Page 26 of The Caged Viking

“Don’t get snarky on me. I’m pretty sure my time travel had something to do with these arm rings my brother Storvald made for me. That and the Viking reproduction hall in Maine where I was standing. Uncle Rolf’s hall somehow resembles the one in Winchester Castle. Suffice it to say, that’s why it’s important that I keep the bracelets on me, and that I don’t wander too far from Aethelred’s royal estate.”

Rasp, rasp, rasp. He continued to work with the sword, seemingly only half listening, to cover his distress. What had he gotten himself into? Out of a cage into…another kind of prison. Wedlock with a witch! So, she wanted to stay close to Winchester. Could it be this was all a plot, and she was a spy for Aethelred? “Why would you need to stay close to Winchester?”

“Well, duh! Otherwise, I might not be able to return home. Or, rather, we might not be able to return to my home in California. Since that’s where my bridge in time or wormhole, or whatever you want to call it, took place.”

“Worm hole? You crawled here through a worm hole?” he sputtered, then stood, dropping the sword and whetstone to the ground. “We?” he inquired with sudden alarm, taking a step back.

“Aren’t you curious to see what it’s like in the future?” She stared up at him through amazingly beautiful blue eyes, waiting for his answer, a picture of innocence. Which could be a deception, of course.

“Not in the least.” What a pointless exercise! He would have to accept her outrageous notions before he entertained speculation on what the future would be like. When boars fly!

“Believe me, there are fascinating advances,” she driveled on. The woman did talk a lot. And it was clear she considered herself of greater intellect, whereas everyone knew that women had smaller brains. “Life is much easier. For example, you wouldn’t need a couple dozen rowers for your longship. All you’d have to do is turn on the motor and steer the craft. Vroom-vroom.”

He looked at her as if she was demented. She was. Not that he knew what a moat-whore was. “Even if I believe this time-travel nonsense, which I do not, are you capable of moving from one time period to another, at will? I mean, can you guarantee I would be able to return here, if I did not like the future?”

She blushed.

As well she should!

“I don’t know for sure,” she admitted. “This is actually the first time I’ve done it, on my own, and I certainly didn’t ask for it to happen. It was an accident.”

He threw his hands in the air. The woman was beyond unbelievable. “Listen to me well, wench.” And, yes, he had deliberately used the word wench to show her he was the one in charge here. “I am all for an adventure, but I am not sure I would want to risk my future in that extreme a fashion.”

She shrugged. “You can decide later.”

Easy for her to say when she’d just admitted that she’d ended up a thousand years in the past by accident. The gods only knew where he might end up, by accident. Mayhap that Biblical Garden of Eden that Christians believed in. Or in the other direction, mayhap the Norse estate of his very own great-grandson, assuming he ever had living children. Try explaining kinship to a great-grandson who is older than you.

Hah! A smart Viking did not depend on mischance for his future. “I doubt I will feel differently later. I have neglected my estates back in the Norselands far too long. ’Tis past time I returned to Haukshire and took care of my responsibilities. Gods only know what conditions I will find.”

Although the tent gave them some privacy, they could hear clearly the loud noises outside of wooden tent stakes being pounded into the ground with mallets, the neighing of huge war horses, the bellow of oxen pulling equipment wagons, the clanging of cooking cauldrons over open fires, the whistles of swords and arrows being engaged in battle exercises, shouts, and laughter.

Hauk felt almost human after having bathed in a nearby stream, shaved, then bathed again. With his long hair hanging in a single plait down his back, except for two slim war braids framing his face, wearing a clean tunic, braies and boots borrowed from Sweyn, he might not be as handsome as he’d once been proclaimed, and he’d lost a good two stone in body weight, but that mattered not when it came to the upcoming battle.

Mayhap later, when the sex urge rose like sap in a maple tree as it did for many soldiers following a good fight, he would be concerned with his appearance and his appeal to willing wenches. He was a Viking, after all, and vanity was a gods-given right to that favored race of men. Truth to tell, bedmates came easy for Norsemen, handsome or not.

Which brought him to his wife. “I would be barmy to believe your story of time travel.”

“I know how ludicrous it sounds. How do you think I felt almost twenty-one years ago, when I was only fourteen years old, living in the Norselands, and suddenly found myself along with my family on the other side of the world, America, a thousand years in the future?”

Hauk thought it best to humor the woman, who was clearly deluded, if not a mite insane. At the same time, he did a mental calculation. Almost twenty-one years ago she’d been fourteen. Which means, she is thirty-five now, or almost thirty-five. Long in the tooth, as I suspected. He was thirty-five, too, but age was different for men than it was for women. He was in his prime, or would be once he recovered from his ordeal.

“Are you saying that in your land…uh, time…when you left yesterday, it was…?”

“The twenty-first century. Yes, as I told you before.”

“Unbelievable!” he muttered. “But your family’s time travel or whatever it was is neither here nor there. It does not explain what just happened to us. Did you and your family travel to the future in a whirlwind like we just did? Which would be something to see! Your father is known to be the size of a horse. Ha, ha, ha!”

She shook her head, and did not smile at his jibe about her father’s weight. “No. There was a shipwreck off the coast of Iceland and we landed on a Hollywood movie set.”

“Uh-huh.” He had no idea what she meant.

“After that, we lived on a California vineyard, where my father remarried, had another child, and still lives.”

“Your father, who already had ten or more children, as I recall, is still breeding in the future? Your father, a noted farmer, now grows grapes?” Her tale grew more and more unbelievable. He laughed.

“Yes,” she replied. Still no smile at his humor. “He’s adapted.”

“Vikings do not adapt. They conquer. They do not surrender and adapt.” He spat the last word as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. For a moment, he realized that was just how his Viking comrades would regard his being a caged Viking…surrender. They would make mock of him and say he should have fought harder and died in battle afore giving in to his captors.