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“Her hair is ugly,” Egill said. “Her face is ugly too.”
Magnus eyed his son. “I had hoped you had become more a man than a jealous little boy. Taunts against little girls aren’t worthy of men. I am disappointed in you.”
“She called you Papa! You’re my papa!”
“Aye, ’tis true, but blame her not.”
Zarabeth said nothing. She well imagined that the little boy, who was the very image of his father, would not be pleased at the intrusion of a stranger.
She said to him, smiling, “You will grow up to be of your father’s size, Egill. He will be very proud of you.”
Egill looked at the woman with the very red hair and eyes so green they looked like wet water reeds. “I don’t care what a slave thinks. You will hold your tongue, woman.”
Zarabeth drew back, silent as a stone. The boy was right. She had no right to speak her mind, she had no rights, she had nothing at all. She held out her arms to Lotti, and her little sister immediately pulled away from Magnus. Zarabeth moved away from Magnus, holding herself away from the hurt.
She saw the slave Cyra immediately take her place. The woman was but a few years older than Zarabeth, and her hair was long to her hips and as black as a moonless night. Her eyes were a dark brown and her flesh a soft peach color. She was exquisitely beautiful and Zarabeth wondered from whence she had come. Ha, where she had been captured was more to the point. She was also a slave, but there was no collar around her throat. A slave prized for her work in the master’s bed.
“I have worked with the flax,” Cyra was saying to Magnus, pointing to a long rectangular field to their left. “I will make you fine trousers and shirts.”
Cyra wore a gown of white, full-cut, belted at her narrow waist. The material was a fine wool, not harsh and coarsely woven. It was as fine a garment as Ingunn was wearing.
Zarabeth was tired and depressed. She wanted to be alone, away from Magnus, away from the dozens of talking people who lived and worked and spent their lives on this farmstead. She hated it.
She touched her fingertips to the cold iro
n of the collar and kept walking.
When Ingunn said loudly that Cyra would show Zarabeth to the slave hut, Magnus did not contradict her. He had no intention of allowing Zarabeth to remain there even one night, neither she nor Lotti, but he would handle the situation in private. It wouldn’t hurt to peel away a bit more of her lamentable pride, that stiff aloofness of hers that infuriated him. Let her believe for a while that she would stay in that mean hut.
He paused a moment, though, when he heard Cyra say to Zarabeth, “I do not sleep in there. I sleep in the longhouse, with Magnus.”
And Zarabeth said with sweet laughter, “I am pleased for you, Cyra. You will continue to bed the savage, and I will be free from his attention.”
Blood pounded through him. He wished now that he had taken her that day, that he had ignored Lotti and just taken her and been done with it. Damn her, he wanted to hurt her. He was shaking as he walked into his longhouse. No, he could not have done that; he couldn’t have taken her in front of the child, nor could he have abused Lotti in any way. But he would have her soon. There would be naught for her to do about it.
Did she really believe he would allow Lotti to sleep with the other slaves in that cold damp hut?
He watched Egill run to Horkel, who had followed him into the house.
Everything looked familiar; everything felt exactly the same, smelled the same. But it wasn’t. Life had changed now, and no matter how he had thought to shape it according to his own whims, he knew in that instant that the future was no longer his to control.
Zarabeth was wearing one of her gowns, a soft pink wool with a white overtunic that she had worn in York. Then she had fastened it with two finely worked brooches at the shoulders. They were gone; she assumed that Toki had taken them. Now she’d knotted the ties of the overtunic at her shoulders. Her hair was combed and hung freely down her back. Ingunn had told her to serve the guests all the mead and ale they wished. She had merely nodded, half her attention on Lotti, who had come to a beginning understanding with several of the small children who played freely throughout the longhouse. She didn’t know who the children were; it seemed not to matter. They were all thrown together and there was always an adult who chided them or played with them, or gently pushed them out of the way.
Magnus’ longhouse was rather like a low, wooden barn. The floor was of beaten earth, so hard that walking on it raised no dirt or dust. There were smooth slabs of stone around the perimeter of the room, set firmly up to the walls. The walls were made of split tree trunks set side by side in a double layer, standing upright. Zarabeth looked up to see that the roof was supported by big wooden beams and sloped sharply. At the close end of the long room were rows of clean wooden tables where all the family and guests were now sitting eating beef and mutton, venison and wild boar. There were trays of peas and cabbage and potatoes, and huge bowls of apples and pears and peaches. Over the huge rectangular fire hearth, bounded with thick stones that rose a good three feet high, were two huge iron pots suspended by chains that were hooked to the ceiling beams. One pot was filled with veal stew, the other with a mixture of potatoes and onions and garlic and beef. There were iron bars over the bed of hot coals upon which thick slabs of boar meat spit and sizzled. On a low table at the end of the fire hearth stood at least six bowls filled with a variety of herbs.
The men were drinking from carved cow horns. The women drank from wooden cups, except for Magnus’ mother, who drank from a fine glass from the Rhineland. Zarabeth moved silently with the heavy wooden pitcher that held sweet wine from France that Magnus had traded for at Hedeby. She was very careful with it, for she knew the wine was valuable. She walked slowly toward the main table, where Magnus’ father, Earl Harald Erlingsson, sat in Magnus’ own carved chair, his wife next to him. He was as tall as his son, so fair that his hair seemed white in the dim rushlight. He looked as hard and lean as a man of twenty. It was very likely, she thought, that Magnus would look like him in some years.
“Wench,” Harald called out. “Bring me more of my son’s wine!”
He had done it on purpose, she thought vaguely. He had seen her approaching with the wine, yet he had chosen to call attention to her presence. In that instant Magnus looked up at her. He frowned. It was hot in the longhouse and he saw the glistening perspiration on her forehead, the wet tendrils of hair that curled around her face. Her face was flushed from the heat and she looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her. He felt a clenching deep within him and quickly said to his older brother, Mattias, “I am sorry your babe died, but Glyda looks well again.”
Mattias cast a worried eye toward his pale-faced girl-wife. “She is very young,” he said. “She knows not how to carry a babe.”
“What is there to know?” Magnus said, giving his brother a questioning look. “She is young, yea, that is true, but you get your seed in her and a child grows and is birthed. What else is there?”
“She was foolish whilst she carried the babe.”
“How?”
