by Joanna Bell
"I came through the tree 3 nights ago, and –"
"You – what? 3 nights?!" I exclaimed, horrified. "How did you – aren't you cold?!"
"Of course I'm cold, woman," he chuckled, placing the tip of one finger in the center of my forehead and then tracing it slowly down the center of my nose and over my lips and chin.
"What are you doing?" I whispered, although I knew he was doing just what I had been doing a moment earlier – making sure it was really me.
"I'm sorry," he said again, his blue eyes darkening. "I left you, Sophie. I left you because I thought it my duty to leave you. I thought too much of my duty – of myself. I didn't see what was right in front of my eyes, I didn't see where I was truly needed."
I began to cry for real when he said that, and he kissed the tears off my cheeks. "Why do you cry? I'm here with you now, you are in my arms where you belong. Why do the tears come still?"
"Because," I said, my voice breaking. "Because this whole time since you left, I haven't been able to admit that I needed you. All I could do was pretend I didn't. I have a daughter to look after. I have responsibilities. If I –"
"If you admitted your weakness, you wouldn't have been able to attend to those responsibilities. I know the feeling well. I think perhaps the time that has passed since I returned to my people has made them think differently about their Jarl of Jarls – that he is a hot-tempered man, with little patience in his heart. And they're right to think it – there is no patience in my heart. Ever since I left you, there is no room for anything except your absence, that empty place where you should be."
"No one could ever think bad things about you," I told him fiercely, "especially your people, Ivar. You led them. You kept them safe and fed and warm. They could never –" I stopped talking then, when my gaze happened to drop to the Viking's feet, which, I was horrified to see, were not well covered in fur. The flesh was bright red, almost purple. I stood up and opened the cabin door, urging him in, and grabbing the box of kindling next to the door to start a fire in the woodstove.
"Come in!" I ordered, as he ducked under the top of the doorframe, where it stood not quite high enough to accommodate his great height. "Come inside where it's warm. I'll make you some – actually, no, I'll get some blankets and then I'll build a fire. Just – sit down, and I'll be right –"
"Mommy?"
My head jerked up to the sight of my daughter standing at the bottom of the stairs, bleary-eyed because it was way too early for her to be up. She was staring at Ivar.
"Who's that?"
"It's – uh. It's – Ashley, honey, why are you awake so –"
"You were being noisy! I heard you talking to a man and –"
"I'm Ivar," the Jarl said calmly, going to Ashley and then crouching low when she balked at the sheer size of him looming over her. "I know your mother quite well, but I haven't seen her in a very long time."
Ashley's eyes grew very wide and she looked at me, then back up at the blond man kneeling in front of her. "Ivar?" She repeated. "Are you the baby's daddy?"
"Ashley!" A third voice – Heather's – piped up from the top of the stairs. "Get your shoes on if you're awake, and come to the backyard to fetch firewood with me. Your mother needs to talk to –"
"The baby?" Ivar asked, frowning with confusion. I still had the blanket wrapped around me, and I wasn't showing much anyway. "What baby? Sophie, what –"
"Come on!" Heather hustled my curious daughter towards the back door. "There are your shoes, Ash."
"What about my coat? What about – mom, what about –"
"Here's your coat, child. Come on, quickly! Your mother needs to speak to her friend now."
"But –"
"Come on!"
Ivar and I stood watching as Heather led my still-protesting child outside, luring her with promises of trips to the ice-cream parlor, and then turned to look at each other when the door finally closed.
Was he going to be angry with me for not telling him? I couldn't rightly be upset if he was, and there was no way I was going to be able to keep my belly out of view for long. My heart pounded and I opened my mouth to say something, although no words came out.
"Baby?" Ivar asked, glancing around the room as if there might have been an infant he hadn't spotted yet. "What – Sophie, what baby? You – you said you had only one child. What is –"
There was nothing else to do. I looked outside to make sure Ashley wasn't watching through the window, and then let the blanket drop to the floor before lifting my flimsy pajama top up, revealing my midsection.
The Jarl of Jarls looked at my belly, and then up to my eyes, and then down at my belly again. He started to say something and then stopped. He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head, laughing and then frowning almost at the same time.
And then he took a great, heaving breath and fell to his knees at my feet.
"You're pregnant," he whispered, placing a hand against my stomach, running his fingers over the swelling. And then he looked up at me. "It's mine."
It wasn't a question. Ivar wasn't asking if the baby was his – he knew. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised – the Vikings live close to the earth, and close to the cycles of birth and reproduction and death.
"Yes," I said quietly. "I didn't – Ivar, I couldn't tell you. I didn't want you to think I was trying to force you to stay with –"
"You were wise not to say it," he replied, running a hand up the back of one of my thighs. "I would have taken you, had I known. I would have taken you back to Thetford, where you would have hated me for the rest of your life."
I pushed my fingers into his hair, brushing it off his sharp cheekbones and his high forehead, and knew that he was telling the truth. He would have taken me back to Thetford against my will.
"You understand now that you can't do a thing like that, right?" I asked, sensing already that he did. "You understand that if you've come back to be with me – to really be with me – that I can't live with a man who thinks it his right to force me to –"
"I understand," the Viking said, resting his cheek very gently against my little bump. "Desolation has turned out to be a great teacher – as great a teacher as war, although the lessons were different. I think I am older than most to learn that I can't have anything I want – or anyone I want – so long as I can take it by strength. It's only that way when men fight, isn't it? It's not that way with love."
"No," I whispered, taking one of his hands and lifting it to my mouth to kiss his fingers. "It's not that way with love."
"Is it true?" He asked, caressing my belly again. "Do I dream this moment, woman? Am I about to wake up in Thetford, with the cold wind sneaking under my furs?"
"It's true," I replied, although I, too, was half-convinced I was about to wake up in my bed upstairs, alone.
Twenty-Seven
Ivar
Heather, the former thrall who was now my equal in Sophie's strange land, took the girl-child out for ice-cream that afternoon, knowing that we needed some time alone together. And when she was gone, and I had the sweet, warm weight of my love's body on my lap, I kissed her mouth and told her I wanted ice-cream too.
"I bet you do," she smiled, as our gazes intertwined and we burned with the anticipation that had been almost 3 moons in building. "I never met a grown man who liked ice-cream as much as you, Ivar."
My love of ice-cream had been a little joke between us during my recovery. She thought it funny that I loved it so much, I thought it funny that anyone who lived in Sophie's world could possibly eat anything else.
"Perhaps you will bring me ice-cream – barrels and barrels of it, huge casks of it – if I please you well enough now," I smiled, lifting her flimsy dressing up over her breasts and flicking my tongue over one of her nipples until her breath escaped her lips in a rush.
I'd not found pregnant women particularly attractive before that day. Not that I found them repulsive, but pregnancy as I'd only ever seen it until then had been more of a w
arning-off than anything that could inspire lust. It was the physical manifestation of another man's desire, a signal from nature herself to keep away. But holding Sophie on my lap, seeing already the beginnings of the child I'd put into her belly, had my manhood growing thick and stiff under my leathers, until it throbbed with the need to possess her again. I put my hands on her back and drew her to me, burying my face in her breasts, kissing and teasing and licking until her eyelids fluttered closed and she moved her hips against me.
It had been so long since I'd allowed myself to feel need like I did for her then. It was perfunctory since my return to Thetford, a grim ritual with my own hand, only performed to keep myself from tearing the heads off my thralls when they were late with my breakfast. But with my woman right there, with her soft thighs locked around me once again, the lust burned thick and hot in my loins and I pushed my tongue between her lips.
She teased me a little when the time came, holding herself over my aching length, lowering herself just until I could feel her wetness about to envelop me and then pulling back again, drawing air quickly into her lungs because she tormented herself as much as she tormented me.
"I missed you," she said, looking into my eyes, watching my reaction as she slid herself over my tip one more time. "Ivar – I – I missed you."
I grasped her hip when she moved down again, and held her in place until she whimpered. And when she gave in and moved to slide herself down onto me, I held her off, even as my body cried out for hers.
We didn't say anything, we just looked at each other, watching the dark clouds of desire flit across our faces, barely breathing with what we both knew was coming.
And then I brought her down onto me, guiding her body all the way, until I was buried in her, and she cried and squirmed and dug her little fingers into my shoulders until I was sure I was going to boil over right there.
I managed to hold off only by keeping her still for a little while, as I twitched and throbbed in her slippery depths.
"Ivar," she breathed my name when I finally allowed her to move again and she lifted her hips up, and then drove them down again. "Ivar. I – Ivar. Oh!"
What sweetness to hear the need in her voice, to know that there was nothing she wanted in that moment except me, nothing else that could satisfy her but me.
I sat back, watching as she worked herself up to a frenzy, controlling my breathing, holding on. And I was so primed when she began to clench around me, so sensitive and ready that I thought I might break my teeth I ground them so hard.
Her cries hadn't even faded when the moment came and I knew my peak was close, that there was nothing left I could do to hold it off. I lifted her up and lay her on her back, needing to be on top, needing to take her. And then she parted her legs for me, holding them open with her hands – I swear I could have finished at just seeing such a thing – and angled her hips up so I could go as deep as possible.
"Sophie," I breathed, as the pleasure began to spill through the restraints I'd set for it and her slickness turned the trickles and drops into a flood. "Sophie. Voss!"
I let go, jerking my hips down, pinning her underneath me as the ecstasy unspooled out me, hunching my body over hers and giving it all to her.
"Ivar. Ivar...?"
I opened my eyes, but there was only darkness. Where was I? I sat up, quickly, and her voice came again:
"Ivar, it's OK. You're in –"
"Where am I? Where –"
"You're in bed. You were so tired – I just thought you needed some sleep."
I was in bed. In bed in the cabin in Sophie's land, not in bed in the roundhouse in Thetford. In the dark, I reached out with my hand, seeking her body. And when I found it, I ran my hand over her midsection, almost in a panic.
"Still pregnant," she said, stroking my hair, knowing exactly what was on my mind. "You didn't dream it."
"How long did I sleep? Is it night?"
"It's about 3 in the – yes, it's night. It'll be morning soon. You slept for almost a whole day. Ashley thinks you're the gender-reversed sleeping beauty. She keeps sneaking up here to check on you and coming downstairs to report that you're still asleep."
"She's watchful," I replied, pulling Sophie into bed next to me. "Like her mother. She looks like you, you know. As soon as I saw her I knew she was your child. She has the same look in her eyes as you do."
"Does she? Everyone says she has her father's eyes, I –"
"No," I said. "I don't mean that her eyes look the same as yours, I mean the expression is the same, the way she holds one of her eyebrows slightly higher than the other, as if she's never truly convinced."
Sophie laughed. "What? You think one of my eyebrows is higher than the other? And what do you mean 'like she's never truly convinced' – are you saying I look like that, too?"
"It's no bad thing," I told her, nestling into her so I could kiss her neck. "It's just a characteristic, like all people have. I noticed it in your girl because I noticed it in you. It's a good thing, it'll keep the boys – when she decides boys are something she might be interested in – honest."
"She told me when she was 4 that she was never going to move out of the house, that she was never going to get married. She did admit she might have find a boyfriend, but apparently he won't be allowed inside and will have to live in the shed."
I softened to hear Sophie speaking of her daughter – and to think, for the first time in my life, of doing the same one day – laughing and joking with my own soon-to-be child as they grew and changed and figured out the world around them.
"What is it?" She asked, when she noticed I'd gone quiet.
"I was just thinking of the baby in your belly," I told her. "My baby. I was thinking of the conversations I'll have with her. Or him."
"Be careful what you wish for Jarl. You spend their first few years waiting for them to talk. Then when they do learn, they never shut up!"
I crept downstairs when she fell asleep, and poured myself a cup of water from the tap. Outside, all was darkness and silence. I thought of my child, floating in the darkness of pre-life. I thought of myself, too, back now in the world where the water ran clean and endlessly and the people, safe and well-fed as they were, lived apart from the rhythms of nature that marked life in my own time.
I rode out of Thetford with a mind to reuniting with my love. Possibly with a mind to persuading her to marry me, and then, possibly, to come back with me so we could live as Eirik and Ragnar did, with their wives from the other world. I thought it would take time, this persuasion. And now that I was back with her I saw that the only persuasion going on had been that of myself. Sophie wasn't coming back to the past with me.
"I'm still not used to the taps," a voice came from behind me – Heather. She was light on her feet, even in her older age – a skill only those who had lived in a place that necessitated being light on one's feet learned. "The water, I mean. Just having it right here all the time. No need to boil it or make ale, because it's clean already."
"And the lights," I added, as she flicked one on and set a pot to boil. "And the – the fire, the, uh –"
"The stove."
"The stove, yes."
"I was ten and ten and two when I decided to live in the Kingdom of the East Angles," she continued, taking a teabag from the box. "You are what, Jarl? Ten and ten and nine?"
I nodded. "Aye."
"Not so much older than I was, then. I was born here, in this place. I'm from here. And yet it is strange even to me, as if my own childhood were a dream I once had."
I watched as the water came close to boiling, still half in disbelief that it happened so quickly, that it wasn't some kind of magic. Was Heather speaking the truth, that her memories of the place where she grew to womanhood were so faded and long past that they were as a dream to her? I could not imagine my homeland being the same to me. I could not imagine forgetting the place as it was then in my head, so immediate as to feel that I only had to take a few steps in a single direction to f
ind myself there once again, under the pale northern sun.
Almost at once, I put it out of my mind. I've never been a man to over-think, and I wasn't about to become one.
"Here," the older woman said, handing me a cup of steaming tea. "Lemon and ginger. Sophie drinks it all day long, to keep the baby-sickness at bay."
I brought the cup to my nose and sniffed. The scent was strong, unfamiliar. "Lemon and ginger?"
"Yes. Lemons are sour fruits that grow in hot, sunny places and the ginger is – well I suppose it is not wholly unlike the fire-root the Angles grind to a paste and take with their venison."
The tea did have a pungency to it, although it was of a gentler variety than fire-root paste.
"Has Sophie told you that she is a wealthy woman now?"
"Wealthy?" I asked, as we sat down at the table. "Everyone here is wealthy to us, are they not? King Edmund of the East Angles himself could not imagine what it is to live like even the lower people here. We –"
Heather fiddled with the teabag in her cup. "I don't mean it like that – like a comparison. I mean she is wealthy here compared to the other people. I am, too."
"Is it so?" I asked, confused. As far as I could tell, Sophie lived in much the same was as almost everyone else in her time. She told me once – during my first stay with her, and when I had commented on some little detail of her life in awed tones – that there were rich people in her society, too, and that I would never believe the opulence of their lives.
"It is so. But the wealth is new to her – and to me. It comes from the sale of a dagger that belonged to my husband – he was a Northman, too, you know."
"The sale of a single dagger has made you and Sophie wealthy?"
"Yes," Heather replied simply. "You have to remember, Jarl, that just as these people have things that the people in our time do not have, we also have things that they lack. Very few people own bladed weapons now, and even when they do the blades are made in a place like where cars are made – each blade is the same, and forged entirely by machines. A dagger like my husband's, made by a skilled craftsman of the North – such a thing does not exist here. It cannot exist here, there is no one alive with the ability to make it. And that made my dagger worth quite a lot."