While the men idled and jested, the women worked tirelessly. There is a great deal to be done to keep the great hall in a steading functioning smoothly; tending the hearths, preparing food, cleaning up after drunken warriors, mending and spinning and sewing. There were housecarls who helped with the heavier work, but much of it the women did themselves. Hedwig ordered them about with a tone much accustomed to being obeyed, not shirking to labor herself. When I asked her what my duties were to be, she waved me away, saying it was for Gunter to say. I asked then if it was permitted for me to leave the hall, for I was concerned for Joscelin and wished to find him. She bit her lip and shook her head. Of her own accord, I think, she would have permitted it, but she dared not cross Gunter so far as that.
So I was confined to the hall, and the attentions of Gunter’s thanes.
One of the youngest-Harald the Beardless, who had given me his cloak-was the most daring of them, and a skilled poet in the bargain. If my heart had been less like a stone in those days, I might have blushed at some of his verses, which gave an exceedingly detailed inventory of my charms.
It was amid one of the latter that Gunter burst into the hall, attended by a couple of his men, shouting for mead. I don’t know where he had been all day, but he was glowing with the cold, snow clinging to his cloak and leggings. When he unclasped his cloak and slung it aside, I saw Melisande’s diamond about his neck and gasped aloud.
It was an incongruous thing, that glistening teardrop lying in the hollow of his powerful throat. I hadn’t even had the sense to wonder about its loss; it had been amid our baggage, it seemed, as untouchable to d’Aiglemort’s men as Joscelin’s Cassiline weapons had been. No small wonder, I thought. I would sooner steal from the Cassiline Prefect than Melisande Shahrizai. The sight of her diamond drew exclamations, and Gunter laughed, running one thick forefinger beneath the black cord.
If I had thought about it, I would have welcomed its disappearance; but here it was now, again, dangling from the throat of my Skaldi master. I felt Melisande’s presence in my life like a touch, and despaired.
"D’Angeline!" Gunter shouted, catching sight of me sitting by the fire. I rose with an automatic curtsy, awaiting with bowed head as he strode across the hall. "I have a powerful hunger upon me!" Strong hands closed about my waist and he lifted me into the air, planting a loud kiss on my less-than-willing lips. Gunter roared with laughter, holding me suspended. "Look at this!" he shouted to his men. "These D’Angeline women weigh no more than my left thigh. Think you she knows what a real man is?"
"Nor like to, at your hands," Hedwig retorted sharply, emerging from the kitchen with a ladle held in one hand like a sword. "Put the child down, Gunter Arnlaugson!"
"I’ll put her down, flat on her back!" he declared, setting me back on my feet with another resounding kiss. I had never known such a hairy man, and it was strange to be kissed by him. "There! What do you think of that, D’Angeline?"
I had never hated any patron, having entered every contract freely, in homage to Naamah. I hated this man now, who would take me without consent, by virtue of an ownership he held through betrayal. "I am my lord’s servant," I said stoically.
Gunter Arnlaugson was in high spirits; sarcasm was lost on him. "And a cursed fine one at that," he agreed cheerfully, picking me up once more and slinging me over his shoulder like a sack of meal. "If I’m not back in two hours, send in a barrel of ale and a rasher of meat," he called to his thanes, striding out of the hall.
I hung, helpless as a child, over his shoulder, listening to the shouts and jibes of his men as we left. I could feel his muscles working beneath his woolen jerkin; I swear it, by Elua and his Companions, Skaldic warriors are unnaturally hale. In his modest quarters, he set me down and turned to build up the fire in the hearth. His room was simple timber, and held nothing but a rough-hewn bed covered with furs and a pile of tangled equipage, bits of steel and leather peeking from behind the edge of a shield, in one corner.
"There," he said with satisfaction, rubbing his hands together. "That should be warm enough for your thin blood, D’Angeline." He eyed me, the unnerving shrewdness back in his gaze. "I know what you are, D’Angeline, that you are trained to serve your goddess-whore. Kilberhaar’s men told me, that I would pay the purchase-price, when I could have had a village girl for free but for the cost of a raid. We have done it before, you know."
"Yes," I said. I knew. I thought of Alcuin, whose village had been burned by the Skaldi. I thought of how the screams of the women had echoed in his ears, as he rode astride Delaunay’s pommel. "What do you wish of me, my lord?"
"What?" Gunter Arnlaugson grinned, stretching his massive arms wide in the firelit bedroom. Light glittered on Melisande’s diamond. "Everything, D’Angeline! Everything!"
It is funny how despair can so soon become an old companion. What he asked, I gave; not everything, not everything I had to offer, but everything he might desire. I was not fool enough to spend the coin of my skill all at once-and indeed, he was too young and too crude in the ways of Naamah to have grasped its value. But what I gave him, you may be sure, was beyond any price he had known to ask.
If I thought before that I knew what it was to serve Naamah, I learned that evening that I had grasped only the smallest part of it. On their wandering, Naamah lay in the stews with strangers for love of Elua, and Elua alone; I had done it for coin, and my own pleasure. Only now did I grasp what it was she had done. For my own part, I would not have cared overmuch if I lived or died. Joscelin thought I had betrayed him, but it was for his sake, and for Alcuin and Delaunay and his oath to Ysandre de la Courcel, I had to live, by any means I could.
I had nothing else to live for, save vengeance.
The arousement alone was enough for my Skaldi lord; I had barely begun the languisement when he gave a mighty whoop and toppled me onto his fur-clad bed, harpooning me with the gusto of a starving whaler. Melisande’s diamond dangled from his neck and brushed my face as he plunged into me, burning like a brand. There is a point, always, where I no longer control either my patrons' desires nor my own. I gazed over Gunter’s shoulder, the room swimming red in my vision, gritted my teeth and wept at my body’s inevitable betrayal. Delaunay had lied, when he had set his value upon me. / can make of her such a rare instrument that princes and queens will be moved to play exquisite music upon her, he had said. A rare instrument I was, that sang at a Skaldi’s crude thrusting. Pinioned under my master’s hairy, heaving bulk, I came shuddering to climax, and despised all I was, and most especially the part that savored the humiliation of it.
In the hall, I had to endure his strutting and boasting, and the envy of his thanes. It was not so hard, compared to what had gone before, but still it galled me. Hedwig saw, and paused in passing to lay a kind hand upon my arm.
"His mouth is large," she said gently, "but his heart is larger. Don’t take it so ill, child."
I looked at her without answering. If I found compassion in my soul later for Gunter Arnlaugson, I had none that night. Whatever she saw in my eyes, it sent her hurrying away.
I cannot recall the verses that Gunter sang that night; well-trained as my memory is, there are times when there is a kind of healing in forgetfulness. It sufficed that my reputation was made, there in the great hall. That, I remember all too well. D’Angeline I was, they said, and kin to the spirits of the night, that visit a man in exquisite dreams, summoning forth his seed for their own pleasure by the most delightful wiles; only Gunter had mastered me, by force of his prowess, and made me cry out his name, binding me to his will.