Winter Serpent (18 page)

The men steered her past the group of Scots who were plunging their spears into the chest of a Northman who lay on his back, feet kicking.

“Doireann!” It was Calum approaching her. He had a horned Viking helmet in his hands and thrust it upon one of the Picts from Coire Cheathaich. “Do not go far with that,” he warned.

“My dear foster sister,” he cried, seizing her hands. “How happy I am that we have rescued you unharmed. You are all right?”

She could not seem to focus her eyes upon his face. “I am going to be sick,” she murmured.

He ignored her. He pointed suddenly to the body of a big man two of the
Scots warriors were rolling over on his back. “Well?” he cried.

“A nice knife,” one of the men answered. “But they were lightly clad. I think we shall have to wait until the fire is out before we can look for their real treasure in the ashes.”

“No, no,” Calum cried impatiently. “That is not what I meant.” He grasped the corpse’s hair and turned the head over. The side of the man’s face had been sheared away by a sword blow. Calum squinted at it a moment, his finger on his lower lip, and then shrugged.

“No matter,” he said, and there was disappointment in his tone. He turned solicitously to Doireann and took her arm.

“Come away from these dead men,” he told her. “We have not found the Norse chieftain among them yet, and this is a pity, for I have heard that he was an athach, a giant among even the Northmen. I would like to have seen his body and the bearskin he wore.”

“Calum, I am going to be sick,” she said urgently.

He did not answer her. She walked with him, half-leaning on his arm, back to the fire. Some men approached but he waved them away.

“Four of our men are dead, and one of Donn’s warriors from the dun,” he was saying, “but this is a small number compared to the Northmen who were slain by us. Look at them, and how they decorate our beach! And all this for your welfare, nighean. Such a small number of clansmen as we had! Yet we struck them down as they emptied from the hall. Big men were never meant to fight in the dark and the fog. Oh, there is no doubt that they are fine fighters when they can use their strength and reach, but in the dark, with men who strike from everywhere, from behind the trees, lying in the meadow, this is what defeats them! I shall tell Donn of this, for it is a clever strategy.”

He slowed their pace and looked at her so that his face was turned away from the rest. It was suddenly cunning.

“You are still beautiful, even as you are, with blood upon you and misshapen with the Northman’s bastard. I wish for your sake that it were my child you carried.”

His words cut through her stupor. He was always dangerous, and his lapses from nonchalance were a warning. She drew herself up with what strength she could muster.

A pony was caught up and Calum indicated that she was to mount. He even held his clasped hands for her as a stirrup, and she managed to pull her ungainly body onto the horse’s back.

At once she realized the position was a mistake. She could not straddle the horse in any comfort and it was a long way to the Coire. She turned to ask Calum to send a smallboat for her instead, but he was occupied giving orders to those who were to be left behind.

The man they called Liam macRuadh pulled the pony’s head quickly toward the stretch of beach that rose to the Coire path, and she gladly relinquished the reins. For the first few minutes she was occupied with vain attempts to find a comfortable position in the saddle. She could not get her breath.

A groan was forced from her, and at the sound she set her lips firmly. In a few hours she would be at the Coire where clean clothes awaited her, and a warm, soft bed and food. If she could remember this and perhaps get down and walk when the journey grew too painful, then her forbearance would be rewarded. Another wave of nausea attacked her, but she fought it down. Warm bed. Home. These were the things she must think on.

Because of Calum she had had her revenge on the Vikings, and most particularly the Jarl, if he still lived. Revenge, that is, when she carried his child. The child he would never see, the proof of her pride-breaking, her captivity. Calum would pay for this; her revenge was not complete. Yet even Calum, who had triumphed, was curiously thwarted. His evil had given him no satisfaction.

God sees I am not defeated, she thought suddenly, and if He will help me this once He will make this a girl child I bear; make her even to look like me so that there will be nothing to mark her unlucky beginning.

Doireann turned about in the saddle to catch the last sight of the cove, knowing Calum watched her closely.

I owe nothing to what has occurred here, she vowed, seeing the rising sun strike the gray sea. If the Jarl is not dead it pleases me to think how he will wonder what has become of the child he longed for. As for you who now watch me, rat-faced and cunning, beware my revenge on you also. It is my thought, Calum macDumhnull, that you will never again see me humbled while I live.

The servant led the pony through the hill track, followed by the chieftain and his warrior on foot. As they climbed they left the bare branches of
the hardwoods of the lower slopes and came into the forest of pine and fir, softer to look on, and giving more protection from the wind. It was growing colder with each hour the pale sun mounted the sky, and when at last the sun crept into an advancing bank of gray clouds the bite of the wind was sharpened. The sturdy pony picked his way over old trails worn by cattle and washed by rain, the girl on his back sunk deep in her thoughts and unaware of the direction.

The spell was broken; all that she had endured was now gone. There would be no more winter nights in the log house listening to the boasting and the outlandish voices slurring in Norse, the sight of the Viking ships eternally swinging on the tide, the sorting of clothing from the wretched Irish village, the narrowness of the wooden bed. It was now like an eerie, violent dream such as the one the Jarl had wakened from in the small hours of the day. He had once asked her how this thing had happened: that his fate had brought her to him, and not the tall blond Norse woman that he would have chosen. Now that it was all ended, she hoped that he would have time to ponder his question, wherever he was.

She had pushed her body as far as she dared. The child was thankfully quiet and did not trouble her with his pushing and kicking, but she felt she was not far from collapse. The pains in her lower back had increased to the point where she could not ignore them, and she roused to a realization of their relentless pace through country now unfamiliar and forbidding. She knew she must dismount.

“Calum, I must rest,” she called. And because she did not hold the reins, “Stop the pony!”

Beside her his face under the ragged bonnet stared straight ahead and he pretended not to hear.

Her heart began to thud slowly and fearfully. “Calum, I know you hear me. Stop the pony!” The two men beside her exchanged glances.

“What is this you are doing to me?” she cried. She attempted to swing her leg over the pony’s bobbing neck and slide off, but she was stiffened and lifeless from the cramped position. She began to kick out as much as she could, and grabbed at the reins at the animal’s mouth, jerking them.

“What are you doing to me?” she shouted. “Where are you taking me?” She succeeded in yanking the reins from the servant and turned the pony from the path into a small clearing of bracken, where it wheeled in bewilderment. Calum’s men ran after her, snatching at the leads.

She fought their clawing hands as they tried to catch and hold her. The pony trod on Seoras’s foot and he howled.

“Hold her!” Calum shouted, running to them.

He drew a length of leather thong from his waist and tied it about her ankle, trying to pass it under the belly of the bucking pony.

“Hold the cursed thing still!” he bellowed as the animal shied away, nearly dragging Doireann from her seat.

The three men threw themselves upon the little animal and tried to hold it, while the girl thrashed about on its back, screaming.

Calum slashed at his foster sister with the free end of the rope, in his desperation hitting her on the face and head, beating the pony across the neck.

Doireann hurled curses at him.

“We will help you, kinswoman,” Calum panted, “knowing that you do not want to keep the Viking’s child. When it is over, I will take you to your rightful place of honor in Coire Cheathaich.”

“You whoreson!” she screamed at him. “Abomination in the eyes of God and man! You… God help you, Calum macDumhnull! If you want me to beg you to kill me, I will. I beg you! Kill me! Is this what you want?”

“How ugly is your tongue, Doireann,” he said bitterly. His face was red. “We mean to take the Viking’s child from you, that is all. When you are calmer you will see how much I loved you and looked after your welfare. I did not mean for this to happen, I swear it! Consider how unseemly it would be to have the Viking’s child in your father’s hall. You will have other children in time, more acceptable children.”

“You cannot kill me!” she shrieked.

“No, I cannot kill you,” he shouted at her wildly. “But you may yet die. We will be careful of you as best we can. Whatever happens, I will not let you go from me again!”

Transformed with rage, she leaned from the grasp of the two servants and spat into his face. He wiped his features carefully with the back of his roughened, chapped hand.

“This is as good a place as any,” he said to the others. At his words Liam macRuadh took the reins and Calum struck the pony a sharp blow on the rump. It lunged forward.

The first sticky flakes of snow were falling in the little clearing in the pines, clinging to the brittle stalks of dead brambles and dry grass. The pony ran a few feet and then stopped to crop at the snowy turf. The servant pulled its head up, forcing it to trot in a circle. Calum and the other man sat down under a small tree and pulled their tartans over their heads to form cowls. Doireann had a last glimpse of their hooded figures before the agony of jogging drove all thoughts from her mind.

It never occurred to her to cry out. She was driven by her rage to resist them and the racking motion which punched the breath from her body. The pain in her back made a red curtain of torment over her mind. Once she had
a clear thought that she was feeling the drive of her own labor as her body twisted about of its own accord, working against the stumbling gait of the horse. But even this realization faded, to be lost in the swirling chaos of pain and falling snow. She began to float away into the world of high places… over the tops of the encircling pines into the gray sky where no agony could reach her; a place where her body suffered and she pitied it, but it was not part of her.

The place where she drifted was full of dreams, dreams of men crouched beneath a pine tree, snowflakes in their hair and steam clouds of their breath before them, evergreens moving endlessly about… the light of day a bright void speckled with brilliants through which time stumbled like a tired pony.

In her dream she passed through the pine forest and came to an empty place where the bare limbs of the winter trees rattled their awful burdens at her… the heads of dogs, the withered bodies of horses and men which swayed tirelessly from the ropes supporting them. The wind which moaned through this forgotten place cried that life was fate, and death a place without love.

She found herself laughing. And as she laughed she went on through the grove into a warm, red place where a fire was burning and a woman screamed endlessly.

Oh God, she thought, and tried to cover her ears because she could not bear the sound of it. Take me away, she thought wildly. But she heard someone say, “This is my destiny.”

Burn then, she shouted over her shoulder, and the red warmth, too, was gone. She was in the clearing, the light sharp and clear as ice, and she circled before the group under the trees in terrible suffering.

“How long have I been here?” she asked thickly.

The redheaded man crouched on the ground had his hands clasped over his ears. The man beside him pulled at his sleeve and shouted at him, but he did not answer.

Two red foxes were running beside the pony. Their coats were fiery against the snow and their feet made no sound. She blinked at them, but their pace did not slacken.

They were with her as she raced across the ground and entered the gray light once more. In fear she clutched at the reins and tried to turn the pony from the path, but it was as if she rode the whirlwind. The tongues of the two foxes were lolling out of gaping mouths and their stride devoured the snowy earth. They were hurrying her away, and there would be no return.

Stop, she panted. She was fighting and struggling. Stop. Stop. Her will was breaking on a point of irresistible force.

A voice shouted, “Watch yourself!” There was the sound of running feet.

It was piercingly, numbingly cold. Cold as death. But the saddle was covered with the warmth of her blood. It looked like a crimson blanket someone had thrown over the pony.

“Gently,” murmured a hoarse Pictish voice. She smiled.

Barra looked at the figure of the old chieftain’s daughter upon the ground. They had stretched her out and drawn up her knees, the better to deliver the child. If it was to be delivered. She had been in hard labor trying to force the child out and the fools had let her suffer. His lips skinned back over his teeth. Better that the one who had died had received an arrow in the neck to pay for this. If she had only cried out in her anguish, perhaps the others would have cut her down; but when Barra had come upon them after following their tracks in the snow, the pony still wheeled, spattering blood, the tied figure writhing wordlessly upon its back.