Deep Water (21 page)

So I looked at that green-eyed man, and I looked with the eyes of power. They say the power came from the gods originally,
and I believe it. At that moment I was more than a woman in her hall; more than a girl facing her enemy. I was greater, impossibly
strong, impossibly desirable, impossibly desiring. I saw his face change, and I exulted.

“I will go with you,” I said, in the trading language that my people and his shared. “If you and your men leave this steading
and all its people in peace.”

One of his men laughed. “You’ll go with us if we choose and we’ll all have you until you’re —” Hard-hand smote him with the
flat of his sword right across the mouth so that he fell to the floor, bloody, his teeth falling out into his palm, and he
was called Bloody-mouth forever after. Hard-hand never took his eyes from mine.

“Willingly?” he asked. There was so much yearning in that question it made me both exultant and sick to my stomach with all
it implied.

“If all are safe. Willingly,” I said slowly.

“So be it,” he said. “I will come in the morning and escort you to my home, where you will be my wife.” At that his men almost
fell over with astonishment, but they said nothing.

He turned slowly, reluctant to take his eyes from me, but once that contact was broken he whirled into action, ordering his
men outside to retreat, to set up camp by the stream in the sheep meadow, to leave all their plunder behind them. They complained
loudly, as such men do, but Gris quietened them. He looked strangely at me, Gris. Later, when I knew more of Hard-hand’s life
I understood why, for giving mercy to defenseless women was not something anyone who knew him would have expected.

I spent the night collecting my belongings and crying in my mother’s arms. But in the morning I rose up and put on my traveling
clothes. My mother pinned my cloak with her best brooch, that had been made by Elric the Foreigner in her youth at the behest
of my father Harald, as a betrothal gift.

“You are a worthy daughter of a great line,” she said formally. “May the gods protect you and bring you safe home.”

“My mother, live long and die blessed by kith and kin, by wealth and weal, by fame and fortune.”

“Fame I shall garner from your actions, fortune you have already been to me, kith and kin shall live here safe, remembering
your name with praise.”

She was proud and stately but her eyes were full of tears, as were mine. Tears of grief and fear, for who knew what waited
for me over the mountains in the strangers’ land?

Customs differ, but work is the same everywhere. What I found over the mountains was a strange life, yet in essence it was
the same life I had left. There were no women’s quarters or men’s hall. Families had their own quarters and women lived with
their own men and children, all in one small house. It is not a good system, for the children annoy the men and the men annoy
the women and no one ever gets a moment to sit quietly alone. Women are kept apart from the other women who would give them
comfort and advice and share the child-rearing and the cooking and the endless scouring of pots. That was different. The herbs
they used for cooking and preserving were sometimes strange to me. But the work was the same: they had goats, not sheep, but
though goats are cleverer than sheep they still need to be fed and milked and delivered of their young. The wool was softer
but a little harder to spin; the blankets lighter but warmer. Small differences.

The great difference was Hard-hand. On that first morning, when I left my mother, he had given me a horse to ride, a pony
that carried me sure-footedly over the mountain trails, even past a great chasm that reached so far down into the depths of
the earth that the bottom could not be seen. Hard-hand had ridden beside me all the way, but there he got off his horse and
led my pony. He remounted and I thanked him, and then he tried to talk to me, although he had trouble finding something to
say. He was not a clever man. In the end he told me about his land, his manor as he called it, and the people who owed him
fealty. He had been elected a chieftain, at least, and so I would not be shamed in lying with him.

The gods’ power worked strangely on me. In my heart I hated him — not so much for his attack on our steading, for such things
are to be expected — but for forcing me to make the choice I had made, for taking me from my family and friends, for stealing
from me my right to choose my husband. For turning the great power of my mother’s line, which should be used to create strong
families living in joy, into a weapon. Yet his person was not distasteful to me. When he reached for my hand I did not feel
the urge to snatch it away.

We came to his farmstead with its cluster of small buildings in the late evening after a long, long ride. I was swaying in
the saddle and he looked at me with concern as he lifted me down.

“Siggi!” he yelled. A woman came out of his house and went to greet him, to kiss him, but he pushed her back roughly.

“This is —” It was then he realized that he did not know my name, that he had ridden beside me all day without asking. Gris
laughed.

“Asa,” he said. “Her name is Asa.” I learned later that it was typical of him, to learn what others did not know, did not
think worth knowing.

“Asa,” Hard-hand said, his voice caressing. The woman Siggi heard it, and her face went hard. “She is to be my wife,” he said.
“Treat her well. Tonight I will sleep in my mother’s house and in the morning we will be hand-fasted.”

Siggi hated me from that moment, and I did not blame her. She had been his concubine for three years before I came, and had
borne him two daughters. Now he looked at her as though she were no more than a servant. She wanted me dead, but she did not
dare disobey him.

She took me inside and showed me a room to sleep in, for in this place they slept in separate rooms, alone or with their husbands
and children, instead of all together as we did.

I slept well through exhaustion and rose to wash and ready myself. Hard-hand came at sunrise, as the custom was there, and
we were hand-fasted over a holy fire struck from flint that had never been used before. Unlike us, where the chieftain is
the go-between to the gods, these people had a seer to perform all the ceremonies, a man who could always hear the gods’ voices,
as Athel sometimes could. I discovered, after, that their gods are smaller than ours but much more approachable, and anyone
could go to their black stone altar and speak to the gods, ask for favor, beg forgiveness. I never dared, being a child of
different gods, but Siggi gained great comfort when the gods told her I would be gone within a year.

She told me that the morning after my wedding, when I rose from my marriage bed bruised and shaken. Hard-hand was bound to
me, but that did not change his nature, and it was his nature to take what he wanted when he wanted it. And I was bound to
be faithful to him until death.

Siggi taunted me, “The gods have promised me, you will be gone in under a year! He will tire of you and kill you and I will
have him back.”

“Is that what the gods say?” I asked, looking her straight in the eyes.

She shrugged, uncomfortable. “They say you will be gone in under a year, and
I
will be the chieftain’s wife.” Then she smiled maliciously. “You thought you had stolen him but he will come back to me when
he tires of you.”

I nodded. “Until then, I am his wife and the mistress of this steading. Fetch me water to wash in.”

She glowered, but she obeyed. I washed slowly, thinking about her message from the gods. “Gone” they had said, not “dead.”
I would have been an honorable wife to him if he had treated me with honor. But he did not. I rinsed the blood from my thighs
and decided, at that moment, to kill Hard-hand.

He was not an easy man to kill. He slept lightly, with his hand on his weapons. He ate no food that I had not eaten first.
Although he wanted me nightly and the power of the gods meant that I did not resist, he never trusted me. Nor should he have.
But when two months went by and we realized I was with child, he relaxed a little.

That was a hard moment for me. I had planned to kill Hard-hand and then myself, but a child changed everything. I could not
take the life of an innocent. Which meant I had to live. To live with Hard-hand until the child was born and I was well enough
to travel. The day I realized I ran down to the goatfold and sobbed into the side of a nanny as she suckled her twins. I raged
against Hard-hand’s gods, because I thought they had caused this as a punishment for not worshipping them. Now I think I was
wrong, but then I felt caught in a trap from which there was no escape. Except one.

So I played the part of the willing wife. I worked hard. I joked with the other women and with his men. I pretended to have
fallen in love with him at first sight and the only one who did not believe me was Gris, who had looked at my face in my father’s
long hall when all the other men were looking at my body. There was a reason for that. Gris did not lie with women. Nor with
men, so far as I could discover, but then men lying with men was scorned in that place and he would have been dishonored by
it.

As it was, his brother taunted him about his refusal to marry and advised him to get a woman from the far north, one of the
Skraelings, who were so hairy they looked like men and might thus satisfy him. Hard-hand talked like this only in private,
and I think did not understand that he was heaping dishonor on his brother. A joke, he thought it. But to Gris it was no joke,
and his heart hardened against his brother day by day. The taunting became worse after my pregnancy started to show and the
seer pronounced the child a boy. Hard-hand bragged that he was founding a dynasty and that his brother would never have descendants.
That, I believe, truly hurt Gris, and I was sorry for him and tried to turn the talk away to other things. We became, in a
sense, allies.

I began, through the winter, to squirrel food away against the time I had borne the child and recovered enough to travel.
I would have to kill Hard-hand and try to escape over the mountains. Steal a horse. I did not ride well, but I could manage.
Again, no one noticed except Gris. He came to me one afternoon in late winter. The rest of the men were out searching for
missing cows. That day my back protested at every movement, I was so gravid. It would be only a matter of days before the
child came. Gris handed me a travel pouch filled with dried meat.

“It is a hard journey even in summer,” he said. “It will be early spring when you are fit to travel and you will need to keep
your strength up on the road.”

I nodded. I felt that more was needed, that this man and I were bound together in a great undertaking. “My son will be your
son,” I said. “When he is grown and you have need of an heir, send for him, and he will come.”

He stood very still for a long moment. “He will unite our peoples,” he said finally. “And rule with justice.”

I nodded formally, accepting his words. I expected to have many sons, then; to marry again and have a family with a man of
my choice. Later I found that the gods exact a price for every boon. Never again did I look on a man with desire, no matter
how well favored he was, nor how kind. I would have married Elric Elricsson otherwise, because he was a good man and a kind
father, but it would have been a poor bargain for him, getting a wife with no passion in her. I think the gods would have
resented it.

The lying-in was hard, but then all are. The women did everything right and with gentleness, even though I was a stranger,
even Siggi. She took the mattress from the bed-box and laid in the straw thick and deep, which was just as well for there
was a deal of blood as well as the birth-waters. Well, no need to talk about it, maybe. Once it is over, birth is a private
thing, a memory of darkness and pain and piercing joy.

Perhaps they were kinder to me than I expected because my pains started on the night before the first day of spring, as all
were readying for the holiday, and spirits were light after the bleakness of winter. My son was born at sunrise the next morning,
an omen among those people that he would achieve greatness. His father had been felling an oak sapling for the Springpole
when he was called to see the baby, so he announced the child’s name would be Acton, which means place of the oak tree. I
was content with that name. The oak tree is strong and long-lived, and gives food and shelter generously to birds and beasts.
Yet I have never understood why those people kill a tree to celebrate spring, the season of birth. Among my people, we use
a living tree to wind the ribbons on and dance around.

I recovered quickly from the birth, but I pretended to be weaker than I was. I think Siggi suspected, but as it kept Hard-hand
from my bed she said nothing. I put off the baby’s naming ceremony as long as I could, until my strength returned, for I knew
that Hard-hand would drink long that night and it was my best chance to escape. The baby was strong, too, and did everything
lustily — yelled rather than cried, sucked eagerly at the breast, kicked and waved his little fists against the binding clothes.
He would not go to sleep unless his hands were free. The other women scolded me for giving in to him.

“His arms will grow crooked if they’re not strapped tight to his sides in the night,” said one.

“He’ll be untamable as a boy, if you don’t bind him now,” said another.

Well, she was right about that. But I was so tired that I left his hands free so he would sleep and I could sleep with him.

When it seemed we were due for a few days of good weather, I set the naming day for the next day. Just before dawn, I took
off Acton’s clothes and wrapped him in a shawl, as Siggi advised me. She was smiling, which concerned me, but she was often
smiling now as the year passed and it came time for her gods’ prophecy to come true. Hard-hand carried the child to the black
altar stone and laid him on it, then took the shawl away so that my baby lay naked on the stone.