by Connie Mason
“Not completely.”
She sobbed louder.
She wouldn’t want him to lie, would she? The taint of thralldom was no light matter. It would be foolishness to pretend otherwise.
She made little whimpering sounds, obviously trying to stop crying and failing utterly at it.
“Katla, please. You don’t have to cry so.” He felt as useless as tits on a boar. “I promise I’ll never pick you up and carry you off again.”
Even as he said it, he feared that would be a difficult promise to keep. She vexed him so, he had a hard time imagining not carting her off again if the occasional called for it.
She shook her head. “That’s not why I’m crying.”
What else have I done wrong? he thought, but wisely refrained from saying.
“You’ll always bear the mark of iron because of me,” she said. “I want you to take your place as my husband in our household, but you’re right. The people will always see you as a thrall.” She loosed a moist hiccup. “A thrall I had to order to marry me.”
“No one put a knife to my throat.”
“No one had to,” she said with a sniff. “You already had an iron collar there.”
He cupped her chin and forced her to look up at him. “Even with a thrall’s collar, do you really think you could make me do something I didn’t want to do?”
“I made you kiss my foot.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “And you weren’t pleased with how I did it, were you?”
“Not the first time,” she admitted with a shy grin that faded quickly. “Are you saying I won’t be pleased with how you intend to be my husband?”
“No.” He hoped not. “I’m saying I went into this marriage freely.”
“Not because I gave you an order?”
He leaned down to kiss her softly. “No. And I didn’t drag you onto this boat because I want to ill-treat you either.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“Because I had to leave. There was no avoiding that. And I want you with me, Katla.” He hunkered down before her so he could look her eye to eye. “Life will separate us often enough, like as not. I didn’t see why we should be apart by choice so soon.”
“But I’ve done nothing but upend your life from the moment I laid eyes on you,” she admitted. “Why do you want me with you?”
Brandr was no coward, but he’d rather face a charge of Saracen cavalry than this one woman and her unending questions.
Especially when the answers involved love.
Love opened a heart for pain, for risk, for loss. But even though he’d never felt the like before, he’d recognized its stirring for a while now. It was time he named the swirling in his gut. He drew a deep breath.
“I want you with me because I love you, Katla.”
She inhaled sharply. “Why?”
He kissed her forehead with a resounding smack. “Because you ask too many questions. Now why don’t you see what Inga packed for us to eat while I set up a lean-to.”
Surprisingly enough, she swiped her eyes and obeyed him for once.
Could that be the secret to peace with a difficult woman? Was love the way of taming the she wolf?
I could admit to loving Katla all day, he thought as he strung a rope from the mast to the prow and draped his cloak and hers over it, tacking the corners to the gunwale on either side of the narrow craft. As shelters went, it wasn’t much, but it would turn the rain.
They made a thrifty meal of potted beef and cold barley buns, and washed it down with some of the mead he’d packed with the cargo. After a few rounds, all traces of Katla’s tears were gone, and she laughed at his tales of the oddities in distant Byzantium.
Finally, he pulled the hudfat from the trunk and spread it beneath the tent of cloaks. The supple leather sleeping bag was roomy enough for two to share body heat through the chill of a night on the water.
With any luck at all, he and his bride would share much more than that.
When he turned around, Katla was climbing over the stowed cargo and stepping across the narrow distance from the long-necked prow to the steep land.
“Where are you going?”
“To find a little privacy.” She alighted on a goat track and turned to face him from solid land. “You may have a bladder the size of a head of cabbage, but some of us aren’t so blessed.” She began climbing the switchbacked path up the slope. “There are bushes on the crest of the rise. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t stray far.” Brandr watched until she disappeared over the rise, and then dropped the front of his trousers and aimed off the port bow. He’d never considered the inequity of it before, but now that he gave the matter thought, it seemed to him nature had made some fairly simply things unnecessarily difficult for women.
Yet another time, he thought as he relieved himself, when it’s good to be a man.
My princess is used to a lime-washed privy, not a bush. He chuckled at the thought of her living rough for the short duration of their journey. Once they reached Jondal, he’d be able to offer her his private chamber and its thick bed of furs and a latrine built right onto the jarlhof, so she wouldn’t have to brave the bitter wind come winter.
After the discomforts of travel, she’d enjoy life in his brother’s hall.
He, on the other hand, could be just as satisfied with a hudfat in a rocking coracle.
Ja, it was good to be a man.
Then he imagined Katla in glorious nakedness in that hudfat.
It was very good to be a man.
He thought about disrobing and waiting for her in the sleeping bag. Body heat was best shared with skin-on-skin contact. Then he decided he ought to watch for her descent on the starlit slope.
When she didn’t come, he cupped his mouth and called her name. His voice echoed against the sides of the fjord.
There was no answer.
Chapter 25
Katla didn’t hear them approach until they were upon her. A sudden blow to her temple sent shards of light careening across her vision. Then she perceived the terrifying strangers in only random flashes and snippets as she drifted in and out of sucking blackness.
A flurry of hands. Biting rope around her neck. No air.
A growling voice gave terse orders.
A gag with a rancid smell and even worse taste was thrust between her teeth.
Rough hands lifted her under the armpits and bore her along with her feet floating over the uneven ground. The way her head reeled, she felt as if she were flying, her booted feet hovering a few hand spans from earth, like a pair of gulls skimming the waves.
Someone called her name. The voice echoed against the mountainside until it faded in receding sibilance.
Brandr.
Her captors lengthened their jolting strides. She forced her eyes open. If she somehow won free, she’d need to be able to retrace her steps back to the ridge and the coracle in the fjord below.
She couldn’t let herself think about how worried Brandr would be. How long would he wait before he came after her?
The dark terrain rushed past her in shades of gray with no discernible landmarks. She pointed her toes and kicked, trying to leave an impression in the track to show she’d passed that way. She managed to scuff the tip of her boot in the dirt in a couple places.
“Stop that, wench,” one of the men growled. “Or I’ll knock out your teeth.”
“Probably be for the best, considering the work she’s got ahead of her this night,” another said, laughing at his own wit. “I hate when a woman scrapes a tooth on my prick.”
Her night meal threatened to come back up.
A faint light showed over the next hillock, the dim shaft of illumination from a smoke hole in the roof of a hovel. One of the men ran ahead and t
hrew open the door. Katla and the ones bearing her hustled through the opening, and the portal banged shut behind them.
They dropped Katla on one of the earthen benches lining the walls. She yanked the gag from between her teeth and spat on the floor to clear the taste from her mouth.
One of the men backhanded her, sending her sprawling into the dirt.
“Good blow, Tryggr,” one of the others exclaimed. “Show her who’s headman.”
“Don’t be spitting on my floor, wench.”
The floor was packed earth, like the floor in the main section of Katla’s longhouse, but unlike her tidy home, no one had bothered to sweep out the bones and refuse from past meals for several months. A gob of spittle would do this filthy place no harm, but Katla restrained herself from saying so.
“Let’s see what we got here.” Tryggr grasped her hair and lifted her to her feet.
It was easy to see why he was the leader of this ragtag group. He was the only one who looked as if he’d recently been fed. Hard and unfeeling, he was a vicious hawk of a man, his eyes as cold as a bird of prey’s.
“Not bad,” Tryggr admitted as he stroked her cheek with the back of his knuckles. She tried to jerk her face away, but his grip on her hair was firm. “The slavers from Birka will pay a pretty price for the likes of you.”
He shoved her to her knees.
“More if she’s a virgin,” another said. “Shall we find out?”
“I’m a married woman.” Katla was shocked at the reedy sound of her voice. She fumbled at the rope around her neck, but her captor jerked it tight.
All her wind was shut off, and she gasped like a cod flopping on the bottom of a boat’s hull. She clutched at her throat, trying to pry the rope loose, but it was so tight she couldn’t wedge so much as a fingertip under it.
Just as her vision started to tunnel, the headman loosened the rope. She dragged in a lungful of smoky air, grateful for every murky bit of it.
“You’ll wear the rope till we can fit you with iron. Cross me again, and I’ll crush your throat. You’ll get no second warning. I’ve no time for unbiddable thralls,” Tryggr said with a snarl. “Obey or die. Do we understand each other?”
She nodded slowly.
A babe wailed from a dark corner of the fetid hovel.
“Shut that brat up or I will,” the headman growled.
A terrified young mother sat bolt upright on her bed of badly cured furs. She bared her breast and gave the child suck, crooning urgent endearments. The woman cast a darting glance in Katla’s direction and clutched the babe closer to her, turning to shield the child from the headman’s malevolent gaze with her emaciated body.
“So she admits it. She’s not a virgin, she says,” one of the men said. His pinched face reminded Katla of a weasel. “Then there’s no reason she can’t entertain us till the Birkamen come, is there?”
“No reason at all,” Katla agreed with what she hoped was a confident laugh. The men laughed with her, thinking her receptive to a debauch with them. Then she glared at them. “Except my husband might not appreciate it, and I imagine he’ll arrive long before the slave traders. When he gets here, he’ll show you the color of your insides.”
She hadn’t actually seen Brandr kill someone, but she’d watched him vanquish Albrikt Gormson and knew his reputation as a warrior.
“And who’s this husband of yours that we should shake in our boots?” Tryggr asked, toying with his end of the rope as if considering whether to draw it taut around her neck again.
“Brandr, son of Ulf, Captain of the Varangian Guard,” she said defiantly.
The rope tightened a bit, and a muscle under Tryggr’s left eye ticked. “You lie. The son of Ulf was enthralled. We heard the tale only last week.”
Katla’s conscience lanced her. She wished with all her heart she’d never enthralled Brandr, but for now, she held Tryggr’s gaze.
“Then you heard wrong. He’ll be coming,” she promised evenly. “When he gets here, you’ll see there’s no iron on his neck. And the only thing that will save you from his wrath is if I can tell him that you haven’t harmed me.”
“Sigurd, go stand the watch,” Tryggr ordered. “Sing out if you see this son of Ulf.”
Sigurd swore and rose halfheartedly, while his smaller, weasel-faced companion smirked at him.
“But what good is having a new woman if we don’t make sport of her?” Weasel-man said, his hand fingering his own genitals through stained trousers. “I claim first time with her.” His gaze darted first to Sigurd and then cautiously to the head man. “After Tryggr, o’ course.”
“You’ll get all the fresh woman you could wish for once the Bloodaxe comes,” Tryggr said.
“How do you figure?”
“The men’ll all be dead, simpleton. Once the Bloodaxe sweeps through this fjord, even you’ll have your pick of women.” Tryggr turned his attention to his other friend. “Get going, Sigurd. I’ll not tell you again. And don’t let me catch you buggering the ewe. If you don’t keep watch for Ulfson, you’ll get no woman at all this night.”
Weasel-man laughed uproariously as Sigurd stomped out.
Tryggr raked his gaze over Katla and licked his lips. Lust oozed from him like sour sweat.
“I don’t know who this Bloodaxe you speak of may be, but if you touch me, my husband will feed you your own balls. On all the gods, I swear it.” She willed herself not to show fear, though her insides roiled like a bucketful of eels.
Tryggr’s lip curled. Then he pulled a small object from his belt and fondled it for a moment. It was a talisman of sorts, fashioned in the likeness of the headless torso of a woman, her belly distended in late pregnancy. Tryggr ran his thumbs over her full breasts and around her belly.
“What do the Old Ones say?” his friend asked.
“They say for you to shut up so I can concentrate,” Tryggr said. He consulted the figure once more with an intense stare. Then he looked at Katla and jerked his head toward the dark corner.
“Get over with the rest of the women. We’ll wait and see if your husband comes, but I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. It would take a wolf’s nose to track us in the dark.” He bared his teeth in an oily smile. “If he does come, it’s still three to one. Once we’re done with him, we’ll do for you.”
Katla didn’t need to be told twice to put some distance between herself and the headman. The woman with the babe, who was now sucking its own bottom lip in fitful slumber, slid over to make room for Katla on the fur.
Katla noticed an iron collar on the thin, lank-haired woman. On the wide earthen bench across the narrow space, three other females snored softly, their bodies entwined like a litter of puppies.
She sank down, her insides shaking, but outwardly, she was as stiff as the rank wolf pelt. She propped her spine against the back wall. There was no way she’d lie down among these miserable women.
She ached to snatch up the helpless babe to protect it from the lice and other vermin that must lurk in the communal bedding, but its mother held it close.
A nightmare. That’s all this is. In another heartbeat, I’ll wake.
But she didn’t.
Katla hadn’t traveled beyond sight of the coastline of Tysnes Island since she was a very little girl, when her father took her and her brothers to see the great temple at Uppsala. The people of the North were a rough lot, and the nine days of festival before the Blot were as wild as she could imagine, but there were clearly defined limits to people’s behavior, even during the Blot.
The Norse peoples were bound by the Law.
Her chest had swelled with pride as the whole assembly listened to the Law Speaker recite the ordinances and requirements. It took two days for him to intone the complex system of rights and responsibilities for civilized men.
Then the priests
of Odin began their rituals. The animal sacrifices were bloody, but nothing worse than what she’d seen growing up on a farm.
Katla didn’t retch until nine men were hung on the sacred oaks alongside the carcasses of roosters and horses and dogs. Her father promised she’d understand when she was older.
She still didn’t.
But thanks to the Law, her father had told her, a man could take his family on a voyage of many weeks and expect to return home in safety.
Then while she married and buried and ran her household on quiet Tysnes, the world beyond those narrow confines had changed. If Tryggr and his lot were any guide, men of the North had cast off the constraints of the Law and gone wild on the inside. She’d seen household gods before, but never that crude female figure. Whomever these men venerated, it wasn’t the Norse deities.
There was honor among the court of Asgard.
Anyone who took somebody against their will was no more than a beast that walked upright.
Her conscience pricked her. There was a balance ingrained in the fabric of the world, and she wondered if her own misdeeds had tipped the scales against her.
She’d been taken by Tryggr and his pack of ruffians because her brothers had taken Brandr.
But Finn and the others hadn’t abused him. They didn’t crush his spirit as the poor woman next to her was obviously crushed.
Katla’s chin sank to her chest.
Whom was she fooling? Finn had offered to geld Brandr and would have done it if Katla had given him the nod. She threatened to whip him the very first night.
She was no better than Tryggr.
It would serve her right if Brandr sailed on without her. She swallowed back a sob but couldn’t keep a tear from seeping from the corner of her eye.
“Will your man really come for you?” the woman beside her whispered.
Katla hoped so. It was her only chance. She swiped her wet cheek. “Ja. He will. He promised to protect me.”
“Mine didn’t,” she said. “After a couple weeks, Tryggr offered to sell me back to my husband, but he refused to take me. Said he didn’t want someone else’s leavings.” The woman’s mouth barely moved as she spoke.
