Kings of the North

by Kings of the North (retail) (epub)

  She leaned toward him, rubbing her arm on him. This was as much as she would give him of apology for her temper. He kissed her, hoping the fight was over. She smiled at him.

  “I like your sister.”

  “Benna’s daughter,” he said. “She was also quick spoken.” He sat next to her, his eyes on her hands; he loved the way she did ordinary things, forking, pouring, and turning the spit.

  This was her power over him, this fragile, everyday love. Her magic. Maybe the only real magic.

  A few moments later, over by the table, Leif said, “Where did you get this ale?”

  Raef turned, startled. The Icelander came across the long flagstone floor with the jug from Corban’s house in his hand. “Best ale I’ve had in a long time. I wish we had a cup.”

  “We’ll find one,” Raef said. He took the jug, which was cool, full of the fragrant, heady drink. He took a long pull from the metal rim. Leif was right; it was very good – the sweetness of the barley and the bitter of the herbs nourishing as bread. He took another deep drink of it. Laissa was frowning at him.

  “What have you done now?”

  “One of Gunnhild’s old spells, I guess, still with some juice in it.” Better to lie than to fight. He handed the jug on to her, brimful.

  * * *

  The crowd of people by the oak grew steadily, and around sundown they started shouting. Raef went out to the door of the hall, or where the door would be. The crowd surged toward him, men and boys, yelling. Their leader was a big young man with a mop of red hair and long knives stuck through the belt of his apron. Goda, Raef thought, guessing he had not taken well what Miru told him when she got home.

  “Yes,” Raef said, “what is it? It’s getting dark.”

  The young man with the butcher’s knives in his belt stepped forward. His top dogteeth stuck straight out past his lips like fangs. He had sparse red hair and hundreds of freckles. “What are you doing here? Who are you to think you can just come in here like this and take over this place?”

  Raef said, “It doesn’t look to me as if anybody else wants it.”

  Behind Goda, a lanky boy called, “We know how to get rid of your kind; we did it once before.” The crowd let out a chatter of agreement, and a couple of them stooped to pick up rocks. Raef folded his arms over his chest. He could tell Leif was moving up behind him.

  He said, “I haven’t done anything to any of you. How do you know what kind I am?” A rock sailed toward him, and he put out one hand and caught it. The crowd murmured, startled, and everybody took a step backward. “Your wife,” he said to Goda, “what did she say about me?” He turned the rock in his hand.

  “Leave Miru out of this,” Goda snarled at him. He came forward, his chest out, defiant. “It’s not what she said, anyway – it’s where you are. This is the King’s hall, and we don’t want a king.”

  Raef said, “You have a king. His name is Ethelred. He’s down in Wessex now, spending your wealth. This is what he’s doing to you.” He held his hand out and closed his hand tight on the rock and crumbled it into dust. The watchers gasped. He let the bits dribble to the ground. “He just murdered a lot of people from Jorvik. People you knew. Are you going to sit here and wait for him to decide to kill the rest of you?”

  Their voices rose in a jabber of questions and names. Goda stared at Raef’s hand. He looked back over his shoulder and then faced Raef again. His freckled face drew long. “It’s true, then – about Saint Brice’s Day?”

  Raef said, “This was a great city once. I remember when there were dragons and knarre here from Hedeby, Mainland, and Dublin; when people here were rich, and the city reached out all the way to the walls. Now you live in hovels.” He dusted his hands off. “You have a king. But the wrong one.” He turned and went into the hall and over to the fire.

  * * *

  They worked all the next day and got a good part of the front wall up, setting posts and weaving withies in between, to make an inside and an outside; they would fill the space between with turf. That night they lay in the shelter of the wall. Through the weaving of the withies the moonlight lay across the floor in streaks.

  Raef and Laissa lay side by side on their cloaks. He wanted to couple with her, but Leif was too close by. She murmured something and took his hand and put it on her belly. He could feel the baby inside, turning, a tiny foot, the curve of a shoulder, and in his mind he saw her. He kissed her mother. “A little while more.” He bundled the cloaks under them to soften the ground. He would build sleeping benches next. One of the old houses nearby was full of sound wood. Before she had the baby, he needed at least two stout walls up and a place where she could be away from all eyes.

  He felt the beats of the hoofs in the ground under him before he heard them. Then the pony galloped up outside the wall, and the boy Peter called, “King of Jorvik! Look out – look out—”

  He galloped away. Laissa sat up, and Raef put an arm around her. He said, over his shoulder, “Do you see anything?”

  “Not yet,” Leif said. He was at the middle of the new wall, where the door would be. “Good boy, Peter.”

  Raef got up and went to the doorway, looking down the street. Laissa followed him. Down near the village he could see a faint glow. Leif muttered something under his breath. Raef started out the door, and Laissa gripped his arm. “Stay here. Stay here. You promised me—”

  “Hush,” he said.

  The glow grew clearer, and closer, and shone above the bobbing heads of several people moving up the street toward them. They were carrying torches.

  “What did I promise you?” he said. He put his arm around her and held her against him. He pursed his lips and blew a long breath into the night. A faint whistle trailed after it.

  Down there, all the torches guttered and went out.

  “You promised me—” she said and stopped.

  He knew what she wanted him to promise her. Down there the mob was trying to relight the torches. He blew another long, singing breath down the street, and the last lights died. At that some of the people began to run, and then they were all running, pattering away down the street. He laughed after them.

  He led her back to their bed and lay down again, and she lay down beside him and was silent. She turned her back to him. He felt her unhappiness like a wound. He kissed her shoulder, caressed her, trying to comfort her; he wasn’t sure about the mob or about him. Leif came down the hall after a while and lay down, and they all slept.

  * * *

  Laissa went down to the shambles. In the yard a flock of sheep crowded together, and at the back, where the shed was, Miru and the redheaded butcher, Goda, stood shouting at each other.

  “God’s love, woman,” the butcher yelled, “I would knock you down if you wouldn’t simply get back up again. Shut up and go gut the pig.” He turned toward Laissa. “Are you bringing me an animal to slaughter or shear? Then what are you doing here?”

  Miru came nimbly through the yard toward her, pushing sheep out of the way. “Laissa. Come on away, you should not see this, so near your time.” She flung a look back at her husband, got Laissa’s arm, and towed her away down the fence and around into the alleyway. Goda’s voice followed them, high pitched and volleying curses. Miru took her in a door, into a small, neat room with two holes in the thatch facing south to let in good light.

  “There,” Miru said. “Sit down. Don’t mind Goda. He listened to what Raef said the other night. We heard about Saint Brice’s Day, but a lot of people didn’t really believe it. We’re so out of the way here now.”

  Laissa sank down on a stool. Miru poked up the fire. She said, her eyes on the fire, “He said folk we knew died. Was it Euan? And Arre?”

  Laissa said, “Yes. I – yes.”

  Miru jabbed at the fire. Her voice trembled. “Arre. She cared for us after my mother died. She was the kindest woman and brave as a man.” She wiped her eyes. “It just seems as if everybody is dying.” She sat back, her hands in her lap, still staring at the fire. “We
grew apart after I decided to marry Goda. She never liked him.” She turned away, tears running down her face. “God, God, it’s a wicked world.”

  “That’s true,” Laissa said.

  Miru went around the room, turning up cups and filling them from a wooden keg. Laissa took one, held it cautiously to her nose, and smelled apples. Miru sat down beside her.

  Laissa burst out, “I thought – when we came here – we would be safe.”

  Miru said, “Don’t worry. I told you, Raef cooled them off. They’re all saying that was a lump of mud, but nobody believes it. And I heard that the Green Stray Boys never even got close to the hall.”

  “It’s Raef I’m not safe from,” Laissa said, and put her hand over her mouth.

  Mira’s voice went up a notch. “What do you mean? Does he beat you?”

  “No. He is good to me; he loves me. It isn’t him, really.” It was, but she had no way to tell Miru about Raef. She licked her lips, her eyes lowered. “He has enemies. I thought – here—”

  Miru said, “If his enemies are the people who killed Arre, they are mine too. For all, I’m only a woman.” She nodded toward the door. “I have to go. It’s shearing time, and I have to do things like gut pigs.”

  Laissa was looking around the room. She had so seldom been inside a real house that it felt odd, solidly around her like a shell. Its order calmed her. I shall have a room also, a place, she thought, seeing the table, the shelf, the jugs and cups. The cloth hanging across one end must hide the bed. She said, “What is that?” pointing at a square of wood.

  “Part of a loom. But I never use it. Come with me, then, and I’ll get you some more meat too.”

  * * *

  The men had finished the angle of the wall. The boy Peter and some other men from the village were helping them weave the last of the withies. Laissa went in by the fire. Miru had sent another big chunk of mutton along, and Leif got one of the new men to spit the meat and hang it over the coals. Laissa sat down on the fur cloaks. She had taken also some of a fleece that had not come off the sheep in one piece, which Miru seemed to think a crime fit almost for beheading.

  Her swollen belly filled her lap. She spread the fleece on her knee. She had seen women spinning wool in Constantinople and in other places. This wool was not yet fit to spin, a patch of tangled dirty fibers smelling of oil, with bits of leaf and thorns and bramble twigs caught in it. Her hands were already slick with the oil. She teased out a few of the fibers, long and rippled.

  Raef came over and sat next to her. She kept her eyes from him. She could not do without him. Yet what he did brought doom on them. She twisted the fibers together into a bit of string. He said nothing. She knew that he knew her thoughts, what she wanted of him, what he would not give her. Jesus would help her. As long as she was a good Christian. She pulled out more fibers and twisted them together, winding the yarn around her hand.

  Chapter Eleven

  The days went by, full of work. The men raised the other long wall and set the posts for benches and the roof. They built a baking oven behind the hall and a wood shed. Besides Peter and the two other men now living there, a woman came up from town and began to help Laissa cook and spin yarn. She was a widow with a toddling boy and no kin, choosing the hall over the street. Raef liked her, and Leif liked her very much.

  With the widow and Mini’s help, Laissa cleaned the flagstone floor of the hall and set what furnishings they could find in proper places. In one corner she came on a rotted piece of leather and a clump of old red cloth. She thought of casting them out on the midden, but she remembered that Raef had brought them there. Under the ring of leather she also found a tarnished silver penny. Maybe that was good luck. Leif had found an old chest in one of the abandoned houses, and she put the leather and the cloth into that, and they raised the new high seat on top of the chest.

  Peter and his pony helped bring Miru’s loom, and the women set it in one corner at the finished end of the hall. Miru brought more wool, and the widow, Edith, showed Laissa how to hang the warp from the loom’s head beam, weight each thread, tie the weaver’s knot, and then slip the weft in and out with the shuttle. The first piece came out like a spiderweb, all holes.

  Early one morning at the beginning of summer, Laissa woke gasping in pain, and Edith ran down to get Miru, and around noon the baby was born.

  Afterward, Raef took the little girl in his arms and danced up and down the hall, whirling and leaping and singing wordlessly at the top of his lungs, his new household scurrying out of his way. Miru brought Laissa a warm, smelly drink and some of the blood cake, which she ate. They watched Raef dancing with his child. Miru said, “They always act as if it were all their doing. He’ll make her sick, jouncing her like that.” Her voice was mild with satisfaction.

  “Yes,” Laissa said. “Come back here, you great fool, and give me my baby.”

  But when he kneeled by her, the child in his arms, she kissed him first of all.

  * * *

  Raef walked around the city nearly every day. The people were used to him now and hardly seemed to notice him, except to nod sometimes. He began to know more of them by name, and almost all by sight. Most of them herded sheep, kept their gardens, fished, hunted, made one another shoes or clothes. They were poor as mice. Every winter, they expected a few to die of cold or hunger.

  One day, walking past the churchyard, he saw a girl in the gateway with thick curly hair like Conn’s; she smiled at him, lifted her hand in a greeting, and turned back into the churchyard. He realized it was Aelfu, Miru’s sister, long dead.

  He walked along the river, with its fretful, uncertain flow. The banks were overgrown, and the long shelving bar along the high edge of the riverbed was clotted with weeds. Among the green tufts, chunks of wood cropped up out of the gravel, pieces of ruined boats weathered to grey planks, a thole pin trailing a few strands of hemp.

  The Jorvikers still rowed little boats up and down and fished. He asked a man casting a line from the bar when there last had been seagoing ships here, and the fisherman shrugged. “Long time. When the city was bigger.” He pulled on his beard. “Euan Woodwrightsson used to trade with Hedeby. Even Vinland, sometimes.” He pulled in an empty hook.

  Raef stood watching two boys in a round-bottomed boat trying to catch turtles on the far bank. The boat rolled over and threw them both into the water, and the boys pulled themselves nimbly back on board. They had no sail, and they used paddles, not oars. He thought the seafaring craft of these people would have rotted along with the ships.

  There would be ships at Humbermouth, if he could get goods there to trade. That would bring ships back to Jorvik.

  What goods? He had nothing.

  He went on upstream of the village, which dumped its black water and offal into the river, and slid down the bank and waded out into the middle. The current was swift along the bottom, and he had to work to keep his feet under him. So far upstream of the village he could see down through the deepening blue-green water to the stony bottom. From the middle of the stream he looked up and saw the wooded banks, some people walking by, and the minster beyond them. The river lifted around him and fell. The pressure of the water reminded him of the air in Corban’s house.

  In a sudden drunken whirling of his mind, everything seemed to flip, dark for light, back for front. He felt around him the whole great light field, the real world, streaming around him. The minster shimmered, strangely shaped, the people were shadows moving through the ever-changing light, wreathed in eerie color, and the whole rang with high, keen music. Everything was present in the light field. Only time shattered it, into past and future, corruptible and material.

  He realized he himself was a shadow, his body, even his mind, that only the light field was real.

  Yet to know this was to yield utterly to it. He saw no way to act in it, save as he already did, sliding along on it like a wave. Slowly his mind settled back to the ordinary world, to the plain colors of the sunlight. He was standing up to his wais
t in the river, staring downstream.

  Benna had known something. He remembered the old stories, that Benna drew on flat stones and the things appeared, made real. Somehow Benna had known how to turn the indeterminate light into manifest things.

  He remembered how he had become the wolf. Being a wolf was simpler than being a man, so it meant only being something less. He had shed something of his manness to be a wolf. He wondered if he could become something higher than a man.

  He wondered where Benna was now and realized with a start that he knew: She was somewhere in the light field. They were all there, somewhere. He walked up out of the water, his clothes streaming. Maybe everywhere in the light field. Maybe they all watched him. Certainly on the bank the boy Peter on his pony was watching him, a bewildered look on his face. Raef went on up to the street that led to his hall.

  * * *

  That night clouds gathered above the roofless hall, and the distant thunder rumbled nearer. Beside him on the sleeping bench Laissa crept down into the bearskins, not even waking up, the baby Gemma snug in the curve of her shoulder. He put his arm around them and pulled them close against him.

  Lightning crackled. In the white instant he saw the outline of the hall, the forked flash like a hand reaching down for them. He let himself out of his body. He stretched himself over his wife and his child. At the same time, he rose up into the air above them, to the roof.

  It had been here once, the roof, on his father’s hall; it was still here, in the light field, and he drew those beams up again into time. He arched over the hall, the first smashing raindrops against his back, and along his spine and ribs and arms and legs he sprouted the rooflines. He pulled a lacing of branches over the beams and rafters like a blanket, bundle by heap, the straw of the thatch, thick as a man was tall, and all lashed down tight.