by Joanna Bell
"I can ride ahead, Jarl. Find your woman and then meet us there – we know what plans to make."
"No!" I barked angrily. "Voss! This woman – she brings me such trouble!"
Ragnar chuckled quietly. "Aye, they do bring us trouble, Ivar. Go, find her. It's no matter, I know your wishes, you trust me to bring them to the others? Sigvald and Vidar are already on their way, they'll be there to speak for you if –"
"Yes," I muttered. "Yes, fine. Go. I'll give the wench a whipping and follow you shortly."
But Sophie was nowhere to be found. When it became clear she was not at camp I sent men to search by the river, and further than that, and then they, too, came back empty-handed. Surely the woman had not been dull enough to wander away from camp and get herself taken captive for a second time?
No, that was not Sophie. She may have been willful, and as much a thorn in my side as she was almost a goddess in my arms, but she was not stupid.
So where was she?
I nearly ran into Ragnar's wife as I raged through camp, nearly out of my mind with an unfamiliar – and deeply unpleasant – feeling of helplessness.
"Do you know where she is?" I asked, after making sure she didn't topple over under the force of my hurry. "Sophie? She's not in camp. She's not at the river. Did she say something to you? Did she –"
Emma was backing away, wide-eyed and frightened.
"Don't be afraid, woman. I'm not angry at you. I'm just trying to find Sophie. She was with me when we fell asleep last night and now I can't seem to –"
"I don't know where she is at this moment, Jarl."
I gazed down at Ragnar's wife, puzzled at her odd wording. Of course she didn't know where she was at that moment. But she was a foreigner, and I was in a deepening panic, so I dismissed it.
There was nothing else to do but call in the trackers. I didn't want to do it, to be seen to use resources in searching for a woman when a battle waited ahead of us, but my desperation got the better of me. She was gone. I had to find her. Even in the short time I'd known Sophie, it amazed me what impact her absence had on my being. I was restless, quick to anger without her there at my side – and knowing it just made me even more irritable.
When the trackers came, I insisted on riding out with them. And just before we left one of the thralls came forward to say that he had seen two women leaving in the night, heading south on the Great Road.
I knew then that she hadn't been taken, or led somewhere against her will – there was no leading Sophie anywhere against her will, not without a fuss. She was gone, and of her own accord. I fell back behind the 2 men looking for signs, my heart anguished. I tried to tell myself it was inevitable, that she had a child and that no mother could be expected to stay away for long. Those things were real and true. As the feeling of being profoundly without her.
And as often happens in the hearts of men, my shock soon curdled into anger. It was easier for me that way, I think. Easier to rage at her, and the wrong she'd done me, than to face that she was gone, and that it had been her own choice.
"After I saved her from the Angles!" I muttered as we cantered along the road. "The very next morning! My uncle was right, women are treacherous creatures."
"What was that, Jarl?" One of the trackers called back, and I told him it was nothing, simply the wind in the trees.
And eventually, as we strayed further from camp, I wondered if what I was feeling then was what those girls, who had shared my bed and then wept bitterly when I seemed to want nothing more serious with them, had felt. I remembered one from my younger years, and the fury of betrayal when I had told her one evening, as if telling her of my plans for the next day, that I would not be marrying her. We are each so consumed with our own emotions, our own cares. What seems mild and easily put behind you when it happens to someone else seems earth-shattering when it happens to you.
We rode back to camp that day without Sophie as the trackers speculated she was in something of a hurry, and almost certainly headed back to the original camp, near the beach where I'd first spotted her.
Sophie was going home. Because a camp of Northmen was not her home. And as simple as that fact was, I could not swallow it, my heart could not accept it. Her home was at my side.
"She'll be back," Jarl Eirik said to me that night, as we ate fresh venison with our advisers and the best of our warriors, in preparation for the battle at dawn.
Eirik's wife sat at his side, her belly almost a rebuke to my wounded sense of pride. I should have a woman sitting beside me, with my baby growing inside her. I lifted a piece of bloody meat to my lips and cursed the way Sophie made me yearn for things that had never troubled me before.
Paige, I noticed, did not back up her husband's opinion. And as she ran a hand over her stomach I knew why that was – because she was a mother. She knew Sophie had to go, just as I did. She knew that, unlike me, Sophie hadn't allowed her heart to be invaded as thoroughly as we were about to invade the Angle's town of Thetford, and conquered just as neatly.
"It's not what I need," I said later, when the women had retired and it was just me, Jarl Eirik and Sig left. "It's not what I need to have extra cares piled on top of me – especially now! It's not what I need to spend my energy on concern for a careless woman, for a –"
"It's life," Eirik said kindly, refilling my cup with ale. "It's what life is, Ivar. Cares and worries and energy spent on those who you can't help but love. You've resisted longer than most."
"But I didn't resist at all!" I protested. "There was nothing to resist. I've enjoyed the company of women as any man has, but I could never look at a man in love and feel much of anything besides a mild kind of pity. And now she drives me to such distraction for – for what? It's not even what she intended! And yet here I sit on the eve of the battle all wound up in thoughts of her, and thoughts of her thoughts."
"Go after her if you must," Sigvald spoke up. "Tomorrow, after we take Thetford, go and take her back. You are the Jarl of Jarls, Ivar. If you wish her at your side, she shall be at your side."
Sig was right. I was the Jarl of Jarls, with no one above me but the gods. What was I doing lamenting one woman? I would do as my advisor suggested, after the battle, and go after her. Her anger didn't matter. What mattered was making things right, putting all things and people in their rightful place. And her rightful place was by my side. If she did not try me too hard when I thwarted her plans, I would even allow her child to join us.
We rode at dawn, Jarls and warriors breaking through the woods as the thin morning light spread its fingers through the leafy canopy.
As anticipated, the Angles were expecting us. They were fewer in number, though not by far, and they had the advantage of the town walls, and high points upon which their archers could perch.
I felt in my bones, though, even as arrows began to whir past my head, that it was not going to be enough. A rage surged through me that was not born of war-lust but of pain. When the first barrage of arrows died down and I let my shield fall to my side I felt like I could take the entire town single-handedly, should all my fellows fall. What did any of it even matter without her?
"Go!" I bellowed, as we watched the archers readying to loose their arrows a second time. "As we planned, the side gates, both sides. Go! Tonight we drink Angle's wine, tonight we sleep in Angle's beds and tonight Valhalla welcomes the best among us!"
At my sides, the other Jarls pulled their swords from their sheaths and we split into two parties, riding away from Thetford's main gate and along the road, in opposite directions, that encircled the town walls.
The first man I killed was the only guard not to flee the northern town gate when he saw a horde of Northmen thundering towards him on horseback. He barely had time to draw his sword, and it trembled visibly in his hand, before I brought my own blade slicing down through his neck. His was a brave death, unlike his companions, who we had to hunt down in the undergrowth and slaughter like rabbits. He would be honored in the Great Hall that night, a
lbeit without his friends at his side.
As suspected, the warriors of Thetford, when they realized we did not intend to batter down the main gate, put up a much stronger fight than those guards did.
I didn't feel afraid, charging into the melee towards mounted men armed with weapons almost as fine as my own, nor from knowing that they, too, had been trained to fight. No, there was no fear in my heart. It was eagerness, a relish almost like lust. I smiled as two warriors spotted me and tensed themselves in their saddles, and then howled as I cut one of them down off his horse, leaving him to be finished off by my men, and then used my sword in the same motion to block that of his companion. He was strong and fit and skilled, but I was stronger, fitter, and more skilled. After trading blows, blocking, retreating and advancing in turn, I caught him out on a slow reaction and drove my sword into his chest, bellowing like an insane person as his blood spattered my face.
After that, everything became a blur. I was less a man, less a thinking and feeling creature, than I was a kind of low beast, slicing and chopping my way through the Angles until my wrist ached with the number of blows my sword had delivered.
Even when it was over I stalked among the fallen, using my dagger to finish off those still living, slick with blood by then and stinking of death.
Not my death, though. No, I was about as far from death as I had ever felt myself to be. Even the color of the sky, as the morning mist faded away, seemed a brighter blue than usual.
It was Jarl Ragnar who found me first, panting amidst a pile of bodies, and although he too was covered in gore, something in my look made him regard me with a certain carefulness.
"Thetford is ours," he said, coming up and clapping me on the back.
I turned towards him, wondering what it was about me that made him stare so openly, and thought of what was to come. We had taken Thetford, and now we had to hold Thetford. An easier task than taking it, in many ways, although far more tedious. We weren't raiding, so there were no goods to collect. The goods that remained after the previous night's fire were staying in place – as were we. Thetford was to be our winter quarters, the hub from which we spread our tentacles deeper into the Kingdom of the East Angles, and then into Mercia and Northumbria. There was much work to be done, now that the shorter, sharper work had been accomplished.
And I was not going to start that work with my people. Finish it, yes, and as soon as possible. But at that moment I was going to take Sigvald's suggestion and bring Sophie back to the place she belonged, which was at my side. Ragnar knew it, too, as I remounted my horse. He was a man, he did not need to be told.
"Won't you eat with us tonight?" He asked. "Won't you at least wash yourself, Jarl Ivar? You are covered in the blood of the Angles, and –"
I shook my head, the battle lust still singing high in my veins, and told him that he would have the command, to be shared with Jarl Eirik until I returned, which I assured him would be soon.
And then I took off, urging my horse to a gallop as I passed through the northern gate of Thetford and back onto the road. I did not bring the trackers with me, nor the hounds, nor any food. All I had was my sword, my dagger and my water-skin. I would find food on the way, I told myself – and I would find Sophie herself before she got back to the camp beside the sea.
Eighteen
Ivar
It wasn't the best plan I ever carried out – it was barely a plan at all. By the first morning, I was deeply regretting the decision not to bring any food. I killed a couple of rabbits but rabbits are lean, they don't fill the belly. I found berries along the road, too, although I could never stop for long to eat enough of them – Sophie was out there, and the need to find her before she got too far superseded all others.
It's much faster traveling alone than with a large group of people. Within three days and nights I was close enough to the first camp to began to recognize some of the estates we'd taken during the spring and early summer. Very hungry by then, and not having had enough rest, I arrived back on the site of the camp on the fourth day after leaving Thetford. Sophie wasn't there, but I knew she wasn't dull enough to sleep out in the open, anyway. I rode down to the beach, listened carefully to every little sound in the woods, and then to the roar of the sea.
She'd been coming north along the coast when she encountered Bryn and Jorunn – at least that's what Bryn and Jorunn had reported. So after a brief search of the beach and the surrounding woods, I guided my horse onto the path south. She'd marked it, she told me – the path home. So as I rode, keeping my eyes out for any people or odd landmarks, I took a number of trails back into the woods. At one estate I came upon the Lord and he swore up and down that he had no idea who I was talking about, but that a girl similar to the one I described had been taken by his men, and then in turn taken by Northmen – by Jarl Ragnar, in fact.
Not being apprised of the fact that I was without an army – without any companions at all, in fact – and not wishing to earn the ire of a Jarl, the Lord eagerly sent one of his men to show me the place where his men had found the girl.
"Pretty, she was," he commented as he walked along a narrow path through the woods in front of my horse. "Teeth as white as oyster shells left out in the sun. Ill-tempered, though. Very ill-tempered."
Sophie did have a mouthful of white teeth, in shockingly good condition. And she could definitely be defiant, given half the chance. But when I asked the Lord's man if she had spoken of a child, he told me that he couldn't remember but that he thought not. And she hadn't told me of any kidnapping by East Angles – or by Northmen. None until the one perpetrated by me, that is.
The small bay we came to eventually was peaceful, deserted, the sand unmarked by hoof or foot.
"Is this where you found her?" I asked, realizing that after this place, I really had no idea where else to look. I could keep riding south – I would keep riding south – but for how long?
"No, Jarl," the man replied respectfully, keeping his head bowed. "We found her in the woods. Attacked a couple of the Lord's men, she did."
"In the woods? At a village?" I asked.
"No, no village. It's very near to here, we passed the spot not a moment ago. Shall I take you there?"
I dismounted my horse when we got to the place where the man insisted his people had first encountered the girl with the white teeth.
"What, here?" I asked, noting that we didn't appear to be anywhere in particular. "But where was she from? What village is close to here?"
"Well Caistley is – Caistley used to be – just around the corner, in the clearing, but it doesn't exist anymore. Burned to the ground."
I turned and peered into the trees, imagining that she might simply be hiding there, about to pop up with a smile on her face and a promise never to leave again. But the woods were empty, quiet and tranquil.
"It was here," my companion insisted, obviously fearing that I might become angry and take that anger out on him if I didn't find what I was looking for. Deprived of rest and good food, and beginning to accept what folly it had been to ride to the coast without hounds or trackers, I couldn't say his fears were unwarranted. Still, there was no reason to harm an innocent man. His King had surrendered, and he himself was compliant.
"Off with you," I told him, waving my hand, and he scuttled away at once, like a crab who has just had his protective rock lifted away by some inquisitive child.
I stood there in the warm silence of the summer afternoon, refusing to think about the truth that grew ever more present on my heart's horizon.
I just need something to eat. Something to fill my belly. I'll ride back to the estate and take some bread from the Lord's table. Then I'll go south again. Farther south. She can't be far now.
A lifetime of believing myself to be the man that others believed me to be – superior to other men, quicker in thought and movement, stronger, less tempted by the things that tempt weaker men. Part of me always knew it was a lot of untruths – but not, perhaps, entirely so. My parents never
caught me weeping over a girl, or fearfully refusing to lead men on raids when the time came for such things. And now I was standing in the middle of a forest in a foreign land. Not because I was needed in that forest, and not because I was un-needed anywhere else. No, it was for no practical reason and only for the feelings I had always secretly scorned in other men. It was for a woman. And – worse – a disloyal woman who had left me in the night.
My horse lowered his head to graze on some grass that grew beside the path, and a wave of tiredness came over me. A short nap, perhaps, would restore me to myself. I stepped off the path, searching for a sunny spot to lay my head.
And then I fell into a deep hole. Unseen, it swallowed me, and I found myself tumbling breathlessly through the pitch black depths, thinking briefly to myself that it was taking a very long time to hit the ground and that perhaps I had hit it already, and was now on my way to the next world?
No. Not the next world. The woods, once again. I was alive. Not only was I alive, I was not in any kind of hole or pit. I looked up, blinking in the sunlight, which now seemed even brighter than it had just a moment ago. In the midst of trying to figure out how I'd had the sensation of falling when apparently I hadn't gone anywhere, the sound of a wolf growling seemed to come from a direction I could not quite pinpoint. I crouched low to the ground, where I had thought there was cover in the undergrowth and was now horrified to find there was hardly any.
My horse was loose on the path, a tempting treat for any hungry beasts – and one I could not allow to be taken, as it would be a long journey back to Thetford on foot. I drew my sword and stood.
But there was no horse anywhere to be seen. There was no wolf anywhere to be seen, either, although the sound of its growl continued. The forest itself seemed oddly changed, the trees more sparse, and a small, dry brook-bed running at the bottom of a gentle slope. I turned quickly, hoping to surprise the predator but still there no glimpse of any animal, friend or foe. Had there been a slope moments ago? A dried creek? It did not seem that there had.
