The Witch’s Cats: Chapter One

Fantasy. A healer takes in a new apprentice: an orphan girl kidnapped by slavers from Mercia.

Rated T, Gen. Diot, a ten-year-old girl, is taken by Vikings to sell amongst some other Mercian slaves, but when she escapes their clutches and flees into the nearby woods, she is rescued by the healer who lives there. Lefsi, her Norseman saviour, is a healer who lives alone with his frighteningly huge cats, and after chasing off her captors, he decides to take Diot in as a new apprentice.

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The grass is slippery under Diot’s feet, the mud giving way under her movements, and God, but she is cold. She is so, so, so cold, the cold and damp digging into her feet through her footwraps and down into the tiny little bones inside them, and digging under her clothes too. She can feel the cold in her face, under the strange hot pouches of her red cheeks, feel the cold stinging at her eyes and her eyelashes, at her chapped lips.

There’s not even snow.

Is that just how it is here, in this place they’ve brought her to, where the trees are the tallest she’s ever seen and the forest is so very dark, and the skies stretch on for miles and miles over a distant sea, everything too blue and too green and too white? Is that just how it is here, too cold and too damp and too deep and sharp and bright in colour, and yet still not even snowing, still without frost? Is it because there’s too much of a salt sting on the air for it to settle?

“Come back here, girl!” roars one of the big men from the boat, whose name is Barni, who has swathes of orange-red hair and is big, but not fast. “You’ll be in for a hiding when we catch you!”

He snaps something else to the other man from the ship – Arn-something, Arne or Arnbrand or Arn-something else, Diot doesn’t know – and she trips and slides down into a ditch with a sharp sound of pain and more mud slip-sliding all around her, mud on her hands and up her arms, all over her clothes. She’s sodden with it and there are tears on her cheeks that are burning hot compared to the rest of her, and it’s dark down here in the ditch so she pauses for a moment, barely even daring to breathe, listening.

She can hear them, off in the distance behind her, hear Barni’s big boots clomping through the twigs and earth and wet leaves; Arn-whatever is quieter, but she can hear him too, hear his quicker steps.

Diot puts her hands, almost blindly, on a big branch in front of her and tests her weight on it – it’s too wet to creak with her weight, but she has to test her footholds carefully so that it doesn’t wrench apart under her feet and hands as she climbs it out of the ditch. She stays close to the ground once she’s out again, glancing behind her before she almost crawls through the wet mulch, following a streak of light coming down through the streets, along the line of a stream.

“Girl!”  Barni roars again, his voice echoing through the too-tall, too-big trees on their every side, and Diot keeps moving, keeps crawling—

“MRAAAAARGH!”

Diot screams, falling back from the monster right in front of her, like a cat but larger, must be some sort of lion that they have in the forests here, its fur thicker and longer than any tabby cat she’s ever seen, the thing nearly as big as she is with sharp fangs and big, yellow eyes. It growl-hisses at her in the way a real cat might, its four paws braced on the ground, its tail and back fluffed up and huge in the air, tail up at an extreme angle, and as Diot scrambles back from it there’s another one and it snarls at her too, quieter, not as loudly but still too loud, too big. Are they going to eat her, devour her right here, scratch her to shreds before Barni and Arn-whatever can sell her off?

They’re coming closer now and she wants to run again but she’s too frightened to move, the cats either side of her and easily big enough that no matter where she runs and how she tries it, they’ll be able to grab her with one of their hand-sized paws.

Barni runs forwards, his shadow falling over her, but then one of the cats lunges at him, the second cat that has more orange in its shaggy coat and is a little smaller than the first one, and when it growl-hisses at him Barni lets out a short noise of fear himself, and stumbles in his haste to get away.

Arn- tries to step forward, says, “Here, kitty,” and leans over like he’s going to nudge the cat out of his way to get to Diot, hunkered down on the grass in the leaves and mud and grass, but it growls again and whips out one of its paws and he shouts not in fright but in pain, standing up straight and holding his own hand tightly. He growls something in a language she doesn’t know, too different to the Nordic she’s heard at home, and Barni replies, but they both hang back, and actually take more steps back when both cats walk forward now to hiss at them together.

They’re each standing in front of her, hissing at the men, and she wonders if this is like how dogs bark at someone who’s going to take away their bone or the bits of meat they’ve found, if the cats are growling at them because she’s their prey and they want to eat her and they think these men will stop them.

“You’re trespassing,” says a voice behind her, and her head whips up to look at the speaker.

He’s a little older than Barni and Arn-something, she thinks, might be forty, a few streaks of grey in his messily cut hair, which sticks out at strange angles because he’s obviously cut it himself, and not let someone else do it for him. He wears black kohl under his eyes like she’s seen some Moor merchantmen wear, but his is a lot darker and shadows the whole of his eyes instead of just lining them to keep out the sun in the desert or on a sail ship, and she sees more lines around his neck and his arms, disappearing under the loose cloak he wears over his tunic – tattoos are familiar, at least, even if she doesn’t recognise the symbols.

“We were chasing the girl,” Barni says, standing up straight, although he flinches when the bigger cat swipes at him, the black and orange one. “She’s due for sale in town, thought to run. As if she’s going to swim home.” He sneers down at her, and Diot shifts experimentally in the mud, staring at the cats to see if they’ll look back at her, but they don’t, keeping their gaze on the men.

When she inches back, still hugging close to the ground, her shoulders hit the tattooed man’s legs – he must have stepped to the side to get in her path, and she looks up at him, finds that he’s looking right back down at her.

“Where did she come from?” he asks, not breaking her gaze. He has a slightly hoarse voice, sort of ragged at the edges, or growly – it’s a voice not that dissimilar to the giant cats, which she presumes must belong to him, or him to them. She’d thought that most of the Northmen would have pale eyes, but this man’s eyes aren’t pale – they’re dark, very dark.

“Bernicia,” she says when neither Arn-something nor Barni answer.

“We picked her up in Mercia,” says Barni. “Down south, a stray. She’s better off here than there – at least here, she’ll eat.”

“Oh, so you’re doing me a favour!” Diot snaps at him, and this makes the cats glance back at her, but they don’t whirl on her or lash out with their paws. They just look at her as if they’re surprised she could make a noise before looking back to the warrior men and standing closer together, both cats shoulder to shoulder.

“Lefsi, she’s ours,” Arn- says, still gripping at his scratched hand and holding it against his breast, although he’s shifting uncomfortably on his feet and glancing back up the hill, like he doesn’t feel very certain of his position.

“You’re trespassing,” says Lefsi for the second time, very calm and very cold, almost as cold as the wet air around them, the wet mulch Diot is sitting in. “This is sacred ground, and you chase a slave over it? Shout and scream and stomp your feet, and don’t even manage to catch her?”

“Fuck you, Lefsi,” growls Barni, and Lefsi’s laugh is a quiet, short thing, sort of mean-sounding, this very much like a cat’s growl.

“I’ll take her as recompense for your trespass,” Lefsi says. “You can return to your work, and me to mine.”

“What?” asks Arn-. “But she’s, she’s ours, we just—”

“Just lost her,” Lefsi says in cold, biting tones, enunciating each of the words. “Had Rusla and Elan not caught her for you, she would easily have escaped you, and I would be taking her in regardless, were she not drowned in the river, or perished of cold in a culvert. Cut the loss whilst you may, boys. You are better off surrendering this battle than attempting to win it.”

“As if you could defeat us in a fair fight,” Arn-whatever says, but Barni looks very serious now, and he puts one of his big, beefy arms over Arn-‘s chest.

“Who said anything would be fair about it?” asks Lefsi softly. The black tar around his eyes blends right into the colour of them, which is very darkly brown if not black itself, and it makes the whites of them look altogether too bright, especially from on the floor where Diot is.

“No, Arnfjord,” Barni mumbles, gripping at the shoulder of his companion’s cloak and tugging him back. “Let’s just get on with our fucking day.”

Diot’s breaths are just starting to slow, although she’s still shivering, as the men turn and begin to trudge back the way they’d come.

“Can you walk, girl? You aren’t injured?” Lefsi asks.

“No,” Diot says.

“Good,” says Lefsi. “Come. You can run off again if you wish, but it’s some miles west,” he points the way Barni and Arnfjord are going, “to the next village, at least half a day’s hike, and there is no settlement this side of my hut for much farther. Besides, there are wolves in these woods, and they’d make a quicker meal of you than I.”

Lefsi doesn’t wait for her to agree or to say anything – he just turns away from her and begins walking until he stands on the path, and his cats give Diot twin glances before they follow after him, their tails in the air and their thick, fluffy legs barely even seeming to be touched by the damp and wet that’s all around them. Only their paws are muddied, the rest of their bodies – their tails, their trousers, the bulk of their thick coats – unburdened by it.

Diot gets clumsily to her feet, really feeling the cold in her body now that her blood isn’t hot enough with running to fight it off, and stumbles after them.

It’s half a mile down the path, but grit and stone have been trodden into the ground to make it easier to walk on, not as slippery as the hillside had been – it’s not the same as real brick or paving, but she guesses that would be really expensive, apart from labour intensive, for just one man’s house in the middle of a forest.

There’s a flat expanse either side of the stream where the flow of the water widens and deepens, and a four-square of fenced fields are tracked around the cabin, two on this side of the stream and two on the other, a bunch of hives on the far side. In very neat rows are planted different plants and flowers in the fields, some on short trellises and hoists, but she only recognises some of them – cabbages, onions. Most of them aren’t even food crop, she doesn’t think, unless you can eat those flowers and leafy things.

There’s a mill wheel in the water, turning regularly with the flow of the stream, although it’s smaller than a lot of mills she’s seen before, she supposes because the stream is smaller, not so deep. The cabin is on raised foundations with stone steps leading up to the door, and a bridge adjoins it to another, smaller building on the other side of the water’s flow, this on a similar raised frame of stone and wood. As Lefsi walks up and in through the front door, Diot follows after him.

The warmth inside compared to out of doors is an immediate relief, and Diot shudders, her hands going up to her upper arms – the cold on the ship hadn’t been as bad, with so many people all around her, and an older lady had kept leaning over her, touching her cheek, hugging Diot against her, chattering away to her in Welsh, which Diot hadn’t been able to understand very well.

The cats don’t follow in through the front door – a ramp outside had led up to some sort of hatch high up in the cabin wall. The two cats each track inside and split in different directions, following bridges that hang from the ceiling and shelves that hang on the walls, giant cat-sized and extending all about the room, over their heads, and other bridges and ramps bring the cats down to the enclosed cabinet bed to one side of the room, to a wardrobe, to a tabletop. There are other hatches that lead out of doors, each with wooden flaps and fabric insulating them so that almost no draught comes in at all, and when Lefsi closes the cabin door Diot is astonished by how warm it is, how incredibly well-insulated the cabin is when it’s not even built of brick, nor even spackled.

“You hail from Bernicia?” Lefsi asks as he crosses the room to a fireplace and takes a kettle from over the flames, replenishing a pot with steaming water and beginning to brew a strong-scented tea of ground bark and mostly unfamiliar leaves, although she recognises the nettles, at least.

“Yessir,” mumbles Diot. “You know them, Barni and Arnfjord?”

“Unfortunately,” Lefsi murmurs, and he kneels on the floor to open a hatch that makes Diot step back from it, a waft of chilly air radiating from the gap as Lefsi reaches in and pulls out a cloth bag that he unties to reveal a rabbit carcass wrapped in herbs and spices, one that he cuts the front legs off before putting it into the oven hatch over the fire.

He kicks the floor hatch closed, and as Diot stands there, feeling the heat of the room prickling over her skin as it bites at her blood and forces it to warm to match it, he hands each of the raw front legs to Rusla and Elan respectively, who scamper off to different corners of the room to gnaw and chew at the flesh. Each of them makes little growling noises between greedy gulps of rabbit meat, and rumble from their big, ruffed chests.

Diot swallows, nervous about the fact that each cat is at different sides of the room, but Lefsi says, “Come,” and pushes at the other door, the one that leads over the bridge to the other side of the river.

Diot swallows as she slowly follows after him, uncertain about how tightly enclosed the bridge is, meaning that Lefsi has to duck his head forward to walk down it, into the dark. She lingers on the bridge, nervous about the sound of the rushing water beneath them and the fact that she can hear the mill wheel just outside the wooden wall – the bridge is well-supported, barely creaks under her weight or his, but she can feel the slight motion of the boards beneath them.

She’s never been in an indoor bridge before, enclosed on all sides like this, and it’s strange.

Through the door on the other side, light flares as Lefsi flickers candles into life, and only now does Diot follow after him and into the second part of the cabin. This is where the wheel attaches – a huge stone bowl with a raised core is set up in one corner of the room, and for now the pestle is raised and rotating with just a regular tick of wood dowels and framework, though it’s nothing like as huge as the grinding bowls she sees in real flour mills. On each of the walls are shelves lined with jars and containers, most of them clay or stone, a few carved wooden boxes beneath them.

She can’t read the inscriptions on some of them in runic writing, but she can understand the ones with pictures okay, sees the shapes of certain flowers and leaves, can distinguish between them – she even recognises some of them, like one very large clay lidded jug that has an acorn on the front of it.

“Are you a priest?” Diot asks. “You said to them warriors it was sacred ground.”

“Barni and Arnfjord are barely pirates, let alone warriors,” Lefsi says idly as he opens up a cabinet to one side of the room and begins to take out several boxes from inside, boxes with folded fabric inside, another box filled with similar containers to the ones around the room. “Are you strong?”

“Yes,” says Diot.

“Take this across the bridge and back to my cabin. Don’t worry about where you put it, just set it aside. I ordinarily use this cabinet for storage.”

Lefsi’s box bed, the one in the main room, is beside the flue for the chimney and is a lot larger, had had the cabinet doors open with a robe over one of the open doors when she’d come in. Like the shelves and many of the other cabinets, it’s built into the wall of the cabin itself – the box-bed here in Lefsi’s workshop is a good deal smaller and free-standing, but also a lot more beautiful. There are carefully carved and painted flowers on the doors and on the panels that decorate its sides, and unlike Lefsi’s bed, which has in-built drawers underneath, this one stands on four legs and has storage chests pushed beneath it.

“I’ve never slept in one of those before,” Diot says after she’s carried each of the boxes across the bridge, and she watches as Lefsi layers blankets over the straw-filled mattress inside the cabinet. She’s heard about them, and had them described to her as the sort of luxurious objects that French princesses sleep in to keep them warm and safe at night – she’s never seen them just in someone’s home, just in a normal house like this.

“They’re very warm inside, and dark, and quiet,” Lefsi says. “But you can sleep with the doors open, if you can stand the chill but can’t stand the enclosure.”

Diot stares at him, beginning to feel colder now, her damp clothes heavy and unpleasantly clammy against her skin.

“How long are you going to keep me here?”

“As long as it takes for you to take your leave, I suppose,” says Lefsi. Diot stares at his back, not knowing what to make of that answer, and when she doesn’t say anything, Lefsi glances back at her. “Good Gods, girl,” he says, suddenly seeming angry, and she flinches back, but all he says is, “Go, get out of those wet clothes, and off with those footwraps, too. Dress yourself with whatever you wish from the drawers beneath my bed.”

Diot wants to argue, wants to ask more questions, but she’s so cold even with the warmth coming from the main part of the cabin, and she stumbles in her haste to pull clothes out from the drawers under Lefsi’s bed.

One of the cats is watching her as she does it, licking bits of rabbit flesh from its chops, and she tries not to meet its eye.

* * *

Some hours later, Diot sits across from Lefsi at his dining table and eats greedily from the porridge and rabbit he’s prepared, the first meal beyond hard wheat biscuits and stale bread she’s had for weeks, and Lefsi eats from his own bowl. The cats, to her surprise, don’t come up to the table and beg for scraps like a dog might – they just watch from different standpoints, lying on their high bridges and looking down at them.

It seems absurd that such large creatures should be able to sit up in what would be the rafters if this cabin had any, bigger than many dogs, bigger than many toddlers, as if they’re little, as if they’re like birds.

“They were going to sell me,” Diot says. The words come out in a dreadful little whisper. She’s heard people say it to children before, heard parents say it, and monks and nuns, and elders in the street – if you don’t behave, men from the northlands will come a-Viking, and they’ll snatch you up and take you away to foreign lands and sell you as chattel, make you work their fields and do their labour, and beat you and starve you and hurt you.

“As a thrall, yes. Many women like to take on a young girl like yourself to train and teach – they find raided girls to be more intelligent than boys, and not less wilful, but certainly wilful in different ways.”

Diot presses her lips together, feeling a burning discomfort in the base of her belly and the base of her throat.

“It might not have been a woman that they sold me to,” Diot says.

“No, there was no guarantee of that,” Lefsi agrees. “Thus why I insisted they remand you to my custody.”

“You’re a man,” says Diot, accusative without meaning to be, and Lefsi smiles faintly at her.

“If you like,” he says, which is a very strange thing to say. “But you are under no danger of harm or hurt from me, girl. Not the harm as a man might do a young girl. Do you know what that harm might entail of?”

“I’ve seen dogs mount bitches, even young ones,” says Diot, and Lefsi seems to consider the point, then inclines his head.

“It’s not dissimilar, though worse,” he says quietly, sort of solemn and serious and grim. “How many summers have you?”

“Ten.”

“Are you blooded yet?”

“Blooded?”

“Your mother never spoke to you of this?” Lefsi asks.

“My mother is dead.”

“Your grandmother, then? Another female relative?”

Diot shrugs her shoulders, not wanting to get into her family history, not with this fucking guy, and yet at the same time… Is she really going to be stuck with him, stuck here? It’s not as if she can buy passage back home, and she doesn’t want to risk it, going back to those warriors and where they’ll push her to, sell her to.

She knows it’s different here, that the Norsemen must live differently at home than they do when they settle in Mercia or elsewhere, that this is harder, less forgiving land, that it gets colder here, much colder, that there are greater predators – not just wolves and boar, but bears, huge bears, bears bigger than any man could ever be.

“You will be my apprentice,” Lefsi says. “And I will teach you.”

“Teach me what?”

“Medicine,” Lefsi says. “Cures for ills, and aches, and the like.”

“You’re not a priest?” Diot asks. “You didn’t answer me before, when I asked you. Are you a priest?”

“I am not.”

“What are you then?” Diot demands. “These are big cats you’ve got. My granny always said that cats are witch’s animals.”

“In this case, her wisdom would not be unfounded.”

“… What?”

“Rusla and Elan are witch’s cats,” Lefsi says simply. “If a witch you would call me.”

“Oh,” says Diot.

“Oh,” echoes Lefsi, and arches his eyebrows.

“Isn’t that sinful?”

“Being a witch?”

“Yeah. Witchcraft, it’s sinful. Divination and sorcery and seeking omens and being a medium or engaging ghosts and spirits. It’s a form of prostitution.”

“… Is it?” Lefsi asks, and raises his eyebrows so far she wonders if it doesn’t hurt his face, stretching it out like that. “I’ve never had that particular accusation levied at my trade before. Were you, ah… Forgive me, what is the word? A priest wets you to sanctify your flesh before your Jesus?”

“… Baptism? I was baptised, yeah. Christened.”

“Christened, of course, because he is known as the Christ,” Lefsi says, and faintly laughs to himself, as though this is some sort of strange, silly fact, and not one he’s used to considering in any kind of detail. “He was crucified, yes? Nailed to hang from a cross, but then was reborn from the ashes of his pyre?”

“He wasn’t put on a pyre,” Diot says. “They interred him in a cave and closed it with a great stone, and then when they came to the cave three days hence, they found that the stone had been moved, and his body gone, because he had been resurrected, and from there he ascended to Heaven.”

“Right,” Lefsi said mildly. “And what’s in Heaven?”

“Well. It’s the Kingdom of God.”

“Just the one god?”

“Yeah, God.”

“What of Jesus?”

“He’s the son of God.”

“Surely, then, he’s a god himself.”

“No, there’s only one God.”

“What of Patrick?”

“Patrick? What, Saint Patrick?”

“Yes, yes. Is he not a god, or, or a demigod?”

“What’s a demigod?”

“A minor god.”

“What?”

“Well, there are gods who have strong powers of divinity, who command great swathes of divine territory, so to speak. Odin Allfather, one-eyed and greedy with his sight, who commands the gods; Thor, Lord of Storm and Thunder, wielding the hammer Mjolnir; Frigg, mistress of divination; Hel, who rules the underworld… I suppose Sleipnir might be a demigod, being a child of Loki and a common horse, although more interesting are the demigods of Greece… Your name, for example, Diot. You are named for Dionysius, son of Zeus and Semele, god of wine.”

Diot stares at him. “No, I’m not,” she says. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to be named for some Greek fellow – they speak Greek in some of the churches, and read Greek, and it’s meant to be quite a far away, hot place, with statues of false idols everywhere, that Crusaders travel through on their way to Jerusalem. “My mother was called Diot.”

“… Certainly, that may well be true,” Lefsi says. “But the origin of your name, Diot, it comes from—”

“No, it doesn’t,” Diot insists.

“From where does it originate, then?”

“My mother’s mother. Or her mother.”

“Yes, but originally—”

“What is Lefsi supposed to mean?”

“A shortening of Léofsige, coming from two words: ljúfr and sigr. Sigr is victory, power, glory, a win. Ljúfr is, ah, dear, darling, friendly, beloved.”

Diot stares down at the tabletop. “There is one God,” she says. “And he doesn’t have anything to do with wine.”

“Isn’t he made of wine?”

“What?”

“Don’t you drink wine from his veins?”

“That’s Jesus, not God. He’s not made of wine, though, that’s stupid. There’s the Blessed Sacrament, where you eat of bread and you drink of wine, and the bread is as Christ’s flesh, and the wine is as his body. They’re sanctified that you might partake of the holy spirit through communion.”

“Fascinating,” Lefsi says, which is a very queer thing to say indeed. “And you have partaken of this ritual?”

“No.”

“Oh,” Lefsi says, seeming somewhat disappointed.

“It’s not a ritual,” Diot mutters. “It’s just— Don’t you know anything?”

“Not about Christians, really, no,” Lefsi says, shrugging his shoulders. “I’ve never been interested in joining a raiding party, and we worship our own gods in this land. There are a few Christians in farther towns, I expect, of the thralls, but they hardly advertise it, nor seem particularly interested in recreating their practices here.”

“That’s sad,” Diot says. “It means you are all doomed to purgatory, if not to the fires of Hell.”

“What happens in purgatory?”

“The soul is purified to make it fit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It takes a very long time.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Probably.”

“And what is in Heaven, once one arrives?”

“What do you mean? I told you: it’s the Kingdom of God.”

“Yes, but… Valhalla, for example, the Hall of the Slain, is a great drinking hall full to the brim with all the greatest of warriors who have died in battle and glory, brought there by the Valkyries to form Odin’s army – and there is also Freyja’s great meadow, where warriors ever train in her service, and she too, has a drinking hall and glorious hearth, Sessrumnir. Are such things present in your God’s Kingdom?”

“No,” Diot says. “I don’t think so. You’re not meant to want to eat or drink anything, or want anything. It’s just… You’re perfect. Like an angel. Everything’s beautiful, everything’s, like light.”

Lefsi doesn’t seem particularly impressed by this, and Diot knows it’s because she hasn’t described it very well, but she doesn’t know how to describe it any better. It’s not as if she’s a nun – she only knows so much about it all because nuns and monks and priests will chatter on to you as they feed you, so long as you do jobs for them, and so long as you listen, and so long as you’re quiet and obedient and helpful.

They don’t ask funny questions like Lefsi does – they’re too busy.

“Why are they so big?” she asks, nodding to the cats.

“I feed them big rabbits,” Lefsi says, showing his teeth when he smiles. Clucking his tongue, he gestures with his fingers, and says, “Rusla, come here.”

Rusla is the big one. He’s mostly black and grey with a tiny bit of orange around his face and in the heavy ruff on his breast. His yellow eyes stand out against his black face, his nose a sort of dark purple like the skin of a plum in late summer, and he has huge paws that are tufted with thick fur, and a tail that’s thick and feathery, and lots of whiskers sprouting out from each of his cheeks, and out of his eyebrows, and out of his big ears.

Elan is more orange with only little bits of black, and the ruff on his breast isn’t quite as thick. His paws are neater and a little smaller, black-grey, and his eyes are greener than Rusla’s – he’s got lines of black around his eyes that then streak back toward his ears, less like the tar Lefsi wears and more like that of the Moorish merchants, it’s neat and careful and almost pretty, not just smeared in shadow.

“Ah ah,” Diot cries out, because Rusla has come too close to her and sniffs at her empty bowl but then is sniffing at her and all she can think of is his big fucking teeth and big yellow eyes and intense stare – Rusla leans back, scrunching up his face, his nose, sending his whiskers in different directions, his ears flying back.

“Are you frightened of cats, Diot?” Lefsi asks softly, and then says something to Rusla she doesn’t understand, drawing him away from her. “Rusla will not harm you – she’s met you now, she sees you. She likes children. Elan doesn’t care so much, particularly, but she won’t harm you either.”

Rusla hops up onto Lefsi’s shoulder, and she can’t believe that he doesn’t buckle at the weight of the beast because she’s so huge, how can she be a she when she’s so huge, when she’s like a tiger, a tigress? Lefsi’s hand sinks right into her fur when he reaches up and touches her, and she sees the muscle ripple under her coat.

Elan is washing her paws. She’s licking the sides of one with a big, pink tongue in a sort of fussy, delicate way like a rich girl at the baths, not the way a dog licks its paws – except that she’s still frightening, still a fucking beast of a creature, and some of her ear is gone ragged on one side, some of her left ear ripped away, and some of her chin scarred and bitten with the fur patchy.

“Did Rusla do that to her?” Diot asks, pointing.

“To Elan?” Lefsi asks, raising his eyebrows and tipping his head forward so that Rusla can stand on both of his shoulders at once, which is easy for her, because she’s so large. “Goodness, no, a hunting dog did that, caught her by the throat until Rusla ripped out its eye and sent it screaming for its master.”

Diot gulps, thinking about these cats covered in blood, thinks about Rusla killing a dog. Was that why Barni held Arnfjord back, because he knew that she would rip out his eye, if they got too close, or their tongues, or their guts?

“You must be tired,” Lefsi says. “Come, girl, to bed with you. Tomorrow, you will learn.”

“I can’t be a witch,” Diot says.

“Don’t be, then,” Lefsi recommends. “You might learn the medicine and leave the witchcraft aside.”

Diot hesitates, chewing on the inside of her lip. “Okay,” she says, and slowly crosses to the other room.

Lefsi follows her, and she shivers as she steps into the workshop from the bridge because it’s cooler now, but once she has climbed into her bed cabinet, she’s surprised by how incredibly warm it is inside, lined with thick quilting and heavy, soft furs, and abruptly she is so tired it doesn’t even occur to her to undress, her head lolling.

Lefsi is standing over her, smiling softly, still with Rusla about his shoulders – this is the last thing she sees before he slides the cabinet door shut with a quiet click, and she is sleeping.

* * *

Her dreams are tumultuous, the boxbed about her instead a ship in which she is tossed and thrown upon the waves, the waters churning around her. When she stumbles out of bed, it still feels as though the floors are uneasy under her feet, and she realises that it was partly the noise in the room that made her dream.

The constant creaking of the miller’s wheel, even with the pestle raised from the mortar, reminded her as she slept of the mast creaking at full sail, the wood turning in its place.

Diot had kicked off her footwraps in the night, and now she sits and pulls them on again, tying them about her feet with the twine.

She doesn’t know what time it is, doesn’t know the sun in this place, and anyway, when she peers through one of the flapped covers that let Rusla and Elan come and go, she sees that the sky overhead is bright and grey, but she cannot find the sun’s place in it.

When she crosses the chilly bridge, it is to find Lefsi already at work, stirring a pot on the fire and painting careful runes on wooden plates and at the base of statuettes and fetishes, exactly the sorts of pagan things she might expect of a Norseman.

“Ah, she wakes,” he says. “Good morning. Eat, child, there’s bread there on the table, eat what you will. We will go into town then, you and I. Gytha Herleifdottir has asked for me to assist her, so the two of us will go together.”

“What does she need your help with?” Diot asks as she awkwardly slices off a piece of bread – it’s very square, a darker brown and crustier than any bread she’s used to, with lots of seeds in it. It’s very chewy, when she bites into it, and maybe a bit bitter, earthier, sourer? Than breads she’s had before. She likes it. Around a mouthful, she asks, “Did you make this?”

“The bread? Of course.”

“Why don’t you have a wife?” Diot asks.

Lefsi blinks, pausing with his delicate little brush touching the base of a jar, and then he finishes the symbol he’s inscribing and washes the brush in water before setting it aside.

“I…” He looks awkward, uncomfortable, and Diot sits and watches him placidly, chewing on her grainy, seed-filled bread. “Surely you know of men who are unmarried.”

“They live with their families,” she says. “Not alone. Unless they’re an executioner or something, you know, somebody who has to live alone, ‘cause they’re untouchable.”

“Executioners must live alone?”

“Well, people who are unclean. Executioners, or gravediggers. Or knackers.”

“What is this? A knacker?”

“The man who takes dead horses away and boils them down into tar or leather or that.”

“And these men live together? Executioners, gravediggers, and knackers?”

“Well, maybe, I don’t know, but in the big towns they live apart, and you don’t touch them, ‘cause they’re unclean – they smell, and the devil is on them, clinging to them, because they’re smeared with death. They can marry, I suppose, but then the women they’re married to are the same untouchables, and you’re not to touch them either, and you don’t even look at them when they’re in the street.”

Lefsi rubs at his temple, looking at her with his mouth open, and then says, “Why don’t you eat an apple?” and pushes one toward her.

The clothes she’s in are a little oversized – she’d put on a pair of leggings that on Lefsi must have worked as short trousers, and they almost come down to the socks she’s wearing; the shirt is too long, sticks out from under the woollen tunic, and she looks like a collection of clothes thrown over a chair more than someone who’s gotten dressed. Lefsi had taken what she’d been wearing and put it aside to wash, she thinks, because she doesn’t know where it all is.

Lefsi walks around her and looks at her critically, his lips pressed together, and then he comes toward her with a belt and tightly cinches it around her waist – she can see where the strap has been cut a bit short and where he must have bored in new holes in the leather this morning so that it would fit her; then, getting to his knees, he does up new footwraps for her.

“Mine are okay,” she says, biting her lip – they’re a little small, in all truth, and ragged from being used so much. A monk had given them to her two years back, and her feet have grown a lot since, and they were already well-used, and made of a really thin old leather, scraps from the church’s stores.

“Don’t be a fool, girl, I won’t have an apprentice with chilblains and frostbitten toes,” he mutters. These are a much thicker leather than she’s ever worn, and they’re so warm as soon as he starts to tie them around her ankles, over the too-big socks to make sure they’re tight around her calves. “We’ll get you some boots – I might be able to get another child’s old ones, and if not, I’ll make some new ones for you. You’re not so big – one reindeer hide will suffice for new boots and a vest, I bet.”

Diot eats the apple and walks with Lefsi down the path – it’s still early in the morning, and light is filtering through the overcast grey over their heads and reflecting off the white mists that cling around the forest floor around them, around the bases of trees, and then thicker down in the culverts and streams and ditches around them.

It’s almost like they’re walking on clouds, and it’s not as cold as she’d been expecting, and she wonders for a moment if she isn’t dead after all, if she’d died on the ship here or in these woods, and this is the Kingdom of Heaven.

She doesn’t know that a witch would be in Heaven though.

Rusla comes out from the white mist on one side, a sudden black streak of heavy furry beast, and Diot lets out a noise of surprise and grabs the back of Lefsi’s cloak and clings onto him, automatically going to hide behind him, but Rusla just comes forward and leans her big body into Lefsi’s legs and flicks her tail around the back of his knee, and then jogs off again into the roiling white mists around them.

“She won’t harm you,” Lefsi tells her quietly, and Diot presses her lips together and nods, and she’s embarrassed, letting go of the fistful of his cloak and focusing on eating her apple, and keeps on walking.

It’s quite a big town, bigger than she’d anticipated, and she stays in close behind Lefsi as people look curiously their way – he is not any sort of untouchable, she doesn’t think, because people greet him and speak with him, and twice as they walk through the paths trodden down between people’s cabins and insulated tents and homesteads, people press things into his hands – a few jars of something from a fat young woman holding a babe on one hip, and then from an older man, a dead chicken, which he takes and straps to his satchel, hanging there.

“He’s giving you a whole chicken?” she asks. “What for?”

“Payment for services rendered,” Lefsi says, touching the back of her hair. He keeps looking at her hair and frowning at it, wrinkling his nose, as if there’s something wrong with it – she’d lost her wrap on the ship, had it blown away from her, but she sees other little girls, and none of them have their hair wrapped. They all have their hair in big braids, plaited far less finely than she’s used to, or even have their hair worn loose, and not covered at all, even the married women, even the old ladies.

He leads her down to the big side of a river where there are ships tied and anchored on the docks, and into a big high-ceilinged wooden house – everything here seems to be made of big heavy logs and wood instead of much stone at all.

“Aah, fy nghariad bach, sut wyt ti, bachgennes?” says the old Welsh woman that she’d seen on the ship, and Diot stands there and smiles up at her as she croons and touches the sides of Diot’s face, and then she goes on, chattering away, and she doesn’t understand, but Lefsi does – when he speaks in Welsh, the old woman captures his hands in hers and speaks to him, and he smiles and nods, and talks, and talks.

“You speak Welsh?” asks a man coming up – he’s strapping and brown-skinned, with a neatly trimmed beard and moustaches and fine-plucked eyebrows and glittering brown eyes, and Diot stares up at him, interested in the handsome planes of his face and his delicate clean hands and the blue fabric wrapped around his hair to keep it clean, and a white cloth as a shawl over his warmer clothes, so clean, so bright in colour. “None of us can speak with her, know what it is she can do or can’t!”

“You should speak with Guðormr the Hound,” Lefsi says. “The man who works his land is a Welshman, and he has two daughters – or there’s a free man who’s Welsh, downriver thirty or forty minutes, uh, they call him Arvid, he’s very freckled and red-headed.”

Turning back to the woman, he speaks with her, asks her some questions, which she answers, and then she’s asking questions back, Diot thinks, because she keeps looking back to Diot, and asking after her, she thinks.

It makes Lefsi smile, and he holds the old woman’s hands and taps at the backs of her aged knuckles with his thumbs.

“Her name is Morfudd, and she is a widower and a washerwoman.”

The old woman is led away now by another woman with clouds of yellow hair, and Lefsi talks on with the man as Diot looks around the room, at the men and women seated around the room – some are tied with ropes that collar them and go about their wrists, but not Morfudd the old woman, and not some of the other women, either, but she recognises other faces from Barni and Arnfjord’s ship, others to be sold as slaves here, or to be taken away and sold in other places, she supposes.

They have things written down here, on scraps of parchment or on wax boards, but she can’t read any of it – she can see that other men are counting things, though, counting big piles of silver coins, not like ones she’s seen before, or bales of fabric or threads or wool, or animal skins.

Lefsi brings her then through the town and up a hill and through a field, and he knocks loud on the door but then steps inside before being called in. It’s a big round hut with skins over the roof and draping the walls, and there’s smoke coming from a chimney.

It’s very very warm inside, and steam fills the room in white clouds almost like the ones in the forest, although it’s perfumed and smells sweet and spiced, and after her eyes adjust, Diot sees a young woman with braided russet hair in just a white tunic. She’s sweating and red and rosy, barefoot and walking back and forth with her hands on an old woman’s forearms, leaning forward, breathing deeply.

“How are we feeling?” asks Lefsi, hanging up his cloak and bag on the back of the door and then moving to a bowl of water, gesturing for Diot to come over to him.

“I’m going to kill that bastard,” says the young woman through fast breathing, her eyes blue and wet and teary. “I’m going to strangle him with my bare hands and break his fucking neck as soon as he comes home from Mercia! I’m going to rip his prick off and shove it down his throat!”

“All very natural inclinations for a birthing mother, dear,” says the old woman. “Who’s this girl you’ve brought with you?”

Diot scrunches up her face as Lefsi pours hot water over her hands – it stings, it’s so hot, and she’s surprised at the sensation of the soap as he rubs it over each of their hands, and surprised again at how little it burns, and how little it smells, too.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Mother, Signe – this is Diot, the Aalsen boys lost hold of her last night and she fled onto my holdings. I took her as payment for their trespass. She comes from Bernicia, although she has good Norse.”

“My mother came from Bernicia,” gasps out Signe. “I wish she could have, could have come to see me birth her a grandson, but her, ah, ow, ow, her leg is broken, she could not make the journey to Vikhamr, oh, Gods, how much longer…?”

“Let’s check, hm?” asks Gytha.

“We soap like this, no dirt, no specks of anything on our hands, hm? We need to trim your fingernails, I fear, but that’s a problem for later. Sit there for now, on that bench, and then just do as the good Mother and I tell you, alright?”

“Yes,” Diot says, and sits, and watches.

Signe is standing up with her arms braced on a chair, and Gytha is on the floor with her head almost under her skirt, looking up between her legs, and Lefsi takes up a cloth and gently pats Signe’s sweating head.

She grabs Lefsi by the arm, and sobs, “It hurts, it hurts, Lefsi, will you pray? Please, please, ask Frigg to take mercy on me!”

“Oh, Signe, Signe, don’t worry, you’re in very good hands,” Lefsi tells her, and he holds her and he kisses her brow and rubs her back, and then Signe screams and grabs his hand and squeezes, and he lets out a grunt of pain but does not pull away from her.

“Not long now at all,” says Gytha. “Girl, bring me that blanket there.”

* * *

It takes hours, which Diot does not think is “not long”, actually, but at no point does it feel like it’s the right time for her to say that.

Where Lefsi is sort of square but lanky, like when a tree goes from looking normal to looking suddenly skinny in winter when all its leaves drop off, Mother Gytha is a very fat and jowly woman: she has big hands and big shoulders and big boobs and a big belly and a big arse, and she takes up as much space as Lefsi and Signe do put together – Signe’s belly is big and pregnant, but it’s like a sort of lump on an otherwise petite frame. She’s not skinny, but she’s sort of little and delicate like a little doll or some of the fine porcelain idols she’s seen before of the Virgin Mary, and her pregnant belly doesn’t really fit with the rest of her.

Mother Gytha has really long grey hair that’s in one really big braid down her back, so big and so thick and so heavy that it makes all the wrinkles on the top half of her face flatten out a little bit, where the wrinkles on the lower half of her face are deep and thick, and all the loose skin flaps about around her cheeks and her lips and her chin and her jowly neck when she talks and when she laughs and when she smiles, like sheets blow in the wind when they’re hung out to dry.

She has a really round nose in the middle of her face, and her lips are spotted with age and darker than the rest of her tanned skin, and she has greenish eyes, and her ears have gold in them, her dangly long old earlobes with little gold rings through, and one of her ears has another gold thing that looks like a dragon or a lizard or a snake, and it curls around it and goes through it, and she’s never seen jewellery quite like it before.

She wears no rings – nor does Lefsi, actually, although he has other jewellery on, wears little dangling charms of faces and animals and things like that from his belt and from necklaces in his clothes and also in his hair, and one of his ears is pierced too, and he has silver armbands around both of his arms that keep his sleeves from moving too far from his armpits, and brooches that keep them pinned in to the wrist so that they don’t move too much while he’s working.

She’s never actually seen a man wear so much jewellery who wasn’t a fancy high-up priest, and as Lefsi talks with Signe through the hours and hours it takes for her to get the baby out of inside her, sometimes he holds some of the charms or pendants and talks very fast to people that aren’t here – Frigga and Freya and Idun and Sif and Nanna and Eir: they are all pagan goddesses, and he calls on them and to them like some people call on saints.

Sometimes they send Diot to do things, to pour out some water or fetch some more from the well, or they tell her to put this herb or that flower into the big boiling pot that’s steaming up the place, or to put more firewood in the hearth, or to fetch more blankets.

And it’s not even over when the baby comes out, and it doesn’t look like any baby she’s seen before, but she’s never seen them be born – it’s horrible and wet and sort of gooey-looking like frog spawn that’s had blood poured on it, and it screams and it screams and it screams until it’s put on Signe’s breast and lying on top of her, and then it goes quiet.

She has one boob out and is feeding the baby right from the teat, and Signe’s never watched a woman feed a baby like this, although she knows that’s how it’s done, how it works.

“Diot, pay attention, girl,” Lefsi is saying. “In the bowl like this, water to this level – if I laid the babe down on his back in this water, it wouldn’t reach to his mouth, you see? Very shallow. Test the temperature, you test it to this part of your wrist, this is very tender skin. Does it sting?”

“No.”

“Do you think it’s hotter than you or colder?”

“Um, the same? A bit hotter?”

“Good, that’s what we want – not too hot, and never too cold.”

Diot is looking past him. “Is she having another one?” Diot asks when Signe starts to groan and moan again, and starts pushing and gritting her teeth.

“No,” Lefsi says, and gently scoops the naked baby up and from Signe’s breast again, and Diot stands by and watches as Lefsi scoops water over the baby and washes the gunk and blood and gross shit from his hair and his arms and legs and his body and his arse, and it looks much closer to a normal baby now, although still very small and so weird. As he pours water over the baby and gently strokes his skin, the baby doesn’t scream or shout, but stares up at them with his big alien eyes, and Lefsi says, “That’s the afterbirth she’s birthing now – it feeds the babe in the womb, connects mother to child, but once the child is birthed, it needs to come out, or it would fester within the womb until it kills her. It is a sort of twin to the babe she’s birthed, a spiritual twin, if you like, and nourishes the soul from within the womb.”

“Why does he have two cocks?” Diot asks, and Signe starts laughing mid-groan, and Gytha glances back at her with a grin on her jowly face, and Diot looks up at Lefsi, who isn’t laughing at her as well, but is smiling faintly.

“This is his cock,” he says, gesturing between the baby’s legs, “but this is just the remainder of his cord, which connected him to the afterbirth. Have you ever dove in deep water, and used a hollow reed to breathe air from the surface?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s like that, in any case, for a babe in the womb is suspended in his mother’s waters, and breathes through this cord as you might through a reed,” Lefsi says, and takes out the baby and begins to pat it dry. “That’s part of why the room is so steamy, to help open up the child’s lungs and introduce him to air, to warm him from the inside as well as without. Here, Signe, your boy.”

“Still worth murdering that Búi of yours over?” Gytha asks as Signe laughs and takes the babe back, now wrapped and swaddled, and she coos over it and taps the babe’s lip, and looks at him lovingly, and murmurs to him that he’s handsome, which Diot does not think is true at all.

“I suppose he can live for now,” Signe says softly, rocking the baby in her arms.

“You can eat now, girl, and must do,” Gytha says.

After Signe has eaten her fill from a fish stew that Lefsi makes Diot eat some of as well, and it smells bad but doesn’t taste as awful as she expects based on the smell, Diot collects the soiled blankets and they wash them in the river whilst pouring away the last of the hot water.

“You can go and play, if you like,” Lefsi tells her with a faint smile, and it annoys her a bit, being dismissed like she’s a little child or a baby herself even though she’s ten and soon to be eleven in the spring, but she walks off a little ways from where they’re working the blood and snot and things from the fabric in the river.

She’s scared to go too far alone, wonders if there are snakes in the tall green grass, hidden under the snow, or if there are birds or cats or dogs or wolves or bears or other things that might jump out at her and bite her.

She walks a little out of their earshot and then walks back in their direction, because Gytha’s laugh and her voice carries, and she’s saying, “She’s yours now, I won’t take her.”

“You need a new girl,” Lefsi is saying, and Diot feels her brow furrow together and her lips frown, and all of a sudden she feels like crying even though she hasn’t cried at all since last night, and even then, it was only crying from being so angry and so scared, not because she was sad. “With Inga gone—”

“I need a woman, not a girl from across the sea,” Gytha retorts. “Besides, you took her in from the Aalsens readily enough, why hand her off now?”

“I could scarcely sleep last night,” Lefsi says, and Diot leans carefully around the trunk of a tree and looks at him with his head bowed over the rock he’s scrubbing a blanket on, using a brush to work the blood and stickiness from the woven cloth. “It was a whim, a stupid one, to take possession of her – having a girl in my house, what was I thinking? And these, these Christian ideas of hers. She all but asked if I was a prostitute.”

Gytha laughs her big jowly laugh, and even from far away Diot can see the flaps of skin around her chin and cheeks and neck shaking and wobbling, and she likes it, likes how the old woman laughs, and it almost distracts her from the fear and the sadness at the idea that Lefsi should want to throw her away after only just taking her.

“What does a girl so small as that know of prostituting?”

“Oh, Christian nonsense, witchcraft and prostitution being the same sort of sin, or something like that. But this is what I mean – she asked why I didn’t have a wife.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I gave her an apple and said it was time for us to go.”

“She’s just seen a babe being born, and didn’t seem too shocked about it. Why should she shock at this? At least you know in your house no man is going to rape her.”

Lefsi sounds half-furious and half-amused as he hisses, “Mother!”

“What? It’s true!”

“I don’t want to think about that happening to her,” Lefsi hisses, so quiet that she has to strain her ears to listen. “She’s so little, and already so very hard, so, so toughened by the world.”

“Why, then, shouldn’t she be with you? You might show her tenderness, and those cats of yours might show her the same.”

“She’s scared of them.”

Gytha laughs as if that’s very silly. “Rusla and Elan? She’s frightened of them? But they’re so gentle with children.”

“Nonetheless,” Lefsi mutters. “She ought to live with another woman.”

“Well, she has the next best thing,” says Gytha, and Lefsi huffs out a noise and splashes the old lady with water, and then they’re both laughing, and Diot doesn’t know what that means exactly.

* * *

Walking home, Diot asks, “So, that old woman, Gytha, she’s your mother?”

“What? Gods, no, no, she’s… It’s just that she is aged and venerable and very wise, so we call her Mother, I call her Mother, other people in the village call her Mother. Do you not do this?”

“The important nuns are called Mother, but most, you call them Sister.”

“And what is a nun?”

“A woman who never marries, because she’s married to Christ.”

“… Christ, the dead man?”

“They’re married to his ghost,” Diot says impatiently. “To God. So they never marry a living man, or have children, because they carry on His work instead.”

“Right,” Lefsi says, and then, “I see,” although it doesn’t look as if he does. “Well, Mother Gytha has had a great many children across three husbands, two of whom she’s outlived.”

“Oh,” Diot says. “Is that why she’s so fat?”

Lefsi laughs. “The pregnancies might be a contributing factor, yes. But great she-bears are always very fat – it keeps them warm in winter, and they share that warmth with their cubs, as well as using their might and size to defend them.”

“I’m going to be a nun,” Diot says.

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“And that appeals to you, yes, the… the service to your Christ?”

“Nuns don’t have to marry a man or have babies hanging off them, and they get enough to eat, and people respect them, and they have clean clothes, always. Most people don’t get that.”

“No,” Lefsi murmurs, suddenly seeming much more serious. “No, child, I suppose that’s true.”

The wind picks up a little as it starts to darken, although now it’s not so dark and cloudy as it was on the night the Aalsen brothers brought her here, the skies seem very pale and bright.

“The weather was fairer at home,” Diot says. “The snows had already melted. Is it snowy here the year around?”

“No, the snow is starting to thaw, look there,” Lefsi says, and he touches the nape of her neck and tilts her with him to look down at the river bank, where the snow is melting and fading into the stone and grass. “Another month or so, and the last of it will likely melt off, except for a few lighter snows here and there. The days won’t end, then, until the season turns again.”

Diot doesn’t know exactly what that means, ominous though it sounds, and she glances up at him, although he doesn’t seem to be making any sort of poetic statement or curse or anything like that.

“The days won’t end?” she repeats.

“The sun lingers here in a way it doesn’t in your England,” Lefsi says. “The nights are already shortening – soon enough, there’ll be scarcely an hour or two of darkness across the span of a day and night, and then, it will be light all the night through. We don’t have box beds only for the warmth, girl: the darkness in them keeps out the incessant bright.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Diot says.

“You will in time,” says Lefsi.

Diot chews the inside of her lip, and then asks, “What did Mother Gytha mean, about you being the next best thing to a woman?”

“Eavesdropping, were you?”

“There weren’t any eaves,” Diot says. “You didn’t tell me not to listen. And you weren’t whispering.”

“I don’t know that Gytha is capable of a whisper,” Lefsi says mildly. “It doesn’t bother you that she doesn’t want you?”

“Why should I want her to want me? You never said I was meant to try to make her want me. Do you have a woman’s parts under your clothes?”

Lefsi laughs, the sound shocked out of him, and then he says, “No.”

“So what makes you womanly? Is it your jewellery?”

“No.”

“That you keep cats?”

“No.”

“Have you been gelded?”

“Gelded? Why should I have been gelded?”

“Mother Gytha said you’re not capable of—”

“That is not what she meant,” Lefsi interrupts her, and he’s gone a little red in the face, but doesn’t try to hit her, and he doesn’t shout, and he doesn’t really seem very angry, more amused, still.

She wonders what it would take to make him angry enough to hit her – some nuns will pinch your ear or slap you over almost nothing, whereas others need to be needled at, and it’s almost like a challenge, to get them to snap, to know what makes them spur to anger.

“Have you known men to be gelded?” Lefsi asks her. “And not horses?”

“No,” she says. “Although I’ve heard of it being done, to men who are very rough and cruel, who do rapes.”

“You understand what that is, then? Rape?”

“When a man forces himself on a woman. Or a girl.”

“And if he forces himself on a boy?”

She blinks up at him, wrinkling her nose and not really understanding what he’s getting at. “Boys can’t get pregnant.”

“… No,” Lefsi allows. He’s still red – he doesn’t go ruddy in the way some people do.  There’s no blotchiness to the redness, just little red dawns in the top parts of his cheeks. His skin is too thick for it, she thinks. “But in any case, I won’t have you raped by anybody. If anyone lays a hand on you in a way that makes you feel threatened, if anyone injures you, burns you, bites you, bruises you, cuts you, makes to intimate themselves with you, you will call for me, you will come to me immediately, and I will respond on your behalf. You understand?”

She doesn’t understand, exactly. “What does that mean, respond?”

“It would depend on the situation,” Lefsi says. “If another child struck at you, I would threaten them a little and make clear to the child’s parents my disapproval. But if a larger boy than you, or worse still, a grown man, did the same? Well. Gelding wouldn’t be such an awful idea.”

She stares up at him, fascinated. Lefsi isn’t frightening at all, but saying this, he seems very sure of himself, very confident, as if he could be frightening, or scary, or strong. “You’d geld a man? Do you know how to do that?”

“I know where the necessary parts are.”

“And the, the tongs, and the heat, and the…?”

“I wouldn’t need tongs,” says Lefsi.

“How?”

“I’m a witch, remember. I carry fire within myself, and can produce it as needed.”

Diot is rather sceptical of this, and she doesn’t hide it from her face as she looks from Lefsi’s face to his hands. They don’t look like they have fire in them – they are marked over with ink, letters and runes on the backs of his hands and on his fingers. “Will you show me?”

“I thought you didn’t want to try your hand at witchcraft,” Lefsi murmurs. “I thought it was a sin.”

“But,” she says, and she stares at Lefsi’s hands as he walks on, wondering at the idea that a man should carry fire inside himself and bring it out at will, then fold it away again like a page or a handkerchief. She reaches for his hand and grips it in both of hers, touches her thumb against the heel of his palm – it is warmer than her fingers and thumb are, but not so warm as a fresh flame. “But…”

“But?” he prompts her.

“I never thought that witchcraft was to be able to conjure a flame like that, real power,” she whispers. “Only women with their cats, and, and dancing naked in the woods in defiance of God, and the milk curdling as it leaves the cow, and ewes born with two heads instead of one, and miscarriages, and curses like that. It’s just a story you’re telling me, that’s all, isn’t it? So I think you’re impressive?”

Lefsi looks down at her, and then drawing his hand from hers, he touches the top of her head, puts his fingers slightly into her hair and cups her head gently, the way that women do, usually, to her or to other children, more so than men ever do.

“I would rarely have cause to curse anybody,” he says quietly, seriously.

“Show me how.”

“Not now, girl, it will take time,” Lefsi says, and sighs, looking toward the house. “Your hair is a rat’s nest. When last did you bathe?”

“Before the journey here,” Diot says. “Only three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks,” Lefsi repeats, wrinkling his nose, even though she usually bathes once a month or so, when they make the bath available at the shore near to the church, with the sisters watching over her and the other poor girls, making sure no boys come close.

Diot follows after him toward the house.

* * *

“There’s men in there,” Diot hisses, scrambling right back out of the doors just as she enters the threshold – she’s never seen people all naked like that, stripped off of all their clothes and all wet and sweaty and steaming, and not just women and girls, but men, too.

Bathing by the river in spring or summer, or even sometimes in a church house, it’s unthinkable that you’d be naked in front of men. Little boys, maybe, if a woman still had her baby in swaddling clothes or he was only very small and couldn’t be on his own yet, but, but men?

Just— Just naked? With their things hanging out, and all hairy?

Lefsi stares down at her, glancing behind himself.

The bathhouse is a big wooden building in the middle of town, and it’s covered all over with animal skins that have been waxed at the edges – there’s tiny little vents around the edges that are letting out some of the smoke, angled so that the air only goes out instead of cold air getting in, instead of having a proper chimney like most houses have. She doesn’t recognise what skins they are – Lefsi has been pointing out different skins to her, and while it’s easy enough to tell wolf from fox or bear, it’s not so easy to tell reindeer from elk, or different deer from one another. These skins are something else, greyer, wetter-looking.

They’re inside a little porch thing that sticks out from the building proper, the door closed so that they’re enclosed and with two of those little vents that let light in. There’s some benches and hooks that have people’s cloaks and clothes hung up or folded, and there’s everybody’s boots and footwraps lined up on the shelves and at the floor level.

Hanging between the porch and the big bathhouse proper are more skins – not the grey ones like outside, but reindeer skins, she knows these ones.

“It’s a bathhouse,” Lefsi says. “You said you’d bathed publicly before.”

“Not with men!”

“Women and men are separate in your bathhouses?”

“We don’t have bathhouses, we just, you know, in the water, or sometimes there’s tents.”

“What are you going to do, then, linger in the vestibule?”

“I’ll go outside.”

“Until when, Ragnarok? When will you bathe?”

“When I need to!”

“You need to now.”

Mother Gytha parts the reindeer skins and comes out, and Diot automatically looks away from her, because the old lady is completely naked, and her big boobs are rested on top of the layers of her big belly and you can see all the curling grey hairs over her crotch and there’s lines and saggy wrinkles over her thighs and calves. Her boobs are massive, but seeing them out of her clothes, they’re sort of flat and almost deflated, maybe from being so old, or maybe from feeding so many babies from them.

“What are you shouting about?” she asks.

“She doesn’t want to bathe.”

“And what were you going to do, boy, force her at knifepoint?”

“Mother, she’s filthy – she hasn’t bathed since weeks before she was brought here. Her hair is more grease than strand!”

“She can eat and piss and shit without your interference, Lefsi the God-Guarded,” says Gytha, laughing, and she comes closer and lays her old hand on Diot’s back, and Diot almost looks at her and then closes her eyes to keep from looking right into the folds of her belly fat. “She can bathe when she’s ready.”

“I will not walk these streets with everybody about us thinking I keep my apprentice in filth!”

“Children sometimes insist upon filth, boy, you would know that were you a parent before now yourself. No one will lay the judgement at your feet, I promise you.”

There’s a bit of laughter from the other room – the chatter from the sauna has gone a bit quiet over the last minute or two, from people listening, she supposes, and going quiet to listen better.

Diot stands there with her eyes squeezed shut as Lefsi huffs out a sigh, and then she hears the hurried noise of fabric rustling and shifting, and the creak of the bench, and then she hears the skins move, and—

She opens one eye, and then is so surprised she opens both of them, and stares aghast about the little hallway, because Lefsi’s clothes are hung up on the hook and his boots are resting on the floor-level shelves, and he’s gone.

“He went in without me,” Diot says to Gytha, looking up at the old woman and trying to concentrate on her jowly face and not on her jowly body, and when the old lady laughs, it all jiggles.

“He always bathes on Thor’s day,” says Gytha, patting her head. “Do you want for me to dress, hm, and wait outside with you?”

Diot shifts on her feet, chewing on the inside of her lip.

When Lefsi had said about coming to bathe today, she’d liked the idea of it, especially because Lefsi had said there would be hot water and she couldn’t remember the last time she was able to bathe with warm water instead of cold water, especially in winter, and she knows that her hair is getting a little bit greasy, especially because she was on the boat for so long and she’d lost her headscarf.

“Isn’t it sinful?” Diot demands. “Won’t the men look at you, and at me, and at all the women?”

“It’s not sinful for men and women to look at each other,” Gytha says. “In any case, they’ll not be looking at you or me. If any of them want to look at anybody, they’ll be looking at the pretty women – Brynja Red-Headed is in there, and the menfolk like to look at her plenty, which she lives to encourage. If you want to wash yourself but you’re afeared of the men looking at you, I’ll stand between you, hm? Itty-bitty thing that you are, it’ll be easy enough for a big woman like me to eclipse you.”

Diot hesitates, and then slowly puts her hand in Gytha’s, and Gytha smiles down at her and it is sort of maternal, and sweet, and it’s nice, it’s—

New.  

* * *

Inside of the big longhouse that serves as a sort of tavern, Diot sits cross-legged on a cushion on top of a table so that Mother Gytha can braid her hair. She does it the way that Diot has seen lots of little girls have their hair done – hers isn’t long enough to have it in all complicated long long braids like many of them have, because the nuns always used to cut it short to keep her from getting lice once it touched her shoulders, but she’s had a while between cuts, and Mother Gytha still manages to do neat little braids.

Lefsi had said that he could try, but Gytha had waved him off and said she was pleased to, and Diot didn’t mind – it had been sort of nice, actually, because in the bathhouse Mother Gytha’s daughter, Ida, had been sat next to her, and some of her daughters, too, so she hadn’t been the only young girl.

Gytha and Ida had told her how much soap to use and where to drain the water into the bowl so it wasn’t quite as hot when you touched it and given her a towel and helped her wash her back with a soft-bristled brush and had washed her hair for her the same way they washed all the other girls’ hair.

And none of the men had stared, actually.

Some of them had talked, sort of casually, like everybody wasn’t naked, with Mother Gytha and Ida and the other women and most of all with Brynja the Red-Headed, who was a bit younger than Lefsi and had boobs almost as big as Mother Gytha’s, although the rest of her wasn’t nearly as big to match.

The room wasn’t separated at all – some of Gytha’s grandchildren in the sauna were boys, and after a few minutes, some men had come in and sat either side of Brynja, and two older women who were sisters who sailed, had sat either side of Lefsi and chatted with him.

It was very—

It was the strangest thing yet, living in this town, the oddest and most bizarre and weird thing, the idea of lots of naked people talking to one another whilst bathing, when it seemed so sinful and so immodest and so, so dirty, but somehow it did feel different, without anybody making it that way.

She didn’t know that she could explain it, justify it, to a nun, if they asked.

“Your parents are dead?” Mother Gytha asks.

“Yes, Mother,” Diot says.

“Lefsi implies you were some sort of street rat.”

Diot wrinkles her nose, and Lefsi chuckles, taking a sip of his wine and leaning back against the chair that he’s seated in.

“I didn’t call you that,” he says mildly. “I said that I was given to understand you were left to roam, that you were orphaned.”

“No living family?” Gytha presses.

“My Granny’s alive,” Diot says. “But she never liked my mother, and she always liked my cousins better than me because they were both boys. She sort of took me in, when my parents died, but she never wanted me there in the house, really, and there wasn’t room for me on the pallet, and it was always cold, and it always smelt horrible because of the pigs, so I went and slept in church places and stuff instead.”

It’s why the nuns were always so paranoid about her having fleas and lice, she thinks, because it was always so filthy in her granny’s house even when she wasn’t looking after her and the boys and the pigs as well, and her granny never cared much for church, and she thinks they liked the idea of Diot being separate from her, even if it meant sort of being on her own.

It’s absurd, how much space people have here – some people do sleep all in the same big bed or in the same room together for warmth, and she knows that in winter some people do have their animals at one end of their longhouses or in barns that are attached to their houses.

It’s partly because it’s a town instead of a bigger city, because there’s more space, but stuff is built different – buildings are different. A lot of buildings are more round and have better angled rooves, and have better indoor separations, rather than being squarer and more solid from the ground up.

And, she doesn’t know. It would be harder to sleep with a reindeer in your house than a pig or a mule, she thinks. At least they don’t have antlers.

“Well, you’re here now,” Gytha says. “We’ll look after you better than she ever did.”

There’s something snippy and sniffy about her tone, and Diot wants to look back at her face, but she’s finishing up a pin in Diot’s hair. Lefsi’s hand touches Diot’s, reaching across to gently squeeze it, and he smiles at her in a small but very warm way, and Diot smiles back at him.

She hadn’t wanted to look at him or any of the men too much today, because she really doesn’t need to see any of that, but she had noticed how many more tattoos he had than basically all of the other people in there. Some of the other men and women had tattoos or jewellery, but while lots of them had jewellery and much nicer jewellery than Lefsi’s, and maybe one or two tattoos each, Lefsi had tattoos all over him.

Most people, he’d said when she’d mentioned it coming out, just painted designs on their bodies – and she’d seen a bit of that, paint in dark blues and browns that was a bit faded but clinging to the skin, and looked different from Lefsi’s tattoos and the actual tattoos around the room, that were under the skin, and were done with needles where you had to sit and let them pierce you again and again and again until the paint was deposited under the surface of your skin so it stayed there and never washed off.

It hurt, he said, like paint didn’t, and it took a long time. It wasn’t necessary for most people to do.

“Do you have a family?” Diot asks, and Lefsi raises his eyebrows at her. “I know you don’t have a wife. But what about your mum and dad, your grandparents? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I do have sisters,” Lefsi says, looking amused at the question and meeting Gytha’s eyes over Diot’s head. “My mother is named Vigdis, and she is a healer and a priestess of the goddess Frigg. She lives upriver from her, some few days sail. I have three sisters, and two live in the same town as her, another lives in Iceland.”

She knows who Frigg is – she’s a marriage goddess, and a prophetess, and Lefsi had etchings of her in his house, more than he has of most of his other gods. She doesn’t know what a priestess to Frigg should look like, maybe a strange old woman or an old man in a cloak, because that’s what most of the priests and priestesses seem to look like.

“Is that why Gytha called you God-Guarded?” Diot asks. “’Cause your mother is a priestess?”

Lefsi smiles and slowly shakes his head.

“He is called that because he had a death wish as a boy,” Gytha says disapprovingly, patting Diot on the shoulder to let her know she’s done braiding her hair, and Diot reaches up and smiles as she touches the little braids, pinned neatly in place with some of Gytha’s own pins, which she’d just kept producing from her bosom, as though she had pins and pins and pins in the lining of her dress. “He would climb the tower of Lord Hval’s house, all the way up it, and dangle from the top; he would swim in icy waters, and not just swim, but dive. You have been struck by lightning how many times, boy?”

“Four times, Mother,” Lefsi says modestly.

“Is that why you say you have magic?” Diot demands. “Just because lightning struck you and you didn’t die? Is that where the fire comes from?”

“I imagine I have magic for the same reason I have this dark hair and these eyes and these shoulders and this nose and all the other things that make me up and down,” Lefsi says, laughing. “From my father and my mother, from the ancestors before them. As anybody has any gift from their bloodline.”

“And what if it was sinful?” Diot demands. “Witchcraft, and, and being naked in front of people, and— and all of that. If I’m right and you’re all wrong. What if you go to the burning fires of Hell, and you’re a sinner?”

“Our gods have rules of their own,” Lefsi says, and he seems so unbothered, even as he pours more water for her and she takes it and sits on the seat beside him, and he touches her hair very carefully, not undoing the braids, and then wipes her cheek because there must have been a bit of grease on it. She automatically shrugs away from him, and he smiles at her, and it’s not a laughing-at-her smile, but the same sort of smile Gytha’s been doing at her and at her daughter and at all her granddaughters and grandsons, is a sort of maternal smile, she thinks, or a paternal one.

“But what if—”

“If they are wrong, and yours is right,” Lefsi finishes for her, reaching for a sweetbun from the table and passing it to her, and she pulls it apart to eat it. She automatically passes him the bit that has nuts mixed in with the honey on top, the way that she has been doing every time she’s had one, and he automatically takes it from her, and smiles more deeply now. “I will reason with your god, if reason he is given to. If not, I will have to accept my fate, whatever it may be. But I do not think too much of the world beyond this one – I am no warrior, no Viking. I live what I hope is a worthy life, and I hope that in death, my friends and those I have served will remember be fondly, and give me a good burial.”

“Won’t they burn you?” Diot asks. “On a big pyre?”

“We don’t make pyres for forest witches, Diot,” Gytha says. “Such things are reserved for men of great word and deed – lords and kinds, famous skalds, storied warriors.”

“Gods forbid I should ever join their number,” Lefsi says. “No, no, you might lay me down to rest in a grave as any other man; if the ground is too hard and cold, a fine cairn will suit me much the same.”

Diot suddenly imagines Lefsi dying, or dead, and she doesn’t like that at all.

“That’s not going to be for ages,” she says firmly. “You have to teach me all you know before you can die.”

“Very well,” Lefsi murmurs. “That will take some time, but it will be no hardship.”

Diot wants to ask, abruptly, if he still wants to get rid of her, if he wants to pass her off to Gytha or somebody else, but then someone taps him on the shoulder and is talking to him as he eats the nut part of the sweet roll, and so she doesn’t, and she sits there and listens to Lefsi talking – people ask him about remedies or if he can do a healing spell for them or if he can ward their house from spirits or bad omens or if he can do this or that; they ask him about his cats and about his goat and about his ducks; they ask him about the stars and if he can augur things; they chat and laugh with him – and to Gytha talking – lots of people ask her things too, about cooking and about rearing children, and also about other things, about gossip, and who is a-Viking and on what ships and where they’re sailing to, and who is sleeping with who and why and when, and all sorts of things like that.

It’s all very dull.

She’s starting to feel a bit sleepy, but when she goes outside to wee, the brisk, colder air of the evening wakes her up a bit. She goes on her own down the path to the river bank – Lefsi had asked if she wanted somebody to go with her, but she didn’t mind going on her own with being in town like this. Lefsi’s house had a little outhouse that you could get to over the covered walkway that his goats and ducks sheltered under, and he’d insisted to her that she could take a candle with her every time she went, because people often paid him in candles, and his candles could last a very long time, he said because of some magic he did to them.

Even if a wolf or something thought to get her whilst she walked out to the outhouse, jumping out from nowhere and between the fence she can follow with her hand, she knows that Rusla or Elan would probably see it first and kill it, or get Lefsi to come out of the house if they couldn’t kill it themselves, which she sort of thinks they could kill anything, even a bear.

They do still scare her a bit, both of them, especially when they look at her, but it had made her feel a bit better about going out to have a wee at night time when she’d realised that every time she got up, one or both of them would follow and watch where she was and make sure she wasn’t on her own.

She doesn’t need a candle right now to walk down to the river – it’s very light out still even though it’s starting to get later into the evening – and she has a wee and she wipes herself off, but when she stands up she hears a noise.

She doesn’t know what it is at first – it’s a little noise, very quiet and muffled, and she sees a bit of movement in the reeds, and she walks up to it and pulls back the sack from the water. It’s wet and cold and moving a little bit, and she’s very careful about undoing the knot in the top, and it makes the noise again, quiet and high and…

Diot looks inside the sack, and then she starts to scream for Lefsi, screams and screams and screams for him to come and see and help.