Page 39 of The Blue Viking

Concentration. She needed to concentrate better. After centering herself this time, she strolled three times, deisel or in a sunwise direction, inside the circle of people, holding the staff in both hands over her head as she walked. The Gaelic chant sounded harsh to her ears in the near silence of the great hall. Energy was practically flowing out of the pores of Maire’s body when she shouted at the pig this time, “Rise! Damn you! Rise!”

Again, the pig just stared back at her, unmoving, through its watery eyes.

Thoroughly disgusted with herself, Maire turned to the crowd and said, “I’m sorry. It didn’t work.”

As one, all the men in the room told her, “Aye, it did.”

“Huh?”

Maire and the maids and womenfolk glanced around the circle. Cook had a wooden trencher placed strategically in front of his groin. Many of the men had criss-crossed their hands over themselves. Others were hunched over. Some of them were grinning; some were grimacing. All of them were red-faced, with excitement or embarrassment, she could not tell.

Old John was the one to break the silence. “Holy blessed apostles! I didn’t know I could still do that.” He gazed with astonishment at a tentlike protusion at the joining of his trews.

“I knew an Eastern houri once who could make a man have an erection at twenty paces, just by swishing her hips,” Toste said, with equal astonishment. “But she was stone naked. And I ne’er saw her arouse four dozen men at one time.”

“Can ye teach me wife to do that?” Dougal asked hopefully, and many other men chimed in with, “Me, too.”

It would seem that Maire’s lévitation experiment had been a success, after all. The only problem was she’d caused the wrong “swine” to rise.

Maire looked as if she were about to weep.

Rurik had had as good a laugh as anyone over her inept experiment with its ludicrous result, but now he recognized how much her failure affected her. She obviously saw no humor in a hall full of rock-hard cocks with no place to go.

He did.

Bolthor surely did. The dreamy expression on his face bespoke the verse mood taking over.

Hell, the rest of the bloody world would find it hilarious, too.

But he couldn’t let her stand there hurting so. Despite all the humiliation she’d caused him, he just couldn’t. He knew too well how it felt to be the subject of mockery. There was naught worse in the world than being made to feel small and inadequate.

“Come, Maire,” he said, taking her gently by the hand and leading her off to the side. With a jerk of his head, he signaled to Stigand that it was time to break up the crowd.

Stigand just then seemed to notice Maire’s distress. His craggy face went soft with compassion, and he immediately began bellowing out orders to disperse. Apparently Maire had won the fierce berserker over. Hah! Soon he would be spouting praise-poems, too.

Rurik dropped her hand and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, tucking her close to his side. With the other hand, he took the staff away from her and set it on the table. He headed toward the stairway where he intended to tuck her into bed, and crawl in after her.

“I am the world’s worst witch,” Maire wailed. “Cailleach would be so ashamed of me.”

“I don’t think you are the world’s worst witch,” he told her soothingly.

“How many witches have you known?” Her voice broke on a stifled sob.

“A few,” he said, his eyes shifting from side to side, avoiding direct contact. Truthfully, Maire was the only witch he’d ever met, aside from Alinor, who had turned out not to be a witch, after all. “There was that witch in Baghdad. And two in Cordoba. I cannot count how many witches I knew in Norway; the place is riddled with the old hags … not that you’re a hag, mind you. And one in Britain, of course … a Saxon witch she was … the worst kind of all.”

Rurik could be facile of tongue, when the occasion warranted. This was not one of those times. He could not seem to stop jabbering.

People who had been exiting the hall, including his own Vikings, halted to hear what utter nonsense he was spewing forth. And half-brain that he was becoming, he continued to spew it forth. “I especially liked the white witch who danced naked in the woods. Her whole coven would join in and, Holy Thor, what a sight that was! Breasts and buttocks twirling all about—”

Maire stopped dead in her tracks and stared at him for a long moment. “You liar,” she exclaimed. “You are such a liar.”

Bolthor cupped a hand to his mouth and told Rurik in a loud aside, “You went too far with the twirling business, methinks.”

Stigand had a different opinion. “Nay, ’twas the dancing naked. Witches like to pretend no one knows of that lewd practice.”

Rurik told Bolthor and Stigand to do something vulgar to themselves, then turned to Maire, hooking his thumbs in his belt with deliberate casualness. “Are you calling me a liar?”

Maire looked right and left in an exaggerated manner, then straight at him. “If it looks like a toad and has warts like a toad …”