What a thought to be having when I’m half-dead! A randy corpse. Ha ha ha! Holy Thor, my brain is splintering apart and I make jokes with myself.
He must have made a grunting sound, for she glanced up, her grayish-blue eyes wide with concern. “You’re awake,” she stated.
Well, hardly.
“I should go get Mother Superior.”
He put up a halting hand. “Wait,” he squeaked.
All things came together in Toste’s mind then, as he noticed her form, shapeless in a black robe that matched her black veil. She must be a nun, and those black crows he’d thought he dreamed back on the battlefield—they must have been nuns, too. Oddly, he felt a stab of regret that this beautiful woman had chosen the religious life… and that he was not dead.
He tried several times to speak again—he had so many questions—but he could not get the words to form in his confused brain. Finally he gasped out, “Your name?”
“Esme,” she whispered.
“Eat me?” he repeated. ‘Twas not the first time a woman had asked that of him, but this woman was a nun, for the love of Frigg! Ah, well, he supposed even nuns had carnal appetites. Mayhap especially so, if his experience with the celibate life was any indication. “Mayhap later,” he offered graciously. At the moment, he doubted whether he could lift his head, let alone his tongue.
“Huh?” She gawked at him for several long moments before understanding dawned. “Oh, you foul man! Why did we even bother to rescue you?” She looked as if she might punch him, if he weren’t already incapacitated.
Rescue? They rescued me? Hmmm. I wonder… could it be possible… oh, please, Odin or God, I care not which it is… please let it be possible… “Sister?” he inquired cautiously of the nun who was now wringing her hands with distress, alternately staring at him and the open doorway, probably contemplating escape.
“You may call me Lady… Lady Esme,” she rebuked him haughtily.
Aaah, so that was the reason for her ill-temper. He had misheard her name. He tried to smile, but it was beyond the muscles of his face, which were attached to a scalp that felt as if it were torn in half, which it probably was. Vagn would get a good laugh over his thinking “Eat me” when she’d said “Esme.”
And that thought brought him up short.
“M’lady, did the good nuns of this convent rescue more than one Viking this day?”
She nodded slowly.
And gave him hope. Oh, please, Lord and Odin and every blessed god that might exist, let Vagn be alive. Give me this boon and I will be good the rest of my life.
“One other,” she elaborated.
I will do good deeds only. I will never swear… or only occasionally when provoked beyond all patience. I will seduce no virgins… unless they beg me. I will rob no more churches. “His name?”
“I know not. He is unconscious, as you have been. He is in another chamber, down the corridor.”
Just then he heard a bellow of outrage. He would recognize that voice anywhere. ‘Twas Bolthor… not his brother Vagn, as he had hoped. His spirits sank… not that Bolthor had survived, but that his brother probably had not.
“Were there other Vikings rescued on the battlefield?”
“I think not. You and the giant were the only living men we saw, and Mother Wilfreda made us look, believe you me. Ne’er have I seen so much blood and gore.” She must have noticed the horror on his face then, for she paused and asked, “Was there someone in particular you were concerned about?”
He gulped several times before nodding. “My brother,” he whispered. Then he did something entirely unexpected. He screamed, pouring all the grief in his pain-ridden body into one single word, “VAAAAAAAAGN!”
With that pathetic wail against the fates, he either succumbed to unconsciousness again, or else he died. He hoped it was the latter, because he honestly and truly yearned to leave behind this life.
* * *
Chapter Two
« ^ »
Northumbria, A.D. 964
Vagn the Virile Meets Helga the Homely…
“Marry my daughter, or you’ll wish you were dead,” Jarl Gorm Sigurdsson of Briarstead snarled.