Chapter 9

Groom’s Preparations

W e left the bathhouse, a little worse for wear. With my hair neatly plaited down my back with charcoal smudges around my eyes.

I wore the dress that Halldora had given me. My wedding dress still hung in the bathhouse. In my head, I tried to remember where everything was placed. My dresses. My belongings. I did not know what was about to happen, but I knew that if the time came, I needed to have everything at hand.

The mead hall looked as though it had been sculpted from tree bows growing from the earth. It was almost twice the length of the longship we travelled in.

‘There,’ whispered Halldora, pointing towards the rear of the hall to what looked like mounds of earth. She grabbed me by the arm. ‘Come on, we must see.’

‘See what?’

She placed a finger to her lips and pulled me harder.

In the distance, flickering torches moved between the stones like will-o-the-wisps. Flitting and moving with a clang and a clink of metal against stone. I could make out the shapes of the men, the Jarl like a bear between them. Almost as drunk as we were, stumbling around amongst the stones.

I strained to listen but between their drunkenness and Norse, I could make out none of it. Even now, after all these years when they are rowdy with ale I could still do with someone to interpret.

‘What are they doing?’ My tongue felt much looser greased with honied mead.

‘The Jarl must break into the tomb of an ancestor,’ she said with excitement, her head shot back to the spectacle. ‘He has to find a sword and he will exchange it at the wedding, with your ring and his fealty.’ She smiled, ‘look at them. Drunken oafs.’

I can tell you now, that when my husband was that drunk, he could not find the fastening to his trousers, never mind find a sword hidden within a tomb but I found myself watching on curiously, at these strange men from places that I had only heard of in stories. I could not take my eyes off them, huge men moving great boulders that were almost the size of them. My husband, from experience, would be standing with his mouth open and one eye closed trying to concentrate on not pissing on his own leg.

‘You are saying that those are your dead?’ My hand shot to my mouth.

I thought of them as no more than barbarians. Surely, they would have to be to dig up their dead. Such desecration. ‘I cannot be part of this.’

I turned to run. I could feel my whole being wanting to crawl out of my chest.

‘Lady Olith, wait.’ Halldora grabbed me again. ‘Our dead are not there. All of the Jarl’s ancestors are in Valhalla, only their ashes remain here in Midgard.’ She pulled at me again.

‘I will not be a party to desecrating a man’s grave.’

I turned.

‘Look.’

As she said it, I watched Sigurd lift a sword aloft. In the flickering torchlight, the blade cast a shadow as though he was split in two. Was it an omen of what was to come?

Through a haze of tears, I watched the Jarl twisting and turning the sword before him, the rest of them clapping him on his back. I felt Halldora’s hand on my shoulder. ‘That is the sword they have come for,’ she whispered. ‘Dry your eyes, Lady Olith,’ she squeezed my shoulder. ‘Those who are married have all been here, you will learn to love him, and you do not want him to see you cry.’

She was right, all those years ago. I learned to love him. I learned to love every part of him, even those parts of him that kept me awake at night and broke my heart when they left me.

I turned and saw the men, all smiles escorting Jarl Sigurd back to the Mead Hall and Angus padding merrily behind. Even my hound could not be loyal to me.

I brushed away the tears with the back of my hand.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘back to Estrid.’

I smiled and followed, hoping that there would be enough of Estrid’s honied mead to make me forget my foolish decision.