Ragnar

by Joanna Bell

  It was only after I'd tucked into a selection of all of it that I noticed Paige watching me. I caught her eye and she laughed. "See?" She asked. "It's not quite guts-pie, is it?"

  Guts-pie. I remembered that conversation, before we had parted for what we both assumed would be the last time. I had believed that in the past – the one she was choosing to live in – people ate badly, subsisting on offal and fibrous, unidentifiable vegetables that required boiling for hours before they became edible. It didn't take more than a few bites at the Viking feast to see how wrong I'd been. It wasn't even that everything was comparable to modern times – it wasn't. It was far better. The butter wasn't a pale, almost flavorless spread – it was deep yellow, nutty, and it tasted very strongly of itself. The bread was dense and toothsome, but tender at the same time and, again, it tasted of the grain it had been made from.

  "Oh my God," I exclaimed again, after tasting the stew and realizing with a pang of guilt that it was more delicious than anything my mother had ever made. "This is – yeah, this isn't guts-pie."

  It didn't take long before I began to feel full. Jarl Ragnar warned me to slow down, that the feast was to continue on into the night, but everything was too good and I was too hungry – I didn't listen. Later, platters of what I at first thought was roast beef but was actually venison were brought in and what looked like a third of an entire deer laid right in front of us, at the high table.

  Jarl Eirik stood then, taking a dagger from his waist, and carved a small piece of dark, still-bloody meat from the center of the joint. With loving ceremony he presented it to Paige, before bending down to kiss her. It was a simple thing, and one I could tell was a ritual for the two them, but something about it took my breath away. Was it the way they looked at each other? The way Paige's eyes shone with love and admiration when she took Eirik's gift? Was it Eirik's tenderness with his wife? I didn't know. It felt like a moment I wouldn't normally be witnessing, a fleeting glimpse into another relationship, one I was not part of.

  At any other time it would have made me envious. Happy for my friend, because it was obvious she was loved – and loved well – but envious for the fact that no one looked at me that way, no one treated me with such solicitousness. At the Viking feast, though, instead of envy there was a kind of recognition. I'd caught Ragnar looking at me that way. Hadn't I? I turned to him, as if to check I had not been imagining things, and saw that he was not watching Paige and Eirik. He was watching me. And yes, there it was in the icy blue of his eyes – that same expression. He leaned in close and squeezed my thigh under the table.

  "I saw it there, Emma," he said. "For a moment, I saw it. That strange emotion you see in women when one of their most loved friends finds the love that all women crave. I saw it approach you, and then I saw it veer away like a rabbit from a hound. You know already what's in my heart, don't you?"

  I couldn't look at Ragnar at that moment. I turned my eyes up, as if to meet his, and then I focused on a point just above his left ear. Not because I didn't believe him, but because I did. And because I knew none of it could come to fruition – not the way it had for Paige and Eirik. I couldn't stay. And, when I got home, I couldn't come back the way she had.

  And even as I looked into the distance, a deeper part of me – deeper than thought, deeper than rationality – knew it was already too late.

  Before I could descend deeper into dark thoughts of the goodbyes to come, Paige's father appeared and took his spot at our table. In his arms he carried his grandson, who played with a string of large, orange-toned pebbles clutched in his chubby hands.

  "Your son?" Ragnar asked, getting up from his spot as Eirik did the same. Paige and I watched as one Jarl passed his baby to the other. "How old is he? Ten moons?"

  "Not five," Eirik responded, his voice bright with pride. "Born towards summer's end."

  Ragnar raised his eyebrows and Paige turned to look at me as the men commented on the baby's size, his obvious robustness, the strength of his grip. She reached out, seeming to feel what was in my heart – the great, rising tide of affection at seeing Ragnar with a baby in his arms – and squeezed my hand.

  "Tomorrow we'll go into the woods together," she said gently. "It's almost Yule, we need to gather boughs and greenery for the roundhouses and the camp. It's a special task, only women are allowed to perform it – and even then only some. We'll be guarded by warriors, there's nothing to fear."

  Paige was reassuring me, telling me there was nothing to fear. But even as she spoke I could see that she didn't even believe her own words – and that she wasn't talking about dangers in the woods, either.

  The feast went on for hours. Jarl Eirik gave more speeches. So did Jarl Ragnar. The food and drink came in endless waves, my bowl always piled high before I could clean it, my cup always filled before I could empty it. In the end I had no memory of the last hour or so – Ragnar told me the next say that I fell asleep on his lap and he carried me to the roundhouse himself and brushed the crumbs off my tunic before laying beside the fire to sleep it all off.

  It was one of the most memorable and meaningful experiences of my life, one of those times that even at it happens you know you will carry with you always. The shining eyes of the happy people in the feasting hall – the Viking children and the men and women – and the contentment that came from feeling, strangely, as if I belonged there. These things would be with me for as long as I had the power to remember, I knew that.

  16

  Emma

  It took an entire day to recover from that feast. And on the next, Ragnar was up and gone early, off to confer with Eirik and both of their advisors, and I woke to the light of mid-day, as a girl topped up the fire-pit with fresh wood.

  "Mmph," I said, rubbing my eyes and sensing her presence before I was fully awake. "What time is it?"

  When there was no answer I asked again and saw, once I had opened my eyes, that she looked nervous.

  "What?" I asked, not understanding. "Don't you know what – oh. Yeah. OK. Uh – it's fine. Thanks for the firewood."

  "May I go?"

  "Sure – yeah, of course!"

  She scuttled out of the westerly roundhouse and I lay back on the furs as the new logs began to spit and crackle in the flames, reminding myself that the Vikings didn't seem to think of time the way modern people did. It made sense – no one had clocks or watches or any sense of what a second or an hour was. They seemed to speak mostly in terms of moon cycles, seasons, nights and days. When I asked how they knew what the first day of Yule was, Ragnar told me that the healers and the 'gothi' knew, that they had special carved stones they used to judge the angle of the sun's light and determine the shortest and longest days. I remembered learning about even more ancient civilizations of the British Isles in school, how many archeologists believed their stone circles and mysterious structures had been built according to the position of the sun in the sky at various times of the year.

  "Hey, sleepyhead."

  I looked up to Paige's face poking in the door of the roundhouse. "I wasn't sure if you were, um, busy with Ragnar or not."

  "What, you think I've been getting laid all morning?" I replied, grinning. "No such luck, he left early today – before I was awake."

  Paige came in and sat by the newly-stoked fire, not bothering to remove her fur cape. "Yeah, so did Eirik. He says more of them are coming – more Vikings. He says the Jarl's council – what does he call it? The 'thing' – in the Northlands has – "

  "The thing?" I asked, not sure I was understanding. "What thing?"

  Paige laughed. "Yeah, that's exactly what I said when Eirik told me about it. It's a meeting – the thing, I mean. That's what they call it. The 'thing.' But it's not like this meeting they're having right now, here. It's bigger. The Jarls and the free people from different clans, even warring clans, come together to discuss whatever business they have between them. Eirik says that at the last large 'thing' it was agreed to move beyond the pillage and invasions of this place – t
o begin settling the land and moving the Northmen and women here to live and marry and raise children. This encampment – and Jarl Ragnar's, and a few others that are already here – are just the beginning."

  "I read about this, you know," I said then, thinking back to my studies of Viking Britain.

  "So did I," Paige replied. "A little. I don't remember all of it now but I do remember that the Vikings will conquer parts of Britain and settle here – or they did settle here, I mean."

  "You don't know what tense to use," I commented. "Past or present."

  She smiled and shook her head. "You're right. Although that was mostly for your benefit. These days it's becoming easier and easier to think of this place as the real place, you know? Like, I understand that the future still exists, and cars and planes and the internet still exist, somewhere out there, but every day it feels more and more like a place I only know from a dream."

  It made me feel uneasy to hear Paige talking like that. I wanted to grab her shoulders and get in her face and remind her that it wasn't a dream. That all of it still existed, as real and true as the Viking settlement around us. I didn't, because I didn't feel it was my right – if part of her needed to see where she came from as somehow unreal, I supposed that was her right. But it did make me slightly uncomfortable. Paige seemed to sense it, too, because she reached for my under-dress and tossed it onto the furs that covered me.

  "Come on, then. We're going out to the woods to find holly and green boughs for Yule. And it's cold again so you better dress well."

  Less than twenty minutes later Paige and myself were crunching across the frost-laden grasses, headed for the woods and trailed by four Viking warriors – not mere guards, but actual fighting men. Two belonged to Ragnar and two to Eirik, and I found the sound of their swords slapping against their leathers and furs as we left the camp to be rather reassuring.

  A mist hung over the land that day, bringing with it a muffling effect that leant the proceedings a magical air.

  "What are we looking for again?" I asked Paige, when we got into the woods. Other women were doing the same thing we were, and at times we could hear their voices, carried in strange ways on the fog.

  "Holly," she said. "But other things, too. Eirik says the idea is to bring some of the greenery and smell of the outdoors into the drab winter roundhouses, to cheer up the dullest part of the year."

  "So it's like Christmas lights?"

  Paige laughed. "Yeah, I suppose it is."

  We didn't talk very much as we made our way slowly through the trees, out feet rustling in the frost-crisp leaves that covered the ground and our cheeks glowing bright pink in the clear, cold air. At one point, a robin with a bright red breast alighted on a branch in front of us and Paige pulled a piece of dark Viking bread out of her leather pouch and scattered a few crumbs of it across her gloved palm. I watched, breathless, as she held her hand out towards the robin.

  "The frost and snow covers the ground," she whispered, as the bird leapt onto her outstretched palm and pecked greedily at the breadcrumbs. "They get hungry."

  "Can I try?" I asked, half-convinced Paige had acquired some ancient magical powers, and that no bird would ever hop willingly into my own hand.

  But when I pulled one of my gloves off and Paige sprinkled some crumbs into my grasp the robin fluttered easily from her hand to my own. I gasped at the incredible lightness of the tiny, cold feet on my skin.

  "Oh!" I whispered, shocked into near-speechlessness. "Look, Paige!"

  We stood transfixed in the winter mist, watching the robin until he'd had his fill and taken his cheerful leave of us. And then we continued the search for holly and boughs, pinecones and fallen branches of a particularly pleasing look. After the encounter with the robin, I felt filled with awe, infused with that feeling I remembered from childhood Christmases, when the world seemed as if it was bursting with goodwill and possibility. It almost made me tear up, to think that I would never be able to share it with anyone back home, in the present – I wouldn't even be able to tell them about it.

  "Here," Paige exclaimed, as we wandered to and fro, the tips of our noses getting pinker the longer we stayed out. "Holly!"

  My arms were already heavy with fir boughs, tendrils of dark green ivy and other vegetation, but the holly was the one thing we'd wanted to find. Paige used the small knife she carried on her hip to take what we needed and piled it into my arms, laughing when one or the other of us got stabbed with a thorn.

  "There," she said, when it seemed we couldn't carry anymore. "This will brighten everything up in the camp, won't it?"

  It seemed such a simple thing to do, but the difference it made after my best friend and I raced back to camp and helped each other decorate our Jarl's roundhouses was amazing. I stood back at one moment in the westerly roundhouse, taking in the new scent of the place after Paige and I had hung and garlanded almost every spare surface with the fresh liveliness of the outdoors.

  "This is crazy!" I said, breathing the scent of fir trees and frost and ivy deep into my lungs. "All of this was right here – just out in the woods! We have woods in 2017, you know."

  "I know," she nodded.

  "But I've never done this before in my life. I usually buy candles. You know, candles full of fake perfume, fake baking smells, fake Christmas tree smell. When I could just go and get the real things for free. That's bonkers!"

  It was true. The westerly roundhouse, at that precise moment, on a cold night just before Yule in the 9th century, was the most breathtakingly Christmassy scene I have ever witnessed – and only two people in the whole camp would even have recognized the word 'Christmas.' The flickering flames from the candles lit everything with a soft glow, including the fat, red berries on the holly branches and the pink cheeks of the two woman who had just spent the afternoon in the cold winter woods. Whatever wonderful magic was afoot that evening, Paige felt it too. She turned to me, smiling, as we admired our work, and then she pulled me into her arms.

  "I know you have to leave," she whispered as we held each other tight. "I know, Emma. But while you're here, let's enjoy this, OK? Let's suck every ounce of marrow out of this so we can go on with the rest of our lives with happy memories of this time – of all of it.

  When she pulled away I saw that her eyes were glimmering, and in turn the candle-flames became hazy in my own vision as we both thought, although it remained unspoken, of the finite nature of our time together.

  Ragnar walked in on us like that and, although I saw that he was about to make a jokey comment, checked himself when he saw my expression, and that of my friend.

  "What is it?" He asked, slipping one of his strong arms around my waist. "What is it, my lovely girl? Has something happened? Paige – has –"

  "No," I shook my head, leaning into his body. "No, nothing's happened. Paige and I gathered holly this afternoon – and boughs. Do you see?"

  But Jarl Ragnar was already looking around, a smile spreading across his face. He closed his eyes a moment later and breathed deeply of the scented air.

  "Are you two responsible for this?" He asked, turning back to me and pulling me into his arms, lifting me off my feet so he could kiss me.

  "Mm-hm," I told him, proud as punch at his reaction.

  Paige reached out, then, and tugged at my sleeve lightly. "I'll see you later, Em, OK?"

  Our eyes met for a brief moment, the understanding passed between us – it was time for both of us to be with our men, but we would not forget the afternoon we had just spent together.

  "OK, Paige. See you soon."

  As soon as she was gone Ragnar set me down in front of him and took my face in his hands. "Look at this place!" He enthused, pausing to kiss my mouth once, and then again. "Emma, have I been wrong to think of you as a savage from a foreign land? A particularly beautiful savage, it must be admitted, but a savage nonetheless? You're not as wild as you seem, are you? Look at this place, as well-garlanded as if a true Viking wife had done it."

  Jarl
Ragnar was being deliberately effusive, but he wasn't making any of it up – I could see it in his eyes. I could see something else in his eyes, too, and feel something else from the way he pulled my body against his. He needed me again, and the plain fact of his need kindled the little flame inside me into a bright, roaring fire. I helped him pull off my woolen tunic, and the layers of linens underneath, and then I put my hands on his as he pressed them into my flesh and forgot about all the holly and the candles and the smell of fir branches and everything else in the world except one thing.

  I lay back on the bed of furs and opened my legs for Ragnar and took him into me the way I opened my mouth to breathe, or curled onto my side to sleep at night. I didn't have to think, because it just happened between us, as naturally as taking breath. And as it seemed to be with us, he carried me along with him, stoking the fire in my loins with that in his own, and with the look in his eyes when he was close.

  "Ragnar," I sighed into his shoulder when I came, my voice almost fading out before rising, sharply, into a helpless little scream as my fingernails sank into his back and my body arched up off the furs, offering itself up to him like a sacrifice, begging him to let me give him the pleasure he was giving me.

  He drove himself into me and held himself there, his mouth open on mine so I could feel every panted breath as he throbbed and pulsed and emptied himself completely.

  We stayed there, our naked limbs tangled together, until the fire needed more wood. Ragnar covered me in a fur and got up to take care of it and I lay back, watching him. There was no mistaking his utter gorgeousness there in the westerly roundhouse, as his battle-honed muscles and the solid, male contours of his face were on such display. I wondered, looking at him, what he would be doing if he had been born in the 1990s, like me.