Maidensong (35 page)

Bjorn pulled out his knife and drew it across Fenris’s throat in a quick stroke. The Walker half-smiled at him before the light went out of his eyes.

“Drain a horn for me in the Hall of the Slain, Birkaman,” Bjorn said softly.

Suddenly the circle of onlookers parted and two officers grabbed Bjorn by the shoulders.

“Northman, you are under arrest for the murder of a fellow
t
agmata.”

As he was dragged away, Bjorn called back over his shoulder to Jorand. “Claim his sword and the arm
band. Take them to Ornolf. He’ll know what to do.”

Bjorn was sure his uncle would remember the arm
band. After all, he was the one who’d given it to Gunnar.

 
Wind whipped over the headland. Behind her, Rika
heard Al-Amin whimper about the cold. She scoffed under her
bourka.
What did these southlanders know?
What they called winter here was more like a fresh day
in early spring to her.

“Why must we come here each week, mistress?” he
asked
.
“The statues in the Acropolis don’t suffer from the chill, but I assuredly do.”

“Stay home next time.” She lengthened her stride to
ward the marble figure that drew her back to this place since she’d first seen it. It was a statue of Mars, his
alert eyes turned to the Bosporus in an eternal stare. “
Go back home now, if you like.”

“My mistress torments me with thoughts of a warm brazier. The master would have me flayed alive if I should leave you unattended,” he said. “You know this. I did not expect you to be so unfeeling, my lady.”

“But you serve me, not the master,” Rika countered. “I would not let him beat you. Stop whining and we’ll
visit the market for some pistachios on the way home.”

“My lady is kindness itself.” He dipped in a half-bow. “Only let us return together.”

“If you give me some peace, I’ll only be a few moments.”

They passed a stylite, a holy man who lived atop a
tall column five times higher than a man’s head. Pil
grims dropped offerings of food and water into the
basket at the bottom of his perch, hoping for the effectual prayers of the saint above them. Rika would
never get used to the odd assortment of beliefs in the great city, but at least the broad base of the spire pro
vided a good windbreak for Al-Amin.

“Wait here,” she ordered.

The teachings of Islam were a blur of rules and rites to her. Christians in the great city squabbled among themselves, sometimes in bloody argument, over
which doctrine was heretical and which was orthodox.
She could make no sense of their constant disputes. The gods of Asgard were a distant memory. She was
sure they couldn’t hear her prayers this far from the
North. So she made this weekly pilgrimage to her own
private shrine, high on the Acropolis amid the myriad of statues dedicated to the now defunct gods of Rome.

She walked on to visit Mars with a growing disquiet in her belly. It was the same every time—the shortness
of breath, the tightness in her chest. She felt hollow as
a gourd, stripped bare, and so light and brittle, she
might shatter. At the slightest gust, the tiny pieces of
her would scuttle away with the remnants of autumn’s
dead leaves.

Sometimes she wished it would happen, just like that.

Rika looked up at the statue. The set of his broad
shoulders, the tilt of his head, his calm steady gaze, his mouth ... it was so like Bjorn, her vision had tunneled the first time she’d seen it.

Farouk-Azziz insisted she wear the
bourka
in public.

This was the only time she felt grateful for the way it shielded her from prying eyes. The veil covered her completely and she viewed the world through thin
gauze stretched over part of her face. The statue’s un
smiling features filled her view until her tears made the
image waver. Then she pressed her forehead to the cold marble base.

“Oh, Bjorn,” she sobbed. “Where are you?”

What little Rika knew had been pieced together from snippets of overheard conversations. Jorand had come to Ornolf with an armband and a sword, the significance of which she never learned. But she did hear that Bjorn had been arrested. By the time Ornolf and Jorand returned to the barracks the next day,
Bjorn’s trial was over. He’d been found guilty and handed over to the civil authorities for punishment.
The military didn’t want to execute a foreign member
of their corps themselves. That sort of thing dampened recruitment, so Bjorn’s punishment was left to civilians.

Somehow in the transfer, all records of Bjorn the
Black, Northman and convicted murderer, were mislaid. Ornolf greased as many palms as he could, trying to find Bjorn’s trail, but all they had was conjecture. Perhaps he had been consigned to a galley and was
chained to an oar somewhere on Middle Earth’s great
inland sea. He may have been sold to a wealthy widow
and gelded; late-made eunuchs reputedly were still
able to sustain a rock-hard erection far longer than an
intact man, without the troubling aspect of concep
tion to bother with. Or Bjorn could have been sum
marily garroted and his body dumped in a cesspit
outside the city gates. There was no way to know for
sure.

Miklagard had swallowed him whole as surely as if
he’d stepped into a bog, but Rika clung to the belief
that he yet lived. Her heart would re
fuse to beat in a world where Bjorn was dead. Though
it twisted her insides to come there each week, the few
moments she spent weeping at the feet of Mars were
the only ones in which she felt truly alive.

*
  
*
  
*

 
Bjorn watched the shadow on the wall and scratched a
line in the stone when he thought it had reached its
peak for the day. The sun didn’t vary as much here in
the southlands, but in this crude way he’d still been
able to mark the winter solstice and follow the change
of seasons. He’d kept a tally of the days as well, but
they depressed him.

At least the nightmare had ceased to plague him. He’d only had it once, and shortly upon waking, he re
alized the terrifying apparition of Jormungand was
closely connected with Gunnar’s symbol of entwined
serpents. He was astounded he hadn’t reached the conclusion before, but then again, he’d never had so
much idle time just to think. From that startling insight, Bjorn began to think back.

Maybe it was his near-drowning with Rika in the
turbulent waters of Aeifor that sent his mind wander
ing down a long-forgotten trail, but another part of the
nightmare began to make sense as well. A memory too
painful to accept crystallized in his mind.

He’d told Rika that Gunnar had saved him from
drowning on that distant day, but he knew now that wasn’t true. His brother had pushed him into the fjord
and held his head below the choppy water. Bjorn was
alive only because he grabbed his brother’s arm and
threatened to pull him in as well. He’d scrambled back
into the coracle by climbing up a startled Gunnar’s
arm. Then as a matter of survival, Bjorn altered the in
cident and swore a grateful fealty to his older brother.
In time, he’d even convinced himself of the revised
event. Since Fenris the Walker had all but confessed that Gunnar had paid him to kill their father, Bjorn re
alized the dream had been trying to tell him that Gun
nar had murdered their father.

His childhood oath had kept him alive because it
made him useful to Gunnar. Now it curdled Bjorn’s stomach like rancid goat milk. If he’d been in
Sognefjord, he’d shrug off the last of Gunnar’s hold on
him like an ill-fitting cloak.

Unfortunately, he wasn't in Sogna.

Sleep was now a welcome respite, because his waking hours were nightmare enough.

The window in his cell was too high for him to see out, but it did grant him light, and sometimes when
the wind was right, rain as well. When that blessed
event occurred, he stripped out of his rags and let the torrent wash away the crust of filth he’d learned to live with.

Once a day, the slot in the door opened to remove
his nightsoil jar and leave a trencher of moldy bread
and vile-tasting water. Whether the jailer was forbid
den to speak to him or unable to, Bjorn never knew,
but he went for months without the sound of another
human voice.

He started talking to himself, realizing he did so, but unable to control it. He carved the
futhark
on the walls
of his cell, desperate to keep his mind active. Priva
tion, he could deal with. Madness, he feared more
than Hel itself. In the isolation and silence, he felt
himself teetering on the brink, threatening to slide into insanity.

Then a kind of miracle happened.

Bjorn glanced over to the corner. His miracle got up
off his knees and dusted the dirt from the front of his
ratty cassock. The prison was so overcrowded the
jailer was forced to house another inmate with Bjorn in his
small cell. It had saved him from raving lunacy.

“Still praying, Dominic?” he asked.

“As long as I’m still breathing, my son,” the little priest said.

“Is your God going to get us out of here?”

“I don’t pray for that.” Dominic's sharp eyes were
bright with intelligence. “I pray for your soul. I would
that God will release your spirit from its bonds.”

“Why don’t you tell him to get my body out of
here?” Bjorn settled against the wall to let
the light hit his face. The warmth soothed him and for
just a moment, an image of Rika flickered in his brain.
In his mind’s eye, he saw her leaning against an
obelisk of some kind, tears streaming. He shook him
self. If he were going to imagine her, why couldn’t it
be a more pleasant phantom? “If your God sets me free from this prison, then he’ll be welcome to my soul.”

The priest’s face beamed with a gap-toothed grin. “
God is relentless in his pursuit of us. If that’s what it
takes to woo you, Bjorn, I’m sure the Almighty will see
you free.”

Bjorn shook his head. “Woo me? You make your
God sound like some kind of ardent lover.”

“So He is.” Dominic nodded. “The first lover of us all and when we least deserve it.”

A god who loved for no reason. The priest’s beliefs
didn’t seem rational to Bjorn. No wonder they had locked Dominic up.

“Well, my gods seem content to let me stay right
here, so
I’m
willing to give yours a chance,” Bjorn said. “
I’ve tried them all, even Loki, but either they can’t help me or they don’t care.”

“Or they are too small,” Dominic said. “From what
you have told me of the gods of Asgard, they exist only inside creation. God is separate from the created
world and yet he holds it all together. Beyond all that
is, beyond what we believe or think we know, beyond
even divine revelation, there is God.”

It was easy to see how Dominic had run
afoul of the local religious leaders. His God was too
big for a man to get his mind around, too big to control
through appeasement, and far too big to be crammed into a religion.

“Maybe so,” Bjorn allowed. “But you have to admit
my gods are more fun at a feast. Take Thor for in
stance. Now there’s a god a man can sit down and
share a horn with.” Bjorn slapped a hand on his thigh
and launched into an old drinking song.

“Ale I bring, thou oak of battle,

With strength blended and brightest tunes,

‘Tis mixed with magic and mighty songs,

With goodly spells, wish-speeding runes.”

*
  
*
  
*

 
“I know just the shop, my lady,” Al-Amin said, all trace
of whining about the cold gone now from his pleasant alto. “It’s next to that spice merchant from Persia. The pistachios are always of the highest quality.”

Rika nodded numbly. She always felt drained after
her visit to the Acropolis, but she needed to see the
statue of Mars. She didn’t understand it, but Bjorn felt
closer to her there, as if she could somehow form a
connection with him for those few moments. She won
dered whether he could feel her love for him still. It
was a fanciful notion, but one she needed to believe.