A Mankind Witch (2 page)

She turned to Manfred. "He means I have not wasted my effort on fighting the inevitable, the Emperor's orders, but instead got the best out of it that I can."

"Huh," said Manfred, gloomily. "What
can
I get out of it? To think I asked for you to send me away from this pile of stones before winter set in properly. I had somewhere warm in mind, before the bishop-general insisted on me coming back to some freezing chapter house in Prussia. Even Erik got chilblains in that first winter."

The Emperor turned his attention to the third person present at the interview. Erik Hakkonsen had not said anything yet. But then the tall, spare Icelander seldom said more than he had to. The Clann Hakkonsen of Iceland had provided personal bodyguards for the heirs of the Imperial House Hohenstauffen's
wanderjahre
for centuries now. They were far more than mere bodyguards. They were the final arms instructors and mentors for the princelings. Their loyalty was not to the Empire—Iceland was part of the League of Armagh, owing no fealty to the Holy Roman Empire, but to the House Hohenstauffen, personally. It meant that they, and only they, treated the scions of the most powerful Imperial house in the world like troublesome children, from time to time. Charles Fredrik knew that he owed his personal survival—and the survival of the Empire—to Erik's father. Erik had done as much for Manfred. When the Hakkonsen spoke, the Hohenstauffen listened. But Erik just shook his head and smiled wryly. "He still complains too much, Godar Hohenstauffen. Even if that affair in Venice did help him to grow up a bit. A bit of hard riding in the cold will be good for him."

The hag spat into the balefire. Green flames leapt as the stream of spittle hit the burning fungus. She wiped her chin with the back of her broad hand, and then turned again to face the
draug
she had raised. Needs be it must be one of the dead of this place. Midgard's dead for information about Midgard, after all. She'd brought the body up here, after her slaves had hauled it out of the bog where she'd laid him, facedown, with his throat cut.

And they thought that his body lay in his ship mound in honor! A seeming was quite adequate to fool these Midgard lice. And she was the mistress of seemings.

"Speak," she ordered.

The
draug
gurgled horribly at her. Her hard green eyes narrowed as her son stepped forward, ready to cuff the dead thing. Bah. Blows, even blows from one such as he could not hurt the dead. But she could. Her
galdr
would burn it like a whip of fire. She waved her hulking child back, back to his
björnhednar
guards.

She raised her arms to begin the chanting . . . and realized that the
draug's
defiance was merely a problem of the cut throat. Or maybe it was defiance of a sort. The
draug
hated her, hated her with a helpless fury that could drive it to act even against the pain she could inflict with her
galdr
chants. She took a handful of clay and mended it. "Now. Speak. Defy me if you dare. What is it that holds us back? Why did the raid fail?"

"The
draupnir
," he croaked. "The oath."

Of course. It was obvious now. The oaths sworn on that thing would be binding, even if the swearer had no intent of honoring them. She should have guessed. But the thing had that about it which repelled her. Odin's temple yard was not a place she went to if she could possibly avoid it. The one-eyed one's priests were less affected by seemings than others, even if she'd seen to it that the present high incumbent was near to blind with cataracts. With certain protections her son should be safe from it. And if not—well they would find a way to break the oath. Or cause it to be broken.

Lightning split the sky, and the thunder echoed among the high places. Big drops began to hiss on the balefire. Now that she had what she needed, Bakrauf began dismissing the spells that had given the
draug
the seemings of life. It fell like a child's broken doll, tumbling onto its side by the fire. The face of the dead kinglet was twisted into the rictus of a smile. She considered it, thoughtfully.
Draugar
thus compelled could not lie. She kicked the body, and gestured to the
björnhednar
. "Take him back. I may need him again."

She turned away, the firelight glinting briefly on the cunningly wrought silver ornaments in her ears. They were perfect, down to the last hair, and no small part of her power over the
björnhednar
rested in them.

Then she strode back downhill, away from the stone that marked the gateway between her place and this, back toward the halls of men in the valley below. Behind her, her son followed. The pelting rain and even the hail did not worry her. Troll-wives have no objection to rain. It is bright sunlight they avoid.

n

You speak Frankish?" the karl translator asked, when the guards deposited him in front of the throne in the high thatched hall.

More fluently than you,
thought Cair. But he put on a show of concentration. Nodded earnestly. "I have small." Cair was still not even sure where he was. Some remote little kingdom in Norselands seemed a fairly sure bet. But now came the difficult bit. He had to lie, and lie fluently.

"Vortenbras King he says have you kin who would pay
blot
 . . . blood price for you? Ransom." Faced with Cair's blank look, the karl tried again. "Give him money for you."

Cair wrinkled his forehead in a show of effort. "You tell him-King, me poor man." If word went out that some Norseman was demanding a ransom for Cair Aidin . . . Well, even in the fleets of the corsairs there were a good few who would pay for him . . . dead. If word got to one of the Holy Roman Empire's spies that the Redbeard was a prisoner here—they would pay generously. Very generously. They would keep him alive, too. Their torturers were good at that. Dead people felt no pain. When he'd last heard, the Republic of Venice also was offering five hundred thousand ducats for his head. "Me poor man," he repeated. It would mean slavery, but that was better than the alternatives. He would have some chance of escape from slavery. And for some obscure reason the slaves here appeared to be left entire. The threat of castration might have persuaded him to try his luck at escaping from the gilded but carefully guarded cage they would put a high-value prisoner into, instead. However, he'd made sure of that already—all that happened to slaves was a branding. And, once branded, slaves didn't appear well guarded at all. Perhaps the Norse trusted to the remote wildness of this place.

The bearlike man on the throne spat disgustedly at the translation. Bellowed something obviously derogatory in Norse. It was like enough to Frankish to have a haunting familiarity. "What him-King say?"

"Vortenbras King say you too old for good thrall. Not enough work in you before you go die. And too small to plow with."

Too old! He was thirty-five. Not a young man, true. But in his prime! Then Cair understood the implication of the second part of the statement. He'd heard of that, yes. Poor places where they plowed with teams of men or women instead of horses. They did that in the high Atlas, apparently. But for one such as he to be put to such a use by these primitive barbarians!

The hulking bear of a man snapped an order. Cair found himself being dragged backward, by the hair, by his translator. He had to turn and follow, stumbling. He was going to have to learn this language. Fast. And he was going to have to restrain himself from killing idiots like this hair dragger.

"Where are you taking me?" he asked.

"To be branded. Then," and the disdain showed in the man's voice, "you go to be woman's slave. Signy."

Cair thought—by the tone—that the last word was probably some kind of Norse insult.

"What your name, slave?" demanded the stable master in mangled Frankish, looking down at him as he sprawled on the soiled straw he had been shoved down onto.

His new-burned flesh throbbed. Cair added that to the reckoning. But right now he had to survive until that reckoning came due. And that meant that he had to stop being a corsair admiral—and become an anonymous slave. He was not Cair Aidin until he stood on the deck of his own ship again. The barbarians couldn't pronounce his name anyway. He bowed his head. "Cair, master." He would be that, and think of himself as just that, until he was free.

"A good name for a thrall," the stable master grunted. "Get up. Move dung," he pointed to a wooden shovel. "And learn our tongue."

Cair, the new slave, shoveled horse dung. That was another thing they'd pay for, when he escaped. But for now he was content to bide his time. To study his captors and the place he was captive in. When he made his break, he intended to be successful. And, if he had to bring half of the Barbary fleet here, he'd burn this place around their ears. The "palace" and its halls were wooden. The roofs were thatch. They'd burn well. They thought that being this far from the coast would save them. Nothing would.

But after a few days of captivity, Cair—the new thrall—was somewhat less sanguine about it all. The first thing that struck him was that they'd scarcely give a slave this much liberty if escape was a real possibility. He soon realized that, beside the brand, there were other trammels set on a thrall. And one of them was that, here in the north, he was a small, unarmed fellow. Among the corsairs he'd been of average height. It was not something that had worried him, previously. With a sword in hand, or a ship to command, he was the equal or the better of any other man. Here he was utterly forbidden to even touch either a ship or an edged weapon. A few older, very privileged thralls had belt knives. Small belt knives.

Besides being a mere small unarmed slave-thrall, at the bottom of the Norse social order, he also found he was at the bottom of the pecking order for slave-thralls. He was a woman's slave. And not just any woman. Signy.

You didn't, it would appear, go any lower, around these parts. Being the lowest of the low meant that you got the worst of everything, from sleeping quarters to food, if you could call it that. They were teaching him the job with a good supply of buffets, blows, and occasional buckets of filth. And even other thralls were free to hand out a good beating if they felt like it.

On the second day, still struggling with the language, and still wracked by the last chill of fever, Cair found this out the hard way. He wasn't even too sure what he'd done wrong. All he knew was that he was getting a fiercesome beating with a broken stave for doing it. And the fact that he'd dared to strike back was making it worse. The thrall doing the beating was heavier, taller, and better fed than most of them. He was one of Queen Albruna's slaves—not supposed to be in the stables at all. The other thralls stood and cheered and jeered. There wasn't much entertainment in the stables. Certainly no one lifted a hand to stop it.

The fight was going badly. And then it was going worse. The big fellow kneed him in the crotch, and as Cair's head came forward, he cracked it down against one of the stalls.

Cair swore, amid the blur of pain . . . and then the hitting stopped.

Cair managed to stand upright. Blood was streaming from his nose, and the world was definitely out of focus. But the big tow-haired thrall was no longer laying into him. And the stable was oddly silent. Cair closed both eyes and then tried opening them again. His vision was still far from normal, but he could see the thrall, stretched out full length on the stable floor. His head appeared to have turned into a heavy wooden bucket.

That was quite enough for Cair. He was plainly either dead or concussed, and in either case he was going to sit down. Now.

He slumped against the wooden stall partition. He was vaguely aware that some of the other thralls had hauled the buckethead away. But he felt too sore and sick to care. And no one had come to drive him to his feet to work again. He drifted away to somewhere between concussion and sleep.

He awoke to find someone kneeling next to him. Lifting his head. Holding something to his lips. "Drink this."

He sipped. It was a clay dipper of water. He tried to work out who was giving this nectar to him. The light was bad in the stable by now, not that it was wonderful at any time, but evening was plainly close.

It was a woman. Not a thrall he'd seen before. A scrawny lass who had plainly been crying. He sipped some more and then tried to sit up. Quite involuntarily, he groaned.

"You've taken quite a beating, by the looks of you," said the woman, critically. Not particularly sympathetically, but kindly enough. "Can you stand up?" she asked.

Cair tested his limbs. "I think so. I'll try."

"Good," she said. "This is Korvar's stall. He doesn't like being put elsewhere. Come. Up."

She hauled at his arm and he staggered to his feet. She made no attempt to support him, but he did manage to grab the stall edge and steer his way out. The woman appeared more concerned at fussing around the stall, and leading an elderly warhorse across to it, than watching what he was doing, so he sat down again. But his head was clearing, slowly. She patted and soothed the horse. "Next time don't bleed in this stall," she said to Cair, sharply. "The smell of blood gets Korvar overexcited." She leaned over and kissed the horse's muzzle. The horse twitched and sneezed. She laughed. "There, you big old silly. Settle now." Eventually, she came out of the stall, and looked critically at Cair. "There is some horse liniment I made up for strains up on the shelf in the corner. I've found that it helps a bit for the bruises. Then you'd better get across to your quarters, before you get another beating."

It was only after she'd left that it occurred to his muzzy mind that she'd addressed him in Frankish. Not just Frankish but good Frankish. Spoken as a highborn noblewoman would, not some stable girl. But he'd thought no more of it. His head throbbed and so did his ribs. He'd roughly slathered some of the horse liniment on himself. It burned in the raw places, and woke him more thoroughly, but perhaps the herbs in it would do him some good. He'd staggered over to the stinking hovel where he'd been told to sleep. It was small, dirty, crowded, smoky, full of vermin . . . and oddly silent when he'd crept in. He'd found a space easily enough, and slept.