Somewhere, past the edge of reality lies a land called...
by Erin Halfelven
Originally posted: 2016-04-15
Somewhere, past the edge of reality lies a land called...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 1 - Los Perdidos
I drove my cruiser north along Interstate 15, heading for Los Perdidos; the silence of the desert night broken only by the hum of the engine and the occasional rattle of the radio. Nothing disturbed the peacefulness of moonlight and tumbleweeds and lines on the pavement, and that’s the way I liked it. Being a Sheriff’s Deputy could be a dangerous, exciting, stressful occupation but most of the time, it was just like this, especially on third shift, far away from the bustle of even small cities like Barstow.
Los Perdidos was barely a dot on the map, but it was one of the communities I was paid to patrol. At 3:05 a.m. I took the exit, the overpass and the short half-mile drive on Cabeza del Mono Road to the “main street” of the tiny town. Los Perdidos consists almost entirely of five avenues running more or less north-south crossed by seven streets running east-west in a sort of lop-sided triangle configuration. A few oddly placed spur roads heading off into the desert had probably led to mines in the old days. The cluster of fast food and cheap gas at the exit showed the only life at this late hour, but even the Jack in the Box had a zombie-like air.
I turned left on Prairie, right on Jasper and drove to the end of town, then right on Mesquite, crossed the main drag and right again on Turquoise back toward the freeway. I kept the speed down below twenty, just showing the colors. A few roads continued out of town toward the old mines that had once given L.P. it’s reason for existing. Other than to sell gas and food to travelers on the way to Las Vegas, I didn’t have a clue as to why anyone would live in such a place now. There’s been talk of putting in a private prison but after the problems with the one in Baker, nothing has come of the idea.
In the middle of town, where the two biggest streets crossed, sat one of those peculiar things you find in small towns: an ornate fountain, complete with the statue of a half-clothed nymph standing in the middle. This being a desert, in a state suffering through a drought, the water had been turned off for more than a decade and like everything else in Los Perdidos, the fountain and nymph were covered with dust and grit. I drove around the little plaza in the middle of the intersection without even looking at it.
*
The night stayed nice and quiet until I passed the convenience store the second time on my way down the road back to the freeway. Two people stood outside near the pumps, one a man wearing a trucking company ball cap and the other a tall woman in heels and a short skirt. They appeared to be arguing.
I touched my gingery mustache instead of frowning. I knew what it looked like, a woman dressed like that in the middle of the night at a truck stop but keeping the peace is my job, so I slowed down and cruised through the parking lot, almost stopping as I went between the pumps.
The woman turned immediately and approached my window. I already had the glass down, and I smiled at her. “Trouble?” I asked. I came to a complete stop.
“Only a little,” she said, bending down to look at me. “Could you give me a ride to the other end of town, officer. I need to get away from this asshole.”
I glanced at the trucker who looked pretty steamed. “Bitch,” he said.
She shrugged and looked her question at me again. She had a pile of messy blond hair and some tired-looking makeup. The dash did say it was 3:28 a.m., no one could expect freshness at that hour.
“Sure,” I said and called it in, “Car 206, offering assistance to citizen, Prairie and Tourmaline, Los Perdidos.” I used a ten code to indicate I was giving someone a ride.
“Copy,” acknowledged Dispatch.
She went around the car, and I unlocked the door for her from my console. Her companion said and did nothing but frown, knowing I had my eye on him.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Buckle up,” I told her, keeping an eye on Mr. Gruntled, the trucker. I could see his rig idling on the edge of the parking lot, a long hauler with a sleeper cab and the name of an Iowa firm on the door. The trailer had one of those detachable container freight boxes sitting on it with a Korean manufacturing company logo.
Once she had her seat belt on, I wheeled out of the lot and headed back toward the tiny downtown area. “Where to?” I asked.
“Sugarloaf and Garnet,” she said, “five up and two over.” She gestured then added, “I could have walked it but he would have followed me.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You don’t want to walk that far in heels, I’m sure, anyway. I’m Deputy Corporal Gus Gallant. I’ll need your name for my log.”
She didn’t answer until we were out of the parking lot and onto Cabeza. “Roger Deloitte,” she said in a different voice than the one she’d been using.
I didn’t comment on the voice. I had suspected as much since I saw her Adam’s apple in profile, but as a deputy, I had met lots of different sorts of people. “Wow, can you write that on my pad? I’ll want to spell it right.” I indicated the notepad on the console.
She scribbled on the pad using the pencil I had chained to it. “He wanted to buy something I wasn’t selling,” she commented.
I nodded, and we left it at that until I got to her corner. “Let me drop you off right at your door,” I said.
“Okay,” she agreed and directed me through the gate into a small mobile home park. In front of Space 14, she got out and thanked me again. “You really are Officer Gallant,” she said, showing a remarkable set of dimples.
I laughed. “Corporal Gallant, it’s worth $35 more a shift,” I said. I’d probably been fast-tracked into a corporal slot because of my military experience: fifteen years ending as a chief warrant officer investigator. Driving a police cruiser was a lot less stressful.
She stared at me a moment longer, and I knew what she was going to say. “Green eyes, you’ve got the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“Contacts,” I lied. People have been talking about my eyes since I first opened them, I suppose. I’m tired of telling them I don’t know if anyone else in my family has the same color because I don’t know anyone else in my family, having been raised in foster homes since before I could talk.
“Wow,” she said, then she turned and went up the short walk to her coach.
I watched while she opened her front door and slipped inside then I drove the loop through the park and got back on the street. Five minutes later, on my last pass through the business district, I glimpsed someone climbing out of a dumpster.
*
I thought what I had seen might have been an animal, perhaps a dog or coyote or one of the big Mexican coatimundi’s that sometimes wandered over from the river. Too big for a raccoon. I hadn’t seen a tail, though, and I really thought it might have been a person, probably a kid.
I went around the block to enter the alley from the other end and stopped the car with the headlights shining between the buildings. I saw the big yellow and white dumpster used for paper and cardboard waste in this county but no one around it. No animal either, nor one near the blue dumpster for regular trash. If there had been someone, they must have gone in a door or out the other end of the alley.
I rolled up the narrow way, looking for evidence that anyone had broken locks or forced any doors while telling Dispatch what I was doing and where. They acknowledged with a curt 10-code, even though those were no longer regulation. At the end of the alley, I looked both ways and turned left the way I had originally been headed.
At the corner, I stopped. The fountain lay due ahead of me, and I saw two figures standing in the middle. One would be the concrete nymph, the second looked about the same size but lighter in color with hair that moved in the wind.
I eased across the intersection and down the short block to Cabeza del Mono where the fountain sat in the middle of the crossing streets, with a miniature roundabout to let traffic go past.
My headlights and four street lamps illuminated a naked girl standing where the water should have been if the fountain had been operational. A girl she was, not a woman, probably somewhere between eleven and fifteen, with a barely developing figure and long blond hair that looked white in the bright lights.
She stared back at me calmly.
I called it in. “Say what?” said Dispatch. It sounded like Bernie Gutierrez, an older cop who had taken the Dispatch job rather than retirement after his knees gave up on him.
I repeated. “There’s a naked girl, young teenager probably, long blond hair, standing in the dry fountain on Cabeza del Mono in Los Perdidos. And I don’t mean the statue that’s normally there, this is a live girl.”
“What’s she doing?” Bernie wanted to know.
“Just staring at me so far. I’m going to get out and try to talk to her.”
“You want someone to wake up Child Services?”
“Yeah, might be good,” I agreed. The girl still stood there, almost as still as another statue except that she lifted a hand to push hair out of her eye when a gust of wind sent a lock of it into her face.
Before getting out of the car, I checked that I had everything I was supposed to carry; 9mm semi-automatic in a closed holster at one hip, taser and baton at the other, etc. I got out and stood up, clipping my radio to the back of my belt and retrieving a large LED flashlight from a door pocket. I even slipped my uniform cap over my thinning red-blond hair.
I tried cheerfulness, smiling at the girl. “Hi,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, so I stepped closer. The rim of the fountain was simply a two-foot-high decorative concrete wall, rounded on top. Anyone could easily step over it and stand where the girl stood on the aqua-tinted tiles of the fountain pool bottom. Dirt, leaves and trash had accumulated there, and the color did not show through at the moment.
I noted that her feet were bare and that she wore absolutely nothing, not even any jewelry. She didn’t seem alarmed or afraid, just looking back at me with mild interest.
I stepped closer again, putting one foot up on the curb around the fountain. “My name is Deputy Gus,” I said. “What’s yours?”
She still seemed interested, so I stepped up on the curb and paused, noticing some yellow chalk marks on the cement, like for a child’s game. She held a hand out to me as if to invite me to step over the wall and join her in the dry pool.
I lifted a leg to do so, careful of my balance. My radio made a burping noise, and she glanced at it. I stepped into the pool as she peered directly into my face and said, “How past grain again sick.”
Which made no sense at all I thought for a moment before darkness came up suddenly and swallowed all thinking.
*
Somewhere, past the edge of dreams lies a land called...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 2 - Perchance...
I woke up with mud in my mouth. Gagging and spitting, I tried to reach my face with my hands, but they seemed tangled up in layers of cloth. I pushed, tugged, rolled and squirmed to free myself and ended up falling into a pool of icy water. Breath knocked out of me by the cold, I struggled even harder.
Desperate, fighting against the weight of cloth and leather, I gasped a lungful of air as soon as I had my face above the surface then I dived back down and tried to swim out from under whatever was holding me back. I didn’t seem to have the strength to simply tear the entanglement away and swim free.
At that point, I discovered that my body itself did not do what I willed it to do. I’ve been a swimmer since before grade school, but such flailing and thrashing I engaged in right then made it seem like a lie. On the edge of panic, I managed to catch another breath of air, only slightly damp.
The thing that saved me was discovering I was not in a pool of water after all—just a snowbank being melted by a drizzle. My knees sank into freezing mud and I was able to straighten up and take as many breaths as I wanted. The air tasted sweet and sharp, flavored with wet earth, pine and a bit of woodsmoke.
I didn’t waste a lot of time being annoyed at myself for thinking I was drowning because now I realized just how cold I was. There are few things colder than melting snow; it seemed to suck the heat right out of my flesh. The sodden cloth I was tangled in seemed now to be the only thing keeping me from dying of the cold.
The remaining snow lay against a hedge of some evergreen shrub, and tall winter-bare trees stood around as I poked my head out of a pile of clothes and gear. The area I could see was all greens and grays and the dark color that is still white that snow has in the rain. The chill drizzle assaulted my exposed face and the wet seemed to go right through to my bones. I shivered and not just from the cold; the whole experience reeked of nightmare.
A moment before —it had been only a moment!— I had stood near a dry fountain in the warm night of June in the Southern California desert. The scene I saw now could not be more different except by being at the bottom of the sea. I could only be dreaming, I decided, but I had never dreamed of freezing to death before.
And it all seemed insistently real, if impossibly strange.
The cold rain, the unfamiliar hedge and trees and the snowbank I mentioned were only the edge of oddness. A newly plowed field began only a few yards away and stretched toward more trees in the distance, dimmed by falling water. Along the edge of the one field, a dirt road separated it from another field where a pair of cows stood hooked up to some metal and wood contraption.
A bearded man in a gray, knee-length robe stood beside the cows staring at me. His lower legs and feet were wrapped in leather tied with strings, and he had a hooded cape-like thing on his head and down his back. His mouth was open, and I realized he was screaming.
When I tried to stand up, his shouting turned more or less to words. “Goat them ready me for a double!” it sounded like. Then he turned and ran away with the cows watching him—as if such behavior from humans were only mildly interesting.
“Wait!” I called out but almost strangled. I not only had mud in my mouth but a wad of hair, too, it felt like. Besides, my voice sounded odd, my hands were still trapped, and I couldn’t reach my face. I struggled again with my entanglement, pulling one arm free to wipe a muddy hand across my mouth, spitting out the hair as I did so.
Then I stared at my hand. It wasn’t my hand. The fingers moved when I willed them to but this was a soft, pale, delicate hand like that of a child. I brought the other one up and stared at it too. Same thing.
The wet, the cold, the psychic dislocation of my predicament overwhelmed any rational thought. I literally gibbered at the sight of my hands. Darkness came up again and swallowed my mind as the melting snowbank swallowed my body.
* * *
I fell into an icy gap between worlds, or, at least, it felt that way. Someone called to me, but it wasn’t a name I recognized. I tried to call for help, but my mouth was full of snow. My teeth hurt, my bones felt as if they had been removed and put back in place by an amateur surgeon. My flesh felt like cold Play-Doh, ready to flake and crumble away from my mis-aligned skeleton.
“I’m dying,” I thought. “No, I’m dreaming I’m dying.” The dream-cold penetrated in a way that ice water and snow could not and I shivered a teeth-rattling dream-shiver. Still, the knowledge that I was dreaming made it possible to bear what seemed to be happening to me. I tried to take control of the dream, looking around for some escape from the cold.
Images assaulted me. A void filled with stars, a sensation of falling beside a vertical landscape of rocks and roots almost close enough to touch. I fell out of the bottom of a cloud and a gap between mountains opened into a meadow surrounded with woods as colorful as a bowl of a child’s cereal, green greens, blue blues, yellow yellows and red reds.
The view melted and I saw a tall blond woman dressed in a red cloak and hood walking in a dark forest. Suddenly, in the way of dreams, she loomed over me.
I heard her voice, but I didn’t know she’d said. It sounded like a blessing, and seeing and hearing her warmed me in some way. A light came from her face, filling me, saving me from the cold. My bones moved back into their proper places and my flesh felt warm and pliable again.
“Who are you?” I tried to ask but the words came out garbled. It sounded like, “Where beast do?” Where beast do what? I wondered.
She smiled. “Dow east gouda. Slape new,” she said. “And wake to another world.” The last part in clear English startled me, especially since she slipped back into authentic dream gibberish at the end. “Micky clapped tea dune,” she said clearly.
Then the channel changed to one filled with dark static and I found my way back to consciousness like finding a path in a night forest.
* * *
I must not have been out long; when I came to, I felt only a little wetter and colder than before. Despite what seemed to have happened to my body, I knew I needed to get somewhere warm and dry, soon. I had very little experience with hypothermia but vaguely remembered Boy Scout sessions about survival in the woods.
And now I knew for sure the difference between waking and dreaming. Whatever was happening, however strange and unbelievable, it was real and I could die from the cold. But instead of being frightened, I had a well of confidence that I hadn’t had before.
I felt stronger, more focussed, and I pushed my way under a bush-like cedar. It seemed warmer there, and I rubbed my arms briskly to help the circulation. Doing so, however, brought it to my attention again that this was not my body.
Not only were my hands small and delicate; my arms were slender. I looked down, again pushing damp hair out of my face. “I’m not dreaming, but I sort of wish I were,” I whispered because even in the dimness under the cedar, I could see small pointy breasts on my chest.
Breasts that reminded me of the ones Jacquie Marston had shown me back when we were both in Middle School. Little cupcake breasts like on some of the child whores I had seen overseas.
I spread my legs apart and looked further down. I didn’t see what I had more than forty years experience in seeing but instead a smooth almost hairless crotch. I put a hand down to explore and found the hidden cleft. The coldness of my fingers made me jump.
I didn’t scream or faint again. “Not dreaming,” I said aloud. It didn’t feel like a dream with snow under my butt and ice water trickling through the bushy twigs of the cedar to drip down my back.
Somewhere, past the edge of nightmare lies a land called...
by Erin Halfelven
Chapter 3 - Under the Cedar Bush
I don’t know how long I sat there, trying to stroke my missing mustache, bemused by the discovery that I seemed to have been turned into a young girl. Eventually, I became aware of sounds and voices. It took a while to penetrate with the mental shock and all, but I’d been trained to hear anger and respond. In fact, I rather appreciated the distraction and turned my attention to the noise and not without a bit of conscious relief. I’d had that mustache for years.
I couldn’t make out words but somewhere not too far away people were shouting at each other. Angry voices went with the other sounds; I heard a metallic banging and thumping. I moved around in my refuge, trying to locate where exactly the sounds were coming from. Doing something, anything, was better than sitting there thinking about what I was sitting on.
The cedar bush did not cooperate completely, the branches all seemed to be turned the wrong way to let me say inside its protection and look out in the direction I wanted to see at the same time. I kept clambering around, this way and that with the occasional icy stream dislodged to run down my neck or the back of my bare legs.
My knee came down on something hard and angular, and I fumbled in the dim light under the tree to see what it might be. My fingers traced a shape that seemed halfway familiar. The meager light coming through the branches showed me the outline of my service weapon, a 9mm Glock 17 automatic, still in its holster and attached to my uniform belt.
“Glory, hallelujah,” I said quietly, then I sat back on my heels and stared. All of the cloth I had been struggling with suddenly resolved itself into the khaki and green uniform I had been wearing when I started to step over the railing into the dry fountain back in Los Perdidos. The gun itself looked enormous; I must be truly tiny now, I realized, to have been so thoroughly trapped in my uniform shirt, kevlar vest, and cotton undershirt.
And here were my dark green pants with black belts and all the equipment I had been wearing attached to them. “Better and better,” I said. I temporarily forgot about trying to see what was going on outside my tree; this was more important. I took the weapon out of its holster and hefted it in my new smaller hands.
As light as a Glock 17 is, I immediately put it back in the holster and started looking for my boots. The damned gun was nearly as long as my new forearm, and my hand did not fit around the grip. I had had a G26 in a boot rig when… when whatever happened had happened. Carrying a boot gun was not regulation in the Sheriff’s Office but prudent peace officers everywhere like to have a spare. The sub-compact G26 9mm was twenty percent lighter than the full-size G17 and would fit my smaller hands better.
That was such an odd thought that it caused me to pause for a moment.
The most surprising thing I supposed was that I wasn’t continuing to freak out. Had the lady in the dream had something to do with that? She had put my bones back where they belonged.
The noise of clanging and banging and what sounded like the scream of someone being impaled on a sharp object brought me back to myself. My new self. The local gang bangers seemed to be having a rumble and I needed that weapon.
I found a boot. Wrong one, the left, but the two spare California magazines in that hideout held ten rounds each in the same 9mm used by either pistol. The right boot was not far away, and now I had both Glocks. Even the little G26 felt monstrous in my hand, but the idea that I could defend myself from whatever sort of murderous mayhem might spill over onto me was wonderfully heartening.
I needed it. Whatever warmth I had acquired from my dream seemed to have been overcome by wet snow. My teeth chattered incessantly, and my frozen hands had trouble holding onto the pistol. I’d dropped the belt holding the bigger G17 in its holster somewhere without noticing. Not my usual care when handling a firearm and losing track of the weapon made me feel like an idiot.
I had the little G26 in both hands, but the spare magazines from my first boot had also disappeared. Not to panic, they were just buried in the snow with lots of my other gear. If you put something down on snow, it is likely to vanish and if you drop it, even more certain. Freaking out would not do me any good at all.
I tried to take a deep breath, but it shuddered when I released it, threatening to turn into a high-pitched girly-sounding scream, no doubt. I smiled, shakily.
A hard shiver almost shook the Glock from my hands and I gripped it tighter. So cold. I needed to do something about that, first.
I wedged the G26 in the bush I had found myself under and dug into the snow, looking for my uniform shirt and maybe the t-shirt I had worn under my bulletproof vest. I wouldn’t be able to wear the vest, too rigid and probably too heavy for me now, but I could roll up the sleeves on the shirt and wear it like a dress. I made a face but… but unless I found a way back to being my own self, I might be wearing dresses for real, soon.
I found the clothing and stripped the white t-shirt out of the vest and pulled it on, after shaking out as much snow as I could. The neck hole almost swallowed my shoulders. “Good God,” I muttered, “I must be tiny!”
I’d forgotten that my uniform shirt was short sleeved, so it ended up fitting about as well as the t-shirt after I pulled it over my head also. My fingers were too frozen to unbutton it and wrap it more tightly around me, but then I didn’t have anything to fasten it in place either. The chest pockets held a notepad and a phone charger…
My phone….
“Fuck,” I whispered. As usual, I had taken my personal phone out of my pocket and had been using it as a music machine, plugged into the civilian-style speakers in the cruiser. So it must still be in the console box, back wherever I had left the Ford Interceptor parked… in Los Perdidos, in the California desert. I looked around wildly for a moment, hoping against hope that I would see the comforting presence of the big white vehicle parked under a tree somewhere.
Another strangled-sounding cry from beyond the bushes snapped me out of my daze.
I continued searching. If I could find my uniform belt again, I would have my police communicator handset which served as radio and had smartphone-like functions, too. Maybe I could call for help….
Maybe not. How far from Los Perdidos was I? Would the communicator work? Would anyone answer? It was a snazzy device, capable of both cellular and radio telephony, but it still needed someone on the other end to talk to. I tried not to imagine how such a conversation might go but before I could put any plan into action, the fight I had been hearing came through the screen of bushes about twenty yards away.
I knelt on my uniform pants and peered through the shrubbery. Four men, fighting with… swords? Well, two of them had swords, and the other two had clubs that looked like armored baseball bats. And the fight was three against one. I scrambled back into the snow under the bush where I had left the G26, hoping not to be noticed.
“Hotyee! Gantow, vey dense!” The tall blond man shouted, swinging his sword in wide arcs to keep the other three off him. He wore an armored coat and had something like a large pot lid in his left hand. He had no helmet, and I saw his face clearly. He couldn’t be much more than a teenager, despite his bulk, with a downy beard and cleanly chiseled features.
The others all had helmets, or maybe armored caps would be a better description. They wore heavy leather coats with metal strips riveted to them, too, like the one the blond wore but less elaborate and not painted in bright colors. The leader seemed to be the huge fellow with the other sword, a bigger man than even the blond defender.
Blondie’s coat was blue with a gold eagle on his chest. It made me think a little of some old comic strip character. The others’ coats were all dark brown with three diagonal white stripes and they looked like henchmen from central casting. They shouted back at him in the same, not-quite-understandable gibberish that sounded as if they might think they were speaking English.
The biggest of the three attackers slashed with his sword, leaving a bloody gash in Blondie’s left arm and knocking the pot lid from his grip. “Nay earn gripe hease chafe!” the larger man screamed, redoubling his attack. Blondie retreated, stabbing with the point of his sword at the faces of the other two, quick as a snake striking, and he nearly got one of them.
They fell back a little, leaving a bit of room around him.
I had the little 9mm in my hands; I don’t know how. I’d been thinking about it but I didn’t remember retrieving it from the branch where I had wedged it in against the trunk of the bush. I braced myself with a two-hand firing range grip and aimed at the biggest man in brown. Before pulling the trigger, I moved my aiming point above the man’s head, intending to give a warning.
The pistol bucked in my hand when I squeezed off my shot, about eight times as much recoil as I expected. I nearly hit myself in the forehead with the barrel.
The noise and the flash cleared the field. When I pulled down to aim again, only one figure remained, and he lay unmoving in the snow. The big man with the sword, the leader of the three…the one I had been aiming at but planning to miss.
I knew I had killed him. In my mind’s eye, I saw the bullet strike him in the ear, and blood and brains blow out the other side of his head, as vivid as old-style Kodachrome. I’d been in the military besides being a cop and death and dying were not things I had never seen.
But I’d never shot and killed anyone before. The smell of the cordite from the barrel of my weapon seared my nose and burned my eyes. I blinked. I sniffed. I felt as if I would begin crying. I tried to take a deep breath but there didn’t seem to be any air under the cedar bush.
Then I fainted.
Somewhere, past the edge of imagination lies a land called...
Chapter 4 - Ay, Caramba!
I heard them talking before I came completely awake.
“Will she be all right?” a man asked.
“She’s just cold,” a woman answered. “I don’t know why she fell over.”
The pronoun didn’t bother me because at first I didn’t realize they meant me. It all seemed so dreamlike.
Then the man snorted. “It might be the thunderbolt she threw at Hustab. He’s dead.”
“Dead?” The female voice seemed taken aback.
“Blew half his face off. Pieces of skull and brains lying beside him. I found her with this Dunnar’s grinder in her hand.”
I started to come awake then. “Dunnars molnir” was what I thought I had heard and somehow I knew that a molnir was a grinder, but my mind also translated it to Thor’s hammer…. I realized that all of what I had been hearing was in that distorted gibberish from before but while half awake, I could understand it.
The memory of my… transformation, the fight in the snow, my shooting of one of the combatants, came back in a rush, and I must have made a noise myself. For a moment, I thought I might be sick. I coughed.
“Heo den varken,” the woman said. “Alenna, varke say.” And I understood that, too. “She’s waking up. Alenna, wake up.” Was my name now Alenna? How did they know that?
I felt soft womanly hands on my cheeks and forehead. I opened my eyes and looked around. The first thing I saw was Blondie, the man with the blue and gold armored jacket. And he had my Glock in his hand, holding it by the barrel as if he intended to pound nails with it.
I couldn’t help it; I laughed at him. How could anyone look at a Glock and not know which way round to hold it? “Give me that Glock before you hurt yourself,” I said, reaching for it. Except it didn’t come out that way. What I heard myself say was “Gay mik glocka den dow ontar dow self mit dayet, ikka.”
“Glocka?” he said, looking at the pistol. “Ne, ne, dit not er en glocka. Enne er en hommar. Ont say den hobed?”
Well, he was right. It wasn’t a bell. A bell? I shook my head violently. “Glocka er han navem. Lilla glocka ger en stark sterya. Unt mika dit haba.”
Now he laughed, though his eyes looked worried. I didn’t blame him; I was worried too. I was carrying on a conversation in this gibberish and I only half understood myself. What I apparently said was, “Glock is its name. It’s a little bell that makes a loud noise. And it’s mine.” Odd that Glock, the name of the gun, seemed to mean bell in this language.
“En stark sterya, ikka. Ig har eldri hard den kalle Dunnar mit en glocka,” he said wonderingly. Likely no one had ever heard of calling Thor with a bell. It wasn’t in any legend I knew of, either.
“Dit verkeda, den dit ikka?” I grumped at him. It worked, didn’t it?
We had both ignored the woman in the room who still had a hand on my shoulder. She was another blonde, perhaps about thirty years old. “Gay dow den ikka, dunkelnarry,” she said to Blondie. When she reached for the gun, I had a sudden vision that she would accidentally put a finger through the guard. A Glock has only a trigger safety; a clumsy ignoramus handling it is the last thing you want.
I sat up, not having realized that I was lying on a bed until that moment. “Ne! Ne!” I shouted. “Gay mika dit!” Give it to me!
Blondie shrugged and handed it over, butt first.
I took the Glock before the woman could, smiling to have it back, but then I made the mistake of glancing down. Tits. I was naked to the waist and maybe lower because my legs and hips were covered with a colorful quilted duvet-thing. “Ay, caramba!” I said.
*
The woman, whose name seemed to be Kilda, helped me get dressed. A little nudity didn’t bother either of them but I wasn’t used to being a girl and being a naked girl in a room with a blond giant was too much. At least he turned his back, grinning, after getting one good look. He had to be nearly a foot taller than Kilda, and she towered over me by several inches.
Being dressed meant a tunic-like white undershirt long enough to reach the floor with a bright blue thing like a mid-calf length vest over it. The undershirt was wool, and the vest was something like cotton but stiffer. She slipped my feet into some of the softest leather boots, dyed red, I had ever worn and hung about half a pound of silver links around my neck. A heavy chain held a thing like a saucer suspended near my waist, pale golden-colored with a tree painted on it in green and brown.
Kilda wore a similar get-up, but her undershirt was tan, and her overvest was gray stitched in red. She had a simple chain around her neck with a small gray medallion hanging from it. The medal had the same tree design etched into it instead of painted on.
She pulled the clothes out of a free-standing closet, called a keldringer, and a stack of trays in a frame that served as a chest of drawers. The only mirror in the room was handheld and went back into the tray after she had shown me what I looked like.
I guess I’d known somehow so it wasn’t so much of a shock. I looked exactly like the girl I’d seen standing in the fake fountain back in Los Perdidos complete with long blond hair. The light in the room, mostly from two small, high windows and the fireplace gave me enough of a that I could see a familiar looking pair of green eyes. My own eyes looked back at me in a stranger’s face.
The big guy —and he was big; taller than the door to the room— was not named Blondie or even Dunkelnarry, like I thought I had heard Kilda call him. Rotgar was his name which, with my new understanding of the language, I realized meant Redfish. Or Redspear. A kind of fish called a spear? En gar, duu gar, Rotgar, blau gar?
Anyway, I started to speak when I realized something else. Dunkelnarry wasn’t anyone’s name; it meant something like dumbfuck. I giggled, looking up at him. The noise embarrassed me and caused me to giggle again. You couldn’t call it anything else, it was a giggle.
He had turned back around after I was dressed and he grinned back at me which made things worse. I kept trying to turn the titters into guffaws but it wasn’t working. He made faces at me, enjoying himself. “Stay gar den dunkelnarry ikka!” I said which only made him laugh. Stop playing the fool. Narry equal fool; dunkel equal… well, little thump; which could also mean… fuck.
I finally had to stuff a hand in my mouth to stop the giggles. And they both acted as if that were the cutest damn thing. Maybe if I could stay annoyed…. Kilda at least seemed a bit afraid of my temper.
Where the hell was I? What had happened? I had so many questions I wanted to ask.
“Var ams ig?” I asked. Where am I? It was English of a sort, like it had a lot of Danish or Norse or German mixed in. I could understand it and speak it which, when I thought about it, was a lot less amazing than having been turned into a teenage girl.
“In your sitting room in the castle,” said Kilda. Well, not sitting room and not castle. I had a sitting room, even if it was a “rom mid arda,” room with a fireplace? And “great house” would be the literal translation of “grotehus” but she meant something very like a castle, and how did I know that?
I looked around. “It’s not so great but grotty isn’t far off,” I muttered in my own version of English. The floor was stone and two of the walls, too. One stone wall had two windows, small and high up, but I could see gray sky with clouds and a patch of blue now and then. The glass in the windows looked lumpy and cloudy, too. The other stone wall had a fireplace. The two remaining walls were wood painted a sort of scrambled-egg-yellow and the furniture was painted wood in brighter colors. Besides the bed, there were two benches, two tables, the thing like a wardrobe with doors and the primitive chest of drawers. The benches and one table were red, the other stuff blue. There were two doors, too, in the wooden walls, both of them painted blue as well.
It wasn’t a large room, maybe twelve feet square, but I had trouble judging the size because I was the smallest person in it. “Ig amst lilla, ikka,” I grumbled. I’m so small.
Rotgar, the goof, nodded, grinned, and held his thumb and index finger up about an inch apart.
I looked away to keep from giggling again. I wanted to be angry with him for teasing me, but it wasn’t working. I kept sneaking looks, he was so big and seemed sure of himself. And looking at him felt dangerous.
“What happened to the clothes I was wearing?” I asked.
“Dey ger geblodt, ikka,” said Kilda.
They were soaked. I could understand that, not just the words, but rolling around in the snow probably did get them thoroughly wet. “Ond vo bist dets?” I asked. But where are they?
I got distracted noticing that the word “they” was said one way at the beginning of a sentence and a different way at the end and I didn’t hear her answer. “Say again?” I said and that sounded almost the same as the phrase in English would. I marveled at how I could use this language effortlessly when in my past life I had never been able to conquer the Spanish future tense.
“I said,” Kilda repeated, “They are hanging on the rack by the fire to dry out.” She pointed, too and I saw them—my uniform shirt and my white undershirt hanging from hinged sticks projecting from the wall near the fireplace. They were even right side up and out.
Rotgar wandered over there and examined the khaki shirt with its patches and badges. I saw his lips moving as he fingered my name tag. “Gal-lant,” he pronounced carefully. ”Why is the writing on this thing in Reymish?” he asked, turning to look at me.
I had no answer for him because I had no idea what the hell Reymish was. He didn’t notice my non-response because he had gotten interested in the buttoned pocket itself. Had people here never seen buttons before?
“Ach!” he said. “This is a very clever knotting, the cloth is folded and sewn to make a small pouch and it is held closed by this little knob thrust through the eye.” He laughed, evidently pleased with himself for having figured it out.
I couldn’t resist rolling my eyes when he looked in my direction and that made him laugh again and… that made me giggle again. Damn.
Somewhere, past the edge of fantasy lies a land called...
Chapter 5 - Duke Awful
I sat on the cloth-covered bench while Kilda fussed with my hair. I had an astonishing amount of it, a pale waterfall with almost gingery streaks down to where I could have sat on it. Kilda worked with a long toothed comb and her fingers, getting snarls out and jerking my head this way and that now and then. It felt soothing somehow. So did the little Glock I had insisted on keeping in one hand.
Rotgar had lost interest in my old uniform shirt. Leaving it on the hangar, he sat on the bigger painted bench, or rather, sort of lounged on it, like a lion playing at being a housecat. He’d left the phone charger in the pocket after examining it and now had the little notebook, apparently marveling at the thinness of the pages and the precision of the blue lines.
“More Reymish writing with a few runes,” he commented. “Some of these marks I’ve never seen before.” He couldn’t seem to make anything of my cryptic notations, and I didn’t try to enlighten him. Mostly it was street addresses and names carefully spelled out to put in the Neverending Story that is police paperwork. Not only useless, once the papers had been filed, but also I can’t imagine anything more boring. But then, it was the paper itself that fascinated him.
He showed me a page with no writing on it. “So white!” he said. “And the lines are so straight.”
“Uh-huh,” I said since Kilda pulling on my hair kept me from nodding.
I noticed that he had dressed the cut on his arm and another on his cheek with a sort of salve. Bear grease or something, it seemed likely. He had eyes as blue as summer skies in a long, ruddy face that made him seem very German. His blond mustache and beard had gingery highlights, brighter than the ones in my hair, but they kept him from looking like the actor who played Legolas in Lord of the Rings. Viggo Mortensen? Maybe more like a younger Chris Hemsworth, the guy who plays Thor.
Or as they seem to call him around here, Dunnar. The Thunderer. I looked down at the Glock, which I still held in my hands. I shivered, even though I wasn’t really cold anymore. The fire popped and crackled a bit and made the gray light from the small windows seem warmer and friendlier.
Rotgar noticed me watching him and I may have blushed. He looked at me, folded the notebook up and put it down on the table. Neither of us said anything for a long silent moment. He smiled at me, and I suppose I smiled back.
I started to ask him who he was, exactly, but he spoke first.
“Three dead men,” he said. His expression turned serious. “They sent five. I killed two, and you killed Hustab with your lightning from a bell.” The Glock.
I felt a little sick. I had shot the man without knowing what the quarrel was about. I had intended to miss, shooting over his head but at the last moment before pulling the trigger, I had moved my aim down. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
“The other two scampered off, so there’s no one to ask,” Rotgar said. “They must have meant to steal you.”
I had been about to blink at the image of ‘skamperen’ when his next sentence penetrated. “Steal me?”
He nodded. “Like a worthy cow, but not for the milk,” he said.
I glared at him because he glanced at my chest when he said that.
“He’s right, child,” said Kilda. “They will do anything to stay the bedding.”
Wait. Kilda, her name, and child are the same word? And, oh! Bedding? It was the same word as wedding. Wedding? “What wedding?” I asked. This language was going to drive me crazy.
“Your wedding, in sooth. It must happen before the Velkmote choose the Olkong, also.” Before the… the… Congress?… chooses the All King?
“What? Who? When?” I stammered.
“In three days, to Yuvil of Esvelk. Your bedding, that is. The Velkmote will be in the Haymoon, most like.” She reached around to turn me to face her and stared into my eyes. I had the feeling she meant to communicate something to me but I didn’t get it.
“Who’s she, I mean, he? Orville whosis?” I asked.
“Yuvil is Ondakong of Esvelk,” said Rotgar. “It will keep his vote with the Narthings, also.” Politics? Ondakong was something like a prince or duke, or maybe a general.
I felt sick at my stomach. I glanced at the Glock, lying beside me now on the bench. Married? Maybe I could shoot my way out of the wedding. I grasped at a straw. “I’m just a kid! I’m too young to marry.”
They smiled at me, possibly at my referring to myself as a baby goat, maybe that wasn’t a common idiom in this language.
“You turned fourteen three weeks ago, child,” said Kilda. “Old enough.” She patted my wrist. “Don’t be afraid, Alenna. Yuvil is a handsome young man, and your father chose him for you.” But she frowned at me where Rotgar couldn’t see and shook her head. That confused me.
How could I have enough history here in this shape that people knew me and had plans for me? Also, I had a father here? What was he like? The kind of guy who would peddle his teenage daughter’s ass to a neighbor for political advantage? Great! Fourteen? Fourteen!
And where was Alenna now? Back in Los Perdidos looking like Deputy Corporal Gus Gallant? But without a uniform because mine had come here with me even though it no longer fit!
I must have been making faces while I thought because Rotgar asked, “Are you well?” .
I shook my head. “I…” I looked at the Glock again. “What happened to my other stuff?” I asked. Unfortunately in English, so he just stared at me. “Vad gedit den mik odur effen onda buske?” I said.
“Vad odur effen?” he asked, helpfully.
I waved vaguely, distracted by the fact that ‘effen’ meant stuff or unnamed things. Where was my effin’ stuff? “Clothes, boots, leather, another hammer-bell….” I trailed off, what would happen if someone like Hustab got hold of the other Glock? “Uh…. Can you go get anything that’s there—under the cedar tree—for me? It’s kind of important.” Important equals muckelfack. I suppressed a nervous giggle.
He seemed to take my expression for extreme distress and while grumbling about it, he headed out the door, pulling on his armored hat and some gloves on the way. The cold came in as he left, even though from what I could see, that was a hallway outside the room.
“I thought he would never leave,” said Kilda. “But you have him wrapped around your ear-finger.”
I looked at her in surprise. She meant little finger and the image of someone sticking their little finger in their ear and twisting it back and forth to make squeaking noises came from some old slapstick comedy. It made me smile then I thought about what she had said and stopped smiling. Wrapping Rotgar around my finger was a completely different image and implied something I didn’t want to think about.
I’m fourteen, I reminded myself, still not smiling.
“Ikka,” she said, also not smiling.
Now I didn’t know what she meant; ikka was sort of an all-purpose word. Literally, it meant “to add”, but could mean “so”, or “also”, or “even”, or “sure”, or “else”, or “another.” Just an instant translation didn’t always help me know what people had in mind.
“So you are my lady’s doppelganger?” she went on. “You must be, with the klabbernosh you spout betimes.”
Well, I hadn’t expected anything like that! Distracted again because doppelganger was the same word as in English and klabbernosh sounded like buttermilk drunk as a snack. And the word that meant lady sounded like queen but didn’t mean queen which was another word, entirely. I pushed it all away and tried to think. My mind buzzed with so much strangeness that I had a hard time focusing.
A thought penetrated. Kilda expected me to not be who I looked like. Foreknowledge implied planning. In cop-speak, premeditation.
Suddenly angry that someone might be responsible for my predicament, I snarled at her, “What in Hela’s name do you know about it?” I’d meant to say “what the hell” but here, apparently, Hell was a person, not a place.
She surprised me again by cringing. The woman was several inches taller than me, at least thirty pounds heavier, and ten or more years older than I seemed to be but she looked afraid. It wasn’t pretty; no grown woman should act like a whipped dog at an angry word.
I took advantage, realizing that I must have status over her. After all, I seemed to be scheduled to marry an ondakong, which was sort of a prince or duke, maybe. I stood up and stepped forward, trying to look menacing. “Woman,” I said, in the deepest voice I could manage. “You will tell me all that you know.” It came out a lot daintier than I intended, like a kitten growling. But it worked.
“Wikkening,” she said, almost falling to the floor in an awkward bow. Wisdom? Witchcraft! “That’s all I know. Alenna wanted to avoid this wedding, so she used the power of the Norns to escape and leave someone else in her place.”
“Norns,” I said, sounding stupid even to myself. I knew what Norns were without the meaning supplied by whatever made the language understandable. Norns were the Viking equivalent of the Fates. I think I remembered that from reading Thor comics when I was a kid. Vikings?
Kilda nodded vigorously. “Alenna was fledged in the wyrd of the Norns by her mother. “She… she had a bend for working spells.”
“A knack?” I asked.
She nodded again. “It came to her in dreams, sometimes waking dreams. She would dream and then she would know how to work the spells.”
I made a leap into the illogic of the situation, and a little physical leap at the same time, a nervous jump. “And she used spells to bring me here to take her place… And a spell to make me look and sound like her?” I paced the width of the room, angry but full of despair, too. Still, it was better than the confusion I had been feeling.
“I reckon it must be so,” she said, sounding fearful. Vikings reckoned?
I sat back down. “She… This is not my world, not my time,” I said. “She has stolen from me my place and even my body.”
Kilda said nothing, holding her breath as if waiting for an explosion.
I glared at her. “I was a man. A warrior. A keeper of the peace in the middle of my…my years.” I looked down at myself, small, slender, female. “And now I am this? A girl-child?”
“Baldur’s death, you were a man?” she exclaimed and almost fainted. “Wicked, wicked child,” she muttered after catching herself staggering into the furniture. Since her name was the same word as child, I didn’t know if she meant herself or the original Alenna but I assumed the latter.
“We’ve got to find a way to undo the spell,” I said. “Send me back where I belong.”
She shook her head. “There is no way; you don’t have the wikkening to do it.”
“You helped her?” I asked.
“She was my kvinna; I had to.”
“Am I your kvinna now?” She nodded, looking confused. “And I have this,” I held the Glock so she could see it. Her eyes got wide.
“I have wisdom of my own, too,” I said, not sure just what I meant by that. “We have to find a way.”
“But the wedding is in only three days, heart,” she said. “There’s no time. It took her most of a month to work her spell. And at the end, three days and two nights without sleep.”
“What if I refuse to marry this Duke Awful?” I said.
“Yuvil,” she corrected me. Her eyes got wider, “You think you have a choice? In sooth, you’ve been pledged to him for six years; this is just the bedding night.”
I did not like the way that sounded.
Somewhere, past the edge of hope lies a land called...
Chapter 6 - Push-Pull
Rotgar chose that moment to open the door, startling both of us so much we ran to the far wall and stared at him. Again his size impressed me, he was almost a giant and had to duck to come into the room. He banged the knob-like round part of his helmet on the doorframe and mildly said, “Skaita.”
He didn’t notice us, his arms were full of my “effen” stuff and his face was turned away to deal with the door. “Dets keldings bint stark agley,” he said.
Oh. The clothes were either very odd or very scattered. Probably odd, I suppose they must be to him.
“And whose are they?” he asked after he turned around. “You said they were yours, but they never could fit you any better than those wrappings I found you in.” He but his bundle down on the lower of the tables and stared at us. “Why are you both hiding behind the push-pull?”
He meant the thing like a chest of drawers and we weren’t exactly hiding behind it, but we were holding each other there in the angle it made with the wall.
I shook myself free of Kilda’s grasp and stepped toward him. “The clothes belonged to Hustab the Bold….” Then I trailed off, I had accidentally translated my own name, August Gallant, into whatever it was we were speaking and it turned my first name into the same name as that of the man I had killed. I had to swallow some sort of lump in my throat.
Rotgar frowned. “Are you sure? I’ve never seen clothes like this. And whoever wore them must have been an Easterling; these are trousers.” He held up my uniform pants. “And not like any I ever saw when visiting my father’s folk in Proits.”
I realized that Proits must be a place and not something else to wear. “I don’t…. He didn’t…. I’m not…,” I said, being nothing if not informative.
“You didn’t mean Hustab the Landsman, did you? I never heard him nicknamed the Bold, though he was if he had a couple of bullnecks with him.” He took off his helmet and ran a hand through his blond hair, grinning at me. “You set his bottom down, though, didn’t you?”
I shook my head. “Not the same Hustab….” I didn’t finish because I forgot what I meant to say. Rotgar reminding me that I had killed Hustab the Landsman sort of derailed me. The scene flashed in front of me again, the snow, the green trees, the boom of the Glock, the bullet striking Hustab and his blood spraying from the wound as I pulled my hand down. I felt sick but I didn’t faint. I swallowed again, recognizing it this time as the urge to puke.
Kilda wrapped her arms around me. “There, child, there. The Glockenmolnir is a fiendish mill, you mustn’t touch it again. But Hustab and his men would have stolen you and maybe married you to someone of their parting, so you did right to slay him.” She squeezed my hand in hers, massaging it. Oddly, this seemed to help with the nausea.
“Is the killing of that skaitakin what’s vexing her?” asked Rotgar.
“She’s a young girl, not a warrior!” said Kilda. “Killing men is not her work!”
“Och, aye,” said Rotgar, a little taken aback at Kilda’s fierceness.
For my part, I was coming out of my funk, and Rotgar seemed so Scottish suddenly that I swallowed a snork that I’m sure sounded like a sob. He made a calming gesture with a hand and stepped back a bit but cut his eyes toward me when Kilda wasn’t looking at him.
“Therr, lilla enkin, therr. Det bist godoll,” Kilda murmured to me, half in babytalk.
It didn’t help with my tendency to giggle. Then the big goof made faces at me over Kilda’s head and I almost strangled trying not to laugh out loud. He raised one eyebrow and winked with the other eye while smiling with one side of his face and frowning with the other. I choked on my laughter, making gagging noises. It didn’t feel like amusement, though; more like near hysteria.
Kilda descended into incomprehensible murmurs while she patted my back.
The door opened again, startling all of us this time. A skinny bald guy in a slightly motheaten fur robe stuck his head in. “Orley wants to see Alenna,” he said. And noticing Rotgar, he added, “Oh, you too, Fishbreath.” Then he pulled his head back out and closed the door.
That did it. I realized that “Fishbreath” was a kind of pun on Blondie’s real name since “rot” meaning red was also “rot” meaning putrid. And one word for breath, “brode,” was also the word for stink. So, “fiskathm” was a play on words.
Rotgar grinned at me and made fish faces, but Kilda mistook my gasping for grief and scolded him, “Don’t you frighten her, you squarehead! Get your flat butt up to the Orley and tell him she’ll be along, bald-like.”
Wait. “Baldlaik” means “soon.” Okay, so she isn’t going to shave my head, but the image did not help with my giggles.
Rotgar left the room quickly, and I wiped tears from my eyes while Kilda fussed at me.
“Who’s Orley?” I asked while she straightened my vest and tucked wisps of hair behind my ears.
“Baldur’s Light! You don’t know?” Her eyes got wide, almost as if frightened. They were a paler, weaker blue than Rotgar’s, I noticed.
“I’m the doppelganger, remember?” I pushed her hands away from me, they had begun to tremble.
Kilda took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. “The Orley is your father, Adelvalt of Moleen. You call him Tahtie. He’s spoiled you rotten because you look just like your mother did when he married her. She was the daughter of the Suderkong of Medley, and after she bore you, her father summoned her back and married her off to one of the Reymish lords, the Deuce of Shanghai, and no one will ever see her again!”
I blinked. “You want me to keep trying to be Alenna?” Deuce of Shanghai? I couldn’t have heard that right.
She nodded so hard, her chin may have bruised her chest. “You must know, child! If they find out you are a doppelganger, well, such folk are put to the Trial of Wedna, for weal or woe.”
Wedna? The guy the middle of the week is named for? Good old Wedna. Who was that? Odin? “That doesn’t sound good.”
She nodded again while slipping some thick bracelets over my wrists. “They hang you in a tall tree from one foot by a rope made of horsemeat!”
“You are shitting me!” I yelped in English.
“Nane of yer bladderskite!” she yelled back. “The birds come to eat the horsemeat and few live after falling from the tree! Gaynow, beast tilla!”
I was so shocked that her last few words didn’t translate. That ‘Trial’ sounded just barbaric enough to be real for people who lived in stone houses and fought with clubs and swords.
“We don’t want anyone else to find these things,” she said, gathering up some of the stuff Rotgar had just fetched from under the cedar bush. “Help me push all of it into the keldringer.” Meaning the standalone closet/armoire thing.
“It’s all wet,” I said, gathering a smaller armful. Pants, boots, belts…. Where was the bigger Glock? For that matter, where was the small one I had had in my hand a moment ago?
“I put both hammerbells into the longshoes,” she said, “and anything else I didn’t know what it was. Get those two sarks off the rack by the fire; they go in here, ikka.”
I wanted to take at least one pistol with me, but this gown and vest had no pockets. I couldn’t very well open carry in a medieval castle. I resolved to get back here soonest and have Kilda sew some pouches into my clothes. My own sewing was of the putting a button back on variety, learned in the Army.
She suddenly grabbed me, one hand on each side of my face. “Heart,” she said. “Both our lives hang from your cleverness in fooling the Orley into thinking you are his daughter.”
“Call him Tahtie,” I said. “Do I sit on his lap?”
“You haven’t done that since you started bleeding, but if he offers, take the chance.”
Started bleeding? Oh, shit.
She had more advice, which she gave while holding me close, but I wasn’t sure I was listening. Bleeding. Menstruating? Would I do that, when the time came? Could I get pregnant? I’m supposed to be getting married at fourteen, and they liked to get an early start on families in the Middle Ages.
“Uh,” I said, something else had occurred to me. “What year is it?” I asked.
“What year is it?” she sputtered. “What does it matter?”
“I dunno,” I said. “But I want to know what year it is…. Please.”
“It is six years and four score since Henrik the Wet conquered Yorvik, becoming the first and last Olkong of the Bloddings. Now are you any more clever or foolish than you were?”
Four score and six? Why did that sound almost familiar?
But…. Odin. Hela. Baldur. Thor. They weren’t Christians here. What the heck calendar would they use that I would recognize?
Rotgar had recognized the lettering on my badge. “Uh, what year do they think it is in Rome?” Rome? What had he called the lettering? Reymish? ”In Reyma, what year is it in Reyma?”
“How by Hela’s Lice would I know?” she said, exasperated. “Now, heart, you must stop your foolishness and fear and be brave. Your father isn’t going to hurt you but he probably heard about the try at stealing you and wants to be sure you are all right.”
She had me one hand on each cheek again. “Och, aye,” I said, though I had meant to say, ‘okay.’ I had another question. “Why do you call me ‘heart’ when we are alone?”
“And aren’t you my heart?” she said. She kissed me on the forehead. “You are like my own chick for I have been your nana for eleven years since your mother was sent away.”
“Alenna’s nana,” I said in a small voice.
I saw tears in her eyes as she nodded. “And you are all I have left of her, heart. I must keep you safe.”
“What….” I swallowed hard. “What did Alenna call you? What do I call you?”
“Nontie,” she whispered.
Aunt it meant.
“Nontie,” I repeated and I kissed her on the forehead, too. For a kid who grew up in foster homes, having someone claim you as family meant a lot.
Somewhere, past the edge of fantasy lies a land called...
Chapter 7 - A Frozen Carp?
We held each other for awhile then I pushed her away and looked her in the face. I had to look up to do that; she was several inches taller than me, and that was disconcerting, but I needed information. “There’s so much I need to know, Nontie,” I said, frustrated that I couldn’t even think of where to start.
“We have only a little time but you are known to be slow to come when called, so we can talk until your father sends someone else to fetch us,” she said.
“Good,” I said. I am a teenager; of course, I don’t come immediately. Worse, I’m a teenage girl, so being late is practically required.
I tried to get back to the information I wanted. “First off, I guess, where are we?”
“We’re in your father’s great house, Adelmolinhus. We are near his town of Molsby, in his lands called Moleen.” Mol was the local word for mill, but really meant any kind of machinery. So the building was The Noble House of Mills, the town was Milltown, and the area was the Place of Mills.
“And, uh, where is that in the world?” I asked.
She blinked. “On Blodsey, the island the Reymish call Ilbian and some of the older people just call Bian.” Blodsey meant Wet Island. Well, dur; most islands are wet because they are surrounded by water!
Ilbian? That translated, too, but with a different flavor: White Island. Albion? “Is it sometimes also called Britain?” I asked. “Or maybe England?”
She snorted, “The wild Kimbru to the west do call it ‘Burton’, or the like. And the Anglings call their eastern lands beyond Esvulk ‘Angland.’ I think.”
Okay. So I am in the time of the Viking invasions of Britain. When was that? How would knowing that help me? Am I in the past? Or is it a whole different world?
I would say it’s a different world because apparently magic works here, but then apparently magic worked in my world too or how did I get here?
My head hurt with the effort of trying to think and worry at the same time.
* * *
We talked more, but Kilda didn’t know much about the wider world. Reyma was a distant land beyond the sea to her, about as real as Neverland, and filled with people who had no idea how to talk. Kimbru was to the west and was also known as Vails, so it was probably Wales. She had no idea of distances, either. The edge of Kimbru was about a week’s walk away was her best estimate. Maybe two weeks.
Even farther away to the north were legendary people called Scotti and Niffelings and Dennorsk. The land of Rotgar’s father, Proits, was somewhere beyond the North Sea, far to the east and near to the lands of the Easterlings, people who wore pants, mined silver and breathed fire.
I gave up asking about foreign lands after that piece of information. But what did I know? After all, I could throw lightning or so it appeared to the locals.
“How many people live here?” I asked, changing the subject to something she might know more about.
“Two hundred or so,” she shrugged. “If you mean in the great house itself. A few thousand in the town and more in the villages and hamlets around.”
I considered that. “How many people will think I should know them?”
“Probably all of them who live in the castle, but Alenna did not speak to that many of them.”
Of course not. I’m the daughter of the local bigwig and probably more than a bit snooty about it. I rubbed my face. “Do I have brothers and sisters?”
“Yes. Your eldest brother is Adelard, he is Byarn of Molsby and will inherit from your father. His wife is Guuni and he has three sons, Valterin, Ardurin and Vulfin.” She went on a bit more, but I had stopped listening for a moment at the thought of having a sister-in-law named Gooney. Okay, it wasn’t pronounced quite the same, but that was what it sounded like.
“Your second eldest brother is Valto, his wife was stolen by Vikings, but your father has forbidden him to hunt them down.”
“Wait!” I said. “Aren’t we Vikings, too?”
She snorted, surprised. “Does this look like a dragonship?” she asked gesturing around the room. “We’re Bloddings, from the men who followed Henrik Blodde.” Henrik Blodde? Henry the Wet?
“Why was he called that?” I asked, feeling a bit weak.
She suddenly dimpled. “The leid has it that he fell off the boat that brought him from Geatasland to Yorvik five times. It’s a funny tale, do you want to hear it? Each time he came up with a different kind of fish in his mouth.” She laughed.
“Not right now,” I said. This Henry Overboard (another possible meaning of “den Blodde”) conquered Britain and died almost ninety years ago. Some joke. Vaguely I realized that Viking just meant someone who crossed deep water in a boat. It had nothing to do with wearing cow parts on your helmet.
Kilda went back to telling me about my “new” family.
It seemed I had four brothers and five sisters, most of them older than me and married with children of their own. Kilda mentioned that Adelard was the only one with a claim to lands, the way I understood it. Byarn meant baron, or something like, and Orley was earl, my father’s title.
I asked if Rotgar had a title and she said, “Yes, but it doesn’t mean much. He has no lands with it but he is the Haltayn of Over-under.”
I knew I had misheard that so I had her repeat it. Oberumber. Almost just as funny.
“What is a haltayn?” I asked. She told me and as near as I could figure out, a tayn is the same as an orley, it’s just what they call them in the north and a haltayn is someone who would be tayn but somebody else got the job first. Sort of.
“The man who would be tayn,” I mused.
We had been talking for about ten minutes when we realized that no one had come back for us.
“They must be busy,” I said.
“The Orley will send someone for us again, shortly, but maybe we should go now to help keep him sweet.”
“Och, aye,” I said, again translating my automatic okay.
Kilda fetched furry robes from the keldringer and we put them on over our other clothes. “It will be cold in the halls and in the Muckelgehrtrom.” Big courtroom? I blinked, then shrugged.
The fur seemed like an astonishing luxury, soft and smelling of some fragrant oil rubbed into the hide. I couldn’t tell what kind of animal they came from but mine was a golden-gray with faint spots and streaks and Kilda’s had a more mottled appearance, tan and brown and off-white, as if it were pieced together from smaller pelts.
I snuggled into the warmth and rubbed the collar against my cheek. It somehow felt cat-like and I wondered if they had lynxes here. We left the furs open because it wasn’t terribly cold inside but leather ties could be used to close them against outside weather. Perhaps a bit decadent to be wearing such an extravagance and even my serving woman had one, but if you’re going to be stuck in a medieval winter, it’s good to be rich enough to wear fur.
We stepped out into a narrow, poorly lit hallway that smelled of smoke, unwashed dogs, armpits and possibly genitals and other nether parts. So much for luxury. There were weeds on the floor and flames burning in bowls that were kind of built into the walls which were decorated with paintings.
I’d never seen anything like them! People in medieval-looking clothes marched and fought and plowed fields and built walls of brick and stone and ground grain and carried water and baked bread. Kilda had hold of my arm and kept us moving or I would have stopped to gawk at everything.
The paintings were mostly all on the inner wall because the windows were on the other side, high in the walls and narrow, with a sort of built-in step directly below them. Not that the corridor was that tall; though my own reduced height made that hard to judge. Seven feet or a bit over? Where in my world, you would think a hallway in a big building would be eight or ten feet high.
We turned a corner and the same bald man in the ratty robe came out of a doorway ahead of us. “Good,” he said. “You’re coming.” And with that, he popped back through the opening like a woodchuck seeing his shadow.
A moment later, Rotgar came through the same doorway, smiling. I smiled back and felt lighter somehow, the gloomy hall seeming brighter because of his blond hair and blue eyes.
Whoa. What?
“I’ve been named by Adelvalt to be your bodyguard, kvinnakin,” he said. “So I shall begin my task now.” He glared around the area as if looking for Dishonest John lurking in the shadows.
“You are such a fool,” I said, shaking my head but I couldn’t stop grinning at him.
“Sooth,” he said, “but a foolish guard is better than a frozen carp.”
“What wouldn’t be?”
“Stop it, you two,” said Kilda.
Rotgar looked at her with such blue-eyed innocence that I blushed as if caught in doing something wrong myself. What the heck had we been doing?
“We have to see Orley,” said Kilda.
Rotgar stepped out of the way and waved us by. He winked at me as we passed, again with the eye Kilda couldn’t see.
Down another short hall and the space opened up into a large room with a higher ceiling, though the upper reaches were smoky from oil lamps and cooking fires. On a sort of platform at one end stood a table and in front of the that were three more long tables in a horseshoe arrangement, open end toward the raised area.
At the high table, an older man sat on the one real chair I had seen here, everything else could be called benches or stools. The man wore a fur robe, shaggier than mine and almost black in color. Bear? Wolf?
There were other men in the room, but the one man seated at the high table drew the eye. All the men had beards, some scraggly like that of the balding messenger and some downy like Rotgar’s but many had full beards, some of which reached nearly waist-length. Most of the beards were trimmed with ribbons and beads near the fringes.
The Orley, for so I assumed the man must be, had a graying beard shot through with gold and red. His trimmings were blue ribbons that matched his eyes plus little white and green beads. He had a tattoo above his right eye; it looked like a bird of some sort.
The expressions he and the other men traded were gruff and stern and reminded me of businessmen in an important meeting but when he saw me at the door, he smiled showing slightly yellowed teeth and a gap or two. The left side of his face had scars, too. He stood, as tall as Rotgar and bulkier, even without counting the fur.
“Alenna,” he called to me. “Come.” He stood and made finger motions that I should climb up onto the platform to meet him.
“Tahtie?” I said, trying it out. Kilda hung back and I stepped forward with Rotgar at my side.
“Lubbikin,” the old man said quietly when I got within arms reach. Then he grabbed me up in a bear hug and made me feel even tinier than I had before. He smelled of beer and woodsmoke, animal and mansweat. And he smelled familiar in a way I had never experienced.
I gasped because I recognized the scent though I had never before encountered such a thing. He smelled like family. “Tahtie?” I said again, still questioning. I had had some foster dads that had been great guys and some others that were assholes through and through but I had never felt about any of them as I felt in that moment about this one old man.
How could I have a family here? First Kilda and now this….
Orley Adelwalt kissed me on the forehead and I pushed his beard out of my face. It felt so much like something I had done before. “Are you all right?” he murmured.
I nodded. “Yes, ever,” I said, not sure why I phrased it in the strongest affirmative available. I buried my face in his robe and wept and I didn’t know why I did that either.
Somewhere, past the edge of reason lies a land called...
Chapter 8 - Ikka den Ikka
The old man patted me on the back and called me “lubbikin,” again. It meant little darling, and it embarrassed me almost as much as weeping in front of all those huge hairy men did. I wiped my eyes and smiled up at him and he chuckled, a noise like a cartoon bear might make. I smiled even more.
Smiling was easy, looking up at him. Orley Adelwalt had almost the bluest eyes I had ever seen, only Rotgar’s surpassing them in depth and clarity. And that thought disturbed me, too.
There I stood in my robe and vest and fur coat, feeling like a child surrounded by adults. Adult men. I still hadn’t got my head around being female, and I was going to need to adjust to all of this, and being a teenager again, too. So much. The culture change alone would be staggering, even if I still had my older male body with muscles and a mustache. I missed my mustache and touched my smooth upper lip, sighing for the immaterial unfairness of it.
Kilda and I were two of only five females in the room. A mature woman dressed much like I was sat on a padded bench near one wall, sewing or something. She looked around with interest now and then but had not said anything. Another woman, clearly of a servant class like Kilda, sat beside her doing much the same.
The last female was a younger woman, but older than I appeared. She had on a rougher version of what seemed to be typical female clothing in this place, long robes with an over-vest and soft boots, and she seemed occupied in keeping cups filled from two ewers she carried. I saw one of the men pinch her bottom to which she reacted with a roll of the eyes. Coffee, tea or me? Sexism, I reflected would be something I would have to deal with; it seemed a given here.
As a man, most of my life I had enjoyed the nearly invisible social advantages that conveyed in my world. But now, in this world, I would have to deal with men who had even higher status than I had enjoyed, while I was reduced to being a teenage girl. A rich and possibly spoiled teenage girl with an arranged marriage hanging over my head.
I sighed and gave Tahtie a little hug, not that I could easily reach around him, then I continued looking around, trying to assess the situation.
The dozen or so men in the room were almost all apparently in their forties or even older, like Tahtie. Their beards would make a Mennonite colony proud. They wore leggings above boots, with shorter robes than the women, and heavier coats. Some of them had pieces of metal-studded leather on legs, arms, breast, neck or stomach. Armor implied a need for it.
All of the men and the one older high-class woman had weapons. The woman had only a knife but the men all had knives as well as something large; swords, axes or those metal-bound baseball bats. No one was wearing a helmet, though a few had on caps or hats, but I could see a pile of headgear on one table near what might be an outside door.
A warlike bunch, for sure, and they did kind of resemble the dwarves and humans from the Lord of the Rings movies in how they were dressed and reacted to one another. Some discussion had been going on and I got all kinds of looks as I pushed away from the Orley, my father – and that was a thought that still had a peculiar comfort to it. I stood close to him, feeling comforted because I knew he would die –or kill– to protect me. Of course, that protection came with a cost I might not be willing to pay.
Rotgar stood to the side within reach, with Kilda a pace or two behind me. More allies. I wiped my eyes with my hands and then wiped my hands on my coat. Handkerchiefs didn’t seem to be a thing here.
The Orley said, “Rotgar had been telling us about the try Hustab the Landsman made at stealing you.” He gave me a light one-armed hug as he spoke, gesturing toward the younger man.
Rotgar nodded, smiling, but did not move from beside me. He opened his mouth to say something then glanced at me and closed it as if a contrary thought had stopped him from speaking.
I looked at him, wondering just what he had already told them. Somehow, I didn’t think it would be a good idea for a roomful of bloodthirsty medievalists to know what my “little bell” could do. I made an abrupt decision to be proactive about concealing the truth. “He saved me,” I said, smiling at my father. “He killed three of them and chased the others off.”
“Ach?” Rotgar looked at me and I nodded, trying to communicate that he should go along with my version. “Well, I killed two and Thor’s lightning did for Hustab,” Rotgar amended.
“We were just getting to that part,” said Tahtie Adelwalt. “They had armored spears and maces, and you had only your blade? Pretty good sword work.” A murmur went through the gathered beards, like a breeze in a wooly forest.
Rotgar grinned. “I kept moving and I knew the land,” he said, making light of a five-against-one battle. Most of the men grinned back at him or scowled. It was hard to tell through all the shrubbery.
“And where were you, daughter?” Tahtie asked me. He still had an arm around me and I one part-way around him.
“Hiding under a cedar bush,” I admitted. “They had me wrapped up like….” I meant to say mummy, but there didn’t seem to be a word for that. “Like a corpse for the grave, and I was trying to get free.” Something occurred to me to add to the tale. “I must have had a knock on the head because I don’t recall getting, uh, grabbed. I didn’t truly know what was going on.”
Tahtie nodded. I didn’t like lying to the old man, but I went on.
“Then the lightning came down,” I said. “It struck the leader, uh, Hustab? And I guess I was close enough to be knocked out, again, too.” Ikka den ikka?
Everyone grinned at me now, and some of them shook their heads. I went back over just what I had said and realized that “knocked out” was not quite the meaning of the phrase I had used. It came out closer to “banged goofy” with a little of the double meaning that banged has in English. I blushed.
Rotgar didn’t correct me. “The thunder made pie of Hustab’s face and brains,” said Rotgar. Pie was what he said, pikka is pie. “The roar of it banged all the rest of us flat on our backs, and when I got up, the last two had run off.” He turned toward me but still spoke to the Orley. “I found your darling under the cedar bush, nearly naked and frozen and I carried her inside.”
Tahtie nodded. “You did well, young’un,” he said. Seriously, the word sounded just like a countrified “young’un” and meant about the same, too. “I see I was right to make you one of my boys when you turned sixteen last fall.” Nobben had the meaning and connotation that boys might have if used by a mob leader in an old movie.
But — sixteen? That moose Rotgar was only sixteen? I boggled at him, and I swear all the men snickered through their face foliage.
I missed something, distracted by watching Rotgar preen himself because he did it in a self-aware, self-deprecating way, dripping charisma and aw-shucks. I wanted to slap him, or, or something, I wasn’t sure what. And now everyone was looking at me.
Tahtie asked. “Are you all right, daughter?”
“I’m fine,” I said, thinking we had already established this.
Kelda spoke up, “I took care to look for signs, lord. They did not make themselves unwelcome with her.”
I blinked. Oh, good, I thought; I hadn’t been raped. And I missed more of the conversation thinking about the implications.
But Tahtie had already considered one of them. “Then the wedding can go forward in three days, as already bespoke.”
Maybe I could claim I had PTSD?
At that moment, three men came in the larger doors at the other end of the hall, two men supporting another one between them.
Tahtie turned. “I sent your brother after the other two men, looks like he caught one of them,” he said.
A big man with a blond beard and a scar near his mouth looked up, smiling viciously. “I did, father. The other died, and their horse-holder got away, but I got one of these carrion crows.”
Everyone in the room moved that direction, including me. I had to get a better look at this brother; there was something about him I needed to see closer.
“Well done, Yungvalt,” said Tahtie. This must be the brother, half-brother really, the one that Kilda had called Valto.
“Put him down here, Asamund,” said Valto and the two of them threw their captive on one of the wider benches.
“Somezing to drink,” the man said. He spoke with an accent, turning some sounds hissy but I understood him fine. It occurred to me that Rotgar had an accent, too, just not one as extreme. But everyone in the room turned to look at me when he spoke.
I took a step back, surprised. Kilda still stood beside me and whispered into my ear. “He has been blamed for doing you a hurt; only you or your father can give him to drink, and if you do, then they won’t be able to kill him without a trial.”
Holy shit!
I looked around. Several wooden, clay or metal drinking vessels stood on the tables. No one said a word to me. I took one of the cruddier looking wooden ones and glanced inside; it had about two inches of what smelled like sour beer in it. I walked toward the captive and people got out of my way, though Valto and Asamund kept their hold on the man.
“How are you called?” I asked him.
“Zenner, my lady,” he said. “Zenner Lu Renart.” He had a narrow face, bright brown eyes and a beard and mustache that had been trimmed regularly.
“Make him promise to talk before you give him gastfrey,” said Valto.
“Or speak ill for him and we cut his throat now,” added Asamund.
Wow.
Zenner looked at me with pleading eyes. “We neva-ar meant to hurt you, lady.”
I poured the cup of beer on his head.
And the room went wild. Apparently, to this gang of not-Vikings, this was a really good joke. Tahtie roared with laughter almost directly behind me, and Rotgar whooped in what sounded like real German as well as in the local pseudo-English.
Zenner smiled nervously and licked some of the sour beer off his mustache. “Zank you,” he said. “I azeto your offer of gas-deerecta.”
“Bueno, esta mejor por ti, que lo has hecho,” I said — in my atrocious Spanish for some reason. Good, it’s better for you, that you have done it. Zenner gave me an odd look, as if he had half-understood that.
“Gastfrey,” Rotgar corrected him. “Gastricked you have not earned.” The difference between hospitality and, uh, neighborliness? Gastricked sounded like something that might produce flatulence or other symptoms, but it was apparently a very serious custom here.
Everyone seemed to be in a better mood now, and Zenner was allowed to sit at the high table with the Orley, me, Rotgar, my brother Valto and some of the other large, hirsute types. Bardamasser was the word; it meant elder, councilor, and big beard all at once. I wondered if there were a female equivalent and what it would be. For some reason, I looked down at my chest then shook off that thought.
Sitting directly across from him, I finally got a better look at Valto. He looked familiar for some reason, despite scars and a certain wildness in his expression. Blond hair. Wide jaw and deep chin, what I could see of them through his beard. High forehead, close-set ears, lashes and eyebrows darker than the hair on his head. Green eyes. “Thou hast greyn eygen sich,” I murmured and recognized it as what the girl in the fountain had said just before the darkness swallowed me. “You have such green eyes.”
“Ikka,” I added.
Somewhere, past the edge of logic lies a land called...
Chapter 9 - Why, I oughtta...
Tahtie sat at the end of the high table with the woman who had been sewing in the corner sitting at his right-hand side and me on his left sitting on one of the long sides. Across from me sat Valto and beside him Zenner then Asamund. Beside me on my left sat Rotgar and beyond him one of the bardamessers named Durnhelm. More men filled out the rest of the table and the more junior types sat at the lower table that crossed the high table at the foot. And still more people at two smaller and presumably even less important tables. About thirty people in all.
Kilda and two other serving women walked around the tables, refilling mugs and steins. She put a slender, silvery cup in front of me, poured in a bit of wine from one jug and filled the container with water from another. After I had tasted the wine, I wished she had given me all water. Tahtie, and the woman who had been sitting near the wall sewing, got wine also but with less water added. Kilda offered Rotgar and Valto wine, too but both opted for ale from another pitcher. The prisoner/guest and all the big beards got ale, as well.
Sitting right across from him, I had a good view of Valto, Alenna’s older half-brother and apparently captain of guards or whatever the position was called here. Other than beard, scars, hair-do and expression, he looked a lot like Corporal August Gallant of the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office. The resemblance was there, but I couldn’t say how close it might be, I wasn’t really that familiar with the non-reversed image of what had been my face for more than thirty years. But Valto looked as much or more like Gus’s brother as he did Alenna’s.
Like all of the men here, he was large, maybe larger than Deputy Gus had been. And I was the smallest person in the room, smaller than any of the women by a couple of inches at least and ten or twenty pounds or more. Judging by the furniture, I couldn’t be much more than five feet tall. I wanted to gnash my teeth and howl about that, but it would not help the situation. Being female was bad but being a short, young female a few days before her wedding night was even worse.
So I kept looking at Valto, trying to figure out if his resemblance to the old me, including the green eyes meant something; something maybe that would help me get back to my own world and my own body.
He noticed me staring at him and made a face; like someone might at an annoying younger sister. I resolved to be as annoying as possible to him when I got a chance. Then he smiled, a bit crookedly because of the scar through his upper lip, and the expression did not erase the worry lines between his eyes, but I realized that he had some of the same charisma I had felt from Tahtie. And I remembered that Kilda had said that his wife and children had been kidnapped by Vikings and that he wasn’t allowed to go after them.
That had to suck.
Before I could think of something to say to him, Tahtie asked, “Valto, where are your other fingers?”
I glanced at Valto’s hands which seemed to have the usual complement of digits, though rough and scarred. I wondered if I had heard the question right but Valto answered, just as if it had made perfect sense. “I sent them after the horse holder. They won’t catch him unless he falls off that big black he’s riding but they’ll find out where he’s going and come back to tell us.”
Oh. Fingers meaning members of the troop of warriors sent after the invaders. But I didn’t have more time to get acquainted with my lookalike; things were still happening in the moment.
Zenner cleared his throat, then took a gulp from the refilled mug in front of him. “Orladeen iss his name. He iss riding to his fazer’ss house. Illa bella shenta on okse furda of luh douche doo shanson lyle.”
That’s what I heard. Then something clicked over in my mind again and translated. The beautiful house in Oxford of the Duke of Song Isle. The language, a sort of distorted French or Latin, must be what Rotgar had called Reymish. The guy whose title I had earlier heard as Deuce of Shanghai, the one who had married Alenna’s mother after she was stolen from Tahtie. Not deuce or douche but… Dux?
And Oxford? Oxford was a real city in the England of my own world. Was this Oxford in the same place here? And what did that matter? I had no idea where in my England Oxford had been or was. But at least I had heard of the place. And wasn’t it not too far from London? Again, I wished for a map.
“The Duke of Song Isle has a house in Oxford? That’s more than a dozen gemelreek to a port from which he can reach his island. What’s he doing there?” Tahtie demanded.
Gemelreek was a land measurement, but I wasn’t sure what distance it represented. My brain suggested league as a translation, but that didn’t help because I had no idea how far a league was in any measurement I knew. Reek was reach, but gemel had several meanings. Come to think of it, reek could mean state or kingdom, too. I tried not to consider linguistic complications and concentrate on what people were saying.
Zenner shrugged in a very Gallic way. “Ploos reason,” he said. “One of kellam is to ray-akweera his stepdaughter.” He nodded at me. Oh, great, mixing languages did a number on my head.
“Ray-akweera?” Tahtie repeated the foreign word. “If that means what I think it means, I might say, he never had her in the first place!” He scowled in my direction, but I knew his anger was not aimed at Alenna.
“Pardon. I should have say, ray-akweera for his wife who has ray-gressa that she mokta lost den infant ploos gars a-gone.” Between his accent, using unfamiliar Reymish words and mangled Bloddish syntax, he wasn’t easy to understand. But everyone seemed to have gotten the gist of it, and the table erupted in noise with all talking at once.
Oh, shit. This was a continuation of the story Kilda had been telling me about Alenna’s mother being stolen back by her father and married off to the Duke of Song Isle. The Duke (a military rather than a noble rank my personal Babelfish suggested) had sent his men to put the snatch on Alenna, me, because “my” mother felt bad at having had to leave “me” behind in the earlier kidnapping. How long ago had that been?
A hot anger suddenly welled up in me. I had already been stolen from my own world and my own body, and this asshole worked for someone who wanted to steal me again before I could work out how to maybe get back to my life. I jumped to my feet and added my voice to the hubbub. “Instead of pouring beer on your head, I should have had them drown you!” And wonder of wonder, that came out in Bloddish instead of English.
The man whose life I had more or less spared smiled at me calmly. “Non ays kayd illa escreeta on seva pista,” he said in pure Reymish. And I understood! “That’s not what you wrote in your letter,” he had said.
Several people at the table gave me hard looks, including Tahtie, Rotgar and Valto. Of course, all of them understood some Reymish. Apparently, Alenna had written her mother a letter before pulling her switcheroo with me. And hadn’t Kilda said that “Mom” had been the one to initiate Alenna in witchcraft?
I wished I had either of my Glocks. I probably wouldn’t have shot Zenner but firing into the ceiling over his head with the huge noise that would make would have been so satisfying. I glared at him. “All foxes are liars,” I said and noted that that had come out in what must be Reymish, too. Or Remice as I realized it was spelled in the language itself.
So, I probably could write a letter, though it occurred to me that I had seen no writing at all here other than what I had brought with me. Or anything to write with. I sat down, disgusted and vaguely embarrassed, while Zenner shrugged off my insult with another of his French-like gestures.
“Kella pista?” Rotgar asked him in Remice, confirming my guess that he understood that language.
A glare from Tahtie silenced everyone for a moment. The old man took a breath, summoning the authority of his rank as Orley before he spoke. In the end, though, he simply repeated Rotgar’s question, except in Bloddish. “What letter?” he asked.
Well, not quite, I reflected. Rotgar had really asked, “Which letter,” implying that there might have been more than one. Had they written back and forth, plotting something between them? Had “Mom” supplied Alenna with the spells that she had used to travel to my world and send me back to take her place?
I looked at him sideways but he was concentrating on Zenner’s reply.
The foreigner shrugged again. “The one in which she ray-kwairt-a to be saved from a be-housing she would odeeray-hate.” Be-housing I realized was his try at translating the Remice word for marriage into Bloddish. Bloddingrteng, that is, going with the native way to write it. Except I realized I was picturing it written in Latin letters, not runes. Were Latin letters the same as Remice ones? Did anyone even write Bloddingrteng in Remice letters? Did I know how to write runes, too? Was ‘r’ a fucking vowel?
Tahtie and everyone else at the table looked at me and I know I looked back at them with genuine confusion. I had to stop trying to think in anything but Bloddingrteng or someone would end up hanging me in a tree with a horsemeat rope. So I spoke the truth, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.” I tried to fill my words with exasperated sincerity and as much truthiness as I could manage.
I think what saved me was the ambiguity of Zenner’s accusation. Since I outranked him socially, he could not politely refer to me in Remice as “you” and so had, in effect, called me “she.” Minor grimace at that reminder, but the point was what he had said could have been heard as “Not what she wrote in her letter.” Ignoring for the moment that I wasn’t originally a she, that statement could have referred to Alenna’s mother writing a letter. Was I the only one at the table with subtle enough knowledge of Remice to understand that?
What was the woman’s name, anyway? Crap. I didn’t want to refer to her with the female equivalent of Tahtie, which would be like calling her “mommie” in English and sounded pretty much the same. I could say “mamika,” my mother, but I didn’t want to do that either. “Madra” or “matheru” were other words for mother, and I guessed I would have to use one of them until I found out her name which I couldn’t ask anyone about until I was alone with Kilda.
But again I had gone down a mental rabbit hole and missed part of the conversation. Everyone was looking at me, apparently waiting for my answer to some question I hadn’t heard. I considered faking being upset. What’s the point of being little and cute and female if one cannot take advantage of the situation to avoid unpleasantness? It took no effort at all to make my lower lip quiver and tears leak out of my eyes.
It quickly began to get out of hand. Dimly, I realized that the question had been did I want to send a letter to “my” mother telling her to lay off trying to get me back. It would go by messenger to the Duke along with a ransom demand for Zenner.
That caused unexpected pain. I had never really had a mother, though I did believe that several of my foster mothers had genuinely cared for me. But there I was, trapped in a body that wasn’t my own, and worse, one that was probably going through the hormonal storms of the wrong sort of puberty and they wanted me to reject this mother I had never met.
Faked tears turned to real ones with sobbing and coughing and I tried to get up from the chair to run away, though I had no idea where I would run to.
Tahtie stood, too, reaching for me and calling me “Lubbikin,” again. Past him, I could see Alenna’s stepmom looking at me with a cynical and exasperated glint in her eye. Behind her, Kilda dropped a serving pitcher of ale and rushed toward me.
Across the table, Valto looked concerned and glared at Zenner then gave him a knuckle punch in the side of the neck. The faux-Frenchman looked surprised and shocked but before he could react, Asamund slapped him upside the head from the other side. It was like when Moe and Larry would both attack Shemp. Zenner looked more like Shemp than Curly, anyway.
I knew I would laugh at that image later but just then it only made me strangle on a sob. I squeezed my eyes closed to force out tears while trying to stand and turn away, so of course, I got tangled in the stool and started to fall.
Someone grabbed me in a hug and it took me a moment to realize it was Rotgar, the shorter beard giving him away. “Be brave.” He whispered, pulling me against his chest. “You’re the rabbit that calls down lightning. Don’t let these wolves scare you, my little Thunderbunny.” Donnekaninkin? Thunderbunny.
I collapsed against him, laughing and crying at the same time. All I needed now was a case of the hiccoughs, so of course….
Somewhere, past the edge of memory lies a land called...
Chapter 10 - Large Uncertain Number
We got the hiccoughs under control when Kilda held the cup for me and made me drink that awful watered wine from the wrong side. Rotgar grinned at me the whole time.
But that was the end of me sitting at the grown-ups table; Tahtie sent me back to my rooms and gave orders to Rotgar to stand guard at my door until relieved by someone else he would send.
When we had negotiated the corridors with their scenic decorations, I firmly closed the door with Rotgar on the outside. I didn’t want him close to me for at least awhile. It had been very disturbing to feel his arms around me. Even his smell bothered me; he didn’t smell bad, and that was part of the problem.
As soon as we were alone, I turned to Kilda. “I’m not leaving this room again until I have pockets in my clothes.” I had to invent the word, ‘pochikinin,’ little pouches. I went directly to the keldringer/wardrobe and opened it, half afraid that my effen stuff would be gone.
But no, it all seemed to be there. I checked the boots first. Kilda had said she stuffed the Glocks in them, and yes, one gun in each boot with the communicator on top of the small pistol and the taser on top of the other. I’d forgotten about the taser, which might be just as useful as one of the guns. I found the can of pepper spray, too, the folding knife, and the expandable baton. That last item was especially useful to someone who knew how to use it, and I did; less a matter of strength than a knowledge of anatomy.
One problem I noted: I didn’t have a gun cleaning kit. There had been one in the trunk of the cruiser in my barracks bag, but that was useless knowledge. I spent only a moment considering if I could improvise a kit and decided I probably could; Glocks don’t require any specialized tools to take them apart or clean them, just rods and patches and cleaning solvent.
I wanted to count my ammo, too, but first, I needed to get Kilda working on making pockets.
She was already protesting my interest in the Glocks, and I needed her help to make the pockets. “All that stuff is of Hela’s brood, heart. You should leave it alone,” she said.
I shook my head but didn’t try to argue with her. I’d had command responsibilities; I knew you didn’t argue with your troops and it was usually best to take no notice if they disagreed with you. I dug through the clothes in the keldringer to find the pants; I could show her what a pocket looked like with them.
The idea of pockets, once I showed her how one was made, intrigued her. She grasped the concept immediately and retrieved another, older gown, to practice on while I explored the room we were in and another room which seemed to be my bedroom. Alenna’s bedroom, anyway. I resolved to be careful about thinking things belonged to me, or I might end up forgetting who I really was.
Both of Alenna’s rooms were about twice my height in width and a bit more than that deep, and both had doors to the hallway, though the one in the bedroom was barred with a heavy board in metal hooks hanging across it. Besides the bed, the inner room had another keldringer/wardrobe with even more finely made clothing, some of which looked suitable for warmer weather. Several trunks with padded lids, a table, and a stool, and a thing like a waist high push-pull completed the furnishings. Also, another closet-like construction I wasn’t sure the purpose of but suspected it might be the equivalent of an indoor porta-potty.
The walls were decorated with cloth hangings for the most part, some with images of ladies in gowns, animals, flowers, or other pretty scenes. No men fighting which had been common in the painted corridor walls. Above the short push-pull hung an elaborately framed mirror, about as wide as my forearm and half again as tall. Dimmer than the mirrors I was used to and with some distortions, still it showed me my image: the face pretty much that of the girl I had seen in the fountain in Los Perdidos.
Looking at myself disturbed me, though, I didn’t like being so forcefully reminded that I was now a short, barely teenaged girl. It was easier to think of things that needed doing if I avoided confronting that fact, so I went back to examining the room.
The bed was basically a wooden frame filled with, well, sacks of wool or feathers or something similar. A covering was stretched over this and duvets and furs and pillows stacked on top of the bedcover. I finally took off my fur coat and boots and tried the bed out, and it was surprisingly comfortable.
It seemed huge, but I remembered that I was not that big myself so I figured it must be about six feet long and four feet wide. Assuming that I stood about five feet tall or a little over.
Curious, I padded in stocking feet back out to the sitting room where Kilda sat on one of the benches sewing with the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
“Nontie, how tall am I?” I asked, sitting on the same bench with my feet under me to get them off the cold stone floor.
She squinted at me. “About six spans and maybe half a knuckle,” she said, smiling.
Great. “Uh, how much is that in inches and feet?” I asked. ‘Unkse’ was apparently the word for inch and feet were feet. Well, close enough.
“Feet?” said Kilda, startled. “Why would you reckon how tall you are in feet?”
She had a point, and I remembered having the same question when I was starting grade school. “I don’t know how long a span is,” I told her.
“Eight knuckles,” she said quickly then added more thoughtfully, “and I think that is nine or ten inches, I forget. The Reymish use inches and other outlandish inklings. Rotgar would probably know.”
“I’ll ask him later,” I said. I didn’t want the man near me at the moment. At ten inches to a span, that would make me—a bit less than five foot one. That fit with my experience, but it did not make me happy.
I looked at my own hand. If a knuckle was supposed to be longer than an inch, it must be the length from one knuckle to the next, rather than the width. I remembered vaguely that an inch was once defined as the width of some king’s thumb. Guy must have had big hands. “Any particular knuckle?”
“Och, aye,” she said. “Originally, it was the second joint of the long finger on Henrik Blodde’s left hand. But now they just say it is one-eighth of a span which is the width of a certain stone in the Great House up in Yorvik. But every Great House and God House keeps such a stone, all of which are supposed to be the same size. Henrik Blodde set that up before he died. Our own spanstone is part of the hearth in the Great Hall.”
“Wow,” I said. Blodde was not only a conqueror; he appeared to have been a visionary. “How far is a gemelreek?”
“I don’t know just how far, it’s a count of strides, but it’s about as much as a man can walk in an hour,” she said. “A stride is three spans, an ell is two, a yard is four, and a reek is, uh, five? Six?” she added thoughtfully, if a little unsurely.
I’d been in the military and done my share of marching. I knew a mile was about a thousand paces; that is the right boot heel hitting the ground a thousand times. And an hour’s march was about three miles; a gemelreek, then, was an old-fashioned league. Gemel meant a turning, or a hinge, or a fold, or a layer, or a bend. Gemelkin meant a twin; gemellon meant a large uncertain number. Whatever. So Oxford was about thirty-six miles from a port.
I didn’t know that much about British geography but probably most of the country was closer to water than that; it was an island. So, I wasn’t terribly smarter than before but it kind of confirmed my guess about where Oxford might be. “How far away is Oxford and in what direction?” I asked anyway.
She considered. “South, mostly, I think. A little west. And three or four leagues. A person can go there and back in one day.”
“How about London?” I asked.
“Lundenna? About twice as far to the southeast. A wicked big town is Lundenna. It’s said you can buy anything you could want on the strand there. It’s a free town, too, not part of any of the five Bloddish kingdoms. The Saxons vow it’s theirs, but it has its own ruler and him picked by the noisy crowd instead of by good folk!”
That sounded like a criticism of democracy. I smiled.
She frowned. “They call it Tremursby, too, because it has three walls around it. An inner Reymish wall, an outer Saxon wall and a middle wall built by the Cymru. It’s not been conquered since the Saxons took it before Henrik’s time. They built their wall against him but then we Bloddish took all the lands around it from them blood-drinking wildmen,” she ended in satisfaction.
I suspected anti-Saxon propaganda.
“They worship Ti-waw, you know. God of iron and war, and, they say, judgment; we leave that to Wedna. But they respect Donner and Wedna and Baldur the Holy,” she conceded. “And Frigga, too, goddess of hearths and families.”
Something came back to me from a dream: a tall woman walking out of a green forest saying to me, “I am called Idunn.” I hadn’t understood her words at the time, but now they made sense.
“What about Idunn?” I asked suddenly.
Kilda smiled. “She is goddess of apples and youth and the sweetness of life. She is supposed to protect maidens from….” She trailed off, staring at me oddly.
“From…?” I prompted. We looked at each other intently for a moment.
“From being stolen,” she finished.
That info caused a weird sensation, kind of like a cross between a warm fuzzy and a cold chill. Had it just been a dream or had I really had an encounter with a goddess? And why would that be any more unbelievable than what else had happened?
But gods and goddesses? I decided to avoid thinking about that and go count the rounds I had available because they were almost certainly all the ammo I would have until I figured out how to get home.
An accurate count would require unloading both guns and all six magazines. The big pistol had 17 rounds in each of three mags, and the small one had ten rounds in each, also three mags. Plus one in the chute of the G17, minus the one I had fired from the G26. 3x17+1+3x10-1. I should have eighty-one rounds left. Or had there been one in the chamber of the G26? I couldn’t remember. And were all the magazines full? This was why I needed to count them.
I wrapped both weapons and the four spare magazines in my old t-shirt and carried them past Kilda into the inner room where I spread the lot of them out on the table and sat down on the stool. I could see myself in the mirror over the push-pull, but I ignored my own blonde cuteness and began unloading magazines from guns and shells from magazines. Both Glocks had had rounds chambered when I started counting, so I made sure that they were empty with their chambers held open and stuck my little finger (ear-finger in Bloddish) into the chambers to be sure.
When I had done all this and lined up the shells for counting, I had eight rows of ten and three left over.
That couldn’t be right.
That would be 3x17+3x10+2. Six full magazines and a round chambered in each Glock. What about the one I had fired? The used shell would have been ejected and was probably lying in the snow under the cedar bush, and I was not going to go outside to look for it unless Rotgar had brought it in with my “odur effen.”
I stopped myself from wondering where the spent cartridge was; even if I found it, I would have one shell too many. Especially if I found it.
Maybe one of the magazines held more that it was supposed to. I looked them over. Glock magazines are very precisely made; none of them seemed likely to hold an extra cartridge. One way to find out. I reloaded all the magazines as full as I could and still had two cartridges left over, the ones that would go in the chambers ready to be fired.
Huh?
Maybe I hadn’t fired the Glock even though I remembered doing so. Maybe I really had called down lightning….
Somewhere, past the edge of trust lies a land called...
Chapter 11 - Foldings and Footballs
I desperately wanted to take all the cartridges out and count them again, but I restrained myself. Instead, I covered the guns and cartridges on the table with a cloth and went back out to my front room. I didn’t want to do too much thinking just then. Magic…. No, I didn’t want to think about it.
I stepped into the outer room, closing the door behind me. Unlike the oaken door to the hallway, this internal door was made of leather stretched over a wooden frame. A pattern of marks covered the shinier side of the leather, and I really looked at them for the first time. After a moment, the marks resolved themselves into runes, like ones I had seen in my own world. Except these I could read and understand. More magic.
The runes were a poem, told with alliteration and rhythm and with rhyming couplets at the end of each six-line stanza. I could read it but it seemed to be in an older version of the language I had been speaking without too much thought since I got here. And yet, I had no trouble at all translating this meaning in my mind, though I could not preserve all the poetry of it.
“So did Henrik, swift and stark, swim back to the ship. And his men
Helped to hale him aboard with laughter and frolic that he was alive.
But in his mouth he had a fish, and the kind of this fish was common,
But it was a cold, cold fish because it was icy, hard and stiff.
And Henrik said, ‘Better a song sung to a tune played on a broken harp,
Better a scant meal than none, even if it were only a frozen carp.’”
Which explained, sort of, something Rotgar had said before. The mental translation lost most of the feeling of the poem which was quite intricate and involved. For instance, the three times it said fish were three different words for fish: one for a caught fish (piskt), and one for a live fish (piske) and one for a preserved fish (salpish), each of which made the rhythm and alliteration in the line work.
I shook my head at the skill of the bard who had written the poem, but there was art in the way the runes were carved into the hide, too. And the lower part of the door had a sort of illustration incised into it, of a bearded man wearing a leather cap and holding a fish in his mouth while he swam toward a boat that looked very like a dragon ship. So we were Vikings, after all, or ex-Vikings, I supposed.
I made a noise, having been pretty much silent until then.
Kilda looked up, smiling. “There you are, heart,” she said. “I’ve got something for you.” She held up a gown to show me that she had sewn pockets into it as neat as could be, right along the side seams, so they hardly showed unless you knew to look for them.
I praised her work lavishly; it was, in fact, very good. The pockets would be practically invisible when the gown was worn; provided they did not get stuffed too full. I wanted to try them out immediately, so Kilda helped me change out my somewhat dressier current gown (it had some embroidery on the sleeves and neck) for the plainer one with the pockets. I didn’t put the vest-like overgown back on as it would stop me from reaching the pockets easily.
Kilda had done something else; each seam had two pockets. The smaller upper pockets sat at just about waist level while the larger pockets hung off my hips. That had been Kilda’s own idea and it was marvelously practical.
I handed her the vest, “Can you put hidden slits in this so I can reach through to get at the pockets?” She nodded and went to work on that right away.
After retrieving the smaller Glock from the inner bedroom, it fit well into the lower pocket on my right side and its two extra magazines went into the left hip pocket. Getting the Glock, or anything of similar size, back out of a hip pocket took two hands, though. It would be even harder once I was wearing the vest. And what about if I were outside and wore a coat or a cloak?
I stood there pondering what might be done to make all of it easier while Kilda nattered on.
“I’m going to add pockets to a couple of my gowns, too,” she said. “If it is all right with you, heart?”
“Ikka,” I mumbled, not really listening closely. I wondered if a leather lining to one of the pockets would make it act more like a holster.
“The kildrinir are going to want to make pockets for their kvinnirin, too, I think.” Kildrinir meant children but here she was using it to mean the serving women to the high-born ladies in residence. Kildrinir and kvinnirin were both double plurals, I noted absently, which was how you said all of something. In fact, kildrinir was a triple plural for some reason. “And for themselves, as well,” she added. “Ont onn demselferin, ikka den gota.”
I nodded vaguely, then reconsidered. “Don’t tell anyone about pockets, not right away. Let’s keep them hidden,” I said. “Hidden from other tongues, at least.” Secret, that is. I noticed that I had automatically double-pluraled tenga to tengirin. Top secret.
“Och, aye,” said Kilda but she made a noise at the disappointment of not being able to share something so juicy.
I was at the keldringer debating whether to get my holster out and try to fit it into my new pocket to see if that made pulling out a weapon easier when the door to the hallway opened and in stepped Rotgar followed by Alenna’s stepmother I had seen back in the Great Hall. No one of any rank ever seemed to think of knocking before entering a room.
Rotgar looked worried, and Borgifu (that was her name) looked sort of happy or satisfied about something.
“Your stedmuther came to tell you…” Rotgar began but the blond woman interrupted him.
“They are readying to send you off to Yuvil this afternoon,” she said. “To keep you safe.” She looked at me curiously. An elegant-seeming woman, she was several inches taller than Kilda and so towered over me.
“Fantastic,” I said in English, provoking Kilda to cough and nudge me. “Vas grosam speller gotam,” I added in Bloddingr. They all looked at me as if confused.
“This pleases you?” asked Borgifu, looking doubtful.
“What great good news,” I repeated, scowling and with more of an edge.
“Ach, zo ikka,” she said. “You meant it cuttingly.” She grinned at me, a woman who could appreciate sarcasm. “Your face and voice are so blameless; no one can know for sure.”
This caused Rotgar to flash a grin at me but he subsided back to his look of worry. “Lennakin,” he said, making a diminutive of my name, “you must decide if you want to go through with this.”
“I get a vote?” I said.
“Borgilla came to warn you and….”
Another diminutive but this one made me think of my stepmom as Borg-zilla, not a bad nickname for a woman who was eight or ten inches taller than me and probably forty pounds heavier. Saftiklik they would say locally, statuesque, or in another Germanic dialect, zaftig.
“…And to tell you that I have horses waiting if you still want to run away,” Borgifu finished for him. The word she used meant horses for traveling; horses for war was a different word.
Rotgar nodded. “And I have my own warhorse who is strong enough to break through any snow we might find on the road going north.”
Kilda squealed and moaned, causing all of us to jump. She seized me in a grip and kept repeating, “Oh, heart, oh my heart, my chick! Fare not, fare not. Fare not without me!”
“Well, of course, you will go if I do, tontie,” I whispered into her fierce hug. “I’d be lost without you.”
She subsided into blubbering and fretting about the North Wind whom she seemed to regard as a personage and an old enemy. “You’ll not take this chick from me, Tayn Nargaela,” she said. “Let me go, heart, and I will ready gear for a long and bitter trek.”
She had been holding me, not the other way around so I turned to Borgifu. “Why? Why did you come to tell me this?” I asked.
Stepmom didn’t like me asking and Rotgar turned to look at her with his eyes narrowing, too.
She tossed her head. “I have a daughter who will be fourteen in six months. If you are gone, perhaps Yuvil will accept her troth in trade for your broken pledge.”
She didn’t look old enough to have a teenage daughter, but if she had gotten married at fourteen too, it could be possible. “A step-sister?”
Borgifu explained, “Yes, but she is more. Your cousin Dagrun is the daughter of my first husband, Unlief, your father’s younger brother. Your father took me as wife when Unlief was killed fighting the Fremderin.” The Welsh? I didn’t ask.
“Okay,” I said. “This just gets more thrice-folded and turned-back-to-fore the more I hear.” I turned to Rotgar. “Why would we go north?” I asked.
He looked dumfuzzled. “My cousin, the Kong of Yorvik….” He trailed off.
Borgifu jumped in. “He’s one of the ones that wants to marry you off to Yuvil, to make the Esvelk fast in the Narthingr party.”
“Skaita,” said Rotgar.
“Should I have let Zenner’s men take me?” I asked but none of them looked happy with that thought.
“The Reymikerin want you for some fell end of their own, and the Sudderings are in their hold,” Kilda said, close to blubbering again.
“But they would take me to my… my mother….” The words almost stuck in my throat. I had never known a real mother back in my own world.
“Your mother wanting you back is just a story to ease their stealing you. Your grandfather is in on this as a way to weaken the Narthingrin. Because of selling lead and tin from mines, and wool and grain and hides from farms, he has got wealthy in trade with Reyma. If he can pull Adelwalt out of the Narthingr grip, then he will be able to name the Olkong at the Velkmote on Zommersdag. And with you in his or his friends' care, he could force Moleen to his side.”
“More foldings.” I snorted. “I’m a political football here,” I said in English. I tried it again in Bloddingr. “I’m a folk-stirring game ball,” it came out. And I look like a frosh-team cheerleader, I added privately.
“It’s true,” said Rotgar.
“There’s only one place to go then,” I said. “Lundenna is a free city, not controlled by the Reymikerin or any of the Bloddingr parties. Right?”
They tried to talk me out of it, all at once.
Kilda grabbed me tight again. “Lundenna is full of Saxons speaking their blatherskite and worshipping Ti-waw and drinking blood and selling babies….”
Rotgar was grim. “I don’t know anyone in Lundenna but that’s where most of the trading with Reyma is done. I don’t know what side they might be on if it came down to it or who they might seek to trade you to.”
Borgifu’s objection was simpler. “It’s not far enough away for Adelwalt and Yuvil to give up on getting you back.” And being willing to substitute her Dagrun for me.
The door behind Rotgar opened suddenly.
“Doesn’t anyone ever knock?” I protested but in English again. Kilda pinched me and I pulled myself free of her, determined to give whoever it was a piece of my mind.
Stepping around Rotgar, I confronted a warrior in full armor, almost as tall as Rotgar but much heavier. And no beard. A woman?
“Lillakatye!” said Rotgar. “I asked for someone else to help me ward you, Alenna. Who better than the house’s only kriegsvrow?”
Warwife? I stared at her. She had a big T-rune on the chest of her armor, looking like a crude drawing of a spear head. Also T for Ti-waw, god of war.
“Saxonish,” whispered Kilda behind me.
“Kvinna,” Lillakatye said to me politely in a voice only a little deeper than Kilda’s. “I will knock next time.” Then to Rotgar she said, “Fishbreath, you were to be out here guarding, not inside nattering with the women.” Then to me again, smiling. “He’s such a flirt.”
“Ikka,” I agreed.
Rotgar laughed.
Somewhere, past the edge of desperation lies a land called...
Chapter 12 - A Fennik for a Pottle of Kawdry
My stomach growled unexpectedly. Kilda could not get back too soon with that soup. During the meeting with Tahtie and Zenner, I’d had a piece of buttered bread and a cup of watered wine, and it had grown kind of thin. I didn’t really feel hungry, just sort of low on energy, but my stomach kept complaining.
Borgifu had gone to make sure horses were ready for us, Rotgar and Lillakatye had followed to have a discussion about planning and whether the Amazon-like warwife would be joining or opposing us. Kilda went to the kitchens to get us some provisions and a hot meal.
Leaving me to pack things into two large leather sacks that looked for all the world like duffel bags. First things packed, all my stuff from elsewhen. Except for the small Glock and two extra magazines that went into my brand new pockets.
I looked around the rooms for other stuff that would likely need to be packed and found a sturdy pair of fur-lined boots my size. Alenna’s size. I swapped the house boots I had on and packed them wrapped in a length of oiled leather on top of the Earth stuff. I found a belt with a large pouch attached and put that on for a hip pack, under the vest. Thinking about it, I dug the taser out and put that in the pouch. Kilda would probably have an idea of what else to put in there. Maybe the local equivalent of toilet paper and toothbrush?
What the heck did they use for stuff like that? Jeez. And…and, uh, feminine hygiene stuff which I would probably need sooner or later if I didn’t find a way out of here and now. Miken Gotter! I pushed those thoughts away with some effort, trying not to dwell on negative thoughts.
I found some heavier robes, but had no real idea which would be appropriate, so I just determined the ones that were the right size and lay them on my bed. Oof. It wasn’t hard to tell Alenna’s stuff from Kilda’s and there go more negative thoughts. Darkness and ice, I cussed in Bloddish.
I really had no idea what else to pack, so I just folded an extra robe and stuffed it in on top of the Deputy Gallant things and left it at that for the moment. Something else nagged at me.
I stood awhile in uffish thought, and it came to me again. I’d thought of it before but lost track of the idea. Alenna was a magic worker and the words for that in Bloddish implied spells written in runes. Why hadn’t I found something like spell books during my searches?
Well, obviously, she had either taken them with her or hidden them well. I had to hope they were just hidden. If I found them, would I be able to use them? I could hope.
I hadn’t found any paper while searching but I did find a box with quill pens, a small knife, a black crumbly stone-like thing, a bottle of what might be ink and a couple of small dishes. I had a vague idea how those were used, but I didn’t find anything to write on and, other than the door, nothing that was already written on.
Surely Alenna kept stuff she had written down somewhere? Besides any hypothetical spell book, she must have done some writing. I checked behind the keldringer and on the bottom of a couple of the trays in the push-pull. Nothing. But one of the trays was curiously heavy. I took the gloves and scarves out and there it was, another box like the one that had held the ink stuff but bigger.
Opening it up, I found three small leather bags and a stack of what I thought must be paper but turned out to be very thin sheets of something a lot like leather. Parchment or vellum (if those two are not the same thing) or something like that, two dozen sheets, each as thick as poster board but flexible. The Bloddish word came to me; skrapenskijdder, scraped hides. And all of them covered in writing, both sides, close and small, and sometimes written on in two different directions, the lines of writing overlaying other words at right angles.
It made it hard to read, using a bit of understatement. And she had used at least two languages and two different alphabets, sometimes on the same line of writing. Excitement and stress made it hard to concentrate on deciphering it, and Kilda might be back with soup any moment.
I turned my attention to the bags because I suspected what I would find. The smallest one contained coins, gold coins. Seventeen of them, each no bigger than a nickel and six of them penny-sized or smaller. I couldn’t judge their sizes very well because of my changed stature until it occurred to me to dig out the change from my uptime pockets and compare. I rushed off to do that as soon as I thought of it and basically took all the detritus of Gallant’s pockets and put it into my new hip pouch for later sorting.
I had a $1.58 in assorted American coins. Three quarters, five dimes, four nickels, thirteen pennies and a $1 token from a car wash, which was slightly larger than a quarter. Quarters, I knew from some piece of remembered trivia, were just less than an inch in diameter and five of them weighed about an ounce. They looked enormous lying in my tiny hands.
The larger gold coins were indeed about nickel-size, but thinner and yet heavier; adding them up, along with the smaller ones, it seemed I had about two ounces of gold, maybe a bit more. In my world, that would be worth about $4000. Who knew what it would buy here?
The largest bag had silver coins in it, of four or five different types; some of them half-coins or quarter-coins, cut from larger ones. It felt like five or six ounces of silver, all added up.
I knew the names of some of the coins, the big gold coins were markka, plural markkan; call them marks. The commonest silver coin was a fennik, smaller than a dime; a penny; the largest silver coin, about quarter-size was a grotta, and it weighed about the same as four of the fenniks; a fourpence then? Most of the grottas had marks on one side for cutting them in half or quarter, and about half of the fenniks had similar marks. Which explained all the half and quarter coins in the bag. The quarter fenniks had a name that sounded like English: farthing.
How much was all the silver worth? I had no firm idea, but some part of my new identity told me that a mark was worth 100 pennies, more or less, depending on… on what? Well, there probably was no government enforcing a proportion like the old U.S. rule of twenty-to-one or whatever it had been. So the value of gold versus silver probably went up and down.
Another part of my borrowed memory said that sixteen fennik weighed one hejr, an ounce, though it would be less than the ounces I was used to but not by much. And that a gold mark was worth eight hejr of silver except that it wasn’t always. And three marks would weigh an hejr, an ounce, also. Sixteen hejr, ounces, to the pund, pound.
How had Alenna gotten so much money? Gifts? Theft? Extortion? It seemed like a lot, but we might need it. We would have people after us, anyway, so where the money came from didn’t seem that important.
The middle size bag held shiny pebbles. It took me a moment to realize these were probably gemstones. Not something I knew much about but a few looked like colored pieces of quartz, and the dark red ones might be… garnet? Surely not rubies hidden in a young girl’s bedroom? If they were only semi-precious, still each stone might be worth several marks.
I needed to sit down. This was a treasure; even in my own world, it would have been enough to get someone knocked in the head. Counting the gems, it had to be worth $5000 to $10,000 in uptime numbers, but the buying power here and now might be five or ten times as much. I seemed to know, somehow, that a mug of ale was a halfpenny and a cup of wine, twice that much. A loaf of brown bread cost a farthing, but a good riding horse might be 100 marks or more.
And we were going to take four or more of such horses. Where would Borgifu get the horses she had promised? Did Alenna own a horse? Rotgar probably owned more than one. Could Kilda ride? How would we carry supplies? How long would it take to get to Lundenna?
It suddenly occurred to me that I should be asking Rotgar these things instead of letting him handle all the details. But I really didn’t know where he had gone. He probably wouldn’t even think of talking with me about this stuff. After all, I was a barely teenage girl.
Annoyed, I put a hand into my new pocket and fingered the stock of the Glock hidden there. I didn’t want to shoot anyone else but having the gun available comforting and anxiety-making at the same time.
Someone knocked at the door. A first, everyone else just barged right in. I hurried to the door and swung it open, and there stood Kilda, her arms full carrying a wooden container with upside down bowls stacked on top of it.
“This is hot,” she said, hurrying inside and setting the —tureen?— down on the table. She had wooden spoons tucked into her kirtle and small buns knotted into a fold of her apron, and while she freed those, I took the lid off the soup, and I nearly fainted from the pleasure of the smell.
“It’s a kawdry of pork and dried fish with butter, and milk, and roots from the cellar,” she said. “Cook gave us a pottle which will do for our midday meal. I told her you had missed out eating.”
Which was true, more or less. We didn’t wait for anyone to get back and join us but filled our bowls, broke a loaf of the good, white bread and ate quickly. The roots seemed to be onions, turnips and something that tasted like cabbage. No potatoes, I noticed. Well, those had not come from the New World yet, had they?
One helping of the soup filled me up, but I did polish the sides of the bowl with pieces of bread while Kilda told me what else she had learned, the most important thing being that no one had any idea that I intended to avoid my wedding by leaving.
Again the door opened suddenly, and Rotgar came in. “Food!” he said and went immediately to the pottle still half-full of kawdry. “Borgifu got the horses, we’d better leave within the half hour if we are going to put any road between us and your father before night.”
The warm soup turned to ice inside me. I didn’t want to betray the man I had been calling Tahtie, but if I stayed I’d have to marry Duke Awful.
Somewhere, past the edge of fear lies a land called...
Chapter 13 - Surprise and...
For all of being about two in the afternoon, the gloom outside seemed appropriate to near dusk. A cold drizzle reminded me why one of the nicknames of Britain in my time had been “Old Blighty.” The weather change seemed extreme but nothing compared with finding myself in the body of a fourteen-year-old girl.
Wrapped in furs, I trudged around melting snow banks between Rotgar ahead and Kilda behind me, with Lillakatye bringing up the rear. I had been relieved of carrying any burden by my companions, and felt glad of it as we made our way over rough ground between furry pines and some other kind of tree that seemed to just be budding out after the winter. My strength now was not up to struggling uphill through thickets with snow still lying in shadowed hollows and the north side of tree trunks.
A few hours ago I had been in Southern California, over six feet tall and male. And in the 21st century. A deputy sheriff with the authority, responsibility, and respect that went with that job. A different world now surrounded me, and I had yet to figure out just how different. The history here did not seem to match up to what I knew of England’s history.
Judging from the technology I had seen, besides what items I had brought with me, now must be smack in the middle of the Medieval Period. And yet…. Well, for one thing, no one had mentioned Jesus Christ, or a pope, nor had I seen any crosses used as religious symbols. On the contrary, people here spoke of the Norse gods as a matter of course. I shivered. Not that I had been a churchgoer but imagining the world to be in the charge of the gentle Lord of Bethlehem and Nazareth was much different than contemplating the quarrelsome, violent and vindictive kin of Thor, Balder, and Odin. Or as they called them here locally, Dunnar, Baldur, and Wedna.
And magic seemed to work, here and now. I had been summoned to take the place of Alenna, the fourteen-year-old sorceress, whose arranged marriage I was now fleeing. “Why couldn’t she have just run away like I’m doing?” I whispered to Kilda.
“She who?” she asked. Then the sense of what I had said penetrated to her, and she hissed a shush at me, shaking her head.
No one else knew I was Alenna’s doppelganger, and it had to remain that way, or I would face the Judgement of Wedna, dangling from a tall tree with a meat-rope around my ankle while carrion crows decided whether I lived or died. Not that Medieval Christianity didn’t have equivalent atrocities, I supposed. I shut up and trudged onward.
Rotgar seemed to know where we were going so we all followed until we finally broke through the screen of trees into a clearing where Borgifu and three men were holding the reins of several horses. “This one is for goods, I’ve put in some blankets and bags of fodder for the horses,” she announced. “I hope you brought food for yourselves.”
“We’ve got money; it’s not a wilderness between here and Lundenna,” said Rotgar. He looked around, counting. “Nine horses? Why so many?”
“Two of my men will ride off in different directions to help confuse your trail,” she said.
“And I am going with you,” said the third extra man.
Zenner!
We all sprang back from him, and Rotgar’s blade came half out of its sheath, Lillakatye dropped the duffel she had been carrying and drew her ax. And I put a hand inside my coat, searching for the slits Kilda had sewn into my gown so I could pull out the Glock.
“No! NO!” said Borgifu. “He’s going with you because otherwise, they will kill him.”
“Tahtie would never break guest-pledge,” I said sounding angry. Now where the hell had that come from? I snapped my teeth together against saying anything else and glared at everyone on general principles.
Zenner smiled at me. “Ah, but if you leave… it is you that took my parolay, not your father. And your brothers would cut my throat in a moment.”
I stared at him even harder. “Your Bloddish just got much better than before.” The word parole had come out in Reemish, but otherwise, he had only a slight accent now.
Rotgar snorted. “He is called The Fox. But why should we agree to save your neck, Zenner Lu Renart, you worthless sack of fart wind?”
Zenner shrugged. “The lady has already taken my pledge and I hers.”
“Well, isn’t that just wintered apple cider mulled with Lokki’s burning prick,” muttered Lillakatya. I blinked at the idiom, guessing it to be meant sarcastically. At least. It sounded pretty impressive.
“Dunkelikka,” said Kilda.
Everyone looked at me, and somehow I understood. If I repudiated him, broke gastfrey, Rotgar and Lillakatye would cut him down without a qualm. They hoped I would but somehow we all knew that I wouldn’t. I ground my teeth in frustration, but I did have some leverage.
“I’ll need a stronger vow from you or else you can ride into the woods as outlaw,” I said. Again, I wondered where that came from.
With no hesitation, Zenner dropped to his knees on the slushy ground and held both hands out to me, palms up. “By Apollo’s Light, I swear to be your faithful servant until we are all safe inside the gates of Lundenna where I can seek my own people.”
Kilda gave him a narrow look. “This Apollo? Is that your name for Baldur?”
The Reemish spy cocked his head a bit, “More or less,” he agreed. “God of light, and music, and medicine. And unbroken promises.”
Again everyone looked at me. “Ikka,” I said, reaching out to put my hands on his for a moment and then tap his forehead with a knuckle. I didn’t like knowing what I should do and how to do it, but there it was. I did the right thing just as if I were really Alenna.
“It’s a good oath,” Rotgar agreed, sliding his weapon back into its sheath. “Let’s get mounted up; we’ve less than three hours of daylight left.”
Lillakatye shook her ax at Zenner then stalked toward the horses, still muttering.
Zenner’s eyes went wide. “All the gods! It’s a woman!” He looked at me. “Is she one of the Valkure we hear about in Song Isle?”
“You better hope I’m not,” Lillakatye informed him. “Only dying men get to see the Choosers of the Slain.”
Rotgar explained. “She’s a Warwife. Sworn as bride to the Gods of Battle, Dunnar, and Tiw-vas and Frejr the Shining.”
“All three?” said Zenner, looking amused.
“They take turns,” said Lillakatye with a straight face. Then she closed her eyes and did a pretty good imitation of having an orgasm, moaning and panting. “Wait, that was just the first one,” she said, pausing before starting again.
I tried not to laugh but it came out as stifled giggles, and that was embarrassing. No one seemed to notice, too busy snorting and choking themselves, even Zenner. No one wanted to make too much noise since we were supposed to be sneaking away.
When everyone had stopped laughing, Rotgar commented. “Having Zenner along will be an advantage in one way; Adelvalt will first look to the southwest, toward Oxford and beyond that to Song Isle.”
Borgifu nodded. “A good thought. I’ve already sent another hand of men to ride that way.” Rotgar gave her a look of appreciation. As a conspirator, Borgifu did more than her part, but something about her still irked me. It couldn’t be that she was too pretty, with a womanly shape that I saw most of the men admiring.
Someone led a horse up to me, smaller than the others but bigger than pony-size. “This is Hunig,” said the man, one of Borgifu’s. “She is sweet and has a smooth gait but can run longer and farther than bigger horses.”
Hunig was the word for honey, and the horse had a honey-like color, golden brown all over except for one white stocking and an off-center stripe down her face. She had already been saddled, and I was pleased to note that stirrups were part of the equipment, too, even if the saddle did not look like the Western-style ones I had used in my own time. Time travel is dangerous enough without falling off your horse for lack of stirrups.
Not that I had done a lot of horseback riding, but one of my foster families had operated a boarding stable, and horses and I did get along well. I knew how much work it was to muck out stables, too.
The man who had introduced me to Hunig also handed me a shriveled-up apple which I held out to the horse on the palm of my hand, fingers carefully out of the way. The little mare took the treat and munched it then nosed my hand to see if I would produce another one. I laughed and petted neck. “We’re friends, right?” I said. She snorted.
“Do you need help getting into the saddle?” Rotgar asked at my elbow.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Am I supposed to ride wearing this….” I gestured down at my gown.
“Why not?” he asked then took me by the waist and with seemingly no effort put my butt into the saddle.
I made a noise in surprise. It sounded distressingly like a squeak.
“Swing your right leg over,” he commanded.
“Kirtle your gown up between your legs and under you,” Kilda advised. She was mounted on a slightly larger, rounder, browner mare and I could see what she meant about the gown.
I tried to do both things at once and almost fell off the horse but managed. It wasn’t the most comfortable seat, in particular, the feeling between my legs just seemed wrong. Things kept reminding me that I was not Corporal Gus Gallant anymore, and I resented it.
Rotgar made a face, and I realized that he was teasing me about the expression I was wearing, apparently a pout. Damnit. “Olla den Gotteren,” I said aloud, pulling my cloak around me.
After some discussion about routes which meant nothing to me, we were on the way, Rotgar in front, with Lillakatye riding beside me and Kilda and Zenner behind, each with a lead for a pack horse.
The warwife smiled at me and I smiled back.
“What did Rotgar say to get you to come with us?” I asked, curious.
“I’m charged with warding you,” she said. “Staying behind or fighting Rotgar would not be doing that.”
“You, uh, you could have gone to my father….”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t. He’s the one who told me to stick with you and do what Rotgar said. Since that was what I wanted to do anyway, the choice was easy.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re welcome, kvinnikin.”
I wasn’t sure I liked being called, “Little lady,” but I let it go and smiled back.
“I didn’t look for you to be so funny; making jokes about the gods….” Again I trailed off. “It surprised me.”
Lillakatye put a hand over half of her mouth. “Our chief weapon is surprise,” she said, winking at me.
Somewhere, rain falls on the Little Ooze in a land called...
Chapter 14 - Willful and Wanderlick
I considered what Lillakatye had said. It almost sounded like a joke that only someone from my time could have made. Before I could think of a probing response, Rotgar called a halt from the head of our little column.
“Folk,” he said, “we’re going to go off the road here. There’s a wide path that leads down to a cowford, and if we take it, it will get us to the South High Road without going through Munsby. Sooth, we’ll have to ford two rivers, first the Wet River and then the Little Ooze in another mile or two.”
Lillakatye and I both stifled giggles. “Clever names for waterways. Imagine calling a river ‘Wet,'” I said. Well, wet in Bloddish was–“blodde”. The whole country and people were all wet. I laughed harder, trying to be quiet and failing.
Rotgar looked at me with tolerance and amusement. “It’s worse than that,” he said. “Ooze is Cymru for wet. So we have the Wet River and the Little Wet.”
He chuckled and waited for the rest of us to stop making teakettle noises. “All done?” he asked.
After nods and grunts of agreement, he turned back to the trail and led us off the road onto a cattle track down to the river.
“Why do we want to avoid Munchburg?” I asked.
“Munsby,” Lillakatye corrected me. “Many of the Great House servants live there. The news of which way we went would make it back to your father within an hour. If we can get to the South High Road before any hunt begins, we have a hope of staying ahead of them long enough to reach Tremursby.” She meant Lundenna, London in my world.
We rode in silence for a bit. It being England, no matter what they called it here and now, it began to rain. The icy piles of leftover snow sheltered under trees and bushes made hissing and popping noises when droplets managed to find them. The cold bit at my face but in fact, wrapped in my lynx fur coat with hood up, and good gloves and boots on, I felt warm and comfortable, despite the wet.
Everyone else was also dressed appropriately, except Zenner had no gloves I noticed when I glanced back. He had tied the lead of the pack horse to his saddle and sat with his hands either buried in his horse’s mane or tucked into his armpits. He looked Gallically stoic, and I glanced away to keep from laughing at his expression.
Kilda, riding beside him, with her own packhorse lead similarly tied, ignored the Remish spy and called to me, “Art thou warm and dry enough then, chick?” she asked.
I felt my face go hot at being addressed as a child might be. “Aye,” I answered her shortly and turned back to catch a grin and a wink from Rotgar tossed over his shoulder.
The rain stopped for a bit just as we reached the first river. The ford was an easy one, the water hardly deeper than a foot or two and the current slow. Mist rose from the water, though, and trees came right down to the river bank. We picked our way across, single-file, and regrouped into our marching order on the other side where the cattle path we had been following wound in and out through a woodland.
It wasn’t silent like the desert I was familiar with back in Southern California, but the deep quiet of the forest had a chilly resonance that empty sand and scrubland could never achieve. Bird noises and the random dripping of water off branches emphasized the lack of other sounds in some way. The horses clopped along, blowing steam out of their noses like hairy locomotives. Oddly, it was a bit warmer under the trees.
We crossed the Little Ooze with hardly more trouble than the first river, except that Rotgar and his mount stood in the middle of the stream, directing us around a treacherous section. On the other side, we passed through another hundred yards of forest and came out onto the South High Road.
I had not imagined that it was called the High Road because it was built up above the surface of the land. It was also straight as a line drawn with a ruler, going out of sight both northwest and southeast, bridged over dells and cut through hillocks. Made of mortared stones, with gutters and drains and culverts over low spots, it looked so improbably out of time and place that I stared at it long enough for the others to notice.
Zenner spoke. “We built this road when Il Bian was a Remish province.” He sounded as proud as if he had laid the stones himself.
The center course was all of twelve to fifteen feet wide, or more, and the curbs on each side were a yard or more extra with ditches alongside so that the whole structure was twenty-five to thirty feet across.
Kilda snorted. “And it and other ways like it would have fallen to ruin if Henrik Blodde had not ordered them made new and kept up and set up fees to pay for it. The Remish left this land six hundred years ago.”
Rotgar nodded. “The Roadwards still gather the fees on this and other Ways across the land. We probably won’t be stopping at one of their Weghussen before Lundenna but here is one of them now.”
And so there was, a great busy mound of wood and stone beside the highway. We rode past the medieval version of a Howard Johnson’s, two stories tall in the center with a set of stables next to it and pens for other animals behind it. A low wall surrounded the compound, and a sleepy-looking man-at-arms sat on a tall chair beside the gate, an equally sleepy-looking horse tethered to his chair.
“Proits!” the guardsman called on seeing Rotgar. “Where be ye bound, lad? And with a draggle a-hind ye?”” He grinned at all of us.
I remembered vaguely that Proits was the name of Rotgar’s father’s lands someplace on the continent. It occurred to me that the man was being very familiar in the way he addressed our young nobleman. Myself, I pulled my hood lower on my face in case someone might also recognize Alenna.
“We’re off to Cannamurr!” Rotgar announced cheerfully. “There’s a haligman there who can cure a sore head.”
The guard laughed. “Cat been playing with your liver? What you need is cabbage soup made with lots of swine fat and rosemary. That’ll make your parsnip rise up and bay at the moon.”
The few people going in and out of the gate laughed at some gesture or expression Rotgar made that I couldn’t see. “You’d best have my share, Nye-Kanodle, my root is willful and wanderlick enough.” That got more laughs.
I’d understood most of that intercourse; it reminded me of the kind of banter jocks and cops made with each other in my time. A haligman was a healer, sort of a witch doctor. Cannamurr, I vaguely recognized as the name of a town, not Lundenna, so a bit of misdirection. Nye was maybe the guardsman’s name? Kanodle was his rank, roughly a corporal. Literally, it meant “small knot,” for the loop of cord worn as insignia. The rest was just jokes about drinking, hangovers and randiness.
Amazing how much easier understanding the world had gotten in just a few hours. It worried me a bit. I still had no trouble remembering who I really was but being Alenna and knowing what she should know without asking kept feeling more and more natural. Would my sense of myself as Deputy Gus Gallant begin to fade at some time?
I preferred to think that maybe I would remember how to work the magic that Alenna had used to reach my world so I could go home, find her and take my body back.
Zenner spoke before I could follow that thought any further. “Best pick up the pace, Alter-Nobbe. Bad luck that he knew you, but he’ll tell anyone hunting us that we passed here and when.” He nodded at me when I looked back at him. “And only an adelkvinne would be wearing a cloak such as yours, lady.” Alter-Nobbe meant “Old Boy” but also was slang, approximately, for “boss.” Adelkvinne meant “noblewoman.”
But I liked my lynx coat. It was both warm and stylish. I sighed.
Rotgar grunted, and our speed did increase by half. His tall steed could walk very quickly, but my smaller horse kept having to break into a jog trot every fifty yards or so to keep up, and behind me, I heard Kelda’s mount doing the same. Beside me, Lillakatye’s horse revealed itself to be a pacer, shifting to that gait and easily keeping up with the leader. Zenner dropped back, staying at a walk for longer then cantering to catch back up. It was a wearisome way to ride because trotting was not comfortable on my stiff-legged pony.
“You’re going to clabber our lady innards with this poxey bouncing along,” Lillakatye called ahead to Rotgar. “Let’s walk for a mile and canter for half. It will go easier on our bones and the horses, too.”
I looked at her gratefully as Rotgar went along with the suggestion, slowing down to only a medium fast walk. Honig, my horse, had to stretch a bit to make that speed, but she could do it for longer without switching to a trot. “Tanka-du,” I said to Lillakatye. She winked back.
There seemed to be one of the Weghussen every six or eight miles along the road and about every other one also had a village or town around it. The road went right through the middle of the settlements, like Route 66 through a New Mexico whistlestop. A half-hour or so after sunset, we turned in through the gate of the fourth Weghus we had reached. The horses needed a rest, and we might as well be warm and eat something before we started a night march.
“How much further to Lundenna?” I asked as Rotgar fetched me off Honig’s back. I hadn’t expected him to do that, but I felt stiff and sore and ended up appreciating his help.
“Two more Weghussen and the marches between, so about twenty miles to the walls of the city,” he said.
Zenner looked back along the way we had come. “Your father is probably at least an hour or two behind us, unless he’s willing to kill his horses.”
Rotgar, Lillakatye, Kelda and I all shook our heads. Adelwalt would never injure his animals to chase me down since Borgifu would have told him that I went willingly. “Maybe he got fooled and went the wrong way,” suggested Rotgar. “That was the plan.”
Zenner shrugged, like a man who knew that things never went as planned. Actually, like a Frenchman who knew that jelly bread always lands jelly-side-down.
Rotgar grinned. “Let’s all go inside and see if we can get some of that renowned cabbage soup.”
We snickered at the weak joke and followed him through the gate, leading our horses. He paid the toll to get inside, a farthing for each person or horse, so three pennies, total, no matter how long we stayed.
But none of us had thought about what if my father had given the chase to Valto instead of leading it himself....
Somewhere, tall horses pursue a runaway bride in a land called...
Chapter 15 - The Black and The Gray
We’d been riding through rain and gathering dark for two or three hours and people were lighting torches in tin-capped baskets beside the entrance of the weghus. The light spilled onto a sign beside the door, a goose in flight which was kind of a neat visual play on words since weghus was pronounced way-goose.
Or not. I blinked. Goose in Bloddish was ganza. Still, I caught Lillakatye grinning at the sign, too, reminding me again that I needed to talk to her about… where she was from, and maybe when? But we had never yet been alone together so it would have to wait.
Rotgar opened the door, a massive thing that I was not sure that I could have shifted an inch in my now puny body. He held the door for all of us and I entered, feeling a bit put upon by his courtesy. “Welcome to the Wild Goose,” he said.
The outside of the building was made of heavy, dressed timbers painted an earthy red and the boardwalk around it was a greasy gray from time and traffic. I sort of expected the inside to be more of the same but instead it was paneled in some lighter wood and the floor was golden oak with straw thrown around on it. A high ceiling above us had been painted to look like blue sky and white clouds. Colorful images right on the paneling covered about half of the walls. Some of them illustrated the saga of Henrik Blodde and some various god-tales.
I heard Kilda sniff when she noticed a prominent one showing Ti-Waw losing his hand battling Fenrir Vulffenmaw but she sighed in sad pleasure at another that showed Baldur with his breast pierced by the mistletoe. I marveled a bit at the skill on display but my mood was not improved by realizing that Gus Gallant would not have recognized either scene, traditional as they were in Bloddeland.
“Niffel den Hela,” I muttered but even my curses came out in Bloddish. Hell’s Ice, I thought in English, but it was still something that did not belong to my own time, place and person. I gnawed on my lip and tried not to let it make me crazy.
I looked around as Zenner lead us toward a table and benches. Two large fireplaces made the place warm and reasonably well-lit with added candles and lamps in dark corners. Sturdy tables were scattered around with people sitting at them on benches. No chairs, I noted. Some of the tables were round but most were rectangular, about eight foot long and three feet wide.
The smell of woodsmoke permeated the air with additional notes of beeswax, food, ale and sweat with hints of wine and the herbs mixed with the straw on the floor.
Zenner found us one of the smaller round tables and I sat with Kilda on a bench. Everyone else was opening their coats and pushing back their cowls and I did likewise, the warmth in the room pleasant on my face. Kilda took my hands and began undoing my gloves. It astonished me so much that I let her.
It made me think of something else. “Orme Zenner, you should see if you can find a pair of gloves for yourself. I saw that your hands were cold on the trek.” Orme was like mister, indicating a respectable person of no particular rank.
He shrugged. “I’ll find a better pair in Lundenna than I would be able to get here. I’ve been cold before and doubt not that I shall be again in this wet and frozen northland.”
Rotgar grinned. “Have you never been to Yorvik? Or worse, my father’s lands in Proits. Now, there you will learn what it is to be chilled.” A subtle joke there, the world for chilled and the word for killed sound the same in Bloddish. “You should have said something, I have a pair of work gloves you can wear.”
“Tanka-du,” said Zenner. “That will do for the rest of the evening’s ride.”
“We are to go on to the city, tonight?” asked Lillakatye.
“I’d like to get Lennakin inside at least the outer gate where she will be safe from being snatched back by her kinfolk.”
Lennakin would be me. I disliked being referred to by diminutives but somehow when Rotgar did so it seemed less objectionable. I glared at him on general principles anyway.
A wench —yes, that was the word for her job— came to ask us if we wanted food or drink. She wore something that reminded me of the St. Pauli Girl or maybe it was just the size of her chest. Zenner waggled his eyebrows at her and Rotgar couldn’t stop grinning as he ordered bread, cheese, butter and hot cider for all of us.
“I’m surprised they didn’t ask for milk,” Kilda muttered and Lillakatye snorted as daintily as someone her size could.
I forgave the wench for her endowments when she brought a large loaf of hot fresh bread, a round of cheese, a tub of butter and mugs of steaming spiced cider. It cost a penny for each of us and a half-penny for the table. I had decided that a penny (or fennik) was about $5 in American money so that did not seem too expensive. And she refilled all our cups for another penny, later.
The hot bread tasted wonderful and the cider had a refreshing herbiness to it that kept it from being too sweet. “New cedar fronds,” said Kilda, picking one out to show me. Whatever, it was delicious and the butter and cheese were good, too. Everyone ate and drank and seemed to be enjoying it.
Somewhere in there, the two guys began discussing horses. They agreed that we had fine choices of animals for our escape. Rotgar’s own brute was a warhorse, trained to fight just like its rider. Why anyone would name a big, sleek, brown, dangerous animal Groddikin, which meant Froggie, I had no idea.
Lillakatye was riding her own horse, too; a lighter animal but also trained for war. A red horse with black mane and tail, her Nessager had a more sensible if still humorous moniker; it meant Naysayer. I rolled my eyes and Lillakatye grinned when I heard the name.
Zenner’s mount was borrowed from Borgifu; a gelding and a good strong riding animal but not a warhorse. He had been told that it answered to the name Faerd. Which was sort of like naming a dog Hound; it was another word for horse.
My own mount, barely more than a pony, was named Honig, and she was a dark shade of honey all over. Kilda was riding another loan from Borgifu; Kugellik, a dark yellow horse with a black stripe down its back. The name meant Stick.
The two reddish-brown packhorses were named Hentel and Baery, or maybe they were just called that because those names translated as Fetch and Carry. It would fit with the Bloddish sense of humor to name them that, though.
Rotgar asked Zenner if he had ever seen the two horses Valto had bought from an Easterling trader. “Like no beast you’ve seen in the West. Tall but bony, they seem hardly to have enough meat on them for a pair of sizable goats. They are called The Black and The Gray and if you give either of them a long enough race, it will win it; unless it races against the other.”
“I’ve heard of those two. Valto won a race of twelve leagues, trading off riding one and leading the other, from Moleena to Warburg and back. No one else finished the race for fear of killing their horses trying to match him.” Zenner sounded impressed.
Valto was one of Alenna’s brothers, the second eldest and Adelwalt’s master of arms. He’d lost his wife and children to Viking raiders though I had never heard the details of just how that happened.
“And sadly,” said Rotgar, “both of those wondrous horses are geldings. The Easterlings will not sell their stud animals to anyone going to the West.”
“Aye,” said Zenner. “Can you blame them? Though, I have heard that the Yezite emperor has beasts to match the tall horses, in his southern lands. I know that in Rema’s own southern provinces, beyond the Altadura, there are some stark and swift animals.”
“Pull up your hoods,” said Lillakatye suddenly. “He just walked in the door.”
“Who…?” Zenner began.
“Don’t look. Valto, who else? Pull up your hoods and maybe he won’t spot us.” She did so and motioned me to do likewise.
I resisted turning to look and pulled up the hood of my lynx coat, reflecting that it might not save me from notice. I hadn’t seen anyone else wearing lynx since I had come to this world. I wasn’t exactly afraid of Valto finding us but a shiver went through me, just the same.
“No point in that,” said Rotgar. He stood and called out. “Hey! Valto! Over here. Abt ikka den ikka, hey?” After also then also… roughly, after all that trouble. I wasn’t sure he meant our effort or Valto’s.
I gave up and turned to look. Valto, who except for his clothes and a few scars was a ringer for my old self, stalked across the main room of the weghus. Deputy Gallant could not have looked more like fate come calling on his best day, too nice a fellow. Valto had a much wider streak of hard-ass.
“Brodder,” I said, and I knew I sounded meeker than I had intended. Also, I didn’t know I was going to call him brother until I had done it.
“Swester,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home.” He stopped almost directly behind me.
Zenner and Lillakatye also stood but Kilda took one of my arms in a tight grasp, holding both of us on our seat. Her round chin was knotted with muscle, showing her determination not to give me up.
“Are you going to fight all four of us, Yungvalt Adelson?” Rotgar asked in a mild voice, including Kilda as one of my defenders.
Valto glared impressively.
A burly man in light armor carrying a cudgel more than four feet long suddenly appeared near us. “No fighting in the weghus,” he said quietly. “Sit down and talk it out or go outside the walls of the steading.” He motioned with the big stick. Teddy Roosevelt would have liked him.
“I’ll bite,” I warned Valto when he looked as if he were thinking of grabbing me and making a run for the door.
Lillakatye and Rotgar laughed and even Valto grinned. “Du vilt, ikka,” he said to me. You would, too.
I nodded and Rotgar motioned him to pull up a bench and sit.
Valto took a bench from a nearby table and put it between me and Lillakatye then sat down. His face and clothes were stained and muddy and I remembered that it had been raining almost our whole trip.
After everyone else had sat back down, the serving wench brought Valto a mug of hot cider without anyone asking her to and he drank almost half of it down at once.
“Get warm and make friends,” the bouncer said before leaving. No one asked for a coin so perhaps Valto’s drink was on the house, the weghus, as an investment in keeping the peace.
“Did you ride The Black and The Gray?” Rotgar asked.
“Aye. How far behind you was I?”
“Not an hour,” said Zenner. “When did you leave? You must have got on the road almost at once.”
“An hour or so too late.” He turned to me. “Tahtie is looking for you on the road to Oxford. I told him you would come this way instead.”
I frowned at him. I’d never had a big brother before and I didn’t much like the idea of having one that could predict what I would do.
“You made that trip in half the time we did?” asked Zenner. “Did you kill your horses?”
Valto shook his head. “They’re fine. I set one of the grooms here to walking them to cool down but in this weather, they could have run all day. They like it cold and muddy. I was ready to chase you all the way to Lundenna,” he added, looking at me.
“Lot of good it’s going to do you,” I said. After a moment’s thought, I stuck my tongue out at him. Alenna would have and I didn’t want anyone thinking I might be a doppelganger.
Somewhere, pine boughs and red shirts mean something in a land called...
Chapter 16 - Pine Boughs and Red Shirts
No one asked Valto, but the rest of us assumed that he had men following behind him in the pursuit, probably lead by his lieutenant Asamund who had helped him capture Zenner before. Was that just this morning? I shook my head, no wonder I felt a bit disconnected. Pulled out of my own world, given an instant family, already equipped with someone else’s plans for me, not to mention the gender-bending mind twist—that I had any sanity left was the only surprise left.
I must have let some of my dismay show because Lillakatye leaned back to look at me around Valto. “Chin up. What ho! It’s only a flesh wound,” she said with a manic John-Cleese gleam in her eye.
Startled, I looked at her grin. We definitely had to have a talk alone. Maybe we could go to the ladies’ together? Did they even have a ladies’ room or whatever in the Dark Ages? Was this the Dark Ages? It was certainly getting dim even with the fireplaces, torches and candles.
I was working out how to ask about going to the necessary in Bloddish, but as soon as everyone had drunk their last cup of hot cider, Rotgar said we needed to leave. This might get desperate soon, Kilda and I had managed to take a quick leak in the frozen bushes back at the Great House on the way to meet Borgifu with the horses, but the less said about that, the better. I wasn’t near the trying to walk with my legs crossed point yet, but the two cups of cider would be working their way through my system quick enough.
And as soon as we stood up, a serving wench arrived to start cleaning the table. The place was beginning to get crowded, and it occurred to me that this was the local equivalent of a night club, she was going to need the table to seat new arrivals. Two colorfully dressed musicians were getting set up on a raised platform in the corner of the big room, a lute player and a flute player, a lutist and a flutist? Flautist? In Bloddish, they were a luttelegger and a fyffeblegger which were even funnier than lutist and flutist.
I certainly didn’t see any signs showing where the facilities might be as we proceeded out of the main room and through the little corridor where people removed any mud they had collected before entering. Rotgar opened the heavy door to the outside, and it was like opening the door to the walk-in refrigerator at the deli I had once worked at back uptime. The cold hit us immediately but moving around seemed to have eased off my distress a bit.
Fortunately, there was no wind, but a quiet, half-hearted sort of rain continued coming down. The courtyard was busy, and men were going around lighting more torches in the tin-roofed baskets sitting atop wooden pillars. It took two of them to do this. One used a pole to lift the lid and drop a bound faggot of wood into the basket at the same time, and the other lit the prepared fuel with a torch on another pole. They pulled a wagon loaded with supplies behind them as they moved from post to post. I wondered vaguely what kept the basket from burning up with the fuel, but I didn’t ask anyone for lack of time and fear of sounding foolish.
We moved around the corner of the building, staying under the overhang but out of the traffic. I kept a hand in one of Kilda’s to keep from being knocked around accidentally in the traffic. Moving seemed to have eased my distress a bit, but all these big people tramping this way and that reminded me of how small Alenna really was. And that made me somewhat grumpy.
After a short discussion, Zenner and Valto went to fetch the horses while Rotgar spoke with some of the locals and Kilda fussed over me, adjusting my coat and patting at my hair. “Don’t be such a mother hen,” I complained.
Lillakatye grinned at me. “Your own fault for being so small and fluffy.”
Fluffy? Okay, maybe she meant dainty but that was not any better. The word was ‘fluffig’ and it was appropriate for a baby bird, not me. “How is that my fault?” I protested. I hated being reminded of my physical size. Lillakatye, nearly a foot taller than me, snorted in amusement and I glared at her.
Kilda wasn’t discouraged. “You’re my only chick, heart. And I’m not too happy at this idea of riding on to Lundenna in the dark.”
And it was dark now. While technically, there might be an hour more before sundown, the clouds and rain made it dark as night. We stood under the eaves of the weghus and watched it come down. The torchlight showed drifting sheets of icy falling mist, really, not honest raindrops.
“Raindrips,” I said aloud, pleased that the joke worked in Bloddish as well as English. That was not a fortunate thought, and I felt my bladder muscles twinge.
“Raindribbles,” said Lillakatye and we giggled, an odd sound coming from the tall war-wife. Laughing out loud was a bad idea, too, I decided.
Rotgar came to stand beside us; he looked a bit worried but smiled at our expressions. “There’s been some trouble between the next two weghussen on the way to Lundenna.” He actually seemed his age for a moment, a teenager doing a man’s job. He put a hand to his chin and stroked his skimpy beard, looking harrassed.
“What kind of trouble?” I asked, welcoming a bit of distraction from my internal developments.
“Set-thieves,” he said, which meant almost nothing to me for a moment. Then I mentally retranslated, highwaymen who struck from ambush. Crap.
“Oh! Heart!” Kilda grabbed at me and I put an arm around her to steady her. I dropped my other hand to the lump I could feel through my coat: the outline of the baby Glock in my new pocket.
Rotgar had evidently had military training and been raised to be in command. He recovered his composure and spoke decisively. “We can’t ride as fast in the dark, even on a good road and there will be no moon showing through these clouds. I’ve hired two men to ride with us who have made the trip daily for weeks.” He gestured at two of the locals who were coming up with their own horses. “Lang and Cortle,” he said. “They’re getting ten fenik each for coming with us tonight and a bonus when we make it to Lundenna.” Not if, when. Rotgar was good officer material and I could appreciate that.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or shriek when I saw that both of the locals were wearing red shirts. I wasn’t sure if it made me feel more or less safe. Actually, the red shirts were leather coats dyed the same ruddy earth color as the building but symbolically, I knew they had been hired to be expendable.
The two men responded to his greeting, calling him, “Kanobbelon,” which meant roughly boss-man but was more subservient than the friendly and ironic Alter-Nobbe that Zenner had used. They didn’t look directly at me, giving only glances in my direction.
Valto and Zenner came riding up along with two weghus grooms leading the rest of the horses, distracting me from the regard or our new hirelings.
Valto’s two Easterling mounts stood as tall as Rotgar’s warhorse but seemed constructed of wire stretched over frames. Not skinny but lean like marathon runners compared to the football-player build of Groddikin. The Black was truly black, glistening in the torchlight and The Gray was a silvery copy with a black face, legs, mane and tail. They looked almost metallic the way they gleamed. I had never seen such beautiful horses. I think my mouth fell open because I had to close it.
“How much did you pay for this pair?” Zenner was asking Valto.
“Two hundred marks, each,” said Valto. Four hundred total, and a mark was a gold coin worth eighty to one hundred silver pennies, each of which was around twenty dollars in uptime money…. Holy frozen carp! That would be as much as $800,000 in my idea of real money.
Zenner nodded as if he had expected such a sum. “A lot for geldings,” he commented.
Valto grinned, the scar near his mouth turning it fierce. “I’ve won back half of it on wagers already.”
All the men laughed, and Kilda, Lillakatye and I traded glances. Kilda added an eye roll, and I suppressed a giggle. Encouraged, Lillakatye whispered to me, “Nobbenir unt dem legosen.” The boys and their toys. Or possibly, the boys and their Legos? The giggles escaped and I winced again. That cider would have to come out soon.
One thing about the story impressed me, though. Alenna’s family was rich if her brother, who wasn’t even the heir, could spend that much on a pair of horses, however fine they might be.
Rotgar started to help me up to my seat on Honig but I stopped him. It was now or never, I had to find the necessary before I got on a horse. “We drank a lot of cider,” I said, not wanting to spell it out to him.
“Ach,” he said, catching on. “Du heb nodde den sette abt lette.” You need to sit at ease. Oh, that’s how you say it.
“Den noddel, ikka,” agreed Kilda, taking my arm. Another way to say it, of a small need. She seemed to know where to go and we hurried off, followed by Lillakatye as both guard and co-sufferer.
The “ladies’ room” proved to be off behind the weghus itself, away from other buildings in a sort of outhouse like you still might find in very rural areas of my own world and time. In fact, it was called althus, old house, which even sounds sort of like outhouse. Cut pine boughs instead of a half-moon decorated the door as a symbol of its purpose.
Surprisingly, a small iron brazier just inside the door heated the building, or at least, knocked the edge off the chill. Little stalls with half-doors seemed almost familiar until I realized that the ‘toilet’ was just a hole in the floor one had to squat over. A basket of leaves and scraps of cloth served as toilet paper and more cut pine boughs on the walls helped with the odor.
The whole experience was so strange, due to both cultural and physical changes, that I completely forgot about wanting to question Lillakatye over her enigmatic pronouncements until we were back out of the althus on our way to meet the men and horses again.
“Skaite,” I said out loud.
“You should have taken care of that,” said Kilda and made to turn and go back.
“Did you forget to use the three sea shells?” asked Lillakatye, another remark that needed explanation.
“Neg, Niffelen skaite den Hela,” I said. Frozen hell-shit. Bloddish had some satisfying curses. I wavered on going back and getting into that discussion but maybe not while people were waiting for us.
“We have to go but you and I need to talk,” I said to Lillakatye as we hurried around the building and back under the overhang, out of the rain.
“Gehebe den durvelk sprekken mitt mynvelk,” she said. Have your people speak with my people? Oh, we really needed to talk.
Somewhere, the road itself casts shadows in a land called...
Chapter 17 - Shadows on the Road
The half-hearted rain continued to come down, some times in a falling mist, occasionally in brief transparent sheets. It only added to the cold and darkness but my lynx coat kept me warm and dry. I saw that Zenner had got himself a pair of gloves and so we all were as comfortable as we could be on a cold, rainy night in March in Merrie Olde Bloddeland.
Once we got away from the torchlight around the weghus and the little village surrounding it, it got darker. Very dark. But a curious thing became evident. The road, the old Remish-built highway hundreds of years old glowed in the darkness. Not brightly, it didn’t amount to more light than a full moon but you could see the way and the horses had no trouble staying on it. The soft silvery light lit everything from below, making strange shadows on faces that changed shapes as the horses did their fast walk.
I wondered how this light worked. It might be magic, since I knew for a fact that magic did exist in this world, but it didn’t have to be. There were natural minerals that would glow in the dark, releasing energy that they had stored in daylight. Perhaps the road had simply been made of something similar. Not just the roadbed glowed but also the curbs, walkways and gutters, and the culverts and drains, too; anything made of the ancient stone.
In a few places, pillars were topped with baskets that seemed to be made of iron, like the ones back at the weghus that had held torches. But there were no torches burning, the eerie light from the stone was the only illumination under the clouds.
“The brightstone will show us our path for another hour or two and there will be the watchfires of the road wardens on the last leg,” Rotgar was telling Zenner. “The dangerous part will be after the sunlight caught in the stone fades and before we reach the second weghus. Then it will be darker than dark and we will have to trust that the horses can see better than we can.”
Valto spoke up. “I will lead during that part, The Black in sooth sees very well in the dark.”
I forgot about the strange lighting while I listened to the talk of tactics and movement. Lillakatye and the men continued discussing our plans, leaving Kilda and I to worry. The two hired men brought up the rear, leading our pack horses. The Gray followed his brother closely without a lead.
I tried to distract myself from the military talk by considering the other parts of our situation. We had few supplies but we did not need many. I did wonder a bit what exactly the packhorses were carrying. I had packed very little but one of the horses was carrying the duffel containing the rest of my uptime stuff.
Thinking of that, I put my hand inside my coat and into the slit in my gown to the pocket holding the baby Glock. I couldn’t keep my hand there – I would get soaked, holding my coat open that way – and drawing the weapon would be possible but very awkward. It might take me as long as half a minute to get the gun out.
But with any luck at all, I wouldn’t need it, would I? I wished we had had time to put the gun in a pocket of the outer coat, instead of in the inner gown. If wishes were horse, I thought, but they would be fine wishes, for sure, if they were as excellent as Valto’s pair.
All the horses seemed refreshed from their half-hour rest in the warm stables and with a snack of oats and dried apples the grooms had fed them. We stayed in a fairly tight group and kept to a medium-fast walk that ate up the distance quickly. According to Rotgar, it was only a bit more than two leagues, six miles, to the next weghus but then two and a half leagues to the second one. At least, I thought we were making good speed.
After only a mile, though, Rotgar dropped out of the lead to ride beside me. “Honig is the slowest horse in the train,” he said. “She has not the long legs of my Froggie, or the racking gait of the Easterlings, nor can she pace like Katye’s mount.” Nessager was the pacing horse’s name, a pun that worked better in English: Naysayer.
“Um,” I said.
“Even the packhorses are faster at a walk,” he said. “Do you think you could ride The Gray? Else, we are going to have to go at a jog for as long as the road gives us enough light to do so. That will tire the horses more quickly, and the riders, too.”
“We’re not going to leave Honig behind,” I protested.
“Neg, never,” he said. “Without a rider, she will be able to keep up.”
So, in moments, I sat in the special lightweight racing saddle atop the tall Easterling horse, almost a foot further from the ground than on my hardly-more-than-a-pony sweet Honig. I didn’t like it much but The Gray was steady and accepted me riding him with less notice than a dog with a flea on his rump. The lean barrel of the taller horse was hardly wider than Honig’s and so my seat was comfortable if higher than I liked.
“Now when I steal you back, sesukin,” said Valto, riding beside me, “you’ll be able to outrun your friends.” But he grinned to show that he was only half-serious. I didn’t like him calling me sesukin, though; it meant little sister and I didn’t want to be reminded of who everyone thought I was. I stuck my tongue out at him again and he laughed.
He and Rotgar seemed to be in a good mood with each other and I found out that before making this adjustment in our riding order, Rotgar had taken Valto’s oath that he would not try to abduct me before passing through the gates of Lundenna. Otherwise, I would be on the even taller Froggie and Rotgar would ride The Gray.
But no one was easy with the idea of my mounting a knight’s stallion charger, least of all me. Neither Alenna nor I had ever been a terrifically skilled horse person, though both of us could ride well enough. Also the big horse would yield better to another male than to a female rider. Riding a charger took strength and, well, balls. And I didn’t have those things anymore. If Froggie took a notion to run away with me, I would not be able to stop him and would have to depend on his training to obey when Rotgar commanded.
The Gray on the other hand was trained as a racing mount and was a gelding with less ego to be a trial and, according to Valto, the Easterling horses were accustomed to young boys and girls as riders in their native lands where apparently everyone rode $400,000 horses. Like some of those High Schools in Los Angeles where the seniors drove their Ferrari’s and Bugatti’s to class. A light touch would actually be preferred in controlling such a mount.
And riding The Gray did feel like driving a sports car. I could feel the lean sinuosity of muscles moving under the leather and felt of the saddle against my thighs. It had a curiously sensuous excitement to it and I knew that The Gray wanted to run, loved to run. My face felt hot and I hoped that no one could see me blush in the darkness and the rain. It felt like my cheeks were glowing brighter than the road, though and I pulled the hood of my coat around my features.
What a glorious animal to ride, with a smooth gait that rocked gently in turn to each corner. Before I knew it, I had slipped into a riding trance, almost dozing in the saddle. We on the leading animals were covering ground at more than six miles an hour without ever breaking into a trot or canter.
I could hear the pack horses and the hired lances change to a jog now and then as they began to fall behind. And ahead of me Zenner’s mare huffed and puffed like a steam engine while Kilda’s did the same behind; they were having trouble and would tire before any of the other horses. Kilda could switch off onto Honig to rest her horse for short periods but Zenner had no such option.
I tried not to worry about it; Rotgar and Valto would take care of any problems I knew. Perhaps they would trade the tired or slower horses at the next weghus, I thought. The torches and outside fires lit up buildings just ahead of us already. But no, when we reached the village and roadhouse, we rode on through with only a short conversation between Rotgar and a guard on the weghus gate.
“Riding through to Lundenna?” the guard asked.
“Aye,” said Rotgar.
“Ware thieves,” said the guard. “A bit over a league ahead, in a dell, trees a mickel to each side.”
“Tanka-du,” said Rotgar.
“Crossbows!” called the guard after us.
“Skaite,” muttered Valto. “Damned Remish new-work.”
“No,” said Zenner. “We made-after crossbows from the Farsani, southeast of Yezbuul. Same people we got stirrups from. The Hellenoi had both of them, too, much good it did them when the Yezite tide washed over Hellas.” Hellas was Greece, I remembered that from somewhere. Who were the Yezites? Turks? I wasn’t sure but I thought the Turks came much later. Later… later than what?
Rotgar snorted. “Henrik Blodde brought stirrups with him from Geatasland. I don’t know where they got them, not from the Farsani, so far to the south.”
“Happen from the Easterlings, they may have made them first. Grand horsemen,” Valto said, patting the neck of The Black.
Lillakatye spoke up. “The Easterlings got stirrups from people even further east. Made-new by the Hann in Gathe. I think the Hann made-first the crossbow, too.”
No one spoke for a moment then Rotgar asked, “How do you know that? I’ve been further east than anyone here, to Proits and Lugan, and I’ve never heard of the Hann.”
Lillakatye made a noise, then added, “War knowledge is a sending from the gods, betimes.”
I almost turned to look at her which is when I realized I had been riding for sometime with my eyes closed, and yet – I could see the sly expression Lillakatye had used more than once when she said something that didn’t fit with who she was supposed to be. In fact, I could see everyone’s expression, including my own.
My face, Alenna’s face, wore a look of calm concentration, like someone thinking about a chess move. Despite the hood pulled around my ears to keep out the rain and cold, I could see every detail of my features, as if in strong moonlight. Colors were washed out or non-existent but it was the same face I had seen on the girl in the fountain back in Los Perdidos, and on the girl in the mirror back in Moleena.
Rotgar was frowning, Valto looked into the distance alertly, Zenner scanned one side of the road, Kilda was looking at my back with concern, Lang and Cordle looked bored and sleepy.
Then there was another face, of someone I didn’t know.
Somewhere, the moon shines above the clouds in a land called...
Chapter 18 - Moonsight
The sun had gone down behind the clouds, though it probably made things no darker. And yet, I could see in a way that had nothing to do with light. At the moment, even though I had my eyes closed, I saw faces, all the faces of our little group. My own, or rather, the face I wore, that of Alenna doch Adelwalt; also Yungvalt Adelson, aka Valto, Alenna’s brother who wore the face I used to wear when I was Deputy Gus Gallant in another time and space; Kilda, my devoted serving girl; Haltine Rotgar den Proits, the boy warrior who was almost a giant; Zenner Lu Rennart, spy for the Remish empire and messenger from Alenna’s mother; Lillakatye, whose full name I did not know, warwife and possibly another time traveler; and the two hired swords, Cordle and Lang.
But I also saw another face, certainly not that of any of my friends. A rougher face, male, older with an untrimmed beard, wild eyebrows and a nose bigger than Zenner’s. Also lumpier, as if it had been broken at some time. And with a tattoo pattern on left cheekbone, not that uncommon in this world. The extra face had an intense expression, gazing into the distance, almost as if it were looking right back at Rotgar who led our little group.
I didn’t know where this ability to see with my eyes closed had come from and I suspected it I could do more with it if I knew how. “Someone watching us,” I said, hoping that speaking up would not break the spell or whatever it was. I tried to not move and to stay relaxed at the same time. The Gray moved under me at a steady rocking walk.
Valto beside me on The Black asked, Do you see someone with your inner eye, Swesel? “Where?”
I ignored him calling me Sis; I didn’t want anything to break my ease and focus with this new ability. Or was it new for Alenna? Don’t think about it. My view of the strange face widened to show a man dressed as a hunter in a short fur tunic and woolen leggings, concealed in brush, even to the extent of wearing twigs in his cap. He stared intently into some distance, and I knew we were the object of his gaze. He must be the lookout or spotter for the group of set-thieves said to operate on this section of the High Road.
All the images I saw were delineated, almost like drawings rather than photos. There were no shades or shadows and almost no texture. Beards and hair appeared as masses of fine lines. Images didn’t have motion either but were replaced about six times a second, each new picture slightly different as the subject moved. I could zoom in or out, close enough to count eyelashes or far enough away to see a whole body instead of just a face. The girl on the tall horse was Alenna, me.
I shifted my focus back to the extra face. Zooming out, I tried to get a sense of just where this man had his vantage point. It wasn’t Google Earth, but it had some things in common. Far enough out and the image became diagrammatic. Our party strobed six frames a second along a road and up ahead of us, Mr. Extraface. “To the right, there should be some trees, maybe half a mile away?” I said, almost whispering. I felt tense and excited, partly because this was just so weird, seeing things in my mind that I had no way of seeing with my eyes and partly because this situation might be truly dangerous.
“She has the moonsight,” Valto was telling the others. “The moon is in the sky, even if we cannot see him through the clouds.” Him? The moon is a him to the Bloddings, and the sun is a her; this is because they think of the sun as a ship and the moon as a beast I realized with one part of my mind while still intent on keeping my inner vision focussed.
Valto continued quietly. “When the sun is down and the moon is up, Alenna can sometimes see things others cannot.”
“Sao gehandverligt,” Lillakatye commented with a particular intonation that nagged me again about her inconsistent presentation as a native of this world. Sao gehandverligt meant “how convenient.”
I tried shutting out distractions and concentrated on my “moonsight.” The man in the brush was not moving, just watching. Would he watch us as we passed or would he send a signal to his confederates? Or had he already done so? I tried to widen the area again to see his confederates, but this did not seem to work. I didn’t understand the mechanism or the limitations of my new power and it frustrated me.
And we were still traveling on the road, making six or eight miles an hour in the odd gaits of the various horses. It was an awkward speed for a group of mismatched animals but one that seemed to work. In half an hour or a little more, we would reach the last of the weghusen before the walls of the city, and that last bit of road between roadhouse and city gates would be patrolled and safe from robbers. I could see our progress again in a bird’s eye view of our party with the hidden watcher ahead of us on the right. But I still could not locate any others. If they couldn’t see me, perhaps I could not see them?
Zenner was speaking. “This is a remarkable ability,” he said in Remish. He continued in his faintly accented Bloddish. “If the watcher is where she says he is, then his fellows would most likely be hidden behind the stand of beech trees twenty paces from the road.” He added more description, so the others could tell just which wood he meant, but I couldn’t quite follow his directions with my moonsight.
Instead, I watched as the hidden sentinel turned slowly and fired an arrow behind him. It must have been a signal.
“He warns the others that he has seen us,” I said. For a moment I seemed to see a hand taking an arrow from the limb of a tree and then the images of the unnatural vision I had been using broke like soap bubbles and I came out of my almost-trance with my eyes open and my own hand already reaching inside my coat to the slit in my overdress, the hidden pocket inside, and my Glock.
The world of textures and shadows reappeared, dim, gray and soft-edged in the quiet rain. The glimmer of the brightstone paving had faded after the unseen sun had set a little while before but it was still brighter than moonlight would have been had there been any moon showing through the clouds. And Valto must have known something for though I could not see the moon; I knew without a doubt that I could have pointed directly at it, behind the clouds. So very, very weird.
The rain still fell but now as soundless mist, thin with gaps that showed the trees all growing no closer than ten yards or so from the road. Our horses clopped along the roadway like coconuts in a fast-paced comedy skit. We had fallen into a new order: Rotgar and Valto in the lead, then myself and Lillakatye, followed by Zenner and Kilda each leading a pack animal. Lang and Cortle brought up the rear. No one had said anything for some time until one of the hired swords spoke up. “We’re close to where people have said the thieves set upon them.”
“Aye,” said Rotgar, “I ken you have it right.” He sounded excited, not worried at all. The dunkelnarry simpleton was looking forward to a fight. I wanted something to throw at him, something large and heavy.
Zenner chimed in. “Look to yourselves; we will be within a long arrow shot from those trees when we pass the next firebowl.” He meant the stone pits beside the road spaced every half mile or so that probably had something to do with the comfort of the crews that had made the road hundreds of years before.
The trees I had seen in my vision were barely visible in the dimness and partially concealed by the rain as well. How in the world could ambushers attack at a distance of a city block or more away in such conditions?
Lillakatye beside me murmured an answer, so apt that I wondered for a moment if I had spoken the question aloud. “They will use crossbows made fast to trees and aimed and tested in better light. When we cross a mark they are watching, they will let fly.”
“Scorpions,” Zenner remarked.
“Let’s hope not,” said Valto.
Lillakatye explained again. “Scorpions are heavy crossbows, too big for man-use. They are shot against walls and forts and can throw a shaft two inches thick and four feet long. It would be like to fix one on a tree trunk. Such a bolt could go right through both rider and horse. ”
The image made me sick at my stomach.
“Let us ride,” said Rotgar. “If they have been timing our pace, we can dunkel their aim if we run past them instead. Everyone keep up.” At a touch from his heels, his horse, Froggie, leaped into an eager canter, probably a dangerous rate in the darkness but maybe not as dangerous as a slower one.
I had worked the Glock out from the layers of my clothing now, holding it against my belly and the saddle with my right hand, the reins in my left. Lillakatye may have seen because her eyes got wide. “I didn’t know you could play the Glockenspiel,” she said. I frowned at her; sure she was being mysteriously humorous on purpose, and I wasn’t quite in the mood.
We all heard the deep sha-rang! sounds, moments after we got up to speed and at the same time that men broke from the cover of the woods a hundred yards ahead of us, a dozen or more on foot and four on heavy horses. It was hard to count them in the mist and gloom with the only light the fading steynbricht.
Something passed a yard or two over my head, and I heard a scream from behind me and Lang or Cortle shouting, “Helaskaite!”
“Stay low,” Valto ordered. “Don’t make a mark for their bowmen.”
Rotgar just screamed wordlessly, and he and his huge horse pulled away from us, charging toward the attackers.
Zenner was saying something about watching out for roadblocks. Valto followed Rotgar, a sword in one hand and a small round shield in the other, guiding The Black with his knees. He made a chilling sound, an ululation like the noise a panther might make.
The Gray needed no guidance; he leaped forward to follow his brother, taking me along. The reins were useless, so I dropped them, using both hands to raise the little Glock and point it up, over the heads of our men.
Lillakatye pulled alongside me, her face intent, a short spear in one hand and her axe in the other. “Boola-boola, kanobben,” she said cryptically. She too guided her horse with her knees, leaning close so I could hear her over the thunder of hooves on stone. “Wait till you are sure to hit one of them; bolts of Godfire are not easily renewed,” she advised.
I nodded, reflecting that even though she had not seen me fire the little gun, perhaps Rotgar had described it to her. Either that or she knew what a pistol was from her own past.
It also occurred to me that I had killed one person, the unlucky Hustab the Landsman, with my one previous shot in this world and apparently still had the same number of rounds I had started with. How did that work?
And then there was no time to think – they were upon us and we upon them.
Somewhere, blood flows black in the land called...
Chapter 19 - Blood and Darkness
In the dying light of the brightstone road, they rode out of the mist and rain and darkness: four burly men on horseback with loaded crossbows. At a range of maybe thirty feet, they fired their bows. One round seemed to skip off Rotgar’s helmet and another buried itself in Valto’s little round shield. A third bolt swept Zenner right out of the saddle and the fourth went wide.
I had the Glock in my hand pointed at them already; I shot the first attacker, the noise seeming ten times as loud as it ever sounded on the range. I changed my aim to the second and fired again. I didn’t miss that time either. The light was poor and the target in motion but I had no doubt that I had hit what I aimed at because both men disappeared, knocked off their horses by the shock of the 9mm rounds.
Then we were past them before I could shoot again. The Gray did a little hop over one of the bodies, and I heard him whuff as he and I saw that the bandit footmen had reached the road, blocking his path. Some of them had bows and others had polearms, things like spears or axes on the ends of ten feet of hardwood.
Arrows flew past me; we were ahead of where they had thought we would be and the noise of gunfire may have spoiled their aim.
I shot three more times and saw my bullets hit flesh at least twice as we charged among them. The pole arms were brushed aside by our horses’ bulk though I had to duck one that that swung at me like a baseball bat. I shot the wielder in the face, making four or five men I had likely killed in less than a minute. The sickness in my stomach made me grab the silver-dark mane in front of me as The Gray gathered himself for a jump. I had lost the reins but the horse knew his own mind.
The Gray lifted me without a command and we flew over a pile of rubble and branches and hit the pavement, still running. Despite the wet stones, The Gray was as sure-footed as if it had landed on desert hardpan. I had one hand buried in horse hair while the other clutched the little pistol to my middle.
Zenner had warned that the bandits might have put roadblocks out to slow us down. Zenner. I had seen him fall. He’d been sent by Alenna’s mother to take me to her. I didn’t like him much but he was one of our company and a man I felt I could trust. I had taken his oath to serve me until we reached Lundenna and a thing like that cut both ways.
I turned a bit to look back and saw Lillakatye’s Naysayer take the jump, saddle empty.
“Fuck!” I screamed in English.
Ahead of me, Rotgar and Valto’s mounts slowed, stopped and turned, and again without a command from me, so did The Gray.
We three looked back, no one on horses followed us but a knot of men with those long weapons mobbed something in the middle of the road.
I looked at Alenna’s brother and my so-called bodyguard. I waved the little Glock in the air and pointed, yelling I-don’t-know-what. It tore at my throat so it must have been Bloddish. The three of us charged back the way we had come, Rotgar shouting, “Blut und murther! Proits! Moleena und Proits!” Valto’s cry was a wordless wail that made me think of a panther. The horses added screams to our own.
I kept shouting and later realized that I had used radio code, “Officer Down! Ten-Twenty-Four! All units respond! Ten-Double Zero! Double-Zero! Double-Zero! Double-Zero!”
The Gray took the leap across the barricade as easily going back as he had the first time and as soon as I had control of my seat, I pulled the Glock up to fire again.
But the bad guys were running and riding away into the darkness. I fired once, over their heads just for effect. I wasn’t sure if that left me any rounds in this clip, I had lost count.
Lillakatye stood over two bodies, holding her axe in both hands. Her spear stood upright in the body of another attacker at the side of the road. Cortle, one of our hired swords stood at her back facing outward.
Rotgar and Valto pursued the bandits a short way just for encouragement but quickly returned. Valto had thrown away his little target shield with the crossbow bolt through it and his arm was bleeding.
I slipped, not to say fell, off the back of The Gray and scrambled to my knees beside Lillakatye; one of the bodies lying under her protection was Kilda, my servant, Alenna’s servant. I didn’t know I was crying until Kilda reached up from where she lay and took my hand, not the one still holding the Glock.
“My pony would not take the jump. I fell off,” she said simply. I pulled her hand to my face and kissed it. “I’m all right,” she insisted. “Just got the wind knocked out of me.”
Lillakatye dropped her axe and knelt beside the other body, Zenner. “I’ve got to get the bleeding stopped or we’ll lose him,” she said. I saw a crossbow bolt standing out of his leather coat. Or rather, half a bolt, the back half. The rest of it must be inside him and blood pulsed from the wound in tired, black surges.
Rotgar rode up beside me. “Are you well?” he demanded. He leaped from the back of Froggie and landed with a tump like his boots were full of concrete.
“Genow!” I said. Well enough. I felt breath at my neck and looked around to see Honey, my own pony, come to see if I were all right, too. The Gray stood behind her, facing out, teeth bared, acting like a big guard dog. Behind Lillakatye, her Naysayer did the same, guarding our other flank.
Lang, the missing hiresword, limped up about then. “That scorpion bolt killed my horse,” he said. “And the pack animals have scattered.”
“I…” I began but the world turned dim around the edges and I sat back on my heels in the road to keep from falling. If Honey had not nosed me in the back, I might have fallen over.
Tiny blue lights as bright as LEDs sparked around Lillakatye’s hands as she pulled the quarrel from Zenner’s side. “Freyja den Vana!” she cried. “Tiw-Waz guard him! Baldur shine on him!”
I still had my hand in Kilda’s and felt her flinch to hear Tiw-Waz and Baldur in the same prayer. But I noticed that the warwife had mentioned Freyja the Just first.
Zenner coughed and complained. “Ay! Mierda!” Sometimes I heard his Remish as Spanish; I supposed that they might be more similar than English and Bloddish were.
Lillakatye chuckled. “You’ll live to pray to your own gods.” She helped him sit up. He lifted his coat and tunic to look at where he had been shot but the dim light from below didn’t show much. Lillakatye traced an outline with a finger, then poked him to see if he flinched.
“That almost tickled,” he said with a bit of wonder. “I saw you leave your horse, even before I hit the ground. I thought you had been shot, too.”
I tried not to think about what I had seen, blue sparks leaping from Lillakatye’s fingers to the wound and blood no longer flowing. I had felt something when she did that, like a current moving around you when you stand in a stream. Lillakatye had magic, too. Was that more evidence that she was a world-jumper like me? Even more, I suspected the tall warwife of not being of this world, anymore than I was.
Rotgar, Lang and Cortle gathered horses and checked bodies to make sure no one was shamming death. The bandits must have carried away their wounded if there had been any. Despite Lang’s mount being killed, we ended up with a horse for him, one that had belonged to the bandits. The packhorses and Zenner’s mount returned on their own, and Kilda’s Little Stick who had balked at making a jump in the darkness showed up, too.
I wanted to cry that we were all together and all safe. The guys were laughing and shouting and pounding each other on the back, even Zenner got up from the ground and joined in. I knelt between Kilda and Lillakatye and we grinned at each other. “Nobbenir,” said Lilla as she had done before. “Boys,” it meant, implying all boys are alike.
We counted dead bodies. Lillakatye had killed one each with her spear and her axe. Rotgar had killed two more and Valto, one. Lang and Cortle had taken down another, together.
And there were five bodies with holes burned and blasted into chests and heads and faces. Dunnar’s lightning added to rounds from my Glock.
“The women have outdone us,” said Rotgar, smiling. “Seven to four.”
“Deadlier of the kind,” said Lilla.
Valto clambered over the low wall of the road and brought back a twig of some kind. “Laurel,” he said, putting it into my hair. “Laurel for the one who wins in blood.”
“Ave, Victoria,” said Zenner nodding. “You truly do throw thunderbolts from your bell.”
Rotgar grinned wide and saluted me, his arm shooting forward, palm out; like a high-five to no one.
I waved back at him but did not feel at all cheerful or victorious. These people could celebrate killing someone who would have killed them, but I couldn’t do that. Not yet, anyway. I really wanted to go home, back to where I carried a gun but did not use it.
* * *
It rained on us as we mounted up and got moving. Ever gloomy, the weather did its best to dampen our spirits. By the time we reached the next weghus, the last before the city, the light from the magic road had faded completely and we rode up to the gate in complete darkness guided only by the preternatural eyesight of the The Black and The Gray and a dim glow near the wall. Even my moonsight failed us for I could not summon it at will, apparently. Fortunately, the gate itself had one of those rain-proof firebowls beside it, and that lit the area up sufficiently for most purposes.
The guards wanted us to spend the night outside the gate, but an extra groat or two got us inside after a brief inspection. The guard who got near me dodged back when The Gray snapped at him. “He’s a little ballsy because we got attacked by thieves on the road,” I said. Ballsy? I meant “testy” but the translation into Bloddish made it sound ironic when talking about a gelding.
Lilla beside me laughed and the men all chuckled.
“What’s that smell?” the guard asked. “Like storm-air?”
“Never mind being afraid of the horse,” said Rotgar. “The little lady there throws lightning when she’s irked at someone.”
I rolled my eyes, and everyone laughed again but the guards let us inside and I really don’t remember much more of the evening before Kilda slipped into bed beside me under nice warm covers.
Had it only been a day? Yes, my first day as Alenna…. I went to sleep before I could make anything more of that thought.
What's so funny about sauerkraut juice?
Chapter 20 - Nut Oil and Cabbage
In dreams, I wandered along a dark shore until I found the bodies of my victims. First was Hustab who I recognized from his livery with the white chevrons on brown. Then came the bandits in their motley, five of them, and the last was the most horrible; he I had shot in the face.
Beyond the bodies, Idunn waited beside a boat. I don’t know how I knew who she was except that she was tall and golden like a goddess should be with a ring of gold on her brow and a gilded clasp in the shape of an apple closing her cloak. Had I seen her before? Perhaps I had.
“Ekalenna,” she called to me.
I tried to tell her that I was Gus Gallant, not a second Alenna, but I could not speak just then. Dreams are like that and perhaps, so are encounters with gods.
A man stepped to the edge of the boat, looking at me. Not a man, a god. Taller than Valto or Rotgar with a full red beard and piercing eyes of a blue so intense it was almost painful to be under his gaze. “Lightning-wielder,” he said to me, his voice a low rumble.
“Lord of Lightnings,” I heard myself reply.
He nodded. “Be not wasteful of gifts in your care. One enemy for one charge and though wilt not soon run out of either.” He sounded stern but pleased.
I didn’t ask what he meant but one question for clarity. “My enemies or thine?”
“For now, they are the same,” he said. He saluted me with the same high-five gesture Rotgar had used then he retreated onto the boat.
Idunn led me back to my bed. I was grateful to her that we did not pass the bodies of my enemies this time, and I slipped into slumber beside Kilda again.
* * *
I woke still warmly wrapped in the blankets and furs of the bed Valto had hired for me last night. That had been an argument I had witnessed since Rotgar and Zenner also claimed the right to pay for my sleeping place. I don’t know how it was settled; I was pretty much out on my feet by that time. Perhaps Kilda had used some of my money I had given her and ended the men’s argument with practicality. The aftermath of the fight and the short trip to a refuge had left me feeling drained.
Did throwing lightning, even with the Glock, take something out of me? I remembered that I had passed out the previous time I had used the little gun, and that was only one shot. But I had kept things together through the fight, not collapsing until we were all safe and at the gates of the last weghus.
I lay under the covers and considered matters drowsily. The gates of the city, Lundenna, were now less than seven miles away, we could reach them in perhaps two hours or less. My stomach grumbled, and I amended that thought: two hours after breakfast.
I opened my eyes to complete darkness. It must still be the middle of a long winter night or at least some hours to sunrise. Beside me, I felt as much as heard the gentle breath of Kilda, my servant, snuggled up against my back.
How hard this must be for her. She was devoted to her Alenna, regarding the girl as her own child. And here I was, a replacement who looked exactly like the original and who had been put in place through magical manipulations by that self-same witch child. And if Kilda betrayed me as a doppelganger, I might be condemned to death in a bizarre ritual called the Trial of Wedna.
But Kilda would never do that; she had accepted me and protected me just as she would have her faithless mistress who had abandoned her. I felt affection for her and a duty to return her trust and protection with my own.
What a world.
Speaking of Wedna, leader of the Bloddish gods, and probably a real personage from the evidence I possessed: I had been visited by Idunn in dreams before, and now this latest dream had involved Dunnar. Wedna was the same as Odin and Dunnar was Thor, the Norse names being more familiar to me in my old life as Corporal Gus Gallant of the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office – mostly through the movies.
And I believed in the dreams. Why wouldn’t I? My relocation in time and space and my transformation from my old life were no more fantastic than some beefy Swede on a boat telling me to slay his enemies. Thor, Dunnar, had enemies? Who would dare?
I actually snickered. The guy was a mountain of muscle, could throw lightning and visit people in their dreams and he needed the help of a fourteen-year-old girl who happened to have a couple of Glock pistols in a medieval world. Yeah, well…. He’d asked, I didn’t see how I could refuse. And he had said that his enemies were mine, too.
My stomach grumbled. It had been a long day. The second thing I wanted to do on getting up was eat, but the first thing had to be to clean my weapon. And count the rounds I had left. If Dunnar were telling the truth, I would be down only one or two from the total of eighty-three I had counted before. And if I had just had a dream that wasn’t a divine visitation, I would be down the six or seven shots I had made.
I’d bet on the big guy on the boat being real. On that thought, I drifted back to sleep.
* * *
Kilda woke me up getting out of bed, or rather the cold draft she let in under the covers did. The darkness in the room had lightened a bit; I could see a dim gray rectangle that must be a window and a yellow line on the floor that probably indicated lamp or torchlight on the other side of a door.
“Stay,” Kilda told me when I stirred. “You need rest. I will fetch a firepot to warm the room before you rise.”
“Bring me some coffee,” I muttered in English, but as usual, she pretended to ignore me when I spouted what she called klabbernosh, nonsense.
When I woke again, the room was noticeably warmer and better lit, and Kilda was working with our clothes, unz keldings in Bloddish. I sat up quickly to retrieve the baby Glock as she tried to pull it from the inner pocket of the gown I had been wearing. “Ess ar gevaarlikt,” I warned her, it’s dangerous. “Don’t touch it, let me.”
She stood back without a word and let me take the pistol. It smelled of the shots it had fired and something else. Ozone?
I stood there naked and shivering not just from the cold while Kilda wrapped a fur around me. “I need to clean this,” I told her. Being naked was freaking me out just the tiniest bit. I guessed that pajamas had not yet been invented, but I didn’t remember getting undressed the night before.
She stared at me then glanced at a bowl and ewer sitting on a small table beside a lamp that was providing about half the light in the room. Steam seemed to rise from the around the wooden stopper in the ewer. The window I had noticed before added a gray glow to the yellow of the lamp.
I shook my head. “Not water. It must be cleaned in the finest, lightest oil you can find. I’ll need patches of cloth and a, a rod, about a span long.”
“A ritual to thank Dunnar for his aid,” she said nodding. “Would nut oil be good enough?”
I thought of Idunn. Somehow I knew that among her other domains, she was goddess of the harvest, and fruits and nuts all belonged to her. “Ollgoodt,” I said. Perfect. “Get enough that we can take some with us for the next time I need it,” I told her.
“My heart,” she said in agreement. “Do you want to wash and dress before I go to fetch what you need?”
“Doch, ikka,” I said. Yeah, sure. She handed me warm wet cloths while I bathed under the fur wrapper then she helped me get dressed in a clean undergown and the same overgown with the pocket I had worn yesterday. Soft boots and my lynx fur would complete my costume but those I could find and manage myself. “Go,” I told her and she hurried out.
While she was gone to fetch cleaning supplies, I emptied and disassembled the Glock. There had been ten rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. Now I had nine in the magazine and one in the chamber. I had fired six times during the fight, I felt sure, but only one round was missing. The one I had fired into the air.
I remembered the bodies by the lake in the dream, six of them counting Hustab. Every aimed shot had been fatal. And apparently, I had got every one of those rounds back. “Dunnar is good, Dunnar is great,” I muttered in English. “Dunnar scares the hell out of me.”
* * *
The nut oil worked fine, and Kilda had gotten me a little horn full of it that we wrapped in a leather pouch along with more patches and the short stiff rod she had found to make my cleaning kit. She had left me alone again while I used it, going out and telling the others I would be down for breakfast when I had done my duty to the god. As good a way of thinking about it as any; my time in the service, Army and sheriff’s office, had certainly made me religious about cleaning my weapon.
Before leaving the room, I dug out one of the other ten-round magazines and replaced the one that now had only nine. If something else happened, I wanted a fully loaded lightning thrower.
The hall downstairs where breakfast was served looked exactly like the dining hall in the last weghus we had stopped in. We sat around one of the larger tables and wenches brought us platters of eggs, bread and meat and cups of heated cider and ale. Hot watered ale was surprisingly good, but the meat surpassed excellence. It tasted like salty, smoked bacon but chewy instead of crisp and it went well with the ale and bread. The eggs had an off flavor, perhaps they were duck eggs, I didn’t ask, but they had been cooked with onions and some chopped root vegetable that wasn’t a potato. A dish of pickled cabbage looked and smelled like a greener version of sauerkraut and Rotgar picked up the empty bowl and drank the juice in the bottom to end his meal.
“Keeps away the skorbut,” he said, smacking his lips.
“Maarlikt har ess, ikka,” I said. Most likely it would. Which got a laugh for some reason.
On the whole, it was a jolly meal with the men reliving the trip and the fight. Cordle and Lang joined us at table and participated in the laughter at the plight of our foes. Lang took some ribbing about letting a horse get shot out from under him, and Zenner came in for a share for being wounded. I sat between Lillakatye and Kilda and tried to concentrate on eating when they talked about the bloody result of my lightnings.
Rotgar called for a round of unwatered ale and raised his cup when it came. “To the shieldmays,” he said raising a toast to the distaff end of the table. “And to their gods!” he toasted again. “To Dunnar and Freyja and Baldur and the rest!”
We all drank to that one, spilling a drop on the floor for good luck, too.
“Ikka,” I said when we sat our cups down. “Let us go to the city.” After a moment, I added, “Before anything else happens.” And that got another big laugh as if I had meant to be funny.