Элизабет Бир - The Red Mother

Aerndis had always been a quiet one, but clever with it. She gave me a sly look. “As I judge from the crumbs in your beard, there’s been little enough room for that as there is.”

“Your cooking outshines mine, it’s true.” Especially when I was cooking up boiled soup-cake thickened with shreds of wind-dried fish.

I found myself reluctant to open the bargaining. When you want something from someone that you can’t just take, letting them know it exposes your vulnerability.

Still, I had to try.

And maybe Ragnar would be feeling generous with a full belly and his ale-cup to hand.

I said, “You weren’t far wrong when you brought up my brother being missing. The real answer to your question of what I am looking for is, ‘Arnulfr.’ Did you hear my brother was exiled for manslaughter?”

“Hm.” It sounded like agreement, around a mouthful of rye bread. Ragnar had gotten ropy with age rather than thick and I couldn’t imagine finding a corner into which to fit another bite of anything, but cutting sod is hard work.

I glanced toward the hearth-stone, as if fascinated by its ornate carved and dyed reliefs. “The line of Arnulfr’s fate led me here, and it ends here.”

Aerndis refilled my cup while Ragnar wiped ale froth from his beard. “What do you want with him?”

“I found the real killer. He can go home.”

Ragnar swallowed, washed it down with ale, and snorted. “Who’d you frame?”

“You wound me.”

He said, “In that case, you could have kept your father’s farm.”

“And what about Arnulfr?”

“Your brother’s got his patch of ground by now.”

I gestured to his rough hands, the whole one and the one the axe had split. “Farming looks like hard work.”

“I’ve half a hundred head of cattle and seven horses. Sheep and goats. Chickens and geese and a dog. Four bondi look to me for protection. I even managed to keep nearly all of them alive last winter, which wasn’t easy.” He waved vaguely at the doorway, through which the ashy dooryard was just visible.

So the eruptions had been going on that long. Perhaps that explained the number of new graves along the road. “Not a lot of Vikings this far north.”

“It’s a long swim to civilization,” he agreed. “You really cleared his name?”

I nodded, looking back toward my host, away from the fire.

Ragnar eyed me levelly. His eyes were light, for such a black-haired man. “So, when you say that someone else was to blame. In all seriousness: factually, or conveniently?”

I smiled.

“And if you can find him and tell him, you’re delivered of your kin-duty.”

“Yes.”

The sun had not set, would not brush the horizon for hours yet. Its rays crept through the vents beneath the roof. It lit the underside of the thatch and all the things stored in the rafters sideways, creating a bright and alien relief. The interior walls of the longhouse were plastered white with lime render and lime wash to make the interior bright in daylight, painted with coiling trees and flowers in ochre reds and yellows. I wondered why they hadn’t finished a ceiling under the thatch.

Ragnar rattled his fingertips on the trestle. “Why not take that land and farm it yourself? It’s an easier living down south than up here in the bright country.”

“I wasn’t lying when I said farming was too much hard work for me.” I decided to be generous. “So you don’t actually have to worry about me buying the next farm over, and my presence weighing on you the rest of your days.”

Ragnar frowned judiciously. “What’s news worth to you?”

“Curse you, Half-Hand. This is a kin matter—”

“Sure it is, and so you shouldn’t mind running a little errand in return for news of your brother.” He smirked. “ And his wife.”

I weighed it. Ragnar always had known me a little too well. “Your word that you know where he is.”

Ragnar shrugged. “I know where he was, and where he was going.”

If he’d been lying, I thought, wouldn’t he have made a bigger promise? “What’s the errand?”

“Let’s go outside.”

He drained his cup and set it down. I did the same, standing as he stood. I nodded to Aerndis, then put my hat on as I followed him into the yard.

If Bryngertha had wanted me, I might have been content with the quiet and backbreaking life of a farmer. Might have made myself contented, anyway. But Bryngertha had wanted Arnulfr, and all Arnufr had ever wanted in truth was Bryngertha… and that quiet and backbreaking life.

Though my brother’s experience showed that even the life of a simple landed farmer was not without its risks.

Ragnar leaned on a stone fence and watched his seven horses and my single one brushing the ash aside to graze. I leaned beside him. I waited a long time, watching his expression from the corner of his eye, before I ventured to ask, “About that errand…”

“So,” Ragnar said by way of answer. “I don’t suppose you’re still a witch.”

His braids were down to his waist now, befitting a chieftain. If you ignored the bald spot they framed, impressive. He hadn’t bothered with a hat.

“Eh,” I said. “Are you about to claim I ever was one?”

He snorted. “You were a clever shit, anyway. Clever as Lopt and just as likely to get snagged on your own pretensions. How are you at volcanos?”

“I can ride away from them as well as any man. They say you ought to head upwind and keep to the high ground.”

He pointed at the thread of smoke that rose through the smoky sky. It was just discernable through fumes and falling ash. I could imagine the outline of a conical hill poking above the horizon if I squinted.

He said, “What about one with a dragon in it?”

“There’s no such things as dragons,” I said.

“Should be easy to slay, then.”

“No,” I said, wondering if it was Arnulfr’s fate-thread that ran out here in the bright country, or Auga Augusson’s. “What kind of naturalist would I be if I went and slew every strange beast I ever came upon?”

Aerndis sniggered, which was when I realized she had come out behind us. Woman moved like a cat.

Ragnar glared at her but spoke to me. “So now you’re a naturalist?”

“I’m not a dragonslayer.”

Aerndis spoke in a tone I recognized as the voice of sweet reason. “If you slay the dragon you stop the eruption, I warrant. He’s been digging around in that volcano with his great black claws. There was nary a rumble until he showed up, this time last year. We were lucky to get enough hay in for winter, and then the sickness came and a lot of us got a late start on planting this year. There isn’t much left, and people are going to be hungry when the dark comes again, especially with a dragon picking away at the livestock. Folks would be grateful to the man who saved this harvest. Grateful enough to give him a home. And they say dragons hoard gold…”

Ragnar glared at her.

“Darling of you to think of my future, sweet Aerndis, and to want to keep me around,” I said.

Ragnar glared at me.

“All right,” Ragnar said, when the glare was well out of his system. “Well, getting rid of that dragon is the only way you’re getting to your brother.”

Aerndis suddenly, abruptly, turned and walked away. Too far away to hear us, and then she kept walking. I had seen what her face did before she turned, and a chill lifted my hackles. “What do you mean?”

Ragnar cleared his throat and spat over the rail. “Arnulfr’s here.”

“…here.”

He tapped the earth underfoot with his toe. “Buried. Dead. His wife too. And my daughter and two sons.”

“I don’t—”

“They came. And they stayed the winter. And they never left.”