The Viking's Woman (3 page)

Yet he was not the customary Viking, for he was the son of two races, the Irish and the Norse. His father, the great Lord of the Wolves, ruled as king in the Irish city of Dubhlain. Olaf, King of Dubhlain, had gone a-Viking in his time too. But he had fallen in love with the land and with his Irish wife, and he had brought about a curious peace with Eric’s grandfather, the great Ard-Ri, or High King, of all Ireland. Eric’s maternal grandfather, Aed Finnlaith, still ruled over all the Irish kings at Tara, and far away in the Norwegian icelands, Eric’s father’s father ruled as a great jarl of the Norse. His education had been well rounded. He had studied in great monasteries of learning with Irish monks, and he had learned about the Christian
God and Christ, about writing, and about literature. At his father’s court he had met many foreign men, masters and teachers. He had been taught to listen to the trees and the forest and the wind by Mergwin, the Druid. He had learned to reap, to harvest.

But he was a second son. He had gone to battle with his father and his elder brother, and he loved his Irish kin, but he had equally honored his Norse brethren. His Norse uncles, too, had taken him on many journeys for another kind of education.

A-Viking.

He had been bred to civilization, for men already proclaimed this time a “golden” age for Ireland.

He had also been bred to the raids that had made the savage quests of the Vikings famous throughout Europe and Asia and even the Russias. There were no finer navigators living than the Norsemen. There were no more furious fighters. And there were no men more brutal.

But he did not sail today to do battle. Though he had gone a-Viking with the best fighters in his younger days, he had also learned about a better quest, the one for land.

Eric had been sent to sea for the first time when he was just a lad, in the company of his uncle for whom he had been named. With his paternal grandfather’s finest men, he had crossed endless seas and rivers and vast lands. He had sailed the Dnieper, entered into the gates of Constantinople, and learned the ways of the Moslem princes. He had come to know different cultures and peoples, and countless women, by conquest and by barter. A-Viking had been a way of life. It was what he did and what he was.

As the lightning lit up the heavens and the sea churned beneath him, as England’s shore loomed ever closer, he wondered vaguely what had changed him. Not that the change had come quickly or easily. It had been like the slow melting of snows in the spring, entering into his heart and his being.

It had begun far, far from the northern icelands that were home to the Viking spirit. It had happened on the coast of Africa, when they had battled the caliph of Alexandria, and the people had come forward to pay with gold for their lives and their freedom.

She had been a gift to him.

Her name had been Emenia, and she knew nothing of rancor and hatred. She had taught him everything about peace. He had known only violence and she taught him tenderness. She had been taught the most exotic arts of lovemaking in the finest harem in the land, but it had been the sweet beauty in her heart, in her unquestioning devotion to him, that had lured him into love. She had enormous almond-shaped eyes, and hair as black as night, all the way down her back. Her skin was the color of honey, and she had tasted of it, and other sweet spices, and had smelled of jasmine.

She had died for him.

The caliph had been determined on treachery. Emenia had heard of it and had tried to come to warn him. He had heard later that the caliph’s men had caught her by her glorious dark hair as she ran along the halls of the palace.

They had slain her to keep her silent, slitting her throat.

He had never been what the Vikings called a berserker—a fighter to lose all thought and reason and battle with nothing more than savage intent. Eric believed in a cool head in battle and had never relished needless death.

But that night he had become a berserker.

He had gone after her murderers, alone, enraged, and he had slain half of the caliph’s guard before the ruler had thrown himself upon his knees, swearing that he had not ordered Emenia’s death, only his own. Somehow, remembering her love of life and peace, he had stayed his sword from slitting the caliph’s throat. He had plundered his palace anew and had sat vigil over his beloved’s body; then he had turned his back on the hot, harsh land.

It had been so long ago. Many cold winters and many new summers had since passed, and through the seasons, violence had guided him again. But through it all he discovered that Emenia had given him something of a lasting thirst for peace, and she had also taught him something of women.

He was Irish as well as Viking. And just as his father had carved his place from the land, Eric had determined to do the same. His brother, Leith, ruled Dubhlain. Eric was ever Leith’s right-hand man, as he was his father’s. Land could be given to him, he knew.

But his pride was as savage as his heart, and so was his determination. He would make his own way, as the Wolf had done. They were all fighters. Even his gentle, beautiful Irish mother had an unquenchable pride. She had dared to take steel against the Wolf. She laughed at it now, but Mergwin never tired of
telling the story. Or the tale of the Danes who had challenged the Norse Wolf and his Irish bride.

Olaf of Norway had sailed to Ireland seeking conquest. He had been an unusual invader to the Irish—and to their Ard-Ri, seizing land but minimizing loss of life, rebuilding anew as soon as he had secured the land he had taken. There came a stalemate between the Norse invader and the high Irish King—and Erin—and Dubhlain—had been his father’s price for peace. Eric’s mother, who once had tried to capture Olaf when he had been wounded, had been horrified. She had escaped the Wolf when the tables had turned on her, but she had not been able to escape her father’s will.

Eric smiled, thinking of his father.

Olaf had given far more to Ireland than he had taken. He had served Aed Finnlaith, battling with him against the fierce Danish invader, Friggid. And in the fighting he had become Irish himself. In the joint quest to preserve their home and family Olaf and his Irish bride had discovered a love that burned as deeply as their passion. Mergwin had witnessed it all and, for reasons of which Eric was not entirely sure himself, prided himself that everything should have turned out so very well.

Eric’s smile turned grim as the wind rushed to meet him and the salt spray of the sea dampened his face. The Danes who continued to harry the Irish coastline already called him the Spawn of the Wolf, or sometimes the Lord of Thunder, for where he battled, steel clashed and the ground trembled.

This ground would tremble! he silently swore. His
hatred for the Danes was innate, he was certain. And he had been asked here to battle them.

Asked by Alfred, the Saxon King of the English. Alfred, who had managed to draw his nobles together at long last against the devasting surge of Danes to hold tenaciously to the kingdoms of Wessex and Sussex and the south of Britain.

Rollo, Eric’s companion and right-hand man, spoke suddenly from behind him. “Eric, this is a strange welcoming.” As massive as an ancient oak, Rollo pointed past Eric’s shoulder to the land. Eric frowned. If a welcome awaited them, it was a most curious one. The great wooden gates were being drawn about the harbor town. Atop the palisade, armed men were taking position.

A coldness seized Eric, and his eyes glittered with pale blue depths of fury. “’Tis a trap!” he muttered softly.

And indeed, so it appeared to be, for as his ships came into the harbor he could smell the oil being heated that would be poured down upon them from the walls of the village.

“Odin’s blood!” he roared at the treachery, and his fury nearly blinded him. Alfred had sent messengers to his father’s house. The English king had begged him to come, and now this. “He has betrayed me. The King of Wessex has betrayed me.”

Archers ran upon the parapets. Aim was being taken upon the seafarers. Eric swore again, and then he paused, narrowing his eyes.

Something was catching the light from the lightning. A sheath of it, long and radiant. He realized that a woman stood upon the parapet and that the sheath
of gold was her hair, neither blond nor red nor chestnut but some shade of fire that was a combination of the three.

She stood among the archers and called out orders.

“By Odin! And by Christ and all the saints!” Eric swore.

A volley of arrows was set loose. Eric barely dodged the woman’s shaft as it sped toward him. He ducked. The arrow landed harmlessly against the prow. Screams went up from the wounded men. Eric tightened his jaw in fury, sick at the treachery.

“We’re coming fast upon the shore,” Rollo warned him.

“Then so be it!”

Eric turned to his men, the ice-blue mist of Artic rage in his eyes and in his stance. He had learned to fight with control and thus to win, and he never gave away emotion, except through the terror-evoking chill in his eyes and the clenching of his teeth.

“We were asked here to do battle! Begged to assist a rightful king!” he shouted to his men. He didn’t know if his words would carry to the other ships, but his wrath would. “We are betrayed!” He stood still, then raised his sword. “By Odin’s teeth, by Christ’s blood! By my father’s house, we will not be betrayed!”

He paused.

“A-Viking!”

The word went up on the air and screamed upon the wind.

The ships came to shore. Rollo brought out his double-headed ax, the Viking’s most heinous weapon. Eric preferred his sword. He called it Vengeance, and that was what he offered.

They came in upon the sand and the shoals, and the Viking ships scraped bottom. In their fur-lined boots, Eric and his men splashed into the shallows. A horn sounded, and a battle cry began as a chant and rose to a chilling crescendo. The Vikings had come.

The gates to the fortress opened suddenly. Horsemen appeared, armed, like Eric’s Irish and Norse crew, with two-headed battle-axes, the kiss of death, and pikes and swords and maces, but they were no match for the ferocity of the Vikings and the depths of Eric’s rage.

Eric never fought as a berserker. His father had taught him long ago that anger must be controlled and turned to ice. He never let his temper carry his sword arm too far, to drive him too recklessly. He fought coldly and ruthlessly, slaying his first challenger and dragging the man from his horse. The challengers fought bravely, and in the midst of the carnage Eric thought that it was a pathetic waste of life and limb. There were a few professional fighters here, surely men of the king’s fryd, “carls” who spent their days in his defense.

But mostly they were simple farmers, freemen, and serfs who fought with picks and hoes and whatever else they could find.

They died quickly and their blood fed the earth. More and more of the Vikings were mounted. More and more of the men of Wessex lay dead upon the dirt.

More cries went up. Mounted upon a chestnut horse seized from a fallen man, Eric lifted his sword, Vengeance. He cast his head back and raised the
bloodcurdling battle cry of the Royal House of Vestfald.

Lightning tore across the sky and the rain began.

Men slipped and slid in the mud, and still the fight went on. Eric urged his mount toward the gates. He knew that Rollo and a horde of others followed him toward the gates. Archers remained above them. Impervious to the flying death, Eric ordered that a ram be dragged from the ships. Despite the arrows that flew and the oil that was cast down upon them, the barriers were quickly breached. The Vikings burst into the fortress town. Hand-to-hand combat followed, and with every moment that passed, victory came to Eric’s men. He shouted in English that the men should lay down their arms. The pillage had begun—one did not bring a host of such raiders across the sea, set them to battle, and not expect that they would demand reward. But his fury had begun to ebb, and the blood lust was leaving his veins. He could not understand why Alfred, known far and wide to be a fierce fighter and a wise king, should have betrayed him so. It made no sense.

More and more men began to lay down their arms. Many of the buildings were afire. The parapets were falling down, and the fortress town was nearly a ruin of earthworks. Terrified squealing pigs and mewling cattle ran through the debris. Those men still alive were gathered together in a corner of the stockade before the gates that led out to the fields. Eric told Rollo to take charge of them. These men would become his serfs. He spun his mount around as he heard screams, and he knew that his men had come upon the town’s maidens.

He raced to the center of the earthworks. A group of his men encircled a dark-haired girl who was no more than sixteen years old. Her tunic was torn, and she cried and screamed in a harried panic.

“Cease!” Eric demanded. He sat upon the great bay and stared down at the scene. His tone was quiet but harsh, and his command was met by silence. When all was still, except for the sobbing girl, he swept his icy gaze around all of them, and then spoke again. “We were betrayed here, but I’ve yet to comprehend why. You’ll not abuse these people, man or maid, for I have claimed them and this place. We will take the riches of the town and divide them to a man. But the livestock will live, and the fields we will keep fertile, for this will be our land upon this Wessex shore.”

The girl did not understand the Norse he spoke, but she seemed to realize that she had been granted a reprieve. Slipping and sliding in the rain and the mud, tears still stinging her eyes, she ran to him where he remained mounted atop the bay and kissed his booted foot.

“Nay, girl—”

He caught her hands impatiently and spoke in English. She looked up at him with dark eyes, and he shook his head again. He beckoned to Hadraic, one of his captains, to come for her.

Even as the Viking lord obeyed his command there was a whistling in the air. The bay screamed and fell, and Eric realized that an arrow meant for him had caught his mount instead. The horse fell, thrashing and screaming. Swiftly Eric leapt from it and stared about at the buildings, those burning and those still
standing. A cry of fury went up among his men. A second arrow flew. Pain like fire tore into Eric’s thigh where the arrow struck. He threw back his head and clenched his teeth, reaching for the shaft. His men raced forward. Taking cover behind the dying horse, he held up a hand, stopping them. Sweating and convulsing, he grasped the shaft and pulled. A cry of sheer agony tore from his lips, but the arrow came free. Blood flowed over his hands, and blackness spun before his eyes. He sat in the mud with the rain still pouring down upon him. For many seconds he feared that he would fall flat upon the earth, unconscious.