by Sandi Layne
“Kingson.”
Tuirgeis’s voice jostled Cowan from his reverie, and the islander shook his head and concentrated to focus again on his master. “Ja?”
“My bags there. Carry them. We’re going home.”
Charis had no room in her thoughts for anything save the disgusting, horrid, heart-rending “verses” that lying, twisted-tongued monk had “sung” in Agnarr’s hall.
“Oh, that I were a man and could rip out his heart! Would that I could tear him apart and feed him to the boars!”
The monk, Bran, had begun by singing a lay that was attributed to one of his holy men, a man called Colm Cille, who had died far away for disobeying his church. Charis held no anger toward this Colm Cille; he had never harmed her and had, from what she had heard, stood up for the Island’s way of worshiping their god over the ways of the men of Rome. As far as the healer was concerned, this indicated the man was intelligent, even if he had persisted in this Man-God worship.
The lay was short; Charis had heard it before and managed not to roll her eyes. It was traditional and spoke more of the love of Éire than of the monk’s god. But then—oh, then!—Bran had added another verse onto the usual two, calling down the wrath of his god upon “unnatural” relationships such as a plural marriage, as her own had been.
How dared he? How dared that lying, squint-eyed, skin-and-bone excuse for a man speak ill of her men? Unnatural? Men living without a woman was unnatural. Not marrying all one’s life was unnatural. Yes, and so it was.
“Unnatural,” she spat, kicking up a stone that had been lodged in the light earth near the dwelling where Agnarr lived. Oh, if I only had a spear!
The rock had not hurt her booted foot, but she had kicked it with enough force to hit a wooden post of the nearest structure with a hollow sound. The sound reminded her that she was in a settlement surrounded by strangers. What if she had hit a person instead of a post?
“Well, if it had been Agnarr, that would have been fine with me,” she muttered to herself.
But no, she had a revenge planned out for her captor and the murderer of Devin and Devlin that would be much more appropriate than a quick death by a head injury.
She stood then, pulling her temper back as if it were a wild creature on a tether. Back, back, deep inside herself. Already, here in this northern place, she could feel a bite to the wind. Winter would not be far behind. She was Agnarr’s wife until she could get away, but escape would not be possible before the green time of spring, when she had had a chance to prepare for a long, long journey. She would need food, clothes, weaponry, and she would have to learn the language of the Northmen. It would take all winter.
Until then, Charis said to herself with a nod, she would have to be strong. Strong for the children she had left behind, whom she hoped to see again. Strong for her men.
That decided, she shook herself and took a deep breath. The air was clear. Salt wafted over her, reminding her of home with a pain so deep that it went almost beyond her knowledge. Almost.
She could be strong. She was a slave; that much she understood. Fine. She could do anything, bear anything, for one winter. Surely she could.
Prepared to be shouted at or beaten, Charis ground her teeth together and turned to go back to the longhouse. She was met by her captor, his huge silhouette filling the door’s opening into his home.
“Eir,” he said, sounding surprised.
“Ja.”
“You did not leave.” It was a statement, but she felt as if he had questioned her. She just shook her head. He nodded and held out his hand to her. “It is time to sleep. Come in.”
She followed, once again reminded that he was the only person she knew here. He kept her by his side as he bade farewell to his companions, and even to his betrothed, that sly-faced girl. To Bran, the monk, Agnarr said nothing. Charis was unwillingly pleased about that.
When all had left the house save the brothers and mother, Agnarr took her to a long platform covered with furs and skins. A bed, but not filled with straw and rushes as she was accustomed to. Still, it was far superior to the deck of the boat.
“I sleep here?” she asked, trying to be polite. He had not retaliated or punished her when she had likely shamed him before his guests; she had to be grateful.
“We sleep here,” Agnarr told her. His voice was firm, but somehow tender. The heat in his hand as it encircled her arm told Charis he expected to do far more than merely sleep.
“No!” She hissed in a breath. “I will not.” The red glow of coals from the banked fire etched his face in an otherworldly manner, but Charis tried not to be overset. “I will not,” she repeated more clearly in his tongue.
He shook her once, with purpose. “You are my leman,” he told her, “and so you shall.”
“Leman?” There was that word again, that she didn’t truly understand.
“My,” something, “Eir.”
“Your kvinn medisin?” Was that what it meant? It would make sense. She nodded in agreement. “Of course I am your leman. I serve brothers and mother.” Until spring, she added to herself. Only until spring.
Agnarr chuckled, surprising her. “No,” he told her, pushing her easily to the fur-covered platform. She glanced briefly around and saw that the brothers were settling under the furs on other platforms, and that Gerda had disappeared behind a cloth draped in front of yet another one. “You are my kvinn medisin, yes,” he said, “but you are also my leman and only mine.”
Agnarr did not explain further with words that she did not understand. Instead, he pushed her hair back from her face and began unlacing her cloak. Cold that had nothing to do with the chilling air started to gather in her stomach. He could not mean this, could he? He had not taken her again, after that one time on the boat. Surely his curiosity had been satisfied. His sense of possession, or whatever motivated him, must be accomplished by now.
She remembered when he had taken her on the ship. He’d been rushed, as if it were a duty to be seen to, no more. She had fought, fiercely, but he had overpowered her as if she weighed no more than a child. She knew the change in his male smell. Knew what it portended, and she stiffened, reaching for the apron that he had taken from her. “Né!”
He jerked the grimy garment with one hand, gripping her chin in the other. “Ja.” He untied her cloak before tossing both cloak and apron to the end of the fur-covered platform. Then he sat beside her on the platform, unlacing his own shirt and indicating she should help remove his boots.
Wary, she did so. A leman, then, might be a personal servant and she was mistaken about his guessed-at arousal. He would not want a personal servant to serve his brothers, perhaps. That would fit.
But maybe I am not understanding. Well, I know I’m not. I don’t understand much about him at all.
She finished with his boots and tucked them under the platform, folding his discarded clothing afterward, making note of something that would need mending. Only until spring. And then, she would serve him a very special tea and take her leave.
He reached up to something she had not yet heeded—a length of cloth that was folded on a wooden beam. “Here,” he said. “Shake it out,” he instructed her, showing her what he meant.
She did so, coughing as a cloud of dust swirled in front of her. Dead insects fell to the wooden floor, so she kicked them away. “Here,” she said, handing him the cloth. “May I sleep now?”
Agnarr chuckled again, shaking his head. “You do not understand, Eir,” he told her, “but I will teach you.”
She moved back a few steps, uncaring that his brothers’ eyes were watching every movement. They slept on the other side of the longhouse, but there was little privacy here. Agnarr could not have understood her, but he faced her fully after settling a drape in front of his platform. “You may not leave.”
She stepped farther from him, beyond the cover of the cloth. “I will not stay. My job is done,” she stated, nostrils flaring.
“You have not yet begun, kvinn medisi
n,” he informed her, catching her in one hand.
Finally, after everyone else in the raiding party, after every other slave that had been kept, after the entire village of Balestrand knew—Charis was made to understand the true position of a leman as Agnarr pulled her tunic from her body and pushed her back down.
Rough hands moved over her skin. “Be easy,” he advised her. “I would not want to hurt you.”
She stiffened, refusing to succumb. Her gritted protests were in Gaeilge. “I will not. I may belong to you, but only until I can leave you.” She would not submit. He had killed her men. She pushed at him, trying to move her hips out from under his, but to no avail.
His breath came more quickly, his body hardening over her as he showed her that her protest was useless. “No more. Now!”
On that word, he came into her body again. All Charis could do was close her eyes and keep her tears to herself. They, too, were useless. No one would help her here.
Chapter 14
The child, a little girl of about six summers with pale blond hair, stared at Charis. “Why do you have a bird on your cheek?” she inquired.
The healer smiled, her hatred of the Northmen forgotten for a few moments as she helped the child. Charis had been in the village of Balestrand a full moon’s cycle. The language was coming more easily to her, though there were still some terms of which she was ignorant. She had learned to dress like the women here, with the heavy woven dresses and head-coverings. The women here also wore aprons that were shaped more like tubes, with panels sewn in to make them wider as needed. Charis herself eschewed the foreign aprons; she had her own. Hers had all of her pockets, of course, that she had added to the fabric. She also had her pouches that she wore. She had created many of them, because she did not trust anyone and had wanted to keep her herbs with her at all times. On her head, at Agnarr’s insistence, she wore a square of cloth that had been twisted to make a circlet. This was put over a veil that hung down the back of her hair, which was now braided as her “owner” had dictated.
“The bird,” she told the girl, “is an ancient symbol of my people. The kvinn medisin of my village has always earned her tattoo—this image—when she has completed her training.”
“She? So is it always women?”
Charis carefully wrapped linen straps soaked in herbs around the girl’s sprained ankle. “No. The one before me was a man. We called him leigheasóir,” she said, with Achan’s title in good Gaeilge.
A braid tumbled from the veil as the healer worked on the little girl, who had hurt herself chasing sheep from an upper meadow. “I think our language is prettier,” the girl pronounced as she studied her injured ankle. “But that’s nice, too.”
Charis hid a smile. “Here’s your willow bark. You’ve made tea before?”
“Yes, and thank you,” the girl said before returning to her home.
Charis gathered her pouches and the small bowl she’d had to make since coming here. It was wooden, but served well for the purpose of mixing herbal preparations.
In the distance, from the center of the village, she could hear the abrupt, flat, smacking sounds of wooden spears hitting wooden shields, of axes striking practice posts, and of the few practice swords as the Northmen prepared for battle.
Battle sounds. Familiar, in their own way, they somehow soothed the healer. As if Devin and Devlin were training the young warriors, and not Agnarr. Was anyone in Ragor training now? Had any warrior survived to teach the children how to fight? Home. It seemed so very far away. Here, women would weave in front of their homes, sometimes visiting back and forth across the main square, or at the well in the square’s center. They would chat, share recipes, and discuss husbands and children. Charis had done much the same, once, but here she was alone. No one spoke to her unless they had an ailment that required her skills.
Gerda had told Charis the morning after her arrival that their old kvinn medisin had died in her sleep while Agnarr had been raiding.
The raiding was never far from Agnarr’s thoughts. “The land is green, fertile,” he had told his mother a few days ago, over the evening fire. “We could farm there.”
Then Magda, that fox-faced girl, had pouted. “I don’t want to move to a land filled with savages, Agnarr. I won’t leave my father.”
The discussion had unnerved Charis. What if others of the Northmen felt as Agnarr? What if they came by boats to stay? What would happen to her people?
There would be war. Charis let her mind wander in that direction as the waves from the fjørd lapped on the shore. War. A minor war was coming now, she remembered. The battle against an invader. Perhaps it would present an opportunity to leave this place earlier than she’d anticipated. But then, the invaders were coming from even farther north, so perhaps not.
“I want to be free of this place!” she called up to the sky. She had never placed her faith in any power or god, ever. But now, for just a moment, Charis wished with all her being that she could trust something outside of herself. Her herbs would not help her get home. Nothing would.
Rage at her helplessness swept up from her feet, seeming to want to burst from her hands in a physical expression. With one fluid motion, she bent, scooped up a hand-sized stone, and threw it far, far into the water, where it landed with an audible plop, sending silent ripples to collide with the boats in the harbor.
A hateful voice slid up egregiously behind her. Magda. “Trying to break something?” The girl was dressed in a richly embroidered gown, but had left her dark hair hanging loose, in the manner of the unwed virgins of the village. Her smile was filled with venom. “You can’t destroy one of our ships with your rocks, Eir.”
Charis did not bother to control her temper. Magda Elsdottir was not her mistress . . . yet . . . and the healer’s rage and pain were throbbing fresh with her memories. “I’ll take his life without stones, Magda,” she proclaimed in Gaeilge. “I’ll make him regret he’s taken me to wife!”
Magda actually smiled. It was a triumphant expression and Charis was immediately on her guard. “You will speak the language of Nordweg!” the dark-haired girl said with a slap. Another slap followed. “You will behave like a proper slave!”
Charis didn’t react at first because she was surprised; part of her mind marveled that she had been hit at all, since no one ever had done so before. The final slap, though, made her clench her jaw.
“You will not strike at anything—anything!—that belongs to us!”
The open-handed slaps stung, but Charis had endured worse. Her tattoo, the mark of her people, had been a torture of sorts to receive. She held Magda’s eyes with her own, keeping her face impassive. She was a trell, yes, but she had honor.
She had heard, around the fire, about the concept of honor among the Northmen. It was believed by these people that revenge was an art, as her people would count the pursuit of a craft or skill. Only the week before—as the men of Nordweg counted days—there had been an incident of theft of valuable personal property: a sword. Agnarr, a member of the council, had met with the nearest lovsigemann, or reader of the law. The law regarding the theft was recited, Charis remembered. All had agreed that the penalty was repayment and the crafting of a new sword.
But the wronged man had, in the dead of night, taken his revenge upon the thief. Charis had approved, in principle, but had found that the men of Balestrand now looked down upon the wronged man.
“A slave takes revenge at once, a fool never takes revenge,” went the adage around the fires of the village that evening. The man of honor, Gerda had said reflectively, would have waited for months or years to take his revenge.
“And then,” Agnarr growled, “it would be done powerfully!”
Charis had listened. She had honor. She was the Healer of Ragor, and she would enact her revenge, with swift power that could not be denied.
When Magda finished her ranting, Charis took a deep breath. “You may beat me, but it will not change who I am. And I am no trell to you, Magda Elsdottir.�
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The younger woman’s hands shrunk into clawed fists. “You will be, Eir. You will be. And you will be sorry, I promise you.”
Charis felt a vindictive smile rising in her chest, but she kept it hidden. “Strike me as you like, but I tell you, you will be the one who is sorry.”
Angry color rose to Magda’s pale cheeks, but Charis did not stay to endure another confrontation. Instead, with elaborate, mocking courtesy, she curtsied and left. “The hills,” she muttered to herself. “I need to get to the hills.”
The green grass, the smell of growing things, soothed her spirit. When Gerda scolded her for a lack of respect toward Agnarr, Charis fled to the hills, ostensibly to seek her herbs. She had found many familiar ones, and others that were not exactly the same as flowers she knew, but that worked similarly. The rich odors of the soil were clean, free from the associations of the village below the hills.
With rapid strides, she cut a path through the village, past the men learning to wield the axe, and through the far gates that led to the fields.
“Erik!” Agnarr called, beckoning to the young warrior. “You’ll be my example.”
The red-haired young man didn’t even exhibit a limp as he crossed the practice square to Agnarr’s side. Agnarr grunted in private satisfaction, remembering the severity of the wound to the groin Erik had suffered back on the Green Island. The younger man faltered in his steps, though, for just a moment, his eyes going to the edge of the clearing.
His were not the only eyes that tracked the woman with the moonbeam-bright hair. Agnarr watched, too. She wasn’t so far away that he missed the angry red splotches of color on her cheeks. Not wanting to deal with her in front of his men, he let her walk out through the gates. She was likely off looking for her herbs. She had standing permission from him to do so whenever she felt she needed some.