Kushiel’s Dart

Chapter Forty-One

Thus began my period of slavery under the ownership of Gunter Arnlaugson, Skaldic chieftain of one of the westernmost steadings held by the tribe of the Marsi-under the aegis, I would learn, of the great war-leader Waldemar Selig, Waldemar the Blessed.

I was roused that morning by Hedwig, who showed me, to my immense joy, the bathing room. The bath itself was nothing more than a tub of battered tin, but it was sized for Skaldi, which meant I had ample room to sit and wash myself. Hedwig showed me how to fetch water and stoke the fire to heat it, marveling that I had no knowledge of such things.

I may have been a servant all my life, I reflected, struggling with a heavy pail of water, but of a surety, I had been a privileged one. Still, I had never known a bath so sweet as that first one I drew for myself in Gunter’s steading. Even the lack of privacy-for Hedwig perched on a stool and observed, while other women came and exclaimed-could not diminish its pleasure.

"What do you call this?" Hedwig asked, pointing at my marque; still unfinished, of course. I was glad, at least, that I had paid Master Tielhard in advance. If ever I returned to the City of Elua, surely he would honor our contract. I gave its name, translating as best I could into Skaldi, and explained that it was the sign of a Servant of Naamah. This too required considerable explanation, which the women heard with puzzled looks. "And these?" Hedwig asked then, her hovering finger indicating the fading lines of Melisande Shahrizai’s handiwork. "This is part of the…the rituals?"

"No," I said shortly, pouring a dipper of warm water over my skin. "That was not part of Naamah’s rituals."

Something in my tone stirred Hedwig to pity, and she shooed the other women out of the bath, remaining to help me out of the water and into a rough-spun woolen gown, so long on me that it dragged on the floor. "We will have it hemmed," she said pragmatically, and loaned me her own chipped comb for my damp, tangled hair.

Washed and combed, I felt more properly myself than I had since Rousse’s messenger had entered the marquist’s shop, and I endeavored to take the measure of my situation.

The great hall of the steading was a busy place. It is, I learned, the heart of any Skaldi community. The outlying fields were held by Gunter’s thanes, or warriors, and farmed by their carls, who I took to be a class of peasants or bondsmen. For this privilege, they supported the thanes and paid a tithe in herds and grains to Gunter. When Gunter and his thanes were not out raiding or hunting, they spent their time carousing in the hall, wagering on contests of strength and song.

For all of this, Gunter was not a bad lord as such things are reckoned. The Skaldi have an elaborate system of law, and he heard complaints twice a week, deciding fairly and impartially as he could. When a decision went against one of his thanes and he was ordered to make reparation to one of his own carls for the unlawful stealing of a yearling bull-calf, he did it without grumbling.

These things I observed over time; then, on that first day, I merely kept my eyes open and my mouth closed, trying to make sense of it all. Of Gunter himself, I saw nothing during the daylight hours. His thanes abounded in the hall, honing their weapons and working thick bear-grease into their leather footware, laughing and joking. They made comments aplenty, elbowing each other and eyeing me, but made no move to molest me, so I ignored it, silently thanking Elua that it seemed I was Gunter’s property alone, and not to be held in common among his men.

While the men idled and jested, the women worked tirelessly. There is a great deal to be done to keep the great hall in a steading functioning smoothly; tending the hearths, preparing food, cleaning up after drunken warriors, mending and spinning and sewing. There were housecarls who helped with the heavier work, but much of it the women did themselves. Hedwig ordered them about with a tone much accustomed to being obeyed, not shirking to labor herself. When I asked her what my duties were to be, she waved me away, saying it was for Gunter to say. I asked then if it was permitted for me to leave the hall, for I was concerned for Joscelin and wished to find him. She bit her lip and shook her head. Of her own accord, I think, she would have permitted it, but she dared not cross Gunter so far as that.

So I was confined to the hall, and the attentions of Gunter’s thanes.

One of the youngest-Harald the Beardless, who had given me his cloak-was the most daring of them, and a skilled poet in the bargain. If my heart had been less like a stone in those days, I might have blushed at some of his verses, which gave an exceedingly detailed inventory of my charms.

It was amid one of the latter that Gunter burst into the hall, attended by a couple of his men, shouting for mead. I don’t know where he had been all day, but he was glowing with the cold, snow clinging to his cloak and leggings. When he unclasped his cloak and slung it aside, I saw Melisande’s diamond about his neck and gasped aloud.

It was an incongruous thing, that glistening teardrop lying in the hollow of his powerful throat. I hadn’t even had the sense to wonder about its loss; it had been amid our baggage, it seemed, as untouchable to d’Aiglemort’s men as Joscelin’s Cassiline weapons had been. No small wonder, I thought. I would sooner steal from the Cassiline Prefect than Melisande Shahrizai. The sight of her diamond drew exclamations, and Gunter laughed, running one thick forefinger beneath the black cord.

If I had thought about it, I would have welcomed its disappearance; but here it was now, again, dangling from the throat of my Skaldi master. I felt Melisande’s presence in my life like a touch, and despaired.

"D’Angeline!" Gunter shouted, catching sight of me sitting by the fire. I rose with an automatic curtsy, awaiting with bowed head as he strode across the hall. "I have a powerful hunger upon me!" Strong hands closed about my waist and he lifted me into the air, planting a loud kiss on my less-than-willing lips. Gunter roared with laughter, holding me suspended. "Look at this!" he shouted to his men. "These D’Angeline women weigh no more than my left thigh. Think you she knows what a real man is?"

"Nor like to, at your hands," Hedwig retorted sharply, emerging from the kitchen with a ladle held in one hand like a sword. "Put the child down, Gunter Arnlaugson!"

"I’ll put her down, flat on her back!" he declared, setting me back on my feet with another resounding kiss. I had never known such a hairy man, and it was strange to be kissed by him. "There! What do you think of that, D’Angeline?"

I had never hated any patron, having entered every contract freely, in homage to Naamah. I hated this man now, who would take me without consent, by virtue of an ownership he held through betrayal. "I am my lord’s servant," I said stoically.

Gunter Arnlaugson was in high spirits; sarcasm was lost on him. "And a cursed fine one at that," he agreed cheerfully, picking me up once more and slinging me over his shoulder like a sack of meal. "If I’m not back in two hours, send in a barrel of ale and a rasher of meat," he called to his thanes, striding out of the hall.

I hung, helpless as a child, over his shoulder, listening to the shouts and jibes of his men as we left. I could feel his muscles working beneath his woolen jerkin; I swear it, by Elua and his Companions, Skaldic warriors are unnaturally hale. In his modest quarters, he set me down and turned to build up the fire in the hearth. His room was simple timber, and held nothing but a rough-hewn bed covered with furs and a pile of tangled equipage, bits of steel and leather peeking from behind the edge of a shield, in one corner.

"There," he said with satisfaction, rubbing his hands together. "That should be warm enough for your thin blood, D’Angeline." He eyed me, the unnerving shrewdness back in his gaze. "I know what you are, D’Angeline, that you are trained to serve your goddess-whore. Kilberhaar’s men told me, that I would pay the purchase-price, when I could have had a village girl for free but for the cost of a raid. We have done it before, you know."

"Yes," I said. I knew. I thought of Alcuin, whose village had been burned by the Skaldi. I thought of how the screams of the women had echoed in his ears, as he rode astride Delaunay’s pommel. "What do you wish of me, my lord?"

"What?" Gunter Arnlaugson grinned, stretching his massive arms wide in the firelit bedroom. Light glittered on Melisande’s diamond. "Everything, D’Angeline! Everything!"

It is funny how despair can so soon become an old companion. What he asked, I gave; not everything, not everything I had to offer, but everything he might desire. I was not fool enough to spend the coin of my skill all at once-and indeed, he was too young and too crude in the ways of Naamah to have grasped its value. But what I gave him, you may be sure, was beyond any price he had known to ask.

If I thought before that I knew what it was to serve Naamah, I learned that evening that I had grasped only the smallest part of it. On their wandering, Naamah lay in the stews with strangers for love of Elua, and Elua alone; I had done it for coin, and my own pleasure. Only now did I grasp what it was she had done. For my own part, I would not have cared overmuch if I lived or died. Joscelin thought I had betrayed him, but it was for his sake, and for Alcuin and Delaunay and his oath to Ysandre de la Courcel, I had to live, by any means I could.

I had nothing else to live for, save vengeance.

The arousement alone was enough for my Skaldi lord; I had barely begun the languisement when he gave a mighty whoop and toppled me onto his fur-clad bed, harpooning me with the gusto of a starving whaler. Melisande’s diamond dangled from his neck and brushed my face as he plunged into me, burning like a brand. There is a point, always, where I no longer control either my patrons' desires nor my own. I gazed over Gunter’s shoulder, the room swimming red in my vision, gritted my teeth and wept at my body’s inevitable betrayal. Delaunay had lied, when he had set his value upon me. / can make of her such a rare instrument that princes and queens will be moved to play exquisite music upon her, he had said. A rare instrument I was, that sang at a Skaldi’s crude thrusting. Pinioned under my master’s hairy, heaving bulk, I came shuddering to climax, and despised all I was, and most especially the part that savored the humiliation of it.

In the hall, I had to endure his strutting and boasting, and the envy of his thanes. It was not so hard, compared to what had gone before, but still it galled me. Hedwig saw, and paused in passing to lay a kind hand upon my arm.

"His mouth is large," she said gently, "but his heart is larger. Don’t take it so ill, child."

I looked at her without answering. If I found compassion in my soul later for Gunter Arnlaugson, I had none that night. Whatever she saw in my eyes, it sent her hurrying away.

I cannot recall the verses that Gunter sang that night; well-trained as my memory is, there are times when there is a kind of healing in forgetfulness. It sufficed that my reputation was made, there in the great hall. That, I remember all too well. D’Angeline I was, they said, and kin to the spirits of the night, that visit a man in exquisite dreams, summoning forth his seed for their own pleasure by the most delightful wiles; only Gunter had mastered me, by force of his prowess, and made me cry out his name, binding me to his will.

So they thought, and I let them think it. And this I remember, that it was the first I heard the murmurs, among his thanes who thought I listened not, that Gunter was minded to give me to Waldemar Selig at the Allthing, the great meeting of the tribes, and thus win the favor of the Blessed.

Once again, then, I would be a gift fit for a prince. Well, and it was no consolation. I wondered at a man that even Gunter Arnlaugson spoke of in tones of awe, and I feared. I thought of Joscelin, somewhere, shivering in the cold, and prayed he kept the wit to stay alive, for I feared I wouldn’t survive this alone. I thought of Alcuin and Delaunay…Delaunay most of all, his beautiful, noble face, the intelligent eyes forever dimmed, and I wept for him, alone by the fire, for the first time. Great, tearing sobs racked me, and the raucous Skaldi grew strangely silent.

Their eyes, curious and sympathetic, watched me with strangers' gazes. I gulped for air, and rubbed the tears from my eyes. "You do not know me," I said to them in D’Angeline, looking defiantly at their uncomprehending faces. "You do not know what I am. if you mistake the yielding in me for weakness, you are fools for it."

Still they stared, and there was no cruelty in it, only curiosity and incomprehension. I had a longing then, so acute I felt it in the marrow of my bones, to be home, to have my feet on D’Angeline soil, where Elua trod with his Companions. "There," I said in Skaldic, reaching out to point to a crude lyre in a warrior’s hand. I didn’t know the word for it. "Your instrument. May I borrow it?"

He gave it over wordlessly, though his closest companions laughed and shouted. I bowed my head and tuned it, as my old music master had taught me, running in my head the lines of a poetic translation. I had a gift for it, Delaunay’s studies had taught me that much. When I had done, I lifted my head and looked around me. "By right of your laws, I am bond-slave to Gunter Arnlaugson," I said softly. "But by the laws of my own country, I have been betrayed and sold against my will. I am D’Angeline, and born to the soil on which Elua shed his blood. This is the song we sing when we are far from home."

I sang then The Exile’s Lament of Thelesis de Mornay, the King’s Poet. It was not written for the Skaldic tongue, which is harsh to the ear, and I had not worked properly on the translation, but the Skaldi of Gunter’s steading understood it, I think. I have said it, and it is true, that I have no great skill at song; but I am D’Angeline. I would pit the lowliest D’Angeline shepherd against the mightiest singer among the Skaldi, and wager on the shepherd each time. We are all of us, no matter how faint the thread of blood, the scions of Elua and his Companions. We are what we are.

So I sang, and put in the words as I sang them my farewell to Alcuin and Delaunay, and my promise to Joscelin Verreuil that I had not forgotten what I was, and my love for all those who yet lived, for Hyacinthe and Thelesis de Mornay and Master Tielhard, Gaspar de Trevalion, Quintilius Rousse, and Cecilie Laveau-Perrin, for the Night Court in all its faded glory, and for all that came to mind when I conjured the word, "home."

When I was done, there was silence, and then a roar of approval. Hardened warriors shook tears from their eyes, clapping and shouting for me to sing again. It was not the response I had expected; I had not reckoned, then, on the deep streak of sentimentality that runs in the Skaldi nature. They love to weep, as much as they love to fight and wager. Gunter was shouting over the din, flushed with triumph, prouder than ever of his conquest.

I shook my head and passed the lyre; I had no other tunes to hand that I could work into Skaldic, and I was wise enough to rest on these laurels. Whatever cost I had paid that night, I had gained some small advantage. Though for that, too, there would be a price. I heard it again, in the murmurs when Gunter proceeded with me from the hall, his face beaming, his hand in the small of my back as he steered me back to his room.

He was a young man, Gunter Arnlaugson, and tireless after their fashion. There was no shame among the Skaldi, and I could feel his eagerness when he brushed up behind me, his considerable phallus erect and straining at the front of his trews. It would be some time before he wearied of this. To my dismay, I felt the answering moisture begin between my own legs. I would have wept again, but my eyes, at least, were dry. I concentrated instead on the murmurs. "He would be a fool not to give her up," I heard. "Even Waldemar Selig has nothing like that."

A gift fit for princes, I went obediently toward my own personal hell.