the centre of the lady’s women, all peacefully sewing or spinning together, taking up the stories like dropped stitches from their lady’s hands and spinning them out, correcting or elaborating.

After a little while they began disappearing to the bower house, searching through chests and coming back with tapestries that told other stories, half-remembered. They would puzzle over them together, and he would commit to mind what they agreed was the closest truth, and wind it into poetry as they worked.

It was so comfortable and useful a thing that, after seeing his master tended to—neither better nor worse, able to rise from his bed only to sit by the fire an hour and then return—Leofgar came back the next day, and the day after that.

On Sunday, after a morning in the small wooden church, packed in and warmed by many bodies, Tatwine captured him, still with the smell of attar of roses in his nostrils, and prevented him from going back. Leofgar looked at the painting, on the far wall, of the tree of life that was Christ, and thought many things—chiefly that Tatwine had come to ask them to leave, as was long, long overdue. He wondered how he could beg the man to at least let Anna stay.

Over the past days, winter had eased its grip a little, and long slanting spears of rain had washed away most of the snow, softening the ground beneath. It had been dim and cheerless and bleak. Today, though, the rain had dried and a wintery sun was making the wet earth gleam. The paintings of vine scroll around the door were so very green they almost hurt his eyes, and the purple grapes looked full of wine.

“Walk with me,” said Tatwine, “while we may. There is something I want you to see.”

Tatwine’s holding lay in the gentle hills near Lachesslei, with common forest bordering it to the north, and everywhere else the prosperous signs of good husbandry. Coming out of the gates, they turned west and walked clockwise around the partly frozen moat. A swathe of grass and scrubby trees led down to the graveyard. Here a fleet of graves lay like upturned boats with long grass growing over them. Most floated in the stream of the sun’s passage, facing from east to west, but faint discolourations in the grass, so old they were no longer mounded at all, faced north to south. Amid these, either in challenge or in hope of doing them good, a preaching cross had been erected, and in a landscape of faded grasses, dun mud, dun trees against an off-white sky, the cross looked like a window into a better world, scarlet, azure and gold with gilt and paint.

Tatwine led him—slowly, as though he supposed Leofgar not fully recovered, or perhaps as though he was gathering his thoughts—to the side of one of the larger mounds. There, a sprig of holly with bright red berries had been laid down, and so Leofgar knew that whoever was inside had been beloved and was remembered.

“She was but a girl when we wed,” said Tatwine, looking down with his hard face rueful. The lines at the corners of his mouth stood out like gashes, and his hands were clenched around belt and sword.

“Your wife?” Leofgar encouraged him in a soft voice, because it was clear enough to him that this was something the lord needed to say, and it was some small measure of repayment to help him say it.

Tatwine smiled, tilting his head towards Leofgar without taking his eyes off the grave. “Her father and I arranged it.” He waved towards the distant hills, where ox teams had almost finished ploughing the narrow strips of fields. “Her dowry would include the arable land my steading had so badly needed. She did not wish to come. I was not to her fancy, this old man her father’s age, boiled hard by life like a leather cup. Yet she did as her father asked, and I was as good to her as I knew how. For a time I believe we were both happy. I was, at least.”

Silence, and Leofgar came in on the beat. “What happened?”

“She died giving birth to our first child. The child died also.”

So Leofgar knew that the folds of Tatwine’s face did not conceal fury, but grief. “The weary spirit cannot withstand fate. Nor does a rough or sorrowful mind do any good. So I, often wretched and sorrowful, far from noble kinsmen, have had to bind in fetters my inmost thoughts, since long years ago I hid my lord in the darkness of the earth,” he chanted, part of him caught up in Tatwine’s sorrow, part thinking of Anna and the fate he was finding increasingly hard to ignore.

“Indeed.” Tatwine unclenched his hands with clear effort, frowning at them as though he had not meant to display so much unseemly emotion. “It has been a hard year, with this like a stone on my back, and a hungry winter. My days and my nights have been like wounds, one atop the other. So I take your coming here, on the holy feast, as a gift from God. I have prayed for a friend to whom I might unbind my thoughts. Here you are.”

Leofgar caught himself in the act of stepping backwards, turned it into a fidget he hoped would look more like one innocently surprised by intense words than like a man preparing to flee. Why should he flee? What was there in this that touched his skin like fire and made him recoil? Why was he, as Anna often lamented, so cursed to think ill of all?

He composed his face into a smile. “I am…overwhelmed, my lord. You do me too much honour. I am nothing but an itinerant musician. Not worthy to speak to you except through intermediaries, and only to tell you how grateful I am for your kindness. I am not of a quality that could ever hope for friendship with such as you.”

Tatwine smiled. “That, I think, is for me to decide.” He seized Leofgar by the elbow, his strong fingers almost crushing the whistle that Leofgar routinely carried up his sleeve—it was for that reason, and for that reason alone, that Leofgar flinched.

Tatwine steered him further downhill, to where the river that fed the moat emerged and spread into a wide, still pond, full of the sinuous shadows of grey fish. There they came out onto a short boarded quay. The slaves who had been fishing on their church-enforced Sunday afternoon of freedom gathered their rods and baskets and fled silently from their approach.

“Look,” said Tatwine, and gestured to Leofgar to lean over and look into the dark water. He saw fins gleaming faintly silver on the humped backs of swirling trout, old leaves and stones at the bottom, sifted over by the slime that was the common destiny of all that perished in this impermanent world.

“What am I looking at, my lord?”

Tatwine laughed, surprised and seemingly confirmed in his thoughts. “I do not think that you know what you look like, Harper. I am trying to show you what every warrior in my hall saw, the night that you staggered through our doors, carrying your aged master so tenderly, though you were at the very end of your strength yourself. Look.”

Now the exercise made him feel a little sick, but he had promised himself not to be disobedient for no reason, and so he tried. He’d seen the face before, in polished cups and puddles. It seemed thin to him, despite a fortnight of good meals, and the eyes regarded him warily, as though they suspected him of being up to no good.

A stoat-like face, he thought, too sharp, too weasely. His hair was getting too long, past his shoulders now and in danger of hanging into his harp strings, but he admitted to being a little vain of the colour. Why should he not wear gold when it came by nature? The softness of it stopped him from resembling the kind of scrawny feral cat, which begs from door to door of a wic hoping for scraps, that he often felt he was.

“I…I’m not sure I see…”

Leofgar searched his lord’s face, seeking a clue to tell him what the man wanted from him, watched as it thawed further from command to a kind of fondness he felt he had done nothing to deserve.

“You truly do not see it. Well, perhaps that is for the best, for it protects you from the vanity that must have surely followed if you had. Come then, let me tell you plain. When you limped into the hall that night, you were fair as one of the heavenly kingdom’s angels, and slender like a reed, and delicate as a woodland flower. I was not the only man moved by your beauty and your frailty in that hour, but I would contest with any the right to claim myself the most affected.”

These words of praise were not at all to Leofgar’s taste. They burned him up inside with shame and sullenness. Indeed, he had opened his mouth to say,
Being starved does not make me a modest maiden any more than famine makes the wolves of the forest gentle
, before the thought of his master leaped up and stopped his mouth.

He bit his lip to keep the words in, and turned away. “I, um… Again, I hardly know what to say. My lord, you have driven the wits straight out of my head.”

Tatwine seemed not unpleased with this. He took Leofgar’s arm again, this time carefully avoiding the whistle held snug by Leofgar’s tight shirt cuff. His fingers were gentler this second time, but neither thing made Leofgar less inclined to flinch.

The fingers slid up between overtunic and shirt and came to rest over the heartbeat that pulsed in the crook of Leofgar’s elbow. From there, it felt as though the tides of his blood spread the touch through every inch of him, itchy and invasive.

“I have seen the great love between you and your master,” Tatwine went on. “When you first came, and I opened the door to see you asleep in his arms, I honoured you both for it. He must be remarkable to win such a prize as you, and you must be remarkable to stay with one so old—now that he cannot protect you as he used.”