A TALE OF TWO VIKINGS By Sandra Hill
A TALE OF TWO VIKINGS By Sandra Hill
Prologue
Double the trouble, Viking style…
Toste and Vagn Ivarsson did everything together.
They came squalling into this world from the same womb together, bare minutes apart.
They suckled from the breasts of the same wet nurse when their mother died in the birthing.
They were weaned and privy trained at the same time.
They invented their own language—words and body expressions that only they could understand.
They rode their first horses at the age of seven, rode their first maids on Friggs Day of their thirteenth summer, and rode off on longships to go a-Viking as untried fourteen-year-old warriors.
They’d been inseparable till their ninth year when their father, Jarl Ivar Thorsson, who considered twins an unnatural happenstance, came up with the lackwit notion that they would mature best apart. He sent them, kicking and screaming, to opposite reaches of the Norselands for fostering. That lasted a total of three intolerable months afore both were sent home by exasperated Norse chieftains.
Because of their identical appearance, except for a clover-shaped birthmark on Toste’s inner thigh, they constantly traded places, to the chagrin of comrades and maids aplenty.
Their father eventually outlawed them from his Vestfold realm on the same day, over the selfsame piddling incident—piddling to them, leastways. Vagn, in a fit of meadhead madness, had referred to their older brother Arne as “Mother’s Baby, Father’s Maybe,” and Toste had piped in with a comment that Arne much resembled a trader called Leif Lousebeard who came into the area on occasion.
They never wed, some said, because they could not bear to be apart from each other. Bolthor the Skald once described them as: Fair of face and form; fierce in the bed furs; even fiercer in battle; quick to wit; loyal to a fault.
In essence, Toste and Vagn were as one.
But, alas and alack, Toste and Vagn, having seen only thirty and one winters, were about to die together.
* * *
Chapter One
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Land of the Saxons, A.D. 964
A-marching they did go, a-marching they did go… uh-oh…
Toste Ivarsson slid in the soft earth and almost fell on his arse, to the amusement of the many warriors who surrounded him on their trek through Saxon hell.
“Remind me again why we are trudging about in scratchsome chain sherts over padded leather tunics, all that covered with wet fur pelts, carrying heavy shields and swords and battle-axes, during a hailstorm, smack down the middle of enemy lands, like bloody game pigeons?” Ping, ping, ping—the icy pellets kept hitting the metal armor and weapons of the soldiers in the bird, creating an irksome din—just as irksome, Toste hoped, as the pellets of his grumbles directed in an endless tirade at his equally irksome brother, Vagn. “And the odor! Two hundred men who have not bathed in a fortnight—phew! ‘Tis said that women of all nations favor us Viking men because we are so handsome, but mainly because we bathe more often than the average fellow. Well, they would change their tune quick as spit if they got a whiff of this aromatic bunch. I’m thinking of putting a pincher on the nose guard of my helmet to cut out the foul body aromas.”
To his frustration, Vagn’s response was to whistle. For the love of Thor! Whistling in the midst of this… this… sure-to-be wasted effort! The lackwit! No church pillage is worth this time and inconvenience. My toes feel like icicles. By the gods, I would love to be sitting afore a hot hearth, feet propped up, nursing a horn of mulled ale.
“I was bored,” Vagn answered cheerily, even though he was equally laden with battle gear, and led an ancient warhorse named Clod he had won the night before in a game of bnefatafl. The destrier, made skittish by the pelting ice, was one of the few horses on the field today. Most of the soldiers preferred to walk the short distance to the monastery… which was turning out to be not so short a distance, after all.
It was a rare peaceable time in Britain. King Edgar, being only twenty and one years old and busy fornicating with every female who crossed his path, was heavily under the influence of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he’d brought back from exile. While Edgar sinned, Dunstan built more monasteries for his king’s penance. A good bargain, in Toste’s opinion.