The Soul Thief

by Cecelia Holland

  Her heart turned over: such ships as those brought the men to burn her home and kill her family, such a ship took her away. Her legs quivered and she nearly sat down in the street. Around her the other women were wailing and crying. They were driven into a pen of withies and the gate swung shut on them.

  She went down, to where the pen met the water; a little filthy edge of the river trickled in under the fence. Kneeling down, she dug out part of the bank to make a pool, and when it filled she washed her face and hands. Her stomach rolled again. The pressure of the people around her seemed like a great weight on all sides. Her ears ached from the sound of them. Suddenly she was too tired even to sit up.

  She wanted only to be home again. To be among her family again. That would never happen. Everything she had known was torn to pieces, and the pieces whirled around her now in a rising storm.

  Soon, though, the men were shouting and crushing through the penned women toward her, and one got her by the arm and dragged her forward. She was making ready to go into the fog again when they thrust her out the gate, in front of a row of people staring at her and talking, and she realized they were not going to rape her this time. She lifted her head, dazed, and saw directly before her a fat man with a thick dark yellow beard streaked with white, his cold wicked eyes like two blue stones lying in the rolls and bulges of his face.

  A shock went through her. She remembered him. Wave on wave of hurt and fear went through her. All in an instant she remembered the flames, the sword that struck down her father, the hand hauling her off, and then over her, shutting out the starry sky, that same face over her, groaning and drooling on her. She felt him all along her body, in her body, a harsh fierce force crushing her down and piercing her like a living sword.

  The other men were talking to him. His eyes were fixed on her but she saw that his ears heard what the men who had brought her were telling him, and although they spoke the evil tongue she read in their gestures of the great storm and how she had hidden them from it and how she had sung while the storm raged. Then one lifted his hand and looked at her intently and drew his finger over his throat.

  Her breath stilled. They would kill her. She looked into the stony eyes of the fat man while the others told him to kill her, and she saw no mercy there.

  Nor interest. He laughed, a thick grunt from his gut, and shrugged, and said something joking. One big hand rose and waved her away.

  Then from behind him another stepped forward, one Mav saw only now, a tall woman, wrapped in a long shawl. Mav thought she did not even see her now, really; that some veil hung around her. She blinked, trying to clear her eyes of the sudden hazy shape before her.

  The woman approached her. Her eyes were sharp and they stuck Mav like points of steel. She said something and the men stilled, respectful. The fat man with the stony eyes turned. He growled at her, and the woman in the shawl answered but without taking her eyes from Mav. She was a blur to Mav, she had no outline, no solid shape. The old man said something questioning and the woman nodded and raised one hand and waved it at him. Her hand was old, the skin wrinkled and the fingers knobbed. Mav forced herself to see through the veils and the blur and saw that this woman was indeed very old, although it seemed not so at first.

  Mav hunched her shoulders. The strange woman sent shivers through her. The woman’s long gray shawl had slipped away from one shoulder and beneath she wore a gown all sewn with emblems of trees and flowers and herbs, or perhaps they were real herbs and flowers woven into the cloth. Mav thought she saw eyes and mouths in the cloth, looking at her, and whispering. The woman’s face was soft and light as a girl’s but beneath it like the shadow under a tree was that other face, very old. She smiled at something the fat man said but behind the girl’s smile was the old one’s sneer.

  The fat man turned, and bellowed; his voice ran cold through Mav like a dashing of cold water and she gave a shudder. The woman in the shawl nodded. She reached out one hand to Mav, and said, startlingly, “Come with me, girl.”

  The sound of her own language fell on Mav’s ears like a blessing. All her body went soft, and she let out a low cry. She could not help but stretch her hand out to the woman’s. Their fingers touched and the woman’s long fingers wrapped around Mav’s, cool and strong.

  “You speak my home-tongue,” Mav said.

  “I speak all tongues,” said the woman. “I am the Lady of Hedeby.” With Mav’s hand in her grip she led her away.

  “Where did she come from?” Gunnhild said.

  They were sitting in the High Seat of their hall, King and Queen of Jorvik, and yet no one looked at them. No one paid them any heed; all eyes were on the tall figure in the center of the room, drawing flames, jewels and showers of money out of the air. Gunnhild twisted a lock of her hair around her finger, and never took her eyes from the Lady of Hedeby, and she frowned.

  “Her ship came in last night from Hedeby,” Eric said. He put one boot up against the edge of the table. Since he had gotten back from his last raid he had shown interest only in drinking and being amused. Gunnhild wound the tress in sleek loops and knots through her fingers, fretting.

  Down in the center of the room the Lady of Hedeby turned slowly in the torchlight, and waves of color flowed from her fingertips. The crowded men on either side let out their breath in a long rapt gasp. The lights flickered and swam in streams up toward the smoke hole, drawing all eyes, except Gunnhild’s.

  “What is she doing here?”

  Eric shrugged. He had no interest in anything but his ale and the magic tricks. “She bought a load of slaves from me.”

  Gunnhild pressed her lips together. The Lady beguiled these silly men with tricks any street magician could perform. Yet she did it well, Gunnhild had to admit; there was a shower of gold, a loud bang, and then the Lady was simply gone, under Gunnhild’s own eyes.

  Gunnhild shifted in the High Seat. The Lady had to be in Jorvik for some hidden reason. She was the richest merchant of Hedeby, buying and selling from Dublin to Ladoga. She was Bluetooth’s shadow. Such a one did not go sailing over the sea just for a load of slaves.

  Eric clapped his hands, and shouted for the skalds. He turned to her, smiling, and caught hold of her arm.

  “Why do you fret over her? She gave us such pretty presents.”

  “If we had a greater kingdom it would have been more,” Gunnhild burst out. She pushed at the jumble of sheer red Cathay cloth on the edge of the High Seat, so that it slithered sleekly away to the floor. Against her will she admitted it was wonderful fabric.

  Eric said, “Jorvik is fine with me.” He raised his cup. Gunnhild reached down and picked the Cathay cloth off the floor, and ran her fingers over it, frowning.

  In the morning she stood on the bank over the river with her eldest son Gimle, a stripling of eleven, and watched the Lady of Hedeby pull off downstream in her fine ship, which was fully as large as any of Eric’s warships, twenty oarsmen to a side, hammered gold shining on the great dragon heads at prow and stern and all along the gunwales. Over the forecastle was a purple awning, under which the Lady sat. The wretched slaves huddled on the deck by the mast.

  “She could not have come simply to buy slaves.”

  Her son wound his arm through hers. “You are more beautiful than she is, Mother.”

  Gunnhild snorted; she squeezed his arm against her, glad of his stout loyalty. She was Queen of Jorvik. Why should she worry about a mere trader, however rich? Yet she was remembering, reluctantly, how one whose wisdom she respected above all others whispered to her to beware the Lady of Hedeby. That she was older than them all, no true woman, not from here. That she had the power to steal souls.

  She was going now, the gilded ship sliding off around the bend in the river below Jorvik. The air seemed brighter for it. Relieved, with Gimle at her side Gunnhild turned back up the embankment toward her own hall, to her own High Seat, her husband and her power.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Corban’s hands hurt; he could not take hold of t
he oar in any way that did not hurt. On the back stroke he glanced at Grod, sitting behind him in a crevice between two piles of hides. Grod somehow had talked his way on board without having to row. Maybe he had given up his silver coins. Corban grit his teeth. He could have given the boatman money, and gone without rowing himself, but then there would have been nothing to pay Grod.

  He needed Grod, he told himself. In England, across the water, he would need someone who knew his way, who spoke the language, who could get him to Jorvik. But his hands were already raw and bleeding, and past the high stern of the boat the long low shape of his homeland still stretched like a denser mist above the edge of the sea, with the humped back of the northern headland even closer on his right. He would be rowing like this for days and days.

  He had worked on his father’s fishing boats, he knew how to use the oar. There was no great art to it anyway. Ahead of him, five other men bent forward, and he bent forward, dipped the blade of his oar into the sea, and leaned back with his feet braced on one of the boat’s ribs and pulled, drew the oar back through his aching hands, back toward his chest. Then forward again, a relentless rhythm. Along the other side of the boat sat another six men, doing the same thing. Behind them all, even behind Grod, the captain sat in the stern, his hand on the steering board, and guided them along. The packs of hides, the sacks and barrels that were their cargo took up all the rest of the space.

  Corban felt the sweat gather between his shoulder blades and spill down his sides. Grod slid closer to him, and held a flask to his lips. “Draw hard,” he said, low. “There is no wind, yet, soon there will be wind, and you can rest then. Now draw hard.”

  Corban set his teeth together. Grod was full of advice. Tucked into the cargo he looked dry and comfortable as a king. The boat groaned as they pulled it through the rippled surface of the sea. Corban stretched his legs out, up to the bench in front of him; with each stroke of the oars a little trickle of filthy water ran forward past his shoes, pooling in the bottom of the boat. Now his back hurt, also, and each stroke made it worse.

  Across the gunwale of the boat he looked out over the flat water. It rose and fell in a long slow rhythm, as if the sea breathed. The land had slipped away down over the horizon, the gulls had given up on them, they were alone on the bulging sleek surface of the vast water. He began to think of wrapping his cloak around the oar, to save his hands, but the cloak was behind him, where Grod sat, and he would have to get up to get it; he knew the other men would howl at that. He had already seen them scream and spit at a man who stood up suddenly to piss over the side, leaving his oar to swing idly. They all had to pull together, to keep the boat moving straight.

  Corban made a silent curse against Grod, who had gotten him into this. A new pain began, this one in his upper arm. His shirt stuck to him. His hair was plastered to his cheeks.

  They rowed and rowed across the flat sea. The land slid away behind them over the horizon. Corban had never been out of sight of land before and he began to think of the deep cold water under them, full of monsters. He yanked his mind off to other things: his sister, his silver, what he would do to Grod if they got to the dry land and he no longer needed him.

  The sun burned through a high mist. Once the boatman stopped them and let them stretch, drink, piss. Corban swiftly pulled his shirt down around his waist and tucked the sleeves under his belt. But soon the captain was shouting them back to the work again, and making the boat move forward again was twice as hard. The men groaned and called out as they rowed, and the captain swore at them. Corban fixed his eyes on the back of the man in front of him, dark from the sun.

  In the midafternoon, they halted again. There was a sharp breeze kicking up and Corban thought it might rain; he imagined being in the boat, in the open, in a hard rain, and he shivered. He slumped against the gunwale, exhausted, and drank water from Grod’s jug, waiting to be driven back to the work.

  The boatman called something out, and Grod leaned toward him. “Ship the oar.”

  “Hah.”

  “Bring the oar on board,” Grod said.

  The other men lifted their oars up vertical and then laid them down inside the craft; Corban did what they did. The boatman came up from the stern. Corban sank back down against the gunwale, his bleeding hands limp before him, and watched the boatman and three of the rowers pull a long peeled tree trunk up from beside the keelboard. They stood it upright in the center of the boat, where there was a block of wood with a hole in it, and sank the butt of the tree down into the hole. The boatman kicked home another chunk of wood to hold it; ropes dangled from the top of this mast and the boatman fastened one to the bow and one to the stern of the boat. Then from the belly of the boat he took another pole, this one wrapped in striped cloth, and hung it crosswise on the upright tree, and fastened a rope to it, and hauled on the rope. Two of the rowers sprang to help him, and they raised the top of the cloth up into the air.

  Even before they had made the ropes fast Corban could feel the boat moving, the striped cloth catching the wind. Relief washed over him. This was obviously a better way of doing things. The boat felt different suddenly, alive, sidling like a snake through the waves. The water warbled happily against the hull. The boatman scrambled back to the stern and took the steering board in his hand again, and the rowers all lay or sat down among the heaps of hides and jugs and fell asleep.

  Corban woke with Grod shaking him, and got a chunk of bread and a piece of dried fish and ate them in three bites. His belly heaved. The boat was sliding rapidly through the water. Night was falling, the far low edge of the sky pink and pale above the dark water. He stood, stretching the stiffness out of his arms and back; a great twinge of pain shot down through his back and he gasped. All around was nothing but water. He had to brace his legs against the rolling of the boat as it worked up and down the waves.

  The wind struck his face. The bow went up against a long wave and skidded down again. His lips were salty and the skin of his face felt stretched and stiff with salt.

  “Sit,” Grod said. “Sleep some more, we won’t row until morning, even if the wind stops.”

  “You haven’t rowed a stroke,” Corban said. He felt in his shirt for the silver, tied up in the cloth of one sleeve, and sat down again. The wind was raking across the boat, bearing rain drops. A wave chopped up over the gunwale and soaked his arm and thigh.

  The boatman shouted something, and threw a bucket at him. Corban took it, wondering, and Grod nudged him again.

  “Bail.”

  Corban cursed him for an idiot old man. Another wave broke over the gunwale and he felt the water sloshing around his ankles, and bending down he scooped up a bucketful and flung it overboard. Up near the bow another man was bailing also. The boat rolled and lunged over the sea, its timbers creaking. He stooped and sloshed and flung water overboard, the salt eating into his numbed hands. Grod gave him fresh water to drink and he drained the whole jug.

  After a while other men began to bail and Corban lay down, soaked and shivering. Grod handed him his cloak and he wrapped himself into it and slept at once.

  In the morning, in the red dawn, the wind died. Groaning and cursing the men struggled up from sleep, lifted their oars out over the gunwales, and set to rowing again. Corban’s hands were numb for a few strokes but then as if the skin burst they began to hurt all the way up to his elbows, and his back throbbed. His hands began to stick to the oar. He realized he was holding his breath with each stroke and made himself take in the air as he reached out and give it up again as he drew back. He thought of Mav. He thought of beating Grod to a bloody puddle. Grimly he kept on flailing the calm flat sea with the oar. The naked back of the man in front of him had a long scar on it; it began to annoy him to the point of rage that the scar was off center. One of the men suddenly started to whistle, and the others yelled at him and swore until he stopped.

  Grod said, “They think it’s bad luck.”

  “Let it bring the wind,” Corban said. Somehow Grod had fou
nd more water, and gave it to him, pure and cool, delicious in his throat.

  All day long they rowed, until near nightfall when at last the breeze came up again and they raised the striped sail again and the boat slid away under the wind, as if it too suffered in the calms, died under the beating of the oars, woke only when the wind came to carry it off in its arms. The bread had gotten soaked with seawater and they ate it anyway. Along the rim of the world the color ran, pink and gold below the lowering sky.

  In the night rain fell; Corban huddled under his cloak, Grod snug beside him, and slept fitfully, waking it seemed every few moments from strange gloomy dreams. Grod against him murmured and twitched in his sleep. Corban pressed close to the warmth of his body.

  In the morning, the brisk wind blew them eastward, and now, far ahead of them, a faint blue hump of land stuck up above the level sea. The oarsmen all cheered but the captain grunted, shaded his eyes to look around them, and spat over the side. Corban spread out his cloak to dry. His hands were still raw and stiff. Grod was twitching and looking around; he said, abruptly, under his breath, “I hate this boat.”

  Corban understood that. The boat felt like a coffin, jamming them all together, smothering him with other bodies, as if he could not take a breath without drawing in the foul breath of the other men. He stared away over the side, across the curling waves. The wind broke the tops off into white foam. The boat leaned over, rushing through the water; under his feet he could feel the slap of the waves against the hull. He twisted again, to see the land ahead of them.

  He gave a low cry, and stood up. Somebody shouted at him and Grod tugged at his shirt; Corban ignored them, straining his eyes to see toward the land. Then the captain bellowed. He had seen what Corban had seen: the two little boats speeding across the waves toward them, the rise and fall of paddles like the legs of beetles, scuttling over the water.