Viking Love Beyond Time (Time Travel Romance) (74 page)

             
Leaning down she grabbed his hair with her right hand and dragged his head up.  “Olaf the Black, look at me” she commanded.  He opened pain filled grey eyes.  “I should, by rights, leave you to die here by inches, but I am not going to do so.  Do you remember your wife
Brunhilda
?  Remember the twelve year old child you raped and murdered, your most satisfying lovemaking?”   He nodded, running his tongue over his lips - God! Was that a smile playing about his features?  He was pure unadulterated filth.  Alodie felt her resolve harden.  “This is from them!” she snapped and plunged the knife into his jugular vein and pulled down and across.  Blood sprayed from the wound in a gushing fountain, splattering the surrounding trees and covering Alodie in the process.  For good measure she plunged it between his ribs into his heart.  Even autodoc would not be able to cope with that.  She was right.  With a hiss Olaf the Black sagged back into the bushes, his mouth falling open and his eyes rolling up into his head.

             
Sobbing, Alodie sat back on her haunches and pulling the knife from Olaf’s body, wiped it on the grass, shivering as she did so.

             
Night had fallen without her noticing, she was in the middle of a jungle, naked, with a dead body and did not relish the idea of trying to find the path through the forest to the shuttle in the dark.  She decided to make her way back to the beach, dress herself as best she could, and try to get some sleep until it was light.

             
She climbed groggily to her feet, glancing again at Olaf, and lifted his wrist, wincing as she did so at the feel of his cold flesh, then removed the bracelet and her father’s ring.  She gnawed her bottom lip.  What to wear?  It would be impossible to put her dress on again, it was in ruins.  There was a boiler suit in the shuttle but she felt vulnerable naked.  She glanced down at Olaf again - of course, his braeis.  Shuddering slightly she pulled them from him, there was blood on the front but not as much as there would have been normally, autodoc having stopped the bleeding from his stomach wound almost as soon as it had started.  She ripped at the bottom of the legs with her knife, leaving a ragged hem, then turned and, following the sound of the surf, went back to the beach.

             
The moon had risen, shining a silver path on the water, a night bird squawked, and an evening breeze wafted.  Alodie felt, sticky between her legs, Olaf’s seed and groaned aloud.  She had an overriding desire to wash herself clean,  to scrub herself free of his taint.  Running to the creamy surf she immersed herself to the waist, it was almost fully dark and the ocean washed over her body like silk.    She removed the braeis and rubbed them between her hands.  In the darkness the blood ran out into the clean ocean like a black oil slick.  Taking a deep breath she immersed herself completely, rubbing herself between the legs and praying once again as she did so that none of Olaf’s filthy seed had taken root in her body. 

             
At length, she waded out onto the beach and pulled on the sh
i
rt Olaf had thrown aside when he had raped her, his braeis she laid on the rock to dry whilst she lay down behind it on the wreck of her dress.  Feeling tears of self pity spring to her eyes she attempted to stem them.  It was impossible, they flowed down her cheeks unchecked.  She was thousands of miles away from civilisation, her children were on a boat in the middle of the
North Sea
with hostile strangers, her father was in a noisome dungeon somewhere and she had just been raped then killed the man responsible.  What the hell, she needed to cry, she deserved to cry.

             
The last thought in her mind before she fell asleep was of Herger, she needed him so badly she could almost taste it.  She would have given ten years of her life to have him here now, holding her close to his chest and comforting her.

             
“Goodnight my love” she sobbed.  “Wherever you are”

********************

             
Alodie was awoken by a sharp pain in her back and with a moan she sat up, realising she had been lying on a jagged stone.  Stretching her stiff limbs she yawned and rubbing her painful back climbed to her feet and decided to take one last dip in the ocean before making her way back to the shuttle.

             
The sun had risen above the horizon, tinting the beach with a rosy hue and making the sea look like a piece of blue satin.  Stripping off her shirt she ran into the water, gasping at the morning coolness as it lapped over her ankles, surprisingly it was almost as cold as the water at Bredond.  The beach shelved down sharply for a few feet from the beach and Alodie launched herself into the waves, feeling the iciness of the ocean biting through her body with an almost welcome pain.

             
Taking a deep breath she submerged, and opening her eyes looked round at the strange and beautiful marine world which greeted her.  The sand was tinted a rosy pink and all around hoards of little damsel fish of all shades from blue through green and orange to red swam around her.  A school of yellow goat fish nibbled and fed from the bottom and three or four spiky sea urchins were being browsed by a golden starfish.

             
She was entranced but feeling the need for air kicked up to take a breath.  As her head broke the surface, however, Alodie felt an intense griping pain in her stomach.  Turning she struck out for the shore and just managed to reach the sand when the first wave of nausea hit her.  She vomited time and again, her empty stomach bringing up nothing but bile until at last, weak and shaking, she stumbled to the rock and began to pull on Olaf’s shirt and braeis. Logically the sickness could not be physical, autodoc was there to make sure of that, it had to be mental, her mind forcing her to purge her body of the horrors of the last twenty four hours.

             
Shaking, she got to her feet and, shielding her eyes from the early morning glare, squinted up at the cliff, yes, there was the shuttle, she could see the sun’s rays winking off it, there seemed to be about a mile of forest to traverse between her  and the long grassy slope which led up to the craft. 

             
The sun, shining on the foliage and drawing up the excess moisture, had formed a cloud around tree top level which made the whole scene look eerie.  Giving herself a little shake she headed toward the small stream which they had followed yesterday afternoon and turned her face into the trees.

             
The jungle closed around her like a thick damp cloak.  Exotic animals and birds chittered to each other from the branches and every so often the grass in front of her parted as some unseen creature, either mammalian or reptilian, fled at her approach.  In front of her, a monkey with a comical red face leaned forward and grimaced in a simian caricature of a smile, Alodie smiled back and reached toward it only to be rewarded by an ear piercing scream as it jumped back and disappeared into the lush verdure.  She shrugged and pulling off her shoes stepped into the stream, glancing around her for the tree bedecked with long mossy hanging creepers which she had noticed yesterday marked the end of the cliff path.
Was that it?
  Alodie clambered up the bank and, grabbing a branch, pulled herself up.

             
With a sigh of relief she saw the steep path heading up the long green slope and the wink as the sunlight reflected off the shuttle at the top.  She set off at a steady lope and within ten minutes she was at the steps of the craft.  Reaching out she grabbed the rail to pull herself onto the step then let go with a scream - the metal was almost red hot!  
Idiot
she thought, she had forgotten, in her haste, to cloak the machine, to protect it from the outside elements.
Gritting her teeth and holding her badly burned hand she almost skipped up the steps, reaching out for the hatch cover, it was impossible, that was even hotter than the rail.  With a sob she pulled off her shirt and wrapped it round her hand, then she unlocked and threw open the hatch.  The heat which belched forth from the interior of the cockpit almost took her breath away.

             
Vaulting into the shuttle, she pulled the door shut behind her and locked it, even half naked as she was the heat almost overpowered her.  She stood up and pulled off her
britches
, throwing them to one side as she examined the damage to her hand - it was red raw, puffy and extremely painful, autodoc would doubtless deal with it but it might take five minutes.  Pulling open the first aid box she took out a cooling burn relief balm and holding down the nozzle covered her hand with a white foamy mousse.  She flexed her fingers and smiled as the pain began to disappear.

             
She loaded the controls, hearing, to her relief, the soft hum as the drive kicked in.

             
“Right kids, Mummy’s coming” she said aloud, then she hit the vertical thrusters and with a muted roar headed upward at a speed of mach six.

             
At a height of twenty miles she stopped.  The curvature of the Earth was quite pronounced from here, making the island below her seem tiny and innocuous.

             
She turned on the navigation console, ordering the shuttle to take her to “
Segensfjord
,
Norway
”.  Obediently the craft dipped and turned to the north.

             
Feeling her stomach give a disconcerting rumble Alodie suddenly realised that she had not eaten for well over twenty four hours.  Reaching into what shuttle crews jokingly called “the larder” a cupboard to the right of the console, she extracted a small cylinder containing, according to the label, Medullan causer steak and salad.  Opening the lid she withdrew two tablets, grabbed a styrofoam plate and placed the tablets on it.  Within ten seconds of exposure to the air an appetising looking meal was laid out before her, she took a mouthful then grimaced.  After a diet of fresh meat and vegetables the reconstituted food on which she had been brought up tasted bad, however hunger makes the best sauce and she finished her plate, disposing of the used implements in the waste recycler.

             
Glancing out of the window she noticed that she was travelling up the eastern seaboard of the
United States
, hugging the coastline.  Presumably when they reached the area of
Northern Canada
- probably
Baffin Island
- the shuttle would make the hop across the
Atlantic
via
Greenland
and
Iceland
.

             
Deciding to bring the craft lower Alodie reduced her height to two miles.  The terrain below her skipped past in a meaningless blur and she regretted somewhat that she was in such a hurry, a leisurely trip up the eastern seaboard of the United States in the ninth century would be fascinating to say the least.

             
She sighed and shivered, suddenly realising she was naked, and climbing to her feet she walked to the locker at the back of the shuttle and donned the green boiler suit which was hanging there.  It seemed innocuous and a little strange after all this time to be dressed as a star ship captain, as indeed did piloting the shuttle, two years ago she would have done it manually.  “Come on girl, don’t be so lazy, your brain has seized up” she snapped out loud and vaulting back into the seat she punched up the navigation charts on the display console in front of her then went into manual mode.

             
The ship immediately came to a dead stop hovering, Alodie noticed, at a height of just under two miles at a latitude of thirty seven degrees north, the approximate position of
Washington
DC
.  Now all that was below her was marsh as far as the eye could see, seemingly fed by several small streams and one large river.  She smiled ironically at the thought that in another thirteen hundred years or so the boggy wilderness below her would be the largest city on Earth.  With a barely audible hiss the crescent shaped manual steerer slid down from its storage place above her head, and passing her palm over the thruster panel Alodie took the machine back up to mach six.  With a grin she pushed forward the steerer, feeling exhilarated at doing her old job again, and admitting to herself that for all her feelings toward Herger she missed being a star ship captain, in charge of billions of credits worth of machinery, using her brains instead of her native cunning.

             
Holding strictly to a
north west
course she followed the coastline round and up the eastern side of
Canada
.  The land below her now was dotted with lakes and forests but Alodie was too preoccupied to marvel at the beauty of it.

             
Thinking of her father and the children she accelerated to mach ten - the coasts of
Nova Scotia
and
Newfoundland
flashed beneath her at mind boggling speed.  Still hugging the coast, she made for
Brevoort
Island
then swept right, making a graceful turn, and crossed the
Davis Strait
which even this early in the season boasted the odd ice floe.  Within minutes she was skimming the surface of
Greenland
.