It was something in the mind, Shef knew, not in the body. Something to do with the way he had used the woman he loved as bait and as bribe, an inner agreement with her rejection of him and her marriage to Alfred, the most truthful man Shef had ever met. Whatever the case, he did not know the cure. Going with Karli might lead only to humiliation. Tomorrow he would be in the slavering, and the day after he could be facing the gelders.
“Do you think I stand a chance?” he asked, patting his ruined eye and face.
Karli’s face creased with delight. “Of course! Great tall fellow like you, muscles like a blacksmith. Foreign accent, air of mystery. What you got to remember, these girls out here, they’re bored. Nothing ever happens. They aren’t allowed out near the road where anyone could grab them. No-one ever comes into the marsh. They see the same faces from the day they’re born till the day they die. I tell you…” Karli expanded in fancies as to how the girls of the Ditmarsh had to amuse themselves for want of handsome strangers—or ugly strangers for that matter—while Shef stirred the stewpot and twisted strips of dough round twigs to toast in the fire. He did not think Karli’s plan would work, or not for him at any rate. But he had gone on the naval expedition in the first place for one reason only: to shake off the black mood of Alfred and Godive’s marriage. He would take any opportunity to break the spell upon him. But without any expectations. It would take more than a marshwife to remove his memories.
Hours later, walking back to camp through the marsh in the black night, Shef wondered again at his own lack of concern. Things had gone much as he had foreseen: the arrival in the village at the hour when folk left their doors and strolled round, the casual conversation with the menfolk to pass on news, Karli’s meaningful looks and quick words with one listening girl and then another, while Shef held the attention of their male protectors. Then the ostentatious leaving at dusk, followed by the stealthy circuit back to a willow copse hanging over stagnant water. The arrival of the girls, panting, fearful and excited.
Shef’s had been a pleasant plump girl with a pouting face. At first she had been flirtatious. Then scornful. Then, finally, as she realized that Shef himself had no hope or anxiety concerning his own failure, worried. She had stroked his ruined face, felt the scars on his back beneath the tunic. “You have had hard times?” she had said, half-questioning. “Harder than those scars show,” he had replied. “Things are hard for us women too, you know,” she had told him. Shef thought of what he had seen at the sack of York and in the ruin of Emneth, thought of his mother and her life story, of Godive and Alfgar and the bloody birch, of the stories of Ivar the Boneless and his dealings with women: remembered finally the slave-girls’ bones, buried alive with their backs broken, which he had stumbled over in the old king’s howe, and said nothing. Then for a while they had lain without speaking till the urgent noises coming from Karli and his mate had ceased once and then again. “I won’t tell anyone,” she had whispered as the other pair finally emerged damp and muddy from their hollow. He would never see her again.
It ought to worry him, Shef reflected, not to be a whole man. Somehow it did not. He paused, tested the footing of the stretch ahead with the butt-spike of his spear. In the darkness of the marsh something gurgled and plopped, and Karli drew his sword with a gasp.
“It was just an otter,” Shef remarked.
“Maybe. Don’t you know there are other things in the marsh?”
“Like what?”
Karli hesitated. “We call them thurses.”
“Yes, so do we. Great big things that live in the mud and catch children who play too close. Giant women with green teeth. Arms covered in long gray hair that reach up and turn over a fowler’s boat,” Shef added, embroidering on one of the stories he had heard from Brand. “Merlings that sit and feast on the…”