He stood, not moving, enveloped in this moment with her. He was happy now. Once he started forward again, he knew, every step was treacherous. She turned and looked up at him, questioning. He cleared his throat. “Let’s go, then,” he said, and started forth.
“It was Euan and your sister and twenty of their friends who saved Jorvik,” Corban said, “and will anybody ever know? Already there’s this rumor of an army of Scots. The world is one thing, and the way people think of it is another.”
She sat beside him in the forecastle of the ship, drawing on a piece of wood. “What does it matter, so long as you know?”
“Better for Euan and those boys and Gifu if nobody ever knows.”
“Did you give him the abacus?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. Her hands stroked expertly over the piece of wood, and the ship appeared on it, the men at their oars, the lines of the prow.
She said, “Where are we going?”
“To Hedeby.”
She leaned on him; the ship thrashed through the sea, England a long dark streamer of land off to their right. A seagull floated in the air before them, white and gray and white, its head turning to watch them.
She said, “Where is your sister?”
“In Hedeby. In the hands of a woman much stronger than Gunnhild. I don’t know why she wants Mav, or what she intends to do with her, but it cannot be good. Anyway, she has my sister now, but she is not almighty, as Gunnhild was not—what did you manage with her?”
“I made her image.”
“As she is, or as she would be?”
Benna laughed. “I would rather have drawn her as she is.” On the wood she traced the shape of a seagull, tipped against the wind, and made the wind visible.
“With the Lady of Hedeby that would be impossible.”
“What?” She licked salt from her lips.
“I can’t explain. She changes.”
“A shape shifter?”
“No, Gunnhild was that; this woman is like water—never the same way twice.”
She sat up, reaching for her drawing kit. “What is Hedeby like?”
He told her, spilling himself into her in words. On the flat piece of wood, she drew the seagull, arching through the weather-beaten sky.
They reached the coast across from England, and rowed northward along it. She asked, “How will you save your sister?”
“I don’t know. If I don’t, you must go back to Jorvik.”
She said nothing. It was dark, so she could not draw. He said, “If I do come back—”
He sat quiet a moment. She was warm against him, her head against his shoulder. He said, “When I went away from you the first time, we did not sail straight to Hedeby, you know. A storm blew us west and south—far west and far south. There was a land there, very fair and sweet and rich. I want to go there again. I want to go somewhere far from here, where the priests and kings haven’t reached yet. I want to make a life for us free of them.”
She said, “I will go wherever you go.”
His heart leapt at that; he tightened his arm around her. Yet the closer they came to Hedeby, the more he wished he had not brought her. He could think of nothing to do against the Lady, no way to rescue Mav from her. Now he was bringing Benna, too, within her reach.
On his right was flat fenland. They were coming up to the watery inlet that took them to Hollandstadt. Another sail ghosted along ahead of them past islands of reeds. She plucked some of the reeds, chewed the ends, and saw how they brushed her ink onto boards. They nosed steadily up the river; on the great earthworks, cows grazed.
With the sun going down they reached the mooring at Hollandstadt. The harbor was full of ships and they stayed on board the ship for the night. They lay down to sleep in the bow, side by side, and when Benna was asleep, Corban slipped away from her and went aft, to where Ulf was dozing in the stern.
“Where are you going?” Ulf said, startled.
“To Hedeby. Shut up. Listen to me.” Corban kept his voice low. “Do you have any money?”
“A little.”
“Pack the ship with food, extra sails, rope, water—everything we need for a long voyage.”
“I’ll do it.” Ulf nodded past him toward the bow. “You’re leaving her?”
“When I get back—if I don’t get back, take her home to Jorvik. But I have to go get my sister, Ulf.”
Ulf slapped his arm. “Christ and Thor both go with you, Corban.”
He said, “I don’t know if it works like that.” He gave one more look back into the bow, and then swung over the side of the ship down into the water, and swam in to the shore.
Benna asked, “Where is he going?”
Ulf jumped, startled; he had been staring away after Corban, over the dark water. He mumbled something at her. The moon was rising up over the earthworks, lopsided and eaten up like a piece of old cheese.
“To Hedeby?” she said.
“He says you’re to stay here.”
She said, “I’m not staying here. Turn your face away.” She stood up, pulling off her long dress. Ulf jerked his eyes in another direction, saying, “Now, Benna—” but he did nothing to stop her. She bundled the dress and her shoes together and sat down on the gunwale, swung her legs over, and slipped off into the water.
“Benna!” he called, softly, behind her. She swam away, toward what she hoped was the shore.
It was hard to swim carrying her shoes and dress. She stroked with one arm and kicked with her feet, driving herself steadily along. From the surface of the water she could not see where she was going. She paddled along past a moored ship; the reflection of a light on the shore wrinkled toward her, and she followed it. She passed another ship creaking at the end of its long slanted anchor line. At last her feet touched the ground. She waded up out of the cove, her clothes weeping around her, into the edge of the light of a flaring torch set above the door of a building.
There was a cluster of houses here, and a crowd of people, many going in and out of the one with the torch. The earthworks loomed up in the dark to her right; a broad road spilled off along the foot of it. She wrung her dress out and put it on, and started uncertainly toward the road. From the house with the torch over the door came a burst of wild laughter.
Maybe he had gone in there. She turned toward the road, and saw nobody. She looked around the torchlit house again, frowning. Most of these people were drunken men. She had to get out of here, before someone noticed her.
She went down the road a little. Ahead of her, pale under the moon, it stretched empty toward the horizon.
No. Far down there, someone walked, alone.
Her heart lifted. She knew that was Corban. She set off down the road after him.
After the long ride in the ship, the walking felt good. Her skirt was heavy with water and she wrung it out as she walked. She thought perhaps she would catch up with him, and make him take her with him, but it was hard enough just keeping him in sight, down the long moonlit road.
She hitched her skirts up under her belt. The night wore on, kicking by under her feet, every stride sliding more of the night past her. She was tired—she had not slept—and hungry, but she could not let him leave her too far behind; she might never see him again. The sky whitened. Her feet aching, her legs sore, she followed him toward the haze of dust and smoke in the distance, getting closer and closer.
They were coming to a gate; even so early in the morning people clustered around it, some on foot, and one with a big wagon. She hurried her pace, afraid of losing sight of him in the crowd.
He disappeared into the gate, and she rushed in after him, walked in through a mass of people, and fought her way through. She went out the other side, into the teeming city. Frantically she searched the crowded ways before her, and saw him, saw the red and blue cloak, bobbing along through the streams of other people. She plunged in after him.
She kept her gaze pinned to the red and blue cloak; she saw only glimpses of the city around
her. She had never been in a place with so many people. She wound her way through groups of women, by peddlers and a crier and three men playing pipes. The wooden walkways boomed under the constant stamp of feet. She smelled a harbor, like the river at Jorvik.
He turned into a side street, and broke into a run. As she watched helplessly he ran up to a wall and leapt up, caught the top of it, and vanished over it.
She looked wildly around. The blank wooden wall stretched away down the side of the street. She went up to it and looked up at the top, impossibly out of her reach, and started off along the foot of it. Reaching the corner she turned into a narrow gap between the wooden wall and a withy fence and fought her way down through knee-deep marshy reeds.
At the far end of this wall she came out on a canal, stinking of rot. At the foot of the wall a little sluice came out, draining water from the space within. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled in through the sluice.
She stood up in a yard still quiet from the night, dark from the high wall around it. In front of her was a hall, deeply thatched, with walls of split planks, as big and fine as the King’s Hall in Jorvik. She went slowly toward it, her heart thumping.
Midway up the long wall a door stood open; she stopped dead, seeing two people there, crouched furtively by the edge of the door, peering into the hall.
They did not move, they did not see her. She went cautiously nearer, reached the doorway, and stood there a moment. The two people were staring fixedly into the hall, and neither paid any heed to her.
Then a voice reached her, harsh and high. A woman’s voice, angry.
“So, you see, you did exactly what I wanted of you. I wanted you to come back here, and you came. Everything you do, I will of you. You are my thing.”
Benna went quietly in over the threshold, into the hall; the benches on either of the long sides were full of people, cowering in the corners; she saw their eyes glinting in the dark. The hall stretched dark around her, save for a white glow of light, at the far end.
There a lamp burned, shining on the floor at the feet of a tall, tall woman, but the light of the lamp was nothing to the white blaze of light from the woman’s face. She stood with her arms outstretched, barring the way, and before her, small and dark, stood Corban.
Benna hung back, in the shadows, with the onlooking slaves of the hall. This then was the Lady of Hedeby. Behind her and her blaze of white light she saw cupboard doors, cast open. That was where Corban was going, and now, he said, “I’ve come to take my sister.”
The Lady blazed up a little, so that all the watching people flinched back, and laughed.
“You have come to your destruction, little man!”
“No—” From the darkness of the cupboard bed another voice cried. “Me. Take me.”
“I will, don’t doubt it.” The woman laughed in her rippling of the white light, shedding beams of color into the air; yet she lit nothing else. All else fell in shadows.
Corban took another step toward her. “I’m coming, Mav!” He lifted his arms, ready to shove the Lady out of his way, and strode forward.
She swung her arm up, and her hand fell on his shoulder. He stopped in his tracks, held fast as if he were nothing. Benna gasped. He was crumpling, struggling to keep his feet under him, but still driven down under that touch, his knees buckling, his back bowed. The woman towered over him, screaming in triumph.
“Did you think you could betray me with no cost? You stupid little man.”
Benna crept forward. She was shivering all over. She had to do something, now, before this woman noticed her. She remembered how Gunnhild had fallen in love with her own face. She couldn’t even see this woman’s face for the glare of the light streaming from it. Corban had said it would be no use, she could not draw her anyway. Certainly she had no time.
Corban was now collapsed at the witch’s feet. She gave a shriek of derision. “Not so strong now, hah—Kill a king, will you—” Without looking back, the woman thrust her other arm out behind her, fending off someone else.
Faint in the lamp light, there was Mav, come out of the bed. She was thin as a twig. She wobbled on her feet, but she stretched out her arms.
“Me—take me—”
The towering light-struck figure whooped, delighted. “I will, girl, but I will have him first—watch him die—” She reached down her hand and gripped him by the beard, to turn his head up. “Look into my eyes, Corban!”
“No,” Benna cried, and ran forward, fumbling around her neck. The looking glass. The looking glass would have to do. The woman in her streaming light swung toward her. “Look into your own eyes, witch,” Benna shouted, and reaching Corban’s side she held the looking glass out before her.
The wash of light struck Benna; her sight blanched, and she winced back, blinded, her arm thrown up before her eyes. With her other hand she held out the looking glass, a shield against that gaze.
The woman shrieked. Benna blinked her eyes, trying to see again. Corban brushed against her, straightening up off the floor beside her, and his hand gripped her hand with the looking glass, holding it steady.
Benna’s vision was a white fog, in the center of it a tall, swaying shape. She blinked, and more of her sight came back, a shadowy counterworld floating in the glare. Before her the Lady jerked her face away, her hands rising, fumbling in the swelling, surrounding dark.
She was shrinking. The white light around her was fading. Mav brushed by her, staggering toward her brother, and at her touch, the Lady slumped down to her knees. The flame on the lamp blew down. Corban murmured under his breath. The Lady knelt down before them. The last light of the lamp showed her face collapsed into a thousand wrinkles, her hair hanging lank and long and white as sea-spume down her shoulders. Her gown was shredding into dull black rags that hardly hid her old white flesh.
“Mav,” Corban whispered. “Bring the baby—run.”
Benna moved closer to him and he put his arm around her; her legs were shaking. Mav tottered off back to the bed. “Is she dying?”
“I don’t know,” Corban said. “I doubt it. We have to get out of here.”
“Wait,” Mav said. “Look.”
The lamp flickered, its flame a blue bead on the surface of the oil. The first sunlight was coming into the hall. The old woman knelt down before them, bowed over her clasped hands, her eyes shut. From her nose a tendril of smoke curled.
Benna’s fingers tightened on Corban’s arm. The smoke drifted up into the sunlight, spreading and swelling into a wraith of a woman. Her long hair swirled in the smoke and her arms rose like columns of the smoke, and she threw her head back, laughing, rising away from the Lady of Hedeby. Behind her another curling vapor slipped free, swimming up after her, and another after that, and another, until Mav had lost count of them.
They rose up into the dusky air, riotous and silent. One at a time they paused above Mav, and hovered over her, only a moment, bending toward her. Then each one floated away and was gone. They left behind only a little old white-haired woman, waxen faced, hunched forward over her knees, and fast asleep.
“Now,” Mav said, and started toward the door.
Before they could reach the door the hall around them erupted. All the frozen, frightened slaves came suddenly to life. Their voices rose in a panicky babble. Flinging on clothes, snatching up blankets, hauling sacks onto their shoulders, they made for the open sunlight. They swept up Corban and Benna and Mav in their midst and out the door and across the yard; the front gate burst open under the first pressure and they pitched forward onto the wooden boardwalks of Hedeby.
The first sunlight was climbing into the sky. Corban clutched Mav by the hand; she could hardly keep on her feet. She was thin as bone, her skin like whey. Her eyes shone bright with life, and in her arms the baby, wrapped in a filthy scrap of blanket, let out a sudden, lusty yell.
Corban turned to Benna, beside him, who had come up suddenly from nowhere beside him when he faced the witch, and put his other arm around
her, and kissed her. He looked down into her face. “You saved us, Benna. You saved us. Where did you come from? How did you get into the hall? How did you find us?”
“I followed you,” she said, and brushed her hair back. “Did you think I would let you go again?” She nodded at his sister. “She’s about to fall. I’ll hold the baby, if she wants.”
“Yes, take him.” He picked Mav up in his arms, a bundle of sticks in a bloody, tattered gown. Benna lifted the baby out of her arms.
“Where are we going?” She raised her gaze to his.
He pulled his cloak around Mav, to shelter her; she leaned on him, and shut her eyes. He was too tired to think. But all he had to do was what he had been doing. He had only to keep on, going straight ahead, doing what he could do. He gathered up the last of his strength, his sister in his arms, and his wife beside him.
The slaves had run away, leaving the boardwalk all but empty. The sun was rising over the rooftops, hot and bright. He turned into the long stream of its power.
“West,” he said, and started off. “Into the west.”
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
New York
BOOKS BY CECELIA HOLLAND
The Soul Thief
The Angel and the Sword
Lily Nevada
An Ordinary Woman
Railroad Schemes
Valley of the Kings
Jerusalem
Pacific Street
The Bear Flag
The Lords of Vaumartin
Pillar of the Sky
The Belt of Gold
The Sea Beggars
Home Ground
City of God
Two Ravens
Floating Worlds
Great Maria
The Death of Attila
The Earl
Antichrist
Until the Sun Falls
The Kings in Winter
Rakossy
The Firedrake
The Soul Thief Page 30
