He took a step closer, both to rouse himself, and in response to the proudly raised chin of Ælfwyn, her eyes lifting from the charred timbers of the old hall to the dullness of the grey sky.
He jumped up on the step of the waggon board, so that the maids stood, suddenly and unsteadily. He took Ælfwyn by the waist with both hands and swung her to the ground, then did the same with the bright-haired one. Their waists were slender and firm under his large hands. They both stiffened at his grasp, a touch he never could have allowed himself any other way.
Standing before them he could see them better, compare their beauty. Ælfwyn was much the taller, and more slender as well. Her hair was that palest of yellow shades, almost a shimmering and silvery gold. All about her was narrow, save her eyes, large and blue. Her nose was straight, rather long and thin, her chin pointed. Her skin was pale, unmarred by any blemish, almost luminous. Again, he thought of the Moon. A noble-woman’s face, he knew, a face formed by generations of wealth and high taste and choice in who to wed.
The other – but now the third woman was struggling to get down from the waggon, and he turned with his hand to help her. A serving woman, older and stolid, clucking her tongue and glaring at him. Then Toki came over, with no little swagger in his step. They spoke a few words about who should guard the waggons until Yrling arrived, but Toki’s eye was all the time roving over the maids he had delivered. They were proud, all three women, the maids biting their lips as if to hold back anger; the plump serving woman snorting out her dismay.
Sidroc remembered the man who claimed that Toki would have bedded the coming bride on the road, and had to hold back from laughing at the notion. These maids were young, but high-born, and sure of their value. He could not think either would throw themselves away like that.
He led the three women into the hall, saw how they stopped as they walked down into the body of it. He could not allow them into the treasure room, but until Yrling came back, the narrow room at the top of the stairs would serve.
After he had left them the serving woman came puffing after him; he was with Toki in the stable. She asked that the drover sleep outside the door of their upper chamber that night, and after his nod, thrust a silver coin in his hand before hustling away.
Toki began to laugh, and Sidroc could not keep from grinning.
“Any man bedding either will have to get through her to do it,” Toki said, and Sidroc forced a laugh of his own.
The two maids from Wessex did not appear that night in the hall. Sidroc understood why, in Yrling’s absence, they would choose not to show themselves before so many strange men. He saw their serving woman several times, moving through the passage to the kitchen yard, carrying a pail of steaming water, clumping down the creaking stairs with emptied food plates. It made him wonder about the second maid, the fiery one, the one who had spoken to him. She of the bright hair.
She could not be kin to Ælfwyn; Ælfsige would not send so marriageable a maid out of the range of his dealings. She was far from a serving maid; there was a boldness about her suggesting she herself had serving folk at her command. And the Lady Ælfwyn seemed to depend on her, was likely to confide in her, trust her judgement, young as she was. They were both estimable maids, and not only for their faces. Carted into a hall yard of gaping warriors, the intended husband absent, they reacted not in fear, but quiet, indignant anger. They showed their spirit in this, and he could but admire them for it. One thought of the shrinking and timorous Eadburh reminded him of how different they might have been.
He was at the table thinking these things, the clamour of the hall surrounding him. Men, having eaten, were sprawling on their benches, calling out for more ale from the serving folk. The men who carried it to them risked cuffing and tripping, and the women, pottery jugs in hand, were subject to having their bottoms grabbed, or being pulled into a drunken man’s lap.
With Toki back Sidroc did not quite take Yrling’s seat on the bench; he left a space there that he and his cousin flanked, awaiting their uncle’s return. Toki, having been denied any ale on the journey to meet Yrling’s bride, was taking full advantage of the flow of it now. He and the men who rode with him were recounting in loud and raucous voices the ride out and back. It was only a matter of time before Toki would fetch his harp and begin the making of a Saga-tale about it. Until then not a few of the men’s large bronze cups were being knocked over by unsteady hands, spilling their contents onto the straw lying in low lumpen heaps upon the floor.
The plate at the high table had steadily improved since the first months after Yrling’s victory over the keep. None could know what had been lost in the burning of the main hall, but when the Danes took their first meal at Four Stones, they ate from wooden plates, crockery bowls, and a few salvers of bronze. This was the serving ware they had carried with them on their horses, and those things scavenged from the kitchen yard. But now, after such success in raiding, Sidroc and Toki drank from cups of silver rimmed in gold, and Yrling, when he was there, from a cup of gold gemmed round with green and blue stones. It was far smaller than that which he had taken from the temple table at Beardan and given to Guthrum, yet gold it was.
Sidroc, fingering the gold-rimmed silver cup from which he drank, gave thought to how quickly his hand had grown used to the touch of his costly cup, how natural it seemed that his lip should rest on gold as he drank his ale. He had not owned it long enough for it to become commonplace, yet though it still gave pleasure to the eye, hand, and lips, it was not the thrill he had felt when first he had lifted it. All treasures were not thus, he felt; some continued to gain in value with use. Good horses were one such source of growing pleasure; anything alive, responsive, and subject to change stayed fresh. The cup in his hand asked nothing of him. His fine bay stallion asked much. Women too, he thought; women demand much. This brought his musings round to the two maids, lately arrived, who had already made deep impress on his thoughts.
In the morning Sidroc looked to the departure of Ælfsige’s thegns, who had camped outside the gates. If Yrling was there he may have had message for them; as it was they must be sent off with only the knowledge that they had accomplished the task of bringing Yrling his bride. He had had the kitchen yard fill their food bags, and they were ready to mount. Toki wandered over, staring at the thegns as they stood, just outside the opened gates, checking girth straps and tightening their packs upon their saddle rings. The waggons still sat where they had been left, their tarpaulins tightly laced, their treasure undisturbed. Only those necessaries the women had asked for had been removed, hauled up the creaking stairs to their rooms. The eyes of one of the thegns were fixed on the waggons as he looked over his horse’s saddle to where they stood, under the guard of two of Four Stones’ men. Regret was in those eyes; any looking at the man could read it. Toki waited until the man’s eyes shifted to his own hard and triumphant stare.
Toki began to move off, back to the hall. It was then that Ælfwyn and the bright-haired one appeared, their serving woman behind them. They had slipped wooden clogs on their feet against the mud of the yard, but even so walked with purpose towards the thegns and their horses. Toki had paused, and now trailed in their wake. Ælfwyn had something in her hands, a shallow but broad box of some kind. She extended it to the eldest of the thegns. Sidroc had to challenge her at this, learn what the box contained.
It angered her, but she passed it to him, telling him it was naught but a message to her parents. He untied the leathern thong that held the two halves closed. Inside one half was a layer of hardened yellow beeswax, with not a little, his nose told him, of sheep tallow mixed in. Marks were scraped into this layer, as with a knife point. They were not runes; he could read none of it. They were the markings of the folk of Angle-land; he had seen such before. He showed it to his cousin, who grimaced as well. He re-wrapped the thong about the halves, tied it in a knot, and handed it to her.
It was the Lady Ælfwyn’s turn to show triumph, and the bright-haired one also
. It lasted a moment only, then they went back to their leave-taking of the thegns. Toki went off, for good this time. What caught Sidroc’s ear was the bright-haired one, telling the eldest thegn she swore to love Ælfwyn as a sister.
So she was not kin. He stood a moment longer watching, then the thegns pulled themselves up on their horses. He turned away then, knowing the two maids stood with their serving woman, watching those who had brought them from afar move off, likely forever.
There were things he must do about the hall, yet he did not move towards it. Ælfwyn and the bright-haired one were also slow to return. He saw Ælfwyn hesitate, speak to her friend, and then set off along the stone wall of the hall. The serving woman was at their heels, her shawl held tightly about her plump person. The steps of the three slowed the more as they reached the charred remains of the old hall. They stood looking over the fallen timbers. A few areas of stone floor were visible through the clotted debris, and the outline of the fire-pit could be discerned. He could tell by the closeness of their heads that they spoke of what they saw.
The day of the hall’s burning, of the taking of Four Stones, was almost as vivid in Sidroc’s mind as if it had happened last month. He saw himself running at Yrling’s side through the kitchen yard, felt again the impact of the butchery knife on the shield with which he had protected Asberg, saw the phantoms of the men he had fought and killed, the shades of those brethren who had fallen. Today the mist in the air, and the wet of the burnt wood even conveyed a whiff of fire, a stale and cold smell of what had been a raging conflagration.
The eyes of the three newcomers had lifted to the pike upon which Merewala’s head had been impaled. Its barbed tip was innocent of its burden now, but was upright, wedged between two paving stones.
He found himself coming up behind them as they stood there, looking upon this.
“They have not even cleared away this rubble,” Ælfwyn told her friend. It was wonder, and complaint both.
He answered her.
“It is kept as a trophy.”
They turned to him, unable to conceal their startle at his nearness. He went on, in the kind of boastful carelessness of tone he disdained in his cousin. “For many months the head of Merewala, the Lord of Four Stones, was stuck on that pike, until the ravens had their fill, and the skull crumbled under their pecking. Thus did he learn of our skill at war.”
Ælfwyn stood her ground, and looked back at the pike. “He rests in honour still,” she claimed. The pointed chin rose again before she turned her blue eyes back to him. She was not cowed; far from it, and was not afraid to let him see it.
He wished to know more of these two, and so would tell them something of himself. “You are a spirited one, Lady,” he told Ælfwyn, “and are made of good stuff, for you stand up well to the nephew of Yrling.”
Both looked to him, their lips parted in surprise. It was Yrling’s bride who spoke. “You are his nephew?”
He smiled at her, both at her surprise, and at the pleasure he felt speaking alone with two such beauties. “Yes, I, and also Toki; but he is not my brother.”
The Saxon words felt strange in his mouth, though he used that tongue to speak to the folk of the hall, to order them to some task. This was so different.
He now could ask that which he most wanted to know. He shifted his eyes to the bright-haired one, before looking back to Ælfwyn. “This Lady is not your sister, but your cousin?”
“No,” Ælfwyn said. “The Lady is my friend.”
Her tone was resolute, suggesting he could not understand the depths of such a bond between women. The bright-haired one stood the straighter at hearing Ælfwyn name her thus, and the shoulders of the two maids touched as they stood before him. They looked at him with something nearing defiance, had it not been softened by the strong and certain affection between them. These two would act as one, he felt.
“She is a good friend, then, to come so far with you,” he noted.
It felt a feeble, even foolish comment, after what he had just witnessed between them. But it would allow another question. He looked at the bright-haired one. “You are then also from Wessex.”
She would have to speak to him now, look at him, and speak. She had been the one to hazard doing so when they arrived, and he wanted to hear her do so, again.
“No, I have not come so far as my Lady,” she said, “for I am come from Mercia, by the river Dee.” Her voice in tone was slightly lower than that of Ælfwyn, and she spoke slowly, as if to make sure he understood.
He was smiling at her, saying anything to keep her speaking to him. “I would like to see that place. I hear there is great wealth there.”
Her answer was much the quicker, almost a snap at him. It was not anger but alarm; she had tossed her head, and her nostrils had flared like that of a mare.
“Then you have heard a lie, for our lands are poor and marshy, and for many years we have fought the Welsh so that no store of grain remains from year to year.”
He must ask now, and did.
“Who are you?”
The green eyes blinked at him, the curve of her shoulders lifting under the mantle that cloaked them.
“I am Ceridwen, daughter of Cerd, and my dead father was an ealdorman.”
He did not know the title, a lord or war-chief of this place, he knew, to have such offspring as she. Her name came out in a rush of hard sounds, bright and demanding, washing over him.
He knew he laughed. Her youth, her tenderness, her beauty and fierceness forced him to laugh, and to say the next, which he meant in admiration.
“You are a true shield-maiden. I will be careful of you.”
Her cheek coloured under his gaze, and her lower lip trembled an instant, whether in anger or in shame he could not tell.
He forced his eyes back to Yrling’s wife. There was something he wished to learn from her parting from her father’s thegns. He asked her what man here at Four Stones had written the message in wax for her. He thought only Christian holy men could do so, and one with that skill might be useful.
It was the lady’s turn to smile. “Then I cannot help you,” she answered, “for I know of no such man.”
It was not the answer he wanted, and he told her so, not hiding the sternness he felt at her jest.
But the bright one, the shield-maiden, took a step towards him, a step shielding Yrling’s wife from his stare.
“My Lady speaks the truth,” she said. “She knows of no such man. I am the scribe that wrote the letter.”
He wanted to laugh, but in astonishment. “You? I do not believe it.”
Her answer was as swift and firm as had been her earlier declaring of her name and father.
“Then you do not believe the truth. I was raised by the Black Monks, and they gave me this art.”
He could not help his smile. “I believe you, shield-maiden,” he told her. He let his eyes linger a moment longer before addressing Ælfwyn.
“You do indeed bring rich treasure to Yrling.”
He heard the serving woman make one of her sputtering clucks at this, but kept his eyes on the new Lady of Four Stones.
She returned his gaze with a mild and questioning look of her own, but there was quiet firmness in her next words to him.
“She is not treasure, nor is the cream coloured pony, for it is hers outright. Will you see that this is known, nephew of Yrling?”
He had to smile. This one, with her gentle demand, her fearlessness in speaking, would be a worthy help-mate to his uncle.
“Yes, I will see that it is known.” He now looked to the shield-maiden at her side, seeming both proud and abashed to be spoken of in this way. He thought of the shaggy pony who had been led in with the waggons; it was hers. Had she ridden it from Mercia?
He could not help the next, and said it almost as he turned away from them both. He spoke now as much of himself as he did of the bright-haired one.
“But I would rather see her on a
stallion of Yrling’s.”
Chapter the Twenty-eighth: Treasure
SIDROC wanted to ride out, go saddle his bay and be off. He would turn the thick arched neck of his horse down the village road and canter to the valley of horses; or range farther out, keep to a westerly track, and with long, loping, and forgetful strides, retrace a part of the path the maids had taken. But he was in command of Four Stones and could not.
He could not leave; he could not enter the treasure room. The body of the hall with its matted and soiled straw upon the floor, and the thralls laboring to bring in more wood for the fire-pit offered no respite. The work and kitchen yards teemed with men, and more thralls. There was no place to be alone.
He went to the stable. On either side of the broad doors were work benches, where bridles, saddles and harnesses might be waxed and repaired. The stable man skilled in the making of saddles had been killed in the capture of the fortress, but the lads who remained were able enough, and one, he had seen, was good with horses as well. This youth now came forward from the shadows of the box stalls, rake in hand, alert to any order Sidroc might give. The tall Dane did nothing but nod at him; he was not needed. The lad went back to his mucking.
Sidroc took his saddle from off the racks farther down the wall and laid it on one of the work benches. A chorus of mewling and rustling from the hay loft above his head told of new kittens up there; the stable cats were good ones and he rarely entered the place without finding the remains of rats and mice near the doorway.
Sidroc the Dane Page 44