Daughter of the Wolf

by Victoria Whitworth

  Elfrun went, feeling both graceless and grateful. Thancrad had been kind, that was all. Very kind. She paused in the doorway and looked over her shoulder to see him lifting a hand in salute, but she pretended she hadn’t noticed and hurried inside. The pot on the hearth smelt as savoury as she had hoped, and it was good to be out of the chill.

  Fredegar came in a few moments later, ushering Abarhild and settling her down on her stool. Her woman came clucking forward with a soft shawl, and the old woman grumbled and muttered to herself. Fredegar stood in the shadows and watched. When he was certain Abarhild was comfortable he jerked his head. ‘Come.’

  ‘But I’m hungry!’

  ‘Bring a piece of bread then.’

  The first stars were appearing, though the western sky was still streaked faint green and orange above the hills. Not frosty, but not far from it.

  The young men had gone.

  Elfrun wanted to explain that she had done nothing wrong, that she had merely been courteous to a guest and a neighbour, but she was reluctant to open her mouth. Why should she justify herself? If Abarhild hadn’t censured her, then no one else had the right. But then why – if she had indeed done nothing wrong – this crawling sense of guilt? Her stomach was still growling audibly. She tried to nibble at the hunk of barley bread she was holding, but it was dry and a little stale and the crumbs stuck in her throat.

  They had walked only a little way up the track behind the church when Fredegar stopped and turned to look down past the huddle of minster buildings to the sea, now visible beyond.

  Elfrun braced herself.

  But when he did speak at last his voice was quiet, and his eyes stayed on the sea. ‘The world doesn’t understand virginity.’

  She stared at him, the bread forgotten.

  ‘Perhaps integrity would be a better word.’ He sighed, a long, juddering breath. ‘Elfrun, dear child, you have such integrity. Such innocence. Like a candle-flame.’ She could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, his beaky profile dark against the evening sky. She had never known him struggle so for words, even though English was a foreign tongue to him and he patched his inadequacies with Frankish and Latin. ‘Like a length of white linen. The note of a true bell.’ He hugged himself, each hand clasping the opposite elbow. ‘From time to time your grandmother speaks wistfully of sending you to some house of holy sisters, like Chelles.’

  ‘But that’s just her talk! Besides, I can’t possibly go to Frankia.’

  He shook his head. ‘There are nearer houses. Hovingham – she says you have family connections—’

  Elfrun forgot all about deference in her anger. ‘She just can’t stop meddling, can she? It’s all about her, not me. She wants to retire, so I have to run the hall. She had to leave Chelles, so she makes these ridiculous plans for me to be a nun, because she couldn’t. My father never wanted... He wanted...’ But she had to stop then, because of the lump in her throat and the burning in her eyes. She pressed her lips together and stared at the restless far horizon, barely visible in the thronging dusk. She could not give in like this, not if she was lady of the hall, and lord in her father’s absence.

  But if he was really gone, forever, gone and not coming back, then who was she?

  ‘Elfrun – your grandmother – don’t dismiss her suggestions too quickly.’ Fredegar sounded more uncertain than she had ever heard him. ‘Child, I fear for you. The world...’

  She waited for a long time, her heart slowing and her breath steadying. At last, trying to help, she said hesitantly, ‘I know I haven’t much experience of the world, but I do know folk do... stupid things. And say them... and believe them. I’m not so innocent...’ She was breaking off little bits of bread, crumbling them between her fingertips, discarding them, trying to make sense of his words. Her feet were going numb.

  ‘Stupid? Wicked, rather.’

  ‘Is this about Thancrad, riding with him, just now?’ She was feeling obscurely insulted. ‘Because I didn’t want to ride with him, Father, but I couldn’t be unmannerly either, when he offered.’

  ‘Unmannerly? Be unmannerly!’ The priest was still staring out to sea. ‘You must be less eager to please. Elfrun, you trust too readily.’

  She shook her head at him. ‘I am the lord of Donmouth. I can’t possibly be rude to a guest. What would my father have said?’

  Fredegar exhaled, another shuddering sigh, and she realized to her shock that he was near tears. ‘These are the manners of the old world, Elfrun. But I am very much afraid that a different world is coming, and you will need to learn to stand up for yourself better. To fight.’

  48

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  Wynn hadn’t even noticed the shadowing of the forge entrance, she had been so engrossed in her work. Jumping up, she pushed the chunk of cow shank and the little knife with which she had been whittling out her design into the dark corner with a casual sideways flick of her foot.

  Her mother was squinting suspiciously into the gloom. ‘Well? I want to talk to him.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘I can see that!’ Her mother had her arms crossed defensively and a little hard frown tugging at her neat, small-featured face. She took a few steps further into the forge. ‘He’s found no one to work with him then.’

  It was a statement, not a question. Wynn saw no need to respond. That was public knowledge.

  ‘What were you doing just now?’ Her mother was peering into the corner.

  ‘Nothing.’ Wynn walked towards her mother, blocking her view. ‘Father’s gone way north, looking for ironstone. Up past Pickering marshes, he said. Days away.’ She sighed and put her hands on her hips. ‘He goes every year, Mam. You know that.’

  ‘He’s not taken you? He’s left you here alone?’

  Wynn wondered how anyone could be so thick-witted. ‘Does it look as though he’s taken me?’

  ‘Don’t you speak to me like that.’

  She relented a little. ‘He’s left me enough to do while the forge is cold.’ She gestured at the oak slab. ‘There’s hammers need rehafting, tongs with loose rivets...’

  ‘Wynn, will you not come home with me?’

  Wynn stared at the floor.

  ‘You’re a girl grown, you shouldn’t be here. You should be with me – or in the women’s house...’

  Wynn muttered something, deliberately pitching her voice below easy hearing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The lady says I can work with my da.’ Wynn had no idea whether this was true.

  ‘Elfrun?’ Her mother sounded startled. ‘Aye, but what does she know? Another green girl! You’re needed by me, I’ve a hundred jobs for you to do.’

  Wynn could imagine only too well. A little pang of remorse needled at her, but it was small and swiftly blunted. She had half a dozen cousins who could hoe the beans and lug the babies around. Her father had no one else. She had fought too hard and risked too much to earn her place at the forge; she wasn’t going to give it up now, never mind how her mother played on her guilt.

  ‘Come on.’ Her mother jerked her head. ‘Let’s go to the lady now, you and me. She’ll understand; she must know this is no place for a girl alone.’

  Wynn shrugged. ‘Try it if you like. She’s no fool, the lady, for all you call her green. Da can’t run the forge on his own. And no one can do without smithcraft.’ She put her hands back on her hips and stuck out her chin, hoping she looked bigger than she felt.

  ‘Are you saying you’re staying here till he finds another lad?’

  Wynn nodded, sighing. She had lost patience with this conversation, and her fingers were itching to get back to her knife and bit of bone.

  Her mother crossed the floor swiftly and seized her by the hair at the back of her neck.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Don’t you dare roll your eyes at me like that, you stupid child.’ Her mother’s face was only inches away, twisted with fury. Wynn flinched, but her mother had her fast. ‘What happens when he loses hi
s temper with you, and shoves you in the fire, eh? You think I want to lose another of my children?’

  Wynn ducked and ripped away, hissing with pain and leaving a hank of hair in her mother’s fist. ‘That’s not what happened.’ She glared from the far side of the cold fire-pit. ‘Cudda was fuddled with drink. It was nothing to do with Da, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.’

  ‘So you’re calling me a liar now?’

  Wynn shrugged, feeling safer. She wasn’t going to go back within reach, and she knew she could out-dodge her mother if it came to a chase. ‘Cudda brought it on himself. And yes – you’re a liar if you say otherwise, just as much as anyone else.’

  Her mother raised a hand, and Wynn braced herself, but after a long moment her mother merely pressed her fingers against her forehead. ‘Well, I tried,’ she said quietly, her gaze lowered. ‘Forgive me, but I tried.’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  Her mother looked at her levelly, light-blue eyes expressionless in her tired face. She seemed about to speak, but in the end she just turned and walked away.

  Wynn waited a long moment. When she was quite sure she was alone she went to the pile of wood stacked in the corner and found the little knife and the hand-long length of bone. She was about to start work again, but looking afresh at her work she found it didn’t please her after all. The proportions were wrong, the creature’s head too small, its back-bent body too jerky and angular, the encircling tendrils lacking all force. She had been snatching furtive glances at the little silver creatures on Elfrun’s cloak tags, but they were no bigger than her thumb, and she was rarely close enough for long enough to get a proper look. Just give her half a morning alone with those tags, to get under the skin of how they had been made, not just the finished thing, but all the stages of how they had come into being...

  She refused even to think about the mirror.

  Frustration and bad temper made her raise her hand, ready to throw the shank of bone back into the kindling pile, but then she paused. He had said something, the kind man with the lovely eyes. You’re a maker... If you truly love it, you can learn. Elfrun had never thought to tell her his name, but Wynn had been very taken with him, the mirror man.

  If he had thought she could learn, then she could learn.

  Love, so that was what was needed. She didn’t know very much about love, but maybe this was the time to start.

  She huffed a sigh. It was bad enough trying to do this by eye, never mind from memory. There were rules about how you made these patterns: she knew that. But no one was ever going to tell her what they were. She squinted at her scratchings, brow furrowed with concentration. Another piece of bone was easy enough to come by; much harder to find beautiful things to look at. But if she were ever to get the knack of it, to make the patterns flow the way the best craftsmen could, then she had to have a teacher.

  Or models to copy.

  Wynn found her eyes flickering again to the long, wrapped bundle on the oak slab. Before he had left, her father had made her promise to leave it well alone. But she had had a glimpse when Athulf had brought it in, and though she hadn’t been able to hear much of the urgent, low-voiced exchange, the firelight had shown her enough of the worked leather of the scabbard and the goldcraft of the hilt to make it clear that this was a finer thing than she would meet again in a hurry.

  She had promised on her honour not to touch it.

  Moving slowly, hardly daring to breathe, she got to her feet again and tiptoed round the forge floor to where Athulf’s sword and scabbard lay swathed in a fold of woven wool, like a swaddled baby. She stood contemplating the bundle, her hands clasped behind her back. Then she stepped to the forge door and looked up the path to the hall, and down towards the river. No one in sight, other than a small child half-minding a gaggle of errant geese bigger than itself. Wynn drifted back inside, feigning innocence, purposelessness, just in case.

  Once back inside, she arranged the faulty tongs together with the tools needed to mend them on the bench, again just in case. If someone did come in they would furnish her an excuse for being at the bench. And then she returned her attention to the sword.

  Her first, and unexpected, sensation was one of disappointment. Scabbard and hilt alike were decorated with angular long-jawed creatures of a type she did not recognize. A long chain of them in the raised leather of the scabbard, and a pair facing each other on the pommel. They looked old, and ugly, and alien.

  But as Wynn looked more closely the fine detail of the design, the control and the rhythm implicit in this hooky, overlapping band of creatures began to entrance her eye. They wove together so perfectly, the jaws of each clasping the leg of the one in front... This was the work of a master. It might be that no one would thank her for making something marked with these beasts today, but she could learn from it, for all that.

  She wouldn’t rush into it, though. Another long hard look at the pommel, drinking in the over and under, the angle of the jaws, the echoing relationship of oval eye and body-curve; and she squatted down with a stick to scrape out the pattern, as a first step, on the packed earth of the floor.

  But it was no good, going back and forth. Her promise entirely forgotten, she picked up the sword in its scabbard and set it down on the ground so she could keep it before her eyes while she drew.

  It was nearly impossible at first, so many little angles and zigzags, and as she copied each component was slightly more askew, so the pattern distorted further and further as she moved along. She looked back at the scratchings in the floor and felt the hot tears of anger. This was impossible. She was on the verge of snapping the stick and throwing it into the kindling-pile, when she had a thought.

  Dirt wasn’t like bone, or metal. Dirt was more like what she had heard of parchment. It could be rubbed out. You could build up layers of lines, rubbing out selectively...

  She ground the floor smooth again with the ball of her foot, and began once more. But this time, rather than trying to reproduce the whole pattern at once, she drew a long, regular, swooping line. Then a second, dip intersecting rise at set intervals. And then a third. These would guide her. Now to draw parallel lines above and below each of her original three. Squatting, shuffling incrementally, using her finger, she erased, drew in new lines, turned other lines back on themselves, joined errant loops. Increasingly she began to notice intentional irregularities, places where the artist had aimed for the effect of symmetry where true symmetry was unattainable. How he had amused the eye with a spiral to distract from the impossibility of a hip joint...

  The whole pattern, from hilt to chape, was making sense now, and she was working with greater confidence, no longer bothering to check every time that her wild scratchings on the floor corresponded to the design on the scabbard. Perhaps only she and the artist to whose vision she was responding would have recognized the pattern she was making, but she knew it was there, and she could feel that other maker’s approval, as surely as though his hand were guiding hers.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  She scrabbled backwards and away, but her first reaction was one of relief. The intruder was neither her father nor her mother. ‘I was looking at the pattern.’

  ‘You put my sword on the floor. The dirt floor.’ Athulf had snatched it up and was cradling it protectively in his arms.

  Wynn eyed him warily, and moved gently back so that the fire-pit was between them, and she was closer than he was to the door. ‘How’m I ever going to learn to mend it if I can’t look at it?’ She gestured. ‘Or draw it.’

  ‘You?’ The contempt in his tone was withering. His eyes narrowed, and he peered at the floor between them. ‘This?’ Deliberately he dragged his heel sideways, scouring and obliterating her designs. ‘Tell your father I’ll bring the sword back later. And he’s not to leave it unattended again.’

  Wynn scowled at him as he barged past her. She knew she was at fault. He would have been well within his rights to strike her, but he had not. And st
ill, she hated him.

  49

  They heard the music first, fitful and distant only, because although the high-summer day was bright the wind was coming in from the sea. Strange, high-pitched, trowie sounds that had everyone dropping their work and coming to the hall, to see the musicians coming, the girl in kale-green who played a bird-bone flute, and the man with an Irish drum against which he rattled a little stick, and the boy who danced on a ball that he turned with his feet – and the bear.

  The bear!

  Elfrun had never seen a live bear before. It was a long, baffling moment before she could work out the dark, hunched shape.

  The bear-leader came shaking a leather rattle in his left hand and leading the bear with his right. It shambled along, its thick shaggy coat pale with the dust of the road. A mob of children came after it, shoving and pointing and egging each other to run up and tug at a clump of the fur. They were growing ever more daring, but the bear plodded on, giving no sign of having noticed their antics. It was bridled, with tags of coloured ribbon, green and red and yellow, fastened to the leather straps, and its nose was pierced with a rope which passed right through the soft flesh of its snout; it followed the bear-leader with impressive humility.

  The musicians were playing a quick, catchy tune, the man with the drum shouting encouragement to the crowd, and especially to the children who were jigging from foot to foot. The boy jumped down from his ball and kicked it sideways, then flipped over and began walking on his hands, his tunic falling about his ears and his bare buttocks flashing white in the cool, hazy sunshine.

  But Elfrun couldn’t look at anything but the bear.

  The bear-leader had stopped quite close to where she was standing in the doorway of the women’s house, drawn out like every other soul in Donmouth by the strange, wailing music. She was not at all sure it was fitting to watch the entertainers, or even to allow them to perform, but for the first time since the news had come of Radmer’s drowning the bear drove all such anxieties from her mind, replacing them with a horrified fascination. Small, red-brown eyes glared out at her, almost lost in the fur which, now she was close, she could see was less thick than she had thought, even mangy, and rubbed bare in places. Its huge feet were tipped with massive claws, black paling to brown at the tips, each one as long and thick as her longest fingers, and she took a step back at the thought of the damage those could do. A powerful musky aroma came off the fur.