Hidden

by Donna Jo Napoli

  The queen shakes her head uncertainly. “Bridge, pit . . . What are you talking about?”

  “Vipers. It was a viper who brought Alfhild to us. Vipers will help us keep her. A pit full of vipers.”

  “What vipers? We keep no vipers.”

  “I’ll pay high sums. The word will get out. Arabs charm snakes—Arabs will bring them.”

  “That will take too much time,” says the queen. “The word would have to travel with them all the way to their home countries before they could come back with snakes. But this Valdemar is breathing down our necks now.”

  “Then we’ll use our own vipers. There are snakes to be caught in the north countries if you search. I’ll pay exorbitantly. We’ll fill the pit. No one will get to Alfhild.”

  I stop gnawing on my fist. “What will I do locked in a tower?”

  “Be safe. And keep us safe. King Valdemar has threatened war if he cannot have you, and the way he talks, I believe him.”

  “But, King,” says the queen, “how can putting Alfhild in a tower save us from war?”

  “I’ll announce where she is. I’ll declare that I will prevent no man from entering her chamber. The vipers will stop him, not me.”

  “That’s good,” says the queen. “He can’t declare war if you make it clear that he can try to enter the tower.”

  “What if he brings arrows and simply shoots the vipers dead?” I say.

  “That will be against the rules. No arrows shot at the vipers unless you are inside the pit with them. No large rocks, either. Yes. I’ll announce that.”

  “What if he has no fear of a viper pit?” I say.

  “Have you heard of Ragnar Lodbrok?” asks the king.

  “No.”

  “He was a Norseman. Years ago they captured him in Saxland. They threw him in a viper pit, and he died screaming.”

  “This Valdemar will know the story,” says the queen. “It will stop him. Everyone knows the story.”

  I didn’t. The king and queen look at me, but none of us say it.

  I shake my head. “He could still try. After all, I didn’t die from the viper bite.”

  “But a single bite made you very sick,” said the queen. “He’d get many bites.”

  “He’d recover and try again,” I say. “He could try and try until he succeeds. No. I have to leave.”

  The queen gasps. “What? You can’t leave me yet. No.”

  “I have to.” I had already realized it was time for me to go in search of Mel anyway—I realized that when I wrapped myself inside the hawk-plumage cloak today. It would appear that three years is all I’ll ever get of family life. Three years with Ástríd, three years with Queen Tove.

  “No!” King Hók shakes his head vehemently. “We’re not going to lose you because of this wretched King Valdemar. You’re going nowhere except into that tower until the danger has passed. Listen to this rule: If a man should try to get you out of the tower, and if he should fail, he must yield to me and I will immediately decapitate him and impale his head on a stake for all to see. I will announce that, as well.”

  “What a hideous threat!” I say.

  “Let’s hope King Valdemar agrees.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  My father, the king, is a dróttinn, a military leader. He has many men who will come at his call, ready to fight for him—his hemþægar. He also has an older man, his þegn, who has sworn loyalty to him at all costs. And he has a younger man, his dreng, who has also sworn loyalty at all costs. My father, the king, is the leader of so many warriors.

  Yet it is the middle of the night and I am high in this tower and King Valdemar stands below, on the far side of the viper pit, calling up to me, and not a single one of these loyal souls is guarding me. Do they think evil sleeps at night? Are they daft?

  “You can hear me, I know that. Show yourself!”

  I go to the window, aware of being framed in the softest glow of the new moon. I hold my hair out above my head and screech like a hawk. “Go away, giant.”

  “What!” He laughs. “That’s what I saw in you, that spirit! You’ll be mine.”

  I sink back into the shadows. “Never.”

  “Don’t be foolish. I am a legendary lover.”

  “You disgust me.”

  No answer. It was an ugly thing to say—but he deserves it. He should let me be.

  “Tell me, Princess Alfhild,” he calls at last, “how dear do you hold your brother Hakon?”

  I rush to the window again. I can’t see anyone else with this giant. But the boy could be hidden somewhere nearby. “Where is he?”

  “Deep in dreams. But I can fetch him here within the hour. They say last time you saved him from a viper bite. Could you save him from . . . let me see . . . six snakes in this pit? But, oh yes, I forgot . . . now only three.” He laughs. “Could you save him from three cobra bites?”

  Cobras. The call for snakes produced three vipers from northern countries on the very first day. But then no more. I felt relieved; three seemed too few to “fill” a pit. Surely the king would change his plan, and I wouldn’t have to be locked in this clammy tower. But on the third day an Arab ship bearing three cobras happened to stop in Heiðabý. The cobras were each in separate cages, beside cages of scorpions and skinks and beavers. It turns out nearly every part of a cobra is useful in medicine, especially mixed with crushed scorpions or skink blood or beaver testicles—or so the Arabs would have the world believe. The captain planned to sell them to surgeons but was only too happy to unload all three at once. And so, it turned out I was cursed, after all. The cobras went into the pit—for a moment there were a total of six snakes—and promptly ate the three vipers, as the fascinated townsfolk looked on. But that didn’t matter: Three cobras were plenty to fill a pit.

  “Answer me, Princess. Could you save your brother?”

  “If that is your threat, then you don’t fight fair. So you deserve whatever you get. Indeed, if that is your threat, I will let fall the door now. You can march over the bridge-door into this tower. You can take me away.”

  “Do it!”

  “And then . . .”

  He waits. Finally he says, “And then what?”

  “I will soon get my chance. Perhaps immediately. Perhaps tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I will kill you.” I keep the shake from my voice and speak slowly, clearly. “Not with a quick knife stab. Not with a push off a cliff. Not with anything you can foresee and take precautions against. I will use a slow method. It will hurt. The pain will grow. From the center of your skull. From the center of your belly. From the center of your groin. Excruciating, incessant. You’ll be like the god Bald, dying from the mistletoe arrow his brother shot—writhing. You will wish you were dead long before you breathe your last.”

  My voice shimmers in the air a moment. Then silence.

  At last he says, “You have an ugly way with words.”

  I hold my tongue.

  “What slow method?”

  “There are many at my disposal. But I have already chosen the most vicious one. A toxin . . . from the sea. It liquidates you, from the inside out.”

  “They say you are a sea king’s daughter really.”

  “Which is why I am immune. But you are not, nor ever will be.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he says. I hold my tongue again. He shakes a fist at me, then drops it. “Bah! You’re more trouble than you’re worth.” And I remember Thorkild, saying those very words, time after time. King Valdemar walks a few steps off, then turns to face me again. “Word has gotten around. Did you know that? Has anyone told you? I’ve made you famous. Your beauty is the talk of the known world. Brave lads from all over have sworn to give a try at winning you. And these are lads who never looked in your eyes, so they don’t know what fire burns within you.” He clears his throat with a growly sound. “They will listen to your ugly words and think a pretty little thing like you must have been told to say them. They won’t believe them.
They will storm the tower. One of them will get you. Or maybe all of them.” He laughs. I can hear him laughing long after his shape has melded into the night.

  If Valdemar’s words are true and other men come, I won’t have to say my hateful lies again, for I cannot believe there are others who would stoop to threatening Prince Hakon. So they will stand at the edge of the pit and try to think of ways to get across it. As they stand there, they will hear the rumors: If you cut a cobra in half, you wind up with two. If you throw rocks on a cobra, it will change into a monster and crush you. And the worst rumor of all: Cobras always get revenge. Men will listen, and then they will leave. Alive.

  So Valdemar is wrong: I will not be made into a victim, nor a monster. No one can do that to me. No one can turn my life into a tale for skalds to tell.

  Besides, the king will release me now; Valdemar has gone home.

  I sleep fitfully.

  * * *

  The king does not release me, for Valdemar did not lie. Over the next few days three men take the challenge, and I am obliged to stay in the tower while they do. The king has announced that every attempt must be made solo. Townspeople come for the show.

  The first solo man arrived dragging a tree trunk long enough to span the pit and land on the bit of dirt in front of the tower door. Anyone could see that easily. It was wide, so he would not fall off. He seemed to have solved the matter of the snakes. But once he crossed the pit, how would he scale the tower? The only window is at the top, in my room.

  I almost called out that question to him. Why not save him useless effort? But calling out would have meant I’d need to drop the robe that I held muffling my face. I will allow none of them to see me. That was the lesson I learned from Valdemar: I will allow no one to claim that my beauty brought their downfall. Their downfall is their own cursed fault.

  And I am not a beauty, anyway. I will learn to spit fire if they continue to use a maiden’s virtue against her.

  So I kept quiet, like all the other spectators, waiting to see what this man would do after he crossed the pit.

  But no one got to see his plan, because once the tree trunk was pushed out midway over the pit, the front tip dropped in. Of course! No man could hold steady a great trunk suspended in the air like that. The man hauled it out, straining with loud groans. Sweat dripped in his eyes. Or I think it must have, for something blinded him to the cobra that clung to the trunk. The cobra opened its hood, hissed, and struck. The man spun, round and round, astonishment on his face, and fell backward, soundless, into the pit, taking the snake with him. It happened in the space of seconds. No one dared fetch out his body.

  That the snake came out with the tree trunk was a fluke. Who is responsible for a fluke? Who is responsible for a spinning corpse? But I wouldn’t even pose those questions. I couldn’t. I couldn’t think.

  The second solo man dragged a krage—a tree trunk again, but now the branches were lopped off a short distance from the base, so, propped up, it made a kind of ladder. The kind they used in the pit house I lived in with Thora and Thorkild and the others.

  This man clearly intended to solve both problems at once with that krage: getting over the pit and arriving at my window. But all of us spectators were alerted to the dangers of weight now. How on earth did he expect to get that krage into position for climbing? Besides, it was too short. It would reach only halfway up the wall. Was his mind deficient?

  The man had a long rope tied around the upper end of the krage, looped around the highest branch-footholds. When he had dragged the krage to the edge of the viper pit, he stopped. Then he took the other end of that long rope and ran with it in a huge circle that encompassed both pit and tower, back to his starting point. He then pulled on the rope until it went taut, from the upper end of the krage, straight to the tower and around it, and back to the krage. He stood there and pulled on the rope.

  It was ingenious—almost. Something was wrong with the plan, though I couldn’t grasp what yet. I chewed on his folly.

  The man leaned all his considerable weight against the drag of the rope and managed to get that krage across the viper pit. But now the tip of it was at the side of the tower, not the middle. The more he pulled, the more the krage went along the side of the tower, farther and farther from the man’s aim. Nothing could make it go up the wall.

  Good Lord. I wanted to scream to him to run. To annul the attempt, say it was a joke, halfhearted. Queen Tove stood beside King Hók, and I watched her shoulders curl forward in defeat. We could not allow our poor king to have to behead this man, this fool. The king would put a good face on it if the man left now. He’d laugh and call off the whole thing. He could give some stupid gift to whatever men had spent their money to travel here for the challenge and just send them all home again. I didn’t really need to stay in the tower anymore. This whole nightmare could end.

  The man didn’t try to laugh it off, though. Perhaps he was of limited imagination. In a rage, he shouted curses, threw down the rope, and raced over the krage, as the crowd gasped. Then he jumped from the krage to the tiny plot of earth in front of the door and stood there, staring up the wall at me. But I had no answers for him. I didn’t invite these attempts. I had no plan to offer. If he didn’t know enough to leap back on that krage immediately and run for his life, it was not my doing.

  He reached out toward the krage with both arms. What? The whole crowd moved forward to try to understand what he was doing. He managed to snag one of the truncated branches, and he pushed it upward, leaning out, as though to wedge himself under the tip of the krage in order to push that tip up the wall. The krage slipped out of his hands and the entire thing swung sideways, the point of contact on the far side of the pit acting as a pivot. The krage thumped into the pit and knocked the man with it.

  Another fluke.

  But somehow a little more predictable than the last. Someone somewhere was a little more culpable. Who?

  Sleepless nights, though I am not lonely anymore. Ragnhild and Thyra came to bed down with me. Queen Tove came to rub my back and moan into my neck. But we didn’t speak. Some horrors are unmentionable.

  Today makes a full week that I have been in this tower, and the third solo man stands at the other side of the pit and waves to me. Solo man one and solo man two had names, which I refused to hear. This man has a name as well. But I don’t want to know it. He is doomed. And none of this is my doing. The world has gone crazy.

  He stands there and waves like a lunatic.

  Suddenly I wave back and lower my robe from before my face. “Go home,” I call. “Live.”

  “Wait right there for me,” he calls back. “Nothing can kill me.”

  This I’m not prepared for. What can he mean? Clearly he must mean nothing—nonsense—for he told me to wait here. Where would I go?

  He opens a satchel and pulls out armor. A hjálm—an iron helmet. A byrnja—a shirt of mail. He puts them on, and I imagine their weight. It’s as though the helmet pushes my head down into my neck, the mail shirt pushes my shoulders down down into my chest. All of me feels forced toward the ground. I know this is how he feels, for I have put on a helmet myself. I have donned mail myself. I wanted to know the parts of battle in that near and intimate way. Earl, little Hakon’s trainer in the ways of warriors, has allowed me this. Earl has taught me so much, always incidentally—an accident of the fact that I stand beside Hakon with my eyes and ears open. I know to be brave. Be ready. Don’t set your heart on a specific tactic; look for opportunities. Use the element of surprise. Attack at night when others are complacent enough to sleep. Use everything you’ve got.

  Does this third solo man know these things? Does he know anything?

  He opens a jug and takes a swig, then holds the jug high to me. “Bjór!” Bjór is a fermented cider, rare and magical. I’ve seen only one person drink it ever, and he drank it from a silver vessel tiny as a thumb tip, because it’s so powerful. The man lifts his ax. He walks to the edge of the pit and shakes his ax over his h
ead. For a moment I think he’d be better off with a sword—for I don’t believe the rumor that a snake sliced in half equals two—but then I realize I am thinking in the fog of that bjór, just as he must be. Ax or sword—who cares?—both are futile. There are three snakes—he can’t attack all three at once. And his legs, his face, his feet—all these are vulnerable, even if the iron shields the rest. Surely he will see that. His desire to survive will make him cease before he begins. His belief in the magic potion cannot be so strong as to annihilate all sense.

  But he doesn’t retreat. He rocks from foot to foot.

  “Go home!” My voice is a shriek. I cannot bear one more death. I will have nothing to do with marriage ever if there is one more death.

  He jumps into the pit.

  Snakes strike. Stupid crazy mystic.

  I grab the window ledge, but I cannot hold myself. I fall to the floor of this room, this prison, and press my cheek to the cold hardness and wish my mind senseless.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The very worst has happened. He has come back to town: Alf. Alf of the eyes the color of rain—though I have not seen them again; it is only my memory that tells me this, and who can trust the memory of a girl who has witnessed the horrors of the past week?

  He apparently traveled by sea to Ribe, going all the way north around the tip of Jutland, then all the way south again. Given how short the land journey is, that was not a sensible act if speed had been his first concern. But he is a seafaring man, so the boat was his natural means. And speed dictated his actions only insofar as he didn’t stop at any towns along the way. He and his crew camped at the mouths of rivers at night. They walked upstream to fill up their water barrels. They built fires and roasted fish on long iron forks. They woke early, went to bed late. They were quick about it.

  My mind knows all. I see him at the helm, steering. His eyes intent. His hand pats the toilet set in his pouch, his precious trust, determined to deliver it to Ástríd. This innocent man.

  Then he lands at Ribe. All that time at sea meant he didn’t learn the news—the absurd quest of Valdemar and the princess in the tower. He knew nothing until he arrived in Ribe six days later, to news of two morons dead in the snake pit. The third was yet to come, yet to die.