Page 9 of The Caged Viking

“No, it’s her maternal clock ticking,” observed Alison. “Mama wants to build a nest.” Meanwhile, Alison was rocking an infant, an only child, so far. Alison was hugely pregnant with twins which she expected this summer. Meanwhile, masses of other children ran around the yard like little hoodlums chasing their cousins. An Easter egg hunt would be held that afternoon.

In Kirsten’s opinion, the sap was rising too much in too many of the male Magnusson trees, and a few female clocks needed to be smashed to smithereens.

“Yeah, but this guy’s in a cage, not a nest,” pointed out Torolf, the blabbermouth who’d told the family about her dreams.

Her older sister, Madrene, known for her sharp tongue and no-nonsense opinions, said, “You’re a moron, Ragnor, always thinking with your dick. Modern women do not need a man to fulfill themselves. On the other hand…” She glanced over to her husband, Commander Ian MacLean, who was helping their three pre-teen children set up a sound system for later dancing on the patio. (Yes, Vikings dancing! It had to be seen to be believed!) Madrene gave her balding, forty-something husband a full body survey in his T-shirt and shorts, and grinned. “On the other hand, Dickie makes a nice play toy for a woman with a little creativity.” She winked at Kirsten and Alison, “Do you agree, ladies?”

Neither of them could speak for their laughter.

“Madrene!” their father exclaimed. “Betimes you go too far! Play toy, indeed!”

“Pfff! Says the man whose toy has been played with by more women than he has hairs on his…other toys, as in balls! Twelve children! Tsk-tsk-tsk!”

“You are not too old for me to put you over my knee and paddle your ample arse,” their father said.

“Ian is the only one who paddles my behind, Daddy. Isn’t that right, honey?”

Ian had just come up, overheard his wife’s words, went beet red, and walked back the way he’d come, without comment.

“How does this look so far?” Her younger sister Dagny joined the group, showing her a sketchpad with a penciled drawing of the man Kirsten had described. Dagny was an artist who worked for the FBI in forensic facial reconstruction, even as she was an accomplished painter in her own right.

Her composite was good, but not quite right. “I think the cheekbones are more defined and the chin a little less square.”

Her brother Storvald, a wood and metal sculptor who worked at Rosestead, their Uncle Rolf’s reconstructed Viking village in Maine, was more interested in the arm rings her father had told them about and Kirsten’s rough sketch from this morning. Using charcoal and her tablet, he’d gotten the etched jewelry down exactly and was excited about casting some of the pieces for sale on his Internet website.

“Bottom line,” Torolf told the group, “I think this calls for a military intervention.”

Kirsten groaned.

“I’m in,” interjected Hamr, who’d no doubt been hit on the head one too many times in football or in SEAL operations.

“A military intervention? Like what?” scoffed Njal, who had been one of the most mischievous of her brothers as a child, but was now a high-ranking, way-too-serious officer in the traditional Navy, not the SEALs, a source of consternation among some in the family. “You want us all to grab broadswords and battle axes and rush back a thousand years to rescue the guy? Earth to clueless Magnussons? It’s impossible.”

“I wouldn’t say impossible,” her father said, looking toward Torolf who’d actually done it one time. And managed to return. With a bride, no less. It was a subject they rarely discussed.

“I wouldn’t recommend it, but I know from personal experience that it can be done,” Torolf elaborated. “The problem is, there’s no control over the year you would land in, how to travel back, or even if you’d be able to return.”

“Face it, this is a God issue,” said her brother Kolbein, a priest. Yes, a Viking priest. He got a kick out of the plaque he had hanging on the wall of his church office, a play on that old Saxon refrain from when everyone feared the invading pagans in longships, “From the fury of the Northmen, oh, Lord, deliver us.”

Several of the men groaned, but Kirsten asked, “How do you figure?”

“Well, much as we all avoid talking about our own time-travel all those years ago, I can only conclude it was the hand of God guiding us toward some celestially ordained destiny.”

“A miracle,” Ragnor concurred with a shrug. “Works for me. There is no scientific explanation.”

“So, you’re saying God wants me to go back a thousand years to rescue a stranger?” Kirsten asked.

She already knew the answer.

Chapter 4

The winds of war…

Hauk’s future was in increasingly more peril as hourly updates came in on the impending arrival of the invaders…Sweyn’s longships at Jorvik and Duke Richard’s vessels which had presumably already begun to cross The Channel. You could nigh smell blood in the air.

Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Winchester Castle were running around like chickens with their heads cut off as war plans were made and discarded, right and left. You’d think they would have set defenses in place long ago. For a certainty, they had to know that retaliation would be coming eventually. Instead, more than once Hauk heard the muttered prayer, “Oh, Lord, from the fury of the Northmen, please spare us.” As if prayers were a battle strategy!

Hah! Prayers did naught to spare the Vikings who were massacred by them, even if they were to the Norse gods and not their One-God.