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Chapter Ten

The morning was dim but for a time the rain had stopped. Starkad walked without favoring his right foot. It would have amazed Mael had he not once seen the big man methodically hack apart an archer whose last shaft stuck out three inches on either side of the Dane's chest. Pain simply did not affect Starkad once he had decided to ignore it. Many a civilized warrior had discounted tales of berserkers—until one made for him, bloody but as inexorable as an earthquake. That had driven many a brave man to flight.

They passed near several openly sited villages and met a number of other travelers on the road the second day. Everyone left them alone. Even the six armed men heading north passed with hard glances but no direct comment. Mael and Starkad trudged forward purposefully, speaking to no one and in general projecting an aura of being busy but not too busy to cut throats if annoyed. They were not called on what was indeed no bluff.

That night they spent in the woods, wrapped in their cloaks under a fir tree. Its branches looked thick enough to protect them if the rain should resume—as it did near dawn. The tree was some help, but not enough to make it worth continuing to try to sleep. The tenth milepost from Winchester stared crookedly at them from the margin of the road, unnoticed the night before when they had stopped.

"We'd better cut west pretty quick," Mael said, his foot scraping morosely at the old marker. "Otherwise we'll be at Venta. It's got a wall and the guards there won't ignore us. Even if we just get close there's going to be somebody who'll wonder if we turn off. Besides, farther south is likely to be out of our way, anyhow."

Starkad nodded. "I'm not arguing," he said. "You're chief for this raid. Anyway, I don't mind walking on something softer than this rock, rock, rock."

Half a mile farther on, a track joined to the left through a line of poplars. It was narrow, a slick band of mud and trampled dung gleaming in the wider area cleared by the shoulders of driven cows. Mael pointed. Starkad nodded again, and they turned onto the local track.

It had a gloominess not wholly explained by the constant mist. The two men walked single file of necessity, and without speaking because they did not want to alarm villagers whom the rain might otherwise keep inside. The Roman road had not changed in four hundred years, but it had been built by strangers and for strangers. Even in the midst of Cerdic's dominions, Mael had not felt out of place on those stones. This track was newer in one sense but from an earlier age altogether, and there was nothing eclectic about it. An Irishman would be noticed and watched in silent hatred—perhaps even ganged by the village bravos. But the same would happen to a man from a neighboring village—who might steal a pig or a kiss from one of the womenfolk, and was in any case not "one of us." In armor and in company with a man as big as Starkad, Mael felt there was little actual danger, but it was as well to slip by in silence.

The path forked. The friends looked at each other. They took two steps on the right hand branch before a goat's bleating warned them of a village nearby. They turned left instead. Three miles further on and an hour later, they almost walked into the fenced garth of a house. Behind the fence in the drizzle bulked other buildings. The path led straight through the center of the village. No humans were visible, but Mael and Starkad faded quickly back into the trees beside the trail. There were murmurs from poultry and a whiff of wood smoke now that the dwellings had called it to the men's attention.

"Well, do we just walk through?" Starkad asked.

Mael thought a moment, visualizing the topography as best as he could from the glimpses the rain had vouchsafed him. "No," he said at last, "let's cut around here to the right. We can pick up the path again on the other side . . . and there ought to be a stream pretty near. I'd like to refill the water bottles."

He and Starkad turned into the brush and through it into the second-growth hardwoods. The area had been cleared for agriculture not too long in the past. Beeches and oaks had overgrown the fields, but pines had not yet started to drive the hardwoods out. There was a slight falling-off to the left. Mael thought he heard the purl of a stream and nodded to Starkad. They stepped between a pair of oak saplings and out into the misty drizzle of a swale too low-lying to support normal trees. A grove of silver birches straggled up at the very edge of the stream some thirty feet away.

Starkad's left hand gripped Mael's shoulder and stopped him as still as an altar stone. The whole population of the nearby village, some forty Saxons of mingled sex and age, was clustered among the birches.

Silently, backing the necessary step without breaking a stick or letting their equipment jingle, the friends eased into the added gloom of the trees they had just left. They might have been seen by someone looking for them, but the rain blurred outlines and washed colors away. Kneeling at the forest edge, their armor gleaming no more in the weak sunlight than the wet boles around them, there was nothing to call attention to the men.

In any case, the Saxons were wholly intent on what was going on in their own midst. At the back of the circle were children, naked or nearly so, clutching the skirts and hands of their mothers. The women wore either dresses, simple tubes pinned at the shoulders and tucked at the waist by belts, or skirts and shawls. Hoods or the shawls covered their heads. Their garments were woolen; some, where the weavers had chosen fleece of contrasting shades, were patterned attractively in soft, natural plaids.

Within the circle of women, nearer the snowy trunks which displayed the only primary color on a gray morning, were the men. Despite the chill and the rain, they were lightly clad in linen tunics and half-cloaks of skin or wool. Most of the Saxon males also wore tight-fitting leather caps, sewn with the hair side in, but these were less clothing than armor—and the only armor worn, save by one of the two men in the very center of the group.

The man in armor was clearly the chief. He was larger and at least as tall as the biggest of the men around him, despite the fact that he was slightly downslope of them. He wore ring mail and a horned helmet that must have been an heirloom from an age when warfare was less pragmatic. The other men carried spears or weapons which were obviously agricultural implements—axes and mattocks and, in one case, a flail. The armored thegn was the only one to have a long sword, besides the spear in his right hand. He faced a smaller, older man across what seemed to be a trench, listening to the other intone a prayer with arms uplifted: "Hear us, oh Lady Nairthus. Be near to us in our sowing and in our reaping, now in our Spring and in our Fall. . . ."

Starkad had slipped his pack off without a sound. His big fingers played over the slipknot that attached his helmet to the rest of his gear. The rawhide had swollen and would not give. Without hesitation or effort, the Dane pulled the thong in half.

Mael laid his lips close to Starkad's hair and whispered, "What's going on?"

Holding the iron cap in his hand rather than donning it at once—the neck flare would separate him from Mael by three inches and there was need for them to talk—Starkad said, "Oh, it's a sacrifice to Dame Nairthus . . . the earth goddess, the crop goddess. They're getting ready to butcher a man to her, I'd judge. In my tribe, we prayed to Thor in the Spring and made do with cutting a goat's throat—you can eat the goat afterwards, too. But some of these Saxons, they're so backward they come to war waving stone hammers. Besides, if you've had a bad harvest the past year you start thinking back to old ways—and you've got more useless mouths in the houses than you do in the fold."

The wizened old man facing the thegn continued to pray in a cracked voice. He sounded nervous. If what Starkad said was true, the priest probably wasn't used to human sacrifice either. His head was bare. Rain had plastered his white hair away from the bald spot at the peak of his skull.

The priest stopped speaking and lowered his hands. The thegn stepped forward, then down into the trench. The crowd murmured, shifting a little. Mael saw heels flash briefly above the lip of earth as the sacrifice kicked. Already the victim lay face down in the boggy ditch. The thegn had one foot planted on its back. Then the Saxon slid his other foot forward to force the victim's mouth and nose down into the ground water in the bottom of the trench. The sacrifice began to scream in a high-pitched, feminine voice. The big Saxon leaned his weight down on the outstretched foot. The screams gurgled to a halt.

Mael cursed quietly. He put his iron cap on and set the slouch traveling hat back atop it. Starkad touched his arm. "Shall we slaughter the whole village, then?" the Dane asked with no hint of emotion. "We'll need to, if we try and break up this ritual, you know. All we need to do now is slip back into the woods and get on with our own business."

The Irishman looked at him. Starkad shrugged and donned his helmet.

Mael stood and took two measured strides beyond the masking bulk of the trees. He did not draw his sword and his shield hung by its strap instead of being advanced toward the Saxons. "Hold!" he thundered in a huge voice, trained to bellow commands across the steel-shattered chaos of a battlefield. Starkad walked to the right, a half step behind Mael in the mist. His axe helve was balanced on his collarbone.

The pair of them loomed up above the startled Saxons, Mael a big man and Starkad a blurred giant in full armor. The leather hat brim flopped low over Mael's left eye as he had planned. The crowd's small noises were cut off by freezing panic as the Saxons stumbled away from the newcomers. The armored chieftain stepped quickly up from the pit. He unpinned his half-cloak and dropped it, then waited with rain dripping from the down-curved ends of his moustaches. He had not brought a shield, but he gripped his spear shaft with both hands.

Besides the thegn, only the Saxon elder stood his ground. As Mael strode closer, he could see that the old man's pupils were fully dilated and that the wizened face had blanched as pale as his hair. "Wh-what manner of men are you to interrupt the gift to Lady Nairthus?" the priest quavered.

"No men at all," Mael boomed back, walking steadily but slowly enough that the Saxons had plenty of time to give way.

It almost worked. The villagers were a dim semi-circle, some of them ankle-deep in the creek waiting for their thegn to act. The elder shuffled backward a step, slipped on the lip of the trench, and jumped across it away from Mael. When Mael was only three paces away, the Saxon chief trembled. Then he cursed and flung himself at the Irishman with his spear outstretched. Starkad had anticipated him. The Dane took a full stride, bringing his axe around as smoothly as a boy would a fly whisk.

The axe blade took the Saxon at a flat angle where the muscles of his left shoulder joined his neck. His head sprang off and the helmet flew loose from it. The two objects spun to the ground in opposite circles, thudding and clanging as they hit. Starkad's axe had continued, shearing the ring mail and separating the Saxon's right arm at the shoulder joint. The torso and the spear which the thegn's left hand still gripped pitched forward, but the impact of the Dane's blow had rotated the victim enough that the point did not even graze Mael's chest. The corpse struck the ground so near to the Irishman that the last spurt of blood from the severed neck covered his right sandal.

The village priest screamed like a pig with a knife through its throat. He ran, caroming off the trunk of one of the birches without slowing, then splashing across the creek. The old Saxon reached the other side without one of his boots. There he sucked in enough air to continue his screaming. He disappeared into the drizzle, again at a run. The rest of the villagers had already melted away, making less noise but with real terror. It was not death that seared their hearts—they had come to view a death. It was not even the loss of their thegn, but rather the way of his killing. Mael's bluff had raised the shadows of superstitious fear which were never far from the minds of barbarian peasants. Starkad had capped the bluff with a blow that appeared inhuman. It would have been spectacular enough to shock even spirits prepared for it.

For years after in that hamlet there would be no sacrifices save to Wotan and Thor, and the slaughter for those gods would keep the region poor.

Starkad levered his axe free of the boggy soil. It had sunk helve-deep with his follow-through. Trying to halt the blow's inertia, even after its work was done, would have been useless and dangerous, likely to pop a cartilage in the Dane's back. Starkad grinned at Mael and began wiping the metal dry with the hem of the thegn's wool cloak. The air crawled with the stench of blood and the yellowish feces the Saxon had voided at the instant of his death.

Mael walked to the edge of the stream and stuck his right foot into the water. The blood washed quickly from the sandal straps but clung to the wool wrappings. From the ditch behind him wriggled the head and shoulders of the intended sacrifice.

"Get your feet soaked and it's going to be hell marching," Starkad said. "A little blood never hurt anybody."

Mael ignored the comment. He stamped his foot twice on the ground to squeeze out some of the water. "What do we do about the girl?" he asked.

"Uh? Leave her. Or do you need to get laid?"

The Saxon girl looked about seventeen, perhaps younger. It was hard to tell from a face so muddy and hunger-pinched. Her hair was a dirty blonde—the dirt might have been an overlay rather than the natural color—double-braided and coiled on top of her head, the braids caught by a bone pin. The men walked toward her from opposite sides. She shrank back down in the muddy ditch. All she wore was a linen singlet and some sort of armband of woven leather. She had been held by a heavy staff laid across her shoulders and pinned at either side by forked branches. Her struggles had dislodged that, but her knees were still pinioned by deep-driven forks.

Starkad tugged one stake free, then the other. The girl did not move. Her face was turned upward and her eyes stared at the two men.

"Well, we can't leave her," Mael said. "Her people are just as apt as not to drown her when they come back again. Besides, she's seen us clearly; she knows we aren't gods. There're twenty men out there who'd be on us like flies on a turd if they got a notion of the truth. I don't fancy what they could do to us in this fog, even with sticks and manure forks."

"Well . . ." Starkad muttered. He raised his axe for another blow.

"MacLir take you, you butcher!" Mael shouted, reaching across the trench to grasp Starkad's wrist. "I didn't just save her so we could kill her ourselves!"

"Shall we carry her with us, then?" the Dane queried softly.

Mael grimaced and spat. "Yes, I guess we have to," he said.

Starkad laughed. He reached down into the trench. The girl squirmed to avoid his fingers.

They closed on her wrist anyway and the Dane hauled her upright. "Up we go, girlie," Starkad said. Beside his armored chest, she appeared a mud-stained wraith. She was thin except for her stomach which had been distended by long-term malnutrition. "What's your name, hey?" the Dane asked.

In panic or the belief that Starkad's grip had loosened, the girl tried to bolt. Mael thrust out an arm. Starkad had already jerked his prisoner back, throwing her feet out from under her on the lip of earth. The Dane straightened her up by the wrist until her toes scrabbled on the ground and her arm pointed straight up. She looked as though she were manacled to a high wall.

"Listen, girlie," the Dane said, without raising his voice or needing to add that emphasis. "We've saved your life, and if you're good it can stay saved. If you aren't—well, you won't get away and you won't be the first Saxon I've killed, will you?" He laughed. "Or the fifty-first. Now, what's your name?"

Mael touched his friend's hand and guided it down so that the girl could stand comfortably. "We aren't going to hurt you," he said, half stooping to bring his face nearer a level with hers. "But we've got to get out of here. We're going to take you with us, as much for your sake as ours."

The girl looked at Mael, then down at the ditch in which she had almost been drowned. "I am Thorhild," she said sullenly. "Why is it you want to murder my people?"

"Look, we've got to get moving," Starkad said. He ignored the girl's question, but he did release her arm. The flesh was already starting to bruise.

"Yes," Mael agreed. He bent over and raised the half-cloak the chieftain had worn. The upper part of it was blood-sprayed, but the wool was dyed nearly black so the stain was not evident. "She can wear this," Mael said. "It's not much, but it's what we've got at hand."

Gingerly the girl wrapped the garment around her. It fell almost to her knees. Obeying Starkad's peremptory gesture, she followed the Dane. Mael brought up the rear of the file until they had again reached the beaten track. There was no sign of the other villagers or of anything at all human in the woods. As they stepped through the runaway privet which must once have been planted as a boundary hedge, Mael cursed. "Forgot to fill the damned water bottles," he explained.

Starkad was using both arms to force the locked growth apart for his companions. He laughed. "Can't keep a thing in your head anymore, can you? Don't know what must be wrong with you."

They marched stolidly along the trail, Mael leading again. When he judged they had come farther than any of Thorhild's kinsmen were likely to have fled, the Irishman dropped back as nearly alongside the girl as the track allowed. "We didn't murder your folk," he said earnestly. "Only the one fellow there—and him we had to kill to save you."

The girl looked over at Mael with a blank expression. It slowly grew to distaste. "You ended the gift to Lady Nairthus," she said. "Now they'll all starve."

"Manannan MacLir, girl!" Mael exploded. "Did you want to smother in that ditch? You were sure fighting hard enough about it from what I saw." In his anger, Mael brushed against a beech tree. It flung him back onto the trail, cursing and using his palms to dampen the clangor the trunk had raised from his shield boss. Starkad snorted.

Thorhild ignored the Irishman's stumble. Her brow furrowed. "I thought I could give myself. But I didn't want to, not really, when the—time came. But that was me.

"It was—" she paused to count on her fingers—"five years that we sold everything to buy a ship so that Borgar could bring us to this land. We would be rich, he said—Borgar, your man—" she jerked a nervous thumb back at Starkad, afraid to turn her head in the slightest to face him—"killed him. Borgar said a great king of the British had called us over to guard him. He would give us fine land. But the first year and the second there was blight. We harvested little. The third, our harvest was good, but we owed the seed to rich folk in the city. Their interest rate ate the corn as surely as the blight had before. Last year all was well, until the hail came just before the harvest. And if this Spring is so wet that the seed rots in the ground, we all . . ." Thorhild shrugged. "Lady Nairthus was angry with us. And now she'll kill all of them, all my family, my friends."

Again the girl glared straight at Mael. "What business of yours was it?" she demanded. "Why did you want to murder us?"

Mael shook his head and lengthened his stride instead of trying to answer. Behind him Starkad called, "Some day you'll learn, little brother. Stay away from any woman unless you want to screw her. And especially don't try to do one a favor."

They ate, completely enveloped by the branches of a weeping peach beside the ruins of a villa. The rain had finally ceased, but the tree's ground-touching tendrils were protection against eyes as well as rain. Within their cover, the earth was bare and fairly dry. The light that seeped through the foliage was pale green, insofar as there was any light at all. "We're going to need more food," said Starkad in Irish, popping the last of a cooked pork sausage into his mouth. Two of their bread loaves had been wetted through the Dane's pack. They had deliquesced into a gluey mass. Besides, the travelers had three mouths to feed now.

Mael shrugged agreement. The girl was watching them, but with no sign that she understood the Celtic tongue. In the same language Mael answered, "We needed directions, anyway. We've come about as far as we can on the little that Arthur mentioned. What I figured we'd do is find a lone hut towards evening—we've passed a few already. That'll be British. They won't dare refuse us whatever we ask—and they'll be enough afraid of the local Saxons, if they're smart at least, that they won't go running off to report us when we've gone. Anyway, we can leave them enough money that they won't take a chance of losing it. They'll know that sure as sin the Saxons'll strip them bare if they learn there's anything to strip."

"And the girl?"

Mael grimaced. "We'll figure out something. Maybe we'll let her go in the morning. She doesn't know what we're about, and she isn't too near her own people now. She'll be no real danger to us." He looked up at Starkad's smile, then added, "I do some stupid things, don't I?"

The Dane's smile broadened. "Oh, well," he said, "we all do."

By late evening the clouds had cleared and Mael could see the single finger of smoke etching the pale mauve sky. They had met several other travelers on the path by then. No one had spoken, letting a glance and a glower suffice to safeguard privacy. One old woman, alone save for the sow she drove in front of her, signed the Hammer at their backs. Starkad had turned and showed his teeth, thrusting the woman on like a blow.

Now the big Dane pointed at the smoke. "It's a ways off the trail," he said, "and there's only one, so it's not a village. Looks to me like what we're after—and none too soon for my feet."

A hundred yards farther on, another track joined the one they were following. Even the long twilight would be fading soon. There was little choice but to take the path to the dwelling. The building lay a quarter mile back from the main trail, surrounded by trees on one side and a small hand sown garden plot on the other. It was a rude hut, a dome like a huge beehive. There was a cupola on the top to shield the smokehole from the rain. The lowest two feet of the walls were of wattle and daub on a frame of bent saplings which provided the roof stingers as well. Down to the wattling, the dome was thatched. The low doorway was covered by a rush mat that leaked light through its interstices. As the travelers approached, the mat was flung open from the inside, silhouetting a bent figure in the opening against the dull glow of the fire inside the hut.

To the rear, Starkad swore under his breath. Metal chimed as the Dane gripped his shield with a beringed left hand. The stooping figure called to them in British, "Welcome, travelers. I've waited for you." The voice was high and feminine, the words so reminiscent of Veleda's to Mael in the Laigin that the Irishman froze. But this was an old voice, a cracked one. As the travelers stepped closer, the firelight showed them that the woman in the doorway was as crabbed and sexless as an ancient fruit tree. Mael's memory stayed with him, though, bursting out of the scab laid over his longings by the chill and the days of heels thudding on the ground.

The three of them ducked one at a time into the hut. Mael went first, darting his head to either side to be sure there was no one waiting flat against an inner wall with a bludgeon raised. There was only the woman. When Mael saw how the shawl of gray homespun bulked about her body, he realized she was even smaller than she had first seemed.

The interior of the dwelling was a single room, dry and warm but thickened by the smoke that swirled from the draft through the door curtain. There was little furniture. To the left was a low bedstead with a rush mattress and a covering of cowhide. Surprisingly, it seemed clean. Across the hut from the bed were a half dozen large storage jars—the pantry, filled with grain and oil and beer, perhaps. A small ham, whittled far down on the shank, hung from a stringer above the jars. There were no chairs, but a three-legged stool stood near the tripod over the low fire. Suspended from the tripod was a covered bronze pot of something savory. There were no other furnishings or decorations in the hut, save the bundles of dried or drying herbs festooning the whole ceiling.

Starkad grunted as he entered the room. A bundle of dried parsley brushed his hair when he straightened up; his hand batted the herbs away reflexively; then he moved a step out of the way. "What do you mean, expect us?" he demanded bluntly. "Are you another of them?"

The woman smiled. It made her more attractive, though she was still neither young nor a beauty. Without pretending ignorance she said, "A wise woman? In a way. I'm not what the folk about here think I am, Saxon and Briton both . . . but I'm not the fraud they pretend to think when they talk in the daylight. 'Old Gwedda, too foolish to find her nose with both hands. For charity, we give her some bread and a flitch of bacon now and again.' I can't keep their lovers true to them, and I won't make their neighbor's cow go dry . . . but I can do more to cure them than anyone else in a day's ride, and I learn things from here and there. I learned that you—two of you, at least—would be coming, and that the world had need of your safety."

They were speaking in British. Thorhild looked from one face to another without comprehension. The girl was first sullen, then restive as her eyes took in the variety of gathered herbs and the paraphernalia half hidden at the head of the bed. The Saxon girl edged toward the door. Starkad's arm stopped her and walked her quickly back. The Dane's index finger curled beneath her shift, plucking one breast out to view. "Not so soon, little one," he said in German. "The party hasn't even started yet."

"You must be hungry," said Gwedda in a businesslike tone. "Sit down and we'll eat."

The two men stripped off their wet cloaks and formed them over their shields to dry a little in the warmth. Starkad leaned his axe against the corner of bed and wall, then hung his dagger belt over the upraised haft. Mael took off his body armor. This time the Dane continued to wear his mail shirt without commenting on his reasons.

Gwedda began dishing a stew of game and vegetables out of the hanging pot. She paused suddenly, realizing that she had only three plates.

"The girl and I'll share," said Starkad. His hand guided Thorhild to the bed where he sat down beside her. The three travelers set to work hungrily on the stew, round loaves of barley bread to sop the juices, and a handful of leeks. Gwedda ate also, with good appetite though she kept an eye out for her guests.

"Oh," she said. "Would you like some beer to drink? Or I even have a skin of mead. A Saxon gave it to me for setting his son's leg straight after a tree had broken it."

Mael grimaced. "Mead's too sweet to drink and too thick to piss," he said. "I leave the muck to Germans. Their tongues all froze in the cold so they don't taste it. But I'll take beer, indeed, and thank you for it."

"Never knew an Irishman with any sense about liquor or women," Starkad chortled happily. He reached for the tied-off goatskin Gwedda was handing him. "Come along, girlie, this'll put a little fire back in your guts." Thorhild twitched her head away from the Dane's caressing hand. Starkad appeared undisturbed by her attitude—unaware, in fact.

"Do you know whereabouts there's a village of Saxons under a thegn named Biargram?" Mael asked Gwedda. The Irishman leaned back against the wall with a pottery mug of cool ale in his hand. The room felt safe, cozy in a way that went far beyond its warmth and dryness. The smoke and dimness of the fire provided a curtain of sorts, dulling the images of Starkad and Thorhild across the room. It even seemed to mute the sound of the Dane's clumsy endearments.

"The village isn't that near," the old woman was answering with a frown, "though you can walk the distance in a day, I think. Now let me see. . . ." she closed her eyes and continued, "There are three, no, four forks in the road between here and where you want to go. You'll have to go around another village about a mile from here where two brothers rule together. First . . ."

The room and its sounds faded as Mael listened to Gwedda's words. The Irishman found a picture of the intended route forming in his mind. It could have been just careful description coupled with images formed from Mael's own years of travel; it could have been something more. Mael was never certain. But as the witch spoke, Mael seemed to walk the trails step by step. He saw the groves and the pattern of chalk cropping out on a hillside, the stream near a crossroad and even the fallen tree a hundred yards downstream from it where men could cross without wetting their feet.

Starkad lay back on the bed, continuing to swig the thick mead and trying to force some on Thorhild. The Dane was still drunkenly good-natured. Underlying his pleasantries, however, was the assurance that he was a stronger man than any other he knew, strong enough to take almost anything when he decided he had waited long enough for it to be offered freely. Thorhild had been edged against the wall. By turns she had been petulant, then taut and sullen. None of her moods made any useful impression on the big Dane, any more than her clenched hands could keep his fingers from prodding and fondling her at will.

Starkad leaned toward the girl to nuzzle her hair. Her singlet had been pawed free of her bosom. A fold of the Dane's chain mail caught her right nipple and pinched it. Thorhild shrieked and leaped away. Starkad shot his arm out to grab her, but the girl was already stumbling over the pile of his equipment. Metal crashed as Starkad threw himself to his feet. Then the girl's small hands were thrusting the point of his own dagger straight in the Dane's face.

Combat reflexes had kept Starkad alive a hundred times before, as they did now, but he flung himself back without thought of the fact that his right heel was under the bedstead. The dagger swept harmlessly in front of the fluff of his moustaches. The tendons of the Dane's ankle popped audibly, even against the din of the girl's screams.

Thorhild turned and ran for the door. Mael was on his feet now, eyes bright with the disoriented terror of a man roused to battle from dead sleep. Starkad was already striding for his prey, but his right leg folded beneath him. As Thorhild darted into the night, the Dane pitched forward helplessly. His forehead fetched up against the door-post. The ground-shaking thud that impact made stilled his roar of anger.

Mael tried to force his way past his friend's bulk. First, Starkad's prone body blocked him. The Dane rolled to his side. Shaking his head to clear it, Starkad put out a hand to bar the passage deliberately. "No," he said. "Let her go."

"What?"

Starkad's face was streaming blood from the pressure cut in his scalp. He lowered the hand he no longer needed to keep Mael away, trying to smear the runnels of blood from his eyes with the palm. Gwedda was there at once, interposing herself between the men and expertly daubing at the wound with her scarf.

"Let her go," Starkad repeated, "because she earned it." Before Mael could protest, the Dane added, "Look, we were going to let her loose in the morning, anyway, weren't we? We just did it a few hours early, think of it that way. That little hellcat's a real woman after all, by Frigga. I'll be damned if I'll have her carved up for it. After all this is over, I just might come back this way and see if I can't look her up. You know?"

"You damned fool," Mael breathed in wonderment. He shot his half-drawn sword back into its sheath. "And you say you like 'em better filled out than Veleda?"

"Don't stand!" Gwedda ordered sharply as the Dane started to get to his hands and knees.

"I can—" Starkad began, but the old woman cut him off.

"You can ruin your ankle forever, or you can stay off it for a few days now," she snapped. "Here, let me see." The shapeless boot slipped off easily, but Starkad winced at even that slight friction. The ankle was red and angry already, so swollen that the big bones were hidden in puffy flesh. Gwedda probed the injury with her eyes.

"The shield and spear," Mael said slowly. "If we wait to get them for this to heal . . . Veleda said to hurry."

The witch's face paled even in the orange light. "The Veleda? She sent you after—"

"Shut up, woman," the Dane snarled, "or I'll shut you up."

Mael blinked in surprise at his friend, but Gwedda understood the reason for the threat. She said, "I can see there might be need for haste. If a—seeker of ability said to hasten, I would take her word for it, Irishman. I would take her word for anything."

"Look, I'll be ready to leave in the morning," Starkad said.

Mael caught the woman's grimace and demanded harshly, "Ready to go without slowing me down? Ready to hike twenty miles, to climb hills and ford streams without falling on your butt and pulling me down, too?" The Dane made a moue of frustration but said nothing. More gently Mael continued, "I know you're tough, old friend. And I know that even hurt you can do things that most people wouldn't be able to do healthy. But there're limits. You can't fly without wings, and you can't walk without two ankles to support you. Remember, we aren't here for any reasons of our own."

"Help me to the bed," Starkad said dejectedly. The ankle was sending jagged black pains up his whole side. "We'll see how it looks in the morning."

 

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Framed