Sandra Hill - [Vikings I 02]

by The Outlaw Viking

  Stunned, Rain just gaped at his departing back. Then she stomped right after him. He was giving directions to Gorm for the scouts when she finally caught up with him.

  Without a thought to her rudeness in interrupting a private conversation, Rain put a palm on Selik’s chest and shoved. Of course, he didn’t budge at all, just stared at her brazen hand in disbelief. Gorm gawked at her as if she had two heads.

  “Listen, buster, you can’t tell a woman something wonderful like that and then walk away big as you please.”

  He looked pointedly at her hand still pushing at his rock-hard chest. Raising an eyebrow, he commented dryly, “’Twould seem you have a dark side, after all. For a pacifist.”

  Glancing down and realizing that she had, indeed, picked up a few violent attributes, Rain dropped her hand as if his chest had suddenly caught on fire. Actually, the insufferable man did throw off a tantalizing heat. Oh, Lord!

  Selik tilted his head in puzzlement then. “What wonderful thing did I say?”

  Rain felt her face flush. “You said…” She hesitated when she noticed that Gorm still stood there, listening to her every word with intent concentration and a wide smirk. She glared at him until he snorted with disgust and walked away, muttering.

  Turning back to Selik, she continued, “You said you hadn’t wanted to make love with any woman for ten years until you met me.”

  “And?”

  “And! There is no ‘and’, you dolt. You said it deliberately to tempt me, didn’t you? And then—”

  “Are you tempted?”

  “No!” she exclaimed too quickly and knew by the slow smile that teased his lips that she hadn’t fooled him a bit. “Anyhow, is it true?”

  “Is what true?” He didn’t even try to hide his smile now, and Rain’s heart slammed wildly against her chest in reaction. “That I want you? That it’s been two years since I have bedded a woman? That I have not really desired a particular woman since my—since—well, for ten years?”

  “Yes, all those things,” she agreed quickly. Finally, she was getting somewhere with the thickheaded, wonderful fool.

  He thought for a while, rubbing his fingertips thoughtfully across his furrowed forehead, then nodded slowly, saying nothing. He just watched her intently.

  She waited for him to say more, but he just stood silently like a damned statue. Stomping her foot in exasperation, she finally broke the silence, “Dammit! I know what you’re doing here. My mother told me all about you. I should have listened. The ultimate seducer, that’s how she described you. Oh, you are slick, I give you that. I’ll bet that line has worked on a thousand women.”

  “A thousand!” Laughter, deep and rich, bubbled up from his throat. “You overestimate my talents, sweetling.”

  She stepped closer, preparing to shove him again, but Selik put both hands on her shoulders and held her off. A jolt of white-hot fire ignited her skin under his fingertips and shot to all the delicious nerve endings in her body. Instinctively, she leaned closer.

  “Nay, keep your distance, wench. My self-control has been pushed to the limits. I want you. Badly. And unless you intend to share my bed furs in the true sense, ’tis best you stay away from me.”

  Rain couldn’t deny that the prospect enticed her. In fact, she would have liked nothing more at the moment than to surrender to all the wild new impulses beating throughout her body. But Rain had never behaved impetuously in the past, and her too-pragmatic brain put forth another message, questioning whether she could compromise her principles by making love with a man who stood for all that she abhorred. She groaned under the weight of all her warring emotions. “Selik, please, will you release the captives and give up fighting?”

  “Nay, I cannot.” He shook his head sadly, then shot her a challenging look. “But I will teach you things your books never told, bring you pleasures your modern lovers never dreamed. I will make your blood sing and your bones melt. You will never want another man after me.”

  Rain should have been affronted at his conceit. She wasn’t.

  She licked her lips nervously, trying to bring her rioting hormones under control. “And how about you?” she asked softly. “Would you want another woman after having me?”

  Selik studied her face closely, the passion in his eyes mirroring her own, before answering, “Probably not.”

  Rain’s heart fluttered with hope. “Selik, unless you are willing to stop the bloodshed, I don’t think we can have a future,” she cried, clutching at his hands, wanting him to understand.

  “We have today.”

  “But that’s not enough,” she said as her hopes deflated. “Can’t you see? Oh, Selik, I’m so frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “You. Us. There’s something powerful connecting us. If we make love, I know it would be incredible. I just know it. You don’t have to seduce me with false compliments or enticing sexual challenges. I already want you.”

  He moved closer, putting her hands on his shoulders.

  Rain backed away out of his arms, unnerved by his closeness. She had to make him understand. “I can’t get involved with a man in that way, so intimately, knowing he’s committed to a life of violence. It’s contrary to everything I value, all my beliefs. Can’t you even consider giving up your vendetta?”

  Selik’s face stiffened and his chin jutted proudly as he refused to bend to her wishes or beg for her favors.

  “It’s hopeless for us then,” she whispered softly, widening her eyes to stop the tears pooling in her eyes from overflowing. She failed. “But know this, you stubborn Viking, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Selik stared helplessly at the tears streaming down her face. After a moment, his face relaxed as his anger melted away. “Do not cry for me,” he said, forcing a lighter tone to his voice. “I have survived much worse than the loss of a mere wench. Much, much worse.”

  Rain’s heart almost broke at the lack of emotion in his voice. She wondered who had hurt him so badly, why he was on such a course of bloodshed.

  This time, when he turned and walked away, his back rigid and unyielding, Rain did not follow.

  “Dear God, how will I ever resist this man?” she asked aloud.

  He needs you, child.

  “What he needs is a good shot of pacifism.”

  What he needs is love.

  If she didn’t stop hearing these voices, she was going to start to accept Ubbi’s belief that she really was an angel sent from God. Surreptitiously, checking first to see that no one was looking, she reached behind her back. Yup! Just as she’d thought. Her shoulder blades were flat. She shook her head in disgust then at her own foolishness.

  When she returned to the cook fires, Blanche was draining some greens from a pot of boiling water, adding what appeared to be sauteed wild onions and garlic. A dozen loaves of golden-brown manchet bread lay cooling on a flat rock. The perfectly roasted venison sizzled over the fire, throwing off a wonderfully delicious aroma.

  The woman was amazing. Rain was beginning to hate her.

  “Where did you learn to cook like this?” she asked sweetly.

  Blanche’s intelligent hazel eyes turned her way, assessing Rain and her question, probably wondering how safe it was to reveal personal information. “My father was a Highland lord and my mother a weaver in his keep. The lord had no particular fondness for me, but he allowed me to work in the kitchens instead of the fields.”

  “How did you get tied up with Edwin then?”

  “My father’s lady—the bitch—hated me from the day I was born. As I grew older and more like my father in appearance, her viciousness grew.” Blanche shrugged. “I had no choice but to use my other talents, on my back, to escape her wrath.”

  Rain shook her head sadly, reminded once again what a brutal period of history she had landed in. “In my ti—country, things are different. Illegitimacy is no real stigma, and women have rights. With your obvious intelligence, you could have any job you wanted and support yourself without havin
g to rely on a man—either as a wife or a prostitute.”

  Blanche laid her cooking ladle aside and stared at Rain incredulously. “Truly?”

  Rain nodded.

  “How do I get to this country?”

  Rain laughed. Oh, if it were only that easy! “It’s a long, long way. I’m not sure I could even get back there myself.”

  Blanche studied her with renewed interest. “Well, then, let me ask you this. Is Selik your man?”

  A slow heat spread from Rain’s neck up her face, and she shifted uncomfortably. “No. I mean, not in that way. We’re not lovers.”

  “Do you plan to take him as your man?”

  Rain cocked her head to the side. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because if you do not want him, I do.”

  Rain’s heart froze at the prospect of Selik with Blanche. Of Selik with any woman other than herself. Oh, what a dog in the manger she had become—not accepting him as her lover, but not wanting him to have any other woman, either.

  But Blanche’s attraction to Selik puzzled her. “The women back at the campsite—they left before you came—they were repulsed by Selik’s scarred looks and violent acts. A beast, they called him.”

  Blanche snorted disbelievingly. “They were blind.”

  Yes, they were, Rain agreed silently. How perceptive of Blanche to realize that. And how alarming.

  When Selik slipped into the bed furs beside her that night, as he insisted on doing every night, Rain saw Blanche watching speculatively. Nothing escaped the discerning woman’s eye. She had to know that Selik shared her bed furs—and Nothing more—and was just biding her time. But for now, Rain relished Selik’s closeness, the heat of his body against her back, his warm breath against her neck.

  “Are you ready to open your root cellar, sweetling?” Selik teased. He nuzzled her neck, and she felt sweet shock waves of pleasure shoot to her fingertips and toes.

  Rain said a vulgar, modern word.

  He laughed, understanding completely. Apparently, some words did not need interpretation.

  Rain mentally berated herself for the deterioration in her behavior. Two weeks in another time and already she threatened violence to people around her, usually Selik, and she used language she would never utter in her modern life. It was all Selik’s fault, she decided irrationally. Instead of her changing him, he was bringing her down to his level.

  Maybe you need to come down off your pedestal.

  Oh, go away.

  “What did you say?” Selik asked, his hot breath teasing the fine hairs on the nape of the neck.

  She groaned. “Nothing.”

  “God again?”

  When she refused to answer, Selik laughed. “Well, then, tell your heavenly being Good Eventide for us both.”

  For another week they traveled clandestinely through the night. Surprisingly, they ran into only a few Saxon soldiers, and they were able to avoid confrontation. Apparently, the Saxons were as weary of battle as the Norsemen and Scots and had returned to their homes. One fleeing soldier told Selik that King Athelstan’s men hunted him in Cumbria, thinking he had escaped with King Constantine.

  One day when they stopped at a small farmstead to water their horses, Rain got her first glimpse of Selik’s obsessive distaste for children, of which the Viking women had told her earlier. Two little boys and one girl, none of them more than five years old, were playing in the mud beside a well while their Saxon mother turned the handle to raise the wooden bucket of water. The minute Selik saw the children, he ordered everyone in his party out of the farmyard, refusing to allow them to alight and quench their thirst. He never once apologized for his thoughtlessness, despite the fact that it took them two more hours to find water again. It was the last time they stopped at a homestead or in the daylight hours.

  Despite their relative safety, they traveled slowly because of the slaves, who had to walk, although some of the men who agreed to serve under Selik were released from their captivity and rode with his soldiers. Bertha, the heavyset woman who had declared Rain “barmy” when she voluntarily joined the rope chain, helped Blanche, complaining all the time. She was pleased to see that Bertha’s mild case of jaundice had cleared up, thanks to Rain’s prescribing a new diet, including large amounts of greens and animal livers, when available. A third woman, Eadifu, a slovenly, thirty-something, coarse-mouthed female, seemed to spend most of her time on her back in the woods, servicing any man with the inclination to taste her dubious charms.

  When they finally arrived at Ravenshire, Tykir’s ancestral home, Rain looked about with excitement, despite her exhaustion. She had heard so much about this manor from her mother, but this crumbling keep couldn’t be the same prosperous estate. Not only did the fields lie fallow and neglected, but the cotters’ huts, more like hovels, were deserted and falling down. The primitive stone and wood castle looked more like a fort in the American West, with its wooden palisade high up on a flat-topped hill, called a motte. Rain shook her head in dismay at the neglect and decay.

  She turned to Tykir, whose sad face reflected her own sorrow. “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “My grandfather Dar and grand-mother Aud held out against the Saxon encroachment for as many years as they could without my father or me or Eirik to help. They are both dead now.”

  “Does it still belong to you?”

  “No doubt it does, or leastways to Eirik. Being the eldest, he holds the odal rights, and he is in favor with King Athelstan. The Saxons would not dare steal his heritage. Now me,” he added with a grin, “that is another matter. The Saxon king would raze the keep and me with it, if he could.”

  “Oh, Tykir. All this fighting and animosity! Over what?”

  “There does not have to be a reason, sister. You will soon learn that. Saxons hate ‘the heathen Norsemen.’ Norsemen hate ‘the bloody Saxons.’ ’Tis the nature of things and always will be ’til one or the other is wiped from the face of the earth.”

  Rain shook her head sadly. She could have told Tykir that the Vikings would lose this battle to the British, but it wasn’t her place to intervene in history.

  “Will you be safe here?”

  “For a time. Until I heal completely.”

  “And then?”

  “Mayhap I will visit my cousin Haakon. He is king of Norway now and can always use good soldiers at his back whilst his brother Eric Bloodaxe covets the throne. Or perchance I will become one of the Byzantine emperor’s Varangian guards. Nay, better yet, I may join Selik in sending a few more Saxons to their graves.”

  Rain gasped. “Tykir! Not you, too?”

  He dismissed her concern with a wave of his hand, then added with a twinkle in his mischievous brown eyes, “On the other hand, I would not mind visiting your land. If the women there are as intriguing as you and your mother, I could no doubt be convinced to give up fighting for a spell.”

  Now that was a mind-boggling prospect—Tykir spreading his Norse charms among modern, liberated women. In fact, Rain had a few friends who would gobble up the studly Viking in a flash. Or vice versa.

  But she knew from her earlier conversations with Tykir that he did not believe she came from the future, just some distant land. “No, you can’t go to my country, Tykir. Unfortunately, I don’t have any directions for traveling back.”

  “Then how did you get here? Nay, do not tell me. I fear you will say that you flew here on angel wings.”

  Rain smiled and reached over to jab him playfully in the ribs. “Ubbi has been babbling again, I see.”

  “Like a brook.” Tykir returned her smile with brotherly warmth.

  They rode into the deserted courtyard, and Selik helped Tykir down from his horse, handing him a makeshift wooden staff to use as a cane. Selik gave orders for the care of the horses and sent some men out to hunt game and scavenge feed for the animals.

  When they entered the great hall of the keep, Rain knew that she and the captives had their work cut out for them. Bats hung from the high rafters, shar
ing quarters with a number of birds’ nests. The rushes on the stone floor were so filthy that the straw stuck together in flat clumps. She shuddered under the overwhelming smell of mildew and decay.

  While she would have much preferred to eat and sleep outdoors, she had seen the look of anguish on Tykir’s face at the sad state of his ancestral home. And actually, it was her heritage as well. Rain had to do what she could to help him.

  She decided that the kitchen and sleeping quarters would have to come first. She accompanied Blanche through the closed corridor connecting the hall with the separate cooking facilities after ordering Bertha and Eadifu to bring all the mattresses and sleeping pallets out to the kitchen courtyard for cleaning.

  The former inhabitants had stripped the kitchen bone-bare. Not a pot or ladle or chair or scrap of food had been left by the servants when they abandoned the castle. Only a large wooden trestle table remained in the center of the massive kitchen, and a dozen bars of hard soap on the shelf of the scullery. The table had probably been too large for thieves to take or it would be gone, too. And from Rain’s experience with these tenth-century people, soap was not a highly prized commodity.

  Rain spent a grueling, backbreaking two hours scrubbing the floor and table and dusting the cobwebs from the walls and ceiling, while Blanche brought in the cooking utensils and supplies they’d carried with them from Brunanburh. They soon had the kitchen in reasonably clean condition and the last of their venison roasting over the hearth fire.

  She went out to the kitchen courtyard to check on Bertha and Eadifu, who were boiling the few bed linens they’d found, along with everyone’s dirty clothing, in large cauldrons of soapy water.

  “Yer doin’ that all wrong,” Bertha complained as Eadifu lifted a sopping garment from the soapy water with a long stick, dumped it carelessly in a cauldron of clean water, creating a six-foot-wide puddle of mud around the pot, then hung it soaking wet from a nearby bush. “Ye must needs wring the bloody tunic, ye stupid lackwit. Do ye think we have a sennight ta dry the buggers?”