For a moment she flew higher. The longhouse had gone and the hall was a forest. Then a thousand grasping hands reached for her and she doubled over, caught on their nails, ripped and torn and terrified. “Tell me,” demanded Grimr. “Describe it.”
She stumbled over the words but she told him. When she floundered and her voice faded, he shook or pinched her, ordering her to continue. She told him when the icy rivers pulled her down, staunching the wounds from the nails. She described submersion and the fish swimming between her legs as she sank. His hands moved to the rhythm of her story, sometimes hurting her, sometimes bringing pleasure, always flying. Then his face was forced downwards on top of her, the weight of his body dragged her back to earth and she felt a different pain, and struggled. He put one arm hard across her throat and held her still as the pain increased. His eyes were slits of cold fire, doors barely opened to glaciers behind, just a breath away from her own. “Tell me what you feel here,” he said very softly, “and here. Tell me.” Something jabbed and stung. “Does it hurt?” he demanded. “And does this hurt more? Tell me. In detail. Describe it.”
There were giants and trolls and the land of the dead beckoned. The rivers ran red and the forests blazed. Her voice trailed off. The other pictures faded and everything turned to darkness. “You promised not to kill me,” she said, small voiced.
“It is death, of a sort,” he whispered back. “But it is also birth. As with the birthing experience, you will remember very little once it is over. But you will live to experience it all again.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Skarga woke in agony with stabbing pains grinding into both belly and groin, and an even sharper knife point slicing through her head. She eased herself up onto both elbows and saw that she was safely alone in bed, naked but covered, tucked, firmly snug beneath the swelter of silks, wools and furs, pillows beneath her head, a sickly sweet smell in her nostrils and the taste of it in her mouth. Her own wolf cape was back across her toes. She eased herself downwards once more but the pain remained intense, her eyes seemed matted with a confusion of impossible memories and her thoughts were tossed in stormy incoherence.
Very cautiously she examined her own body beneath the covers. She found no wounds though her groin, her breasts and her throat felt bruised and when she touched a fingertip to the dampness between her legs, she discovered blood. She sighed and curled again for sleep, hoping to escape the throbbing in her head and belly. Her back was to the door when she heard it slide open, and a smoky chill from the hall slipped through. In the pause she heard only quiet breathing. The brief proximity of warm but gentle fingers, and one edge of silken blanket was carefully lifted to wrap and tuck behind her neck, blocking draughts, keeping her snug. Then the door slid shut again and Skarga slept.
She did not know how much later it was when the door opened and the sharp click woke her for the second time. Grimr’s voice said, “Are you in pain?”
Knowing her pain pleased him, she muttered, “No,” into the pillows and did not move.
He had a low, barely audible laugh like the growling of his dogs. “Don’t lie,” he said. “For those unused to the henbane and ergot, the first experience brings considerable discomfort the day following.” She felt the weight of him, sitting sideways beside her on the edge of the piled mattress. He continued, “I know exactly how you feel, but you must not vomit in my bed. If you have sudden spasms, lean over and spew on the ground. I shall get a slave to clean it up.” She didn’t answer, but curled, knees tight. “Turn and face me,” he said. She meant to ignore him but fear had long ensured instinctive obedience. She rolled over and looked up. His expression was surprisingly gentle. “It was not only the drugs to which you were unused. Are you bleeding?” he said.
She thought a moment. “No,” she said.
He smiled. “I am sure you are.” Abruptly he reached down, shoving his arm beneath the covers, his hand forced between her legs. She pulled urgently away but he held her still, then raised his index finger to the light. From tip to knuckle his finger was smeared in blood. He laughed, put it to his mouth, and sucked. “You must rid yourself of the vain hope that I am either a fool, or pathetically inexperienced,” he said. “This evening I shall bring you a salve. Until then you may stay here and sleep. No lessons today.”
She squinted up at him. Although the light at his back was just the pale haze of a short winter’s day, it hurt her eyes. “What happened to me? What have you done?”
“I am not interested in explaining either myself or my actions,” he said, though his voice remained low and surprisingly kindly. “You are not hurt, although no doubt you feel as though you are. I shall have a weak gruel brought to you this evening and bring the ointment myself some time later. Until then, dream.”
But he neither moved nor returned the bed to closeted darkness, continuing instead to watch her with a curious affection. Skarga glared in return. “Dream of what? Of what you did to me last night?”
“If you wish. I doubt you fully capable of appreciating the experience though of course you have no comparisons. In any case, your memory is likely somewhat blurred.”
Skarga did not admit that her memory was almost entirely blank, what little she could remember being distorted. She was not actually sure what he had done to her at all. “You raped me and poisoned me,” she accused, though more guess than certainty. “You think I want to relive that?”
His smile remained patient. “You may have noticed that you are not dead, and therefore not poisoned. Rape is a concept rather than a fact, and one I dispute. Indeed, you did not, as it happens, resist me. Now, I suggest you argue your case later when you are rested and in less discomfort.”
He left her abruptly, and equally abruptly Skarga turned, snuggled back down and tried to sleep.
It was a long time later that she woke with the smell of gruel and a bowl thrust towards her. She groaned. “No. I can’t eat. Take it away.”
The bowl was pushed at her again. Scowling eyes above a slave’s tunic. The voice, “The master says eat. Take it.”
Another calm voice from the distance, “Leave her.” The slave disappeared immediately, the bowl and its nauseating perfumes gone, the door shut again.
When finally Grimr reappeared, the hall behind him was empty, the light almost out with just a faint glimmer from the dying fire. “You have slept most of the day,” he said, still quiet, smiling with persistent tolerance. “It is time to sit up and talk. How do you feel?”
Skarga was surprised to discover that she felt reasonably well. She was stiff and bruised but her head was clear. A disgust of food was the only remaining symptom of bellyache. She scrambled upright, pulling the covers with her up to her chin. “Alright. I suppose.”
“The modesty is a little pointless, I think, after last night. Come here,” said Grimr.
“If it wasn’t poison, it was a drug,” Skarga said, staying where she was. His geniality annoyed her. “You drugged me.”
“I did,” said Grimr. “The skald is visionary and the muse of destiny, and for one night I allowed you to share my tools. Poppy syrup and henbane seeds with an elixir of the ergot fungus are the most precious secrets that Midgard brews. You have no magical power, but you were permitted to experience mine. You were honoured, although I am not in the least interested whether you appreciate it. However, I found you satisfying on many levels, and am pleased. You were neither too passive nor too irritatingly resistant, and you were capable of describing your visions and sensations in some detail. Your powers of vocabulary are emotionally succinct. So I intend making use of you again once you are fully recovered. Several times perhaps. Then I will let you go.”
Skarga sat up straighter and blinked. “I suppose you wouldn’t promise? A real promise. About letting me go.”
“For once you are right,” he said, “I will not give you either my promise or my assurance. But I have already given you my word, which is far more than my usual practise. Now, sit still, and do exactly as I tell
you.”
She sat still. Grimr moved to the opposite end of the bed and, kicking his boots to the floor, swung his feet up beside Skarga, pushing aside the pillows. He leaned back and looked at her. He had been holding a small wooden pot which he now placed on his lap. It held a creamy substance, almost solid and sweetly scented. “This will heal you quickly,” he said. “For once it serves me to have you salved. Stop huddling beneath the covers. Come here and I will apply it.”
She guessed what he meant and shook her head. “Thank you but I can do that myself.”
“You are absurd,” he said. “After last night you can claim no secrets. Or were you so beguiled you have no memory of just how exposed I had you? What I choose to do, I do. Nor should you risk annoying me at this time. While pleased, as I have told you I am, I am more likely to reward than punish you. But I’ve warned you what punishment waits, should you antagonise me.”
Grimr’s smile remained smug and his voice placid. Skarga found it patronising and was relieved she remembered so little of the night before. “I don’t need rewards,” she said, “except my freedom. And don’t pretend that ointment’s for my own good. You only want to embarrass me. I don’t want to be touched and I don’t need healing. At least when you’re cruel, you’re more predictable.”
He laughed. “You show some intelligence after all,” he said. “Yes, I enjoy your embarrassment but the cream will also do you good. I intend repeating last night’s exercise, when I shall probably decide to hurt you again. However, if you come to me still unhealed and burning, you will not react as I intend you to. So you will sit still now, and open your legs, and do, at all times, exactly as I instruct you.”
“You said you wouldn’t punish me.” Skarga still huddled back against the containing wall.
He nodded. “Indeed. As I reward my dogs when their behaviour satisfies me, so I intend to reward you. But first with the gift of healing. Now, put away this absurd timidity and uncover yourself. Then come here.”
She slept well but she woke in the quiet dark hours, disturbed by the sudden warmth of another body close to hers. The huge bed was wide enough for many men to stretch never overlapping hip to haunch. Grimr always lay apart. He was very still when he slept, and never touched her. His pleasure had been in hurting her and not in comfort. Now in the depths of his sleep, he lay tight to her back and his arm was around her, one hand clasping her naked breast. She shivered and twisted away, extricating herself. Grimr did not wake. When she woke in the morning he had already gone as usual, rising early for the hunt.
It was snowing as Skarga waited for Grimr to return, but he did not. She sat, conscious of Bram’s eyes always on her, ears alert. Finally she realised there would be no lessons and so returned to bed, nursing her memories and her fears. A lethargic weariness kept her sleeping through both evening and night, and on into the following day.
That evening the hall was full. The deepening cold brought every man, eager to fill his belly and save his own shrinking store of fuel. Grimr’s lease-farmers came with their wives and sons, the jarls; not only the personal retinue but also those whose own longhouses circled the forest edges and who assembled only for the monthly Althing, and many of the bondi, those freemen who owed Grimr allegiance and paid him their levies even though no longer required to call any man king. Each brought his principal servants and the hall was crammed with sweating, sour breathing, and the bad tempered envy of each man for his neighbour. There was the smith and his son, huge men, leather tunics and a pride of armlets advertising their skills. A small wife, bedecked like a Yula log, walking propaganda. No shipwrights here, but a number of carpenters and all the wealth of the artisans supported by a modern and thriving community. There was no skald, but there was music and while the food was prepared, one man clashed cymbal to drum and another piped. There was stamping in rhythm and clapping, hand to knee and hand to heel, and a quick grab of someone’s daughter for a kiss and a hand on her rump while her father was busy tuning his lute.
There was a young hound on heat, squealing her confusion, chased by a gangling eagerness of panting dogs. The men jeered, grabbing at the wagging, hopeful tails, a coarse revelry of jokes and gestures. One larger dog trapped the bitch in a corner, cheered on by the men.
Grimr’s hunting was always successful so there was well hung venison turning on the spit with a rhythmic grind and the squeak of the handle, where the spit-boy, face black with soot, licked his scorched fingers. Four female slaves stirred the huge cauldrons, the chief baker proudly laid his flat rye loaves in great piles by the hearth, and the barrels of ale were tapped, fronted by a raucous shoving of each man lined up with cup, beaker and horn.
Sheep’s cheese herbed with thyme and rolled in creamed mustard, pickled goose eggs and parsnips fried in a crust of horseradish. A mash of onion and leeks, served with wedges of oat biscuit. Barley cakes and salt herring, cabbage soup stirred with bacon and the froth of mare’s milk, rissoles made with broken eggs and crumbs of baked pea flour, stuffed with sheep’s brains, liver and kidneys fried in mutton grease, and above all, the delicious perfumes of roasting meat, soft pink under dark crackling skin and the drip of savoury white fat.
A goat, udders already withered to winter scarcity, butted her growing kid, refusing the plea to suckle. Kicked by a dozen impatient legs scrambling to be the nearest to the hearth and to the meat ready to slice, the goat bleated hopefully beside the fast shut doors. Two men, pissing into the rushes against the far wall, competed their aim, none too well. A cluck of scrawny chickens, trapped behind a bench, became the moving target.
Outside the snow was banking up the walls, hurled by the strengthening wind as high as the window slits and against the door up to its great iron handles. The days were already short as if all time was running out, the sun peeping over the horizon for little more than a couple of ice-green hours. The shy light reflected a surreal hush of snow, blithering in wind flurries. Where the starkly shadowed mountains rimmed the horizon, the sun did not seem to rise at all and an endless night merely paled, before deepening again into moon polish. Steady swirls of snow sprinkled the great blackness of a starry infinity above the longhouse thatch, where the smoke from fire, from roasting carcass, from cauldron and old accumulations of a hundred past meals and spent fires, leaked up through the bundled turf and rushes, and merged with the great open white silences.
Grimr marched in like an arm of the gale, his cloak, rich falls of sable fur, snow streaked across his shoulders. The crowds moved aside for him at once and he walked first to the blazing fire, rubbing his hands, laughing with his companions. Asved, Ingmar and five others had been hunting with him and followed him now, nudging numb fingers closer to the flames. The boy came behind, walking alone as always. The pale tangles of his hair were windswept and he looked cold. His cloak was rain proofed wadmal, dyed mahogany and lined in russet wool, but his small face looked frozen and his fingers were mottled blue. Yet he did not approach the fire with the others, sitting quiet and staring into the shadows.
Grimr had taken the best hounds, led by Bram. Now they crowded in around their master, nuzzling grey furred haunches against his legs, shaking the melting snow drips from their coats, tails wagging high, nudging any loose grasped cups and licking up the spilt slurp of the ale.
Grimr slung off his sable and threw it to a slave. He turned then, looking amongst the throng, coming over at once to where Skarga sat, far from the hearth. He had never before come to her in such a manner. His evenings in the hall were spent amongst friends while she was left in a solitary corner until choosing to creep to her bed. It was rare that he gave her one word or one glance. Now he stood before her, bowed and took her hand. She was startled. “Lady, come sit with me and take wine.”
He pulled her up, all polite courtesy, but his grasp on her fingers was crushing. Two slaves had scurried to bring a stool, and when Grimr sat, she sat beside him. He reached up, snapping his fingers, and two cups were brought. He took them both and handed one to Skarga.
“Imported wine,” he told her, “from the south,” and he raised his beaker, watching her over the brim as he drank. She sipped warily and wondered if this time, instead of drugging her, he wanted her drunk. Food was brought and because she had no knife, Grimr cut her meat. The music became very loud. Grimr ordered more food and Skarga ate and drank as he told her. She would not deny him in company, knowing he would punish her severely for any affront to his pride.
Many calls were made for his poetry and his songs, but Grimr smiled and shook his head. His audience insisted, but again he refused. Another carcass was hauled in from the barns outside, a headless doe with her belly slit. Skarga longed for bed but instead of sleep, took more wine.
Most of the bondi left eventually, husbands supported by wives, staggering out into the frosted black. The sharp chill of the open doors and the gusts of icy wind vibrated, then the doors were heaved shut once more. The flames across the hearth blew first low, then blazed high again. Some men slumped where they stood, legs outstretched, heads to their chests, drunk senseless. One younger woman vomited on her own skirts, slapped by her bespoken intended who lifted her bodily and hauled her out, one large hand quickly profiting down the front of her tunic.
With no more hunger for the food and little for the ale, men remembered other appetites and whispered to their wives, or grabbed a pretty slave to drag off into the dark. The jarls yawned, bowed to Grimr, and wandered back to their own homes, or to the men’s quarters at the end of the hall. Asved had watched Skarga throughout the evening. Grimr’s behaviour seemed to puzzle him not at all and his smiles, when she noticed him, seemed sly and secretively smug. It increased her suspicions but she sat straight and drank too much as she was ordered to do, ate what she was given, and said nothing at all.
When Asved left, the last of the men still conscious followed. The pale child, who had sat alone and silent for some hours, came over and stood before Grimr. He did not look at Skarga. His eyes were bruised with tiredness. He bowed his head and said, “May I retire now, lord?”
Stars and a Wind- The Complete Trilogy Page 21