Toste reacted to Vagn’s remark. “Bored! Why could we not have wrestled a bear, like we did last time you got bored? Why could we not have dug for amber or hunted whales in the Baltics? Why could we not have gone horse buying in the Saracen lands? Why could we not have drunk a tun of mead and slept the ale-head away all winter long? Why could we not have spent a sennight and more in a talented harlot’s bed furs?”
“Together?” Vagn asked.
How like him to home in on the last and most irrelevant of my suggestions! Toste snorted with disgust. “We have tried it together more than once, as you well know, but we were half-brained youthlings then. Now, I much prefer to do my own plowing, thank you very much.” He regretted the words the minute they slipped from his mouth.
“Mayhap you are getting old,” Vagn commented, as if he were not the same advanced age of thirty and one years. “Almost a graybeard you are. For a certainty, I saw a wild hair growing in your ear yestereve when you were retching your guts over the ship’s rail into the stormy sea. Up and down, up and down, up and down, our boat followed the path of the roaring waves. Ne’er have I seen a man vomit so much.”
“In the midst of that sea-gale, you noticed a single hair in my ear?” Toste arched his frosty brows in disbelief. At the same time, he swiped a forearm across his forehead to wipe away moisture from the melting hail.
“Yea, I did… and, come to think on it, there was one in your nose, too. Women do not like such misplaced hairs, you know. Dost want me to pluck it out for you?”
Toste made a coarse observation about “plucking” and jabbed Vagn in the upper arm with an elbow for his deviltry, Toste’s hands being full of weapons.
His brother just grinned and danced away.
The hail began to die down and was replaced with sleet, which in turn created a mire of mud underfoot. What a miserable day! If they didn’t soon find this monastery, he was going to turn on his heel and head back to the ship, blessed booty be damned!
Then, ignoring Vagn’s flummery, he commenced afresh his earlier diatribe. ” ‘Tis all your fault. ‘Twas you who convinced me that we should join the Jomsvikings, and look where it has landed us.” They were surrounded on all sides by Viking warriors intent on plunder or battle, or whatever they faced ahead—way too far from the four longships anchored near shore. “A bloodthirstier lot I have ne’er met than this mercenary band, including our chieftain. I swear, Sigvaldi would hew down his mother if she sneezed the wrong way. And, by the by, you failed to inform me that no women were permitted at the Jomsviking fortress at Trellenborg. ‘Tis a year since we joined this troop of noble warriors. Nobility is one thing, celibacy is another. Not what I envisioned, I’ll tell you that.” It was not the first time Toste had voiced this particular complaint to his brother.
“Methinks you have lost the adventuresome spirit, brother. To go a-Viking is a way of life for us Norsemen. ‘Tis what men do when the crops are harvested and high-winter has not yet icebound our longships.” Vagn shrugged as if there were naught more to say on the subject. Norsemen would be Norsemen, was Vagn’s simple philosophy. Toste thought Vagn had finished blathering, but then he added more of his non-wisdom, “A dollop of celibacy hones a man’s appetite. Makes him a more self-disciplined fellow.”
“Hah! More like a wallop—as in overabundance—of celibacy hones a man’s randiness and makes him nigh beastly when he finally lands betwixt soft thighs. The monkish life is not for me.”
“Me, neither,” Vagn admitted. “Shall we go home?” A dozen hailstones lay in Vagn’s as yet unhelmeted, dark blond hair. Water rivulets ran down his face in muddy streaks. He looked absolutely ridiculous, and absolutely endearing, at the same time. Toste loved his brother more than himself.
Choking back the emotion that clogged his throat, he asked, “Home? What home? Oh, nay, you surely do not suggest we hang tail and return to our father’s estates in the Norselands? He outlawed us—his own sons.”