He arrived a few minutes later, holding the bucket out from his body with an extended arm so that the freezing contents wouldn’t spill on him. He gaped as he made out the figure slumped against the wall.
“It’s crazy old Thorn,” he said as he set the bucket down. “What’s he doing here?”
Karina’s eyes narrowed again as she heard the phrase. Obviously, this was how the local boys referred to the decrepit former sea wolf. It’s a crying shame, she thought, remembering what an amazing man Thorn had been before he had lost his hand.
The raid when Karina’s husband, Mikkel, had lost his life had turned into a succession of disasters. On the return trip,
Wolfwind
had been dismasted in a storm. In the struggle to clear the wreckage and save the ship from sinking, Thorn’s right arm had become hopelessly trapped in a tangle of ropes and broken timber and he lost his hand.
Thorn had been devastated by the loss. With only his left hand, he could no longer wield a sword or ax, nor pull an oar. He had no skill as a navigator, and although he’d been a competent helmsman in his time, a steering oar often required two hands in rough weather. Consequently, there was no useful place he could fill on a wolfship and he had found himself on the beach, with no way of continuing the life he loved. In addition, he had lost his best friend. He had sunk into a deep depression, looking for comfort in an ale or brandy tankard. There was little comfort in either, but there was oblivion, and strong drink helped him forget his loss, albeit temporarily.
It also soothed the pain that would hit him without warning, searing through the stump of his right arm and seeming to come from the missing hand itself. Thankfully, that was an infrequent occurrence and as time passed it became even more so. But it gave him a further excuse to continue drinking.
His hair and beard grew long and matted and unkempt, and he seemed to go gray long before he should have. He washed infrequently and took no interest or care in his appearance. He degenerated into a staggering wreck of a man, mourning the loss of his right hand—which seemed to have taken his self-respect with it. None of his friends or former shipmates could rouse him from this downward spiral of self-destruction. Even Erak, who had been his skirl, or ship’s captain, before becoming Oberjarl of Skandia, couldn’t reach or reason with him.
“He’s not that old,” Karina said tersely to her son.
Hal raised his eyebrows, peering more closely at the unconscious Thorn.
“Really? He looks about a hundred.”
“Is that so?” she said. To a boy, she knew, anyone over twenty-five appeared positively ancient. She cocked her head to one side, giving in to curiosity—knowing she shouldn’t, but doing so anyway.
“And just how old d’you think I am?” she asked.
Hal made a deprecating gesture with his hands and smiled at her.
“Oh, you’re nowhere near that old, Mam,” he said reassuringly. “You wouldn’t be more than sixty-something.”
Karina was, in fact, thirty-eight. She was slight compared with the more full-figured Skandian women, but she had strikingly beautiful looks. More than that, she had a calmness and a confidence about her, even when she had first arrived in Hallasholm as a slave, captured on a raid in Araluen. And that’s when she had taken the eye of Mikkel Fastblade, one of Skandia’s foremost warriors. Once Mikkel had bought her from the man who had captured her, he immediately set her free. Seeing the determination in Mikkel’s eyes when he made an offer, Karina’s captor promptly added another thirty percent to the price. Mikkel had paid it without hesitation. Even now, Karina was still considered a beauty in Hallasholm and in the past year alone had refused four would-be suitors.
She regarded her son coldly and he shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. Something he’d said had offended her, he thought. But he couldn’t figure out what it might have been.
Perhaps it was Hal’s total lack of tact that sealed Thorn’s fate, dispelling any sense of compassion that Karina might have felt for him. She jerked her thumb at the full bucket.
“Let him have it,” she said.
Hal hesitated, looking from Karina to Thorn to the bucket.
“Let him have … what exactly?” he asked, wanting to be sure.
Karina put her hands on her hips. Sixty-something indeed, she thought. “The water. Let him have it … in the face.” She leaned down and pulled the collar of Thorn’s ragged fur away from his face. As before, he tried to bat her hand away.
“Mam … ,” Hal said uncertainly. Thorn might be old and dirty and ragged and disheveled. He might be a wreck who could be seen staggering around the village and his right arm might be missing below the elbow. But for all that, he was a big man, known to have a very bad temper. And perhaps it might not be wise for a small woman in her sixties and her ten-year-old son to throw water on such a person—at least not without an escape route planned.
Karina’s foot began to tap rapidly on the snow-covered ground. This was never a good sign, Hal knew. She gestured to the bucket again.
“Throw it.”
Hal shrugged and picked up the full bucket.
“Now,” she said.
And he did.
Thorn came awake with a roar as the first of the water hit him. He sounded rather like an angry bull walrus that Hal had heard the previous summer—although the walrus couldn’t match Thorn for volume. He tried to sit up, flailing his arms to gain balance.
Karina noticed that the bucket was still a third full.
“And the rest,” she ordered. Obediently, Hal threw the remaining water at the roaring, flailing figure. When a person roars like a wounded bull walrus, of course, it follows that the person’s mouth is wide open. Thorn’s certainly was as he received the remaining four liters of water.
The roar changed to a gasping, choking splutter as the water went down his throat. He coughed and retched and lurched to one side, as if fearing a further soaking. But the bucket was empty now and after a few seconds he realized there was no more to come. His eyes opened, bleary and bloodshot. He squinted in the bright morning light that reflected off the snow around them, and made out the two small figures standing over him.
Hal was still holding the empty bucket, although as Thorn’s bloodshot gaze fell upon him, he tried to hide it behind his body.
“You threw that on me,” Thorn said accusingly. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I told him to,” Karina said. There was a tone in her voice that didn’t encourage further argument. Instead, Thorn opted for misery, in a pathetic whine intended to melt a hardened heart.
“I could have drowned! I’m soaked to the skin. I’ll probably catch my death of cold. How could you be so … cruel?” he protested.
But Karina’s heart was beyond melting. She was angry—angry beyond belief at the way Thorn had let himself go, had let himself be reduced to this shadow of his former self.
“Get up, Thorn!” she ordered crisply.
He flailed around, trying to find purchase in the slippery snow.
“Throw water on a poor, sick, freezing man,” he muttered. “What sort of woman would do that? How could anyone be so heartless? I’m sick. I can’t help myself. Now I’ll die of the galloping pleurisy, soaked to the skin out here in the snow. Will anyone care? No. Certainly not the witch who threw water all over me and drowned me …”
“You’re making a lot of noise for a drowning man,” Karina said. Then she gestured to her son. “Get him on his feet, Hal.”
Hal stepped forward carefully. He still wasn’t sure that Thorn was safe to be near. But he got hold of the man’s left arm and dragged it across his own shoulders, bending his knees to get power into his attempt to heave the stricken derelict to his feet. As he came close to Thorn and raised his arm, he caught a solid whiff of the man’s considerable body odor and turned his face away, trying not to breathe through his nose.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed, fighting the instinct to gag. “He really reeks, Mam!”
Thorn lurched to his feet, crouched over, swaying uncertainly, holding on to the boy to prevent himself falling again. This had the effect of dragging Hal deeper into the gagging fog that had built up over seven unwashed months. The boy tried to lurch away. Thorn clung to him desperately and the two of them swayed uncertainly back and forth, feet slipping in the snow.
“Oh, by Gorlog’s claws and nostrils, Mam! He stinks! He really stinks! He’s worse than Skarlson’s old goat!” Hal complained.
In spite of her anger, Karina couldn’t totally suppress a smile. As smells went, Skarlson’s old goat was as bad as they came. She went to step forward to help steady the two of them, then thought better of it and kept her distance.
“Don’t curse,” she said absently. Gorlog was one of the second rank of Skandian gods, like Ullr the hunter or Loki the liar, although unlike them, Gorlog had no specialized skills. She wasn’t sure that invoking his claws and nostrils ranked as a curse but it wasn’t suitable language for a ten-year-old.
“Get him into the kitchen.”
Halled the bulky, one-armed man on a zigzag path to the back door of the eating house. Together, they staggered up the three steps to the door and went inside. Thorn raised his head gratefully as the warmth of the room wrapped around him. There was a fire blazing in the hearth and Hal led him to it, depositing him clumsily in a large, curved-back wooden chair, then backing away hastily.
The warmth of the kitchen might be welcome to Thorn, wet and freezing as he was. But it also had the effect of accentuating the thick miasma that hovered around him.
Karina, entering behind them, blanched and turned her face away for a moment. Then, gathering her resolve, she moved toward the pathetic figure, huddled in her favorite chair.
“You can go, Hal,” she said and the boy scuttled gratefully away into their living quarters behind the dining room. She heard water splashing into a basin and guessed that he was trying to wash the stink away. She stepped closer to Thorn, standing over him, forcing herself to endure the renewed olfactory assault.
“Thorn, you disgust me,” she said. Her voice was low, but it cut like a whip and the old sea wolf actually flinched. For perhaps a second, a brief glimmer of anger showed in his eyes. But almost immediately, it died away as he pulled his protective coat of self-pity back around himself.
“I disgust everyone,” he said. “What’s special about you?”
“I don’t care about everyone. I care about me. There was a time when people looked up to you. Now they laugh at you. Even the boys call you crazy old Thorn. It’s an affront to see what you’re doing to your life.”
Now anger did flare in Thorn.
“What I’m doing? What I’m doing?” He held up the scarred stump of his right arm, pulling the ragged sleeve back from it to bare it. “Do you think I did this to myself? Do you think I chose to be a cripple?”
“I think you’re choosing to destroy your mind and your body and your self-respect, along with your arm,” she told him. “You’re using your arm as an excuse to destroy the rest of you. To destroy your own life!”
“It’s my life. I’ll destroy it if I want to,” he retorted. “What right do you have to criticize me?”
“I have the right because you promised Mikkel that you’d stand by me and Hal. You swore you’d see that we were all right. You let us down. And you continue to let us down with every day that you try to destroy yourself!”
Thorn’s eyes dropped away from hers.
“You’re doing all right,” he muttered. But she laughed harshly at his words.
“No thanks to you. And no thanks to the promise you made. A promise you broke, and continue to break every day!”
“Not my fault,” he said, in a voice so low she could barely hear it. “Leave me alone, woman. There’s nothing I can do for you.”
“You promised,” she said.
He reared his shaggy head up at her, goaded now to full anger. “I promised when I still had my hand! It wasn’t my fault that I lost it!”
“Maybe not. But it was your fault when you let everything else go with it! You’re killing yourself, Thorn! You’re destroying a good man, a worthwhile man. And to me, that’s a crime! I won’t stand by any longer and watch while you do it.”
“Haven’t you noticed?” he said, sarcasm heavy in his voice. “I’m not a man anymore. I’m a cripple. A useless cripple who’s no good for anything, no good to anyone!”
“I don’t recall it saying anywhere that a man is measured by how many hands and legs he has. A man is measured by the worth of his spirit, and the strength of his will. Most of all, he’s measured by his ability to overcome tragedy in his life.”
“What would you know about tragedy?” he shot back at her. She held his gaze until, once more, his eyes dropped from hers.
“You only lost a hand,” she said finally. “I lost an entire man. A wonderful man.”
He kept his eyes down, nodding his head in apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If I could bring him back, I would.”
“Well, you can’t. But there is something you can do for me.”
Thorn laughed bitterly, shaking his head at the idea. “Me? What can I do for anyone?”