This Rough Magic

you that. Whatever has delayed him, it isn't that. And until I hear otherwise, I will be sure it is only that— delay.'

It wasn't sane, it wasn't rational, but Kat took heart from his surety—and so did her grandfather, who sat up straighter and nodded.

'By Saint Raphaella, Valdosta, you shame me,' he said. 'If you, a stranger to our family, can have such faith, how am I to doubt? Right enough. My son has survived so much else, how can he not return home to us?'

'Exactly so, sir,' Marco agreed, giving Kat's hand a squeeze.

Now Lodovico turned to the Vinlanders. 'And that being so, young sirs, please: Let us hear your plans, and how Casa Montescue means to figure into them.'

To anyone but a Venetian, that statement would have seemed callous in the extreme. Here, Lodovico's son had literally been raised from the dead, only to vanish again, and he was discussing trade alliances?

But Kat knew, and Marco surely knew, that this was perhaps the bravest thing that her grandfather could have done. There was nothing, or next to nothing, any of them could do to help Carlo, wherever he was. And this trade agreement was her father's hard-won legacy to the House of Montescue. Should they now throw it away because he had vanished again? That would be like taking gold he had sacrificed to send them, and flinging it into the canals and starving, setting his sacrifice at naught because he was not there himself.

No! She and her grandfather would trust to God and her father's eminent good sense and cleverness, and fight to preserve what he had given them.

* * *

Lying in bed, late that night, Kat realized her father's ambitions were going to cost a great deal. Yes, the profits from trade in Vinland goods, particularly this cotton, could be very, very lucrative. Egyptian and Indian cottons were only for the very rich. Cotton was as expensive, or more so, than silk, because picking the seeds out was such a laborious process. Either the Vinlanders had some process to remove the seeds or labor must be dirt cheap over there. Still, however it was done their prices would bring the fabric within reach of the merely well-to- do. But it would require offices and warehouses in either Flanders or Denmark or Ireland to meet up with the Norse-Celtic Atlantic trade ships. The family her father had tied in with were of Icelandic stock. The Icelanders tended to run a Denmark-Vinland journey. It was not a good route for serious volumes of merchandise. It was too slow, with too many overland expenses and tolls and tariffs. Yes, from a port somewhere on the Atlantic coast, they could and would sell to northern Europe. But the east and markets on the Mediterranean would be best served by meeting the Venetian Atlantic trading convoy and selling out of Venice. But that meant warehouses. Local agents. And money. Lots of money.

Are we in the fire, still? she wondered, before she drifted off to sleep, or have we at least climbed back into the frying pan?

 

Chapter 8

Svanhild Thordardatter was not a maiden easily intimidated; she had faced, in her time, bears, catamounts, blizzards that piled snow to the rooftree, drunken and aggressive skraelings who had gotten more aqavit than they should have, and skraeling war- bands. She could make a wilderness camp, milk a cow, goat, or sheep, cook a meal without a single implement but a knife, and read an Icelandic saga like a skald. She could hunt, fish, and ride as well as her brothers, besides having all of the usual skills of a well-bred maiden. She had, during the rough crossing, climbed into the rigging in her leather skraeling trews to help alongside her brothers.

She had not only been willing to go with them, she had been eager. Valkyrie-like she might well be, but like the storied Brunnhilde, she had her soft side. She wanted a husband, children, and a home of her own. But the only way she was going to get one was to find a husband who wasn't somehow related to her.

Impossible in Vinland. Well, perhaps not impossible, but difficult. The only unmarried men who were not somehow tied into the Thordarson clan were thralls (her mother would have died), skraelings (actually, not unacceptable, but she didn't really want to set up housekeeping in a bark lodge or a skin tent), or trolls. Trolls, at least, so far as she was concerned. Nasty, fat, obnoxious, hairy, smelly, uncouth, elderly trolls.

So for both Svanhild and her mother, this trade expedition was heaven-sent. For her mother, it would be an opportunity for Gulta and Bjarni to find their sister a fine, unattached nobleman, and if this furthered their trade alliances, all the better. For Svanhild, well, if unattached young men were so thick on the ground as all that back in the Mother Countries, she would make sure that any noblemen that the boys presented to her were young and handsome. Or at the least, not trolls.

She had strode confidently off the ship once it reached the harbor in Venice—and then, for the first time in her life, discovered something that intimidated her as bears, catamounts, and blizzards had never been able to do.

The women of Venice.

In the Piazza San Marco she encountered the women of Venice, and, though Gulta and Bjarni were deaf and dumb to such nuances, knew that although she might be considered to be one of the prettiest maidens in Vinland, here she was . . .

A troll.

The women of Venice were tiny, dainty, slim-waisted and small-breasted. Their perfumed hair was either dark as a raven's wing, or a becoming honey-colored shade. They did not stride, they glided. They did not wear leather and fur and homespun in tunics and trews, nor aprons and plain dresses; they wore elegant gowns of silk and brocade, velvet and linen, embroidered and trimmed with laces and ribbons. Their hands were soft and white; their complexions pale and faintly blushed. Svanhild towered over them; with her sun-browned face and brassy-gold hair, she looked like a huge, cheap trinket among a box full of dainty, gold-set jewels. Or a cow among a herd of deer, a goose swimming with swans. And she knew it, and they knew it; she saw it in their eyes, in the amused side-glances they bestowed on her.

No young man, noble or otherwise, would look at her with anything other than amused contempt.