One King's Way

Chapter Thirteen

Shef sat on a broad wooden bench which almost filled the tiny dark room, lit only by a single wick burning in a dish of whale-oil. Beneath it a covered trough of hot stones radiated heat, scorching heat that shriveled the mouth-lining and stung the nose with the stink of pine-resin from the wooden walls. He luxuriated in it, feeling the deep chill thaw from his bones. Feeling also the need for instant decisions recede. He was in others' hands now. Even Karli was no longer his responsibility. He did not know where they had taken him.

At the queen's instructions, the slave-women had pulled him away, taken off his filthy, clammy clothes. One of them had rubbed his face furiously with handfuls of snow taken from the fast-shrinking drifts outside, to prevent the frostbite that had already attacked it. Others had poured warm water over him, rubbed him with lye, scrubbed off the dirt and blood and animal fat from his hands. Dimly he had realized that they had also taken his sword, that something or other of the same kind was happening to Karli, but the sudden entry into warmth had half-stupefied him. Then they had led him into the steam-room and left him.

For a while he sat, not even sweating in the fierce heat, just letting the warmth soak through to his half-frozen marrow. Then as weariness came over him he lay back, propping his head against a wooden billet, and fell into a light, uneasy sleep.

Somewhere in the dark above him, his fate was being discussed. He heard the now-familiar rumble of mighty voices. One spoke for him, he realized, one against.

“He should have died on the ice,” said the hostile voice: cold, authoritative, unused to contradiction, the voice not only of the Father but the Ruler of gods and men.

“No-one should blame a man for saving himself,” argued the second voice: Shef knew he had heard it many times, recognized it as the voice of his patron, perhaps his father, Rig the cunning.

“He threw away the spear, the spear with my own runes on it. He denied me sacrifice. He does not follow the heroes' road.”

“The less reason, then, for taking him to you. He would not find a place in Valhalla, would not be an obedient recruit for your Einheriar.”

The first voice seemed to hesitate. “And yet… There is a cunning there. Too few of my champions have that. Maybe it is a quality I will need on the day of Ragnarök.”

“You do not need it yet. Leave him where he is, let us see where his luck takes him. He may do you service in his own fashion.” The second voice was lying, Shef knew, he could tell it by the sweet reason that dripped from its tongue. It was buying him time.

“Luck!” said the first voice, suddenly amused. “Let us see that, then. If he has a luck, it will be his own, for mine he has thrown away. And he will need powerful luck to survive the dangers of Drottningsholm. We will watch.”

The two voices drifted away in a rumble of agreement.

Shef came to himself with a start. How long had he slept? Not long, he thought. It was too hot for anyone to lie comfortably. He was sweating now, and the bench under him was damp. Time to get up and look about him. He remembered the lines of poetry he had heard from Thorvin:

Not evident to any, where un-friends sit

In every hall.

As he rose to his feet, the door of the tiny room creaked open. There was a fire lit in the room outside, and from the glow behind her, he realized that the figure standing in the doorway was the queen, Ragnhild. He could not see what she was wearing. As she came forward, closing the door, she pressed close to him.

“You have shed your jewelry, queen,” he said with a roughness in his throat. He could feel himself stirring at the woman-smell that came from her, stronger even than the pines.

“No-one can wear gold in the room of hot stones,” she replied. “It would burn. So I have shed my rings and armlets. See, even my brooch has gone.”

She caught his hands, held them to her gown, ran them down its lapels. The gown fell open. Shef's hands cupped the heavy swell of her breasts, realized she wore nothing but the one open garment. His arms went round her, his hands stroked down the long muscular slope of her back, gripped her buttocks fiercely. She pressed forward, thrusting her pelvis into him, pushing him back. The bench caught him behind the knees and he sat back with a thud.

As the sweat poured suddenly from his body, the queen straddled over him, thrust herself down on his rigid erection. For the first time since he had entered Godive two years before in the Suffolk wood, Shef felt the inner warmth of a woman's body. It was as if a spell had been released. Half-amazed at his own ability, he tore the gown aside, seized the queen by her hips, began to thrust upwards violently, still sitting.

Ragnhild laughed, steadying herself on his shoulders. “I have never known a man so active in this room,” she said. “Usually the heat makes them as slow as a gelded steer. I see that this time I shall not need the birch-twigs.”

Unknown time later, Shef walked to the outer door of the hall, opened it, peeped cautiously out. In front of him, to the east, he could see a thin line of light over the Eastfold hills far on the other side of the fjord. Ragnhild looked over his shoulder.

“Dawn,” she said. “Soon Stein and the guards will be here. You will have to hide away.”

Shef pushed the door open, let the air in on his naked body. In the last few hours he had been first frozen, then all but roasted. Now the air felt only pleasantly cool and fresh. He took deep breaths of the clear air, thought he could scent in it the green smell of grass thrusting up through the vanishing snow. Spring came late to Norway, but then plants and animals and people all made up for lost time. He felt more alive and alert than he had since his boyhood. The danger threatened in his dream was forgotten.

He turned, seized Ragnhild once again, began to push her to the floor. She resisted, laughing. “The men will be here. You are very vigorous. Have you never had your fill before? Well, I promise you—you will have it again tonight. But now we must hide you away. The girls will not talk, and the men will not look. They know better. But we must not give Halvdan any excuse for trouble later.”

She pulled Shef, still naked, away from the door.

Karli wondered where they had hidden his friend—he supposed he now had to call him, his master. He himself was lying on a straw mattress in a garret reached by a ladder through the slave-women's quarters. A small unshuttered window gave light, but he had been warned not to look out. His gashed wrist and head had been bandaged, and he was wrapped in a warm blanket.

The ladder creaked, and he reached for the sword which he had picked up when they separated him from Shef. But it was only two of the slave-women coming up together. He did not know their names: plain, brown-haired women, one his own age, one ten years older with a deep-lined face. They carried his clothes, washed clean and dried by a fire, a loaf of hard bread, a crock of ale and another of curds.

Karli sat up, grinned, reached appreciatively for the ale. “I would stand up and thank you properly, ladies,” he said. “But all I have on is this blanket, and what I have behind it might shock you.”

The young one smiled faintly, the older one shook her head. “There is not much that shocks those who live on this island,” she said.

“How is that?”

“We have other things to worry about. The queens play their games, with men and the king and the boy Harald. In the end one of them will lose, and pay the forfeit, and be carried to the grave-mound. Queen Asa has already started to put aside the things that will go in it with her, the sledge and the cart and the jewels and the fine clothes. But neither she nor Ragnhild will go alone, when they go. They will take attendants—maybe one, maybe two. I am the least valuable of those here. Maybe Asa will take me, or Ragnhild send me. Edith here is the youngest. Maybe Ragnhild will be jealous and send her.”

“Edith,” said Karli, “that is no Norse name.”

“I am English,” said the younger girl. “Martha here is a Frisian. They took her from her island in a mist. I was caught by the slavers and sold in the market at Hedeby.”

Karli stared at them. Up till then all three had spoken in Norse, the women quite fluently, Karli still uncertain. Now he changed his speech to the Ditmarsh language, related to Frisian and English, which he knew Shef could easily understand.

“Did you know that my friend and I are not Norsemen either? He is a king in England. But they say he was once a thrall, like you. And they tried to sell him in Hedeby only weeks ago.”

“Tried?”

“He knocked the man who said he was his master down, and threatened to sell him instead. A good joke, and not a bad punch. But listen—I know my friend, and I know he has no love for slavers. When we get back to our friends, shall I ask him to buy you from the queens here? He would do it if he knew you were English, Edith, and he would take Martha too.”

“You aren't going to get back to your friends,” said Martha flatly. “We hear a lot. Queen Ragnhild fears your friend. She thinks he may take the place she means for her son. She meant to kill you both last night. Now she means to drain your friend's manhood, get a child from him, in case his blood is the one destined for rule. Once she has that child in her belly, your friend will find the henbane in his porridge. And you too.”

Karli looked uncertainly at the loaf he had been gnawing.

“No,” the woman went on, “you are safe yet. As safe as we are. Till she has got what she wants.”

“And how long will that take?”

Martha laughed for the first time, a short and mirthless bark. “Putting a child in a woman's belly? You are a man, you should know. As long as it takes to walk a mile? Less, with most of you.”

“More with me,” muttered Karli. His hand had strayed automatically and unresisted to Edith's knee.

Valgrim the Wise looked carefully at the dripping spear, its steel head already showing rust. He spelled out the runes on its iron shaft.

“Where did you find this?” he asked.

“On the shore of Drottningsholm,” said Stein, the guardsman. “When we went back on to the island this morning, as usual, I sent men to round up the dogs as we always do. They couldn't find them, and the queen Ragnhild told me she had been disturbed by their howling and sent her maids out to bring them in. When I asked more, she flew into a rage and told me to get out before she had my ears cut off. I guessed something was wrong and sent out a guard-boat to row along the shore, now the ice has gone. They found this.”

“Floating?”

“No, the head's too heavy. They said it was close to the shore, in about three feet of water. The head was lodged on the bottom, but the shaft was still bobbing about.”

“What do you think it means?”

“They could have drowned on the rotten ice,” suggested Stein. “It all went quite suddenly early last night, when the rain came on.”

“But you don't think so?”

“It's the dogs,” said Stein. “There's something fishy there, and Ragnhild is hiding something.”

“Maybe a man?”

“Probably a man.”

Both heads turned to the third man in the room, the remote unbending figure of King Olaf.

“This seems to affect the good name of your family,” said Valgrim, a trifle uncertainly.

The king smiled. “What you are thinking is that it is also a good test of luck. If King Shef was on the rotten ice last night, and survived, that was one test passed. If he got past the wolfhounds, that was another. You want me to set him a third?”

“Third time pays for all,” said Stein.

“I agree. A third test it is, and then no more, from me or from you. Agreed.”

Valgrim nodded, reluctantly, eyes full of calculation.

“Then I will send word to my brother that there is reason to think things amiss on Drottningsholm. I have never done that before, and he knows I would not do it lightly. So he will believe me and give permission for a thorough search of the island and every building in it, from end to end. You must think how you would make it, Stein. And if intruders are found there, hiding, then they must go to the king's justice. It will be heavy, when he thinks the good name of his son Harald is concerned.

“Till then, Stein, you had better double the guards on the bridges, both from Drottningsholm to the second island, and from that to the third and to the mainland. A bold man could swim between the islands too, so have your guard-boats out between them. I need not tell you to make sure there is no boat a man could steal.

“If this is to be a test, it is in your hands to make sure it is a strict one. Do not come to me afterwards and say, this was no fair test, any man might have escaped. You must make sure that the only escape is by Völund's path, through the air! Then if King Shef escapes, we will know that Völund he is, in whatever shape.”

Stein and Valgrim nodded again.

“And no word to his friends,” added Valgrim. Out of the window of the high room where they sat, he could see Thorvin walking across the college precinct, Brand at his side. Both men looked deeply anxious.

“No word to his friends,” Olaf agreed. “I will play fair on this one, Valgrim. See you do too. Otherwise it is no test of king's luck.”

As he turned and went out, Valgrim and Stein looked at each other.

“He said make it a strict test,” said Stein. “I could make it a little stricter than he plans.”

“Do that,” said Valgrim, looking again at the ‘Gungnir’ runes on the spear he still held. “No strictness is too harsh for the man who pretends to come from All-father.”

“And if his luck does prove stronger?”

Valgrim hefted the spear, shook it like a man about to strike. “I think it has left him already. I hated him for aping my master Othin. I hate him more now he has thrown away my master's token.”

From the shadows of the great hall, Karli watched his friend-and-master musingly. All the signs, he thought. I should have realized earlier.

Almost from the moment of their first meeting—certainly from the first time they had talked together—Karli had unconsciously assumed that Shef was the elder of the two, the wiser, the more widely-traveled, the more weapon-skilled. It had given Karli no sense of inferiority. His own animal spirits were too strong for that, and he remained unshakably confident in his own ability to knock any man down with his fists, and bed, if not any woman, at least any woman reasonably good-humored. He did not feel inferior to Shef. But he had assumed that Shef knew as much as he did.

A mistake. He should have realized that where women were concerned, this tall warrior with the scars and the mighty friends was no more than a boy. He was behaving like a boy now. A boy who has met his first woman. What he had been doing with Queen Ragnhild all day, Karli did not know, but now night had fallen and the guards had been withdrawn he still could not take eye or hand off her. As he spooned the strong salt stew into his mouth, his left hand lay on the queen's bare arm, lightly stroking it. Every time she spoke he leaned close to her mouth, laughed, took every chance to touch her again. Karli had heard stories of witches who sucked away a man's manhood. In his experience there was no need of witchcraft. Sexual skill, consciously exercised, worked on any man—the first time anyway. Once you realized there were more fish in the sea than ever came out of it, you might be protected. But Shef did not know that yet. And there was no way of telling him. When Karli had approached him after being freed from the garret, Shef had been pleased to see him, but vague, reluctant to talk or plan or even think about what had happened. He was slit-struck.

It was up to him, then. Karli had no doubt that for all the warmth and the food and the careful attention, he and Shef were in greater danger than they had been on the ice. What Edith and Martha and their two friends had told him had chilled him deeply. Shef was against slavery because he had been threatened with being a slave. Karli was against it because he had no experience of it. In the uncivilized and poverty-stricken Ditmarsh there was neither room nor work for slaves. They might sell shipwrecked strangers to other strangers, but they kept no thralls themselves. The constant fear under which a thrall like Edith or Martha lived was a new thought to him.

And fear made people good listeners. Their lives depended on knowing what might happen and taking the few pitiful precautions open to them. So Martha not only bore with the contempt and bullying she received from the Norwegian female housekeeper who came in with the guards each morning and left with them each night. She encouraged it, making mistakes to provoke a beating and a flood of words. What the massive Vigdis had said after Martha dropped the pan was that a time was coming for idle sluts. Aye, and maybe not them alone. Why else the doubled guards? And don't think to swim off like the spineless eel your father. The men have brought up boats to the channel between each island. When the king comes we'll see who's useful enough to let live and who is fit only for howe-bridal.

Vigdis obviously did not know what the guards were for, and thought it some royal intrigue: maybe King Halvdan tired of his mother waiting to die, or of his wife and her independence. But the slave-women knew better. The dogs, they said. Men coming round to look in their pens, ask where the others were, why they had not all come home, why they could not be heard baying if they were still loose somewhere on the island. We cleared up the bodies before first light, Edith had said, and the rain washed away the blood, but in the soft ground it would not take a tracker to see that people had been doing something.

A night or two's grace, thought Karli, still watching Ragnhild and Shef, the sour queen Asa sitting glaring at both across the table. I know. The slave-women know.

Shef will not listen. And Vigdis has not told the queens. Well, one thing is for sure. They will not notice if I am not there. Quietly he went through the door to the little cramped room where the slave-attendants waited.

“Have you thought what to do?” whispered Edith.

Karli squeezed her hip. “I am a Ditmarsher,” he said. “I know something about water. I need to build a”—he hesitated for the right word—“a boat?”

“There are no boats on the island. No planks, no tools. It would take weeks to fell trees. And anyway, they would hear you!”

“I don't mean a boat like that,” said Karli. “I mean”—he turned to the Frisian woman Martha—“we call it a punt.”

“For the duck-hunters,” said Martha, nodding. “But what do you need to make that?”

Hours later Karli bent sweating over the contraption he had put together on the island's seaward shore, furthest removed from the guard-posts. Its flat bottom was simply a door. There had only been one whose absence would not be immediately noticed the next day—the one that led to the slave-women's stinking latrine. Probably neither the guards nor the queens knew such a place existed, let alone whether it had a door or not. Karli had lifted it bodily off its hinges and carried it out. He could have stood on that alone and poled himself along if he had been able to keep to shallow water. But he knew he would have to do better than that, make a seaward circle before he ran in to the shore. He needed a place to stand if he was not to be tipped off by every wave. And something like a bow to cut the water. Done with no tools and no noise.

Slowly and clumsily he had cut away one edge of the door with his sword, sharp but not serrated. Iron skewers from the kitchen had nailed down billets of firewood toward the stern, hammered in with a flat stone muffled by layers of cloth. On top of that he had fixed a flat wooden tray with four nails worked loose with his fingers and pulled stealthily out of the ornate wooden planking at the rear of the hall. Finally, growing impatient and trusting to luck that the damage would not be seen next morning, he had pulled away one strake of planking low down to the ground, snapped it over his knee. He was trying now to drive three more nails through the planking into the cut-away edge of the door, to make a bluff, square bow. Once it was done he would have a makeshift imitation of the craft the Ditmarsh fowlers steered through their everlasting bogs. He would neither row nor pole it, but scull it over the stern with a single oar—snapped planking again, wedged into a split fir-branch. It would do, if the water stayed calm. If no-one picked him out from a guard-boat close in, or one of the king's giant coastal patrol warships further out. If he met no creature of the deep.

At the last thought Karli's hair bristled. Deep within himself, he knew he was afraid. Not of water, not of men. He and the English catapult-men had idled away too many hours telling each other monster-stories, and passing on those they had heard from the Vikings. In his own land Karli feared the fen-thurses. The English feared boggarts, hags, and groundles. The Vikings told stories of all of them, and stranger creatures still, skoffins and nixes and marbendills and skerry-trolls. Who knew what might not be met, out at sea, in the dark? All it would take would be a gray-haired hand reaching up and seizing an ankle as he sculled six inches above the water. Then the things would feast at the sea-bottom.

Karli shook himself, drove home the last nail with a flat stone, straightened up.

The voice in his ear murmured, “Going fishing?”

Frightened already, Karli leapt straight over his punt, turned in the air, came down braced for flight, gaping to see what threat had crept up on him. Almost, he relaxed when he saw the amused, contemptuous face of Stein the guard-captain, standing there fully-armed but thumbs still hooked in his belt.

“Surprised to see me?” suggested Stein. “Thought I wouldn't be back till morning? Well, I thought a little extra care wouldn't hurt. After all, if men aren't allowed on Drottningsholm after dark, nor are you. Eh?

“Now tell me, short-legs, where's your taller friend? Stallioning away up at the hall? He'll lose more than an eye when we hand him over to King Halvdan. Do you want to go along with him?”

The sword Shef had retempered for Karli still lay on the ground where he had been using it. Karli lunged forward, seized its hilt, straightened up. The shock had worn off. No hag from the deep. Just a man. On his own, seemingly. With helmet and mail, but no shield.

Stein dropped a hand to his own sword-hilt, drew and stepped round the boat. Karli was no dwarf, but Stein out-topped him by head and shoulders, outweighed him by fifty pounds. How fast was he? Plenty of farmers' sons in Viking armies, Shef had said.

Karli cocked his elbow and threw his weight into a forehand slash, not at the head, too easy to duck, but at the point where neck met shoulder, as Shef had taught him.

Stein saw the beginnings of the movement, knew before the sword was drawn back where the blow was aimed, where it would fall. He had time to tap his foot once before his riposte. In one movement he turned his own sword in his hand, drove the base of his blade in a short chord to intersect the longer arc of Karli's blow. The blades clanged once. Karli's shot into the air, knocked from his grasp. A twist of the wrist, Stein's point rested in the hollow of Karli's throat.

Not one of the farmers' sons, then, Karli thought sickly. Stein's face creased with disgust. He dropped the point to the ground.

“It's not the skin that makes the bear,” he remarked. “Nor the sword the warrior. All right, you little freckle-faced bastard, talk or I'll cut you up for bait.”

He bent forward, thrusting his chin out and up. Karli's feet shuffled from the fencing position he had taken to the one that came naturally to him. He shrugged a left hand feint out of habit and swung instantly with the right hook to the side of the jaw.

This time Stein's decades-drilled reflexes failed him completely. The blow caught him standing flat and still. As he straightened his sword for the killing counter-stroke, another blow snapped his head back and a third from six inches' range crashed into his temple. As he slumped forward Karli side-stepped and swung a hand-edge chop at the back of his neck: illegal in the Ditmarsh ring, but not against husbands or rivals met at night. The veteran sprawled his six foot four full-length at Karli's feet.

Out of the shadows came Martha, the middle-aged slave-woman. Terror stood in her eyes as she saw the lying man.

“I came to see if you were gone. That is Stein the captain. It is the first time he has ever come spying at night. They must know you are here! Is he dead?”

Karli shook his head. “Help me to tie him before he comes round.”

“Tie him? Are you mad? We cannot guard him for ever, or keep him silent.”

“Well… What are we going to do with him?”

“Cut his throat, of course. Do it now, quickly. Put his body on your boat and roll it off in the water. It will be days before he is found.”

Karli retrieved his sword, stared at the unconscious man. “But I've never killed anyone. He's… He's done me no harm.”

Martha's face set, she stepped forward, bent over the man now starting to push himself up from the ground. She snatched the short knife from the sheath he carried on his belt, felt its edge for a moment, hurled the helmet aside and pulled his head back by the hair. Reached forward and round, drove the point in deep under the left ear. Dragged it round in a deep, slicing semi-circle. Blood spouted from the severed arteries, Stein cried out, his voice coming as an expiring whistle from the great hole in his windpipe.

Martha released his head, let the body fall forward, wiped the knife automatically on her filthy apron. “You men,” she said. “It's just like killing a pig. Only pigs don't steal other pigs from their homes. Don't bury them alive. He'd done you no harm! How much have he and his like done me? Me and my kind?

“Don't just stand there, man! Be off with you. And take this carcass with you. If you are not back within two days we'll all go to join him. Wherever he's gone.”

She turned and fled into the darkness once more. Karli, his throat dry, queasily began to drag his clumsy craft into the shallow water and then to load the dead weight on it.