The Lost Tales of Mercia (23 page)

As Canute gaped down at it, the world seemed
to spin. Tears filled his eyes and blurred his twirling
surroundings yet more. He did not merely look upon a dying bird. He
looked upon a dying god. He looked upon a dying god!

Then he heard everyone laughing.

At first the sound filled him with
confusion. Why would anyone dare laugh at an omen like this? He
glanced desperately from each of their faces to the next. Then he
realized they were not laughing at the raven. They were laughing at
him
.

“Oh no, look out, it’s Odin!” someone
called.

“Guess he couldn’t stand being in the same
room as Canute!”

“No, no, look!” Everyone turned to look at
this speaker, who sounded quite serious. But then his voice changed
to mimic Canute’s. “
I think it’s still alive!
”

A new howl of laughter, even louder than
before, rang over the congregation.

Canute breathed so hard now that he might
have opened his mouth, if not for his clenching jaws. So they knew
about the raven, too. Tosti had not only told them about their
physical connection; he had shared one of Canute’s most intimate
secrets. There were reasons why his father had not made the
runewoman’s sighting common knowledge. It was incriminating. And
for the truth to come out like this, with a raven twitching to
death at Canute’s feet after a desperate attempt to escape …. it
was more humiliating than anything he could have imagined.

Canute unsheathed the knife at his belt. He
hesitated only long enough to regain everyone’s attention.

Then he knelt down and plunged his dirk into
the raven’s chest.

The bird gave one last spasm, then went very
still.

Canute pulled out the blade. The wound he
left behind was not so much a fountain of blood as a damp
indentation. But the edges of his dirk gleamed red with the liquid,
and he found this to his satisfaction as he stood again, holding
the blade aloft.

He looked past its tip at Tosti, who stood
petrified with horror.

Canute did not feel any sort of expression
on his face, but the look in his eyes must have been terrifying
enough, for Tosti trembled. “Canute ...” he gasped. “I didn’t mean
for any of that to happen. I thought … I thought it would be a good
thing. I wanted ...”

Canute did not want to hear him speak
another word. The sound of Tosti’s voice brought too much pain. And
his own inclination to respond revealed that he could not trust his
feelings. He pulled back the knife, then flung it.

Tosti’s fast reflexes saved him. Canute
rarely missed a target. He had better than normal vision, and his
hands grew steady when aiming, no matter his circumstance. His
blade would have pierced Tosti through the eye. But Tosti darted
out of the way; he ducked, swerved, and then ran away. He was
almost gone by the time the knife plunged into the far wall and
stuck there.

Despite his exceptional eyesight, Canute’s
vision blurred again, and he blinked rapidly to push back a film of
thickening moisture. His calm composure wavered. He felt the weight
of all the Jomsvikings’ eyes upon him, and thought that if he stood
there too long, he would buckle underneath it.

“You fools,” he said. “There is no Odin. Not
anymore. It should be as clear to you as it now is to me. The one
God is so powerful, there is no room for another.”

Nor was there allowance for the relationship
he had nearly had with Tosti, he recalled. He took a deep,
shuddering breath.

“And so ... He is my God now. If any of you
feel differently, I welcome you to worship this miserable
corpse.”

He kicked the dead raven towards them, and
everyone scattered from it.

Canute already had the men’s respect again,
he realized; their expressions changed, their interpretations of
the night’s events morphed into something new. Canute turned a
defeat into victory. Thorkell would be proud. Such transitions came
easily to Canute, and he sensed they would be even easier now, with
the one true God on his side.

But he could not bring himself to smile as
he turned and walked away, leaving them all in silence.

**

9

The
Ninth Lost Tale of Mercia:

RUNA
THE WIFE

(Or go back to
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
)

*

JOM

1001-1006 A.D.

She awoke in his heavy arms, and at first
she panicked. The memories of the night before came back to her in
shattered pieces. He chased her through the woods. She jumped on
him from a tree and they fell in a breathless tangle. The
underbrush scraped her back. His wiry beard tickled her stomach.
They laughed, they groaned … they grew silent.

Now his breath roared and faded behind her,
up and down the back of her neck, steady as an ocean current. She
looked down at his large hands, still clasped around her stomach.
He was the most magnificent man she had ever met. Thorkell the Tall
… they did not call him so without reason. Her small fingers traced
the thick, golden hair of his arms. He had returned to Jom with the
rest of his army, victorious over Olaf Tryggvason. He had proved
himself a mightier Jomsviking than his own brother, Jarl Sigvaldi,
chief of Jomsborg. He could have had any woman he wanted, willing
or otherwise. But she had not even given him a chance to choose.
She wanted him for herself, so she lured him into the woods and she
took him. Now what?

Now she was done with him.

She took hold of his hand and slid it like
sand from her body. He sighed and shifted, but otherwise showed no
signs of waking. The rumble of his breath almost made her want to
fall back against him and drift into his dreams, but she resisted.
She slipped gracefully from his relaxed grip and into the free air.
She draped her dress over her skin, a light gray garment that
looked blue in vivid sunshine and left very few lines of her body
to the imagination. She left her hair loose and ruffled, a swirling
and tangled mass of pale yellow strands, as wild and free as her
own spirit. Then she tip-toed away.

Only once did she glance back at Thorkell,
his partially-clothed body draped across the forest bed. His skin
looked coarse where the shadows fell upon it, but seemed to gleam
as smoothly as gold in the sunshine. The muscles of his torso were
a sight to behold, bulging and tightening with the slightest
motion, yet softening into a gentle ripple of his strength when he
relaxed. She had observed this phenomenon many times the night
before.

Leaving him now would be an unfortunate
loss. But that loss was little compared to her freedom.

With a sad smile, she turned and hurried
away.

*

Close to the shore, she sat facing north and
cast the runestones into the soft earth. She watched the shapes
roll and settle, their stony surfaces gathering a film of soft
yellow dust. Then she studied the lines and drew her own conclusion
from them.

She did not believe the stones had any
magical power. She imagined that the gods perhaps nudged them one
direction or another, with their knowing winds and earthly pull,
but she cared little for the source of their design. No matter why
they fell a certain way, the runes always spoke to her. Runa would
always find a reflection of herself in the words and ideas they
conjured. Often, her own interpretation of the runestones’ casting
would reveal more about her inner hopes and fears than any other
form of insight.

What she saw troubled her, so she closed her
eyes and listened to the distant whisper of the ocean. She breathed
deeply of its salty breeze. Her mind swam to the rhythm of the
far-off crashing waves. She saw two different fortunes in her mind,
but she did not understand how they could both be true, when in
fact they strongly opposed each other. Two futures lay ahead of
her, forged by her own decisions and willpower.

In one future she lived a settled life, in a
single home, with a man who loved her and a community that
supported her. She left the wildness of the fields and forests for
the stability of a town and market. In her second future she
traveled far, far away, further than she had ever imagined
traveling, over the roiling ocean to some distant shore. She began
a new life, doing whatever she willed, controlled by no group of
people, inhibited by no man. She took what she wanted and left the
rest to burn. She was a Viking.

She shuddered and opened her eyes again,
steadying them on the knife-like edge of the horizon. Both futures
excited and frightened her. She wanted both. She wanted
neither.

And so she would not worry about them, she
decided. She collected the runestones and returned them to her
pouch. She stood and brushed the twigs from her dress. As she
glanced at the ocean she thought of Thorkell the Tall, sailing the
vast seas with his Viking army, gathering gold and reducing his
enemies to puddles of fear. Bumps lifted along her arms, making her
sensitive to every slight brush of the wind. She trembled and
shoved him from her mind once more.

She slipped back into the woods, to the cave
in which she lived alone, to the safe abode in which no one
supported her, nor constricted her.

*

Runa waited for the winter to break. She
waited and waited. She ate the last of her stores. She ravaged the
last pieces of food from the cold earth. But she could not do
enough to support herself. Her body rejected her. She rejected it.
She ate strange flowers and herbs, even though she knew they would
make her sick.

She and the baby would not last another
fortnight unless she sought help.

By the time she walked to the fortress of
Jomsborg, her dress hung in ripped tatters. Bruises and scrapes
covered her skin. Her elbows were sharp enough to rival a pair of
spear-tips. She was thinner than she had ever been in her
life—except for her belly, protruding from her body like some
sprite-infested mass. Between her legs, blood trickled out and
caked on her thighs. She didn’t even know when the bleeding had
begun.

The guards of the land-gate stared at her
with a mixture of disgust and fascination.

“I’m here ... for Thorkell the Tall,” she
said.

“Er ... no women in Jomsborg,” said one.

“Then I’ll sit right here and wait for him
to come out,” she said.

Once she sat she fell asleep, and her mind
became lost in the evening’s cold embrace.

She awoke in a peasant’s lodge and smelled
food. Her stomach flipped within her. The sensation felt strange …
like her body had changed shape. She touched the swollen lump of
her belly and groaned. The ceiling flickered above her with the
orange light of the fire. Shadows flitted over her vision and made
her head ache.

“Drink this.” A woman’s hand touched her
clammy forehead. She poured cool water down Runa’s throat. Runa
struggled not to gag.

“It’s killing me,” she rasped, her
fingernails digging into her own stomach.

“No,” said the woman. “I think you’re
killing it.”

This seemed inexplicably true.

Runa’s dizzied gaze fell on a large man
standing in the corner. She recognized the towering frame and soft
gray eyes of Thorkell the Tall. She tried to smile at him.

Her pain overcame her and swept her away.
Her body writhed and jerked in the clutches of agony, battling
itself, struggling to expel the fetus like a poison from her body.
She became lost in the struggle and thought of nothing else. She
roared a battle cry. Her muscles ached and stiffened, as if they
became rods of ice cold steel twisting within her. Her vessels
throbbed. Her loins heaved. The blood flowed.

By morning she expunged the baby’s small,
dead body from her womb.

She heard Thorkell’s heavy breath next to
her. It heaved less steadily than she recalled. His hands enveloped
hers, coarse but comforting. She looked to him, her lids heavy, but
her gaze bright. She saw tears on his cheeks. She wanted to reach
out and touch one, but she felt too weak.

He met her stare and jerked with a sob. It
was strange to see the giant cry. “It ... was a girl.”

“It was nothing,” said Runa. “A lifeless
piece of flesh.”

He did not have a naturally expressive face,
but his eyes crinkled and his lips twisted with despair, shifting
his yellow beard. Her heart lurched, giving her the strength to
squeeze his hand. Water stung her own eyes, and it was an
unfamiliar feeling.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She thought of
the plants she had eaten, knowing they would weaken her body. “I
didn’t want it.”

He squeezed back against her fingers, a
gesture that sent pain up her arm, but she ignored it. “Why not?
Why did you go away?”

She didn’t respond at first, only stared at
him, not judging, only observing. Had he really missed her all this
time? She thought he would have forgotten her, written off their
night together as a meaningless jaunt through the trees, and yet
she could she see in his eyes that he had searched for her, longed
for her. And she had longed for him as well, though she had tried
to ignore the feelings as trivial lust, when in truth they ran
deeper. The warrior had raided helpless villages, slaughtered
innocent people, and taken what did not belong to him. But somehow,
he did not frighten her. He was a Jomsviking. It was his job. As
for the rest ... she trusted him completely.

“I don’t know why,” she said at last. “But
maybe I’ll stay this time.”

*

At first she did not stay by choice. She
remained sick. Two well-off peasants of Jom took care of her on
Thorkell’s command. With rest, and food, and Thorkell’s kind
attentions, she felt well again by the time winter lifted and the
morning dew ceased to frost.