“If Ragnor of York has raped her, no man of high rank will wed her and you know it.”
Cleve just looked at his friend, his hand unconsciously going to the beautifully worked knife at his belt.
This was interesting, Merrik thought. He made his way to where Eller sat, tapped him on the shoulder, and took over his oar. Soon he was stripped to his loincloth, his back glistening with sweat.
6
THE SKY WASdarker than the bottom of a witch’s caldron. The storm was close now. There was no wind, no movement of any kind. The huge wadmal square sail was hanging loosely as the flesh on an old man’s neck. It was hard to breathe, the air was so thick and still. It seemed that the earth had simply stopped.
The storm was closer now. It had to be because surely they couldn’t continue like this, the warship like a ghost, eerie and silent in the water, no sound, no squawking of gulls overhead, no lapping of waves against the overlapping oak plank sides of the ship. Even the sea serpent’s head that stretched up above the prow looked strangely ghostly, as unearthly and terrifying as it must to the natives when they saw a Viking warship coming out of the fog, a demon come to take them to hell. But now it was different.
They waited, unwilling to move, silent as the still water around them that would become their tomb.
She stood in the opening of the covered cargo space looking out at the men who sat on their sea chests, bent motionless over their oars. Even they had stopped rowing, becoming as still as everything around them. They were silently praying to Thor, to Odin.
Ragnor’s ship lay off the coast of East Anglia. Kerek had told her that Ragnor was drunk. He was sprawled beside the rudder, too frightened to do anything but drink the last of the warm mead. Kerek told her in a low voice that the captain, Torric, wondered if they would see morning. Torric had seen the beginning of a storm like this only one other time in his life, off the western coast of Norway, but that time the air wasn’t warm and dead the way it was now. It had been frigid, so cold that the men accepted death when the storm blew in on them because if they were hurled into the sea, they would be frozen in an instant.
Torric was then a lad of ten years old when he and one other warrior had managed to ride the storm out, landing on the rugged rocky shores near Bergen.
Now Torric walked to where Kerek and Chessa stood. “It will be here very soon now,” he said, his voice a whisper.
She said nothing. What was there to say?
Then Kerek was pointing, nearly panting in his excitement. “Look, yon, ’tis an island. See how the blackness has parted over there? It is an island, I’m sure of it. Surely Torric, if the men row with all their might we can reach it. There must be a safe harbor there.”
“Aye,” Torric said, hope in his voice. “Aye, I see it. The gods have shown it to you. It wasn’t there before, I would swear to it.”
She waited silently, listening to Torric yell at the men, urging them to row with all their might, telling them they would survive if they made it to that island.
“It’s the storm that makes for the strange lighting,” Kerek said. “I think it’s raining hard over the island. The splurges of lightning make it visible. Go inside now, Princess.”
“Oh, no, Kerek, I will watch. Isn’t there anything I can do to help?”
“You can stay alive,” he said, and left her.
It seemed but moments later that a sheet of rain cascaded down upon them. She watched one man plucked up by a mountainous wave and tossed into the sea. No one could do anything. Torric yelled louder for them to row, row, harder and harder still.
Hawkfell Island
“My lord, all the boats are pulled ashore, lashed down, and covered. We’re ready for the storm.”
Rorik Haraldsson, Lord of Hawkfell Island, nodded, raising his face as rain swept in. He sucked in his breath at the force of it. It had been years since he’d felt anything this violent. Everything had been done that could be done. Now they would simply wait.
He turned back into the longhouse. The long rectangular structure was already filled with a faint blue tint from the smoke held inside the huge closed house. He walked to his wife, Mirana, who was sewing calmly, probably a blue shirt for him, since she’d long ago declared that it made him look even more magnificent than he actually was.
He rather liked the way she always complimented him and smacked him at the same time. There wasn’t a sweetly compliant bone in her entire body and he loved her dearly. He knew she would kill anyone who tried to harm him, kill anyone who threatened their island, their people, their children. He trusted her implicitly, something he didn’t believe many men could say about their wives or their friends. She looked up as he approached, but she didn’t smile. Her face was pale, and he noticed with a frown that her fingers were none too steady with her needle.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Is it blue, wife?”
“What? The air? Of course it’s blue. The smoke can’t escape, you know that, what with the doors closed against the storm and—oh, your shirt. Of course it’s blue. It’s just the color of your eyes. I must make you many of them before your eyes fade to some dull color and I forget what they were once like. By all the gods, Rorik, it sounds as if Thor has unleashed all his anger on us.”
“Aye, but what do you expect? I told you not to do those woman things to my body. The gods don’t like mere women to seek to dominate their menfolk, they know that men are weak of flesh and always eager to take whatever is offered to them.” He grinned shamelessly at her.
She was out of her chair, the beautiful blue shirt tossed on the chair arm, and at him. She was hitting his chest with her fists, laughing, biting his shoulder.
“Mama, don’t hurt Papa. Surely what he did wasn’t that bad, was it?”
Mirana turned to look down at her little girl, Aglida, so beautifully golden that it closed her throat to look at the child. “Your papa,” she said, sweeping the little girl into her arms, “is a great jester. He thinks himself amusing when he is only outrageous. He believes he can crush me down with his humor, when in fact he falls short and—”
