The Raven's Table: Viking Stories

by Christine Morgan

  THE MOTTLED BEAR

  They undressed in the longhouse’s firelight, fine men all, stripping to wash now that the meal was done.

  Here was a flesh-feast of a different sort, a feast for the eyes to follow the feast that had filled their bellies.

  A feast for the eyes, but Hvit’s hungry gaze sought only one.

  Bjorn, the king’s son. Bjorn, young and breath-taking. His broad shoulders, the sinews of his powerful arms and his back… his thickly-furred chest, tapered waist and slim hips… taut buttocks, long firm thighs and lithe legs… at his loins a thatch of hair from which rose a thin line almost to his navel…

  Hvit imagined the touch and taste of him, clean love-sweat and salty desire. She imagined him thrusting into her, filling her as she so ached and yearned to be filled. She imagined his hands on her breasts, his mouth locked with hers in hot and wet urgency.

  As she watched him, through a gap in the wall between her own chamber and the feast-hall, the craving became too much to endure.

  Why she had ever consented to marry such an ancient relic as Bodvar…

  Pushing from her mind all thoughts of her husband and his tepid love-making, she looked again, with lustful admiration, at young Bjorn.

  In place of his hands on her breasts, her own would have to do. She brought them there, cupping the ample white curves. A ruddy flush swept tingling through her.

  Bjorn, by the fire, tipped a wash-basin so that the water coursed down his body in rivulets. Drops steamed on the flat hearth-stones. He took up a dry cloth then and commenced drying himself.

  When some friend of his made a witticism, white teeth flashed a bright smile through his beard. His eyes, on occasions grey as storm-clouds, seemed to have the warm shine of pewter.

  If she went to him…?

  No.

  If she sent for him…?

  No.

  Much as she might want to, Hvit did not dare. Not yet, not now.

  Instead, as the men in the hall began retiring to their sleeping-platforms, Hvit went alone to her bearskin-heaped bed. Tucked beneath the carved bed-frame was a small wooden chest of intricate design; inside this was what Hvit’s own mother had given her as a bride-gift.

  “Likely, you’ll need it,” Hvata had said, cackling. “A girl such as you marrying a man so old? It’ll be this or take lovers… but, of course, if you did, he’d be fearfully wroth… all the more so because of the shame of the failings of his poor limp-withered prick.”

  Hvit took from the chest a piece of polished whale-bone, shaped and smoothed in ways meant to pleasure a woman’s most sensitive secret places. She cradled it in her palms, rubbed it, blew her damp breath upon it, until it was no longer ivory-cool.

  She envisioned Bjorn with her, Bjorn above her.

  Bjorn. The son of her husband, by a queen long dead. King Bodvar, known as a wise lord and peace-maker, was often away visiting the halls and council-meetings of other kings. He’d been in need of a wife to manage his household and look after his own lands until his son, then a boy of eight, came of age. And so, the king had married Hvit, young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy man’s widow.

  The day following the feast and her impassioned spying, Bjorn and Queen Hvit met together in her chamber to discuss the upcoming harvest.

  “You have learned well,” she said, smiling at him. “You’ll make a fine, strong king.”

  “Some day,” he said. “May it not be soon.”

  “With Bodvar gone so much, you already all but rule in his stead.”

  He rubbed his chin, and said nothing.

  “This evening, why not sit at the head of the feast-hall table?”

  “In Father’s chair?”

  “Drink from the gold-chased mead-horn.”

  “Father’s drinking-horn?”

  “You could even,” Hvit said, rising to cross behind him, trailing her fingertips along his arm, “rest for a night in the great bed heaped with bear’s pelts of many hues.”

  He paused. “What… Hvit, what are you saying?”

  “It is a very large bed. Too large for just one, and lonesome.”

  “You are my father’s wife. I’ve known you since I was a boy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I have known you. I’ve seen you grow from boy to youth, from youth to man.” She pressed herself against his back, molding her body to his as her arms slid around him. “Oh, such a man. Far more a man than your father ever was.”

  He held very still, very tense, though it seemed a faint tremor worked through him, deep in the frame of his bones.

  “Should it be so strange,” Hvit continued, lowering her voice to a whisper intimate in his ear, “and so wrong, that my fondness for you might become something more?”

  His hands, resting on the tabletop, clenched into fists.

  “Something…” she breathed, “more like… love.”

  “Love of a step-mother to a step-son,” Bjorn said.

  “Is that what this feels like?” She curled her fingers into his belt.

  “Hvit, stop.”

  “Why?”

  “You are my father’s wife,” he repeated. With, she thought, a desperate tone.

  Hvit strayed her reach lower, pushing her fingers into the folds of tunic bunched in his lap, over where his prick stirred and swelled despite his protestations. “He need never—”

  “I love another.” He caught her wrists.

  She laughed softly. “Do you, now? Another?”

  “We mean to marry once Father comes home.”

  “Oh, Bjorn.” Hvit licked his earlobe. “A secret sweetheart?”

  Sudden resolve tightened his grip. He tore her hands from his lap, rose from his seat, and whirled on her. “Do not—”

  She kissed him, the tongue that had been tickling his ear plunging into his mouth, stifling his words in a muffled outburst.

  Bjorn broke from the embrace. “Hvit!”

  Her gaze met his, hers determined, his shocked. With very deliberate motions, she unpinned the brooches of her gown and let it drop to the rush-strewn floor. Her linen shift draped her breasts, nipples poking dark and stiff against the fine fabric. As Bjorn gasped and sputtered, wiping her kiss from his lips, she gathered the skirt to raise the hem.

  “Stop this!” Bjorn said. “Are you mad?”

  Shins… shapely knees… white thighs…

  “Mad with passion, mad with love.”

  Baring her hips, the fleecy mound of her loins, brazen and naked, challenging him and entreating him—

  “I said stop!”

  The force of his slap sent her sprawling. Her face went numb. Her head rang as if bell-filled. She scrambled in the rushes, undignified, furious, the shift rucked and twisted around her waist.

  “You dare!” she cried.

  “You dare!”

  Their gazes met now as glares, hot as forge-iron and colder than winter frost.

  Hvit rose to her feet. “Did I say you were far more a man than your father ever was? How could I be so wrong? You are no man at all. And so shall you… be no man at all!” She snatched up the bed-bearskins and flung them over his head.

  They engulfed him, entangled him. Bjorn’s shout of anger became a startled, pained cry. He staggered backward, thrashing in the furry pelts. He tugged and tore but was unable to dislodge them. The pelts held to his limbs as if painted with sticky pine-tar glue.

  Then the pained cry became a shriek, a shriek of agony and horror.

  ***

  Bjorn burst from the longhouse in a clumsy, stumbling, lumbering run. The hounds at their tethers went wild. A slave-woman saw him and screamed.

  Never, never in his life, had he fled. Never. From anything.

  Not from a boar-hunt, not from a battle, never.

  Yet now, in a panic of terror greater than he’d ever known, he fled.

  What had she done to him?

  The witch-whore, what had she done?

  Past halls and hovels. Through pastures and fields.

/>   His mind felt fractured, thoughts breaking apart the way ice did in a thaw. He saw strangely, as if a smoke-haze fell over his eyes. His heart thumped like a war-drum in his chest.

  Scents stung sharp in his nose—farm-scents, man-scents, bitter and foul. He fled from them as well, seeking the better scents of the forest. Rich soil and loam, fallen needles, tree-sap, bird’s nests, moss, mushrooms.

  The forest, yes. The safe forest, dark and deep.

  His paws splashed through a stream—

  His paws?

  Bjorn stopped.

  He was on all fours, his limbs shorter, stunted but thick with slabs of muscle. Fur covered him in mottled patches—black and brown, russet and grey. His palms, when he reared back on his haunches to look at them, were leathery pads from which long claws sprouted.

  Paw-pads.

  He had paws. He had claws. He had fur.

  He was…

  No.

  No, it couldn’t be.

  He was a man, not no man at all, not a…

  Not a bear.

  Not a bear!

  Bjorn blundered upstream to a place where the water pooled against stones. In its rippling surface, a visage different than his own stared back. The wide black nose with its flared nostrils, the long muzzle, the fuzzy ears rounded and upthrust, the shaggy-haired head…

  He was a bear. With eyes of flint and jaws from which yellow-ivory fangs curved. A bear.

  His fracturing mind nearly gave way. Running again, driven onward by the bear-form’s powerful haunches, he fled deeper into the woods.

  Seeking refuge, he came at last to a cave that smelled of disuse, unoccupied for several seasons. The bear’s instincts guided him to scrape together a sleeping-place, to make of this cave some sort of den.

  For a while, Bjorn took leave of thought. He ate berries, and snared fish from a white-foaming river. He drove a lone wolf from its kill, the meat of the scrawny old deer only whetting the bear’s appetite.

  Then, roaming the forest, he saw men cutting trees, and got close enough to overhear their talk. It woke the part of him that was still himself, still Bjorn.

  He remembered his father. His friends. The folk of their hall.

  And Hvit, who had cast this vile spell upon him.

  And… Bera.

  Drawn by memory and longing, he returned to the farmlands by the fjord. But the closer he came, the more his bear-side fought and grew stronger. The scents drove it half-mad with fury and hatred and fear.

  And hunger.

  The bland, bleating sheep. The herds of cattle, fat and cud-chewing.

  Meat. Meat and blood.

  He took a plump ewe. With jaws and claws he savaged the creature. He gorged until only scraps remained, bones and tendons.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Soon, he took another. And another.

  Once, an arrow grazed Bjorn’s flank. Twice, baying dogs set upon him and he tore them to pieces.

  The men spoke in hushed tones of the dread killer bear that had come to their land. The bear with mottled pelt of many hues, which had murdered their own king’s only son—

  At that, Bjorn was shocked. He slunk far nearer to their watch-fires than was wise, to better listen to their talk.

  So it was. For so the queen, Hvit, wife of Bodvar, had told them.

  Bjorn, she said, had heard of the beast and gone at once, to hunt and kill it. She said she’d begged him to wait, to take other men with him, but he would hear none of it.

  And then he had never returned. He was gone, believed dead. Surely he must have been dead, devoured. Why else would there have been no trace found of him?

  He returned to his cave, more himself again than he’d been in some while. His thoughts buzzed like disturbed bees at a hive—which, he, as a bear, now knew better of than ever.

  Did his father know? Had the grim news been sent, a messenger dispatched by horse or dragon-prowed ship, to wherever King Bodvar’s latest travels had taken him?

  What of Bera? When word of his supposed fate reached her brother’s farm high above the fjord…

  Distraught, he sank again into the brutal nature of the bear, a welcome oblivion.

  At a cattle-byre where many cows had been penned to await the autumn slaughter, he fell into a frenzy of kill-lust. His claws ripped udders and entrails, soaking the cattle-yard with milky crimson mud.

  A man’s voice bellowed. A stave cracked hard on Bjorn’s spine. The cow-herd, brave but foolhardy, realized his mistake too late when the bear rose up on hind legs, towering above him. A sweep of one great clawed paw struck the stave from his hands.

  Bjorn seized the man in a crushing embrace. Bones snapped like dry twigs. Guts ruptured. Blood spewed. The bear’s jaws gnashed his face, teeth snagging, peeling away a raw red flap from chin to ear. A fang punctured his eyeball. Then Bjorn opened the cow-herd’s throat to the knobs of the back-bone.

  The taste of this blood… the taste of this meat…

  It was foul. Unutterably vile.

  He knew, somehow, from the depths of his soul, that to consume it was to consume himself, forsake and lose the last of that which was Bjorn forever. Only the bear would remain.

  Choking, he spat out the vile mouthful. Tears—did bears shed tears?—blurred his eyes. He blundered half-blind from the byre, heedless of where his path led.

  He had killed a man.

  Oh, he had killed men before, on raids and in battles. This, somehow, was different. Terrible and wrong. The cow-herd had been of his own folk. Perhaps even a kinsman, making him a kin-slayer!

  When, finally, he stumbled to a weary halt, Bjorn sank to the ground. His sides heaved. His fur stank of blood, cow’s blood and man’s.

  If they had hunted him before, they would do so with all the more fervency now.

  Pushing himself upright, he looked around. A knot twisted in his beef-glutted stomach. He knew this place.

  He knew this place well.

  This was the high hill-land where Bera’s brother kept his farm.

  She would be near. His Bera. Did she grieve for him, mourn him? Had she forgotten him already and found a new love? How long had it been? How much time had passed? He could not keep the days counted.

  He had to see her. He had to know.

  In a grove near the farm-house, where they had often met, he found her.

  Bera. Sweet and pretty Bera, his love. She sat on a stump with her face in her hands, a gather-basket empty and neglected beside her. Bjorn smelled her tears, heard the sobs of her weeping.

  His heart wrenched. He took a step without thinking. Twigs crunched underfoot. Bera lifted her head up, and gasped as she saw him. Now, as well as her tears, he smelled her terror.

  For what did she see? Not her dear Bjorn but the beast that men said had slain him… the mottled bear, savage, reeking of slaughter!

  He did not move. He only gazed at her, woeful. He tried to speak but the bear’s voice was a growl, the bear’s muzzle unsuited to speech.

  Poised to flee, Bera hesitated. Her brown eyes, red-rimmed, searched his grey ones. A tentative consternation supplanted her fear.

  “Bjorn?” she asked in a whisper.

  He nodded, chuffing a cry like a sob of his own.

  Bera approached with one trembling hand outstretched. Bjorn pushed his wide black nose against it. She touched him, stroked him, wept anew but with joy.

  She knelt and embraced him, heedless of his blood-matted pelt. He let his big head drape over her shoulder. Then, from some distance, came the sound of Bera’s brother’s wife calling to her, impatient.

  Bjorn began to draw back, but Bera clung to him.

  “Take me with you,” she said.

  ***

  “You’re a fool to think that a king’s son will marry you,” they had told her. “He’ll have the pleasures of your body, your beauty and youth… but when the time comes for him to wed, he’ll take a wealthy woman to wife.”

  Bera never believed them.

  Bjorn love
d her. Loved her, just as she loved him.

  She helped him wash the blood from his mottled pelt, combed the tangles from it, brushed it until it shone. While he hunted, she gathered, and made the earthen cave as homey as any log-walled longhouse. They ate fish and fruit, nuts and berries.

  Though he still could not speak, with effort and practice Bjorn proved able to utter some words, and Bera grew adept at understanding his snarls and growls. In this manner, he was able to explain to her the misfortune that had befallen him, how his step-mother had cursed him with bear’s shape when he resisted her seduction.

  In the evenings, she sat cradling his head in her lap. She’d sing and tell stories. She’d talk to him of how they’d met, how they’d fallen in love, how they’d dreamed and planned for their life together.

  For some time, they lived so, and loved so, and were happy.

  Then came the first snow of winter.

  As they went to the river, where Bjorn would fish while Bera gathered firewood, the white-filled day’s hush shattered with baying and neighing and shouts.

  Hounds and horses surrounded them. Men rushed from the woods, armed with bows and axes and spears. One seized Bera, telling her as she struggled that she need not be afraid, they were saving her, had she not seen the bear?

  She slapped at him, swore at him, scratched his face. He struck her, mistaking the cause of her fear-maddened panic.

  The world spun downward to black, and as she spun down with it, she heard Bjorn’s furious roars become screams.

  Her eyes next opened to timber and thatch, to folk and firelight.

  Bera sat up, then shrieked as she beheld the severed, shaggy head, raised upon a spear-point as a grim trophy.

  “It’s all right,” someone said kindly. “You’re safe.”

  Turning, she saw the king, Bodvar, Bjorn’s own aged father.

  “The bear!” she cried. “Your son!”

  He smiled at her, a smile both soothing and sad. “The bear is dead. My son is avenged.”

  At that, Bera fell into blackness again.

  She revived to the bleak, stricken truth of her loss. And to the knowledge that Bjorn was not avenged; far from it.

  But she kept silent. She had no proof of her claim, just her word against that of the queen… when the huntsmen already believed Bera so fear-maddened as to have taken leave of her wits.