Dyna paused, pondering Andrea’s meaning, as did others in the room who were listening in. Bodil who was folding laundry. Helga who was churning butter. Dotta who was sweeping the dirt floor. Girda who was peeling turnips. Even the two boys who tended the fires, Tumi and Bjorn.
Dyna was the first to burst out with laughter, followed by giggles, and snickers, and outright guffaws from the others. Some of them gave Andrea a suspicious look at the same time they were enjoying the humor, perhaps wondering about the morals of a woman who was a walking invitation to sex.
But Girda got the humor. “Would that be like, Save a Longboat, Ride a Viking?”
“Exactly,” Andrea said.
A week passed with her doctoring her sourdough starter twice a day, like a baby. It kept her from dwelling incessantly on the fact that there was no sign of Cnut or the other men, except for the fishermen, Arnstein and Ingolf, who brought them strings of bony trout. Girda said she could do a better job with spit and a stick. So, they went off again. And again. If nothing else, they had bread and fishes, like the Bible. The Good Book hadn’t mentioned all those bones, though.
But no Cnut.
Was it an ominous sign that Cnut hadn’t returned?
What if he’d returned to the future without her?
He wouldn’t do that. Unless he was forced to, against his will.
And what about Celie? Ten days with no idea what was happening with her sister. Or even if she was alive.
Face it, she had to trust that Cnut would come back and help her.
He was her anchor in this time-travel madness. Without him, she would have to be strong if she was to survive this ordeal. Without him, she would have to sink or swim, on her own merits.
She decided to swim.
“Hey, Girda,” she called out, “Did I tell you I make a great seafood chowder?”
“Whass chowder?”
Andrea explained.
Girda groaned, “Son of a troll! Soup again!”
Chapter 12
They ran into everything except Eskimos . . .
Cnut was gone for ten days. He’d run into a few problems. Like a bear the size of a bus that they’d tracked for three days. Then they’d had to build a sledge to pull the thing back to the castle. A good problem, right?
Wrong.
While they’d been struggling in the midst of a sudden blizzard to put together the conveyance, which he and his five men would have to pull by hand since they’d traveled on foot, they’d run into two Lucipires who’d been tracking Igor’s lemon lure.
As far as Cnut knew, there had been no Lucipires in this territory when he’d lived in the Norselands before, but maybe they’d just never traveled this far below their arctic homeland, or one of them. But they were definitely here now. The question was how many, and how Cnut could let Michael or his brothers know of this presence.
For now, he had his frightened housecarls to deal with. Try to explain ten-foot-tall mungs with red eyes, six-inch fangs, scales, claws, and a tail to five Viking warriors, who wouldn’t blink at the sight of a troop of Saxon soldiers, or a bear the size of a bus, but were petrified by these unexplainable beasts.
Even worse, one of the mungs got his teeth into lemon-scented Igor, which caused him to dissolve into nothing, from his bald head down to his stinksome toes, his clothes lying atop the snow. Forget Valhalla, this Viking sinner was now on a fast track to Lucipiredom.
Cnut was able to handle the two mungs with some expert swordwork and stabs through their evil hearts. Some skills you never unlearn. Thankfully, he still had his switchblade sword with him that had been treated with the symbolic blood of Christ. He could have killed them with a regular sword, but then they would have come back to “life” again as demon vampires. This way they were sent with tails between their legs, so to speak, to Hell for eternity. These two Lucies dissolved, as Igor had, but into pools of sulfurous slime.
But then Cnut turned and saw that his four remaining men were gawking at him like he was a monster.
With quick thinking, Cnut asked, “Have you ne’er seen a Lucibear before?”
“Huh?” Ulf the Archer, whose arrow had provided the final wound bringing down the real bear, stared at Cnut suspiciously. “What is a Lucky Bear?”
“Not a Lucky Bear, a Lucibear,” Cnut lied. “They come from the far north. Rarely do they roam this far south of their polar home. We will have to tell our skald Brian to write a saga about this adventure.”
Ulf and the others seemed satisfied with that explanation but Njal just stared at him. Njal was older than all of them and had no doubt gone a-Viking more than fifty times and traveled to more countries. He had lived too long without ever hearing of such creatures.
The five of them were left to drag the gutted thousand-pound bear on a poorly constructed, toboggan-like sled. It was like a not-so-funny reenactment of the Three Stooges, except they were the Five Stooges.