The Viking Takes a Knight Read online

  The Viking Takes a Knight

  Sandra Hill

  This book is dedicated to my four sons, Beau, Rob, Matt, and Daniel. They’ve got Viking in their blood, rogue in their rascally brains, a comedic vein that would put SNL to shame, and enough alpha to drive a mother mad.

  Instead of there having been a book titled Truly, Madly Viking, there should have been one titled Truly, Madly Viking Mom. No kidding, every gray hair on my head (not that you’ll ever see them), was put there by the four musketeers.

  Although none of them has ever read a word I’ve written (fear of learning Mom knows something about sex, I suppose), they have been supportive of my writing from the get-go. From spotting and reporting my books on store shelves (including that Maine bait-and-tackle shop), to setting up computer programs, to researching items, to talking up my books to friends and acquaintances, to general enthusiasm when I’ve won awards or made lists. Although the one who owns a pizza franchise for some reason refuses to put my books’ covers on the delivery boxes. Jeesh! And each of them refused to dress as a Viking and wear a signboard at my book signings, not even for cash. Even so, they probably think they’re going to inherit a million dollars some day from my writing. Ha, ha, ha!

  They say there is a special place in heaven for mothers of sons. I believe it. But they bring joy and humor to this mother’s life, as well.

  So, this one is dedicated to you, guys. Maybe you’ll even read it this time.

  He said:

  “My tongue, leaden with grief

  Lies listless.

  Naught will stir my soul.

  No skaldic poem touches me,

  My heart is heavy with woe.

  So many tears! Such sadness!

  All my thoughts are dark.

  How can I breed joy from such blackness?

  Rain in my sad heart

  And rain drenching my lands…”

  She said:

  “I have braved sea waves

  and fought serpent winds

  through many countries to

  make this visit to you…”

  –A loose interpretation of Egil’s Saga,

  circa tenth century

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Clueless men get stung…every time…

  Chapter Two

  To market, to market, to buy a…chauvinist pig?

  Chapter Three

  And so the trouble begins…

  Chapter Four

  You did WHAT with my honey?

  Chapter Five

  Oh, baby!

  Chapter Six

  Beware of rogues with angel faces…

  Chapter Seven

  They were certainly lippy today…

  Chapter Eight

  Clueless men will believe anything when it comes to sex!

  Chapter Nine

  You could say she was going a-Viking…

  Chapter Ten

  In the battle of the sexes, men rarely win…

  Chapter Eleven

  Sometimes the best meals involve no food…

  Chapter Twelve

  The shortest distance between two people is a smile…

  Chapter Thirteen

  The terrible trouble arrived…

  Chapter Fourteen

  You could say it was a sexual healing…

  Chapter Fifteen

  He never promised her a rose garden…

  Chapter Sixteen

  There was nothing sweet about the sorrow in this parting…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Even a thousand years ago, men were clueless…

  Chapter Eighteen

  They wouldn’t even let him wallow in peace…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hope blooms…

  Chapter Twenty

  Some men bang their heads against a wall, others bang…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A man can only be pushed so far…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They were party animals before party animals were invented…

  Reader Letter

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Other Books by Sandra Hill

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  HAWK’S LAIR,

  NORTHUMBRIA, A.D. 970

  Clueless men get stung…every time…

  Honey was a lot like a woman. Sweet when you were in the mood, and sticky when you were sated.

  John of Hawk’s Lair grimaced at his own flowery musing. He was a warrior when called to service by his Saxon king, a good master to his various estates, but mostly just a reclusive student of…yes, honey.

  He didn’t realize that he’d spoken aloud until his visitor from the Norselands, Hamr Egilsson, made a snorting sound and said, “Hah! Forget about honey—when a man’s sap is rising, a female nether nest is the only thing that will do.”

  Nether nest? Help me, Lord!

  Hamr of Vestfold, the wildest Viking that ever rode a longship, dipped a fingertip in one of the dozens of small pottery jars that John was experimenting with, each marked with an identifying placard, such as “Clover” or “Cherry Blossom,” and licked the honey appreciatively. Hamr was a nephew, thrice removed, of John’s Norse stepfather, Lord Eirik of Ravenshire. Vikings considered even the thinnest blood connection family; John, though full Saxon, had been raised to do likewise.

  John smacked his hand away. “Those are for research. Be careful you don’t drop any on my notes.”

  While Lady Eadyth of Ravenshire, John’s mother, was a beekeeper far-famed for her mead and time-keeping candles, John was more interested in the medicinal properties. His patience was wearing thin with his irksome guest, who was clearly getting restless after only three days here in the wilds of Northumbria. John doubted he would have his company much longer. Not that Hamr would be returning to his homeland anytime soon since he had been recently outlawed by a Vestfold Althing for trawling the wrong bed furs…those of a high chieftain’s wife. Hopefully, it would be a short exile.

  “Can you not go find a country to plunder, Hamr?”

  “Done that.”

  “Pirate hunting?”

  “Done that. In fact, I am thinking about becoming a pirate.”

  “Have you not fame enough as an outlaw? Must you add piracy to your sins?”

  “Methinks I would be a good pirate. I would give piracy a respectable name.”

  “You would not know respectable if it hit you in your face.” John inhaled for patience. “Swordplay then?”

  “Done that.”

  “Visit a brothel?”

  “Done that. And done that. And done that.”

  “Go exploring in the lands beyond Iceland?”

  “Too cold.”

  “Join the Varangian guard in Byzantium.”

  “Too much work.”

  “Build a new longship.”

  “I have too many already. Rather, my father does.”

  John made a clucking sound of disgust.

  “Lord Gravely, you are too somber by half and unimaginative,” Hamr continued.

  John frowned at the rascal for all his m’lording. John was entitled to wear the title of Lord of Gravely, which he disdained because of his deceased, evil, undoubtedly insane father. For that reason, he would never beget children of his own. The risk of the taint in his blood was too great. “Call me Hawk, or call me John, but do not call me Gravely,” he warned.

  Hamr crossed his eyes at John. Betimes the lackwit behaved like a youthling scarce out of swaddling clothes, even though he had passed the same thirty-one years as John.

  Easing himself off the stool with a long sigh of boredom, Hamr f
inally started for the door, just before Graeme the Stableman knocked.

  “Is there a problem, Graeme? One of the horses?”

  Graeme twisted his cap in his hands. “Nay, the horses are fine. My manpart is not.”

  By the rood! What now?

  Hamr’s ears perked up and, instead of leaving, he turned to listen to the conversation.

  “I know ye pay me and me wife to slather that honey on my manpart so we kin stop breedin’ babes, but—”

  “You can go now, Hamr,” John said.

  “Are you daft? This promises to be the most fun I’ve had since I got here.” Hamr sat on his stool once again.

  John was about to tell Graeme to come back later, but he blathered on, “By the saints! I was tuppin’ Mary in one of the horse stalls las’ night, and I’m still pickin’ straw off my ballocks and in my crack. Mary says she has straw up her woman channel, and it itches somethin’ awful.”

  Way more detail than John wanted or needed.

  Hamr had a hand over his mouth. Laughing, no doubt.

  “We both got flies swarmin’ around our private parts.” Graeme was on a roll now. “What should we do, Lord Hawk?”

  “You could take a bath,” he suggested.

  Graeme stared at him in horror. A bath a year was his routine, John guessed. Or twice a year, at best.

  “I have an idea,” Hamr said with a grin.

  “Shut your teeth, fool,” John advised. Then, to his stableman, “Do you want to quit the project, Graeme?” John had twelve couples of childbearing years involved in his experiments to prevent conception. One less would not be fatal to the study.

  “Nay!” Graeme replied. “We need the coin.”

  “My idea…Does no one want to hear my idea?” Hamr was waving his hand to get their attention. “You could remove Mary’s honey by licking her nether folds.”

  Graeme’s expression bespoke his reluctance.

  “And she could remove yours by sucking your cock.”

  Graeme’s eyes lit up with delight. “Good idea!” he said. “I will tell Mary it is Lord Hawk’s orders.”

  John groaned. But he had no time to bemoan his dilemma. Efrim the Woodsman arrived, holding a bloody rag to his left hand, which had been cut almost to the bone two months past. The wound still festered. “Maude, the scullery maid, said you used honey on her husband Harry’s boil an’ it healed jist fine.”

  Honey on a broken blister was one thing, a gaping wound quite another. Next, his people would expect him to cure leprosy with honey.

  John washed Efrim’s wound, then honey-salved it, emphasizing the importance of keeping an open sore clean and covered with unsoiled bindings.

  “Thank ye very much, m’lord. I have no coin, but my Essie will send ye some of her special goat cheese.”

  Arguing that he did not need to be paid had gained John naught in the past; so, he just nodded. “I do appreciate good goat cheese.” I loathe goat cheese.

  “Do you do this all the time?” Hamr wanted to know once Efrim departed.

  “I do not claim to be a healer, but, yea, a fair number of people come to me as a last resort when all else fails.”

  “And they pay for your services with cheese?”

  “And eggs, fish, venison, live chickens, a pig, wool, manure…yea, manure for the gardens. Even a barrel of eels.”

  Hamr rolled his eyes. “Mayhap you could hint that a big-breasted woman with wanton ways would not be unwelcome payment.”

  John decided the best course was to ignore the lackwit.

  That night a lone rider entered the keep gates. A man of about fifty years with a grizzled white beard and long hair in the Viking style, and a patch over one eye. Oh, Good Lord! It was Bolthor, the world’s worst skald, who quickly told John that he had been sent by his mother to keep him company. A mother he was going to throttle if she did not stop interfering in his life.

  John knew from past experience that come nightfall there was going to be a poem about honey licking and miracle cures.

  And there was.

  That night in John’s great hall, where the fare was plain due to the recent death of the longtime Hawk’s Lair cook, a glaze came over Bolthor’s one eye…a sure sign that he was overcome by the verse mood. Without much ado, Bolthor announced, “This is the saga of John of Hawk’s Lair. I call it ‘Hawk’s Honey.’” It mattered not that John groaned and pleaded with Bolthor not to recite his saga aloud, or that Hamr laughed so hard he fell off his seat. Bolthor considered it his gods’ given duty to spread his poetic wisdom.

  In the land of the Saxons,

  A lackwit knight was born.

  Day and night he spent

  Mooning over honey.

  But alas and alack,

  As time went on,

  He did not realize that

  Ice was growing on his heart.

  Even worse, cobwebs were growing

  On his manpart.

  And the most important honey

  Was missing from his life.

  Mayhap honey is a bane betimes.

  Mayhap man needs a bit of sour

  To offset the sweet.

  Mayhap the hawk should fly

  Instead of resting on his feathery arse.

  While everyone else laughed and clapped their hands with appreciation, John was heard to murmur, “Mayhap someone ought to stuff a codpiece in a certain skald’s mouth.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  To market, to market, to buy a…chauvinist pig?

  Ingrith Sigrundottir walked through the busy streets of Jorvik with five young orphans trailing behind her.

  To Ubbi, her elderly “guard,” she whispered, “I feel like a goose with its goslings.”

  “Best ye not be waddlin’, m’lady. Many a lustsome man here in the city might take it as an invitation.”

  “Ubbi! I’m almost thirty-one years old. Way past the time when men grow lustsome and drooling at my comeliness.”

  “Age is naught when the sap rises in a man,” Ubbi said, “but ye are not to worry. I will protect you.”

  Which was ludicrous, really. Ubbi…seventy if he was a day…was no taller than ten-year-old Godwyn, who preceded him. If anyone waddled, it was him on his short bowed legs. The little man carried a lance in his gnarled right hand, but it was more for a walking stick. No matter! Ingrith was well-armed with sharp daggers at her belt and ankle, and she knew how to use them.

  Truth to tell, Ingrith was still an attractive woman. It was her no-nonsense personality, rather than her appearance, that repelled most men, who preferred biddable women. She was happiest when she was organizing a kitchen and all the cooking, some said like a military commander. And she satisfied her maternal urges by caring for the orphans at Rainstead, an orphanage located outside Jorvik.

  With blonde hair braided and wrapped into a tight coronet atop her head, Ingrith did her best to hide her tall, embarrassingly voluptuous figure with a modest, long-sleeved gunna under a calf-length, open-sided apron. She wore her usual prim expression on her face.

  “As fer that,”—Ubbi was still blathering on whilst she had been woolgathering—“that Saxon commander, Leo of Loncaster, is certainly smitten with you.”

  Ingrith made a grimace of distaste at the reminder of the soldier, who persisted, despite her continual rebuffs. Lately, although she did not see him often, he had become vile in his attentions.

  “Could we proceed?” Ingrith urged, suddenly nervous.

  It was not that the market town was dangerous, especially during daylight hours, but it was crowded. And there were evil men who preyed on young children for the sex-slave trade. Those same men resented the children’s shelter, which offered refuge to what they considered a commodity. In addition, the city was home to numerous thieves able to slip a pouch of coins from people’s belts without them noticing. Godwyn had perfected that particular talent before being “rescued.”

  Jorvik, at the confluence of the Foss and Ouse Rivers, which led out to the North Sea, was once the
site of the Roman city Eburacum, or what the Saxons still called Eoforwic. It had been held as the capital of Northumbria by Vikings off and on over the past two centuries, most recently as ten years ago when the Norse king Eric Bloodaxe had been driven away. For the time being, Saxon earls ruled in King Edgar’s place, and the clomp-clomp of the garrison soldiers’ boots could be heard as they patrolled the streets in groups.

  “Stay close. Hold hands,” she warned as they approached the minster steps, where two young monks were tossing out hunks of bread to the destitute who crowded there every morning.

  “Why are the monks’ heads bald only on the top?” five-year-old Breaca asked.

  “’Tis called a tonsure,” Ubbi explained.

  “A ton-sore? Oh, do they have sores on their heads, like Aelfric’s flea bites? Listen to the bells. ’Tis like angel music. Remember the story about St. Michael the Archangel?” Betimes, Breaca chattered away like a magpie.

  “I would like to see an angel some day.” Seven-year-old Arthur sighed, and the other children nodded.

  “I would not want to be a priest,” Godwyn asserted. “They cannot tup girls.”

  “Godwyn!” Ingrith exclaimed.

  “What? ’Tis true.”

  “The boyling has a point,” Ubbi agreed with a chortle but still tapped Godwyn on the shoulder with his lance.