by Angus Donald
* * *
Bjarki was still feeling a little ambushed by that conversation when he was shown into Hildegard’s quarters, which was not helped by the fact that the young queen was wearing few clothes and was sitting on a large bed and powdering her long neck and upper torso with something that looked like fine milled flour and smelled like flowers.
‘Stand over there,’ she said, pointing at a spot on the black-and-white tiled floor, ‘and remain silent. I will attend to you in a little while.’
The ground-floor room was painted plain white, pale yellow and pink and was inordinately large, about half the size of the longhouse where thirty Auxilla spent so much of their days. There was even a small fountain tinkling in one corner, several stands filled with lit candles and various tables and chairs, as well as the huge bed covered in a fine woollen blanket.
Perhaps Tor’s right, thought Bjarki, perhaps she just wants to copulate with me. He caught a whiff of the flour/flowers powder and sneezed loudly.
‘By the Virgin, you’re not sick, are you?’ Hildegard said, looking at him in disgust. ‘Stand further away, go over there – go, go, shoo.’
Bjarki moved a few steps away. They were alone in the massive room, Lord Grimoald having being firmly told by the queen to leave them in peace, and wait with his Black Cloaks on the other side of the heavy door.
Bjarki watched the young lady as she powdered her half-dressed upper body. She was beautiful, yes. Slim, well made, with pleasing curves where you might expect them; and her face, while a touch long, thin and pointed, was no hardship at all to look upon, either. If she wanted to make love with him, he would oblige her. Indeed, it might well be very pleasurable…
He felt a sudden deep pang of homesickness: and Freya’s face sprang into his mind. The two girls were about the same age – although from vastly different worlds. He pictured making love with Freya in the dunes; her laughing freckled face, the warmth of her breath on his face, kissing her soft neck… Would he ever see her again?
Yet it seemed that, for once, Tor was wrong. Hildegard did not desire him carnally. She was now putting on some sort of gauzy dress, covering up her freshly powdered skin. A long robe followed, embroidered with gold thread and belted snugly at the waist, then a pair of delicate slippers with pearl buttons. Then, at last, it appeared she was ready to speak to Bjarki.
‘You are probably wondering why I summoned you here,’ she said as she walked over to a table and poured herself a large beaker of red wine.
He remained exactly where he was, following her only with his eyes.
‘So, yes, well, I needed to ask you something; to seek your help…’
Bjarki said nothing. He inclined his head and smiled encouragingly.
‘You can understand my language well enough, can’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I understand you perfectly, my lady.’
She nodded, threw back her head and drank off her wine in one long swallow. Bjarki got the impression she was nervous but trying to hide it.
‘It is a delicate matter,’ she said, at last. ‘A matter of the heart. A matter of… well, a stupid infatuation, I can think of no better word…’
Bjarki remained silent.
‘The thing is, sometimes a young heart wants something desperately; yet it is not really appropriate, and then, well… No. Let me start again.’
Bjarki was deeply puzzled by this performance. A queen, obviously used to having whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it, why could she not speak plainly. She had all the power; he was little better than her thrall.
‘It’s about my brother, Gerold. The Duke of Swabia, you know.’
‘Yes, I know him. I saw him in the council hall.’
‘Well, yes, that’s right. It appears that Gerold has conceived… no that’s not the right word… not the right word at all. It appears Gerold has somehow decided that he is… in love. He claims he is in love. It’s a silly infatuation, of course. But lusty young men never recognise that, do they?’
Bjarki’s jaw fell open. ‘The duke is in love with me?’
‘Not you, imbecile, with your pretty little companion. Duke Gerold is infatuated with your girl. He has been watching her. On the parade ground, practising with her weapons. He made me come too, to admire her fighting style. He wants her. He claims he’s in love. He says he must have her. The barbarian girl. Whatever she is, your servant, slave. Wife. Is she your wife?’
‘You mean Tor? She is none of those things. She’s my friend.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Why is that good?’
‘Because you can have no legal objection, then. He would take her as his concubine for a season, an affaire, set her up in the palace somewhere. Jewels, clothes, whatever she likes – within reason. I would like to help my brother in this matter. He is clumsy with women. And he does not care to risk… shall we say, an embarrassment. So I had thought we might come to an arrangement between us. As it has always been done. I would make you a payment in silver, a fee, or perhaps a favour, if you’d help arrange things.’
Bjarki was bewildered; then suddenly blindingly angry.
He clenched his teeth and breathed out through his nose. He knew that if he chose to he could rip this stupid, pampered girl into bloody rags with only his bare hands. He also knew that, if he did so, he would not live more than a few heartbeats longer than her first scream. Lord Grimoald and his Black Cloaks would be through that door in a flash. He breathed in, and out.
‘So, will you help me, then? You would be handsomely rewarded.’
‘Stop… talking. Just stop talking about this, please.’ Bjarki could feel the thick veins in his neck pulsing, writhing. He knew he was red in the face. His hands were clenched so tight that his nails were digging into his palms.
‘I’d part with a purse of gold, if you could get her for a night…’
‘Shut up!’
Queen Hildegard looked as shocked if she had just been slapped hard.
Bjarki briefly wondered if anyone had ever told her to be silent before.
‘I don’t see why you are getting so upset, barbarian. You admit she’s not your lover, nor wife. She’s unmarried. He’s a lord. What’s the matter?’
‘Where I come from, friends don’t serve up their friends to other men like a plate of tasty honey cakes. Why doesn’t he ask to meet her? Give her some flowers. Invite her to take a walk with him. Do whatever you people normally do in these situations. Not that she’d accept him as her husband.’
‘You are insolent. He doesn’t seek to wed her. And you are making this far harder than it ought to be. I wish you to tell your friend that she’s caught the eye of the Duke of Swabia himself. Tell her how lucky she is. I told him he should just force her. Take her into some hay barn. But he’s too proud.’
Suddenly, like a passing rainstorm, all Bjarki’s anger was swept away. He began to chuckle. The lurid image of a petulant Duke Gerold trying to have his way with a stubbornly unco-operative Tor popped into his mind.
He laughed out loud.
Tor would beat the horny fellow into a bloody pulp. She would knock him round the bedroom. She could literally kick him to death. And if he did manage, somehow, to couple with her, he’d end up with a thumb in his eye-socket before the patch was dry. And the balls ripped clean off his body.
Bjarki laughed. He laughed again and suddenly found he couldn’t stop.
‘Stop that stupid noise. Stop it right now,’ shouted the queen.
Bjarki was folded over himself. He couldn’t control the storm of mirth.
‘I command you to stop that ridiculous braying – now!’
Yet the tears continued to run in torrents down Bjarki’s face.
‘What is all this merriment? What is going on here?’ said a new voice.
And Bjarki saw through blurry eyes that His Majesty was with them.
* * *
A half hour later, Bjarki found himself sitting on a long padded bench and sipping a cup of extr
emely good wine in one of the king’s private halls.
‘The duke could have his pick of any of the slave girls, of course. There are dozens of them, pretty little things, all different colours, shapes and sizes, in the kitchens or the bathhouse. But Hildegard says he’s always liked girl-fighters, shield maidens, and they’re few and far between. When I was younger, before I married, I remember, there was this one lady…’
Karolus stopped. He had been pacing up and down the marble floor while Bjarki sat and sipped his wine. He turned to face the younger man.
‘I’m sorry if you have been embarrassed by this grubby business, my friend. Hildegard should know better. But she dearly loves her brother. And Gerold… well, young men don’t use their heads to think with, do they? But he is a powerful man, an important vassal. I’d like to keep him happy, if I can. Don’t suppose there is a chance your friend might consider…’
‘Not a chance,’ said Bjarki. ‘If the Duke tried to force her, he would swiftly end up dead. She is careless of her own life. It doesn’t matter to her that killing him would mean her own end. She’d think it a glorious exit.’
‘So Death holds no terror for her – nor for you, either?’
Karolus poured himself wine from the jug stand and came over to sit on the end of the bench, a yard or so from Bjarki. The young man noticed the Black Cloak standing by the wall a dozen paces away, had shifted his stance a fraction. Not that Bjarki had any intention of trying to harm the king.
‘No one wants to die,’ said Bjarki slowly. ‘But if the manner of your death is pleasing to the gods, then there is a suitable reward in the afterlife.’
‘Eternal feasting in the Hall of the Slain, isn’t that what you believe?’
‘That’s what all the skalds and gothi claim.’
‘Gothi?’
‘Our priests – but also law-givers and sometimes healers, too.’
Karolus scratched his beak of a nose. ‘An eternity of feasting with a gang of boozy warriors; boasting, burping, bellowing at each other down the benches. I’d quickly find that very tedious. Sounds more like a punishment.’
‘There would be singing and story-telling, as well. And the presence of the All-Father, Odin – it’s his feasting hall, of course. And the other gods.’
‘You know you are speaking heresy, don’t you?’
Bjarki stared in shock at the king, who smiled mischievously back at him. ‘If our good Bishop Paulinus were with us right now he’d be yelling “Abomination!” and calling for you to be executed without delay.’
‘I humbly beg pardon, Your Majesty,’ Bjarki stammered.
‘Pardon granted. Your heresy is hereby forgiven. I can’t expect you to be a pure Christian soul after only a week or two. Lord Paulinus is a tedious buffoon anyway. He is blinded by his devotion to God – and it is preventing him from fulfilling his duties properly. He thinks that strict adherence to the Faith is the answer to every problem in the kingdom; that all men must be either good or evil. And the men he deems evil must all be exterminated.’
Bjarki had nothing to say to this.
‘But I’m boring you with my own problems. Let us forget Bishop Paulinus and God and heresy and all that business, and take our ease. Tell me a story, friend Bjarki,’ said the king, sipping his wine. ‘One you might hear in the Hall of the Slain. Tell me something shockingly heretical.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, Bjarki Bloodhand. I command it of my faithful vassal, my newest convert to the light of Christ. I’ve a feast to attend tonight and some of the greatest men of Francia will be there – dukes, lords, bishops and priests – and it’s sure to be as dull as a feast filled with the drunken heroes of the Northlands. So tell me a tale, Bjarki, tell me one I haven’t heard before.’
The warrior finished his wine and dutifully got to his feet, striking a heroic posture in the manner of a skald at a feast. But his mind was blank.
Then, almost as if another man was speaking through him, he began:
‘Once, when the world was fresh, before the first men were made, even before the gods came into being, there existed but a single tree, a mighty oak called the Irminsul, which was so huge and vast that it connected this Middle-Realm with all the other eight worlds of the universe below and above, its great thick trunk running through the centre of them all…’
Chapter Nineteen
A blade in the darkness
Tor did not find the revelations of Duke Gerold’s infatuation with her in the slightest bit amusing. When Bjarki returned to the longhouse that night, cheerful, content and more than a little drunk, he found her waiting for him.
‘It’s not funny at all,’ she said, scowling. ‘It is a dangerous, even potentially lethal situation for me – for both of us.’
‘The king will sort things out. I made it plain that you would not be Gerold’s – what? – concubine or bedwarmer, under any circumstances.’
‘The king? Why should he help us – against his own brother-in-law?’
‘He’s a good man. And, well, he seems to like me. He’s friendly.’
Tor lost her temper. Her yells echoed through the sleeping longhouse.
‘A good man? Are you fucking insane. This “good man” would crush all our countrymen like worms beneath his boot heel; he would kill all the Saxons, the Danes, the Svears, all who fought him, enslave all the rest, and force his Christ-worshipping nonsense across the whole of the North. He is our enemy, oaf. He’s our mortal fucking enemy; our foe until death and even beyond. He is not, and never will be, your fucking friend.’
‘Hey, keep it down over there, girl. Some of us are trying to get some sleep,’ said a man’s voice from the darkness at the back of the longhouse.
‘You pipe down, dick-breath, or I’ll put you to sleep permanently,’ Tor retorted. But she seemed to have regained a little of her usual composure.
‘You are becoming one of them,’ she said, in a more moderate tone.
‘But you’re the one who made us swear an oath of loyalty to Karolus,’ Bjarki replied. ‘You insisted we should submit to their Christian god.’
‘We had no other choice,’ said Tor, her voice a whisper. ‘But don’t think we must become like them. Become like poor old Henk, the happy slave, content with his servitude, having no memory or notion of freedom.’
‘What shall we do, then?’ asked Bjarki.
‘That’s obvious. We must get out of here. The question is how. And how do we stop them coming after us and dragging us back here in chains.’
They left it there and went to their sleeping blankets. Bjarki was snoring within a few moments, but Tor lay awake, staring into the darkness.
* * *
Bjarki did not know exactly what it was that woke him: a clink, perhaps, of steel on iron; a shuffled misstep; a creak of leather. Some insignificant noise that his deep-sleeping brain told him was out of place, simply wrong.
He opened his eyes in the darkness. Sensed something. A presence. A disturbance in the space directly above him. And rolled. He heard something heavy thud down into the straw pallet where his sleeping body had lain only a moment or two before. He saw a shape, darker than all the surrounding blackness. And a gleam from the last of the hearth-fire embers on steel.
A sword.
He yelled out – not a word, a war cry – and hurled his body directly at the dark shape. He caught the attacker with his shoulder, forcing a bellow of air and pain from him and then they were both on the floor of the longhouse, rolling, grappling, the sword trapped uselessly between the writhing bodies.
The assassin’s head butted hard into Bjarki’s face, a disorientating blow to the cheekbone. The attacker reared back and repeated the manoeuvre.
Bjarki got one good punch in, a looping overhand right, and felt the crunch of cartilage, and a spurt of wet over his hand. He punched again and felt the slice of broken teeth across his knuckles. Good, he thought, punching a third time, much harder. I’ll have marked the murdering bastard at least.
> ‘What in the name of Christ is going on?’ Otto’s cry rattled round the longhouse. Bjarki’s opponent had slipped loose from his grip. Someone was sparking tinder and flint; another Auxilla was blowing on the hearth-fire, bringing it back to life. Bjarki fumbled at his feet, trying to find his seax in the darkness. But he knew the fight – if you could call it that – was over.
‘Are you hurt?’ Tor was beside him, gripping his arm. In the newly kindled light of candles and lamps, he could see that she had a short-handled axe in one hand and her seax unsheathed and stuck through her leather belt.
He felt his battered face; his left cheek was already beginning to swell.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘But whoever it was that attacked me will have a freshly broken nose and he’ll be lacking more than a few of his front teeth.’
* * *
When all the lights had been lit, the hearth-fire stoked, and the longhouse roused to full excited wakefulness, Captain Otto gathered all the members of the Auxilla in a circle. Bjarki looked at each face carefully but no one bore the marks of his fists, which he believed could not possibly be hidden. The Irish girl Yoni had a fine black eye, but her small button nose was perfectly intact, and she claimed the bruised eye had been earned on the training square two days ago in a pole-arm bout with her best friend, Brigitte.
