The fire had been used for roasting geese, and they’d eaten well, but although the flames also kept the crocodiles at bay, each man kept one eye alert for the sudden snap of huge teeth. Now, as the fire began to die low, one of the group jumped up and lit another. “Tis ice down me neck to my back,” he complained, “and a roasting face you could mistake for another helping of duck. So we have two small fires, and we sit between. Ain’t no nasty big reptile gonna risk two fires, is they?”
They sat, now relaxed, between the surge of flames, and Jak said, “I’ve heard of a Fraygard, but not sure where or why. Has anyone any idea what happened to him back in Eden, as long as he didn’t drown on the voyage back?”
“Oh, I know indeed,” Shozwall leaned forwards, elbows to his knees. “There was a lad who went over and found him.” Shozwall cackled again. “Son of my first mate. Groswall, and named for me, he was. He’d loved Fraygard as a kid, and went to find him. We had a larger ship by then and his father captained it for him. He came back well-nigh a year later and told me the story.”
Jak was only partially interested. He had other matters to think on, and Symon seemed preoccupied, which worried Jak more than the fate of a long dead adventurer.
But Symon said, “I heard o’ Fraygard too. Went to prison, he did. Locked up fer life. But at least he got a decent cell up on top. From the top, you gets better food, you watches the river go by, and you gets other stuff n’ all. But I never met the bugger. The Island Prison don’t mix the rabble wiv the lords and such.”
“He was thrown into prison indeed,” sighed Shozwall, “and it was as unjust as could be. The new Lord of Rantall, distant cousin to the other one Fraygard killed, came over as furious and bitter as a cuckolded peasant. He met with the lord of the land up north where Fraygard was living.”
“North?” Jak smiled. “I come from the north of Eden.”
“Fraygard lived in Lydiard,” Shozwall nodded, “and fell in love with a lass from way down south in your country. Chia, she was called. I remember it all for the lad, that found it out, came back to tell me how wicked it was, and tell me I should sail to Eden to fight the Lord of Lydiard. But we’ve had enough wars. I didn’t do it. But I sent another, name of Crok. And he told others. Made friends with some bugger name of Thribb. And Thribb promised to kill the lord off. I don’t know if that succeeded.”
Frowning and now remembering words he had at first ignored, Jak said, “Lydiard? I knew the lord. But little or nothing of Fraygard, or what Lord Lydiard had against him. I know the name Thribb as well. But he never managed to kill Lord Lydiard.”
Symon looked up. “You knows the story?” But Jak shook his head.
“Rumour. Names. I met nobody, being a child.”
“Then I’ll finish it off,” Shozwall said, hurrying on. “This next lord of Lydiard, though I never met him, sounds a fool and swallowed the story of Fraygard being wicked. He was thrown in the gaol you talk of,” and he turned to Symon, “with no hope of getting out. But meanwhile, this lady he loved so mighty hard, name of Chia, though I never met her neither, had his baby daughter. Fraygard never saw her, but cried his heart out, I heard, for never being able to hold her nor hear her call him father. For Chia gave the baby over to a friend, not being able to keep the child while she rushed to the city to visit her husband whenever she could.”
Now unblinking and riveted to the words, Jak asked, “The child? Did she have a name? And who took her?”
“Name of the child, I don’t know,” Shozwall said cheerfully, “I reckon she’d be around the twenty-two or three mark by now. Probably still lives with her adopted mother.”
“And you know the adopted mother’s name?”
“Yes indeed.” Shozwall thought a moment, again chewing his bottom lip. “At least, far as I remember.” He paused. Jak held his breath. Then Shozwall said, “Her, or like it. Higher. Perhaps Hyr. Hry? or mighty like it.”
Finally Jak blinked, then breathed. “I knew – a woman named Hyr. And she had a daughter.”
Shozwall grinned wide. “Then tis a story worth the telling indeed. Do you know the little baby’s name too? And was she told she was adopted, though her father was in prison for life?”
“No knowledge of a father in prison, and no knowledge of adoption,” Jak said, “at least, not before the woman finally died. Hyr was a good woman, and her daughter’s name was Freya.”
Symon looked up, breaking his trance. “Wot were that, you says?”
“We are talking of Freya, I believe,’ Jak said, “the woman I’ve loved since I was a child.”
But it was that night, alone and uninterrupted, that Jak repeated the story to himself, questioning whether he could still love a woman after so long without connection. It was justice he had grown to love. His passion surrounded the beauty of the land and the need for life itself to be as beautiful as nature. Yet Freya and her sweeping, climbing and spiralling blues, had always haunted his dreams.
Chapter Ten
The stream froze from the frosted mud of its banks gradually inwards towards the current, enclosing it until it was solid, and until the great wheel slowed and one night it shivered to a stop. Caught in the ice, it remained trapped for a month and more. Feeling equally iced inside the unheated mill, Freya had surrendered to hopeless self-doubt. The dark winter skies seemed to enter her heart, and the hope of escape had frozen too, becoming a solid icicle in her belly. Yet now, when Doria kicked, Freya saw it coming, stooped, and reached out for her leg as it came whipping towards her, caught it and tumbled her over.
It happened more than once, and the third time she yelled as she hit the hard-rimed cobbles and her wail echoed in the freezing hush of the snowed land. Freya leapt on top of her, stifling Doria’s voice with her skirt hem shoved into her mouth, and held her with both hands to her wrists. Doria was a lot stronger than she’d looked and her struggles threw Freya partially over. Poorly fed, imprisoned and drugged, she was far weaker than Doria. Freya reached for a stone and cracked it across her skull. It was only a small stone. Bleeding a little into the tangled dirty hair over her forehead, Doria spat into Freya’s face, rolled over, and wrenched her hands free. Then she was standing over her prisoner as Freya remained on the ground, with Doria kicking her over and over, in her groin, her ribs, her stomach, and her face. Doria’s clogs were solid wood. Freya twisted, clambered to her knees and then upright. Without looking back, she began to run.
Rudd caught her from behind, two huge hands around Freya’s waist, and his leg shoved between hers.
He dragged her then, by her hair and one arm, back to the mill. His daughter pranced behind as cheerfully as if she danced for the start of spring, wiped the blood from her eyes, and called happily to her father. “Go on Pa, you can do it to her now. Whup her and fuck her. His lordship said as how you could if she done something bad. ‘Scaping’s bad, innit? She hit me, she did, the dirty scut. So now you can beat her and swive her and hurt her ‘stead o’ me.”
Since Rudd did not have the incentive of getting information or confessions, or pleasing a master with his special talents, his need was simple satisfaction, instantly and now frequently demanded. Expecting no co-operation, and now believing permission to beat and fuck was granted him, Rudd was always forceful. At least once a day, and sometimes several times a day, he would suddenly appear, slam back the door and stride in. He would quickly raise his smock, uncovering his old-fashioned hose which hung around his muscled pink and hairy thighs, and pull the opening of his braies aside with one hand as he knocked Freya flat to the ground with the other. His erection would spring out like a hare from a trap, his prick as huge as she’d seen on any man, and scarlet as an alderman’s livery. The man stank constantly. Seen close up, his hose and braies were piss stained, the grime of past ejaculations remained around the groin, and the sour acid of old sweat and lice bites clogged the tangled hair. He would kneel and shove himself inside. His grunting was brief, satisfaction achieved in a few short thrusts. Mercifully, he would qu
ickly withdraw, strap himself up and stomp back outside, locking the door behind him. Freya would be left, dry, ragged, sore and inflamed, to catch her breath sufficiently to crawl to bed and sob into the straw.
Sweet pig-brained Doria, much to her irritation, still took a share of her father’s attentions. He beat both, swived both, and made both work for him. The fucking was the easiest since Freya was accustomed to the humiliation of servicing strangers. Eventually, accepting the inevitable, she sometimes managed to ignore his violence, acquiesce in order to avoid the pain, and even tried to think of other things.
Freya soon realised that her attempt to escape had evidently given the Rudds licence to do as they wished. Doria came one morning with a torn smock and dumped it on the doorstep. “You takes off them fine clothes,” she ordered, “and you put this on instead. Them clothes is torn and grubby, but it’s fancy stuff and I can sell it or wear it meself.”
Her clothes were utterly ruined anyway. She waited until Doria left, and quickly hid Jak’s ring beneath two layers of folded sacking and amongst the remaining grit of old chaff under the mattress. Then she tucked her once fine cloak between two of the thin blankets. Obediently wearing the dirty blue smock, Freya placidly handed over the small heap of bedraggled materials.
Thribb frightened her more. His words sounded vile, and she could not sympathise with his injuries since he seemed more interested in hurting others. He wore no eye patch, and rarely bothered to comb the few streaks of white hair.
Once she asked about the battle and his supposed courage – the cause of the wounds. He ignored her with contempt, and Rudd punched her in the breast for addressing Thribb unasked. Instead, Freya asked Doria, who knew nothing. “It’s too long past the invasion, I think,” Freya decided. “Though I’m not sure – but surely at the least, he’d have been too young to fight.”
“There was other fights.”
“Skirmishes in the South. Town against town. I know. But nothing terrible unless he travelled the islands.”
“Dunno nuffing. Don’ wanna know nuffin.”
He was often ill, but recovered soon enough, and Freya made no mention of her apothecary skills, nor offered to help nurse him in any way. But gradually as she became accepted within the scrap of wantonly unpleasant household, she was unlocked from her grubby gaol, and marched into the cottage each morning to help clean. Doria, it was apparent, did not understand the need for cleanliness, nor had the slightest desire to do what could be avoided, unless forced. Scrubbing the kitchen pots and carrying water was preferable to Freya, rather than absolute confinement, and easy enough in the belted kirtle of coarse woven flax and wooden clogs which she now wore, being permitted no change of clothes. Her own became quickly soiled, but now at least she had the opportunity to cleanse herself at the stream and was no longer forced to use the sewerage dump with someone watching. The clogs were far too large for her and tripped her, but outside it was bitterly cold for walking barefoot as she had at first.
The second time she attempted escape, she was caught by the man Thribb. She ran straight into him. Having been sent to collect water from the well, a bucket in each hand, she was alone and felt strong enough to take advantage of the opportunity. With the river now solid white ice, the well was used, and it was further towards the dark shadow of the village in the distance. It was raining with an icy drizzle which turned the air to a swirling haze, so she was sent off alone. Within the low mist she thought herself hidden, unwatched, and safe. Removing her clogs and holding them in one hand, she left the buckets by the well, and tiptoed under the trees. Thribb was pissing up against the big birch. Freya almost knocked him over. Then he knocked Freya over.
His power seemed extraordinary compared to the feeble look of the man. He fisted her in one eye and as she tumbled, he grabbed her by her breast and dragged her back to the cottage. His grip, holding both the nipple and the flesh around it, his fingers digging sharply, was extraordinarily painful and Freya was crying and choking on the tears.
The man himself was so thin, she had thought him weaker than Rudd or Kallivan. His hair was a pale cream streak across the back of his head, and a few strands ruffled across the ears and forehead. His one eyelid always seemed swollen but remained open, and his eye, barely seen between the lids, was the colour of the sky during a snowstorm. He was thin, almost scrawny, and his limbs dangled from his clothes, yet he was strong after all.
Fighting, and fighting as bitterly as she was able, kicking over and over and aiming for his groin, she now had no nails to scratch with, all long broken, but she fisted both hands and pummelled where she could. She managed to punch where his empty eye socket seemed vulnerable, and where she could, she tried to bite. Yet her struggle seemed to invigorate Thribb and he gripped the open neck of Freya’s smock and ripped it downwards. It tore to her waist. Well-worn and almost threadbare, it ripped easily and he tossed her onto her face, put one boot hard to the small of her back, and wrenched the rest of the material from her until she lay entirely naked.
He used his riding crop, a polished birch cane which sprang and swept back, flexible and cutting, striking with a force that seemed greater than its fine appearance. Freya had been beaten before, but it was not something easy to endure, however accustomed. Firstly Bryte and then Bembitt, later Sal in the Bog Dock and now Kallivan, Rudd and Thribb. She lay crying as Thribb continued to cane her across her back and buttocks. She would have called the pain unbearable, but she bore it. Yet she lost something valuable as her last streak of confidence and self-worth oozed away on the current. Freya became the victim so entirely that her furious intention to escape floated away on the winter wind, and she wanted only to faint and make her escape, but now through death.
Rudd, hearing the noise, had come to watch. He said nothing but stared intently. Doria’s footsteps, clog heavy, stumbled down the stairs as she also came to watch. To be the audience, when often instead the victim, was one of the few pleasures remaining on a bitter day where nothing else remained to enjoy. They were still watching when Thribb ordered them to hold Freya down while he raped her.
Afterwards Doria dragged her back to the mill and locked the door as Freya crept to the water bucket, and then crawled to her bed. She could not lie on her back and had no salves nor ingredients to make some. But she slept for many, many hours and was feverish for three days, then gradually recovered. The poppy drink helped, as it always did.
The scars remained, of course, with persistent pain. Freya could not see the injuries having no mirror, nor wanting one, but she could feel the open wounds across her buttocks and thighs. She knew when the injuries closed and turned into scabs, then dry welts, and finally healed into flat scars. Nor was it the last time she was punished that way. And she knew that all this would pass. It is the mind which fails to recover.
She stopped trying to run away, having neither will nor energy. In the end, it wasn’t fear, it was apathy. Everything ended in pain, which made struggle pointless. At last she accepted the violence that came so constantly and called it destiny.
It was a nightmare, and sometimes as she cuddled alone at night, hugging her scabby and frozen knees to her chest, she whispered to herself how all this was a poppy dream, and how in the morning she would wake in her own warm bed back at Webb’s stewe. Nothing else could be real. It was simply the wandering nonsense that comes with sleep.
But she knew that she lied, even to herself.
The riverlet had now fully frozen and was solid enough to cross on foot. Freya slipped quietly over the surface, staring down at the gradual silver veneer – everything white, everything translucent, everything still. It was a temporary frozen world. For so many nights she had listened to the mill wheel’s swirling rhythmic spin, the endless sad repetition of pointless turning in wind and water. Now the stream had solidified and the wheel could not move; only a faint shiver now rattled in gales. It made little difference since this was no working mill and pounded no grain, produced no flour and sold no bread. The village,
being way beyond the trees was too far away and no one came. So there was nothing to grind, only the grinding of Freya’s stomach.
Stomping out to the latrine patch, she could see her reflection for the first time in the smooth white ice. Beaten, kicked and half starved, she was also ill, her eyes puffy and her cheekbones dark sunken. After Thribb had ripped her smock, she had been permitted needle and thread to repair it, but she had made no attempt to stich neatly and a huge scar, thicker even than her own, ran from hem to neck both back and front. It was filthy and so was her hair. Since the stream no longer flowed for washing, fleas infested the dark places of the body and their bites became red sores as she scratched them.
There was a snowstorm one night and it snowed all the next day. Freya’s tiny world, the small patch which was the only thing she ever saw now, closed down into its winter hush. The little scuttling black rats hid and even the mice cuddled down in whatever warmer corners they might find and were rarely seen any more in the courtyard. Most of the birds were silent or had flown to other brighter lands. Only the crows stayed. She saw a robin once, but it flew away. Previously the cottage had seemed cosy, even delightful. Warm fires and cushioned chairs flanked all three rooms. The thatch, sprinkled with snow, had seemed like a haven of fragile beauty. But after the whipping, the cottage became a hell of its own, and the daily cleaning, which was still Freya’s job, seemed desolate and she returned to the mill more quickly than before.
There was something more important that now concerned her. It was twisting at the apathy, driving nails between her desire to do nothing and her renewed need to get away. Freya began to keep a very careful score of the days again, counting nights and watching the moon wane. She thought herself pregnant.
At first, she hoped that the disappearance of her monthly courses was the result of bad food and misery. She waited for the other signs, knowing them all, and they all came. Once morning’s nausea made her vomit back the poppy drink and for that day she was violently sick both from opium withdrawals and from whatever had made her heave it up.
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