*
At the night meal, a great number of aspiring young warriors sat near Canute, but very few spoke to him. He chewed angrily on his meat as he surveyed the faces around him. The only young men sitting here were the ones who wanted to sap from his power and renown. None of them cared to engage in conversation with him, nor ask him how his day had gone. They only seemed to exchange such trivialities with one another.
One of them bragged that on a recent trip to Jom, the nearby town that the fortress of Jomsborg protected, he had lain with an eager woman. Women were not generally allowed into the Jomsborg stronghold, so encounters with the opposite sex were rare. All the other young warriors hung on his every word. Canute scoffed.
The sound drew some furious glances. The young man, Fromund, who had been the one to lie with a woman in Jom, dared to speak. “What’s wrong, Canute?” he said. “Not lain with a woman yet?”
“Lain? No.” He threw his meat-stripped bone into the center of the table. “Any woman I have, I will take. And that should go for the rest of you, as well. If you want sighing maidens as your bedfellows, you have chosen the wrong profession.”
A few of the boys laughed nervously. More of them stared at him with incredulous looks on their faces. Fromund, meanwhile, outright frowned. “I guess that means you haven’t,” he said. “You obviously don’t know what I’m talking about.” Some of the other boys snickered.
“Like hell!” snarled Canute. His voice was harsher than he intended, and everyone flinched as he dropped his fist on the table with a loud thump. His blood roared in his ears. Even he didn’t know why he was so upset. Why was everything today going so wrong? He stared in a panic at the faces around him, feeling as if they were all disgusted. Why should they be? “I, uh … I kissed a girl once, in Jom, after she winked at me. It was … nice enough.” In truth, as he recalled, it had been quite awkward.
The stares on him did not relent; they only blinked a few times, to return even fiercer than before.
“You’re all a bunch of dimwitted idiots,” he growled, and stood up. Even though he had a few bones on his plate left to clean up, he walked away. He’d lost his appetite.
On his way out of the hall, he glimpsed Tosti a few tables away. Even more unexpectedly, Tosti looked up and stared back at him. Canute felt a physical jolt go through him as their gazes locked. Then he shivered and hurried out even faster than before.
Outside, he leaned against the walls of the hall, listening to the muffled echoes of the laughter and camaraderie through the wood. His fingers pulled angrily at his own tunic, the red fabric soft and tight-woven, heavily embroidered with golden thread and far more beautiful than the tunics of any other Jomsvikings. But for some reason, he wished that he could rip it off. His teeth ground against each other as he reflected upon how the other young men had treated him today, and how their behavior grew worse and worse the longer Thorkell the Tall was away in Engla-lond.
His heart ached as he thought of Thorkell, for he missed his foster-father terribly. What would Thorkell have to say about today’s events? Would he be pleased by the way Canute had handled Tosti’s insult? Or would he have disapproved of Canute’s wild “temper?” He reprimanded Canute often for his temper, saying that no leader should be prone to rash decisions.
Perhaps Thorkell would comfort him, at least, with the reminder that kings were not meant to mingle with all the other boys like one of their friends. It was his place to stand apart, to remind them all of their place, and thus his own.
“Hey.”
He jolted and turned to face the intruder. Under the bright glare of a yellow moon stood Tosti, his gray eyes unreadable in the dark light. He swayed slightly, his body ever moving, his long braids swishing back and forth across his lithe shoulders.
“Hello,” said Canute. He forced a thick swallow down his throat. Why did he feel nervous? He had nothing to apologize for, and yet he fought the urge to say I’m sorry, nonetheless. “Good spar today,” he managed at last. It was a lie.
“You think so?” A strange laugh came out of Tosti’s throat, chiming and carefree. “Don’t think I’ve ever been hit in the head that hard before. Totally blacked out for a few seconds.”
Once again, Canute bit back an apology. “You’re lucky you experienced it when you did, then. It might happen to you a lot in battle, when your life is on the line.”
“Hah.” The sound from Tosti’s throat was not quite so pleasant this time. A long silence followed it.
Canute felt unexpectedly awkward. Tosti must have come out here and addressed him for a reason. But what? If he’d intended to say something, he must have lost his courage, for his swaying had turned to fidgeting, and he glanced all around himself as if he didn’t know what to focus on. Whatever the case, Canute felt as if it was his responsibility to fill the silence.
“You’re ... you’re quite good, you know.” His own words surprised him.
“What’s that?”
“I said: you’re a very good fighter. You move quickly, and you’re difficult to predict.” Canute forced himself to look Tosti in the eyes. At last the testy youth stilled somewhat. His face looked surprisingly elegant right now, the lines of his lips and jaws glowing in the moonlight. “We should practice together more often.”
“Oh? So you can hit me in the head again?”
“Only if you let me get away with it.”
It was a challenge, and for a moment he was not sure how Tosti would take it. But then his cheeks lifted with a smile. “Not a chance.”
“We’ll see, then.”
“Yes we will, Sweynsson.”
Canute repressed an “oomph” as Tosti reached out and jabbed his shoulder; but the gesture was playful. As Tosti turned and scampered away, he sent a whoop of unrestrained joy into the darkness. Canute found a smile on his own face.