Just then a wave hit the ship, causing the boat to list a bit before righting itself, but in the process she and Arnis were soaked. Arnis didn’t seem to mind being wet from neck to toe, but she was beginning to shiver, being now not only cold to the bone but wet as well.
Did Arnis notice her discomfort?
No. He was staring at her shabby gown, which was molded to her breasts and hips and legs. Glancing downward, she saw that her cold nipples were standing out prominently.
“Yea, Brandr is going to be very pleased,” Arnis said just before walking off.
“Pervert!” she muttered, then shouted to his back, “Hey, I’m freezing here. Unless you want to deliver a frozen corpse to this berserk brother of yours, you better untie me and let me huddle under a blanket somewhere.
Instead of doing as she asked, he stomped back a short time later with a huge white fur, which he wrapped around her twice. The thing still had a head on it.
“What is this fur?”
“Polar bear.”
“Are you crazy? Polar bears are an endangered species.”
“Wouldst rather freeze to death?” When she just glared at him, he said, “I thought not.”
And so it went for the next five days. Although her rope restraints had been removed, she continually argued with anyone within hearing, mostly the thickheaded Arnis but also with his brother Erland, who was equally thickheaded.
At one point when both of them stomped over to say that their sailors were complaining about her constant “blathering,” she said, “I wouldn’t need to ‘blather’ if you two idiots would listen to me. This is a huge mistake. I am not intended to be here. Whether you are reenactors or part of a primitive tribe that managed to escape civilization, I’m supposed to be on a live op to capture some Arab terrorists. And if you don’t let me go, all hell is going to break loose.”
Instead of heeding her words, Arnis remarked to Erland, loud enough for her to overhear, “Dost recall what Ivan did to his wife Signe when she nagged overmuch?”
“Yea. He sliced off her tongue and fed it to the hounds in his great hall.”
“Yeech!” she contributed, even though they were probably kidding.
“A sad case indeed,” Arnis said on a fake sigh. “But the blessed peace that abounded after that was well worth the bloody mess.”
They were traveling down some narrow fjord now. Well, narrow compared to the open sea they’d been on before. Igorssfjord was actually as wide as a football field. It had begun to snow this morning and was so darn cold the water-way was beginning to ice up on the sides and on the oars, which had to be continually banged against the sides of the ships to free the buildup. That’s all she would need . . . to be ice-locked in some godforsaken country. They were so far north it could be the North Pole, for all she knew. All anyone would tell her was that it was the Norselands. Like that made anything clear.
Where am I?
And why?
“Bear’s Lair!” someone shouted from high up on the mast pole. “Home at last!”
“Home,” Joy murmured to herself. Landfall, at last. After this past grueling week, she wondered if she would ever see home again. Or would this be her new home?
What every good Viking needs is Joy . . .
At the end of another long, hard day, made harder by the snow, which was coming down steadily, and his worry over his brothers’ return, which could be forestalled for the winter once the fjords froze over, Brandr decided to relax in the steam house. It was empty this late in the day, a blessing when he needed quiet to contemplate his choices.
Should he sail out and search for his brothers? After all, they might be in trouble.
Or should he wait and trust in their dubious abilities? With the loud blare of a horn, immediately followed by another, the choice was taken out of his hands. These were the signals of two ships approaching. It had to be Erland and Arnis.
Please, gods!
Almost immediately following the horn blaring, a smiling Tork opened the door. “They’re home.”
“Thank the gods. Tell Kelda to prepare a feast and order all the housemaids to help. Send everyone else down to the wharf to help the ships unload. We will be snow-buried afore morn. The animals must be stabled immediately, assuming the wooly-wits purchased milch cows and goats. And chickens. The coops are ready, are they not?”
Tork nodded, a huge smile on his face. He was no doubt thinking of the women who might be aboard. Hopefully a comely lass to warm his bed furs this night.
Brandr would not turn away a good swiving himself. Alone again, Brandr took his time scrubbing the dirt off his body and donning a clean tunic and braies. It would take at least an hour before the two ships were secured and anyone would be able to come ashore.
Erland and Arnis were grinning from ear to ear when he walked carefully in the deepening snow down the roadway to the fjord. Despite all his grievances against his brothers’ delays and all the questions he had for them, he took one, then the other, into a tight hug of welcome. They were the only blood family he had left, except for Liv, who was more dead than alive these days.
“Greetings, lackwits,” he said, looping an arm over each of their shoulders as they walked away from the longships. There were men and women aplenty to bring the animals and supplies up to the keep. The longships could be beached on the morrow, joining his other six vessels. “Didst have a successful journey?”
“Yea, we did,” they both said at the same time.
“We got everything on your list, Brandr,” Arnis told him, “and more. Including some winsome women to please your men on the long winter nights.”
“Is that why it took you so long?” He tried his best to keep the annoyance from his voice. Now was the time for rejoicing. The recriminations would come later.
“Yea. That and the present we bought for you.” The mischievous gleam in Erland’s eyes boded ill for Brandr; he was sure of it.
He made his face deliberately blank.
Arnis motioned with a jerk of his head toward the huge white furry mound that one of his men, Gorm the Giant, was carrying up the hill from the fjord. Arnis also had a mischievous gleam in his eyes.
What deviltry were these two up to?
“You bought me a polar bear fur for a gift? How . . . nice!”
“ ’Tis not the fur that is the gift but what is inside,” Erland told him.
Gorm was just passing them when Brandr noticed that the fur was moving, and he could swear he heard a voice inside say something that sounded like, “Damn stupid idiot Vikings!”
“Please let that be a parrot.” Years ago, when he was a youthling, his father brought him a talking parrot from the eastern lands after one of his trading voyages. What a noise-some pest! And it had no respect for Vikings, continually chanting that famous ditty Saxon soldiers prayed as they pissed their pants in fear, “Oh, Lord—squawk—from the fury of the Northmen—squawk—please protect us. Squawk, squawk!”
“Uh, not quite,” Erland hedged.
“Let us go up to the keep and warm our bones afore opening any gifts,” Arnis added a mite nervously.
Erland and Arnis exchanged meaningful anxious looks. Well, Brandr was not going to worry about it now. This was a day for celebration. Nothing could mar that joy.
Little did he know that the Joy about to enter his life was going to change him forever.
Chapter 6
Joy to the (Viking’s) world . . .
Hours later, Brandr leaned back in his chair at the high table, watching everyone feast with great joy. Three roasted reindeer, leftover boar, a brace of hares in a new stew, dozens of fresh fishes, pickled eels, sweetbreads in a gelatinous mold, honey, even some of that horrid Scottish fare, haggis (another
yeech!
dish for him, but others—doltheads, to be sure—liked it), hard and soft cheeses, apples, pears, long-absent vegetables, and manchet bread were consumed in large quantities. That and the ale, of course.
But even in the midst of this gaiety, Brandr felt alone. He tried to hide it from his brothers, his friends, and his comrades-in-arms. He raised his horn of ale. Many times. He clapped his brothers on their fool backs. He even sang along with Tork in a ribald song about the gods’ gift to men: maids of easy virtue. But he was different since he’d gone berserk. He knew it, and they knew it.
More than anything, he wished he could entice his sister Liv to come down the stairs and join them, but she was fearful of men and preferred the solitude of her own bedchamber. How could he force her to change, when he could not do so himself? Leastways, he’d sent her a tray of the various dishes along with her favorite honey oatcakes.
Ah, well! He turned to Arnis and said, “So, where is this great gift you have brought for me?” He recalled the large white fur one of the shiphirds had been carrying from the boat hours ago.
Erland, overhearing, hit himself aside the head. “Holy Thor! I forgot.”
“You lackwit! Where did you put her?” Arnis asked Erland, whacking him on the other side of his head.
Her? He refers to a fur as “her”? Oh. Must be it is a she-bear.
“In the storage room,” Erland replied with a cringe of embarrassment.
“You did unwrap her, did you not?” Arnis had his hands on his hips, standing now, scowling at his younger brother.
“Um,” was all Erland could utter.
“Good gods! She’s probably dead of suffocation by now.”
As the two idiots rushed off, Brandr had a bad feeling about this “gift.”
“What now?” Tork asked, sinking down into the chair next to him, pulling one of the new thralls down onto his lap. Ebba, her name was, he recalled now. Though no longer a young wench—she was twenty-five, if she was a day—Ebba had impressive bosoms and lips that could no doubt suck the skin off a turnip. She claimed to have a talent for weaving, but Brandr suspected it would be her other talents utilized the most.
“I know not what the two lackwits are up to now, but methinks it bodes ill for—
what
? For the love of Frigg! Look at that!” Brandr’s eyes widened as he saw Arnis and Erland walking back into the hall, carrying the rolled-up fur, one end over each of their shoulders. A
squirming
fur.
“Uh-oh!” Tork said.
“That is precisely what I was about to say.”
The music and chatter began to die down as everyone began to follow the progress of the bundle being carried, then dropped to the rushes at the bottom of the steps leading to the dais.
“Come down and see your gift, brother,” Arnis urged him.
“And she is not even a little bit dead,” Erland the Idiot said.
Yea, that is going to be my new name for him. Erland the Idiot. And a new name for Arnis will be Arnis the Addlebrained.
Brandr exhaled loudly and proceeded across the dais and down the steps. “Well?”
With a flourish, his brother unrolled the fur, and out jumped a body. A body that was tall and slim with wild red hair and . . . breasts. It was a woman but unlike any woman he’d ever seen before.
A Valkyrie?
She wore odd white under-raiment. Scraps of white fabric barely covered her woman’s fleece and buttocks and cupped her breasts—very nice breasts, he observed, by the by—held up by thin straps. But the most amazing thing was the stance the woman took, legs braced apart as if for battle, in her hands a poker she’d grabbed from the nearby fireplace, and shimmering fury in her green eyes.
Yea, she must be a Valkyrie come to earth.
“I am going to kill you two idiots,” she warned Arnis and Erland.
Brandr’s temper rose at the insult to his kin, but only a notch. After all, he considered them idiots himself. “This is your gift to me?” he questioned said idiots.
“Yea, your new bed thrall,” Arnis said proudly.
“She might need a mite of taming,” Erland added.
“Why not just give me a mangy she-cat to bed?” he sniffed, then added, “a mangy, smelly she-cat.”
The two dimwits seemed to consider his remark, the sarcasm passing over their thick heads.
Not so the woman, who growled. She actually growled. “I am no man’s slave. Any taming to be done will be at my hands and no one else’s. Furthermore, if I smell, it’s because I’ve spent three days wrapped in a stinking endangered species fur. Believe me, the Alaskan Wildlife Preservation Society is going to hear about you . . . you criminal poachers.”
A ripple of laughter ran through the hall at her words . . . words that were in a strange dialect. English, but a strange English, he was thinking. Old Norse and Saxon English were very similar, and each could understand the other. The same was true of this wild wench.
“Dost think to tame me then, wench?” he inquired, stepping closer, then stopping when she raised the poker in her right hand and drew forth a sharp knife in her left hand. She must have grabbed the blade off one of his brothers when they’d unrolled her from the furs. This was not a meek housemaid. She knew how to use a weapon, of that he was certain. But not a Valkyrie, he concluded. This was no dead goddess. Not even a live goddess.