“I wish we had Santy here,” Kugge said wistfully as he gathered yet another holly branch with bright red berries. “He would bring me new ice skates.”
“I would get a new carved wooden kitten to play with,” a little girl, Elsa, said. “The tail broke off my old one.”
“And it only has one eye,” Kugge pointed out with boyish insensitivity.
“Kitty is still beautiful,” Elsa insisted.
Kugge rolled his eyes and was about to say something more when Dyna swatted him on the head.
Another boy, Oslik, who was a little older than the others at about ten, said, “I would get my very own pony. A real one.”
The others didn’t disagree, but their consensus was that the chances of that were as likely as a pony falling from the sky.
“I like the way Santy—I mean, Santa—has reindeer. We have reindeer here. And he lives in the North Pole which we have here, even if it is a distance away. And he gives gifts. We Vikings like to give gifts, when we have the coin to buy them or the goods to make them. Once my father gave me a set of colored ribands. It was the best gift ever.” All this from Dyna.
Once they had enough holly branches, which they piled onto a sled, they began searching for mistletoe that grew on oak trees. Dyna then told her the legend of the mistletoe and why it was considered so important to Vikings. Apparently, the god Balder was killed by a mistletoe arrow but came back to life when his mother, the goddess Frigga, wept tears over him, turning the red mistletoe berries to white.
One of the more skeptical of the children, a snot-nosed little urchin by the name of Dorf, said, “Ain’t no Santy. Ain’t no magic god or goddesses, either. Ain’t no healin’ powers in the mistletoe. If they was, wouldn’t be no famine. If they was, me mother would still be alive.” He wiped the green snot on his sleeve.
That put a damper on the festivities. For the moment.
By the time they got back to the castle, the sled was piled high, and they each carried huge bundles of holly and mistletoe and evergreen boughs, and they were back to being in a jolly mood. When Girda opened the back door, she was serenaded with a rowdy rendition of “Jingle Bells.”
“Frigg’s foot!” she exclaimed. “You folks been eating berries from the barmy bush?”
They all laughed and shook snow from their clothing onto Girda and anyone who came near them. By evening, the great hall and all the doorways were decorated with the fragrant greens, and Andrea had even talked Finn into opening Cnut’s treasure room to her, where she found some red silk fabric that, much to Finn’s consternation, she cut into strips and made bows to adorn her creations. She’d also taken a few coins that she used to commission the woodworker, Hastein, to make carved animals as secret Christmas gifts for each of the children under the age of ten.
With each item Andrea took, Finn kept clutching his heart and muttering something about the lord going to have a fit. She was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the Lord above.
By the next morning, Cnut still hadn’t returned, and the snow continued to fall. What if he didn’t come back at all? What if she was trapped in this time period forever, or until she died? What if Celie wasn’t safe, as Cnut had assured her? What if Celie was about to have her head lopped off by terrorists? What if Cnut had been captured by the demons and was being tortured at this very moment? What if . . . What if . . .
To keep herself from going insane with all these speculations, Andrea tried to talk some of the men into bringing an evergreen tree into the hall. More than one of them declared her “barmy,” others said she was “demented.” It wasn’t that Vikings didn’t bring a tree indoors for the yule season. In fact, their traditional yule log was actually an immense evergreen—she was guessing twenty feet tall or more—that they dragged into the hall on the evening of the winter solstice. They propped it trunk first into the largest of the hearth fires and continued to feed it forward during the following days.
Now, that was demented, if you asked Andrea. Which no one did, of course.
She cornered Thorkel, though, and had better luck. “If you get me a tree, I could put in a good word for you with Dyna,” she coaxed.
“You already have.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Then you owe me.”
“Thor’s hammer! You are a persistent wench.” Belatedly, he realized how rude he sounded, and added, “Sorry I am, m’lady if I offended you, but—”
“It doesn’t have to be a huge tree,” she said. “Halfway to the ceiling would be fine.”
“Halfway to the ceiling!” he exclaimed, looking upward. It was probably a twenty-foot ceiling. “And what will you do with the tree? You do know that a dead evergreen will begin to shed almost immediately?”