Stars and a Wind- The Complete Trilogy
Page 1
Table of Contents
Stars and a Wind, The Complete Trilogy
Book One: A White Horizon
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Book Two: The Wind from the North
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Book Three: The Singing Star
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTERTWENTY NINE
The Change: A side story to Stars and a Wind
Also by B G Denvil
STARS AND
A WIND
The Complete Trilogy
By
Barbara Gaskell Denvil
Copyright © 2017 by Barbara Gaskell Denvil
All Rights Reserved, no part of this book may be
Reproduced without prior permission of the author
except in the case of brief quotations and reviews
Cover design by
It’s a Wrap
FOR
MATTHEW BOURNE
AND HIS SUBLIME SWAN,
ALAN VINCENT,
MY INITIAL INSPIRATION
Stars and a wind
Book One:
A White Horizon
By
Barbara Gaskell Denvil
INTRODUCTION
Standing muffled against the light snow, he watched the crystals falling from the stars. Little echoes, pearlised, cold on the tongue and the eyelids. His breath condensed around his lips. The condensation puffed like the white sails of his ship billowing in the ocean’s winds.
He had crossed the seas sailing north, south and west, then finally had come back to the village of his birth. But it was not as he had expected. He knew so much more now than he had known before, so it was both far too late, and wretchedly, ignominiously, too soon.
The slight crunch of snow startled him and the young man turned quickly. The girl’s hair seemed silver in the star light. He had no idea who she was.
He raised an eyebrow. “Well?”
“My lord.” She was a slave then, one of the Saxons presumably, recently captured in the southern raids and brought in from Gotland. Some of the captives had caused trouble and Grimr had ordered one killed, flogged back and belly to his grave as an example. The women had become immediately compliant.
The young man shook his head. “I didn’t call for company,” he said, dismissing her.
The shallow green valley below sloped up into the surrounding foothills, first slow grassy rises and then on into high treeless symmetry, mountain perfumes and snow-breath. It moved him so tremendously, with the frost shimmering on the higher ground and the black sky huge behind. The moon was a thin slice, like the paring of a finger nail. Its pale hesitancy did not disturb the wheeling intensity of the stars. The stunning and startling call was singing as loud in his ears as though everyone else must hear it too, though he knew they could not. The call was his alone, overwhelmingly tender, astonishingly strident.
His groin ached with it and his temples pounded. Each inhalation of the night rime took him closer. He was nearly ready. It mattered to him so very much that he could make the Change again, better perhaps than the time before. Each time, he knew, it could be more intense. Each Change was a new mastery, an extension of the glory.
Then the girl moved and he turned back to her, annoyed because she was still there. The need to be alone was now a desperation. He frowned. “I told you no. Go back to him.”
The girl began to pull away the great beaver cape that enveloped her. She was biting her lower lip, eyes screwed up against the freeze and the fear. She slipped one arm up to unclasp the broach and threw the fur off. It rippled into its own shuddering shadows as it heaped at her feet, collecting snow damp. She stood before him quite naked except for long gartered stockings and little thraell’s shoes in cracked leather.
Her hands were rigid at her sides, fingers gripped into determined fists. She opened her legs a little, feeling for balance. Her studious concentration, remembering and following the orders in which she had been coached, furrowed across her brow. The thick knitted wool of her stockings and the triangle of hair at her crotch gathered snow flecks. She was shaking uncontrollably.
The young man looked her over silently. “The shuddering,” he said eventually, “is it because you dislike me specifically, or is it simply fear?”
She could barely speak and her voice, tremulous, was strongly accented. “It’s very cold, my lord.”
He nodded briefly. “It is,” he said. “So put the cloak back around yourself. Then leave.”
The girl swallowed, clamping her fingers tighter into their fists. “My lord, I daren’t leave. Lord Grimr, he said if I came back before – without – that he would scourge me – and then – . My lord Thoddun, I’m his gift to you. Won’t you take me, lord?”
The young man’s frown deepened and he shook his head. “I don’t want you,” he said simply. “Go back to Grimr.”
She was crying quietly. The sobbing shook her
shoulders as the shivering pulsed through her. Her small breasts swayed and the soft nipples darkened into tiny frozen knots. “I’m an honourable gift, lord,” she whispered. “The Lord Grimr hasn’t touched me. No one has. I don’t even know how – that is, my lord, I don’t know how – nor how to say it. But take me, my lord, I beg you. Anyway you wish. I will try and please you. I won’t complain. I won’t cry.”
He had started to turn away but he hesitated, looking back down at the naked girl. He wanted so very much to be alone. He had been building the power of the Change for some hours, standing so carefully still in the bitter cold, concentrating, imagining and yearning, carving the burning golden eye into the front of his mind and the back of his sight. The control of his breathing had almost reached perfection, his heartbeat greatly accelerated. Quite lost now. Hours of preparation gone. He would have to rebuild, almost from the beginning.
Anger itched at the back of his throat. He tightened his jaw against it. Losing his temper now would delay him further. The Change was a thing of Love, not of anger. He held sternly to patience. “Tell Grimr thank you for an honoured gift.” He kept his voice quiet and calm. “Tell him I have – enjoyed his gift. You have my permission to lie. Then go to your own place and sleep. I must be alone.”
The girl gulped, breath caught on a sob. “He will examine me as soon as I go back, lord. He will know.”
“Oh, Ragnarok and Fafnir’s damnable quills take both of you,” the young man cursed under his breath, leaned down and took the girl’s bony little wrist, sweeping her behind him. “Collect your borrowed cloak girl, or you’ll be dead before Grimr has a chance to finish you off himself. Hurry.”
She reached down, grabbing the folds of lined beaver, clutching the warmth back around her. Scurrying, breathless, nose buried in the upturned fur collar, she scrabbled to keep up with the man striding down the slopes before her. She caught him up by the corner of the saetr hut. He kicked open the door and pushed her in before him. The smell of damp straw and a reluctant haze of mouse piss surged out into the cold air. The girl jumped quickly inside and Thoddun kicked the door shut behind him. With a sigh, he sat down heavily on the straw bales beside the girl and watched her a moment.
“Not only am I forced into this by Grimr,” he said softly, “but I suppose I have to teach you what to do as well.”
Her words whispered out of the gloom in scared little gasps. “I thought you would be doing it, my lord.”
“Oh well.” He’d thrown off his own cloak and was fumbling at the waist of his britches. “I dare say I shall have to. But I wish myself somewhere else entirely, you know. Which is not to say – that is – but to Hel with it. The wrong moment, that’s all.”
Both of them were becoming more accustomed to the dark. “But will you not be able to do it then?” murmured the girl. “Am I so unattractive, my lord?”
The young man looked up, briefly startled. He smiled then and returned to the crossed ties of his britches. “Don’t be absurd. Of course you’re pretty, and I dare say I can do everything alright as long as this draught doesn’t get any colder in the wrong places. But I’m not taking you back to the hall afterwards. There’s something I was in the middle of arranging, and I intend getting to it again before I’ve lost it entirely. After this is finished you have to run back to Grimr and tell him what I tell you to tell him, and let him examine you if that’s what he enjoys, and hopefully then he’ll leave us both alone.”
The girl nodded, cringing a little deeper into the scratch of the straw. “I’m sorry for – interrupting you,” she said. “But lord Grimr, he hurts us a lot. When he said he was giving me to you, I was very pleased. Better you than him, my lord.”
Thoddun chuckled, reaching for her in the dark. “Well, that’s a Hel of a compliment.” His hands found her hips and slowly circled her buttocks, drawing her closer.
“Will you tell me what I should be doing, lord?” she said. “If you can’t do it all by yourself.”
The tense resentment of the interruption faded. “Well, I’ll explain some of it, if you want me to,” he said. “What’s your name, anyway?”
She mumbled, “Ella,” and he smiled into the shadows.
“Well, don’t worry, Ella. I may not be quite sixteen yet, but I can certainly manage this without your help. Just don’t wriggle or I’ll end up hurting you”
“The girls all say you don’t hurt them, my lord,” she whispered. “It’s Lord Grimr who hurts us.”
Thoddun shook his head. “Does he now? I suppose that’s because he can’t do the other – the thing – that is – what I was doing before you turned up. Stop talking now. It’s distracting.”
Ella nodded willingly. “Whatever you say, lord. But will you explain? It feels very strange.”
He snorted, pulling her beneath him. “Gods and thunder, girl, I’m here to do you a favour, not give lessons.” He thought a moment, and in the cause of justice, added, “And doing myself a favour too of course, now I’m here.”
It doesn’t take long at fifteen. Afterwards he shrugged the beaver cape around her and helped the girl stumble from the saetr and down the steep pastures to the smoky shadows of the township way below. “Ella, did you say you’re called? Well, thank you Ella. I hope it didn’t hurt. But tell Grimr I’d be obliged if he doesn’t send me anymore gifts. I’m busy and I won’t be back tonight.”
He was up on the higher slopes again, adjusting his breathing and clearing the musty sour sweat of his body with snow flutter and fresh clean hope, when it occurred to him that Grimr had probably known exactly what he was doing and had meant to interrupt him. Grimr had his own bitter hauntings. Grimr was jealous. Furiously jealous. Wouldn’t admit, but knew, and knew he knew.
The young man slumped his shoulders, gulping in frost. Then the breeze sprang in spiteful little fingers down from the mountains, ice born. He smiled, sensing it again. One easy, careless climax achieved, he braced himself for the far greater pleasure, the unspoiled excitement of pure achievement. The wind was at his back. He controlled his heartbeat, steadied its rhythm, feeling the pound, pound of pulse and rising expectation. The rhythm quickened. The pounding sped, twice as fast, then faster again. Thoddun pulled back his shoulders, expanded his lungs, and then, smiling hugely, he stretched out his arms.
The wind strengthened, moaning softly from the heights. The stars were as sharp as knife sparkle. He felt it swirling, coming closer, and with a massive sigh of relief, closed his mind around its warmth, encompassing the unutterable joy of it. The most perfect potential, most perfectly realised.
The great sea eagle blinked golden eyes and spread its massive wings into the rising air currents, sailing as smooth as any ship into the night’s starry clarity.
CHAPTER ONE
With the journey ahead, wind in her hair and the boy snug at her side, Skarga was definitely not thinking of her father. But her father was definitely thinking of her.
With the blizzard from the west like wolf’s teeth through the black tide and the churning rain threatening to close off all visibility as far as the crag-drop, Ogot knew, as he had known months ago but had refused to admit, that it was time for rare patience and not for common temper. Unswervingly attached to a belief in his own natural control over everything within his realm including the weather and the oceans current, he had long denied the possibility that anyone else, especially including his daughter, could ever thwart him. But life had not always worked out the way it should have, and now if he wanted his daughter dead, he would have to arrange it after winter had paled into soggy spring when, braving the milder tides, the first boats would come home at last.
Winter should be waning by now and spring was surely close. The first gentle breezes were due in from the western seas yet it rained strenuously for six more days. The stored grain barrels, sodden soft splinters where the starving mice had gnawed, were thick with mould. The brindle hound whelped in the lean-to by the midden but with no milk for the pups, two were dead before she’d bit
ten their cords. The wolves crept up from the forests, smelling blood.
The township waited, each man concentrated on the salvation of his own family’s prosperity, with bed the cosiest place - even the only place - to wait. The comforting sweat of arms and legs entwined, the children grizzling, fleas and lice searching out the warmth of armpit and groin, and the squeak of mice nesting deep in the straw. Waiting for the land to thaw sufficient for the plough, waiting for the passes to melt and the trade routes to open again, waiting for the mountain streams to unfreeze and the churning waters to turn the grinding stones. They waited for the coastal anchorages to loosen their winter chains, the warm currents to bring the herring, and the little fish to fill the strings of weedy brined nets. Every man and his wife waited for the first mild days.
It stopped raining. But then, almost at once, it began to snow again. Ogot suspected immediately, when the mountain mists remained low across the foothills and the snow would not bate, that such unnatural villainy could come only from the curse and it was his daughter to blame. The farmers could not sow and kept the cattle snorting impatiently in the byres. Fields were frozen down to the rock face and even the wormy-wrigglers and leggy-beetles could not burrow through it.
Then when the great hall took fire and the fire raged while the snow stormed, he knew for sure. Only witchery turned icicles into flames spiralling between the snow flurries. Each white flake carried a separate reflection of reddened gold. For half a day’s span it seemed the stars were falling. It was Ragnarok, muttered some. But Ogot knew it as his daughter’s curse and the little bitch’s revenge.
As the comforts of home were reduced to spirals of dirty smoke, the old man called his sons into the cow byre and sat them on the straw around him. He then proceeded, in the simple terms which were all he could hope they might understand, how Skarga had done it.
Everything stank and the cows ruminated, farted, and rolled their eyes. Ogot kicked at the straw, and said, “Did any of you see her do it?”
“See who do what?” said Banke, wiping cow shit from his hand to the knee of his britches.