As he rose to his feet, the door of the tiny room creaked open. There was a fire lit in the room outside, and from the glow behind her, he realized that the figure standing in the doorway was the queen, Ragnhild. He could not see what she was wearing. As she came forward, closing the door, she pressed close to him.
“You have shed your jewelry, queen,” he said with a roughness in his throat. He could feel himself stirring at the woman-smell that came from her, stronger even than the pines.
“No-one can wear gold in the room of hot stones,” she replied. “It would burn. So I have shed my rings and armlets. See, even my brooch has gone.”
She caught his hands, held them to her gown, ran them down its lapels. The gown fell open. Shef's hands cupped the heavy swell of her breasts, realized she wore nothing but the one open garment. His arms went round her, his hands stroked down the long muscular slope of her back, gripped her buttocks fiercely. She pressed forward, thrusting her pelvis into him, pushing him back. The bench caught him behind the knees and he sat back with a thud.
As the sweat poured suddenly from his body, the queen straddled over him, thrust herself down on his rigid erection. For the first time since he had entered Godive two years before in the Suffolk wood, Shef felt the inner warmth of a woman's body. It was as if a spell had been released. Half-amazed at his own ability, he tore the gown aside, seized the queen by her hips, began to thrust upwards violently, still sitting.
Ragnhild laughed, steadying herself on his shoulders. “I have never known a man so active in this room,” she said. “Usually the heat makes them as slow as a gelded steer. I see that this time I shall not need the birch- twigs.”
Unknown time later, Shef walked to the outer door of the hall, opened it, peeped cautiously out. In front of him, to the east, he could see a thin line of light over the Eastfold hills far on the other side of the fjord. Ragnhild looked over his shoulder.
“Dawn,” she said. “Soon Stein and the guards will be here. You will have to hide away.”
Shef pushed the door open, let the air in on his naked body. In the last few hours he had been first frozen, then all but roasted. Now the air felt only pleasantly cool and fresh. He took deep breaths of the clear air, thought he could scent in it the green smell of grass thrusting up through the vanishing snow. Spring came late to Norway, but then plants and animals and people all made up for lost time. He felt more alive and alert than he had since his boyhood. The danger threatened in his dream was forgotten.
He turned, seized Ragnhild once again, began to push her to the floor. She resisted, laughing. “The men will be here. You are very vigorous. Have you never had your fill before? Well, I promise you—you will have it again tonight. But now we must hide you away. The girls will not talk, and the men will not look. They know better. But we must not give Halvdan any excuse for trouble later.”
She pulled Shef, still naked, away from the door.
Karli wondered where they had hidden his friend—he supposed he now had to call him, his master. He himself was lying on a straw mattress in a garret reached by a ladder through the slave-women's quarters. A small unshuttered window gave light, but he had been warned not to look out. His gashed wrist and head had been bandaged, and he was wrapped in a warm blanket.
The ladder creaked, and he reached for the sword which he had picked up when they separated him from Shef. But it was only two of the slave-women coming up together. He did not know their names: plain, brown-haired women, one his own age, one ten years older with a deep-lined face. They carried his clothes, washed clean and dried by a fire, a loaf of hard bread, a crock of ale and another of curds.
Karli sat up, grinned, reached appreciatively for the ale. “I would stand up and thank you properly, ladies,” he said. “But all I have on is this blanket, and what I have behind it might shock you.”
The young one smiled faintly, the older one shook her head. “There is not much that shocks those who live on this island,” she said.
“How is that?”
“We have other things to worry about. The queens play their games, with men and the king and the boy Harald. In the end one of them will lose, and pay the forfeit, and be carried to the grave-mound. Queen Asa has already started to put aside the things that will go in it with her, the sledge and the cart and the jewels and the fine clothes. But neither she nor Ragnhild will go alone, when they go. They will take attendants—maybe one, maybe two. I am the least valuable of those here. Maybe Asa will take me, or Ragnhild send me. Edith here is the youngest. Maybe Ragnhild will be jealous and send her.”
“Edith,” said Karli, “that is no Norse name.”
“I am English,” said the younger girl. “Martha here is a Frisian. They took her from her island in a mist. I was caught by the slavers and sold in the market at Hedeby.”
Karli stared at them. Up till then all three had spoken in Norse, the women quite fluently, Karli still uncertain. Now he changed his speech to the Ditmarsh language, related to Frisian and English, which he knew Shef could easily understand.
“Did you know that my friend and I are not Norsemen either? He is a king in England. But they say he was once a thrall, like you. And they tried to sell him in Hedeby only weeks ago.”
“Tried?”
“He knocked the man who said he was his master down, and threatened to sell him instead. A good joke, and not a bad punch. But listen—I know my friend, and I know he has no love for slavers. When we get back to our friends, shall I ask him to buy you from the queens here? He would do it if he knew you were English, Edith, and he would take Martha too.”
“You aren't going to get back to your friends,” said Martha flatly. “We hear a lot. Queen Ragnhild fears your friend. She thinks he may take the place she means for her son. She meant to kill you both last night. Now she means to drain your friend's manhood, get a child from him, in case his blood is the one destined for rule. Once she has that child in her belly, your friend will find the henbane in his porridge. And you too.”
Karli looked uncertainly at the loaf he had been gnawing.
“No,” the woman went on, “you are safe yet. As safe as we are. Till she has got what she wants.”
“And how long will that take?”
Martha laughed for the first time, a short and mirthless bark. “Putting a child in a woman's belly? You are a man, you should know. As long as it takes to walk a mile? Less, with most of you.”
“More with me,” muttered Karli. His hand had strayed automatically and unresisted to Edith's knee.
Valgrim the Wise looked carefully at the dripping spear, its steel head already showing rust. He spelled out the runes on its iron shaft.
“Where did you find this?” he asked.
“On the shore of Drottningsholm,” said Stein, the guardsman. “When we went back on to the island this morning, as usual, I sent men to round up the dogs as we always do. They couldn't find them, and the queen Ragnhild told me she had been disturbed by their howling and sent her maids out to bring them in. When I asked more, she flew into a rage and told me to get out before she had my ears cut off. I guessed something was wrong and sent out a guard-boat to row along the shore, now the ice has gone. They found this.”
“Floating?”
“No, the head's too heavy. They said it was close to the shore, in about three feet of water. The head was lodged on the bottom, but the shaft was still bobbing about.”
“What do you think it means?”
“They could have drowned on the rotten ice,” suggested Stein. “It all went quite suddenly early last night, when the rain came on.”
“But you don't think so?”
“It's the dogs,” said Stein. “There's something fishy there, and Ragnhild is hiding something.”
“Maybe a man?”
“Probably a man.”
Both heads turned to the third man in the room, the remote unbending figure of King Olaf.
