Page 3 of The Reluctant Viking

She knew what she’d do if she could do anything. She’d be twenty years younger, Ruby thought defiantly. She would give anything for a chance to live her life over again, knowing what she did today. She’d certainly never get involved with another male chauvinist. She wouldn’t let herself love another Jack. It hurt too much.

In fact, she didn’t think she’d get married. Sure, there’d been lots of good times with Jack, but men demanded too much of the women they loved. They sucked the very dreams out of them. Barefoot and pregnant, that’s how they all still wanted their women!

Ruby wiped her tears with a tissue, rewound the tape, and pushed the play button on the cassette machine, trying to forget her worries and all the decisions she’d have to make. Eddie and David knew their parents had problems, but they’d be devastated to find their father gone. Ruby felt as if she were hanging from a cliff by her fingernails. Would she find the strength to climb up or should she just give in and let go?

Hot tears scalded Ruby’s eyes once again as the mesmerizing voice declared, “You can control your own life.”

Hah!

The speaker continued, “Before we start, clear your mind of all other thoughts. Picture yourself floating out of your body—floating…floating…floating…

“There’s nothing—nothing—in the world you can’t have if you want it badly enough. The mind is a powerful tool.”

“Oh, God, help me find a way out of this mess,” Ruby prayed aloud. “I don’t know if I can live without Jack.”

“Some people consider prayer the answer to their problems,” the speaker said, and Ruby’s eyes shot open in surprise. Was she going crazy now, too? Geez! Mental telepathy with a tape recorder!

“Prayer is fine,” the voice soothed, “but even God wants you to help yourself. I’m telling you there’s nothing in the world you can’t do. Where the will’s strong enough, there is a way!”

The speaker’s evangelizing voice droned on and on as Ruby allowed her mind to lift out of herself. Totally relaxed, she felt as if she were floating above her own body. A heavenly feeling! Lighter than a feather, her buoyant body drifted from cloud to cloud in a clear blue sky.

Her problems disappeared. The five extra pounds she’d gained during these past stressful months melted away. She felt twenty years younger.

Even in her sleep, Ruby smiled.

It was the odor that first pulled Ruby from her deep sleep—human body odor. “Okay, Ruby baby,” she muttered to herself. “Go with the flow.” Sense-dimensional dreams! That would be something to tell her therapist—if she ever got one.

Ruby opened her eyes lazily, then shut them quickly in horror. When she peeked out again, she realized she must still be asleep, awash in the most realistic dream she’d ever had. About a dozen wretched-looking people, wearing bizarre, drab clothing, like burlap sacks, crowded her in a long boat, which moved swiftly toward shore. By the smell of them, they hadn’t bathed in weeks.

Ruby wrinkled her nose in distaste and edged away from one toothless harridan, who resembled her flaky cleaning lady Rhoda. She giggled aloud. Imagine! The dream of the century and she got to take her cleaning lady along. Some women got handsome actors like Kevin Costner in their fantasies with his preference for “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days” in Bull Durham; she got Rhoda. How would Rhoda survive without her tabloids?

“M’God, be you a boy ur a girl?” the Rhoda person exclaimed.

Ruby realized then that everyone in the boat was staring at her—as if she were the oddball. Ruby looked down at herself. She saw nothing unusual in her Nike-clad feet, her blue jeans and her son’s oversized Brass Balls Saloon T-shirt. Oh, that was probably the problem. The T-shirt logo offended some people.

She started to explain that her shirt really belonged to her fifteen-year-old son Eddie who had bought it at the shore without her permission, but stopped herself. Really! She didn’t have to defend herself in a dream.

Ruby smoothed the fabric of her shirt over her slim waist and hips, then jerked alert. Slim! Dear Lord, she hadn’t been this thin since before her first pregnancy. Not that she was ever fat, but this kind of body tone came with youth, not childbirth and thirty-eight years of easy living.

Ruby discreetly lifted the edge of her T-shirt, peeled away the loose waistband of her jeans and peeked at her skin just above her navel. Hallelujah! No more stretch marks! Her wish had come true. She was twenty years younger.

Smiling widely, Ruby looked back over her shoulder…then gasped. Three Viking-style dragonships rode at anchor on the sunny horizon of what appeared to be the confluence of two huge rivers. Hundreds of other ships stretched along the shore or headed in or out of a wider river which must lead to the sea. She hadn’t seen anything so spectacular since the Tall Ships event held on the Hudson River in New York years ago. They were magnificent.

A loud thud caused her to turn forward. Their boat had hit the dock and was being tied ashore. Hundreds of people swarmed on the wharf, all dressed in strange clothing.

Some of the men wore short tunics that barely reached their knees and left their arms bare, while others wore plain, collarless, long-sleeved shirts down to their hips over tight pants. Belts, ranging from leather thongs to ornate gold chains, cinched in their waists. Short swords and scabbarded knives clanged at their sides.

Long, pinafore-type tunics, mostly open-sided, covered the women’s pleated, linen chemises which trailed on the ground in the back. Ornate brooches, with dangling keys or scissors or small knives, fastened the tunics together at the shoulders.

Ruby noticed an inordinate amount of blond hair sparkling in the afternoon sunlight, from almost-white to fire-red and all the colors in-between. The older women knotted their hair at the back of the neck and covered it with scarves or cloth headdresses, while others braided their long tresses or let them lay loose down their backs. The men’s hair hung shoulder-length and longer, often in braids, too, framing faces that ranged from clean-shaven to heavily bearded and mustached.

Finely wrought, heavy wrist and arm bracelets of solid gold or silver, studded with jewels, adorned the better-dressed men and women. Some appeared to be museum-quality pieces. Wow!

Fascinated, Ruby asked Rhoda, who still eyed her suspiciously, “Where are we?”

“Jorvik.”

“Jorvik? Where’s that?”