I frowned at her, thinking there seemed room for cheating in these rules, but Ademar was respected by his household and Renaud kept a tight rein. Some servants were free and some were unfree serfs, but as a slave I was the most lowly. Ademar, Melisende, Aina, and many of the servants treated me with kindness but some of the lesser servants took advantage of for once having someone lower than them, and they looked on me with contempt and suspicion, muttering that a pagan would soon go straight to hell.
There was a large chestnut tree on the riverbank, some distance from the castle gate and not visible from the walls. I decided that this would be my sacred tree and as often as I could I left small offerings there to the Aesir and the Vanir, begging that they would keep Thorgils and Olafr safe and help me to find them very soon. I could not push the toleration of Ademar too far and if anyone found out I was sacrificing to my gods I would be badly beaten, so I left things that if noticed I could say I had just dropped them: a shiny pin, a strand of scarlet thread, a lump of bread. I would be punished for carelessness too, but it would be mild compared to the fury that would be unleashed against me if I were caught in my solitary rites. I prayed to the Aesir in my head and assured them of my secret loyalty and hoped they would be loyal to me and give me my freedom, and I looked for the omens of birds and tried to hear the raven’s sayings.
Father Dominic sometimes railed in the chapel against pagan gods who were demons according to him, and he always looked at me then and the whole household, excepting Ademar and Melisende, would turn around and stare at me. Aina would also turn and stare at me but with frank interest on her face. Margareta, the poultry girl, who envied me Phillippe’s kindnesses, said I needed to be exorcised and I gave her the hebegeebies because I looked like a carrot. I tried to keep my head down and keep my own counsel but I was stubborn in my beliefs as in everything else.
‘Saint Paul said let women keep silence in the churches,’ bellowed Father Dominic in his sermon that I was made to sit through, ‘Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived, and was in sin. We see prostitutes all around us wearing fine clothes.’ To my mind, Father Dominic and his god spoke ill of women and I would have none of them.
Every now and then Ademar or Melisende would try gentle persuasion. ‘There are many of your countrymen, Sigrid,’ Ademar told me, ‘who accept that Christ is a God, one among many, alongside your Aesir – could you start with that perhaps? And let Father Dominic tell you about Christ in that way and then make up your own mind – I know you will make up your own mind.’
I shook my head. I had taken my ground and I was going to stand it. Nothing would change my mind – not beatings, not harangues, not alienation and ostracising. Eventually they gave up. I wore them down or they forgot about my secret resistance as I went through the motions, attending their church services.
Phillippe recognised that I clung to my own traditions and each time he returned from a trip North he brought me something: two oval brooches, a decorated book in Norse, a rune-carved mirror.
‘What do the marks say?’ Aina asked, excited, but I pretended that I could not read them, for they simply said Toka made this for Inga, and that was a little disappointing. If I were at home Thorgils would have made me such a gift and the runes would say Thorgils Thorolfsson carved this for his sister Sigrid Thorolfsdottir. Instead I had to worry about what had happened to Inga that she had lost her mirror. Was she made a slave like me?
‘Why do you resist converting Sigrid?’ Aina asked. ‘Would it not go better for you to do so, with Father Dominic, but also with the other servants who do not accept you because you are stubbornly pagan.’
‘I cannot say I believe in your god and not in mine when that is not the truth. I cannot lie.’
‘Don’t you like it here?’
‘Yes, your parents and many people are kind to me but I don’t belong here. I am ripped from my life. I belong on a boat, in a fjord, on a mountain, in sun or snow and ice.’
At night, lonely for Thorgils and Olafr, I sometimes sat by the well and sang songs in Norse. The sound of my singing carried in the night air to Aina where she lay on a pallet in her parents’ room, until one night she asked, ‘Mother, may I sleep in the other chamber to myself and may I have Sigrid for my own maid?’
Everybody in Ségur was stacked up in their proper order, but I saw noblemen come to visit the household who were not noble and spoke unkindly or lasciviously to the maids, and I saw the lowest, like me, who could be as noble as a king and as kind as an angel. Sometimes Melisende sent Aina and I on an errand to the village to the chandlers or the fishmongers and I witnessed the orders of the people there. In the house of a weaver there were five women spinning for him and children worked sorting and carding the wool. The women had to work hard, scouring flax and combing hemp. The butcher was a widow woman and though she had two boys who were apprentices, she also had her two young daughters under her tutelage. One of the boys told me that apprentices had to swear not to marry, frequent taverns, tell their mistress or master’s secrets or to rob the master. I nodded. This seemed reasonable. I considered that everyone in a way was indentured to someone else – even the lords owed a duty to their overlords, and if they were good men as Ademar was, then they owed a duty of protection to their servants, tenants and serfs too. Some mornings I woke longing with a desperate intensity to be able to do, just for one day, only what I wished and not what I was told. I saved those feelings up, promising myself that one day they would have their chance, they would be able to soar out.
Walking to the village one morning Aina and I stopped to exchange gossip with the laundresses at the river as they washed and wrung out clothes, their arms and hands red and chaffed. Aina called a hello to two men thatching on the roof of a house. In the fields men, women and children were weeding. The peasants here lived frugal lives, with a few pigs, cows and sheep, slender meals and rough clothes. When times were good they lived a simple life but if the harvest was poor they would be wretched and hungry and Ademar did what he could to bring the families relief. We stopped off that morning in the inn, because Melisende had sent a tonic to the innkeeper’s wife who was recovering from a difficult birth. The innkeeper sat us down in his warm kitchen with two small beakers of hot mead to warm us and chunks of fresh bread. We could hear snatches of men’s conversations from the main room of the inn.
‘These rich lords,’ an angry voice exclaimed, grown loud with drinking, ‘they are either raiding us: killing, stealing, slaving, or they offer us their “protection”.’ His last word was said with a sneer. ‘And the price of our “gratitude” for their so-called protection is our submission to their unjust commands and their greedy tolls and tithes.’
‘Hush, man!’ I heard the innkeeper cry, no doubt conscious of Lady Aina listening in his kitchen. ‘You speak unwisely and here in these lands, unreasonably, for our lord, Lord Ademar is a fair man and we are all truly glad of his protection of us.’
The drunken man began to argue with this, but we could not hear properly, as the innkeeper nudged the kitchen door shut with his shoulder as he passed with two beakers of ale in his hands.
‘My father is not greedy and unjust!’ Aina said indignantly to me.
‘No, but many lords are, and this man speaks of those others. He is right that the inequalities are not right.’
‘How can you speak so, Sigrid? The orders of the people are the will of God.’
‘Your God,’ I say and she rolls her eyes at me and tears off another chunk of the warm bread with her teeth, in an unladylike manner that Lady Melisende would not allow at the hall table.
Ademar and Melisende had Aina and me educated together by Father Dominic since there was no boy in the family to teach instead. Father Dominic protested to Ademar that women should not read and write. ‘Their minds should be constricted,’ he said, ‘because they can’t be trusted.’ Ademar diplomatically but firmly rebutted his arguments.
In our classes Aina ran rings around him. She was good at count
ing and I was good at stories. If Father Dominic set us something to write for our task that day, Aina would pout and say to her mother, ‘I want Sigrid to do it for me.’
Melisende would widen her eyes and shake her head. ‘What a daughter, eh, Sigrid?’ she’d say.
The thought of spending time in the company of Father Dominic held no charm for either of us, but for me, there was an added grief. Since he was forbidden by Ademar to beat me for my failure to accept Christianity, he took full advantage of the opportunities presented to him in my schooling instead and most days he made me put out my hands and hit them with a leather strap for any reason he could concoct. Aina took me into the kitchen afterwards and applied butter to my swollen fingers.
After one particularly vicious beating, she marched me to her father where he sat with his clerk, surrounded by accounts, in the Great Hall, and held my palms out under his nose. ‘Enough of that mean priest, Father! I’ll not tolerate this more. We need to go to the nunnery once a week for our lessons now. Father Dominic is barely literate or numerate himself anyways!’
Ademar looked at my hands and then at his daughter’s impassioned face in astonishment, and after that we did indeed go to the nunnery for our lessons.
I look up at Aina now and smile, catching her eye. She pushes herself up from her seat and steps close, bending to kiss the top of my head. ‘We are so different, you and I, and I love you for it,’ she says. The long hanks of Aina’s loose hair mingle with my red braids, as she bends over me and it is difficult to tell where the hair of each of us begins and the other ends in the tawny mass of our two heads together. Aina’s hair is the dark red of an autumn leaf or the depths of a rich red wine held up in a glass towards the light, whilst mine is brighter, tending more towards the colour of amber. Aina’s hair is straight but mine has grown back curling. My skin has a thickness and a ruddy tint about it, stretched smoothly across my prominent high cheekbones. If you knew to think about it, mine is clearly a Scandinavian face. My eyelashes and eyebrows are light brown. Phillippe told me that when the sun touches my head there is a red aura coming from my hair and skin. Aina’s pale skin, on the other hand, does not take the sun as well as mine. She sometimes suffers with sunburn if she uncovers any part of herself for too long outside.
‘Yes,’ I say, agreeing placidly that we are different, reaching up to smooth her hair from her face with both my hands.
Aina sits back down on the chest and sighs. There are three hours yet until supper. ‘Tell me about it again, Sigrid,’ she says. ‘I know it was so hard on you, but tell me again. I love to hear of the sea and the ship and the strangers.’
‘Perhaps another time my Lady,’ I demur. Aina swings one foot back and forth, but contains her frustration. I watch her do it and relent. ‘Alright,’ I say, and my mistress sits up straight instantly, her face brightening, ‘I will tell you again. I am Sigrid Thorolfsdottir,’ I say, and then wait for the rustling of Aina’s skirts to stop as she wriggles expectantly on her stool and clasps her hands together beneath her chin.
‘This is the story of my childhood, before I was enslaved. Long ago and far away in the snowy lands of Norway where the wolf howls at the nidjaros – the northern lights in the sky …’
‘It wasn’t all that long ago.’
‘Do you want to hear the story or not?’
She presses her lips together, pulling a comical face and twirls her wrist and hand around in the air to indicate that I should continue.
‘In Norway in the kingdom of Viken, King Tryggve was the grandson of Harald Finehair who had ruled all Norway and conquered all the world.’
‘All the world, Sigrid?’ Aina’s voice is laden with scepticism.
‘Are you taking this seriously?’ I ask crossly.
‘Absolutely!’
I pause for a while to make her worry.
She opens her big grey eyes at me. ‘Sigrid, please!’
‘I was a baby just born and my mother dead in birthing me, and my father a great lord in Viken, when murderers came from Denmark, greedy for land.’
Aina sighs happily. She has heard the story many times before and the sound of the names of people and places strange to her fills her with delight. She repeats them after me, which I find a little annoying but I indulge her.
‘My father took the lady he served who was heavy with child, me and my brother, Thorgils, and we fled by boat in the night to hide from the murderers. My father was renowned for his piloting skills and his knowledge of the sea routes. We sailed north and then west with no sight of land for three days and my father steered us by the sun and the stars, the moon and the flight of birds, until we came to the islands of Orkney and we concealed ourselves there.’
‘You can’t remember any of that?’ Aina interjects, excited at the vision of the sea voyage that she is conjuring in her mind’s eye.
‘No, my Lady, I was a newborn. Thorgils was three years old and little as he was himself, he had to carry me, while my father helped the Lady Astrid whose birthing time was near. As I grew older and began to understand, my father or brother would tell the story of our escape when we gathered around the hearth at night-times, so that I came to know it and tell it to you now.’ I draw breath to continue, mimicking the hand gestures and mannerisms of the skalds from my childhood as I tell my story. ‘My father took us to the homestead of his kinsman on the Brough of Birsay.’
‘Brough of Birsay,’ Aina echoes the name. ‘What was that place like?’
‘It was a tidal island. Twice daily when the tides rose the homesteads were surrounded by roiling waters and cut off from the main island, so that we must live our lives to that rhythm of the sea. When Lady Astrid’s time came, the women slung curtains to give her privacy and the men were banished to the neighbouring farmstead. She gave birth to a son and named him Olafr. We stayed there all summer and Thorgils said it was a good time. He watched the warriors set out to go viking and played with the sons of the fishermen and farmers, and me and Olafr, the two babies, we grew strong. My father waited as long as he could to give Lady Astrid time to recover, but he knew we could not stay because the murderers were searching for us everywhere, wanting to kill us.
Before the viking warriors returned home, as the nights began to wax cold and long, we set sail back the way we had come and travelled by night and hid in farmsteads that were friendly to my father, but when the spring tides came, the spies were out looking for us once more. Sailors came in with the tide and the tidings that we were hunted.’
Aina shakes her head from side to side, her eyes wide, impressed as always, at the drama of my young life. ‘Nothing so dramatic ever happens here,’ she says. ‘Why did they hunt so hard for you?’
‘Because we were important,’ I say mysteriously. ‘We travelled by night, in the clothes of plain people and slept in ruined barns and under hedges to avoid speaking with anyone who might betray us. We were exhausted and hungry and in Skaun a man named Biorn turned us away, guessing we were fugitives. We travelled on weary, and came to his neighbour Thorstein’s homestead, and he made us welcome, but then a travelling workman came and said the search party were hard by. Biorn had told them of strangers travelling with small children. “Quickly,” Thorstein said to us, rousing us from our sleep, “bestir yourselves. You must go now”. He sent us with a guide into the forest and we heard the thuds and cracking branches of many horsemen close behind.
The guide led us to the edge of a lake and gestured for us to wade into the cold water. My brother held me on his shoulders and my father held Olafr aloft who laughed all the time at this adventure, though the rest of us were solemn and begged him to hush. In the middle of the lake was a small overgrown islet and we hid in the high rushes there, shivering in the water, with my father’s hand gentling on Olafr’s chattering mouth, as the soldiers searched for us. We heard their calls in the clarity of the morning air, and the snorts and tramp of their horses. We saw their breath white in the cold. I peeked through the reeds and looked mute and anxi
ous into the eyes of my brother Thorgils. The men searching had Thorstein with them and he led them in the wrong direction, away from our hiding place.’
I pause and Aina reaches for the wine jug, pouring a cup for each of us. ‘Were you very afraid Sigrid?’
‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘my heart was thumping hard. My knees were knocking together in the water. I feared that I might, by accident, betray us all, with a sneeze, or the loud sound of my teeth chattering together, or a cry if a frog should jump on my foot, and then we would be killed.
Then father kept us safe at the homestead of Hakon the Old. Olafr and I ran in and out of the longhouses playing and Thorgils learnt the skills of the warrior and pilot from my father. Astrid hid her jewels and fine silks and lived a quiet life. My father showed Thorgils the craft of making a good ship and Olafr and I watched as the boat took shape under their hands. When Olafr and I were eight the enemy soldiers found us.’
Aina gasped even though she had heard the story before.
‘My father looked to where his sword stood in the corner. One of the warriors made to grasp Olafr by the arm, but Hakon’s thrall, Bristle, jumped between them and slapped down the warrior’s hand. Bristle was unarmed but he was a mountain of a man and could do them damage. My father’s men were making ready to fight, the warriors backed down and left. Bristle got his freedom for that brave act, but decided to stay with his master in any case. We knew we could not remain there so my father determined to take us to Holmgard to the east.’
‘If you were freed, Sigrid, would you stay with us?’
‘I am a pagan Northgirl and I need to find my brothers.’
Aina stares steadily at me, disappointment evident in the pout of her mouth. To distract her I say: ‘What about the map?’ She nods and jumps up to find the large rolled map on the shelf, bringing it back and pinning it down on the table with pebbles, tracing with her finger our voyage. I help her locate the starting point: Viken in Norway, and nod as Aina’s finger moves first around the coast of Norway westwards to Orkney, and then back again to Oprostad, then eastwards into southern Sweden and Hakon’s homestead near Uppsala, then out into the open sea towards Holmgard.
Viking Hostage Page 7