took out two bottles and came back to the fire with them. He sat and took out the wood stoppers and removed the oily hemp padding that had kept them in place.
‘Here, friends,’ he said, ‘drink your fill.’
‘Two bottles is not our fill, merchant,’ said the rat-faced berserker, taking one from him and swigging it back.
‘You must leave me something for the king,’ said Leshii. A silence fell and he felt the mood darken. Fastarr looked at the merchant.
‘You’re a friend of our lord?’ he said.
‘A second father,’ said Leshii.
‘Very good. I think it’s the least we could do to take you to him.’
‘I have to wait here for my protector,’ said Leshii.
‘That Raven’ll be back in camp soon enough, I should think, provided he hasn’t found anyone dead to eat,’ said Fastarr. ‘Come on, Hastein. Svan, grab hold of those mules and packs and let’s get back down to the camp. I want to be the man who brings such a dear friend to the king’s sight.’
‘I must wait here,’ said Leshii.
But it was no good. Fastarr took his arm, pulled him to his feet and led him down the hill while the other men loaded up his mules. He’d be lucky, he knew, to ever see those packs again.
‘I have gifts for the king in there. Don’t open them,’ said Leshii.
‘We won’t,’ said Fastarr, ‘until you’ve met him.’
Leshii looked back towards Aelis.
‘Well don’t just stand there, you idiot boy,’ he said. ‘Roll up my carpet and make sure it’s stowed fast. If it hits the mud again you’ll follow it.’ Aelis stood looking at him in incomprehension and Leshii realised he had spoken in Norse. Still, it would benefit the girl’s disguise if he treated her badly.
‘I said get the carpet!’ he screamed at her. He grabbed the edge of the carpet, mimed rolling it up and pointed at the mule. Aelis still hadn’t understood a word he said.
‘That is a bad slave who makes twice the work for his master!’ said the rat-faced one.
‘Are you sure it’s the boy who’s the slave here, merchant?’ laughed Svan.
‘Put the carpet on the mule,’ said Leshii in a low voice to Aelis. Then, more loudly and in Norse, ‘I ought to beat you, but bruises would make you even more useless. Do it, put the carpet on the mule.’
Aelis hurried to roll the carpet and Leshii mocked her, miming her inexpert actions, pulling faces at her. The Norsemen thought this high entertainment but Leshii had achieved what he wanted. By placing the lady beneath their contempt he had made her true nature invisible to them. They were looking at a simple boy, they thought, and had enjoyed Leshii’s ridicule. He had placed the idea of a stupid slave in their minds and made it difficult for them to see anything that didn’t fit that conception. It was a kind of everyday magic, but one he normally used in reverse, to make someone see the rarity and value of commodities that were neither rare nor valuable.
Leshii turned to Fastarr. ‘I look forward to your hospitality.’
The Dane smiled at him. ‘And we to yours,’ he said, gesturing down to the twinkling lights of the Norse camp that lay in the deep dark of the valley like a mirror to the stars.
7
Aelis felt sure she would not survive until the dawn. Everything was going badly for her, right down to the smallest detail. The mules refused to move, the packs slipped on their backs, she stumbled and fell on the slippery mud of the slope into the camp, her toes were numb with cold and she feared discovery at any second.
All that she could have borne. She had been raised on a country estate and spent many nights roaming the forests near her home, sleeping out with her friends under the stars, drinking from streams and going hunting with the daughters of the count. Her aunt had taught her how to use a bow and said that Aelis might not be good but was certainly lucky when it came to shooting deer. She held the bow wrong, nocked the arrow wrong, drew it wrong, moved when she shot and, like as not, hit what she was aiming at. So she was used to the discomforts of the outdoors. She was unused, however, to the ridicule.
Her fear brought on clumsiness, and every time she slipped or a mule wouldn’t move, Leshii led the chorus of derision. The little Norseman with the mean mouth had been particularly cruel, walking behind her and tripping her with his spear, laughing all the time. No one had ever treated her like that and she found it very hard to bear. Tears started to come down her face but that only made the men mock her more. In the end Leshii had come to her rescue, telling the spiteful little elf who was tormenting her that if his slave came to damage, he would ask for compensation from the prince.
The camp was a vision of hell. Hard faces, scarred and filthy, loomed from the firelight; women and men copulated like animals in the open air while, not three paces away, someone else sat eating from a bowl or sharpened an axe. This army had been ravaging the countryside for years and was more like a travelling town. The children were goblins, pulling at the packs, jabbering at her in their strange language, touching her even. The Vikings had taken over many of the mean houses, though their numbers were too great for all of them to be accommodated that way. So there were tents and shelters built from branches and foliage, but many were content to sleep huddled together beneath blankets and furs in the open air. What do they do if it rains? thought Aelis. There were so many of them, so many spears stuck upright in the mud, so many shields and axes. It really seemed as if this camp stretched as far as the night itself.
The mules pressed on, the warriors swatting away the children, calling to friends. They approached the river and Fastarr talked to a man on the bank. He gestured them towards a small beached longship. It was lying at an angle and the man put a plank up to its side.
The Viking turned from his negotiation and spoke directly to her but she didn’t understand what he said.
‘Come on,’ said Leshii. ‘Get the mules on the boat.’
Aelis wanted to speak, to tell the merchant that would be impossible. She loved horses and had grown up around enough mules to know they only worked for people they trusted. Mules were more intelligent than horses and needed to be coaxed rather than bullied. The animals were not going to walk up a plank onto a precarious boat for her.
She felt an intense shame building within her, an anger and a deep resentment. Her legs hurt and she had bruises down her back where she had been prodded. That feeling she had had since she was a girl returned, the ability to sense people’s emotions, to hear their character almost as a musical note, to see it as a colour. When she was a small girl and given to sentimental descriptions she had told her nurse that she could hear the ‘strings of the heart-harp’. The sickly sweet description made her blush now that she was a grown woman. But it really did feel like that, and the feeling was intensifying. The Norsemen were a mixture: toughness, cruelty, generosity, bravery, humour; she experienced their minds as a thin band of sound, bright colours, a feeling both hard and cold. The merchant was more complex. When she thought of him she had a taste in her mouth sweet like honeyed almonds, but underneath was something else bitter and astringent: cloves and smoke, vinegar and tar.
One of the Vikings was screamng at her in Norse, gesturing to the mules and then to the boat. It was the little one again, the nasty imp with his pinched face and thin, strong limbs. Aelis understood nothing of what he said, but his presence was dull and heavy, baleful and narrow. He kicked her and her legs went from under her. She hit the ground hard, driving the wind from herself and banging her head. He was screaming at her, gesturing for her to get up with one hand and prodding her with the butt of his spear with the other. His voice was shrill and high like a pipe blown by a child, almost hysterical.
Fastarr grabbed him by the shoulder and spoke to Leshii: ‘I am sorry for my kinsman, merchant; he has been unlucky in battle these two years.’ His voice was softer, like a flute, she thought. What was happening to her? Her senses were jumbled by the fall but something else was taking over and the world was not as it had been. All her sensitivities seemed amplified, people and personalities understandable to her in new and confusing ways. It was as if the uncommon stress had unlocked something in her.
‘Wounded?’ Again Leshii spoke in Norse. She heard the word as two thudding syllables, like the beat of a
