Laissa felt nowhere, suddenly disjointed, as if something had changed fundamentally and she had just noticed. She missed Raef with an inconsolable ache, and yet he seemed to be all around her. In crowds, near the river, at night when the wind blew hard, she heard his voice speaking, too low to catch the words. She felt the touch of his lips on the places he loved to kiss: her throat, her hair, her palms. She woke one morning drenched with sweat from a dream where they coupled in a wild lust.
Knut came to her.
“I did not intend this.”
“Ah,” she said, “don’t talk to me like that. It happened.” She had always hated him, but it was not his fault.
He said, “When you get to Jorvik, if there is no hall, if nothing is left, send to Odd. He will be the jarl in Northumberland. He will provide for you all the rest of your life.”
Laissa shrugged, indifferent. She knew there would be no hall in Jorvik. That was what he had meant, “later.” She was beginning to wonder if Raef was calling her.
She went back to Jorvik. She had a token from the King that made everybody along the way give her anything she asked for. Raef tormented her, a glimpse, a touch, a whisper, the dreams of rollicking as merrily as bears in heat. She came into Jorvik and saw how different it was, how much bigger. They called it Jor’ck now. They admitted her at the gate with many bows for the favor of the King. She went along toward the hall and out on the low hilltop there, the stones tumbled around and the grass blowing in the wind. In one corner the brass jug lay on its side, full of dead leaves. The fire ring was there also, cold as the dirt.
Now she knew that he was calling her.
She went down into the city, finding her way through a new close, across a wide new street with a fountain. Down the next alley she came out before Corban’s house.
The ruin still stood in the row of well-built houses around it. She walked in over the threshold. At first, she felt nothing. Her heart sank; it had gone with him too. Then she took another step, and she felt the air thicken around her, folding, bending, opening into a field of light.
Voices sounded around her, deeper than human. Slower. Old, mellow, like bits of a strange, pure music. She went farther into the house, into the curved and folded space. Nearby Raef was saying, “Come home. Come home.” She looked down and saw her body floating off in pieces, like spindrift carried by lapping waves. It was warm. His hands touched her. She lay back, spread her arms out, and let herself go, bit by bit, into the endless stream.
Afterword
Devotees of the reign of Ethelred the Redeless, or Unready, will see what liberties I’ve taken with the historical facts here. This would pain me more if the facts about this bloody and vicious reign weren’t so sparse and unreliable. I’ve left out a lot of what seems redundant. Ethelred was murderous and inept, and various Viking armies marched back and forth through the country for years, hacking and hewing and destroying everything. It seems unnecessary to untangle this very much. On Saint Brice’s Day 1002, Ethelred engineered a massacre of all the Danes and Danish sympathizers he could get his hands on, which wasn’t enough to do more than make everybody really angry. The Vikings were no less vicious. In the following war the archbishop of Canterbury was beaten to death with bones in his own cathedral.
Nonetheless, Sweyn Forkbeard was apparently summoned to England by the northern lords in 1015, who submitted to him in bulk at Gainsburgh, handing him the kingdom. At this time Ethelred did actually escape to Normandy. When Sweyn died, less than six weeks later, probably not from a wasp bite, Ethelred crossed the Channel and claimed the crown again, and then he died within a few weeks. All this while, Edmund Ironside was conducting operations against Sweyn and was functionally king. Excising Ethelred a little early seems merciful.
Emma was probably not possessed. Jorvik, or York, did not go through a major decline during Ethelred’s reign. Archbishop Wulfstan was much different than I have made him. Knut’s war actually lasted fourteen months and involved an inconclusive siege of London that I have not inflicted on you; so the last campaign, on Ermine Street, the great old Roman road, moved north instead of south. Thorkel the Tall was there for part of Knut’s war, although they didn’t get along; Knut’s thorny relationship with the Jomsviking is part of the lore, as is the suggestion that Thorkel fostered him. How old Knut actually was is one of those wild guesses. He first shows up with Sweyn at Gainsburgh, and the sagas say he went young to war – and certainly if he was fostered by Thorkel, he couldn’t have been much more than a teenager in 1014.
Thurbrand Hold’s murder of Uhtred of Bamburgh, with Knut’s connivance, is well documented. Several stories suggest that Eadric Streona murdered King Edmund, either at the Battle of Assundun or later, and that Knut had him killed because of it. Knut’s offer to Edmund to share the kingdom rather than fight on is also well attested. Edmund’s wife, Ealdgyth, bore him two sons who wound up in Hungary. That tidal bore on the Trent in Gainsburgh is the tide Knut allegedly commanded to stop.
Greatest of the Viking kings, Knut reigned for twenty years over England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden; he was so powerful and successful that some modern writers call him the Emperor of the North. But he left no dynasty. Both his sons were inept. After the death of Harthacanute, his son by Emma, the English high council called in Edward Aetheling, Emma’s son by Ethelred, who reigned for the next twenty-odd years. He was called Edward the Confessor for his piety. Knut’s real heirs were Godwine of Wessex, who married Knut’s sister, and his son Harold Godwinesson, who effectively ruled England through the reign of the mild and unworldly Edward.
What happened after the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066, everybody used to know, and that so many people don’t anymore is a puzzle to me.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2010 by Forge Books
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Cecelia Holland, 2010
The moral right of Cecelia Holland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788634434
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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