“And what do you think?” asked Shef. “Do you remember what they did to your father? He is your father, not mine, but even I felt sorrow for him. And though Ivar did not do that, he gave the orders. That is the kind of thing he does. He may have spared you rape, but who knows what else he had in mind for you. You say he has children. Has anyone seen the mothers?”
Godive turned over Shef’s palm and began to lance the blisters that covered it.
“I don’t know. He is hateful and cruel to men, but that is because he fears them. He fears they are more manly than he is. But how do they show it, this manliness? By violating those who are too weak, by taking their pleasure from pain. Maybe Ivar has been sent by God—as a punishment for men’s sins.”
“Do you wish I had left you with him?” Hardness edged Shef’s voice.
Slowly Godive bent over him, abandoning her thorn. He felt her cheek against his naked chest, her hands sliding along his sides. As he pulled her up next to him, her loose shift slid from one bare shoulder. Shef found himself staring at a naked breast, its nipple girlish pink. The only woman he had seen before like this was the slut Truda—heavy, sallow, coarse-fleshed. His roughened hands began to stroke Godive’s skin with disbelieving tenderness. If he had thought of this happening—and he had, often, lying by himself in fisherman’s hut or deserted forge—it was years in the future, after they had found a place, after he had deserved her and made a home where they could be safe. Now, in the wood, in the clearing, in the sunlight, without blessing of priest or consent from parents…
“You are a better man than Ivar or Sigvarth or any other man I have ever met,” sobbed Godive, her face still buried in his shoulder. “I knew you would come for me. I only feared they would kill you for it.”
He pulled at her shift, her legs squirming beneath him as she turned onto her back.
“We should both be dead by now. It is so good to be alive, with you—”
“There is no blood between us, we have different fathers, different mothers—”
In the sunlight he entered her. Eyes watched from a bush; breath drew in, in envy.
An hour later, Shef lay on the soft grass, in the sunshine where the rays of the now-hot sun came through the upper branches of the oak trees. He was torpid, completely relaxed. He was not asleep. Or he was, but at some dim level he remained awake, conscious that Godive had slipped away. He had been thinking of the future, of where they could go: into the marshes, he thought, remembering his night spent with the king’s thane Edrich. He was still conscious of the sun on his skin, of the soft turf beneath his body, but they seemed further away. This had happened before—in the Viking camp. His mind was rising from the forest clearing, traveling out beyond the body, beyond the heart’s confines….
A voice spoke to him—rough, gravelly, laden with authority. “Of mighty men,” it said, “the maid you have taken.” Shef knew he was somewhere else. He was at a forge. Everything was familiar: the hiss as he wound the wet rags round the scorching handles of the tongs, the heft in his back and shoulder muscles as he lifted the red-hot metal out of the heart of the fire, the scrape and scratch of the top of his leather apron across his chest, the automatic duck and shake of the head as the sparks flew up toward his hair. But it was not his forge, back in Emneth, nor Thorvin’s forge within the enclosure of the rowan berries. He sensed round him an enormous space, a gigantic open hall so high he could not see the top, just mighty pillars and columns leading away to the top where the smoke clung.
He took the heavy hammer and began to beat out a shape from the formless mass glowing on his anvil. What that shape should be he did not know. Yet his hands knew, for they moved expertly and without hesitation, shifting the tongs, turning the bloom, striking from one direction and then another. It was no spear-blade or axe-head, no ploughshare or coulter. It seemed to be a wheel, but a wheel with many teeth, sharp-pointed ones, like a dog’s. Shef watched with fascination as the thing came to life beneath his blows. He knew, in his heart, that what he was doing was impossible. No one could make a shape like that straight from a forge. And yet—he could see how it might be done, if you made the teeth separately and then fitted them all together on the wheel you had originally made. But what would the point of it all be? Maybe, if you had one wheel like that, turning one way, up and down like a wall, and another wheel, turning the other way, flat and level with the ground, then, if the teeth on the one wheel matched with the teeth on the other, the first could drive the second round.