Chapter 17
The Turning Point
At Lisbon, the crew traded two bales of leather for new oars and a bolt of sailcloth, and Samira bargained the price down in a language none of them spoke.
At the mouth of a Galician river they drew the snekkja up on a beach of gray stone and slept one night on land.
Off Brittany Torstein kept his word. He took the ship out wide, away from the coast, and cost them a full day doing it.
That night Samira stood at the stern and watched Suhayl lift clear of the water for the last time.
She did not take her eyes from it until the haze swallowed it, and Torstein stood beside her the whole time, clasping her hand, reassuring her that although she had given up her homeland for this mission, he would become her new home.
Then they crossed to the Irish coast and put in at Dyflin, where half the men in the market spoke Norse which was the language used widely by Vikings and similar to Norn.
Torstein bought her a cloak lined with sealskin.
Then they passed the Southern Isles, before they rounded the great headland the crew called Hvarf.
"It means turning," Leif told her. "Every ship coming home from the south turns here. After this, it is our water."
Samira looked up at the black cliff with the sea smashing white at its foot and thought that it was a hard place to call a welcome.
Somewhere in those weeks, between one port and the next, she and Torstein had grown closer.
While they still had not consummated the marriage, Torstein used every opportunity to touch her and remain near her.
Either he held her hand or wrapped an arm about her, or lately, to her great embarrassment, he would haul her onto his lap and settle her there if they dined at an inn or tavern.
Every night they shared a bed and every morning, Samira would wake with Torstein wrapped around her.
***
Thurso, Caithness
THURSO WAS THEIR LAST overnight stop before Orkney. It sat at the mouth of a river on the Caithness shore, a straggle of turf-roofed houses and one hall of timber larger than the rest. Across the firth, low and dark against the evening, lay the hills of Hoy.
The hall belonged to a man named Hrafn who held the land for Jarl Thorfinn and owed Torstein a debt. Hrafn gave the crew his hall floor and his ale, and he gave Torstein and his wife the small chamber behind the hall wall, with a door of solid planks and a bed built into the timber.
A real bed. Clean straw ticking, wool blankets, a fleece on top. Samira stood in the doorway and looked at it for some time.
They had washed by the river that night and changed into dry clean clothes. Samira was able to wash her long hair with scented jasmine oil and sat by the open fire drying it while using her ivory comb to tame the curls.
Torstein moved to sit on the bed. It creaked under his weight. She stayed where she was, oblivious to the fact that he watched her every movement with a mix of hunger and adoration.
When she turned to face him, he said, "I have never seen it down."
She crossed the floor and sat down beside him. He put out his hand and drew a length of her hair through his fingers from the crown of her head to the ends.
"Samira."
"Yes."
He did not say anything else. He took her face in both hands and kissed her, and it was nothing like the kiss in the storm. This was slow. He kissed her as though he had been thinking about it for three hundred leagues and meant to take his time about it now.
She put her hands flat against his chest and felt his heart beating rapidly beneath them.
They lay back together in the bed with the lamp burning low.
His hands learned the line of her ribs through her shift, the curve of her waist, the small of her back.
Hers learned the scars across his shoulders, one by one, and when she asked about them he told her, in a voice gone rough and low, where each had come from.
Then he rolled her beneath him and kissed her until she was breathless.
When his hand found the hem of her shift, it stopped there.
Samira stilled. He was braced above her on one arm, breathing hard, and his face in the lamplight was a struggle she could read plainly for once.
"Do you not want to?"
"Not here," he said.
"Torstein?"
"Not in another man's chamber with my crew snoring through that wall." He pressed his forehead against hers. "Two more days, Samira. You will have my own hall and my own bed, and a home I built with my own hands. I want that to be where I make you mine completely. I want it done right."
She put her palm against his cheek and felt his jaw clench under it.
"Then I want that also."
He lay down beside her and drew her back against his chest, and his arm came round her waist and stayed there. "Sleep, wife. We will be home soon."
Samira relaxed into his arms yet felt a burning physical need within her that needed to be satisfied. She lay listening to his breathing slow and the wind working at the thatch, and she thought that she had never been so content and so discontented at the same time in all her life.
***
SAMIRA WOKE BEFORE dawn, as she always did, and slipped out from under Torstein's arm without waking him.
The hall was dark and full of snoring men.
She stepped between them and let herself out into the gray morning.
The tide was far out. The snekkja lay drawn up on the shingle below the hall with two men asleep beside the fire pit and a third, Olvir, sitting awake with a spear across his knees.
He raised a hand to her. She raised one back.
She went down to the river mouth where the fresh water met the sea, to wash before she prayed. She had her sleeves pushed up and her hands in the cold water when she heard the shingle shift behind her.
There were five of them.
They came out of the dune grass quietly, spreading as they came, and the nearest was already close enough that she could smell the ale on him. Norse, by their clothes. One of them had a sack in his hands.
She rose slowly and let her right hand drop to her belt. The koummya was where it always was.
"Easy now," the nearest one said in Norse. "No one wants you hurt."
"Then go back the way you came."
He grinned. It showed a broken tooth. "She speaks our tongue, the little thrall."
Then they rushed her.
She cut the first one across the forearm as he reached for her, and he howled and let go.
The second got an arm round her from behind and lifted her clean off her feet.
She drove her heel back into his knee and felt it give, and they went down together into the shallows.
Cold water closed over her head. She came up with her blade still in her hand and her scarf gone, and the man with the sack was on her, and she could not get her feet under her in the soft sand.
"Olvir!" she screamed.
The sack came down over her head.
Then she heard the sound she would remember for the rest of her life. Not a shout. A roar, coming down the shore from the hall.
The hands let go of her. She tore the sack off and got to her knees in the water in time to see Torstein sprinting towards her, sword drawn, his hair flying behind him, his feet bare, his chest bare. He reached the first man. The man went down and did not get up again.
After that it was very fast. Olvir had come running with his spear.
Leif and Mathias were half dressed and fully armed.
Njal came last with an axe and no shirt on.
Two of the attackers ran for the dunes and got away.
One lay in the shallows and would never rise again.
Mathias knelt on the chest of the last one and held a knife at his throat.
Torstein came into the water and pulled her up by both arms.
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Are you hurt, Samira?"
"No. I am all right." Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely get the words out.
He looked at the blade in her hand. He looked at her face. Then he pulled her against him in the freezing water and held her so hard she could not breathe, and she felt him shaking, and she knew it was not from the cold.
***