Carrot, onion, and turnip medley
Salted herring
Buttered lutefisk or lye-fish (beaten and broken into fibrous pieces)
Mashed turnips with pork gravy
Manchet bread
Sourdough rolls with butter
Honey oatcakes
And then a Christmas visitor arrived . . .
Cnut kept Andrea by his side most of the next day. Every time she wandered off to the kitchen to help Girda with some task, or to feed her precious sourdough starter, he sought her out. For some reason, he needed her within touching distance. It probably had something to do with the lifemate business, which he could no longer fight. What would be would be.
Andrea asked at one point what Michael would say about their making love, and told her, “You don’t want to know.”
“Why?”
“Vangels are supposed to be celibate.”
“Vikings celibate?”
“Exactly.”
“But you said that your brothers are married.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen. The only way a male and a human can wed is if the woman agrees to live only as long as her partner does. Vice versa for female vangels.”
That had puzzled her, but only for a moment. “But that could be five hundred years.”
“Or five days.”
“Wow! What will Michael do to you for breaking your vows of celibacy?”
“Oh, probably add another couple hundred years on to my sentence.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He wasn’t.
Throughout the day, even as he held her hand or stole the occasional kiss, and more, he made precautions for Hoggstead to survive if he did not. First, he sat down with Finn and Girda at the far end of his great hall to make an inventory. Andrea was given scrap sheets of parchment, quills, and thick oak gall ink to make their lists. It took several splotchy failed attempts and some modern swearwords that Finn and Girda did not understand before she was able to get legible words down. Her list read:
¾ brown bear
12 boars
14 deer (red and reindeer)
22 grouse (Andrea jokingly asked if the plural of grouse was greese, but Finn and Girda just exchanged raised eyebrows, not getting the joke. He got it, though, and kissed her on the top of her head to show how much he appreciated her humor. She was busy glaring at her inky fingers. He was not about to tell her that it would take days to wash it off.)
6 seabirds
50 rabbits
12 squirrels
3 large bass
2 extra large cod
10 lampreys
62 trout
Dozens of assorted fishes—roach, bream, pike, perch, herring
2 large sacks of onions
1 small sack of carrots
1 small sack of wild celery
1 small sack of endive
1 small sack of mushrooms
1 small sack of dried peas
2 big sacks of turnips (Would they ever escape the dreaded neep?)
25 heads of cabbage
1 basket of dried apples
3 barrels of oats for bread and animal feed
1 barrel of barley
2 tuns of ale
1 small barrel of mead
Assorted spices, small quantities of dill, coriander, cloves, pepper, cardamom, nutmeg
12 honeycombs and 3 jugs of honey
Mustard seed
Vinegar
Plenty of salt
“That seems like plenty to last until spring, even with tonight’s homecoming meal for Cnut, and the yuletide feasts,” Andrea said to Finn and Girda.
Cnut heard the hope in her voice. She was thinking that, if there was enough food, they could make a concerted effort to go home. He hated to disappoint her, but then he didn’t have to. Finn and Girda did it for him.
“There are one hundred and twenty people to feed here in the castle and more than fifty down below. Closer to two hundred, all totaled,” Finn said. “’Twill be a least four months ’til the longboats can manage the fjords. This will never last that long. And, besides, we are assuming the spring planting will be successful or, truth to tell, whether there is seed enough for planting.”
Finn painted a bleak but honest picture.
Then Girda added to it. “I once worked in the royal kitchen of King Hakon. I was only a girling, and my mother was one of the cooks, but I remember like it was yestermorn. For one of his feasts alone were prepared twenty boar, twenty deer, fifty ducks, and a thousand boiled eggs.”
They all gaped at Girda, but then Cnut said, “Well, we are no royal household, and we are in the midst of famine where we must ration food, not spread it about in a wasteful manner.”
“Hmpfh!” Girda said. “Does that mean soup for the yule feast?”
Cnut saw Andrea bristle and he jumped right in before a war of the cooks started, “Andrea makes wonderful soups, Girda. Did I not eat six bowls of her chicken soup yesterday? But we do not need to serve only soup at the yule feast. It is your decision, after all.”
Girda’s response was another “Hmpfh!”