Daughter of the Wind (5 page)

Hallgerd made a noise through her nose. Her mother seemed to hear something, stopping midsentence.

Sigrid was listening, her attention a palpable presence. And then she started talking again.

Hallgerd snorted, wrestling, trapped in the arms that held her.

She struggled hard, kicking over a stool, striking the clothes chest as she swung her foot, digging her elbows sharply into her captor's sturdy body. As strong arms grappled with her, the sounds of swords clashing came from the darkness beyond, at the village edge.

Her wrists were bound together, and a gag was thrust into her mouth. A cloth sack was flung over Hallgerd's head. Even as she struggled, kicking, crying out against the salt-cured leather between her teeth, she was lifted like a bundle and handed out through the window.

She made as much noise as she could, stifled cries that must have been audible to any neighbor paying the smallest bit of attention. She dug the point of her chin, muffled within its sack, into the muscular back that bore her. The man grunted, but neither cursed her nor made any attempt to hurt her, aside from increasing his grip around her ankles.

You will eat my father's sword
.

The man kept a steady loping stride, running with little sound over the soft pasture.

Ravens will prick your eyes
.

She prayed to Odin the Cunning. She prayed to Thor, friend to plowman and woodgatherer. She prayed to her dead ancestors, the legendary Inga Alfsdottir, who invented the loom, and Ketill, who discovered the hot springs above Midwife Mountain. She prayed to gods of field and water, cursing this stranger.

Whoever carried her was traveling ever faster now, his shoulder forcing the breath from her body as she hung, head down, wrestling and wrenching from side to side. Blind within her wool sack, trying to guess the direction they were traveling, she was certain that at any moment her mother would cry out—or perhaps Hrolf, who had always been vain regarding his own watchfulness, would sound a warning.

Certainly her father would see what was happening, or a neighbor. And people did notice—she could hear the startled voices, but too late, too far behind—Grettir's cry, and Hrolf's, “She's gone!”

She could make out Rognvald's voice, “Men and women to their swords!”

Danish accents surrounded her, men panting, leather armor creaking, while far behind, and in another direction, swords rang against shields. Her father would scatter these invaders like unweaned pups!

Sheep made their low, startled noises as her captors made their way through the flock. The sharp, familiar odor of the livestock rose around them, and then receded as the heavily breathing men made rapid progress up-slope.

If any neighbor was going to spy her captors it would have to be now, before they reached the great, lichen-splashed boulders at the foot of the mountains, the paths she knew so well from the long summer twilights, climbing with Lidsmod up to their favorite, secret place, an elf cave just big enough for two people.

But there was nothing—no cry, and even the sound of battle was muted, was gone. She arched her body, freeing one leg.

She kicked.

Her captor struggled to seize her foot, grabbing and missing. She jacked her deerskin shoe hard into his manhood.

The stranger threw her down into the wet sheep-grass, with a deliberate, even movement. Two hard hands roughly cradled her head, and a voice hissed, “Do that again, beautiful prize, and I'll break every bone in your skin.”

She grunted a retort through her gag. To her surprise her captor simply laughed and gave her a gentle pat through her hood.

Eight

Her bonds were loosened and retied, all the more tightly, using a length of some sort of fabric she did not recognize. Once again she was flung over her captor's muscular shoulder. Hallgerd tried to calculate where they were, how high above the village, the strangers' boots soft across the turf on one of the high sheep meadows.

A stream gushed, and splashed as they forded a current, Stag Brook, one of the many watercourses full of snowmelt this time of year. They were traveling faster higher, footsteps crunching snow. Hallgerd was surprised at the path they seemed to be following, a little used, rocky passage up through the mountains.

Hallgerd had heard of such captures, she reminded herself—they were the stuff of fireside tales, told to chill children and teach them caution. A jarl's daughter, forced into marriage or held for some political gain, would find herself powerless, far from friends and family. While the Norsemen of her experience treated neighboring women as respected equals, the women of far-off places were sometimes little more than prey.

Surely, she told herself, her father would retake her before the Danes could reach their ships.

By the time hands unfastened the sack from around her neck it was full morning, the sun nearly blinding off the mountainside snow. Someone behind her unknotted the leather gag and loosed the bonds around her wrists.

She blinked at the sudden sunlight, and kept silent. They were on the far side of the mountain ridge, out of sight of her village.

After her long journey, half-breathless and upside down, the sky swung slowly back and forth, and even the chirp of mountain birds sounded unfamiliar. Armed men were panting hard, flushed from their long climb. There were only half a dozen men, so badly winded that one or two slumped to the ground. Their armor was dark and well oiled, unlike the yellow, cracked armor of Spjothof's fighters. Their sword pommels were well-polished bronze. A man with long blond hair and gray eyes held forth a goatskin sack, and she accepted it, tasting water pleasantly flavored with mead.

This honey wine was not a common beverage in her own village, although foreign merchants sometimes traded it for cheese and sailcloth. The gods enjoyed mead every night, according to the poems. Only the wealthy men and women of the kingdoms to the south were so fortunate.

Which one of these men had carried her over the mountain?

“Did they hurt you?” the gray-eyed man inquired in that lilting, foreign accent of the Danes. His voice was soft, not unpleasing, and he wore a sword buckle of polished silver, an amber finger-ring on his hand.

Hallgerd said nothing. She could not trust herself to speak, and her bladder was about to burst.

Not far down the mountainside four ships nestled in the deep shadow of Wulffjord, the fjord to the south of her homeland. The tops of the spruce wood masts just caught the sunlight. Far in the distance was the early morning cooking smoke of the tiny village of Ard. She counted her enemy, and did not see enough to work so many ships.

“Tell me, jarl's daughter,” he insisted gently, “if you have suffered so much as a single bruise.”

She would choose her words carefully, and above all she would delay. Hallgerd expected to hear her father's battle cry very soon, and to see Hrolf's sword flash in the bright morning light. Now that she felt confirmed in her understanding that she was not going to be raped and butchered immediately, she tried to recall her father's ability to negotiate with difficult strangers.
Act as though the outcome is of no concern
.

And remember
, her mother had always advised her,
who you are
.

Hallgerd's parents had often counseled her on her behavior in recent years, helping her to see that while she could continue to wear her hair loose around her shoulders like any unmarried woman, she would have to speak with a certain bearing. Hallgerd had a good example to follow: Rognvald's even temper, Sigrid's warmhearted gentleness.

And the legendary pride of her village. But it took an effort to keep her voice steady and speak as nobly as she wished. “No Dane alive,” said Hallgerd, “has it in his power to hurt a man or woman from Spjothof.” She said this to strike an attitude of calm indifference. She sounded, she thought, convincing. She began to feel the first glow of real courage.

The gray-eyed man smiled. “Then no one will do Rognvald's daughter any harm.” He used the formal designation,
Rognvaldsdottir
, indicating that he realized her father was a man of name.

This polite way of referring to her parentage—fine courtesy by Spjothof standards—made her uneasy. Perhaps it was this easy reference to harm, or the extreme politeness, which Danes used to cover up their baser motives.

“If you have spilled one drop of my father's blood,” she said, “I'll see your heads on stakes.” She said this with too much passion for a noblewoman—there could be no mistaking her anger.

To her surprise, the gray-eyed man gave a bow.

Hallgerd's captors conferred with him, and with an apology one of them refastened her wrists. “Forgive me, pretty one,” said the rough voice.

This was the one—the man who had threatened to cut off her nose and break her bones. This man spoke with an air of good cheer, as though she had agreed to take part in a rough game with well-established rules.

“Do you believe,” asked Hallgerd, “that a few weak threads will bind the arms of my father's daughter?”

Her captor finished with his knots and stepped back. He was a well-built, suntanned man evidently proud of his smile—he showed nearly every tooth. “For a little while,” he said, in a tone of gentle teasing. “If you will allow a seaman's hitch-knot to test your strength.”

Like many seamen, his handsomeness was offset by a white scar, a straight line across his forehead. Many men carried such scars, the result of splintering oars or ship's strakes in collisions or battle. Oddly enough, this scar made him look less like a violent pillager and more like the good-natured shipwrights she had known all her life.

“These knots
do
hurt me,” said Hallgerd, in the tone her mother used to get a shoemaker to set a lower price. It was not true—the cloth was some slithery, soft fabric, perhaps silk, although Hallgerd had rarely set hands on the precious cloth herself.

The gray-eyed man turned to his scarred shipmate with a troubled frown.

She spoke again, trying to sound as a noblewoman should, and doing, she thought, a good job. “They pain me very much.”

The gray eyes blinked.

“They will cause me a bruise,” she said. “And besides,” she added, with what she hoped was a noblewoman's offhandedness, “I need to relieve myself.”

The gray-eyed man nodded to Scar-Face. “Untie her,” he said.

“I'll do that, Thrand, but she'll scamper,” said Scar-Face. His voice was as rough as a file-stone, a man so strong, he could climb through an entire mountain pass without growing weary of his burden. But either the presence of his superior, or the proximity of the ships, softened his nature, and he did not frighten her so badly now.

She gave him what she hoped was a cool and level glance, and her scarred captor looked right back at her, smiling. She had an instant of impulse, imagining her hand drawing his knife from his belt, slicing his neck where the life throbbed.

“She's a noblewoman, Olaf,” said Thrand. “Such folk expect to be well treated.”

Scarred Olaf broke into a chuckle. He was a broad-shouldered, tall man, with the sort of muscles the best seamen develop from seasons of rowing. Hallgerd had heard ale drinkers describe a fighter named Olaf Bjornnson, often known as Olaf the Strong, who had sailed with Gudmund and killed scores of men. Such war tales were often unreliable exaggerations, she reminded herself, and a fighting man hired himself to various jarls, from season to season.

But perhaps this was the storied Olaf himself. It certainly was possible. This insight, she tried to reassure herself, did not trouble her at all.

“I think the ladies of Spjothof,” Olaf was saying, “are at least half-wolf.”

“Release her,” said Thrand, with a soft laugh. “And I'll bet you a piece of silver she doesn't run.”

“One whole piece of silver.”

“Two,” said Thrand, and the two men laughed together.

The sound of their amusement disturbed her, and she realized that calm as she tried to sound, she could do nothing to command these strangers, or to prevent them from hurting her.

Olaf unfastened her bonds and handed her the long length of silk, for certainly that's what it was, nearly two full ells in length. The shiny fabric was midnight blue, and at the same time it shimmered in the sunlight.

The armored men had fallen still, their faces expectant, while two muttered side bets to their companions.

Run
.

Run, now
—
why are you waiting
?

She should bolt across the mountainside, toward the distant, sulking hamlet of Ard, a smoky little settlement in the far distance. Which of these overmuscled, sword-clad men could catch up with her? Let them spear her in the back, or use a Danish weapon—an arrow or a sling stone.

She stepped behind a boulder furred with spring moss, the moss so fresh with life, it was golden. She knelt, disarranged her linen underclothes and, as she relieved her bladder, she had to admit how frightened she had been, and still was.

O Freya, goddess of the earth
, she prayed.
Shall I run, and die in the attempt
?

Or stay, and pray that Odin shares his cunning with me
?

Nine

Hallgerd's infant brother had died two summers ago.

It was cruel that the sunny season of tall, green-black birches and plush pastures saw Knut, the jarls son, slowly develop a cough, then a fever, and gradually drift into a sleep from which he never awakened.

Hallgerd had helped her mother dress Knut's pale, shriveled body in the finest doeskin clothing. He was interred with a whale-ivory spoon and high-lace leggings in a burial mound that also protected the bones of his ancestors. Sometimes a seeker spent the night on top of such a burial mound, hoping that the dead would impart dreams that would allow a glimpse of the future.

Publicly, Hallgerd's parents had mourned the baby's death in the stoical manner expected of a jarl and his wife, but sometimes late at night Hallgerd had heard Sigrid weeping, and Rognvald joining her. Knut's cradle, made of oak, remained untouched in a corner of the longhouse. Hallgerd's family was proud, but it was a pride rooted in love for one another, and for their neighbors. The gods were enigmatic, but they respected human dignity, she believed, and they would not forget Hallgerd now.