“Poor Ulf! His face looks like a bloody beet.”
Both women giggled.
After their return, Ruby strolled through Coppergate with Astrid and the ever-present guard. The craftsmen who plied their trades in the open air in front of their city homes fascinated Ruby, especially the instrument makers who drew sweet, haunting music from the pan pipes they carved so lovingly.
With their long, flowing manes of hair and belted tunics, the Viking artists—wood and leather workers, jewelers, gold and silversmiths, glass blowers and weavers—resembled the hippies of the 1960s. Unlike those gentle flower children, however, when winter winds blew, these swaggering males turned fierce and rode the North Seas a-Viking in their longships. Finding the difference hard to reconcile, Ruby asked Gyda about it.
“You have come to us in a rare peaceable period,” Gyda explained. “Just six years ago, when Rognvald captured and became king of Jorvik, the city fair flowed with blood. Every family lost sons, brothers, husbands and fathers.” She shook her head sadly before confiding, “Our oldest child Thorvald died in the battle.” Gyda’s voice cracked as she wept silently.
“Oh, Gyda, how inconsiderate of me! I never knew you had a son. Please forgive me.”
When Gyda calmed down, she continued, “The saddest part is the fighting does not end yet. Mark my words, blood will flow again here. The Saxons will ne’er allow us to live here in peace.”
“Don’t the Vikings have their own lands?”
“Our homelands are small and overpopulated. The Viking leaders there wield their power as viciously as our enemies here.”
“Like Thork’s father, King Harald?”
“Just like. Hordes of our brethren have broken away from the yoke of tyranny and seek to settle in new lands as farmers and traders—like here in Jorvik—but ’tis ever a struggle to survive, even when we agree to give up our own culture to blend in the new lands.”
“Gyda, you may find this hard to believe, but in my country people consider Vikings heathen barbarians who killed for the joy of it. And what is a-Viking anyway, if not raping and plundering other lands?”
“Some are driven so,” Gyda admitted. “Overcome by the bloodlust they are, like the berserkers, or by the plunder, but mostly they go to seek better lives for their families. Mayhap they conquer unwilling lands in the process, but survival drives them. Nothing more.”
That was one of the more serious conversations she and Gyda engaged in recently. Mostly, they laughed and enjoyed themselves as women gathered in Gyda’s home each afternoon to get Ruby’s expert help in making the frivolous lingerie.
Today a group of Gyda’s friends from nearby homes arrived once again for a “sewing bee.” Ruby had shown them once before how to make a pattern, but some had run into problems and wanted hands-on assistance.
She suspected they were more interested in seeing the washboard she’d designed with the blacksmith’s help for Gyda, not to mention the hand-carved clothespins a wood-worker in the market area had made to her specifications. Gyda beamed with pride when she looked at her clean laundry hung on the newly strung clothesline between two trees behind the house. She displayed the washboard, when it wasn’t being used, on a special, highly visible wall peg, its rolled metal surface polished to a high sheen. And Ruby suspected that Gyda let her laundry hang out longer than necessary to impress her neighbors with her modern gadgets.
The lively, outspoken women in Gyda’s solar that afternoon chattered and gossiped as their nimble fingers plied precious needles and rainbow-colored threads.
“Did you hear that Gunvor is with child again?” one woman confided. The others rolled their eyes meaningfully. Tsk-tsk’s clicked through the women’s teeth as they sympathized with the “poor girl.”
“Ten babes and her not yet seeing twenty-five winters!” Gyda exclaimed. ” ‘Tis dead she will be by her thirtieth year. She near bled to death in the last birthing, I was told.”
“Then what will Siegfried do for the care of all those children?” Gyda’s next-door-neighbor Freydis, a rotund, jolly woman, clucked.
“Probably wed some young, unknowing bonder’s daughter whose father wants one less mouth to feed,” another lady snorted with disgust.