by Swan Road
"I— I do not know how I— how I came to do such a thing," Cerys whispered, contrite and cringing in the face of Winifred's admonishment.
"Like as not because your mind is on Rhodri— instead of your work!" dark, sly, malicious Morgen gibed. She was fair-faced and ripe-bodied, the siren and mischief-maker of the lot, as eager to tumble into a man's bed as she was to shirk a hard task or to start trouble. She had had her eye on the warrior Rhodri for some time and, resenting the fact that it was Cerys he preferred, was quick to side with Winifred.
"Aye, well, that is the way of it when a maid is in love," plump, jolly Jestina observed affably, as though there were no argument brewing. With her capable, willing hands and kind, generous heart, she was forever smoothing over the upsets and the quarrels of the others. Taking the gown from Cerys, she began patiently to undo the ragged stitches of the crooked sleeve. " 'Tis not so bad, after all. A turn here and a tuck there, and 'twill soon be put aright. Fetch a sharper needle from the sewing chest, child," she directed to Cerys, "for Winifred spoke truly when she said that your own needle is dull. That is why you had to push it so hard through the fabric and so twisted the sleeve."
"I did that once— twisted my knee. 'Twas so painful, I remember.... You will need to put a compress on it and to bind it well," frail old Gladys chimed in querulously from where she half dozed by the fire, her embroidery sliding from her lap. Deaf and senile and so invariably muddled, she was often inadvertently humorous and so a favorite target of the housecarls' good-natured baiting and jesting.
Glancing up from her spinning as she joined in the laughter that greeted poor old Gladys's contribution to the conversation, Rhowenna had banished from her mind her fears of impending doom. In that instant of laughter, she thought only, with pride, that her mother, the Queen, was like a swan amid ducks where she sat among the circle of serving women. Lovely and serene, graceful of form and movement, keen of mind and wit, Igraine alone took no part in the mirth at Gladys's expense. Instead, her head was cocked a trifle, as though she were lost in reverie or, more likely, listening for the sound of Pendragon's return. But then Rhowenna saw her mother's face go suddenly still and heard, too, the loud squawking and violent fluttering of panicked hens in the bailey, the thudding hooves of horses ridden hard and furious, the discordant jangle of bridles yanked up short and spurs upon booted feet, and the urgent, frightened shouting of men outside; and she knew then, even as her mother did, that something was wrong, terribly wrong.
The Queen rose abruptly, accidentally knocking over her chair, a clumsy action so unlike her that Rhowenna felt a sudden fist of fear clutch her heart. Igraine's face was now drained of color; one fragile hand trembled at her throat for an instant before, recovering, she glided swiftly toward the doors of the great hall, through which the housecarls were even then bursting in a biting gust of rain and wind that brought with it a whorl of brittle leaves and old straw blown up from the bailey, and that set the rushlights in the great hall wildly aflicker.
For a moment, as the massive oak portals swung inward, Rhowenna could see naught but the men's faces, grim and angry and afraid beneath their helmets dripping with rain, for the broad shoulders of those who came foremost blocked her view. So at first, she felt only a deep sense of relief that the faces were familiar, that the royal manor was not under attack by some enemy force. But then she saw that between them, the warriors bore the bloodstained body of her father, the King, and she was struck dumb with anguish and disbelief.
Time seemed to slow then, and Rhowenna viewed her surroundings through a shadowy vignette, blurred at the edges, unreal. An afflicted cry rose to echo amid the heavy timber rafters of the great hall. She was only dimly aware that the wail came from her own throat as she, like the rest, pressed forward to reach the King. Metal clanged against metal and upon stone as one of the housecarls swept the cups of mead and wine from the long trestle table by the fire to clear a place to lay Pendragon; and as the other men carefully maneuvered the King's body onto the table, the dark, rich liquor from the scattered cups flowed and puddled like blood upon the rushes that strewed the stone floor. The mead, made from honey, would be sticky and difficult to clean up, Rhowenna thought stupidly, then was stricken and ashamed that she should think of such when her father lay so silent and unmoving upon the table.
"Is he alive?" The Queen's voice was low and sharp with fear; for it seemed to them all as she bent over Pendragon that he did not breathe and that the pallor of death had already crept upon his flesh.
"Aye, my lady," Pendragon's head warrior, Brynmawr, replied soberly, "but badly hurt, and I fear that the wound may prove mortal."
"Jestina, fetch my medicine chest and clean linens for bandages! Winifred, set a pot of water to boiling! Morgen, I will need mud and cobwebs to staunch the bleeding! Cerys, send for the healer! Rhowenna, you will assist me! Brynmawr, your knife!" Like stones cast rapidly from a sling, Igraine's orders flew as, taking the speedily proffered blade, she began carefully to cut the King's blood-stiffened leather garments from his body so that she might see what damage had been done.
As sharply as Brynmawr's dagger sliced through Pendragon's clothing, so her mother's words pierced Rhowenna's shock. Gathering her wits, she moved to stand at the Queen's side, her insides knotted with terror as she stared down at her father's handsome, bearded visage, as ashen as though all his life's blood had poured from it. There was a smear of mud upon his cheek and bits of twigs and leaves in his dark beard. He had been struck down in the forest, then, and had fallen to the earth, she surmised. The hounds of the hunting party must have flushed a wild boar, she thought. Savage and dangerous, a wild boar could gore a grown man to death, even a man so large and powerful as her father. One of his housecarls had died that way once, long ago, when she was just a child, she vaguely recalled. But now as her mother probed the injury, Rhowenna spied the cruel iron barb and the small, broken piece of wood embedded in her father's flesh, just above his heart; and she knew then, horrified, that he had been brought low by an arrow. A hunting accident? Or had someone attempted to murder the King?
"Brynmawr, how did this happen?" Igraine asked, her voice harsh and throbbing with emotion, her midnight-blue eyes dark and huge in her pale, fine-boned countenance.
"An ambush, my lady. We were set upon in the woods— by whom, I know not, except that they were men of Walas and not the Saxon wolves from east of Offa's Dyke; for they were wise in the ways of our hills and forests, my lady, and of our style of fighting. Most like, they were warriors of Glamorgan or Gwent. If so, my lady, it may be that they will believe the King dead and will lay siege upon us!"
Rhowenna shivered at Brynmawr's words, for until now, except for her dream, she had never really thought of Usk as being vulnerable to assault, and certainly not from other kingdoms of Walas. She had not suspected treachery from one of Walas's own.
"Go, then, and make the necessary preparations to ward off such an attack," the Queen ordered to Brynmawr, looking suddenly, Rhowenna thought, as though the blood flowing from Pendragon's wound somehow sapped her own strength, as well.
Why, she is no longer young, Rhowenna recognized, startled, and I never realized it until today; and without Father, she is vulnerable, as I am....
What might befall them if her father died? This time in which they lived was not like the old days, when a queen could rule in her own right. If Pendragon were to die, one of his kinsmen would claim the throne, and she and her mother might have little say about what became of them. Worse, Usk might be conquered by enemies and she and her mother taken prisoner, raped, or even killed. For the first time in her life, Rhowenna longed to be a man, so she might wield a sword and a shield to defend herself. Of its own volition, her hand dropped to the small dinner dagger she carried in the mesh girdle around her waist. If the worst should happen, she would not be seized without a struggle, she vowed silently, fiercely. She would fight to the death if need be to protect herself and her mother.
Bowing to the Queen, Brynmawr strode to
the doors of the great hall, taking several of the housecarls with him to set about fortifying the royal manor and the palisade that bulwarked it, while Igraine and Rhowenna strove to save the King's life, Igraine calling for more rushlights to be brought and placed upon the table to drive away the shadows where Pendragon lay. Her hand trembling as she took Brynmawr's knife from her mother, Rhowenna passed the blade through the flames of the fire in the central hearth, as she had been taught by her mother to do when using any kind of instrument to perform surgery upon an open wound. When the knife glowed hot, she poured a small amount of wine upon it to cool it. Then she handed the blade back to her mother, watching anxiously as, setting her teeth against the pain she must cause her husband, Igraine grimly pressed the knife point into the congealed blood and torn flesh around the broken shaft of the arrow that protruded from just below Pendragon's collarbone.
How long they labored over the King's body, Rhowenna did not know, although it seemed like forever. Daylight faded to dusk and then dusk to darkness as, back and legs aching from standing motionless for so long, she bent over her father, wiping the perspiration from his feverish brow and, with a cloth dipped in a bowl of warm barley water, moistening his dry lips, hoping and praying that he would gain a little nourishment to sustain him through his ordeal. Now and then, at her mother's direction, she felt his heart, which beat faintly and unsteadily beneath her palm, and her eyes were huge and scared when they met her mother's. More than once, as the King groaned and stirred restlessly at the Queen's ministrations, his breath rasping and rattling in his throat, Rhowenna was forced to press him down to hold him still. But to her relief, he did not regain consciousness as, little by little, her mother dug from the wound the iron barb that had caused it. Then, at last, grasping the broken shaft, Igraine pulled the arrowhead free. Blood gushed from the gaping hole; Rhowenna gasped as her father made a terrible choking sound. But the Queen did not falter, mopping away the blood, while with boiling water, and a fresh cloth lathered with soap from a medicinal plant, she cleaned the wound. After that, Rhowenna poured wine into the injury to ensure that putrefaction did not set in. Then, sweat beading her own brow, she pulled the jagged edges of her father's skin together, while her mother carefully sewed the laceration shut with a needle and thread. Despite the stitches that had closed it, the wound still bled, but this Igraine stanched with a poultice of the mud and cob- webs she had earlier sent Morgen to fetch. Then, folding one of the linens into a pad and tearing the others into strips, the Queen bound the injury tightly. During the whole, the King roused only briefly, then lapsed once more into an increasingly delirious unconsciousness— not a good sign, Rhowenna knew.
At her mother's direction, the warriors who had remained behind in the great hall following Brynmawr's departure lifted the King's body and carried him into his sleeping chamber, where they laid him upon his bed. After that, there was nothing to do but to wait, to hope, and to pray. Her face grave with sorrow and fear, Rhowenna sank upon a low stool by her mother at Pendragon's side, knowing that the vigil would be long and its outcome uncertain. Somber-faced, talking softly, earnestly, among themselves, the housecarls moved slowly to leave the two women alone with the King. Feeling a quick, gentle touch, in passing, upon her shoulder, Rhowenna glanced up to see Gwydion gazing back at her reassuringly as he left the sleeping chamber, quietly closing the door behind him. She had not realized until now that he had been one of those who had stayed behind when Brynmawr had gone to gird the royal manor against a possible assault. A wealth of love and unspoken words had been in Gwydion's steady grey eyes; and now, the cold knot of fear in Rhowenna's belly warmed and loosened a little at the understanding that no matter what, her beloved kinsman would be at her side to support and to defend her. She yearned to go and seek him out, to lay her head upon his shoulder and to feel his arms hold her close against his hard young body, loving and protecting her. But the memory of his hand upon her shoulder must be enough to comfort her until she could slip away from her father's bedside.
The healer came at last, bled Pendragon copiously, then retired to the great hall, declaring that the Queen's treatment had been exemplary and that there was nothing more to be done. Hard on the healer's heels followed Father Cadwyr, with his burning eyes and dark robes, to proclaim that whatever came to pass, God's will would be done and that the two women must trust in Him— to which Igraine retorted, rather sharply, that God helped those who helped themselves. Still, she did consent to kneeling beside the priest while he lamented the attack upon the King and prayed for Pendragon's swift recovery. But as Rhowenna, too, knelt and bowed her head, she could not repress a shiver at the thought that for all his pious pronouncements and prayers, Father Cadwyr resembled nothing so much as a huge carrion crow hovering over her father, waiting to pick the flesh from his bones.
Chapter Two
Loki's Wolf
The Shores of the Skagerrak, the Northland, A.D. 865
Wulfgar Lodbróksson was caught between two worlds. Neither jarl nor thrœll, he was the bastard son of the great Ragnar Lodbrók, a powerful konungr, a king, of the Northland, and a captive Saxon woman, Goscelin, whom Ragnar had brought home to the Northland one year from a raid down the coasts of Caledonia, Britain, Frisia, Normandy, and beyond. Ragnar had taken Wulfgar's mother as his concubine, but, in truth, she had been nothing more than a slave, for he had never deigned to marry her, since he already had more than one wife; and when, presently, he had tired of her and cast her off, she had been reduced to serving as a scullion in his kitchen and— as a result of her subsequent lowly place in his household— as a whore for his jarlar and thegns. Indeed, there were many who doubted that Ragnar had actually fathered Wulfgar. The first and foremost of those who cast aspersions upon Wulfgar's paternity were Ragnar's three legitimate sons: Ivar, called the Boneless— not for his shapelessness, but, rather, for his fluidity of movement— and Ubbi and Halfdan. Yet because no one, least of all Ragnar and his sons, could ever really be certain Ragnar was not, in fact, Wulfgar's father, Wulfgar was never compelled to wear a thrall's collar. Instead, from the time he was born, he was a bóndi, a freedman. This alone was his salvation, the one thing to which he clung ferociously against all odds; for in reality, his lot in life was little better than his poor mother's had been.
As a child, Wulfgar had been given to his half brothers and made to understand that his livelihood, indeed his very existence, depended solely upon how well he served them. Although once he had attained his manhood, he could, as a freedman, have left them at any time, he had no means to do so, and he had, besides, come to understand that out of sheer perversity and spite, his half brothers would not have tolerated his breaking away. Being the true sons of their father, they would have found some foul manner of forcing Wulfgar's acceptance of their claims upon him—or, worse, have seen him dead in his grave. Even Yelkei, the sly old spaewife who had been his wet nurse, who had reared him when his mother had died, and who in the past had fought like a she-wolf to protect him, could not have stayed their hands against him then, Wulfgar thought. Whether he be driven to subjugation or to death mattered not to his half brothers; but he must continue to serve and to obey them because he dared to call himself their father's son— and so held a claim, however tenuous and remote, to Ragnar's kingdom and throne.
Of his father and half brothers, it was Ivar whom Wulfgar most hated; for being the oldest of Ragnar's three legitimate sons, Ivar was heir to Ragnar's vast holdings, a prince of the Northland, and the handsomest of men, besides, while Wulfgar was naught but a bastard and believed himself nothing uncommon to look upon. But these things alone, although cause for jealousy, would not have earned Ivar Wulfgar's enmity; there was one thing more: Ivar was also the cruelest of Wulfgar's half brothers. Many times over the years had Wulfgar felt the stabbing sting of Ivar's needle-sharp wit and scorn, an injury piercing Wulfgar's pride and manhood more deeply than the smart cuff to his ear or the swift boot to his backside, which he often received from Ubbi or Halfdan.
Although those two were mighty warriors, as bold and bloodthirsty in battle, as ambitious and hungry for power as their older brother, they were rougher, simpler men, lacking the complexities and subtleties that made Ivar clever and cruel. Unlike Ubbi and Halfdan, who cared not what any man thought— and even less for a woman's feelings— Ivar made it his business to know the hopes and dreams of all who served him; and Wulfgar, in his youth, had been foolish enough, once, to blurt out his own aspirations during a heated quarrel, when his ingrained wariness, forbearance, and plain common sense had fallen prey to the fierce prick of Ivar's needling. Wulfgar had regretted ever since that evil day when his own pride and temper had placed such a weapon in Ivar's ruthless hands.
Ivar would not, Wulfgar thought, have much grudged him the small farm that would have been his by birthright had his father been a freedman and not Ragnar Lodbrók, a king. Wulfgar would have been of little consequence then, merely one of the many entitled to speak at the Thing— the assembly of all freemen: bóndi, thegns, and jarlar alike— who, under the law that, a hundred years later, would come to be part of the great Frostathing Law, would have been permitted to acquire three thralls of his own, provided he had also possessed no less than twelve cows and two horses. But being no one's heir and so having little enough to his name, Wulfgar called no square of land his. Nor would Ivar, knowing that it was Wulfgar's one burning desire in life, agree to his half brother's joining the ranks of the thegns, the warriors, and going a-víking in one of the square-sailed longships that had made the Northmen the scourge of the seas for over two centuries.
It was for this prohibition most of all that Wulfgar hated Ivar.
So it was that Wulfgar was little more than his half brothers' lackey, as was proved this winter's day by his driving of their sledge, piled high with equipment and supplies for the hunt upon which they had embarked earlier that morn. It had snowed the night before, and the wind was raw, the air frigid. Shivering a little, Wulfgar might have wished for the heat of the fire in Ragnar's skáli, a great mead hall, or at least for a heavier fur cloak; but he was accustomed to the cold, having known naught else all his life. There was a stout, iron-ringed barrel of mead on the sledge, and one, too, of bjórr, a highly fermented fruit wine. Doubtless when the hunting party paused to rest, he would be given a cup of one or the other to warm him, its never before having been his half brothers' whim that he should freeze to death. Meanwhile, to take his mind off the day's chilliness, he dwelled on the strange warning that Yelkei had given him earlier that morn. Since the two sturdy, yoked oxen harnessed to the sledge were prone to plod placidly after the horses being ridden and so had scant need of any real guidance, a low command, a gentle tug on the reins now and then were all that were required to maintain the pace and direction of the sledge, which left Wulfgar's mind free to wander where it willed as he hunched on the seat, his bare blond head bent, his blue eyes downcast to avoid notice, as was his habit. He had long ago learned that like a slave, a freedman, if he were poor and wise, did not attract to himself the attention of the jarlar and konungrs of the Northland— especially of those who had reasons of their own for singling him out and wishing him ill.
