Maidensong (26 page)

There was pain in Torvald’s eyes as the old man
watched her go. Suddenly it was clear to Bjorn why
the old man had tried to buy Rika’s freedom, even to
sacrifice his land holdings for her. It was the reason be
hind Torvald’s irrational decision to make this trip. He
loved Rika as hopelessly as Bjorn did.

Bjorn flashed Torvald a look of understanding. Tor
vald had abandoned her as a father. Bjorn had robbed
her of Magnus, the only father she’d had. The old man met his gaze. They were bonded somehow in that mo
ment by their love for a woman they had each hurt
deeply in their own way.

And she’d never let either of them forget it.

 
They passed safely through two more cataracts the same size and ferocity as Essoupi, using the same tech
nique of maneuvering the boat over the rocks by hand. The
Valkyrie
rode swiftly between the barrages, drawn inexorably by the rapidly falling water as it surged to
ward the Black Sea.

A distant thunder began to rumble.

“It’s going to rain,” Rika said.

“No.” Uncle Ornolf shook his head. “That’s Aeifor
you’re hearing. We’re still a good way off, but the
cataract is sporting enough to warn of its coming.”

“It must be enormous,” she said.

“Ja,
that it is.” Ornolf leaned on the steering oar to send the
Valkyrie
closer to the right
bank of the river. “Bjorn, keep an eye out for that big
hawthorn. The spot to put in and begin the portage is
coming up soon. If we miss it, the river won’t give us a
second chance.”

Bjorn nodded from the prow.

“Aeifor is so big, we must haul the ship overland for
several
miiller,”
Ornolf explained. “It roars through a
canyon, swirling and boiling, and ends in a fall of some thirty feet.”

Bjorn leaned out over the
Valkyrie’s
long neck, making hand signals back to his uncle when he saw a shal
low place to be avoided. “How were the Pechenegs
behaving when you came through last?” he called back to Ornolf.

“Not as cordial as we might wish,” his uncle replied.

Bjorn turned to Rika. “We must be wary. The Pech
enegs are poor fighters in a clinch, but they’re demons with a bow.”

Rika nodded mutely as guilt hammered her. Yet an
other danger her choice forced upon them. “But don’t
you trade with the Pechenegs?” she asked Ornolf. “Won’t they provide a wagon like the tribe who helped us for the portage to Kiev?”

“The tribes here are not so agreeable. There’ll be no wagon this time,” he said. “We’ll fell
some saplings and push the
Valkyrie
overland on a
movable skid road of pine. It takes longer than a wagon, but we’ll manage it.”

“Isn’t that the start of the portage?” Bjorn pointed
toward a slight opening in the thick forest in the shade of a broad hawthorn.

“Ja,”
Ornolf said. “You’ve got sharp eyes. It’s been
ten winters at least since you made this trip with me. I’m glad you still remember the landmarks.”

Ornolf turned the
Valkyrie’s
head toward the bank and beached her.

“Stay close to me while we’re on the march,”
Bjorn said to Rika as he helped her out of the boat.

She nodded mutely.

Ornolf kept watch for hostile tribesmen while Bjorn
and Jorand pulled out their axes. They started felling
trees to be cut into lengths to skid the hull of the boat
across for the portage. Torvald and Helge busied
themselves with setting up a temporary camp while
preparations for the overland trek were made. Since Rika’s scathing rejection, Torvald had not attempted
to draw her out in conversation or trouble her in any
way. She sometimes felt he was watching her, but she
never caught him at it directly.

Rika wandered a short distance downriver, near
where Bjorn hacked rhythmically into a ramrod straight pine. She’d heard so much about this fierce cataract, she had to see it. Her first glance at Aeifor snatched her breath away.

The pounding water grinding away at rock roared in
her ears. Mist rose around her like dragon’s breath. It
coated her with dizzying spray and peb
bled her skin with cold. The white water plunged downward
into a seething cauldron the entire width of the river.
The cataract seemed to go on forever, its fury not
abated as it rounded a bend. Ornolf had told her that
the river disappeared into a stretch where the banks rose on each side to form a narrow canyon.

The restless energy tugged at her and Rika leaned
closer to the edge. Thousands of kegs of water poured
into the barrage in a never-ending dance of frenetic
insanity.

She remembered the standing rune stone she and
Bjorn had read at the mouth of the Dvina and spared a moment to think of the lost brother memorialized
there. ‘Roald went far into Aeifor and so gave food
to
the eagles.’ To go far into Aeifor would be a journey to the next world, indeed.

The hypnotic pull of water drew her closer. Individual droplets leaped over the rocks always different, but always in the same pattern. She began to notice hollow indentations in the granite, where the river had pummeled the stone into grudging submission.

Not even stone lasted forever. Eventually,
the rocky bones of the Middle Earth would wear out
and be destroyed in fire. Nothing was
eternal, neither her world nor her gods. The realiza
tion made her feel suddenly very sad and very small.

The short span of seasons allotted to her and the problems of her life were both fleeting.
Her hopeless feelings for Bjorn, her sacrifice for her
brother’s life, a thousand winters from now, none of it would matter. All she had was this one life, this one
moment. What was she doing with it?

She turned her back on Aeifor to look at Bjorn. He’d stripped to the waist the better to free his arms to swing the heavy double-bladed ax. His hair was bound
back out of his eyes. A look of dogged concentration
was etched on his rugged face and she knew in that
moment that she loved him. Loved him with every fiber of her being, with every breath in her body, with
every drop of blood coursing through her veins.

And she knew just as certainly if she died without letting this man love her, she might as well die right now.

Maybe it didn’t matter that tomorrow or next week
or next month they’d reach the end of this journey and
be parted. A Pecheneg arrow could find either of them at any moment. Life was nothing but a series of good
byes. No one was promised tomorrow. But
they did have now.

 
Even though Bjorn was a hunter, he still had the same instinct that tells a wild stag there are eyes on him. He
stopped the ax in mid-swing and swiveled around to
find the intent gaze that had sent a tingle to the base of his skull. He expected a Pecheneg warrior looking
down a long arrow at him, but found Rika instead.

Something about her softly parted mouth was dif
ferent. Her eyes were warm and hazy, the deep color of
tall summer grass, instead of their usual icy green. He
saw her lips move. He couldn’t hear her over the riot of Aeifor, but he could tell from the shape of her mouth that she’d said his name.

 
“Rika?” he said uncertainly.

She took a step toward him, but made it no farther. Not only stones were chiseled by the force of the wa
ter. The soft bank beneath her feet had been eroded by
the constant hammering and all it took to send it
plummeting downstream was the slight addition of her
weight.

Her eyes and mouth flew open wide as she disappeared into the mists of Aeifor without a sound.

 
“Rika!” Bjorn bellowed her name and dropped the ax.

Ornolf turned his head in time to see his nephew race to the edge of the cataract and leap in.
Arms windmilling, Bjorn dropped out of sight. Ornolf
didn’t see the skald anywhere and his heart sank.

He and Torvald chugged to the crumbling spot on
the bank just as two bobbing heads, one flame-red and
one dark, disappeared around the bend in the river.

“What can we do?” Torvald demanded frantically.

“Nothing.” Ornolf’s voice was flat. He loved Bjorn like a son and he’d mourn him as one. “They’re gone. If we’re lucky, at the end of the portage we’ll recover their bodies, but don’t count on it.”

He clamped a hand on Torvald’s shoulder and led
him away from the pull of the cataract before the old
man followed his lost daughter into the water out of
grief. Without Bjorn, Ornolf needed Torvald more
than ever. Even without a bride to deliver, the
Jarl
of Sogna still had a load of trade goods for
Farouk-Azziz
that would not wait.

*
  
*
  
*

 
Bjorn was drowning. And this time not in some night phantom, but for a certainty.

The water closed over his head and he writhed against the force that dragged him down. His
lungs ached. When his feet touched bottom, he
propelled himself upward with a thrust. His head
breeched the surface long enough for him to grab
a breath and see Rika fighting the water three arm-
lengths away.

It might as well be three
miiller.
He had no way to reach her.

The water grasped him and wrestled him down
again, dragging him across the rounded stones on the
bottom. In the flash of a moment, he looked up
through the clear liquid to see shim
mering spokes of sunlight through overhanging tree boughs. Then
his back was dashed suddenly against a boulder and
with the thud of the impact, all the air expelled from
his lungs. Bjorn struggled against the urge to
inhale, his depleted lungs screaming at him.

Arms flailing, he clawed his way upward to the
world of light and sound. He broke through the froth
ing surface and dragged in a lungful of oxygen. Air had
never tasted so sweet. Why had he never appreciated
the simple miracle of breathing?

Rika was closer now, wide-eyed and gasping. Bjorn
thrust out his arm, straining toward her. Their finger
tips grazed each other, but couldn’t latch. A swirling
current spun her away from him as an undertow grabbed his ankles and yanked him down again.

The force of the water assured that there were no
jagged surfaces to rip at him. The rocks in Aeifor were
polished smooth, but that didn’t detract from their
hardness. No fist in all his fighting life had ever pum
meled him like the stones of the Dnieper. His
flesh gave way, a blow to the shoulder here, a punch to his
kidneys there, a glancing shot to his head that made
his vision tunnel for a heartbeat or two. He had to get
away before the river pounded him into raw meat.

He surfaced in time to see a boulder looming toward him, and he twisted in the water to meet it
with his back. He braced himself for the impact. The rock knocked him across the current and into some
thing soft. It took him a moment to realize that it was Rika. He wrapped both arms around her and held on
as they disappeared beneath the water again.

She was limp and boneless. Her head lolled back onto his shoulder. With one arm, he pawed the water, clambering back to the surface.

The banks of the Dnieper rose menacingly on both
sides and though there were fewer half-submerged boulders for him to avoid, the water ran swifter and
deeper than ever. Even if he somehow worked his way
to the side, there was no place to crawl out and no way
to withstand the drag of the current as it drove them
along.

The roaring in his ears grew louder.
The fall.
It was coming and there was no help for it.

He gripped Rika tighter as they neared the
precipice. For a frozen moment, they seemed to hang
on the edge and he saw the sky, blue and serene above them. Then down, down they fell in a rush, droplets of
water airborne around them, crashing into the deep pool at the bottom, feet first.