Viking Series - My Fair Viking Part 7

She pointed to a nearby terraced garden where a pet.i.te woman-pet.i.te by Norse standards-was kneeling amidst a profusion of autumn flowers, her dainty hands covered with dirt. Her raven hair and slightly slanted eyes were the only signs of her half-Arab heritage. Otherwise, she looked like a dark-haired Viking woman.

"It certainly is... pretty," Adam commented, his mouth still agape.

"Pretty!" a nearby soldier said with a snort of disgust. "What kind of keep is this for fierce fighting men? We should have dirt-stomped exercise fields, but, nay, Drifa had to plant gra.s.s there and shrieks every time we trample it with our heavy boots. And the great hall! That is where the other sister, Vana, reigns. Thor's b.a.l.l.s, a man should be able to put his feet up in the hall, belch if the meal is particularly tasty, bring his dogs inside, spit in the rushes if he wants... not that there are rushes in this great hall. Nay, Vana says the dirty rushes breed maggots. We cannot even take a p.i.s.s in the courtyard if the need comes on quicklike from an overabundance of mead. And we men must wipe our feet afore entering the great hall. Can you imagine that?" That last was spoken with such horror that you would have thought the men were required to cut off a limb... or a manpart... before dining.

Adam and Rashid looked to Tyra for an explanation. The soldier had stomped off with a curse to help Alrek toss ropes to the lad on the wharf so the longboat could be tied and pulled in close for landing. Twice so far, Alrek had missed his target.

"That would be my sister Vana he refers to... Vana the White she is called because of her white-blond hair. Her mother came to us, via my father's bed furs, from Iceland. What can I say? She likes cleanliness."

Rafn pa.s.sed by and muttered under his breath, "Pfff!Like would be too weak a word. More like she worships at the altar of the G.o.d of cleanliness. The woman is a tyrant, I tell you, a tyrant. What she needs is a husband to beat her on occasion. Yea, she does." You'd never know it by his words, but Rafn was in love with Vana. When asked by his comrades on many occasions how he would be able to abide living with such a zealot, Rafn always grinned and said, "I will give her more to occupy her time than brooms and lice."

"Does the Norse religion have a G.o.d of cleanliness?" Rashid wanted to know.

She and Adam looked at each other and smiled... and wasn't it amazing how her heart turned over at the small gesture of shared amus.e.m.e.nt? How pathetic she was! And how interesting that she had never noticed all these years how needful she was of a man's attentions.

Or was it just Adam's attentions that touched her so?

Now, that was an alarming prospect. Best to think of other things. What was it Rashid had asked? Oh, about a G.o.d of cleanliness. That was all Odin and Thor would need-a Vana-style G.o.ddess insisting that the great hall of Asgard be spotlessly clean! Asgard was reputed to be big enough to let 800 armed hesirs stomp in with their dirty boots through 540 doors... doors with bra.s.s hinges that would need polishing.

"Alrek says there are two dozen spotlessly clean garderobes at Stoneheim," Rashid commented, "and as many outside privies."

"Alrek was jesting," she said. "There are only ten... each."

"Nice to know, though, that the bed furs will be clean and fragrant at Stoneheim," Adam said. "I do so like to have clean bed furs when I am"-he paused long enough for her to look at him and blush-"sleeping." He winked again, then leaned down to pick up his leather medical bags.

"I would pick you up and toss you overboard if I did not need your skills so much," she snarled.

"Lucky me!" Adam murmured, a somber expression on his face now that the time to revive his medical talents was at hand.

"Skills? Skills?" Rashid hooted, obviously inferring that she'd meant a different kind of skill altogether.

"Hismedical skills," Tyra emphasized. Then she did to Rashid what she would have liked to do to his master. She picked him up and tossed him over the side into the icy water.

She glanced around then to see everyone staring at her. The men were laughing. Her sisters were frowning with disgust.

And Adam-the b.l.o.o.d.y rogue-safe ash.o.r.e... he winked at her.

A short time later, they were in her father's bedchamber.

With an authority and expertise he hadn't displayed before, Adam ordered everyone from the sickroom except his a.s.sistant and the king's resident healer, Father Efrid, a monk from a monastery in Ireland. Thorvald practiced the Norse religion, but was Christian, too, when it was convenient. And everyone knew the monk healers were the best physicians... next to Arabs, that is.

Adam had also ordered Tyra to depart, but she'd dug in her heels, and he'd finally relented, saying firmly, "Stay, but keep your distance and shut your teeth, or I will remove you bodily myself." She stood at the back of the room, watching with silent fascination as he did his work.

Adam laid his various vials of ointments, linen packets of herbs, and instruments such as lancets and cautery rods on a small side table before turning to examine her father. With gentle efficiency, he removed the king's garments, exposing a big body which was still wide-shouldered and barrel-chested and bulky, though his muscles had no doubt lost their firmness from lying abed so long.

He pushed back the king's eyelids and examined the whites of his eyes. He pressed his ear against her father's chest and seemed to be listening to his heartbeats. He examined her father's fingernails and toenails, even his genitals. The wound itself at the back of his head garnered the most attention.

Quietly he asked questions of Father Efrid, whom Tyra knew from experience to be a good man and a good pract.i.tioner of the healing arts when less serious injuries were involved. In truth, she knew of no physician who had a high rate of success when mortal wounds were involved. Mostly, it was luck, or in the hands of the G.o.ds. Still, she had heard of Adam the Healer's reputation and knew she had to let him try his particular talents on her father, even if it turned out to be a futile effort.

"How long has he been thus? Does his condition never change?" Adam asked.

"Do you manage to get food and liquid into his body?"

"Does he pa.s.s water regularly? What is the color of his waste?"

"Any fever?"

"Does he appear to be in pain? No screams, or excessive groaning?"

"When did the bleeding stop?"

On and on his questions went. During the course of the examination, her father's eyelids fluttered

occasionally, and once or twice he even muttered aloud. Father Efrid reported that the king had regained consciousness a few times while Tyra was gone. They'd been able to feed him thin gruel and liquids, and he did swallow with ease. All these things Adam seemed to take for good signs.

When they left the room, after an hour-long examination, Tyra walked with Adam back to the great hall.

"Can you help him?" she asked. He shrugged. "I just don't know. There are some good signs, but the length of his unconsciousness troubles me deeply. There is something I could try, but... nay, I will not do it."

"What?"

"You have put me in an untenable situation, and I resent it mightily."

She tilted her head in question.

"I could try drilling a hole in his skull to reduce the swelling. Trepanation the procedure is called. It has

been done afore, and even successfully in some of those cases. But..."

"But?" she prodded when he did not immediately ex' plain.

"But it is extremely dangerous. And once again, I find another person's life in my hands, and I do not

want that responsibility. I do not!"

"What is the alternative?"

"There is always the possibility that someday your father would awaken on his own, but, frankly, that

would be practically a miracle. 'Tis more likely that his brain would continue to swell within the confines

of his skull, and his body will begin to wither away, and he will die a slow death." "Nay!" she a.s.serted, much too harshly. Realizing she was directing her outrage to the wrong person, she lowered her voice and told the physician, "My father would abhor that kind of death. He would rather die on the battlefield, but if not that, then under your knife."

"Do you have the authority to make that decision on his behalf?"

"I do."

"I just don't know. I did not think it would be this bad. I was hoping... well, I was hoping for something else."

"Please," she said, putting a hand on his forearm. "Try this trepanation."

He looked at her hand, big and callused; then he looked into her eyes.

"Please," she repeated... a hard word for her to say and one she could not recall using for years and years.

His face was rigid and unyielding. She could see that a myriad of emotions warred beneath the surface.

"So be it," he said finally. "G.o.d help me, but... so be it."

Chapter Five.

"I'm thinking about joining a harem."

Tyra's sisters giggled at their sister Drifa's remark, but Tyra reacted quite differently. The remark was so unexpected and outrageous and out-of-character for her timid sister that Tyra just about fell out of the tub as she was rising from her bath.

The big bra.s.s tub that she and her sisters shared had been set up in the kitchen so that all of them could grill her with questions without pulling their sister Ingrith away from her cooking. Actually, there were a cook and several kitchen maids to perform such menial duties, but Ingrith's special interest was cooking and she made sure all her directions were followed to the letter. In truth, all the meals at Stoneheim were feasts, thanks to Ingrith's talents, unlike the unpalatable fare the men had eaten aboard ship. Some of Ingrith's dishes were basic recipes that appealed to all, but some of the frothy, sauce-covered concoctions had the big Nors.e.m.e.n blinking down at their plates with confusion... and a fear of ruining their fine physiques with excessive fat.

In most Norse households, the cooking was done on a large central hearth in the great hall, the site of most communal activities. Because of the large size of the resident population at Stoneheim-more than three hundred fighting men alone-most of the cooking was done in this separate kitchen with its immense hearth and stone ovens. Meanwhile, the five open hearths down the center of the great hall were there to provide heat during the cold winter.

But a harem? Drifa is thinking of joining a harem. "Drifa!" Tyra exclaimed.

Drifa might be half Arab, but that was as close to an Eastern harem as she'd ever been, having resided in Norway all her life. Tyra couldn't imagine her performing the wanton things a pampered concubine would do.

Drifa continued to arrange large bunches of autumn flowers in a pottery jug filled with water. Drifa loved to bring the outdoors inside with her numerous arrangements, which Tyra admitted made the keep look more cozy, but which the men hated for the same reason. Once, she'd even brought fifty rose bushes inside, to everyone's consternation, because they were looking frail and in need of special attention.

Her father had grumbled last year that soon she would be putting flowers in the privy. To which Drifa had shot back, "Let me marry and you won't have to worry about all my flowers marring the horrid rooms of your horrid keep." And then she'd run off, weeping. Her father, dunderhead that he was betimes, had looked at Tyra and her other three sisters and said, "What? What did I do?"

But now Drifa reacted angrily, to Tyra's surprise.

Well, why not? It appears I am never going to be a bride, and the way Rashid describes the... um, pampered position, it sounds like a very good life for a woman. Besides, flowers bloom in the Eastlands all year round."

I am going to wring Rashid's neck.

Vana was tsk-ing at the mess Tyra had made when she'd sloshed water about in the tub. She was on her hands and knees wiping the puddles off the stone floor with a thrice-folded square of linen cloth that she always carried on her person for spot cleaning. "Actually, I've been thinking about it, too... joining a harem, that is," Vana remarked. Even with her white-blond braids tucked under a scarf, and her slim figure barely hidden by her big, open-sided ap.r.o.n, Vana, too, had the physical attributes of a man's play companion.

I'm going to wring Rashid'sneck .

"And what will Rafn have to say about your skipping off to some harem, Vana?" Tyra figured that question would give Vana pause to reconsider.

Vana blushed but lifted her chin with stubbornness-a trait all of Thorvald's daughters shared. "Rafn has no say in the matter. We are not wed, and may never be at this rate. If I want to join a harem, I will."

"Me, too," said Ingrith as she stirred a fragrant cauldron of fish stew with dumplings floating on the top, then checked the eel barrel to make sure there were enough of the slimy creatures for her special eel pie. "If you all are going to join a harem, I'm not staying here in this... this... prison. I want to cook for one man who will appreciate my efforts, not three hundred men who would just as soon have boiled possum, as long as ale abounds to wash it down."

I'm going to wring Rashid's neck.

"Me, too," said Breanne, who was peeling apples for one of Ingrith's far-famed tarts, "but only if the harem is in the Eastlands. I would love to study their building methods there."

"How silly of you, Breanne!" Drifa said with a soft laugh. "My mother told me much about her homeland, and I do not think houris would be permitted such freedom... to roam the cities gaping at buildings and such."

"They can, too," Breanne countered. "Rashid told me agood harem concubine can do anything she pleases."

I am going to wring Rashid's neck.

"Well, none of you are going to join a harem. So forget that. Father would never permit it. And, Drifa, stop putting those flower petals in my bathwater. I'm going to smell like a posy."

"That is the purpose, Tyra. To remove the stink of horse and ship and battle from you and make you smell more like a woman," Drifa said. Under her breath, she muttered, "Good practice for being in a harem, too. They smell like flowers there, I would wager. Desert flowers."

That last comment about houri practice didn't even merit a response from Tyra, who was the least likely to become any man's desert flower.

"As to Father not permitting it," Drifa said, "that is the best part. Rashid said the harem is the perfect solution to our problem. Since none of us can marry till you do, Tyra, and since it appears you will never wed, then how can Father object if we settle for being the next best thing? Concubines."

I am going to wring Rashid's neck.

"I think you have all gone barmy. Harems! Not in this lifetime!"

"Perhaps one of us could try it, and if it works out, the rest can follow," the ever practical Vana offered.

Borrowing a phrase of Adam's that she herself had used before, Tyra said, "No harem. Not now. Not ever."

Silence permeated the room then as her sisters harumphed their discontent and murmured such comments as "Tyrant!" or "She never wants us to have fun," or "Who namedher master?" Tyra ignored the muttering and began washing her long hair with the aid of one of the kitchen thralls.

When she came up from rinsing the soap from the heavy strands, it was to hear that her sisters had given up on one objectionable subject only to move on to another equally objectionable one.

"What ishe like?" Ingrith asked.

"Who?" Tyra answered, as if she didn't well know whom her sister referred to. Adam was the subject of everyone's conversation at Stoneheim. She stood and wrapped one linen towel around her head turban style and began to towel off her body with another.

"The healer, of course," Ingrith said.

"Arrogant," she replied flatly.

"Really?" Ingrith was leaning over the shoulder of the heavyset cook, Signe, who was kneading the flat, unleavened manchet bread dough for baking. The cook's a.s.sistant, Arva, also got her attention. Ingrith watched closely as Arva ground grain-rye, barley, and even peas-on the large round stone known as a quern. Little by little, Arva poured grain through a hole in the top, then turned the top stone around and around with the handle, thus squashing the grain between the two stones and eventually turning it into flour. It was a long, tedious process, especially in a keep this size, where at least one hundred loaves were consumed per day. Meanwhile, Ingrith continued to talk. "Seems to me I heard Rashid say something like 'Confidence is a great aphrodisiac.' "