Page 2 of The Caged Viking

Egil declined to answer, but the nervous tic at the side of his mouth said it all. Egil was worried about something the beast had told him.

“Does he know he’s my father?” Bergliot asked of a sudden.

Egil shook his head. “He thinks ye dead.”

Bergliot shrugged. “He would not care anyway.”

“Foolish boy!” Egil said, slicing her with a glare. “Ye are the reason he’s in that bloody cage.”

Chapter 1

I know how the caged bird (beast) feels…

Hauk the Handsome was not so handsome anymore.

Truth to tell, not having bathed or shaved or cut his hair for more than six months (twenty-four sennights and three days, to be precise), he, who had once stunned one and all, especially women, with his godlike good looks, stunk to high Valhalla. A disgrace! Everyone knew that Vikings bathed more often than the average man and took special care with personal appearance. Unlike the stinksome Saxons who had no excuse for their foul odors.

In his defense, Hauk scarce got enough water for drinking, let alone bathing, residing as he did in a cage in a corner of the great hall of the royal court at Winchester, put on exhibition like some exotic animal. In fact, his wooden pen had once been occupied by a huge white bear, a hunter’s trophy from a far-off arctic land. Beasts, both of them, according to his ignorant captor, King Aethelred. `

Despite the thin war braids he tried to maintain in his wild hair, framing his face for some semblance of dignity, lice had become his new best friends, cracking the nits his only source of entertainment. That, and the occasional beast-like growl he emitted just to amuse himself when lackbrain Saxons poked him through the bars with sharp lances or burning sticks. Actually, they didn’t prod him much anymore, or leastways not from up close, ever since he grabbed one irksome housecarl by the wrist and bit off the man’s foul thumb.

Hauk was so thin his hips scarce held up the loin cloth he’d fashioned out of a fur tossed his way on that freezing winter night, following the St. Brice’s Day Massacre. And, yea, he had been known to let it drop a little lower when some tongue-sucking, pole-up-the-arse ladies of the court passed by.

His other pastime involved making mental lists of all those foemen he would torture and kill when he was free, starting with the king, who’d ordered the death of all Viking males in Britain on that infamous saint’s feast day, even Norse settlers who had lived peaceably in England for decades. Among the horrendous acts committed was the burning of the locked St. Frideswide Church in Oxford, where dozens of Norse men, women, and children had taken refuge. In addition, there had been the noted hersirs and their warrior underlings, who’d managed to evade the fiery end but then were handed a worse fate. Face-front decapitations.

And they said Vikings were brutal pagans! What did that say about Christians?

Hauk could not dwell on the mind pictures that plagued him day and night, berating himself for not arriving earlier, or he would grow as demented as he pretended to be. For a certainty, he now understood the rage that drove some Vikings into berserkness. Hauk shook his shaggy head, loosening a few more pests in the process. With determined effort, he banked the embers of that roiling wrath, hiding the emotions which beset him suddenly, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Every good warrior knew that timing was everything, whether in battle or a contest of wills.

It was a waiting game.

Sweyn Forkbeard, king of all the Norselands, would come to his rescue, eventually. Hauk was certain of that fact, not because Hauk was of such importance, but because no Viking worth his salt would allow the atrocities leveled at his family to go unavenged. Among those who had burned to death in the church had been Sweyn’s sister Gunhilde, her husband Pallig Tokesen, a Danish ealdorman of Devonshire, and their child.

Included among those who’d reportedly been beheaded was Hauk’s son Bjorn, who had seen only twelve winters, but had been big for his age. Bjorn had been fostering in Pallig’s keep ever since his mother died three years past of a wasting disease. To his shame, Hauk had considered the youthling safer there than a-Viking with him in the Rus lands or ensconced in his small northern Hordaland estate. Now, that is a lie! Truth to tell, I did not want to be bothered with the bratling, whose Saxon mother tricked me into a marriage I never sought or wanted. I neglected the child to punish her. And now… He sighed. …and now ’tis too late to make amends.

Hauk had been in Frankland when he’d first heard rumors of Aethelred’s perfidy…not the massacre, no one could have predicted that, but rumblings of the inept Saxon king’s wild imaginings that there would soon be an uprising of Norse settlers in Britain against him. By the time Hauk arrived in Oxfordshire, he’d been a day too late. The church had been a charred ruin. Piles of headless bodies lay untended as feasts for the vultures that hovered overhead in a dark cloud, the heads scattered about the fields.

A cleric, who’d stood praying over the corpses, even as he kept swatting at the angry birds, told him of his son’s passing, or what he knew of it. Nay, the God-man had not stayed to witness the actual decapitations, but he recalled seeing Bjorn among the males being led to the slaughter.

In his grief over his son’s death, and the guilt he felt over his neglect that led to the boy being in peril, Hauk hadn’t exercised his usual caution. As a result, he’d been captured by some of Aethelred’s guardsmen who’d returned to the site of their treachery, no doubt to plunder the bodies for treasure. Human vultures. Even the clothing of the corpses would have been taken by nightfall, he’d known from past experience.

But that was past. Hauk had to look forward. He only hoped he could hold on, that the Saxon curs would allow him to live long enough until Sweyn’s arrival with the northern army that he was gathering. They should be underway shortly, gods willing. That news he got from the newly arrived Egil, one of his hersirs who’d been off in the Baltics on one of Hauk’s longships gathering amber for trade and only recently heard of his master’s fate.

Egil, pretending to be a woodsman until he put in place a plan for Hauk’s escape, had with him a ragtag maid for which he claimed questionable guardianship. Hauk was suspicious and wouldn’t be surprised if they were fur mates, despite the girling’s youth. But why Egil wouldn’t just admit such was beyond Hauk. All the maid did was gawk at Hauk with a sneer on her fool face.

Until Egil’s arrival, all of Hauk’s hopes had lain with Queen Emma, Aethelred’s not-so-adoring child bride. To give her credit, Emma was partly responsible for Hauk’s survival thus far. At the very least, she’d arranged for a serving boy to put a pile of clean straw outside his cage every few days and remove the pile of soiled rushes that he pushed through the bars. A pail of drinking water and the occasional hunk of bread or slab of cheese were also given to him by the same servant, when he remembered.

Emma had been given in marriage by her father, Duke Richard of Norsemandy, last spring when she was only twelve years old to the Saxon king who’d been well into his thirties and had already fathered ten children, none older than the young Emma. It was meant to be a powerful alliance between the two countries with Emma acting as peacemaker. Hah! Some peace, considering that Richard and his family came from a long line of Vikings, including Rollo, or Rolfr the Ganger, first Duke of Norsemandy.

The king had long been referred to as “Aethelred the Unready” because of all the poor decisions he had made. Yes, he had been a boyling when he took the crown and no doubt was ill-advised by his guardians on the Witan council, but what excuse was there for the rest of his reign? Really, what could the monarch have been thinking to order the massacre of Vikings a mere eight months after wedding a Norse bride? Could he not see that it represented a slap in the face to Vikings everywhere, and to Emma, a personal affront? Thirteen years old she might only be now, and already breeding a Saxon whelp, but she knew her own mind. And that had benefitted Hauk, thus far.

“You must be patient. Norsemen from Hordaland to Iceland are volunteering readily for Sweyn’s sea army,” Emma had whispered the last time he spoke with her two sennights past whilst her husband and other nobles on the high dais were being entertained by a troop of jugglers. “’Tis said the numbers are so massive, five hundred longships are required.”

Hauk had shrugged. Not for the first time, he’d told her, “They consider your husband’s Viking death decree to be a slur on our very culture.”

“I know,” she’d said with an exaggerated moue of sympathy. “I told Aethelred that my father would be furious, but he just waved my concerns aside.”

Hauk wasn’t so sure that the girling queen cared about such issues as their shared heritage, or even her father’s temper. He’d noticed in the months of his captivity that her appearance had changed dramatically, with more and more adornments in the form of robes of samite silk and jeweled brooches. In fact, she wore a ruby encrusted circlet about her head all the time as a reminder of her rank. Perchance her sympathies would sway toward whichever side was favored to win.