In the grim land of Kolaren, ruled by the fierce warlord
Raynor, the castle crouched over the land like an ancient evil bewitched into
stones and timbers lying ill-fitted and slovenly atop its cliff, defying the
sea to come closer. Looking down from the battlements, below Lady Jayne
of ample curves and generous heart can be seen calling up.
"Come now, quickly! Lord Raynor has summoned you."
"Himself?" Incredible! Lord Raynor paid no more heed to me than to a
field mouse. "Why?"
"And what would you be expecting? That Lord Raynor confide his plans in a
woman?"
I remember, for I have had cause to think often on that day, how I
started to run so fast my legs tingled. The sea wind caught my hair as I raced
along the uneven planking of the rampart walkway and careened at the square
west turret to plunge down the stairwell. With one arm wrapped around my harp
and the other trailing down the stone wall to keep my flight in balance, I
rushed downward like a gust of silly wind.
I remember, too, how my fur boots, which usually carried me about
as noiseless as a prowling cat, slapped on every downward step with a noise as
shrill as a raven. No doubt they were trying to warn me. But
I did not listen. How easily we are struck blind, deaf and dumb by one
flash of self importance!
I should have stopped to ask myself why Einar, the Viking
captive, would be useful to any man in Kolaren, much less to its warlord. But I
didn't. Keeping my cloak well drawn around me, I scampered along the
wooden walk and down the last narrow staircase, my boots slapping away in
protest.
"A feast perhaps?" I asked Lady Jayne. "Are we to have a
feast? Will he warn me again, 'no songs of love?'
"If we have a feast, Lady Nelda will insist on songs of love. More's the
pity."
"What do you mean," I asked, "'more's the
pity'?"
"Nothing at all," she said in a tone reserved for children who cannot
understand adult matters.
But I understood. Our beautiful, gentle Lady Nelda delighted in songs of
love, but she took no delight in her ferocious warlord. It was common knowledge
in the kitchen.
As we crossed the courtyard
stones, Dovan hurled his war axe and hit the target dead center.
Show me the technique, he
had said to me, and
my arm will do the rest. How well his arm did its part! The axe
could not have been better thrown by a Viking. Dovan looked over at me
and could see the approval in my eyes. He smiled.
One might expect that, given the bitter parental pulling and tugging for his
soul, Dovan would grow up a weak and flopping thing. But no, he was every inch
the warrior, taller than most men already with the piercing green eyes of the
Kolaren warlords.
He was driven, not by his father's demands but by his own desire, to learn
every weapon. The Celts favored the javelin. Lord Raynor, it was said, put a
small javelin in Dovan's hand when the boy was but one year old so that the
heft of a javelin might be as familiar to the child and the man as the lift of
his own arm. . . . .
He turned to us as we walked by, his long legs apart, his arms folded,
his green eyes upon us.
"Lady Jayne! Why is Einar with you?" he asked.
"Why the singer, Lady Jayne?"
It was like Dovan to ask a question outright that the rest of
us would let slip into the shadows. It was like Dovan to notice anything out of
place. Any reasonable warrior took notice of a bough freshly bent, or
grass newly trampled, or a sudden rise of birds from the ground. But Dovan's
quick mind like a hunting falcon seized on any act or word that rang false.
Perhaps he also had a firmer grasp on the realities of Kolaren.
The singer is ushered into the room
where at the moment Lord Raynor is receiving those he needs to see.
I stood alone in the great square doorway, clutching my harp with
both hands, dwarfed by the fierce green eyes of Lord Raynor. Those eyes had not
gazed at me directly in the four years since I first arrived in Kolaren, thrown
at his feet as a sorry prize of war.
But he was watching me now.
A fierce-eyed, fleshy man, uncombed and unkempt, he half-crouched in a great
leather council chair wrapped with the fur of the gray wolf. For a moment I
felt chilled, as if no time had passed since, my face swollen and my body weary
from having been captured three times, I had been thrown at his feet and he had
ordered me beheaded.
Lady Nelda had saved me. She glowed amid those grim stones. Her hair floated
like the mist from a golden waterfall around a face as dainty as the Lady of
the Fairy Glen.
"In my brother's castle, warriors fight warriors!" she had cried.
"Is it your custom in Kolaren for warriors to test themselves against
unarmed boys?"
Lady Nelda took the captive to wash and care for, and thus she
discovered what before had not been noticed.
"What is your name, child?" Lady Nelda had asked.
"Bergith," I answered, "named for my mother and all the
first born women of her family."
Lady Nelda had nodded, then handed me a shapeless fur tunic and fur leg wraps.
"This is a hard, cruel castle. They must never know."
And they never did. Not even Dovan.
Lord Raynor's purpose is to
send "Einar" along with four warriors to the castle of the Brit Lord
Elnor to speak of peace. He insists that they speak not only with Elnor but
with Elnor's younger brother, the handsome, popular Dugan so that both agree.
At least, that is the reason he gave, but it is not the true one. Bergith/Einar
does notice that the warriors chosen are an odd choice for a peace parley.
I knew the names of all the best warriors. I had made up songs to sing their
praises. But these four were not among the best. They were among
the oldest.
I wondered if Lord Raynor, often unwise in war, was also unwise in peace.
Surely these four aging warriors were an odd assortment to negotiate with Elnor
the Mad. Even if the Brit warlord knew none of
them, he would see that their fighting days were long past. Perhaps they had
been chosen for their wisdom, even if such wisdom did not leap to the eye like
a stag from the glen. Perhaps beneath their battle-scarred and sagging skins
they possessed hidden abilities to conduct fine-tuned diplomacy.
Alas, they did not. They had been chosen just as I had been chosen by our
wily lord. Alas, like me they felt honored. They believed the words they
heard because the words were spoken by their warlord. They should have known
him better, but they were warriors and did not look inside a man's words for
truth.
At Elnor's castle, better
than Raynor's but not by much, "Einar's" songs are very popular and
many gold coins are tossed the singer's way. The kitchen also welcomes a
singer, and Bergith, who had learned some of the Brit language in her Norsk
village where Brits came to consult with her father, a master shipbuilder,
enjoys a castle kitchen for it is a center for castle gossip.
I certainly heard about Lord Dugan. Everyone in the castle
and its lands loved Elnor's younger brother, the splendid Lord Dugan. Stable
gillie or ranking warrior, servant girl or noble lady, courtier or turnip
farmer, they all sang his praises as if he were a young god come to grace their
lives. He did not, however, come to grace our peace talks.
I was curious to see this most beloved Dugan. I had begun to notice men, and compare them, not as
warriors but as a woman sees men, for face and form and spirit. I had
begun to speculate on them and wonder, were I not "Einar," which one
I might hope would pursue me.
A week passed. Still no Lord Dugan.
I began to spend more time in the castle kitchen where truth is often
found. In between the hymns of praise for Dugan that tripped from every
tongue, I began to hear phrases that told me Lord Elnor truly did not know
where his handsome brother roamed. Apparently Dugan's life was dotted with
undisclosed comings and goings.
I kept this discovery silent. The four old warriors, although they
were kind to me and liked my songs, when it came to the serious matter of this
most important mission, I was as insignificant as the smoothcloth that polished
their shields.
But that was not the only reason I kept silent. My giddy pride had not
completely blotted out my Norsk cunning. Just beyond my grasp lurked suspicion
like a bird fluttering invisible in a bush. Somewhere in my soul where common
sense still resided, I felt a vague fear.
I began to recall whispers from the kitchen in Kolaren. Whispers about a
handsome, well-spoken bowman taking his ease by the kitchen hearth and
vanishing after the banquet room was empty. Rumors of a handsome, unknown druid
cloaked in gray standing alone under the worship tree at twilight, watching
Lady Nelda's chamber windows. Rumors of a handsome peddler with
uncommonly fine fabric to sell who would show his goods only to the Lady of the
castle.
They return from their mission, quite satisfied except for not having
spoken with Lord Dugan, but, as they will discover, there is a reason for
that.
When we returned to Kolaren, Lord Raynor called me to his chambers. . . .
Had I not been so puffed up with the empty vanity that bedevils all
self-important souls, I would have been on my guard at once.
The green eyes from the wolf chair locked on mine. "Singer of Songs, did
you see Elnor's brother, Dugan?"
I was pleased to have an answer. "No, my lord."
A small smile played within the beard of Lord Raynor.
I
have often wondered during a thousand dark nights why I stared so unblinking at
disaster. Never did a face look more cruel than Lord Raynor's when it smiled.
What the "peace
mission" has proven is that the captive in Raynor's dungeon who was caught
on the grounds is indeed Lord Dugan, and he is Nelda's lover. Raynor's
vengeance is swift and gruesome and all must attend and watch. The two
young princes, Dovan and Edrin, were supposedly kept within the castle so as
not to bear witness.
On
the day of Lord Raynor's darkest deed, a still and leaden air wrapped about us.
The deed was to be carried out beyond the castle walls, beneath the single
great oak tree that once served as the druids' worship tree. . . . . As I
raised my head to contain my flood of tears, I saw, high on the square west
turret, silhouetted stiffly against the clouded sky, the tall, straight form of
Dovan. He was looking down on us, as silent as the castle stones. He saw me
looking up, and even at that distance, our eyes locked.
Dovan is never the same from that
day on, and the man who carried out the bloody execution is found dead the next
day with a war axe in his back. Bergith ("Einar") knows that it was
Dovan who threw that axe. Women are banished from the castle as is music,
Bergith as Einar strives only to remain unnoticed, and Raynor plunges the
kingdom into three years of ruinous wars.
Dovan and Edrin in those three years grew to manhood, both tall, both strong.
None could best them with a sword. None could best Dovan with any weapon, and
no one had such a way with horses as Edrin.
"They are so much alike, our two young lords!"
"Like two halves of the same melon!"
"Like
two horns on the head of the same bull."
How wrong they all were! Only blunt-minded men who saw
no deeper into a man than the sinews of his sword arm would think those two
young warlords were alike. Edrin had not seen his mother die.
Edrin's green eyes could sparkle still from out his merry soul and look
on the world blind to fear. Dovan had stood alone on the high square
turret watching her death. He was no longer the youth who had asked me to
teach him to hurl a war axe. Now Dovan looked on the world with eyes of
winter, as cold as the ice moon that lights the star trail to Valhalla.
Dovan's soul walked a lonely path. . . .
. . . .Whether Dovan's
soul burned hot with passion or died beneath the snows was irrelevant. In the
warrior world of Kolaren, Dovan was the perfect heir, destined to be a warrior
of legends.
Kolaren was in desperate need of a legend. The men had wearied of battles
fought to a deadlock. The women had wearied of exile and long weeks without
their men. The countryside had wearied of being ravaged when the enemy was too
strong. Shadows of disloyalty lurked around every captain and his warriors,
every meadowman and craftsman, every bondsman and archer, every lancer and
tenant, every stable gillie and kitchen maid and cleaning wench.
Thus, when Raynor returned home fatally wounded, no one grieved.
As soon as it
known that Raynor is dead,, Kolaren is attacked. A villager arrives with an
arrow through his throat, but Dovan and his men cannot know for sure whether it
was an attack by Elnor to avenge his brother Dugan or an attack by their uncle,
the formidable Celt Lord Cullen to avenge his sister Nelda.
Edrin lay a hand on his brother's arm. His voice dropped, meant
for his brother's ears and heart alone.
"Let the old sins die with the doers."
"An empty dream, Brother. They already ride against us. But who? Elnor or
Cullen?"
"Let's find out, then," said Edrin. "We'll send a courier of
peace. I'll go."
Dovan's eyes narrowed. "You'll be killed."
"I'm not so easy to kill, as you know."
Guffaws, respectfully muted, crackled through the warriors gathered in the
courtyard.
"I'm the one to find out, Dovan," Edrin insisted. "Elnor has no
quarrel with me. Cullen is our uncle."
Dovan shook his head. "You cannot be risked."
He had listened to me once. He would listen twice. "I, my
lord," I said, "I can be risked."
No one had noticed that I had not left. Now they all turned around, surprised to find me still standing
there.
"You're not a warrior," said Sulvin.
Lord Dovan regarded me thoughtfully. "But he is a
singer. Three
years mute. Do you still sing?"
I
smiled. "I still sing, my lord. Every castle welcomes singers. We're a
harmless lot."
Kevin laughed. "He's right."
"I'm not sure I want to lose our one singer," protested Edrin.
"There's little risk," I argued. "I wager I could walk into
Elnor's castle and not one Brit would remember my face."
Robar nodded. "Good point. How many wandering singers do any of us
remember?"
"They will hear your speech," objected Edrin, "and guess you're
from Kolaren."
"No, Lord Edrin. At Cullen's, I'll speak Brit. At Elnor's, I'll
speak Norsk."
"Do you know Norsk?" asked Kevin, surprised.
"I am Norsk," I reminded him.
Kevin laughed, the deceiver deceived. "I'd
forgotten."
"Our Viking spy." Lord Dovan favored me with his wintry smile and
looked around at his captains. "I think he can do it. But where do I send
him first?"
I was still surprised at myself that
I had dared advise Lord Dovan, yet content that perhaps Nelda's sons might not
wage eternal war. Above all, my heart soared that Lord Dovan trusted me to ride
out and return, just as he had trusted me to teach him the war axe and not try
to kill him with it. For the first time since I came to Kolaren, I felt
loyalty, which is to bondage as sunlight is to shadow. Lord Dovan was right to
trust me. I would not betray him.
For the first time, I relished being Einar. Dovan would never have taken advice
from a woman.
So it was that Bergith, as Einar,
began a new kind of life that would lead her as well as Dovan to their separate
destinies.
