One Night With The Viking

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Light flashed behind his eyelids and sent shards of pain shattering through his skull. Or it should have been pain, like every other time he’d awakened to pain so sharp that it had sent him hurtling back into unconsciousness. Instead, it was darts of light that roused him enough to open his eyes and it took an extraordinary effort to accomplish that minor task. Almost too much effort, as the need for slumber pulled him under again. But the sensation of falling was enough to make him finally open them. The light that had teased him before had disappeared to a hazy golden crest on the horizon. It was dawn or perhaps dusk and he was floating in the sky, which was absurd.

Gunnar turned his head to the left and then the right and realised that it wasn’t him that was floating, but everything else around him. The horizon wobbled as if the world itself had shifted. A man’s head drifted into his line of vision and then moved out again. Soon, more heads followed, but none that he recognised. These weren’t his men.

The realisation brought with it the awareness that he was on a ship. Only it wasn’t his ship, because these weren’t his men. His gaze travelled over the vessel, trying to identify it, but he was having trouble keeping his gaze steady to look for markings. There was no figurehead on the prow.

‘Where are we going?’ he called to the man nearest him. He hardly recognised his own voice and it was delayed when it came to his ears.

‘Up the coast, Brother.’ Eirik knelt beside him, his face looking solemn and grim in the morning light. It must be morning if they were setting sail.

Gunnar jerked, not expecting to see anyone appear so close before him. Brother. The word rang around in his head and he had trouble holding on to it. ‘Brother,’ he whispered the word as if he’d never heard it before. As it found purchase, he was able to capture it on his tongue. ‘You are my brother.’

‘We haven’t been good brothers, not in a long time. I regret that.’

Gunnar smiled, though he couldn’t understand his compulsion to respond in that way. Perhaps it was because his body was finally numb from the endless pain that had gnawed at him, though he had no memory of what had caused the pain. He felt heavy and weightless all at the same time. He raised his hand and, after an attempt or two, it landed on his brother’s shoulder. ‘Aye, Brother. But there’s not much comfort in regret. What use is it?’ The soft leather of a well-worn tunic met his fingers, not the chainmail of battle. He thought it curious Eirik wouldn’t arm himself properly for battle and he meant to comment on it, but another figure he’d not noticed before materialised at his side. ‘Vidar, little brother. You are a man now. Do you go to this fight with us?’

Vidar glanced at Eirik before shrugging. ‘I go, but Eirik is staying.’

The unfamiliar smile stayed on Gunnar’s face and he couldn’t make it leave no matter how he tried to summon a scowl. He struggled to keep his eyes open as that strange heaviness tried to claim him. His head drooped and he noticed that his legs were covered in furs. Did they think he’d go to battle like a woman, wrapped in blankets and furs? His legs wouldn’t obey his command to kick them off so he yanked at the coverings. And then he stared because one leg was wrapped tight in rags and appeared twice as big as the other. But that didn’t seem possible, so he considered the fact that the appendages weren’t his legs at all but something foreign from his body entirely.

Eirik grabbed his hand, drawing Gunnar’s attention back to him. ‘I thought you’d like this back.’

Gunnar frowned down at the lock of hair Eirik had placed in his palm. He immediately recognised it as Kadlin’s, but wondered how it had become separated from his tunic. A feeling of unease sat heavy in his stomach. ‘How did you get this?’

Eirik was quiet for a moment, drawing Gunnar’s wavering attention back to him. Only then did his brother raise his troubled eyes from the blonde lock. ‘I never knew Kadlin meant so much to you. I should have realised.’

An image of her beauty swam before his eyes, bringing back that bizarre smile he couldn’t seem to shake. ‘She is everything.’

Eirik looked down. Something was troubling him, but Gunnar had no idea why that would be true. He’d gone off to battle numerous times without this concern from his brother. Deep down, he realised that it must be linked to the strange memory of pain, but he couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to formulate a question. Finally, Eirik met his gaze again and said, ‘I want you to live, Brother. Remember that when you awaken.’

Gunnar intended to ask what he meant, but then Eirik pressed a small wooden barrel of mead to his side and draped Gunnar’s arm around it. It was the kind they would strap to their horses when out on a short campaign. He pulled out the cork and pressed it to Gunnar’s lips. Gunnar obliged him and took a long draught, but something didn’t feel right.

‘Drink more if you feel pain.’ Eirik put the cork back in and rested the barrel against Gunnar’s side.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I do this for your interest, Gunnar.’

The ship rocked and he recognised that it meant they were leaving the dock and heading towards the sea. But there was a disturbing hole in his memory and his time with Eirik was fading. The blackness was settling around his vision and threatening to overpower him again. He grabbed Eirik’s cloak and pulled him back. ‘Where are you sending me?’

‘Live, Brother.’ Then he pulled away from Gunnar’s grasp with ridiculous ease and seemed to disappear.

Gunnar tried to sit up, but his head swam and began to ache, so he laid back and allowed the comforting blackness to claim him.

* * *

Gunnar floated the entire trip, his body lightened by the strange sense of weightlessness that followed him. There were times when he realised something was odd, that his limbs weren’t responding as they should, that his thoughts were muddled, but he couldn’t find the strength to care. The allure of sleep was too much to resist. Its relentless pull on him was the only thing that grounded him. That split second before it overcame him was the only moment when he felt as if his body was connected to the world around him; it weighted him down and pressed his back solidly to the wooden platform that had become his world.

Most of the time his dreams were nightmares, clawing at his mind with their vicious memories of the past. As always happened when his mind turned dark, it took him back to that night he’d spent with Kadlin. He remembered how he’d spent hours gazing down at her beautiful face, peaceful in sleep. He’d wanted to remember it for ever, because he’d known the horrible words that would have to be said before he left her. He’d known that he had to push her away, even as it had turned his stomach to mar something so precious.

Then the nightmare shifted to that sunny day as an adolescent when he had finally acknowledged that he was as worthless as his father liked to claim. It was the day he had tried unsuccessfully to strike from his memory; the day that he and Eirik had been attacked. A small group of criminals had found them fishing and had overpowered them, tying them up and taunting them with promises of their dark intentions. Gunnar had managed to escape his bonds and had run until he found a washerwoman who sent her son to get their father, so Gunnar had returned. Except he’d been too young and powerless to do anything except hide and listen to Eirik’s screams as the men tortured and violated him. He’d made himself listen, absorbing every scream as if it had been his own, each one a confirmation of how contemptible he really was. Confirmation that had only been reinforced once his father had arrived and saved Eirik only to sneer at his bastard for not intervening.

At times Eirik’s screams would become the hounds of Helheim hunting him down. At other times, the bays of the hounds would become his father reminding him of his many failures. Or the screams of his father on those nights when he’d imbibe too much mead and seek Gunnar out to rail at his son for making Finna, his mother, leave them. He’d awoken many times with a blackened eye from those encounters. They’d begun to happen so often that he’d run to Kadlin’s home when he knew his father was in one of those moods. So, naturally, when his nightmares conjured up those memories, he would escape the nightmare and find himself in her arms. Only this time they weren’t children.

The dreams were so vivid that he was sure that he was finally with her. He twined his hand in her flaxen hair and felt the silk sliding through his fingers; he felt the softness of her mouth beneath his thumb as he rimmed her lips and pressed inside the moist heat just as he had claimed her body; he sang songs to her that he had never even heard before. It was what he had hoped would happen if he died. If not for his occasional awakenings and nightmares, he would have thought the battle had killed him. Though he couldn’t actually remember the battle, just riding towards it. He’d never admit it, though. What warrior would admit to forgetting an entire battle?

Finally, a new voice woke him enough to make him realise that he wasn’t floating any more. The world had stopped and a real beast bayed in the distance.

‘Freyja!’ a woman’s voice called out. The word crashed through his brain and he struggled to understand it. ‘Freyja!’

When he was finally able to make his eyes open, a mongrel’s giant snout appeared in his line of vision, just before a large, wet tongue stroked his face. He grimaced at the sensation, but then sobered when he saw that Kadlin loomed over him, her hair loose and flowing around her shoulders, the sky a fair blue behind her. She looked angry, vengeful. Not his sweet Kadlin. Then it dawned on him what he should have known all along. He had died in battle. Instead of spending eternity in Valhalla, Freyja had claimed him instead. Eirik had sent him off on his journey to Folkvangr. He laughed with bitterness. It seemed appropriate that the goddess would look just like Kadlin.

Death hadn’t provided a relief to his torment after all.

Chapter Four (#ulink_f1f35041-3305-5f33-9cf1-4a905929baf7)

Gunnar looked as close to death as she’d ever seen anyone look with a beating heart.

‘Get him inside.’ Kadlin forced the words past a throat that threatened to close and stood back out of the way so that Vidar and the two men he’d brought with him could unload Gunnar from the wagon. If not for the distinctive red of his hair and the fact that Vidar accompanied him, she wasn’t entirely sure that she would have known who had been delivered to her door. Gunnar’s cheeks were hollowed and his frame shrunken from that of her memories. His skin had taken on a grey, unnatural pallor that twisted her heart. This was not the powerful warrior she had known.

The men hoisted him and walked past her to the sod house. His strange laugh lingered behind him, making her shiver from the unnaturalness of it. She was no stranger to the smells of men newly arrived from sea, but she covered her nose and mouth as she followed them inside and directed them to place their burden on a large bench in an alcove off of the main room. One of the men pressed a small barrel to Gunnar’s mouth so that he drank, spilling a good bit of it down his neck.

Kadlin stared down at the man she had loved, afraid to touch him, afraid that it would wake her from this bizarre dream where nothing seemed real. One minute she had been hanging the freshly washed linens and the next Vidar was calling to her. He’d ridden ahead of the cart and she’d heard Gunnar’s name, but had been so overwhelmed she hadn’t understood the rush of

Vidar’s words. Even now, with him lying before her, she could barely believe he was there.

His head fell back to the bench and lolled to the side. Whatever animation he’d had, the drink had taken it from him, leaving him unnaturally still. She might have thought he was dead if she hadn’t just met his eyes with her own. His flesh was so drawn and pale that she didn’t know how he had survived the journey across the sea. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he’d only come here to die.

‘What’s happened to him, Vidar?’ As the boy spoke, she imagined what he described. Gunnar, fallen in battle, lying trapped beneath his dead horse while the fight raged around him. His crushed leg crudely bound at camp and his head wound cleaned, but it had taken days to get him back to Eirik’s hall. A fever had raged for even more days and he’d yet to regain consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time.

Yet, he had stirred when the men had lifted him from the wagon and she was sure that he had recognised her. It gave her hope, even though he had now settled into a laboured sleep. His breath came harsh and uneven.

‘What does Eirik think of his leg?’ The right leg of his trousers was intact, but the left had been cut away to allow for wood and bindings to keep his leg stabilised.

Vidar shook his head. ‘The leg is ruined.’

She had spent many late nights cursing Gunnar, but she had never wanted this to happen. Kadlin blinked past the sudden haze of tears in her eyes and focused on the dirty linen binding his leg. The bandage, along with his clothing, had likely not been changed since the men had set off on their journey. His tunic hung from him like rags and his hair was a tangled mess. She decided that the first thing to do would be to get him clean.

‘Go help yourself to broth and ale.’ She looked at the two men who had accompanied Vidar and waved them towards the front room and the pot bubbling on the fire. Turning her attention to Vidar, she said, ‘Help me undress him.’ But Vidar didn’t move when she reached for the hem of Gunnar’s tunic. ‘Lift him up a bit,’ she urged.

‘Kadlin...’ He glanced towards the men who had moved to do as she had bidden, then lowered his voice. ‘I don’t think you should be the one to undress him.’

‘Have I shocked your delicate sensibilities, Vidar?’ She gave him a wry smile and tugged on the tunic. ‘He’s filthy. Someone needs to bathe him.’

‘But—’

‘It’s not as if I’ve never seen a man before. Help me!’

He sighed and when Gunnar groaned at a particularly harsh tug, he relented and lifted his brother’s shoulders to help her divest him of the tunic and undershirt. Fabric was tied tight around his torso, making her suspect he had at least one broken rib.

‘I can do the rest. Fetch me a bucket of the water by the fire and then go and get Harald.’

Eirik owned the farm where she lived and his farmer-tenant Harald lived across the field. He had experienced a similar leg injury as a young man, so she hoped that he would be able to provide some guidance. When Vidar left, she was alone with Gunnar, except for the two men who had accompanied them. But they were famished and drank their broth by the fire, not paying her any attention.

This was not how she’d imagined meeting Gunnar again. Any number of scenarios had crossed her mind and they varied from angrily smashing a tankard over his head to holding him tight and vowing to never let him out of her sight again. Her emotions regarding him had been wild and unrestrained. Much like her love for him had been.

She brushed the grimy hair back from his face with her fingers, noting that it was tangled and would likely need cutting. His beard, too, was caked with grime and would need to be shaved. It was a task she looked forward to, because she’d always preferred him without one. It obscured the sculpted beauty of his high cheekbones, which was the very reason she suspected he liked it. Men weren’t supposed to be beautiful, but he was. A Christian monk had once wintered with her family years ago and told them stories of angels and demons. She had always imagined Eirik to be beautiful like one of that God’s angels, full of light. But not Gunnar. He had always been wicked. He was one of the dark ones, a fallen and wrathful angel.

Fishing the washcloth from the bucket, she rung it out and began wiping the grime from his torso, careful of the bruise over his left side. She tried to work in a perfunctory manner and not linger on the scars he’d acquired since she’d last seen him. But she couldn’t help but stop to wonder how he’d come by each one as she found them. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop the flood of memories that came over her. Their days of running wild through the forest as children and their evenings spent inside playing hnefatafl, when he would tease her mercilessly as he tried to break her concentration while she stared at the board, contemplating her next move. The first time he’d kissed her when they’d been children, when she was just beginning to understand what it meant. How strange and wonderful it had felt to have the weight of his body pressing down on hers, even though she’d not understood her own reaction. The years afterward when he’d become almost like a stranger to her, but she would still watch him and feel her breath catch when his gaze would lock on hers.

He’d held a strange power over her even then and she could feel it now trying to take her over. It wanted to make her soft where she had tried so valiantly to harden herself against him. She was seized by a nearly overwhelming devastation that their lives should have turned out differently. She thought she’d squelched that longing and the anger that accompanied it, but it rose up inside her anew. Tears stung her eyes, but she was able to blink them back and shake the melancholy from her head. Her task was to get him clean before Harald arrived and then to make sure that he wasn’t lying on his deathbed. Then she would see him gone, back across the sea or wherever he longed to be, somewhere away from her, before he could destroy her again.

* * *

A short while later Harald arrived. Kadlin averted her eyes from the crutch the man held and the stilted but efficient way he moved with it. She immediately felt ashamed, because it had never bothered her before, except that now she could only imagine Gunnar walking in that same crippled manner and it filled her heart with sadness. Together with Vidar, they unwrapped the wounded leg to examine it. It was horribly discoloured, but Vidar thought that it looked less swollen than when they had set sail. Harald confirmed that it had been broken in more than one spot, so they were careful to hold the wood in place to minimise any movement, but Gunnar still roused from the pain. Vidar was quick to supply him with the small barrel of mead he’d been clutching in the wagon. She gave it a harsh study, suspecting that it contained something much stronger than mead, but held her tongue.

After Gunnar settled down again, they wrapped his ribs and then the leg in clean linen and she grabbed a knife to cut away the rest of his trousers so she could finish cleaning him. Harald stopped her with a hand to her shoulder.

‘Let me do this part.’

She frowned and shrugged him off.

‘Kadlin, do you think he would want you to bathe him? He’ll have trouble enough when he awakens. Don’t do more to take his dignity away.’

Her eyes froze on the grime-covered trousers and she realised that he was right. It would likely embarrass Gunnar if he knew that she had tended to him so intimately. ‘I’ll wait by the fire.’

He nodded and took the knife from her, so she left him and Vidar to finish washing him and went back to the front room of the sod house. The fire warmed the space comfortably. It was small, but she never failed to experience a wave of satisfaction at how she had managed to turn the house into her home in the year that she’d been there since her husband had been killed in battle. Benches dressed in cosy blankets surrounded the perimeter of the room, while the stone hearth sat in the middle. Off to the side were shelves and a table used for eating and preparing food. It had given her sanctuary when she’d needed it and it appeared that it was to be Gunnar’s sanctuary, as well. Picking up the empty bowls the two men had left behind, she intended to wash them, but she couldn’t concentrate. So she abandoned the bowls to the bucket of water and moved to the bench where she usually did her sewing, lighting upon it briefly before standing again to pace the length of the hearth. Her gaze repeatedly went to the alcove just off the hallway until Harald and Vidar finally emerged.

‘How bad is he really, Harald?’

Harald shrugged. ‘Hard to say. If the fever has passed and doesn’t return, he should live, but he won’t ever have use of that leg again.’ He indicated the large crutch he leaned against. ‘At least not without one of these.’

She couldn’t face that just yet, so she didn’t think about it. ‘How long before he...before he can attempt walking?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s largely up to him. A couple of months, maybe more.’

Months. How would she survive being so close to him for months? Yet her heart wouldn’t let her send him away. ‘Thank you for coming. Stay for a while and have supper.’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve already supped. I’ll come back in the morning to check on him.’ Vidar rose from his seat on a bench to escort Harald home, but the older man waved him back to his seat. ‘I’ve crossed that field many times without you, boy.’ He smiled and made his way out the door, stopping outside to talk with the men who had accompanied Vidar in the wagon. Their voices rumbled through the wooden door, speaking of the battle across the sea with an excitement that baffled her.

‘Has he been awake at all?’ she asked Vidar.

‘Merewyn’s Saxon witch made a potion of laced mead. Eirik gave it to him before they set his leg and he’s been drinking it since. We thought it was best for the pain. It makes him sleep. He’s been awake a few times, but he’s not very lucid.’

‘Don’t give him any more of it. He needs nourishment now more than he needs oblivion.’

‘But, Kadlin, he’s in pain.’

‘No more, Vidar. He’s wasting away.’

Vidar sighed and nodded from his seat on the bench beside her, exhausted. ‘All right. He’s in your care now.’

She frowned at his resigned expression. ‘Why has he been sent to me? Wouldn’t it have been better to let him rest and recover at Eirik’s home?’

‘Perhaps, but Eirik believed that he had no will to survive his injury. I agree. He would have died had he stayed and he still may.’

She crossed her arms and held them tight to her belly, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the pain. Seeing Gunnar again had caused the old wounds to fester and it was taking all she had to keep them from reopening. ‘Why does he think that?’

‘Gunnar has changed.’ Vidar glanced to the alcove where his brother slept, seeming to weigh his words. ‘He fights with recklessness, without thought for his own well-being. Like a madman. It’s true that he was reckless before, but now he’s even more so. It’s clear to anyone who knows him that he fights with a longing for death.’ He paused as if trying to determine how much to reveal. ‘I once saw him walk into a camp of Saxons, alone, and draw his sword. He fought them all with a smile on his face. The men who fight beneath him have tripled in size, because he’s amassed a fortune, or so the stories claim. But he doesn’t use that fortune for anything except to purchase his boat from Father. He hasn’t bought himself a manor so that he can become a jarl. Most men fight bravely to die with valour and glory—Gunnar fights so that he won’t have to live.’

She imagined the danger that Vidar described and couldn’t control the anger and fear that made her hands shake. Had he even once thought of her and considered making a future together? If he’d settled himself in a manor, even across the sea, he could have come for her. Her father would have put up some resistance, but he wouldn’t stop her if Gunnar could prove that he could provide for her. But Gunnar hadn’t done that because he didn’t want her. He’d said as much before and it was even clearer now. ‘Why send him to me? What does Eirik suppose that I can do?’

Vidar shrugged. ‘You are the only one with some connection to him, the only one who can bring him back, according to Eirik.’

‘That makes no sense. If that were true, he would have come back long ago.’ There was a time she might have agreed with Vidar, but Gunnar had proved her wrong.

Vidar shrugged again.

‘Go. Eat your fill and then take your rest. You must be beyond exhaustion.’ She waved him to the pot on the fire.

* * *

‘Where is my mead?’ Gunnar grumbled and felt for the ever-present barrel, but the bedding beside him was empty. ‘Vidar!’ His voice, hoarse from disuse, carried through the hovel where he had been dumped, but no one answered. Opening his eyes to the meagre light that filtered in, he could barely make out the shadowed opening of the alcove where he lay. Uncertain of the distance, he pushed himself up on a shaky elbow and reached out. The opening floated before him, out of reach, but if it were feet or mere inches away he could not fathom.

A sweat breaking out on his brow, he lay back down and closed his eyes to wait for the sudden nausea to subside. Images swam across his mind. If they were from the past days, weeks, or hours, he didn’t know. The faces of Magnus and Eirik came to him and it seemed they were saying something important, but he had no memory of their words. He remembered opening his eyes to Vidar replenishing his mead on several occasions, but the world might as well have been black behind him, because he had not seen past the boy’s face. He did remember Kadlin, another dream in a long line that featured her. Clearly, she was not a goddess because he was not at Freyja’s table. If this was Sessrumnir then the goddess needed lessons on hospitality. A fallen man should not be without his mead.

‘Gunnar? Are you awake?’

He opened his eyes to see that his tiny world had righted itself and stopped floating. Vidar stood framed in the narrow arch of the opening. Nay, he finally admitted, he was not a fallen man. He was sure that a fallen man wouldn’t feel this much pain. His entire body ached from the roots of his hair to the bottom of his feet. His leg throbbed, with the pain seeming to centre around his left knee and shin. ‘Where is the mead? It’s not here.’

Vidar’s face was grim as he set the humble, wooden bowl that he held, with its single candle, on the stool beside Gunnar’s bed. The flame wavered, causing a drop of fat to sizzle where it fell in the bottom of the bowl. Vidar glanced down the passageway, running a hand over the back of his neck before looking back at Gunnar. ‘There’s no more mead. I can bring you ale or fresh water. I’ve just brought it back myself from the stream.’

‘No more mead?’ As long as he could remember there was mead. Every jarl kept a steady supply and it was a practice Eirik had adopted. Even his uncle Einar, who spent months at a time in the countryside waging battle, managed to keep a supply of mead to give out after battles. The men expected it after victory. Of course ale was often given out, as well, but generally to the lesser warriors, the younger ones who had yet to prove themselves.

Gunnar tried to sit up again and noted how his forearms trembled with the effort. How long had he been unconscious? Had he been injured? Aye, his leg throbbed with pain. He searched his memory for what had happened, but his last clear thought was forming the battle plan with Magnus and his men. But it seemed so long ago. Everything else was a fuzzy, disjointed mass of memories that he couldn’t piece together. He looked around the alcove and realised he couldn’t place it. It didn’t seem to belong in Eirik’s home.

There had been a boat. He was sure that he had travelled in a boat.

Then he realised something strange in what his brother had said. ‘Why are you fetching water?’ While Gunnar still thought of his brother as a boy, the truth was he was old enough now to fight in battle and work on a ship. Fetching water was a task relegated to little boys and servants.

Again, Vidar looked away rather than meet his gaze. Alarmed, Gunnar clenched his teeth to control the nearly overwhelming urge to bash an answer out of the boy. ‘What has happened, Vidar? Where have you taken me?’

‘You were injured. Eirik thought it best that you recover here.’

Gunnar looked down at himself to ascertain the truth of his brother’s words. His entire body felt as though he had been pelted with stones, but his head ached the most. Nay, his leg ached the most. He raised a hand to prod a tenderness on his scalp. Pain lanced through him so sharply that he hissed and closed his eyes to the light dancing in his skull. Slowly opening them, he looked down his body to find other injuries. There were scrapes on his hands, but they seemed older—mostly healed, in fact. The pain had gathered itself together and settled in his left leg, blazing through the appendage like fire. He threw off the blanket with disdain and stared.

The leg was at least twice as big as his right one, but if that was its true size or not he couldn’t tell, because it was wrapped in a linen binding. Only when he grabbed the binding to pull it off did he realise that wooden splints had been put in to keep it stable. ‘By the gods, what happened to me?’

‘Your horse was killed in battle. When it fell, your leg was caught beneath. Do you not remember any of it?’