She walked slowly to him, stopping in front of him, her head still bowed.
His hand closed over her upper arm. “I have need of you tonight,” he said.
Laren watched the two of them, frowning. Taby said, “Merrik’s father and mother are dead, just like ours. He is very sad, Laren.”
“Aye, he is. He was so excited about seeing them again.” She remembered the strange feelings he’d had and wondered at it.
She set about unfolding the blankets and arranging them on the packed earthen floor. She looked up, but Taby had left her. She saw him ease between the great oak doors of the longhouse. She started to call after him, but saw that many of the Malverne people were wrapped in their blankets on the benches and the floor. She rose instead and followed him.
Taby saw Merrik standing near the palisade wall, utterly silent and unmoving. He was looking upward at the brilliant display of stars overhead. It was very quiet. The huge expanse of water below, the tree-covered mountains on the opposite side of the fjord, all was silent, eerily so.
“I’m sorry they died,” Taby said to the big man who towered over him, the man he trusted more than anyone he’d ever known in his short life, other than his sister.
Merrik turned to look down at the child. Words clogged in his throat. He knew his cheeks were wet but he didn’t care. His grief was deep and his pain at his loss deeper.
“I don’t remember my mother and father,” Taby said after a moment. “I was too young when they died, but Laren tells me about them sometimes. She tells very good stories.”
“I know.”
“Sometimes she cries, just like you’re doing. I ask her why and she says that the memories of them are so very sharp and sweet that crying makes her almost feel them and taste them again. Sometimes I don’t understand what she means.”
Ah, but Merrik did. He leaned down and lifted Taby into his arms. He carried him to an oak tree that was probably as old as the cliffs that the fjord had cut through below and eased down, leaning back against the trunk. He settled the boy against his chest. He began to rub Taby’s back in wide, soothing circles.
He said quietly, his voice deep and low, “I am lucky, for I grew to manhood with my parents. But that makes their passing that much more difficult, for I knew them first as parents, then as a man and a woman I could trust beyond life itself, and as my dearest friends. My father was a very proud man, but he was a man who loved his children, a man who loved his wife dearly, a man who would never act unfairly or hurt another out of anger.”
“He is like you,” Taby said, settling in against Merrik’s shoulder.
Merrik smiled and lightly kissed the top of Taby’s head. “To be like my father would be a great accomplishment,” he said. “You would have loved my mother, Taby. All children flocked to her and she gave them all equal measures of love and attention. She was warm and strong and my father never tried to make her into a submissive female.”
“She sounds like Laren.”
That made him frown. “Hardly. My mother was very different from your sister. She had not your sister’s pride, her vanity, her arrogance.” He remembered telling Laren that his mother was a warrior one minute and gentle as a child the next. He frowned more deeply.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Taby said. “Laren is my sister. She would kill to save me. She would die to save me too.”
“That may be true,” Merrik said. He didn’t want to speak of Laren. She was only important because she was Taby’s sister. He didn’t want her to be important in any other way. He thought of her throwing herself against him at Kaupang simply because he’d bought clothing for both Cleve and Taby. He clearly remembered the feel of her, the touch of her warm breath on his cheek. He said now, “I must leave Malverne soon, for now it is my brother’s home, and he and Sarla will have children, surely, and it is not large enough for both of us. Aye, I had thought of it before, thought that I must leave soon and build my own house, farm my own land. My other brother, Rorik, owns an entire island off the coast of East Anglia called Hawkfell Island. It’s a beautiful place and it is his alone. I must make my own way as he did. What do you think, Taby?”
Taby was asleep.
Laren said quietly, stepping into his line of vision, “A man must be his own master, tread on ground that is his alone, farm land where he spreads his own grain and tends and reaps it.”
Merrik was silent for a moment. He was taken off guard, and he didn’t like it. She’d come upon them, silent as a shadow, and overheard him. He didn’t like that, for he’d also been thinking of her, and he didn’t want her to get close to those thoughts, to guess about them, perhaps. His words to Taby were really meant for himself, not for anyone else, for Taby was a child without a man’s reason. And yet she was here, coming upon him like a silent shadow, listening to him without his knowing it.
“I like it not that you hide yourself and listen to words not meant for your ears. It is true, though, and I will repeat it to your face: your pride is overweening. You are as arrogant as a warrior, which is absurd. Your belief in your own value is more than a female’s should be.”
She only shrugged. “I had not heard you say that, but if that is what you believe, why then there is little I can do about it.”
He sighed, wishing he’d not spoken. “Does your leg pain you?”
“Not so much now. The cream is wondrous.”
“There won’t be more, for my mother is dead. Perhaps she taught Sarla how to make it. We will see.” He stared off into the nothingness beyond her, and thought, first she is starved then beaten and then burned. His anger at her died. Her damned pride and arrogance had brought her through it; she’d survived because of it. Aye, he thought, that part of her was like his mother, or more like his sister-in-law Mirana, Rorik’s wife, perhaps, a woman he’d hated at first, for he saw her tainted and befouled with a villain’s blood as had his parents. He’d distrusted her, feared for his brother. Ah, but she’d been strong and loyal and as stubborn as his brother.
He sighed now, saying, “I hate the suddenness of death. The finality of it. To die in battle—a man is ready for that, at least he is in his heart, if not fully in his mind, because he knows that if he falls, he will go to Valhalla and live there for all eternity. But to be felled by an illness that is unexpected, to be helpless against it, to know there is nothing you can do, that is frightening. It strips a man of dignity, of honor.”
Her voice was hard, as was the line of her mouth. “That is life. Honor and dignity have nothing to do with death. I see being cleaved into two parts in battle as no more a virtue than being struck down by an illness or an assassin’s knife. There is so much death in life that soon you cannot think of one without the other. Death is always riding on your shoulder. Always. It all ends in the same thing. You are no more.”
“You speak harshly and you don’t understand the virtues of a man’s passing in a certain way, in a way of his own choosing, in a way that proclaims his valor, his worth. My father did not choose this plague.”
