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Excerpts

PRÍR

Jorgen held the smile on his face because she was looking at him and because it masked his real feelings. They were irritatingly strong feelings, feelings he couldn’t quite control, and so he made himself smile while he sat thinking. And listening, always listening. And rocking.

She didn’t fear him. That’s what annoyed him the most. The others, even her pigeon-chested father, the clan’s chieftain, could be made to move aside with a dark glance. It was a precious art, one he’d been polishing for many years now, and he wasn’t about to let some child—a girl, no less—shrug that away.

He felt for and found the bear tooth amulet he had tied on a thong around his waist and kept next to his skin, hidden beneath his tunic. His father, the clan’s skald before him, had given it to him, relating a belief about the amulet’s power. He chuckled, allowing his smile to widen a crease. Funny how his father hadn’t realized the heady power of his own position. For all the man’s wisdom he’d never noticed how easily people could be influenced by a carefully worded compliment or chastened by a pointed rebuke. But Jorgen had; he’d hung in the shadows and watched people, all the while waiting for his father to die. And while he was waiting, he’d come to know each weakness and each want—and discovered how one could feed the other—for every member of the clan.

When his father had finally died—a terrible accident, really, bleeding to death all alone in the forest following a mishap with his axe—Jorgen had taken his honored position at the hearth fire. He continued entertaining the clan with the stories of his father and his father before him, but he recrafted the stories here and there to fill the clan’s needs and to guide their desires. He told how great men rose up; how peoples came to be conquered; how the gods, in their pleasure, sought to aid humans—or in their anger, turned away from them.

Shaking his head, he released the amulet. They were like children, really, squatting with mouths agape, waiting to be spoon-fed the pabulum that was his stories. He’d nursed them well these many years, and they loved him as children love their father. And feared him, too, as children should a father.

All except one: this copper-headed girl, Asa. And that annoyed him. He reached for the amulet again, raked the bear tooth across the skin above his hip, relishing the prick, and released it. No, it more than annoyed him: It made the blood swell in his veins. The way she refused to step off the path when he approached made his chest hurt. Her stare, too direct, with gray-blue eyes flashing to every color of the ocean, made it hard to breathe. Sometimes she even argued a story’s ending, as she had just the other night in front of all the others. It had infuriated him so completely that he’d lain sleepless till morning. Recalling it now lit a new fire beneath his skin, and he fondled the amulet. It wasn’t right.

A torrent of raindrops began hammering the thatched roof, and he watched the dispirited members of the clan look upward. Worry soaked their faces, and he was quick to douse his smile, to look upward as well and be one with their misery.

The unusually foul weather of this past year had presented to him an unexpected opportunity. He’d always craved something more than he had, though up until now he’d not known exactly what that was. But as the nonstop rains rotted friendships, as the cold weakened resolve, he began noticing the chieftain’s power eroding just a little. That made him think of things. And carefully, so very carefully, with all the cunning and patience of a wolf, he’d begun guiding the clan’s thinking even more. He called up certain age-old stories of his father and embellished them. Or abbreviated them. He spoke ever more often of the gods’ vengeance and the reasons behind it. Carefully, almost holding his breath, he deposited a suggestive whisper in one ear and a conflicting rumor in another until the clan members, blinded by misery upon misery, flopped about like fish in a net.

The chieftain had been surprisingly easy to sway. Over the past few weeks it had only taken a few private goads, along with a public appeal to pride and a veiled question of bravery, to send him off to sea in the worst of weather. And he’d taken the men with him, all but himself and old Ketil. Amazing, really, what a few well-placed words could do.

He let his eyes wander from the rafters to the empty looms set against the wall to the two figures directly across the fire. That left the chieftain’s wife, leader of the clan in his absence, untended and alone. Her husband wouldn’t return. Perhaps she didn’t know it yet, but he did. The chieftain and his men would lose their battle with the gnashing teeth of a wintry ocean and find their graves in its depths. Their deaths would be crafted into a saga of bravery and added to the long list of others.

But here again was his problem: the chieftain’s daughter, Asa, kneeling at her mother’s head. His chest tightened. It seemed this girl was always in his way of late. He wouldn’t have it. She’d have to be made to understand.

© 2010 Diane Lee Wilson