The Soul Thief

by Cecelia Holland

  Arre came in the door, carrying firewood. Grod had not seen her in the light before and recognized her first by her smile. Her dark-red hair flew loose around her shoulders; she was taller than Benna. She wore a long apron, dirty where she had knelt on it in the mud. “We can peel bark for the goats. It’s going to snow.” She dumped the wood down and knelt to feed the fire.

  Somewhere off in the distance a bell tolled. At once the two girls straightened up on their knees, and put their hands together in prayer. Grod looked from one to the other. Arre squeezed her eyes shut, lifting her smiling face up, deep in her prayer, but Gifu barely nodded her head down, and then peeked around her hands, saw her sister gave her no heed, and went back to putting on her shoe.

  In the open door came Benna, with the old man by the hand, and brought him to the fire and sat him down. She hung a blanket around his shoulders; he shrugged it off again at once, impatient.

  Arre crossed herself and turned again to the fire. She said to Gifu, “Let the goats starve a day, if it’s going to snow.”

  “I can help,” Grod said, eagerly. He sat up in the wrapping of the cloak.

  Gifu gave him a quick, unfocussed look, seeing him without seeing him. She turned back to Arre. “Who is that?”

  “He helped Benna, last night, with the pots. We let him come in to sleep for the night.”

  Grod said, “I can help find food for the goats.”

  Benna lifted her head and glared at him. Covering her hand with the hem of her skirt, she took a little crock from the fire, popped the lid off, and wrapped the crock in a cloth and put it into the old man’s hands. Into his ear she shouted, as if he were miles away, “Gruel, Papa! Eat!”

  Arre reached into a pocket of her apron and produced a lump of cheese, wrapped in cloth. Grod could smell the cheese, and his hunger drove like a sharp knife through his belly; but they did not call him in. Arre broke the lump in half, and gave half to Gifu.

  “I wish there were some bread.” Gifu bit off a great chunk of the cheese.

  Grod wanted to lie down again and go back to sleep. They were feeding a useless old man and ignoring him, who could work, and was starving. He watched the old man slurp down the gruel, his thick hands wrapped around the crock and his dead moist eyes staring at nothing. Grod wanted to be one of them, in their company, even as much as he wanted food, but they shut him out, their backs to him, their eyes elsewhere, their voices pitched away from him.

  He had to get moving. He thrust himself up out of the old rag he was wrapped in and stumbled out the door.

  A cold wind blew into his face and he shivered. It had snowed a little during the night, turning the ground thinly white; against the snow the leafless trees around him stood out dark and rough. The peaked hut stood in their shelter, only a few steps above the riverbank. There were branches heaped around it, to keep in the warmth of the fire, so that the hut looked like a great nest. Off to one side of it stood a rough lean-to of poles and woven withy, with a blackened brickwork oven beside it: the potter woman’s workshop.

  Half a dozen brown and white goats nosed around under the trees, crunching the dead leaves under their hoofs, and as he stood there considering it all, the girl Gifu came out and started away. She gave a high call, and the goats bunched together and skittered after her, their tails up. Grod went behind a tree and made water.

  Uncertainly he went back to the hut, where Arre was sweeping the floor with a handful of twigs. She sang as she worked, her voice high and strong. The old man dozed by the fire. Benna brushed past Grod out the door, into the watery sunlight.

  He said, “I’ll help. I’ll bring wood.”

  Benna shook her head. She was wiping her hands on her skirts. Between her teeth, she said, “You don’t understand. We have nothing. It doesn’t matter how much you can do for us, we can do nothing for you.” She turned and went off, toward the workshop.

  Grod still stood at the threshold of the hut; just beyond it, Arre straightened, hung the broom of twigs on the sloping wall, and took a heavy cloak down. “I will walk with you over to the river, Grod,” she said.

  Defeated, he let her shoo him along ahead of him. The sun was rising, stronger now, glinting on the patches of snow; the tracks of the goats led up like ribbons of shadow across the white meadow, where already the snow was shrinking away into the air. Arre walked along beside him, smiling, her cloak slung around her. Her long loose hair showed russet in the sunlight. Some way up the river were other huts, larger and better made than Arre’s; the smoke from their chimney holes blew out in a flat fuzz over the river.

  She said, “Don’t be wrong about Benna. She has a great heart, but she’s the oldest, she has us all on her back now.”

  They had come to the top of the riverbank; a notched log tipped up against it led down to the shore. He remembered getting the pots up this ladder the night before, and wondered again how the girls ever did it by themselves. The handcart still stood down on the shore where they had left it. He looked across at the city, climbing above the far side of the river in layers of wood and thatch, the church steeple overtopping it all.

  “Euan!” Arre cried. She flung her arm up, waving.

  On the far bank, a tall thin boy was walking across the pebble shoal toward the stepping stones. He lifted one hand to answer her. Arre said, “Euan is my friend.”

  Grod gathered himself to go back into the city. He said, “Thank you for letting me stay here.”

  She smiled at him. Her friend was walking across the river on the stepping stones. She took the lump of cheese from her apron pocket, unwrapped it, and broke it in half. She held one half out to Grod.

  “Thank you.” He seized it, his mouth watering. “You are good, Arre.”

  She laughed. She turned back to watch the long lean boy Euan climb up the riverbank. Euan gave Grod a suspicious look, got Arre by the arm, and drew her away. Grod heard her sunny laughter rise. He went down the log ladder to the shore of the river and crossed into the city.

  At daybreak Corban woke and realized Grod had not come. More even than the cold, that brought him up out of his slumber.

  He went out of the church, found the fountain again, and washed his face and hands in the icy water. The church bell began to ring, right overhead, and he stood with the bell’s brassy shivers passing over him and wondered what he should do now.

  Look for Mav. He collected himself, and went away down a sloping road, toward the river in the distance.

  The day was breaking, fine and cold. As he went by, a few of the shops along the street were opening, a candlemaker already in his waxy apron pushing out the shutter on his stall, two old women hanging sprigs of herbs from a string. He smelled bread baking, somewhere in the general reek of the place, and ached for food.

  On his right now loomed the long thatched rooftree of the King’s Hall, and he went clear of that. In the cold clear air, his steps boomed on the wooden planking of the street. Ahead in the middle of the street a pack of dogs was fighting over something, and he walked wide of them also. He could hear the high whiny voice of a peddlar calling.

  In the first sunlight the town seemed caught in a drowse, only coming awake. On the thatch of a big house he passed, a rooster with a high-arched russet tail cocked its head back, gaped its pointed beak and ripped out a raucous blast of noise. The road dropped away before him, leading down toward the river, broad and brown, and the ships drawn up on this side, where a gravel bar made a broad shore below the bank.

  His heart started to pound. Those ships—those ships—he stopped still, his hands opening and closing into fists at his sides, and his throat dry. He had seen them before, he had seen them drawn up on the beach of his burning farm.

  He shook himself, and blinked his eyes clear of the smoke of memory. Not the same ships. They just all looked the same. He went on down the road, willing his heart to slow. Nothing he could do now anyway. He closed his mind over it and pushed it down, out of the reach of memory, and went in along the pebbly river bar, past
the high deep-breasted prows of the ships, all carved with twining serpents. Ahead he saw a string of pens made of withies.

  His steps quickened. But they were empty.

  He drew near them, square black-willow shapes laid against the water’s edge. Through the screen of the withies he could see that there was nothing in any of them. Yet he felt the people here as if he could see them, cold and wretched, huddling here in the wind. He swallowed; the world bulged suddenly around him, ominously full.

  He went up to the side of the nearest pen, and laid his hand on it. There had to be some way on from here, but he could not see it.

  “Corban!”

  He wheeled around. Down the shore Grod was running toward him, his face hung with the broadest smile Corban had ever seen on his face.

  “Well,” Corban said, relieved. “Well, there you are.”

  The old man slowed and walked up to him, strutting a little. “Got yourself lost, didn’t you? Got into trouble. At least I managed to find you again.” He reached out and twitched Corban’s cloak. “I saw this.”

  Corban wrapped one arm around him. “I’m glad you did. Do you have anything to eat?” Grod smelled vaguely of cheese.

  But he shook his head. “No. I don’t. But I have—” he took the coins out of his shirt “—I still have the money.”

  “The King took mine,” Corban said. He turned, and looked back at the slave pens. “She was here. She must have been.”

  Grod’s forehead crinkled. They stood on the river shore, below the high embankment where the King’s hall stood; the path led away back into the city, but Grod turned the other way. “Come along,” he said, and went back past the ships on the beach, toward the foot of the bank, where a little fire burned, and some men sat around it cooking fish.

  Corban slowed his steps, recognizing more of Eric’s men. But Grod went straight up to them, and talked for a while in dansker: asking about the last people in the slave pens.

  Corban looked away. He felt as if she stood by him, unseen, cool in the air against his cheek.

  Grod came back to him. “Those people went to Hedeby, they said.”

  “Hedeby. Where is that?”

  “On the far shore of the sea. In the Danes’ march. The whole load was bought at once, they said.”

  Corban stood where he was, too heavy to move on. Mav was out there, somewhere, but whenever he thought he might catch up with her, she turned out to be farther away than before. It was a curse, part of his father’s curse. There was no use in even trying.

  Grod said, “Come along. I’m willing to break my usual custom now, for your sake, and buy some bread.”

  In a flash of anger, Corban remembered how he had lost his money. “I could buy my own, but for the King.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t take your head,” Grod said. He shook his finger at Corban, and with one hand on his arm got him turned and walking back toward the city. “Did you do as I told you? You must have made a mistake. I had no trouble at all. You big fool, you can’t do anything without me, can you?”

  Corban said, “I can’t do anything.” He trudged on up the street, his eyes on the ground. Grod led him through crowds of people, but he paid no attention; he felt as if the road had disappeared before him and left him standing at the end of the world. He thought of Mav, and of what must have happened to her, what happened to her yet, and his mind went blank.

  He could not save her. He could only plod along one step at a time, going nowhere.

  He stood at the back of a little crowd while Grod took money to buy them bread. The smell of the bread was maddening and he kept swallowing the water in his mouth and wishing Grod would get back. He lifted his eyes and saw only a few feet away the red-bearded gape-mouthed Viking from the King’s hall, staring back at him.

  “Looking poor, Irish,” the Viking said, and put a hand on him and shoved him.

  Corban stood. The terrible gloom evaporated from his mind and left him pure with anger. When the Viking shoved he leaned against it, and when the Viking drew back, startled, and cocked his arm back and went to push him harder Corban caught his arm by the wrist and held him.

  The Viking’s eyes blazed. He jerked at Corban’s grip on him, and Corban tightened his hold; he put all the strength of rowing across the sea from Ireland into holding the Viking’s arm exactly where it was. Their eyes met.

  The Viking smiled. He stepped backward, relaxing his arm in Corban’s grip, and Corban let him go. The redbeard said, “What’s your name again?”

  “Corban,” he said. “Corban Loosestrife.”

  Grod had come up to them. Wide-eyed, he stood watching as the Viking put his hand out and Corban clasped it. The Viking said, “My name is Sweyn—” and then some muddle of sounds Corban did not know. He turned abruptly and went off into the crowd.

  Grod had three loaves of bread in his arms, flat wheels studded with onion and sprinkled with cheese. Corban took one and broke off a chunk and stuffed it into his mouth. The taste of the bread made him almost light-headed. Breaking off another piece, he looked around for a fountain.

  “What did he say? His name.” He turned back to Grod, walking beside him. “Why did you get so much? Who is that other loaf for?”

  “Oh, someone,” Grod said. “He said his name is Sweyn Eelmouth.”

  Corban laughed. “He has a very lamprey look to him.”

  “How do you know him?” They were walking downhill, toward the street where Corban knew there was a fountain; he swallowed bread in great chunks.

  “He took me to the King. Yesterday, when they stopped me at the gate.”

  “Don’t trust him,” Grod said. “All these—” He straightened, looking up ahead. “There she is. Come on.”

  “Who?” Corban followed him down the street; they turned into a steep, wood-planked lane leading down to a big oak tree.

  There the street widened out, and opposite the tree on the corner sat a woman in a welter of clay pots. Grod strutted down toward her. Corban went along after, more slowly. The woman sat with her head down, doing something before her with her hands. When Grod pranced up before her she startled, and flung her head up.

  Grod danced like a little cockerel before her; she was only a girl, really, looking older for the way her dark hair was drawn back and covered under a white cloth. Hastily she was bundling something away under her apron, as Grod told her that now he could pay her back, and she would be glad now she had helped him—see how her humble gift had been returned to her manyfold. He held out the third loaf of bread to her, with a flourish of his hand, as if he gave her the crown of the world. Corban could understand almost everything he said, words and gesture.

  The girl seemed not so grateful and impressed as Grod deemed she should. She smiled at him, and with a murmur of thanks she took the bread, but Corban could see she believed Grod was only giving her something due, and that she thought him funny, her eyes narrow in amusement, and her smile a little sideways.

  Then she saw Corban, and the smile curved into a frown. “What?” she said. “Now there are two of you. I knew this would happen.”

  Corban backed up, raising his hands; he said, “Not me.” She gave him another hard look, pushing him off, and then turned to talk to someone who was looking over her collection of pots. Corban started away up the street again, and Grod trotted beside him.

  “You would like the sister much better. She has two sisters, and one is an angel.”

  “I doubt that matters since she doesn’t much like either of us.”

  “The sister, I tell you, is much better.”

  Corban was thinking of the girl’s little crooked smile. He wondered where they were walking to so fast. They had nothing to do, nowhere to go but back to the church. There Grod promptly got into a gambling game in the shade of the church wall. Corban loafed around in the square, listening to people talk around him; he understood more and more of the words. Late in the day a wagon rolled by and the man on the seat looked around, saw Corban and beckoned.
He went after, and with a few words got to work unloading the wagon into a nearby house. For this he got a bit of a silver penny.

  He got more bread with it, and he and Grod slept once more in the back of the church, bundled together against the seeping cold. It snowed again during the night. When they woke there was nothing to eat. Grod went grumpily away toward his gambling; he did not offer to use any more of his silver money, and Corban guessed he had lost it in the game. Alone, Corban went over to the fountain to drink his belly full.

  As he stood there, wondering how to find more work, something thumped him on the back. He wheeled. Before him stood Sweyn Eelmouth, holding out a jug.

  “Here, Irish. Only poor drink water.”

  Corban took the jug and tipped it to his mouth; it was ale, so thick it left a rim of foam on his upper lip. He gave a groan of pleasure, and his head whirled, airy as a cloud. When his mind settled, he was walking along with Eelmouth and his men down the street past the church. Reluctantly, he gave the empty cup to the redheaded Viking, who turned as he strode along to talk to him.

  “Make money. Two pence.”

  “What?” Corban said, startled. The ale softened his head, too muzzy for Eelmouth’s Irish.

  “You make me money. Two pence.” Eelmouth spoke as distinctly as he could, blowing spume through the gaping hole in his face with each word. He held up his two fingers. “Because of King take two.” He laughed, an erupting maw.

  Corban tried using his new learned dansker. “I have no money.”

  “Aha.” Eelmouth eyed him a moment. They turned into the street that smelled deliciously of bread, and he stopped. The other two men drifted up toward them; one had gotten an apple somewhere and was eating it. Eelmouth led them all into the first bakery.

  Here they filled the whole shop; the baker came out and shouted at Eelmouth, his face red, as the Viking picked up a loaf from the shelf. With the baker still yelling, they all filed back out to the street, and Eelmouth tore pieces off the loaf and gave some to everybody.

  Corban’s mouth watered. He didn’t want to take this bread, but his stomach growled. He remembered when he had stolen whatever he could. Eelmouth shoved a big piece of the bread into his hand; it was still warm, and he began to eat. Eelmouth gave him a sideways look, and they went off down the street again.