The Caged Viking Read online

  The Caged Viking

  Viking Navy SEALs Book 8

  Sandra Hill

  Contents

  Praise for Sandra Hill’s Viking Books

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Reader Letter

  Dark Viking Excerpt

  Also by Sandra Hill

  About the Author

  Glossary

  “And now in Norway a branch

  of the gods’ race had grown.”

  — Ynglinga Saga

  Snorri Sturlason

  Praise for Sandra Hill’s Viking Books

  “Take a Norse God, a beautiful heroine and add a dash of time travel, and you have the makings of a great novel by Sandra Hill…A sweeping dramatic tale of timeless love.” The Literary Times

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  “Only the mind of Sandra Hill could dream up this hilarious and wacky scenario. The Vikings are on the loose once again, and they’re wreaking sexy and sensual fun.” RT Bookclub Reviews

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  “Few authors can fuse erotica and drop-dead humor like Hill.” Publishers Weekly

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  “Zany scenario and over-the-top humor…engaging characters to care about, passion, love, and a happily ever after. Don’t miss it!” Romance Reviews Today

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  “…sometimes I was even laughing out loud, but of course that is what I expect when reading a Sandra Hill story…a wonderful book that successfully mixes romance, adventure, and humor.” FreshFiction.com

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  “A well-told story, funny and heartwarming. Ms. Hill has created characters who will stay with you long after you close the book. This is a time travel that shouldn’t be missed.” The Paperback Forum

  * * *

  “Sandra Hill has truly captured the lifestyle and language of medieval times. The story allows the reader to immerse herself in the spirit of the day. Her prose eloquently develops the fragile relationship between two people who have given up all hope of love…This enchanting work is worth reading again and again.” I’ll Take Romance Magazine

  * * *

  “Trademark Sandra Hill is filled with lots of humor, some of it laugh-out-loud fun. She has that magical touch when it comes to creating heroes who are warriors but have a vulnerability that appeals to readers.” RT Book Reviews

  Copyright © 2021 by Sandra Hill.

  Excerpt from Dark Viking, copyright © Sandra Hill.

  ISBN: 978-1-950349-89-0

  * * *

  Publisher: Parker Hayden Media

  Imprint: Sandra Hill Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Art credits:

  Cover Design: LB Hayden

  Man: fxquadro/DepositPhotos

  Cage: foto-pixel.web.de/DepositPhotos

  This book is dedicated to all those still recovering from the Coronavirus pandemic…and those who were out in the public exposing themselves to danger for the greater good, and those who quarantined themselves at home, also for the greater good. I hope this book will provide a bit of humor to lighten your heavy burdens. And aren’t smiles and laughter the best medicine, anyhow, pre-, post-, or during a crisis?

  Prologue

  Saxon England, AD 1014

  Daddy, dearest?...

  Bergliot, the serving girl, stood a fair distance from the cage and stared at the beast. It was a man, actually. A Norseman. But, after six months and more living in a cage, the pitiful creature was more animal than man.

  Not that Bergliot felt any pity. Nay, she did not. What kind of man allowed himself to be captured and put on display in his enemy’s hall? Especially a Viking. A disgrace he was!

  Bergliot had been raised in a Saxon keep, though half Norse-blooded herself, and had been told from an early age that Vikings were the world’s fiercest warriors, never given to surrender. They were also reputed to be more handsome than the average male. Hah! There was naught handsome about this hairy, smelly, snarling spectacle.

  He was tall, but gaunt with nigh starvation. Hair once blond hung in greasy clumps about his face and down his back. Unshaven for many a month, his face was barely discernible under a heavy beard. Despite the grime and filth that covered him, old and new scars were prominent from forehead to legs. He wore but a scrap of fur tied about his male parts. The only life left in him stemmed from piercing silvery blue eyes.

  Not that those eyes took note of her. No one did. And that was all well and good. An over-tall maid with no bosom or curves to speak of, with hair chopped off unevenly, even to her scalp in places, adorned in a drab homespun garment that hung on her skinny body down to her bare feet, blended in well with the lower staff that labored for this vast royal household.

  Bergliot had only been in the Winchester Castle a few sennights now, having been brought here as an indentured servant, and she, for a certainty, was not supposed to be in the great hall. But she’d been drawn to this spot and continued to stare, trying to comprehend why the beast fascinated—and repulsed—her so.

  She knew why, of course, and spat on the rushes at her feet.

  For his sins, the beast was her father.

  Not that she would recognize him if she hadn’t been told of his identity, and not just because of his present condition. She hadn’t seen much of the man in all her twelve years, and not at all the past three. Some father!

  In one hand, Bergliot held a boar leg bone, gnawing idly on the little remaining meat, whilst using the other hand to scratch her backside. The coarse wool of her gown caused a bothersome itch. That, and the fleas that infested her bed furs and took bites out of her fair skin.

  Suddenly, she felt a hard whack to the back of her head, causing the bone to fly and her to stumble, almost falling flat on her face into the rushes. The bone was caught midair by one of the royal hounds permitted to prowl the great hall. The dog scooted under a trestle table, too far under for her to reach, if she was inclined to retrieve the bone, which she wasn’t.

  “Stop picking at yer arse,” the raspy-voiced Egil, her self-proclaimed protector, hissed, waving the wooden end of an axe at her. What kind of protector sells his ward into slavery? For her protection? A likely story! A good one for the skalds, but not for me, Bergliot griped silently, but did not say aloud. She was not such a dullard that she did not know when to curb her tongue, if forewarned.

  Egil, though a graybeard of considerable years…having seen at least fifty winters…was short and wiry in frame, one of a dozen woodcutters who provided the kindling for the many palace hearth fires. He was stronger than he looked, as Bergliot well knew from the bruises on her arms from his dragging her hither and yon, all for her
supposed well-being.

  “Have I not told ye a hundred times that ’tis unseemly fer a lass to touch her privates?” Egil waved his axe handle in her face to make sure she was paying attention.

  “Huh?” Bergliot said, rubbing the back of her head. She would no doubt have a knot the size of an egg by nightfall. “What’s a person to do when they have an itch, then?”

  “Do it when yer alone and no one can see.”

  “Like the self-pleasuring I caught you in yestereve in your bed furs?” Bergliot laughed and ducked, just missing a second knot from Egil’s axe handle.

  “And why have ye washed yer face and hair? Are ye trying to look pretty?”

  “What? Are you barmy? I am no more pretty than…than you are!”

  Egil’s lips twitched with a grin at her outrage. The codger knew how much Bergliot disliked being called pretty, her bane from the time she was a toddler.

  “Pretty or not, do ye want some Saxon whoreson tupping ye in a dark corridor?”

  Bergliot gasped with outrage. “They would not dare!”

  “They would dare, believe you me, and they will not care if ye are barley-faced, or pretty as a gilly flower. Nor will they care which hole they plug either.”

  Now he had gone too far. Blood rushed to Bergliot’s face and her hands fisted. She was about to launch herself at the old man, but he had turned abruptly at the hissing sound that came from the cage. The beast had made the sound, as if to signal Egil.

  With a motion for her to remain where she was, Egil sidled over to the cage, looking right and left to make sure he was unobserved. It was early morning, and there were few people about, but still the household had been warned to stay clear of the cage.

  The beast shuffled forward in his cage and whispered to Egil, who pretended to be examining the strength of the wood bars, something a skilled woodcutter might do. Egil nodded several times, then returned to her, his demeanor one of sadness or worry, she wasn’t sure which.

  “What did he want?” Bergliot asked as they walked out of the hall, he toward the wood lot and she toward the outside scullery where there were another five or fifty cauldrons for her to scour.

  Egil declined to answer, but the nervous tic at the side of his mouth said it all. Egil was worried about something the beast had told him.

  “Does he know he’s my father?” Bergliot asked of a sudden.

  Egil shook his head. “He thinks ye dead.”

  Bergliot shrugged. “He would not care anyway.”

  “Foolish boy!” Egil said, slicing her with a glare. “Ye are the reason he’s in that bloody cage.”

  Chapter 1

  I know how the caged bird (beast) feels…

  Hauk the Handsome was not so handsome anymore.

  Truth to tell, not having bathed or shaved or cut his hair for more than six months (twenty-four sennights and three days, to be precise), he, who had once stunned one and all, especially women, with his godlike good looks, stunk to high Valhalla. A disgrace! Everyone knew that Vikings bathed more often than the average man and took special care with personal appearance. Unlike the stinksome Saxons who had no excuse for their foul odors.

  In his defense, Hauk scarce got enough water for drinking, let alone bathing, residing as he did in a cage in a corner of the great hall of the royal court at Winchester, put on exhibition like some exotic animal. In fact, his wooden pen had once been occupied by a huge white bear, a hunter’s trophy from a far-off arctic land. Beasts, both of them, according to his ignorant captor, King Aethelred. `

  Despite the thin war braids he tried to maintain in his wild hair, framing his face for some semblance of dignity, lice had become his new best friends, cracking the nits his only source of entertainment. That, and the occasional beast-like growl he emitted just to amuse himself when lackbrain Saxons poked him through the bars with sharp lances or burning sticks. Actually, they didn’t prod him much anymore, or leastways not from up close, ever since he grabbed one irksome housecarl by the wrist and bit off the man’s foul thumb.

  Hauk was so thin his hips scarce held up the loin cloth he’d fashioned out of a fur tossed his way on that freezing winter night, following the St. Brice’s Day Massacre. And, yea, he had been known to let it drop a little lower when some tongue-sucking, pole-up-the-arse ladies of the court passed by.

  His other pastime involved making mental lists of all those foemen he would torture and kill when he was free, starting with the king, who’d ordered the death of all Viking males in Britain on that infamous saint’s feast day, even Norse settlers who had lived peaceably in England for decades. Among the horrendous acts committed was the burning of the locked St. Frideswide Church in Oxford, where dozens of Norse men, women, and children had taken refuge. In addition, there had been the noted hersirs and their warrior underlings, who’d managed to evade the fiery end but then were handed a worse fate. Face-front decapitations.

  And they said Vikings were brutal pagans! What did that say about Christians?

  Hauk could not dwell on the mind pictures that plagued him day and night, berating himself for not arriving earlier, or he would grow as demented as he pretended to be. For a certainty, he now understood the rage that drove some Vikings into berserkness. Hauk shook his shaggy head, loosening a few more pests in the process. With determined effort, he banked the embers of that roiling wrath, hiding the emotions which beset him suddenly, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Every good warrior knew that timing was everything, whether in battle or a contest of wills.

  It was a waiting game.

  Sweyn Forkbeard, king of all the Norselands, would come to his rescue, eventually. Hauk was certain of that fact, not because Hauk was of such importance, but because no Viking worth his salt would allow the atrocities leveled at his family to go unavenged. Among those who had burned to death in the church had been Sweyn’s sister Gunhilde, her husband Pallig Tokesen, a Danish ealdorman of Devonshire, and their child.

  Included among those who’d reportedly been beheaded was Hauk’s son Bjorn, who had seen only twelve winters, but had been big for his age. Bjorn had been fostering in Pallig’s keep ever since his mother died three years past of a wasting disease. To his shame, Hauk had considered the youthling safer there than a-Viking with him in the Rus lands or ensconced in his small northern Hordaland estate. Now, that is a lie! Truth to tell, I did not want to be bothered with the bratling, whose Saxon mother tricked me into a marriage I never sought or wanted. I neglected the child to punish her. And now… He sighed. …and now ’tis too late to make amends.

  Hauk had been in Frankland when he’d first heard rumors of Aethelred’s perfidy…not the massacre, no one could have predicted that, but rumblings of the inept Saxon king’s wild imaginings that there would soon be an uprising of Norse settlers in Britain against him. By the time Hauk arrived in Oxfordshire, he’d been a day too late. The church had been a charred ruin. Piles of headless bodies lay untended as feasts for the vultures that hovered overhead in a dark cloud, the heads scattered about the fields.

  A cleric, who’d stood praying over the corpses, even as he kept swatting at the angry birds, told him of his son’s passing, or what he knew of it. Nay, the God-man had not stayed to witness the actual decapitations, but he recalled seeing Bjorn among the males being led to the slaughter.

  In his grief over his son’s death, and the guilt he felt over his neglect that led to the boy being in peril, Hauk hadn’t exercised his usual caution. As a result, he’d been captured by some of Aethelred’s guardsmen who’d returned to the site of their treachery, no doubt to plunder the bodies for treasure. Human vultures. Even the clothing of the corpses would have been taken by nightfall, he’d known from past experience.

  But that was past. Hauk had to look forward. He only hoped he could hold on, that the Saxon curs would allow him to live long enough until Sweyn’s arrival with the northern army that he was gathering. They should be underway shortly, gods willing. That news he got from the newly arrived Egil,
one of his hersirs who’d been off in the Baltics on one of Hauk’s longships gathering amber for trade and only recently heard of his master’s fate.

  Egil, pretending to be a woodsman until he put in place a plan for Hauk’s escape, had with him a ragtag maid for which he claimed questionable guardianship. Hauk was suspicious and wouldn’t be surprised if they were fur mates, despite the girling’s youth. But why Egil wouldn’t just admit such was beyond Hauk. All the maid did was gawk at Hauk with a sneer on her fool face.

  Until Egil’s arrival, all of Hauk’s hopes had lain with Queen Emma, Aethelred’s not-so-adoring child bride. To give her credit, Emma was partly responsible for Hauk’s survival thus far. At the very least, she’d arranged for a serving boy to put a pile of clean straw outside his cage every few days and remove the pile of soiled rushes that he pushed through the bars. A pail of drinking water and the occasional hunk of bread or slab of cheese were also given to him by the same servant, when he remembered.