Lord of Falcon Ridge (Viking Era 4)

“I’ll strangle you.”

“What did you get for me, Papa?”

It took Cleve a moment to focus on his daughter. He smiled, handing her a small arm ring of shining silver. He let her touch it and stare at it, then slipped it onto her upper arm, tightening it because her arm was very small.

“Your second papa is the daughter of the King of Ireland. I suppose that must make you some sort of adopted princess too. That’s very fine, Kiri.”

The men looked jealous and wistful. Chessa knew they missed their wives and children. She wondered if they wanted to kill Cleve again. She imagined all of them had traded their goods for jewelry. But it could be a long time until they returned to Malverne.

“Och, yer white gentiles!”

All the men whirled around to face a graybeard who looked as if he should have died twenty summers before. He had a long scraggly beard that hung nearly to his waist, and no hair at all on his head. He wore a black robe that was tied at his sagging middle with a thick rope. He was giving them a big toothless smile.

“We get many black gentiles trading here,” he said when he reached them, and Chessa thought, Ah, here’s a perfect mate for Old Alna. “They don’t stay long. They go back down to the Danelaw. They’re not fit for our climes.”

“What’s that, Chessa?” Kiri asked, unable to take her eyes off the old man.

“I don’t know. Cleve?”

“We’re from Norway, thus we’re white gentiles. Black gentiles are Danes. We’re taller and have lighter hair, that’s all, that’s the only difference, that and we have more honor than the damned Danes.”

Merrik smiled down at the old ancient. “I am Merrik, Lord of Malverne, in Norway. We’re bringing our friend home. He’s been gone since he was a small boy. His family rules Kinloch. Perhaps you know of them?”

It seemed the old man shriveled before their eyes. The scoring wrinkles on his face seemed to deepen. He stared at Cleve and began backing away. “Och,” he said, crossing his fingers in front of him to ward Cleve off. “Yer one of them, one of them fiends what call out the monster.”

“What fiends?” Chessa said.

“What monster?” Merrik asked.

The old man was trembling, his gnarly hands opening and fisting. “The Kinloch, he calls himself the Lord of the Night. He rules as harshly as the earls of Orkney. He orders his men to kill and take what they want. He’s a fiend, a man of evil, lower than the Christian’s devil, who draws nearer to us everyday. We don’t know if the Christian God is more powerful than the Christian devil. Who wants to take the chance? But we’re already got our devil here, and it’s yer kin—the Lord of the Night—the Lord of Evil. Get away, get away from here if yer a part of him and his. Aye, ye are, a monster, just like he is. I see it clearly now. Jest look at ye.”

“This is interesting,” Cleve said, frowning after the old man, who was surprisingly agile in his escape for one of his advanced years. “I come from the family of fiends? The Lord of the Night? Of Evil? As bad as the Christian’s devil? He must not like my hideous face. This sounds like one of Laren’s tales. Where is Laren?”

“She will be here shortly. She and Eller were trading soapstone bowls. Ours are the finest in the market. Sarla made them before she became, well, maddened.”

No one said anything to that.

* * *

They left Inverness several hours later, well before it was dark. They sailed down the narrow river Ness, seeing small settlements on both sides of the shore, looking for a deserted cove to stay for the night. At the mouth of Loch Ness, they pulled the warship and the trading vessel into a small inlet that seemed deserted and pulled both boats well up onto the shore.

The mist became thicker during the evening, the summer air chill. Laren cooked a red deer stew that made everyone groan with pleasure.

“I remember now,” Cleve said as his knife tip speared another piece of the tender deer meat. “I remember that red

deer abound, as well as rabbits and grouse. With all the salmon and herring in the loch, no one ever starves, even in winter, for it is never as cold here as it is in Norway.”

“A land of plenty,” Merrik said to Cleve. “But this fog or mist—it’s summer, and just look. We’re shivering off our bearskins. Tomorrow,” he continued, smiling now at Cleve, “we’ll find out what kind of a friend you really are.”

Chessa was holding Kiri between her crossed legs as she sat close to the fire. She said, “Cleve, tell us about this man who married your mother after your father died.”

Cleve flinched; he couldn’t help it. “His name is Varrick. You know, what I remember most clearly is the coldness. Even curled next to the fire pit, I was always cold. Everyone in that longhouse was cold. And he was the coldest one of all. He made the cold. I think he’s a white gentile, just like you are, Merrik, despite the darkness of his hair. My mother was a Dalriada Scot. I can see him as if I were a small boy again, standing in front of him, staring up at him—he was a giant to me for I was small—and I knew he must hate me since my older brother and I were the heirs to Kinloch, that he must want us dead, that he would kill us, it was just a matter of time. I was terrified of him. He never hit me, never touched me. He would just look down at me as if I were something of mild interest to him, nothing more. He was big, as are most Vikings, but he was thin I remember, for once I saw him naked in the bathing hut and I could see his ribs. He was very young, no older than I am now. As I said, his hair was dark and he usually wore it loose around his face. His face, by the gods, his face was so cold, just as he was, and he treated everyone with that same coldness, even my mother and my sisters, particularly my elder brother. Everyone was terrified of him, why, I don’t know. He liked to lift me up so my face was right in front of his and he’d shake me—never hard enough to hurt me—and I’d shrivel into nothing. But then he’d smile at me and that made me all the more terrified of him. Many times he hugged me against him and I was so frightened I often forgot to breathe. I remember he told me I was his, only his, and I would be what he wanted me to be. And I wasn’t to forget it, ever.

“I remember one night he came into the longhouse after standing on the edge of the promontory that overlooks Loch Ness. A storm was raging outside. He was wearing black, I think he always wore black, and there were strange blue markings on his face. No one said a word. But I remember again the coldness of him and of how he made me feel.

“I remember he hated filth. He wouldn’t allow any blood to be seen on anyone. When the men came in from a kill, they couldn’t show themselves until their bodies and clothes were clean. He abhorred animal flesh, I remember that clearly. I can see him looking at my mother when she once forgot and offered him a platter of roasted deer. He took the platter from her and then put it on the ground at his feet for his dogs. He looked at her and said she would regret that.

“It’s strange, but before that, I remember laughter and fighting and quarreling, everyone, the men, the women, the children, and everyone shared and worked together.” Cleve sighed. “Then again, I must have been very young. Maybe I dreamed that once everything was different, mayhap it wasn’t. But I do remember my mother coming to my pallet at night and holding me and telling me that one day my brother would become Lord of Kinloch and my brother would see that I served him well and honored me. She had to know that he would rid himself of my brother and of me. She had to.”