

### Viking Hunter

### A War of Outlaws

### By Wulf Anson

### Volume I

### Grab The Wolf

Text and Cover Copyright Wulf Anson and Wulf Publish 2016

Rights reserved

Distributed by Smashwords

Also Available

Viking Hunter Volume 2 Kill Them Twice

Viking Hunter Volume 3 The Valkyr's Kiss

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Viking Hunter is a work of fiction set in the 13th Century. It is not meant to disparage today's Catholics, Jews, Gays, Native Americans, Savage Mastiffs or any other current sub-groupings. The prejudices within are those of the characters and are historically accurate.

Table of Contents

Induction

I Baggage

II He Found Her Oak

III Idiot

IV Count It Up

V A Parliament of Trolls

VI The Booth

VII Rules Are For Losers

VIII Dirty Joke

XIX Who's For Nightmeal

X The Fall-Down Fits

XI Spooks Playground

XII The Bishop's Bet

XIII Every Man's A Hero

XIV A Slap In The Face

XV Terrapins And Sumacs

XVI Your Goddamn Digging

XVII Skak

XVIII Prepossessed

XIX Mortgaged

XX Burned

XXI Weasel

XXII Baleyg

XXIII Unless I Die First

XXIV Too Many Women

XXV I Cured Her Of Complaining

XXVI The Road To Grand Reputations

XXVII Go On You, Live

XXVIII You Want To Be A Hunter?

XXIX No Man's Land

XXX Poached

XXXI Da'hal The Black

XXXII What I Wouldn't Give

XXXIII Heretics

XXXIV Broken Toys

XXXV Then Things Are Looking Up

XXXVI The Fenris Wolf

XXXVII Trolls And Lesser Pests

XXXVIII She Actually Farted

IXL Shtoog

XL You Forgot Your Hammer

XLI The Logmadur

XLII You Can't Spoil A Rotten Egg

XLIII Meals And Monies

XLIV Night In Normandy

XLV I Will Steal The Stars

XLVI Cat Squeezings

XLVII Clondayre Town

XLVIII I'll Take It As Criminal Slander

XLIX Sticking Other Men's Pigs

L If It's Half As Big As Your Words

LI Target Painting

LII Bones Might Be Broken

LIII A Morning For Clods

LIV Repossessed

LV The Only One Here

LVI Turned Inside Out

LVII Jarnulf's Reputation

LVIII Your Immunity's Forfeit

LIX Treed Bobcat

LX The Undead

LXI The Owl's Kiss

LXII I'll Deal With You Later

Viking Hunter Continues In Volume II and III

Induction

When Leif Erickson sailed home to Greenland from his trip to Markland and its mammoth forests his news was snatched up as if it was free silver. The few trees in Greenland grew no taller than man height. Fortunes had been made importing wood from Norway to Iceland and Greenland. Land, forests, fish and game waited just over the horizon. The news shot back to Iceland and from there to Norway and Denmark and the rush was on. The Swedes were too busy taking over Gardariki (Russia) to notice, much less care.

First stop was the island of Hellulandia, across the icy seaway from Markland.

Markland to Hellulandia's west then became a dumping ground for Outlaws exiled from Hellulandia by its Courts. These following events occurred in that part of Markland known as Skoggangurstrond, (Outlaws Strand) in the year 1279.

Note on names:

Before you dislocate your tongue trying to pronounce the Viking names in it, the Icelandic J is retained in them.

Pronounce it as either a Y, or a long E.

Jarnulf becomes Yarnulf.

Anja becomes Anya.

Kjartan becomes Kee-yartan.

I Baggage

Badger's boot jostled Mirha awake midmorning as he and Karl stood over her wrestling the ship's stem dragon up from its mount. Karl returned her worried stare with a wink, confiding that they were almost home. It wouldn't do to go scaring their own friendly elves and wood sprites even though he didn't believe in such things.

"Ah." she said, nodding. The Sidhe could turn nasty if you gave them a rude enough shock.

"I guess being Vikings you got to move around a lot." she said.

"Been here eighty years." Karl said.

"Figures." she said. "Eighty years and they don't know you yet. Like tenant like Sidhe."

"I'd heard," Karl said. "that the Tuatha de Danann turned themselves into Sidhe and sank into the very bones of Irskr lund rather than be run off it by your Gaels. Seems a stretch they'd give it up after all that just to follow you over here."

Mirha kept the rest of her snubs to herself as the sun climbed a forearm higher over the horizon.

The keel ground ashore in a sandy cove. Two huge sheds sat back fifty yards from the beach. A noisy mob of women and kids with many an anxious glance boiled round the north shed as the men hauled up sails and stowed gear. Condolences were offered upon learning that her captor, old Gorm was the season's only casualty and then the mob turned festive.

Three more ships joined hers on the beach.

Sailors moored them to the twisted little pines scattered about the yard as other sailors splashed about unloading their season's get. The celebration surrounding her over the crunch and shoonk of booted feet and thumps of dropped loot only heightened her fears.

Filthy, wretched and not knowing what from where she searched wide eyed through the milling crowd.

Returning stares from the younger girls cut her like knives.

Skipper Adam began calling the auction.

From beyond the south shed came a bronzed, well-muscled six footer in his early twenties strutting toward them as if he owned the whole ship yard. He'd nary a hair out of place and was wearing clean hide trousers and a shirt of brilliant blue wool. A tiny knife, its blade finger length unlike the arm long knives the others wore, filled a sheath sewn to his thigh. An ornate ivory hilt atop a skinny, thigh long scabbard of black wood hung thrust through his belt. Hanging from the belt was the same thong with its profane pairing of cross and hammer most of the sailors were wearing.

King Tore seemed quite pleased to greet him and Mirha's apprehension doubled as the crowd around Tore suddenly found reasons to be elsewhere.

Another great, scarred, ursine grandfather rounded the other shed's rear headed towards him.

"So you got Thidrandri's rope." the man said.

"Hroald, you bloody handed old hypocrite." Tore bellowed at the man.

"Don't you hypocrite me." the man roared back. "I'm a heretic and it's souls that need scrubbing, not hands. And yours is due again before winter."

"That stream's awful cold." Tore said.

"It won't be cold where you're going if you skip it." Hroald yelled.

Tore promised Hroald he'd submit to it, again, if only to shut him up, and waved him off. Priest Hroald, Tore's brother, crossed himself.

"God be with you and the Pope's a bugger." he droned and then ambled off to inspect the rope.

Tore had tired of these annual baptisms years ago. Hroald's position was that he wasn't taking any chances at their late stage of this game considering the debts they were both still piling up.

"How'd it go son?" Tore asked the blue shirted fop. "Those women of yours give you any trouble?"

"Nothing I couldn't handle." Jarnulf lied, toying with his sword's pommel.

A bidding war erupted beside Mirha over a silver brooch two women both wanted and she missed Tore's son saying that aside from a few fist fights their women and kids were all fine but they'd lost two horses. The fiends were still chatting and laughing when the two women spotted a pair of matching ear rings lying beside the brooch and piped down, splitting the set.

"Old Gunnbjorg's heart gave out last month." Tore's son was saying. "Ref and those two big bucks on her in that heat all afternoon was just too much. Hildr strayed off one night. Big Blackie caught her and tore her to pieces."

"Gunnbjorg, huh?" Tore asked, looking more than a bit crestfallen. "Well, no matter. The Ottarrs always have plenty more and they're cheap enough."

Ice sheeted Mirha's innards. She searched desperate through the crowd for a kindly face who might find her serviceable enough to want. While she hadn't a clue what a Ref looked like, a Big Blackie ought to be easy to spot amongst these six footers, half of them blondes or red heads like herself. Anyone but those two or King Tore's murdering, woman hating Princeling.

Her bulging eyes seized on a gangly teen with stringy blonde hair milling about with his twin. So he had pimples. He'd grow out of them. They were standing at the edge of the crowd, looking shy and uncertain of themselves, gazing hungry at all the young women sifting through the loot. They were both old enough to have a job but not too old, and neither seemed to have a girl of their own.

She strutted off towards them batting her eyes, and working hard at dislocating her hips. Karl saw where she was headed and caught her shoulders from behind.

"Don't go get yourself in trouble." he said, turning her back around, and her heart skipped a beat as Big Blackie swept scowling into view, heading toward Tore and the prince.

He was made all of rippling muscles and was the tallest horror that even her worst nightmares had never seen. His midnight hair was neat trimmed but his stubbled jaw hadn't felt a razor since at least her kidnapping. He and his grimed hide trousers looked like they'd clawed their way up out of a coal bin.

At his side grinned, like the weasel whose sleeping bag she'd lived in aboard the ship, a smarmy looking rascal of normal size who was sporting a prissy, well-manicured beard.

Tore fixed a sardonic smile on them.

"And you two." he said, dripping condescension.

"Sorry about Gunnbjorg. I know how you loved riding her." the shorter one said.

Tore sighed.

"We probably should have turned the old gal out anyway. Her belly was dragging and her teeth going." he said.

He stabbed a finger into the giant's chest.

"And you, swinging those hammers, getting rich. Did you make sure everyone got enough to eat?" he said.

"Nobody went hungry." the giant said, clapping his shovel sized hand on the prince's nape.

"Father did most of the work. Didn't have time," he said, thrusting his huge, dark chin out towards Hroald who was carrying a coil of rope off toward the shed's doors. "with digger there keeping the pack of us playing at gophers."

Tore finger stabbed him again, ordering him to shut up. Suddenly she was sorry old Gorm who'd called her his chipmunk when he grabbed her had died. If, as Karl had suggested, he just wanted someone to talk to he hadn't been planning on killing her with a hammer and eating her. Tore grumped out a few more orders and then trudged off after Hroald into the shed.

II He Found Her Oak

Hroald, crouching beneath a low shelf in the shed's dark rear, was making yet another inventory of barrels of pine tar. Tore bent under the shelf to join him, cursing and sweeping a cobweb full of dead flies off his face.

"Got enough of this too?" Hroald said.

"Below decks." Tore said.

"Best get what's outside in here." Hroald said. "Especially those hide halyards and stays."

"You're sure this stuff's going to the right place?" Tore said.

"Ansvarr jumped the border." Hroald said.

"He get back? Is he alright?" Tore said.

"He got back but the Mare's rode him near every night since." Hroald said. "They left a trail west hugging our border almost to Storm's. They're going to hook around, hit our back door."

Hroald took Tore's shoulders and stared owl like into his brother's face.

"He found her oak." Hroald said. "Spent five days laying for her. Was going to take all day skinning her alive. Then leave what was left propped against the tree where Nacarr would find her. They didn't even bury them. The ground was littered with little bones. Skulls, ribs, arms and legs. Nooses up in the branches."

"He tell anyone else?" Tore said.

Hroald balled his fists, started upright to set them on his hips and banging into the shelf above him, slipped a curse.

"How many men who crossed him have turned up dead right here in the last twenty years, and nobody could ever even summons him?" he said.

"Good." Tore said. "If that gets around the uproar will force us in there head to head. The knock down shove of skinning his bed witch would wake Nacarr right up. Ruin everything."

"He knows." Hroald said. "It just took him five days of berserk to remember it. He found a few little crosses in the Gaelic style.

Looked like the last group had been dead about a year. Another was maybe four or five. Couldn't tell about the rest."

"Four winters," Tore said. "before she makes sacrifice again?"

"Pray God." Hroald said.

"Keep nudging him." Tore said. "Keep his spying scum stumbling over their own feeding our flies."

A blonde in her late twenties without makeup and dressed like a women twice her age let off her sifting through the auction's scant wares and straightened upright clutching a block plane.

Jarnulf stood alone to the blonde's right casting his disparaging eye over the auction's remains. To her he looked naked without his usual pair or more of noisy, complaining women.

"Another one?" he said, eying her purchase.

"He's still at it," she groaned. "trimming axe and adze marks out of the whole place."

"You?" she said.

"It was picked clean before Tore got through with me." he said.

"Why all the rope?" she said.

"Thidrandri's promised Tore a handsome price for it." he said. "He's refitting all six of his ships and building two more."

"There's enough here for three times that many." she said.

Jarnulf shrugged.

"Probably figures to build more this winter and sell them on Hellulandia." he said.

Anja nodded towards Adam, who was auctioning off a dirty, skinny girl in a tattered brown shift. Her toes had worn through the fronts of her shoes. Adam was down to six ounces of silver, half of the going rate for a girl slave.

"What is it I'm supposed to be looking at?" Jarnulf said.

"That coal biting bag of rat snot." Anja said pointing past Adam and the girl to Leif, the pimpled, blonde teen the waif kept making cow eyes at.

"So he got back. There's next season." Jarnulf said.

"I can see him drooling from here." she said.

"I suppose it's a shame," he said. "but somebody's got to take her."

"You know what'll happen to her as soon as he's got her out of sight." Anja said.

"So?" he said.

Anja's eyes drilled him with scorn.

"That snail?" Anja said, socking her elbow into his ribs. "Buy her."

"I can just see Kadlin's face." he groaned.

His mind was seeing Rakel's face, but bringing her up to Anja would get him no sympathy. Rakel had been singing a somewhat different and almost conciliatory tune this summer. Of all the women in Hrafnstadir Rakel and Anja were the two best used to hosts of men's most far reaching braggings and beggings, and as such had no use for each other.

More than one sailor who was gone all season suspected Jarnulf and his hunters of entertaining their wives and daughters the moment their backs were turned. They'd all be drinking tonight. It would get ugly just like it did every year. Jarnulf was the target of more than one sailor's suspicions.

"She'll understand." Anja lied. "Most of your apprentices aren't even here. Get her a decent husband and make yourself a penny or two."

"They can't afford to be here." he said.

The grimy Gaelic girl was about all that was left when Leif the pimpled's lust stepped in for his missing spine and he slouched his way toward Adam. Karl and some other men looked at their feet.

"Damn you. Do something." Anja said.

"Die into hell." Jarnulf muttered.

Leif offered his bid of two ounces.

Anja gave Jarnulf a shove forward.

"How much of your money is still out on loan to girls reconciling their disputes?" she groaned.

She shoved him again, and returning her a defiance in retreat glare he turned it back over his shoulder to Adam, and loudly offered a cow, which was short speak for two and a half ounces.

Mirha understood only being called a cow.

"She's yours." Adam said.

Jarnulf headed toward her pointing, scowling, and grumbling.

She retreated two steps. He scorned her with a sneer. Kadlin's expensive pretensions were becoming a backbreaker and a reconciliation with Rakel might even be effected, but this nuisance loomed as freezing an impediment to any night time entertainings as a snow bank.

Two dozen sailors let out a massed sigh of relief thinking well I'll be damned, he hadn't had any all summer. More to the point he hadn't had any of theirs. The portion of theirs who'd been hoping to be had were equally though less audibly chagrined. Jarnulf flushed, hoping the handful of chuckles surrounding him were about something besides himself. At least the snickers wouldn't last as long as his evenings for the next few months would.

Mirha stared after Leif slinking away thinking that trying to talk the fop Adam had given her to out of anything would be a waste of breath. With his snotty way and girly little sword he'd probably never worked a day in his life.

Not a scar on him. Obviously used to having people jump for him the way Adam had the instant he'd opened his mouth. Probably the meanest pervert of the lot.

The older blonde with him asked her name.

Mirha said nothing.

The older woman tried again.

Mirha wasn't having it. There remained a chance he'd sell her off to that other guy if she could convince him she was crazy.

Anja told Jarnulf that under all that dirt was a girl who was very pretty. Jarnulf said he hoped so. It would make her easier to get rid of.

Jarnulf pinched his nose and stepped crosswind of her.

"How about you take her to the steam house. I don't want her under my roof stinking like this." he said.

Anja socked him in the arm, hard.

"Once she's had a steam and gotten into decent clothes you'll see a very lovely girl." she said.

"May be." Jarnulf said. "But she looks more like a chipmunk in a tanner's bed."

Fresh animal hides spent six weeks at the tanner's shieling in beds of chicken and dog manure.

The last, and the only word in Norrona Mirha truly understood, was chipmunk. Teeth gnashing and eyes narrowed to slits of green hellfire she snatched Jarnulf's skinning knife and aimed a slash at him. He'd become the grandson of the ghoul who'd destroyed her life.

III Idiot

"Shit!" he yelled, leaping back wide eyed as his knife flew past, barely missing his ribs.

Mirha, overreaching for a second swing, lost her balance. He caught her wrist and knuckled the back of her hand. Shrieking, she dropped the knife and sent a knee toward his groin. He took it on his thigh and pulled her filthy little thumb back. She tried to bite him. That too failed so she hissed and spit at him.

He pinched her sun blistered, button nose hard, and holding her at arm's length lifted her up onto her toes by it. The harder she pounded and clawed at his wrist the harder he pinched.

He turned to Anja.

"I must find some way of thanking you for this." he said.

He shot Karl an inquiring glare. Karl threw both hands high, baffled, and said she hadn't given anyone any trouble all the way here. Jarnulf turned back to Anja.

"And you were all worried about her?" he said.

Without thinking she leapt behind the first piece of cover available.

"I'd be in a murder rage too. It wasn't her idea to be here." she said.

"Oh?" he said. "You would be in a murder rage too? But I'll just sell her off to a decent, God fearing husband among our apprentices who can't even afford to pay attention most of the time, in a murder rage, at a profit."

He released Mirha and retrieved his knife as she backed away whimpering and groping her nose. He clasped Anja's shoulders and kissed her forehead.

"Well?" he said. "Go clean her up. I've got to get her home and lock up all the knives to be ready for all those suitors and silver chasing after these newest endearments she's just shown them."

Mirha knew she'd been insulted but the reason eluded her as Anja led her off. She didn't smell a bit different from his neighbors, those bastards who'd kidnapped her. One thing she was certain of was she wasn't going to like whatever was coming next even if it was a Christmas feast.

When they arrived and Anja peeled her out of her rags to drag her inside she was horrified to find seven more women ahead of her in the boiling mist, all naked and dripping sweat, scrubbing and scraping each other or lounging about on the benches as if it were the most proper and natural thing under heaven.

Jarnulf stood leaning against the back wall of the ship shed, alone, a more than overlong time later when Anja dragged Mirha back. Even Badger had deserted him in the rush for the men's steam house and then the Mead Hall and all those fresh scrubbed girls.

Mirha's sun burned, kitten eyed face looked like a boiled crab and her soles were dragging, but she no longer seemed feral. She was wearing a purple dress with room left over in it for her twin. Her hair, scrubbed and the knots combed out, drooped unbound like so much wet, orange seaweed down over her shoulders and back, advertising her virginity. Anja promised to collect a wardrobe for her and drop it off later. Jarnulf wondered had what set her off earlier.

He started her on the path to his steading, muttering a single word over and over, luckless.

He skippered her into his steading, down the two steps to his living space, and on between the snarling, black wolf heads painted on his pillar hung door shields.

He steered her up onto the north platform and on to the tiny back bed closet. She stared into it bewildered. It even had a door on it. Despite Anja's garbage about him not hurting her there could only be one reason she was here.

Her Gaelic and his Norrona led them into the swampy marsh of their shaky Aenglisc.

She pointed around his home.

"Here?" she said.

Her brow furrowed.

"King Tore's son?"

"No Kings. No son." he said, taunting her with a smirk.

"Only Chieftain."

She raised an eyebrow.

He laughed and lapsed into Norrona.

"If he or anyone else made themselves King they'd be dead by sunset. And if he starts falling down on the job, he can be replaced, like," Jarnulf snapped his fingers with a flourish on the word, "that."

She folded her arms and stared him down firing back a storm in Gaelic. Of her words he understood, her, King, not common, not whore. Of her bearing he understood that he was a backwards, ignorant barbarian.

"With chicken shit on your dress." he said in Aenglisc. "The law is our king."

"Law?" she said, fighting with her upper lip. The lip seemed to be winning, curling itself into a sneer.

"Exactly." he said with a single, defiant shake of his head and upward thrust of his chin, as if he'd got his hair in his eyes. Its effect was the more pronounced as his hair was too short for it to be the cause.

He steered her back into the main room and pointed with his boot to the teeth in the head of a huge bearskin rug.

"King." he said. "Dead."

He dug two pennies from his belt pouch and shoved them up under her nose, toyed with her sleeve, pointed to the hams and cheeses hanging from his rafters and on to her tiny bed closet before pretending to hug something huge in the air before him.

He dropped his invisible burden at her feet, returned one penny to his pouch, waved the other before her, flung it out his open door and lowered his head, shaking it and venting a disgusted groan.

He drew his skinning knife, the one she'd attacked him with, and waved it under her nose. He kicked the bearskin in its teeth.

"Many kings in the forest." he said, thumping his chest and pointing to the half dozen bows in his wall rack. "We eat them after I kill them."

He escorted her to the back door and pointed out into the yard. It held a small corral, which held a grey, blocky little mare and a tiny, two horse barn. To its north stood a raised, closet sized outhouse and a half dozen stacked hay bales. His finger homed in on the outhouse.

He picked up a large, woven basket with a trowel in it and handed it to her.

"Get your own moss." he said, swinging his pointing finger straight toward her recently pinched nose.

"Food. Drink. Dresses. Blankets. Fire." he said. "My lawful maintenance ends there.

He turned on his heel, headed for his workbench and snatched up a knife in passing. He daggered it into a ham and set it swinging.

"Knife for food. Not to murder me." he said and continued on for his door muttering about having already wiped more of her ass than the law called him to.

Adam gained his door relieved that Jarnulf had bought the girl. Before they'd sailed this spring his daughter Kadlin had been singing the praises and extolling the virtues of the dashingly handsome Marshal Jarnulf with an alarming frequency.

Later, at the Mead Hall he told Tore who'd bought the girl. Tore shot him a well satiated grin and grumbled that it was about goddamn time. Seduction of any woman other than a man's wife or concubine was Lesser Outlawry but here on the frontier it was rarely applied except to repeat troublemakers when nothing else would stick.

Still, it was unseemly for his Marshal to be so obvious with it. Having this chit in his bed might crowd a few others out of it.

Rakel's uncle, Skipper Starri, said nothing at the news but said more than usual later and none of it to Jarnulf's good.

IV Count It Up

"Wake up." Jarnulf said.

Mirha stumbled out of her closet rubbing at her eyes. She dropped onto a bench at the table. There had to be a plate somewhere under that king's ransom of pink and black charred, steaming venison and squash he set before her. He dropped two knives and a spoon beside it. Where were the other guests?

She stared at the piled plate like a thief caught in the act. She pushed it away to the middle of the table beside the tub of butter and two flat, circular loaves of bread. It all looked fresh enough to be soft. He'd given her the serving platter. He returned from the hearth with another plate piled even higher. He didn't look drunk but he smelled like he'd been at it.

Rakel's reaction to his protestations of charity on Mirha's behalf had been to slap his face. Kadlin only gave him a look like a seal surfacing at its breathing hole and discovering a white bear waiting for it, before diving deep back into its icy refuge. Since most of his friends he hadn't seen in months had beaten him to the Mead Hall he'd had some catching up to do.

"Why the feast?" she said. "Sacrificing day?"

"What do you eat?" he said.

"Lentils and bread?" she said.

He pushed the plate back to her. He pointed a spoon at her nose.

"Eat." he said.

He announced he'd finished with a roaring belch, snatched up his kit and tromped back out into the night, leaving her, greatly relieved, to her own devices. She busied herself prying into every nook of his steading in search of some unknown something, some shred of security.

Perhaps an army lurked hidden in one of the trunks, waiting to charge out and rescue her. In the end she snatched a chisel from his workbench back to bed with her. He'd notice a knife was missing if she palmed it.

She was shaken awake in the predawn by a tall, thin, blonde girl commanding her in Aenglisc to get up. It was time to go meet some folk and get her bearings. Mirha launched a yawn back at her as the girl pulled away her covers and snatched Jarnulf's chisel from the blanket beside her, glaring disbelief and hatred at her.

"Have you gone out of your wits?" the girl screamed, shaking the chisel in her face.

"Obviously." Mirha said. "I'm still here. This is a nightmare and I've taken leave of my senses."

"Cousin Jarnulf wouldn't hurt you for anything, though he can kill you if he wants, for nothing at all." the girl said, which was a lie.

An owner needed hard legal cause to kill his trael. Even owning a trael, while it hadn't yet been outlawed, was widely viewed as lacking any moral cause.

"I figured as much." Mirha said, eying the chisel.

"If you stick this in him in his sleep," the girl began.

"What are they going to do, kill me?" Mirha sneered.

"Probably." the girl said. "But if by some miracle they don't, you'll certainly wish they had."

Mirha said she didn't care, she'd be better off dead anyway.

"Idiot." the girl said. "You're a trael. If you kill your master they'll catch you and lop your hands and feet off with an axe. That's the law."

The girl's glare grew redder as Mirha cringed.

"Cousin Jarnulf did you no small favor." she said. "There's girls in the village who'd almost be willing to trade places with you. I'll point them out so you can stay out of their way."

"Can they kill me too?" Mirha begged, now truly terrified.

The girl peered at her like Jarnulf had yesterday wondering if Mirha wasn't truly crazy.

"Of course not." she said. "You own immunity under the law just like everyone else, so long as you behave yourself. Jarnulf's the only one who can lay hands on you, and you're the last thing he wants. You don't really look like a chisel murderer to me anyway. My name's Kolfinna."

Three days later four of Chieftain Thidrandri's ships beached alongside the Hrafn ships in the cove. That afternoon as their crews shoved pennies at the serving girls in the Mead Hall Kolfinna caught Mirha fluttering her eyelids at Leif, and told her who and what Leif was. Mirha knew she was being lied to. Jarnulf's cousin had her own eye on him.

And the rest of her new neighbors she discovered to be a vain and sneaky batch. You couldn't even smell them sneaking up on you, obsessed as they were with constantly steaming and scrubbing themselves.

Her owner demanded she join in their obscene ritual on a daily basis. She was outraged.

Parading her privates before his neighbors had been mortifying enough the first time. No civilized person's hide could survive that much scrubbing. It would kill them.

He restated his command. Stinky baggage suffered a daily scrub or enjoyed its lodgings outdoors.

By evening Thidrandri's crews had collected their rope and tar and he and his Skippers were carousing drunk at the hall with Tore, Hroald, Starri, and Adam.

"Hell yes," Thidrandri, a tall, red bearded, narrow waisted powerhouse, was saying and every man in the hall was hearing.

"Chieftain Red Axe up there ordered six just for himself. We'll take all you can get. We're going to be way too busy to go collecting the stuff or making it ourselves."

Thidrandri slapped one of the six saddlebags on the table between them.

"Go on." he said. "Count it. It's all there. I know you're dying to."

"Bullshit." Tore said, shoving another tankard at him. "If I don't know you well enough already I wouldn't have trusted this trip to scrounging it up for you."

"Yeah," Thidrandri laughed, "and you'll be up all night and half tomorrow counting every penny of it four times over."

"Well," Tore said. "business is business, unless you mean to be out of business."

Thidrandri let go another roaring laugh and called to two of his men at the adjoining table.

"Put this money in a cart and drag it over to this penny pinching, money grubbing bastard's place right now before I change my mind and go buy my rope from somebody who does trust us." he said, and then grabbed another tankard off the tray beside the bags and shoved it at Tore.

They drank till Mordach, the gnomish ancient who ran the place, threw them out in the middle of the night. Tore took Thidrandri home to his steading to put him up. His wife Maeve was waiting up for him. Thidrandri stepped back outside heading for the outhouse.

"What the hell's going on here?" she said.

"What?" Tore said.

On the floor beside the table were the six saddlebags. She undid a buckle and pulled back the flap.

"This." she said. "All six of them."

She withdrew a handful of small rocks from it and shoved them up under his nose.

V A Parliament of Trolls

"This," he said. "is something you don't know anything about and will talk to anyone else, even less about."

She browbeat him. The crews' shares were coming from the treasury? They'd get paid next summer? After Thidrandri had built and sold the ships to Chieftain Red Axe? Had he lost his mind?

What were they supposed to do for money through the winter?

She was still having at him when Thidrandri returned and spied the open saddlebag.

"Tore." he said, now seeming dead sober.

Tore stared at his wall half wondering if he beat his head against it hard enough would she just stop.

"Maeve." Thidrandri said. "The day comes up."

Her eyes widened.

"And a certain parliament of cave trolls might catch us before it turns them to stone, if anyone breathes a word," he said, now pointing to the bags. "about this."

In the morning after Thidrandri's ships had sailed for home Jarnulf dragged Mirha to the barn they called a church. In the street before the door she balked upon being stared down by its huge, hideous, roof pole dragon, convinced she was to be embroiled in some pagan ritual, probably a blood sacrifice, perhaps her own. Within she stumbled, thunderstruck.

Light, glorious light, hallucinogenic, in all the colors and blinding splendor of a prophet's visions streamed in at the far end of the cavernous shed through three, ten foot tall, stained glass windows. She'd seen them from without and that was startling enough, but with the sun streaming in through them, . . . the very gates of heaven stood open at the end of the church and she might walk up to and through them.

Jarnulf nudged her onward, up to the third row of benches. Three more windows faced them from the north wall, their colors deeper and richer. The sun, in the south, hung hidden from them.

The nearest was her hands down favorite, the Archangel Michael, God's Marshal. The mountains behind him were purple with dusk. The fields and trees before them glowed a sunset bronze. His wings were the hue of golden straw in autumn. His hair was blonde, loose and long. His byrnie of fine chain was silver.

His lance was the purple brown of cherry wood. It was thrust through the heart of Satan embodied in a writhing, furious dragon sheathed in iridescent, blue green scales as fine as the rings of the Angel's mail. The dragon's blood red tongue snaked out toward Michael, long and forked.

All else however was askew. Where was the confessional, the baptismal, the sacristy, or even the Altar? There was nothing but a monstrous huge, night black desk beyond the windows, and darkness behind it.

They sat next to Karl and his wife. Beyond Karl's wife sat Tore's twin, the huge, scarred and dinged up grandfather. He, Karl, and Jarnulf chatted terse and gruff in Norrona as the penitents filed in. The grandfather made wild, menacing gestures with his huge arms and hands, and punctuated every third word with a scowl. He'd shoulder length gray locks, a hand's length gray beard, and beetling brows above deep sockets wherein burned the most fiercely predatory blue eyes she'd flinched from yet. He was dressed in old hide trousers and a ragged shirt of plain gray. The elbows were worn through and the cuffs tattered.

She remembered him arguing with Tore at the beach the day Jarnulf bought her and Chieftain Tore losing the argument. His high bridged, square nose and thoroughly intimidating manner minded her of the bearskin rug on her captor's floor.

At length, the last worshiper paraded in and she sighed relief as the huge, shaggy berserk, undoubtedly some crazed axe murderer, heaved himself erect, and ambled off toward, of all places, the big, raised black desk beyond the windows. He lumbered up behind it and banging upon it with his fists, bellowed the church to silence.

This was their Priest?

Karl translated the service into Gaelic for her. His thunder squall ravings were obscene, a mockery in their own barbaric tongue.

He railed at length about the evils of venery and drunkenness, which was fine, but then he read out the most preposterous things, claiming them as Scripture, which she was quite sure the Lord Jesus had never said. And then the monster made lewd jests about his Holy Eminence the Pope, called him a pervert he did, maligned him as Anti-Christ.

God offered her a choice, martyrdom or hell. Such sacrilege demanded rebuke though they'd surely wring her neck for it. Cringing, she confronted the priest after the service and let him have it. He understood her Gaelic perfectly, but the devil was known to speak in tongues and work false miracles like those windows.

"Your sins are between yourself and God my pious little Papist." Priest Hroald laughed. "Confess them to Him. They're none of my damn business."

Then he patted her on the head like a dog.

He turned on Jarnulf and barked at him in Norrona.

"You, find her a husband or marry her." he said.

Jarnulf's desperation to lose her was already a by word in town.

"From what I just understood," Jarnulf said. "you two would never run out of things to talk about. You'll wonder where your evenings went, with her. Yours for the asking."

Hroald turned his irritated glare upon each of the others in turn, warning them, as eyes were averted, lips bitten, and Karl hugged himself.

"More trouble than making beef steaks out of cow shit." Hroald said. "All of you."

They then swarmed across the street to the Mead Hall for a late morning meal where Priest Hroald waxed boisterous and jolly as they bolted into a race to drink the place dry. He pulled quickly ahead and maintained a three tankard lead till well past noon.

Mirha'd heard all about the devil from her first steps, and how if she didn't mend her ways she'd end up his. Hroald with his weathered, bucket face, fence rail nose and cheekbones like elbows beneath those deep pits of blue brimstone had haunted her for years.

Later that day she shared her dreads with Kolfinna.

"That's right." Kolfinna said. "And he's as devious as is told. No one has ever been able to prove in twenty winters, that he is not just playing at being a Priest."

Four weeks passed.

VI The Booth

Thing's Assembly plains were forty miles inland against the broken hills along the Ottarr border. At the northwest end of the vast, sloping field loomed five monstrous size, hollowed out hummocks of earth and stone. They were the Booths. Capping one was a tent of faded red and white awnings, fifty feet by a hundred. Nacarr's Nahri were here first, and as usual fattening on poached Hrafn game.

Topping the other four mounds were griddles of black wooden beams awaiting their awnings. Everyone's grandfathers could have saved themselves a deal of shoveling by building the Booths of wood but trouble was not unknown at Thing. The odds of surviving a night time arson attack were better with only the roof in flames.

From beneath the elms at the plain's east streamed Tore's Thingmen, women, kids and eight wagons crammed with food, housekeepings, and wares for sale.

Atop the second wagon Mirha feigned sleep while sneaking sidelong glances at her owner. Here he would surely sell her to some other barbarian. His silly little mare nuzzling his ear was mocking his preening strut, and Bror, the black haired troll astride his chestnut stallion beside them, kept laughing at her owner's orders to keep his stallion from sniffing his mare.

The Hrafn wagons halted at their mound. Hunters and sailors swarmed up its grassy side cumbered with bagged awnings and scrambled out over the beams to affix the red and white striped fabric roof.

Thirty feet above the weather cracked, planked floor Jarnulf spit the dust of his ride down into the long, stone fire pit. It ran almost the length of the Booth. It was the langeldur, and it would blaze high through the night with sleeping bags crowded close.

Jarnulf slept in the Booth despite his run ins with Starri but the chill outside wasn't why. Kin of Hrafn killed poachers were always about. No hunter roamed Thing without supporters. Badger and Asgrim Toreson were always delighted to roam about with any of them and glare in their most surly fashion at any Nahri.

The Nahri might have tried their luck with Badger, and regretted it. Badger would no more back down than fire would, but the mere sight of Asgrim at two hands taller than Badger and when angered seemed half that wide snapped any vengeance plots they might have cherished like rotten twigs. There was no mistaking who'd fathered Asgrim.

Twenty summers ago Jarnulf's father Ulf, Ansvarr, and Gunnarr were attacked by seven kin of killed poachers. Ulf hewed one's leg off at the hip. Ansvarr hurled his knife into a second's breast. Then, after the remaining four ran away straight into the Nahri Booth, the trio stuffed Gunnarr's handless cripple head down into an outhouse barrel and drowned him in it.

It caused quite a stir when Nacarr and his Thingmen stormed into the Hrafn Booth demanding compensation.

Tore, his sworn brother Grimkel, and Starri told Nacarr that they'd gladly pay him three hundreds in steel but never so much as an ounce of silver.

Those threats had been tarred over but still festered beneath the surface like a bole in an oak crawling with wasp larvae as Tore had feinted sideways toward friendship with the Nahri Chieftain over the intervening years.

VII Rules Are For Losers

The last sun of Mirha's first Thing was setting, and to her amazement her owner hadn't sold her off yet. Hrafnstadir's giant, father and son Smiths Hroghar and Da'hal had set up shop and cleaned up selling everything but swords which as usual displeased the other Chieftains Thingmen, especially Nacarr's.

The Courts had been held, and Tore was still displeased over Jarnulf's naggings that Tore had to bring suit against Nacarr for not reigning in his poaching Thingmen. The actual cases brought forward were the usual petty thefts, nonpayment of contracts, slanders and assaults. Thingis Nahri and Storm traded three Outlaws apiece, six men of notable disrespect for the rights of their neighbors.

An Ottarr named Ginnfast with the size and bearing of a fo'c'sulman was outlawed for an illegal killing he'd committed. As he was already unpopular with the generality of his neighbors, except for Ottarr Chieftain Eikinn's son Hrorik, Ginnfast accepted immediate harboring with Chieftain Lalghar's Stormers rather than wait out his three year grace period at home first.

He had pitted himself in a well-attended wrestling match against Da'hal. He suckered Da'hal with a vicious kidney punch and claimed the purse. The judges ignored it. Starri was betting heavy on Da'hal. Starri never wrestled. When asked he usually muttered something about rules being for losers.

Starri challenged Ginnfast. Ginnfast was bigger and younger than Starri. He accepted and Starri trounced him soundly in the first two falls while offering to marry him and sire children on him. At their third grapple Ginnfast rushed in a foaming fury at Starri.

Starri turned his back, and spun dropping to one knee to lift Ginnfast like a slung stone clean into his Hrafn partisans with his iron fist up into Ginnfast's groin.

The judges wanted to know what Starri thought he was doing.

Starri said he wanted to know if they could tell a foul when they saw one. Ginnfast got the purse as he lay curled sideways clutching himself and groaning.

Starri personally covered all his neighbor's losses, laughing. Anja's husband Olaf refused his money, saying that he'd bet on the other fellow. Starri didn't laugh at that. Storm Chieftain Lalghar also bet on the other fellow, his new Thingman, and Lalghar found nothing funny about it either.

Olaf bought a new stallion from his former Ottarr neighbor Ivar. It was a huge, excessively savage, blue black yearling. Olaf named it Stigandi (High Stepper). His Hrafn neighbors prophesied an imminent mischief for him, probably a broken neck, at its adoption.

VIII Dirty Joke

The last red slice of sun had long since dropped beneath the trees. Jarnulf and his trael waif were headed by way of the Thunder Booth for the Ottarr Booth and Olaf's in laws. Mirha was grumbling about stomach rumbles, and Jarnulf, between glances for Tore, kept saying that if she'd get up before noon and eat she wouldn't be hungry.

In the long, cold shadows cloaking Thunder's Booth, Jarnulf spotted his mark. Shoulder to shoulder with Tore stood a man almost as big as Hroghar, and like Hroghar looking as if he could step a ship's mast all by himself.

His smirk, and Tore's, belonged just inside the church door sharing a dirty joke in the middle of the mass.

Tore's left forefinger was subtly counting off the finger joints of his right. Thidrandri shot his gaze up and away from Tore's open right hand. He nudged Tore's shoulder and they fell silent at Jarnulf's approach.

"We are going to get this straightened out tonight. Aren't we?" Jarnulf said.

"Who died and left you Chieftain?" Tore said.

Mirha offered up another nightmeal whine.

"Go feed your kitten," Thidrandri laughed. "before she starves on you."

Understanding that they wanted him to feel like he'd just walked in on his parents at the wrongest possible moment, he pointed Mirha off toward the Ottarr Booth.

The Chieftains in silence watched them walk out of earshot.

"Of course." Thidrandri said. "It will be there under guard right where Hroald wants it when you get home."

XIX Who's For Nightmeal?

The nightmeal was crowded with Hrafn women. Olaf's sister Thorgrima was renown for her pork roasts. Boiled meat, near impossible to ruin, was everyone's usual fare.

Even Mirha was impressed enough to venture a timid compliment. These Norse were scum, but they ate good and regular.

Jarnulf's uncle Ansvarr, with his steel snake grace, muscled Mirha aside, hip to hip with Jarnulf, and himself down onto the end of the bench. Jarnulf offered him a frown, and his uncle returned it a 'what?' look.

Jarnulf had found Ansvarr an insufferable pest these two weeks, always showing up whenever Jarnulf thought he'd found her a husband and telling lewd jokes or rolling his eyes and snorting at Jarnulf's tales of what a great cook, or wonderful whatever Mirha was.

Jarnulf had bought her a scarlet dress of fine linen, finer than any she'd ever dreamed of owning, and it disappeared while they were asleep on the first night. In its place was her brown woolen rag, freshly laundered. Jarnulf bought her a second dress, and it was stolen just as promptly, though no one else in the Booth had troubles with burglars.

He'd quit trying to dump her three days ago after that last dreadful exchange with one of Ulf's friends and his son. And for once Mirha hadn't any itch to know what they'd seemed so upset about, not after the looks they'd given her.

Rumor was out that she had a whore's disease. Jarnulf wouldn't have put it past his meddling uncle, but he'd have been thunderstruck at the harsh words Starri gave Galinn and Gunnarr for starting it.

"This is delicious. What do you call it?" Mirha said, her green, bug eyes meekly reaching for another slice. Olaf served her a huge one, steaming as it dripped juices down onto her trencher.

"It's just a forest piglet." Rani said.

Anja winced and turned aside. Jarnulf and Olaf sucked in their cheeks, and bit down on them while trapping the little orange squeaker in the corners of their eyes.

"Some special kind of pig?" Mirha said, cramming her mouth full.

"Hell no." Rani said. "The west woods are crawling with them, but you got to get them young, and only females."

Thorgrima declared that the mead pitcher wanted refilling and excused herself.

"The bucks are too stringy." Rani said.

"A cross with a boar?" Mirha mumbled past her mouth full of forest piglet. "Can't be all that young, that's a big roast."

"She was about your age, but quite a bit fatter." Rani said. "Good thighs and rump."

Mirha quit munching. Her eyes widened, and their green oozed out between her freckles.

"That's awful old for a piglet." she said, her windpipe constricting.

"It was killing cold," Rani said. "and there wasn't anything to harvest that first year when my grandfather moved out from Thunderstadir. Hardly any game. The Skraelings killed it all off."

Mirha spit her dinner out into her trencher, gagging. She forced a finger deep into her throat, struggling vainly to vomit up the rest of it. Jarnulf started a laugh and Olaf clamped his fingers over Jarnulf's mouth.

"They'd have starved to death." Rani said.

"You, you unholy, you." Mirha gasped, in mortal terror for her Christian soul.

"What else are they good for?" Rani begged. "Aren't you hungry?"

Mirha dashed for the door, trying to force her whole fist down her throat and hurl out her Satanic food. Anja ordered Jarnulf to go retrieve her and tell her the truth, but the men were gone, guffawing and slapping their knees and each other's backs.

Thorgrima topped off everyone's tankard and took a hearty pull from her own before telling Rani that she still couldn't figure out why she put up with him and shared his bed.

"Well, there was Thraslaug," Rani said. "that first winter when they found her chewing on her uncle."

Thorgrima cuffed the back of his head.

"We don't talk about that." she said.

Jarnulf eventually fetched Mirha back in with the truth, but she stuck to the boiled cabbage while shooting, furtive, suspicious glances at Olaf and his in laws.

Dinner concluded and the men headed off for the Hrafn Booth and Thing's main event. The women were left behind as tonight would be heavily attended, and with the big drinking there would be no shortage of big words, which could easily become big trouble.

X The Fall Down Fits

Within the Hrafn Booth white orange flames writhed four feet and more above the blue coals snapping in the langeldur. The red and white striped awnings high above fluttered in the star cold breeze.

The Booth was mobbed and the revelers deafening. Best clothes riotously colored, jewelry, and ornate weapons vied to out snob each other at every table. Board games and dice cups were everywhere, along with the gambling and the squabbling attending the cheating.

At the southern end of the Booth stood the high seat, a raised dais thirty feet deep by fifty wide. Atop it perched three tables, also mobbed. The center table was raised up on a further dais, knee high above the others. At those three tables crowded a boisterous assortment of grizzled muscle so confident in the thunder they exuded that they seemed oblivious to it. Among them they'd sent at least ten times their number down into Hel.

Every Chieftain in the Quarter, except the Stormer's Lalghar, and even Morrow the Skraeling were swapping crude jokes, oaths, and shoulder slaps as their cups drank down oceans of mead. The Skraelings, used to naught more than their native beer, were in for an ugly morning after, perhaps three or four ugly mornings.

Behind them their shadows piling up on the earth and awnings would have given a witch the fall down fits as she boiled her brain unraveling their endless, entwining portents.

At the first table sat Jarnulf and his hunters. Across the fire pit from them sat Rakel with her snowy treasures oozing from a scarlet gown that never should have escaped the bed closet. Starri had ordered her back off to the Thunderer's Booth earlier, but as ever, he might as well have ordered a cat to cook dinner.

Her perfect, square white teeth sparked brimstone toward yet another suitor, as she threw her head back, her haughty 'come hither to be refused' laughter scorning away embarrassed victim after victim.

Sigrid, Aud and Adis were with her. They too were summoning suitor after suitor to toy with. Aud was wearing an elaborate, blue herringbone headdress to hide the horror she'd chopped her hair into.

Rakel fought down her urge to glance again, across the fire pit.

The bending of knee was his, and he'd damned well better make it soon. His snobbery had gone on beyond forever.

A chill scurried, rat like up from her tailbone to her nape. What if he couldn't master his pride, and it never came. It had been a year and a half. Perhaps it might never come. And her life, such as it was, of idle, monied distractions, and illusions, was that all that awaited her? Couldn't Jarnulf show the slightest bit jealous? This was demeaning.

Apparently he did prefer owning a girl as he'd tried to own her. His standing, that was a laugh, what standing did a woods runner own, wanted the fiction of dragging the little slut out here to dump. Well that wouldn't wash now. She was still tagging after him as if on a leash.

Damned, infuriating pervert. Rakel sighed, exasperated, within herself. But he was such a deliciously infuriating pervert.

Back by the Booth's door capered the giant Da'hal and a second fiddler, dancing and sawing vigorously, and a drummer raising a stumbling racket. Da'hal's sheathed sword angled across his back jigged about like some leather caged lightning bolt. Its broad belt was looped over his right shoulder and under his left. The sword's wire wrapped hilt was as long as his fiddle.

Dancing out of time beside him was Ref, bellowing equally tone deaf verses. Raucous bursts of bawdy lyrics shouted the players down on the choruses as tankards were drained and acquaintances renewed.

Their posting, as was those of their Ottarr and Thunder counterparts, was to run their overbold young women back outside but thrilled with any audience who returned them anything but desperate pleas to stop they were falling down on the job.

In the guffaws following another of Ref's scurrilous verses, as the men traded grins and knee slaps, a young redhead and her brunette friend dashed behind their backs and down the aisle.

Aerin the redhead and Hlif were sixteen, virgins, and in the main virtuous, but the imp in their pixies was sparking rebellion tonight. They were dressed to the nines and drawing whistles and invitations all along their way to join Rakel's mischief makers.

Hlif was pleased that Da'hal was wearing the blue shirt she had made for him and embarrassed him with. Girls gave such gifts to their betrothed. She'd have been more pleased to be chided back outside by him but Aerin yanked the skids right from under her noisy try at getting them arrested.

In this week alone Da'hal had chased off three men he'd caught talking to her. Catching her being fawned over by a crowd might serve the final prodding he needed. Hlif again shared her worries with Aerin over Rakel's friend Kveldalf chasing her Smith, and Aerin again snorted that pigs would fly first.

XI Spooks Playground

Again Rakel glanced into the dagger of Jarnulf's dismissive sneer. It chilled her as if she were some slatternly collector of coins. Jarnulf laughed within himself at her blue black tresses flying loose, unbound. He'd had her before she was a virgin. Entertaining Satan's niece, as infuriating as it had been, still topped his list of reminiscences.

He'd never known a girl who didn't need to fight about something. And it was always nonsense, some nothing they'd let fester for weeks rather than just bring it out and be done. And it was always his fault for not reading their mind and salving their secret anguish first. Rakel was the undisputed queen of secret anguishes, and when he failed to unravel those booby trapped anguishes before she suckered him into them, bonfire vengeances.

She'd set herself across from him just to taunt him, praying he'd start a half dozen fights, shoving and bulling his way to the fore, which was in perfect keeping with the ice storm she'd pitched at him from the moment he took in the trael.

And now one more of Thidrandri's younger Thingmen, against the advice of his knowing elders, or the prodding of the more dark humored, pressed his luck with her and found it broken. She asked the poor fool, whom she'd just been introduced to not once but thrice, yet again what his name was. His face flushed blood and then the gray of a dead hearth.

"I thought that fool Lalghar was going to hit Starri in the mouth," Rakel told Aud. "with that bag of coin Starri paid him for what he did to Ginnfast."

"And when Lalghar dropped it in the dirt, at Starri's feet?" Aud said.

"And stomped off spitting nails?" Sigrid said. "with all that hooting at his back?"

"And that wretch Nacarr," Aud said. "kissing your hand, and telling Starri how proud he must be of you. You'd think he expected Starri to pay you out."

At the high seat's left, lower table, sat Skippers Adam and Dalla, their fo'c'sulmen Hraerek and Halldor, and the Skraeling underlings Humach, and Quiniquesh with their feather, bone, and rag bedecked supporters. Their younger women were quite stiffening but the bucks, with their kicked dog scowls and stoop shouldered, shuffling gait minded Jarnulf of diseased wolves.

At the center high seat sat their Chieftain Morrow, conspiring half-heartedly with Starri.

Starri was wearing an odd bit of rubbish on a thong about his neck. Morrow had honored him with a polished eagle's skull like the one he wore. Morrow'd got the best of the gifting. He was wearing an ornate, gold, double hammer alongside his bird trash. Those hammers always traveled with a matching crucifix but no one remarked its absence.

The slender, silver haired, sixtyish aborigine looked dumber than a box of hair. But slight him, even unintentionally, and those flint black eyes blazed alight with the cunning of a pack hunter as he strained within himself to skull you with his hand axe, were you stupid enough to glance away.

Skraeling pride suffered at Thing, slinking about in their filthy animal hides with their broad bladed falchions and rough cast axes. Morrow and a few others wore true Norse swords of steel which they'd stolen after murdering their owners.

Skraelings found God incomprehensible. Why would anyone pray for anything but more animals to shoot, and eat? After Jarnulf's grandfathers skulled them they tried teaching them to farm. They lost interest at the first hunger pang after their next meal. However, they didn't lose interest in the Norse smith who stupidly taught them to smelt bog ore into iron for plow and shovel edges. They smelted and cast arrow and axe heads with a vengeance, and huge, clumsy falchions, thick, arm length imitations of swords. They turned them first on each other, and then to their unspeakable sorrow, they turned them on their benefactors.

The Norse had stolen huge chunks of their hunting grounds and forbid them to roam over them slaughtering everything. The Skraelings took it badly. The Norse killed them as poachers, and the Skraelings took to raiding outlying farms and taking days to torture those families to death.

The vengeance the Norse visited on them for that, while it hadn't stopped them, did teach them to quit painting themselves head to toe in red ochre. It made them far too easy to find.

The Skraeling woods were a spook's playground of deer, moose and bear skulls hung high in trees so their spirits could greet the eastern sun. Women and children, as inferiors, were forbidden to greet the returning hunters as the spirit of the quarry would be insulted.

If they slaughtered an entire herd of anything even counting up their victims as they left behind what they couldn't use, was also an insult to the animals. Bears they venerated as closest to themselves in gait and intelligence. A bear's right forearm had to be cooked apart from the rest of the animal and could only be eaten by the oldest man among them. Similar customs accompanied its brain and other organs.

The Norse laughed at their beliefs and the Skraelings blamed them for every belly rumble they suffered. The animals' spirits had been angered and every empty plate was a punishment for it. The fact that the Norse rarely starved to death in winter with their back breaking farming through the summer, they overlooked.

Their women did the physical work as the men were too prideful for anything but hunting and fighting. The men rewarded them for it by lending them to their friends. Skraeling women owned no immunity from their men's rages. They could be beaten or killed with impunity and were often used as gambling stakes. Skraeling children ran wild with no thought of correction or discipline. A young warrior's spirit might be irreparably damaged if the little owl was taken in hand.

When one's winters finally piled up their grown children murdered them. And the victims rarely complained. Many asked repeatedly until their offspring relented and clubbed them to death.

The raucous suitors ringing Rakel's table finally roused the imagined and magnificent reputations upright from another table.

Five rough looking Ottarrs headed, chuckling crudities, down the aisle toward the Hrafn temptresses. Their leader, Hrorik, was a man of thirty and five, broad shouldered, brown bearded, and clad in hides.

His swagger and gleaming eyes said the drink in his gut had sunk his brains down beneath his belt. He was Chieftain Eikinn's youngest, and sole surviving son. His two older brothers were a whispered curse among the Skraelings. It had cost the savages thirteen of their neighbors to kill those two Eikinnsons.

At Jarnulf's table Olaf excused himself saying he needed a word with an old friend and Ansvarr's gaze chased Olaf's across the langeldur. Ansvarr grabbed Olaf.

"Sit." Ansvarr said. "If they can't behave like grown women it's time they bought themselves some growing up."

XII The Bishop's Bet

At the center high seat Nacarr was telling Tore that Nahristadir's mill needed new grind stones, its main barn was falling apart, and two of his six ships were overdue for an overhaul. His plate this summer was too overfull for even a quick trading trip down to New Tara.

Tore kept sharing out his own list of overdue obligations to his Thingmen in Hrafnstadir, while always returning to the thought that their profit would be two or three times with their ten ships combined what it would be without each other.

At Nacarr's elbow perched his man Skjalg with shoulders drawn high and forward, and his sullen gaze ignoring fo'c'sulman Asgrim seated across from him at Tore's elbow, topping off Skjalg's tankard.

Skjalg's face was all drink sweat and self-importance. Asgrim's wasn't.

At the lower right table sat Hroald, Chieftain Eikinn and Chieftain Thidrandri all more than half loaded and in the highest of low humor. Hroald, as usual appeared an aging, penniless, axe for hire. All that remained priestly seeming of him here at Thing was his occasional roaring evocation of Scripture as he stomped around brandishing his axe.

Eikinn, resplendent in greener than summer spruce linen and a king's ransom of gold and jewels, was pushing seventy but still solidly massive and menacing as a fo'c'sulman of forty. Thidrandri with his gaunt, red bearded, jut jawed grin was the youth among them. Their jocosity was not easily or freely entered into by their table mates.

Those surrounding them, while laughing to their cues, numbered Skjalg's three brothers, Skeggi, Halflidi the half breed, and Thorfinn, the Pallsons. Morrow the Skraeling Chieftain's sons Bear Knife and Long Arrow sat next to Thidrandri, bolstering each other's courage with recountings of their prowess in blusters studiously managed beneath the roarings of their Norse bench mates.

Hroald's axe lay flat on the table before him, its thin, fresh filed lip glinting brighter than new minted silver, and behind his shoulder loomed the hilt of one of Hroghar's finest swords. Its pommel and guard were bright, plain steel. In his sailing days Hroald found fittings of gold and silver suffered badly when hammering them through a man's helmet. Eikinn's and Thidrandri's axes also lay table top at their elbows while those of their Nahri and Skraeling table mates leaned against the benches.

Hroald scowled, a gaunt, gray browed gargoyle, and leaned forward leering a cannibal hunger toward Thidrandri.

"But the Bishop lost his bet," Hroald concluded. "It was really the ninth night."

Thidrandri gaped, the blue wolf eyes guarding his scarred, Roman nose, vacant.

"It wasn't the farmer's daughter in the dark, you cud chewer." Eikinn bellowed. "It was the Pope."

Thidrandri pounded the table, rattling their axes atop it, and splutter showered Hroald and Eikinn with mead. Those around them laughed, partly at Hroald's humor, but more because it was demanded.

At the first table down before the dais, and the one behind it, Hrafn hunters were busily trading lies with their Thunder and Ottarr counterparts about close escapes, a rich season, and in a much lower tone, their amorous conquests.

Jarnulf sat his bench, leaning forward stuck between Galinn and Olaf, chuckling and looking ever drunker as he drowned in the absurdities of their exaggerations. Galinn nudged him.

"Tore's been humping Nacarr half the night," Galinn said. "and I haven't heard word one about poachers. Do it now before they get too drunk to remember it come morning."

Jarnulf rose, stiffly, and Galinn stayed him to propose a toast to his own sworn brother, Ulf.

A pervert's reckless imp tingled through Jarnulf as he mounded the two steps before the dais. Before his Chieftain and those men who fixed the quarter's destinies diplomacy was demanded, but it mustn't be mistaken for a request. What he brought was a demand. As much as he lived to kill Nacarr's poachers, all good things must, sadly, come to an end before one of his own got killed. He masked all but his eyes with a hollow smarm.

His swords, both long and short in his belt, gathered a murderous weight and solidity as he made for the high seat. It was with the greatest effort that he set aside their thrumming pleas to be groped. Hands to hilts on his toes here before the high seat might drown the whole Booth in blood.

Jarnulf planted himself before Nacarr and folded his arms, drumming his fingers against them rather than his hilts and cracked a wan smile down to Nacarr.

Tore offered Jarnulf another scowl, but this one seemed void of any fatherly humor.

"I'm glad you've finally come," Tore said. "to pay your respects and leave."

The surrounding guests fell silent, turning to stare at this hide clad woods runner.

Hroald knew what was coming, as did Thidrandri and Eikinn, and they wished it wasn't.

"Well," Jarnulf said. "I'd hoped that since we're all one big happy family now somebody's Thingmen will stop jumping the river to raid our pantry."

Tore's reaction, tiny as it was, wrenched Jarnulf's eyes and only his eyes, into a violent double take. Jarnulf hadn't thought Tore even knew how to wince.

Nacarr regarded him with an icy arrogance. Beneath his high forehead and coarse, grayed black hair he'd high, pointed cheekbones and a jutting hawk nose that had been broken more than once. Across it writhed a livid, diagonal scar that flowed down off his right cheek. Its mate above his right brow looked like it had been made by a ring. It was too jagged for a blade. The skin hanging loose at his jowls and beneath his eyes bespoke decades of drink. On the nail of his right little finger was painted a red nead rune, two straight lines angling across each other, to ward away poison in the cup. Tore had caught it and pretended not to.

Nacarr and his two brothers had been run out of Normandy in their teens, and then Outlawed from Thing Keel Rider in west Hellulandia where he was remembered as a great trouble maker and dueler.

Along the shores of New Tara he was known as the most notorious of Vikings. His immunity was forfeit anywhere beyond the Quarter, or Althing itself. His brothers on Hellulandia had sidestepped his fate by the skin of their teeth and bags full of silver.

While he called himself a Chieftain, the concept was laughable, at least behind his back. There had been no call for his installation, and more than a few attempts on his life afterwards. His word alone spoke life or death, and his interpretations of the law were boggling in their twisted, lethal application. He'd applied for, and it must have involved gold, lots of it, and wrangled legitimacy for his Nahri as members at Althing. Without it they'd have lain fair game for the other member Things.

Thidrandri's gravely basso crashed upon the silence like a roller upon shale to begin another blue jest. Both Hroald and Eikinn interrupted him, repeatedly and noisily, to correct his tale of the virgin princess and her shameless monkeys with their own embellishments.

Of the Skraelings and Nahri at their table, cocooned in their fascination with Tore's posturing Marshal, none noticed the stiffening and bristling of three massive forearms, edging imperceptibly toward the axe hafts alongside them.

Seated at the bench beside Thidrandri, who was still struggling with his urge to hurl him from the bench, was the forth of Nacarr's Pallsons, Skeggi. He looked like a common, coarse featured mucker, strong and agile enough, but with all the imagination of a plow horse.

Thidrandri, like Tore and Eikinn, was a zealous upholder of his Thingmen's rights. The Pallsons arranged settlements among their neighbors with steel and an eye only to Nacarr's, and their own, advantage. Skeggi was trying hard to catch Jarnulf's attention by performing ugly tricks with his ugly eyebrows. It wasn't working.

Skeggi grumbled a blasphemy, laid a hand to the butt of his axe and said something about standing up with it. Thidrandri snarled at him. Skeggi's mates thought they heard something about a broken head and a female goat in it. Skeggi flushed redder than Thidrandri's beard and he put both his hands up on the table, in plain view, empty. He fell as silent as if he had been dunked beneath the sea.

"Is that what happened to those lazy bastards?" Nacarr laughed back to Jarnulf. "Serves them right. Consider it settled. I'll straighten the rest out and we'll speak no more on it, son."

Jarnulf smiled back, hoping Nacarr could read the runes burning in his unblinking eyes, that sign glaring "You murdering son of a bitch."

Already tonight at the high seat there had been much fatuous wishing of a dozen doughty sons apiece to each other. Nacarr's assurance had been conspicuously void of such proposed benefices to Jarnulf's blood. The omission was lost on no one. Nacarr wished Jarnulf as dead, and his house as issueless, as Jarnulf in turn wished Nacarr. Tore's hunters had been hunting down his own poaching Thingmen for decades.

"Marshal." Hroald called, as Jarnulf continued icing down Nacarr with his predator glare. Hroald beckoned again, and Jarnulf glanced to catch Hroald's urgent nod toward Rakel's table.

Breathing a purple curse Jarnulf spun on his heel, slapped both his scabbards and made for the girls. Behind him issued a sharp, collective gasp. Chieftain Nacarr was not a man anyone just turned their back on, ever. Tore closed his eyelids, yanked his eyeballs inward behind them and softly cleared his throat, like a bear with indigestion, turning over in its sleep.

Rakel perked upright, affecting the damsel in distress. This was the shining moment she'd engineered. Hrorik was angrily shoving her other admirers and ordering them off as if she were his wife, between enthusiastically boring her with tales of his daring do, lists of his possessions, and constant reminders of his father's standing as Ottarr Chieftain. He remained silent however, on the subject of his three concubines.

XIII Every Man's A Hero

Across the table from Hrorik and Rakel, Aerin was in over her head. Adis and Aud looked ill at ease at the coal browed Nahri crowding her. It was Thorfinn Pallson's son Sumarlidi. At twenty and four, Sumarlidi had night thief and shadow skulker writ all over his greasy, anemic crow.

Sigrid was giving him blue hell and halfway to giving him her white knuckles, and he was ignoring her. Hrorik laid his hands on Rakel's shoulders, and her damsel turned dragon.

"Bugger yourself, sacrificer." she said, swatting his hands away.

Hrorik fawned, saying he would do anything to get free of her anger. Rakel said that would be easy to accomplish if he would just get free of her presence.

"I like a filly with spirit. Give us a kiss." he said. She caricatured an obscene pucker, and shoved him stumbling and sprawling into the table behind them.

Starri slapped Morrow's back, choking him on his drink and hatred writhed in the old savage's eyes like a pinned millipede. Starri slapped his own knees and stabbed his finger in his niece's direction, ordering Morrow to witness. Eikinn gained his feet in a rage at his son's impudence.

"This filly'll pull plows before swine like you'll ever ride her." Rakel told Hrorik.

Jarnulf bulled his way through the mob and laid his grip on Sumarlidi's shoulder and even Sigrid leapt aside albeit grinning wickedly.

"I don't remember giving you leave to speak to my sister." Jarnulf said.

"I didn't ask it." Sumarlidi blustered, and found Jarnulf's fingers in his hair, and the pommel of Jarnulf's short dragon slammed into his throat. Choking, Sumarlidi scrabbled for his own sword and Jarnulf clubbed him to the floor with three vicious blows of his hilt. Behind them, back near the Booth's door the fiddling stopped.

Every eye around Rakel's table was now riveted on Jarnulf's drawn sword and the very angry man behind it. This was no farmer. This was a hunter in his savage prime, a man who lived by his wits, hunting and killing other hunters between packing deer and moose quarters.

"Yeah." Hrorik laughed to Jarnulf's back. "Two drinks and every man's a hero."

Hrorik's men traded nudges and nods, unfolding their arms to toy with hilts.

Sigrid, never one to miss a chance, threw her arms around the nearest bravo's neck and locked lips with him.

"Where have you been all my life?" she demanded of him, as he tried for seconds, and she held him at arm's length. "I have always wanted a hero. And don't you even worry about the morning gift, as from the looks of you, I'll have to provide my own."

A substantial morning after gift was expected of new husbands for their bride's favors.

"Careful with your slanders." he said.

"How in the hell," Sigrid said. "can anyone slander a drunk mare?"

He slapped her hard and she took it glaring murder back at him.

"I can see now that I was wrong about you." she said. "You must be the richest man who ever lived as you have an extra life you can spare."

Jarnulf yanked Aerin up from the bench. He shot Hlif's two suitors a sidelong 'Who's next?' glare. There are few sights more pathetic or hostile to any man noticing them than frustrated suitors affecting dignity in retreat. Jarnulf ordered his girls off around the langeldur to his own crowded table.

"Marshal?" Rakel said. Wasn't he going to rescue her too?

"Can I speak to your other sister here?" Hrorik sneered to Jarnulf.

"Thanks to you, sister," Jarnulf said to Rakel. "I've already got my hands full."

Hrorik told Jarnulf that he was smarter than he looked. In Jarnulf's eyes serpents reared, and setting their fangs into Hrorik's brown glare, feigned retreat. Jarnulf had seen beyond Hrorik and down the aisle, and what was fast foreshortening that aisle.

XIV A Slap In The Face

"He was one thing, you're another." Jarnulf said, backing a step to encourage Hrorik's bully.

Triumph flared through Hrorik's mead murk. He cupped Rakel's cheek and rubbed himself against her shoulder, promising he'd entertain her this very night. Rakel took his offer in hand, gently sizing it up.

"If you do, and I ever find out about it, . . ." Rakel said.

Rakel had pulled plenty of fifty pound lobster traps up into her faering in years past. Seizing Hrorik's offer firmly, she pulled. Hrorik, bellowing in pain, took Rakel's hair, Rakel took Hrorik's knife, Da'hal took the back of Hrorik's neck, and Starri at the high seat took no small satisfaction from all steps taken.

Da'hal was well aware just who he had in hand, Chieftain Eikinn's son, and he cut Hrorik a break, introducing Hrorik's nose without even breaking it to Rakel's tabletop. Then he spun Hrorik back toward the door and introduced his boot to Hrorik's rear.

At the high seat it seemed Hroald and Thidrandri might need ropes to restrain Eikinn as he struggled with them, roaring out his displeasure to his son's back.

Hrorik spun back about demanding a duel. Da'hal told him that fire would freeze first, because unless Hrorik turned back around and kept going, right now, Da'hal was going to tear Hrorik's arms off and beat him to death with them, right now. Hrorik slandered Da'hal with sacrilege of a virulent perversity hoping to shock the giant to distraction, who in turn told him all about the Divinity's bowels and what they were about to dump on him.

Hrorik grabbed his hilt and immediately felt the cold impress of a knife from behind beneath his ear.

"I know you've done dumber things than this," Ref said, behind him. "but I'll bet you can't think of any right now."

Hrorik's own supporters tackled him and dragged him past Ref and toward the door.

Behind them and Ref, in the langeldur's glimmer stood six feet eight of darkly amused, black haired smith, now double handing four feet of bastard sword, snarling out advertisements that he was well ready to take whatever next step might need taking. He seemed a statue of some warrior king in which the sculptor had improved the model into a frenzied nightmare of freakish muscle, sinew and bone, just to say 'See what I can do?' And then in the moonless dark the devil himself, just to say 'Now, see what I can do.' had imbued it with all the calculating and horrifying intent and agility of an enraged viper.

Immediately to his back rushed Rakel, thanking him for his support. Da'hal, growling low over the sudden hush, pointed round from table to table to Ottarr roughnecks, who in the main smiled unconcerned back at him.

"Hroald and Eikinn," he told her. "are trying to get us and them married, and you, you stupid."

He hooked a finger into the all too low, gold broidered neck of her dress.

"Why don't you just pull them out and go slap Jarnulf in the face with them?" he said.

Two seated Ottarrs offered him toothy grins and extended tankards. Another stood with a sweeping bow to volunteer his empty seat at the bench, and Rakel prayed for the floor to open and swallow her.

Sumarlidi Thorfinnson's friends were now ringing him round, and asking if he was just going to take that lying down, as Bror and Gunnarr helped him back up. Sumarlidi grabbed his hilt again and started off toward Jarnulf. Bror stepped in front of him.

"Not with him, and certainly not tonight," Bror laughed. "unless you mean to be buried tomorrow."

Shame faced and furious Sumarlidi demanded of the short, twin sworded troll just who he thought he was.

"This is the man," Gunnarr sniggered. "who enriched the other with the coin you just got paid, and a hundred red compensations more, too."

Greatly disgraced, Sumarlidi blustered off and tried to elbow his way past Da'hal.

"Mauvais Coucherie!" the giant roared down at him. Mauvais in Frankish meant evil, and coucherie meant bed sport. The scorn in Da'hal's eyes slammed him harder even than Jarnulf's hilt had. Da'hal told Sumarlidi that if he knew what was good for him, he wouldn't run into him again. Bror saw that Rakel needed help finding her bench. He approached to take her elbow, and put his lips to her ear.

"Why won't you just go tell him you're sorry?" he whispered, and though she'd have wanted to, Rakel couldn't blush redder than she already was.

Across the fire from them, and across the hunter's table from Jarnulf, Galinn sat shaking his lowered head and pinching the bridge of his nose. Even his curly black beard was dripping sarcasm. From the gold flecks in his dark eyes and the crow's feet beside them to his bit back bottom lip he screamed a silent scolding at Jarnulf.

"You sounded like you were asking a girl to get married." Galinn spat. "We'll speak no more on it, son. Blunt I said. Be blunt!"

Aerin gave Jarnulf's arm a petulant slap.

"How's a girl ever to find a husband with you around?" she blustered, flushing shamed as Sumarlidi. Jarnulf only snicker sneered back at her, and Aerin glued her tremble eyed, unworldly self to his brawn the rest of the night. Hlif huffed out her own wordless displeasure to Jarnulf. His job was to see to Rakel so that Da'hal could see to herself.

Jarnulf leaned forward over the table square into Galinn's ire.

"Hrorik don't know how lucky he just got." Jarnulf said.

"Oh, I don't think she'd really have gelded him." Galinn said.

"No," Jarnulf said, snorting through his nose. "Lucky he didn't get lucky."

"He ain't got no luck." Olaf said, sour and grim. "He ran it off years ago."

Galinn's sidelong glare alone voiced his need for the rest of Olaf's tale.

"My sister Brindalf," Olaf said. "was even less amused with him than Rakel."

Olaf started to his feet.

"And it comes to me now," he said. "that I never thanked the bitch properly for my Outlawry because of it."

Ansvarr told him to sit back down and behave. Ansvarr nodded up toward the high seat.

"The last thing Tore needs is more of our knuckles in his stew." he said.

Galinn toyed with his black moustache affecting to appear unimpressed with Olaf, but his grinning admiration peeped through anyway. Olaf grudgingly reseated himself.

Across from Olaf sat Badger, and between them a board game. Badger could have been Mirha's older brother, with his broad, freckled brow, square, turned up snoot, wide set gray green eyes, and red gold locks flowing well beneath his square, iron shoulders. His fluent Gaelic, which Mirha remained unaware of, had gifted Jarnulf with numerous insights into the little witch's grumblings. He was a filthy barbarian, a grunting swine, a stingy old goat, and the Luciferian rape of her sweet, post virginal life.

Badger prodded his game piece with his knife point, and returned to carving out graffiti into the table. There were girls, beautiful girls, different girls, at every Booth but his own and his damned Skipper had ordered himself and every sailor at arms to attend tonight's gathering.

Tore had been romancing Nacarr for a sailing together for three years now. And every year it sounded better to Nacarr but never better enough. Badger confided to the board game that the sun would rise in the west and squat before Tore ever got that skunk to behave like a proper neighbor rather than a poaching, runny, wolf pie.

Rakel strutted back to her companions, and sidestepping her resolve, sneered through the langeldur straight into the dagger of Jarnulf's returning sneer. It chilled her as if she were an ankle hoister for hire. That sonofapervert. This was the last straw.

XV Terrapins And Sumacs

Half the night and eighteen barrels of mead later, and Hrorik being the closest they'd come to spilt blood, Da'hal and his new Ottarr drinking friends saw the last of their new Nahri friends out the door, slapping backs and wishing them well. Olaf's brother in law Rani slipped his knife back into its sheath behind his back.

"Die into Hel." Rani whispered, smiling to their departing, moonlit backs.

Away at the high seat Tore was feeling somewhat less elated.

"If he won't sail with us next summer," Tore sighed. "there's another coming."

Starri ripped Morrow's bird skull from his neck, and spitting after it, tossed it into the langeldur.

Nacarr stomped off through the moon's witch glow cursing Skraelings, Outlaws, and Halflidi Pallson in particular. That ass just couldn't keep his hands off of everybody else's women. Had it been anyone but Halflidi, one of the few he trusted not to stick a knife in his neck, Hel take it, he should stretch the bastard's neck just to teach the others. But Halflidi's brothers would be tough to replace and that bastard Skraeling Dog Knife knew it. He'd had his goddamn nerve demanding a whole hundred in silver for Halflidi's rape of his daughter. The stinking bug eater rented her out regularly for a twentieth of that.

He slapped at a mosquito on his neck, and swatted aside a tangle of sumac branches.

That vermin could take the twice the going rate he'd thrown at him and choke on it or a thousand weight of his Thingmen's arrows and axes.

Perhaps it was time, no it was past time, to hand those Skraelings on his southern border their heads again. They'd been coming in to trade, and rent out their daughters and wives for twenty years now, since the last time he'd butchered them down to their proper place. This crop seemed to have forgot the lesson, blustering about as if they were his equals.

"By Odinn's spear." he muttered, pausing to draw his knife to scrape the pounds of mud from his boots. His knife, and sheath, were, as usual, mysteriously missing. He scrabbled frantic beneath that yellow nail paring of a moon for his sword. It too was missing. The only thing not missing were those giant mosquitoes, their deafening roar, and dagger teeth.

Icy sweat enveloped him. That sick silver, rotting fish mist was already swirling and stinking at his knees, and the mud was past his ankles. Brambles bristling with razor thorns tore his face and arms as he struggled ever deeper into, and for his life he begged, for just this once, through them.

The putrescence roiled about his waist, and he clamped shut his teeth lest a scream escape and beckon his nemesis. His silence was in vain, and through the brambles glowed two yellow green eyes, gathering luminance and solidity as they drew in, and rigor shackled his limbs. He tore his terrified gaze aside, praying they would dissolve and disappear only to discover two more closing from his left, and then all round him more blinked alight.

Agony inflamed his right thigh as huge, razor jaws sliced deep and wrenched a great, bloody chunk free to gulp it down whole and bite again, seizing his hip, twisting and tearing another free. He shrieked, batting clean through the vaporous multitude of terrapin jaws and awful yellow green eyes swarming him in that marshy thicket, as they gulped down his flesh in silence but for his screams and the snapping of their jaws dripping red with his blood.

He shot bolt upright, biting back another shriek and clutching himself all over. His flesh was still where it belonged, uneaten, and the warming orange of the langeldur beyond disclosed startled looks from a few of his annoyed, sleepy Thingmen. The bare assed girl in his sleeping bag cringed away from him, expecting blame and a buffet. He shot out a hand for the mead jug on the floor beside him. The little slut wasn't half as good as Bergthora, and though his morning's hangover would be a bitch it beat the hell out of chancing that swamp again the instant he dozed off.

At the moon splashed door of the Ottarr booth two grizzled behemoths paused for a word. Chieftain Eikinn waved Ivar and Kolgrim within. Asgrim took Eikinn's cue and backed off out of earshot.

XVI Your Goddamn Digging

"Christ, you're worse than an old fishwife." Eikinn groaned. "You and your goddamn digging. How many times do I have to promise you we'll take care of it?"

Hroald laughed, embarrassed, to his old friend. He stared into the dirt between their boots.

"You'd better." Hroald said, shaking his head. And then he and Asgrim shuffled off through the starlight back towards the Hrafn Booth, and their sleeping bags and a midnight cup.

Eikinn watched them go, cursing his ancient joints and wishing he were even a year younger much less Hroald's ten. This getting old was way past getting old.

Eikinn headed for his sleeping bag with at least a mental spring in his step, despite the broken glass in his knees and ankles. He was nineteen again, and his soul brimmed with the loveliness, and pleading blue eyes of his only wife as they lay together on their wedding night and she begged him to never stop loving her and needing her.

He wrenched his bones into his bag still smiling despite his pains, just this final responsibility and then he could turn it all over to someone else, perhaps he might even entrap Ivar into it, and pray for that final sleep and awakening to laugh again with his Eithne, forever young and more in love with each moment, as he'd vowed when she lay dying in his arms, so terrified, so long ago, throughout God's sorrowless, sun bright eternity. And if not, he'd no longer suffer his all-consuming ache of missing her.

XVII Skak

Thing and the Assembly Plains were six days gone. Mirha in a rapture reinvested her tiny bed closet as if it alone contained every star in the heavens. Jarnulf continued cursing Anja at odd times of the day. He quit trying to talk to Mirha. Chores he assigned she dispatched in a grave side silence. He'd never met a girl who hadn't an opinion about at least a dozen somethings a day. This one had been opinionless a month and a half.

Exhausted, he staggered through his door long after sunset dragging a mystery package someone had left on his porch, after laying all day for absent poachers.

The ghost waif haunting his steading was sitting at his table fiddling with one of his tafl (table) boards. Five more boards for different games were stacked neat upon his mantle. Mirha had this one's black and white pieces scattered all over the board in no discernible plot.

Pilgrims to Jerusalem Land had dragged it back home with them. It was called Skak Tafl, (Check Table) and more than one frustrated loser had called it the Saracens Revenge. Bror was unbeatable at it whereas Chieftain Tore despite his reputation with strategies was often infuriated by it.

Jarnulf knifed away the mystery package's ties. There they were, as he knew they'd be, the stolen dresses he'd bought her.

In his hearth a stew was glazing itself to the inside of a pot. He shed his kit at the door as she scraped out a bowl full and set it on the table before wafting off into her closet. He called her back and nodded to the board game.

"Who's winning?" he said.

She retreated into a silent shrug.

"What kind of game have you been playing here?" he said.

"I don't know." she said. "My father says Christians don't play with the devil's toys."

"Hmmm." he said. "I suspect the devil doesn't get involved until pennies do."

He picked up a tiny, black berserk and moved it a square toward her.

"Check." he said. She stared back with no more comprehension than a fence post. He reset the board. He explained the game. She paid rapt attention, but through a smug mask of condescending piety.

Her fascination with his Satanic board game dwindled into stifled yawns as he easily defeated her twice. When he let her win the third game she perked right up. She'd have happily beaten him all night but after letting her win three more he stumped off to bed.

Her third solo game arrived before she dared a sidelong glance. He was indeed asleep. She hurled another handful of imagined stones at him. Up to now he'd been nasty and snide as he ordered her to clean this, cook that and fetch something else, when he wasn't ignoring her.

A month earlier she'd asked Anja if he preferred men. Anja, horrified, warned her that moronic jests like that were about the only thing which might actually earn her a slap.

Then her snooping uncovered his reputation as a woman chaser. She was more confused than ever. If she was such a nuisance why hadn't he just cut his losses and got rid of her. He'd taken her to Thing and brought her right back. Apparently no one met his price. For some unfathomable reason that idiot Anja found it amusing.

After another half night of solitaire Skak Tafl she pinched out the candles and retreated to her little closet. Schemes of how she could get him to trade her off to that adorable Leif fellow consumed her as she drifted off.

He arrived the next night with a bulge under his coat. The wide eyed face of a tiny grey kitten peeped out at her. She bobbed about for a better look as he approached the table still loaded with pack and weapons. She bubbled out a chagrined stream of thanks and tucked the squirming fur ball under her chin.

He shed his kit and set to hacking at the cindered roast above the fire. She was off in another world meowing, rubbing noses with and making eyes at her new kitty. He diced a small chunk of venison into a dozen pieces and dumped them in a pile in front of her. The kitten inhaled them and insisted on seconds. Upon receiving them it reconsidered.

She asked about his day and without a pause leapt into excruciating detail about her own. He gagged down his second plate wondering how he could put the stopper kitty had pulled back into her jug.

"Does he have a name?" she said.

"Name ought to tell a person something about the fellow stuck with it. Cats live to hunt. Fasten whatever you want on him." he said.

"I know, but he's so cute. I can't imagine him killing other little animals." she said.

"You've never had a cat?" Jarnulf said as his dinner weighted his eyelids and he headed for bed.

"No, not my own." she said, somewhat abashed. "My father says cats are the,"

"Oh God." he groaned. "Not the devil again."

Deciding a defense of her father's impugned piety might be taken for ingratitude she returned to making eyes at her kitten, meowing and asking it if it were her little Hunter. Kitty's thumb sized dinner sent him off to dark dreamland even before Jarnulf's snores filled the room.

She dragged the box of wood shavings from under his arrow lathe to the table. She snatched a blanket from her owner's bed and swaddled kitty up before placing him on the bench to keep an eye on him.

Halfway through her second game of solitaire Skak she had an epiphany.

A kitten and cast off clothes shoved into this nightmare constituted romance?

Grinding her teeth she slammed piece after piece onto the board. The fiend's God awful snoring was forcing her to make all manner of mistakes as she pursued the King. When his snoring and half of her indignation subsided it was almost midnight. She shoved the board aside.

At least the bastard fed her in between his bouts of trying to sell her off to every horny little twit in town. She'd actually put on a pound or two. He even did all the cooking on his days off. He insisted on it. And only a single gripe about all the wood she burned when he was off at work. She'd expected a boxed ear from the way he came running when he caught her sneaking a fresh supply but he'd only snatched the axe from her.

"Give me that before you cut your damn foot off." he said.

She again counted all seven of his expensive bows in their three separate racks on the wall. The well-used crossbow hung by the door was his bread winner. Then too there was that cache of mirror polished swords and knives under the trap door she'd discovered the day after her arrival. In the same compartment nested a foot square box of jewelry and a few precious or semiprecious, she couldn't tell which, stones. The table top beneath her thrumming fingers, as well as the floor planks, showed adze marks but the chest in her bed closet and the larger one out here were scraped shiny smooth and showed tight, clean joinery.

She yawned, stretching and wriggling her toes in the shoes he'd tossed her. They were brand new, fit perfectly and were of the best workmanship. She should know. Her father, a bondsman like herself, which was just another word for trael but she'd be damned if he'd ever find out, was a tanner. The fiction that he'd introduced her to slavery remained the only barb she owned to prick him with. But he seemed utterly immune to her scorn.

Draped over the bench at her hip, the deerskin jacket accompanying the shoes, while not as fancy as some she'd seen here, was of similar quality. That gorgeous Leif who was still so fascinated with her looked like long odds as she'd learned today he was broke. Her owner wasn't going to just give her to him. Then there were the other girls. Emerald with misplaced envy, some of them were hatching schemes to get her tossed out on her butt.

The glass buttons on her jacket beckoned. She inspected all four yet again. The candle's flicker showed through them in places. Countless ropes of countless colors swirled clean through them. Someone with a lot of skill put a lot of work into making those buttons.

As she wondered which of the village trolls would eventually put in a winning bid it struck her that that smelly, miserly dragon asleep on his foot thick fortune of furs was actually handsomer than she'd noticed. Hunter let out a piteous shriek as he thrashed about, hopelessly tangled in the blanket. A week later he quit rushing the table for scraps unless Jarnulf had cooked them.

XVIII Prepossessed

The third night arrived. He dragged in, shed his kit, traded his cloak for two blankets and collapsed at his table, shut eyed and shivering. She set to chattering and wouldn't quit. He knew he'd heard that noise before, on his porch. His mother had been fond of feeding squirrels, begging, barking, squirrels.

He put on his straightest face as she put on her idiot best, seductive smile and moved in on his flank bearing something that might have been food in a former life, before roasting in hell. He told her between bites he was delighted she'd found her voice again, while wishing she'd save it for later. He then piled off to bed before she'd gotten in half the things she'd been rehearsing all day. She thought him rude in the extreme as she pried her kitten's claws from her blouse and put him on the floor.

Hunter shot to the firewood stacked knee high at the hearth and busied himself boring into it in pursuit of some speck of life he alone had discerned. She'd gone to great lengths to open up and the bastard had ignored her. The thought that he'd been out hunting all day and was incapable of anything but sleep hadn't been able to nock a niche into the maelstrom of her preoccupations.

His day off came and went with her furious at him for disappearing with his oafish drinking buddies rather than succumbing to her urgent need to chat. Two nights later discovered her still fuming and more determined than ever.

He dragged through the door and she leapt to the fireplace and snatched a pot of something back to hurriedly ladle it into the bowls set out. He wriggled out of his pack staring dumbstruck. It actually poured from the ladle without a knife to help it this time. It smelled like the same stew but those familiar blackish lumps weren't making that sucking sound as he spooned them out.

She tossed another huge log atop the mountain of elm in the hearth before returning, offering up a tiny, scorched, smoking something she'd filched from the coals edge between potholders. She set it on a plate. Close inspection revealed it an attempt at a loaf of toast.

Her cuffs of badly tattered gold brocade drew his eye up her worn to a shine, scarlet velvet clad arms and then to her chest where two similar widths of brocade plunged to her navel, open between them. The vee of snowy skin between them showed all too much of a pair of surprisingly ample and well-formed endowments. He shuddered.

Feeling he owed her a smile for her attempt at dinner, and dreading where it would lead, he tugged his gaze from her chest and up into her face. He shuddered harder. Her hair, parchment dry and flaring off in every direction, said she'd been in and out of the steam house once too often today. Beneath her long, scrambled orange locks she was stuccoed with more purple kohl and red rouge than even Rakel ever troweled on.

Her bright green eyes devoured him from deep within their maroon, opalescent ellipses. Had the room had been a bit darker, he thought, she'd have looked like an owl with tits. He hoped she wouldn't be up all night with a stomach ache after swallowing the extra rouge on her lips down with her meal.

"How was your day?" she begged in a honied whine. "Did you see many of those nasty bears?"

His eyes whipped sideways to give her a look he'd give the wrong end of skunk stumbled upon at arm's length. He ground through the tougher clumps in his bowl as snatches of her sing song whine darted like hot daggers in and out of his already inflamed annoyance.

"And then I told Kolfinna, I hate those mean old bears." she pouted, as if explaining an argument her dolls were having to her mother. How the hell would she know? he wondered. The closest she'd ever been to one was the rug under the table. It struck him that it might not really be her voice at all. She'd been through a lot.

Sometimes people losing everything, . . . perhaps old Loki had moved into her to torment him for who knew what, or just because he could. A greasy skein formed on his stew as he fumble thumbed the cindered crust from his bread and began shooting ever more frequent, furtive glances at her, his brow darting up and down in time with his eye, checking for tiny smokes.

"But then, I suppose the little ones aren't so bad." she murmured.

He stared back into his bowl, jamming his spoon against its bottom. When it cracked through the surface a finger length of limp carbon drooped over it like a corpse carried to a grave. He gingerly laid it on the table beside the bowl. It might have been a carrot. He wasn't certain. But he was certain the taste of her rouge didn't agree with her as she nibbled away at it, wrinkling her nose.

"Baby animals are so cute, aren't they? Even baby bears." she said, propping her lower lip on the tip of her finger, hunching her bony shoulders forward and hugging herself.

"Oh yes." he said. "Forty or fifty together in a clearing, swinging from the trees, playing with the squirrels and birds, while all the grown up bears sit in a big circle around them grooming each other."

"Just like boys and girls." she cooed with a smile so sweet it chilled him like a winter outhouse. And that memory gave him something other to think about than waiting for the half pint succubus to burst into flames and sink her teeth into him.

He shook himself, cracking an embarrassed smile as if she'd read his mind. She looked away, dipping her eyes. The fire behind her flared as the huge log in it finally caught, further shading her painted, owl eyes, and glowing through the orange bird's nest above her shoulders.

She parted her lips in a smile he'd seen before, victory through surrender. Stuck along the bottom of her teeth was a thin line of crimson rouge. It was heaviest on her canines. He bolted for bed praying the cinders in his gut would let him escape her in sleep.

XIX Mortgaged

He stilled his breath, his long trigger warm in his hand this half day as he and Olaf lay concealed in this brush pile, waiting and watching, the river's incessant roar to their left robbing them of their ears. One of Nacarr's three, the tail man, a half breed youth bony and malnourished within his filthy buckskins, stopped and turned his back to them peering intently north, in mortal dread of ghost Hrafns, through the thick copse of red fire willows.

He whispered three and they squeezed. The range was only twenty yards, but at their bolts whistles Jarnulf's man dropped, catlike, as the bow shoved back. The poacher pitched forward onto his face jerking like a burnt snake. The broadhead had driven through his neck from behind. The poacher hacked up red, champing on the ashen shaft, drowning on dry land.

The easy part was done. He and Olaf cocked and reloaded their bows, and crouch ran after the third man's panicked, crunching footsteps. Olaf's man lay dead, heart shot. Olaf had held low, almost on his target's tailbone. There was an eerie familiarity to this, Jarnulf knew. He had lived this ambush before.

Yes, Olaf was gone, and he was alone in the woods, and his man gone silent to ground. His right hand fell from trigger to pommel. Its ivory fangs felt needle like, just as they had the last time after he'd killed the youth, and then the old man, lurking behind that downed elm forty yards further, to fire that horrifying miss that sliced the loose shoulder of his hide shirt.

His prescience filled him with smirking glee. He would replay this board game and win it again, but with a different and eminently more satisfying gambit. He skulked left and west to sneak up behind the scum. His edge would taste salt today, unlike the last time.

Gnats clouded the saffron, summer morning above the dank, river bottom forest he crept through. Another, the fifth, flew into his eye. He blinked, swiped, and opened his eye to the downed elm magicked right before him, untenanted.

A dark phantom flitted away north through the leaning, rotted trees. He dashed after it consumed with his conscient, black merriment only of it and his ivory dragon thrumming a silent chantey in his hand and on into his soul, a paean of blood, vengeance, and the assurance of content immeasurable, after it had drank drunk of its preferred mead.

The phantom proved elusive, vanishing but for the crackings of twigs, and branches in its flight. The last time he'd gut shot the old fart the poacher looked as if he hadn't the strength to even walk home. Dragged headlong by his dragon he hurtled after it along a broad, open trail, utterly exposed and reckless of the danger.

A hundred yards ahead the poacher appeared again, a black shadow in a flowing cape imbued with bounding, deer like grace. Only by concentrating on it alone, and blinding himself to any chance that he himself was being suckered into ambush, could he gain in the least on it.

Glancing into the thick brush along their route allowed it to gain, and the woods wavered, hallucinogenic, their grays, maroons and viridians echoing deep behind his eyes. It was like being sixteen again and working with Galinn stoned out of his mind on fermented rye. His dragon wriggled, cold and uneasy, signaling its discontent with his infantile mind strayings.

Somehow summer had fled and the woodlands were gowned in their god's ransom of autumnal splendor, ochres tinged with curling calfskin, and crimsons streaked with a grackle's shimmering green blacks. Beneath the broad arms of hoary oaks, huge stands marching as in mirrors to infinity, quivered fat, gray, rut swelled bucks upright upon their hind legs nibbling acorns from the branches. Behind all pulsed a late afternoon gold, wavering, beckoning like Ingi's blonde white tresses and her soft, sweet perfumed, come to bed laughter.

But the silence was more desolate than being under water, he thought, and immediately birds chirped all around him, and the wind rustled through branches innumerable. The frenzied knockings of woodpeckers, the shrieks of jays, and most oddly at this day lit hour, the lawless invultations of owls, cracks through which the black fingers of the abyss groped into the world of the living, first beckoned, and then threatened ever more loudly, until he remembered the phantom, searching for it, and the sounds again all dived back into the void.

Whatever he sought sprang up in abundance, landmarks from ice riven boulders to hunting blinds of thatch before wild orchards, and mouthwatering, yearling moose, blocking out all else.

Dragon fangs nipped his thumb, and cold, wet eyelids blinked within his hand. His caress stroked downward toward the guard, unblinding them. His dragon snorted, sniffed, and hissed.

Immediately the phantom flashed into view again, ahead. Scales of yellowed, serpent ivory bristled sharp and prickling in his hand. The flames ablaze in his legs and lungs died down, mellowing to a burnt mead glow, and he gained on the shadowy figure in huge, easy, god strides, his toes alone barely spurning the earth.

It had to be the Thunderer. Thor had shared with him his own, as he rushed to the onset with those terrible giants, and Mjolnir, his hammer, straining to crush the enemies of his master's beloved, mortal man. Vainglory blazed sun bright within him, stomping about with his hammer, glaring down through his field of bloodied, smashed, quivering, troll corpses, and the sanguine horizons beneath his boots swirled, dissolving like red wine into the sunlight's thick, amber mead.

Deep in those troll wounds blossomed new worlds, one from the next, and became the most fascinating and annoying of distractions, beguiling him into an ever deepening labyrinth of hollow, taunting promises, one after another, all empty, swirling mind mists, will of the wisps, an addictive waste of his attention like dragonflies daring and drawing a boy's grasping hand out over a mucky bog.

A cold, forked tongue licked his knuckles and remembering, he rallied his will into a rage daggered wholly into that one, fleeing phantom. His soul became a single black oath to catch, and devour it in a whirlwind of ivory, steel, and a sun obscuring, ruby mist.

Still, infernally, the light whorls of a rotted rye autumn hazed about him, sucking him under, and drowning him in deliriums of the aurific and incarnadined splendors of red oaks, aspens, and maples, as one after another distracting inspiration unfolded into an all engulfing universe, annihilating the last, as unique and myriad a waves in a storm. And at the edge of each diverse totality, ahead, retreated his phantom, compelling him after it through woodlands now purple gold with dusk, woodlands he knew like the back of his hand, but different, pregnant with both a super immediacy and an incalculable remoteness. All in heartbeats his dragon dragged him after it from trail to trail, never wondering at the tens of miles missing between those widely dispersed and unconnected trails.

The black cloaked figure became a woman, and his ache to prove his manhood through murder wrestled drunkenly with one rising to prove his manhood within her. His latter lust grew ever more consuming as all surrounding her grew ever more immaterial, waterish, translucent, surrendering their light and substance to cloak themselves as a skin hugging bodice about her, as he gained on her and all else went black.

Whether blinded by the fire she exuded, or her magnificence were compelling the light of all the universe to gather into her, he remained unsure, and unconcerned of. Ever barely beyond his reach she ran, glancing back oft over her shoulder.

In those taunting eyes of chestnut night teased the surcease of his agony, fulfillment, his every desire holy and other, and more. He burned to grapple her into his arms, or strangle her, perhaps in equal portions. Damn the bitch! He'd master her though the cost of it be his soul.

What was a soul, a plunge into hell, beside a plunge into her for even a moment? Her writhings and pleadings, her tears drowning his cheeks as she begged him not to stop? With lungs and legs of molten lead he redoubled his efforts and still she sped unattainable and aloof, skipping along effortlessly just beyond his grasp. She was perdition's black haired queen displaying and denying him heaven.

It was an early spring afternoon when the chase debouched into a blackened, lightning blasted bowl, littered with charred stumps and granite boulders, greened but by lichens and mosses. The phantom cast her cape in flight and slowed.

Naked, blinding in her snowy splendor, Freya, the very goddess of love, could not have been more achingly arousing, she skipped up the western hillside, turned, and came to a stand, surrendering to him with open arms beneath the towering, centuries old pines. Higher still she rose before him, in place, as if helped heavenward through the agency of angels invisible.

Aghast he stopped short before the stones erupting from the earth beneath her spume white toes. They mounded half man height, the dimensions of a grave cairn. His Freya chilled, hoar frosted, lustrous and wan, a bloodless, corpse hue. The faint, awful, sick sweet of carrion corrupting shuddered his every sense. The stench quickly grew overpowering as he stared, heart riven and horrified at her, whose unholy whiteness was become the dull silver of a disused axe, the black of her hair, and now her eyes, that of the unplumbed, devil infested depths behind the stars. She was indeed his Freya, but seen reflected in the depths of Hel's mead cup.

His gaze darted frantic past her, desperate to renew his heaven. It discovered instead a multitude of sad eyed figures, departed figures, also aglow with her corpselike phosphorescence, his father, his beloved grandparents An and Thorara, and so many others.

The old, those bent beneath a lifetimes cares, the wrinkled and shriven who'd warmed him so tenderly as a child gathered round the cairn in their silvery cerements, but there was no laughter in them, as they'd owned before their final journey.

His goddess taunted him, laughing, and shaking her naked, steel colored treasures. From somewhere she'd procured a supply of ashes and most lewdly powdered her blue self as she descended with an agonizing slowness into the very stones, beyond his reach.

The ghost army shrank after her, downward. In the sharp, glaring gold attending their aching departure, a final ghost topped the stones. His dragon strained at it, though weakly, and without any heart. His own heart strained, in tatters and shreds, after it. A blonde youth, perhaps sixteen, glared at him with a vicious, trapped wolf angst before it too, sank into the cairn.

His senses roiled, buffeted as by an avalanche. Oblivion again drank down the light. He hurled himself sidelong upon the cairn, hugging her echoes, and trembling in the black. She returned, materializing within his arms, pressing her hot, naked back, up tight against his own naked self. He clutched her to him, not knowing or caring if she'd take him down to Hel with her. She was his, and this time he would never let her go, again.

Staggering through that dim, drunken hallway between the worlds of dream where past, present and future mingle, and wakefulness, an all too familiar panic thrilled him. His mind raced, but sleep like piled horse blankets still muffled his senses. Kadlin had not been amused at hearing Rakel's name murmured into her ear. He sleepily groped further. To a certainty, it wasn't Ingi. Nor Kadlin neither. 'They' could have been Kadlin's, but the rest of her was too tiny, elfin and faery like.

His dream elf pushed and wriggled her delectable, hot little self back, more firmly, and arousingly, up against him. His calloused hand slid down her burning belly and then lower, questing after her Holy Grail. His elf moaned out his name. He shot awake, furious, jerking away from her.

"What the hell are you doing?" he yelled.

Mirha clutched her fists to her lips and shivered as if his bed had become a snow bank. She scooted on knuckles and heels away from him to the bed's edge, blanketed only to her hips. His furied glare became rapidly awkward, through an unseemly, and increasingly unbearable, interest. And then cursing himself for a mush head, he traded his condemnations for apologies and unknowingly mortgaged his soul for the pittance of a night's amusement.

Mirha's subsequent dreams were poisoned by melancholy, and a most unsettling modulation on their usual theme. At least thrice weekly an angelic young knight on horseback, a pimpled blonde, had with his lance dueled a terrible dragon for her favors, and swept her off over the reptile's smoldering corpse. Tonight the knight just rode on by, and the dragon retreated to its treasure grotto under the table, and returned to present her a pile of rags, glass buttons, and a kitten.

XX Burned

Winter passed in relative quiet. Mirha stuck her nose back up, out, and into town where she slandered Sigrid and collected her first black eye. It was now six weeks after the men had sailed off to Greenland selling timber.

In that still hour when hearths are smudges of gray reds Gudrod woke them pounding their door almost to pieces. Mirha let him in as Jarnulf struggled awake. Gudrod wore his sword and clutched his axe. His jaw was clenched and the veins on his temples stood out, throbbing.

"There's a party at Bror's." Gudrod said, terse and clipped. "Let's go."

Jarnulf did not seem eager at first.

"Bror has many Visitors. Olaf, and Gunnarr, and Galinn are with them. Now. Let's go." Gudrod grunted.

Jarnulf leapt from the bed as if it were on fire and jumped into his clothes, grabbed his longsword, warbow and kit and dashed out the door after Gudrod. Two horses waited, Gudrod's own and Olaf's black brute Stigandi, both bridled yet unsaddled.

In the clear, bitter night as they bent forward, clinging bareback to the plunging horses, Gudrod panted the details out over the thundering hooves.

"Olaf heard the uproar and dashed outside." Gudrod said. "Bror's place was on fire. Olaf ran off naked with only a spear and shield. Anja got Galinn and Gunnarr and then Gunnarr's wife got me and ran off after the others. She said there were two dozen. I stole Stigandi because you know how Olaf is."

Jarnulf indeed knew. If Olaf had got Stigandi first he'd have ridden hell bent after a whole army without waiting for help. And they'd have caught up to only his corpse later.

"Bror said they'd come," Jarnulf grunted. "sooner or later."

Even before they reached the trail's rise beyond the ship sheds, the tall fire six miles north of town could be seen glowing above the trees.

Jarnulf set his heels in the stallion's flanks, thankful Gudrod hadn't brought his mare. Stigandi proved a fearsome ride. Jarnulf hadn't believed any animal capable of such speed as the monster redoubled its efforts leaving Gudrod far behind.

As they pounded over the bridge Jarnulf discovered a few scattered women milling in the streets, armed, gaping and wondering what to do. Jarnulf damned them all, ordering them back inside.

He reined in before Bror's blazing steading. Anja, Brenn, Gunnarr's wife Aethle, and Galinn on his horse, were there waiting for him.

Three men lay dead on the ground. One's left leg was cut off at the knee, a second had his head lying a half dozen feet from his body and the third had had something thrust through his heart. Two more lay fifty yards west beyond Bror's door with arrows in them.

Galinn was beside himself with impatience. Anja shouted Galinn down, pointing north.

"Go after them." she yelled. Jarnulf ordered Gudrod to wait for stragglers and bring them together. Then Galinn and Jarnulf bolted after Bror and the other hunters.

"The bastards didn't have the guts to wake him up." Galinn said. "But Bror doesn't sleep well anyway. He shot the first two from inside before the rest got out of the light and then he cut down two more. Then Olaf showed up and speared the third one. They turned on Gunnarr and Ansvarr as they came up and they all fought. Ansvarr cut one of them deep and then Da'hal came and they ran away. Gunnarr thinks he put an arrow in the last man's back. Then Thorarin showed up with their horses and they rode after the bastards. Ref rode straight by just now. He was carrying two extra saddles. I don't know how many are left. Bror gave Olaf hell about how he'd rather be dead than have us get sucked into his feud."

"And?" Jarnulf said.

"Gunnarr's still shooting at them," Galinn said. "and the rest yelling mare, bitch, and regi at their backs as Brenn runs out clutching at Bror. Anja comes running with Olaf's 'skins, boots, and sword, both Bror and him standing there naked glaring at each other as his steading burns down, and Olaf tells him to get his head out of his ass."

Behind them at the burning Hroald paused to order Gudrod not to follow him, but to pack those bodies out to Hroghar's shieling at the bog before anyone else saw them, and keep his mouth shut about it. Anja and Aethle told Hroald to mind his own business. They'd see to the bodies. Gudrod kicked his horse into a gallop, anxious to join the chase. Hroald yelled after him to slow down before he cracked his skull on something and then he too rode after them. In their haste no one inspected the hoof prints. They were unshod.

A quarter mile into the black woods Olaf yelled out to them. The man Gunnarr backshot was lying dead where he'd fallen from his horse. Olaf, Gunnarr, Ansvarr, Ref and Thorarin were mounted, waiting as Jarnulf and Galinn rode up. Bror and Da'hal were tightening belly cinches, and thanking Ref. After saddling his own mount Ref had grabbed the two saddles nearest his stall, theirs. Gudrod and Hroald quickly joined them.

Jarnulf and Olaf traded horses.

"We'd best be off." Hroald said. "The whole town will be here in a moment."

"There's a ship up here somewhere." Galinn said. "These perverts are going to jerk us off chasing them around in the dark till they lose us and then run for it. It's a good sized ship if they brought horses. We'd best find it and burn it first. Then we'll hunt them down come daylight."

"If we wait till daylight they'll beat us to the Skraeling border." Gunnarr said.

"And the Skraelings will kill them for us if they're a foot off the track." Da'hal said.

"Don't bet on it." Hroald said. "They'll take them to Morrow. He'll negotiate a ransom and send them home."

"If we follow the beach," Galinn said. "they'll follow us to save their ride home."

"What if they go back to town for hostages?" Gudrod said.

Thorarin laughed at him.

"Straight into a hundred scared, angry women with bows?" he said. "They're already outside the law with their conspiracy. They don't want to be recognized. We can kill them as poachers and then send word to the lawspeaker up there."

Hroald took Thorarin's ear, and pulled it turning Thorarin's head sideways so that he could speak directly into Thorarin's ear.

"I'm going to feed you both to Eirika." he said. "If even a fart of our hewings escapes to Althing, Bror's enemies, all of them, would learn exactly where he is. If the bodies of these assholes, ever, ever, crop up, they will scream Full Outlawry at Tore for his concealing our secret murder of them."

"I told you not to get entangled in this." Bror said. "It would be better if I just left Hrafnstadir."

"Is that all you think of us?" Ansvarr said. "Do you hold our friendship so cheap? Your life would be a mortgage on our manhoods we can never pay."

Bror never spoke of it again.

The moon high in the south was three quarters full. Beyond the trees to the east the tide was out, and the sea breaking in sluggish, greasy swells. The horses could see their footing over the fathom wide beach of fist sized rocks and the breaking swells would mask some of their noise but they'd be completely exposed.

"Tell me they're just stupid and didn't plan for this." Ansvarr said to Bror as they rode in the lead toward the open.

"I was surprised to see Anskar Glumson." Bror said. "He usually delegates such tasks. He ran from me years ago leaving his brother to my sword. His mind is a nest of snakes and he is very sneaky in his murderings. My kinsmen called him Anskar Weasel. There was a youth with them."

"So?" Ansvarr said.

"I think I recognized Sighvat." Bror said. Ansvarr's blood ran cold and Bror yelled at his horse, digging his heels deep and they shot into the moonlight flying north over the stones. Ansvarr charged after Bror, yelling at the others to come on.

XXI Weasel

Bror had invested in the Ottarrs best stallions, knowing he might need one someday. This chestnut two year old was his third in fourteen years. Olaf and Stigandi alone had any chance of catching him but that was slim. In a horse race Bror owned the weight advantage.

Olaf almost caught Bror before the arrows screamed out of trees a half mile north along the beach. Jarnulf's outrage, already red, flared white as the shafts sped past Bror and into the silver swells. Jarnulf wished he hadn't been so high minded about giving Olaf his own horse for Gunnarr's old pack animal.

Bror leaned low and kicked his mount harder, cursing his attackers, as he sped beyond them and veered into the dark woods north of them. Olaf pulled Stigandi into the forest south of the ambushers, almost on top of them.

Men yelled in the black and hooves thundered west away from them. One fellow, the man Ansvarr had cut, grunted a curse as he was swept from his saddle by a low branch. More hooves crunched and thudded up behind Olaf. Olaf leapt from his mount on the fly. Having Stigandi gutted in the dark wasn't necessary to find the man. Olaf's left hand tightened around the grip of his shield and he drew his sword. At his third cautious step a grunt gasped through the dark twenty yards ahead. Then silence.

"Bror?" Olaf begged the dark.

"No." Bror's sarcastic drawl carried back. "It's your great grandmother.

They pissed away the night's dregs and dawn's flush looking, in vain, for the ship before heading inland. It was midmorning when Ansvarr cut their trail. It led northwest toward the Skraeling village. The unshod tracks said the conspirators had hired the horses from the Beothuk. The ship must be at the Skraeling village.

Chancing that type of trouble wasn't like their Chieftain Morrow. There had to be a lot of silver behind it. The kind of silver only powerful, and influential men had.

The hunters came upon one of the attacker's horses dead from Gunnarr's arrow. Two men would be on one animal. They'd be moving slower. Jarnulf thumbed his hilt dragon's ears.

It was bright noon when Olaf and Bror out in front cantered to the edge of an open marsh. A small stream bubbled through the its midst. Dwarf willows and scattered clumps of blue, white and copper colored flowers clustered about the stream. They were now almost twenty five miles northwest of the burning.

Above the wall of aspens across the meadow a dozen crows rocketed into the sky. First Olaf and Bror, and then the others shot headlong toward them. Whatever had put those birds to flight was just within the trees.

A mile further the gently rising wood was ulcerated with broken, craggy, granite out crops. They'd have Hel's own time sorting them out in that. They'd have to be killed before they got into the rocks. Now at a gallop Gunnarr and Ref, the only others with bows, rose in their stirrups nocking arrows.

Jarnulf cursed, bareback atop Gunnarr's pack horse. While it had more fire than his mare, actually it was just spark and smolder, he was quickly in the rear, swearing as the winded old timer's hooves sucked and squelched through the muddy bog. Even Da'hal, almost as sharp with a penny as Olaf, was pulling away from him. Da'hal had been groaning about needing a younger mount for two years now, and putting it off. Jarnulf longed for his spurs, in the bottom of his chest at home, disused these six summers since he'd bought his clumsy little mare.

Olaf spotted the burners first, a glimpse of purple cloak streaming out beneath the pines ahead. He and Bror shot after it. The man in the cloak, the second man on the horse, whipped his cloak aside at the sounds of pursuit, drew his sword, and shouted defiance. His gray eyes glared out over his shoulder with a hatred cold as stone, but within knew they witnessed the stones of his own cairn approaching.

Bror closed on his right and Olaf his left. He cut at Bror. Bror checked his blade as Olaf shore through his back just above the buttocks, toppling him. The man with the reins, now in his teeth, also chose Bror. Bror's second stroke cut clean through the man's gold arm ring, and bone. Olaf finished him with a chop between the shoulders.

Hunter voices behind them roused in demon fury as a race through the pines ensued. Jarnulf kicked and cursed. It was his business being at the front of things, not here at the ass end. It would be over before he'd blooded his sword. Even Hroald was ahead of him.

If any of his men fell he'd never be able to hold his head up again. He clutched his hilt. Its carvings writhed, as ravenous for vengeful justice as he was. There wasn't a more lowly and loathsome attack than burning a man in his home, asleep. Such deserved no more quarter than wolves slaughtering penned sheep.

Gray grew through the trees ahead, sunlight on granite. Their quarry broke north forty yards short of it, paralleling it, scanning the scarp for a bolt hole. The hunters were now strung out in a line but for Olaf and Bror seventy yards ahead harrying the enemy's rear, and Galinn and Gunnarr twenty yards behind them. Gunnarr bellowed at them to get out of his shooting lane, before swinging off to their flank to loose two arrows without result.

Their quarry discovered a narrow cleft in the scarp. It was barely enough for one horse. The burner second from the end rose in his stirrups and turned to loose an arrow at Olaf. He missed.

Bror and Olaf again fell on the last in line and hacked him from his saddle. The horse bolted through the cleft and Olaf threw Stigandi hard against Bror's stallion, checking it aside as he flew between the rocks after the burners. Bror gave Olaf the rough side of his tongue as he in turn edged Galinn aside in pursuit. Jarnulf damned them to hell as the gray rock swallowed them.

XXII Baleyg

The cleft debouched into an open bowl of rising, fresh greened, boulder broken sward. Fire had raped open a radius of seventy yards. Towering evergreens ringed its limit. One might imagine trolls beneath those trees, staring from the dank twilight with quickened breath and palms sweaty to their iron nails, as they enjoyed the sport before rushing out among the charcoaled stumps to rend the victors.

Seven horsemen streamed in a line towards the trees' western wall, their cloaks of brilliant purple, russet, and emerald billowing behind. Olaf barreled headlong at the last man's back, a massive, shaggy, brown bearded axeman. Olaf roared out a challenge.

"Get hither, coward."

The six burners ahead of Olaf's man wheeled, casting cloaks and gold brooches earthward, and galloped back brandishing sword, spear, and bow, hurdling high over the fallen, charred, black trees.

Olaf's yell, and their enemies' echoing it, carried back to Jarnulf and in that moment he'd have traded his soul for the wings of the archangel Michael. Four hunters, the apprentices, and then Hroald were swallowed by the scarp and the yelling struck him like a hammer as Da'hal crowded in ahead of him.

Behind Olaf, and almost at each other's heels came Bror, then Galinn, Gunnarr, and Ansvarr, all echoing his cry. Olaf spit out his reins leaning right with sword high. Another five Hrafns shot into the open fast and furious with aspect so fell that frantic arrows and spears shot past them harmless, too hurriedly aimed.

Stigandi snorted, his nostrils flaring cavernous and crimson in his Hel black muzzle. His gaping brown eyes glared with the intelligence of a true fiend. His ears lay back, plastered against his head, and his lips were drawn. His head darted, hammer like, to bite deep into the flank of the burner's scarecrow mount. The animal bolted, but only its rear quarters, and as if chained by a nose ring to a post it swung about, bucking and roaching, with the rider yanking viciously at the heavy curb bit in its mouth.

The burner wrestled his axe up. Olaf yanked his shield up awkwardly across Stigandi, between them. The burner stood, bracing himself in his stirrups. His edge struck the shield's iron boss full on, unhorsing Olaf. Olaf crashed onto his shoulder. Immediately a white fetlock of Bror's stallion thudded down before his nose.

Stigandi, between the axeman and Bror, bolted, sweeping Bror's horse along with him. Olaf threw his shield and sword arm up over his face as Bror's horse stumbled its way around him. Bror cursed vilely, colliding twice with Stigandi as the brute whipped about intending to bite or butt and then stomp the axeman. Olaf, half sitting beneath his shield, scrambled back propping himself on his sword arm's elbow.

The axeman leaned forward and low, hoping to shear clean through the shield this time. The axe came down, and the man slid from his saddle after it with a bellow of pain. The axe stuck deep in Olaf's shield. Olaf wrenched his shield aside but the burner clung to his haft.

"Bishop!" Bror cried, and Olaf looked up to see the iron shoe of Bror's rearing stallion lash out, and dash the burner's head aside, smashed into ruin. The stallion came down, straddling Olaf, and then four more horse legs appeared, weaving, stamping, and tearing the turf around him.

"Whoa!" Galinn's voice barked above him. Galinn leaned over and wrenched his spear from their enemy's leg.

Jarnulf barreled into the gap taking the reins in his teeth. He drew Tore's gift. The knelling shouts, grunts, clanks, and hoof thuds consumed him and he craned to his right straining desperate for more than the blurred snatches of mounted men beyond Da'hal's huge, sunlit back and the rippling brown quarters of Da'hal's gelding, hurling pebbles back at him.

He galloped the twenty feet through the cleft and into the arena with his sword lancing out straight and level before him, pulling itself, and him, inexorably toward living bone.

In the middle of the bowl sat Bror on his horse guarding Olaf, who was struggling to his feet. They were alone but for Stigandi and the corpse. Olaf twisted frantically about looking for any hunter who might need help. Mounted hunters twenty feet beyond them formed a ragged half circle, double teaming four of the burners as another four charged back down the hill. Da'hal made straight for them with Jarnulf chasing him. They glimpsed mere snatches of what followed in the few heart beats before reaching Bror and Olaf.

Fifty feet ahead on their quarter right was Hroald, leaning sideways off his mount and bellowing fit to blow the needles from the pines as he throttled an axeman half his age. Hroald dragged his man off the lathered, muddy bay and they crashed heavily to earth with Hroald on top.

Hroald fought his foe's axe haft up from between them, across the man's throat, leaned, and crushed it. Between Jarnulf and Hroald lay another man on the blasted, spring sward with Hroald's own axe deep in his chest and the foe's dark blue shield splintered in halves to either side.

To Hroald's right Galinn and Ansvarr were flanking and backing a tall, lank fellow atop a russet sway back. The man had a jutting jaw and thinning brown hair. He looked almost like Ansvarr but for his clam colored right eye.

The horse backed into a cindered stump and reared. Galinn feinted, the man threw up his blue and white checkered shield, and Ansvarr's sword drove deep beneath it.

Between Bror, Olaf, and the hill were Gudrod, and Thorarin, raining sword strokes on another burner's shield. Gudrod's spear was stuck through the shield. Thorarin landed a sword stroke on the man's forearm and Gudrod reared his mount, and laying flat, charged back to the right toward Hroald.

To their far, quarter left Ref's bow sounded and a man galloping almost into Ref's lap grunted, dropping his outstretched sword, and swayed off his horse as a second gaunt, all ribs and eyes animal careened headlong into Ref's chestnut mare. The groggy beasts backed staggering from each other.

The burner grinned evilly at Ref who was scrabbling for his undrawn sword. The burner kneed his mount back in, cocking his sword. Ref drove the fire hardened, pointed tip of his elm warbow deep into the man's chest.

Slanders and curses rebounded about the bowl as the remaining burners learned their doom and took it like men, spitting brimstone into the teeth of their headsmen.

Hroald, still on his knees, swept the axe left at the thunder of hooves rushing his back. The horse slammed Hroald flat and its rider pitched drunkenly to crumple and shudder on the ground before him, his back and left arm ruined where Gudrod's sword had opened them. The Hrafn priest gained his feet, and casual as splitting firewood, finished the man.

One of their enemies charging down the hillside on their left, a man of fifty with gray red hair, a face long, blocky, and slate hued, so grim it might have been born that way, lowered his spear, heading straight for Bror.

"Weasel!" Bror yelled, meeting his charge.

Anskar Glumson's blue eyes and Bror's blacks drove nails into each others' across the twenty yards between them. Anskar's ill fed, scarred animal veered off seeing Bror's stallion rushing at it, then shrieked and charged back with blood streaming down its flanks where Anskar's long spurs had punctured them.

Bror stood in his stirrups and cinched his legs tight. He swept his right sword left, level and out beyond the shoulder, and thrust his left out lance like, seeking Anskar's throat.

From Bror's right a blonde youth on a dappled roan started a charge at him. An older man, hard lined and heavy set in fine, blue white ring mail, and bearing an axe, bulled his mount into the roan, yelling at the youth.

"Hjalti, get away!"

The axeman drove his spurs deep and his bay uttered a scream from the pit as it raced toward Bror.

XXIII Unless I Die First

Gunnarr wheeled and shooting almost blind sent his arrow into the ribs of Anskar's mount. The horse stumbled throwing Anskar.

Bror spared a glance at the teen as he turned to face the axeman. But for Da'hal's axe, pitched into the withers of the axeman's mount, Bror's glance had cost him his life so close his foeman was.

Three heartbeats later Bror's great stallion reared high beside the collapsing animal. Bror swung down, nicking the man's chin, as the horse fell away from him. Its rider bounded to his feet with the struggling animal between himself and Bror.

Anskar had got to his feet again and was fronting Ref, Thorarin, and Galinn, all mounted. Ref reached behind his shoulder for an arrow. To their right a riderless, blue black quarter ton of knotted muscle backed two steps toward Anskar.

Anskar snatched up his spear. It was tight in his fist, beside his temple, when he decided on Ref. Stigandi curvetted full twelve hands skyward and lashed out with rear hooves, pashing Anskar's ribs and hurling him away with a broken back.

Bror's big, gray bearded axeman leapt atop his dying horse, roaring like a bear. He started a great right handed roundhouse, heedless of Bror's blades. Bror's left sword caught the haft, and his right sheared deep into the man's temple.

Above them on the hillside the blonde youth's roan collapsed on its knees with another of Gunnarr's arrows through its lungs. Its young rider fled on foot. His comrades were all dead.

Da'hal leaned out from his saddle toward Stigandi's reins. Stigandi started a deep, grunting nicker.

"Don't!" Olaf yelled. "Right now I'm his only friend, and I'm not sure about that. He'll kill you."

The boy turned and bayed forty yards up the hill in the shadows of a huge fir, spitting and snarling at them. Jarnulf stared stricken, his sword untried, sick at his sole chance remaining, to butcher a youth who could have been his own apprentice.

He rode forward at a walk, praying another hunter's arrow or mount would rush past him, and take upon their own soul this onerous deed. None did. Ansvarr caught his arm. Bror dismounted and lowered his swords as they approached the youth.

"You killed Sighvat!" the boy yelled.

The boy held his sword straight out before him, quivering, at Bror. His blue eyes were brimming with frustrated rage as he whipped them wildly around at Gunnarr and Olaf, also on foot, flanking Bror, and the wall of mounted hunters behind them.

"Yes." Bror said softly. "He was swinging his axe at me. Since you don't know me, I doubt you'll forgive me. I wish you hadn't come Hjalti, but you have, so end it, and go."

Bror stared down at the ground between them. The boy lunged.

"No!" Gunnarr yelled, straight arming Bror aside. The boy's sword shot between them and Gunnarr's plunged through the boy's chest and on, out through his back. Gunnarr withdrew his blade. The boy dropped onto his knees again spitting at Bror.

"No!" Bror screamed as his hilts slipped through his fingers to the ground. He joined the boy on his knees, hugging him.

"May I die half as bravely as you, kinsman." Bror choked out, as the light slowly ebbed from the boy's startled eyes. Bror laid the corpse down gently, closed its eyes and turned his own to Gunnarr. They were filled with tears.

"I don't know that you've done yourselves any favor." Bror said, and then looked up at Ansvarr.

"You'll remember?" he said.

"Unless I die first." Ansvarr said.

"I must keep the wolves and birds from him." Bror said. Then he walked away in search of rocks to begin the cairn, though the place was littered with them. He inspected and quickly dismissed one rock after another. None of them seemed right to him.

"What, was that?" Jarnulf said to Ansvarr.

"That, was his nephew." Ansvarr said. "His sister's. Sighvat was the boy's foster father. Bror spoke often of him to me, and his hopes for him. He hadn't seen him since he was a baby. I promised Bror that if it actually was Hjalti, that whenever Bror himself died I would come retrieve the boy, and bury him in our consecrated ground behind the church. Then I would go to Althing and send word that Bror killed them all, and only told us as he lay dying, so we'd be blameless and never inherit his feud."

"Awful hard on his sister, isn't it? Her brother killing her son?" Jarnulf said.

"He said she'd know it was a lie and she'd help spread it." Ansvarr said.

"What started all this?" Thorarin said.

"A neighbor axed one of his grandfather's farmhands over some straying cattle thirty summers ago. Its got so mixed up that both families, and now another three, are fighting among themselves. The women won't let it die." Ansvarr said.

Gunnarr straightened the boy's legs and placed the boy's sword on his chest, folding his hands over it as the huge, gray bearded priest spoke a prayer over them both.

"This proves the old saying that the hand is soon sorry it struck." Thorarin said.

Gunnarr looked up at him wanting to say not this time but he said nothing as first Bror, and then Olaf and the others began mounding stones over Hjalti.

Thorarin started off after the dead men's remaining horses, anxious to slip from beneath the iron horror crushing Bror and the others. Ansvarr forbid him, saying to let the animals go to whatever doom awaited them. Bringing them home would deluge the hunters with questions. Dignifying those questions with any answer would be throwing pitch onto the bonfire of speculation already ablaze there. Such gossip would inevitably attract more of the same trouble, some day.

When Hjalti's cairn was mounded Bror walked to his chestnut stallion and stepped up into his saddle. He held his head high and turned his horse to walk slowly away back toward Hrafnstadir through the slender shafts and great columns of blue gray now slanting east through the pines.

Ansvarr remounted and went after him. Bror sent him back. Ansvarr and the other hunters draped the corpses over their own mounts and then lead them miles west, before burying the bodies deep in the forest. Hjalti should have gone too, but in deference to Bror they left him there, where he'd fallen.

Midnight found them all together again, drinking within Hroghar's smelting shieling at the bog.

"A curious command word," Galinn said. "to set your horse to attack."

"There was another man," Bror said. "a fourteenth, a churchman and a Fifth Court Judge."

Silence dropped like a curtain of lead and his companions gaped, cups dangling forgot in the hands.

"He reversed a poor man's suit on a procedural quibble," Bror said. "and imposed a fine that beggared that man, utterly dispossessed him. Took his home and his little farm."

"One of your dependents?" Jarnulf said.

"Never knew him." Bror said. "Anyway, six months later the poor wretch still hadn't found a household to join, and was living in the forest. He was old and had a bad leg. Nobody wanted him. One day the churchman and four of his householders stumbled across him by accident, and when the fellow foolishly admitted that he was still without any household attachment, the churchman had him castrated as a vagrant. Of course it killed him. When I got through with my thirteen, I gave that churchman the same."

An audible gasp ran round the shieling.

"Svein?" Galinn said. "The Bishop of Hellulandia? That was one hell of a scandal."

"Baleyg hates the word as I do." Bror chuckled. Naming his stallion Baleyg was blasphemous, as it was an Odinn name. It meant Fiery Eyed.

"None of us ever saw you working that trick with him." Da'hal said.

"Nahri poachers," Bror spat. "have their uses. I tied two dead ones to trees last year. Baleyg is a quick study."

Then he gave the darksome giant a hearty shove.

"And now you know why I can't geld my mounts." Bror said. "May all Bishops of Anti-Christ sheath their groins in iron and beware excommunicates and heretics."

At which Priest Hroald refilled his cup and led his hunters in a rousing chorus of his own invention concerning the Roman Pope's bed closet perversions, and crimes without number as captain general of Satan's army.

They spent that night and the following day at the shieling, deep in their cups, gorging on gloom, and praying for Hjalti, his mother, and Bror.

XXIV Too Many Women

Winter's poisonous cold had finally gone. They'd been lucky this year. It only killed three people.

At his table Jarnulf clamped an arrow between his teeth to retrieve his knife and goose quill.

High above his rafters, in that glare cutting under his open shutters, smoke faces strong and manly played about his roof pillars. The pillars reached up from broad, knee high platforms, running the north and south walls. Most daily living was done up on the platforms. It wasn't really warmer up there, but a man's steading was his castle, and holding the high ground had held countless castles.

"What the hell good are you, up there?" he asked the smoke phantoms. They were always there, but today their vacuity preyed with a unsettling insistence upon him. This summer more than ever, they might be sore needed. They seemed bitter as himself, at being unborn and unable to support him, and he them.

He took a mind swat at his mood, missed, and bent to pull up a pant leg. It was past time to button up his boots.

Spring and Tore's sailing with Nacarr's six ships, finally, was three weeks gone, and women were darkening his steading in droves.

Some, ancient and bitter, arrived with lies that they would not return, while others young and beautiful came breathing perfumed promises both subtle and gross that they would if he'd just take care of this one little dispute for them.

The collected laws were called Gragas (Grey Goose). Unlike the cart wheeling gulls, geese flew an undeviating path, straight to their target. He aligned another gluey slice of grey, goose quill onto his arrow and set it.

He'd just got rid of Aud and Tjorni. Both girls were dirt poor, and so stiff necked it seemed they'd a burr up their butts. They were at the shouting stage. The punching stage was right around the corner. Aud had lent her shears to Tjorni. Tjorni said she'd returned the shears to the shelf in Frigga's stall in the barn. Frigga was Aud's cow.

Aud said that Tjorni hadn't. He said that Tjorni had borrowed the shears from Aud, and not Frigga. Shearing time was a ways off. The shears would surely show up before then. The girls were not impressed. He teased Aud about not looking him in the eye. People would think she really was a liar if she didn't stop that.

Jarnulf said he'd miss them both, what with folks discussing their calling each other liar and thief. Such public slurs to their honors could not be born, and one of them would have to kill the other over it, and then get herself Outlawed and killed soon after. At that they were very put out with him and departed together sharing a huff.

In the three years since his fellow hunters dumped the vacant for decades post of Marshal on him the squabbles of women of all ages had become his fault. From thefts and business deals gone bad to personal slights real and imagined, no matter what his settlement half of the disputants left, and stayed, wishing him evil.

Atop his table lay three dozen arrows, a rainbow pile of quills and feathers, his skinning knife, and a glue pot fuming vilely in its wire frame above a sputtering candle stub. Twenty pounds of grey striped Skoggkatt fidgeted at the table's far edge, stalking a fly. Mirha's cat had pounced and missed twice already.

Jarnulf's hand flashed out and stole Hunter's fly. Hunter told Jarnulf that he didn't like having his game poached. Jarnulf released it, and compensated Hunter with a goose quill. Hunter pounced on it in a murder blur.

Hinges creaked and cold white midmorning rushed in through his doorway silhouetting a dark, featureless elf laboring under a bundle of wet laundry.

She padded across the bearskin rug behind him and up onto the platform to drop her burden into the shadows near her abandoned loom by the back door. Aromatic tendrils from the roast in the fireplace set their hooks in her nose and reeled her in.

"Moose?" she said.

"Galinn shot a yearling late yesterday." he said. "I expect him and Frakki are out fetching the rest right now."

She reached for his knife to harvest a niblet. He frowned at her skinned knuckles. She seated herself across from him. He leaned forward over his glue pot's fumes, and squinted at the red welts surrounding her left eye.

Between bites her right eye stole darts at the sneer in both of his. Another of his damned know it all corrections was brewing. And if the flaring of those nostrils in that square tipped nose didn't disappear immediately, her Lord and Master would be providing his own amusements for the next few nights.

"I didn't start it. It wasn't my fault." she said.

"It never is." he said.

She bristled upright, folding her arms.

"I was minding my business washing stuff in the stream when that, That, Rakel, started blowing off to Sigrid and Kveldalf about you being a back shooter." she said.

"And?" he said, his voice and eyebrows rising. The defiance in Mirha's eyes was becoming more pronounced.

"She was slandering you."

Rakel could chew Mirha into little pieces with one hand. Whatever possessed Mirha into thinking she could keep goading her was beyond him.

XXV I Cured Her of Complaining

"But she spoke this verse," Mirha said. "before everyone."

Dames, find Ulf's pup strange,

Cowed, by their disputes, owl's

Bane would glory, obtain

Save stroke, of antlered shame

Jarnulf despised owls. He warred against them constantly. A shaming stroke was a sword cut to the buttocks marking its victim for life as a coward who had run from a fight and in Rakel's verse, from a deer's antler.

"I said you only shot one of those poachers in the back." Mirha said. "You shot the last two in the chest and throat."

Anywhere off the narrowly defined trails through each other's district to their village was poaching and a death sentence. Jarnulf bit his tongue. Any man in their right mind would gladly shoot three or three hundred armed poachers in the back and Mirha damned well knew why.

"And that's when you got your newest scrapes?" he said.

"I told her the only reason she kept spreading that shit around is because she's jealous. Then she had to rub my nose in it by telling everyone that I'm just a trael and how she's better than me because she's a free woman of standing, and if you loved me you'd take me as your wife, instead of your property." she said.

"That was when the fight started?" he said, his resolve to give her grief set aside for the moment.

"Almost." she said. "I told her a few things she's not likely to forget."

"You are going to get us Outlawed." he said.

"But those things she keeps saying about you." she said.

"Does she have to dangle them in an actual bait bag for you?" he said.

"I don't care who she is." Mirha said. "It doesn't give her the right to keep slandering you like that. And you know I'm right."

"Being right," he said. "isn't always the right thing. She's got you by a hand's height and thirty pounds."

"And two black eyes." Mirha said. "I cured her of complaining today."

The thought of closing his mouth did not occur to Jarnulf.

"She strutted up with her nose in the air and threw a right jab. I ducked but she got me. She looked back to tell Sigrid she was going to enjoy teaching me manners again. She was just standing there with her leg sticking out and not looking so I kicked her knee, shoved her over and jumped on her. Then I belted her across the nose and worked on her ears. A lot of girls said she'd think twice before she picked on me again."

Gritting his teeth, Jarnulf glared up at his shutters, thirty feet above him in the roof's peak. His ghost brothers had cleared out.

"Have you any idea what you have done my love?" he said.

"I knocked her evil tongue back into her head," Mirha said. "where it'll stay and rot."

"You got lucky because she got stupid." he said. "The next time she won't offer you such an easy opening.

The stench from his glue pot became again pervasive as that familiar knot began growing and twisting in her chest.

"Well maybe she'd stop if you let me wear a knife, like she does." she said.

"Proof," he said. "that I'm not as far seeing as I thought I was."

He rose, dragged the table from the bench, booted the bearskin back and opened the trapdoor. From his strongbox beneath it he handed her his father's forearm long knife. He pointed at a roof pillar twenty feet away.

"That roof pillar is trying to kill you." he said.

Clueless, she stared back at him down on his knees.

"Well," he said. "now you're dead. Indecision got you. Try again."

She took four swift and determined strides toward her pillar.

"Dead again." he said. "Took too long."

She asked what he expected her to do and turned to find him upright leaning against the table with his hand out. She returned the knife to him.

He turned his back to her.

"Now it's trying to kill me." he said, and whipping about hurled the knife into the pillar.

"I didn't know you could do that." she said, more than a bit amazed.

"Rakel can do that too." he said. "And while I doubt she'd kill you, well, look at Freystein. I was a little kid when someone cut his face. It still hurts him to eat.

Rakel doesn't need to think when someone comes at her. My uncle, who taught us both, made sure she doesn't get herself killed by thinking when she should be doing. Thank God you didn't use a rock or a stick on her."

Mirha glared down at the table top in the ensuing silence.

"Will you stay here until I get back?" he said.

"We're almost out of salt." she said. "I've got half the water in the cove to boil off."

"It can wait." he said.

"Fine." she said. "You can explain to Aethle and the others why their catch has to rot when they show up tomorrow because there's no salt."

"We're that low?" he said. "I don't want Sigrid taking a fist to you."

"She'll be hanging over Rakel all day anyway, and nursing the knuckles Astrid gave her." she said.

"What kind of goddamn riot did you start?" he said.

Astrid, the serving woman at the drinking hall, had her own long standing feud with Sigrid, and now he was stuck between them again too.

He rose. At the hearth he snatched down his short sword in its thin, wooden scabbard from the rack above the mantle and thrust it between his belt and buckskins. At the second pillar from his door he grabbed a favorite warbow, quiver, and belt pouch. Mirha wanted to know where he was off to.

XXVI The Road To Grand Reputations

"Targets and Olaf. I'm late. Then Hroghar's, and Kolfinna's again. Don't know why I continue to pay her." he mumbled.

Mirha smelled a very large, weeks dead rat. If he was so late why had he waited for her to get home? He was off to compromise the advantage she'd finally got over that pig.

At the door he turned back.

"I'm afraid you won't think so kindly of Hunter after you've seen what he did to that dress you left out last night." he said.

He cleared his door wondering which of them was the trael. What Mirha contributed wasn't a third of her upkeep. Life had seemed such a great idea when he was a kid, the promise of growing into a man of wealth and standing, a man deferred to throughout Hrafnstadir, like Starri, and later all Skoggangurstrond, perhaps even a Chieftain like Tore. His father hadn't been so sanguine about it.

The road to grand reputations was mazy with detours to Court. Whatever life path he trod he'd need the law in his pouch to keep his neck out of its endless snares.

Well, he'd studied it, and except for his seductions tried not to step in it. With three jobs he was still scraping to support his drunk Aunt and cousin Kolfinna. Even the clandestine encounters he'd lived for were gone, vanished the moment Mirha descended on him. In their place came a never ending stream of arguing, ambitious women all demanding he dig something out of their neighbors and supposed friends for them.

Making peace as disputants tried to bribe him was a pain in the ass. Since he'd foolishly accepted the position of Marshal, taking any such bribes, especially with the open hell Mirha would raise over it, would target him for criminal suits for seduction from the very batch who'd been so willing before.

And the moment Tore got home in the fall there'd be a mob howling over his head about how vilely he'd treated them. Tore was ever sympathetic but hearing them out sucked up days of his time.

XXVII Go On You, Live

Jarnulf's jaw clenched harder as he removed his mare's bridle and clamped her lips shut. He was in no mood for another tongue bath. Then in silence he loped off over the pave of broken shells to town with her crowding his heels.

Mirha wasn't the first stray he'd taken in. He hadn't wanted this one either. She would have made some rich kid a grand pet but none wanted her. While horse gazing at Thing she'd kidnapped him. Two words with her owner told him she wasn't worth her feed and was headed for a bait pile if she didn't sell within the week. Cursing himself for a fool he bought her for almost nothing. Her owner sent her off with a laugh.

"Go on you, live." he said.

Jarnulf figured that for as good a name as any.

Like Mirha she was small of stature, quite possessive, and an expert at tripping over her own feet.

Many outside Jarnulf's circle found him moody and given to dark broodings since his father got killed. Ulf had been a workmanlike hunter, but never the artist Jarnulf became.

Ulf's art had been diplomacy. Folks paid him year round to arbitrate their disputes. He'd built his steading out here beyond even the ship sheds to burn off some of his clients heat toward each other with a heated three mile hike first.

As Tore's Marshal, Jarnulf couldn't charge silver for his decisions, and the stipend Tore paid him was a joke compared to what Ulf milked out of them.

Jarnulf suspected Ulf's preoccupation with the laws, and there were more than too many of them, had got him his death. He must have been wracking his brain for a solution to some spat two women were having that summer when he blundered crosswind of that bear's kill.

When Jarnulf was fifteen Ulf plead Hoskuld Onehand's suit against Mord Svenson. Hoskuld, Mordach's ale brewer, sued Mord for Averki, infliction of a blood wound without just cause. Mord lost and was ordered to recompense Hoskuld three Marks, a Mark being eight ounces of silver. Two nights later, Mord, drunk as usual, began braying at the Hall that his debt to Hoskuld was Ulf's fault.

Ulf smiled and held his tongue as his brother Ansvarr told Mord the fault was doubly his own. First for giving Hoskuld a nasty cut under his eye when Hoskuld ordered him away from his daughter, and second for representing himself and having a fool for a client. He should have hired Ulf before Hoskuld beat him to it.

Mord shoved Ansvarr aside bellowing that real men settled such things between themselves. Only women and cowards resorted to courts. And as everyone knew all lawyers were unmanly. Ansvarr jumped Mord but hunters Galinn and Gunnarr dragged him off. Mord had marked himself as Ulf's meat.

Mord had forfeited his immunity. Ulf, who wasn't at all short on manliness, could have easily and legally beaten Mord senseless or killed him. No one would have stopped him. But to Jarnulf's horror Ulf laughed it off, telling Mord that drink was another man, and in the morning he'd think different.

Young Jarnulf grabbed his hilt and started to his feet. Ulf grabbed Jarnulf's collar and returned him to the bench so hard Jarnulf thought his tailbone was broke. After Mord had been tossed out Jarnulf asked his father why he tolerated fools like that. Ulf took Jarnulf by his shoulders and went all serious on him.

"Because Mord is a fool and everyone knows it." Ulf said. "And he'd hold a beating to his breast like a hot poker to the end of his days. Had I given him the gut full of steel he deserved, after his wife and sisters shamed his sons into putting an arrow in my back, they'd do the same to you, your mother, your Aunt Marnee, Uncle Lars and little Kolfinna, or maybe your own sons someday."

It was the most valuable inheritance Ulf could have left him, a life free from feud. Not that the one he had collected after Ulf's death had him worried. It had never amounted to more than grumbling. But still it was a lesson Jarnulf wished he'd heeded.

His knuckles whitened, throttling his bow. He couldn't decide whether he was madder at Rakel or Mirha. Mirha went out of her way to put him into these binds. Kadlin was still gilding him with icy laughter a year and a half later. And to top it, she'd taken up with Olaf's helper, Thorarin.

At least it no longer raised blisters when Ingi burned it in. Ingibjorg was a stacked little blond with a laugh like a cup of jiggling quicksilver but she was only good for half the year, the half Halldor was at sea. If Halldor were fool enough to make her mistress of his steading and let her wear his keys on her belt, let him chase the faithless tart around, along with his purse, and good luck to him.

And that brought him back through a string of perfectly, well maybe not so perfect, to Rakel, who was, well, Rakel. Nobody could cry and moan her way through bed sports like Rakel, but she wouldn't stop it when she was out of bed.

Her father, a wife beating drunk, had drowned himself when she was a toddler. Rumor held his brother in law Starri's hand firmly on the back of his accident's neck. Her mother, a weak willed and clinging woman then attached herself to a series of remarkably unremarkable men over the next fifteen winters.

Rakel's formative years had been tantrums rewarded rather than punished, with presents, a blind eye, and limitless license. Uncle Starri was the worst offender.

In her teens she'd gone through suitors like a scythe through grain. At eighteen she'd taken her first stab at fidelity with Jarnulf. After a year of it he broke it off rather than strangle her. Rakel would be old and grey long before she grew up.

He reigned in his pace. Interfering in women's business, even with a flawless plan was bound to summons a storm of trolls. He had no plan at all. When it came to women, he, like most men, learned through bitter, repeated experience that they always discovered what you'd meddled in and that you paid dearly for it, no matter how well intentioned.

XXVIII You Want To Be A Hunter?

In the ship yards women were repairing traps. Four dozen sat stacked against the wall with piles of dog sized buoys. The traps were cages two and a half feet square of saplings lashed an inch and a half apart. A glass tube depended into them from the hinged top.

Once lobsters and crabs crawled through the trap's glass tube to get at the bait bag below, they couldn't get a hold on the tube and crawl back out. Scandinavia had always been too cold to play in the mud so Norse folk had pretty much forgone pottery but those lovely beads of glass in the ashes of bonfires on sandy beaches fascinated them no end.

The trail forked atop a tiny rise. Before him in the morning's cold white lay sixty steadings, shielings and shops in gray bark and dead bone heart wood. Tiny knots of mewing, gray white gulls canvassed geese and hog pens looking to steal a breakfast.

Marshal and mare took the inland trail. Above the porch roof of each steading poked an arm length dragon of weathered oak. This morning the place seemed indeed a lair of dragons, lady dragons hungry to bite and paralyze him with guilt and blame.

Atop the beach front bluff the elms, pines, beeches and firs wind shifted, petulant at him, like the squib of Jotuns afraid to laugh openly at their foolish parents.

The village's small log steadings were half hidden behind piled up earth and their roofs sodded over to forbid winter's entry. Towering above all was the barn sized church and its two man sized dragon heads, one questing on its long neck seaward, and the other west toward the forest.

A wide main street under the trash of eighty years of shellfish dinners cut north south through town. The village swelled briefly to three more lanes paralleling main to both sides. Dung hills surrounded the outskirts and beyond them were vegetable gardens.

Pig stys and pens for sheep and geese adjoined most steadings. The pigs at the moment were strung out along the field's limit rooting through last year's acorns beneath the oak stands scattered along its border. A mile past the field's western trees stood another clearing even larger than the farm fields where sheep were grazed.

Formerly his bone tired evenings had been interrupted at least weekly by distraught little girls tearfully demanding he go chasing off into the night for them, not with them but for them, after some cherished, straying lamb. Evening sheep patrol, two years back, had been his least popular innovation among the apprentices.

'You want to be a hunter? Go, hunt the sheep.' was all the satisfaction their complaints ever got from him.

Women in voluminous, gray, woolen dresses moved in and out of the forest border with switches, steering their porkers back out of the woodland's depths. Their apparel was strikingly uniform and practical, as of a nunnery given to poverty and labor. Many wore dairy aprons of off white and hid their faces within baggy, hooded cowls of the same. Cloaks of wool and felt, pinned at the shoulder with bronze brooches further obscured their identities.

In the boulder and stump studded field behind town a plow horse pulled a single axled wagon with axes lain atop a load of firewood. Four stooped girls plodded along ten yards behind it. Four dozen cows, spackled dun and brown black loafed about pecking at what the near barren earth offered at the north limit of the field, six miles away.

Behind the granary eight women were struggling with split rails moving the corral. Moving it every week was easier than carting all that fertilizer over the field in wheelbarrows.

Through the middle of the field snaked the stream's silver blue. Reeds, pussy willows, and lilies would bloom along the banks and scattered thickets of pink white rhododendron along the fences. But today clumps of maroon briars and the pale greens of lichens on the granite boulders were the only colors showing above the frozen earth and dead brown oat grass. When this years crops came up, foxes and toy wolves would be out in it all night chasing rabbits and quail.

The toy wolf, like the Norse, were immigrants. Sixty years ago Thjorgier Thornfoot brought eight of the little yippers home with him from his three year wanderings inland.

They were an unheralded prodigy. To Thjorgier's neighbors they seemed cause to herald him with abuse. What on earth would anyone want with yet another wolf? Thjorgier released them, and within three autumns and litters he was hard pressed not to accept kingship from those same neighbors.

Timber wolves in packs wrecked hell on their livestock. Once the real wolves were thinned out the rabbits and quail, who devoured whatever grains struggled up between the stones, exploded.

The little toy wolf however kept his polite distance from folks while making a regal dent in the pests. Of course some became chicken coop Vikings, but still most folk enjoyed their nightly concerts in grateful consideration of the service they rendered.

And in a queer way their sad music took some of the menace out of the brooding, owl haunted forest at their backs. Ulf had enjoyed saying they'd let out one long, mournful howl, and then chase after it biting it into little pieces.

XXIX No Man's Land

At town's edge two crones in clay, mud and straw were replenishing the chinking between the logs of their steading. Next door old Geirrid and her two spinster daughters knelt on the seaward sloping half of their roof with hammers, planes, and a short, hoe shaped axe replacing a rotted plank. Wet laundry hung in the breeze at a number of steadings. Passing the roof crew he ignored their curious stares.

Two doors further a skinny blonde in her late teens broke off sharing words with his apprentice Gudrod to lean on a bony hip and batt her rouged eyelids at him. Her smirk said she knew something naughty.

"My hides done? Cousin?" he said.

Gudrod chased after him. Gudrod started a nervous apology. It was unseemly at the least, to be so open with an unmarried woman, especially his friend's cousin.

"You two." Jarnulf said. "A man doesn't spend that much time with his wife."

Gudrod put on a hangdog look and said he hadn't meant to damage Kolfinna's reputation.

"I'd be more worried about your own." Jarnulf said and waved him off. When it came to romance Mirha's cat showed more discretion.

Kolfinna had been ready to tell him to drop off another bale, but if that was the way he was going to be. Shame's caress flushed her. She'd long taken him for granted while the work he left her piled up, but she was nineteen already. A year after Uncle Ulf died her own father Lars deserted her. Her mother Marnee took to drink. She'd been at it ever since. Kolfinna had been thirteen at the time. Then Jarnulf's mother remarried and moved almost a hundred miles northwest. Over the next year Jarnulf spent the inheritance Ulf left him and more supporting her and her mother and he was still doing it.

Being a hunter took courage in no small amount. Christians, at least the adults, loudly scoffed at elves and such while avoiding trips into the forest of more than a few hundred yards and those only in daylight.

After the drink took Marnee the elves took her. She began seeing them first singly, peering from the forest edge at sunset, and then in troops of a dozen and more parading down main under the full moon. Fortunately they were a jovial lot, juggling colored pine cones and singing merry verses. Marnee had a remarkable eye, even cross eyed, for every detail of their gaunt, vine like frames and outfits of fresh flowers, even in winter, and leafy garlands.

She left them bowls of beer. They seemed to like it. The bowls were always empty come dawn. Folk said she was mad but as she'd never had evil words for anyone but Lars they couldn't call her evil.

Across the street her neighbor Hlidareth kept two greyhounds who knew that visitors sole purpose was to provide a lap for them to jump into. Olaf quietly noted that on each day after Marnee got the elves drunk Hlidareth's greyhounds were somewhat withdrawn and growly.

While Kolfinna and her mother were Jarnulf's household, and he was required to see to their needs, he paid her far more than he had to for making shoes, clothes and blankets of his hides. There were those who'd do it for less.

If anything happened to Jarnulf she could join another man's household as a dependent but her mother was still able bodied and capable of work, except for her drinking. Once she drank herself out of house and home she'd become a vagrant. The legal fate of male vagrants was castration.

It was a criminal offense to give vagrants food or anything more than leather for shoes and material for clothes. Jarnulf was entitled to be short with her from time to time, especially after what Mirha'd just done. Kolfinna determined she'd tell him about his hides later.

Half of the girls in town seemed on the same holiday, all halting their smirks and gossip as he passed.

A weathered gray, wooden bridge a dozen feet wide and forty long arched over the stream. As the echoes of Liv's shoes boomed out beneath it Jarnulf envisioned Rakel sneering as she, Sigrid and Kveldalf marched across it to take one more shot at Mirha. He laughed aloud at his vision of them half carrying her back across it.

On the far bank was the old wooden granary. Beyond it the barn, and beyond that the Church. It was of the older, expensive, stave construction. The walls were cubit wide, flat panels set upright into a mortised lintel. The lintels and floor joists rested a foot above ground on a foundation of rocks to keep them from dry rot. The shingles of its high peaked roof were weathered a charcoal black and cracking with age.

A huge cross hung above the porch roof and beneath the jutting roof pole. The pole curved up and out, capped with a man sized, open mouthed dragon head.

The church's huge stained glass windows were Hrafnstadir's bragging treasure. They'd been his grandfather Priest An's project.

Hrafnstadir's glassmakers busied themselves for twelve years with An's vision as the rest of Hrafnstadir groaned about its new church tithe to pay for it. Tore's first act as Chieftain was declaring the windows paid and overpaid and rescinding the tithe.

Behind the church lay the graveyard surrounded by a split rail fence. His father, and his fathers before him, lay buried beneath chest high cairns of stones at the west end. Ulf's cairn, as did most, had a carven, stone cross at its head. The history of the Thingi could be read, when the westered sun painted in the lengthening shadows of the tallest cairns against the back of the church. It often seemed to Jarnulf as if the lesser shades were accusing the taller for spending their lives for things everyone's kin could do without.

At graveyard's end stood a centuries old oak. No one had hung from it for years but the three Skraelings caught in the barn stealing horses one night when he was a child.

Outlawed two hundred yards to the oak's northwest were the dyer's, glass maker's, and blacksmith's off by themselves, obsessed as they were with setting fire to themselves. Jarnulf's eyes seized relieved on Hroghar's smithy and the pennants of gray black smoke above it. Behind Hroghar's fumed a dozen stacks of earth and wood where his wife and others buried and slow burned oak into charcoal.

A league further west stood the solitary tanner's shieling. It wasn't in danger of catching fire but despite the indispensable hides it produced, many wished it would burn down. Even goats avoided it.

Liv followed him into the barn. He hung her leather water bags in her stall and filched three dried apples from her crate up in the stall's rear. She followed him back outside. She gladly took the apples, and again offered him the look. He planted a hand on her muzzle. He pointed her at the field out between the buildings and slapped her flank. She waited for his second slap. He might relent. He often did. He sighed and walked off with her crunching after him nuzzling his elbow.

XXX Poached

He stopped before the church and crossed himself. No matter how often he'd stood before it staring up at its dragon head questing out from the roof's peak, and reverently basking in the promise of its protection it always pricked his nape.

Though the massive cross of rusted iron beneath it marked the place as God's own, still the dragon stood watch, serving warning to trolls or ghosts who might be minded to ride its roof pole a nights. The dragon was the tallest point in town, and could be seen above the aspens topping the bluff at the beach from miles out to sea.

Four teeth, cat like but forearm long, carved from thighbones of moose, dared all comers from its gaping, crimson maw. Scales of copper sheathed it, from pebble sized at its squared, dog snout, to fist large along its neck, overlaid in neat nailed rows.

Its dog ears of cast copper stood straining for whispers from the sea of impending menace. Their weathered blue green, glimmering with dew in the dawn's gray gold, or torch lit beneath night's star splashed ultramarine rarely failed to fill him with fearful awe.

Iron spines of black and rust orange, long as its fangs and angrily erect, crested its neck. Naught escaped the compass of its basilisk eyes. Huge as two fists they were, of still water polished glass, a proper serpent tawny green and with pupils black as Rakel's tresses, ellipses tapered top and bottom like throat cutting razors.

It seemed anything but amused with him today. It looked like his uncle always did whenever he'd missed the mark throwing knives. Jarnulf half expected it to sprout hands and hips, it hadn't any, just to plant one atop the other, like Ansvarr.

The dragon's twin behind the church cast its baleful glare, shepherd like, over the sleepers in the graveyard. From each of the church's steep slanting roof corners leered one of their arm length hatchlings. Every steading in town had its own roof pole dragon. Most were mere silhouettes. The more affluent bowed to custom according to their means.

His skin prickling dragon stare down was rimed over by an icier chill at the sound of his name. He turned. A weathered imp in her early fifties with both fists on the hips of her green tunic glared him down. The toe of one of her salt stained hip boots was drumming pieces of shell pave into ever smaller pieces.

"Good morning Maeve." he said, warily eying both her and the snow white gander at her right knee, as it eyed himself and Liv. An urge to draw his sword and whack the bird a good one, just on principle seized him, but not with Maeve watching. Maeve's gander was as possessive of her as Liv was of himself. It was also a vicious, and unprovoked biter. It had taken Bror unawares last week.

Maeve never touted her wealth. She pulled traps with the other women, which made her more approachable, which made her husband Tore's job easier.

"Did you talk to that thief yet?" she said.

"She denies it." he said.

"Well of course she does." Maeve said. "I swear, ever since your father, God rest him, had his awful accident, this place has gone all to hell. He'd straighten her out. I told her if I caught her pulling one of my traps I'd shoot her lazy ass. It's got so a woman's got to do everything around here if she wants it done. Can't get a lick of help out of you and the rest of those drunk womanizers."

"No one's seen her working your pots or anyone else's." he said.

Liv sensed that he needed reassuring. She tongue lathered his cheek with horse slobber.

"Blyeckh." he said, pushing her away.

"Well somebody's pulling them." Maeve said, craning forward at him. "I've got my bow in the boat with me."

Jarnulf threw up his hands in surrender.

"All right I'll go have another word with her. But you calm down. Even if she is stealing your catch it isn't worth a killing." he cut in, in spite of the fact that legally it was.

"And where's my arrows you were refletching last week?" she said. "I got Fenrir after my geese at night. Because you won't kick those lazy brats of yours into doing their job."

He returned her a cocked browed squint. Fenrir was the worst of wolves.

"Need dye for the nocker. Anja'll have it." he said, waving her off.

After another half dozen reassurances he took his leave with quickened step. Her admonitions pummeled his back for another thirty yards.

There was no way he was about to beard Logmadur Eirika with Maeve's nonsense. The woman wasn't some common thief. She was far worse, the sharpest lawyer he'd ever met. Every visit he paid her dragged into a half day on what he didn't know about the Law, and why, as Marshal, he was going to. Logmadur meant Lawman, not a marshal, but an expert at law. Eirika's title was an oxymoron.

Women were forbidden to practice law, bring suits, or sit on Kvidurs (empaneled jury/judges), but as Eirika knew more about it than anyone Tore endlessly consulted her and dragged her along to Althing to back him up.

He peered about, clawing at his nape and hoping not to sight all six feet of her in her ankle length purple gown, a perfect match to her choleric disposition, and long, goose gray hair, tied neatly behind her slender, sixty something shoulders. And those watery blue eyes above that taut line nose, he'd seen more warmth in an eagle's.

Despite weapons and women being illegal many here wore a knife on their belt beside their comb case, keys and scissors, and a few wore trousers. They did men's work eight months out of the year.

The thought that anyone would even look sideways at a woman bearing a bow wrought peals of laughter. They put too much sweat into their farming to let crop raiding deer devour it on summer nights. And woe to the toy wolf or fox caught sneaking a gosling.

Eirika lived alone, and modestly despite her means. She owned a ship. Half the profits from its every voyage were hers. It had belonged to her husband Grimkel. Grimkel had taken sick and died two years ago. They'd a son, Ari, who had disappeared thirty years earlier. They'd also had four daughters who'd kept Grimkel in a hair tearing fit till he married them off extremely well dowered to prominent men on Hellulandia, while spending barely enough on keeping his ship up to keep it from going down.

Ari had been eleven and an apprentice hunter. The hunter he was apprenticed to, Eirika's cousin Thjostolf, didn't disappear. He was found murdered on the southern border. Tore had just been elected Chieftain, and Grimkel fought him for years at his refusal to start a war with Nacarr over it.

"Only an idiot takes vengeance right away," Tore had said. "and only a coward never does."

On the landing at Starri's shop Bror was fidgeting before the door still chained and locked, and craning his neck north up the street. Almost forty and all of five five in his boots, with lank black hair, beady eyes, and brows, nose, cheeks and chin that slashed out like a fistful of knives.

Olaf alone was forever teasing him, saying he belonged under a bridge somewhere in a children's tale stealing goats. Two inches of inkvine along his left jawbone twitched alive like summer lightning on those rare occasions when someone crossed the line with him.

Catching sight of Jarnulf, Bror left off his pacing and stepped sideways toward him, bristling his black brows high, and thrusting his hands out palms up.

"Where's Rakel? Hroghar hasn't a nail in the shieling." Bror said.

"Starri buy him out again?" Jarnulf said. "Before he sailed?"

"Olaf beat him to it this year." Bror said. "Left all of them except a two pound sack right at Hroghar's. He shaved Starri good before Starri hauled them over here."

Jarnulf told Bror where he suspected Rakel was, and why, and might remain, for the next few days. Bror snorted a laugh through his nose before telling Jarnulf to give little Mirha a kiss for him.

Bror's steading in the north woods was a hundred yards from the ocean. It had formerly belonged to Gorm, the solitary ancient who'd dumped Mirha into his lap. The patch of ocean before his steading contained the richest lobster beds for miles. It was home to Maeve's traps.

Perhaps Bror might be willing to tell him about his taking a look, from time to time. Bror spit.

"Guarding lobster pots?" Bror said. "I'm going to drown in my sleep if I don't get Gorm's roof fixed."

"Of course not." Jarnulf said. "Just be overheard so it will get back to her. And its been your roof for almost a year now."

"I know," Bror sighed. "but it still just doesn't seem right around here without the old fellow."

"Bror," Jarnulf said. "Maeve says she's carrying her bow with her in the boat."

"Oh God help us all," Bror groaned. "if she misses."

"She's full of it." Jarnulf said. "They cooked this up together to keep me avoiding them so I wouldn't wind whatever else they're conspiring in."

Bror withdrew a fold of homespun from his pocket and handed it to Jarnulf. It contained a fine, curved needle of bone which he had spent an evening carving and filing.

"I'm sure she'll thank you for it," Jarnulf said. "after she gets through making it my fault I had to find out what really happened between her and Rakel this morning. And where's Ansvarr? Thought he was going to help you today."

"I hit him up at home earlier." Bror said. "No sleep last night."

"He's not the same," Jarnulf said. "since those ten days in Nacarr's back yard, and it's more than the trail he found along our border."

Bror eyed him as a man would his own son caught lying to him.

"You know full damn well what he found." Bror said. "We all do. And all I ever got out of him was one night this winter, he was dead drunk, almost passed out, muttering to himself nobody lays a finger on the bitch but me, nobody watches."

"Whatever it takes." Jarnulf said.

"Don't know." Bror said. "The men dead in his trail right here never bothered him. It was actually seeing it. He can't not see it now. It's stuck inside him. He can't get it out. Clawing his eyes from the inside. He's scared that if he dresses it out for us, shows us its teeth and claws, that's all it'll need to get us too."

Jarnulf put the needle in his belt pouch and offered Bror a hungry grin.

"He didn't say we couldn't listen, did he?" he said.

"Huh?" Bror said.

"While we're standing guard around him?" Jarnulf said. "Shooing off the curious?"

"No, he did not." Bror laughed back at him.

XXXI Da'hal The Black

Twenty yards from Hroghar's smithy Liv stopped short. Jarnulf let her be. If he ordered her any closer she'd desert him the instant he turned his back. Hroghar's meant a shoeing. He marched within.

Women trooped out to Hroghar's at all times of day but none lingered. Little girls who misbehaved were threatened with a future apprenticeship here. Jarnulf stopped just within the door. It was insufferably hot even with the roof shutters open, and cocooned in soot blacker than a dead man's dreams.

In the shieling's heart its light bending bed of night blue charcoal, six feet square by three high, snapped, sighed, and from its myriad violet, red orange eyes winked out its sorceror's summons, 'Come, pitch yourself into our grasp, and be transformed into something useful.'

Racks along the bed's brick walls sported a brown iron forest of specialty tongs. Crafting such a collection could take a competent smith a year or more. Beyond the rifflings of the bed's upwending fire breath one of the three kilns along the back wall also searched him out with its deep orange red glower.

Haloed crimson and shirtless, side on before it, accoutered in forge filth, leather apron, mitts and cap, loomed Da'hal. Sweat rivered, gleaming down through his knotted muscles.

The tongs in his left hand pinned an orange plat of iron atop the anvil before him as the hammer in his right leisurely clanked it into a door hinge. He was the spitting image, but for his coal black hair, of his father, long limbed and loose jointed with broad shoulders, a tapered waist and hips, and agile and sneaky as a specter for all his sharp chiseled brawn. But it was in Da'hal's bony face that the wolf habitually slinking about, more than even the rest, routinely set strangers on edge.

His hammered, broken bell tocsins ringing through the kiln's deep, dragon's breath sigh only further exacerbated his already bloated pretensions as the Lord of Hell at play in his living room. To Jarnulf the place was heaven. Magic, glorious, woman free, black, metal magic, was conjured here.

Debris from bent plows to broken swords all entered within to exit weeks later as weapons, cookware, farm tools, fish hooks, tapered rectangular nails, and anything else anyone would pay for. It was relatively quiet at the moment. It got a lot noisier in the winter when men traded weeks of their sweat for such goods and services.

Da'hal and Jarnulf were sworn brothers. If one were attacked or killed, his sworn brother took vengeance. Failure to avenge one's brother heaped dishonor and scorn upon the survivor. Badger, off sailing with Tore, was also of their brotherhood.

Da'hal was not his given name. He'd been christened Thorgrim.

He'd grown to almost his full height by his fifteenth winter. That following summer at Thing a scrappy little Saxon from Thunderstadir stared up at him all agog and demanded "Now jewst Wot, in da' Hail, moight yew bee?"

Thorgrim found it amusing, and flattering, and had insisted on calling himself Da'Hjael, but the girls insisted on toning it down to Da'hall, as he seemed to be spending more and more time drinking in Da' Hall.

"Hey, Sky Skull." Jarnulf called to him.

"Catch!" Da'hal snarled, and cat quick he whipped about. Irresolute as he shown, quavering through the charcoal's fire breath, his intent showed cold and hard as the hammer rising in his long, loose, corded arm behind his shoulder. Jarnulf flinched despite himself. Da'hal shook the shieling with an evil, booming laugh. Da'hal was a master of evil laughs.

"Hey." Jarnulf yelled. "Liv's out front."

"By the ankles of The Virgin." the giant roared. "Then it would have been your own goddamn fault for not saying so sooner."

Each eyed thunder at the other for a moment and then both refilled the shieling with dark laughter.

Da'hal adored the memory of Richard the Lion Heart who'd been dead now eighty years. Richard had adored infuriating Priests, Bishops, and Cardinals with his vile, offhand sacrilege, routinely cursing by the private parts of the Trinity.

They assured Richard he'd reap the torments of hell for it, exactly as Logmadur Eirika was ever upbraiding Da'hal for his bellowed impieties. Richard had a real corker for his threateners. Da'hal, who could have tossed Eirika right across the street like a kid's doll, had once, and only once, tried it on her.

'From the devil have I come, and to the devil will I undoubtedly return.'

It took his swagger a month to regrow the strip she barked off it.

From the first Da'hal had been enraptured with thunder. Storms animated him greatly in his cradle. He'd shriek out savage ululations of infant glee, while struggling to stand erect and shaking his cradle so violently that Hroghar added iron to its base, lest his boy topple it and crack his skull. The nearer and louder the storm, the more manic he waxed. His mother believed him a fey child.

Hroghar hid his thoughts from her. Someone, someday, and their whole damn neighborhood would get themselves many a sleepless night from their little Thorgrim.

In his twelfth summer he'd been standing out in the field's midst, worshiping a lightning storm with head back and arms thrown wide, grinning skull like up at the jags of white fire. One returned his adoration with its kiss.

His parents shuddered, crossing themselves repeatedly while wondering if the old Thunderer, or worse, had sensed a useful tool and reached back for it, from beyond.

Genevieve gave Hroghar seventeen shades of hell for bullying her into christening him Thorgrim, which meant the masked Thor.

Hroghar refused to be bullied into any apology, repeatedly, until she threatened to tell Da'hal his darkest secret, that his own father had been christened Richard.

Hroghar had heard all about the Lion Heart's warts and thought his former neighbors in Rouen, his own father included, were great fools for painting them over into beauty marks.

The Lion Heart took his first military command at eleven. By fourteen he was known as Richard The Ruthless. Rebellious nobles were continually rebelling. Richard was continually hanging them and everyone in their castles. After his first conquest in Jerusalem Land, at Acre, he marched 2700 captives out before the Muslim army and had them all butchered.

Da'hal lowered his hammer.

"It's been ten summers." he growled.

"I can still feel that last one whizzing past my nose." Jarnulf said. "And you might have struck Liv."

Da'hal's booming, giant laughter rolled again through the shieling, but its cocky menace stumbled, barking its shins badly.

"So the bench in the outhouse finally gave out." Da'hal said.

In unison they chorused the rejoinder.

"All the way to a year's worth at the bottom."

"I heard Mirha gave Rakel many Skeggjold words, while she was beating her." Da'hal said. "Such language, tsk-tsk-tsk."

Skeggjold was a Valkyr. Her name meant 'Old Beard' as in a bearded, or long edged axe.

Jarnulf waited an anxious moment, and then another. His mistress was not running his household, he was. Begging his huge friend for details of the little witch's doings was an embarrassing admission to the contrary. The giant smirked in silence, enjoying Jarnulf's moments.

"Where's Kjartan?" Jarnulf finally countered, having endured his surfeit of smirk. His barb went home but didn't draw blood. It was long blunt from being flung too often already. Kjartan was Da'hal's apprentice, hunter and smith, and Da'hal's responsibility.

"Trying to get Outlawed, I suppose." Da'hal sighed. "His usual useless self, hung over or working on one in some girl's bed. I ran into Galinn last night. He and Ansvarr killed another of Nacarr's perverts in your back yard yesterday. Two more dropped the does they stole and made it across the river."

He paused for emphasis.

"They were ten miles further west this time."

The twain's eyes traded that wordless agreement of skulking assassins, you strangle the one on the left, I'll stab the right.

XXXII What I Wouldn't Give

"You'd think they'd learn." Jarnulf said. "I'm losing count of the ones we've shot."

Jarnulf knew exactly how many he'd shot, as did Da'hal and every other hunter, and were quite proud of their tallies.

"A curse upon Tore, Hroald and the rest." Da'hal snorted, waving his arms and hammer wildly about. "We'd be better served just riding straight into Nahristadir."

Naming his Thingmen the Nahri was a piece of Chieftain Nacarr's humor. Nari was one of Loki's sons.

"So what?" Jarnulf said, "He'll come calling this summer."

"I am sore afraid," Da'hal moaned. "that they even stole that from us."

Nacarr had sent his regrets to Tore at the last moment. He couldn't sail with them as planned this season, but his man Skjalg would command in his place. Nacarr had been thrown from a horse and injured his leg. Nacarr was an excellent, and brutal horseman. The only way he'd come unstuck from his saddle was if the animal were shot from under him.

"What I wouldn't give to have him right here." Da'hal said, and hammered the hinge plate atop his anvil a punishing, ruinous blow.

"If wishes were horses." Jarnulf said.

"We'd be up to our eyes instead of our noses in their horseshit." Da'hal said.

"And Chieftain Eikinn's." Jarnulf said.

"May a curse fly up his ass too." Da'hal said.

"Well the rest of us," Jarnulf said. "would like to know when you're coming to work, Mister hunter Da'hal, to give the rest of us a hand, filling the smoke house, of course."

Filling the smoke house was the last reason likely to pry Da'hal from his forge. An offer of the southern border and poaching Nahri however, and Hroghar, wherever he was, would return to find the first someone Da'hal could dash out and grab minding his fires.

"Well, Mister Lord High Mar e chal, Dispenser Of," Da'hal sneered.

"Speaking of horseshit." Jarnulf sneered back.

"Galinn taught you deer almost from upwind." Da'hal said. "Ansvarr taught you never to bet money at every board game there ever was. Bror beat you half dead making you sword and axe proof. Gunnar kept telling you that luck left unleashed was a back stabbing bitch. But dead drunk you out foxed them and Hroald all together."

"And I'd appreciate it if you'd stop reminding me." Jarnulf said.

"Ten days." Da'hal said. "Sailors got all winter to get their gear mended and every year half of them wait till three weeks before they sail to bring it in. Father rented out everything in the place this year. You just missed Hlif."

"And I hope not to be given another chance to miss her." he said.

"Anyway," Da'hal said. "She just left. Her and Aerin just discovered that three of the five plows sitting in the barn all winter need fixing."

"Funny how the more grown up she gets has her finding all these fixings needing your attention." Jarnulf said.

"And?" Da'hal said.

"And, have you shears I might buy?" Jarnulf said.

Da'hal said that he did not and Jarnulf told him of Tjorni and Aud's dispute. Da'hal agreed that neither girl was so rich in friends that they could afford to lose each other.

"I need words with Olaf." Jarnulf said. He headed for the door.

"I'll be here." Da'hal's voice boomed out after him as Jarnulf soundly cursed his missing mare. As usual he'd been too long farting around with Da'hal and Liv had fallen to remembering all the shoeings she'd been subjected to here.

Next door was the dyers shieling. Liv was hiding around back and a four wintered girl, Alvhild, was offering the pretty horsey a handful of twigs. The flowers weren't blooming yet. Jarnulf snuck to the shieling's corner, clicking his tongue and snapping his fingers to Liv.

From behind, a thirtyish blonde ambushed him. Her woolen dress was splotched with every shade imaginable. Alvhild's mother Hlidareth, with her purple dyed fingers, immodestly hiked up her hem to show him the nasty red welt on her calf.

"The geese don't run loose when Tore's home." she said.

Indeed. Whatever law Tore wanted kept was kept, right until the horizon drank down his sail. Jarnulf told her that that was what God made sticks for. Just crack the damn thing a good one. Hlidareth said she'd gladly lay Maeve's gander out for dinner if he didn't mind finding them both before his table arguing over compensation for it.

"And where's my best spoon?" she said. Hlidareth's spoon, wooden carrying case and all, had walked away from her bench in the shieling three days ago. Something as personal as a spoon was often very ornate and no small work went into carving it.

Hlidareth was a widow and beneath her many hues a rather attractive one. Her spoon and its case snared Ansvarr's eye and became his immediate cause, which did not displease Hlidareth but needling Jarnulf was as comfortable as old shoes to her.

Jarnulf collected his mare and set off for Olaf's wondering what he wouldn't give to be rid of all these women and their petty nonsense. Hlidareth's new spoon was almost finished. He'd seen it twice already. Ansvarr was carving a masterpiece. Hlidareth would gladly have given him his green dye but in his rush to shed her asking for it didn't occur to him.

XXXIII Heretics

A quarter mile into the forest the clearing surrounding Olaf's steading welcomed him. Wet laundry hung from a rope beneath the eaves. He knocked thrice and was invited in.

A hoof landed, tentative, on the step behind him. He regarded Liv sternly.

"You know better." he said, and she stepped down.

Immediately within on the pillars nearest the door Olaf's shields saluted him. They were two foot circles of pine with rearing stallions painted brown on white. The squared pillar's back sides sported two six foot throwing spears and a third spear between them half as long again. Pillar and arsenal were duplicated across the walking space up on Olaf's south platform, as in his own, and every steading in town.

A fat, dead turkey topped the chest inside the door. Up on the steading's north platform, behind her table, sat a trim, blonde, blue eyed goddess wearing a simple shift of gray homespun, bereft of makeup or jewelry as usual.

She was inking letters onto a sheaf of sheepskin. Two foot tall stacks of it lay at the tables' near edge, one blank and the other covered with inch tall, ornate script of pale greens, reds, blues, and black. In the table's midst between them sputtered four fat white candles. To her left sat her open Bible. It was in Latin. She was transcribing it into Norrona. She'd been working on this copy all winter between teaching neighbors of all ages to read. She might even have it finished when the ships returned.

While Starri could read still it seemed a waste for him of all people to pay her a year's wages for it. But then he always had to have the biggest and best.

Jarnulf's hilt dragon settled in for a nap like a well fed old dog even though Anja was more to blame for his troubles than anyone, having sicked his bansidhe on him.

Anja not only spoke, but could read and write Latin, Aenglisc and Frankish, as well as Norrona, and most of it self-taught. Her grandfather had been a very wealthy and curious man who'd taken great pains collecting every scrap of written parchment within rumor of him. Anja inherited his library. Norrona as a written language was only in its second century. She'd compiled three Bibles already continually refining her translation.

The papacy forbid lay persons to read the Scriptures. The Pope was Christ's intermediary. The laity couldn't be trusted with Christ's Holy gospel except as transmitted through the Church.

Anja was one of those determined to decode whatever secrets the Church feared might be learned by the little people. To the papacy, the single greatest heresy, the one that had already gotten tens of thousands of Christians butchered by the Pope's agents, had lain in declaring that nowhere in the Scriptures was there any mention of a Pope being indispensable to individual salvation.

Anja was the worst sort of heretic, joyously spreading the infection of scriptural literacy wherever it might incubate.

Her genius with letters was a sad compensation Jarnulf often reflected. After years of trying with Olaf, Anja had concluded she was barren.

"Nice tom." he said. "Mirha and I inhaled the one you brought us last week."

"Fun part's over." she said. "Should be boiling and plucking it. Latin. That clearer understanding always barging into whatever else needs doing."

He'd watched her with his mouth open nail three straight one afternoon with the bow he'd built her. It was no mean feat. Shoot the first and the rest of the flock disappeared with even worse disorder and caterwauling than the mead at Mordach's Hall when the ships got home.

He stepped up on to the platform. He dug through the moss in his pouch for three silver pennies in its depths and laid them on the table. She dried her brush and laid it atop an ink pot before turning her bemused frown up to him. She pushed his silver back at him.

"You two are family." she said.

"I haven't time to be teaching her letters." Jarnulf said.

"No. You won't make time." Anja laughed.

"Where's that Ottarr you married?" he said.

"Probably the butts." she said. "Him and that recurve you made him, his favorite, were both gone when I got back from the stream. Seen Mirha this morning?"

"Yes, I see her every morning." he said.

"And did she fill you in on her doings?" Anja said.

"Right out to her skinned knuckles." he said.

"You're going to have to stick your nose in it this time." Anja pointed a finger at him as if she were his exasperated older sister. "Rakel will be up and around soon enough, and once she is, she won't take this lying down. And just what exactly did Mirha tell you?" she said.

Jarnulf retold Mirha's telling to her.

"Oh Ho." Anja said, raising a blonde brow high. "She must have been practicing her answer for a while. Spat it out like lightning. This one was beneath even Ref."

Anja recited Mirha's reply to Rakel's slander.

Fjord of cow farts

Ice choked in summer

croaks sorrow, in wonder,

nest of many bed snakes.

Anja thought that no matter how many times she'd watched him make a ass of himself over girl after girl she'd never yet seen him flush beet red. She continued, as his hand snuck unconsciously, instinctively, to the security of his hilt dragon.

"Even Kveldalf thought those words over large." Anja said. "She didn't even try to talk Rakel out of it this time. Sigrid tried to pull Mirha off but Maeve and Astrid stopped her. Maeve said as how it was Rakel threw the first punch, she could damn well get herself out of it. No one's stood up to her like that in a long time and I know she's never got a beating like that.

Mirha gave us all a start when she snatched Rakel's knife, but she just tossed it in the stream. I'll have the older women keep an eye on her but we can't protect her forever."

"I'd best go deal with Rakel." Jarnulf said, swallowing his heart, his middle nail scratching mindlessly the carved dragon teeth of his pommel.

"You would have been proud of Mirha if you'd been there." Anja said.

At the moment he wanted to wring her neck, or perhaps just shooting her would be easier.

"Have you greens you can spare?" he said.

Ink was a gall produced by oak trees where wasps bored into them to lay eggs. After being dissolved in vinegar and thickened with egg white, it bit into the sheepskin. Various iron salts, verdigris, rusts and red and yellow ochers colored it.

"Fletchings?" she said.

He nodded. She raised from her bench and wincing, hobbled to the hearth's sideboard. She separated out a half dozen, green mallard quills from the two dozen black, yellow, and gray ones, and offered them to him.

He noted her ginger footing. She quill pointed to a brand new pair of shoes, ornately tooled with flowers and serpents, before the doorside chest.

"Overdid it breaking them in, blisters." she said. "He's forever buying me gifts and doing without, especially since he bought that horse. I wish he'd stop it."

"Oh do you now?" Jarnulf said. They traded impish grins. He dropped the quills into his quiver and headed smartly for the door, dreading she might be holding onto yet further, horrifying revelations. She called out to him.

He turned just in time to catch the coins she tossed at him, one by one as she ordered him to take one of Olaf's cloaks lest he freeze. Grumbling his thanks, he took it from its pillar peg. She tossed him the long fastening pin from her own.

"She had it coming." Anja said. "Naming Mirha matar ast "(meat love) which meant the only love a woman had for a man was the meat he put on her table.

Beneath his breath curses wrapped themselves around Rakel's name. Most of her mischief drew stares like a hammered thumb in a shipyard, a half dozen muted groans followed by turned heads.

At the sight of her steading, second to last on the north end of town, sick sweet repulsions cascaded through his gut. The leafless, gnarled black orchard forty yards behind her steading only deepened his need to be heading anywhere else. From the south seven crows winged their way toward him and then veered northwest toward the archery butts. He stopped short mightily tempted to accept their counsel and Liv suckered him with another kiss.

"Goddamn women." he groaned, swiping it off.

XXXIV Broken Toys

Liv nuzzled his shoulder right to Rakel's steps. He tapped her ever so lightly between her nostrils.

"Not here, of all places." he groaned.

Before the door he plucked a single, brown hair from his comb and cursed before jamming it back into its sheath on his belt. It went home with a snick. He cursed again. He'd broken one of its teeth. He knocked, thrice.

A small breasted blonde pine tree in a pale green dress loomed from behind the door and demanded of him what the hell he wanted. All that was missing, he thought, was a bit in her teeth to match those heavy silver earrings.

An image of himself patting her cheek and feeding her half an apple sprang to mind but he shoved it back into the shadows before something worse slithered from his lips. He was here to prevent another fight, not start one.

Perfectly proportioned but delicate, thin waisted with slender, boyish hips and shoulders as if she'd been stretched out and thinned on a rack, Kveldalf Chatterer glared blondely down at him, folding her arms. Kveldalf meant Evening Elf. Her skin was no darker than moonlight, and she lost no chance to lord it over the other girls, but at a full hand taller than himself, she was no elf.

They'd been friends once. That rimed over the night he shoved Ulf's knife through Ketil's, her second cousin's, throat.

He noted the backs of her hands and their three fresh bee stings.

No satisfaction there either. She was usually showing a few and considered herself blessed. Bee keeping paid more than well enough to ignore the stings. Honey wasn't the only thing people paid silver for.

Their combs were a Hall keep's hotly sought staple. Mead was fermented from honeycombs and rotten bilberries, cranberries, or blueberries. Wine came from currants and cranberries as the limit of Vinland with its grape vines lay two days sail to the south.

"I need words with Rakel." he said.

"Of all the folk she wants none of today." Kveldalf said.

He sighed, shook his head, and stepped toward her, wishing she were Sigrid, Aud, Adis, or anyone else. If there was anything a woman wanted to know about another, especially if it were none of her business, Kveldalf was the one to ask.

"Are you deaf as well as stupid?" she said, spreading her elbows to block the doorway.

"Are you absolutely certain you absolutely want to stand in my way?" he said.

Whatever she'd intended to say next stuck in her throat as he shoved his way past her and leaned his quiver and bow against the door sill.

Rakel's pillar shields glared at him. They bore her uncle's emblem. Women could only act as the legal head of their household if they hadn't a close male relative to perform the office.

Starri's emblem was a berserk in silver chain and helm, threatening with upraised sword. His bug eyes were vacant moons and he was savagely biting the rim of his own shield. Berserks had long ago outlived their usefulness, and immunity. Their idiot rages were as like to kill friend as foe. The word meant bear shirt, as in wrapping or shape shifting oneself into a bear.

Jarnulf stepped up onto Rakel's wide, richly appointed platform, and stomped off past her roof pillars toward her bed closet door, which slammed violently shut, rattling the glassware on her sideboard.

What paneling Rakel's tapestries didn't hide was only lightly smoke darkened. Her steading was three years new. Thick, purple and red wool rugs, woven with yellow flowers and green vines hid most of her platforms. Her hearth stones were close set and fine mortared. Conspicuously absent was any loom leaning against a wall.

At her bed closet door he leaned heavily against the sill, grimacing sour. Usually, through the playpen of her lambent, chestnut eyes snuck a hen filching fox nipping at a wounded doe. And those hips. A man could be injured as if playing a ball game. Winter sports included a vigorous contest on ice with a large ball, bone skates, and scrapers of bone and antler. The ball was made of wood. Sore losers sometimes hurled it at your head.

He sucked at his teeth, dreading the awful metamorphosis lurking within like some spiteful dragon in its cave furious at having its treasure or in this case its standing smeared with shit.

He kicked softly, twice, at the closed door.

"We've matters to discuss." he told the door. Profanity raged beyond it. He had no business in her steading and the trolls would take her before she'd hurl curses at him over anything. He stepped aside and shoved the door open. A chamber pot flew out past his nose.

XXXV Then Things Are Looking Up

He charged into the room for the nightstand by her bed. Perhaps he could reach it before she snatched up something worse to hurl.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, glaring at the floor. A cheery little fire crackled in the steading's second hearth in her bed closet. Closet, Hell, it was a bed barn.

Rakel lived well. On what Starri paid her she could afford to.

She was dressed in workaday buckskins, a far cry from her usual black leathers, wolf cape, broad, brass riveted belt, too much eyeshadow, blood red lips and nails, and that knife, the whale skinner, whenever she, Sigrid and the others stormed through town.

No, that wasn't fair, he thought. Aud took great pains to be taken for a rag picker. Kveldalf always wore dresses and half the rouge. All cloud tall of her was obsessed with playing the perfect, prospective bride for Da'hal, who had other ideas. Strawberry blonde, pixie Adis, whom Jarnulf suspected thought she was slumming it with them, usually dressed a gaudy cut above, and decorated herself with a hefty slab of her dilettante jeweler's inventory.

In Rakel's case at least, me knew her rough trade look for a lie. Whatever Sigrid and Aud got up to at night with each other might well be the stuff a man's dreams were made of but this was not the time to let his mind wander off down that lane again.

Two night blue jars of unguents perched at the nightstand's edge. Behind them roosted a dented, tin tea pot, its contents surely laced with a soporific. Rakel finally turned, acknowledging him with a sneer.

Their eyes traded sword strokes. Neither the wounded doe nor fox were home today. An adder had evicted them. The lights in them were still there but glinting hard like the last sparkle of sun before black thunder heads burst down upon a lead rough, winter sea.

"Come to gloat?" Rakel said.

"No." he said, inspecting her shiny, well-greased face. Her soft, hollowed cheeks blazed red with fury and shame. Her for once unrouged, heart shaped lips were tight, thin and snow cold. And that delicate, straight snoot, which he had so oft nuzzled, so ecstatically, once. Its desecration bordered on sacrilege. Mirha hadn't been blowing smoke. She'd softened Rakel up just like a stiff, old hide shoe in spring, with a hammer.

It was too soon for her skin to start purpling but the swelling around her eyes had begun. Both cheekbones and eyebrows showed red abrasions aplenty. There were still traces of dried blood beneath her nostrils but it was her ears that interested him most. Both looked like beets and promised that even blowing on them would raise a howl out of her. Almost as an afterthought he noted her left leg. It was extended at what must have been an uncomfortable angle. She returned to studying a wine stain in her rug.

"What are you doing here?" she said.

"Seeing to your continued good health." he said.

"You break into my bed closet to salt the wound?" she said.

The narcotic of his belt top dragon beckoned. He folded his arms in no small haste. Rakel's snake eyes drilled him and volumes passed unspoken between them. She was all too familiar with his obsessions. She'd started numberless fights with him over nothing more than, as she saw it, his blustery sword fondlings.

"I'll spare you the hypocrisy," he said. "of saying I'm sorry to see you all banged up like this. But I want you to know I hope something far worse doesn't happen to you in the future."

"She got in a cheap shot. It won't happen again." she said.

"Then things are looking up." he said. "Because you're right. It won't happen again. You've been bullying Mirha from the start and I'm telling you that this, is the end of it."

"That scatterbrained slut." she began.

He cut her off.

"What you went raking up wasn't oysters." he said. "If Mirha knew you half as well as I do she'd have fetched a rock and bashed your head in with it. She still doesn't understand just how petty and vindictive you are. If anything happens to her, if you or any of your coven get within shouting distance of her, it's your ass."

Rakel tried on another sneer and immediately regretted it.

"I'll have her Outlawed!" she shrieked.

Initiators of assaults, verbal or physical, forfeited their immunity on the spot. But now that Mirha and Rakel had left the scene of the action their recourse lay in self judgment, a private reconciliation, which was as likely as getting stones to float, or in Court. There, either could be pronounced a Lesser Outlaw. Between them they'd totaled up enough such assaults in the last year and a half to get them both Outlawed for ten eternities.

The judges had no say in altering penalties. The law was the law. As Mirha's owner, if he couldn't control her he too was liable.

He toyed with his sleeve. It wasn't going to call attention to itself through his fingers. She'd dare him to use it on her just to embarrass him.

She fixed her serpent eyes down on his cold, cracked and lifeless dragon. He was always playing with it, caressing it, stroking it. The wonder was he hadn't tried to stuff her with it, as if it were his manhood. He was definitely all wolf mooded today. He hadn't even bothered with his comb first.

He tightened his grip on his biceps.

"Try Court, and I'll give you worse." he said. "You've got more to lose than she does."

Rakel flushed a hotter crimson. She looked like she'd swallowed a hummingbird. Rakel spent half of her life squeezing into and out of leathers that left little to the imagination and that seax of hers was no work knife. It was long as his short sword and heavier.

For a woman to wear either was Lesser Outlawry. Compounding Lesser Outlawries became Full Outlawry.

Chieftain Tore took a dim view of his Thingmen going to Court. Testimony in any matter would reveal Hrafnstadir itself as a target for being Outlawed. The Law Council at Althing was well aware of how loose things stood, or rather flopped about, here. They looked the other way. But having it crop up weed like in open Court was something else. There was no telling where the harvest would end.

Prosecution of many offences lay open to anyone who wished to take them up, if the principal in the case wouldn't. The idea at least, was that even the weakest of Thingmen who dared not force their malefactor to Court, would, through others see their rights upheld, for a percentage.

Upon conviction the prosecutor collected a portion of a Full Outlaw's wealth in a second proceeding, a Confiscation Court.

Problems in Hrafnstadir which couldn't be settled through self-judgment or arbitration routinely wound up before a Husthing, a District Court, or House Thing, at home. If Rakel demanded her right to Court, Tore could put a stop to it there, but he had to make it look good. Jarnulf wasn't certain where Starri would stand on it, after this. Creating a disagreement between those two, with himself in the middle, . . .

Rakel turned frigid and haughty.

"Starri will just have Tore use his Chieftain's veto and your case will never even be heard." she said.

"And my own standing with Tore, is as wobbly as yours is with yourself today?" he said.

"You force your way into my bed closet to threaten me after your trael assaults me?" she said. "Do you have any idea what a Husthing alone will do to you for this? Who do you think you are? The only folk you have any authority over are those precious hunters of yours."

"Yes, I am in charge of them." he said. "And they're in charge of protecting everyone until the sailors return. That gives me the right to do what I've just done, talk to you any damn way I see fit, and everything more."

She glared back with the gut wrenching scorn only a discarded lover can.

"As for a Husthing," he said pointing to her stiff knee, "even if you had a leg to stand on, I'd love to see you explain, in front of the whole damn Thingi, how you let a girl half your size beat the snot out of you."

He turned to leave.

"Have a care." she said. "It's a dangerous world and accidents happen to people all the time."

Whipping about he bent over so they were eye to eye, wrestling with the impossibility of his desire to grab her throat and shake her. She was still somehow his, like a cherished but broken toy a child hides away from himself because even seeing it makes him heartsick and furious that it's broken. He won't play with it, but he still can't discard it, and Rakel knew this because she couldn't discard her broken toy either. Instead, she considered biting his handsome nose.

"If any accidents, as you put it, happen," he said. "You'd best be sure they happen to me first, because if I'm still alive I will take a positive delight in dressing you out like a deer and tossing you on a bait pile."

He straightened, wiping his hands against each other as if that settled it. She scoff groaned back. His empty threats were nothing new, and contrary to his manly fantasies they were as manly seeming and endearing as a bet winning beer fart.

"You pompous ass." she said. "You spend half your life running and hiding from old women who don't even have a bone to pick with you, and now you're going to murder me?

He leaned back into her face. There, at bed play's distance, bolts of blue fire leapt between their eyes. His bony brow swelled into her mind. He thrust an upright finger between them. That knuckle looked awfully big, she thought, too big for the rest of him. Perhaps some elf had haunted his cradle, and cursed into him a night breath of its elder, forest portion.

"My men do what they do," he hissed. "because they're the best forest men in the Thingi. And they're my men. Do you really think that my men would even try to catch me?"

It hit her like a kick in the face. He'd walked right out of his wits. He could toy with his title, swords, and comb till Hell froze but Hroald was running things and everyone knew it.

He made for the door to gather his gear, and Kveldalf dropped the cleaver she'd armed herself with onto the table and stepped back from it. With the mood he'd worked himself into brandishing it no longer seemed a good idea.

"This will establish you as a man to be reckoned with." Kveldalf said.

He ordered her to silence.

"You had to wait till poor cousin Ketil was cross eyed drunk before you dared murder him. Now you've moved up to crippled girls." she said.

He wanted to slap her but settled for pointing and yelling instead.

"What goes for her goes for you and the others, twice!"

From the bed closet Rakel offered him her parting benediction, in full shriek.

"Die into hell you son of a bitch!"

Kveldalf's shrill whinnying followed him out the door.

"When the other men hear of this they'll all run, farting, from the very sight of Jarnulf the Terrifier. Trolls take you and all your friends."

Her screechings shattered in a gibbering crescendo as she ran smack into Liv, up on the porch, who snorted, displeased, into a choppy canter down the steps chasing Jarnulf as he rounded the steading's corner. Kveldalf whipped back inside and barred the door.

XXXVI The Fenris Wolf

He dog trotted for the orchard anxious to avoid any questions about what he'd been doing at Rakel's. With Kveldalf's horse sized mouth half the town would know it word for word and more by noon anyway. He'd have a lap full of questions and accusations as it was when Tore and Starri, and Rakel's current man interest Dalla returned.

Before he'd even covered the forty yards to the apple trees, they minded him of a field of naked, burnt, witches at the moment, he found himself cursing Rakel, Kveldalf, and women in general, repeatedly. Rakel had collared him dead center into the very spot he'd spent the last year and a half sidestepping. He'd had no intentions of offering her anything more than a few vague intimations.

When the keels ground ashore it wouldn't be nightfall before Dalla made a pain in the ass of himself. Skipper Dalla was a fo'c'sulman first and foremost. That honor went to the toughest fighter on the ship, and his standing as such took failing to push the issue, in public, right off the table.

Up to now they had gone their separate ways with barely a word to each other. This was only his second season as a skipper. He'd sailed the previous three as Grimkel's fo'c'sulman.

The pragmatist in Tore, after deciding no one had any gain in the affair, would probably tell Rakel to go piss up a rope. Starri, on the other hand, would be a whole 'nuther kettle of fish.

Of course the manner he'd chosen to dump Rakel could have had more than a rotten herring to do with it, if Starri had somehow sniffed the details. No, that wasn't possible. Rakel's arrogance would never have allowed it to get out. Starri would have killed him.

She'd started a God awful fight with him in bed that night over something he couldn't even remember. It went on for quite some time. The glassware she broke he'd tolerated well enough. It was cheap stuff anyway. With her in his life it had to be.
But when she shrilled that he'd never have dared to face Ketil sober, he hauled her over his knee and shared his other feelings with her, the ones he doubted she really wanted to talk about, as he spanked her alabaster ass into a pair of stinging, quivering rubies. Then he handed her a torch and tossed her, and her clothes after her, out into the night.

Short of a Husthing, Tore owned the final say, but Starri might still convince him to pry open the crack between truth and justice just far enough to hemorrhage some thinly disguised kick in the groin. Four sixty foot ships needed a lot of scraping and tarring on their way to the sheds every autumn. He might even find his already paltry third of the hide concession further chiseled if this season's faring to New Tara went bust.

Despite the verbal battering Starri dealt him Jarnulf freely admitted that if there was anything Starri feared, it could only be living on into a dotage where Starri himself would no longer be feared. Now in his late forties and stronger by half than most of his young lions he was the embodiment of terror. With arms and legs like gnarled oaks and a deep, grating roar second only to a cornered bear his adversaries were frozen with fear at his approach. With his manic obsession to draw first blood many believed his continued existence miraculous.

Others circumspectly opined the influence of a darker spiritual liaison was involved. Starri made no attempt to discourage the minority opinion. His courage had gained him much. His thirty summers take had bought him the largest steading, a half ownership in the only Mead Hall, and sole ownership of the major trading warehouse.

It'd also cost him. On a faring to Greenland eight years ago the Hrafn ships sailed into Eriksfjord and unloaded their timber at a handsome profit, and then sailed back out into seven of the King of Norway's ships. Escape was unthinkable as the king's men would wreak horrid scathe upon the Greenlanders for dealing with them.

In the ensuing arrow storm and shield clashings Starri cleared half of the ship bearing the king's standard by himself, and lost his right eye. The Norwegian's pleas for quarter fell on deaf ears and they were all put to death. Starri grumbled that his eye might have been worth it if only the king himself had been there.

Adam reminded him that Odinn had plucked out his own eye to trade it for a drink at the well of wisdom. Starri said that he'd never been in any danger of going cross eyed from looking overlong at both sides of any issue. There was only his side and the dead side.

Hroald told him to take it as a sign from God, that he should turn a blind eye to his avarice, luxury and lechery. Tore grumbled that he'd missed the point. He should train his remaining eye on his niece's overweening hauteur and the mischief it bred, and his missing eye on her affairs of the heart. Starri didn't tell him that the two were inseparable.

His stone solid frame was criss crossed by white, keloid scars, the worst of which painfully contributed to his already abusive demeanor. Despite his scars he was seldom without a bevy of female admirers. Whatever Starri wanted he could afford. Starri filled in a good portion of his off season entertaining a rotating group of widows and young adventuresses.

As Tore's Marshal Jarnulf could yell himself blue at Rakel with impunity, he hoped, but the fact that he'd been acting as Marshal would count for spit with Starri.

Rounding a bend in the trail to the target butts his dark musings were interrupted by a small, tow headed six year old, stammering out a friendly greeting. It was Arnor, son of fellow hunter Gunnarr Torgilson.

Gunnarr treated Aunt Marnee's elves with a good deal more respect than they were due, telling her that in thirty summers in the forest he'd seen many strange things but he'd never seen an elf, and he was quite jealous of her good luck.

"What are you doing out here by yourself?" Jarnulf said as the boy fidgeted first on one foot and then the other knowing full well he was in trouble.

XXXVII Trolls And Lesser Pests

"Well, nobody else wanted to go a Viking." Arnor said.

"You, my young friend," Jarnulf said. "would make some troll a perfect snack."

"I don't believe in trolls." Arnor said, his chin shooting skyward as if such declaration served proof of manhood beyond his years, and might get him off the hook.

"Oh?" Jarnulf said. "Did you miss Olaf's telling of the one that attacked us last week?"

"No." Arnor said. "And why didn't you bring it back if you killed it?"

"Because horses won't go anywhere near trolls," Jarnulf said. "even dead ones. And they're too damn big to carry over my shoulders."

Arnor gave Liv his critical once over.

"Maybe if you had a bigger horse?" Arnor said.

"Not even Olaf's Hel stallion." Jarnulf said.

"I still don't believe in them." Arnor said.

"Why not?" Jarnulf said.

"Because they never took you, or anyone I know, out there." Arnor said, sweeping his arm westward toward the endless forest.

Blue devils of irony danced in Jarnulf's eyes. Two more jigged at the corners of his lips. He exorcised them with a scowl which affrighted Arnor not a whit, so darkly exaggerated it was. Jarnulf staged a new mask and the trepidation in Arnor's eyes became most encouraging.

Arnor dreaded that look. His father still treated him like a child, and patronized him with it at that part of his favorite tale where the villain confides to his henchmen that 'The King must die at midnight, else we're all doomed.'

Liv sensed their impasse. Perhaps Jarnulf needed another kiss. He made it plain to her that he did not.

"Well, trolls or not," he confided to Arnor, as if to another hardened and calloused man, a secret too awful to let any girls in on, "winter's over, and there's hungry bears out here now, real man eaters."

"Where?" Arnor said.

"Arnor," Jarnulf said. "You come along with me and if I catch you anywhere but town again you'll wish I hadn't."

Arnor brightened visibly. His self-esteem had just increased tenfold. He'd been caught, red handed and in the act, by the he man hero he'd gladly sell his young soul to trade places with and the great, though no longer menacing brute hulking over him hadn't even raised his voice.

It was an indisputable fact shared by all six year old boys that the hunters were dark and mysterious assassins possessed of boundless cunning and guile who crept invisible through the woods visiting death on countless poachers and Skraelings bent on the bloodletting of the entire village every day.

The tons of meat they hauled to the smokehouse each month was merely a courtesy, snatched up offhand as a sort of afterthought. Arnor knew to a certainty that his father had been holding out on him to keep from scaring his mother half to death.

And the most diabolical of them all, the very leader of his father's crew of blood drinking wolves actually knew his name.

As they continued towards the archery range through the clacking birches, maples and scattered patches of snow Jarnulf spotted a single, bedraggled squirrel. It had been a hard winter. Most of the squirrels had had the good sense to clear out. Slow learners like this one ended up in stew pots. All the steers save the herd bull had been eaten and the bread, until the fall harvest, would taste like the acorns they'd stretched the flour with.

He bethought himself that of all of the Devil's imps circling overhead this year, one particular pest among them who made certain of his neighbors ten times the trouble they usually were, was laughing at him, determined to show up early and in force.

The crops folks fed on wouldn't be ready for a month after the hay harvest, feed for the livestock. They'd be into the moldy rye left over from last year and its day or even month long bouts of demonic possession. The mold on rye in sufficient quantities was a powerful hallucinogen.

And with the demonic rye came the stockfish. Cod was salted and air dried on racks, and piled high as a last rampart against starvation. Hard as a rock it lasted for years. Even after breaking it up with an axe it still needed more than boiling to soften it. The softener was lye, the very stuff that socks were scrubbed in.

It was widely lampooned as ljuga fisk (lie fish), as no one upon tasting it could believe it had ever been a fish in the first place. Some kidnapped the scaled horrors on their way to the pot in winter and assaulted the cook with them. Others starved themselves to death. It was easier than fighting over the outhouse.

Squinting through the glaring, winter sun above the cloudless horizon as they entered the clearing, Jarnulf sighed relief. There, retrieving his arrows at the hay bales forty yards out was Olaf, also wearing hides. Olaf was the son of Asmund Stallion Breaker, son of Anund Broke Neck, son of Grimulf Skraeling's bane. Grimulf had also fathered Ottarr Chieftain Eikinn Grimulfson.

Among his former neighbors in Ottarrstadir Olaf was known as a jovial and even tempered fellow, doughty in all sports and games, and shrewd in his business dealings, especially at horse trading and training. Most ambitious men know how to play the fool when profit's at stake, but Olaf had overdone it. His last few years in Ottarrstadir had been rather sparse as most had learned better than to let him sucker them. They didn't really begrudge him his cunning, but they weren't unhappy to see him go ply it somewhere else.

He had rarely thrown his weight around there. He hadn't needed to. He and his friends had usually had their way in most matters, but Olaf had had his way once too often, and thrown all his weight behind a right jab into the wrong nose, which blew the lid off of a long fermenting family uproar. The nose belonged to Olaf's cousin Hrorik Eikinnson. Kin were not assaulted no matter how deserving they might be of it. If they needed doing in the job was farmed out.

Chieftain Eikinn took no part in the settlement but privately agreed with Asmund that Hrorik had had it coming. Asmund and Eikinn also agreed that unless one of them got going there would be worse coming. Olaf accepted Lesser Outlawry, his steel, the clothes on his back, and banishment for three years.

Summer and Thing arrived. He was looking for new neighbors in Thunderstadir when a tall and very attractive blonde lowered her eyes before returning his greeting and scurrying off. He followed.

Anja did not know what to make of him. He would not acknowledge the scorning glances and innuendoes her other suitors offered him. Being Outlawed for his last show of manliness had sobered a good deal of restraint into him, and returning to Ottarrstadir, in three years or thirty, would lead to a killing or three, and so to the bewildered bad language of her other suitors, he wooed and won Anja.

"Recruit us a new helper?" Olaf said.

"Maybe in four or five summers." Jarnulf said. "Young Arnor here says there's no such thing as trolls."

"God, but wouldn't that be nice?" Olaf said. "That was a close one, last week. Big fire breathing bastard. Bigger than Hroghar, all red gold like oak leaves at summer's end, and those awful eyes, burning blue red like late night coals. We put both bolts right in his heart, and he just laughed and kept coming. He'd a had me sure with those big black claws, if Jarnulf hadn't sworded his leg off at the knee."

Arnor rolled his eyes, and Jarnulf covertly, he hoped, swallowed a groan. Jarnulf told Olaf to stay put. Then shooing Arnor before him he headed back into the forest along the short trail to town with Liv clumping along at his heels.

"Yes, my Chieftain." Olaf called out. Jarnulf hated being called anything but Jarnulf. Olaf was habitually amusing himself with such petty irritants. He sometimes seemed a most fit companion for Arnor.

Arnor marched before Jarnulf looking like he was enjoying a massive overdose of last year's rye. His future among the pantheon of dark antiheroes was guaranteed.

His would be the hand that wrote not chapters but volumes of bloody vengeance and awful retribution against the limitless legions of villains who were even now skulking about in these woods cowering in terror of being discovered and justly dispatched to hell by his father and his friends. Chieftain Jarnulf himself had said that in four summers he'd take him on as his apprentice. So vivid in Arnor's mind's eye showed the shock on the face of the third enemy he'd just now heroically thrust through the heart that he almost fell flat on his face as he tripped over a maple root.

"You all right?" Jarnulf said.

When the boy said yes Jarnulf pointed to the now plainly visible village beyond the field.

"Yes, Chieftain." Arnor blurted out at a dead run.

Jarnulf and Liv returned to the butts to find Olaf drawing arrows from a bale at the eighty yard mark. The silhouette of a spike buck was painted on the bale. Jarnulf sorted through the arrows in his quiver and laid aside his broadhead tipped trio.

"Thanks, a lot." Jarnulf called out. Olaf quizzed him with a wordless, over the shoulder smile as the final shaft bottomed into his quiver.

"That last troll we killed?" Jarnulf said.

"Oh, that." Olaf said.

"The first time you told it he was colder than ice and greener than the Church Dragon." Jarnulf said.

Olaf hiked his cheeks up in feeble apology.

"Oops?" he said. "Well, winter's over, we'll chase him back into town with bear stories."

"Tried that." Jarnulf said. "I'm beginning to think he won't credit God till he shakes hands with him."

"Come on, how old were you?" Olaf said.

"Even younger." Jarnulf said. "Scared my mother witless. There were cannibal Skraelings and heathen Outlaws hiding behind every bush."

"Hmmm." Olaf said. "Do you think yours and mine might be related, or at least conspiring?"

"Definitely." Jarnulf said. "They're both women."

Jarnulf drew his comb, snapped out the broken tooth, cursed, and set it to work.

"How many of those do you go through in a month?" Olaf said.

Olaf grinned broadly, and came toward him seeming as if his body were of two minds. His legs wanted to dance, while the rest of him hunched forward and low, with clenched fists face high, and elbows swinging wide.

But even through his clumsy pantomime the disjointed agility of a big cat, easing off to nowhere on a sunny day and reveling in its God gifted catness permeated every nuance of the six two by two and a quarter prankster.

Thin receding brown hair though he was yet in his early thirties topped a ruddy, rounded face sporting a fighter's pug nose and lucent, close spaced amber eyes. There was a look about him suggesting that he wasn't the sharpest knife in the rack. Olaf always seemed to wind up as the almost comprehending butt of some crude joke.

Jarnulf had felt sorry for him, at first. If just being dumb was a crime half the world deserved to hang for it.

Eighteen wintered Jarnulf volunteered to audition Olaf. On their first day in the field Olaf taught him more about the arts and intuitive sciences of stalking and tracking than Jarnulf ever imagined existed. After producing, rain or shine, for a solid week in sections nobody else had been able to pull so much as a rabbit out of, Olaf was offered the job on probation. The other hunters swore his luck couldn't last. They were wrong.

A taunting gleam appeared in Olaf's eyes as he leaned close and confidential.

"I have heard a rumor," Olaf said. "that a certain girl who seems to think a deal too much of herself opened her mouth this morning. You wouldn't happen to know which one of those dainty little mattress thrashers it was who used her like a handful of moss, would you?"

XXXVIII She Actually Farted

Jarnulf regarded him narrowly.

"It was Mirha." he said, and bit the inside of his lip, wondering what shade of crimson Olaf would stop at.

Olaf looked like a bride at the altar whose 'I do' had been preempted by a flock of graphic accusations. Jarnulf rolled his eyes and made an exaggerated show of peering intently about the range and back over his shoulders.

"You forget who we're talking about?" Jarnulf said. "Bad breath in the morning, whiney, moany, girl friend from hell?"

Cupping hand to mouth he leaned close.

"You know, one night last week when we were doing it, right in the middle of it, she actually farted?"

Then he shared out Anja's version of the story and his run in with Rakel. He strung his warbow and fitted an arrow with a bodkin point to it. The razor wings of broadheads would slash a hay bale into powder in a week.

Eighty yards downrange his fletching of two gray goose feathers and one black crow zipped over the top of a human silhouette's head painted onto the bale.

"Bad luck." Olaf said with an ill-concealed smirk. Jarnulf warned him not to start.

Let a rumor that a man's luck had left him get round and it swiftly became a self-fulfilling prophecy as his friends and business connections deserted him, desperate to avoid the contagion.

Debts and loneliness piled ever deeper until many turned to drink, harebrained heroics or even thievery in their desperate quest to dispel any assertion that they were luckless, with predictable results, a violent death or banishment as an Outlaw. Trying to escape it by running off to another district was useless. Once a man lost his luck, his reputation clung to him like the pine tar on a ship's rigging.

When Ulf was killed most nodded gravely and said it was a shame his luck had deserted him. The black cloud Jarnulf cloaked himself in lasted almost a year. People wondered aloud if he hadn't caught his father's bad luck.

He was drinking at Mordach's one autumn eve when Kveldalf's cousin Ketil Bjorgilson, a sailor ten years his senior and three cups ahead of him, slandered him as Ulf's luckless pup.

Jarnulf had never cared for Ketil. Ketil was more than overbearing when sober. He was much given to malicious verse and making free with other men's possessions.

Jarnulf shouted at Ketil to mind his own business and his manners. Ketil reached out from the aisle and grabbed him. Bror and Galinn started to their feet. Jarnulf drove Ulf's knife through Ketil's throat before Ketil had even dragged him from the bench.

The hunters surrounded Jarnulf. Ketil had forfeited his immunity. He had placed himself outside the law the instant he slandered Jarnulf. He'd killed himself.

Ketil's mother, sister, and brother Hjortgren made the customary stink by demanding payment for an unlawful killing. As Ketil had not only slandered Jarnulf, but then laid hands on him, their claim went unpaid.

The mischievous gleam broadened in Olaf's eyes.

"My luck loves me." Olaf said. "Anja carries my son."

"I shall be lucky indeed," Jarnulf said. "to ever see my own, with this never ending infuriation from Rakel and Mirha."

Olaf thought that Jarnulf's own luck would love him more if he'd stop setting it into wrestling matches with his temper. It was an issue he had raised with Jarnulf more than once, and its weariness wrote itself on his features.

"This is more than that usual tired look." Jarnulf said.

"Door dreams again." Olaf said.

Olaf's childhood nightmare had granted him peace for twenty and five winters. Now, this last winter, it had returned. In it a huge door of iron, in the west, groaned slowly open in the dark upon iron hinges, and leagues of Skraelings and the dead boiled through it to devour his family and neighbors. Beyond Ottarrstadir there were no Norse, only Skraelings.

"It's just a dream." Jarnulf said, knowing that there was no such thing as just a dream.

"I am afraid," Olaf said. "that we shall have the wolf by the ears yet."

IXL Shtoog

Together they shot six flights of twelve arrows each, and trudged downrange six times to recover them before Olaf departed for Hroghar's shieling at the bog. Hroghar smelted iron ore at the bog. Anja was low on black and green ink. Iron salts went into the dyes used in ink, and woolen homespun.

Every woman in town, except Rakel, owned a loom and wool basket. Undyed gray homespun bespoke poverty. Greens, reds, and purples predominated. Olaf would return with a hundred times what Anja needed, searching out profit as Rakel wouldn't be opening the store for a day or two.

Jarnulf shot his seventh round and marched off for the stacked bales forty yards distant. Though he hunted with a crossbow, the warbow had it beat for range and rapidity, and was always in reserve for poachers. Shafts sort of grew on trees but broadheads didn't. Plinking while he was off working in the woods made finding them a pain in the neck.

He drew seven arrows from the top bale and minded himself to have young Frakki exchange it for one at the end of the range two hundred yards out. The near ones took a fearful pounding.

He rounded the bales and snatched up his four snaked into the grass behind them. He made for his fifth and a hair raising 'shtoog' sounded from the bale behind him. He bellowed a black oath at the broadhead on the new arrow protruding halfway through the bale. He stole a nervous glance around the side of the bale.

Back at the shooting line stood a young blonde barely bigger than Mirha, in a crimson tunic over herringbone trousers and cross strapped to her knees, sky blue leggings. Her bow lay on the ground at her feet and her hands were clamped over her mouth.

"I didn't know you were out there." she cried in a tremulous whine.

Jarnulf glared back, badly shaken and confused. Adis was the outsider of Rakel's crowd and the least likely of them to take a crack at him, or anyone else.

He yanked her arrow through the bale and strode briskly toward her slapping its green and gray fletchings against his buckskinned thigh.

"Then what, is she doing here?" he said, pointing out Liv, who was only too happy to accept his offer to join them.

"I didn't see her?" Adis said.

Had it been Sigrid he'd joyfully have slapped her senseless and to hell with the consequences, and then gone and done, well, something to Rakel. Sigrid was the black sheep of a large and prosperous household. Eleven of Adam's crew, including her brother Trand, were her kin, and while they openly disapproved of her flagrant perversity they'd come for him with a vengeance. And half of Tore's crew, his own distant kin, would go for them. Tore would not be pleased.

But it wasn't Sigrid, and it wasn't Rakel, it was little Adis. Hel take it. He was still brim full of Rakel and Kveldalf's bile and dying to pour it out on someone. Adis protested her innocence anew. Jarnulf clenched his fists and quickened his step. His eyes became blue flints. Adis looked about to bolt.

"A little early in the day, isn't it?" Jarnulf said. "Don't accidents usually happen at night?"

"What's, what, what about accidents?" Adis said.

"As if you didn't know." Jarnulf grunted, his square, bronzed snarl flushing an angry copper.

"Mirha gave Rakel a long overdue beating this morning." he said.

"Oh no. Rakel won't like that a bit." Adis gasped, looking more terrified than she had even at his thundercloud approach. Her husky, baby doll lisp was conspicuously missing. Jarnulf's predator brain had long known it for an affectation.

"Oh yes, my little Disa." he drawled, waving her arrow's nock before her nose. Disa was a child's nickname, from the Disir, meaning little guardian spirit. Adis cheeks pinked at his slander as she gnawed a knuckle and peered back up at him, timorous, over her fist.

"And she promised me an accident." he said.

"Jarnulf I just got up." she said.

"Bullshit." he said. "It's mid-day."

"I had a late night." she said.

"Doing what? With who?" he said.

Her blue eyes, normally agleam with a reckless insouciance, now darted frantic glances over her shoulders for someone, anyone, to intervene. He got the impression she'd almost prefer a beating to answering his question.

Adis snatched the tip of her long, tight braided, yellow white ponytail (she was a divorcee) and staring straight down into it, began picking through it, as if looking for an answer within. Jarnulf gently tapped the top of her head with her arrow.

"Ref." she mumbled, visibly embarrassed.

"Doing, what?" he barked.

"Ref." Adis mumbled again.

His fellow hunter Ref Thorliekson's cooking, renowned as it was, of itself had never kept a girl abed till noon the next day. At thirty and two he was still reveling in the lecher's paradise Jarnulf had so cherished before Mirha.

"And wait for you to take another shot at me?" Jarnulf said.

"Astrid threw us out last night, when she closed up. Go ask her." Adis said.

She jammed her clenched fists against her lips, her ponytail sandwiched between them, and began chewing on it. The sight of her staring up at him trembling like a little blonde field mouse nibbling a poached kernel of barley cut him to the quick. His embarrassment over it needed cloaking.

"Fine. We'll go hit her up." he said.

He picked up her bow and handed it to her. Then he took her elbow.

As they shuffled back through the orchard his annoyance at his own bluster grew more onerous with every step. Liv plodded discreetly along ten feet behind them. He was in one of his moods again. Best not to press him.

He glanced about through the withered trees, desperate for a distraction and fell to remembering them heavy with cherry and white blossoms, as they'd be in a month from now, and had been one twilight three years ago when he and Rakel chased each other through them, laughing, and panting after each other, and then crushing a fragrant sea of delirious sweetness from the ground's thick carpet of those blossoms as they rolled about on them, locked in each other's arms.

Whatever had it been they'd found to fight about later? It always started off as some vapid nothing and blew itself into a hurricane over the following day or two. Then they'd make up and get on with their laughing and loving, for a week until the fighting started again.

And how indescribably sweeter each time had been afterwards, with her turning on the tears, and gasping and moaning out her apologies and pledges of undying love.

"No." he grunted soft to himself. It wasn't his fault. It was hers, always hers.

"No?" Adis injected into his stiffening recollections.

He let go her arm and started an apology, feeling she'd somehow been there, inside his head, watching. Adis found his stumbling inanities almost as frightening as his accusations.

She pulled away from him, hoping not to receive a cuffed ear at his next mood swing. He groaned soft and reiterated his apology, adding an offer to buy her a morning meal. She refused, having just finished one at Ref's.

While avoiding his eyes her own lit on a boulder covered in the softest and finest of fresh, emerald moss. She handed him her bow and scampered off to scrounge handsfull of it into her pouch. He hauled up, waiting for her, and launched into a detailed recitation of his day, to palliate his scaring her so but hoping in the main that his unvarnished version might prevent her from swallowing whatever monstrous embellishments Kveldalf would paint atop it.

"But I didn't mean you." he summed up. "But she pushes so damn hard."

"Yes, she does." Adis said, taking her bow from him, "It's always so irritating in others, isn't it? You haven't seen Sigrid today, have you? She's going to be more trouble than Rakel, if Astrid struck her."

"It appears," he groaned. "that I am not to be a man envied, by many, today."

XL You Forgot Your Hammer

They'd crunched their way over the pave of smashed shells almost to Mordach's door with Jarnulf peering in every direction for Sigrid. What he spotted was young Arnor.

"Hello, Chieftain." Arnor said.

"You seen Sigrid?" Jarnulf said, rankling at Olaf's jibe.

"Not today, Chieftain." Arnor said.

Jarnulf snarled, showing Arnor not only his teeth but his gums. Arnor found it amusing far beyond what Jarnulf had intended, and then vowing to track her down and report back on the instant, he scurried off westward between two steadings, heading towards Sigrid's place.

Two summers ago, four year old Skipper Arnor had been leading his imaginary crew in a raid on Marnee's chicken coop. He was exhorting them at a shout to take no prisoners while brandishing a barrel stave as a sword. Two boys twice his age and size, Raud and Hall, stumbled upon Arnor's raid, and with that savage cruelty peculiar to children, they ridiculed and taunted him mercilessly.

Arnor stood up for himself with his stave. They were shoving him around and slapping him when Sigrid happened by on her way home from the ship sheds, and reddened both their backsides with Arnor's stave. Sigrid had long since forgotten the affair but Arnor hadn't. He remained her most loyal and staunch supporter.

Mordach's door banged open with a blast of profane screaming. A woman in black calfskin, a half hand taller than himself and only forty pounds lighter, and all of it in the right places, backed out into the street cursing to make a Viking blench.

From the back she looked like Rakel in those tight, midnight leathers, especially her hips and butt, you could bounce a penny clear across the street off those things, but bigger, and meaner, like Rakel as she stormed off after a fight with him.

Both of Sigrid's clenched fists were in the air before her, describing little circles. An ancient, leather aproned gnome, Mordach, chased her out with his head craned back, glaring up at her with his rheumy blue eyes almost level with her armpits.

Mordach was showing her the blunt back of his hand axe. Throttled in his bony claw it quivered, glinting in the sun above his shoulder. The blue veins on his bald pate complimented nicely the scraggly gray hair streaming from the top of his ears to his shoulders.

"Take a week off before you come back." Mordach yelled up at her.

"What makes you think I'd ever come back into your stinking outhouse?" she said.

"Sigrid." Adis howled. "There's been enough trouble today."

Sigrid turned slowly, and completely around to wink at her while contemptuously ignoring Mordach and his hand axe, who was still close enough and more than half ready.

Sigrid blew Adis a kiss.

Mordach planted his free hand between Sigrid's shoulders and shoved her. Sigrid half stumbled, and snarling, whipped about with her arm raised, offering him the back of her hand. Mordach ordered her off again and tossed her the one unforgivable insult a man can call a woman.

"Goddamnit Sigrid." Jarnulf bellowed.

Sigrid offered Mordach a parting crudity and then tossing her long, fine brown hair out of her face, and again defiantly turning her back on him, she strutted forward swinging her magnificent 'I can make any man act like an idiot' endowments toward Jarnulf and Adis.

"Don't, you, dare." he started, whipping his finger out at her with each word.

"It wasn't me she mouthed off to." Sigrid laughed. Her blue eyes beneath her thin brows, beside her aquiline nose sparkled with an honest, innocent mirth.

"And don't you forget it." Jarnulf said. "Whatever cold dealings you have with Astrid, . . ."

"Is my business, and none, of yours." she sneered.

"I'm warning you." Jarnulf said.

"If you're heading east you forgot your hammer." Sigrid said before parading off proudly erect toward Rakel's, and with an utter disinterest in the scene she'd just created. Aesir Thor had made many trips to the east where he crushed the skulls of many evil Jotuns, male and female, with his hammer.

Jarnulf stared after Sigrid, as he often did, wondering how she could behave like such a rough and tumble whore and yet maintain a dignity as condescending as Eirika.

"That went well, don't you think?" Adis begged in a tinny quaver.

Jarnulf told Mordach that he was sorry. He should have seen this coming. Mordach, sullen and irascible, smiled his jowls into bags of wrinkles and wheezed out a 'Heh, heh, heh'.

"What makes you think I need you?" he said.

He propped his door open with his axe and politely ordered them in. Mordach viewed his hunters as royalty, though he'd rarely show it. A handful of virile men were a wondrous draw through what Mordach called woman season. And none of them ever broke up his Hall unlike the sailors.

Adis scurried within. Saying no to Mordach even in his best of humors wasn't wise.

"You, just keep your eyes out for Galg Nar." Mordach told Jarnulf. Galg Nar meant gallows carrion. It was Mordach's pet name for Nacarr. Jarnulf sharply elbowed Mordach's arm.

"Yeah, big secret." Mordach muttered, slapping the flat of his axe against his palm.

Jarnulf stepped inside onto the broad landing above the half dozen stairs descending into the Hall, his nose hairs wrinkling at that familiar, sick sweet smell of old Mead Hall, decades of drink and worse spilled and soaked into the floor and furniture.

Liv stood her ground in the street waiting for him, wrinkling her muzzle and eying the door intently. That door had a history. There was no telling what might come out it next.

At the foot of the stairs stood Maeve, stroking the backs of her hands, and poised as if everyone obviously thought as much of her as she seemed to think of herself. A ghost of the wanton haunted her smile, and a hardened hint of the daintiest of malices lit her soft, autumn blue eyes. She nibbled her bottom lip and arched her thin, brown brows up at him. Jarnulf found it disconcerting that the dimples still showed in her cheeks, a woman older than his mother.

"I have heard that Rakel is most displeased with you." Maeve said.

"Well why didn't you stop her and Mirha?" he said.

"It's not my job to break up fights." she said. "Starri too will be displeased at this. You're going to have pour a lot of oil on these waters before they get home, Marshal."

He groaned. Maeve, but for her grayed locks, at the moment looked a ringer for Mirha as if she'd set fire to her parent's steading and was expecting a pat on the head for it.

She picked her way up the stairs toward him. Her Tore would be quite pleased with things when he got home. Jarnulf'd find some way of dealing with Rakel. The pressure would do him good. And Rakel had needed the wind dumped out of her sail for some time.

Maeve sidled out past him and Adis and Mordach, and Jarnulf, thrusting his chin out, descended the stairs into the Hall.

Nine tables sized to seat a dozen flanked both sides of the aisle back to a second set of stairs rising again to ground level and another eighteen tables. The back wall was obscured behind Mordach's rear counter and a wall of kegs. When Mordach built his Hall he'd dug deep to keep out the winter.

A year later, and deep in debt to his shovelers, who were ever on the verge of striking, they'd contracted to dig dirt and not the nine parts granite they struck, Mordach halted the excavation and began building. Twenty summers later he added on the second, rear level.

Both the side walls were near hidden behind weapons, most heavily notched, and some broken near the hilt but none let go to rust. As a sop to his hunters, their most freakish trophies bleached skulls and antlers ringed the walls beneath the eaves. Bears and boars with massive canines and tushes mingled with moose and deer sporting huge combs of twisted horn that spiraled like a sea cliff's worth of wind blasted pines.

Huge, stone fireplaces burped out midpoint along each wall on both levels. Their chimneys doubled back and down behind themselves to pass through yard square trenches beneath heavy iron floor plates, before rising again to vent outside on opposite sides of the Hall. Mordach had dreamed it all up on his own. The place stayed warm as the heated serving stone under a plate even in a blizzard, which kept the place mobbed.

At the forth table from the landing on Jarnulf's right, Da'hal and Ref's real home, a blonde with her hair tied like Adis, who'd just passed her twenty eighth winter, finished rehanging an ancient axe on the wall. The skull splitter had belonged to Tore's great uncle Ragi and had played a pivotal role in ridding them of the Papacy's tax parasites. Da'hal was forever fondling it, and pestering Mordach to sell it to him.

Mordach's granddaughter Astrid was Rakel's height, and possessed of the same driving ambition. But there all similarities ended. Astrid wasn't near as well-endowed as Rakel. She looked built for speed.

With her fine gold hair tied back tight the high dome of her unwrinkled forehead bespoke a deep mind, which that pink razor between her teeth rarely set the lie to. She'd thin brows of white gold above teal blue eyes. In their depths capered the lightest, and darkest of elves, entwining in lewd caracoles, and her nose and chin held a longish, even cruel hint suggesting that her angel might not be of God's Thingi, but Lucifer's.

Her grandfather's half of the Hall would be hers in the none too distant future. She missed no chance to keep it a money maker.

Constantly dancing up and down those midpoint point steps while laden with trays of food and drink had honed her every curve in a fashion to make the devil drool. She seemed the sauciest of wenches from first to forth glimpse but it was all bluster, a mask to wear at work, and rake in the pennies. She was Jarnulf's forth cousin on his mother's side.

The hunters affectionately lampooned her as Astrid the marriage minded as she remained utterly unseduceable. A woman unmarried at eighteen, much less Astrid's twenty and eight, was considered an old maid. Astrid knew her worth, and like Anja, wasn't going to sell herself short. She tied her waist length hair back only to keep it out of the mead and food, and took endless kidding over it.

She offered Jarnulf a cordial greeting. He returned it wishing he'd been there to witness her gift Sigrid an overdue fist.

Two winters ago Astrid had loudly informed the entire Hall, after a drunken, obnoxious Sigrid squatted atop a table and mooned the place, that she didn't give a damn who Sigrid thought she was, or that her friend Rakel's uncle owned half the place, before throwing her out.

Two days later Astrid had been pushed from behind off a narrow section of path north of town above a snippet of rocky bluff. She broke her elbow in the fall. Astrid hadn't seen who'd pushed her, but she knew to within a mosquito's whine who'd done it. She looked like she'd enjoyed doing her laundry. Jarnulf joined her and extended his arms to hug her.

"Thanks cousin." he said.

"Not her business, hey?" Astrid said, keeping him at arm's length. "Pulled me off that bitch like there was a hundred of gold between us. I haven't recompensed her half enough."

"Yes, you have dear." Jarnulf laughed. "You pay her anymore and the mortgage will land in my lap."

"We'll just have to wait and see what crops up in that field." she said.

She spun away from him and he aimed a slap at her butt. She returned a backhand at his head, and it seemed she pulled it in midair as he ducked. She skipped up the stairs smiling inwardly, relishing his incestuous study of her departure.

Behind them Mordach's door squealed outward on its iron hinges.

"Marshal!" Eirika's voice knifed into Jarnulf's gut. It somersaulted. He turned. The white haired witch in her purple gown and cloak was headed down the stairs, straight at him. Her eagle blue eyes were fixed on Adis but he knew it for an opening feint. Her talons would be razoring into his own throat in an instant.

XLI The Logmadur

She snapped a desultory sneer at his short sword and suppressed an affected shudder, as ever. No Hrafn had ever seen its like.

The pair, his long sword usually snuggled racked above his hearth, looked more like long, lightly curved knives than the customary, straight, double edged bastard swords. One night in the fall of his eighteenth year, three nights after the ships returned, Tore had shown up at his steading to offer his condolences. Ulf had been killed that summer. Tore brought the swords with him. He'd had them in a trunk for years. Tore assured him that they were for real, though these were the first he'd ever seen, either.

Jarnulf set to testing them the next day. They severed a side of deer ribs at a single pass. When Hroghar saw them, he sucked in his breath with a whistle. The steel had been folded, hammered out and folded again, so many times he couldn't count it. Hroghar unpinned and removed the hilts. The tangs showed graven with strange runes, probably the maker's name.

Hroghar copied them and showed them to other makers and learned men at Thing. No one could read them. They must have traveled far before sailing with Tore. Hroghar figured they were hundreds of years old. Jarnulf took to wearing them instead of his father's sword, which got him snickers.

Guthorm Frodeson, one of Starri's crew, called them a little girl's sheep scissors, which led to more snickers. Guthorm drew his sword and showed it to Jarnulf. Steel clanged once between them, and Guthorm found his neck scissored between the flat spines of Jarnulf's new toys. The edges would have taken his head off. Jarnulf laughed in Guthorm's face, and backed away.

Guthorm, embarrassed, made to pick up his sword, and grunted a curse. It lay at his feet on Mordach's landing with a big notch taken out of one edge.

Eirika's tongue shredded them both, and after inspecting Jarnulf's blades she decided she didn't like them either, and the more he showed them off the less she liked them. She then invested three whole weeks in inventing the most fantastic, self-serving tale he'd ever heard. When she finally reeled it out her reputation among fools, and her privacy, were assured. Dimwits went out of their way sidestepping the seeress and her unholy troll wisdom.

'At various times his swords had been the property of men so obsessed with murder that they had carried those swords with them even into their dreams, a place where their wills and bloodlust were infinitely more powerful. The swords and the wills that guided them over time became so entwined that when age or other finally took their owners, a part of their insanity remained, lurking, anxious to do their former master's biddings. His swords were the well springs of rivers of spilled blood, much of it innocent, and were champing to please whoever wielded them with more. They reeked, exuding murder, and she'd forbid him to pollute her with their presence. Her counsel was to take them out in the woods, dig a deep hole and bury them, and forget where they were.'

Olaf said she'd missed her true calling. She should have been a seller of tall tales.

Tore smiled, telling Olaf that that was why she was his lawyer.

Eirika turned on Adis.

"Is this your prime suspect in the matter of the purloined lobsters?" she demanded. "We can't have such a threat to the public weal running about loose. Heaven knows what a miscreant like that might turn their nefarious hand to next. Possibly even the pilfering of whales."

"So that's what that masked woman was doing this morning," he said in deathly, wide eyed earnest, "ahead of me on the trail to town, dragging one behind her on a rope."

Her top lip quivered, and a hint of the growl a cat makes just before raking four, lightning, bloody furrows in the back of a hand, hissed through her clenched teeth.

The law had detailed provisions on drift rights, salvage rights, blubber rights, payment to the harpooner, the concealing of another man's harpoon from a claimed carcass, how the damn thing was to be tied down once it drifted onto your property, and on infinitum, none of which anyone paid any mind to.

Whenever one washed ashore everyone put their lives on hold and sweated nonstop flensing it. They boiled it down, and divided the oil, meat, and whalebone equally. Many sold their oil to Mordach. Leaving a whale unattended was unthinkable even when the larder was full. They'd decay and reek to high heaven, swell up, and occasionally explode.

Eirika expected him to have whale law memorized word for word. It was time for another quiz, another ass chewing, and more patronizing tutoring. His father's books, the law codes, still proudly adorned his mantle, but since Ulf hadn't drawn breath in years, neither had they.

"Not now Eirika." he said, starting past her for the door. "I've things to do."

"I should think you've done quite enough today, Marshal." she said. "scaring those poor girls half out of their wits with that lightning storm you hurled into Rakel's bed closet."

He'd just shot high above the mere top of her list. One never addressed Eirika as other than Logmadur Eirika.

"You've no right," she continued. "as you, of all people, should know, to threaten her with any such thing. The law specifically forbids a man from killing on behalf of his bondswoman bed partner, no matter what happens to her. Keep it up Marshal, and her blood will end up on your hands yet."

Jarnulf bit his lip. He could get away with blowing up at most of the women but this desiccated fish eagle, pecking at him, demanded being suffered, and subserviently acquiesced to. It would get a lot worse for a lot longer, should he dare voice the pair of words written in his eyes, the epithet she was brazenly daring him to hurl.

"Or is this the one you've chosen to make an example of to the others?" Eirika demanded, sneering down at Adis who snicker giggled back at her. Eirika's thin, bloodless lips drew tightly thinner still, unused as she was to having her tongue stepped on. Jarnulf wanted to hug Adis for it, but as his inquisitor had just pointed out he'd done enough to shaft himself today.

The squeal of Mordach's hinges snatched his sidelong sneer and the breastless, bee stung pine tree in her green dress blew in. She planted the bony fists of her spindly limbs on the boles of her skinny hips, and like manna from heaven broadsided Eirika's screed with one of her own.

"You!" Kveldalf shrieked. "Three of my hives are destroyed. And there's huge bear tracks all around the others! What are you doing in here? Getting drunk? Instead of your god damn job, as usual?"

Jarnulf laughed, deranged, at this disaster he'd blundered into. This was what birthed of interfering in women's business. This couldn't be his fault. But then it really wasn't Mirha's either. She'd simply got her own back on a bully. Stuck between the devil and the green pine tree, he chose Kveldalf.

"It can wait." he said to Eirika. "Let's go have a look, Kveldalf."

He snatched up Adis and dragged her along towards the stairs, and freedom. Adis might be willing to pour out some of that oil to quiet Kveldalf's vituperative maelstrom.

"Marshal!" Eirika called after him, "Your sloth, with the law, will cost you dearly someday."

"If I ever," he said. "have to bring suit in Court, and there's a whale in it, rest assured, I'll come see you first."

"Mark my words." she railed. "It will, and you won't, like it."

A mere five paces beyond the door he sicked Adis on Kveldalf, leaving Kveldalf 'ack' ing and spitting like a cat being drowned, and dashed off past his mare for the barn. There was no profit in looking at bear sign with Kveldalf howling over his shoulder. Ulf's old roan would enjoy a quiet walk through the forest out to Hroghar's smelting works. Chasing a huge bear through the woods was a dangerous, stupid waste of time, especially a bear that figured it was being chased but the fiction of it offered an iron thewed, manly escape from this bucket of hornets.

Jarnulf cantered Ulf's roan in mock haste back toward the target butts and Olaf's trail.

"Oh yes." he chortled, finally smelling the single rose blooming atop his dunghill of a day. The twins, Kjartan and Andar, his inseparable and most trouble prone sixteen wintered apprentices, lived only to ride, shoot, chase girls, and fight like wild Skraelings with each other, and God have mercy on the fool who tried to separate them.

Both of them, who were almost Olaf's size, routinely rewarded their peacemakers with fearful pummelings. Flensing and tanning hides, and stoking the smokehouse fires was beneath them and evaded like the pest.

Da'hal alone commanded any sway over Kjartan. Andar, Ref's gopher, was his blonde brother's spitting image in every lack of respect. They were the sons of Starri's friend and fo'c'sulman Iron Bardi which would have made them utterly uncontrollable save that Bardi had disowned them the instant they fell in with the hunters.

Their horses alone they tended to, religiously. The animals were nothing special being of average size and conformation. It was what they could afford but they were devoted to them even above the girls they chased. And both, always at the targets, were devastating with the warbow.

There was no way they could be put together atop Kveldalf's roof on a nighttime bear ambush. They'd get each other drunk and fall off it, or worse yet, have a foot race to discover which of their bolts had killed the damn thing before it was even dead. Alternating nights up there in the blood freezing cold, smeared in dog crap to hide their scent for the next week or two, was a perfectly fit and just doom for such.

But for himself, a hammer called. Town was seething with trolls today. Blooms of bog iron fresh from Hroghar's furnace were rotten with impurities. They had to be furiously sledge hammered out before the fifty pound bloom cooled.

Despite the coming of Christ, Thor and his hammer weren't leaving, at least not till the world's very last workman had hammered out his very last mind vengeance on every troll ruining his own world.

Arnor caught sight of Jarnulf departing and dashed headlong, calling after him, between the church and Starri's. He'd just missed Jarnulf at Mordach's, after running Sigrid to ground at Rakel's. Jarnulf didn't seem to hear him. Arnor stopped short at the graveyard oak, fearful of jeopardizing his future apprenticeship. He gazed, envy would surely kill him on the spot, at that great, dark warrior riding off so proud and tall, before hanging his head and kicking a clump of weeds. He moped his way back to main, and the rest of his interminably boring, lonely young life.

Liv stared after Jarnulf feeling almost as deserted as Arnor, but then he was usually in one of his moods whenever they were in town. He'd be more fun tomorrow off in the woods where she'd have him to herself.

The riot Mirha had whipped into his own run ins with Rakel, Eirika, and Sigrid had him wondering how heaven, if there was such a place, could possibly measure up if it would eventually be infested with those same pests who ruined his every moment in town.

XLII You Can't Spoil A Rotten Egg

Rakel had thrown an extended tantrum, demolishing her bed closet before Sigrid finally got her fall down drunk. She was rarely a heavy drinker, but even cross eyed and slobbering, she was still quite a threatener. She'd promised tortures and mutilations for Mirha so gruesomely inventive that Sigrid laughed herself silly. Rakel just didn't have more than a fist or two in her.

Kveldalf felt she'd burst when Jarnulf lied to her and deserted her before Mordach's. Adis listened patiently for twenty breaths before remembering she had work to do, a nap to take, or anything but listening longer. Kveldalf spent the afternoon chasing sympathetic ears. There were no lack of ears, or amused replies that Rakel had suffered a huge disgrace in letting the Marshal's little Madcap abuse her so. Mirha's standing had grown considerably.

Many said they hoped Rakel's bruises would heal quickly, but few added that they were sorry she'd got them. Most thought Jarnulf's black threats to carve up Starri's niece news indeed, promising a most interesting summer. Kveldalf, as usual, couldn't keep a bit of it to herself. Rakel found these comments very trying, and hard to bear.

At Rakel's table Kveldalf and Aud were busying themselves with a board game. Adis, at Aud's elbow, sat toying with her ponytail while waiting to play the winner, and wishing she'd more friends. Kveldalf, as usual, was losing. Aud was always good for a laugh but these other two ghouls were growing more morbid by the moment. Aud was board gaming one eyed and one handed with the bulk of her attention on the squalling, struggling lamb in her lap. It was someone else's lamb, as ever. It seemed quite healthy too, which was also becoming an all too frequent as ever.

Rakel lolled hearthside in her chair with her head back, eyes shut and mouth open, and her game leg stretched out upon a stool. She groped her chairside trivet for her wine glass. Its bottom showed dry as her tongue felt. She lurched unsteadily up, and more unsteadily down from the platform to her table to snatch away the wine pitcher.

"Get that piss pot out of here." she snarled at Aud, who blinked at her ire, promising Rakel she would, while hoping the wine would catch Rakel before Rakel's ill humor caught her again.

Aud dressed like a near destitute man, but it was impossible to take her for one. She had a round, lightly freckled face with thin brows, a small, stub nose like Mirha's, and nervous eyes that minded some of a mistreated dog. She was of average height, but like Sigrid, with endowments a cut above. She might even have been thought demure had her cherub not been tempered by a life of hard labor. And like Sigrid she swaggered and cussed like a drunk sailor.

Rakel's suitor Dalla had once been Sigrid's suitor. Dalla had once thought a side course with Aud might be amusing. Aud hadn't, and when Sigrid heard of it, she hadn't either. Sigrid laid an axe haft to the side of Dalla's head, which started her friendship with Aud.

Aud divided her time between shepherding her half dozen sheep, everybody else's sheep, her cow Frigga, farming, and occasional work as a charcoal burner. Hroghar always needed help burning charcoal whenever she was flat broke.

Adis mother died when she was a babe. When Starri leapt aboard the Norwegian's longship eight years ago, her father leapt after him. Starri lost an eye. Her father lost his life. Her father and Starri had left her a tidy sum, and the jealous backbitings from those who didn't have a tidy sum. With that sum she amused herself tinkering as a jeweler, but there wasn't much call for it. Arts and crafts weren't a pastime, they were a Norse obsession.

Even butter churns were banded with embossed metals and carved with runic prayers or scenes of battles, weddings and whatever. Most of Adis income came from sawing, filing, and riveting combs of antler. The apprentices were always scavenging it for her. It had to come from the forest floor. Antler from hunted deer was too soft.

While she got on tolerably with Rakel, their liaison remained a business connection. Having her jewelry out under everyone's nose at Starri's sold more of it than she'd ever sold on her own. She and Kveldalf had nothing in common but Kveldalf at least wasn't blinded by ambition like Rakel, except for snaring Da'hal. Sigrid, with her boisterous and mannish ways she detested, and was ever pretending not to.

Rakel stumble hopped back to her chair before the hearth. She groaned down into the chair and propped her game leg back atop its stool. She refilled her cup and traded the pitcher for her knife atop the trivet. Orange fire sprites danced about the mirror flats of the foot and a half long blade as she crossed her eyes and held its edge an inch from the tip of her nose.

Kveldalf giggled to herself, distracted by her dopey dreams of that muscled mountain of blacksmith. She wasn't long on friends either. More than a few of Da'hal's admirers had been treated to a private showing of her bony fists. Da'hal was perfect, but feigning temperance and friendship to his cup companion, that wastrel Ref, whose only prospects he'd pissed away in pottles and prurience, galled her sorely. She'd take care of that after the wedding.

Da'hal and his sworn brother the Marshal were thicker than thieves. The prospect of them all sitting a Sunsday table soon as one big happy family seemed remoter than ever, after this morning's alarums.

Kveldalf sighed out another weary "Oh Well", and turned away from her board game to shoot Rakel a wrinkled glare.

Aud set her kidnapped lamb on Rakel's rug, cautioning it to behave.

Behind Kveldalf's beanstalk back Aud traded a knowing, pixie grin with Adis and then both puffed out their cheeks, wrinkled their brows, and hunched their shoulders high. With elbows akimbo, and clutching unseen hammers, they rocked from side to side pounding at invisible anvils.

"If you hadn't egged the spoiled brat on." Kveldalf said to Rakel.

"You can't spoil a rotten egg." Rakel mumble moaned.

"And stop waving that knife around," Kveldalf said. "before you drop it into your other foot."

"I'm going to make a rug out of that bitch." Rakel told her knife.

"Outlawry and a confiscation court." Kveldalf said. "Where are you going to go, Hellulandia? You don't even know anyone up there."

Rakel continued staring vacantly at her knife, and the two, blurry everythings beyond it.

"But you won't have to worry about that. Remember Jarnulf?" Kveldalf said.

"Who?" Rakel sneered.

"If not for him you'd never have noticed her." Kveldalf said. A long and profoundly crippled moment limped by.

"Aunt Ranveig hasn't had a decent word to me these last seven years," Kveldalf said. "since I told her I wouldn't help her shame cousin Hjortgren into killing Jarnulf. Hjortgren's not the brightest but even he knows his luck wouldn't reach that far. And he'd know luck if any would, surrounded by the lack of it on Dalla's ship. He even told Jarnulf that though his brother's death grieved him greatly, it was fairly done and he'd not pursue it. Ketil asked for it. If he can get over that, you can get over a punch in the nose."

Rakel kept her thoughts about Hjortgren's open mindedness to herself. Hjortgren wasn't half the fool Kveldalf took him for. Jarnulf was Bror's prodigy. He'd carve Hjortgren and any three of his friends like dinner geese but at the moment he could die into hell and wait there for anything resembling a compliment.

"I thought you were my friend." Rakel said.

"You ignored Kadlin because you knew it couldn't last." Kveldalf said. "And Ingi, and all the others. But when he bought the bed trael you came unglued."

The front door swung inward and Sigrid swaggered in. She took Aud's cheeks in her hands, and bent over and planted a kiss on her forehead. Adis wrinkled in feigned disgust. Sigrid stuck her tongue out at Adis before muscling herself onto the bench between her and Aud. Adis hissed, clawing the air between them before heaving off to join Kveldalf at the bench across from them, which amused Aud greatly.

Sigrid spied Aud's escaped lamb, now closing on Rakel's again lolling fingertips.

"What's wrong with this one?" Sigrid groaned. "It looks fine to me."

"Aud must have thought it looked lonely." Adis said.

"The whole town's singing that slut's praises." Sigrid said. Adis waved her to silence.

"She's been howling for sympathy since we got here." Adis said. "Don't start her up again."

Sigrid gingerly groped behind her ear at the knot Astrid had walloped onto her.

"I guess that bitch didn't get it the first time when I kicked her off the cliff." Sigrid said. "From the looks of our dear Rakel, she could use some help."

Kveldalf's gaze darted Sigrid a murderous warning to shut her yap. Plotting to attack someone was Lesser Outlawry. Discussing it in front of Aud's snooty, shifty little friend might be asking for trouble to come bite all their asses.

"You wouldn't go carrying tales." Sigrid said, craning forward toward Adis. "Would you?"

"As if that gossip would be news to anyone," Adis said. "or Jarnulf would do anything about it."

Aud caught Sigrid's arm and told her to mind her manners. Rakel had no right to anything for this morning's beating. She'd asked for it.

"His life wouldn't be worth spit if he lays a finger on any of us and he knows it." Sigrid said.

"I wouldn't be so sure." Kveldalf said. "He and his hunters seem to be awfully good at hiding from poachers and shooting them in the back. Your kin aren't woods runners and neither is Starri."

At the fire Rakel moaned like a mother at her urchin muddied head to toe in her best clothes just laundered.

"Why would they lie?" Kveldalf said. "All of them except Da'hal look furious and relieved every time they come in with another story. And so far they haven't lost a man."

Sigrid snapped her suspicious leer back on Adis.

"You seemed cozy enough with him this morning." Sigrid said.

"He almost tore her arm off today." Aud said.

"How could I know he was hiding behind that hay bale," Adis said. "before I shot an arrow through it?"

Sigrid guffawed and her mood turned from suspicious menace to darkly amused.

Aud's lamb finally got Rakel's attention, and Rakel again ordered Aud get it out of her steading now. She was not going to be scrubbing her rug again on top of everything else.

The fire and evening wore down.

Sigrid tossed another log on the embers and poker stirred them before raiding the sideboard. Aud was off in baby animal bliss again. Sigrid said she was not going home to this one's bleatings all night. Dogs, cats, and sheep, it was all one to Aud though calves and foals were off limits. Jug in hand Sigrid gathered a double armful of hides from the bed closet, it looked like a cyclone had gone through it, and spread them before the hearth.

Rakel's head drooped and her tongue peeped out between her lips. Drool decorated her cheek. Sigrid wiped the spittle off and kissed Rakel's forehead. She pulled Rakel out of her chair, under knees and shoulders to deposit her before the fire. Rakel started awake and again babbled on about how she'd do anything to make an example of that rotten trael.

"Yes, I'm sure you would." Sigrid said, pulling a bearskin over Rakel.

XLIII Meals And Monies

Da'hal sat on the shieling's dirt floor, his back to a roof pillar, legs out and crossed before him. He dipped his glass into the ale bucket for a refill, watching the fires slowly burn through lids heavy with sleep.

A girl's voice hailed him in Frankish. He mind groaned.

"Yes Hlif?" he said, knowing he wasn't going to sleep for a while yet.

"I know you've been working very hard," she said. "and I feel terrible asking you, but, .."

"What's broke tonight?" he said.

"A wagon." she said. "It's pulling hard and the right wheel's making noise."

"Try packing it with fat?" he said. The wheel hubs, axle and mounts were wood. Repairing or replacing them needed a carpenter, not a smith.

"Well, no." she said. "You always seem to know just what to do."

"All right," he said. "let's go."

"It's out front. Aerin helped me." she said. "And don't get up till after the nightmeal I cooked you. I'll bring it in."

Da'hal watched her march back out to gleefully tell Aerin she'd cornered him again, raised his ale, sighed, and turned it back into the bucket.

In another Smithy miles to the south two men harangued the grime and sweat painted owner as he poured red iron into smoking, wooden molds.

"No goddamn edge on these." Ageir said. "Didn't Nacarr tell you to,"

"Your arm broke?" Kvigr the smith growled. "Or maybe sharpening them's beneath you and your high seat at the ale bench."

"Look you." Ageir snapped back. "Nacarr wants these by week's end and you're not half home. You're not the only man here who knows smithing."

"Been hearing that for twenty years." Kvigr said. "What I haven't heard, not once, is what a terrible loss it would be if someone tossed a pot of something hot on such an irreplaceable asset as you."

"Rather large words." Ageir said.

"Anyone half as important and a quarter as bright," Kvigr snapped back, slowly cocking his pot, two handed behind him, "would know they've been warned. And all I see in your hands is my bag of warheads."

"That can change." Ageir said, wrapping his free hand around his pommel.

"Go on." Kvigr said, cocking his pot back even further and tilting it slightly forward.

"Tell Nacarr's schedule it can come give itself a hand, provided it can drag its lazy ass out from under Bergthora's."

"I'd watch my words." Ageir said.

"Well, there's another way of getting shed of you." Kvigr said. "You go tell him what I just said and he'll heap praises on your loyalty, yeah, as he's discovering you're the perfect man to go find out what Tore's up to."

"Come on." Ageir's friend said, taking Ageir's arm. "Even Thorfinn's bucking Nacarr."

"That he is." Kvigr said. "They've all had a belly full. Only three ever came back. The first two didn't go beyond stepping on their neighbors face down and dead. Then Nacarr told Abbi that since he liked hiding in our woods for three weeks so well, he could go keep hiding in them for the next three years.

Here there's Thorfinn and his brothers, Bergthora, Ragna, Groa, Alof, a few other women and that's it. They've already got bootlicks, plenty of them. You aren't getting in. Bribes will only get you robbed and laughed at. Bullying or blackmailing will get you killed. Keep your mouths shut and don't go throwing your weight around till you know exactly who's who, and what's what, which will take you years."

"You saying you're one of them?" Ageir said.

"What did I just tell you?" Kvigr said. "Tough guy."

He spit into the dirt.

"You'll be lucky to live out the year."

"Well, thanks." Ageir's friend said.

"Piss on your thanks." Kvigr said. "Where's my money?"

XLIV Night In Normandy

Rakel rolled over facing her fire, toying with her crucifix. She'd been so set to show that bastard. She'd lose herself in the Lord, like other women of quality did.

Hroghar's tales of convent life in Normandy had been a slap. What she'd heard was real enough, but those convents cost money to get into, more than she had. They were refuges for rich women who'd become an embarrassment at court.

Life for those privileged few was obscenely rich and obscenely decadent. For everybody else it was just obscene. Lords petty and great were continually asserting their supremacy over the Pope's, who in turn put their lands under interdict.

Papal interdict was no small suffering. All were denied every church service. Dead loved ones lay unburied, exposed in the fields, till their overlord relented and kissed the Pope's ass.

Yes, the cathedrals there had windows like the church here, but much bigger and more glorious. But she wouldn't be seeing any of that. Convent life was getting up eight times every night for prayers on her knees on a frozen stone floor, and back breaking labor in threadbare poverty and filth from dawn till long after sunset. Lentils and waterish gruel were the starvation fare. For chitchat she'd have only whispered snatches of other sisters failed romances, and starting at their affrighted shrieks in the night at otherworldly visitants.

It wouldn't be a day till that venison the hunters brought in, the milk and skyr, cabbages, turnips, crabs and lobsters had her desperate to scrape up her passage home which would be a master trick as beggars there often starved to death and they were the experts.

The sole alternative would kill her. If the men didn't do it with blows the diseases they'd give her would.

She told him that life would drive anyone mad. It was no wonder they had visions of heaven. Hroghar said they were all loons before they went into the orders anyway and legions more of them were trapped by visions of hell instead.

Hroghar added that she was not to believe a word of whatever Da'hal said, as he was a great dreamer. Hroghar thought dreamer sounded better than shit head.

Da'hal had told her, and everyone else, mountains more about it all, right down to the Latin on the Lion Heart's tomb though she doubted that the Cathedral existed solely as a Holy Sepulcher for Richard's Lion Heart, and that if it hadn't already been there, the peasants would have thrown it together just for Richard the instant he finally had any use for it.

Da'hal had had twenty and seven winters to pick Hroghar and Genevieve's memories. Hroghar was uncle Starri's friend. They were conspiring against her.

King Henry II of Aenglalond sired four sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. Richard was his mother Eleanor's favorite. Henry jailed Eleanor for eleven years and cared as little for her favorite son. Among Richard's holdings in France, which came to him through Eleanor, not Henry, was Poitou. Richard's nobles there saw it differently, and when Henry set his other sons at Richard's throat, with armies, Richard's nobles leagued with Henry. Richard kicked all their asses.

This royal nonsense continued back and forth for seven years. Three years into it Richard's older brother Henry died leaving Richard heir to the throne. Father Henry redoubled his efforts and losses.

On his death bed Richard left his heart to his most loyal subjects in Rouen. His body he had entombed at the feet of his father in the Abbey of Fontevrault for all the disasters he had rained down on his father's head in life. And to his treasonous Poitevins, Richard commanded his bowels be left on their porch to stink up the place.

Rakel yawned, trapping her silver cross between her palms and pillowing down on her knuckles as the wine mothered her into its securing embrace. Behind her sounded the toonk squeak of a slap stoppered jug and her friend's satisfied burp, and the fire's bright, warming orange beyond her eyelids darkened.

Hroghar was full of it. Rouen was anything but a stink hole. The streets were golden. They were so clean. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder about all those magnificent destriers and palfreys everyone rode about, and their leavings, and the city's teeming inhabitants leavings.

Dark fathoms beneath her marched pew after pew of burnished cherry, drowned in slabs of sea bottom colors and littered with lobster traps. Directly beneath her a western amber married an eastern blue and their glorying passion birthed emerald in the granite paved aisle. Their myriad cousin hues slant buttressed the windows from within as the gray granite arches buttressed her Cathedral without. This orgy of entwining hues must be heaven's own bed from which the Lord had fathered all things sacred and beautiful into the world.

Floating disembodied above, and yet part of it all, as an angel she relived the world's creation, as she'd first lived it in on his porch, watching the moon shed her cloud robes to stride naked among the stars, as he held her under his shoulder vowing to love her beyond all time, that first time, her creation time.

At the aisle's far terminus, tiny before the gold bathed altar of Richard, knelt an ermine furred nun. She plunged into shut eyed darkness whispering devotions to her clasped cross, and the flags beneath her knees braided their ice about her every bone.

She prayed twice through the stations and started round again. It was harder this time. Before her the golden light flooding the altar was a swirl with dust motes magicking into faces left behind across that awful, cold black ocean. They peered through and past her.

She was dead, and they went on living too busy to notice her dying, or the corpse of her love laying out in the orchard, unburied by her grumpy Bishop's interdicting, and ever present, nearness.

Vision after vision swirled into one another, first her hotheaded Bishop and his dragons, and then his bloody henchmen, and her father the one eyed Cardinal leading that big, black haired Fo'c'sulmule she rode and even the Pope in his tattered hunting clothes. There went Sigrid and Kveldalf and Aud, and snooty little Adis.

There was nothing sad eyed in them, nothing of the 'how could you leave us?' Their final well wishings had been mere civility with nothing heartfelt in them.

Would old age would feel like this? How anyone could stand it? Their friends drifted away, and their eyes didn't work, their ears needed a second telling, breasts, belly and butt all flabby and saggy?

Those stones were hard on the knees and that itchy wool underwear was riding up again. Making oneself this miserable seemed at odds with the object of it all. And those self-inflicted birch scourgings, how her back burned. Did God really need such atrocities before sharing his bliss with her?

Vertigo's muddle stumbled through her, and round her sounded faint clackings as of beach stones stumbling after an ebbing wave. The flags beneath her knees swelled up and fell as the deck of her lobstering faering had, slimed to her eyebrows in lines, traps, buoys, those huge clacking, pincered, green black bugs, and unprofit.

In a quandary she wondered what strange sea worms might be eating the flags undersides, and how the hell she'd replace those flags and keep her Cathedral from sinking. Perhaps she'd have a look see. She reached forward to steady herself against the salt wet rail. The cold and sharp cut inscription beneath it warmed her like a langeldur, emanating courage.

HIC COR CONDITVM EST RICARDI

ANGLORVM REGIS QVI COR LEONIS DICTUM

OBIIT AN M CX C IX

Atop her granite rail Da'hal in stone lay snoring, robed and crowned, passed out drunk.

No, crawling over him to peer beneath the flags wasn't a good idea. Awakening him would surely provoke another invocation of the Savior's privates. Da'hal wasn't usually as grumpy as his sworn brother, and his over bloated manhood, but he was certainly louder.

Pitching about on her icy knees she prayed herself blue for release from earthly desires, and the harder she prayed, the earthier and bluer her desires became, stoking the flames of her apostate's desire to turn her back to the Lord, and flee back to the arms of her Lord, her dark and angry forest grocer.

Beside her bawled another of Hrafnstadir's lambs, nosing her elbow. She turned in the fervent hope that it hadn't puked on her rug and her eye lit on St. Michael, towering fifty feet and more in a south window. She beseeched him, please, save her from sin. The unseen lamb at her elbow whispered to her in Aud's voice.

"Be quiet." it said, and then retreated back down the aisle still bawling.

The reds, blues, greens, and ambers through the massive windows darkened.

Around her the forest of masts, the great roof pillars of polished granite were a shiver. She realized the unthinkable, catching at her drier than dry breath, as if she'd not slept in days. Those stone lobster clackings were the profane liturgy of the masts impending wreck, and the sails, the red and white striped, stone roof awnings, fluttering in the cold star winds, blazed alight in the arsonist's grasp of late night Trolls and Fire Jotuns.

Michael saw the foulness in her sinner's heart, and glowered back with eyes of burning sulfur. Her sins were beyond forgiveness, and she would burn in hell. She had lied to her Bishop, again and again, and fought with him only for the pleasure of their reconcilings until he had given up and done with her.

Again in true contrition she begged Michael to save her, and the devil speared on Michael's lance laughed at her. Michael's scorning face became her Bishop's face, glaring redly through his door, and yelling at her to go away.

Her soul shrank knotted into that mind churning sick of moldy rye, or wine and ale together, or her final walk home beneath the stars careering drunkenly through her tears that night, and the owls' cheerless judgments of outlawry chasing her home to her empty hearth.

The frozen flags beneath her frozen knees began to shake, and the benches leapt crashing about, and the windowed walls beneath the blazing roof awnings began to sway. Her Cathedral groaned and roared all round her. In that voice, like a mountain being murdered, it chastised her.

"And I'm telling you that this, is the end of it." it thundered again and again.

A league behind her the great doors of greened bronze, thirty feet tall by twenty wide, shook and boomed violently, as from without they were assailed by battering rams. And then the doors groaned in their colossal voice of tortured metal, breathing inward and back. Twenty feet above the floor, two red glows scorched and discolored the bronze in waves of a blue brown tempering, and they strained mightily toward her. The red glowered darker and hotter at her, and became the similitudes of steer huge, outspread hands.

Then sounded the furied crash of the lightning bolt, and both doors entire were hurled in smoking, twisted shards in upon the nave, halfway up the aisle, and God's army glowing in the walls colored glass darkened as if the living sun, God's very eye behind them, had been axed.

Their summer sea blues became the violet tempest of the drowned, their emeralds the jade of jealousies to egg on murder, their ambers and reds the lickings of the burning stake, and their whites the blood pinks of corpse linens.

But it was upon the leaded bars of those windows that true terror feasted. Tiny black lightnings crawled writhing over, and consuming them.

"We have matters to discuss." his voice thundered from the doorway's smoldering devastation, louder even than the lightning, dragging her eyes, trembling, back upon it.

In that gaping ruin towered anathema, mockery so beautiful, so perfect its proportions and gloriously settled its self-assured magnificence that it could not be of God. Only God owned perfection.

This was counterfeit, a lie, her liar, he who had sworn to forgive and embosom her beyond the grave and all time, and then cast her aside. His awful Jotun fists which had burnt the bronze were glowing white hot. Smokes pearled heavenward from them. Lightnings skirmished in the blue white diamonds of his wolf eyes.

He swept back his cloak of sable and beaver. Dragon maws of yellowed ivory strained toward her from his belt. He combed his hair. Then throttling his serpents he started toward her all in black, funereal linen. His cloak billowed, becoming a translucence of night behind him, breathing out and spreading its trolls sleep terror. Upon that veil shimmered garish traceries, a storm whipped spindrift of nacreous amethyst, emerald, diamond, and ruby, all polluted with the plague tints of dead men weeks unburied. It was the open strongbox of Lucifer, coming to prison and number her among its defiled lustres, forever corrupted, and forbidden the nearness of God.

Her every quailing shudder abjured its approach, as her every thumping heartbeat compelled his. Behind her sounded the scrapings of heavy stone, and the air grew rank with ozone.

Hideous squealings of the devil's fiddlers assailed her, and now behind her towered his black, sworn brother, gesturing wildly and bellowing at all the worshipers to make way, awaiting His arrival, each infecting the other with their eternally unforgiving rages. His brother had spurned God's light, and sent himself to hell.

Seething there in his remorse he would lash out and destroy even the stars in the furied, ice swept halls of his Lion Heart. They were in truth brothers, the awful sons of Odinn.

Behind her nighted Marshal the pews of burnished cherry, roof columns of gray granite, and heaven's glass angels twenty ells tall were defiled and darkened by their furies.

They were all under interdict. She could not escape damnation even here. They had come to drag her back to that unholied armpit across the sea, that Outlawed land of summer nights beneath the apple trees amid the fiend yippings of the toy wolf, that land of warm glowing hearths and hearts where she owned standing and friends. Forbidden heaven it may be, but gladly would she return with them and roast in heaven's counterfeit forever, if but one more hearth might reopen its heart to her.

Toward her he rushed exuding night and terror like the green black sea billowing from a breaching whale. Upon his brow rode murder so calm and open as if it were a trifle unworth even bandying. He was her dark angel in all his lying glory, her never ending tempter, her prince of shattered promises.

Behind him marched his familiars buckskinned and bloodied with dripping hands. In their trail came dark and terrible phantasm's nine. Behind those ghosts through the ruined door's breach black clouds roiled, and bolts like blue white swords writhed hissing and shrieking through them.

In the torment of her inmost soul she cried out in loneliness and fear. The very ends of the world could not keep her terrible master from her. He would always come for her, and never again would he take her.

She shouted a curse into his heart and he dispersed in widening circles like still, moonlit water from a tossed stone. Clouds of starless night vomited toward her from his wrent heart, and from behind his rippling ruins he renewed and relentless thundered toward her, batting the spindrift aside and gathering the window's black lightnings, leaping and crackling through the air onto his murder brow. And then his awful familiars swept through the wrack of his former self, close on his new rushing heels with their hands dripping the wet rubies of ruined lives smoking down onto the aisle's boards of ancient, brown black pine.

XLV I Will Steal The Stars

A closet darkness belched in through the windows. All round her now that black murder fury devoured the worshipers, her neighbors, jammed row upon row, though they saw it not.

Before her, her bringer of nighted sin took his stand, and folded his arms. False dice tumbled scintillant through his cock browed glower. In their dragon eyes was writ an utter weariness of love's bargain, those little feigned inadequacies they foisted on your ego, coy and clingy, which made them so endearing in their vulnerability, and so hair tearing reprehensible when they towered those same shortcomings into thunderstorm tantrums, demanding you remain blind to the transparency of them.

His dragon of yellowed ivory hissed cold in her ear. The mind talons of his predator flayed her standing, as if she were a mere stander at corners. She brushed his idiot dragon away.

His Jotun hand dove deep within his deer skin shirt and drew forth a necklace, blinding her with its unhallowed inner lightnings, of amber and diamonds. Its worth might buy all Norway, Sweden and Denmark. He draped it round her neck, and gladly would she sink through the granite flags to hide her shame. It was the Brisingamen. Freya had whored herself to four dwarfs in trade for it. He stared owlishly down at her as if to say 'have I standing sufficient, for such as you, now?'

From their windows Michael and the apostles leapt down howling like blood mad Skraelings, splintering the polished benches beneath their feet, and the devil in blue green scales still thrust upon Michael's lance slithered after them. They crowded her, probing with red ember eyes, and her diabolus with only his glance crashed them aside into shards of broken glass. He reached down a smoldering giant knuckle to brush the necklace.

"If I must sack heaven, I will, steal the stars and string them for you." he said. He raped her up into his iron embrace.

What was a soul, she asked herself. What was the devil's embrace, compared to her own devil's embrace?

Michael's dragon on its belly leered up at her, melting into an emaciated, freckled, red haired witch, champing and gnawing at her Bishop's boots. She kicked the glare eyed imp away again and again and always on its belly it rushed slithering back to clutch his ankles in her twig claws.

On the first bench to her right sat a smug blonde behind her candle lit desk, scribbling onto stacks of parchment. The blonde was tall and dressed in bridal white, and unadorned but for her bow and quiver. Her dress seemed dated, fit for a woman twice her age.

The red haired witch returned its attack to herself, and sank its fangs into her knee. She snatched up the squirming fiend and with all her might hurled it at the blonde, cursing them both to return to hell. The blonde caught the witch offhand, and grinning primly, hurled it back, making no more reply than to return to her scribblings. Her Bishop booted the witch, and gibbering backwards Gaelic it scurried away.

He took her black cassock from her head, dropped it to the polished flags, and booted it away. Shame, and the cold, still air pricked her scalp. She had been so beautiful once. Shorn to her skull she was ugly as a hatchling crow. He yanked her to her feet by her habit, and she faced the golden lit altar, shut eyed and trembling. He lifted her arms and yanked her habit up over her head and off. His hands on her nape felt so reassuring, and right despite the wrongness of it. She shivered, unable to refuse. Stories abounded throughout town. They were ugly stories, and she couldn't have cared less.

Her Bishop spun her round roughly and bruised her lips with his. He had vises for hands. He gripped her head and thumbed back her eyelids.

The granite columns thrusting the roof's vault so high, the high side galleries the choirs dueled each other from, and the rows upon rows of saints and angels spilling their brilliance within from God's eye without, all these paled before the predacious fire in his ravening, blue, wolf eyes. He raised up his crozier, as in blessing, or threatening, and it became a dirty yellow smoke, a dragon streaked with grimy, black cracks.

"Put that silly thing away." she said.

"Grow up." he said. And then he tenderly wiped her wet, salt cheeks with the callouses of his archer's fingers and gathered her tighter in his hunter's arms. His sable cloak he tossed to the flags before the altar, and pointed to it. She cursed him to hell, scooping up her habit. They'd use a confessional. How dare he? Didn't he know who she was? Her father was a Cardinal. There were hundreds of Bishops who'd ....

Bent over, he whacked an eye watering slap onto her. She shot erect, arching back on tip toes and cupping her sting in both hands. He added his hand to hers. Whimpering, she let herself be led to the confessional. He was all hers.

The bed within was thick strewn with furs of otter, seal and marten. The air reeled with scents of wood smoke, cured hams, and apple blossoms. Her bishop commanded her with only his sneer to the bed as he shed his swords, boots and buckskins.

Streamers of gold and red dust motes speared in through the lattices above the confessional's bow racks. She studied his short brown hair in them, as he again combed it, wondering if she'd like him better with a proper bishop's shaven crown, and decided that no, his vanity, did he ever have his share of that, and its rebellion suited him best.

Beyond the confessional's open door, framed against the autumn pines, the Pope's brother ambled by looking dour as ever with his long gray beard and craggy, gray brows. He hauled up a moment to look in on her and her Bishop, and raised up his axe in his huge, iron arm and smiled sweetly. He tugged at the reins of her fo'c'sulmule, kicking and complaining behind him. Her fo'c'sulmule was wearing a nasty red welt over its left eye, where Sigrid had walloped it with the axe haft.

"Come along," the Pope's brother coaxed, "I've a nice dog for you to eat."

She ordered her Bishop to close the door. And for once he did as she told him. She sat the bed's edge, telling him what she thought of, and his face hardened as he strangled his biceps.

Between them yet again rose smoking his ghost dragon, tawny, breathing clouds spider shot with tiny webs of entrapping night. His sapphire wolf eyes peered ravening through it, and the infernal demandings in them darkened her sight.

Through that amber mist his jaundiced glare devoured her with sin so candent that shame itself must wither before him. In the kilns of his eyes entwined imps of virescent azure, seid shimmering their lawless seductions into ghosts of amaranth and violet. Flame sprites of sapphire caracoled in orgies of lewd summonsings. Return, return and be retaught whole grammaries of forbidden blisses. Drown deep in their long denied elysiums.

"For you, I would lay the world in ashes." her Bishop whispered.

Her Prince of Lies had returned for his true paramour, she who alone dared summons in all its ferine brutishness her true partner and master. He set his jaundice mist aside and dove atop her taking her cheeks to make for her lips with his own. She ordered him to go shave first. He flipped her over and up onto her knees, saying that if that, was how she wanted it, she could damn well take it.

She said that wouldn't do at all, at least not for openers. He said if she gave him any more lip, he'd give her cause to regret it. She offered to make him a shirt. He said he'd had thoroughly enough of shirts and shirt making, and it was time she wriggled or cut bait. The door burst asunder splintered by a boot and a bear like roar.

Its splintered remains were blasted from its hinges and hurled away, and in the purple night beyond loomed her father, the Cardinal. His single blue eye held fury sufficient for an army, one to take Jerusalem, Acre and Antioch before matins. The Cardinal drew his sword. It was broken off a foot above the guard. Her naked Bishop snatched up his swords, and she pleaded with them not to fight. The fault was hers, not his. The red haired, dragon witch slithered in after the Cardinal, and shrieked at her Bishop in a fluttering squeal.

"There's a troll on my roof!"

Her Bishop rushed out of the confessional clutched in the red fiend's twig claws.

XLVI Cat Squeezings

Heart wracked with waking's empty ache she struggled an eye open and its sleep blur filled with Kveldalf, in a tremble panic, in her nightclothes. Behind Kveldalf Sigrid leaned heavily on one hip, wrist rubbing the sleep from her eyes while clutching the mead jug in one hand and her father's sword in the other.

Kveldalf had just got home and was preparing for bed when boots clomped across the roof above her. Her single, backward fleeing glance showed a filthy vagrant straddling her roof pole, and swaying behind its dragon, relieving himself and bellowing at her to come back. Jarnulf hadn't bothered to tell her.

"It's probably one of the hunters," Sigrid groaned. "dealing with your damn bear."

Kveldalf could not be talked into returning home, no matter the reassurances or sword Sigrid offered to escort her with. Kveldalf snugged herself into three of Rakel's blankets and commandeered the bed closet, where she passed out, and into, her own unsettling dreams. They were of gleaming lances, their tips a sea of stars in the morning sun. They were lances that she had somehow summonsed.

They were clamoring for drink. She watered them, and reawakened Sigrid and Rakel with her screams as the drink she gave them became the red blood of her neighbors.

Atop the roof of Kveldalf's steading Andar settled back beneath his dung smeared bear hides. Cursing Jarnulf he sifted through the shadows swallowing Kveldalf's bee hives. He winced and gulped down another bitter swig from the second of his four wineskins.

He and Kjartan had stomped out this vintage and kegged it last fall. It was hard to tell whether it tasted more like vinegar or cat squeezings, and it wasn't doing a thing to keep out the cold. Perhaps after this next skinful none of that would matter. Andar applied himself. He wished his bonus bear would show. They'd need something to pay Mordach's brew master Hoskuld One Hand for his help this summer.

XLVII Clondayre Town

Nine pounds of notched and bloody falchion sheared through the iron rim of Diarmud Mac Eoghan's shield, taking a third of it away and hurling him to his knees. But for his Gaelic tongue and coal black hair, he'd been Jarnulf's twin.

Dazed by the blow, he looked up into the late morning sun, bisected by the blade rising above the Skraeling's head. He lunged forward into a hip tackle as the falchion began its descent. A bodkin on a long shaft of birch popped through the savage's breastplate of bones and feathers above him.

Diarmud's shoulder broke the shaft and it cut his cheek as he bore his doomed foe to earth. He quit his writhing man and scrambled upright. His vision swam and his knees quaked. He jerked the leather thong about his wrist and his axe haft leapt to hand as he whipped about seeking meat for its edge. A Skraeling on bended knee a rod distant locked eyes with him, and left off tugging at the arrow in his thigh to double grip his falchion and struggle erect using it as a cane.

Diarmud's voice was gone. He'd been howling encouragements and curses from the start. In a silent, dead run he flung his shield's edge before him and struck the man's chest with its iron rim. His axe flashed sun bright from behind his shoulder, batting the falchion away. Its thin red lip took the savage high, behind his ear, and its momentum spun Diarmud full circle. Gasping, he again twisted about to see if anyone else wanted him. The Viking's line had pressed beyond him.

A ulcer from hell encrimsoned the sward for forty yards. A forest of hacked and arrowed men, his friends and kin, lay still in death, or groaning and gasping in its tightening bonds. The terrible wounds on Padraigh his father, and younger brother Donal, lying crumpled and still twenty yards to his left among that score of his butchered neighbors, told him they were beyond any more suffering.

Four of the bastards ships beached in full view at dawn, their sails all showing the crimson, severed head of Viking Nahri, and a hundred of them murdered three men at the boatsheds before advancing toward town. His garrison leapt to the attack. A quarter mile from the gate their left flank was broken and turned by a second mob from the northern woods. In the riot a third boiled from the southern wood inland to maul their rear. His friends were outnumbered three to one and losing ground fast.

A vision terrible, a massive and savage demon appeared before him, staying his heart. Its fury was tenfold that of the others. A hauberk of black chain sheathed it from neck to knee. It bore two swords, the right broken an ell above the hilt. It owned but one eye. Diarmud's mates bounced off it or were sucked in, slapped sprawling like trout by a bear, or crushed beneath it as if they'd blundered into a cyclone. Starri Rikr was in his element.

Diarmud's young cousin Brian raced toward the black fiend, axe high, and roaring back at it. Diarmud yelled at Brian, again, and again to stop. Brian did not hear him. Brian's eyes spit fire and his brain churned, a blind idiot maelstrom of vengeance lust.

One Gael rushed at Starri with an iron pike. Starri spun on his right foot and batted the pike away with his half sword and sheared clean through his attacker's neck with the full sword. Three more charged in.

His full blade ruined the first man's ribs and stuck fast in his spine. Bracing his foot against the squirming hip as he strove to free his trapped blade he caught the down stroke of his second foe's blade on the crossguard of his broken sword. His opponent stared amazed. He'd put everything he had into that cut. The black demon caught it offhand on one foot with hardly a flinch.

Number two got the half sword in his throat as he wound up to try again. Starri thought he was killed as he felt the bite of number three's axe glance through his helmet and into his scalp. His eye burned from the salty blood pouring into it. Through that crimson blur he watched the tip of a spear pop out through the man's chest as he clutched it and sank dying to his knees.

And Diarmud's heart died with him as Tore pulled his spear from Brian's back. Diarmud dashed for the northern treeline. In his flight he promised God that the suffering had only begun. Someday these and theirs would all pay hell's blood price.

"What the hell's with you?" Tore said.

"Ought to at least make a show of it." Starri said.

Starri tossed his wrent helmet aside. He swiped and shook the blood from his eye, peering about for another helmet as the battle line pressed inland. Their Hrafn Thingmen swept past them from the rear, in reserve. A Gael speeding for the woods caught Starri's eye, and filled him with an unnamable, and more than usual, furor. Starri unslung his crossbow and drew down on Diarmud's fleeing back.

"Leave it." Tore growled, shoving the bow aside. "He's had enough, and they'll be short on men to look after them as it is."

"My gut says different." Starri said. A moment's glimpse back toward beach ignited Starri's fury. Orange flames and billows of black smoke belched from the Gael's boatsheds.

"Assholes." Starri roared. "They were supposed to watch the ships, not burn the sheds."

"Forget it." Tore said. "I sent Adam and Dalla to secure the barns."

Tore rolled his head over onto his shoulder and rubbed the back of his neck. He sighed, weary, and arched a squirrel tail brow.

"You think this place will do?" he said. His question was mere rhetoric, but still, Starri's iron grin alone said that it would more than just do, it would do splendidly.

Midnight found Diarmud and Garth peering out through the trees at Vikings tearing down the second of the barns. Diarmud had beat the bushes at midday and found himself the only survivor. Then following sunset Garth and three more hunters, after a day of beating stream bottoms, had shown up with fresh venison. Five more hunting parties were still out.

Diarmud pondered how best to make use of their heretofore unappreciated, and universally unrequited talents for anarchy. Given the tenor of their more outlandish pranks he wondered if there might not be a grain of truth in their boasts of wolverines in the family woodpiles.

Diarmud's tortured questing after the perfect plan to gain their allegiance was cut short at noon the following day by exhaustion's oblivion. Throughout that afternoon and evening the full score of Garth's hunters quietly materialized around him like a coven of malevolent and vengeful ghosts.

XLVIII I'll Take It As Criminal Slander

Diarmud and Garth's second eve in the forest edge's black chill arrived. The creaking and groaning of its pines was filled with the eerie cries of great horned owls. It was a song that never failed to raise the hair on a man's nape, and ice his heart, no matter how many decades he'd been hearing it, its lyric the promise, its melody the assurance, of death eternal to all small creatures of the wood.

The loon alone dared answer in challenge, its goblin laughter and drawn out wails echoing about the length of its lake deep in the forest, so unearthly and insane it could only have birthed from the lightless pit beyond the stars.

Out in the field beside the Viking's fires were the boards and beams which had earlier been their town's barns. They was being reassembled five hundred yards from the gate into catapults and mantlets. Wheels from farm carts now mounted two, twenty foot flatbeds. Tall A frames sat atop each, joined at their tops by axles. Men more dead than alive stumbled about pinning together the main arms and buckets for the counterweights. Huge leather slings would hurl the boulders now arriving in more carts trundling back and forth from the beach.

Garth shook Diarmud awake to conference with his hunters. Diarmud's misgivings were speedily confirmed. They weren't taking orders from any weekend sargeant and full time grog seller, especially in light of his garrison's suicidal cupidity. Diarmud would be quite free to do whatever he pleased so long as they weren't involved. If Garth were crazy enough to go with him they'd miss him, but it was his own affair, and funeral.

Dawn's amber burnished a grimy thirty nailing bear hides to the first catapult to fireproof it. A second group strained to push their forty foot bar of cross pinned beams up onto the axle of their machine. Tore was haranguing that crowd with curses and threats that if they didn't hurry up they'd be loaded first into the slings and hurled at the gate. A trio stormed toward him gesturing wildly and bellowing like herd bulls whose harem was being stolen.

Tore couldn't decide which of Humach, the Skraeling commander's, features beneath his shaved but for its foot long, top knotted scalp offended him most, the man's beady, rat brown eyes or his thin, vulturine beak. Humach tended to sink his head down between his hunched up shoulders, and his legs showed a pronounced bow. His only skill was riding a horse as he was too lazy to walk anywhere. Human bones tied into a washboard bib rattled atop his naked chicken breast and bracelets of bear claws snicked about his wrists. The claws and other trappings had to be inherited, Tore figured, as there was no way this desiccated, turd bronzed pullet had collected them himself.

Quiniquesh, the Skraeling in the middle, dwarfed him. His brawn, scars, swagger, and stolen sword said that unlike Humach he'd fought his way up.

Skjalg, Nacarr's surrogate, dissipated by drink and debauchery, looked like a malnourished, pregnant, fifty year old teen beneath his tunic of scarlet linen, and fine woven breeks. Physically he wasn't any more imposing than Humach, but the unease and revulsion he inspired among his Outlaws was, palpable, an aureole as black as his shoulder length, coarse hair. Though his sword and dagger with hilts of fancy gold were known to be well used they'd no nicked edges, or reputation as battlers. Their work lay in murdering rebellion as better men than Skjalg restrained their struggling victims.

Skjalg's nephew Sumarlidi had got himself killed on a poaching foray. Ref had insisted that Da'hal was pushing things when he dragged the dead Nahri back across the river and nailed it to a tree through its eye with its own knife, and dumped its left leg on the ground before its remaining foot. Skjalg never discovered or cared which Hrafn had done it. To him they were all guilty.

Tore's allies wasted nary a heart beat in giving Tore hell for usurping their commands. Tore planted his axe in the dirt, cupped his bear sized hands over its haft's iron cap, and leaned forward on it.

"If you were actually in charge of anything but shit we wouldn't be here now." Tore said. He pointed his gray bearded chin toward the town's stockade.

"We'd be in there, up to our balls in booty and warm beds. But instead," he continued, waxing louder with every syllable, "I got to sleep in the dirt, and start all over from scratch this morning. You can't get your rabble to even piss straight."

His defiance avalanching through the camp summonsed Starri, who arrived more in search of amusement than any perceived need to toss his friend a lifeline. He stopped ten feet behind the trio and coughed out a grunt to yank their eyes to his fist full of hilt.

Humach shot Quiniquesh a questing glance before restating their position. Tore, glowering disbelief, yanked his axe up, flipped it end for end, and with both hands throttled its haft. Starri took a single step forward. The three departed, still blustering but with more than an unseemly glance or two back over their shoulders. Tore turned on Starri.

"Don't you have anything to do?" Tore growled.

"I thought I'd see if you needed a hand." Starri said, immediately regretting it.

"When the day comes that three or thirty like that even try to pull me down," Tore said, now throttling both his axe and his mounting amusement. "I'll take it as criminal slander if you or anyone else stops them."

XLIX Sticking Other Men's Pigs

Twilight was gathering. Fires blazed and sentries lolled at their postings, thirsty, sober, and grumbling. Most of the camp had been sleeping like the dead on the field behind them since noon. A delegation from town had come out under truce earlier, tried to negotiate a ransom, and failing, departed.

Two of Tore's men sat leaning back against one of the mantlets. Karl, the lanky six footer in his early thirties with short, early graying hair, was running a stone down the length of his sword. Badger, the spry and stocky red blonde eight years his junior and shorter by a hand, sat chin in hands and elbows on his knees, frowning at the stockade.

"These mares won't hold inside." Badger said.

"Of course not." Karl said, testing his blade's edge with a calloused thumb.

"So we're finally going to skin the cat." Badger said.

"Keep sticking other men's pigs," Karl said. "and eventually you will get stuck."

Three flaming bolts streaked up into the night signaling Tore's readiness. Starri's bellow thundered across the field ordering the advance. A hundred men in chain and helm to loincloths and hide chaps shouldered breastworks and bows. Forty Nahri and Skraelings grunted and bitched, leaning into the catapult to mule it forward. A train of carts loaded with boulders followed in their rear. Half a dozen more carts were strung out still ferrying rocks from the beach.

Atop the town's stockade helmets went up and came down clapped on almost as one.

Starri ordered a halt and the catapult loaded. The ropes restraining the sling were released and four hundred pounds of stone hurtled through the air. They thudded to earth twenty yards short of the gate.

Starri grabbed the Skraeling in charge of his crew and loosened two of his teeth with a right jab. Humach scurried forward, Quiniquesh looming at his side, demanding to know who the hell Starri thought he was. Starri told him.

Quiniquesh reached for his sword. Starri snatched his own, left hand and backwards. His pommel caught Quiniquesh in the chest as they drew. Quiniquesh staggered back but not far enough as Starri finished his draw, his point clearing the scabbard and arcing upward through ribs and past his man's face. The sword floated for a blink in the air above him as Starri traded his grip.

The Skraeling struggled with shorn breast muscles to finish his draw. Starri swung from the side and beheaded him. Humach scuttled back, his hands forward, empty and in plain view as Starri glared back mightily tempted. He whirled from Humach and back to the Skraelings pushing the catapult.

They vowed mutiny. They had done all the fighting and dying. Starri lifted his sword high for their inspection. Their mutiny died deader in them than last nights' liquor, gaping at their real commander's ruined life on the sword. The advance resumed. It stalled again as a withering volley of arrows from the town dropped every third man of them.

One Skraeling ran for the beach. Skipper Adam shouldered his crossbow and backshot him. Starri, Adam, and a dozen more advanced on the catapult's crew with shields raised between themselves and the stockade, axes and blades at the ready, and bellowing.

The stockade's archers played cat and mouse atop their parapet through almost twenty firings of the catapult. A final sling full of boulders drum rolled into the gate and on through it, pashing flat its wreckage within. The crew quit the hated machine in a sprint to join those behind the mantlets, and the march resumed.

The Gaels returned to firing in volleys, as the Vikings held their mantlets up before them. They'd covered half the distance when those volleys arrived bearing flaming rags. Starri ordered a charge.

The mantlets were abandoned and the horde rushed over the wrecked gate timbers, and into the town. Resistance within was light. Starri beat and bullied his allies up the ladders to finish off the dozen remaining Gaels above them on the parapet. The parapet ran unbroken around the stockade's top, and those doughty archers remaining on it all escaped after shooting seven more of Tore and Starri's allies. Which sight heartened Starri greatly. The remaining Gaels were women and two grandfathers.

Behind Garth and Diarmud the features of the dead shone cold as the stars above as the pair crawled about pilfering armor and weapons from their enemies.

"I'm confused as to how we're going to get out again even if we get back in." Garth said while nervously keeping the three roving leopards pinned down with only his two eyes.

"Just find a helmet with a face shield." Diarmud said.

L If It's Half As Big As Your Words

Tore kept his shield kept before him and axe at his side as he quietly handed orders out. Pointing at things was something your archers watched for the enemy to do. Put a man in charge and he just had to point at things he wanted done.

The troops were soon hugging walls, peering over their shields at doorways and rooftops as they advanced. Three blocks further two Nahri in the lead fell clutching arrows in their throats. Tore ordered Dalla to take four men and clear the building the shots issued from. He ordered Skjalg to send half a dozen and seal the building's rear.

Dalla singled out his quartet and raced to the door, kicked it in and went in low and left, out of the light. Huddled against the wall, his eyes straining the black within, a bowstring twanged and an arrow embedded itself in his right thigh as the next man came through the door. The arrow missed bones and arteries but it didn't the hurt the less for it. The third man in, Halldor, Dalla's fo'c'sulman, dove headlong, sliding prone along the floor. A bolt zipped over his head and out the doorway.

"Stairs, top right." Dalla hissed. A bolt slammed into the wall beside his ear. Dalla's three loosed in the shooter's general direction as one. Their fourth and fifth mates ran in and hit the floor. The muted thunks of their barrage into the far wall were answered by four feet beating a hasty retreat on the upper landing. Halldor, lying in the light from the open door, was recocking his weapon as another shot issued from the dark to their upper left, angling down through his back. Halldor's bow rattled onto the floor as his killer's footsteps pounded across the landing.

By now Dalla's men could see that the upper landing was empty. They took the stairs two and three at a time. A doorway at the head of the stairs revealed only an empty room with an open window. They peered out the window and jerked back in as five Nahri bolts zipped through it and into the ceiling above.

"It's us!" one of Dalla's men cried out. Their echoes reverberating through the alley mingled with the thudding footsteps of three men running across the rooftop above their heads. The remaining Nahri loosed his bolt at the killers as they leapt through the night to the roof adjacent. The six in the alley reloaded and dashed after them.

An adjoining room revealed the stairway leading to the rooftop. Dalla's men stomped back down the stairs buzzing like wet hornets. Dalla cursed all creation as he broke off the fletched end of the arrow in his leg and pulled it through from the back side. It took his men three tries to get Halldor separated from the floor. The bolt through his back had him securely anchored to it. They hauled Dalla and the corpse out into the street.

"God Damn You!" Tore yelled to the rooftops. "If one more of my men gets shot I'm going to hang all of you bastards up by your thumbs and skin you alive. But not until after I've done that and worse to your women and kids. Do you hear me?"

An arrow thugged into his shield.

In the rush for cover Dalla was heard above all promising murder to the idiots who had first dropped him on, and then stepped on his shot leg. Scuttling backwards on his hands and good leg he got behind a barrel. He ignored the arrows coming past it as he ripped pieces from his tunic to staunch and bind his wound.

"Run!" Knut yelled to Leif as a Skraeling five feet from them took a bolt through his eye and out the back of his head. Two convulsions later the Skraeling crumpled into a heap and lay still. The column scattered like roaches from a torch in the hailstorm of bolts and arrows. Dalla was heard offering a double share for the first corpse.

In his dash for cover Badger glanced back. He spotted a rooftop bow, corkscrewed into a crouch and snapshot it. Whether he'd a double share coming he couldn't be sure as he sprinted round a corner just in time to catch a glimpse of the fleeing Knut and Leif. 'Double share?' he mused grinning. That plus his discretion times two, divided by, oh, say a half, each.

Dalla hoped he'd own even a quarter the hell Tore still had in him when and if he were ever pushing sixty. The old monster was screaming obscenities fit to strip every barnacle from a sixty foot ship as he ordered their allies off their asses and down the alleys after the swine who were shooting at them. Skjalg's leadership, as expected, was conspicuous in its absence.

The ambush quickly evaporated but its confusion remained as the unit reformed and heads were counted. No Gaels were dead but four Skraelings were and three more were wounded. Leif and Knut were missing, again. Dalla thought his wounded leg was a hell of a trade for those pimpled rats but at long last he was finally shed of them.

Tore gave the order to move. A large Skraeling, one of Quiniquesh's underlings, turned on Tore with his bow. The Skraeling vowed not to advance another step. His neighbors were doing all the dying.

The Skraeling angled his bow toward Tore. Badger, ten feet to the Skraeling's right, laid his grin against the stock of his crossbow, and whistled. The Skraeling's head jerked about, toward the sound. Badger's bodkin lay leveled straight into his eye.

Karl, and another five Hrafns too, drew down on the mutineer. Asgrim backed into the shadows behind Badger. Tore flipped his thumb back over his shoulder, toward the center of town. The money and the women were that way. Did Morrow's men want to miss out? Or perhaps they didn't know what to do with a bunch of scared, defenseless women?

The Skraelings snorted derision to their fellow. Two howled, clutching themselves. The mutineer said his manhood worked fine, but he planned on living long enough to use it again.

"If it's half as big as your words," Tore said. "it must be a real killer."

The mutineer's comrades roared laughter at Tore's words. They all knew what to do with defenseless women. The Nahri saw no humor in it. Outlaws and perverts though they were, the thought of loosing Skraeling butchers on Gaelic women, white women, . . . The Skraeling flinched. His supporters were deserting him, stolen by the old Hrafn's guile. Tore smiled his kindly grandfather best back.

"Just once," Tore said. "I'd like to actually see one bigger than my own, if you haven't left it with your woman for safekeeping."

The Skraeling's comrades howled like moon struck dogs at him, and he lowered his bow. He blustered that many women would soon know more than just the sight of it. A huge, corded forearm shot round his neck from behind, and the hand of its mate grabbed his jaw. Asgrim yanked the jaw aside and the soft crack of a broken neck split the night. The Skraeling thudded to earth and his mutiny exploded. Badger, Karl and their mates shot six, and it died in two eye blinks.

"Asgrim?" Tore beckoned. "A word?"

His tone seemed most reasonable.

Asgrim blenched, and yanked his pilfered falchion loose from the other Skraeling's neck, the one still quivering prone beneath his left boot. Six Hrafns reloaded, and the rest covered their fuming allies as all the Hrafns traded snickers. Fo'c'sulman Asgrim was in for yet another explanation of the difference between initiative and insubordination.

LI Target Painting

Dalla's leg was splinted between two barrel staves. Sweat, cold and greasy, bathed him as he stumped along wondering which God Awful screw ups Tore and Starri would stick him with to replace Halldor and the young sods who'd gone missing. His ship, the leakiest of the four, its seasons numbered seventy three, seemed the repository for the greenest kids, habitual drunks, troublemakers and luckless losers. It hadn't been that way when Grimkel skippered it though they were mostly the same men.

Staring across the street and up the column Dalla wondered where Hring, who'd been the second man into the building with him, had gotten off to. He wasn't an easy man to miss. He minded Dalla of an oak stump, with teeth, and nostrils, and about as little imagination. Dalla had taken Hring's iron, graceless exterior for the shell of a simple bruiser. He'd sold his mate short.

Hring's mind ran to low cunning and self-serving artifice, all of it a maze planted with needle thorns. When unmasked in a crooked stratagem, he simply bulled his way through with brute force which he owned in abundance. Many would have bet money on him against Starri at wrestling. Some thought he even looked like Starri had Starri been squashed by a boulder and flowed out sideways from under it.

Tore had figured Hring and three of his closest bench mates for the perfect hearse for returning Halldor to the ships, and his burning and bone packing for Christian burial at home, and another far more important piece of work.

Hring's temperament and hobby had earned him a nickname, Torch. Common wisdom held that he could burn stones. Four of his mates had seen him do it. Hring took their silver, laughing, after igniting a piece of sandstone he'd steeped in whale oil for three days. Dalla, even after paying up, still swore it couldn't be done.

When the Skraelings burned the ship sheds Dalla had done a double take. Perhaps Hring had been left at the beach by mistake. Dalla wondered if he'd have traded him for Halldor.

Halldor's mania had been discipline and he'd imposed it with fists and a knife hilt. As Dalla's mates knew all too much of his own indiscretions they'd tried to run him, and rather than nip it himself he'd dumped the job on Halldor. What he'd got in return was resentment and disrespect.

"Satan's balls! It'll be midwinter." Starri bellowed.

One Nahri stole a glance at him and wished he hadn't. Starri stood ten feet out into the street while everyone else crept frescoe like, behind their shields, along the walls. Thirteen winters Tore's junior and without the beer gut he looked more the arch fiend himself than even the forest demons haunting their nightmares.

His eye transfixed the curious Nahri with the same intensity a cornered rat might feel as an iron poker approached it. The sleeves of his chain ended above his elbows. The fronts of his gold stitched, black boots hid behind greaves of browned steel that came almost to his knees, and the chain's hem above them. His round, iron bossed shield sported the broken stumps of four arrows.

His sword's hilt, foot long and wrapped in silver wire, filled his scarred right fist. Its three and a half foot blade was fullered to a foot shy of point and red to its guard. Such swords were devastating two handed choppers, and almost as wicked in one hand as two. Hence, they were called hand and a half bastards. They were Hroghar's standard.

The fact that nothing escaped Starri's single eye served only to reinforce his allies fears that they had been suckered by Satan himself. Seven of their own were dead from snipers and four more had been ordered off into the darkened alleys by One Eye, doubtless to the same end.

Starri would have gone into the first building that fired on them but for the certainty he'd be shot, by accident, on his way out, Humach's orders. There had to be some way of painting a target on the rat for the town's snipers.

Forty yards ahead of his column two Gael's sprinted across the street and back into an alley. Four Skraelings in the van bolted after them. Being suckered into an ambush beat dealing with the black, one eyed demon if they didn't go.

"Get back here." Starri yelled.

The four gladly turned around, and the Gaels reappeared to back shoot two of them. Six Viking bolts chunked into corners as the Gaels whisked back behind them. The leading half of the column chased after the shooters. Starri sent the rest after them. He ordered them into the left alley and devil take the right. If they got separated in the dark he'd have hell's own time trying to reassemble them. He yelled that he wanted prisoners this time, not corpses.

His men streamed into the first alley to their left as the Nahri and Skraelings turned left two blocks further down main. If his crews raced two and three blocks left before turning right to link with the others they might catch the sniper's flank.

The maneuver was an unimagined success. Nine Gaels were caught from behind as the Hrafns made their right turn at the second and third intersections. Three dozen of Starri's regulars faced them down from well covered vantage points. The futility of shooting it out became immediately apparent. The Gaels disarmed and surrendered as one.

"Blades, bows, the works." Adam commanded the seven kids and two grand fathers. "Kick them over here. Turn around, on your knees."

Adam yelled to their unseen comrades that the next of his men to get shot would be all the excuse he wanted to cut the throats of his hostages. Signing his men back behind cover he ordered the prisoners to take off their boots and walk backward as they were called by number.

By now the Nahri and Skraelings had arrived with a chorus of ghastly threatenings, as if the kids needed further cowing. Starri had Humach shout them down into silence.

"Bring the boots." Adam corrected the first lad as he backed into the shadows. The boy was frisked and allowed to put his boots back on after Adam dropped pebbles into them, in case any tried to run. The boy's wrists and elbows were tied behind his back and he was blindfolded. Six more got the same before the remaining two were told to gather the weapons and impressed as pack horses.

"You know what we're here for." Adam shouted into the dark. "Bring it and your weapons out and pile them up, or else."

Turning to his fo'c'sulman Hraerek Adam told him to put a noose with a fathom's trailer on each of the hostages and separate them, no talking.

Starri signaled Adam to come have a word.

"Have Humach take this one." Starri said, signaling out the lad Adam had just finished with. "And give the others to the biggest of his vermin. If we start cutting throats, I want these Gaels to watch the Skraelings do it. And I especially want them to watch Humach slashing one of their kids."

Orders were given and the Vikings, still hugging the walls, filed back out to main and on toward the heart of town.

LII Bones Might Be Broken

Mirha and Rakel's verses were on everyone's lips. Many women were disappointed that there hadn't been more versifying before the fists flew. Such scandalous accusations were immensely satisfying as springboards for further speculation.

Rakel, stewing in the cauldron of her proposed vengeance, was treating all and sundry, which came as no surprise to any, as though they'd pelted her with rotten eggs. Mirha, on her first trip back through town to Anja's for her reading lesson had been insufferably pompous over having hurled the first.

And as often happens many who hadn't an axe to grind or even a bone to pick with the loser retained the smirk they'd taken away from her pummeling. Many knowing glances were exchanged and some averted between those who did have bones needing picking, as if to say 'See what can happen?' If the very niece of Starri Rikr could be trounced so soundly and with seeming impunity, perhaps now was the time to settle other old scores, with similar impunity.

Jarnulf again confined Mirha to his steading where she moped lest her haughtiness set the kindling beneath many old wounds aflame and anarchy exploded as the usual string of fights followed the first.

Brenn and Aethle took to mothering Mirha at their fishing day's end, as she grew increasingly surly at being robbed of the fruits of her victory.

Jarnulf and Olaf skulked through brush along the southern border hunting poachers. Gudrod and Thorarin skulked with them. Both were nineteen, and should have been training apprentices of their own. Applicants had been in short supply this last winter which did not displease any of them. They all greatly preferred hunting poachers over hunting deer, a delight impossible with kids in tow.

Jarnulf bitched about his responsibility to his men. For all his carping about poachers, and how it was his duty as Marshal to personally attend to them, he was in heaven at work, and hell in the evenings, besieged by women picking at old scabs with each other. The lack of Nahri had him oozing thunder by week's end, and more convinced than ever that this whole idea was harebrained.

Ref made no secret of his displeasure. Jarnulf and Olaf were hogging all the fun. To the older hunters it was all one but Da'hal would return to work soon. When Da'hal demanded something he got it, and he and Ref would get their rightful share. Hunting meat animals, and deer pilfering bears and wolves held not a candle to ambushing poachers. Jarnulf and Olaf and their helpers hunted them with a vengeance. And in those four days they killed nothing but boot leather.

All the same, Gudrod and Thorarin strutted like roosters about Mordach's each evening, lording their savage preeminence as man killers over Andar and Kjartan, who took it badly. Neither had yet killed a poacher. At least they were taking it separately, in turns freezing their nights away on Kveldalf's roof.

Jarnulf prayed that one of them would shoot Kveldalf's bear soon. If this kept up for another week the air would fill with flying knuckles. Bones might be broken and they wouldn't be Andar's or Kjartan's. Starri was always after them to join his crew but those bull necked, square nosed young savages seemed quite content to confine their sailings to the mead cups and maids in Hrafnstadir.

LIII A Morning For Clods

Sunsday arrived. It was past daybreak. Just within the barn stood Kadlin, a brunette of nineteen winters. She was shoveling up a sweat, frocked to her ankles in a heavy dress of dark blue wool. Behind her the sun glowed gold brown on the loft poles and roof beams marching in rows fifty yards to the building's rear, and Liv's stall.

Horses and cows poked out their heads and breath clouds into the aisle from their stalls. Every household in town owned a cow or two, and the choicest stalls seemed those closest to the doors. The hunters, who knew better, stabled their horses in the back. If a bear got into the barn some night it would content itself with what came easiest.

All five seven by a hundred and ten of Kadlin would never lower herself to wearing pants. She, Adamsdottir, exuded that luscious glow that all hard working farm girls have, making the meanest of them a hundred times sexier than any painted, shop keeping fricatrice. Thorarin had made such a big deal of giving this blue dress to her for Christmas. He'd best come up with something nicer for her birthday.

Jarnulf had warned Thorarin, but Thorarin was obsessed. Apprentices drew their stipend from the hunters they were apprenticed to, and a stipend it was. Jarnulf and Olaf had graduated Thorarin and Gudrod two summers ago, and Thorarin promptly dumped his raise into renting Kadlin's affections, and she kept him dumping it, perennially broke.

She bent and savaged her shovel into another steaming cowpie. Again, that snotty little foreign tart had stolen what was by rights hers, giving Rakel her comeuppance. Unlike Mirha, Kadlin hadn't the nerve to goad Rakel, and was ever telling herself that she was barely keeping it in check.

Kadlin swiped a few sweaty auburn hairs from her forehead and cussed before troweling her dripping shovel full into her wheelbarrow, and partly onto the hem of Thorarin's Christmas present. He was late. He'd be here any moment to collect his horses. Late again, stuffing that snippy little, again, while she'd been feeding, milking and then shoveling ten whole stalls.

Thorarin and Olaf weren't here yet either. As her daily routine of fawning over Thorarin was unavailable yet, she was determined to snub Jarnulf behind a fine show of shoveling. Beyond the door Gudrod's whistle approached, setting her teeth on edge. She daggered a peek out through the barn's doors.

There he was again, just like every morning strutting in like he was God's gift, as if his precious looks alone were enough. I can have any woman I want for a smile. Well, not this one. No sir. Those square bones and silver blue eyes, and those hollowed cheeks, and all those muscles.

Off to go play in the woods again, and then pretend he'd had such a day, swaggering about all puffed up as if his murderings of starving wretches trying to borrow a deer were of some great benefit to anyone. It wasn't as if there were any shortage of deer. The other hunters brought one or two home every night. They must be dripping off the trees out there.

Jarnulf strutted past his soiled dove without a word in that dreamy, bronze half-light, but still he darted an aching glance at her across the langeldur in the aisle, which ran almost the barn's length. It got cold, killing cold, in winter.

He'd abandoned his attempts at reconciliation long ago. The snit she pitched when he took Mirha in left no doubt as to where he could shovel his affections. And Mirha saw to it that Kadlin remained in her snit. At their first meeting Kadlin had a number of uncomplimentary things to call Mirha. Mirha landed the first and only fist square on Kadlin's nose.

Kadlin scuttled back bleeding, crying, and begging for quarter. Mirha taunted her, naming her Sissy bitch. Thereafter Kadlin kept her slanders to herself except when she had a few friends with her.

Jarnulf sighed, balancing his melancholy against his usual justification. Kadlin had been a most expensive entertainment.

Aud's cow, Frigga, was lowing pathetically, begging to be milked. Naming a cow after Odinn's wife was ludicrous. It had once been criminal blasphemy, and it had Aud written all over it. This was unusual. When Aud first got her calf, she'd lead it out into the field and hand pick a particularly lush spot of pasturage for it. Whenever it seemed the slightest bit off, Aud slept in the barn with it, summer or winter.

"Will one of you please milk that poor thing?" Jarnulf begged, pointing to Frigga. Kadlin speared her shovel into the dirt and leaned forward, toward him, on it. Her jaw dropped. Jarnulf, twenty feet from her, began counting her lovely teeth.

"How'd you like to come hunt whatever's stealing my chickens after you've been playing the hero all day?" Kadlin said. "I milk thirteen of the damn things every morning, and then shovel up after them."

Jarnulf's mind dragon wriggled at his belt, proffering its mordant balm. He made to fold his arms, and instead clasped his hands behind his back. Kadlin, like Rakel, had called him on it all too often in their past. He started an apology and she barreled over it.

"All winter I have to listen to how Father can't wait to retire and become a farmer. And all winter I'm out here freezing while he's sleeping in. I'll be milking his cows till the day he drops dead and you want me to milk another one?"

Jarnulf bit his tongue. She should be so lucky. Through summer it took her half of half a day. In the winter when Adam was home it took all day. Sitting on a milking stool between two cows was almost like knitting at the fireplace. The chinking between the barn's logs was well kept and a thousand pounds of heifers threw off a lot of heat.

"Where's Aud?" Jarnulf said. Kadlin offered his hilt a very pointed sneer.
"Probably across the street," Kadlin said. "hiding, waiting for you to leave, after you promised Rakel to slash them all open with your toy."

Jarnulf damned Rakel again as he pulled up the stool and milk pail beside Frigga. Gudrod, standing behind him, sniggered. Jarnulf booted a clod of Frigga's droppings onto Gudrod's buckskins, before ordering him off to milk Rakel's cow, which was also advertising its displeasure at being unattended.

He plunked the pail up on the shelf at the end of the stall and kicked the stool back into the aisle.

"Tell her I took care of it." he told Kadlin. "Maybe she'll get the message that I'm not out to get her or anyone else. I just want an end to this feud between Rakel, Sigrid and Mirha. I, have better things to do."

Calling out to Liv he made for her stall at the back of the barn.

Liv ignored him. That too was odd. Both Liv and Ulf's old roan, his pack horse, were nuzzling deep into their feed bags. From behind Liv Arnor called out a cheery good morning to his Chieftain. Arnor struggled out into the aisle with a shovel full. The hunters owned their own wheelbarrow, in the aisle's midst. The last man to work earned himself the honor of emptying it.

"What's this?" Jarnulf demanded.

"My father said if I want to be a hunter I have to start with the horses." Arnor said.

"How about your father's horses?" Jarnulf said.

"I'm going to be your apprentice." Arnor said. "You promised."

"Ohh, I see." Jarnulf said.

In the purple across the aisle sat Aerin on her milking stool. Bemused condescension flashed into her blue green eyes. She looked like a naughty cherub who'd been made mortal as punishment, and was paying for it with her second spurt of maturity. Her long, loose, red brown hair was nestled against the flank of her black spotted, dun cow, and she was milking away.

Aerin was one whose advertisement of virginity with her hair unbound was undoubtedly legitimate. She was a devout, practicing Christian, and Hroald's amanuensis, reading to him from his bible, and noting down his sermon for him in extra-large script.

"Just because you've got appetites," she said. "as make you late, doesn't mean Liv's lost hers."

Jarnulf returned her a lewd leer, and a wink. It was expected, a part of their morning ritual.

"It's not too late to find out what you've been missing." he whispered.

"What you've got," Aerin said. "is hardly a secret, and definitely not, anything out of the ordinary. I've heard all about it. And when are you going to straighten out Hlif? She's edging my furrow again, like last year."

At Aerin's accusation Hlif took up her shovel with a howl, and came at the quick march. She was a little brunette about Adis size and like Adis she perpetually lurked behind a smug, secretive smile which promised far more mystery than actually lived there.

Jarnulf tossed Aerin another salacious leer.

"I knew you'd want me to see to your furrow, someday." he said. Aerin leapt from her stool laughing, and booted a clod at him. It was a morning for clods.

"Damnit," Hlif said. "I know exactly where my survey stakes are, and if I have to have the Marshal resurvey the whole field, you're going to look awful silly when he's done."

Both women were not yet eighteen, but their endless bickerings over a couple of bushels of turnips seemed to have gone on for twenty years the way they pursued him over it. Aside from the turnips, and except in his presence, they remained the closest of friends. It was some horrid conspiracy. They were all out to get him.

Sigrid's howl filled the barn as she and Kveldalf marched in behind Olaf and Thorarin almost stepping on the men's heels. Both girl's fingers and tongues were wildly awag. Sigrid let fly at Jarnulf.

"You!" she shrieked. Aerin continued joyously kicking clods at him.

"What?" Jarnulf said, dodging and dancing.

"You finally murdered her," Kveldalf said. "but Aud got in the way so you killed her too and now you're running off. You won't get far. When Bror and Hroald get in tonight they'll drag you back here draped over those horses in short order."

She turned her wrath back to Olaf. Aerin quit kicking, flummoxed. Jarnulf took his head in his hands, and groaned. Olaf smiled, imbecilic, at Kveldalf.

"We just came from Da'hal's," Olaf said. "but he wasn't home. He must have slept somewhere else last night."

Jarnulf thought he could hear Kveldalf's teeth grinding.

"Sigrid came and got me out of bed." Olaf continued. "We went to Rakel's first. Aud was staying with her last night. They were both gone. The door was kicked in and the place all broken up. Her bedroom was the worst. Sigrid and Kveldalf keep saying I helped you."

Jarnulf edged sideways past Arnor into Liv's stall, groping in the dark for her saddle and tack.

"Give them two days." Jarnulf said. "Whoever grabbed them will bring them right back."

"Jarnulf," Olaf said. "please tell them I didn't help you."

"I warned Anja not to marry you." Kveldalf said to Olaf. She shot out a bony, bee stung finger toward the front of Liv's stall.

"If that idiot told you to jump in the fire you'd do it, laughing." she said. Olaf favored the stall with a look like an abandoned, starving puppy.

"Who's going to work the north border if Bror and Hroald are out chasing us?" he said.

"Aaahh!" Kveldalf screamed. "Not that it matters. They're going to Outlaw and kill you both anyway."

Jarnulf led Liv, saddled, into the aisle. He brushed a trio of green bottle flies from his face.

"You spend too much time with Rakel." he said. "She's got you as deranged as she is. We, did not murder them, and we, I guess, are going to go find them, and bring them back."

The four men led their horses from the barn and past the church toward the graveyard. Olaf fell silent, waiting for a lull in the firestorm of accusations chasing them.

"Do you really think Hroald and Bror will come with us, Chieftain?" Olaf asked loudly, making certain their accusers, glaring after them in the street back between the buildings, heard him.

LIV Repossessed

Olaf's earlier head of steam seemed to have boiled dry, after he'd got another good look at the tracks. He was looking back at the village like he'd never seen it before, taking his time and drinking in all the details.

"Come on, the trail's a half day cold." Jarnulf said.

"There's no rush." Olaf drawled. "You know, I really like living here, by the sea, nice folks here."

They led the pack train back to the trail of footprints. Olaf pointed down to the jumble of boot prints at the muddy edge of the stream. Jarnulf barely glanced at them.

"Thought you said there's three of them." Gudrod said. "Here's two men, one heavy, and two women, and that front half print is Rakel's busted up leg.

"Well excuse me." Olaf said. "I suppose you haven't ever broke a deer's leg."

He pointed again, insistent, at the tracks.

"If that was her she'd be dragging it." Olaf said. "Fatso's carrying her. I know that toe print. Name's Teit. He's Hrorik's. After cousin Hrorik and I had our disagreement, this bitch tried sneaking up on me. He should be grateful I used the wrong end of his axe on his heel. I should have buried the sharp edge in his head."

Twenty yards within the treeline they came upon a jumble of hoof prints where the kidnapper's horses had been held. Olaf again pointed.

"Here's that nasty bay Hrorik rides to Thing every year." Olaf said, still staring at the prints.

"Mar told him he could geld it or shoe it himself after the last time it bit her. I don't suppose its mood's improved wandering around half shod like that. Hrorik will be in and out of the stream all the way home, hoping we'll get lost combing the banks chasing his false trails."

"You two." Olaf continued to Thorarin and Gudrod, "You're coming, but only to the border."

Thorarin and Gudrod made their displeasure known in no uncertain terms.

"Every second man doubles our chances of getting caught." Olaf said. "If we ride anywhere near Ottarrstadir, we'll get dead before we can even try to lie our way out of it. My Ottarrs don't have any Norse at their backs, just Skraelings. They keep watch, real good."

"Are you all right with this?" Jarnulf said.

"Hmmm?" Olaf said, raising a brow.

"Well, I mean they are your folks, your friends, you grew up with them and all." Jarnulf said, wishing he hadn't.

"If you're uneasy, now's the time." Olaf said, wearing the same dead pan he'd given Kveldalf earlier. "This may come to a killing, or two. With luck one of them will be Hrorik. Get someone else if you like, or I'll go do it with someone else tomorrow. My wife's here, my boy will become a man here, and Rakel and her very odd friend are my neighbors, and in some strange way, friends, here. I'd hate for either of us to die thinking the other didn't trust him."

Jarnulf wished he'd something to say, but there'd never be any words which could unsay the ones he'd already said.

"Don't be sorry. It needed asking." Olaf said.

A little later Jarnulf tried explaining himself again.

"Hrorik's a pervert." Olaf said, his voice flat, and distant. "He deserves to reap the cairn he's sown for this. And if he gets you killed, I am going to become even more upset with him."

"Speaking of." Jarnulf said. "Just how much more certain do you think Kveldalf and Sigrid are going to be that we murdered Rakel and Aud, supposing Bror or Hroald don't come in tonight?"

"Isn't it lovely?" Olaf said.

The western horizon's last bloody smudge had long since faded to purple, and then a star pricked jet.

"Where are we?" Jarnulf said as they lay flat just within the treeline peering out at two corrals and a shieling. One corral held a dozen mares and the other four stallions.

"Just north of town." Olaf said. "Hrorik fancies himself a breeder. His place. Girls are probably here."

With faces and hands grease striped black and green they ghosted up from the forest floor, cocked their bows, and crouch ran to the rear door.

Jarnulf kicked it open and Olaf burst in, crossbow at the ready.

At a table in the room's midst a heavy set man turned at the sound and scrabbled frantic for his sword.

"Hi there Thorstein." Olaf said, and shot his bolt through Thorstein's head.

"Oh God, it's you two. You took long enough." Rakel groaned.

She was tied up and sitting on the floor backed into a corner.

Jarnulf took a step back. It had been three days since he'd last seen her. Her nose had swelled considerably, as had her half shut eyes, and a mottled blue black stripe was painted across all.

"Aud's in there." Rakel said, nodding to a closed and barred door.

Jarnulf kicked the bar up and away. Aud too was sitting in a corner, oblivious to everything, shivering and mumbling to herself. Bright red, palm sized welts defaced both of her cheeks.

Rakel glared angrily up at Jarnulf.

"I suppose I should thank you." she said. "I'm not pretty enough for Hrorik yet. Aud wasn't so lucky. I kept telling him that Starri would skin him alive, war or not. He just kept laughing."

Jarnulf got Aud's attention on his third try as Olaf untied Rakel and helped her to her feet.

Shocked at the way Olaf had smiled as he killed her guard, she gave him an earful.

"You killed the wrong man." she said.

"No I didn't." Olaf said.

"It was Hrorik who raped Aud." she said.

"Yeah, right." Olaf said. "after that bone breaking fight this one had with Hrorik trying to stop him."

"Well," she said."

"Hmmm," Olaf said. "funny, there's others living here who will be happier than you that I did kill him."

Then his ears went back and he glued a finger to his lips. Shortly, Rakel too heard the approaching hooves beyond the front door. She grabbed a log from beside the hearth, limped to the door and wound up for a swing.

Jarnulf said he wasn't quite sure that was a good idea. Olaf said he didn't see why not. Jarnulf said that if it was Hrorik she might kill him herself. Olaf asked him what his point was.

The door opened and Hrorik staggered in. Rakel struck him and he went to his knees. She raised it high to hit him again. Jarnulf grabbed her as Olaf wrapped both arms, from behind, around Hrorik's neck. Olaf's right hand held his knife. Olaf planted its point low in the side of Hrorik's neck.

Jarnulf forbid him.

"If I didn't think it would start a war I'd kill you myself." Jarnulf told Hrorik.

"Over a bride stealing?" Hrorik said.

"Too late for such worries now." Olaf said to Jarnulf.

"I'm amazed," Jarnulf said to Hrorik. "that no one's tied you to a millstone and set you to grazing grass yet."

Bride napping was a Skraeling amusement.

Rakel wasn't taking it quietly.

Jarnulf ordered her to bind Hrorik's hands with the rope he had bound her with. Jarnulf and Olaf slammed Hrorik to the wall. It was not easy going. Olaf had to twice kick Hrorik's legs from under him. Hrorik promised that if they'd release him he'd take both of them on.

Olaf spun him around to face Aud, now emerged from the bed closet and snatching up Jarnulf's cocked and loaded crossbow from the platform at his feet.

"I forgot." Olaf said. "The honor is hers."

"Over a little bedsport?" Hrorik said.

"You bitch maggot." Olaf said.

Aud kept bobbing about for a clear shot as Jarnulf kept jumping between her and Hrorik. Jarnulf finally wrested his bow away from her but not before its bolt shattered into the steading's roof. Aud made a snatch at his short sword as he pushed her away. She rushed at Hrorik screaming. She pounded him with the heels of her fists. Jarnulf grabbed her from behind and clamped a hand over her mouth, as she swung her elbows wildly back at his ribs. Olaf put his blade back to Hrorik's neck.

"Goodnight, cousin." Olaf said, tensing all over for the awful deed.

LV The Only One Here

"Coward." Hrorik yelled.

Jarnulf again ordered Olaf not to kill him.

Rakel averted her eyes. Aud continued flailing and kicking at Jarnulf, and Hrorik struggled in Olaf's headlock, drowning him in poison language.

Jarnulf begged Olaf to stop, saying that he'd never forgive himself if he went through with it.

But for Hrorik's slanders and struggles silence fell as Olaf's tensings became tremors of rage and frustration. Jarnulf released Aud and snatched up his empty bow. He threatened Olaf with its butt and Rakel dropped her log.

In seven years Rakel had never known Jarnulf and Olaf to argue.

"Cousin?" she said to Olaf. "Olaf, you can't do this. Not to kin."

Olaf replied only with strangled gurglings as if his own throat were being cut. He tossed his knife hilt first to Aud whose second thoughts stumbled at accepting the grim gift. Jarnulf again disarmed her.

Olaf shoved Hrorik away and kicked him to the floor.

Jarnulf jumped between them.

"You'll regret this." Olaf said. "See if you don't."

Jarnulf nodded at Rakel.

"Not as much as I'd regret carrying her out of here." he said.

"So that's what kept you." Rakel said. "You walked out here. Well there's more than enough horses outside.

"They're breeders." Olaf said. "Not gentled or broke."

"What about his?" she said. "Out front?"

"What time of your month is it?" Olaf said.

"Oh," she said, after a blank moment. "It's that time."

"Full stallion." Olaf said. "He'll smell it. Probably attack you."

He ordered Rakel to find him a rag. She did.

Hrorik demanded to know what was going on. Olaf told Hrorik he'd give Rakel her log back if he didn't settle down. As swollen as her eyes were Rakel managed to open them like wet, brown moons as she in turn wanted to know what was up.

"You can't walk ten feet." Jarnulf said. "Somebody's got to carry you. If I give Aud my bow she'll shoot the bastard before we're out the door."

"Like hell." Rakel said.

Hrorik told Jarnulf that they were out of luck because he wasn't playing along. Olaf clouted him behind the ear and jerked his head round to face Jarnulf.

"He's the only one here who doesn't want you dead." Olaf said and stuffed the rag into Hrorik's mouth and tied it off.

Hrorik struggled to his feet. Olaf pushed him back down on his knees and bowed to Rakel. She gimped close and snatched at Olaf's knife. He whipped it behind his back and told her Hrorik was it and they were leaving, ride or stay, it was up to her.

Her retrievers loaded her legs through Hrorik's arms as she cursed and ouched her way aboard. Olaf peeked out beyond the door and motioned them to follow him out the back. Jarnulf gave Hrorik a starting shove. Hrorik bounced Rakel's head off the door frame. She started a yell and Olaf told her he'd kill her himself if she did it again.

"She's going to get us caught." Olaf said to Jarnulf.

"Oh, they'll just flay us alive." Jarnulf said. "It's nothing next to what Starri'd do if we left her here."

And then they scurried low with Hrorik and Rakel swaying, off into the dark behind the shieling.

LVI Turned Inside Out

They picked their way along the mazy, choked, game trail in a blackened thicket heavy with patches of rhododendrons. At least the new moon was just a sliver. The bears, with their rotten eyesight, would be home taking a nap. At full moon they'd be out feeding all night in the berry patches. Jarnulf hoped they wouldn't stumble into any more feeding deer. Holy Mother of God, what a racket that last four made when they stepped on them.

"Are you lost?" Rakel asked Olaf's back, as she groped frantic through her hair for any more spiders. Hrorik had smacked her into a nest on a low branch.

"And stop grabbing my butt." she warned Hrorik.

Behind her Jarnulf whispered.

"That's my hand. Shut up or all our asses are going to get worse than grabbed. If anyone's out here looking for us, they know where we live too."

Half a dozen grunts and ouches from her later Olaf turned back, pushed by Aud and got in her face.

"Why don't we just light a bonfire and yell for help?" he said. "Aud's had the worst of it and I haven't heard a word from her. Another peep and I'll knock you senseless myself."

He punched his forefinger into Hrorik's nose.

"And if you," he told Hrorik. "don't stop finding dry twigs to step on, your concubines will be washing out someone else's sheets."

Four miles later Olaf turned right, and stopped to point east.

"Yes?" Jarnulf said.

"My spine chilled." Olaf whispered. "It feels like Teit. I'd lay a hundred in gold he's passed us, and waiting somewhere, up in those rocks ahead. If it was just us I'd go settle his ass right now. But with her," he nodded at Rakel. "squealing like a cut hog, we head home for a bit first, might shake the rest loose long enough, and then back to the hills and lose them permanent."

He turned to Rakel and handed her his knife.

"If he even farts, cut his throat." Olaf said.

Rakel grinned and mimed the deed.

Olaf sighed, disgusted, and angled his point back into the hollow between Hrorik's shoulder and the base of his neck.

"Shove it in, you." he said.

Rakel knew she'd never heard a dirtier word than Olaf's 'You'.

Jarnulf warned Hrorik yet again about keeping his mouth shut as he struggled up and over the rocks behind him beside the night choked gorge to their left. Hrorik had been moaning about having to drain off a quart of ale. Olaf would not untie his hands and nobody but Aud was interested in helping him.

Jarnulf turned around for the hundredth time to check their back trail and his heart sank. In the open meadow below them a half mile distant two men were running their way. Before he could call to Olaf a third, and then a fourth popped out of the woods at the meadow's far edge.

"Olaf, they're on us, at least four." he called.

Olaf turned for a look.

"Up there, out of the light." Olaf said, pointing to a curved shelf of rock, overhung, little more than man height, sixty yards ahead.

They soon lay prostrate in the shadows, squinting over their crossbows for a target, legs and lungs on fire from their sprint. Olaf grabbed Hrorik by his hair, and whispered to Rakel.

"Don't let him get away." Olaf said.

Jarnulf peered down through the scrub pine and night silvered, broken boulders, tracking the quartet. Rakel prodded Olaf's knife into Hrorik's side with one hand, and took Jarnulf's arm in her other.

The men below them weren't Nahri poachers, they were Ottarrs, which was a by word for woods war. They came up through the broken scree and pines with a terrifyingly fluid, near invisible stealth, flitting from shadow to shadow in concerted bursts and different directions.

"Thanks for coming." she said. "I'm sorry."

"No you're not." he said.

"Jarnulf?" she continued.

He peeled her fingers from his arm.

"What happened to us?" she said.

Suddenly the four Ottarrs below them became three.

"You did." he said, searching frantic for the missing man.

"Olaf, I lost one." he hissed.

"Me too." Olaf said. "You go back, I'll go up, we'll find him."

Jarnulf wriggled twenty feet further on his belly, out along the shadow's lip. The fourth man popped back into view a hundred yards below him. At the meadow's far edge seven more boiled out, on horseback and riding as if the apocalypse were nipping their heels. Jarnulf drew his short sword. He laid it on the rock beside his bolts.

"Well its been a lovely, goddamned life." he said to himself.

A bolt ricocheted off the rock behind him just above his head. He returned his own bolt at a head poking out sixty yards below. The head dropped out of sight behind its boulder as his and Olaf's bolts both shattered off the rock.

A commotion broke out behind him. Jarnulf rolled onto his back, snatching up his sword, but it was too late. Hrorik shot into the light and scuttled down into the gorge still gagged and hands tied. Aud kneeled, grasping after him. Rakel, on her good knee, was looking uphill at Olaf.

Jarnulf recocked his bow.

A voice rang out from the near edge of the meadow commanding the men in the rocks between them to stop shooting.

"Olaf, is that you?" it yelled.

"Hello Ivar." Olaf called.

"Eikinn sent us to get Hrorik." Ivar said. "He says he's sorry about this business. You're free to go or you can come back with us and we'll give you horses tomorrow."

"We got our own, just over the border." Olaf called.

He turned to Rakel.

"I told you to hang onto that pervert." he said.

Rakel pointed past Olaf to the cap of the ledge behind him.

A child sized figure lay prostrate on it a dozen feet behind Olaf. A hand axe lay on the rock beside it. Protruding from its chest was the hilt of Olaf's knife.

"Hey Ivar," Olaf yelled. "would the deal still be good if I told you Teit's dead too?"

Jarnulf thought his blood would freeze.

"Eikinn sent me to get Hrorik, not Teit." Ivar yelled back, and then invited Olaf to come have a word with him.

Jarnulf asked Olaf if he'd lost his mind. With Hrorik being that brazen and that stupid, everything was beyond just being wrong.

Olaf said that of everybody he wouldn't trust, Ivar wasn't one of them, and loped back down the rocky hillside.

A man his own size greeted him. The man was in his mid-thirties. His penetrating, dark brown eyes in his dark tanned face looked anxious and ill at ease above his neat trimmed brown beard. He too was dressed in buckskins and clutching a crossbow. It was cocked but unloaded. Had it been day and not night the white scars on his large, bony knuckles would have shown even more prominently.

"Well, brother?" Ivar said. "Do I have to break Eikinn's heart?"

"His son's still alive." Olaf said. "Unless he's broke his own neck jumping into that gorge."

"Eikinn offers you self-judgment." Ivar said. "He wants to be reconciled with all of you, and he promises to deliver a full compensation to each of the women. He says if that's not enough, you're to name your price. And Olaf, he truly is sorry about that son of his."

"He can thank Jarnulf." Olaf said. "I was going to kill him."

"What have I ever done to you?" Ivar laughed.

What humor their reunion held lived solely in Ivar. Olaf remained stern as a father with a pregnant, unmarried daughter.

"Because if someone doesn't kill him he'll murder you some day." Olaf said.

"Eikinn's blind spot is ambitious." Ivar agreed, sobering visibly.

"Yes, and Eikinn must be getting blinder by the day if that idiot son of his thought this would go unanswered." Olaf said. "Hrorik and his conspirators need to be kicked out into the forest. But they won't be, and he'll hold this disgrace of needing to be rescued from his own stupidity against you."

Ivar stared down at the ground between them and shook his head.

"Your counsel, as ever, there's no disputing it." Ivar said.

"Something," Olaf said. "has been turned inside out. Watch your back. Don't go anywhere alone, especially at night."

"Tall order." Ivar said.

Olaf balled his fist and took a slow play swing past Ivar's chin.

Olaf led Ivar and two more sturdy and most capable looking Ottarrs up the hillside to retrieve Teit's body. Olaf cautioned them to say nothing of Eikinn's money. Aud had been penniless her whole life. It would be far more fun to watch her as a hundred of silver dropped into her lap.

Jarnulf had seen Olaf chumming about with his former neighbors at Thing, but he could not recall their names. One was his own age and the other about forty. The younger minded him of the sluggish confidence of a copperhead surprised at streamside. The men clambered up onto the shelf to retrieve the body. They brought it back down and stopped before himself, Olaf and the girls.

"Which of you killed him?" the older man said. His voice was deep, flat, and full of gravel.

Rakel had been proud of her handiwork, but his tone chilled a quaver into her reply.

"I did?" she said.

The man stared incredulous at the evidence of the terrible pounding someone had given her. She was barely able to stand on her bad knee. He thought about saying he was glad she was not his wife, but knew she'd take it wrong as women were invariably well practiced at twisting men's compliments into insults.

"Gods." he said. "I'd hate to cross you when you're fit and feeling your oats."

"That's a nice knife." the younger man said to her. "Don't you want it back?"

Olaf plucked his knife from the corpse's chest and thanked the man, calling him kinsman Kolgrim.

Jarnulf volunteered to pay compensation for the killing. True, Teit had tried to attack them, but he had owned the right at law as they were poaching in Ottarr turf.

"You'll pay nothing." the older man said in that same, gravely tone. "If anyone ever raises the issue, tell them you've paid over your compensation to Ulfkel Thormodson. They won't raise it again."

Rakel insisted that he couldn't pay her debts. She would send the money to him. Ulfkel looked away from her, and down into the little corpse's death mask.

"Don't worry." Ulfkel said. "They won't want the compensation I'll pay over to them."

Then the Ottarrs left.

Olaf took Rakel's elbow as if flirting with her.

"You've made a friend," Olaf said. "and one of no little consequence. The only time Teit ever smiled was when he was killing someone. Hrorik thinks he's entitled to his father's job after Eikinn is gone. There'll be ice in hell and ball games on it first."

Just before first light Olaf roused Gudrod and Thorarin.

"This has me smelling the wolves circling." he told them. "Get south of us. Then east toward town a half day before you double back to our trail. When you cut it go to ground and go deep. If no one shows by tomorrow morning go look around. If you find any of those wolves don't kill them. Don't let them know you were even there. Just get home."

After a bit he woke Jarnulf, who needed to know what he'd done with their helpers.

"You ever walk into a dark room and just knew someone was in there ahead of you, waiting?" Olaf said. "Probably the drink on top of the nonstop hell they both gave Hrorik that set him on Aud. Even he's not stupid enough, when he's sober, to think he'd get away with this."

"What," Jarnulf said. "would lurkers do in our dark and eyeless forest if we'd all pulled out of it together to go talk to Eikinn, instead of what we just did?"

LVII Jarnulf's Reputation

It was sunset. Mirha opened Mordach's door and the stink of old ale soaked into the floor slapped her. She stepped onto the landing wishing she'd filched a smaller knife from Jarnulf's hoard. The one beneath her coat made her feel, and probably look, like she was smuggling an anchor.

At the foot of the stairs almost all of the tables, nine to a side and built to seat a dozen were occupied. The bleached skulls of bears, moose, elk and deer with twisted, freak antlers crowded the eaves of the log walls. Swords, axes and spears vied for attention between and beneath them, most badly notched, some broken, but none rusting and each with its proud history, the oldest going back nine generations.

Four stone fireplaces, two on each wall, heated the place. Iron cressets angled from the wall above each table.

Two of the fireplaces and every third cresset were lit. Gnomish Mordach was bent half into the nearest fireplace basting a spitted boar. Their heat and smoke were drawn through yard square stone flues under iron plates in the floor and then on to chimneys outside. Even so, the rafters and roof were almost black with soot.

She smiled wishing she could have seen it before the iron plates were finished, as folks scrambled to put out the floor when it periodically burst into flames beneath their feet.

She jammed her hands in her outside pockets to straighten her coat, took a deep breath, and spotting Kolfinna and Elsa, descended the stairs and strode quickly toward them.

At the table beneath the stairs Sigrid was wringing her hands and giving Kveldalf and Adis an earful as Adis tried to interest Kveldalf in a six inch length of gray white bone. It was incised with three scaled, wingless dragons. They were in such a knot that even had the creatures been alive it was doubtful they could have untangled themselves.

It was a trial piece. Norse jewelers kept them to display their motifs in bone or antler rather than tying up their silver and gold in pieces that might take years to sell. The pattern itself was centuries old but this was Adis sixth and best attempt.

Across the aisle Bror and Ansvarr sat behind empty plates. A third plate sat between them, piled high with lobster shells boiled red and broken to bits. Beside it empty ale jacks flanked a little wire trestle nestling a pot of melted butter. A fat, lopsided, green candle stub flickered beneath it. Bror was exercising a toothpick.

"You're wrong," Bror told Ansvarr, "they won't be back till their day off and we'll be dead from bug bite before then waiting on Nacarr's rats in those brush piles."

Ansvarr, all six two of him muscle and whalebone though he looked like a well-tanned cadaver, spread his arms wide, clasped the table's edge, leaned forward into Bror's face, and burped loudly.

At the last table on the right beneath the back landing, Ref, Anja and Maeve all called Priest Hroald a hypocrite as Astrid served him his second tankard. Behind Hroald, the heads of four fat tom turkeys drooped over the edge of the table beside the green and gray fletchings topping Anja's quiver. Astrid rounded the table with a saucy bounce and made for the stairs. Ref's fingers darted after her like hungry minnows to nibble at her bottom. She swatted them away.

"You're a pig." Astrid said, and took a halfhearted swing at his head with her tray.

"And you're a Goddess." he said, ducking and looking up like a smitten fifteen year old.

"There'll be another along as soon as my back's turned." she said, her braided blonde ponytail swinging as she bounded up the steps.

Hroald took a hearty pull at his mead and condemned Ref with a hangman's stare.

On the entry landing above Sigrid and Adis the Hall's iron hinges squealed and Da'hal filled the doorway, ducking beneath the lintel. He tromped heavily down the steps two at a time loudly informing Astrid and everyone else, in Frankish, that he'd invested a full day and a half at his forge to keep the whole damn town from falling apart and the least they could do was have his mead waiting.

Astrid cursed him out in waterfront Frankish, ordering him to wait his damn turn. Which minded Adis that Da'hal had kept her waiting her turn for three weeks. Where were those three new dies he was making for her to stamp flowers into gold and silver? Aerin had taken a fancy to one of her new floral designs. Adis scampered after Da'hal, her trial piece of twined serpents deserted on the table before Kveldalf.

Ref, who'd kept Mirha in a corner of his eye from the instant she came through the door, pinched Anja's chin and told her to relax. Olaf was a big boy, he knew what he was doing. Mirha no sooner joined her friends than Ref slid onto the bench beside her. He wrapped an arm around her, planted a kiss on her cheek, and asked how she was holding up.

"I'm worried about him." she said.

"So am I." Ref said, his hand jumping inside her coat to tickle her. She grabbed at it and found the knife hilt poking out. Ref hugged her tighter and whispered in her ear.

"He's got enough to put up with. Give me that." he said.

"No." she said. "I'm not going to go looking for trouble."

"He killed a man with that." he said.

"He never told me about it." she said.

"Killing a drunk over an insult isn't a thing I'd want to relive either." Ref said.

She paused, stared at the hilt, and then stuffed it back under her coat and looked away from him, down at the table.

"Then take it off and sit on it." Ref said before giving her another peck on the cheek and rejoining his companions. Mirha unbelted the knife, hiding it within her coat and bundled them on the bench beside her. Kolfinna and Elsa gave her giggles.

Kolfinna reset the board game. Mirha cast a nervous glance about the Hall, and half a dozen at Kveldalf and Sigrid. Even without Rakel they might be trouble. She patted the bulge in her coat. Adis palled around with them, but she never took part in their bullying, and while Kveldalf would stand there and smirk, she'd never seen her actually hit anyone either. As her dinner settled through four games her paranoia dropped and her voice rose.

Jarnulf would often be out overnight, especially when it rained. In the beginning she'd worried herself sick imagining the thousand accidents that might befall her meal provider, off in the woods. If he'd any decent excuse to be out tonight, like a thunderstorm, a herd of, well, something or other, or even spending the night treed by a bear that would be one thing. But to be off chasing that goddamn Rakel, was he ever going to get it.

After her first few months of driving Anja and Kolfinna to distraction every time he pulled an all-nighter, and Ref teaching her board games for money, she began looking forward to her nights off. Jarnulf wasn't overt like her father about gambling's evils, but with his sideways looks and raised brows, she reserved it for nights when he deserted her.

Jarnulf called it an idiot's mania. No matter how much the losers lost the winners never seemed to remain a bit richer. It was as if all that silver just disappeared like smoke. It was one of the few things, besides each other's back, that he and Rakel still saw eye to eye on.

Half of the evening passed.

Adis, drawn by Mirha's carping, sauntered towards Mirha's table. Across the aisle, Ref's ears went back. If Mirha kept making up new rules as she went, like she was doing with Elsa, there might be trouble. Since he was the one who'd taught her how to cheat, Jarnulf would give him hell. Adis invited herself in for a game and Ref caught the grin on Mirha's face as she motioned her to the bench opposite. Ref motioned to Astrid, and asked her what she'd been serving Mirha tonight.

"Be it on your own head, she was an honest girl before she met you." Astrid said.

Ref pointedly watched whose money ended up with who as Adis and Mirha traded pennies.

LVIII Your Immunity's Forfeit

"Do you think they'll find Aud and Rakel?" Adis said.

"Olaf never has any trouble finding anything in the woods, day in, day out. Even Galinn says he's never seen anyone like him." Elsa said.

"Jarnulf didn't get to be Marshal for nothing." Mirha said, clueless that what he'd got had been anything but a promotion.

One night in here, a year before he'd got her, he'd been haranguing his fellow hunters about how unprepared they were if anyone attacked them. Jarnulf's tirade wasn't what they'd come to Mordach's for after a hard day's hunting. Hroald endorsed Jarnulf's ideas at once. Jarnulf was flattered that such a renown hell raiser as Hroald thought so much of his foresight. Hroald never shared with Jarnulf, or any of the hunters, the true extent of his foresight.

Hroald's gaze nailed Gunnarr, at the wall end of the table and deep in his third cup, who was being browbeaten by Aethle for the umpteenth time over her being cheated at the glass maker's shieling a month earlier. Ansvarr, beside Gunnarr, reached for a pitcher in the table's midst, hoping there'd be some magic at the bottom of his fourth cup to make her disappear.

Ansvarr's eyes caught Galinn's, at the aisle across from Hroald, who was wishing that Jarnulf, hovering over his shoulder, would similarly dematerialize. Inspiration's lightning shot first between Ansvarr and Galinn, and then round the table, and Jarnulf's doom was sealed.

The hunters were sick to their guts of being dragged into the endless squabblings the women had. They began electing Jarnulf into, and themselves out of, a goodly share of their already limited responsibilities. Director for war planning could hardly be assigned to anyone beneath the rank of Chief Hunter, which entailed what they really wanted, chief dispute mediator.

The five men there, all old enough to be his father, and with over a century of collective experience with armed poachers, knew that Jarnulf was the perfect man for it, especially in the light of his obsession with it. With Hroald's improvisation of Marshal tossed in to cement his as the final word in all such arbitrations, they smugly, and repeatedly, drank toasts to him.

In twenty heartbeats they dumped everything but shoveling out the barn on him. Fearing that was next he left off protesting and solemnly acquiesced on the condition that they were sincere in the trusts they were reposing in him. Their roaring assent shook the roof as he smiled back thinking, Got 'cha, word and bond.

When he awoke the next morning hung over, reality struck him. Those men, who'd had more than a finger or two in raising him, were now under his charge. How he was going to order them about, was not a pleasant prospect.

Lost weekends and aching muscles were their reward as he and Hroald set them to digging pits, hanging deadfalls, and moving tons of earth and rocks along trails deep in the woods. As their complaints mounted he rewarded them with bruises, throwing them against each other in mock ambushes with wooden swords and leather armor.

When the complaints turned to threats of mutiny, he once, and only once, added bows and fowling quarrels. The welts, sore ribs and open threats that resulted in had him stepping lightly and buttoning his lip for the next month.

Nevertheless, he'd made his, and Hroald's, point. Building traps and practicing ambushes was cheap insurance against getting shot, or worse still, losing their right to tell two women in a catfight that arbitrating disputes was now the sole province of the Marshal.

"Dead or alive, he'll be back with them in a day or two." Mirha said, spit shining her hope for the former.

Astrid found herself before the entry landing serving out drinks to a table of weary, grimy women. They'd been plowing in the field all day. They were lustily cursing rocks, the same rocks they cursed every year rather than carting them back to town for the new granary. They were seated at the table behind Ansvarr and Bror, and across the aisle from Kveldalf and Sigrid. Sigrid remained loud and steadfast in her claim that Jarnulf and Olaf had murdered Aud, and Rakel.

"Jarnulf's a killer of men," Astrid said. "not little girls."

"Mind your own damn business." Sigrid said.

"Cousin Jarnulf's reputation is my business," Astrid said, taking a step toward Sigrid from the aisle.

"He's a murderer." Sigrid said.

Behind Astrid, Ansvarr and Bror struggled to their feet, grimacing sour. Astrid was now standing bent forward over the table, and into Sigrid's face.

"That's enough." Astrid said. "Grandfather told you not to come back for a week, and you're two days early. Get, out."

Astrid leaned closer into Sigrid, daring her. Sigrid's knuckles flew into Astrid's eye, hurling her back onto her butt in the aisle. Astrid regained her feet in a flash. She shook her head once and raced for the heirloom weapons hung upon the wall.

"Your immunity's forfeit bitch." Astrid shrieked as she turned back raising a sword high above her head. Astrid charged and Ansvarr grabbed her about the waist as Sigrid shot from her bench for another swing at Astrid and plowed into Bror's outstretched palm.

Ansvarr peeled Astrid's thumb from her hilt and forced the thumb back, and the sword clanked down onto the table. Sigrid glared like a wildcat down her nose into Bror's bemused, upturned, black eyes.

"Sit." Bror said, as if to a bumming dog.

Sigrid was well used to pushing other girls around. In her drunken rage she mistook Bror for one, and laid her hands on his shoulders to shove him aside. Bror took her wrist and turned it inside, down and hard, and her half round. He shoved her wrist up behind her shoulders and marched her, screaming threats, up the stairs to the door.

"Home, to bed." he said. "And if you start any more trouble before Jarnulf brings Aud back, I'll personally teach you just how much that trouble costs."

"They're not coming back, you ass." Sigrid said.

"The only way they won't be back," Bror said. "is if they both get themselves killed trying to bring them back."

He coaxed her out through the door.

Astrid gave both men a furious earful. The bitch had been legally hers and they ruined everything by sending the bitch packing, away from the scene of the bitch's criminal, well witnessed, assault.

"That's right." Ansvarr said. "And now your rights go no farther than prosecuting her for it in Court. You two have all summer to get reconciled or become a pain in Tore's ass when he gets back."

Astrid smothered a wince, and began bitching again about the bitch this and the bitch that.

Ansvarr and Bror reseated themselves shaking their heads. Ansvarr retrieved his bow and kit from beneath Bror's at the wall end of the table.

"I'll make sure she finds home." he said. "Then give her time to let a few more drinks knock her out before I turn in. Astrid's hellcat'll bitch itself out by closing time."

Bror said he liked the sound of that.

LIX Treed Bobcat

Sometime later Adis closed the Hall's door and pulled her collar up against the night. She wished she'd given Ref a wink and a nod. She'd been too busy slipping sideways questions across Mirha's table to catch his departure. Showing up at his steading would be awkward if someone else were there ahead of her. He was an incorrigible hound.

Feeling she owed Aud she headed reluctant for Sigrid's. While she and Aud got along famously, Sigrid was a basket of insecurities, ever bullying people to hide them. They were all worried sick but Sigrid was a wreck and Kveldalf wasn't far behind, convincing themselves the men wouldn't even bother to look for them, if in fact, Jarnulf and Olaf hadn't murdered them themselves, a notion beyond even ridiculous.

The looks Jarnulf and Rakel gave each other's backs said there was a lot more than just something still there.

It was after midnight when Jarnulf, Olaf, Rakel and Aud rode from beneath the trees and back into view of Hrafnstadir's black clustered buildings. They were all sore and bone tired.

Jarnulf's mind writhed. Aud hadn't complained a word, though the ride home was obviously hell for her. He and Olaf had wanted to stop halfway and camp the night through but Aud wouldn't hear of it. She needed to be as far from Hrorik as possible.

They followed the stream back to the graveyard, and then past the church to the main street.

A black purple wraith loomed in the dark before them bearing bow and quiver.

"What took you so long?" Eirika said.

"I'd think you'd be relieved we brought them back." Jarnulf said. He nodded down at her bow.

"Or perhaps you were coming to rescue us?"

"Yes, thank God you found them," she snapped out. "but this never should have happened. Its gotten so anyone can just walk in here and help themselves."

Jarnulf clenched his teeth and growled through them.

Olaf folded his hands atop his saddle and stiffened upright.

"It's a hundred miles to Hrorik Eikinnson's and back." Olaf said.

"God no." Eirika gasped.

"Yup." Olaf continued, sober as grim death. "Best get everyone up, and out of town. There'll be at least a hundred Ottarrs here by morning. I figured Starri would want them, so I got part of Hrorik in my saddle bag."

"Damn You!" she shrieked.

Rakel and Aud's choked snickers cut short Olaf's goading of the old woman. Jarnulf quietly cursed. He should have known she'd be lying in ambush. The girls would have played along if only he'd thought to ask them.

"Damn you." Eirika cursed again, but with an ill-concealed chagrin before hieing stiffly off into the night, north towards her steading.

Behind their backs, from the forest, the owls continued their screeching like cats and howling like dogs, crowding out even the occasional fox bark as they published the funeral notices of small woodland creatures various and sundry.

Mirha had surely slipped her leash to summons the devil with Kolfinna the instant his back was turned. They were probably out right now stirring up something he'd have to straighten out tomorrow. He hoped she'd remembered to bring her cat in for the night. Hunter brooked no crap from most dogs but he knew enough to want nothing to do with owls.

They waited so as not to overtake Eirika, and then turned north, along main, with hooves crunching weary over the shellfish pave toward Rakel's between neat ordered rows of night and weather blacked steadings.

The roofs of their porches sloping down toward the street were a dreamy, star borrowed blue while the dark beneath them remained black as the owls' pronouncements. Little currents of hot air eddying up from chimneys and roof shutters turned the stars behind them all wavy. Arm sized dragons of oak leered out at them from roof poles along the street, silent, grim and accusatory as if they were the girls kin, and like Eirika wanted to know where the hell have you been?

They delivered the girls to Rakel's living room, and Olaf built a fire in her hearth as Rakel repeatedly cursed Hrorik, Eikinn, Ottarrs and horses in general. Aud however gushed out torrents of gratitude. Jarnulf scraped together a nightmeal of moose, stale bread and wine from Rakel's sideboard.

Sitting across the table from her he wolfed it down desperate to quit the ghost of their love affair leering up at him between bites behind the raccoon's mask Mirha'd knuckled onto her.

Aud saw them to the door with anxious embraces. Rakel grumbled out a stiff thank you from the table over her wine cup.

Both men left near stumbling over their cold and guilty guts.

Jarnulf staggered through his own door to a chilled, dark, empty steading. He crawled into bed not giving a damn what noise Mirha would make when she got in. She'd let the fire go out, again. She could fumble about in the dark for the flint and steel to drive the goose pimples from her butt.

"Out, I'm locking up." Astrid said.

Mirha glanced up from her game and about the Hall, empty but for Elsa, and the turkey Anja had just left her. Ref and the others had left ages earlier, just before Kolfinna and Adis. Anja stayed behind continually asking her to come home and spend the night as they gambled it away for only the tiny wooden fish that served as betting tokens. Mirha had been mightily tempted but Jarnulf's knife remained. Jarnulf would find out about it through Olaf.

LX The Undead

Her pique at Rakel's latest intrusion into her life got a slap in the face from the icy black beyond the Hall's door as Astrid closed it behind her and Elsa. The long, black and frigid hike home, the last of it through the forest, had been conveniently forgot as the evening at the fireside with her friends wore down.

Astrid had forced one of the tavern's flaming cressets into her hand on her way out. At Elsa's door she dithered before refusing to spend the night. Fifteen wintered Elsa lived with her mother. There'd be hell to catch even with the bribe of Anja's turkey.

The walk home couldn't be that bad, she hoped. Ten paces later she knew different. Late night roamings were shunned. They were hair raising. Doors were barred and often locked. Christ the Warrior fought his grimmest, most desperate battles in the dark. She begged his protection, and hoped he wasn't too tied up to keep an eye on her foolish self tonight.

The pagan dead did not sleep peacefully. They lived on in the grave, and sometimes above it. They were the Draugar, and only their brain and soul had truly died. Their blue black corpses swelled to the size of an ox and a hardness that blunted swords. They were furious at being thrown out like garbage.

They'd shamble home in the night and knock, hoping someone would open the door. Being dead they weren't bright enough to knock more than once. Within the steading the living shot the bar on the door a stare down and shared an embarrassed laugh. If you wanted doors opened to you, you knocked three times.

Of course she'd never actually seen a Draugar, nor had anyone with a brain that hadn't been killed by drink, but they were out there despite what Jarnulf said about it.

She wished he was here now, to say it all over again.

At least the fog hadn't blown in off the ocean tonight. Hugging the far side of the street she passed Maeve's place before Geirrid's at the edge of town, clutching tightly at the cresset, heavy and reassuring, and looking nervously about hoping Maeve had penned her geese for the night. Maeve's gander squawked and honked itself silly behind the building as she passed by and crossed the intersection with the short path to the beach. Maeve's gander had caught Bror unawares and bitten him savagely last week.

A gruesome what if assailed her before she'd hiked a hundred yards beyond the last steading. Andar and Kjartan were still sitting up waiting for Kveldalf's bear. She should have left earlier with Kolfinna. Kolfinna's mother was usually too drunk to care when they got in.

Shifting her cresset from hand to hand while shielding her eyes from its glare, she peered out through the field, looking for anything large and out of place. It was amazing how noisy it was out here in the middle of the night, more crickets than stars, toy wolves barking and owls hooting, the ocean breaking soft on the rocks, and the occasional fox's flinty yip, out late working through last year's stubble, trying to feed a new litter.

The ropey clouds of stars above were so thick in places they seemed to have been tossed out of a bucket. Looking back to the trail she stopped dead as a pair of eyes at its edge, reflected in the torchlight a mere twenty yards ahead glared back at her.

Trembling, she raised her arms like Jarnulf had told her to do if she stumbled into a bear or big cat and yelled her lungs out. Behind her, Maeve's geese honked out another round of complaints. The eyes blinked and darted side to side, before their owner, a large raccoon, scurried across the trail and disappeared back into the night.

Forcing a laugh, and on shaky knees, she again started homeward. Halfway through the field she found herself singing an old reel. It told of a soldier off to war, in lyrics matter of fact to the point of dull, but in its quirky melody, and challenging accents she found succor. They hinted at times lost in antiquity, savage and barbaric.

It was odd, wishing Jarnulf was here with her as she usually reserved her singing for moments when she wanted him out of her hair. Where do you find those notes, was the closest he'd ever come to a compliment before disappearing. This was as good a time as any especially as she didn't want to sneak up on something big, hairy, and hungry.

The crossbow predators were served when they came to steal dinner had them on notice that people hereabouts were not to be taken lightly. Best to let them know one was coming.

Bearing her cresset, which had gained twenty pounds in the last mile, before her like some miniature of a conquering heroine, she belted it out, faltering at the chorus as a toy wolf miles west critiqued her with its mournful howl and pinched barks. The third verse of a jig her father loved kept eluding her as she neared the end of the open field. Pausing, she turned for a look back at the village.

Those little dark gray blocks on the plain held people, some of them friends, snug and secure before their glowing, orange blue hearths. The forest wall, looming above her black and impenetrable promised only another nerve wracking mile to a chill, empty bed. At least Hunter would be glad to see her.

Twenty yards into the forest, her triplets hopelessly out of sync with her footsteps, she stumbled along la la la ing and do do doing over forgotten lyrics. Unlike the open field with its symphony of noisy life, the sounds in the forest were sparser, and infinitely colder, just the incessant clacking of bare branches, creaking and snapping like a field of ice.

Her cresset lit the wood, its every detail garish in startling clarity for a brief moment, only to leave them plunged back into black as she hurried along. As her torch cast shadows swept through the trees, she peered into the wood, looking for things she hoped weren't there. When the knots of deeper black at the light's limit began looking like they were, she locked hers eyes away and back on the trail.

Deep in the woods a great horned owl shrieked, unleashing in her a noxious, skeletal hoard of rat gnawn, pre racial memories, fading rapidly as they fled off into the black uncertainty, and then charged back, alight with a dead fish sheen, swooping at her from all corners.

Jarnulf detested owls, and skunks and raccoons too, all for the same reason. He'd shocked her in the middle of their third dinner together, at dusk, when one hooted behind the steading. He knocked his bench backwards in his rush for his bow and dash through the back door. He returned in mere moments, wearing a grim grin.

"Got the bastard." he grunted.

What manner of blood drinking fiend was she living with? He couldn't even get through dinner without killing something.

It was at this very spot where the trail from the beach joined the one home when again at sunset, weeks later, he cautioned her to silence, and snuck off through the trees. The deep crack of his fired bow and the short shriek of its bolt in flight heralded his momentary return, again looking smugly satisfied with himself.

"Got him. I'll try her again in a couple days." he said.

"Why do you have to kill animals you're not going to eat?" she said. He guided her into the forest and pointed out a nest high in a rotting elm. Then he pointed to the thick circlet of tiny bones and skulls piled round the tree's base near the bolted owl.

"Chipmunks and songbirds come to my door. I like them there." he said. "Let an owl set up shop and it'll murder my yard into this in a couple of days."

That heart tearing image of all those pathetic little skulls and bones wouldn't leave her, alone here, in this suffocating dark, as it mocked and swallowed whole her timid songs. Approaching the ship sheds she thought of poor Ref, and the time Olaf had tied an already dead owl up into a tree behind Ref's steading, and suckered Ref into shooting it. And how long Ref pretended to be mad at him over it. And that got a giggle out of her.

The night devoured her giggle, and sat up on its haunches hungry for more. She hurried past the ship sheds as her imagined menace from the forest focused itself into a will, palpable and real, landing hard between her shoulders and riding there with its claws dug into her back.

LXI The Owl's Kiss

"So you think it a matter for laughter?" a familiar, hated voice demanded in the dark behind her.

Mirha turned and held her cresset out and away, to her left. Thirty feet further, its light fell on Sigrid slinking into the path, her chestnut hair now black as her leathers, the color drained from her in the night's middle distance, glistening spectral and disheveled from the sea breeze like a drowned woman. Barely discernible flickers from the cresset glinted like distant fireflies on the silver necklace Sigrid was toying with.

"What do you want?" Mirha demanded, her eyes glued on Sigrid's hands. Mirha fumbled with her coat's glass buttons, hoping Sigrid would give her time to get it open. She couldn't outrun Sigrid. She'd already tried twice. The first time she got a split lip, the second, a black eye.

The crunching of the path's shells beneath Sigrid's boots were the only sign Mirha had that Sigrid had started toward her, so intently had she been staring at Sigrid's hands.

"You like this, don't you?" Sigrid said, holding the necklace out before her.

"Aud liked it too. But now it's mine. Isn't it pretty?"

Sigrid stopped and stretched her right arm forward, the necklace dangling from her fingertip, now close enough in the cresset's light to show its single emerald in the claws of a stooping, silver eagle, individual feathers and open beak chased in exquisite detail.

"It matched her eyes. They were such a beautiful green, late at night, before the fire." Sigrid said draping the necklace over her left finger.

Mirha's fingers strangled the hilt of Jarnulf's knife jutting from her inside pocket.

"But it doesn't match mine." Sigrid said. "Mine are brown. I've come to give it to you. You and your green eyes."

Mirha jerked Jarnulf's knife out.

"Get away from me you crazy bitch!" she screamed.

Sigrid's eyes remained on the eagle, swinging trapeze like, beneath her index fingers.

"Don't you want it? You, and your master took everything else I had. It would look so pretty on you. It's a pity it won't match your eyes, like it did Aud's."

Sigrid flipped the necklace in a loop around her left hand and reached for her knife.

"After I cut them out." Sigrid said. Looking up as she drew, she noticed the fighter shaking in Mirha's hand.

In the dark behind Sigrid another voice rang out.

"Sigrid, stop." it said.

Fixed on her evil intent, Sigrid did not hear it, but she did fix on the knife Mirha was waving at her.

"Oh good, this is going to be so much more fun." Sigrid said and again started forward.

At her third step her head and shoulders snapped back. She dropped her knife to claw with both hands at her back. Standing on tip toes she shook and champed her jaws, biting a hole in the night above her. Quivering as though she'd been branded with a hot iron, she dropped her head to face Mirha again with an awful recognition in her eyes.

Sigrid tore violently at her own throat, marking livid, red welts on it, the silver eagle bobbing about her wrist. Her mouth open, struggling for breath, she coughed out a spray of blood. She sank slowly to her knees, and then dropped forward onto her right shoulder, the shells crunching beneath her as she gurgled, retched, and clutched at them.

In her back was an arrow, fletched with one greenish blue, and two gray feathers.

Jarnulf started awake to the pounding of two tiny battering rams trying to stove in his door.

"Let me in." Mirha shrieked. He rolled over onto his face and extended an arm into the frigid air from beneath the covers. He lifted the door's bar. It weighed a ton. Through the door, quicker than thought Mirha landed on him like a wet dog.

"She's dead! She's dead!" Mirha panted, dragging at his arm.

"Well that was considerate of her. She couldn't have died before Olaf and I had to go get her?" he mumbled, wishing Mirha would take her icy hands off him.

"Sigrid's dead, someone shot her." Mirha said. Yanked from his torpor like a drowning man to the surface, Jarnulf dressed and groped around the tinder box at the hearth. Mirha stammered breathless through Sigrid's attack.

As the kindling's first tiny lights pirouetted off the roof pillars he discovered the bulge beneath her wet cloak. Blue flames crackled up and around the resinous pine logs. He caught her in his arms and tenderly shifted her about in them till he was sure it was the pommel of his knife pressing into his ribs.

She was still racing backwards and forwards from detail to detail over his attempts to calm her when suddenly she pushed hard against him, breaking free. Orange hair soaked and plastered to her pale, shivering face, she backed away in a half crouch. Eyes and lips wide she dashed down from the platform to slam his knife upon the table.

"It isn't my fault." she said. "I didn't start it this time, You, son of a, bitch."

"I, I, didn't mean, " he said. Again offering his embrace he started towards her.

"Stay away from me you bastard, you sonofabitch, you, you stinking, filthy damn savage." she shrieked.

Reaching behind her she groped about on the table, found a glass cup and hurled it at him. It shattered against the hearth. Then sinking to her knees, she buried her face behind her hands and cried in choking gasps.

"I want to go home. Oh God, I want to go home." she said, her voice quavering and tiny. He joined her on his knees and gathered her cheek to his shoulder.

"I know. I know." he said, rocking her gently back and forth.

"There was so much blood, it, it kept coming out of her mouth." she said. "I want to go home, where people don't kill each other with knives, and arrows, and, you'd like my father, he doesn't drink like, like anymore like he used to, after mother died, and my friend Aisli, and, and, you could work with him and, or you could still be a hunter, if you want to."

"Yes, I know." he said.

"Couldn't we take one of the little fishing boats and go there?" she said.

"If," he said. "we made it that far, your people would kill me on sight."

"Please, oh God, please, I don't want to live here anymore, just, please, let's go someplace, anyplace, far away from here." she said.

"I know." he whispered.

He helped her into a dry cloak, got her seated on the hearth, and filled a cup half full with burnt wine. She pushed it away. He insisted. She gagged it down as he wrapped pitched soaked rags around both ends of three arm length sticks. He stuck one into the fire and it blazed alight.

Most of her wits had returned and her shaking stopped by the time he was unbarring the door.

"But, you're not, going out there?" she said.

"We can't leave her outside." he said.

"But whoever shot her," she said.

"Is long gone." he said.

She leapt to her feet, strutted to the chests at the door like a drunken rooster and grabbed his crossbow. She slipped her foot through its iron stirrup, planted the other sideways atop it and with both arms straining, wrestled the cocking lever back. She started a bolt from his quiver.

"No," he said. "that's fine."

LXII I'll Deal With You Later

The Hall's cresset lay where Mirha'd dropped it fleeing the killer. A splotch of blackened shells lay beneath it where the burning oil spilled out.

At the sight of that still, voluptuous woman, prostrate in those tight, perverse leathers, and that long, wet, tangled dark hair, Jarnulf was seized by a dread darker than any shave with a poacher had ever given him.

He rushed trembling to thrust the torch down before her face. It was indeed Sigrid. In his relief he almost thanked God but choked instead on the sacrilege of such a gratitude.

Sigrid was lying on her stomach, facing left and east, her eyes open, chin and the right lower half of her pale blue face covered in blood. A spot of it no bigger than a baby's fist lay dark and sticky on the path beneath her. Her right arm was folded under her and her left extended out before her bitten to the quick nails, in the dirt, where she'd clawed away the shells. The necklace was wrapped around her hand.

The arrow however, was missing. Jarnulf bent down and pressed two fingers to the side of her neck. Sigrid was cold. She had no pulse.

Jarnulf closed Sigrid's eyes. He ran his fingers over her wound. The arrow hadn't been broken off, it had been pulled out. He straightened and slouched, beaten, the thirty yards to the ship sheds. All three of the two wheeled carts were loaded with traps.

He returned to Sigrid, handed Mirha his torch, and scooped Sigrid up in his arms. Lord, but his legs and butt ached. Sigrid weighed three times what she should.

Within the shed was sepulchral. He followed Mirha between two faerings upside down on sawhorses, their keel planks removed. Work benches ran down the first half of each wall. Axes, planes and boring augers lay carelessly strewn atop them.

Mirha pushed aside the long wooden jointing plane. Jarnulf laid Sigrid on the bench. He folded her arms beneath her breasts and pushed her wet hair back from her forehead.

"Sigrid, Sigrid, Sigrid," he sighed, leaning over her. "What have you been chewing on these last years to make you so mean and bitter and end up like this?"

"Can we please go home?" Mirha said.

"She wasn't always like this." he said. "She was full of smiles when we were little, had her share of mischief too, but no more of the real devil than most."

Taking the torch from Mirha he headed deeper into the shed searching for a tarp. The rear half of the shed was lined with multi-tiered racks of squared oak and pine. Barrels of pine tar and turpentines squatted beneath the racks. Even in this cold, their aroma was dizzying.

He gazed up into the rafters as he neared the shed's back wall. A fist sized white circle high in a corner turned away from the torch light. After some staring, it resolved itself, as he knew it would, into a face atop a knee high body of mottled, amber grey feathers. Little pellets of bones and fur lay on the floor beneath it. Barn owls killed with their talons and swallowed their tiny victims whole, and vomited out the skin and bones later.

Jarnulf stabbed a headsman's finger up at the bird. It was welcome to every mouse it could find but not the chipmunks in his yard.

"I'll deal with you later." he said. Mirha'd witnessed enough killing for one night. Then too shooting up the place might not be such a good idea until he'd had a chance to explain Sigrid.

His eyes were misting and it wasn't all because of the fumes. Whether Sigrid had gone looking for it or not wasn't the issue.

Returning with a tarp he laid it at Sigrid's feet and began unrolling it over her. Halfway he stopped, unwound the necklace from her fingers, wiped her blood from the eagle, and pocketed it just in case. There was no telling which of the women would arrive ahead of him come morning.

He bent forward and kissed Sigrid's dead forehead before rolling it up over her. He weighted down the edges with hammers and planes. The owls wouldn't bother her but he hoped nothing else had snuck in.

Mirha found his reticence and distance from her most awkward all along their way home through the black surrounding their feeble torch.

To Jarnulf such black meant life. His forest was forty miles by forty miles. It had to be kept black.

Wolves were coming, sacrificing wolves, and there would be at least a long hundred of them. With the twins, Gudrod, and Thorarin he had just thirteen men. Now he'd be stuck here in town for days asking questions. And the others would all be here for Sigrid's funeral to uphold the lie that nothing was wrong. If even one spy got through a lot more people than Sigrid were going to be killed.

END

Volume I

If you enjoyed this book the author would appreciate a positive review at the retailer you purchased it from.

Viking Hunter Continues in Vols 2 and 3.

Here's the opening of Volume 2.

Kill Them Twice

LXIII Get Lost

Leif and Knut finished their four block sprint doubled over, hands on knees and gasping. In the stars and moon's sliver they felt as if they'd been surprised by some girl's father. They scampered up the alley and cloaked themselves into the shadows hugging a building.

"We'll get the log if we're not back soon with a damn good story." Leif whispered.

"What's your rush?" Knut said. "Hauling a log on your shoulder all day beats getting shot in the eye."

"Someone's coming." Leif hissed.

A buckskinned urchin with charcoaled features ghosted through the intersection they'd quit. Once safely out of the light the urchin meowed and five more flitted through the open after him. Knut was tempted. If they bagged one of the two brats toting bows he'd have a shot at a double share. Leif reminded him that for every rat you see there's twenty you don't.

After giving the kids time to get out of earshot the deserters clinked and clanked westward up the alley paralleling their band's line of march, inventing heroics for their cover fantasy. They started with every other step at creaks and groans from cooling buildings, wind sighs and imaginary lurkers. Within two blocks there wasn't an unfrayed nerve between them.

Knut's crossbow flew to his shoulder to spit its bolt into a patch of shadow ahead. An arthritic mongrel hobbled out into the cold, colorless light, looked back over its shoulder, growled halfheartedly, and limped away on three legs.

From the next corner as the mutt disappeared around it, a man's voice called out.

"Gol?"

"Not me." another replied, behind them.

"Shut up and find them." a third said.

The deserters pressed themselves into the wall's only doorway as the slumbering dark around them yawned in a scattering of stealthy footfalls and phantoms stretching through the shadows. Leif tried the door. It was barred within.

"That's it. We're going to die." he said.

Knut forced his knife point between the frame and the door. A pimp's knife was what Karl called it, he remembered as its hilt of polished walrus ivory kept slipping about in his sweat slick palms. With the heel of his hand he hammered it into the frame and with an apocalyptic 'Crrack', split out a long strip of wood.

His point found the bar within. He leaned on it and lifted. The door swung back and they slipped inside. Knut thanked his maker that somebody had oiled the hinges. He closed and rebarred the door.

In the still, sarcophagal black they held their breath as the door strained inward against the bar and then relaxed.

Night blind they listened to their sanctuary depict itself. The pounding in their ears gradually subsided unmasking ever more distant and subtle accumulations of reverberant, complaining wood. The building was cavernous and choked with that glorious smell of money.

Fresh cut timber, turpentine and oils vied with musty grains, cheeses, and a chimeric taint of the devil's nerve queller. After hugging their chiming mail into silence they discovered patches of an even darker hue in the void before them. The starlight trickling down between the roof planks fell upon lofts to either side, and an aisle between stretching away into the black.

Whatever was beneath those lofts, be it riches or murder, remained hidden. If they went back out into the alley however, getting ambushed was a dead man's bet.

Leif's nose, panting in the murk, caught another whiff of mischief and the issue for him was settled. He revealed his objective to Knut.

"Are you mad?" Knut said. "We disappear for half the night, come back with a shit song about chasing snipers and sing it drunk?"

"Fat chance." Leif whispered. "With the trouble we just saved him finding this place we'll get fat bonuses. We've had a busy night you know, getting pinned down on that rooftop and killing four of them before we lost the other three in here at daybreak. I'm getting thirsty just thinking about it."

"What about the bodies outside?" Knut said. "The four we killed?"

"Their friends hauled them off after we left." Leif said.

Through the mob of jostling smells tiny atomies of potable courage pitched their wares like hawkers at a brothel's door and dragged the pair by their noses to the mead casks. They groped them one by one. Knut found the one with a spigot, removed his helmet and quarter filled it. He gave it a sniff, a sip, and a choked back whistle. It was the burnt stuff, potent as a snake bite. Most of the water had been cooked out of it.

They felt their way twenty yards back to the wall and settled in to expand their saga. Three fingers of mead later and drenched in sweat Knut knew his woolen surcoat had to go. He crawled out of his mail and its scratchy insulator, and rebuckled his sword belt determined on a refill.

As he poured his helmet almost full, there was no telling how hard that barrel might be to find again as the night wore on, a muffled voice filtered through the black from across and above the aisle. Knut scrunched down between the barrels, sipping, listening, and peering up into the dark. The voice spoke again but he couldn't make out any words. It was a girl's voice.

The level in his helmet dropped as she tittered away unanswered.

From the jet of the building's far end a barn owl's scream slashed and gutted his surrogate womb. It thundered and bounced about in the dark above a sibilant rush of tiny vermin feet.

Knut spilled half the mead into his lap. He left off his whispered cursing and winced as a door opened and a shaft of yellow candle light flooded the loft and ceiling. The girl's petulant whine, nasal but now distinct, called out.

"Tyto be quiet! Do you want them to find us?" she said.

The closing door swept the arc of feeble light back into the room. Intrigued, Knut rose, set his helmet atop the cask and drew steel. He tip toed across the aisle drawn by her singsong teasing away from up in the dark. Halting at each second step, he strained for any reply to her as he felt his way along more casks and pallets of lumber.

He found the back of a stair tread with his forehead, felt his way round the staircase and began his halting ascent, avoiding the creaking center and hugging the rail. Her converse from behind the door grew intelligible as he gained the landing. It was that gibberish people spoke to pets when they were alone with them.

He lurked at the threshold through an eternity of "Aren't you a gooood kittys" and "I love you too Spots" before trying the door. This door too was barred.

Somewhere back in his mind an inhibition kept sputtering that Spots wasn't a kitty cat's name, but it was too thoroughly mead logged to keep its mouth above the roiling surface of that sea for more than a half thought or two. He lifted the bar with his knife point and swaggered in.

A tiny field mouse of a brunette fresh to her teens turned and stared at him in wide eyed horror.

LXIV Goooood Kitty

Leif had killed his drink and was weaving up and down the aisle looking for Knut, noisily crashing into things and wondering where that idiot had got off to. Perhaps he'd run into someone in here and bolted back for the column.

Knowing Knut, there was a chance he'd improvise on their cover story and earn them both a lashing. But that was unlikely as Knut had left his chain behind and they both reeked of mead. It would be after daybreak before the smell wore off and they'd both been on thin ice with Dalla and Tore for some time.

Knut dropped the bar back into its lintel, and moving to block the door, surveyed his prize. The clanking of chain links whipped his stare sidelong into two marsh gas green eyes rising towards him. Knut sprang back from the claws coming for his neck. The chain snapped taut and the leopard at the end of it, now raising vocal murder, dropped out of the air raking Knut's left thigh in its descent.

Leif, after traversing the building's length unknowingly found himself back where he'd started when the leopard cut loose. His sworn brother be damned whatever awaited him with Dalla and Tore beat all hell out of remaining blind in this menagerie. Owls, giant demon cats, what was next?

Knut staggered back from the clawed and fanged, shrieking horror to grab the girl by her hair and hurl her into a corner. Taking his own quaking stand between her and escape, he dropped his woolen breeks.

The three, ragged, finger length tears in his thigh weren't deep but they were enough to kill him. The film of rotting meat under a leopard's claws would have his leg looking like a ripening corpse in a few days as the mottled purple, green, orange and red spread.

Screaming delirium and joint racking convulsions would follow.

He snatched the candle from the desk and thrust it at the screaming leopard. It was a lot cleaner and better fed than the only other one he'd seen, the dead one, but that was no guarantee. A jug on the desk snared his eye.

He traded the candle for it. He set his teeth and pulled its cork. A quick sniff confirmed its contents.

A sotted old biddy at Thing had once confided that the stuff was a good bet against cuts from rusted blades and such. Remembering his experiment the time he'd slipped with a whetstone he wondered if she'd made her discovery after a sword stroke through her own brain.

Between watching the cat and menacing the girl he managed a vicious pull at the jug before setting it down among stacks of ledgers on the desk.

Beside the leopard's mattress squatted a three foot cube of browned iron strongbox, its padlock and lid open.

Beneath opened cabinet doors against the opposite wall all the way back to the room's other door lay stacks of oddments.

Spots very essence had been transmuted to rage with a thoroughness to turn an alchemist green. With cocked ears and baited breath he'd heard every tiny noise the pair had made since their forced entry.

Spots little friend had tried to distract him with conversation and banging around in cabinets the whole time. Even through all that mead Knut was wearing his cat nose caught something ugly about him from the foot of the stairs. It got stronger as the anger smell lingered in the still air beyond the door. But when the door opened and that stench of hatred, fear and aggression swept into the room before him Spots coiled and tensed.

After his ambush failed the hate stink shoved fire in his face to taunt and humiliate him.

He vented his frustration in a bloodcurdling racket, shooting back and forth at the end of his chain while making damn sure the smelly bastard got a good look at all of his teeth.

Knut dropped the idea of killing the cat to shut it up, as even chained, a full grown leopard was more than he was ready for. The girl cowering before him wasn't.

"You and me are going to have us a party and kitty can watch." he said, yanking her to her feet. Grinning as she pled for mercy, he slammed her face down over the desk, still brandishing a sword while assaulting a girl half his size as if he might need it to protect himself from her. Between relishing her struggles, and the leopard's fury, he missed the heavy boot falls in the hallway beyond the far door.

The door crashed inward and Knut glanced up. A man in chain bearing a heavy axe was headed his way. Knut pinned the girl to the desk with his left hand and pointed the sword in his right at the intruder.

"Get lost." he snarled. "She's mine."

"Viking Bitch." the intruder grunted, cocking his axe for a swing as he charged.

"Garth!" the girl screamed.

Pants about his ankles, Knut's rearward leap landed him flat on his back as the axe whistled through the air above him. From the floor he aimed a frantic slash at his attacker's knee. Garth kicked Knut's wrist, sending the sword clanking out of reach as he raised his axe to cleave Knut's chest.

The axe poised at the top of its arc and Knut, unable to see beyond the next heartbeat, rolled left into the center of the room. He didn't feel a thing as the leopard's canines drove through his left arm. He did, however, feel its claws in his back and gut as it wrapped both forelegs around his neck, anchored them, began biting him, and then wind milled a trench into his belly with its hind legs.

The girl covered her eyes as the cat spattered flying entrails and crimson splotches onto the walls, floor, strongbox, and its mattress. Garth on the other hand, after leaping clear, lustily cheered the cat on while enjoying every bit of the affair with a scribe's eye for detail.

Shaking and crying, the girl stammered gibberish as Garth found her a blanket and wrapped her in it.

"Sinead, we're leaving, there's sure to be more of them." he said.

Sinead's leopard was still savaging the corpse as Garth steered her toward the door grateful that the cat had waked him. He hadn't meant to drift off but she'd taken forever collecting things she just couldn't live without after gathering father's ledgers.

Spots turned his Viking drenched face up to eye quiz him with that single, universal cat question that begs ten in return because no man has ever figured out what that cat brain is asking, as he and Sinead slipped past just out of reach.

"Gooood kitty." Garth purred down to him.

Starlight blinded Leif as he shot out the building's far end. Shielding his eyes he dashed down the empty alley. He stopped at a corner trash heap and buried all but three of his bolts in it. He'd get skinned for certain showing up with a full quiver and a tale about a long shootout.

No sooner had he finished than it came to him that the column wouldn't be where he'd left it. Those bolts might be sore needed. He dropped to his knees and began rooting through the garbage. Thoroughly engrossed in his search he wondered why his slice of luck always seemed so rotten.

His remaining moment of consciousness was filled with a whorl of colors beyond the natural spectrum and a feeling like being dropped on the back of his head from a high roof as the blunt back of a hand axe dented in the rear of his helmet.

"You're holding it backwards. Use the sharp edge." the axe wielder's girlfriend urged.

Sixteen wintered Caoimhe had never killed anyone before and putting an axe through a man's brain was more than she was ready for on her first try.

LXV To Live Through This

Garth in mail with a satchel of ledgers and little Sinead in a blanket stepped out into the night, turned right, and paralleling the main street headed for the heart of town.

"I told you to be quick. I knew those bastards would show up." Garth said.

"But what about Spots?" Sinead said. "He's why we went there. He won't stand a chance when the rest of those pirates find him."

"Just because he lets you pet him and play with him doesn't make him a dog. Or have you already forgot what he did to that Viking?" Garth said, greatly annoyed at the way his father's request for his ledgers had turned out.

What use could the damn things be to him anyway? There wouldn't be any shop and most of the folk who owed him money would be dead if they weren't already when this was over.

"He'll be fine." Garth said. "His water bucket's full and I doubt he'll need to be fed for a few days."

After watching Spots finally earn his keep Garth was beyond certain that he didn't want the cat anywhere near him now that its blood was up. With all the excitement Spots had probably forgot he was part of the family. He'd been pampered and fussed over since Garth brought him home as an orphaned cub but he was still a leopard.

"Can't we please go back and get him?" Sinead whined.

Garth said no again.

"Garth?" Sinead's tone said she was not about to stand by and let her kitty be murdered.

"All right already." he barked. "I'll go get him but not till you're indoors with the others."

Sinead said that would do as they marched stepped east towards the old blockhouse where the others were massed.

"I'm going to get through this. I'm going to get through this." Garth swore repeatedly, as he donned the chain coif and steel gauntlets he'd retrieved in his father's warehouse.

"Because if I don't, I can't get even with her." he said. "I'm going to live through this."

He cinched the fasteners of the black steel greaves tight behind his calves and then traded helmets until one of them fit over the coif. Thrice tonight counter sniper fire had near shaved his chin as it whistled by on rooftops. He'd got half way to the warehouse on his father's idiot errand when his baby sister caught up to him all worried about the damn cat. Then he'd been scared motherless the cat would maul him instead when he chased the rolling pervert into its reach.

Spots had been hand fed his whole life. He'd never killed anything before. Now, Garth thought, I'm going to pull a full grown, tom leopard off its first kill. He damned the little witch again. There was no way she realized what she'd got him into.

LXVI About The Sharp End

The candle on the desk still flickered as he pushed open the door. His unctuous pleadings were answered by a guttural, rattling hiss from the floor by the strongbox. Carefully skirting the chain's limit Garth gained the rear of the desk and eyeballed kitty. Spots was hard at work on a thighbone as he lay partly across the Viking's remains.

Garth waved the hunk of venison he'd hoped to bribe Spots with. Spots laid his ears back, lowered his head, and curled his lips open. The cat's whole face and forepaws were bloodied and festooned with little chunks and strings of Viking. Garth waited a long, nervous year as Spots ate his fill, returned to his mattress, and cleaned himself.

Garth reached behind himself and retrieved a shaft of oak ten feet long and the thickness of a girl's arm. It bore a padded loop at one end and a smaller one to draw it tight at the other. Repeatedly telling Spots that he was a good kitty between asking him if he were going to behave himself and cursing Sinead, Garth gave the kill a wide berth and inched closer. The big meal Spots just had might make him more tractable, or not.

Spots lifted a foreleg and snarled as the loop approached.

"Come on boy," Garth pleaded. "let's go for a nice walk."

Walk seemed the magic word. Spots dropped the idea that he was being challenged for his kill and submitted as the loop snugged around his neck and Garth unlocked the chain from the wall. Garth steered Spots around the corpse and led him through the door.

The poor bastard Sinead married someday would soon wish she hadn't, if she could hector her own brother into this. He hadn't put anything on underneath that chain coif. The damn thing was pulling a hundred hairs out of his head at every step, and chewing the hide off the back of his neck. He'd be in a fine mood after delivering and stowing her cat.

Spots dragged him out into the alley and almost off his feet, and eagerly tugged him half a block in the wrong direction, towards home. A hat full of whoas later Garth got him stopped and turned around. Now that blood was no longer in his nostrils Spots capered about like a big, fawning puppy again.

On his rooftop Diarmud swallowed his heart, pushing his stomach down beneath it. His heart was blacker even than his hair. All thoughts of flight and life had left him.

"That's it. They're all dead." he whisper moaned.

The chimney soot on his forehead came off on the back of his hand. He backed away from the edge and put his head in his hands. His kin, friends, and neighbors all lie in the field before town, strewn like the hell leavings of some devil sized leopard. Some had still been moaning, unable to crawl from the field when he awoke earlier this evening. They'd quit now. A handful of real leopards had seen to that. He damned the devil.

He spared an awful, tear choked gaze up into the stars, and promised them all he'd be along shortly, as shortly as his luck held and it wouldn't hold long because he was about to push it past breaking, taking a red wave of Viking blood in return for theirs.

And now there were the kids he'd just lost. One was his nephew and two more his cousins. The others he saw daily. How he was going to tell their folks he'd no idea. This ambush had been his idiot plan. Watching, as he directed it from up here, had been somehow worse than standing shoulder to shoulder with his friends, though they were being hacked to bits. This bunch were just little boys and two lame old men. Again he damned the devil, for stealing even his glorious suicide.

He snatched up his bow and bounded down the back stairs. At the foot of the stairs his heart leapt back into his throat as he almost tripped over a dead Viking in chain, face down on the stairs with an arrow through his neck. Two more sprawled beyond the first, also neck shot. He hadn't heard a thing. Whichever kids pulled this off were a lot braver or crazier than he'd credited them with.

Slinking, he peered around corners and then cupped his hands to howl through them like a love sick tabby. His call returned from a couple of blocks towards the main gate. He headed for it.

He paused at the intersection and signaled again. His whispered name carried back and he dashed across through the starlight and back into the shadows. The kid at the corner joined him as he made his way to the four clustering around a garbage heap. Two boys and two girls, all about sixteen, were standing over someone in mail and helmet, face down in the garbage. The girls were arguing.

"If you'd done it right the first time." one girl said.

"Oh God, he's not dead." the second squealed as she wound up with the same wrong end of her hand axe to bat the Viking's head clean through the garbage and into the street beneath it. Diarmud snatched the axe from Caoimhe as it came back over her shoulder. He clamped his free hand over her mouth.

Leif struggled awake wondering what hit him. Hangovers always started in the middle, not the back of his head. And what's that awful smell? He blanked back out as Diarmud gave him a gentler tap with Caoimhe's axe than the one she'd wound up for.

"Get that chain off him." Diarmud said. "Get his bow, blades and anything hid in his clothes."

Diarmud tucked his crossbow beneath his arm and turned to watch their backs. When they'd finished he heaved Leif over his shoulder and led them back toward the center of town and its rundown, sprawling blockhouse. A century earlier it had served as forest citadel housing the seed stock of the town they eventually built around it.

At the back door of the darkened building he rapped out the coded knock. It opened. Caoimhe dropped Leif's mail into a corner with a hearty sigh. It weighed only thirty pounds but it bit her at every step wriggling about like a viper in her arms. Serena dumped Leif's helmet and sword, clanking, atop it. Serena apologized for giving her a hard time over not killing him. Caoimhe examined her bruised and bleeding forearms and explored her breasts. She bit back a yelp as gingerly, she encountered her left nipple.

"You were right. I should have used the sharp end." she said.

LXVII Fellow Castaways

One of the boys offered to poultice her injury with a kiss. Caoimhe snatched her axe from Serena and warned Jimmy. Jimmy leapt back laughing. His offer was good any time.

Women crowded Diarmud for news. Moments earlier a lad had come flying in hysterical. Three dozen of their kin were being butchered. Diarmud sidestepped his worried sick sister, as he explained it had been nine, not three dozen, who'd been captured, not killed. He recited their names. The wailing grew louder as women of all ages joined the mourners upon hearing names from their families. Mary, a brunette in her early thirties, shouldered her way to the fore.

"Are you daft? Bringing that, that, thing, in here?" she said. She whipped out a knife and plunged it into Leif's butt. Diarmud spun sideways but still an inch drove home. Leif shot awake screaming through his gag.

Mary flailed possessed as Diarmud held her off, and Leif landed on his head, cutting his howl short as he was knocked senseless a third time. Diarmud felt his head exploding as he spun his women his yarn about how important this louse was if they wanted their kids back.

Calming them sufficient to turn his back proved no small beer. And then his own spirits landed in a heap on the floor beside Leif in his sweat grimed surcoat. If he didn't dredge up something more than this scrawny pimple popper, who seemed no more menacing or valuable than a half empty oak sack, and in short order, the kids would all turn up throat slashed by sun rise.

Diarmud shouldered Leif and a tattoo of knocks rattled the door. The kids looked back for the nod. Getting it, they opened the door. A helmeted enemy in Viking chain loomed without, in the night. The crowd panicked. The kids slammed the door and rebarred it. A bone tired, exasperated voice carried through.

"Will you please, let, me, in?"

Diarmud grimaced. Shifting Leif higher onto his shoulder he gestured the kids to reopen it. Viking Garth leaned sideways into the torchlight with a chain in his left hand, tugging something in after him.

"Come along you! I've had enough tug of war." he said.

Well, there's one, Diarmud thought, perhaps two from the trouble they were giving Garth.

"Haven't you sniffed enough dried turds yet?" Garth demanded of his captive.

Leaning heavily aside he pulled his chain and stick within, shouldering into Diarmud, who was near asleep on his feet. Silence swept the few women remaining as the leopard's head and shoulders appeared, squatting half in and half out, blocking the door.

Diarmud backed to join the wide eyed gapers. Their furor at Leif was as naught to seeing Spots invited in.

Garth pleaded kitty's case as he retreated to the door to grab Spots collar. Kitty wasn't any danger to them. He might come in handy. As Garth wound the chain around his wrist Sinead shot forward to give both her guys a big hug. Garth's eyes gaped like he'd been shot. He leapt between her and Spots.

Diarmud snatched Sinead's collar wondering what might be amiss. Sinead was always fawning over her kitty cat. He'd even sit when told to, though she was still having trouble with roll over and play dead. Nobody'd ever told Spots he was a leopard. He thought he was a retriever.

Leif wrestled awake knowing things had gone terribly awry. Two unspeakably evil green eyes in an amber and white rosetted face peered up at him as he opened his eyes. The jaw beneath those eyes dropped open and a throaty, rattling hiss accompanied by a charnel house stink sprayed him with cat spittle. A forearm sized pink tongue licked turgid, snowy whiskers, as it slithered past a pair of finger long ivories.

Leif missed the browned steel, chain wrapped gauntlet clutching the cat's bronze collar as he blacked out for the fourth time.

Garth leaned in close, leering and twitching his way through a blow by blow, curling back his lips and grunting as his free hand mimed frenetic clawings.

"And you brought him in here?" Diarmud said, voice and brows rising.

"She wouldn't leave without him." Garth said, eying Sinead who, still solidly tethered in Diarmud's grip, was blowing Spots kisses.

"Maybe we should put her in charge." Diarmud said.

His barb prodded Garth's gripe with his sister forward, and he brusquely shooed her off, more for his own benefit than hers, to their parents. Grumbling, she tottered off, but only after extorting hardened assurances she could pet Spots come morning.

Garth waxed horrified as Diarmud appraised him of the kidnapped kids.

Together they dragged the cat and Leif into what were originally Chieftain's quarters, but had since served as office, storeroom, kid's playhouse, and now storeroom again. They locked Spots to a heavy, blackened desk. In the desk's storeroom posting as junk furniture, no one bothered with a plate beneath their candle. Its top was slick with spilled wax.

Leif they dumped to the floor beyond the chain's limit. Lining the far wall stood a dozen oaken barrels filled with emergency water stocks. Diarmud hoped aloud the chain would keep kitty from eating the son of a bitch long enough for them to collect another half dozen. Barring that, Leif's life lay in convincing his mates that they actually had another five or six live ones.

Garth asked Diarmud how he planned on snatching six more that stupid after learning how Leif had been bagged. They hoisted a half full barrel atop the desk to keep Spots from dragging it across the room for a bite of Leif for dessert. They left, closing the door behind them.

Leif was shocked awake in the black as the barrel slammed to the floor. He hadn't a clue where he was except that he was getting soaked. Struggling to gain his feet he found his arms and legs weren't working, or feeling. His thumped skull ached with each panicked breath.

Squirming from his port to starboard beam alerted him to his wounded butt. Choking on his gag, he feared he'd drown but the torrent quickly subsided and a raspy, shallow breathing bore in through the dark.

His empty, but for that helmet of booze, stomach, writhed like a nest of venom dripping vipers. He moaned through his gag and the leopard, bored and lonely, vouchsafed a friendly, if tentative, hello.

After Garth and Diarmud departed Spots had instinctively taken the high ground atop the table. To him the dark was but as twilight, and rubbing against the barrel he worried it off the wax slick edge.

Perhaps this fellow castaway would chat it up with him, or maybe even pet him. He smelled like that lout at the warehouse, booze, salt, wood smoke, rust and oiled steel, sweat drenched leather, and lots of fear but the lust and aggression weren't there. Fear was a smell he was quite familiar with. It usually accompanied the booze. He'd studied both in detail while lounging about the office chained to the wall.

Visitors would occasionally argue with Father. The thicker the booze, the louder the argument. Spots enjoyed the arguments. Father would approach his mattress cooing and offering venison and pet him whilst gently rattling the keys at his belt.

At the repeated agglomeration of K's, H's, and other cat consonants Leif's bladder let go. Spots pinned his ears back and told Leif that among gentleman marking one's turf was unacceptable.

Leif gushed out a different, aromatic torrent as his bowels failed him.

Thanks for reading.

Visit my author blog for more on real Vikings, links to original 800 year old Sagas and Tales in Old Norse, Modern English translations, learning their language, sword making, fighting techniques, their laws, courts, and more.

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