Danish demands appeared to have been met, but Aric’s demands were not yet over. Turning, he pointed towards Kean, the young Moneyer’s son, beckoning him to his side. Thinking that the Dane had some words of wisdom for him, Kean went to him willingly, not flinching as the man’s hand rested on his shoulder. Thored’s hand went to his sword hilt while, next to Fearn, Arlen and Kamma leapt to their feet with yelps of protest.
‘No!’ Thored bellowed. ‘Oh, no, not the lad!’
Kamma’s hands flew to her mouth to stifle the wail, though it leaked through her fingers. ‘Tell me,’ said Aric to Kamma, ‘how old the lad is.’
She ran towards him, her face contorted with fright. ‘He is ten years, my lord. He’s too young to be taken as a slave...please...he’s our only child.’
‘Your child, is he?’ Aric said. ‘Did you bear him? You? Yourself?’
Earl Thored knew where this was leading. Angrily, he kicked over the table before him with one mighty shove of his foot, sending drinking horns and beakers flying and bouncing across the floor. He strode over the edge of it towards Kean who now looked anxiously from one adult to another, wondering what this was all about. But as Thored moved towards Aric, the helmeted Danes closed in around their leader and the boy in a semi-circular defence. ‘So this is why you wanted them here,’ Thored growled. ‘So that you could insult the parents and steal their child. And is this how you repay my hospitality, Dane? Is this the price of peace, after all?’
‘We have bargained for peace, Earl,’ Aric said, with an icy calm, ‘but this is not a part of that and I believe you know it. Cast your mind back twelve years to that time when several young Danish couples sailed into Jorvik asking to settle here. You had been Earl five years then. Remember?’
Impatiently, Thored shrugged. ‘Vaguely,’ he said.
‘Not so vaguely, I think, my lord Earl. You will recall one of the young couples, newly joined, very comely they were. Especially the woman.’
There was a muffled cry of distress from Hilda to whom this situation was all too familiar. Thored took no notice of her. ‘So?’ he said. ‘What are you implying, Jarl? Let’s hear it. You’re probably quite mistaken.’
‘No, I think not. There are enough Danes here in Jorvik to tell their relatives in Denmark what happens here, especially to young husbands who stand in the way of their Earl’s needs.’
‘Relatives? Which relatives, exactly?’
‘Me. Brother to the young woman who sought a life here with her goldsmith husband of one year. Prey to your lust, Thored.’
Lady Hilda’s sobbing could now be heard by everyone in the hall, yet Thored would not glance in her direction. ‘Your...sister?’ he whispered, frowning in disbelief. ‘You lie. She never mentioned...’
‘She wouldn’t, would she? I was a mere lad of fifteen then, not a king’s jarl. But I was not too young to swear revenge on the man who arranged my brother-in-law’s death and then took my sister for himself and fathered a child on her. Yes, this lad here. My nephew. Your son!’
Furiously, Kean shook himself free of Aric’s hand, whirling round to face him. ‘No!’ he yelled, pointing at his parents. ‘No! There is my mother and there is my father. I have never known any others, I swear it.’
‘Well said, lad,’ Aric said. ‘But the truth is, like it or not, that your mother was my sister Tove and your father is a man as weak as water when it comes to women. I took an oath on Odin’s name to return you to your own family and my chance has come, as I knew it would.’
Hilda, with her head on Catla’s shoulder, was racked with sobbing and of no help at all to her husband, whose unfaithfulness was nothing new to her. She had borne him no live children and had now stopped trying, though the pain of Thored’s easily found comfort was like a wound that was not allowed to heal. He had foisted the five-year-old Fearn on her, not as an act of kindness, but because it suited him for her banished parents to know that he had their child’s life in his hands. The appearance of the young Danish woman called Tove in their household had lasted only a year. Fearn remembered Tove as a beautiful young woman whose child had been born a year after her husband’s violent death in a street fight and had always understood that both Tove and her child had died, although she could recall no burial rites from that time. Now, it appeared that young Kean was Thored’s own son and Tove’s.
Kamma, the woman Kean had been calling mother for ten years, fell in a heap at Aric’s feet, begging to keep her son. ‘Lord...my lord...do not do this. We are innocent of any crime. We have cared for him...loved him...please,’ she wailed.
‘Yes, lady. I know that, too. Your husband was made a moneyer to the Earl for his compliance. Not a bad reward for your silence. But the facts are there for all to see. Look at his colouring, for one thing. Can you doubt he is of my family?’
It was hard not to see the similarity, Kean’s flaxen hair against the foster parents’ darkness, his ice-blue eyes like Thored’s. ‘His home is here, lord,’ said Arlen, catching Thored’s nod of permission to speak. ‘We have nothing if you take him from us. He is our only son. He will be a moneyer, too.’
Thored found his voice again after the shaming revelation that he had taken the life of the husband who stood in his way. ‘Revenge,’ he said, loudly. ‘A blood feud, no less. You intend to tear up the lad’s roots and ruin the lives of these two good people, for what? For your gratification? And will he fill the void your sister made, when she left your family of her own free will? She gave herself to me willingly. I did not force her.’
‘You took the life of her husband, Earl,’ Aric yelled at him. ‘Deny it!’
‘I do deny it. Tove’s man was killed in a street fight. I took her in and cared for her, and—’
‘And made her pregnant and killed her in the process.’
‘It happens like that, sometimes. The mother is forfeit. Or the babe.’
‘As you well know, Thored,’ said Aric, making clear his meaning while the Earl’s wife howled in anguish. It had happened like that to her too many times and the losses were still as raw as they had been at the time. ‘But this child lived, didn’t he?’ Aric continued. ‘And he was a son. The only son you’ve ever had. A bastard, but a son, nevertheless. My sister’s son. My nephew. And my family demands his return in exchange for my sister’s life.’
‘Your sister had already left Denmark, Jarl,’ Thored bellowed. ‘And the lad belongs here in England with his foster parents and all that he’s known since birth. It makes no sense to uproot him from that. He’ll be a fine moneyer, like Arlen here. Accept your losses. You’ve taken enough from us already this day. Tell your family the lad is happy here. Well cared for. Will be wealthy, too. Tell them that and let their revenge lie with the gods. Let them deal with it.’
Within the tight cage of her ribs, Fearn’s heart beat like a war drum at the sight of these two men facing each other like bulls stopping just short of physical violence, Thored red-faced, angry and discredited by his own lechery, Aric standing proud and fearless on the moral high ground. She could not see Thored ever yielding to the Dane over this, Kean being to him more valuable than she had understood, though now she saw how Hilda must have suffered as much as she herself did at her husband’s constant unfaithfulness. To pagans, this was an accepted part of a husband’s behaviour, but not to Christians. Thored wanted it both ways: the lax morals
