Captive Of The Viking

Looking back on this, as she did many times, it was more like a dream than reality to step down into the wide belly of this monster and to feel the instant rocking motion as men moved about, many of whom would take over the oars as the first rowers tired. The deck thudded and vibrated beneath their feet as she and Haesel were hustled past them to a slightly raised platform in the vee-shaped prow where they would be out of the way. A kind of shelter had been erected for them from a heavy double-thickness wool smeared with tar and foul-smelling fat to resist the water, stretched across the space. Open at the front, this gave them a view of the rowers’ backs, though the men were denied the luxury afforded to the two passengers of a pile of furs to sit on. So far, they could not grumble about the comfort, but the strong winds of Haesel’s vision were not very far from their minds as they sat cross-legged and subdued, aware of the utter helplessness of their predicament. Fearn placed her arms around her maid, who was visibly shaking and close to tears. It was a new experience for her, too, as were the stares of men who had not seen their wives for two years. ‘Where are they taking us?’ she whispered, clinging like a limpet.

‘To Denmark, eventually,’ said Fearn, ‘but first they’ll have to row down the river to reach the sea. Don’t ask me how far, how long. I have no idea. They’ll want to keep us alive, though, or we’re no use to them.’

‘What use?’ whispered Haesel.

Fearn merely sighed. They wriggled into the furs and watched the wharf move away, taking the crowd of Jorvik men off into the distance along with the thatched rooftops, the outline of St. Peter’s church and the few territorial dogs that yapped at the longships with dipping oars like the legs of a centipede. They felt the powerful rhythmic lurch as the oarsmen pulled in unison and heard through the oak timbers the rush of water. They noticed the change of smell as they moved through the smoky fug of the city, then the appearance of alder and willow along the banks, the affronted squawk of ducks protecting their new downy progeny.

The oar master shouted a command and immediately the oars were suspended over the water as the acrid smell of smouldering thatch and mud walls reached their nostrils, just before the devastation came into view. A blackened ruined village sent clouds of grey ash into the evening sky, slowly passing them by, peopled only by a few miserable owners who rooted about for possessions or burnt remains of food. In a moment, Fearn was at the side of the ship leaning out to see if there was anyone she recognised, shading her eyes against the glare of the water, but unable to offer them the slightest comfort.

‘Sit down!’ The unmistakable sound of Aric’s deep voice was not to be argued with.

She turned to him, her face reflecting her anguish. ‘I know those people,’ she said. ‘You’ve destroyed their houses and taken their food. How will they live?’

‘That’s their problem,’ he said, callously. ‘My problem was to feed my men. I solved it. So will they—one way or another. Now sit down. We shall be stopping as soon as the light goes, then we’ll eat and move on again at dawn.’

She would like to have told him to keep his food, stolen property, but realised that she had not eaten since morning. Much as she rebelled at the thought of eating the villagers’ food, she hoped they would forgive her for it, for Haesel’s sight had not suggested that they, too, were in danger of starving. She also knew that there was some truth in Aric’s uncaring words that, one way or another, they would find something to eat from the hedgerows or in Jorvik itself, where kindly people would help them to rebuild.

Watching him walk through his men to the other end of the ship, she could not help another comparison of the Jarl to the wretch who had been her husband, who had shamefully betrayed her foster father’s trust by abusing a woman who was fleeing from the very danger he was meant to be assessing. By association, she felt tainted by his baseness. People would point to her as the wife of a rapist who, to all women, was the lowest of the low. Perhaps it was as well, she thought, that she would be out of sight for a year, especially of the Lady Hilda and Catla who would never believe the worst of her son. But what would that year be like in the company of this man who appeared to get whatever he wanted?

* * *

The same question, by coincidence, was occupying the mind of the man himself as he joined his two most trusted companions. Oskar, a year older than Aric and as experienced in warfare, was from Lindholm where his young wife and infant son waited for his return. As he smiled at the wound on Aric’s thumb, his comment was typically unsympathetic. ‘Fought you, did she? Lovely set of tooth-marks, though. Quite a trophy.’

Aric looked at it, huffing with annoyance that he was the only man to have been injured and then by a woman. ‘Still bleeding like a stuck pig,’ he muttered. ‘I must have lost my wits, Oskar. I was supposed to have brought the lad away. I can imagine what they’ll have to say when I get home with that one in tow.’

Oskar’s grin widened. ‘Probably send you back to get him. Come over here. I’ll bind it up for you before we stop for the night. We don’t want your blood on the bread.’ No ship ever set off on this kind of expedition without being prepared for wounds of some sort, so now linen strips were torn and wrapped round the honey-smeared wound over which had been laid a pad of moss, while Aric was treated to the banter of Oskar and the other companion, Hrolf, who was curious to know what he proposed to do with the captive woman and her maid. ‘We could have used the lad,’ he said, reasonably, ‘and you know how some of the men feel about having women on board.’

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with them yet,’ Aric said, irritably, ‘but I don’t need your suggestions, either. We have to join forces with Swein in Lundenburh before we set off for home, so we’ll see what he has to say.’

‘And if he forbids it, we throw them overboard, yes?’ said Hrolf.

‘Fool,’ said Aric. ‘Let’s concentrate on finding somewhere to stop.’

Oskar winked at Hrolf. ‘So where will the next bite-marks appear, I wonder?’

In other circumstances, Aric would have welcomed the suggestions of his companions about how they might deal with a problem. But not this time. He had acted on some powerful impulse when he had adopted the Moneyer’s proposition of an alternative to taking his nephew. The woman had filled his mind since his first sight of her that day, not only for her stunning beauty but her courage, too, for she had suspected her husband’s death well before it had been spoken of. It had taken some guts for her to challenge him so cleverly while filling his drinking horn, hoping he would spill it like a pool of blood on the table, then to keep the knowledge to herself until the right moment. Without a doubt she was certainly a cut above the other two whose shrieking had filled the hall, but from whose line did she derive her strange eye colour? And how much of her fierceness was the by-product of being abandoned by her parents and brought up by women who wanted none of her? She had naturally expected the Earl to put up a fight to keep her with him and so had he, but Thored had seen greater value in the boy, caring little for her distress. He, Aric, had acknowledged Kean’s plea to look after her, but in truth he did not know how he would do this when revenge was his motivation for the life of the sister he had lost to the Earl. And as chance would have it, it was the Lady Fearn’s husband who had been killed that day, albeit in quite different circumstances. So now he would keep her in thrall to him for the year of her mourning. A just revenge for the death of his sister.

Now, he himself must strive not to be spellbound by her looks, as he was in danger of being, unless he armed himself against her. Still, she would not be in a hurry to let a man near her after her experience of marriage, for it was obvious that she had been in fear of the man she had lost. The recent memory of holding her close to him, struggling and screaming, was both sweet and bitter, for if he thought to damage her by this thraldom, he must recognise that she was already suffering from the Earl’s handling of her life, so far.

* * *

On a wide stretch of the river, the four longships were anchored and lashed together side by side so that the men could come and go across them, share the food and ale, and keep a lookout for danger. The marshland on both sides made this unlikely. The morning raids on the villages had provided them with a plentiful supply of bread and sides of cured bacon, cheeses, eggs eaten raw, honey and apples, oatcakes and a churn half-filled with newly made butter. Since they had eaten very little for the last two days but dried fish and stale bread, the meal lasted well into the night, most of the ale being taken, so the men laughingly told them, from the houses of the priests.

Privacy was not easy to come by for the two passengers, but nor had it ever been, even at home. So when food was brought to them as night fell and lanterns were lit, Haesel hung an extra piece of oiled wool across the opening to give at least the appearance of seclusion while they drank buttermilk with their food and listened to the noisy eating of the Vikings whose table manners, it had to be said, were little different from those of the Jorvik men. Later, as they lay between the furs, neither of them feared much for their safety while Jarl Aric and his two companions were just beyond the makeshift curtain, but Fearn thought it more than a little odd that their captor had spoken no word to her, not even to ask after her welfare. Perhaps, as he’d said, her likes did not concern him.

Escape being out of the question with so many bodies around and icy water on all sides, they listened to the rush of the river on the other side of the oak hull and felt the gentle movement of the ships as they bent and creaked together. Before Fearn’s eyes closed, she watched the glow of lanterns through gaps in the wool curtain and the movement of men adjusting ropes and stowing baggage beneath the slatted deck. Then, as an owl hooted to its mate across the river, she whispered a prayer of thanks for her safety and for a night of freedom from harassment. For how long this freedom would last she did not dare to speculate, for she believed she might have gained it at a very high price.

Naturally, an element of guilt crept into her prayers, for wives did not usually express relief at their husbands’ deaths. She tried to alleviate the dark thoughts by searching her mind for Barda’s merits, but found nothing to recommend him. Earl Thored had insisted on their marriage and, in the end, her objections had been overruled. Now the situation had worsened, if that were possible, since the arrogant Dane had referred, not too obliquely, to her probable fate. After which, she would no doubt be obliged to redirect her life yet again.

As she had searched her mind, so she did with the Dane and found, to her interest, that his concern for her comfort had, in one day, exceeded Barda’s of two whole years. He had returned her knife to her and the beaver cloak, ordered a horse for her to ride and furs for her to sit on. She fell asleep while thinking of the gold embroidery around the neck of his tunic, wondering whose hands had worked it.

* * *

She woke as Haesel parted the curtain, holding a wooden bucket of river water in which to wash. From the deck came sounds of shouts and yelps, then the lurch of the ship as men leapt over the side or hauled themselves back in, slopping the water in the bucket. Haesel’s cheeks were pink with embarrassment. ‘They’re jumping into the river,’ she said, ‘naked as the day they were born. There’s wet everywhere.’

‘Swimming, you mean?’

‘Washing. It must be freezing.’

The water in the bucket certainly was, but Fearn managed well enough to wash and tidy herself, combing her hair with her antler comb, one of the many and varied contents of the leather bag that Haesel had packed in advance. The Moneyer’s wife had also added things, like Fearn’s golden crucifix given to her by the priest when she was baptised. He had taught her to read and write in Latin, too. She found her sewing tools, as well as the tablet-weaving she’d been working on, carefully rolled to keep it from tangling. Her wax-tablet book and stylus was also in there, a detail that Fearn found touching. Now she would be able to make notes.

With her hair plaited and braided with green wool, she broke her fast on cold porridge with buttermilk and honey. The kindly quartermaster had sent two pears for them, so rather than ask where they’d come from, Fearn ate hers with gratitude before venturing out to see what was happening. Standing with his glistening bare back to her was Aric, his wet pigtail dripping between his shoulderblades, his dark linen loincloth sticking to him like a second skin over slender hips, with droplets of sparkling water dripping into a pool around his bare feet. His calves and thighs were as taut and hard as polished oak.

He turned as she emerged and stood upright, waiting as she usually did for a person to decide which eye to speak to. His mouth opened and closed, and then, to give himself time, he hitched up the wet cloth and tightened it. ‘Ah, Lady Fearn,’ he said, holding out his bandaged hand. ‘Perhaps you could rebind this for me?’

She looked at it with distaste. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, calmly, ‘since it was of my doing. Do we have dry linen?’

Holding his hand in the air, he called to the far end of the ship, ‘Oskar! Bandage!’

Her eyes wandered over the shipload of half-naked men slithering about in various stages of undress, laughing and tousled, some of them combing wet hair and beards. Yet her gaze was held, rather against her wishes, by the man before her whose sun-bronzed skin rippled over bulging muscle and sinew, over powerful shoulders and a chest like those men singled out for their wrestling skills for Jorvik’s entertainment. He saw where her eyes went before they locked with his. ‘Well?’ he said, quietly.

She blinked. ‘Hold your hand out,’ she retorted. ‘I need to take this one off.’

Bantering shouts diverted his attention as she began to unwind the soggy linen. ‘Are you coming in to bathe with us, lady?’ they called. ‘We’ve warmed the water for you.’

Aric grinned. ‘Enough!’ he called. ‘We man the oars at a count of two hundred.’

‘Hah!’ said Oskar, holding out the linen strips. ‘Which of them can count to two hundred?’

Fearn took them from him, flicking a haughty eyebrow. ‘Twenty counts of ten?’ she murmured. ‘Yes, it’s healing. I don’t need the moss, just the honey. Hold still. It won’t hurt.’

The two men exchanged grins, appreciating their beautiful captive’s attempt to patronise them in retaliation for her plight, taking the advantage the bandaging offered to watch her hands skilfully tending the row of punctures on his skin. They noted her graceful figure braced against the rocking of the ship and took time to admire the smooth honeyed complexion and the long sweep of black eyelashes on her cheeks. They had time to see the swell of her perfect breasts beneath the linen and wool, and the neat waist tied with a narrow leather girdle. A leather purse hung from this beside the knife in its fur-lined sheath and a rope of beads hung from her neck at the centre of which was a large chunk of cloudy amber, nestling into the valley of her breasts. Just for a moment, the two men would both like to have been that piece of amber.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Try not to wet it. It will heal faster if it’s kept dry.’

Aric turned his hand over and over, then nodded his thanks. But Fearn had already turned away to help Haesel fold the skins and furs, pretending not to have seen. She did not hear Oskar’s flippant question asking if Aric thought she might bite him some time, but Aric was not as amused as his friend had expected. ‘It was not done in play,’ he said, pressing the wound. ‘Far from it. If she’d done this to her lout of a husband, he’d have knocked her down.’

‘Well, so do many men when their women step out of line,’ Oskar said.

‘Do you?’

‘Hit Ailsa? No. Never had to.’

‘No man has to, Oskar. There are better ways than that to deal with women.’ There was a tone in Aric’s voice that his friend had not heard before, that made him wonder if Aric was telling the whole truth when yesterday he’d said that he didn’t yet know what he was going to do with her. Was revenge his only motive? Oskar thought not.

Chapter Three

The Earl had been right when he’d said how the Vikings’ ships moved fast, for now there was a sense of urgency as the rowers took turns to man the oars, thirty-two at a time, speeding through the water with the current to help them. Time and again they passed burnt-out villages, still smouldering, some no more than heaps of charred wood and ash, earning no more than a brief comment from the men who watched impassively. Fearn and Haesel felt the despair and anger of the villagers who saw the ships pass by, who dared not call out for fear they would stop again. At any other time, in happier circumstances, the two women would have enjoyed the sight of swans and their cygnets, the wide stretches of flat countryside in its new greens, the great expanse of sky, the green-brown water rushing past the oars. Now, they sat close together in silence, always aware of the men’s bare backs straining with the effort, their grunts of exertion, the hostile situation of being stolen by Danish Vikings who were under no obligation to be on their best behaviour. The women were no strangers to the crude expressions men used, their oaths and unrestrained humour, but as the Earl’s foster daughter, lack of respect had never been an issue. Here, as comments flew backwards and forwards between the Danes, usually followed by a laugh of sorts, Fearn suspected that their vernacular phrases alluded to women and particularly to them. The fact that this stopped when Aric the Ruthless passed by seemed to confirm her suspicions and, although it should not have concerned her too much, it did nothing to alleviate her sense of total helplessness.

Apart from access to ale whenever they wanted it, there was no stopping for food until the sun almost touched the horizon. Then, as the river widened considerably between sand dunes and scrubby woodland, they came to an island where oars were lifted out of the water and men leapt over the sides to haul the ships halfway up on to the sand. Assuming that the deck would remain at the same angle as it was before, Fearn and Haesel were quite unprepared for it to tip to one side, tumbling them out in a sudden lurch on to their fronts, half in and half out on to tufts of coarse grass and clumps of prickly sea holly. Unhurt, but by no means as amused as the men, Fearn controlled the temptation to make a fuss. Gathering herself together, she reached out for her golden circlet lying in the sand just beyond her reach, but not before it was snatched up by one laughing young man who set it upon his own brow, challenging Fearn to retrieve it.

Remembering Aric’s threat to deprive her of her knife if she should draw it on one of his men, she deliberately rested her hand on its hilt. ‘Give that back,’ she said. Without it, her veil had slipped down around her neck, revealing the shining black hair and the thick plait hanging over her breast, and she saw that the young man was making the most of her threat by responding to the men’s jeers, hoping she would be goaded into action. He came closer, grinning, yet he was obviously unsettled by seeing for the first time that her eyes were not of the same colour.

Fearn saw his eyes shift, as men’s often did, then she deliberately let her gaze flicker over his shoulder as if she had seen Aric approach. In that moment, as the man’s attention was distracted, she darted forward to snatch her circlet off his head, whipping out her knife as she did so to warn him not to retaliate.

Hearing the hoots of derision and seeing the crowd of men shirking their duties, Aric barged his way through them to seize the offender by his hair, pull him backwards, and to kick into the back of his knee. The man landed with a thud, but just as quickly sprang to his feet, none the worse and bearing no grudge.

Aric snarled at him. ‘Fool!’ he said, pointing to Fearn. ‘Don’t underestimate our passenger.’ Holding his bandaged hand under the man’s nose, he waited for the realisation to dawn in his eyes, before the man nodded. ‘Get to work, all of you, or it’ll be dark before we eat,’ Aric barked.

Fearn and Haesel dusted the sand and sea holly off their gowns, righting their veils and, in Fearn’s case, sheathing her knife. She held a protective hand over it, half-expecting confiscation. ‘Self-defence,’ she said.

‘Stay by the ship,’ he said. ‘Bring your rugs and furs out here. We shall be making camp on the island.’

‘My maid and I need to go...’ She pointed to the low gorse bushes and stunted trees making a dense thicket behind them. ‘In there. We need privacy.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Make a shelter and do what you have to do here.’

‘With those louts gawping at us?’

‘Get on with it, woman. There are ships between you and them. I’ll have your food sent as soon as it’s ready.’

With little option but to do as they’d been told, they made the best of the situation, erecting a makeshift hide between the prow of the ship and a young willow that gave them some shelter from the salt-tasting sea breeze. They need not have been concerned about the men’s interest, for now all hands were needed to light fires and to prepare food, cooked on spits and in pots with enough noise to make whispering unnecessary. ‘Haesel,’ Fearn said, ‘I’m going to creep up alongside the ship and take a look at where we are. I believe the other channel between the island and the shore is much narrower than this side. It’ll be shallower, too.’

‘You should wait, lady,’ Haesel said. ‘If you mean for us to escape, we should wait until we’ve been fed. Then they’ll settle down and darkness will hide us.’

‘You’re right. Look, here comes our food, at last.’

The young man who approached using an upturned shield as a tray carried a lantern, bread, baked fish, a stew of chicken and barley, a jug of wine and an apple each. As he was the same man who had teased Fearn, his manner had now changed to something between respectful and apologetic. This woman had actually managed to injure his leader. Asking if there was anything else the lady required while avoiding her eyes with his, he made a hesitant bow and left, while Fearn and Haesel tried hard to contain their laughter at the sudden change in his attitude. That unexpected lightness of heart and the possibility of an escape into the night gave them an appetite for everything set before them, even the wine. The custom of Danes to drink milk with fish was, unsurprisingly, not being observed, and although Haesel had never tasted more than a mouthful of wine and Fearn only rarely, the last of the jug’s contents was used to soak up the last crusts of bread.

Haesel yawned, loudly. ‘Should be getting...er...packing ready,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Packing. Put your knife away...no...wipe it first! Are we going soon?’

‘Yes, s’pose so.’ Fearn stood up, wobbled and took a step forward, then sat down again rather heavily. ‘Yes, course we are. What can we carry?’ She caught Haesel’s yawn as she spoke.

Not too successfully, Haesel was trying to clear away all signs of the meal, paying no attention to the young man when he returned to remove the few vessels from her hands and silently depart. Rolling up a woollen rug, she tossed it over to Fearn who, instead of catching it, keeled over sideways to lay her head upon it, her eyes already closed. The wine had done more to Haesel than send her to sleep, for in the next moment, she was stumbling over to the water’s edge to rid her stomach of its contents. Then, staggering back to the untidy pile of furs, she collapsed on the edge, groaned, and lost consciousness. Unused to wine, it had gone straight to their heads.

As the tide of the estuary receded, it was the gentle rushing lap of water that reminded Fearn where she was in that bleary state of half-sleep when the blackness of night hid everything from them. Vaguely, she wondered how it was that warm furs now covered her, wondering, too, about the something else she had been going to do and why could she now feel Barda’s length at her back? Barda?