Magnus

by Joanna Bell

  Perhaps I felt a little something when I saw the coast of the Kingdom of the East Angles come into view, from the ship I sailed on, smaller than the rest and filled with the thralls, as the Northerners called those who were little better than slaves. But whatever I felt, it was fleeting, and gone as soon as my heart remembered that the place no longer contained the people who had made it special to me.

  As it happened, we made camp near to where Haesting had been – I was not permitted to wander freely but I recognized the coastline as being just north of the old estate. Sometimes, when I was sent to gather berries with some of the other thralls, I would keep one eye half open for the tree. Not that I was searching for it to return to the United States – not at all. The place, if it was even still there and not yet destroyed by nuclear war, would be as alien to me then as the deep past was when I first came through the tree. I was just aware that I was in the general vicinity of where it would be, and curious to see if it even still existed.

  And then one day I found myself traveling south, with another Jarl who had arrived to help with the conquering and settlement of the Kingdom by his Northern brethren. Ragnar was his name, and I was sent at the back of a group of his warriors, and the warriors of a second Jarl, as they moved south to confront the King of the East Angles himself. I listened to the battle with little interest, awaiting the arrival of the wounded and dying. And then a girl appeared – a woman, really – and casually mentioned that she would need to get to a hospital to have her wound treated.

  A hospital. The word struck my brain like a sledgehammer and I remember stumbling slightly, barely remaining on my feet. Further questioning revealed that she was from where I was from – the United States, and when I was from – the future. She did not seem to understand, right away, where she was. She came to understand, though, as she ignored my warnings to return to the tree and return home as soon as possible, or risk losing herself forever in the past. She came to understand almost before it was too late, and we both discovered that there were two more from our time – two more women, one who already had a Jarl's child, and another in her belly. Paige and Emma, Jarl's wives, they knew where they were and they did not wish to return. Sophie, who had a child back in the United States, and who was slightly older than the other two, did.

  And on the night that she left, after the Angles had briefly taken us captive and the Northmen had rescued us, I faced, for the first time since I had come to the Kingdom, the possibility of going home. The girls had already advised me to return, questioning why I would stay in the past where I had no one, and no status. They were young, and they did not understand that even if I were to return, I would still have no one, and no status.

  But I liked Sophie. She was warm and smart and I wanted to see her safely south, back to the tree.

  We left in the night, so her Jarl Ivar would not realize she was missing until dawn, and started south on the Great Road, which I had heard talk of in Haesting, but never traveled on. We were far from the coast at the time, and I knew the Jarl would have tracking men – and hounds.

  To that end, I persuaded Sophie to walk in streams when we could find them, even if it left our feet wet and cold. Hounds couldn't follow trails in streams – nor could men.

  It was a difficult journey, and more than once I sensed I was holding her back. But Sophie refused to leave me behind and when we got further south and I recognized where we were – or thought I did – I showed her an alternate route, so if the Jarl was following, he might not find us.

  The tree itself, when Sophie found it, did not look as it did in my memories. It was bigger than I remembered it, its roots and branches more numerous, thicker, it's trunk taller.

  "We should go," Sophie urged nervously as we stood gazing at it. "We shouldn't waste time – the Jarl's men could be right behind us. You are coming, right?"

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Magnus*

  All my life, from the time of my first hazy memories, I lived with the feeling of being somehow apart. I often caught the villagers in Apvik looking at me out of the corners of their eyes, sometimes whispering as they did so, and thinking I hadn't seen them. Their interest always seemed slightly pitying, rather than malicious, and it happened so frequently I soon let it pass without thought. It wasn't as if I didn't have an explanation for their pity – I was the son of the man who would have been the Jarl, grandson of the actual Jarl, raised by my grandparents because my own mother and father were dead. I was a figure of sadness, a motherless – and fatherless – boy, no less worthy of compassion because of my upbringing in a Jarl's high household.

  That is, at least, what I thought when I was young. My grandparents, the Jarl and his wife, were always reluctant to speak of their son. I understood it to be painful for them and tried not to ask too many questions of an elderly couple who had lost their firstborn.

  There were a few taunts from other children, when we played in the fields. One girl in particular, the daughter of another high person in Apvik, seemed to take great delight in telling me repeatedly that I was not a Jarl's son at all. But when I lost my patience and pushed her up against one of the barn walls one afternoon when we were not yet ten winters, she dissolved into tears and refused to say what she meant.

  My grandmother was prone to strange fits of melancholy, too. Every now and again I would catch her staring wistfully at me as I played in the longhouse on a rainy day, or when I returned from a day training with child's swords.

  "What is it?" I would ask sometimes, when I caught her doing it. "Why do you look at me like that, grandmother?"

  Usually, she would shake her head and put a smile on her face and tell me she had forgotten where she put her knife, or that she was thinking of a conversation she had that morning with one of the village women. But every now and again she would approach and take my face in her hands and stare down at me.

  "You look just like him," she would say sometimes, as her eyes welled with tears. "Just like him!"

  Of course I assumed by 'him' she meant my father Asger, the Jarl-to-be who had died heroically in battle in the Kingdom of the East Angles.

  When I was ten and five, my grandfather – the Jarl – died. He fell into a ravine whilst hunting a stag, and dashed his head on some rocks. And when he died, my grandmother began to slip away. At first her grief seemed expected, as grief is when one loses one's husband. But instead of returning to her routines after three moons, as was the way of mourning in Apvik, she began to spend more and more time in bed, staring out the door she would ask me to keep open, so she could see the waves in the distance.

  I was to be Jarl, but at ten and five was not considered ready yet. Another man, one of my grandfather's most trusted friends, took on the role in the interim. It was this man – Kiarr – who became responsible for my training and education, and it was he who came to find me at the beach one day to tell me my grandmother called for me urgently.

  Back in the longhouse, I found her in her usual place in bed, reaching one of her tiny, gnarled hands towards me.

  "Grandmother," I said, taking her hand in mine. "Kiarr says you wanted –"

  "Sit, boy. Sit, Asger. I have something to tell you. Go and get a chair, this won't be quick."

  I brought one of the heavy wooden chairs from the table and placed it at her bedside.

  "Look how strong you are already," she rasped. "Ten and five and already as strong as a grown man. If what Kiarr says about your training with the sword is true, you will be Jarl before you are ten and ten and one, my love."

  But my grandmother had not called me back from my day's activities to praise my strength in carrying chairs. I sat down beside her, still holding her hand in mine, and asked what it was she needed to speak to me about.

  "I will be with your grandfather soon," she told me. "Do you see how I fade away? I will not go like he did, all at once. No. I will go gradually, bit by bit. Already I am more in the next life than this one. But before I go, there is something you must know. I was
told never to tell you the things I am about to tell you, Asger. But now I see the young man you are becoming and I cannot keep my son's son from knowing the truth of his father – and himself."

  My head dropped to my chest as my grandmother spoke matter-of-factly about her death, which I had known was coming but had not quite been faced with so starkly until she put words to it. I had no parents, and as such my grandparents were my parents, and my grief at their deaths the grief of any child who faces being orphaned.

  But my grandmother didn't have time to watch me wipe my eyes and weep at her side.

  "The first thing you must know, is that your name is not Asger. You are Magnus, boy. Your name is Magnus, as was your father's. It is not just your name that is his – I look at you and it is as if the years have spun backwards and it is Magnus himself who stands before me, with that look in his eyes that I see in yours sometimes, of unspoken impatience. He –"

  "My name is not Asger?" I asked, thinking my grandmother was beginning to lose her mind. "Why do you say –"

  "Because your father is not Asger! The Jarl and I had two sons. Asger and Magnus. Asger was the Jarl-to-be. But all that you heard of him from your grandfather the Jarl – about his bravery, his talent, his skill with a sword and the warmth he carried in his heart for those who were beneath him – those things are true only of Magnus."

  My grandmother did not seem to be lost in madness. I looked down at her and in truth she looked more alert than I had seen her for a moon or more.

  "I see how you look at me," she continued. "And if you hate me, and you hate the Jarl for our lies, I will understand it. He could not live with Asger's shameful death in the Kingdom of the East Angles, and so –"

  "So my father died a shameful death?" I asked, horrified. "Is that why the people in Apvik have been staring at me all my life, as if –"

  "No! Listen to me, boy. He was not your father. Asger was not your father. It was Magnus who brought you forth, and it was, it was..."

  She trailed off and we sat in silence for some time, as I let the news take hold in my mind. I was not the son of the Jarl-to-be, Asger? I was the son of Magnus, the second son? And if it was all true, why had they spun such a story? If my real father was the brave and good son, why had they pretended otherwise? When I asked my grandmother these questions, a single tear slid down one of her cheeks and she gripped my hand a little tighter.

  "If I tell you the answers," she whispered. "You are going to hate me."

  "I'm not," I told her. "There's nothing you could do to make me hate you, grandmother. If the truth has been kept from me, or twisted around to resemble something it isn't, I know it was not on your prompting. I know you had to listen to your husband."

  My grandmother sobbed quietly when I said that, and wiped more tears from her cheeks. "You even have your father's understanding," she said. "He was often angry with me, for obeying a man he came to think unreasonable, or defending a son he came to think unworthy of defense. But he always understood that I had no choice – as he himself did not, being born second to Asger. As it is, child, I must tell you before I lose my courage. I do not know that your parents are even dead."

  I heard the words. There was no sudden gust of wind to carry them out of the longhouse before they found my ears. I heard them, but I did not quite understand them, not right away.

  "What is it you say? You do not – you do not –"

  "I do not even know that your parents are dead! There was a fight, my precious boy. A fight in the Kingdom of the East Angles, between Asger and Magnus. You know as well as I do the penalty for a second son to take up arms against his elder brother! But it was Asger who died, at Magnus' hands, and the Jarl who returned to tell me that one son was dead, and the other lost to us forever."

  "But," I said, shaking my head as if to clear it and feeling my heart hammering away in my throat. "But – how –"

  "He stayed in the Kingdom. Magnus stayed in the Kingdom when his father and his brother came to kill him, and instead he killed his brother. He took a wife, and made a life for himself there, and all the while the Jarl – your grandfather – took updates from a local peasant girl on any children that might be born of the union. It was so long, boy. It was so long we thought the marriage would be childless, until one day many winters later word came that Magnus' wife was pregnant. The Jarl sent a ship, and gold for the peasant girl, and a few of his best men to wait for the birth. And when the child – when you – were born, the –"

  "The peasant girl who grandfather paid in gold stole me away?" I asked, my voice as flat as my heart was stirred near to a frenzy. "Is that what you tell me? The Jarl took me away from my mother and father?! HE STOLE MY MOTHER AND FATHER'S ONLY CHILD AWAY FROM THEM?!"

  I put my face in my hands as my heart broke for the parents I had thought long dead, and the torment they must have suffered.

  "What were they told?" I cried. "What were my parents told?"

  "I assume they were told you were dead, I do not know for sure. I tried to warn the Jarl against it. I tried to tell him that you would one day learn the truth – it is not as if there are not many here in Apvik who know it. And after all this time, still all I can think of in the early morning when I wake and cannot find sleep again, is of Magnus in that other land, thinking his only child dead. Thinking –"

  My grandmother's voice broke then, and she wept with me. There was rage in my heart, and it came close to alighting on her. But it was as she said – she could not have stopped the Jarl. I knew my grandfather, I knew his stubbornness. He was not a cruel husband, but he was also not one to be persuaded by a wife, or a child, if his mind was made up.

  "So you have spent my whole life with this secret," I said. "With knowing that your son thought me dead. And I have spent my whole life with it too, without knowing it."

  I had so many questions. I stayed with my grandmother after nightfall, raining them upon her head – most of which she could not answer. She knew only the barest details, as my grandfather the Jarl, in his shame at what his first son had been and his inability to admit it to himself, had not spoken of it often.

  "What of the people?" I asked, after the sun had long set. "If the men saw Magnus kill Asger, why did they go along with calling me Asger, and allowing me to –"

  "Your grandfather was the Jarl, Magnus. I will call you Magnus tonight, boy, as it is your true name and it feels right to do it even at this late time. As it is, your grandfather was the Jarl. He spun a story about an Angle girl falling pregnant with Asger's child, and then in those years that passed between Asger's death and the appearance of the baby – of you – here in Apvik, of that child growing old enough to have a child of their own, and of you being that child. Of course no one believed it – perhaps they would have, if you had not been so obviously your father's son, so similar to Magnus in look and manner that no one could deny you were his. But what were the people to do? They feared your father – but they loved him, too. They were bound to obey their Jarl. And many understood the torment he had been put through by having the bad luck to father a son like Asger. You were the Jarl's blood. The Jarl's sons were gone – dead or elsewhere, and you were the link to the Jarl. That was what mattered."

  Less than two days after she told me of my origins, my grandmother died. I, as the sole remaining direct descendant of the late Jarl's bloodline in Apvik, carried the torch that lit her funeral pyre. And when her ashes had blown away on the wind, I continued my training and learning with Kiarr and some of the other warriors. I did not speak to anyone of what had been revealed to me.

  But when I was ten and seven, and the first opportunity presented itself to sail to the Kingdom of the East Angles with the warriors, I insisted on taking it. Kiarr tried to talk me out of my determination, thinking me too young, but I ignored him. It was battle he thought I wanted – but I couldn't have cared less for battle. What I wanted was to find my parents. And if they were dead, I wanted to find someone – anyone – who could speak to me of them, and te
ll me what and who they had been.

  As it was, Kiarr kept a close eye on me, understanding as he did that if I died, his old friend the Jarl's bloodline died. Still, I had opportunities, in various small hamlets, to make enquiries after a man from the North with the name Magnus, and his Angle wife.

  Nobody had heard of such a man. Or perhaps some had and were too frightened to tell me as I stood over them with my sword in my hand? As it was, I returned to Apvik with no new knowledge of my parents or where they might be or if they were even alive. The next raiding party, one winter later, brought similar results.

  And then when I was ten and nine, I went on my third trip across the sea to the Kingdom of my birth, and it was not one for raiding that time. The people of the North were then intent on conquering and settlement more than they were on taking pigs and gold. I sailed for the first time with my own ships, although I was not yet Jarl and would not be, according to Kiarr, until I had reached ten and ten.

  When we came ashore we found our people already there in abundance, with large camps built along the coast and the King of the East Angles having already surrendered. That night, as I sat with the high warriors from some of the coastal camps, they spoke of a party of Jarls and men who had already moved inland, the first force to do so, and were probably just then in the midst of taking Thetford for the people of the North.