“All will be well,” he said, his heart feeling to hammer out of his chest when her lips trembled. “We shall win through.”
She flinched and he did in turn, his hope for their own little one, his wonder and gratitude at her having his babe, coiling tightly in his breath. It made it hard to say more. He fell back on warrior sayings as if Eithne was a guard in his war-band, hating the clumsy words even as he said them. “Well done! Excellent! We shall drink deep tonight!”
Urrg. That one was the worst of a mess of truly terrible speech.
Heat searing up his face, he plucked her off her feet, whirled her round once and set her down, giving her a small pat before he strode off—anywhere, his mind supplied.
Loki, the trickster, shall not win this!
Olaf whipped about. “I am glad, Eithne. Glad.” He clenched his fist behind his back, wanting to stifle the next, but it came anyway, “I would have been gladder sooner, but no matter.”
She ran to him, stumbling once in her haste. Alarmed, he turned back and caught her, lest she should fall, injure herself, hurt their babe. “Careful!” he scolded, before he could stop himself.
She leaned into his shoulder. “I wish we could go back to bed,” she murmured against him, a sentiment he wholly shared.
“After today, we shall,” he vowed.
She raised her head, her eyes no longer wide and staring but puzzled. “What is special about today?”
He could deal with her curiosity. “Let me explain,” he said, relieved with the diversion, and needing to say more, anyway.
Chapter 13
Olaf had gagged the herald so the Pict could not shout any warnings. He tied the smaller man onto a sledge, with his white cloak covering his bindings, and pulled the herald with them as he and Eithne set out.
There had been no question of Eithne remaining behind. Even as she drew breath to argue against staying at Black Broch, Olaf had told her, “This is your land. You deserve to see what happens.”
From the way Olaf had loaded her with cloaks and hung flagons, knives, arrows and her bow on himself—also stowing flints, a long strip of copper and a pair of shears he had found from somewhere into various pouches on his body—Eithne suspected that he wanted her with him in case whatever happened went badly and they had to make an escape. With Conall already having gone over to Mongfind and Fina brazen in her pragmatic loyalty, Eithne understood her husband’s concern.
As for his reaction to her pregnancy. She had feared worse but part of her had hoped for more, a murmur of love, perhaps, or some winter flowers, sprays of snowdrops, heather and holly decked in berries, all carefully collected and presented by him.
Olaf cannot trouble with such trifles, you fool! He has greater problems, and so have you.
His plan was simple. Follow the track of the herald to the standing stone circle and discover who might be waiting there for them.
“If it is an army?” Eithne asked, torn between a wry humour and horror at that prospect.
Olaf flexed his arms, giving the sledge a fierce tug that sent it and its staring-eyed, red-faced passenger skittering over the track behind them. Stopping for a moment, he ignored the silent, squirming struggles of the herald and touched her nose with chilled fingers, grinning when she scolded, “Too cold!”
“Had Constantine gathered a war-band they would already be outside Black Broch, sticking everything in sight with burning arrows.”
His brutal answer steadied her, for both he and she were used to dealing with practicalities.
“What do you think the herald is worth as a hostage?”
The man on the sledge strained some more against his bounds. Eithne dismissed him. You tried to poison me and mine, fat man.
“I would say virtually nothing. We already know how little your sister values her people. I, on the other hand—” Olaf dipped a hand into his tunic and brought out the thick gold torc, fastening it carefully around her neck. “A Viking woman is always rich in jewellery,” he said, adding, “It looks well on you. I will have you glittering in a king’s ransom in gold, Eithne. You are worth it.”
She touched the torc. It was his, as she was his. Such possession, she decided, was...pleasing.
“Will there be any of Constantine’s at the stone circle, you think?” she asked, returning to harder matters after her moment of silent savouring.
“Aye, I have called him out for parlay and that will be known in this part of Alba. As I said yesterday, Constantine must come or seem a coward.”
“But surely he will not answer a direct challenge,” Eithne persisted, aware that even her father would not have been drawn into such a risky fight. Too much rides on such a straightforward struggle, and Constantine will know that.
“Indeed, and luck, good or bad, has been a part of this all along. We must try something else, unexpected.”
“Another trick?” she asked, catching on at once.
He glanced at the captive herald and stalked off the track into the woods, out of earshot. “Remember when the Gaels raided and we were on Maiden Isle? Remember the fog, how confusing it was? We could not tell how many were attacking. If we can suggest by some artifice to Constantine and his followers that we have many men at our back, keep the lie going that I have Viking allies, that might be enough.”
“The herald cannot tell them otherwise.” Eithne gave a sharp nod. “That could work.”
“If we reach the standing stones close to dusk, the sunset will help us.” Swiftly Olaf explained how, and his wife’s eyes widened and grew ever more admiring.
“Excellent!” she exclaimed, swaying a little in her clear excitement, as if about to start a harvest dance. “We can do much! Place copper tokens in the trees and hide them with greenery until ready, when a tug will bring the cover down and the metal will flash like blades! I have an idea, too, for those flints you have brought. There was an old kind of music my people made with flint, but such strange tunes have largely fallen from use. When I was a wee girl, my mother taught me a little—she said she learned from her mother. Save for dreams, I had forgotten that until just now, but it is a haunting sound.”
Eithne said more and then they were off again, plotting and hoping.
♦◊♦
Constantine, king of the eastern Picts, stood on his stirrups, rolled his mail-clad shoulders, and subsided back onto his horse’s back. Ranged alongside him, facing the old standing stone circle, his troop of twenty men kept their fists tight on their mounts’ reins. No one moved, save for the king and a restive, prancing war-horse.
“The rain has stopped,” observed one of his men, scanning the woods surrounding the stone circle.
“By Christ’s blessing,” put in the priest mounted beside him, piously crossing himself.
Constantine did not bother to point out that the rain had ceased hours ago, while they had been riding out to this place of parlay. The snow still remained, thick and dazzling on the moorland, and the westering sun had gilded the tops of the nearby pine and was now doing the same with the oak trees.
Constantine recalled his pilgrimage to Rome, where the sun had always seemed to shine. So far, the power promised to him by these Irish priests was holding, although he had disliked the cleric’s insistence of scattering holy water over the standing stones nearest to them. This was an old place, where the spirits deserved respect.
He flexed his fingers, keeping them moving in case he had to fight. He did not know how large the company from Black Broch would be, and Mongfind and Conall were uncertain. The old man had carped on and on about the new laird of the place, a Viking, with more Norse allies.
Constantine frowned. Mongfind, of late, had been tiresome. When she first entered his court, she had dazzled everyone, including himself. Soon, though she antagonized too many people. Even with her beauty and noble status she had little wisdom. Her loud and persistent hatred of her half-sister was, to his mind, unwarranted, though he would not tell her that.
Not until she had safely had the
ir child, at least.
Just yesterday, before he had set out, he had discovered that Mongfind that persuaded the herald to deliver poison to her half-sister. A herald! A man chosen by God to be neutral!
He suppressed a shiver. He was not like the Irish or Roman priests, seeing all things pagan as evil. He did not think her plot would have succeeded, not against a seasoned warrior apt to notice such things as a tampered-with weapon. He also knew that to be an oath-breaker to a Viking was dangerous.
Mongfind could have cost the herald his life by that poison blade trick, he thought.
A wolf howled, somewhere in the forest, and a light wind rustled the trees and swirled up wisps of loose snow. The rider beside him twitched, a movement echoed up and down the line of his men.
“See!” cried another, and Constantine spotted what his clansman had just noticed—before it had been hidden, or rather disguised, by the form and shadow of the tallest standing stone. Now, with the sun shifting, it picked out the tall pole posted into the snow and moorland. It was pale, like bone, and was topped by a stag’s head.
“Pagan sorcery!” The priest jabbed his heels into his horse, but Constantine snapped his fingers, and two warriors spurred their own mounts, blocking the priest on his smaller bay.
“My Lord, it must be destroyed!” the priest began, but Constantine shook his head.
“You do not touch it,” he commanded. Not until he knew more. How had they missed this? And the stag’s head, a clear signal and sacrifice. A stag, the holy symbol for all the Picts.
Strange forces were at play here.
Peering into the trees where the track led off to the Black Broch, Constantine thought he spotted movement.
Then he heard the sharp, ringing sounds, like snapping bones or cracked bells, like the sounds of horses’ hooves.
“The stones are singing!” cried a rider whose face was now in shadow. “Ill luck!”
“Doom!” shouted another.
The priest began to pray, but the sounds—were the ancient stones truly singing?—continued, seeming to grow still louder. The stag’s head atop that corpse-white pole seemed to be glaring at him.
An older Pictish warrior tumbled from his horse to prostrate himself, followed by three more. The sun dipped lower, flashing suddenly on metal amidst the trees, bright sword hilts, Constantine thought, picturing the Viking war-band approaching.
A dark, long shadow shot out from trees and Constantine’s archers drilled it with arrows, before he could order them to stop. The shadow lurched between two of the taller standing stones, coming to rest in the midst of the circle.
Constantine cursed when a ray of sunlight revealed the long still shape as a sledge, one carrying something that was pierced by arrows.
“Well met, O King, that was your own herald,” came a bone-dry voice.
The Viking stepped out of the forest onto the moorland, as confident and easy as if he was ruler of both places, and spoke again. “Go back to your lands. Do not trouble me in mine.” He placed a hand upon his sword hilt, his hand blood-red in the sunset. “Or fight me here and now, man to man, ruler to ruler. Your choice.”
Constantine felt the stares of his own men, the glare of the stag’s head, the desperate snuffling of the Irish priest and thought of those bright weapons, glinting out from the woods. More Vikings coming, he was certain, and this one here, big as a great door, skilled in battle—and who knew what else.
Pagan sorcery, to be sure.
Constantine dismounted, gave a brief bow, and took a step back.
After that, with the Viking and the stag’s head still watching, he and his men turned east to their homeland and began the journey back, taking the body of the herald with them.
The parlay, such as it was, was over.
♦◊♦
Olaf whistled and listened for an answering soft tapping, the flint music gentle now. He waited until the moorland was empty, the woodlands quiet, the sun vanished, until Constantine and his men were long gone.
The stone circle seemed to be waiting, too.
Eithne, carrying the cloaks she had draped over two elder bushes until the time to show off the scraps of copper that showed as false weapons to Constantine, stepped into the circle. By her sudden freezing and stop of breath he knew she was taking in the cursing pole, with its stag’s head.
Silently, she glided beside him and pointed.
“I did this,” Olaf admitted. “Norse magic, man’s magic. The stag, though, that was for the spirits of this land.”
Eithne crouched and pressed a hand into the snow, feeling for the earth beneath. “We need a second sacrifice,” she breathed.
She reached under her cloak and for an instant he braced, expecting her to remove the gold collar he had given her. Instead a spill of copper shards and two knives fell onto the bared soil, followed by a bone scraper and an assortment of narrow, glistening flints of different shapes and sizes.
For the different sounds of the flint music. Again, Olaf marvelled at this clever mate.
As she tried to bury the same by one of the taller standing stones, using only her fingers—the bone scraper was a sacrifice and so not to be used—Olaf knelt beside her and dug with his own knife to help.
Together they buried the metal, the scraper and the flints. After, Eithne rose quickly and sped back into the woodland, not a retreat, Olaf guessed, and returned with a spray of holly with lush bright berries that she placed over the burial. “For the holy mother,” she said, and Olaf bowed his head.
When he straightened and rose to his feet, he risked a glance at the cursing pole. For an instant, a last glitter of dusk lit the pole, making it seem briefly aflame. The stag’s head seemed surrounded by the floating tongues of fire, only a moment.
A trickster’s illusion. Loki is pleased.
“Back to Black Broch?” he asked.
“Aye.”
♦◊♦
Once more they had kept the folk of Black Broch safe. The very people who had once dismissed her, even when she was their healer, now owed her and Olaf their lives.
I wish that the herald had not been killed. Perhaps it was a kind of justice, though, for the man’s treacherous betrayal of his own sacred role.
Eithne touched her stomach, tracing the slight curve there. She hoped the child growing within her had not been disturbed. She and Olaf had won through again, yet the hunger-times of spring were coming.
Walking beside her, offering an arm each time she slowed for any tiny ripple in the snow, Olaf gave her a crinkle-eyed smile. Almost as if he had caught her thoughts, he took her hand and squeezed it gently. “We shall be well,” he said, as he had done before, to comfort her.
And better still, he backs his comfort with real deeds.
Reaching carefully, so she could shift away or stop him, he touched the gold torc on her neck. “It looks well on you, Eithne.”
“’Tis still yours, to me,” she answered, stopping and turning to look up into his handsome, tanned face. “Myself and the torc. I am proud to be owned by you, Olaf.”
At once, he brought his arms tight around her, whispering into her ear, “Nay, lass, ástin mín, far, far more. You are my hearthstone. You are the well-loved mother of my coming child. Where you are, I make my life.”
He kissed her and the woods about them were bright with moon-shine and snow.
She was home.
Book Three:
A New Beginning
Chapter 14
Olaf punched the needle through the scrap of leather and stitched. The heat and insects of summer buzzed in his ears as he crouched by the unlit hearth of the croft, listening to his wife gasp and pant as she laboured to bring their child into the world. It had been a night and half a day already, and yet, save for her odd breathing, Eithne never made a sound.
Olaf rose from his crouch and stepped closer to the rough screen of hurdles and skins that gave his wife and child some shielding. Custom said he could be near Eithne, but not with her or the w
omen.
Much more of this and I will go to her, tradition be damned!
The rest of their little clan were outside, feeding Sunset the cow or Sæhrímnir, his small black horse, setting fish-lines in the loch or scratching and weeding in the little gardens inside the palisade. Today, no one had strayed far into the forest or up to the moor to gather blaeberries.
Everyone waits, while she works.
A mother in labour was certainly a warrior, he decided, flicking one of the screen pelts, wishing he could take Eithne’s pain in her place. He punched another stitch in the leather, his fingers almost bending the needle as he caught a faint whimper behind the hurdles.
Eithne with women who called her their healer but who also once mocked her as a bastard. How must it be, to be naked before such folk?
Olaf scowled, wishing he had taken his wife to Maiden Isle instead. It was she who had shaken her head at the idea and as she was, so warm and glowing with life, so grumbling with heat and discomfort, he could not deny her.
I wish I had.
He heard another long breath and then a high shrieking cry, angry as a banshee—
“A boy, my lady! Healthy and whole!”
Mine. Olaf dropped leather and needle into the litter on the floor and reached out to lift away the screen. He ached to hold his son, but first he wanted Eithne, had to know she, too, was safe.
Another cry, not a wail, but shocked and panicking, a scrambling, protests of, “No, my lady, wait! Fina, what do you do?” and Fina darted past the covered hurdles, clutching a howling bundle.
Her face bright with malice, her light brown hair braids bobbing in her eagerness, Fina laid the ragged bundle at his feet. Instantly, Olaf gathered in the new-born. The baby was red, with a faintly pointed head, and a large, angry open mouth.
Olaf touched the little one’s downy cheek. Protectiveness surged within his chest in a great wave. He spoke the words he had heard from other proud, Viking fathers, his voice ringing so everyone would hear. “I accept him. He is my son.”
The Viking and the Pictish Princess: The Rose and the Sword Page 8