The Viking’s Sacrifice (3 page)

Northeast England, in the year of Our Lord 844

Wilda muttered under her breath as the yarn snapped, again. No matter how she tried, she could never spin it longer than a foot before it either tangled or broke. Her maid, Myldrith, looked up in alarm at the words Wilda used before she dropped her gaze to her stitching, her face pink and indignant. Wilda promised herself—again—that the next time she took the Lord’s name in vain she would do so silently, especially in front of Myldrith.

It seemed she did that ever more frequently as life closed in around her, her days reduced to spinning, sewing, running a household rather than along the beach. Myldrith, particularly, frowned upon her language. She was Bayen’s young second cousin, come up from her parents’ home in the hope that here Bayen could broker a good marriage for her. But, Lord forgive Wilda for such thoughts, she was a censorious thing, tutting at every word of Wilda’s out of place or perceived infraction against the Bible and going to confession at least once a day, though Wilda couldn’t work out what it could be she had to confess.

Outside, a lowering autumn sun tainted everything gold, yellowing the grass, reddening the leaves. Washing the far beach a subtle rose-pink. Wilda set her lips and turned back to her spinning. Beaches and running along them, delighting in the feel of sand and surf on bare feet, were for children, for girls and maids, not ladies. Wet sand squidging between your toes wasn’t practical, or useful, and nor was a hem ruined from salt water.

A rapid tapping on the window frame made her drop the spinning again, this time with a loud “Goddamn it!” that made Myldrith gasp in outrage.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to say it,” Wilda said, and immediately repented the words at the shocked look on Myldrith’s face. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Maybe because summer’s gone, the air chills. Soon it will be winter, the little death.” Wilda shuddered at the image that brought to mind.

The tapping came again, and Wilda stood to look out of the window. A raven, black and glossy, perched on the pussy willow just outside. As she watched, it tapped again, three times. Tap, tap, tap before it looked at her with unblinking eyes. Wilda crossed herself, almost without thought. Tap, tap, tap, and again the look. Its eyes were even blacker than its feathers, little drops of night, oily bright and intent on her. Tap, tap, tap.

Wilda grabbed her spindle and threw it at the bird, making it squawk and take to the air, but when the spindle had passed, it settled on its perch again, seemingly unperturbed. The feeling of foreboding grew in her, one that had made her irritable and nervous all day since she’d seen the magpie on her roof that morning.

Crows, magpies, ravens. Birds of ill omen all. Ones she had come to dread. A crow fluttering round the altar the day of her wedding to Bayen, Thane of Oxhurst. A magpie swooping on the goodwife the day their son had been stillborn. A raven, blocking her path the day her mother—and her heart—had died, a day of flames and blood and murder that had ended her childhood, and her running free, forever.

Tap, tap, tap. The raven watched her, unblinking in the dying light of the day before, with a whoosh of feathers and a last warning caw, it swept off toward the beach. She shaded her eyes to watch, her breath tight at wondering what this new thing meant even as her mind told her it was just superstition. God watched her, God looked after her in His glorious embrace, she had no need for heathen ways. Yet hadn’t He used ravens and other birds, through Noah on the ark? Even then, the raven had never been the bearer of good news. The skin prickled on the back of her neck.

The raven became a smudge, then a dark speck almost lost to view and Wilda’s heart lightened. Even ravens had to be somewhere, and this one just happened to be here. That was all. Portents were for the superstitious, for those who clung to the old ways even though they went to church and prayed to God.

The speck turned along the beach, dove down to the waves and—

Wilda ran out of the room, startling Myldrith, who dropped her stitching with a screech, casting servants and slaves aside in her rush to reach the church, and the bell there. The bell to warn the whole town.

Heathens were come.

This time, they did not burn. They plundered in a halfhearted kind of way, but they burned nothing. Wilda was glad; dreams of flames and blood—and a heathen boy dying to save her—woke her often.

No, they did not burn, but they killed. The open space where the market was held was churned and bloody, bodies lined up against the thane’s house, her house. She’d found Myldrith and they’d hidden, but they couldn’t hide well enough. These raiders knew what they were about and scoured every hiding place until the patch of grass in front of the church was full. One had found them, Wilda trying vainly to still Myldrith’s sobs, and they stood among the churls, slaves, priests and traders while the raiders brought in yet more. At the last it was the warriors, the defenders who were thrust upon the ground, bruised, bloodied, dying. Wilda couldn’t see Bayen anywhere.

A heathen came forward, a big, broad-shouldered man about Wilda’s age with a shock of fair hair. He growled out something in his tongue and a smaller, darker man with a shorn head and an iron collar round his neck translated.

“Sigdir doesn’t come to kill you, not this time, if you do as he asks. Which of you is the thane’s wife?”

One or two of the crowd cast surreptitious glances at Wilda, but no one spoke. Yet the implication was clear, and she served those who served her, another of her father’s lessons. She straightened her shoulders and stepped forward. Myldrith grabbed at her arm and tried to hold her, but Wilda shook her off.

“I’m the thane’s wife. Where is my husband?”

The heathen looked her up and down with a cool smile before he nodded and said something to the warriors behind him, big, raw-boned men all. One of them grabbed Wilda and dragged her toward the Great Hall. Another snatched Myldrith and pulled her, screaming, after him.

Wilda didn’t resist the arm—there was nothing she could do that wouldn’t get her and others killed except to go along for now. A way might present itself, once she knew what this Sigdir wanted. That they hadn’t burned the houses and farms, had left most alive, was a hopeful thing. She’d heard of such before, farther south, where the heathens would sometimes beach their boats and offer the townsfolk a chance to pay tribute rather than be raided.

The warrior shoved her into the smoky dimness of the hall, lit by candles and rushlights. Bayen was on his knees by the fire, hands tied behind his back and a warrior holding his head up by his hair. His face was sore used, and blood mingled with the grey that shot his dark beard, but he looked at Wilda steadily enough.

A red-haired heathen stood beside him, and by the way he carried himself, the way all the others deferred to him, the richness of his clothes and armour, this must be Sigdir.

“Is this her?” the slave asked Bayen.

“Yes, that’s my wife.”

The slave said something short and brutal to Sigdir. The heathen’s sword flashed out and took Bayen in the neck, so suddenly Wilda didn’t have a chance to even cry out. That didn’t stop Myldrith from screaming when Bayen’s body dropped lifeless to the floor. His head hung from the heathen’s hand, his face slack, beard now nothing but blood.

Wilda couldn’t think for shock, couldn’t move for fear—all her limbs seemed made of ice. All she could do was stare at Sigdir as he barked out orders to his men. One of them grabbed a sheaf of Bayen’s vellum scrolls while the rest methodically stripped the hall of anything of value. Sigdir studied Bayen’s sword, ran his fingers lightly over the hilt in seeming appreciation before he sheathed it and buckled it on next to his own.

He turned to Wilda and watched her, a cool appraisal. Finally he gave a short nod and spoke.

“You’re to come, you and your maid, for he’s not heartless. No one else will be harmed, or taken,” the slave translated. “If you come without trouble. You have his word.”

Wilda’s numb lips spilled out words without thought. “Can I believe the word of a godless heathen?”

The slave’s sideways look was a warning maybe to watch what she said, but Sigdir stepped closer, close enough that she could smell the mustiness of the furs across his shoulder, the sweat and blood of this day’s work. Wilda forced herself not to shrink back as the slave translated.

“A man of Odin will never promise what he can’t keep, and to say otherwise is to insult him. His word is iron. No one else will be harmed, if you come without trouble.”

“And if we do give trouble?”

“Then he’ll kill all he can find, take everything of value and burn the rest, and still, he will take you.”

“Then we’ll give no trouble.” Wilda tried to think that it would be no different from her arranged marriage to Bayen, which was, if not loveless, at least not born of love, yet practical, essential for survival. Though the tales she’d heard, of how these brutes used women… She would bear it if she had to, if circumstances made it necessary. Survival was all, a lesson hard learned.

Sigdir smiled coolly and inclined his head.

“He admires your level head and your sense of practicality. You’re his slave, less than nothing, to do with as he will, and you
will
do as you’re told. Sigdir will leave men to guard the town, and if you don’t, they’ll torch it and everyone in it.”

Wilda set her face and straightened her shoulders. The Northmen despised weakness, she’d heard, and she’d be damned if she’d show him any. If this was the only way, then it was. There was nothing else she could do, except get everyone in the town killed, the town itself—Bayen’s town and estates, his true love—burned.
Survive now, think, plan, grieve later. But survive the now.
The Northmen and their brutality had taught her that bitter lesson. “Very well.”

“Wilda!” Myldrith’s face was pale and as blotched as turned milk. “No, we can’t—”

Wilda took Myldrith’s hand. “We have to. We’ve no choice, not against men armed and armoured.”

“But they’re heathens, animals.” Myldrith glared at Sigdir, which made his mouth twitch in amusement. Myldrith dropped her voice. “They’re godless.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Anything! Anything but go with them. The king—the king will help, other thanes, your father. They might ransom us.”

Sigdir growled out some words and waved a hand at them, seemingly having lost patience. Two of his men, shoulders hulked from being at oars, took hold of Wilda. They weren’t gentle, but neither were they too rough. That didn’t stop Myldrith screaming fit to burst.

Wilda did her best to make her see sense. “There’s nothing I can do that won’t end in our deaths and those of everyone here. We’ve no one to call on for help. King Rædwulf died against Northmen not a week ago. Bayen had word this morning. The thanes are in uproar and the Northmen ready to take advantage. No place is safe and we’ve no one to call on for help. I need to make sure the town is safe, at least until a new king is found. Maybe now Rædwulf is dead, Æthelred can take the throne again. Until then, we’re friendless. We need to live long enough for help, for ransom to reach us, if that’s what they’re after.” In her heart, Wilda had doubts about that. If ransom was the goal, why kill Bayen, the one most likely to pay?

Myldrith dissolved into tears but Wilda didn’t have time for pity, for herself or anyone else. The warriors marched them toward their longships. Myldrith kept up a long stream of sobs, but Wilda held herself straight, and the warrior who held her gave her at least the dignity of not dragging her by the waist as Myldrith’s escort had to. Instead she walked through the town, hers and Bayen’s, past the stunned white faces of so many people she knew.

Bayen’s men-at-arms knelt, heads down, on the greensward in front of the church. Their captain—a hard-faced man in his forties with hands scarred from a lifetime of wielding blades and a mind just as scarred from the battles he’d fought—knelt at their head. He didn’t keep his head bent as Sigdir’s slave spoke in his ear. Instead the captain watched Wilda with mix of impotent anger and admiration, and he graced her with a knowing nod as she passed. At least one person saw she’d done the right thing. Not much of a blessing, when the chill in her heart told her nothing.

The warriors helped her onto the ship, though they had to drag Myldrith, and before the day was done, their home, their life, was a blurred light on the horizon.

The Norwegian fjords, in the year of Our Lord 844

They called him many names. Once the by-names had been full of praise. He had been Einar Skinfaxi, Einar Strangi, Einar Fagri, Einar Ungi; Einar sheen-mane, the strong, the handsome, the young. Those days were long gone. Now they called him Burlufótr, Hokinn, Kamban, Kleykir, Nidingr, and those were the kinder—clumsy-foot, crooked, crippled, disgraced, coward. Mostly he was Toki, the simpleton. No one bothered with his real name anymore, all knew who they meant. The coward who had lost his mind in the raid that claimed Arni’s life, whose courage had failed, who had run away to be stabbed in the back. Whose fear had turned him mute and witless.

Toki chewed the names over in his mind as he looked up from the meagre patch of high summer pasture that was grudged to him. The soil was poor, too shaded by dark firs and the angle of the mountain for much to grow, and the snows had come early this year, leaving him unprepared. Even the pig looked half-starved, and it had taken him over a year to gather enough fox furs to buy it and the horse that made life so much easier. The pig snuffled at his boots and tried to steal the turnips he’d pulled.

His horse stamped a hoof and snorted in alarm. A raven made its perch on the horse’s back, digging in its scrabbling claws. It cocked its head and regarded Toki with a beady eye through the swirling snow. He sat back on his heels and watched it in turn, a feeling of foreboding churning his stomach. Raven’s Home Fjord saw many of the birds. They nested on the outcrop of rock called Odin’s Helm, their cries echoing round the mountaintops. Odin’s birds, which gave warning, birds of sacrifice and ill-omen. It was rare they came so close, almost within touching distance. Toki slid a hand to his amulet, a warding, a protection.

The raven launched into flight and stooped down over the fjord below with a triple warning cry. Toki lurched to his feet and watched it plummet almost to the water before it turned and skimmed the smooth surface of the fjord, the water dark and bleak, smooth as oil, cold as death. With a further triple cry that sounded thin and weak, the raven swooped up and over a ship and was lost to view in the swirling snowfall. Sigdir’s ship, with its raven’s sail. Two more behind. The raiders had returned and that must count a success.

The ships cut their paths through the water, oars in perfect rhythm, the wind that blew stinging little flakes of snow into Toki’s face pushing the raiders home. Bausi had been right about one thing; they had become strong. He’d increased the raids and, with the wealth that brought in, many men had come to join him from other fjords. He rewarded them well and so they stayed and each year the raids became bigger, ranged farther, brought back more wealth in gold and slaves. Each year they became stronger. This was the last raid to return this year and the first one Bausi had allowed Sigdir to lead, while he’d led the main force elsewhere and killed a king, or so he boasted.

There would be a feast in honour of Sigdir’s first success, Bausi would lay on meat and ale, and the spoils would be bartered and sold. A good day for the fjord, for the men who’d raided. Meat and ale. Toki’s stomach rumbled at the thought. The snow had come too soon, before half his crops had ripened properly in their shady bed. The pig wasn’t fat enough to slaughter, but it would have to be done. Toki didn’t have enough food to keep it alive during the long snows and dark days, and meat from the pig was almost all he had for himself.

The ships pulled up on the shore and men tumbled out, greeted by their women and Bausi’s warriors, who’d returned only two days ago. Other men, those who hadn’t raided—the too old, the too young or, like Toki, deemed too incapable—gathered round with much slapping of backs and rough laughter that drifted up to Toki like acrid smoke.

He should go to the feast. It was time to come down the mountain for the winter anyway. If he had the courage, if he wasn’t the coward they made out, he would go, would close his mind and ears to the by-names he now went by. It wasn’t courage that decided him in the end. It wasn’t even the thought of a full belly for once, of proper meat—beef, pork, mutton—not the scant and scrawny hares that were often his only source of food. It was company he craved, even company that shunned him.

Far below, Sigdir jumped down from the ship, instantly recognisable from the shock of flame-red hair he’d inherited from their father, and a tightness in Toki’s chest loosened. His little brother, not so little now, a full-grown man of eighteen, strong and brave. Unlike Toki, Sigdir came back in one piece, came back a man of Thor. Toki would go to the feast, if only to see Sigdir and Gudrun, whose safety had led him to this shameful hovel, to this lonely, silent life. To see them, know they were safe, he would brave a dragon’s den, cast all his courage on one action.

He packed up what little he’d managed to gather to see him through the long winter, got the brace of hares he’d trapped that morning, and shooed the pig ahead of him while he limped to the grazing tether.

He’d named the stout dun horse Einar, silently in his head, for he was sheen-mane, young, strong and handsome. As Toki had once been.

Wilda gave thanks to God when the ships finally stopped moving and pulled up on the shore. She lay shivering under the scant protection of a blanket, no match for the bitter wind or the biting flecks of snow. It had been worse for some of the other women the Northmen had taken, from other villages along the coast, who Sigdir’s men claimed for bed-slaves. Sigdir himself had chosen Myldrith. Wilda had protested, had even offered herself instead, because Myldrith wasn’t strong enough, had never seen the inside of a man’s bed before and still had rosy notions of how it should be.

Wilda was strong enough, open-eyed enough—she’d had to be. A bed-slave wasn’t much different from your father selling you to a man twice your age and more in return for no outright hostility, to settle a decades-old feud. It was to be borne, that was all, if she wished to survive.
Be practical. Live, and thank God for His mercy in allowing your life when too many died. Think only of that, not how you want to run.

Sigdir had brushed her off with a wave of his hand and his cryptic words through the collared slave. “I would not dishonour a lady of the Saxons in such a way.” Though he’d said it with a look that Wilda had taken to mean “Yet.” A look that had made her heart shiver.
You will bear this. You will live. You must, if it is God’s will.

She’d tried again, until the threat of a sword had her acquiescent. When Myldrith returned to their little patch at the rear of the ship—some blankets to hold out the chill was their only luxury—Wilda had done what she could to console her, but it was precious little, even if it seemed Sigdir hadn’t been overly rough with her. No more so than Wilda’s own wedding night perhaps.

It was enough that Sigdir had the power over them, and that was what made Myldrith sob. That, and that she’d sinned against God, lying with a man not her husband, and a heathen too. No soft words of Wilda’s helped. Until today, Myldrith had never let go her foolish dreams of marriage and a man’s bed, had never discovered as Wilda had that the bards lied, that a marriage was a bargain, a sale from a father to a husband as surely as a slave was sold, and yet was necessary. It was how it was.

The stripping of those dreams laid Myldrith bare, as they had made Wilda cold of heart when hers had been taken by blood and murder. She hoped Myldrith didn’t end the same—for all her faults she was a sweet girl and didn’t deserve that, to live in cold numbness.

Finally, after three days of rough weather, slanting sleet and now snow, the ship stopped rocking and Wilda’s stomach began to settle. One of the heathens came toward them, his face wild and ruddy behind his tangled beard. Wilda faced him steadily at the forefront of the gaggle of slaves and refused to cringe back as he reached down, grabbed her arm and dragged her and Myldrith to the rail. He spoke to them in a language Wilda could only make out bits of, and shoved them toward the front of the ship. Another shove, like being barged by a horse, indicated they should get off. Wilda managed all right, but Myldrith stumbled onto the shore, weak from days of sickness on the sea, the oddness of the places they passed, the looming mountains seemingly made for fog and cloud and snow. All that had gone before faded in the face of the sea and now this harsh landscape.

Wilda held herself together and helped Myldrith up. The heathen shoved them again with an angry wave of his hand. It was so odd, that the men and the country seemed made for each other. Hard and forbidding, dark in the deep parts, yet Wilda had seen high pastures and lower fields trim and tended, seen wildflowers in the meadows before the snow had started. She had yet to see anything like that in these heathens.

A woman’s voice stopped the heathen from another shove. Not gentle, this voice was a scold, high, shrill and demanding. An older woman with shorn hair stepped down the shore toward them, snugly wrapped in fur against the wind. She stood square before the man, looked up at him and berated him with a wagging finger. The other men laughed and cat-called. The one taking her tongue-lashing dropped his head and blushed, though he hid a shame-faced grin in his beard. With a final sharp flourish, the woman turned to them and eyed them critically but not unkindly.

“Seasickness is a bitch, ain’t it?” she said in Saxon.

“I—er, yes.” Wilda was too taken aback to say anything else.

“Well, you’re off the boat now. You’re to come with me, my lady. Agnar and his wife Idunn have got the job of keeping you for now.” The woman pointed up the shore to a grim-looking man with a ruddy, weathered face and a gut just starting to turn to fat. The woman next to him, the first Norsewoman Wilda had seen, was handsome but stern, her fair hair gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck and covered with a scarf, making her face seem even sterner.

“What about me?” Myldrith asked. “I should stay with my lady. Please, I have to stay with my lady.”

The woman snorted and her eyes slid over Wilda with a cold, contemptuous look before she looked more kindly on Myldrith. “You belong to Sigdir, you’ll be in his house and I don’t envy you.” She crossed herself and muttered under her breath.

Myldrith clutched at Wilda’s arm, but seemed to be rendered speechless with fear. Wilda held on to her, an arm around frail, hunched shoulders.

Wilda managed to squeeze her hand before she was taken. “God is with you.” A poor comfort, perhaps, but all Wilda had to spare for her. Time for no other words of comfort before a heathen dragged Myldrith away sobbing. Wilda couldn’t bear to watch, to think what might happen to Myldrith. To her.

Finally the cries stopped, cut off by the slam of a door that was a slam to Wilda’s heart too. In a godless land, her and Myldrith, and each alone.
Survive, only survive. Do what you must.

“I’m Bebba by the way,” the thrall said. “Come on, my lady, let’s get you to the smithy for your collar. At least it’ll be warm in there.”

“Collar?” Wilda asked, but she knew well enough. Saxons and Northmen both kept their slaves in collars, but it was the reality of it that brought it home, even more than Sigdir and the others’ treatment of their new slaves.

“Aye, collar. Like this, see?” Bebba pulled the tatty fur away to show an iron collar welded shut around her neck. “Mark of the thrall. Well, the hair too. Of course, your ladyship gets something different. Sigdir said you’re to keep your hair, for a start. Won’t make you no more free though.”

“Why…why did they bring me?” Wilda stumbled after Bebba, who led the way off the windswept shore, watched by the avid eyes of half a score of heathens and their women. “Why didn’t they just raid the town, kill us?”

“Because slaves is wealth. And they brought you for a special reason. Don’t know what it is but you’re to be kept up at Agnar’s house, all quiet like.” Bebba shot her a sharp glance. “It won’t be good, I reckon I can tell you that. They ain’t all bad, I’ve had worse Saxon masters than old Agnar and his wife. He ain’t too bad for a heathen, the old goat. Idunn is a fine mistress too, firm but fair. But there’s some of them… There’s a curse on this village. I knows, I sees it. They don’t, not all the while they’ve got gold coming in, while Bausi and Sigdir make them strong. But they will.”

Bebba led them up the shore past Agnar and Idunn’s watchful eyes, onto a path that wound up the steep slope where the village looked out over the fjord. A river tumbled down the centre, loud and chattering, crossed by a small wooden bridge. A biting wind laced with snow whipped through Wilda’s dress and shawl. My Lord, it was so cold, so early in the year. She hardly dared think how cold it would be come Christmas.

They passed by neat-looking houses with wooden walls and turf roofs. A man stood on one, scything the hay before the snow ruined it, but stopped to watch them pass. Bebba noticed Wilda watching him. “A winter long as it is here, you got to find as much hay as you can. The amount of livestock a man can feed over winter is a sign of his wealth, so they don’t spare nothing in that regard. You think it was cold where you’re from? Here it’s colder than Satan’s heart for more than half the year. Get used to it.”

Walking into the warmth of the smithy was bliss. The smith was hard at work at the anvil, the sound of metal on metal reverberating round the small room in a rhythmic song, like the peal of church bells. He finished what he was doing and stood up, head and shoulders above Wilda, so tall he all but brushed the ceiling. He snorted, said something short and brutal-sounding to Bebba and turned away.

“Off you go,” Bebba said. “Over to the anvil so he can put your collar on.”

There was no escape from this, not now. For now she had to survive, and that meant doing what she was told. For now, the thought of Sigdir’s men left behind in Bayen’s house would keep her from acting too impulsively.

The smith appraised Wilda’s neck critically, then pulled a collar from a chest at the rear of the smithy. When he held it up, ready to put it round her neck, she saw what was different, as Bebba had said. Not iron but bronze, with an intricate pattern engraved upon it, of ravens and horses and a huge tree threaded through everything.