Karli’s habitual grin spread across his face once more. “Just like me, I guess. If you met a real champion, a fist-fighter from the marsh, he’d be all over you. But you can knock a man down well enough, if he stands still.”
Shef nodded thoughtfully. That at least was a skill worth knowing. Strange that they should have so specialized in one fighting art, here in this unvisited corner of the world. Perhaps it was because they did so little trade and had so little metal that they fought by choice empty-handed.
Only Nikko bothered to look up as they rejoined the campsite, giving the pair of them an angry glare.
“We reach Hedeby tomorrow,” he said. “Then your prancing will have to stop. I say, your prancing will have to stop,” he repeated, voice rising to a shout as Shef ignored him. “The master you’ll find in Hedeby won’t let you fool around pretending to be a swordmaster. It’ll be work all day and the leather across your back if you shirk! You’ve felt it before, I’ve seen you stripped! You’re no warrior out of luck, just a runaway!”
Karli lobbed a handful of mud neatly into Nikko’s campfire and the shouting died into exasperated mutters.
“It is our last night,” said Karli in a low voice. “I’ve got an idea. See, we’re coming out of the Ditmarsh. Be on the high road tomorrow, and the dry land, where the Danes live. You can talk to them then, but I’m not so good at it. But there’s a village half a mile off, where the girls still speak good marsh-talk, like me—and you too, you still talk like a Frisian, but they’ll understand you. So why don’t we just slip off and see if there isn’t anyone in the village who feels like a bit of a change from whichever mudfoot she’s attached to?”
Shef looked at Karli with a mixture of irritation and affection. During the week he had stayed in the Ditmarsh village by the sea, he had realized that Karli, cheerful, open and thoughtless, was one of those men whom women invariably liked. They responded to his humor, his lack of care. He seemed to have tried his luck with every woman in his home village, and usually successfully. Some husbands and fathers knew, some turned a blind eye, all were careful about giving Karli an excuse to use his fists. But there had been general approval of Karli going off with Nikko and the others on their trading trip to Hedeby, whether they managed to include Shef as merchandise or not. Their last night in the hut Karli shared with his parents had been broken by continual scratching on the shutters and stealthy disappearances into the bushes outside.
They were not Shef’s women, so he had no cause for complaint. Yet Karli made him anxious at some deeper level. In his youth, working at the forge at Emneth in the fen, and traveling round the neighboring villages on work-errands, Shef had several lusty encounters with girls—churls’ daughters, even thralls’ daughters, not young ladies whose virginity was prized and guarded, but ready enough to educate his ignorance. It was true they had never sought him out as they did Karli, perhaps put off by his unsmiling concern for the future, perhaps sensing his inner obsessions, but at least he had had no need to think he was lacking, or abnormal.
Then had come the sack of Emneth by the Vikings, the crippling of his foster-father, the capture and then the rescue of Godive. The moment in the little hut in the copse that summer morning, when he had become Godive’s “first-man,” and thought he had reached the summit of his ambition. And since then Shef had had no dealings with any woman, not even Godive after he had won her back, not even after they had put the gold circle of kingship on his head and half the trulls in England had been his for the taking. Shef wondered sometimes whether the threat of Ivar to castrate him had worked on his mind. He knew he was still a whole man—but then so had Ivar been, or so Hund had insisted, and he had been called “the Boneless,” just the same. Could he have caught impotence from the man he had killed? Had his half-brother, Godive’s husband, put a curse on him before he was hanged?