There was the softest sound behind him, and he swirled around, unsheathing his sword.
High upon the cliff, Mergwin stood before him. Eric lowered his sword with a sigh and resheathed it, swearing softly. “By Odin, Mergwin, but you do come like a wraith from the darkness!” Mergwin should not have been with them, Eric thought. Aed Finnlaith had left this life in his nineties. Mergwin was even older than Aed; far too old to follow a battle trail. And yet he had insisted.
Now the wind whipped his hair and his beard, and his eyes caught the glow of the midnight moon; he appeared the magician, the wizard, in truth. “I have come to warn you that much will be amiss with tomorrow’s dawn,” Mergwin said.
Eric smiled. “Very much, Mergwin. We’ll go to battle against a fierce and talented warrior, and the future of all the land and of the houses of Aed Finnlaith and the Norwegian Wolf will be at risk.”
Mergwin shook his head. “That is battle, open and simple.”
Open and simple? Eric thought. Battle was never simple. It was always a horror of blood and pain and death. But in his lifetime Mergwin had witnessed countless battles, and it seemed that he knew things could be even worse.
The old man cast him a wry glance and came to sit upon the cliff. He stared out at the night, at the ripping wind. “There is something gravely amiss. I followed you to England because I sensed it. I stayed with your bride because I feared it. And now, here, it has come close again.” His fingers knotted into fists. “By Odin and all the hosts in heaven! I can feel this thing, but I cannot touch it! I can only warn you to look beyond the obvious. Duck the battle-ax, parry the thrust of the sword. And beyond that, too, you must take care.”
He rose again. He looked at Eric, and Eric studied him gravely. “Aye, Mergwin, I’ll take the gravest care. And if I manage to stay alive, I will try to see what is hidden.”
Mergwin nodded. He started to walk away and then paused, looking back. “By the way, my prince, it is a boy.”
“What?” Eric said sharply.
“Your child. It is a son.”
Mergwin disappeared into the darkness as he had come. Eric watched after him and smiled slowly, and then his smile faded.
What was it that Mergwin sensed but could not touch?
Could something treacherous have followed him from Wessex even unto these cliffs?
It was impossible. The impending battle was making Mergwin uneasy. Since Aed had died, Mergwin had not been the same.
Eric needed to sleep.
But when he returned to his men and his tent, he did not find rest. He dozed and tossed with the night. Visions came before him. Visions of battle, men carrying swords and axes. Visions in which she walked to him …
Slowly, beautifully, naked in the moonlight, the glow illuminated her every curve and hollow.
But she never reached him. A sword fell between them, and he awoke with a start.
The dawn had come. It was time for battle.
He had left the white stallion behind in Wessex, and from his father’s stables he had chosen a favorite, especially bred for war, a massive black with sleek lines, a startling speed, and a rugged stamina against the strains of battle. Eric led men into the first fray along with Niall and his father and his brother, Leith. No true king ever hid behind the flesh of his people, his father had taught them as children, and it had been a lesson he had learned well, one that had attracted him to Alfred, for like his father and grandfather, Alfred was a warrior-king.
The sons of the Wolf met the first clash of steel, and they bled the first blood.
Eric felt the first wound penetrate his lower thigh, but his mail protected much of his body, and those thrusts he could deflect in the first fray bruised him but did no great harm. After the first rush the battle was enjoined so that he was more at his leisure to meet his opponents. He had learned to fight well with his family. When his younger brother, Bryan, was caught between two axmen, Eric was able to sweep down and dispatch one. Later, over his shoulder, he realized that his father had severed the throat of a berserker about to leap upon his mount.
Horrible, frightful battle continued for several hours, until the ground beneath them grew slick with the blood that had been shed.
Then a retreat was sounded by Lars, and the battle began to ebb.
Eric remembered his promise to Rhiannon to guard Rowan, and he swore fiercely. He had not seen the lad in some time. “Some of your Englishmen were caught in the fighting behind the trees!” Leith called to him, and Eric nodded in response and hurried the black stallion toward the copse. He arrived there to find Rowan and several others still in the midst of battle. Rowan was taking on at least four of the men trying to escape.
Eric rode hard up behind him, swinging his sword, taking down one and then another. Rowan pierced the heart of a third enemy, and the last man made good his escape through the trees.
“Thank you, then, milord!” Rowan called to Eric. “I daresay I hate to admit that I was in need of assistance, but alas, so I was!”
“We’re all in need of assistance now and then, my friend!” Eric assured him. “Knowing this can make a man a great warrior!”
Rowan tipped back his visor, smiled, and waved. Eric swirled his mount about and returned to the crest where his father, brothers, and kin were gathering.
Lars had offered terms. He, himself, would bow down before Niall of Ulster if his men would be granted pardon, his wounded returned to his women, and if Niall would grant him a small spit of land in his own right.
An emissary went back. Niall would do so if Lars would sign an oath of fealty before his man, claiming Niall his overlord.
Darkness fell. Leith ordered that their own wounded be tended to, that their dead be gathered for Christian burial. His father, his brothers, and his immediate family had survived the battle, and for that Eric was grateful. But as he watched the bodies of old friends and faithful followers being laid out before him, he braced himself against the onslaught of pain. Then he started as he saw Rollo carrying forth a certain body, and he swore and rushed forward, taking the corpse from his friend.
It was Rowan.
Rowan, pale in death, handsome, young, still, a thin trickle of blood trailing from his lip. Eric laid him down upon the ground. Moving his hand from beneath the lad, he saw the pool of blood that stained it. “By God!” he swore, “I left him at the battle’s end! What happened? Who saw this? I swear that the reward shall be great if someone here can tell me!”
One of the Englishmen stepped forward, leaning heavily upon his sword from some leg wound. It was an older man, one who had often been at Rowan’s side, a man called Harold of Mercia.
“My lord, I swear that I, too, saw him alive and well at the battle’s end! But the Danes were slipping through the trees, and Rowan would pursue them. Sire, we do not know how he met his death.”
Grief and guilt fell hard upon Eric. He sat there, fury seizing him, staring at the men gathered around him. “He would be a warrior,” someone commented.
“Men fall in battle, ’tis the way of it,” Rollo reminded him quietly.
Eric, again bearing his burden of the fallen lad, stumbled to his feet. He carried Rowan’s corpse over to the others; monks had already gathered around the fallen. Bitterly he placed Rowan among them, and he paid a small, weathered monk a gold coin to have additional prayers said for the lad.
The English youth deserved to go home, to be buried within the soil of Wessex. But Eric could not bring Rowan’s body home, he knew, not when the journey was so long and the weather still so changeable. Rowan would lie here, in the north of Eire.
Eric saw to his men, and he saw to his duties as Olaf’s son and Niall’s nephew, and then he retreated hastily to the cliff and stared out upon the water. Rollo found him there first and offered him a dagger. Eric stared at the bloodied earth, then looked to Rollo again. There were no Celtic designs upon the dagger, nor did it seem to be of Danish make. He had seen similar weapons in Saxon England.
“What is this?”
“I did not wish to speak to you before the others,” Rollo told him. “But that is the weapon that killed young Rowan. I thought that you should have it.”
Eric looked at Rollo, nodded slowly, and rolled the weapon in his hand. “Thank you.”
Sensing that Eric needed to be alone, Rollo left him. Eric sat upon the shelf of the cliff as Mergwin had done the night before. The battle had been taken. It was time to go home.
But how dearly he dreaded that now. Mergwin had warned him. But what had the warning been? They had seen fierce battle. Rowan had fought bravely and well. And then Rowan had fallen.
It wasn’t right. Eric simply sensed that something about Rowan’s death was not what it appeared to be.
There was a step behind him, and Eric swirled about. He exhaled as he saw his father there in the moonlight. Olaf hunkered down beside him, and for long moments they both stared out at the sea. “A man fell in battle,” Olaf said at last. “He chose to fight that battle. It is not your fault.”
Eric grinned ruefully and turned to Olaf. “But I swore to protect him, Father. I, in my arrogance, assumed that I could keep him from death. And I failed.”
“No man can keep another from death, Eric. It was the lad’s time, and nothing can change that.”
Eric nodded slowly. “It is how he died …”
“If you question his death, you must find the truth of it,” Olaf told him.
Eric showed his father the dagger. “’Tis English, is it not?”
Olaf studied the weapon slowly. “It is not Irish, nor of any Viking design that I have seen. Yet Vikings seize their weapons from many lands—and many fallen enemies—so you must be sure of what you suspect. And you must watch your own back.”
“Aye, Father, I will do so,” Eric assured him.
Olaf clapped him on the back and left him to find his own peace with the night wind. They were very much alike, and it seemed that Olaf knew his son needed the shelter of the darkness to ease his soul.
It was a cold day in late December, and Rhiannon sat in the grianon with Daria and Megan and Erin, anxiously listening to the last message from the King of Dubhlain about their final victory when the first contraction wrapped mercilessly about her back. She leapt to her feet and gasped with the startling onslaught of the pain. “It’s the child!” Daria exclaimed. The messenger went still, and Erin smiled, very calm as she bent over her needlework. “Pray, do go on with the message. Rhiannon, I’m afraid that we shall have a bit of time before the baby truly arrives. Let’s hear the sweet music of this victory first, then we will retire to your room and await this new grandchild of mine.”
Daria arched a severe brow to her mother, but Rhiannon could already feel the pain beginning to ebb. She sat again, and the messenger cleared his throat and continued. When he had finished, Erin just as calmly asked him, “My husband made no mention of my sons?”
“None other than the ‘all is well’ line, milady.”
“Then all of them are well and will return,” Erin said softly. Then she set her needlework down and turned to Rhiannon. “Eric will return, Rhiannon. And return ecstatic to find a new child.”
Rhiannon lowered her lashes quickly. Would he truly be ecstatic? She had hoped that the child would take longer. She closed her eyes, wondering if it had even been a full nine months since their wedding night. He had seemed well assured then that he had taken her maidenhood, but Would he believe so now? Would he doubt that the child was his?
She closed her eyes tightly, remembering the few sweet weeks that had been theirs. So sad an occasion—the funeral procession for the great Ard-ri! And yet for them it had been a first taste of peace, a time when they had met without anger, without suspicion. And if no words of love had been whispered, neither had words of hatred or of wrath. And he had touched her breasts with a new tenderness, had lain his head softly against her while he caressed the growing roundness of her belly.
Dear God, she thought, don’t let this be destroyed now! Oh, please, let him know that this is his child, let him love the babe, let him love me ….
He would never love her; he had said so.
A second pain seized her, and with it she gasped aloud and stared reproachfully at Erin. Erin laughed and told her, “Dear Rhiannon, I have done this eleven times, you must recall, and I assure you, we’ve still a while to go!”
They did have quite a while to go. Erin brought Rhiannon to her room, and Daria and Megan took turns at her side. Grendal came with fresh linens to change the bedding and Rhiannon’s gown when her waters broke and soaked everything about her. And still the hours went on and on, and the pain became ever more severe.
With nightfall she was frantic and severely in pain; the contractions now seemed to seize her one a minute. She fought tears and swore instead. She bitterly railed against Eric and swore that she despised all Vikings and wished that every one of them would be swallowed up by the sea. Then she saw Erin’s emerald eyes bright above hers; gasping, she tried to apologize.
Erin laughed. “My dear, do not apologize to me! Trust me once more. Eleven times I swore against all Vikings myself, wishing that they would be swallowed up by the sea.” She smiled reassuringly, cooled Rhiannon’s forehead with a cloth, and held her when a scream seized her.
Dawn came, and when Rhiannon thought that she could truly take no more, that she would die of the misery and exhaustion and pain, Erin called out with delight, “The head is crowning! Oh, Rhiannon, this is it! Just a little more effort. Push now, push!”
She tried, but the effort was too great and a pain seized her again.
“I can’t! I cannot!” she cried out. “Oh, I cannot!”
“Indeed you can!” Daria pressed her. “If you managed to pierce my brother with an arrow, you can surely bring forth his child!”
“Come now, push!” Erin urged her.
“Think of it as thrusting Eric into an icy fjord,” Daria suggested.
“Daria!” Erin chastised.
“I’m just trying to help, Mother. Now come, Rhiannon, come. Oh, this is it! Press down hard!”
She did, and this time the babe came rushing from her, and the relief was tremendous and wonderful. She fell back, too exhausted to inquire about the child’s sex. But she did not need to.
“A boy! Oh, that arrogant brother of mine will be so pleased!” Daria said affectionately. “Oh, Rhiannon, a son!”
A son. Mergwin had told her that it would be a boy. He had told her when she hadn’t even believed that she could be carrying a child. A son. Eric would have a son. All men wanted sons.
Unless they thought that the child might not be theirs ….
“Here, Rhiannon! Oh, he’s beautiful!”
Beautiful, squalling, swaddled in linen, still wet and slick and wrinkled. She laughed, holding him, then something swept over her, some emotion so deep that she shivered and trembled and fell instantly in awe and in love.
“Rhiannon, you must push again,” Erin told her. “The afterbirth must come now. Daria, take the babe back. Rhiannon can have him soon enough.”
She obeyed her mother-in-law without another thought of pain. She was so anxious to hold her son again that she obediently changed her gown, moved so that the bed could be changed again, and then blissfully reached for her infant. Erin said that she must let him suckle for just a few moments and so she did, and when the tiny lips tugged with such startling force upon her breast, she was forever lost.
She loved the babe so fiercely. So very fiercely.
Just as she had come to love his father, despite her denials. But the babe she could love without fear, while Eric …
He gave her his passion, his protection, the fires of his heat, deep in the night. But he held from her his thoughts, his secrets, and his heart.
Please, God, let him love this child! she thought, and then she drifted, exhausted, into sleep.
The journey home seemed endless, and yet at last the walls of Dubhlain rose high before them. Hor
ns were sounded, their return was announced, and soon the endless parade of warriors rode through the courtyard. Their number had decreased, for Niall had remained in Tara with his sons and his men, and several of those called to arms had also returned to their homes.
Still there was tremendous commotion in the courtyard. His mother was upon the steps to greet his father. She seemed like a girl—beautiful, fresh, and young—as she awaited her lord, as she had done so many times. Yet even as Erin rushed forward and was lifted by her golden husband, Eric realized that she held a bundle carefully within her arms.
He left the black stallion with its reins dangling for a stable boy, and his strides lengthened with every second as he hurried toward his parents. A chill, and then a warmth, and then a wicked rush of blood seized hold of him, and at the end he was running. Then, before Erin, he slid to a halt and she spun around, her eyes wide, and then she smiled and greeted him. “Eric!” With her free arm she caught him and kissed his cheek, and he found he had voice. “Mother! Mother, is this—”
“Indeed, Eric, this is!” Laughing, Erin cradled her bundle in her arms and moved a patch of blanket from a tiny face. “He is ten days old, and we christened him Garth, since we did not know when you would return. Rhiannon was hesitant to name the child without your consent, but it was her father’s name and I—”
“Garth! It is a boy.”
“Eric, I said ‘he’!” Erin laughed. “Take him.”
He scooped the child into his arms, muttering, “Mergwin! That old Druid said it would be a boy!” His arms were trembling as he tried to study the child. He walked away, hurrying for the entrance to the manor. The news had gotten out among the returning men. A cheer went up, and Eric swung around, smiling, lifting an arm in thanks for the approval of the men. He gazed at his child, at the enormous blue eyes, at the near platinum hair, so light and yet in thick abundance. Ten days old. His son seemed to study him with equal curiosity. His son.