the court and spending his time with farmers’ daughters, he showed some promise at arms. Now his weapons lie neglected and he spends his days at your mother’s house, whittling away his time in games and talk. The son of Authun the White Wolf a cinder biter!’
Vali laughed. He had always wondered about that particular expression. Did cinder biters really bite cinders? If so, he wasn’t one. But if it meant he was happiest at the hearth, sitting beside Adisla and listening to the stories of the farmers, then it was true, he was a cinder biter.
‘I haven’t cast a spell on him,’ said Adisla.
‘No,’ said Bragi, ‘but you may as well have. Come on, we’re going to see your ma.’
It was a stiff walk up the valley to Adisla’s farm and hot work in the sun. Bragi made Vali carry both packs and all their weapons as punishment for running off while hunting, and when he saw the prince wasn’t encumbered enough added a few rocks to the bags for good measure.
Adisla’s mother was Disa, a noted healer who lived in a house above the growing port of Eikund in Rogaland, home of the Rygir people. In Vali’s time there it had blossomed from eight to twelve houses and so was considered a large settlement. Vali had been sent to Eikund by his father Authun five years before to guarantee the treaty between the Horda and the Rygir that had ended a bloody war.
Bragi had been sent with him to see to his training in hunting and swordsmanship but it had become apparent very quickly that the old retainer and the prince were temperamentally unsuited. The only time they seemed to get on was sailing Vali’s little skute around the coast, hunting for seals and fishing. Neither ever said much on these trips. Vali was too engrossed in the sun and the water, the feel of the small boat as it moved with the wind like an animal. Bragi didn’t speak because he had a superstition that it drove the fish away.
Vali was sweating by the time he reached the house, which was no more than a large hut. He was glad that it was high summer, where time began to lose definition and night was just a sliver of darkness in the broad wash of the day. Even though it was late, the sun was still high and down in the river that skirted the farms people were still bathing, as they did every Saturday. As soon as he got the chance, he would join them.
He laughed as he remembered the first time he’d met Adisla. He’d been at Eikund a week when he’d heard a commotion. She had gone to the bottom of the river and held her breath until her mother had plunged in after her on a mission of rescue only for Adisla to pop up behind her, giggling wildly. Even then, five summers before, no one could swim like Adisla. Her brothers called her ‘The Seal’, the first of a series of ever-evolving nicknames they had for her, not all of which were particularly flattering. Seals were known as ‘dogs of the sea’, so she had been called Garm for a while, after the hound that lives in Hel, and then — after Disa had objected to that — Woofy. Vali sometimes called her that himself when he was with her family, but he always used her real name when they were alone.
Vali loved this place — the smoke with its promise of food issuing from the vent on the roof, chickens running around his feet and dogs coming out to bark at him in greeting, not warning.
He had a place in the long hall of King Forkbeard in the port below but, since he’d come to Rogaland, this was where Vali had always felt most at home and he’d spent as much time at Ma Disa’s as he had at the court.
‘Hello, Ma!’ Vali shouted, and a woman taking drying herbs from the low roof of the hut turned to see them approach.
‘Been up to your usual tricks, I see,’ said Disa. Unlike her daughter, she was as brown as a baked barleycorn, having given up applying the lotions that kept her pretty and pale at about the same time she had ceased caring if she was attractive to men. Disa had divorced her husband and, since he was heavy with his fists, the assembly had voted that she be allowed to keep his farm. He’d died the next year on a raid that was intended to restore his fortune, and she hadn’t been sorry. Now she was queen of her house, which teemed with her own children and those of the surrounding small farms.
On the summer evenings Vali would sit outside with Adisla and her family, playing the board game King’s Table, telling and listening to stories and eating the food from Disa’s incomparable hearth. He even managed something of an education there. Old man Barth, Disa’s only thrall, had been captured in a skirmish with the Danes. Vali was fascinated to learn his language and spent a long time talking to the slave about his homeland and customs. Barth had been a slave in Denmark and, it turned out, regarded Disa as a better mistress than the Danish jarl who had owned him before.
In the winter everyone would cram into the tiny smoky hut, eating baked roots, salted fish and laughing until they couldn’t laugh any more. Her brothers, particularly Leikr and the youngest, Manni, were very dear to him and were his friends in hunting, play and conversation.
‘Ma,’ said Bragi, ‘I need to talk to you about your daughter.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I want you to forbid her from seeing the prince.’
‘I’m not in the habit of forbidding my children anything,’ said Disa, ‘but I’ll talk to her.’
‘You can’t call her a child — she’s thirteen years old at least. There are girls of her age a year married and all the better for it.’
‘What appears to be the problem?’
Bragi threw his hands into the air and gave a sound like a hiss, as if the bubbling cauldron of complaint he kept inside himself had finally boiled over. Still, he tried to maintain a grip on his politeness, to temper his language and to use fine words to emphasise the difference between himself and the farmers around him.
‘The problem is this. I am an oath-sworn retainer of King Authun the White Wolf. I am a veteran of twenty- three raids. I stood side by side with the king as we faced the Geats at the Orestrond, hopelessly outnumbered, ready for death. With that dread lord I cut my way through twenty of the enemy and made the ocean red with sword sweat to reach our boats…’
Disa was having to suppress a smile. Behind Bragi, Vali was miming the story. He’d heard it all a hundred times and in a hundred ways — boasted before the drinking hall, whispered around a campfire, shouted at him as an example to greater effort. He knew the words by heart.
‘I am a warrior, and I was honoured and delighted to be offered the post of bodyguard and tutor to this boy. I find, however, that it is increasingly a burden of loathsome proportions. Loathsome proportions. I feel like Loki, tied to the rock and my eyes filled with venom. He is ungovernable, madam, and your daughter is to blame.’
‘In what way?’
‘I curse the day he laid eyes on her. At first it was an innocent friendship of children, but in the last year he has had no time for hunting, none for weapons training. His father had the very unusual idea of allowing him work in the smithy, in order that he should know everything about weapons from their time as rocks of the earth to their effect on an enemy shield. He is absent from the forge. He is absent from the assembly meetings where Forkbeard was to teach him statecraft. He is absent when I call for him to test him with sword and spear. He is absent everywhere, madam, other than at your daughter’s side, where he is, very annoyingly, present.’
Disa shrugged exactly the same shrug as her daughter had made earlier.
‘I can’t tell her who she can and can’t see. Nothing can come of it — he’s already spoken for, isn’t he?’
‘Not by me,’ said Vali.
Bragi gave him a look very similar, thought Vali, to the one he must have given Geat number twenty on the way to the ships.
‘He is betrothed to Forkbeard’s daughter,’ said Disa, as if that ended all debate.
‘The fact that I don’t want to marry her seeming of very little consequence in the arrangement,’ said Vali.
‘Not very little,’ said Bragi. ‘None. Madam, Ma, this dalliance between your daughter and the prince must stop.’
Disa just spread her arms out. ‘What do you expect me to do? He’s come here since he was a little boy.’
‘He is a little boy no longer. Have you any idea how the king would feel if any issue should emerge from this?’
‘He’s never touched me!’ said Adisla.
‘Not through want of trying,’ said Bragi. ‘Look, madam, forbid this association. If you do not, I could have the king command it.’
Now Ma Disa frowned. ‘All I owe the king is a portion of my income and my sons in the wars. I’m not a member of his sworn bodyguard to be bossed and bullied. Who me and mine choose as our friends is none of his business.’
