Sandra Hill - [Vikings I 05] (15 page)

After everyone stopped laughing, Maire brought Rurik back to the issue they had been discussing before they’d been interrupted by Bolthor’s poetic efforts. “Back to that ecstasy drivel, if you’re envisioning me having fits for you, you’re more daft than I originally thought.”

He smiled at her. “Not only am I going to cause you to have ‘fits,’ you just might have multiple ‘fits.’ ”

That was an image that would not leave her the rest of the evening.

Another hour had passed, and the Campbell clan was still celebrating.

Maire yawned widely and wished she could be off to her bed. It had been a long day, topped off most recently with a lute performance by Inghinn, the sheepherder’s daughter, a bawdy song rendered by the twins, Vagn and Toste, a playing of the bagpipes by Murdoc that brought tears to the eyes of many in the hall, and two sagas delivered by Bolthor, one about the Battle of Brunanburh, where Maire’s father had died years ago, and one a hugely funny story about Rurik and a fake witch who’d put an eel skin up her gown to scare him into believing she had a tail. Had Rurik really made a fortune at one time selling wood crosses and holy water to ward off witches?

Banging on the table with her cup for attention, Maire announced, “ ’Tis time to end the feast. I know that tomorrow is the Sabbath, and your workload is not so great, but
some
of us are falling asleep on our feet.”

“Nay, nay, nay!” the crowd yelled in disagreement. “One more entertainment.”

Maire slumped to her seat in surrender. She was outnumbered by a clan that had been too long deprived of merriment. Ah, well! Let them have one more performance then.

People were looking here and there to discover who would provide the next talent exhibition, but no one volunteered. Someone from the back of the hall shouted, “How about one of our lady’s witchly feats? A lévitation, perchance?”

Maire’s shoulders, which had been slumped with exhaustion, went immediately straight. “Nay, I will not be part of your entertainment. That’s not what witches do.” Actually, lévitations were one of the few witchly rituals she
was
able to perform on occasion.

“Ye made Lacklan’s bull rise in the air when it kept tryin’ ta mate with Fenella’s cow, and we were all watchin’ then,” the same man called out. It was Dougal, the blacksmith.

“Nay! Find someone else. I am too tired.”

Rurik stood up beside her and looped an arm over her shoulder, as if in companionship, but there was naught companionable about the twinkling blue eyes of the rogue. She shrugged his arm off, then listened with amazement while he told the crowd, “Have pity on your lady and let her be off to bed. Can you not
see that she has been up since dawn and must needs he down on her bed furs?”

Maire owned no bed furs. The only bed furs on her bed were Rurik’s. And, belatedly, she noted that he’d never once mentioned sleep when referring to her going to her bedchamber. She slanted a look at him, and he had the nerve to wink at her.

Her clan members seemed to have pity on her then, and were making tsk-ing sounds of sympathy. Even Dougal had the grace to duck his head shamefacedly.

Maire said a foul word under her breath, one she almost never used unless provoked mightily. She was provoked mightily now. With another expletive, this one directed at the smirking toad at her side, she stomped to the end of the dais and down the short set of stairs. “Bring me that suckling pig,” she ordered the cook, who was standing in the kitchen doorway, off to the side of the great hall. And to Stigand, she said, “Don’t you dare go berserk on me again. It’s not your pet, for the love of heaven.”

Soon the platter with the roast pig, which had not yet been carved, thanks to Stigand’s wild over-reaction, sat on a small table in front of her. The Vikings had come down off the dais and her clansmen gathered behind her, all of them forming a large circle.

Before she started, she shot Rurik a glare.

He shot her a grin.

The lout!

Maire stood facing east, with her legs slightly apart, just as Cailleach had taught her. Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply and tried to feel as one with the earth and all its energies. With her eyes still closed, she let
all of nature’s colors fill her… in her head, out to her fingertips, down to her toes. When she felt that her body was centered enough, with her feet firmly planted on the rush-covered floor, she opened her heavy eyelids and raised her staff high above her head in both extended arms. Addressing the suckling pig, she chanted all the ritual words in their original Gaelic, then ordered, “Puse! Rise now!” Nothing happened.

This time, she repeated the Gaelic chant, then lowered her staff, pointed it at the pig, and ordered, “Rise!”

Again, nothing happened.

Concentration. She needed to concentrate better. After centering herself this time, she strolled three times, deisel or in a sunwise direction, inside the circle of people, holding the staff in both hands over her head as she walked. The Gaelic chant sounded harsh to her ears in the near silence of the great hall. Energy was practically flowing out of the pores of Maire’s body when she shouted at the pig this time, “Rise! Damn you! Rise!”

Again, the pig just stared back at her, unmoving, through its watery eyes.

Thoroughly disgusted with herself, Maire turned to the crowd and said, “I’m sorry. It didn’t work.”

As one, all the men in the room told her, “Aye, it did.”

“Huh?”

Maire and the maids and womenfolk glanced around the circle. Cook had a wooden trencher placed strategically in front of his groin. Many of the men had criss-crossed their hands over themselves. Others
were hunched over. Some of them were grinning; some were grimacing. All of them were red-faced, with excitement or embarrassment, she could not tell.

Old John was the one to break the silence. “Holy blessed apostles! I didn’t know I could still do
that.”
He gazed with astonishment at a tentlike protusion at the joining of his trews.

“I knew an Eastern houri once who could make a man have an erection at twenty paces, just by swishing her hips,” Toste said, with equal astonishment. “But she was stone naked. And I ne’er saw her arouse four dozen men at one time.”

“Can ye teach me wife to do that?” Dougal asked hopefully, and many other men chimed in with, “Me, too.”

It would seem that Maire’s lévitation experiment had been a success, after all. The only problem was she’d caused the wrong “swine” to rise.

Maire looked as if she were about to weep.

Rurik had had as good a laugh as anyone over her inept experiment with its ludicrous result, but now he recognized how much her failure affected her. She obviously saw no humor in a hall full of rock-hard cocks with no place to go.

He did.

Bolthor surely did. The dreamy expression on his face bespoke the verse mood taking over.

Hell, the rest of the bloody world would find it hilarious, too.

But he couldn’t let her stand there hurting so. Despite all the humiliation she’d caused him, he just couldn’t. He knew too well how it felt to be the subject
of mockery. There was naught worse in the world than being made to feel small and inadequate.

“Come, Maire,” he said, taking her gently by the hand and leading her off to the side. With a jerk of his head, he signaled to Stigand that it was time to break up the crowd.

Stigand just then seemed to notice Maire’s distress. His craggy face went soft with compassion, and he immediately began bellowing out orders to disperse. Apparently Maire had won the fierce berserker over. Hah! Soon he would be spouting praise-poems, too.

Rurik dropped her hand and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, tucking her close to his side. With the other hand, he took the staff away from her and set it on the table. He headed toward the stairway where he intended to tuck her into bed, and crawl in after her.

“I am the world’s worst witch,” Maire wailed. “Cailleach would be so ashamed of me.”

“I don’t think you are the world’s worst witch,” he told her soothingly.

“How many witches have you known?” Her voice broke on a stifled sob.

“A few,” he said, his eyes shifting from side to side, avoiding direct contact. Truthfully, Maire was the only witch he’d ever met, aside from Alinor, who had turned out not to be a witch, after all. “There was that witch in Baghdad. And two in Cordoba. I cannot count how many witches I knew in Norway; the place is riddled with the old hags … not that you’re a hag, mind you. And one in Britain, of course … a Saxon witch she was … the worst kind of all.”

Rurik could be facile of tongue, when the occasion
warranted. This was not one of those times. He could not seem to stop jabbering.

People who had been exiting the hall, including his own Vikings, halted to hear what utter nonsense he was spewing forth. And half-brain that he was becoming, he continued to spew it forth. “I especially liked the white witch who danced naked in the woods. Her whole coven would join in and, Holy Thor, what a sight that was! Breasts and buttocks twirling all about—”

Maire stopped dead in her tracks and stared at him for a long moment. “You liar,” she exclaimed. “You are such a liar.”

Bolthor cupped a hand to his mouth and told Rurik in a loud aside, “You went too far with the twirling business, methinks.”

Stigand had a different opinion. “Nay, ’twas the dancing naked. Witches like to pretend no one knows of that lewd practice.”

Rurik told Bolthor and Stigand to do something vulgar to themselves, then turned to Maire, hooking his thumbs in his belt with deliberate casualness. “Are you calling me a liar?”

Maire looked right and left in an exaggerated manner, then straight at him. “If it looks like a toad and has warts like a toad …”

He hitched one hip. Hell, he’d only been trying to make her feel better. How had she turned the tables on him? Well, at least she wasn’t weeping anymore.

“I suppose it’s a cultural trait amongst you Norsemen since you do it so well,” Maire continued.

“Do what so well?” She’d lost him back at the culture thing.

“Lying.”

Now, Bolthor, Stigand, Toste, and Vagn stiffened with affront. “Maire, your words wound deeply. Best you be careful whom you insult. Stigand tends to lop first and think second.”

But Maire wasn’t paying any attention to him. “You know what they say about Vikings, don’t you?” Truly, the woman did push and push. If she were a man, she’d be dead as a herring by now.

Five pairs of fists went white-knuckled at this point.

“Maire, have a caution,” he warned.

“Every time a Viking lies, his… uh, male part shrinks.”

Five male jaws went slack-jawed with disbelief. Indeed, a whole hall full of jaws dropped open. But did Maire know enough to stop then? Nay. She just blathered on.

“Aye, that’s what the old proverbs say. The
part
that Viking men prize so much shrinks and shrinks with each lie till eventually it resembles naught more than a wee nub, and eventually falls right off.” While she was pontificating, she held her hands an arm’s length apart, for demonstration purposes, but the palms moved closer and closer till in the end she clapped her hands together.

Every single man winced. A few might have whimpered.

Now she’d gone too far. He should ignore her, but no man worth his salt could let such an insinuation go unchecked. “Let me see if I understand what you are saying. Every time a Viking lies, his cock falls off?” Rurik demanded of her.

“Eventually.”

It was hard for Rurik to tell if that was a sparkle of mischief in her eyes, or some residual tears. In any case, it was the most ridiculous statement he’d ever heard anyone make.

“That’s the most ridiculous statement I’ve ever heard anyone make,” he said then. “And why only Viking men?”

“Must have been a witch’s curse put on lying Viking men,” Maire surmised, waving a hand blithely. And, yes, that was a definite twinkle in her eyes.

“Vikings don’t lie any more than Scotsmen.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Maire disagreed. “For example, Vagn …”

Vagn jumped about a foot off the floor at being singled out.

“… when Stigand raised an arm in front of you this afternoon, following your baths, did he not ask you if he smelled? And did you not say, ‘Nay’?”

Vagn’s face flushed bright red.

Stigand looked at him, saw his guilt, raised his arm and sniffed his armpit, then thwapped him with a big palm on the back of his head, causing Vagn to fall to the rushes. Then, that fool, Vagn, could be seen checking inside his braies, discreetly, for any evidence of shrinkage.

“And Toste …,” Maire called out to the rascal, who was trying to sneak out of the hall through the scullery door with the sheepherder’s daughter. “Did I not hear you tell Inghinn yestereve that you were in love with her?”

Toste tried to keep walking, but Inghinn stopped. “Well?” she demanded of him in a quivery voice. “Were you lying?”

“I… um… well… not precisely,” Toste said. “I was in love with what you were doing with your hands and—”

Inghinn slapped him across the face and stormed away but not before calling over her shoulder, “Now that you mention it, his worm
was
smaller than usual.”

“ ’Tis not. ’Tis not,” Toste protested.

Inghinn’s father, Fergus, gave Toste a glower that said this subject of bedding his daughter was not over, but for now he hurried off to placate the now sobbing Inghinn.

“She’s only teasing us,” Rurik tried to tell his comrades. “It’s just a jest.”

“Oh, really?” Maire said. “Well, I have heard it said just as I have told you, and the only way to reverse the demise of said virility is to correct the lies.” Then she addressed the entire crowd. “And, now that I think on it, I’m not so sure it’s not true of Scotsmen, as well.”

Pandemonium ruled then. All over the great hall, men were checking their braies and spouting out disclaimers to previously told lies.

“Really, Mary, I did not spill that ale. I drank it all meself.”

“Calm down, Collum. I will replace the missing bag of barley I charged ye fer.”

“Daracha, yer not really as satisfying as I said ye were.”