The Ice Queen (14 page)

It was only as she spoke the word that I could put a name to my feelings and realized that I had been in love with her from the day we met.

“If not love, then what, Inge?”

“The desire of flesh, nothing more. Will you have me on those terms? Say yes or say nothing, I won't hear words of love.”

“Yes.”

“And nothing more?”

“If it must be.”

“Then that's settled.” She nestled her head under my arm.

“But, Inge,”—a sudden doubt assailed me—” doesn't your religion condemn this desire of the flesh? Mustn't you confess it to Father Dmitri, your chaplin?”

She looked at me as though I'd lost my mind. “Confess? To Dmitri? I should say not! I am a daughter of Eve, through whom sin came into the world. Like all Eve's daughters I am weak and sinful by nature. And besides, I have been a dutiful wife and born my husband children. What more can he expect? I must be the woman I am. God and blessed Olaf will forgive me.”

“As to God, Inge, I can't say, but I've met Olaf and, if I were you, I shouldn't like to run into him in the next world; there never lived a less forgiving man.”

“You godless wretch,” she answered, “how dare you talk like that.” But she was laughing as she said it and rolled on top of me, covering my face with kisses. Which roused us to combat once again.

We decided to excite each other this time in less accustomed ways, and in so doing I could not help but see the inside of her thigh. Four long parallel scars ran the length of it. The gashes that produced them must have been frightfully deep. She explained that she'd once owned a bear cub with whom she loved to play, but that one day, without warning, it turned vicious and clawed her. Luckily, she always carried a small knife on a chain around her neck, which she was able to plunge into its eye and brain. She was eight years old at the time.

I found this a sobering thought.

Our second bout finished, she called to one of the women to bring us a tray of honey cakes and walnuts and a flagon of green wine. We ate and talked of this and that, chuckling over Einar Tree-Foot and Old Thordis, who, swore Inge, would be much improved in her temper if my friend bedded her.

When our hunger was satisfied, she lay my head in her lap and said, “Tell me everything about yourself, dear Odd, I want to know all about you.”

I told her the bits I was proud of and she responded to each with looks of astonishment, or amusement, or sadness, or whatever the words suggested.

At last, after a night of talking and dozing and still more love-making, it began to be morning and I readied myself to go. (She had sent her women to fetch our things from the sauna; I noticed, with a blush, that my sword had been found and replaced in its scabbard.)

As I was pulling on my boots, she sat by me on the bed and, smoothing my hair, asked me if I intended to tell Harald where I'd been. When I hesitated, she took my face between her hands and said, “My dear, we both have masters—if I must deceive mine, you must also deceive yours.”

“By no means will I deceive Harald as long as I accept his silver,” I replied, full of righteousness. “On the other hand, I consider it neither his business nor anyone else's whom I make love to. Will you be content with that answer?”

“More than content,” she answered meekly, and planted a chaste kiss on my cheek.

I drove back to Novgorod in the grey dawn of a gusty morning. The tossing clouds and swirling snow made a fit backdrop to the confusion of my thoughts. I could hardly believe what I had just done. Bedded a princess! A woman without peer in all the world. I had an urge to shout it aloud to the hills, I was that pleased with myself. Ah, but no. For Harald must never hear of it.

Here was the lie. Not deceive Harald while sleeping with his deadliest enemy? What troll-talk! And yet, if my answer satisfied Inge, as it seemed to, couldn't it satisfy me too—at least for a little while? Oh, but it was impossible, I must either tell him or never see Inge again. But to lose her! No, I couldn't think of that—not so soon, not with the smell and feel of her still so new.

And hadn't I handled myself well? A whole night of love-making and conversation and I hadn't made a fool of myself once (if you didn't count the steam-bath) nor betrayed Harald in any way I could think of. Nor would I betray him.

Yet in my heart I knew I was no match for this woman, fifteen years above me in age, and in experience older still. Thor's belly! What did she want of me?

Vaguely worried and perplexed, yet at the same time enormously excited, I drove straight to our barracks in Gotland Court and threw myself down on a bench to sleep.

When I awoke my thoughts were no clearer, but I longed already to be with Inge again. She forbade me to call my feeling love. All right, then, it was a thing wholly of the body, but no less urgent for that. In my indecision, I yielded my will to hers and let her decide for us both.

In the weeks that followed we met constantly, in front of whole battalions of blinkered saints. Sometimes at Gorodische, sometimes in another lodge she kept near the village of Lipovo, sometimes, so help me, under Yaroslav's own roof. When I protested of the danger, she replied that she liked it best when it was dangerous.

She was a master at arranging trysts. There was a maple sapling that
grew behind the dvor next to the men's latrine. She would send Putscha to tie a bit of thread to one of its twigs in such a way that no one who wasn't looking for it would notice it. A red thread signified that I was to ride out to Gorodische; a white one, that we should meet that night in her bed chamber in the tower; finally, a green thread meant that I should look under a certain stone at the foot of the sapling for a message, written in a cipher of her own invention. She took extraordinary delight in all this complicated business; I think it excited her as much as the love-making itself.

As for her servants, all of whom knew about us, she swore that they were absolutely loyal, and I could only believe her, though I wondered whether it was love or fear that made them so. Moreover, if it should ever be necessary to explain my absences to Harald or Dag, I was to say that I had spent the night at Stavko's house in the company of his ladies. That genial slave merchant was forewarned to support my alibi.

In the course of our meetings, I never found Inge precisely the same woman two days running. Sometimes she would be preoccupied with weighty matters of state, making me feel rather like an ignorant child. At other times she was a child herself—coaxing, pouting and playful. She loved any sort of surprise or secret, and was forever giving me elaborately wrapped trinkets and making me guess the contents before I opened them. I soon ran out of places to put the things where they wouldn't attract attention.

It was after bouts of love-making that she revealed more of her past to me. Novgorod and Yaroslav, she said, had been hateful to her from the first moment she arrived. Her husband's dullness and lack of energy drove her wild, his city bored her. The only things that made life bearable to her were wielding power and taking lovers. Yes, she had taken them before from among her husband's druzhiniks (what boyar's wife had not?), although even that pleasure was spoiled by the knowledge that she could parade them naked past his window, if she'd a mind to, and he would notice nothing. “And they call him ‘The Wise'!” she laughed bitterly.

One night, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to take the wolf by the ears: “Did Olaf bed you?” I asked casually as we lay naked under the covers, sipping from a goblet of mulled wine.

She struck the goblet from my hands, sending it flying across the room. “Don't speak his name! That man was holy—a living icon—don't even think what you just said!”

This sudden ferocity stunned me, but it answered my question. I was more certain than ever that Olaf in the flesh had been more of a disappointment to her than she could afford to admit. She had a gift for love and the only man she truly loved would not take the gift. Somewhere that must have left a deep wound. I wondered then and often again, whether when I, or Yaroslav, or any other man lay with her, it was his untasted kisses that she imagined she felt. Furthermore, she had transferred her passion for the father to his son, the shy and sickly Magnus; even professing to see Olaf's rugged features in every line of his wan little face.

On a different occasion, still mindful of the ambush that had nearly claimed Harald's life, I asked her straight out if she would go so far as to kill in order to protect the boy.

Instead of the furious outburst, which I half expected, I got a look of innocence that would have done credit to a virgin. “Are you asking me for a declaration of war, my darling? You men kill all the time and generally for no good reason at all, but with men there is always so much posturing and shouting and swearing and insulting to be got through first. A woman is different. Like the falcon, who does not make a speech before she strikes, a woman goes swiftly and quietly to the task at hand.”

“And that's what you're planning for Harald, is it—a quick and quiet death?”

She laughed and covered me with kisses, which had the effect intended of distracting me from further conversation.

Even had the ambush never happened, I would have been a fool not to suspect her motives in taking me into her bed. But as the weeks went by and she made no attempt to wheedle even the smallest confidences out of me, suspicion surrendered to manly pride. After all, why shouldn't she desire me for myself? In bed I was young and able, in conversation not dull. Indeed, she seemed to find virtues in me that I never even suspected, and I began to think better of myself than I was used to.

Einar Tree-Foot, however, would not let me off so easily. He was the only man in Novgorod I dared confide in, because he had no other loyalties and, for all his cackle and conceit, he knew how to keep his mouth shut when it mattered. I was glad I'd taken him along—though I didn't always like the advice I got.

“Will you let an old man give you a word of warning?” he said one day when we happened to find ourselves alone.

“You will anyway, Tree-Foot, what is it?”

“Harald may be Dag's fool, but you're mine, and I worry about you.”

“Why, because of Inge? Then you worry about nothing.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You know that Thordis and me keep company. Now, I won't have it thought of her that she talks behind her mistress's back no more'n I talk behind yours. Still and all, not everything must be said in words. Tangle-Hair, you're like a man trapped in a pit with two wolves who want to tear each other to pieces—the wolves in question being named Harald and Ingigerd, just in case you don't take my meaning—and all I have to say is, look sharp that they don't tear you up instead. That's all the advice Einar Tree-Foot has to give you. I wish it was more.”

“Thanks, old friend, but not needed. I'm quite equal to looking after myself.”

Einar Tree-Foot snorted.

Harald, his face flushed with drink, lurched to his feet at the head of the table and proposed, “Yelisaveta!”

“Yelisaveta!” we answered, tipping back our mugs of ale and setting them down again with a bang.

That pleasant young lady was not, however, among the company; nor was her father, nor her mother—to whom we had already drunk ‘Health' and ‘Damnation' in that order.

It was early in the month of Yule and Harald was playing host in his new dvor to me and his dozen bodyguards for a day of sledding, fighting with snow-balls, getting drunk, and enjoying his latest purchases from Stavko's establishment.

Dag was noticeable by his absence: there had been a coolness between those two for some time now. As for me, I would far rather have been abed with Inge than damning her in Harald's company, but there was no putting him off this time. As the sun sloped toward evening, we had done the first two items on his list, were in the midst of the third, and anticipating the last.

But it was not to be.

At that precise moment one of those pretty slaves ran shrieking into the room.

“What the devil's wrong with you?” snarled our chief, with his usual good manners.

Not knowing a word of Norse, she could hardly be expected to tell him. But she motioned to the bed-closet and we all followed.

She had been turning the straw mattress and found something rather nasty stuck to the bottom of it—she pointed at it from across the room, not daring to go closer. It was a flat piece of wood, about three fingers wide and the length of your forearm. A brown mess of dried blood covered both it and the mattress around it.

“Odd! Odd, for Christ's sake!”

“Right behind you, Harald, don't shout. Here, let me get a closer look.”

Despite the encrusted blood, the rune signs, large and deeply carved, were easy enough to read.

“They're sickness runes,” I said. “It's a spell to bring the wasting sickness on you.”