The Viking’s Sacrifice (13 page)

“It wasn’t just one brother I lost that day,” Sigdir said to his back. “I lost Einar, not because he died or was a coward or even became simple, because I don’t think I ever believed that. I lost him because he abandoned me, even when he never left, and I hate him for it.”

Einar shut his eyes and wished he could shut his ears too.

“And worse, now that brother dishonours me, my house,
our
house, in the worst way possible. I—I only have Bausi to look to, and I know, I
know
what he’s like, that what he says isn’t always the right thing. But a haze comes over me, a black mist on my mind, and I can’t think but to do as he’s taught me. Arni shrinks of shame in Valholl, I don’t doubt, at some of the things Bausi teaches me. But I know no else, no other way. Because you abandoned me to him. So, Einar, tell me, why did you take her—and dishonour me?”

Einar forced himself to look at Sigdir, to see the youth and bafflement under the mask of hate, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. What could he say, what reason could he give? None, because he had no excuse. No reason except for a kind word, a soft touch, a single brief warmth in the frozen waste of his life.

“She was going to be my way out, away from Bausi.” Sigdir’s face crumpled in a frown. “The raids go well enough, we’re strong and become stronger. Other jarls become richer because they don’t raid, they settle. Yet Bausi likes to raid, to pillage and plunder for the pleasure it gives him. So I took her, killed her thane husband and took her. They had no children, no obvious heirs. His estate was willed to her, but under their law she couldn’t marry yet, not for a year after his death. So I brought her here. When we marry, those lands come under me. I planned to settle there, with some of my men. They’re farmers, herdsmen, woodsmen, and they too weary of raiding. I thought to get out from Bausi, to appease him by making tribute.

“Only now, now I must take a blood price from you. That saddens part of me, that I should have to do that to my brother, who I once loved. But the other, stronger part of me is glad that I can lay my hate of you to rest, because the brother I loved never came back from his first raid, though he lived. The brother I loved would never have abandoned me to such a man as Bausi, knowing I had no way to escape him, as my jarl and protector. So I will take my price, then I can marry this Wilda, and be gone with a clear heart.”

Einar watched Sigdir’s back as he made for the door. Pull the right thread, but which was it? Sigdir—it must be Sigdir, but Einar had little hope now, no hope of lifting this curse, except that it would die with him, and maybe that would be enough. There was still one thing left to do though, one faint chance for Wilda.

“Sigdir.” Einar’s whisper stopped his brother with his hand on the door. “Sigdir, I didn’t abandon you. I did what I had to, bore every word and taunt, to protect you and Gudrun. Because we’re cursed, all of us, and that’s all I can say. Silence was my only defence,
our
only defence.”

Sigdir looked back over his shoulder, a suspicious frown darkening his forehead. “Cursed? Why?”

“Because I didn’t die.”

Sigdir’s frown deepened and he opened his mouth to speak, but Einar cut him off.

“Keep her away from Bausi. Please, Sigdir. This coward, for I am that, this coward begs. Keep her from Bausi.”

“You think I’d let him near her? Why do you think I keep her hidden? Because he’d take her and her lands, in a heartbeat, and I’m not the heartless man you think I am.” He stepped through the door before Einar could say any more, and the door banged shut, leaving Einar in pig-strewn darkness.

It wasn’t enough. Bausi would see her at the wedding, and worse, she would see him, she would know him, Bausi would kill her, and there was nothing he could do now to prevent it.

Wilda couldn’t breathe for fear as they waited. Yet there was no sound of fighting, of a sword drawn, no screams or cries, only a dread silence that was worse. When Sigdir came out of the pig barn his face was turned in, a hint of sadness behind the hate, but his hands were free of blood, and Wilda could breathe again.

Sigdir stamped into the longhouse and all scurried out of his way, warriors, karls and thralls alike. Only Wilda couldn’t move, had to stay there and stand to him, brazen and afraid. Afraid too of what would happen if she didn’t. It was all she could do for Einar, and it was nothing.

Sigdir eyed her, his brow darkening as she stood and faced him when all others hunched out of his way. He waved a hand, barked an order at her, but she didn’t move. At Sigdir’s impatient signal, Rowena crept out from where she hid by the byre door.

“He asks what it is that you want, why you stand there defiant before him like a lady of the house already. A freed woman must still listen to her former master. Wilda, now’s not the time, not when he’s like this.”

Wilda set her shoulders and tried not to think of running, out through the snow, up the mountain, as far and as fast as she could with the knife-wind in her hair and lungs. She couldn’t run, not now, not with Einar there with the pigs, waiting to pay the price for her folly. “Now is the time, it must be now. Tell him, he’s not had to pay a bride price for me, for what this marriage will give him. He stands to gain much, and I lose much. I ask a price, a bride price, a small one. That’s the custom here as well, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then he should honour it, if he has any honour.”

Rowena cringed as she relayed Wilda’s words, and it seemed she was right to. Sigdir’s face twisted into a hook-mouthed sneer and he stepped forward to loom over Wilda. It took all her nerve not to flinch, not to make a break for the door and run, anywhere, anyhow, just away, run until her heart burst on the mountain. Sigdir’s eyes held hers, their restlessness gone, still now, bright, hard. The Devil’s child.

When his words came, they were little more than a whisper, but all the more menacing for that, and for the breath of them over her cheek from his nearness.

“He—he asks if you question his devotion to Odin.”

Wilda managed to shake her head without the tremor travelling through the rest of her.

“Then what is your price?”

His eyes were too blue, too cold—like the glacier ice at the head of the fjord, glimpsed only briefly when the clouds deigned to lift.

“Free Myldrith, let her have the child in Christian lands, baptised. And don’t kill him. Not for me, not for my honour, for I have none. Tell him that Christ forbids it, that my faith bids me to speak for him, for his life. I must forgive.” Though she had nothing to forgive poor Einar for, and everything to thank him for. Yet Sigdir mustn’t know that, and this was all she had.

Sigdir took a step back at that, clearly puzzled. Yet the anger, the hate still bubbled through, apparent in the set of his shoulders, the timbre of his voice. “Your Christ is weak, with milk for blood, thinking everything worth doing is a sin. That’s why they call him the White Christ, the coward god, no match for red-blooded Red Thor. It seems you have a hard, cruel master as well as cowardly one. My brother forced himself upon you, and you wouldn’t take vengeance for that?”

Not even if he had.
“No. Christ bids me to forgive, seventy-seven times if I must. Fine him in the Saxon way, the Christian way, if you have to. I’ll not have his blood on your hands and my soul. Not if you wish to marry me and take my lands.”

Sigdir’s brows drew down and his eyelids hooded, guarding his feelings. Finally he jerked his head in agreement. “Myldrith may go if that will please you, if that is your price. I brought her only as company for you, as a comfort. Come spring, I will take her back myself, and in the meantime she may live up at Agnar’s. I will not trouble her again. As for Toki—if he’ll be the hostage to your good behaviour, then I’ll take thought on it, and counsel. Bausi must be told, at the least. Yet if truth is told, it’s not just this that brings his neck into my hands. Not just this. I’ll think on it.”

And Wilda had to be content with that.

Einar had lost all feeling in his hands from the rope that twisted round his wrists. His bad leg had begun to seize from the cold packed-earth of the floor seeping into the mangled knee joint. He tried to move, to loosen it, but the numbness of his hands and having them tied made balance difficult. Worse was wondering what Sigdir was doing, who he was telling, what he was planning.

When the door banged open again and Sigdir strode in, his face dark as black ice, it was almost a relief. Sigdir yanked him up by the hair but steadied him when his leg failed and he would fall. Sigdir’s sword stayed in its carved wooden sheath, peace ties still intact. The blood price would not come yet. Not yet.

Sigdir looked him up and down, eyeing him critically. “She’s a strange woman, all these Christ followers are strange. All is sin, everything a man wants to do, everything a true man knows is right, is a sin. Forgive those who wrong you, where’s the glory in that? She asked that I not kill you, as her bride price.”

Einar shut his eyes. Strange her beliefs might be, but she’d come to see what was important to them, to the Norse, and use it well.

“Will you pay it?” was all he could ask when he opened his eyes again.

Sigdir got him standing upright before he cut the rope where it was tied to a beam and pushed him to the door. “It’s her right to ask it, to name her price. But for this—for this I must talk to my jarl. And so must you.”

A yank on his hair made sure Einar followed, though it was hardly necessary. Sigdir pushed him ahead, made him walk at the point of his now-drawn sword, like a condemned man going to the death that should have been his anyway.

They passed karls and bondsmen who looked at him with sneers and derision, past thralls who saw him as little better than themselves. His face throbbed and not just with the swelling. He stumbled across the snow, out of the shelter of Sigdir’s holding and onto the path that led to Bausi, to his jarl and chief tormentor.

By the time they came to the point of the path below the feasting hall that also served as Bausi’s home, most everyone in the village had turned out to watch. Women whispered behind hands, men openly debated what had brought the simpleton Toki to this. Word soon got round, it seemed, because Wilda was mentioned, words said about her that burned him to hear, that would have made him lay about with fists and feet if he hadn’t been tied, even if he had no sword to bite the words from their mouths.

Silence is best, silence is your friend, has kept you and Gudrun and Sigdir alive this long. Keep silent.
He held on to that, to the only thing that had kept him alive so long. He missed the silence of his days in the high meadows on the mountain, before Wilda had come, when the only noises were the snorts of Horse-Einar, the snuffle of the pig and the call of the hawk. The homely quiet of his little hut, with little but a mean fire to break it. The silent days when all he’d wanted was company.

A simple thing to want, an easy thing, not this Norn-weave that left him wanting everything with no hope of getting it. And yet—and yet he couldn’t regret her coming, even if it cost him everything. He could never regret one night of soft comfort and warmth that had, briefly, made him remember what he’d once been, and still was in his head. A warrior, a man of Thor. To everyone else he was a simple coward, and had the ties on his wrists to prove it, for any man would have fought back, would have kicked and bitten and stabbed with the good sword he’d earned, not have stood silent while they tied him.

He wanted to shout it all out, say all the words through his rusted throat, see what they thought of their beloved jarl when they knew what he was, but he couldn’t. Not even when Sigdir had a sword at his back, because Einar saw a hope there. That Sigdir’s heart was still strong, that he still might see.

The point of Sigdir’s sword kept him on his path, even if it was kept well back. Three brothers, and the watchers whispered about that too, of the sagas, of Gunnar and his brothers and how that had ended.

The feasting hall loomed above them, just by the falls, short and fierce here, thundering their spray over everything, turning all soon to slick ice. Einar slipped and fell to his knees without the balance of his arms, dragging a grunt of pain whether he wished it or not. The knee wouldn’t straighten when he tried to stand, too hard used this last day. He had to hobble like an old man, more shame upon his shoulders. More by-names to add to the ones he already owned. Wry-foot, nithing.

“Wait,” Sigdir said. “Let’s not foul our jarl’s hall with your pig-stink.”

He prodded Einar toward the falls, to the ledge that jutted out under the thunder of the water. Another prod, and Einar screwed himself to go, to stand under the blast of frigid water, to ignore the laughter above as the force of it almost took him from his feet and he had to grab a rock to keep from falling into the thrashing foam below.

The wall of water slammed into him, the cold of it stole his breath, the smack of it numbed his skin, left him dripping and quaking like a new lamb when Sigdir yanked him out again. Water froze on his shirt, clanked in his beard as his breath shivered in and out.

The door to the feasting hall loomed above them, all carved in likeness of the World Tree, with Ratatoskr the squirrel running up one side, carrying his messages from the creatures that lived there. Dvalinn the deer nibbled on the leaves in wooden splendour, Nidhogg chewed on the roots. Between all the carvings, standing like Odin himself before he gave up an eye for wisdom, no doubt forewarned, stood Bausi.

Sigdir prodded Einar on up the hill, away from the roar of the falls and the eyes of the villagers. Bausi watched him, silent, eyes guarded under his heavy black hair, neatly braided now, tamed for his own wedding tomorrow, for his bride’s arrival today. The distraction Einar had hoped to use, when Bausi’s eyes and thoughts were fixed firmly on what he was about to gain. Now his eyes narrowed in calculation, in disgust.

“Why are you bringing me this nithing again, Sigdir?” He cast his gaze over the watchers and stood aside to let Sigdir and Einar past.

Sigdir didn’t answer but pushed Einar through the door and into the hall. The warmth from the fire pit was a blessing and a curse as numb fingers came alive again, and made him clench his hands and mouth to keep the moan inside. Thralls and free women bustled around lighting soapstone lamps, sweetening the air with fresh herbs, making everything glisten as though it were new. Getting ready for a new bride, a new dawn for Raven’s Home Fjord, when its jarl married close to the kingship of Sogn. More power for the already powerful. The only sourness was Bausi’s glance at Einar, and Ragnhilda’s pinched-in face that was a bitter extra twist to Einar’s heart.

Bausi cleared the hall with a harsh word and a harsher look and took his place on the high seat, set between carved pillars. He leaned forward, making his hair fall over his face, black as crows’ wings and as secretive. One hand crept inside his tunic, under the jarl-torc and reaching for the little leather pouch that held the curse, that hid it from other eyes so only he and Einar knew of it.

“Found your tongue properly now, I hear, talking many words. Be careful how you wag that tongue, before you lose it.”

The leather pouch dangled in Bausi’s fingers, loomed large in Einar’s head and he looked to the floor, head bowed against it.
Hold all your courage in thoughtful inaction, in silence
. Geira’s voice echoed round his head.
Odin’s deep thinking, making the wise choice. Now you need the other sort, loud courage, Thor’s courage. Red blood and iron
. He raised his head and stared Bausi full in the eye. In his head, his arm was strong and held good steel, and Bausi fell back before him. In his head, Bausi was no longer jarl but dishonoured. In his head, in his heart, he was not the coward they made him. He was Thor’s man, but yet must bide his time, deep think it, as wise as Odin.

“So, Sigdir, tell me, why do you bring this nithing? I gave you leave to deal with him as you saw fit if he bothered you or that thrall again.”

Sigdir hesitated and cast a nervous glance at Einar before he spoke. What did Sigdir have to be nervous about? “No thrall now. I freed her.”

“Freed her?” Bausi sat back, brows knit together in puzzlement, eyes suddenly sharp as arrows and twice as dangerous. “Why do that?”

Still Sigdir hesitated, cast a quick, furtive glance at Einar before the words came out, halting as though dragged unwilling. “A gift for my jarl, and for myself. She has lands, many acres. I thought to marry her and take them, take some men and settle there, a new longhouse to raid from, closer to the people we raid. Send you tribute.” Sigdir shifted uneasily under Bausi’s look. As well he might. “Only our brother here dishonoured her, and me, took my bride into his bed, took her against her will.”

Bausi snorted, apparently disbelieving but a quick look at Sigdir’s earnest face sobered him quick enough. “So why isn’t he dead already?”

“Because she’s asked for a bride price. She’s a freed woman, she’s within her rights to ask, demand a price. The White Christ bids her to forgive him, she says, and she won’t have his blood on her, or on my hands. I came for your counsel.”

Bausi stroked a hand down his beard thoughtfully. “I’d say you freed her too soon. She sounds a sleekit one, but these Christ followers are peculiar. So this is the surprise, this thrall with many lands? And you thought to marry her yourself?” One eyebrow arched.

Sigdir stood back a pace and licked dry lips at the hint of a threat in Bausi’s low words. Einar wasn’t sure what game Sigdir thought he was playing, but he knew, none better, that to interfere with any plan of Bausi’s was disaster, and it was clear Bausi wasn’t pleased.

Sigdir spoke quickly, quietly, his stance defensive as though he readied for a fight. Shoulders tense, hand tight on sword hilt, legs planted just so for balance, ready to lunge forward or dance back from attack. “You’ve wives already, another arriving today, bringing us closer to the king. You can’t leave to take over the running of this Saxon land. You’re a jarl, a warrior, your strong hand is needed here. I can be your right hand over there, raid from that strong place. No wind and water to drown men when they bring the spoils, but good earth under their feet and spears. Maybe get more lands, more cattle, slaves. More everything, for us both.” He stopped his flow of words and waited.