Finally, when Cleve lightened the pressure from Merrik’s throat, Merrik splayed his hands upward in the dirt. “I am defeated. Actually, I’m dead, truth be told. You and that bloody knife, Cleve. You’ve gotten much too adroit with it. Then you’ve got the gall to toss it away and use your elbows on me, a trick I taught you.”
“You were angry, Merrik. You’ve told me often enough that a man is a fool if he allows himself to be angered during a fight.” Cleve grinned down at him. “Actually, I don’t think you had a chance, angry or not.”
Merrik cursed him, loud and long, until all three of them were laughing and others had come to them and were telling some of their own tales of cunning and guile.
Cleve climbed off Merrik, then offered his hand to his friend. Merrik could have broken Cleve’s arm, could have thrown him six feet with a simple twist of his body, could have brought him eye to eye and crushed the life from him, but he’d claimed defeat, and thus the sport was done, at least for now. There was always another day to test each other’s strength.
Suddenly, Merrik was as serious as he’d been when fever had come to Malverne the past spring and killed ten of their people. “Listen to me, Cleve. You can never relax vigilance, you know that. There is always trouble somewhere, and if you blink, the trouble can be right in front of you. Remember just weeks ago my cousin Lotti nearly died when a wild boar came into the barley fields? She was lucky that Egill was nearby. You can never nap, my friend, never.”
Cleve remembered well enough and the memory still made his blood run cold. Cleve adored Lotti, a woman who couldn’t speak but who could communicate just as clearly as those who did by moving her fingers. It was a language of her own creation but all the Malek people, her children, and her husband, Egill, understood, and spoke thus to her as well. Cleve himself had learned some words over the past five years but he doubted his fingers could ever be so adroit as Lotti’s or Egill’s.
“I was thinking of a dream I had,” Cleve said. No sooner had he said this than he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Dreams were always important to Vikings, each one remembered was spoken about, argued over endlessly, until all were satisfied that it posed no danger to any of them.
“What dream?” Oleg said, handing each man a cup of pure fjord water, so cold in late spring that it constricted the throat.
“A dream that has come to me five times now.”
“Five nights in a row?”
“Nay, Oleg, five times over the past two years, it has come unexpected. It has become fuller, richer, I suppose, like one of Ileria’s tapestries, yet I still can’t grasp what it means. But it means something, I know that it does. It’s very frustrating.”
“Tell us,” Merrik said. “A dream that returns in fuller detail could mean something very important, Cleve. It could portend things to come, mayhap dangers of which we know naught as of yet.”
“I cannot, Merrik. Not yet. Please, my friend, not yet. It’s not about here or about you. It’s about the past, the very distant past.”
Merrik let it go. Cleve was as stubborn as Laren, Merrik’s red-haired wife, particularly once he’d made up his mind. As they walked down to the fjord to swim with a half dozen of the men and boys, he changed the subject. “You leave tomorrow for Normandy and Rollo’s court. You will tell Duke Rollo we will come to Rouen to visit after harvest.” He paused a moment, his face lighting with such affection that Cleve was glad Merrik’s sons weren’t there to see it. “Tell Taby I will teach him a new wrestling trick. By all the gods, I miss him. He’s ten years old now, a handsome lad, honest and loyal.”
“You couldn’t have kept him with you, Merrik. As Rollo’s nephew, he belongs in Normandy.” Aye, he thought, Rollo had subjugated northern France so that the French king had been forced to grant him the title of the first duke of Normandy and cede him all the land he already held. It was important that Rollo’s hold never be weakened else the country would again be ravaged by marauding Viking raiders.
“I know, but it doesn’t make me miss him less.”
“I will tell him his brother-in-law misses him so much that he failed to thrash a former slave.” Cleve thought about that time five years before. Merrik had been trading in Kiev. He’d wanted to buy a slave for his mother, but had seen a small boy in the slave ring and been drawn to him. He’d bought Taby and then rescued both Cleve and Laren, Taby’s sister, from the merchant who’d brought her. Merrik had loved Taby more than any other human being, save his wife, Laren, even more than his own sons.
Cleve waited until Merrik smiled at that, then continued. “I think Rollo wants to send me to Ireland to see King Sitric, at least that’s what his messenger hinted at. Sitric was once a very old man near to death. Yet when we visited Rouen last year, Rollo told me that Sitric is again a man in his prime. Magic was wrought by a foreign magician called Hormuze, who disappeared after he’d wrought this change in the king. I can’t believe it, but most do. Odd, all of it. Do you know anything about this King Sitric, Merrik?”
“I? Know about Sitric? Nay, Cleve, not a thing. Not a single thing.”
Cleve knew Merrik was lying. He also knew he wouldn’t ever find out why or what precisely he was lying about. Not unless he could find out from this King Sitric himself or if he could manage to find more guile than Merrik possessed. He doubted that would happen.
“Laren and I are pleased that you’ve become Rollo’s emissary. You have a wily tongue and a quick mind, Cleve. Rollo is lucky and he knows it.”
“I could be an utter fool and Rollo would still reward me since he believes I saved his beloved Laren and Taby.”
“Rollo is fortunate,” Merrik said, and clapped Cleve on the back. “Since you aren’t a fool, he can make good use of you as well as reward you.”
2
Dublin, Ireland
Court of King Sitric
A.D. 924
THE FIRST TIMECleve saw her she was arguing with another woman, a woman older than she, a woman endowed with the most glorious silver blond hair he’d ever seen. It wasn’t her mother, but perhaps an older sister. He couldn’t make out their words, but there was enmity in the air—bitterness and resentment of longstanding.
The young one said, anger thick in her voice, “You evil witch, I won’t let you hurt her again, do you hear me?”
“Just what will you do, you interfering little bitch? Go whining to your father? Mind your manners, show me the respect I’m due, or I’ll make you regret it.”
