by Joanna Bell
"No, Ragnar," she would say, smiling to herself and speaking of this girl or that one. "It's not this girl who will take your heart and carry it around in her leather satchel."
And when I asked her how she knew she would say, cryptically and maddeningly, that she just knew – and that when I did love, I would know it, too – it would be that obvious.
And then the day came when it was that obvious. Why would I not have spoken it aloud? It was obvious for Emma, too. She even parted her sweet lips to say it back to me, the words only barely unspoken before she caught them and held them in her throat. And as soon as it happened something inside me just knew that what Eirik warned me of was true.
It was confusing, though, because other things, also seemed true – Emma loved me, I was sure of it. She needed me in the same way I needed her. But she was going to leave. I'd been worried when Eirik spoke of it, and then worried by her avoiding it when I brought it up the first time. But this time, I knew it in my bones.
"Why?" I asked her, my brow furrowing as she lay beside me. Nothing in the world could have pulled me away from Emma. Not a message from my father to come home to the Northlands, not a call to battle, not Odin himself. So what – or who – was it that had such a hold on her?
I didn't have it in me to be angry with her – that was impossible after being as close as a man and a woman can be for the previous two days. But I did have it in me to be sad. She must have seen it in my face before I lay back on the furs because she was sat up, the dreaminess of pre-sleep fading from her eyes.
"Why, what?" She asked, attentive after having seen a cloud flit across the blue sky of my expression.
Part of me didn't want to mention it. It would have been so easy to tell her that she was mistaken, there was no trouble, that she should come back to my arms and lay her head on my chest again. But I'm not the kind of man to slide around important matters in that way, as if failing to speak of them makes them disappear.
"Why do you say nothing when I tell you of my love?" I asked. "You're not entirely here. Or you're here, but your heart hears voices from afar – part of you is elsewhere. How long before you go back to that place?"
She opened her pretty mouth, and then closed it, and opened it again – but no words came out. I didn't need confirmation of Eirik's prediction that Emma would leave, but there it was anyway.
"What I don't understand is why," I told her again. "I see the happiness on your face, girl. I see the contentment – I saw how you had to stop yourself from telling me you loved me. So why must you leave?"
Emma looked away before she answered, and busied her fingers with a leather tie that held the furs to the bed, twisting and untwisting it over and over. "It's too early to talk about love."
Her voice was low and quiet, I did not quite hear what she said. "What?" I asked and she turned to me quickly then, and her voice was no longer quiet.
"I said it's too early to talk about love!" She replied. "Why would you even say something like that to me, Ragnar? That you 'love' me? What am I supposed to do with –"
"I say it because it's the truth," I told her.
"But you don't!" She laughed, but it was not a soft laugh. "You can't! How can you love someone after knowing them for such a short time? You're just – you're just trying to make me stay with you. And I don't think it's entirely fair."
My girl was no longer on her back, relaxed and open. Now she lay tightly on her side, her arms crossed over her breasts, her eyes still refusing to meet mine. I watched her for a moment, waiting to see if she would break and admit she was playing a trick, being silly. But she did not and so it was my turn to laugh.
"I had taken you more as a woman than a girl," I said. "And now I see you lying there like a very young girl of ten and five, pretending to herself that she feels nothing for this boy or that boy, so that she doesn't have to risk her heart. Why are you lying to me? And if you think you believe what you're saying, why are you lying to yourself? I can see it plain as day how you feel about me, Em –"
"Don't turn this around on me!" She snapped, before I could finish. "You already told me that Eirik said I was leaving – and I know you don't want me to leave. So don't act like this is about anything except you trying to stop me from doing that."
"Girl!" I roared, drawing myself up in the bed, incensed at her childishness. "If I want to stop you from leaving it's as simple as calling my warriors and ordering them to keep you with me. Do you think you would ever escape if I wished otherwise? Voss! Why do you try me in this way, after giving me yourself so sweetly?!"
But she wasn't going to give in just because I was angry. If anything I'd just made it worse. She caught my eye then, finally, and whispered her response: "But if you kept me here against my wishes, I would hate you."
"Hate?" I bellowed. "Look who speaks of hate so soon after she had to catch the opposite word on her tongue!"
"But I would," she continued, quietly insistent. "It doesn't erase anything else, it wouldn't make these past couple of days or any of our time together meaningless. It wouldn't even erase how I actually feel about you. But if you kept me prisoner, yes, part of me would hate you. You would be the same if I did it to you, Ragnar, and you know it."
It was too much. She was too much. As perfect as she seemed, as pliant in my arms as any man could wish to hope for, there was a part of Emma that seemed dedicated to testing me. What other woman would dare speak to a Jarl of hate after he had shown her such care, such love, as I had shown her? I rose from our bed and dressed as she lay waiting for me to respond. And when she saw that I wasn't going to respond, that I was in fact going to leave without another word to her, she, too, got to her feet and tried to grab my arm as I was leaving. I pulled it easily away and she stumbled backwards, having not expected such roughness from me. I paused, just briefly, instantly regretful – but I was too angry. She shouted after me to come back as I strode out of the roundhouse and barked at the guards to make sure she wasn't allowed to leave except to relieve herself – and even then that she should be accompanied.
"She must be watched at all times," I told them, aggrieved. "Such a troublesome woman!"
One of Eirik's men approached me as I stormed – where was I storming to, exactly? I didn't know – across the camp, but I waved him off before he could speak and he bowed his head respectfully, stepping away to let me pass when he saw my face. Soon I was near to the cooking pits, and then to the pens where the livestock were kept during the night, and then to Eirik's roundhouse, where I thought I could hear soft, murmuring voices from within.
A surge of anger at my childhood friend came up as I thought of him in there, his wife in his arms, his heart secure in the knowledge that she was his, entirely his. It wasn't fair to feel such things towards Eirik, and part of me knew it. But I was on a rampage, and anyone who got in my way was going to feel the heat of my anger.
Eventually I found myself on the rocky headland that struck out into the sea on one side of the bay where my ship was tied. A high wind blew in off the water, a touch warmer than it had been for days, and I stood tall in it, facing it down, holding my chin high in greeting.
And then I began to laugh – at myself, and without much mirth. What was I going to do – fight the wind? It seemed only slightly less useless than trying to fight Emma. I didn't even know why I was fighting Emma. I loved her. She loved me. And yet she was filled with dodges, with averted glances and mumbled words. What foul thing was keeping her from giving her whole heart to me? It wasn't a child, as I could see from her body she had no children. A man, then?
Standing on the beach that morning, filled with the righteous anger of a young man unused to hesitation from a woman, I gave the idea of Emma with another man full reign to run wild through my head, as if torturing myself would make anything better. I knew she'd been with men before, that was as it is – virginity was not common past ten and ten in Viking society, whether a girl was married or not – but I hadn't actually thought about it in excruciat
ing detail before. Buffeted by the wind and stung by Emma's refusal to meet my open declaration of love with her own, I began to picture her in another man's arms, whispering in her soft voice in another man's ear that she loved him, that she was his.
It didn't take long for me to work myself up to a real peak of rage and set off back to the westerly roundhouse, to show that girl that she was mine, no one else's, and that she was staying with me – whether she wanted to or not.
When I was almost there I suddenly found myself grabbed from behind and whipped around, my hand already on the hilt of my sword, to see Eirik standing before me.
"Where do you go with such unhappy haste?" He asked, noting my expression and dropping his eyes to where my hand still stood ready to draw my sword.
I pulled the hand away, realizing even in my childish anger that two allied Jarls getting into a swordfight over nothing would be unforgivably stupid.
"It's her!" I told him, running my hands through my hair, almost panting with emotion. "It's that demon woman! She tries me, Eirik – she tries me like no woman has ever tried me before! And the worst of it is, she does it without sorrow, as if it were her right – her right! – to speak to me that way. To me! Her Jarl! How dare –"
A strange expression came over my friend's face at that time. Very briefly, I almost thought he was about to smile. And then he bent his head and sighed and ran his hand over his brow.
"Come to the feasting hall with me, Ragnar. I don't want you rampaging through my camp in this state – you'll just as likely kill anyone who gets in your way and I don't need that kind of trouble."
"I'm not hungry," I told him, although it was a lie. "I need to speak to Emma. I need to make her understand that she is not the queen of – whatever backwards place it is she comes from – and that she's not the queen of – of – me."
"Come," Eirik said again, placing one arm around my shoulders. "Things often seem less impossible when one has a full belly, my friend. And then we can talk about how very little you care for this impertinent foreign wench."
Was he joking? Was he making fun of me in my torment? I looked at him to see that, yes, he was smiling. But instead of going for my sword again something inside me gave in and I stopped, bending forward and putting my hands on my knees.
"I'm a fool," I told him a few moments later when I was beginning to understand how silly I was being. "Voss, I'm the worst kind of dull-wit. Listen to me. Listen to the idiocy I speak! Listen how I tell you she is not the queen of me, as if I were a child refusing to obey its parents. Gods, don't speak of this to anyone, I beg you. My men would lose their will to heed my commands."
Eirik slapped me on the back as we walked towards the hall, chuckling. "They do have that ability, don't they? Women, I speak of. They have a way of making a man – even a Jarl – into a foot-stomping little boy. Come, friend. We'll drink ale and eat smoked fish and bread and figure out what to do."
A short time later, after eating, Eirik and I sat alone in the feasting hall. "Sometimes I think she's not from the land across the sea," he said, picking his teeth with a length of dry grass. "Paige, I speak of. And your Emma seems to be the same as her, does she not? I've noticed even the smallest things, when I watch the two of them, that are similar. What I mean is that it isn't just their teeth or their skin more flawless than an infant's, it isn't just in appearances. Have you noticed that neither seems to understand when or how to speak to their highers? Paige is a Jarl's wife now, so it's right that she speaks to whom she pleases, and how she pleases. But even before we married she was just like your Emma, as willing to snap at a King as she was a thrall, and just as likely to be incensed by being given an order."
"She says she is not a queen," I replied, "but what you say is right, she acts as if she were."
"Paige says the same, that she is no one where she comes from. She tells odd stories sometimes as well, often before catching herself and laughing and saying she made it up."
"Odd stories?" I asked, grabbing a piece of straw to clean my own teeth and thinking of something Emma had said the previous day, about the way a series of crop-fields look from the air: 'Like a patchwork blanket of green.' When I'd questioned her on the phrase 'from the air,' not understanding her meaning, she'd changed it to 'from a great height' and when I'd then asked her how she had managed to see fields from a height great enough to cause them to appear as a blanket, she had no real response.
"Well, she seems to know things she shouldn't, for one thing," Eirik replied. "I've caught her correcting the healers before. Of course there is always someone who corrects the healers, but the thing is Paige turns out to be right. And she – I almost hesitate to say it as I don't want you to think me insane – but she sometimes almost seems to know my future plans. Plans I have not spoken to her about. Not three nights ago we lay in bed and she turns to me and warns that it will not always be so easy. 'It will not always be so easy, Eirik,' she says, and when I ask her what she means she speaks of us – of our people – and our presence here, our plans to move inland, to settle."
"Has she overheard your men talking?" I asked, assuming there could be no other explanation.
Eirik shook his head. "No – and I don't speak of specific things. She doesn't know we're raiding an estate before I know it. But she warned me about pushing further into the Kingdom of the East Angles, she told me that the King would need to be appeased or killed, and that – voss, it's difficult to explain! Maybe it's not what she speaks of but how she speaks? As if she knows how these events will turn out, as if she's seen the battles, and the years ahead of us already."
"But how can she?" I wondered aloud, a little shaken by what Eirik was saying because it matched so perfectly with something Emma had said about the children of the East Angles – the 'children's children's children's children and so on,' as she'd described them, 'and even further down the line,' one day thinking of us, the Northmen, as their own people. Like Eirik with Paige, I hadn't understood. I explained to Emma that we were invaders, that the East Angles and the Mercians and the others in this land would never think of us as anything else. But she had just smiled at me and said that maybe, once enough time was past, the descendants of the East Angles would talk of their Northmen as if they were as much a part of the place as their own people.
Eirik shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know. It's so many things like that, though. You meet someone, even a woman from a foreign place, and you assume certain shared experiences and thoughts of life. And yet there are so many little things, so many comments from her that sometimes I get the feeling we aren't the same at all. It's as if she sees things in a whole different way. Even matters as basic as time and distance."
"Yes!" I agreed, sitting up straighter. "I was just thinking of Paige doing the same. She spoke just recently of ten-by-five generations ahead of now, of how they would think back to us, of how the Northmen and the East Angles and the Mercians and all of us would be no more separate but blended into one kind. Who thinks of such things? And with such seeming certainty in her tone – as if she weren't speculating but speaking truth, speaking fact?"
We spoke of our women almost until mid-day, when Hildy came in with her girls to lay out the bread and cured pork for the afternoon meal and Eirik burst out laughing.
"Look at us!" He exclaimed, pulling me to my feet along with him. "We speak like two besotted girls! Come, friend, I will bring my advisors to the meeting roundhouse and we will plan the move inland, and what messages to send back home."
18
Ragnar
That night, I refused to allow Emma out of the westerly roundhouse to take a place at the high table for the first feasting night of the late Yule season. It was petulant and it made me morose with guilt, but some part of me wanted her punished, wanted her to feel how she had wounded me that morning. I had Hildy send a plate piled high with bread, cheese and dried fruits, but when I returned after the festivities, loosened by dark ale and Yule songs, it sat untouched on the table next to the
bed. Emma herself lay curled on top of the furs, her back to me, unmoving. Was she awake? I approached, and placed a gentle hand on her back. She shrank away from my touch.
"Are you not hungry, girl?" I asked, chastised by that simple movement of her body. "Look, I sent you cheese and fruit from the –"
"I would rather have eaten it in the feasting hall," she responded coldly. "And not have it sent to me here as if I were some naughty child being punished for misbehaving."
The fire in the roundhouse was high, and the air warm. Emma wore only her linen under-dress, and it fell tantalizingly over the curve of her waist and the plump roundness of her backside as she lay on the bed. I reached down and adjusted myself under my leathers, almost chuckling at the hold she had over me.
"You are being punished," I told her, sliding onto the bed behind her and pulling her against me. At once, she moved away and rolled over to face me and I saw that her eyes were dark with anger and betrayal.
"For what?"
"Look at you," I chided her. "So incensed! Stop being silly, Emma, and come here. Come here and open your legs for me like you did last night."
I reached out and ran my fingers over one of her nipples, pinching it gently to bring it up to a hard point, but she brushed my hand away. "Ragnar, what do you think you're doing? I'm not joking, you know – I'm not teasing you right now. Don't think you can lock me away in this roundhouse all day and then come back and get a blowjob just because you're the Jarl."
"What? A blow –"
"Never mind!" She cried, rolling over and showing me her back again. "I'm tired. And I'm not hungry. Leave me alone and let me sleep."