by Sandra Hill
“Explain it again.”
Andrea did.
“And again.”
Andrea did.
Then Dyna smiled. “I could see this working for me, as an unmarried woman. I can rebuff a man’s advances . . . Thorkel’s advances . . . whenever I want, but a married woman would have more trouble doing that.”
That wasn’t so, but Andrea wasn’t about to get involved in a discussion of female liberation and the right to choose if and when to have sex, even when married.
Besides, wasn’t it ironic that Andrea, who was trying to teach others about contraception, was depending on a man’s word that he was sterile as a birth control precaution? It was all about trust, and she was placing her trust in a Viking vampire angel who’d managed to land them in a time-travel debacle. Oh boy! When she said it like that, it didn’t sound so good.
By the end of the day, six other women came to Andrea, asking her to explain the method to them. And Girda laughed. “M’lady, you are going to have more than a few men raging at you for interfering with their bed rights.”
“Bed rights, be damned,” Andrea muttered under her breath.
But Girda heard her and laughed some more. “So ye can say when ye’ve been bedded right and good already.”
“Hmpfh!” was the best Andrea could come up with.
That night, the female skald, Luta, amused the women in the great hall after dinner—though only a few of the men appreciated her work, especially her male counterpart Brian—when she told a particularly funny saga. She called it, “A Woman’s Woe.”
Didst ever know a man
Who named his manly part?
Like pets they are to the lackwits,
With names like Sword or Blade or Dart,
Avenger, Rooster, Bull, and Lance,
Or how about Randy, Lusty, or Love Mart?
Women, on the other hand, are not so vain
About the luscious field betwixt their legs.
Not even when the man so wicked
For her compliance he begs and begs.
Let me touch yer velvet folds,
Let me lick yer sweet honey,
Let me tickle yer pert teats
Betimes men are so funny!
If only men knew
What women really think
When first they drop their braies,
And we can only blink.
Is this the beauteous object
They cannot for even a day neglect?
Why it looks like nothing fierce or pretty
As they led you to believe.
In fact, ’tis just a wobbly stick.
Andrea slept alone that night and found herself missing Cnut’s warm body. And other things. But the next morning she awakened with anticipation. It was possible Cnut and his men would return today.
The men did return that night, along with the three dogs they’d taken with them, but not Cnut. The fool had stayed behind to look for Lucibears, they told Andrea. Hah! She knew what that meant. Cnut was looking for demon vampires out there, all alone, and with a winter storm brewing, according to Girda, Njal, and all the old ones in the keep.
Well, at least there were six more boars to add to the larder, along with some fish, three reindeer, an elk, a bunch of grouse, and rabbits brought in by the other men. How they were able to catch so much game in the midst of a famine was a miracle brought by the gods, many of the people proclaimed. Andrea tended to think it was one particular God, and his sidekick, St. Michael.
“You’re the commander in charge here. Shouldn’t you go back out and look for Cnut?” she asked Thorkel later that evening when Cnut still hadn’t returned.
He shrugged. “The jarl told us he would find his way back himself.”
“Fool!” Andrea said.
Thorkel was taken aback because he wasn’t sure if she referred to him or Cnut. Actually, both. But then Thorkel’s attention was diverted by Dyna, who’d suddenly taken to flirting with him. When Andrea caught her attention one time in passing with a tray of bread, Dyna winked at her. Several men gave Andrea dirty looks, though. Apparently, their women were in fertile periods, and they’d declined their advances.
The next day the snows started. Oh, there was already snow on the ground, but this was a full-blown, steady downpour of flakes the size of golf balls. Beautiful, but potentially deadly for someone stranded in it. Andrea was tempted to go out herself to hunt for Cnut, but recognized immediately how futile that would be. She barely knew her way to the steam bathhouse.
She was distracted for a while when one of the two wagon sledges returned, finally, from attempting to purchase goods from other estates. It was only half full, and apparently Gorm had been required to go much farther afield than he’d expected to get even that much. The famine had affected a wide area, even those who had planned for the harsh winter better than Cnut had.
At least now there were oats and barley to feed the horses and make more flour, plus some root vegetables, mead, spices, and such. Andrea got the idea then to begin preparing for Christmas, or the Jól season, as the Vikings called it, which was only a few days off, less than a week. It would lift everyone’s spirits in the midst of this famine depression and give them something to look forward to. In her case, perhaps she could stop thinking about Cnut and whether he was in danger somewhere by himself.
Turned out many of the Christian rituals for Christmas originated with the Norse pagan ones coinciding with the winter solstice. They celebrated for more than a week to commemorate the return of the sun. From then on the days would be longer, and the darkest days of winter would be over. Oh, the cold and dark wouldn’t be over by any means, but it was an annual promise that brighter days were coming. Sort of the Christmas coming of Christ with a promise of new days.
Andrea bundled up in her old jeans, T-shirt, outer shirt, Old Gringo distressed leather boots with blue embroidery (which had been intended for good looks, not wet snow or ice; oh well!), fur-lined gloves, and a heavy wool, hooded cloak. Her cowboy hat was still missing. Dyna, Kugge, and the other children who accompanied her did likewise, except for the vanity boots. They all wore the big, awkward snowshoes laced to their boots, which felt like badminton rackets, but were actually very helpful for plowing through the deepening snow once she got used to them.
It was fun. Andrea taught them some Christmas songs, “Deck the Halls,” “Over the River and Through the Wood,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Here Comes Santa Claus.” Of course she then had to explain the concept of Santa Claus and the North Pole, which intrigued the children, and Dyna, too.
“I wish we had Santy here,” Kugge said wistfully as he gathered yet another holly branch with bright red berries. “He would bring me new ice skates.”
“I would get a new carved wooden kitten to play with,” a little girl, Elsa, said. “The tail broke off my old one.”
“And it only has one eye,” Kugge pointed out with boyish insensitivity.
“Kitty is still beautiful,” Elsa insisted.
Kugge rolled his eyes and was about to say something more when Dyna swatted him on the head.
Another boy, Oslik, who was a little older than the others at about ten, said, “I would get my very own pony. A real one.”
The others didn’t disagree, but their consensus was that the chances of that were as likely as a pony falling from the sky.
“I like the way Santy—I mean, Santa—has reindeer. We have reindeer here. And he lives in the North Pole which we have here, even if it is a distance away. And he gives gifts. We Vikings like to give gifts, when we have the coin to buy them or the goods to make them. Once my father gave me a set of colored ribands. It was the best gift ever.” All this from Dyna.
Once they had enough holly branches, which they piled onto a sled, they began searching for mistletoe that grew on oak trees. Dyna then told her the legend of the mistletoe and why it was considered so important to Vikings. Apparently, the god Balder was killed by a mistletoe arrow but came back to life when his m
other, the goddess Frigga, wept tears over him, turning the red mistletoe berries to white.
One of the more skeptical of the children, a snot-nosed little urchin by the name of Dorf, said, “Ain’t no Santy. Ain’t no magic god or goddesses, either. Ain’t no healin’ powers in the mistletoe. If they was, wouldn’t be no famine. If they was, me mother would still be alive.” He wiped the green snot on his sleeve.
That put a damper on the festivities. For the moment.
By the time they got back to the castle, the sled was piled high, and they each carried huge bundles of holly and mistletoe and evergreen boughs, and they were back to being in a jolly mood. When Girda opened the back door, she was serenaded with a rowdy rendition of “Jingle Bells.”
“Frigg’s foot!” she exclaimed. “You folks been eating berries from the barmy bush?”
They all laughed and shook snow from their clothing onto Girda and anyone who came near them. By evening, the great hall and all the doorways were decorated with the fragrant greens, and Andrea had even talked Finn into opening Cnut’s treasure room to her, where she found some red silk fabric that, much to Finn’s consternation, she cut into strips and made bows to adorn her creations. She’d also taken a few coins that she used to commission the woodworker, Hastein, to make carved animals as secret Christmas gifts for each of the children under the age of ten.
With each item Andrea took, Finn kept clutching his heart and muttering something about the lord going to have a fit. She was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the Lord above.
By the next morning, Cnut still hadn’t returned, and the snow continued to fall. What if he didn’t come back at all? What if she was trapped in this time period forever, or until she died? What if Celie wasn’t safe, as Cnut had assured her? What if Celie was about to have her head lopped off by terrorists? What if Cnut had been captured by the demons and was being tortured at this very moment? What if . . . What if . . .
To keep herself from going insane with all these speculations, Andrea tried to talk some of the men into bringing an evergreen tree into the hall. More than one of them declared her “barmy,” others said she was “demented.” It wasn’t that Vikings didn’t bring a tree indoors for the yule season. In fact, their traditional yule log was actually an immense evergreen—she was guessing twenty feet tall or more—that they dragged into the hall on the evening of the winter solstice. They propped it trunk first into the largest of the hearth fires and continued to feed it forward during the following days.
Now, that was demented, if you asked Andrea. Which no one did, of course.
She cornered Thorkel, though, and had better luck. “If you get me a tree, I could put in a good word for you with Dyna,” she coaxed.
“You already have.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Then you owe me.”
“Thor’s hammer! You are a persistent wench.” Belatedly, he realized how rude he sounded, and added, “Sorry I am, m’lady if I offended you, but—”
“It doesn’t have to be a huge tree,” she said. “Halfway to the ceiling would be fine.”
“Halfway to the ceiling!” he exclaimed, looking upward. It was probably a twenty-foot ceiling. “And what will you do with the tree? You do know that a dead evergreen will begin to shed almost immediately?”
“We’ll put it in a bucket of water and decorate it with candles and ribbons and gold braiding.”
Finn overheard them as he was walking by and slapped a hand against his heart. “More decorations!” he moaned. “Lord spare me!” He was, of course, referring to his worldly master, not the celestial one.
Later that day, the tree held a place of honor near the dais, with unlit candles (They wouldn’t be lit until solstice), more red bows, and garlands of gold braid that would normally be used to trim fine garments. Everybody oohed and aahed over it.
Except for Finn. She was pretty sure he was hitting the locked barrels of ale, what was left of it.
By the next morning, she was frantic over Cnut. The snow had stopped falling, but it was waist-deep. “You have to go find him,” she begged Thorkel. He was the only one who would even listen to her.
By noon, he agreed, but only after Dyna added her pleas to Andrea’s and made him a few promises of a nature Andrea could only guess. He took three men with him.
Four hours later they returned carrying something. Or someone. Whatever it was, it resembled the Abominable Snowman. Covered with snow and crusted over with ice. Eyes frozen shut. Icicles hanging from its nose. Its lips cracked with frozen blood.
With a cry of horror, Andrea realized that it was Cnut.
“He’s still alive,” Thorkel assured her, but one of the men added, “But barely.”
They carried him into the great hall and laid him near one of the hearths on a trestle table, where Andrea helped them remove his garments. Not an easy task with their being so frozen. But the heat of the fire soon began to melt the ice.
“Be careful how you handle him,” Andrea warned. “He might have frostbite.”
“That’s the least of his troubles,” Girda said, clucking and rattling out orders for warm water, clean cloths, dry clothing. “And warm up some of that ale, Finn, and don’t ye be saying there is none or I’ll personally give ye a heart attack.”
It didn’t seem to matter to any of them that they were exposing Cnut’s nude body to the scrutiny of one and all, although Girda at one point ordered everyone to step back and give them room for breathing. Cnut didn’t have frostbite, which was a miracle, but he was blue in spots, especially his toes and fingertips and the edge of his nose.
She breathed a sigh of relief when his body began to shiver, and once she removed the warm cloths from his eyes, he turned his head to the side and said, “There’s a tree in my hall.”
“Andrea insisted,” Thorkel said defensively.
Cnut turned toward her then.
“What happened?” she asked, taking one of his hands gently in hers.
“I got lost. Again.” He tried to smile, which caused his cracked lips to start bleeding.
Which prompted Andrea to start crying. She wasn’t sure if she was crying with joy over Cnut’s return, or crying with dismay over the pathetic Viking who kept getting lost.
He squeezed her hand and said, first licking the blood off his lips, “I missed you.”
And then Andrea cried for love of her Viking.
Chapter 17
Your coop or mine, Ms. Hen?
It took several days for Cnut to recover. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be warm again. In fact, at one point, when he feared being frozen into a living statue out in the forest, he’d pleaded with Mike to help him.
But Mike remained absent. He was punishing Cnut for something. Cnut had a fair idea what that something was. And it wasn’t gluttony.
On the other hand, maybe Mike was the one who’d sent Thorkel to find him. Although Thorkel claimed it was Andrea who had beleaguered him into going out to search. Okay, so, maybe Mike sent Andrea to prod Thorkel into searching for him. Same thing.
His head hurt from all that thinking.
But another thing. Cnut wasn’t convinced that he’d gotten lost all on his own, despite all the jests about him at Hoggstead, implying he couldn’t find his way around a privy anymore. No, it was Zeb who’d somehow muddled his mind so he lost his way. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it until proven otherwise.
Anyhow, after a day in bed under three bed furs and another day of a hacking cough and a third day of Andrea force-feeding him so much chicken noodle soup he was growing feathers (how she’d bullied Girda into giving up one of her hens was another story, and there were some black specks in the noodles that were suspicious!), he made his way to the bathhouse, which was thankfully empty. And why not? It was the middle of the night.
Andrea had declined to share his bed while he was sick, and instead slept in the spare bedchamber. Well, he was sick of being sick.
The bathhouse was an ingenious facility put
together by his great-grandsire Bjorn Hoggson, taking advantage of a natural underground hot spring. The circular bathing pool was about fifteen feet in diameter, with stone steps leading down each side to a maximum depth of three feet. The neat thing was that water came in and ran out in a continuous slow current, rather like a self-cleaning tub. The warm waste water from the bathing house was often used for laundry, although there was a deep well closer to the keep.
He lit several wall torches and used a sharp knife, some soft soap, and piece of shiny bronze to shave his itchy beard and then the sides of his head as well. Not as good a shave as provided by modern razors in front of illuminated mirrors, but it sufficed. Then he sank his stinksome body into the steamy water, scrubbed himself clean, and half reclined along the steps so he was covered up to the waist. He felt human at least now, or as human as he would ever be again.
He heard the door creak and cracked an eye open, half expecting Thorkel or one of the men to have come out after a night of bedsport. But it was Andrea instead, coming in on a waft of coconut.
“What are you doing here? I hope you aren’t planning on pouring more of that soup down my gullet.”
“What? You don’t like my soup?”
“I like your soup fine. But after five bowls, I’m beginning to cluck.”
She didn’t even smile. “I was worried about you,” she said, sitting down primly on one of the benches, tucking her long wool cloak around her tightly and crossing her booted ankles. Her blonde hair was pulled off her face in a ponytail tied with a red silk ribbon. Finn had told him what Andrea had done with several ells of priceless samite silk fabric, not that he particularly cared, though there was a time when he would have. “I went in to check on you in the middle of the night and you weren’t there,” she continued.
“Do you always check on me?”
“I have been since you got sick. You shaved.”
He nodded and rubbed his chin. “I was getting itchy.”
“You look good, though you’ve lost some weight, I think.”
“It will come back, believe you me.”