“Me father passed on to Valhalla a sennight ago. Mauled by a rabid dog, he was.”
“Who has taken his place?”
“No one. Yet,” Ivar said as he narrowed his eyes to peer more closely at Cnut. “Is that you, master? Where you been?”
Around the world.
“Everyone searched for you, even up to the northern woods. We figgered you was dead.”
I was. I am.
“You look different. Skin and bones. Was it the wasting disease?”
More like a diet to lose two hundred wasted pounds.
“Master?” Andrea questioned him.
He put a forefinger to his lips. “Later,” he whispered. To Ivar, he offered his condolences, “My sympathies on your father’s passing. He was a good man. Sorry I was not here for his funeral rites, but I had to, um, go away for a while. No wasting disease. Just, um, lack of food.”
“Hah! Don’t we know about that! The villagers raided the second storage shed, and we are nigh starving up at the keep, too.” It was the second hirdsman speaking. Cnut recognized him now by his bright red facial hair. It was Red Ranulf. “Was you captured by Huns? Or them bloody Saxons? Mebbe outlaw Vikings? Did they starve you?”
No, I starved myself. ’Tis called a diet. “Something like that,” Cnut replied.
“Asbol the Witch claimed a vision,” the third hirdsman, Boris Bad Breath, said on a waft of bad breath, “where she saw the villagers turning you on a fiery spit and feeding their babies your entrails.”
Yuck!
Ivar elbowed Boris, who had the grace to blush.
“Ivar, you mentioned that your father died a sennight ago. How long have I been gone?”
“Four sennights,” Ivar answered, staring at him warily at what must have seemed a barmy question.
“A month!” Cnut exclaimed before he could catch himself.
“Is it really Jarl Sigurdsson?” Boris asked Ranulf.
“It is, it is,” Ranulf declared. “I can tell by the way he frowns. Praise the gods, the jarl has returned.”
“Jarl?” Andrea questioned again. “Not the jar business again!”
“Now things will be better,” the third hirdsman said.
With a flurry of movement up ahead, Finngeir the Frugal, Cnut’s steward, came out of the doors that led to his great hall. “What is all the commotion out here? We could hear . . . is that . . . nay, ’tis impossible. Master Sigurdsson?”
“Hello, Finn,” Cnut said.
Finn fell into a dead faint.
A short time later, they were inside the keep. Andrea was parked on a bench in front of one of the great hall’s hearths, thawing out, muttering every imprecation against him she could think of. Finn had been taken to his pallet to rest from the shock. And Cnut was being besieged with questions, rather complaints, from his men . . . and women.
“Did you bring food?”
No, but I brought a chef.
“We’re hungry.”
So am I.
“Greta stole my best gunna. You must hold court and punish her.”
“I did not. It was my gunna to begin with.”
“You gave it to me!”
“I lent it to you.”
Forget the damn gown.
“I’m sick of gruel. Me stomach needs fresh meat.”
“I could eat a boar, all by meself.”
I prefer a pizza with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, peppers, and extra cheese. Even made on a circle of manchet bread.
“The bread is moldy and stinks of mice shit.”
Forget the pizza. A boar flank will do.
“The privy is full, and someone needs to dig a new one.”
Don’t look at me.
“Ye can’t dig a new one in frozen dirt, ye lackwit!”
“Who you calling a lackwit?”
“Finn put a lock on the mead barrel. My throat is parched.”
On and on the complaints went until Cnut raised both hands and bellowed, “Enough!” Glancing around the hall, he began to take note of the conditions, “This place is a pigsty!” Grabbing the closest members of his household, a pair of twin youthlings, he ordered, “Get some rakes and remove all the rushes in this hall. They reek. Then lay down new ones.”
“Huh?” The twins looked at him as if he’d ask them to piss blood.
He gave them a fierce glower, and they ran off to find rakes.
“And you, Britta,” he said, pointing to an elderly servant who was sidling along the wall, probably attempting to escape his attention. “You are in charge of scrubbing down these tables. Lye will probably be needed to penetrate the grease and built-up filth.”
“Me?” Britta squeaked out.
“You. Get several maids to help you.” He pointed to three women in the back of the hall. “You, and you, and you. Help Britta.” When they all just stood, gaping at him, he hollered, “Now!”