Ashild looked discomfited for an instant, but pulled at the silver chain, drawing it, and what hung from it, forth.
It was a silver amulet, a hammer of Thor; a large one, a size a man would wear. It was cast of solid silver, and worked over with tiny balls of silver interlacing across the arms of the hammer.
Ceric had seen men, and woman too, of Four Stones wearing both the Christian cross and the hammer of Thor. These Danes had come late to the True Word, and if it gave them comfort to wear both, all one could do was smile. But Ashild had been raised in the True Church.
If he was surprised, her mother was stunned. Her face had paled, and she lowered the two baskets she held.
“Where…”
“In my chest, at Aunt’s, where it has always been,” Ashild answered. Her words were mild, but her hand had closed about the hammer, as if protecting it. “It is mine, as you told me. Mine to wear.”
Ceric was looking back and forth between the two women. Now Ashild answered his look. “The hammer was that of my father, Yrling. He who won Four Stones.”
Her mother’s lips, which had remained slightly parted, now gently closed. She had never imagined Ashild would place it around her neck, but now she had.
She had asked about her father last night, and then sought the comfort of his amulet. Perhaps it went no further than this. At any rate, there was little she could say now, and before Ceric. She forced a smile, and nodded her head. “Of course,” she assented.
Ashild was dropping the amulet back within her shift collar. Her mother was still smiling, but her thoughts had veered. Let us give thanks that Sigewif will not see this, she was thinking. And if Wilgot discovers it, always fussing about heathen idols…
Ælfwyn leant forward and gave her daughter a kiss on her forehead. “We will only be a day or two,” she told her. “Keep well.”
Ashild returned her kiss. Ceric took up the baskets Ælfwyn had been toting, and Ælfwyn moved off to her waggon, allowing them their own farewell.
Ceric did not know what to say. Ashild had always referred to Hrald’s father as her own. Now by this act she had allied herself with Yrling. A moment ago he had felt closer to her than he ever had, without even a touch from her hand. Her placing of the Thor’s hammer on her breast placed a barrier between them, almost as if she had donned a ring-tunic. He wanted to ask her more; he wanted to talk to Hrald about it, or even Worr; and he did not want to ride away from her now.
He stood before her, holding her mother’s baskets in his hands, feeling foolish and young and lost for words.
“Smear some ink for me,” she said. Then with a quick bob of her head she planted a kiss on his brow.
Once underway Ælfwyn was captive to her thoughts. The waggon was open at both ends, with an oiled tarpaulin hanging from four stout uprights, for shade. The morning was dry and reddish dust rose from the feet of the horses which pulled it. Lindisse was always wet, but this Summer had seen a spate of unusually fine weather; they would need rain soon lest the rye and barley begin to suffer. Ælfwyn felt grateful for the thinness of her woollen gown, and the tarpaulin casting her in its coolness. She let her eyes rest on the driver, an older Dane who had been lamed in battle but who served well behind a team of horses or oxen. She sat up front, on the bench just behind him, next to Burginde. Eanflad, Ælfwyn’s youngest sister, always preferred to sit looking backwards when travelling by cart or waggon, and so she sat, seemingly content in her quiet. Little Ealhswith clambered between them and the packs of food and clothing resting on the waggon bed. They had rolled through the village, past the fields of spiked barley growing silver in the warmth, and were now out beyond the furthest reaches of the sheep meadows. Ælfwyn could hear the soft singing of Eanflad, and turned to see Ealhswith nestling at her feet, her head in her aunt’s lap.
If she had been alone with Burginde she would have told her at once about Ashild, if only to hear the old nurse cluck her tongue and soothe her with a few pithy words. That comfort would have to wait, not only for lack of privacy, but for the fact that Burginde was slumped against the side rail of the waggon, sleeping.
The tarpaulin shielding them from the Sun’s glare was of coarsely woven linen, stained grey by the flax oil it had been soaked in, and Ælfwyn raised her eyes to it. Ceric’s arrival had brought the joy of seeing him again, of taking pride in his growing manliness, and feeling a share in Hrald’s pleasure at having his closest friend at hand. But Ceric’s coming had also served to carry her back eighteen years. He was the living link to Ceridwen and their times together, both before and after their arrival at Four Stones. It could not be accident that Ashild had asked about her father, and then the very next morning appeared wearing the Thor’s hammer. Ceric had seemingly triggered her curiosity – if that was what it was – in Yrling.
Seeing the amulet again, and so unexpectedly, had affected her in ways that made slight the years’ passage. A strange and fearsome Dane had dropped it over her head on the day of their hand-fast. Thereafter he had worn it every day of their brief union.
Ceridwen’s returning it to her after his death had told her all she had need to know, all she could bear to consider, about Yrling’s end. It would not have been carried to Kilton if it had not been taken as battle-gain. She found herself now squeezing her eyes shut to block the memory of the panicked dread of that time.
And there was more that Ceric had brought with him: The silk gown, once hers, and now returned to her daughter; the bailiff Raedwulf recalling her to her lost home, to the very hour she had first met Gyric.
She turned her head to her right, where Raedwulf and Worr rode side by side. The bailiff’s dark hair, which had been neatly combed upon setting out, had through the jostling of the ride separated into those wavy locks she had noted when first she met him. He was talking, and sometimes laughing with Worr, and his air of youthfulness struck her.
She forced her eyes away from them, then closed them once more. She had made this journey to Oundle more times than she could count. She had travelled thence in joy, and in great distress. Oft times while doing so she told herself, One day I shall journey here, and not come back. When Ashild and Hrald are wed, I will be free to know the peace of the abbey; live as my mother does in its blessed quiet.
A few days in that quiet had always restored her, found her even restive. The demands of the hall, of her children, and of the village could deplete, but also nourish her. She knew herself fairly well, and sometimes wondered if the idea of Oundle was not a greater attraction than Oundle itself.
The jangling of bridles made her open her eyes again. Ceric and Hrald, riding side by side, had moved up from where they had been, behind the waggon. They lifted their hands to her as they passed. Just behind them came Jari, always trailing Hrald. His younger brother Gunnulf had been riding with him, but must have stayed back with the two warriors who brought up the rear.
When they had passed out of earshot of the waggon Ceric looked to his friend. He tried to keep his face from showing what he felt, and tried too to keep his voice low.
“Ashild is wearing a hammer of Thor today,” he told him. “That of her father.”
Hrald blinked, and narrowed his eyes a moment. Their father did not wear a hammer.
“Yrling’s hammer,” Ceric corrected.
Now Hrald knew. He looked at Ceric.
“You are sure?”
“She showed it, both to me, and your mother,” he answered.
Hrald shook his head. “Why…why would she do such a thing?” He looked forward over his horse’s dark ears. “That is sacrilege.
“She cannot mean it,” he went on. He studied Ceric’s seemingly untroubled face.
“She did it to tease you,” Hrald decided. He nodded his head at his own words.
“To see if she could anger you, worry you. It is just like Ashild to do something like that.”
Hrald tried to convince himself of this as his thoughts went on. It must have been a shock
to his mother. He glanced back over his right shoulder towards the trailing waggon.
Hrald had another thought. “But she still wears her golden cross, right?”
Ceric nodded. “She had both of them on, the cross outside, the hammer in her gown.”
Both, like one of the Danes in the keep yard, he thought, but did not say. Some of the Danes even wore them on the same chain.
Hrald studied Ceric’s face. “Does this trouble you,” he asked. He feared that Ceric might tell him that he must order Ashild to take off the hammer.
“I have thought about it the whole ride,” Ceric answered, but with a steady voice. He had, in fact, been picturing bringing Ashild to Kilton as his bride, presenting her to his pious grandmother and aunt. He could not do so with a maid who wore a heathen amulet. Now Hrald’s words reassured him. Perhaps Ashild had worn it only to rile him.
He clung to this explanation for the single moment it deserved. Ashild would not play such a petty game. He knew this, and thought too that she had fully seen her mother’s troubled brow when she displayed the hammer and named it as her own. Ashild was not unkind, and seeing her mother’s brow would have cost her something. Yet she had closed her hand about the hammer.
His fingers went to his brow a moment, touching the spot where Ashild had kissed him. It had been the first touch of her lips, and she had been the one to give it. She was always ahead of him.
They rode on in silence. The Sun was climbing overhead, and large but white clouds rested in the sky. A cooling wind ruffled the ripening grass-heads on either side of the road. No birds sang; the only noise was that of their horses and the creaking waggon, or the infrequent drifting words of one or another of the men.
They both were looking forward now. Trees stood in the distance ahead of them, thickening into a forest, making their path forward disappear in its darkness.
“Will it keep you from marrying her?”
Hrald had rushed it out in his confusion, making his voice rise a pitch higher.
Despite Ceric’s thoughts, the question startled him. He tried to laugh.
“You as well? Yesterday at the valley of horses Ashild asked me if I came to wed her.”
“I think it is a very good idea,” Hrald said at once, and with so much strength that Ceric fastened his eyes on him for an instant.
“I cannot wed yet. I am too young,” he countered, glancing down the road.
“But Ashild is not,” pressed Hrald.
“She is not yet eighteen.” Ceric’s tone showed he recognised her to be of more than marriageable age. He brought his eyes back to Hrald. “She will wait for me, will she not?”
It was less question than statement. Hrald did not know what to say; he could not often predict what Ashild would do.
“What did you answer, when she asked if you wanted to wed her?” he asked now.
Ceric breathed out a deep breath. “She asked me – as a simple question – if I had come here to wed her; or rather to take her back to Kilton to wed her. She took me off-guard. I said no, then yes.”
“You said yes? What did she say?”
Ceric’s green eyes rose upward. “She said, ‘So you wish to wed a Dane.’”
“Then what?”
“Not much. She seemed angry. Then you came back, leading Ealhswith on her pony.”
They fell into silence. Ceric thought of the question Hrald did not answer, whether Ashild would wait a year or two for him. She must; certainly she would. At least he was sure now that Hrald approved of the match.
As they entered the forest the road narrowed slightly, hemmed in as it was by hazels. They heard a horse moving up behind them, and reined their own to accommodate the rider. It was Gunnulf. He settled in next to Ceric, nearest the edge of the road. He was riding the same restless and half-broken horse he had been on when he cantered up to meet Ceric’s party on the road to Four Stones, a red roan who kept tossing its head.
Gunnulf nodded at both, grinning as he patted his horse’s damp neck. Gunnulf too looked hot; his brow was glistening. His yellow hair was tangled, and so long it fell far over both shoulders. The roan he was on was not bigger than the chestnut Ceric rode, but Gunnulf, being both taller and broader than Ceric, looked slightly down on him.
“So tell me of your home,” the Dane invited. His white teeth showed as he grinned.
Ceric considered how best to describe Kilton. “It is on the sea, in the West,” he began.
Gunnulf nodded his head. “Já, I have seen it, on a map,” he said.
Ceric found himself shifting his eyes at the Dane. He did not like knowing that so far from its shore, Kilton had been marked out like this, and by one who had once been an enemy. He gave his chin a single nod, tried to dismiss it. He reminded himself that it meant little that this Dane knew where Kilton lay. In the treasure room of Four Stones were maps of Angle-land. Perhaps it had even been Hrald’s own mother who had added Kilton to the parchment face of one; she had once gone there. Wilgot the priest had maps as well, one showing as far as the Holy City of Rome.
“It is on a bluff, above the sea. You are then good seamen,” Gunnulf prompted.
Ceric had gone sailing often enough in the swift waters beneath Kilton’s cliffs, but could not in truth say that many at Kilton relished the perils of the water.
“Our sea is dangerous, with currents and deep tides,” he answered.
Gunnulf’s grin spread, as if Ceric had just admitted a lack of seamanship. But he moved on with his questioning.
“How many men have you?”
Ceric’s dismay was real. At the moment, and with the Peace, Kilton had only five and sixty men, less than half of Four Stone’s number.
“Near to seventy,” he answered. “Because there is peace,” he added.
Gunnulf was proving a skillful and relentless interrogator.
“And the women?” he went on, his grin deepening. “I hear they are pleasing.”
Ceric heard Hrald spluttering on his right, but he tried to grin in response. His mind raced; Gunnulf would have been a lad of ten or twelve when his mother was last at Four Stones, and have little memory of her; and he could not have seen another woman of Kilton outside that.
He could not resist. “They are the most beautiful in all of Wessex.”
“Good,” said Gunnulf with decision. “Then you will marry one of them.”
“I have been to Oundle, when I returned from Gotland,” Worr was telling his father in law. “To deliver a young serving woman who lived at the hall of Ceric’s mother. Lady Ceridwen had asked me to escort her.” Worr had almost referred to Sparrow as a serving maid, before he checked himself. He knew Sparrow had been a slave, and no maid remains one long in captivity.
Worr had never spoken to Raedwulf about his few days on Gotland. The older man knew but the skeletal facts of its outcome, and understood the younger’s reluctance to speak more of that trial. Now they were nearing the tall wooden palings that surrounded the grounds, Worr spoke about the devout young woman he had brought to the abbess, and of his hope that Sparrow was well.
The broad gate was open, giving the party a clear view of the squat church of grey stone that sat in the centre of the enclosed grounds. On one side stood the timber hall in which the majority of nuns slept and lived, with a row of smaller and conjoined private cells beyond it, including that in which Abbess Sigewif slept. The other side held the men’s hall, for the smaller number of monks and brothers. Set off beyond this was the house in which the two priests lived, those who offered up the holy sacrament of the Mass twice a day in the cool recesses of the stone sanctuary. Behind the church was a garden of herbs, fruit trees, and flowers, divided down the middle by a wooden fence, making each half private, that of the nuns to themselves, and that of the brothers, to their own devising.
The inside of the palisade wall sheltered the numerous outbuildings needed by any great hall: barns, fowl-houses, sheds for tools, housing for the lay-folk wh
o lived there and worked side by side with the professed nuns and monks, and whose labour helped the community thrive. Several of these came forward as the party entered; a visit from their chief benefactress was always an occasion.
“Our Holy Mother will be with you shortly,” said Mildgyth, who was prioress, and thus second to Sigewif. She had greeted Ælfwyn warmly, and now had shown them all into the great hall. Three novices garbed in pale grey gowns and white head-wraps had carried in basins of water and crisp linen towels. The hall was cool and dim after the heat of the road, and the water they rinsed their hands in bracingly cold, as well-water ever is.
Sigewif entered from a side door, her large, dark-robed person blocking the light for a moment, then showing sharply outlined in the afternoon rays. As she neared, the cross of walrus ivory on her breast stood out the brighter against the charcoal-hued wool of her gown. She crossed with her characteristic briskness over to where Ælfwyn and Burginde stood, with Ealhswith and Eanflad next them.
All bowed to her. Kisses were exchanged amongst the women, and welcome given to all the abbey’s guests, with especial fervour for the well-remembered Ceric. The horse-thegn of Kilton also warranted a warm glance from the abbess’s grey eyes.
Raedwulf took a moment to assess her; she had the noble bearing of her dead-king brother. Edmund, as King of East Anglia, had been shot full of arrows by marauding Danes, then beheaded. A wolf had guarded Edmund’s head, letting no heathen near it, resting the night with it between his outstretched paws, and would surrender it only at dawn to a group of monks.
The slain king had been regarded as a saint shortly thereafter, seen as a Christian martyr cruelly felled by the heathen horde. Sigewif had been his youngest sibling, and made of such stuff that if she had been a man she might have been named King. Of her courage there was certainly no doubt. She had rebuilt Oundle during the most perilous times, won the respect of the conquering Danes, and now governed this doubled foundation, leading nuns and monks both.
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