I lick my hand—which won’t cure it the way a cow’s lick does, but at least soothes it—and look around. Nothing but straw over hard earth and open boxes built into the side walls—for feed in deepest winter, I’m sure. The walls are tree trunks split vertically and placed standing in the ground, each tight against the next with something shoved into the crevices to keep out the wind. I put my face to the damp wall behind me and sniff: dung. Not mixed with hazel wattles or heather or even grass—just plain dung. It can’t be as good insulation as a proper mixture. These people don’t know how to treat their animals.
I swallow and my ears pop and then buzz loudly, and I feel all dizzy for a moment.
Mel should have jumped. She should be here now, taking care of me. Immalle. Together. As Mother said. Sisters don’t abandon each other.
But maybe Mel couldn’t help it. Maybe someone grabbed her and stopped her. Maybe she’s right now searching for a way to get back here, to find me. She’ll do it. Mel can do things.
I snuffle back tears and get to my feet and immediately sink to my knees again. My feet are no use. I feel them with my good hand. They’re ripped up on the bottom from going barefoot across the frozen ground last night. I imagine Mel scolding me. When Mother put us on the nag dressed as peasant boys, Mel insisted we keep our shoes. Princesses can’t go barefoot.
But last night I had no choice. I had only one shoe, and I couldn’t hop on that one foot with all the water inside turning to ice and stabbing my toes. I had to rip it off. Anyone would have done the same. Even Mel.
I crawl on my knees and my one good hand, till I’m against the wall beside the open door, and I lean sideways to see out.
A woman passes so close I hear the flap of her long undershift with each step. She could have reached out an arm and touched me, easily.
I fall back on my heels and scrabble away to the nearest corner, pressing into the shadows. I don’t know what to do. And I have little strength. I wait.
I’m hot again.
I lift my tunic clear and relieve myself and then move to the side, away from the wet.
I need a plan. I want Mel. I’m always the one who comes up with plans, but she’s the one who knows which plan will work. My eyes feel like huge, hot balls. They keep closing. I have to think. But I can’t keep my eyes open. My head falls to the side and hits the wall. I don’t bother to lift it.
* * *
Scrape.
I jerk awake.
The door has been closed. A person moves inside the barn and plunks something down on the ground with a heavy thud. Light comes dimly through cracks around the door, and I make out a form. The person lifts off a wide cloak and drops it. A man. He’s wearing a huge floppy tunic over those funny baggy things the Norsemen in Dublin wore—trousers. Lord no, have I found myself among Norsemen? I swallow, and my ears ring now.
He lurches forward, and though his back is to me, I can tell he’s sick. He groans in pain. He yanks wildly at the drawstring on his trousers, and now he’s ripping them off. He squats and he’s stifling yells, I’m sure of it. His head writhes on his neck and the pain goes on and on. Misery like that can only come from a struggle with the devil. I hug myself hard and wish I could shrink to invisible.
At last he lets out a cry, just small and wavery, a pitiful cry, and seems to go all heavy and slack. He takes something from between his legs and throws it into the center of the room, the pig area. It lands with a slop. It was a large something. The smell makes my nose wrinkle. Stale eggs.
He reaches into that something on the floor beside him, and I hear splashing. It’s a bucket and he’s squatted over it now, washing his privates. He stands and stuffs something between his legs and pulls on his trousers and dumps the bucket and struggles into his giant cloak. He turns. But this time he spins toward me, not away.
Our eyes meet.
His mouth drops open, and his face crumples.
I stare back.
He says something. Quiet. Like he’s trying to convince me. Like he’s making a pact. His face is young and hairless. It shivers with fear at me seeing what he did. He won’t tell on me, no he won’t, because what he did was secret.
My heart beats so hard I hardly hear him, but I wouldn’t understand anyway. I nod.
He opens the door wide and leaves.
I can’t stay in this corner, that much is clear. And something’s gone wrong with me; I can’t crawl anymore. I wriggle and thrash my way along the wall, heading for my corner. When I pass level with the center, I stop a moment and listen hard.
A snuffling noise.
No! I shouldn’t have stopped. I shouldn’t have listened. I can’t do anything. How could I do anything, all messed up the way I am? Besides, if I went over there, with the door wide open, anyone looking this way would see me cross the floor. I can’t do it.
But I can’t not, either.
I move slow slow toward the snuffle. It’s covered in slime. But it moves. It moves. I’m clearing that slime away now, as fast as I can. Energy has come from nowhere. I’m cleaning off the head frantically—the head has to be first. I may be only eight, but I know that much.
The baby lets out the smallest noise, like a chick that doesn’t realized it’s hatched yet.
I slip the body from the caul and feel. It’s a boy. A sweet boy. I can’t use my tunic to clean him, because it’s so filthy and the coarse nettle would be too harsh on his tender skin anyway. But the only parts that really need cleaning right now are his eyes and nose and mouth and ears. The rest can wait. So I lick him. That’s what animals do. I gag at first. But I mustn’t do that again. I pretend to be a cow. And he’s my calf. I can do this. I have to.
Then I push on my back the rest of the way to my straw burrow, holding this babe on my chest. We need to burrow away. I’m dripping sweat. It rolls into my ears.
When Father’s men came home from slogging through wetlands last summer, the horses got hot like I am now. They bled from their nose. They died.
But my brother Nuada got through his fever when the Viking youth chopped off his hand. That was when? Only weeks ago. It seems like forever ago. Nuada had Liaig, the royal physician, looking after him, though. This babe and I have only each other.
I pull the straw around us and bite my bottom lip hard. I don’t really have the energy to cry, but biting my lip seems a good precaution anyway. I am not a cow, and this babe is not my calf. So he’s sure to die, but I’d rather be damned for all eternity than let crying be the last thing he hears.
CHAPTER THREE
Oof! Something smashed into my back.
Oof! Now it’s pulling on my tunic. I’m curled with my arms around the babe and my knees up behind him. My back is to the room, but I know it’s a pig behind me. The animals have returned, and I slept through it. I slept the entire day.
Oof!
If I don’t react fast and hard, the lot of them will attack. I go rigid; I’ve seen pig attacks. Though these pigs are short, I know they can get vicious. There’s got to be at least three, and there could be four, even five. But there’s nothing in this barn—no stone, no club, nothing I can use to fend them off.
He’s tugging harder. My tunic tears.
I clutch the babe tight, turn over as fast as I can, and slam my head into the pig’s snout. He screams and runs off. The others snort and squeal as he pushes through them.
I lower my face to the babe’s head. I think he’s still warm—I’m so hot myself I can’t be sure, but I think he is. His forehead is soft under my lips. I feel his back and legs. He moves just the slightest.
Good. I grit my teeth. Fight, fight. We both have to fight!
I reach around and feel for the cow, up her hind leg, to that udder. It swings empty, a withered sack. Of course. They milked her just before putting the animals back in the barn for the night.
My stomach is a pointed flint that jabs at my gut. And the babe needs food even more.
And, most of all, pigs are smart. It won’t take them long t
o realize we’re defenseless.
I can’t think what to do, though. These are Vikings. Oh, I know not all Norsemen are Vikings—only the bad ones. But these ones are bad. It’s dreadful enough to kill a baby. It’s worse by far to kill an unbaptized baby. And it’s the worst thing ever to kill a baby by throwing it to the pigs. Because that’s what he—she—meant to do.
I have no understanding of a girl who would throw a child to the pigs. I have no understanding of Vikings.
And why does she dress like a boy? Something’s wrong in that girl’s life. She’s afraid. I swallow. I know the kind of fear that makes a girl dress like a boy. Mother made Mel and me dress like boys when she shooed us away from Downpatrick before the battle.
But it doesn’t matter how bad the girl’s fear is. Nothing can excuse what she did.
The baby moves again. I hug him close, and he somehow manages to lift an arm and close his fingers around the thumb of my mangled hand. That’s all it takes: I love him. If only he lives, he can be mine.
“We won’t die here with the pigs,” I murmur into the matted wisps of hair on his roundest of heads. “I promise you that, little one, little egg, because that’s what you are, hardly more than an egg. I name you Og, then. And in my heart I baptize you.” I’m not a priest, so it doesn’t count. But he’s a baby; he can’t know better.
I take a deep breath. No one beside that disguised girl knows about Og, I bet, so maybe no one else wants him dead.
And, in the end, those people out there are the only chance we have. They have food and warmth; we have nothing.
I get to my feet, trying to hold in the scream from pain. But maybe it would be better if someone heard and came running.
Unless it was the girl.
No. I bite my tongue and stumble through the animals.
A pig noses at my side. I hold Og tight with my good arm. Then I lean over and jab my elbow hard into the pig’s face. The pig shrieks. I must have gotten his eye.
And I like pigs. The old sow back home won’t let anyone else near her baby piggies. She charges all the others, but with me she lies there on her side as I tie ribbons around their ears.
It’s a gift I have, this way of understanding animals. Mother says that.
And now I’ve injured this pig when all he did was what any pig would do.
It’s unfair I had to fight the pig. It’s unfair I’m here at all. I hurt all over and this baby, my Og, is hardly alive, and he didn’t do anything to deserve such a rotten start in life. We’ve both been cheated. I’m screaming now. I can’t help it. I’m screaming as loud as I can.
I plow through the rest of the pigs and stop short at the door. The hatefully heavy door that hangs all wrong so it drags. These people can’t even hang a door right.
I can’t put Og down or the pigs will snatch him. So how am I to pull open this most horrible of doors?
I lean my cheek against the door and practically slide off, I’m so drenched in sweat. A wave of nausea washes over me.
I pull off my tunic with my bad hand, and it starts bleeding again. The blood rolls along my arm. The smell must be driving the pigs crazy, because one’s already back nuzzling me hard. I’m scared to be naked like this. I have to hurry. I struggle and twist and pull and every move hurts so bad, but I manage to make that tunic into a sling that hangs around my neck, and I tuck Og in it—he’s so tiny and limp, it’s easy. Poor little starving thing. I throw all my weight into lugging the door open.
The pigs rush past me, stupid with the excitement of stirred-up hunger, baffled by being let out at night. I stumble after them and look around.
There’s nothing but that other building, the squat one. I don’t understand, because these people are normal size, tall even, but they have to be in there. Where else could they be?
I go to the door, every step a torture. Yesterday’s light snowfall has frozen into a stiff layer that crunches under my broken feet. The cold air nips at my skin, and I know Og doesn’t have enough heat of his own to last out here much longer. Tears make warm rivulets on my cheeks. It’s a reaction to the air. It’s not crying. I can do this.
Finally I’m there. I bang on the door with both fists.
It opens inward, and the blade of an ax shines, backlit by a fire that hisses loudly. The ax stops just short of my eyes. Beside it a startled, yellow-bearded face makes a shout and stares at me. I stare back. The man’s nothing more than a chest and head. His eyes reach level with my waist. I don’t understand. And if he doesn’t put down that ax, I might just faint dead away. I’m shaking all over.
He moves downward, and I can see he was on a strange kind of ladder. I go to take a step down and fall, tumbling-head first, holding onto Og for dear life.
Arms catch us, though they hurt maybe more than a flat fall would have. Screams fill my head, but I keep my mouth shut tight. We are hauled, Og and me, to a wooden platform built into the side of the room. They stretch us out, a naked babe on a naked girl. A woman—the one I saw pass the open door of the barn this morning—pries my arms apart.
“Og,” I call in protest as she takes him. My voice that seemed so loud in the barn is barely more than a whisper now.
“Øg!” says the woman, changing the sound a little. She holds Og at arm’s length, her eyebrows furrowed, her face alarmed. But slowly her expression changes. “Øg?” She looks at me in doubt.
I blink.
A blanket is already around me. I didn’t see who covered me.
“Alf.”
I turn my head to the voice.
It’s a child, no older than me. She comes to stand beside me and reaches out a hand toward my hair.
A man slaps it away. He chatters at her. I make out the sounds alf and øg in the quick stream of odd words. The air is warm and peat-smoke heavy, with the odors of a meal hanging in it. Fish. Barley. The room swirls with my hunger.
The woman calls out something, and then the boy who is really a girl shows up with a bucket that sloshes water, and his eyes won’t meet mine. I see the lines of fatigue on his face, and I know it must take all his will to keep up the act, to not let anyone know he gave birth just this morning. He’s pitiful weak. But not as pitiful as Og and me.
He turns to me purposefully, still not looking in my face, and I tense up. He snatches away that blanket that I’ve already grown attached to. There are so many people in this home that is half den in the ground—I hear their voices, and I know not a one of them will save me from the boy/girl.
He grabs an ankle and swabs my foot roughly. I jerk my knees up, but the girl child at my side throws herself across my legs, clearly to help the boy/girl, only she knocks my bad hand, and it hurts like the devil is shredding me. I curl around my pain, calling, “Mel, oh, Mel.” I need my sister so badly. “Mel,” I sob again. Please, Mel, make them stop, I pray inside my head.
The woman holding Og, who is now wrapped in a cloth, says something to someone beyond my view. A moment later a pelt is thrown across my chest. And another. And two more. All white. They are fox skins, I’m sure.
“Melrakki,” says the woman holding Og. She puts a hand on my chest on top of the furs. “Mel . . . melrakki.” She leans over me. “Sefask,” she says softly. She stands tall and calls out something.
A younger woman with a toddler on her hip appears quickly. She taps the little girl who is still lying on me, and the girl eases off and stands. The woman hands her the toddler. Now she undoes the brooches that hold the wool sheet wrapped around her body over her long shift. She opens the front and faces the woman in charge, taking Og from her and cradling him to her breast.
Og turns his head and bangs his face into the nipple, but finally opens his mouth and latches on. She puts out her free hand and strokes his arm, and he grabs her thumb.
Just like that, Og goes from being mine to hers. My heart breaks.
The air smells of honey.
Fire! What are they doing to my wounded hand? It’s on fire! Everything goes black.
AUTUM
N
CHAPTER FOUR
I’ve been living with these people for many months—all through spring, all through summer, working with the women, busy absorbing their chatter so I can master this language. But right now, on this fine autumn day, I’m in a boat with a man—Thorkild, the one who held the ax just a hand-width from my nose the night I showed up naked with a babe in a sling.
The wind blows in my face, which is not a good thing—it makes rowing harder, and we’re already going against the current. But I expected it would be like this; the wind always blows from the west along the water here. I don’t know why. It’s so consistent that the trees actually lean to the east. We passed a stand of them a long while back, reaching out low, over the water. But there are no trees in sight now. Just land stretching out as far as I can see on both sides. In the past half year I’ve gotten used to this strange place—this awkward and stark Jutland—but right now the flatness makes me miss Eire almost more than I can bear. I want to see cliffs, or at least big boulders along the water’s edge. I want to see rolling glens with grasses stretching over them like the softest green cloth. I want to see my sister and brother, my mother and father, all running toward me, saying how hard they’ve been searching for me, how much they’ve missed me, how they’re going to shower me with treats now.
“Alf, can you see it?”
I blink away those wishes and sit tall, grateful for an excuse to pause and pull the oar up so it rests across my thighs. “What? What am I looking for?”
“If you see it, you’ll know.”
A challenge. I perk up and scan the area closely. The marsh grass ripples around us. A large clump of yellow-green seaweed dangles from the neck of my oar. The waters are thick with it. I look over the side. This grass has to be rooted into the silt. If this feræringr—fishing boat—weren’t so shallow, we’d get stuck on the bottom here. We might anyway. Being on water makes me anxious. This is my first time in a boat since that awful boat I fled from. I hate boats. “The water is shallow. We’ll get stuck.”
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