Viking Hostage

by Warr, Tracey;

  THE VIKING HOSTAGE

  Tracey Warr

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Maps

  Main Characters

  Part One Freedom 972–988

  1 Tallinn, Summer 972

  2 Montignac, September 972

  3 Hedeby, September 972

  4 Montignac, August 973

  5 Ségur, February 974

  6 Poitiers, Easter 974

  7 Ségur, Winter 975

  8 Limoges, Spring 976

  9 Brioude, Easter 982

  10 Angers, Autumn 987

  11 Ségur, June 988

  12 Saint Michel en l’Herm, June 988

  Part Two Hostages on the Swan Road 988–996

  Maps

  13 Atlantic Ocean, June 988

  14 Brioude, July 988

  15 Kelda Ey, 988

  16 Charroux, June 989

  17 Poitiers, Easter 990

  18 Limoges, 990

  19 Kelda Ey, 991

  20 Fécamp, September 991

  21 Bellac, 991

  22 Limoges, 991

  23 Milford, 992

  24 Limoges, 994

  25 Fortress of the Fishes, June 996

  Part Three Truth 997–1009

  26 Limoges, 997

  27 Gençay, July 997

  28 Fécamp, September 997

  29 Roccamolten, 998

  30 Llanteulyddog, 999

  31 Limoges, 1000

  32 Kelda Ey, 1000

  33 Poitiers, 1000

  34 Kelda Ey, 1001

  35 Poitiers, 1003

  36 Limoges, 1009

  37 Kelda Ey, 1009

  Historical Note

  Genealogies

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  10th century Northern Europe

  Central France at the time of Sigrid and Aina

  Main Characters

  (Genealogies are on pages 377–386)

  Sigrid Thorolfsdottir, Norwegian slave

  Thorgils Thorolfsson, Sigrid’s brother

  Olafr, Sigrid’s foster-brother

  Ademar of Ségur, Viscount of Ségur, cousin of Gerard of Limoges, custodian of Limoges

  Melisende, Viscountess of Ségur, wife of Ademar and their child Aina

  Gerard of Limoges, dispossessed Viscount

  Rothilde of Brosse, wife of Gerard and their children:

  Guy

  Hildegaire

  Aimery

  Adalmode

  Hilduin and six others

  The sons of the Count of La Marche:

  Helie

  Audebert

  Boson

  and two others

  Guillaume IV ‘Strong Arm,’ Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou

  Emma of Blois, sister of the Count of Blois, Duchess of Aquitaine, wife of Guillaume IV and their son Guillaume

  Aldearde d’Aulnay, Viscountess of Thouars, mistress to Guillaume IV Duke of Aquitaine

  Geoffrey ‘Greymantle,’ Count of Anjou and his son Fulk ‘The Black,’ heir to the county of Anjou

  Blanche of Anjou, sister of Count Geoffrey of Anjou, Countess of Gévaudan

  Bishop Guy of Le Puy, brother of Count Geoffrey of Anjou

  Lothaire, King of the Franks, descended from Charlemagne his son Louis, heir to the kingdom of the Franks and other members of the last Carolingian royal family

  Hugh ‘Capet,’ Duke of France and his son Robert

  Richard I ‘The Fearless,’ Duke of Normandy

  Gunnora, Duchess of Normandy and their son Richard, heir to the duchy of Normandy

  Maredudd ap Owain, King of Gwynedd and Deheubarth and his daughter Angharad

  And various clergy, vikings, servants, serfs and slaves.

  Part One

  FREEDOM

  972–988

  ‘Know that things did not happen as I have written them but that everything could have happened thus.’

  1

  Tallinn

  Summer 972

  A list of items for sale was called out in the marketplace. I was described as one female Northchild, but my name is Sigrid Thorolfsdottir. I am for sale along with my brothers, Thorgils and Olafr, who stand either side, holding my hands.

  ‘Ease up Sigrid,’ Thorgils whispers to me, ‘you’re crunching the bones of my hand. It will be alright.’

  I try to relax my grip on his knuckles and look out at the few buyers staring up at the platform where we stand barefoot. Most of the crowd have gone since we are the last and least interesting item. Around the edges of the market square tall, thin houses are painted in gay colours. Awnings above the stalls flap in the slight breeze, their colours leached out by sun. Apples, nuts and cheeses are carefully arranged in small mounds and circles. Chickens are panicking in wooden cages. If I squint my eyes I can just see the sun sparkling on the sea in the distance, beyond the square and the buildings, and the buyers.

  ‘Three fine children of the Northmen, already growing muscled and hard-working,’ Klerkon, the slaver, shouts to the sparse audience, pushing up the grimy sleeve of Thorgils’ shift and pinching the flesh of his bicep, leaving white fingerprints against the brown skin. I glance up at the angry muscle shifting in my brother’s cheek. Olafr and I are nine and we still have the scrawniness of childhood, but Thorgils is strong for his twelve years, with arms and thighs filled out from rowing and working on boats. Me and Thorgils are red-haired, and Thorgils’ face is reddened and splattered with freckles from the sun at sea. Olafr has blond, curling hair like a sunny nimbus but it is not shining today. The crowd is silent and Klerkon encourages them: ‘Have you ever seen more perfect physical specimens! Blond and ruddy. They will soon be tall as date palms.’ He raises his hand above his head to demonstrate how tall we will be. ‘They will do all your hard, nasty work for you. Come on! Give me an offer here!’

  A woman in a fine scarlet cloak with black hair caught into a flimsy, transparent veil is staring at me with a look of pity. All three of us belie the slaver’s description. We are grimy, starving, exhausted, humiliated. My red braid clings flatly to my neck in a greasy hank, my face is streaked with dirt, my blue eyes swim with tears that I frequently sniff back from falling. I stink of the pigpen where we were kept for a week on Smaeland Island after the pirates captured our ship and killed our father. Thorgils told me that Father is with Freya and the other gods now. Olafr is our foster-brother and his father was also murdered and his mother sold as a slave. Klerkon threw a few buckets of cold water over us this morning to smarten us up but our misery is ingrained by now. A slave is reduced from a person to a thing, Thorgils said bitterly as we watched the sale of the adults before us.

  ‘I’ll give you a cloak,’ a man shouts from the crowd and I turn to see what he looks like.

  ‘Two!’ shouts back Klerkon.

  ‘I’ve only got the one,’ the man says, unpinning it from his shoulders and sweeping it around, ‘but it’s a fine one.’

  ‘A cloak!’ mutters Thorgils, ‘for us!’

  ‘Done,’ says the slaver, ‘for the two boys.’ He swiftly cuts down twice on the rope that ties me at the neck to my brothers and hands the two ends to the now cloakless man.

  It happens so fast and we do not know all the words of this language. ‘My sister!’ Thorgils shouts but he and Olafr are already being pulled roughly from the platform, Thorgils’ ankles tangling as he struggles to stay upright against the rope. No one understands or cares what he is saying. Coming slowly to the realisation that I am losing them, I begin to wail, my voice small and cracked by thirst and fear. ‘Be brave Sigrid!’ Thorgils shouts. He bends one knee and digs his toes into the dust to stand and speak to me, resisting the drag of the rope at his neck that is already c
ircled with red and purple bruises and sores. ‘We will come for you! This I promise.’

  ‘We will Sigrid!’ shouts Olafr. ‘We will find you.’

  I press my lips together desperately, grip my hands around each other, willing the tears to stay in my eyes as Thorgils and Olafr are pulled farther and farther off into the crowd. Thorgils has promised, I tell myself emphatically, but a chill grips my body and my teeth start to chatter.

  ‘I will take the girl!’ calls the woman in the scarlet cloak and the portly man next to her puts a hand on her arm, speaks to her, but she shakes her head and calls out ‘two solidi!,’ walking up to the edge of the dais, showing the coins on the flat of her hand. The slaver slaps his sword hilt to confirm that a bargain is struck. I weave my head from side to side trying to see around the backs and hats of people, past the rear-ends of horses and the piles of produce but I can no longer see the red head and fair head of my brothers. They are gone. I am panting like a hot dog but my heart wears the thick ice of the fjord in deepest winter.

  Money chinks into Klerkon’s hand. I look at my new owner, trying to control my lower lip, scrubbing at the drip of my nose. The woman smiles and reaches to take my hand but seeing how filthy it is she thinks better of it. ‘Ademar,’ she says softly.

  The finely dressed man accompanying her takes hold of my rope and beckons me to come with him. He leads me down from the platform, through the milling people browsing and bartering at the stalls, to a water spigot. He unclips a ceramic cup hanging at his waist, fills it and offers it to me, saying in Norse, ‘Drink!’ I take a few sips, looking into the crowd for a glimpse of Thorgils. The man, my owner, acts out throwing his head back and drinking to indicate that I should drink more. I guess that he only has a few words of my language. The man’s hair and beard are dark grey, streaked here and there with the deep red vestiges of the hair colour of his youth. His dark blue tunic stretches over a rotund belly. I study him and he raises his eyebrows and smiles at me but I do not smile back. There is humour and perhaps kindness in his grey eyes, or maybe he is laughing at me.

  ‘Will you tell us your name, child?’ says the man called Ademar. I listen and understand but I do not speak. I feel dazed, as if I have forgotten something but I cannot remember what it is.

  Ademar turns to his wife who is pretty and much younger than he is: ‘She has suffered. That is why she is silent, Melisende. She lost her brothers. You saw that, and who knows what went before.’

  The woman sighs and peers down sympathetically at me. ‘Or perhaps she does not understand. Our language is Occitan,’ she says to me, slowly and a little loud. I stare stonily at her and watch how she looks me over and grimaces. ‘Her hair crawls with lice.’

  I try to maintain my stony face as Ademar draws a sharp knife from the scabbard at his belt, grasps my thick red braid close to my neck, saws at it, and drops it in the dust at my feet where I look at it, bereft, doubly humiliated, a shorn slave.

  ‘It will grow back clean and not itching,’ Melisende reassures me, untying a comb from her girdle and running it over my cropped head to remove the rest of the vermin. Her touch is gentle. Minutes ago the braid was part of me; now it is abandoned, like a snake’s old skin. Everything is gone.

  Ademar concludes some business with a group of Moor traders, weighing out silver and then folding up his scales which fit neatly into an oval clasped box made from the two cups of the contraption.

  ‘Are you taking the majus home with you to Francia?’ one of the men asks Ademar, gesturing towards me.

  ‘Majus?’ says Ademar.

  ‘Fire-worshipper.’

  ‘Oh. Yes we are.’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough of those visiting you already with swords and axes?’ grins the Moor.

  ‘Yes,’ sighs Ademar, ‘we have, but the Northmen raids are not so frequent now in Francia.’

  ‘I hear the slave trade is falling off in the West,’ the man remarks.

  Ademar nods politely but seems keen not to be drawn into a conversation.

  ‘There is still good trade in the East though, especially for young bed-slaves, but on the other hand enough breeding goes on amongst slaves that it renders the buying of new ones unnecessary really, or at least the price is very low. I’ll give you one solidi for it,’ says the man, gesturing at me again.

  ‘She’s not for sale,’ Ademar tells him, and I realise that I have been holding my breath since the man’s question and let it out with relief. Ademar steps up onto his horse and leans down to grip my arm. I put one foot on his and swing up behind him as I used to with my father.

  At the tavern where they are staying, Melisende orders a warm bath, food and water for me. She is smiling broadly, pleased at the outcome of my scrubbing and combing. Despite myself I like her face, but I determine to continue not speaking to them. Somehow my muteness keeps Thorgils and Olafr with me, denies that I am made a slave, a nothing, owned by these people. I run my hands over my shorn head which feels strangely light and naked without my hair. Even Ademar who had seemed doubtful about my purchase at the market is grinning. They watch me as I wolf down the bread and meat set in front of me.

  ‘She’s extremely hungry,’ says Melisende, smiling.

  Ademar bends to tie one end of a long rope to my ankle and attaches the other end to his belt. I lift the rope, examining the knot, admiring how well-made it is. In response to his wife’s doubtful expression, he tells her, ‘If a runaway slave is captured they are killed immediately. You don’t want that to happen to her and naturally she would run if she could. She wants to be with her brothers, your Northchild.’

  I keep my face expressionless, as if I do not understand him. What I feel is not his business.

  ‘Melisende, Melisende!’ he says indulgently, shaking his head. ‘What do you think we are going to do with her?’

  ‘I couldn’t leave her there, Ademar. Look at her. That shapely red head, those huge eyes, blue as a summer sky in the little triangle of her face, and the way her nose tilts up at the end? She looks like a scalped fairy. How could I abandon her to just anyone who might take her?’

  ‘You speak of her as if she were a doll.’

  ‘No. You saw how she was wrenched from her kin. She is near enough the same age as our own daughter. I could not leave her there.’

  There is vexation with him in her tone now and I look between them. I listen hard, catching some words, guessing some others perhaps wrongly.

  ‘No,’ Ademar says finally, ‘you could not. Nevertheless, what shall we do with her? There is no place for a slave in our household, nor should there be. Some bishops have rightly railed against this traffic, even when the unfortunates are pagans, as she no doubt is.’

  ‘Well she is not a slave through any fault of her own, at her age. We will see what we shall do with our Northchild, when we return to Ségur, when we grow to know her.’

  Melisende’s maid, who bathed me, takes advantage of the lull in their conversation to step forward holding out her hand to her master. ‘I found this unchristian thing on her, my Lord.’

  I watch the flash of the silver as she passes my serpent brooch to Ademar and curse her in my head with the worst curse I know.

  ‘Bit my hand she did when I took it.’ She turns her hand to show them the marks of my teeth on the soft part between her thumb and index finger, and Ademar lifts his eyes from the serpent in his palm, to glance briefly at me before returning his gaze to my gleaming brooch.

  I tried to hold tightly to the filthy shift where the silver serpent was hidden, but the maid wrestled it from me, bent my fingers back painfully from the brooch, prising it out of my grip. The slavers stripped us of everything of value: my rings, knife, thimble and shoulder brooches, but my father pinned his great serpent brooch inside my belt when he saw the billowing orange sail of the pirate ship coming fast upon us. I transferred the brooch to the hem of my shift, keeping it safe until now and this stupid maid.

  Ademar weighs the heft of the silver in his palm, runs
a finger along its finely wrought serpentine curves, and peers at the runes that Thorgils scratched on its underside for me when we were in the pirates’ pigpen.

  ‘What do the marks say?’ asks Melisende.

  Ademar shrugs and looks the question to me. Leap from the fetters! Escape from the foes! I recite the runic charm in my head but keep my face blank. Ademar nods at my silence and hands the serpent back to me. I cannot keep the surprise from my face now, so I look down swiftly instead, pinning the brooch onto the new belt they have given me, nodding my thanks curtly. From the corner of my eye, I see Ademar raise his eyebrows at me again. ‘That is a brooch of great value and workmanship,’ he tells Melisende. ‘How quickly and utterly our fortunes may shift,’ he says thoughtfully, and I see the reflection of my shorn head in the dark pupil of his eye. ‘It seems your Northchild comes of good stock. Either that, or she is a wondrous good thief.’

  2

  Montignac

  September 972

  ‘Must you pace up and down like a hungry hound?’

  Hearing the irritation in his brother’s voice, Audebert stopped, his face close to the wall. The heavy chain at his ankle was pulled taut to its full extent. Above his head a sheer rock wall fifty foot high reached up into cold air and a circle of distant blue sky. He placed his palms and forehead on the cold, damp stone letting the misery it had witnessed over the years seep into his skin and mingle with his own.

  ‘Sorry,’ said his brother, Helie, relenting. ‘I know. We are like caged beasts. We should be out there, riding down a stag.’ He gestured upwards in the direction of the sky.

  Audebert suppressed the grief that rose in his throat at his brother’s words. He turned and paced back the ten strides which was all the hole allowed, the hole they had been imprisoned in for many months. Helie’s beard reached to his belt. Audebert’s thick black hair stood up from his forehead, aside from one dangling lock. His hair rolled over the top of his head in dense, turbulent waves, and snaked in matted twists and hanks down his back. At least it warmed his neck in the frigid nights.