Chapter 26
MERRIK, LAREN, AND all the Malverne men left two days later, on a bright morning that Chessa now believed would stay bright, the mist biding its time, but not closing in about them until the evening. Eller sniffed the air and grunted. “Aye,” he said. “’Twill serve.”
Chessa and Cleve, Kiri in his arms, waved until the two ships disappeared around a slight bend in the loch. “This is our home now,” Chessa said.
Kiri said, “Papa, let me down. I want to go find Caldon. I haven’t seen her for two days now. She misses me. I told her I wanted to meet her children.”
He merely nodded and set her on the narrow path that led to the wooden dock that stretched out into the loch beside the promontory. “Her imagination rivals Laren’s. Unfortunately, Laren never saw the monster again. Merrik says she will droop like a withered flower for a while.”
“Let’s take Kiri and go back to work,” Chessa said. “I would have our own bed soon.”
Varrick looked at her belly every single day, asked her how she felt every single day. She merely smiled at him, nothing more.
It was soon after that things began to change at Kinloch.
There was some laughter now, some arguments amongst the men as they ate, as they drank, as they worked.
The children, led by Kiri, battled with their wooden knives and swords and axes.
They threw their leather balls. They ran about the hall, tumbling over each other, insulting each other.
The women chatted as they wove the wool into thread.
Varrick frowned, but remained quiet. Chessa laughed more than she’d ever laughed in her life, most times not because she was amused, but because she wanted all the Kinloch people to know that laughter was a wonderful thing, that they could do it and not be struck down.
She wanted them to know that Varrick would do naught to stop it.
Cleve must believe he’d become the greatest wit in all of Scotland, she thought, for she laughed at nearly every thing he said.
She looked over at Cayman, who still only spoke to either of them when it was necessary, never volunteering a word or a thought or an opinion.
She was gone most of the time, out in the hills, Argana said.
As for Argana’s sons, they called Cayman a madwoman, singing to the goats, they said, speaking strange incantations over rocks, they said, then they’d stare toward their father.
The day Chessa broke Athol’s leg began with a dull gray mist, then cleared into a magical morning that smelled crisp and clean.
A falcon perched on the high ridge of rocks that formed the eastern perimeter of their new farmstead.
All the men were working on the farmstead, to be named Karelia, named after an isthmus between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, a place Cleve remembered with pleasure.
When Chessa questioned him more closely about this pleasure, he simply kissed the tip of her nose and told her it would go with him to the grave.
“Karelia,” she said. “It sounds pleasant, thus I will allow it, husband, even though I know you knew a woman there. What was her name?”
“Tyra,” he said, and kissed the tip of her nose again. “If I remember aright. There were so very many.”
She fisted her hand and hit him in his belly. He grinned down at her. “Do you yet carry my babe?”
She frowned. “So many times I’ve claimed to be pregnant and yet now when I truly want to be, it won’t happen. Do you think I’m barren, Cleve?”
“Nay, sweeting, I think your husband isn’t trying hard enough. Mayhap you’re worrying about it too much and it makes my seed wary.”
“It’s true you’re very tired every night now with all the work.”
He clasped her neck in his hands and squeezed lightly. Then he kissed her hard on her closed mouth. He looked at her closely, at those beautiful green eyes of hers, as green as the moss-covered rocks near the waterfall he’d shown her. “Has my father said anything to you? Bothered you in any way?”
“He just stares at my belly every time he sees me.”
“Papa, is it true?”
Both looked down to see Kiri frowning up at them, an apple in her hand, three children trailing after her, all bickering over a leather ball.
“Is what true, sweeting?” Chessa said.
“I heard Athol tell his brother that you were having my first papa’s babe.”
“Aye,” Cleve said, his single word as bald as the goat that was chewing on a discarded tunic near the newly built privy.
“He then said it wasn’t true, the tale you were telling. He said Chessa was carrying Varrick’s babe, not yours. I told him that wasn’t right and he laughed at me. I don’t like Athol.” Kiri looked at the ground for a moment, frowning ferociously. “Athol somehow isn’t right in his head.”
“No, he’s not, you’re right about that, Kiri,” Chessa said. “You keep away from him. He’s a coward and a troublemaker.”
But Kiri didn’t. Luckily, it was Chessa who came upon the two of them. She heard Kiri shout up at Athol, who was sneering down at her, “You lied to me, Athol. My second papa won’t have Varrick’s babe. It’s my first papa’s babe.”
“You’re a stupid little girl,” Athol said. “You don’t know anything. Go away. She isn’t your second papa, she’s nothing but a silly woman, worth little save for breeding.”
“Not until you tell me you lied.”
Athol swore at her. Then when she kicked him in his shin, he leaned down and picked her up. He shook her. “You miserable whelp,” he shouted in her face, spittle spewing out. “You damned miserable whelp. You’re his and you don’t deserve to live, much less to live here and take what is mine.”
Chessa had no idea what he intended, but the look on his face terrified her. There was a complete lack of control there, his eyes dark with rage. She said very quietly, “Let her down, Athol, now.”
“You,” he said, and shook Kiri again. She fisted her small hand and shoved it into his nose. He yowled and threw her down.
Chessa was on him in the next instant, shrieking in his face, cursing him with all the words she’d learned in Dublin from her father’s soldiers.
When he raised his hand to her, she sent her knee into his groin.
When he was bowed and yelling with pain, she kicked him in the leg and knocked him to the ground.
She kicked him in the ribs, then again in the leg and heard the bone snap.
Still, she didn’t stop. She was panting hard, her anger making the air around her as red as the Christian’s hell, making the loch look black as midnight.
“Chessa!”
She tried to struggle away from him, to keep kicking Athol, who was cringing at her feet, holding himself in a ball, but Cleve pulled her off. She whirled about, panting, “He was shaking Kiri. Then he threw Kiri on the ground, Cleve. Threw her!”
“Kiri is all right. I taught her how to roll off her shoulder if she ever fell. Stop it, Chessa. Look, Kiri is just fine.”
“Papa, see, I’m not hurt, not like Athol is.”
The red mist fell away from her as she heard the satisfaction in Kiri’s voice. She took a deep breath. “I wonder why I didn’t draw my knife and send it into his black heart,” she said, then shook her head. She stared down at him, raised her foot, then lowered it. “Nay, that’s enough for him.”
“My leg,” Athol said, holding it and rocking back and forth, moaning. “You broke my leg.”
“Aye,” Chessa said. “I heard the bone crack. Hold still and I’ll see to you.”
Athol screamed and tried to scramble away from her.
“You bullying coward, hold still.”
Cleve said, “She won’t kill you now, Athol. Do as she says, else I’ll have to hit your head with a rock so you won’t move while she takes care of you.”
“What is this?” Igmal said as he strode to them, wiping his hands on the leather apron tied around his waist. “Aye, Athol, you forgot her warning, eh? You’re lucky she didn’t kill you.”
Athol groaned. “Don’t let her touch me, Igmal, I order you.”
“Hold your damned tongue in your throat, Athol. She won’t kill you now.”
“My father—”
Cleve leaned down and sent his fist into Athol’s jaw. He fell back, unconscious.
“Papa, can you teach me how to do that?”
“No,” Cleve said and picked up his daughter. “Are you truly all right, sweeting?”
“Aye,” Kiri said. “Igmal, can I come with you now and help you work?”
Igmal grinned, those beautiful white teeth of his glistening in the sun, and took her from Cleve. “Aye, little one, I think I’ll let you play in the tar pot. Your papas will like that, I think.”
In late September, when in Norway the air would have turned frigid in the early afternoon, it was still warm in Scotland, the air soft and sweet from the smells of the heather.
Karelia was finished. The wood smelled fresh and new and Chessa loved it.
It was small, but there was enough room for three of them and the dozen men and the four families that came there to live.
There was a bathing hut, just like the one in Malverne, only smaller, a privy, a barn for the grain, several storage huts, a barn for the cows, goats, and two horses, a blacksmith’s hut, and a small slave compound.
Now the men were erecting a palisade some ten feet high that would surround the farmstead.
“It’s ours,” Chessa said with relish as she rubbed her hands together.
Argana had given her pots and dishes and spoons and knives.
She even gave her a beautiful linen cloth for the long narrow eating table.
The first time Cleve lit the fire pit, the first time Chessa pulled the thick piece of wood attached to the roof beams with the serpent’s head at its end, adjusting its thick chains hooked to the iron cooking pot over the pit, she laughed aloud with pleasure.
Varrick was there. He frowned at her. Argana laughed as well.
Cayman just stood back, watching, saying nothing, just watching.
Athol stood on crutches, watching as well, his expression so sullen Cleve wished he could kick him out.