The Danish demands appeared to have been met, but Aric’s demands were not yet over. Turning, he pointed towards Kean, the young Moneyer’s son, beckoning him to his side. Thinking that the Dane had some words of wisdom for him, Kean went to him willingly, not flinching as the man’s hand rested on his shoulder. Thored’s hand went to his sword hilt while, next to Fearn, Arlen and Kamma leapt to their feet with yelps of protest.
‘No!’ Thored bellowed. ‘Oh, no, not the lad!’
Kamma’s hands flew to her mouth to stifle the wail, though it leaked through her fingers. ‘Tell me,’ said Aric to Kamma, ‘how old the lad is.’
She ran towards him, her face contorted with fright. ‘He is ten years, my lord. He’s too young to be taken as a slave...please...he’s our only child.’
‘Your child, is he?’ Aric said. ‘Did you bear him? You? Yourself?’
Earl Thored knew where this was leading. Angrily, he kicked over the table before him with one mighty shove of his foot, sending drinking horns and beakers flying and bouncing across the floor. He strode over the edge of it towards Kean who now looked anxiously from one adult to another, wondering what this was all about. But as Thored moved towards Aric, the helmeted Danes closed in around their leader and the boy in a semi-circular defence. ‘So this is why you wanted them here,’ Thored growled. ‘So that you could insult the parents and steal their child. And is this how you repay my hospitality, Dane? Is this the price of peace, after all?’
‘We have bargained for peace, Earl,’ Aric said, with an icy calm, ‘but this is not a part of that and I believe you know it. Cast your mind back twelve years to that time when several young Danish couples sailed into Jorvik asking to settle here. You had been Earl five years then. Remember?’
Impatiently, Thored shrugged. ‘Vaguely,’ he said.
‘Not so vaguely, I think, my lord Earl. You will recall one of the young couples, newly joined, very comely they were. Especially the woman.’
There was a muffled cry of distress from Hilda to whom this situation was all too familiar. Thored took no notice of her. ‘So?’ he said. ‘What are you implying, Jarl? Let’s hear it. You’re probably quite mistaken.’
‘No, I think not. There are enough Danes here in Jorvik to tell their relatives in Denmark what happens here, especially to young husbands who stand in the way of their Earl’s needs.’
‘Relatives? Which relatives, exactly?’
‘Me. Brother to the young woman who sought a life here with her goldsmith husband of one year. Prey to your lust, Thored.’
Lady Hilda’s sobbing could now be heard by everyone in the hall, yet Thored would not glance in her direction. ‘Your...sister?’ he whispered, frowning in disbelief. ‘You lie. She never mentioned...’
‘She wouldn’t, would she? I was a mere lad of fifteen then, not a king’s jarl. But I was not too young to swear revenge on the man who arranged my brother-in-law’s death and then took my sister for himself and fathered a child on her. Yes, this lad here. My nephew. Your son!’
Furiously, Kean shook himself free of Aric’s hand, whirling round to face him. ‘No!’ he yelled, pointing at his parents. ‘No! There is my mother and there is my father. I have never known any others, I swear it.’
‘Well said, lad,’ Aric said. ‘But the truth is, like it or not, that your mother was my sister Tove and your father is a man as weak as water when it comes to women. I took an oath on Odin’s name to return you to your own family and my chance has come, as I knew it would.’
Hilda, with her head on Catla’s shoulder, was racked with sobbing and of no help at all to her husband, whose unfaithfulness was nothing new to her. She had borne him no live children and had now stopped trying, though the pain of Thored’s easily found comfort was like a wound that was not allowed to heal. He had foisted the five-year-old Fearn on her, not as an act of kindness, but because it suited him for her banished parents to know that he had their child’s life in his hands. The appearance of the young Danish woman called Tove in their household had lasted only a year. Fearn remembered Tove as a beautiful young woman whose child had been born a year after her husband’s violent death in a street fight and had always understood that both Tove and her child had died, although she could recall no burial rites from that time. Now, it appeared that young Kean was Thored’s own son and Tove’s.
Kamma, the woman Kean had been calling mother for ten years, fell in a heap at Aric’s feet, begging to keep her son. ‘Lord...my lord...do not do this. We are innocent of any crime. We have cared for him...loved him...please,’ she wailed.
‘Yes, lady. I know that, too. Your husband was made a moneyer to the Earl for his compliance. Not a bad reward for your silence. But the facts are there for all to see. Look at his colouring, for one thing. Can you doubt he is of my family?’
It was hard not to see the similarity, Kean’s flaxen hair against the foster parents’ darkness, his ice-blue eyes like Thored’s. ‘His home is here, lord,’ said Arlen, catching Thored’s nod of permission to speak. ‘We have nothing if you take him from us. He is our only son. He will be a moneyer, too.’
Thored found his voice again after the shaming revelation that he had taken the life of the husband who stood in his way. ‘Revenge,’ he said, loudly. ‘A blood feud, no less. You intend to tear up the lad’s roots and ruin the lives of these two good people, for what? For your gratification? And will he fill the void your sister made, when she left your family of her own free will? She gave herself to me willingly. I did not force her.’
‘You took the life of her husband, Earl,’ Aric yelled at him. ‘Deny it!’
‘I do deny it. Tove’s man was killed in a street fight. I took her in and cared for her, and—’
‘And made her pregnant and killed her in the process.’
‘It happens like that, sometimes. The mother is forfeit. Or the babe.’
‘As you well know, Thored,’ said Aric, making clear his meaning while the Earl’s wife howled in anguish. It had happened like that to her too many times and the losses were still as raw as they had been at the time. ‘But this child lived, didn’t he?’ Aric continued. ‘And he was a son. The only son you’ve ever had. A bastard, but a son, nevertheless. My sister’s son. My nephew. And my family demands his return in exchange for my sister’s life.’
‘Your sister had already left Denmark, Jarl,’ Thored bellowed. ‘And the lad belongs here in England with his foster parents and all that he’s known since birth. It makes no sense to uproot him from that. He’ll be a fine moneyer, like Arlen here. Accept your losses. You’ve taken enough from us already this day. Tell your family the lad is happy here. Well cared for. Will be wealthy, too. Tell them that and let their revenge lie with the gods. Let them deal with it.’
Within the tight cage of her ribs, Fearn’s heart beat like a war drum at the sight of these two men facing each other like bulls stopping just short of physical violence, Thored red-faced, angry and discredited by his own lechery, Aric standing proud and fearless on the moral high ground. She could not see Thored ever yielding to the Dane over this, Kean being to him more valuable than she had understood, though now she saw how Hilda must have suffered as much as she herself did at her husband’s constant unfaithfulness. To pagans, this was an accepted part of a husband’s behaviour, but not to Christians. Thored wanted it both ways: the lax morals of the old religion with the respectability of the new.
Beside her, the boy’s foster father was trembling with emotion, unable to interfere in this terrible dilemma, sick at heart at the threat of losing Kean, the lad he loved like a natural son. For ten years, he and Kamma had kept their secret, having every reason to be grateful to Earl Thored for supplying them with a child they could not produce themselves and for the reward that attended the lucrative position of Moneyer, coin-maker to the King. Fearn felt the man’s longing to speak breaking through his relu
ctance to join in the argument without permission. Finally, he could contain himself no longer. Stepping forward, he spoke the first and most obvious words on his mind with little regard for their implications. ‘Better still,’ he said, looking from the Dane to Earl Thored and back again, ‘take an alternative. Is there not someone of more years you could choose, who would be of more use to you?’ Flinching under the Earl’s furious glare, Arlen stepped back again, too late to undo the damage.
Aric’s approval overlapped Thored’s blustering protest. ‘He speaks well, your Moneyer,’ Aric said. Taking everyone by surprise, he swung round to point a finger, like a spear, at Fearn. ‘There! That one! The woman. Your foster daughter for their foster son. How will that do, Earl? I’d call that a fair enough bargain, eh? I’ll take her for one year, then return her to you and take the boy. He’ll have another winter under his belt by that time and she might well have something interesting under her belt. Now that’s what I call an alternative. See, Thored? I’ve backed down for you.’
The collective gasp of shock was audible to everyone in the hall. Even Thored was taken aback by the insulting audacity of the Dane’s suggestion. Fearn was the first to find her tongue, released by the outrageous innuendo. ‘Then back down further, Dane,’ she shouted, taking a step forward until only the upturned table was between them. ‘This business is between you and Earl Thored. Count me out of it and don’t play word games with my virtue, for I’ll have none of it.’
Facing each other like alley cats, glaring eyes locked together, they made the air between them vibrate with open hostility, causing the company to catch its breath at the ferocity of Fearn’s defiance. Any woman would have had the same feelings of shock, but few would dare to say so in such terms, especially to an enemy in the hall of one’s guardian. Aric’s eyes narrowed in admiration. ‘You have no say in the matter, woman. Neither you nor your foster parents are in a position to argue.’
Indeed, the Lady Hilda had stopped moaning and was far from arguing against the Dane’s latest demand. But Fearn would not be silenced so easily. ‘Wrong, Dane. Both the Earl and myself are in a position to argue. I’ve listened to your pathetic story of your sister, but now you should admit to the killing of the Earl’s brave warrior, my husband, the man whose cloak you’ve had the audacity to wear around your shoulders. Here, in the hall of his lord. You deny that, if you can.’
‘What?’ Earl Thored roared. ‘Barda’s cloak? Are you sure, Fearn?’
‘It’s the one I gave him on his last feast day, my lord. Of course I’m sure.’
Aric stood motionless, neither denying nor admitting the murder, though his eyes did not leave Fearn’s face, not even when Earl Thored addressed him directly. ‘Well, Dane? Does my foster daughter speak the truth? Where did you find that cloak?’
Speaking to Fearn rather than Thored, Aric replied. ‘It was handed to me by my men,’ he said. ‘Searching the woodland along the river’s edge, they found the Earl’s three men. There was a skirmish. The wolves will have found them by now.’ His last words were drowned by a scream from Catla, who would have flown at Aric if the wall of the table-top had not prevented it. Tempers flared as both men and the four women hurled abuse at the Danish group who stood firm and resolute against the insults, being prevented from drawing their swords by their leader’s forbidding hand. Cries of ‘Murderers!’ mingled with hoots of derision until Thored’s thundering voice reminded them that the Danish leader and his men were still guests in his hall, though no one was impressed by that. The Danes still had the advantage and, even now, were in a position to demand more Danegeld.
Catla’s howls were immediately taken up by others, mingling cries of ‘My son...my own beloved son...’ with calls for the wrath of the gods to come down on their cowardly heads and for Barda to be found and buried with honour.
‘Cease your howling!’ Thored yelled at them. ‘What’s done is done. Those men died protecting their city. They knew the risks. We are proud of them. But this puts a different light on things, Dane,’ he said, turning to Aric. ‘You came here on a peace-seeking mission and killed three of my best men. You cannot now claim my son Kean and you certainly cannot take my foster daughter from me, now you have made a widow of her. Besides which, she is already hostage against her parents’ good behaviour. It would be best for you to go now and take what you’ve got.’
Having accepted the possibility that she was already widowed, it still came as a thunderbolt to strike Fearn with the reality of her situation, knowing intuitively that she would never be allowed this short-lived freedom from a husband. She had disliked Barda more with each passing day, his disloyalty to her, his crass insensitivity and his disturbing contempt for the new religion he had flippantly agreed to adopt at Thored’s insistence, in order to marry her. Now she was sure that Thored would not allow her to keep her freedom. In spite of a Christian woman’s entitlement to choose her own husband, Thored would insist on his choice of another of his personal warriors in order to direct her life, as he had directed the lives of the Dane’s sister and her husband, his young son and the couple who had reared him. That revelation had come as a shock to her, although she had suspected for some time that that could have been one of the reasons behind Hilda’s deep unhappiness.
Possible escapes from the impending danger whirled through her mind as the leaders’ arguments continued, as Thored tried every loophole to get out of his predicament. The escape that appealed to her most had already begun to take shape in her mind while her future was discussed as if she were so much merchandise, all her attempts to assert herself ignored and talked over. Kean was, apparently, far too valuable to lose because he was a boy, Thored’s natural son, and useful, whereas Fearn’s role was as peace-weaver between two factions, the traditional function she had thought would never apply to her.
‘I came for my nephew,’ Aric said, yet again. ‘My family demands it.’
‘And my family demands that he stays here in Jorvik, with his own kin.’
‘Then I’ll take the woman. Since it was her man we killed, it is her duty to weave peace between us and she can best do that in Denmark.’
‘I’ll be damned if I will, Dane,’ Fearn said, making heads turn in her direction at last. ‘You had no need to kill my brave man for he was no threat to you. It is you who have played Earl Thored false in this and he who has done the same to you.’
‘Brave man?’ Aric scoffed, turning on her with a coldness that made her quail. ‘It always surprises me to hear a newly made widow sing the praises of her lost husband when she knows them to be lies. You are no exception, it seems.’
‘Say what you mean, Dane, but don’t dare malign my man when he’s not here to give you the thrashing you deserve. He was a brave warrior. Ask any of his brothers.’
‘Very touching,’ said Aric. ‘So perhaps you and his brothers should know how my men came across him and his two companions. Not being overly brave, you’ll agree.’
Fearn felt the thud of her heart betraying her loyalty. ‘What?’ she whispered.
‘Do you really want to know how they were raping a woman in the woodland where she was hiding? Yes, one of the villagers. An English woman. One of your own.’
‘You lie!’ Thored roared.
‘No, Earl. I do not lie. Your man had thrown his cloak and sword aside. Two men held the woman while he...’
‘No...no! My Barda would not...’ It was Catla who screamed while Fearn covered her mouth with both hands, feeling the familiar churning of her stomach.
‘I speak the truth,’ Aric shouted above the din. ‘Why would I lie? My men dragged them off her and killed your three brave men. Go and find them for yourselves. Give them the honours they deserve, what’s left of them, but don’t whine to me, woman—’ he glared at Fearn ‘—about what you’ve lost. What makes a healthy man act like an animal when he does not have the bloodlust upon him, with a wife like you at
home?’ His voice dropped so that she saw rather than heard his words. ‘Perhaps I should find out.’
But Fearn’s mind had been fed more information than it could deal with in one day and now she stared at the Dane’s pitiless expression over her hands while an icy coldness stole like a frost along her arms.
Chapter Two
The hubbub died down, broken only by Catla’s loud lamenting that her son had not only been killed but slandered, too, quite unjustly. He would never...never do anything so base. Fearn knew that he would. Earl Thored was bound to say it was a lie. ‘The Lady Fearn’s destiny is in my hands now,’ he insisted, ‘and I say that she shall remarry. Sitric...here...come, man...you shall have her.’ Eagerly, a young man stepped forward, but was stopped by Fearn’s strident protest.
‘He shall not, my lord. I am newly widowed and I demand a year of mourning. You know full well that I may now choose my own destiny. I shall go to live with the nuns at Clementhorpe. I have decided.’
‘Then you can undecide, woman. You’re coming with me,’ Aric said, flatly.
But they had bargained without Catla and Hilda, her resentful foster mother, who saw a way of paying back all those years of humiliation at Thored’s hands and for having to bring up a child whose strange beauty had threatened her own self-confidence for so many years. Catla’s wailing seemed to give Hilda courage, for now she found a voice. ‘Take her, Dane. Yes, take her away...far away. She does not belong here. Never has.’
Catla joined in before anyone could stop her. ‘Take her, for she will ever remind me of the son I have lost this day. She is widowed and of no use to anyone, not even to you, Dane, so if you think to bear sons on her, forget it. She bore no grandson for me and I doubt she’ll do any better for you. Those witch’s eyes turn men’s heads. Take her.’ She strode over to Fearn and, with a disgusting contortion of her face, spat at her.
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