An image of her beauty swam before his eyes, bringing back that bizarre smile he couldn’t seem to shake. ‘She is everything.’
Eirik looked down. Something was troubling him, but Gunnar had no idea why that would be true. He’d gone off to battle numerous times without this concern from his brother. Deep down, he realised that it must be linked to the strange memory of pain, but he couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to formulate a question. Finally, Eirik met his gaze again and said, ‘I want you to live, Brother. Remember that when you awaken.’
Gunnar intended to ask what he meant, but then Eirik pressed a small wooden barrel of mead to his side and draped Gunnar’s arm around it. It was the kind they would strap to their horses when out on a short campaign. He pulled out the cork and pressed it to Gunnar’s lips. Gunnar obliged him and took a long draught, but something didn’t feel right.
‘Drink more if you feel pain.’ Eirik put the cork back in and rested the barrel against Gunnar’s side.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I do this for your interest, Gunnar.’
The ship rocked and he recognised that it meant they were leaving the dock and heading towards the sea. But there was a disturbing hole in his memory and his time with Eirik was fading. The blackness was settling around his vision and threatening to overpower him again. He grabbed Eirik’s cloak and pulled him back. ‘Where are you sending me?’
‘Live, Brother.’ Then he pulled away from Gunnar’s grasp with ridiculous ease and seemed to disappear.
Gunnar tried to sit up, but his head swam and began to ache, so he laid back and allowed the comforting blackness to claim him.
* * *
Gunnar floated the entire trip, his body lightened by the strange sense of weightlessness that followed him. There were times when he realised something was odd, that his limbs weren’t responding as they should, that his thoughts were muddled, but he couldn’t find the strength to care. The allure of sleep was too much to resist. Its relentless pull on him was the only thing that grounded him. That split second before it overcame him was the only moment when he felt as if his body was connected to the world around him; it weighted him down and pressed his back solidly to the wooden platform that had become his world.
Most of the time his dreams were nightmares, clawing at his mind with their vicious memories of the past. As always happened when his mind turned dark, it took him back to that night he’d spent with Kadlin. He remembered how he’d spent hours gazing down at her beautiful face, peaceful in sleep. He’d wanted to remember it for ever, because he’d known the horrible words that would have to be said before he left her. He’d known that he had to push her away, even as it had turned his stomach to mar something so precious.
Then the nightmare shifted to that sunny day as an adolescent when he had finally acknowledged that he was as worthless as his father liked to claim. It was the day he had tried unsuccessfully to strike from his memory; the day that he and Eirik had been attacked. A small group of criminals had found them fishing and had overpowered them, tying them up and taunting them with promises of their dark intentions. Gunnar had managed to escape his bonds and had run until he found a washerwoman who sent her son to get their father, so Gunnar had returned. Except he’d been too young and powerless to do anything except hide and listen to Eirik’s screams as the men tortured and violated him. He’d made himself listen, absorbing every scream as if it had been his own, each one a confirmation of how contemptible he really was. Confirmation that had only been reinforced once his father had arrived and saved Eirik only to sneer at his bastard for not intervening.
At times Eirik’s screams would become the hounds of Helheim hunting him down. At other times, the bays of the hounds would become his father reminding him of his many failures. Or the screams of his father on those nights when he’d imbibe too much mead and seek Gunnar out to rail at his son for making Finna, his mother, leave them. He’d awoken many times with a blackened eye from those encounters. They’d begun to happen so often that he’d run to Kadlin’s home when he knew his father was in one of those moods. So, naturally, when his nightmares conjured up those memories, he would escape the nightmare and find himself in her arms. Only this time they weren’t children.
The dreams were so vivid that he was sure that he was finally with her. He twined his hand in her flaxen hair and felt the silk sliding through his fingers; he felt the softness of her mouth beneath his thumb as he rimmed her lips and pressed inside the moist heat just as he had claimed her body; he sang songs to her that he had never even heard before. It was what he had hoped would happen if he died. If not for his occasional awakenings and nightmares, he would have thought the battle had killed him. Though he couldn’t actually remember the battle, just riding towards it. He’d never admit it, though. What warrior would admit to forgetting an entire battle?
Finally, a new voice woke him enough to make him realise that he wasn’t floating any more. The world had stopped and a real beast bayed in the distance.
‘Freyja!’ a woman’s voice called out. The word crashed through his brain and he struggled to understand it. ‘Freyja!’
When he was finally able to make his eyes open, a mongrel’s giant snout appeared in his line of vision, just before a large, wet tongue stroked his face. He grimaced at the sensation, but then sobered when he saw that Kadlin loomed over him, her hair loose and flowing around her shoulders, the sky a fair blue behind her. She looked angry, vengeful. Not his sweet Kadlin. Then it dawned on him what he should have known all along. He had died in battle. Instead of spending eternity in Valhalla, Freyja had claimed him instead. Eirik had sent him off on his journey to Folkvangr. He laughed with bitterness. It seemed appropriate that the goddess would look just like Kadlin.
Death hadn’t provided a relief to his torment after all.
Chapter Four
Gunnar looked as close to death as she’d ever seen anyone look with a beating heart.
‘Get him inside.’ Kadlin forced the words past a throat that threatened to close and stood back out of the way so that Vidar and the two men he’d brought with him could unload Gunnar from the wagon. If not for the distinctive red of his hair and the fact that Vidar accompanied him, she wasn’t entirely sure that she would have known who had been delivered to her door. Gunnar’s cheeks were hollowed and his frame shrunken from that of her memories. His skin had taken on a grey, unnatural pallor that twisted her heart. This was not the powerful warrior she had known.
The men hoisted him and walked past her to the sod house. His strange laugh lingered behind him, making her shiver from the unnaturalness of it. She was no stranger to the smells of men newly arrived from sea, but she covered her nose and mouth as she followed them inside and directed them to place their burden on a large bench in an alcove off of the main room. One of the men pressed a small barrel to Gunnar’s mouth so that he drank, spilling a good bit of it down his neck.
Kadlin stared down at the man she had loved, afraid to touch him, afraid that it would wake her from this bizarre dream where nothing seemed real. One minute she had been hanging the freshly washed linens and the next Vidar was calling to her. He’d ridden ahead of the cart and she’d heard Gunnar’s name, but had been so overwhelmed she hadn’t understood the rush of
Vidar’s words. Even now, with him lying before her, she could barely believe he was there.
His head fell back to the bench and lolled to the side. Whatever animation he’d had, the drink had taken it from him, leaving him unnaturally still. She might have thought he was dead if she hadn’t just met his eyes with her own. His flesh was so drawn and pale that she didn’t know how he had survived the journey across the sea. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he’d only come here to die.
‘What’s happened to him, Vidar?’ As the boy spoke, she imagined what he described. Gunnar, fallen in battle, lying trapped beneath
his dead horse while the fight raged around him. His crushed leg crudely bound at camp and his head wound cleaned, but it had taken days to get him back to Eirik’s hall. A fever had raged for even more days and he’d yet to regain consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time.
Yet, he had stirred when the men had lifted him from the wagon and she was sure that he had recognised her. It gave her hope, even though he had now settled into a laboured sleep. His breath came harsh and uneven.
‘What does Eirik think of his leg?’ The right leg of his trousers was intact, but the left had been cut away to allow for wood and bindings to keep his leg stabilised.
Vidar shook his head. ‘The leg is ruined.’
She had spent many late nights cursing Gunnar, but she had never wanted this to happen. Kadlin blinked past the sudden haze of tears in her eyes and focused on the dirty linen binding his leg. The bandage, along with his clothing, had likely not been changed since the men had set off on their journey. His tunic hung from him like rags and his hair was a tangled mess. She decided that the first thing to do would be to get him clean.
‘Go help yourself to broth and ale.’ She looked at the two men who had accompanied Vidar and waved them towards the front room and the pot bubbling on the fire. Turning her attention to Vidar, she said, ‘Help me undress him.’ But Vidar didn’t move when she reached for the hem of Gunnar’s tunic. ‘Lift him up a bit,’ she urged.
‘Kadlin...’ He glanced towards the men who had moved to do as she had bidden, then lowered his voice. ‘I don’t think you should be the one to undress him.’
‘Have I shocked your delicate sensibilities, Vidar?’ She gave him a wry smile and tugged on the tunic. ‘He’s filthy. Someone needs to bathe him.’
‘But—’
‘It’s not as if I’ve never seen a man before. Help me!’
He sighed and when Gunnar groaned at a particularly harsh tug, he relented and lifted his brother’s shoulders to help her divest him of the tunic and undershirt. Fabric was tied tight around his torso, making her suspect he had at least one broken rib.
‘I can do the rest. Fetch me a bucket of the water by the fire and then go and get Harald.’
Eirik owned the farm where she lived and his farmer-tenant Harald lived across the field. He had experienced a similar leg injury as a young man, so she hoped that he would be able to provide some guidance. When Vidar left, she was alone with Gunnar, except for the two men who had accompanied them. But they were famished and drank their broth by the fire, not paying her any attention.
This was not how she’d imagined meeting Gunnar again. Any number of scenarios had crossed her mind and they varied from angrily smashing a tankard over his head to holding him tight and vowing to never let him out of her sight again. Her emotions regarding him had been wild and unrestrained. Much like her love for him had been.
She brushed the grimy hair back from his face with her fingers, noting that it was tangled and would likely need cutting. His beard, too, was caked with grime and would need to be shaved. It was a task she looked forward to, because she’d always preferred him without one. It obscured the sculpted beauty of his high cheekbones, which was the very reason she suspected he liked it. Men weren’t supposed to be beautiful, but he was. A Christian monk had once wintered with her family years ago and told them stories of angels and demons. She had always imagined Eirik to be beautiful like one of that God’s angels, full of light. But not Gunnar. He had always been wicked. He was one of the dark ones, a fallen and wrathful angel.
Fishing the washcloth from the bucket, she rung it out and began wiping the grime from his torso, careful of the bruise over his left side. She tried to work in a perfunctory manner and not linger on the scars he’d acquired since she’d last seen him. But she couldn’t help but stop to wonder how he’d come by each one as she found them. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop the flood of memories that came over her. Their days of running wild through the forest as children and their evenings spent inside playing hnefatafl, when he would tease her mercilessly as he tried to break her concentration while she stared at the board, contemplating her next move. The first time he’d kissed her when they’d been children, when she was just beginning to understand what it meant. How strange and wonderful it had felt to have the weight of his body pressing down on hers, even though she’d not understood her own reaction. The years afterward when he’d become almost like a stranger to her, but she would still watch him and feel her breath catch when his gaze would lock on hers.
He’d held a strange power over her even then and she could feel it now trying to take her over. It wanted to make her soft where she had tried so valiantly to harden herself against him. She was seized by a nearly overwhelming devastation that their lives should have turned out differently. She thought she’d squelched that longing and the anger that accompanied it, but it rose up inside her anew. Tears stung her eyes, but she was able to blink them back and shake the melancholy from her head. Her task was to get him clean before Harald arrived and then to make sure that he wasn’t lying on his deathbed. Then she would see him gone, back across the sea or wherever he longed to be, somewhere away from her, before he could destroy her again.
* * *
A short while later Harald arrived. Kadlin averted her eyes from the crutch the man held and the stilted but efficient way he moved with it. She immediately felt ashamed, because it had never bothered her before, except that now she could only imagine Gunnar walking in that same crippled manner and it filled her heart with sadness. Together with Vidar, they unwrapped the wounded leg to examine it. It was horribly discoloured, but Vidar thought that it looked less swollen than when they had set sail. Harald confirmed that it had been broken in more than one spot, so they were careful to hold the wood in place to minimise any movement, but Gunnar still roused from the pain. Vidar was quick to supply him with the small barrel of mead he’d been clutching in the wagon. She gave it a harsh study, suspecting that it contained something much stronger than mead, but held her tongue.
After Gunnar settled down again, they wrapped his ribs and then the leg in clean linen and she grabbed a knife to cut away the rest of his trousers so she could finish cleaning him. Harald stopped her with a hand to her shoulder.
‘Let me do this part.’
She frowned and shrugged him off.
‘Kadlin, do you think he would want you to bathe him? He’ll have trouble enough when he awakens. Don’t do more to take his dignity away.’
Her eyes froze on the grime-covered trousers and she realised that he was right. It would likely embarrass Gunnar if he knew that she had tended to him so intimately. ‘I’ll wait by the fire.’
He nodded and took the knife from her, so she left him and Vidar to finish washing him and went back to the front room of the sod house. The fire warmed the space comfortably. It was small, but she never failed to experience a wave of satisfaction at how she had managed to turn the house into her home in the year that she’d been there since her husband had been killed in battle. Benches dressed in cosy blankets surrounded the perimeter of the room, while the stone hearth sat in the middle. Off to the side were shelves and a table used for eating and preparing food. It had given her sanctuary when she’d needed it and it appeared that it was to be Gunnar’s sanctuary, as well. Picking up the empty bowls the two men had left behind, she intended to wash them, but she couldn’t concentrate. So she abandoned the bowls to the bucket of water and moved to the bench where she usually did her sewing, lighting upon it briefly before standing again to pace the length of the hearth. Her gaze repeatedly went to the alcove just off the hallway until Harald and Vidar finally emerged.
‘How bad is he really, Harald?’
Harald shrugged. ‘Hard to say. If the fever has passed and doesn’t return, he should live, but he won’t ever have use of that leg again.’ He indicated the large crutch he leaned again
st. ‘At least not without one of these.’
She couldn’t face that just yet, so she didn’t think about it. ‘How long before he...before he can attempt walking?’
He shrugged. ‘That’s largely up to him. A couple of months, maybe more.’
Months. How would she survive being so close to him for months? Yet her heart wouldn’t let her send him away. ‘Thank you for coming. Stay for a while and have supper.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve already supped. I’ll come back in the morning to check on him.’ Vidar rose from his seat on a bench to escort Harald home, but the older man waved him back to his seat. ‘I’ve crossed that field many times without you, boy.’ He smiled and made his way out the door, stopping outside to talk with the men who had accompanied Vidar in the wagon. Their voices rumbled through the wooden door, speaking of the battle across the sea with an excitement that baffled her.
‘Has he been awake at all?’ she asked Vidar.
‘Merewyn’s Saxon witch made a potion of laced mead. Eirik gave it to him before they set his leg and he’s been drinking it since. We thought it was best for the pain. It makes him sleep. He’s been awake a few times, but he’s not very lucid.’
‘Don’t give him any more of it. He needs nourishment now more than he needs oblivion.’
‘But, Kadlin, he’s in pain.’
‘No more, Vidar. He’s wasting away.’
Vidar sighed and nodded from his seat on the bench beside her, exhausted. ‘All right. He’s in your care now.’
She frowned at his resigned expression. ‘Why has he been sent to me? Wouldn’t it have been better to let him rest and recover at Eirik’s home?’
‘Perhaps, but Eirik believed that he had no will to survive his injury. I agree. He would have died had he stayed and he still may.’
She crossed her arms and held them tight to her belly, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the pain. Seeing Gunnar again had caused the old wounds to fester and it was taking all she had to keep them from reopening. ‘Why does he think that?’
One Night with the Viking Page 4
