Page 1 of The Caged Viking

Prologue

Saxon England, AD 1014

Daddy, dearest?...

Bergliot, the serving girl, stood a fair distance from the cage and stared at the beast. It was a man, actually. A Norseman. But, after six months and more living in a cage, the pitiful creature was more animal than man.

Not that Bergliot felt any pity. Nay, she did not. What kind of man allowed himself to be captured and put on display in his enemy’s hall? Especially a Viking. A disgrace he was!

Bergliot had been raised in a Saxon keep, though half Norse-blooded herself, and had been told from an early age that Vikings were the world’s fiercest warriors, never given to surrender. They were also reputed to be more handsome than the average male. Hah! There was naught handsome about this hairy, smelly, snarling spectacle.

He was tall, but gaunt with nigh starvation. Hair once blond hung in greasy clumps about his face and down his back. Unshaven for many a month, his face was barely discernible under a heavy beard. Despite the grime and filth that covered him, old and new scars were prominent from forehead to legs. He wore but a scrap of fur tied about his male parts. The only life left in him stemmed from piercing silvery blue eyes.

Not that those eyes took note of her. No one did. And that was all well and good. An over-tall maid with no bosom or curves to speak of, with hair chopped off unevenly, even to her scalp in places, adorned in a drab homespun garment that hung on her skinny body down to her bare feet, blended in well with the lower staff that labored for this vast royal household.

Bergliot had only been in the Winchester Castle a few sennights now, having been brought here as an indentured servant, and she, for a certainty, was not supposed to be in the great hall. But she’d been drawn to this spot and continued to stare, trying to comprehend why the beast fascinated—and repulsed—her so.

She knew why, of course, and spat on the rushes at her feet.

For his sins, the beast was her father.

Not that she would recognize him if she hadn’t been told of his identity, and not just because of his present condition. She hadn’t seen much of the man in all her twelve years, and not at all the past three. Some father!

In one hand, Bergliot held a boar leg bone, gnawing idly on the little remaining meat, whilst using the other hand to scratch her backside. The coarse wool of her gown caused a bothersome itch. That, and the fleas that infested her bed furs and took bites out of her fair skin.

Suddenly, she felt a hard whack to the back of her head, causing the bone to fly and her to stumble, almost falling flat on her face into the rushes. The bone was caught midair by one of the royal hounds permitted to prowl the great hall. The dog scooted under a trestle table, too far under for her to reach, if she was inclined to retrieve the bone, which she wasn’t.

“Stop picking at yer arse,” the raspy-voiced Egil, her self-proclaimed protector, hissed, waving the wooden end of an axe at her. What kind of protector sells his ward into slavery? For her protection? A likely story! A good one for the skalds, but not for me, Bergliot griped silently, but did not say aloud. She was not such a dullard that she did not know when to curb her tongue, if forewarned.

Egil, though a graybeard of considerable years…having seen at least fifty winters…was short and wiry in frame, one of a dozen woodcutters who provided the kindling for the many palace hearth fires. He was stronger than he looked, as Bergliot well knew from the bruises on her arms from his dragging her hither and yon, all for her supposed well-being.

“Have I not told ye a hundred times that ’tis unseemly fer a lass to touch her privates?” Egil waved his axe handle in her face to make sure she was paying attention.

“Huh?” Bergliot said, rubbing the back of her head. She would no doubt have a knot the size of an egg by nightfall. “What’s a person to do when they have an itch, then?”

“Do it when yer alone and no one can see.”

“Like the self-pleasuring I caught you in yestereve in your bed furs?” Bergliot laughed and ducked, just missing a second knot from Egil’s axe handle.

“And why have ye washed yer face and hair? Are ye trying to look pretty?”

“What? Are you barmy? I am no more pretty than…than you are!”

Egil’s lips twitched with a grin at her outrage. The codger knew how much Bergliot disliked being called pretty, her bane from the time she was a toddler.

“Pretty or not, do ye want some Saxon whoreson tupping ye in a dark corridor?”

Bergliot gasped with outrage. “They would not dare!”

“They would dare, believe you me, and they will not care if ye are barley-faced, or pretty as a gilly flower. Nor will they care which hole they plug either.”

Now he had gone too far. Blood rushed to Bergliot’s face and her hands fisted. She was about to launch herself at the old man, but he had turned abruptly at the hissing sound that came from the cage. The beast had made the sound, as if to signal Egil.

With a motion for her to remain where she was, Egil sidled over to the cage, looking right and left to make sure he was unobserved. It was early morning, and there were few people about, but still the household had been warned to stay clear of the cage.

The beast shuffled forward in his cage and whispered to Egil, who pretended to be examining the strength of the wood bars, something a skilled woodcutter might do. Egil nodded several times, then returned to her, his demeanor one of sadness or worry, she wasn’t sure which.

“What did he want?” Bergliot asked as they walked out of the hall, he toward the wood lot and she toward the outside scullery where there were another five or fifty cauldrons for her to scour.