With great effort, he lifted his heavy eyelids and gazed upward. What he saw scared him spitless, and he was not a man easily scared. He said something quite embarrassing then, for a Viking: “Eek!”
Five black crows stood in a circle about him—very large black crows. In fact, they were the height of humans and they cackled in the Saxon tongue. They must be the ravens of death. In the past, he had seen vultures hovering over battlefields waiting to feast on the mortal carrion, but he’d never seen them up close; nor had he ever imagined them being so big.
“He’s awfully big,” one of the crows said. “How will we carry him?”
And what is wrong with big?
“Mayhap we could drag him over to our cart.”
Birds have carts?
“Are you barmy? The man is half-dead. He would ne’er survive a dragging.”
Good thinking. No dragging.
“Each of us could take a limb and lift him. Yea, that’s the way.”
Take a limb? Oh, bloody hell! They’re going to dismember me and gnaw on my bones.
“That would no doubt kill him.”
For a certainty.
“He will probably die anyhow.”
A little optimism wouldn’t hurt, you know.
“He has nice hair. Not quite silver. Not quite gold.”
What does the color of my hair matter? Dead is dead.
“Tsk tsk tsk! Who cares what color his hair is! Look at the muscles in his shoulders and arms. He could probably pull a plow for us… if he survives.”
What? What have the ravens of death to do with plows?
“He’s a heathen,” still another of the crows whined. “Why should we save a heathen Viking?”
Well, actually, I’ve been baptized. You could call me a heathen Christian.
Another crow, obviously the head crow, swatted the whining crow about the head. “For shame! God shows His mercy to all men.”
God? Uh-oh. Mayhap I’m not going to Valhalla after all.
That thought was reinforced when the crows lifted him unceremoniously off the ground by his arms and legs. Pain shot from his splitting skull through his injured body—some Saxon bastard must have run a lance through my side, even after I fell from the head blow—all the way down to his frozen toes, and he surrendered to blissful unconsciousness. With luck, he would not wake up when the crows began to feast on his flesh.
Is well-dangled the same as well-hung?…
“Well!” Esme remarked as she gazed down at the fallen Viking, now reclining on a hard pallet in a guest cell at the abbey. A roaring fire at her back provided welcome warmth on this cold day. “Well, well, well!”
“Well, indeed!” concurred a flushed Sister Margaret, who swayed slightly on her feet, tipsy from sampling her own latest batch of mead after their grueling trip back from the battlefield. Margaret was the daughter of a famed Saxon ale maker, and she’d brought his recipe with her to the convent. In truth, if it weren’t for the profits earned from the mead enterprise—aptly labeled Margaret’s Mead—the abbey would have been forced to close long ago. Esme’s knack for growing vegetables in the abbey gardens also helped them subsist.
But that was neither here nor there. More important for the moment was the blond-haired Norseman who lay blessedly unconscious before them… naked as a newborn babe. Nay, that was not an accurate description. This man was no child. If he were, they wouldn’t be ogling him so. He had no apparent injuries other than a cracked skull, but they’d had to check to make sure. Mother Wilfreda had performed her healing ablutions on the man and left momentarily to get her chest of herbs.
“Well!” added Sister Mary Rose, a worldly nun who prided herself on being sharp as a sword. She used to sell fake relics on the church steps of the Pope’s own monastery in Rome and still traded in the toenails of baby Jesus or Virgin Mary eyelashes on occasion when the nunnery floundered in dire straits… which was often. “I have seen many a man in my time, and I daresay this one is surely the fairest of them all. And well-endowed, for a certainty.”