by M. K. Hume
In Dene terms, Arthur was still tall, but not unusually so. However, his pale, changeable eyes were rare in these lands, and the heaviness of muscle that covered his long bones was much greater than the general lankiness of most northern youths. It seemed to Arthur that Dene warriors became heavier in the body as they aged, or so he determined from the many older folk around him.
There doesn’t seem to be any fat Dene among the peasantry,” Arthur hissed at Eamonn.
Eamonn shrugged. “Nothing would surprise me with this lot. Rowing would add bulk to their upper bodies, and we’ve seen how proficient they are when they’re at the oars of their ships. They seem civilized in the way they live and speak, yet I believe we’ll discover that they’re a merciless race when forced into a corner. They seem to view us as beasts, as if the luck of being born a Dene raises them above the stature of all other tribes. Such pride and arrogance can be exploited.”
“You’re right, Eamonn,” Arthur said with a broad grin. “You’re beginning to think clearly again!” Eamonn had found a chink in the Dene armor, so his heart leaped in fierce joy to discover that these warriors mightn’t be invincible.
“At least I hope so,” Arthur added to himself.
But the greatest curiosity of the Dene villagers was reserved for Eamonn and Blaise, whose tempers were soon tested by the rude stares and comments that came from the crowd. Eamonn put his own interpretation on their discourteous gestures and interpreted their comments regarding his short stature as mortal insults. Blaise slapped away one intemperate hand that snaked out of the crowd and sought to fondle her breast. The warrior guards sniggered, but they made no move to chastise the peasant.
For his part, Eamonn fell into a fighting crouch despite being unarmed. With gritted teeth, Eamonn responded to the curiosity of the crowd by growling and straining against his bonds until the Dene villagers recognized a berserker redness forming behind the stranger’s eyes.
With an unexpected sensibility, they ceased to torment him.
Meanwhile, Blaise could feel the eyes of the Dene males mentally caressing the curves of her small, beautiful body while they imagined what lay beneath the dark-blue robes she had donned on the morning of their capture. She felt dirtied by the lustful gloating in those eyes.
The blue dye of her dress served to hide the grime of their long voyage, so that the girl looked like a princess forced to walk amid common citizens. Her proud face spoke of her scorn, so the crowd respected her for hating them, even as they were amused by her pointless defiance.
Although Blaise’s outer robes were salt-stained from seawater, the tarnished gold thread that decorated her tunic at the neck, hem, and wrists spoke eloquently of the wealth of her family. The raven hair that had come loose from her plaits tumbled down her back. Sword-straight and strange in this northern world of fair-haired women, its blue-black gloss was so fabulous that many of the Dene women reached out their hands to see if it was real. But her eyes snapped with fire, so no man present doubted that she was a highly spirited young lady.
Dene women were beautiful and seemed to enjoy extraordinary good health, but they weren’t voluptuous in form. In these lands, a smallish and lush-bodied girl like Blaise was a rarity from her rounded breasts to her womanly hips. “I reckon she’d be a hellcat,” one warrior whispered to his friend, but Arthur was able to understand their conversation. As usual, his speed and skill with languages had brought him a rudimentary understanding of the northern tongue.
“This lady isn’t for a pig like you,” Arthur spat out in rudimentary Dene. The warrior would have responded with his own insults, but Stormbringer slapped the man across his cheek and issued orders so quickly that Arthur was unable to keep up with the flow of words. Then, before any further trouble could develop, the Dene captain led his men in orderly ranks up the cobbled path towards Heorot and the king’s hall. He ensured that the captives were enclosed within the ranks of his warriors, more for their protection than to stress their status as prisoners.
The reaction of the common folk towards Blaise and Maeve served to underscore Arthur’s misgivings. Blaise’s marked difference to most Dene women, coupled with her rarity and her voluptuousness, indicated that the young girl would soon become a rape victim if she was enslaved. Her master would own her—body and soul!
While not as softly curved, Maeve’s hair color alone made her a valuable asset and therefore a source of status for any man fortunate enough to possess her.
Arthur felt ill at the very thought of the grim life that stretched out before them.
Although his heart was heavy with foreboding, Arthur’s eyes were hard at work as the prisoners were escorted up the cobbled road. Alert to the possibility of escape at some time in the future, he was determined to become familiar with his surroundings by absorbing everything he saw around him.
The village of Heorot seemed to be well planned and efficiently constructed. The rectangular walls of the cottages were quite foreign to Arthur’s eyes, for they were only three feet high on the outside edges. But each roof was steeply pitched in an unusual design whereby the apex of each structure was at least four times a man’s height under a central pole. Arthur realized that snow would easily slide down. Smoke was allowed to escape from a central gap in the wooden, split-timber roof partially sealed with a hide flap, and a riot of decorations had been painted all over each simple construction.
A tall, thin shutter high up near the roof suggested that a second story existed inside each building. Used to the simple, round homes of ordinary Britons, Arthur was fascinated.
The ends of rafters, doorways, and roof supports were heavily carved with complex curving designs superficially like Celtic interlace, with a strange resemblance to decorated serpent forms reduced to linear patterns. To add to the overall effect, the houses were also lime-washed in vivid hues.
Light snow covered every detail of the village and harbor, although the narrow paths between dwellings were cleared of snow. Wicker structures such as cow byres, smokehouses, pigpens, and well-kept gardens were also clean and tidy, necessities in these climes where the snowdrifts were often as deep, or deeper, than the height of a tall man. Such deep snow was unheard of in Britannia, except in the far north, but the Dene peasantry seemed unconcerned by the cold. The snow lay deeply on the slopes behind the village; Arthur looked at the rosy cheeks of the peasants with new respect, because they seemed to take such snowfalls in their stride.
No wonder they’re so tall and so ruggedly built, he thought. You’d need long legs to plow through these snowdrifts.
Vegetable gardens were laid out in cheerful coverlets of straw in shades of beige and chocolate-brown where the soil and tentative shoots of green showed through the light dusting of snow that hadn’t been cleared away by hand.
Braziers were burning in a few places where some plants had grown taller, although judging by the strong traces of blue above him and the melting snow beside the roadway, spring was advancing towards Heorot on green-shod feet.
Occasionally, Arthur observed the flash of metal ornaments worn on Dene shoulders in great pins made of brass, bronze, or even tin, but it was obvious that gold was a prized metal in this town. It was almost as if the Dene population was poor. Yet the pelts of small, furred animals were staked and stiffening on drying racks behind the domestic houses, while strings of fish were hung out and threaded onto sharpened sticks to cure. Smoke rose in the gelid air from small huts. Evidently, the Dene had no lack of physical comforts.
The cobbled road suggested that the Dene were scrupulous about the cleanliness of their environment. Rough channels running parallel to the cobbled surfaces were designed to carry away the deluges of water from driving rain or the floods from the spring thaws, thereby minimizing the sticky, brown mud in the tangle of pathways between the rectangular cottages.
The huge king’s hall at Heorot was soon looming above them, and the captives were halted
on a stone platform in the forecourt of the impressive building. Arthur shuddered at the sight of a skeletal arm nailed onto a large cross plank of oak above the door. Amazed at such a barbaric decoration, he peered upwards at the delicate bones of a hand that should have separated and fallen away with the first thaw. But golden wire held the delicate finger bones together. The nails that secured the arm at wrist, elbow, and where the shoulder should have been were gleaming with the same ruddy color of precious metal.
“That’s Grendel’s arm,” Stormbringer stated. “And above that trophy is the skull of Grendel’s mother. All enemies of the Scyldings are doomed to perish in this way, so their bones now decorate our halls. Any man or woman planning treason should see these bones and beware of the king’s punishments.”
The captives looked at the space under the painted eaves of the hall and saw a skull nailed into place by its long bony forehead and lower jaw. The delicate teeth, elegant cheekbones, and smooth ovals of the empty eye sockets suggested that this grisly trophy was, indeed, the skull of a woman.
We considered the Dene to be civilized because we were captured by a sweet-talking, cultured, and educated man, Arthur decided with a jolt of despair. Now, after seeing these grisly trophies, I realize that I don’t understand the Dene and their violence at all.
Then Arthur remembered what the king of the Ordovice tribe, his own kinsman, had done at Calleva Atrebatum. Bran had unleashed Greek fire, the flammable weapon far more barbaric than anything the Dene could imagine. The memory of men burning within their armor in a fire that couldn’t be extinguished continued to haunt Arthur. Even worse, the knowledge that his kinsman had killed so many men through such barbarism ate at his vitals whenever his thoughts dwelled on the destruction of that venerable Romano-British city.
The two guards at the great timber entrance to the hall bowed their heads respectfully to Stormbringer and then used their combined strength to open the two doors that were easily the height of two men. Automatically, Arthur noticed that the massive structures were almost five inches thick and made from heavy slabs of tree trunk deeply carved to decorate the entrance and to create an overall pattern in which the winged worm was prominent. He was reminded of the great doors leading into Uther Pendragon’s hall at Venta Belgarum; these Dene doors had the same brutal power. Arthur wondered if he might be able to use the Dene superstitions to his advantage.
Inside, the gloom blinded the captives for a moment after the weak sunlight outside, but the details of the room’s contents gradually became clear. The low sides of the huge hall were shrouded in darkness. Huge tree trunks supported the steep roof, brightly painted with scenes from mythical and historical tales with repeated use of the motifs of tree, moon, dragon, wolf, and sword.
Arthur had expected the hall to be filled with a gloom that matched the dark and snowy landscape surrounding the town. Yet the interior of the hall blazed with scenes filled with light and color. Huge bronze sconces were attached to the columns where torches soaked in pitch and fat were blazing fiercely with an intense white-gold light. Holes cut in the steep roof permitted the smoke to be drawn away so that the air remained relatively sweet close to the floor, although the rafters were black with soot. Beneath his feet, Arthur could feel crudely sawn floorboards.
Generations of feet had worn the wood until it was smooth and honey-colored, while the inevitable spillages of food and drink and countless bones and shells had created an oily patina on the porous wood. The refuse had created a gleaming polish that no man or woman could duplicate. Arthur raised his eyes across the brick fire pit that was so large it could roast several whole bullocks on its elevated spit. Then his eyes followed an avenue of shields and the figureheads of ships forming a trophy wall that showed the spoils and exploits of war. Beyond, a raised dais and a throne permitted the seated man to see everything and everyone within the confines of his hall.
A single closed door behind the dais indicated that other quarters used by the king existed behind this imposing space while above the door large shutters stood in rows leading up to the roof.
Someone coughed and Arthur saw warriors, old and young, assembled in rows stretching from one large set of pillars to the other. Frodhi stood in a prominent position in the front row. As Arthur watched him through narrowed eyes, Frodhi turned and winked at Stormbringer.
In darkened corners beyond the pillars, small rooms provided space for warriors to use as barracks when they were called upon to serve the king inside his hall. Further rooms had obviously been designed as storage space for weapons and equipment. Arthur imagined that somewhere in this maze, Hrolf Kraki’s treasure was also stored under guard.
Most of this detail had been revealed to Arthur by Stormbringer in a whisper as they waited behind the Dene warriors and their lords. The air was charged with reverence and something less tangible. Caution—or was it fear?
Arthur could smell a heavy aroma composed equally of woodsmoke, fish oil, and wet fur. He also thought he recognized the scent of burning aromatic herbs. So the air of Heorot contrived to smell of green and growing things and of the deep forest, as it cleansed away the stink of men’s bodies.
“Stormbringer! Valdar Bjornsen—Hero of the Sae Dene! What have you brought me from across the icy seas?”
The voice that boomed out into the open spaces of the hall was a strong, hoarse baritone, damaged during years of shouted instructions over the tumult of battle and efforts to overcome the noise of howling gales at sea.
As Stormbringer’s warriors moved forward, the gentle hubbub that flowed through the hall was stilled by that same impatient voice.
“Don’t keep me waiting, Stormbringer. I want to see these Britons you’ve caught for me.”
Arthur looked up, and there, in restrained splendor on Heorot’s dais, sat Hrolf Kraki, Lord of the Dene. Arthur’s confidence dissipated like smoke in a gale. The time of testing had come.
Somehow, he must keep his friends safe.
Somehow, he must win the trust of the owner of that harsh, unlovely voice.
Somehow, he must survive in a world so alien that he felt like a child among giants.
In the silence that followed the king’s command, the sound of their booted feet could be heard as they clicked on the dense wooden floor. In his head, Arthur could hear his inner voice shrieking sharply at him, and he knew, beyond doubting, that they were all in terrible trouble.
Chapter VIII
BLOOD PRICE AND DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Ignorantie, quem portum, petat, nullus suus ventus est.
(If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.)
—SENECA THE YOUNGER, Epistulae ad Lucilium 71:3
A silence charged with danger and imminent threat settled over the massed warriors in Hrolf Kraki’s guard. Arthur glanced at the backs of the men of Heorot and was disconcerted to see how many of them were standing at attention with their hands tightly clenched. Every line of their bodies indicated stress and fear, hardly the emotions one would expect from the king’s lords and allies. Who was this Hrolf Kraki? Only Frodhi seemed unmoved, but even that equable man’s fingers were twitching.
As if on a signal, the rows of warriors moved to the left and to the right in unison, leaving a corridor some five men wide that allowed Stormbringer and his warriors to stride forward and approach the dais. The Sae Dene inclined his head and ordered his warriors to march in disciplined ranks ahead of him till they reached a space below the throne where they knelt and lowered their proud heads in obeisance. Feeling awkward and nervous, the captives remained standing, and Arthur could feel his body assessed and analyzed by dozens of pairs of curious eyes.
But only one man’s opinion really mattered among this throng, so Arthur felt the chill of a particularly cold evaluation. Our time has come, Arthur thought, his heart beating wildly. Our doom or our fortune is in the hands of God or Fortuna.
Stor
mbringer knelt on the wooden floor and bowed his whole body in homage. “Hail to Hrolf Kraki, true master of the lands of the Dene, lord of the Sae Dene, and ruler of the wide seas. Hail to the king, lord of the Scyldings and master of Midgard.” His voice carried to the extremities of the hall as it reverberated through the still air.
As Stormbringer rose to his feet, the strong voices of his warriors repeated their greeting to the king until the rafters seemed to shake under the power of their reverence.
“Hail to Hrolf Kraki, master and king. Hail!”
Then, as one, the warriors beat their shields on the wooden planks of the floor in a rumble of powerful sound, until the man on the throne raised his right hand and ordered silence.
The stillness, when it came, was immediate and complete.
“You may speak, Stormbringer, kinsman and Sae Dene beyond compare.”
Arthur was amazed at how the inscrutable, unflappable leader blushed like a girl at praise from the man on the dais. Not for the first time, Arthur wondered how Hrolf Kraki could command such homage from such men. He reassessed his plan of action. It was obvious that truth would best serve the interests of the British prisoners.
“We journeyed into the western seas last spring on your orders, my lord. When we made landfall, we sailed through the islands to the north of Britannia and learned that they were green with grass and deep, untouched forests. The land holds great bounty, the seas are filled with large schools of fish, and the hills are alive with game. We sailed farther south and learned that these lands are so soft and bountiful that cows seem to produce cream rather than milk and the earth gives the farmers such pleasure that they cannot eat all they grow. Britannia has metal aplenty, and the people grow fat from the pleasant conditions in which they live.”
