Maidensong

by Mia Marlowe

  Gunnar pulled at his lower lip. “The problem is whom do I send? I have no sister to marry off and no daughters yet. Though don’t wish any for me till Astryd births my son.” He held up a hand as if to ward off the specter of a girl-child. “I suppose I could send Evja or one of the other serving girls. They’re all comely enough.”

  “It will have to be a girl of some importance and unquestioned virtue or the Arab will be offended,” his uncle said with surety.

  In the fjords, slights and insults often required bloodshed before satisfaction was declared. Ornolf always claimed that in the case of preserving personal dignity, his Arab trading partner was even more exacting than a Northman.

  “Perhaps one of your karls has a daughter that might suit.”

  “I’ll think on it,” Gunnar said as his gaze followed his brother’s halting progress down the beach. He and Bjorn hadn’t said three words to each other since Bjorn stared him down over that redheaded thrall. Bjorn might have voiced disagreements with him privately in the past, but that was the first time his little brother had blatantly defied Gunnar’s will—and over something as inconsequential as a wench.

  What if Bjorn decided to assert himself on weightier matters? How many would follow him? That was yet another situation that required Gunnar’s attention. “What other news have you from the southern fjords?”

  Ornolf’s mouth turned down beneath his heavy mustache, as if knowing Gunnar would not be pleased with what he had to say. “Halfdan is amassing men,” Ornolf said. “He draws them like ants to honey and each day more swarm to his table. Already he controls Raumarike and looks to gobble up his neighbors as well. Some say they may fall willingly because Halfdan is well-loved by his people.”

  Gunnar made a growling noise in the back of his throat. “I need more men, more silver and more time,” he complained.

  “Right now, you are overmatched. We’d be wise to avoid a direct confrontation with Halfdan. Have you considered allying yourself with him?” Ornolf suggested, his tone as conciliatory as he dared. “Perhaps an offer to foster his son or to arrange a marriage between your houses once your own child is born?”

  “Why should I go cringing to him?” Gunnar’s pale eyes frosted over. “The Norse will have a king, you’ve said so yourself. That king will be me, and after me, my son. I will have it so, Uncle.”

  The older man cast a sideways glance at his nephew. Gunnar had always had a will of iron and a black temper to match. Ornolf looked back down the beach where his dark-haired nephew leaned on his staff. More than once, he’d wished the fates had switched the birth order of these two boys and given Sogna to Bjorn. He drew men to him naturally. Bjorn’s crew would trail him blithely into Hel, singing as they went.

  “That is why you will return to Miklagard within the month,” Gunnar said.

  Ornolf closed his eyes. The way to Miklagard— Constantinople, as the inhabitants called it—was a long, weary one. Not only was the journey fraught with danger, but upon arriving in the sprawling city, one had to navigate intrigue as well. Ornolf had hoped to winter in Sogna before attempting another trek south. He’d planned to offer a steadying hand to his nephew the jarl and persuade him to a more peaceful road. Strange, how the older he got, the sweeter peace sounded. Perhaps Ornolf had spent too much time in the voluptuous south. Fair weather and fine living made a man soft.

  “We have enough trade goods,” Gunnar continued. “My little brother got lucky in the frost lands, so we’re well stocked with walrus ivory and furs. We took a fair cache of amber in the Hordaland raid. There’s more than enough to make a trip worthwhile. If Farouk-Azziz is seeking a permanent bond with us, let us not keep him waiting.”

  “But what of a bride for him?” Ornolf asked, wondering what his devious nephew was scheming this time.

  “You just make what preparations you must for your trip,” Gunnar said, the corners of his mouth curving into a calculating smile. “Leave that little detail to me.”

  Chapter 12

  The old midwife Helge had been wrong. It was a full week before the heir to Sogna decided to be born. On a mizzling day, when the sky and water competed to see which of them could be grayest, the Dragon of Sogna was finally brought to childbed.

  She did not believe in suffering in silence.

  Astryd’s shrieks rattled the timbers of the longhouse and sent her serving girls scurrying about with no more purpose than a bunch of lemmings on a trek to the sea. Despite the rain that fell like cold, wet needles, Gunnar fled the longhouse to hunt, most of his fighting men trailing him gratefully.

  As Rika predicted, Bjorn pushed himself too hard and his wound reopened. He was forced to sit around the great hall listening to Astryd’s overblown moaning. And Rika was forced to sit with him.

  “I had no idea sound carried so well through wattle-and-daub.” He looked wild-eyed at her over the chess set on the table between them. “Is it always like this?”

  “How would I know? There’s not much call for a skald in a birthing room.” A long wail reverberated toward them. “Thor be thanked,” Rika murmured with the callousness of a maiden.

  Hearing Astryd’s groans made part of her glad she had not given herself to Bjorn. Childbed was no light matter. But another part of her replayed that night over and over in her mind, reliving his kisses and the shivering ecstasy of his hands on her, till her lips and skin tingled, and she was left wondering what further delights she’d denied herself. What was it about this man that seemed to tie her up in knots? Even now, his steady gaze was enough to set her pulse dancing.

  Bjorn turned his attention back to the ivory and jet pieces before him. Uncle Ornolf had brought him the intricately wrought chess set from Miklagard. Once Bjorn found out that Rika knew how to play, he insisted that she teach him. It proved more challenging than Bjorn expected. He was considered a master of hnefatafl, the Norse board game of strategy, but the wide variety of moves and gambits in chess would take time for him to learn. He fingered the figure with a cross on its top that Rika told him was called a bishop, and then slid the piece over to threaten her white queen.

  “How do you expect to learn if you ignore my advice?” she asked, swinging her king's knight around and knocking his bishop from the board. “You’re not paying attention.”

  “That’s because it doesn’t make any sense.” There were far more white pieces than black left on the board. How was it possible that a woman could out-strategize a man?

  “When I learned to play while we were at the Dannevirke, I was taught that the game is modeled after a Christian court,” she explained. “There’s the ruler and his consort.” Her fingers danced over the board and slid down the side of the king. “You’re just not thinking about it in the right way.”

  It was a wonder he could think at all as he watched her pale hand stroke the chess piece. He remembered those slim fingers, cool and smooth on his own heated flesh. His ballocks clenched at the memory.

  “The bishops represent their religion.” She waggled the piece she’d just captured in his face and then tapped the mounted figure. “And the knights are their fighting elite.”

  “That’s the one piece whose movement makes sense to me. It’s a flanking action, just like cavalry swooping in from the side when a battle is at fever pitch,” Bjorn said. Of course, he’d also stood up to a frontal charge with nothing but a long spear propped up before him to drive into the horse’s chest. But he supposed it would complicate the game even further to allow the knight another type of motion.

  “And the castle is their stronghold.” Rika balanced a fingertip on the crenellated top of the piece.

  “Which is a foolish playing piece because real castles never move,” he said.

  She ignored his complaint. “Then there are the pawns, the hapless foot soldiers, which Christian kings spend like so much cordwood on a bonfire.”

  “But why should the queen be able to move about so freely while the king moves but one square at a time?” Bjorn positioned his remaini
ng knight to threaten her queen. “I begin to think this is a woman’s game.”

  “Isn’t that how the kings conduct their battles?” Rika asked. “Magnus always told me that they sit astride great steeds on the top of a hill and direct the battle from a distance.”

  “Ja, that’s true, but it does them no credit.” Bjorn tracked possible moves on the variegated board. “How can a man call himself a king if he won’t lead at the head of his men when they must pass into harm?”

  “Speaking of harm,” she said, a satisfied smile on her lips as she slid her white queen into a menacing position, “your king is in jeopardy. Check.”

  “And so is your queen,” Bjorn smiled as he toppled her with his knight and lifted the vexing piece from the board.

  Her castle roared across the table and knocked his king on its side. “Checkmate. Bjorn, you have to pay attention to your king instead of going after my queen all the time.”

  “I can’t help that I’d rather chase a woman than worry over a man.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Let’s try again. One of these times, I’ll beat you.”

  As they reset the game pieces, Bjorn caught her sneaking peeks at him from under her lashes in quick, unreadable glances. He’d trade a year in Valhalla to know what was swirling in this woman’s head. From the birthing room, Astryd wailed again and loudly cast doubts on the parentage of her absent husband.

  “You had another bad dream last night, didn’t you?”

  He frowned. "I didn’t think I woke you.”

  “You have them often, Bjorn. Sometimes more than once a night.” She leaned forward. “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me about them? Ketil—” She broke off what she was going to say. “I just think it might help you to talk about it.”

  “I don’t know why it would.” He folded his arms across his chest, trying to seem intent on the chess pieces but not really seeing them.

  “But it might, and I think you’re being selfish.”

  He looked up at her sharply. “How is that?”

  “The dreams interrupt my sleep, as well as yours,” she said.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The dream terrified him, true enough, but lately he’d been even more afraid of seeming a coward in her eyes. Last night, he thought he might have even rebuffed her angrily in the throes of the nightmare, but when he fully came to himself, she seemed to be asleep.

  Part of him was tempted to share this private terror with her, but he was already a cripple just now. How could a man admit weakness and yet remain a man?

  “Please, won’t you tell me?”

  When he met her direct gaze, the warmth in her green eyes made him want to trust her.

  “All right, girl, all right. If only to put a stop to your nagging. You’re worse than a leaky roof.” He pushed back from the chessboard and dragged a hand over his face. “It’s always the same dream.” If he related the facts baldly, perhaps none of the panic the dream gave him by night would creep into his mind by day. “I’m underwater and I can’t get back to the surface.”

  “Why?” She made her opening move, sliding her king’s pawn forward two spaces.

  “Sometimes ice blocks my way and sometimes it’s as though there’s a hand that comes down into the water and holds me there.” He mirrored her chess move with one of his own. “I run out of air and start to sink.” Bjorn’s voice trailed away.

  “Go on.”

  “Jormungand,” he whispered, not able to meet her eyes. “I see the Great Serpent.”

  Rika covered her mouth with her hand. “An evil dream, indeed.”

  “Then I wake, making a fool of myself.” He exhaled noisily in disgust.

  “But no wonder you cry out. The World Serpent is terror enough when we’re awake.” Rika reached across the small table to touch his forearm. “It’s not foolish to feel fear, Bjorn. It’s human.”

  “A brave man feels no fear.”

  “Nonsense. I don’t care how daunting the act, unless you fear, you’ve done nothing brave.” Rika paraded her bishop to a new position. “It takes no courage at all to face something you’re not afraid of. Fear is a requirement for true bravery.”

  Bjorn rolled that idea around in his mind, grateful for the fresh insight. Perhaps he wasn’t the coward he feared. He nodded slightly. “You may be right about that.”

  “Of course I am. Now we just have to discover why you dream of drowning and seeing the serpent,” she said as she studied the positions of the chess pieces with obvious satisfaction. “It’s your move.”

  “The first part is easy enough.” He inched another pawn forward. “I nearly drowned as a boy. I couldn’t have been more than five or six winters. It’s one of my earliest memories.”

  “That’s awful.” She captured his pawn with her bishop. “How did it happen?”

  “Gunnar and I were out in a little coracle.” He leaned back, threading through his memories to that young time. “We’d been climbing the cliffs for gulls’ eggs all day and were headed back home. I remember we got into an argument about who found the most eggs. He’s about five years older than me, and in my childish eyes, he was practically an adult. So I had to lord it over him that I’d managed to scale more cliffs and find the most eggs. We are brothers, after all, and brothers fight. Sharp words turned to yelling and then”—Bjorn grimaced both at the gap in his memory and his lost pawn—“I don’t recall exactly how it happened, but suddenly I was in the fjord and sinking. I couldn’t swim.”

  “That would certainly explain part of your dream,” Rika said. “Then what happened?”

  “Gunnar pulled me out. Again, the how of it is fuzzy in my mind, but my next clear memory is of my hand clasped on his arm, then me clambering over the side, and collapsing in the coracle. My brother saved my life. And even child that I was, I knew I owed him. I swore an oath of fealty to him right there in the boat and then repeated it later in our father’s hall. We have our differences, Gunnar and I, but I’m still his man.” He grinned at her sheepishly. “And to this day, I still can’t swim a stroke.”

  “Then you are a brave man, Bjorn,” she said. “If I couldn’t swim, I wouldn’t set foot in a boat.”

  He smiled at her and then took her bishop. She hadn’t seen the danger. Perhaps the key to besting her lay in distraction.

  “How strange . . .” Rika’s voice trailed off to a whisper.

  “My taking one of your pieces isn’t all that unusual,” he said defensively.

  “No, I mean your near drowning.” She paused and gnawed her lip. “Someone meant me for the water, though I don’t have any memory of it.”

  Bjorn cocked his head at her.

  “I’m not Magnus’s natural daughter,” she confided, with an odd catch in her voice. “He and Ketil found me on an ice floe. ‘My Pictish princess,’ he used to call me, because I was so blue when they first fished me out.”

  Bjorn shook his head. “Whoever abandoned you was a fool.”

  She gave him a sad little smile and raked her fingers over her cropped hair. “I like to think of it as a gift. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had Magnus.” Her chin wobbled a bit and she didn’t meet his eyes.

  Bjorn sensed how much it cost her to tell him those things. He knew she still blamed him for Magnus’s death. So why did she look so . . . guilty? Ja, that’s what he saw on her. When she looked back up at him, her face was pale and drawn. Guilt. He suddenly felt it, too.

  “Rika, I wish . . .” Only weaklings wished for the impossible, yet he knew he’d be willing to give up even his hope of having his own land if he could somehow give Magnus back to her. Still, her expression puzzled him. Why would she feel guilty unless she was starting to feel something for him? Ja, that was it. It had to be.

  She sighed deeply and moved another pawn. “Anyway, back to your dream. Your near drowning happened a long time ago. Have you always been plagued with this dream?”

  Bjorn frowned. “No. Now that I think on it, I really hadn’t thought about the mish
ap for years.”

  “When did the dream start then?”

  He tented his hands before him. “Last year. After my father died.”

  When she raised a quizzical eyebrow at him, he continued. “My father was still an active man, even though he’d seen nearly fifty winters. He always liked to hunt alone, said it steadied him to have just his own company now and then. He’d get away into the mountains to bring down a buck or two. When his horse came back to the stable alone, we set out to find him.”

  “An accident?”

  “No,” he said. “Murder. He’d been set upon by someone, but he’d put up a fight. His sword was nicked deeply, but not bloodied.” Bjorn dragged a hand over his face. “The worst of it was ... the death wound came from behind. A coward’s wound.”

  Rika bit her lower lip. “And you think your father tried to run away from the fight. It might not have happened that way. Things are not always what they seem. But it seems clear that your father’s death called forth your dream somehow,” she said. “Now, what meaning can you see in the image of Jormungand?”

  Bjorn leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, studying Gunnar’s symbol on one of the many shields hanging on the walls. Entwined serpents. He frowned at the image, then shrugged. He’d called his beloved dragonship the Sea-Snake. It seemed both brothers had an affinity for the fearsome creatures and he wondered whether Gunnar was plagued with similar nightmares. He didn’t even want to think about the clammy, reptilian visions that haunted his sleep. “You’re the skald. You tell me.”

  “In the sagas, the World Serpent is linked with both treachery and destruction,” she said, her eyes flitting up and to the right as she mentally scanned her repertoire, “Jormungand helps destroy the gods at Ragnarok, but the serpent is also killed in the last battle, so that’s an encouraging thought.”