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  Sidroc the Dane: A Circle of Ceridwen Saga Story by Octavia Randolph

  Copyright 2018 Octavia Randolph

  ISBN 978-1-942044-08-6

  Book cover design by DesignforBooks.com. Photo: Shutterstock © Iuxorphoto, background photo and photo rendering by Michael Rohani. Maps by Michael Rohani.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests beyond this, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions” at [email protected]

  Pyewacket Press

  The Circle of Ceridwen Saga employs British spellings, alternate spellings, archaic words, and oftentimes unusual verb to subject placement. This is intentional. A Glossary of Terms will be found at the end of the novel.

  Sidroc the Dane

  Octavia Randolph

  Contents

  List of Characters

  Sidroc the Dane Map Year 847

  Preface

  Chapter the First: Jorild

  Chapter the Second: Gotland

  Chapter the Third: Ingirith

  Chapter the Fourth: The Bride

  Chapter the Fifth: The Babe

  Chapter the Sixth: Another

  Chapter the Seventh: Always Be Reaching

  Chapter the Eighth: Why Do You Look Up?

  Chapter the Ninth: Yrling

  Chapter the Tenth: Endings

  Chapter the Eleventh: Toki

  Chapter the Twelfth: Fire

  Chapter the Thirteenth: Two Gifts

  Chapter the Fourteenth: The Warrior’s Bargain

  Chapter the Fifteenth: What Ribe Held

  Chapter the Sixteenth: Haithabu

  Chapter the Seventeenth: The Ship

  Chapter the Eighteenth: The North Sea

  Chapter the Nineteenth: Angle-land

  Chapter the Twentieth: The First Warrior

  Chapter the Twenty-first: Nothing

  Chapter the Twenty-Second: The Warrior’s Bargain

  Chapter the Twenty-third: Four Stones

  Chapter the Twenty-fourth: Jarl

  Chapter the Twenty-fifth: A Bride for a Jarl

  Chapter the Twenty-sixth: Heat, and Loss

  Chapter the Twenty-seventh: Ælfwyn of Cirenceaster

  Chapter the Twenty-eighth: Treasure

  Chapter the Twenty-ninth: Two Calls

  Chapter the Thirtieth: The Beech

  The Wheel of the Year

  Anglo-Saxon Place Names, with Modern Equivalents

  Glossary of Terms

  About the Author

  List of Characters

  Hrald, a farmer on the West Coast of Dane-mark, father to Sidroc

  Gillaug, a freedwoman; serving-woman to Hrald

  Jorild, a freedwoman; serving-woman to Hrald

  Stenhild, a woman of Gotland

  Oddi, a former thrall, now a freedman

  Yrling, younger brother to Hrald, uncle to Sidroc

  Ingirith, wife to Hrald

  Sidroc, son of Hrald

  Toki, cousin to Sidroc, nephew to Yrling

  Signe, sister to Hrald, mother to Toki

  Ful, husband to Signe, father to Toki

  Jari, a young adventurer

  Asberg, a young adventurer

  Merewala, Lord of Four Stones in Lindisse

  Ælfwyn of Cirenceaster, a young woman of Wessex

  Ceridwen, a young woman of Mercia

  Sidroc the Dane Map Year 847

  To know the man, look to the boy. To know the boy, look to the father.

  Preface

  Sidroc the Dane was Fated to become one of the greatest Jarls in Angle-land. This is his story.

  He was a son of Dane-mark, in the 9th century the most powerful of the Nordic lands. Its Kings were the mightiest, and its young men thirstiest for adventure. All the Norse were an active folk. The Svear to the East wandered deep into the heartlands of the Slavs. The men of Norway struck West to Eire and beyond.

  Yet the men of Dane-mark had the boldest plans. The great island of Angle-land lay across the North Sea to the West, with rich yet disordered kingdoms ready to plunder. From the middle of the 9th century it was the favoured target of the Danes. Sidroc was one such adventurer.

  Not all struck out for riches with spear and sword. Twenty years earlier, on a farm on the large Danish peninsula of Jutland, lived a young man named Hrald…

  Chapter the First: Jorild

  Dane-mark

  The Year 847

  HRALD had been gone nearly a year when he returned to the farm he owned with his mother.

  He walked a day overland, from the great trading post of Haithabu where the merchant knorr dropped him, and its cargo. His clothes were those he had left in, a brown-dyed tunic of mixed linen and wool which reached his hips, over dark woollen leggings loose enough for working ease. Thin straps of leather lent protection while hiking, wrapping his lower legs to the knees. His brown boots were low and of cow-hide, almost entirely worn. The mantle on his back was a length of hemmed and heavy blue wool, held by a bronze pin. He had no cap.

  His route on foot took him across the narrowest part of the vast Jutland peninsula. At first he walked directly along the Danevirke, the earthen and timber wall that shut out the Frankish Saxons on the other side. From there he headed North, up the coast.

  After another two-day walk he turned his back on the sea, and the barrier islands blocking the way to open water. The fishing was ever good in their shoals; before his father’s death the old man had taken their small boat once a week up the narrow river on which the farm lay, returning at dusk with a wet basketful of shimmering haddock or herring. Now Hrald traced that path, walking on the grassy bank, his leathern pack pulling at his shoulders, until he came in sight first of the boat hove-to on the sandy bank, and then the farm. It was a small holding, just inland enough to be out of sight and smell of the North Sea brine.

  The first thing he noticed was the rye field. It had not been planted. Spring had been fully come for more than a month; the rye should be high and green, reaching toward the bright Sun which struck his already sun-browned face. Likewise the barley; the furrows showed only Winter-shrivelled stalks left behind from an imperfect harvesting. Beyond the barley, fenced behind their low wooden palings, thirty black and cream-coloured sheep should be grazing; even more, for lambing time was well over. It was empty.

  He gained the pounded earthen track, leading to a woven withy fence enclosing house and out buildings. The farm housed his mother, Ashild, and his little brother, Yrling. Five others lived there as well, both free and thralls. No one moved between house and barn, stood at dye-pot or cooking cauldron in the kitchen yard, or called out in greeting. Yrling’s darting form and ringing laughter was not seen, nor heard.

  He was running now, forgetting his tiredness, his thirst, his eagerness to show his mother he still lived.

  “Oddi,” he called, as he neared the closed gate. Oddi was chief hand about the farm, a thrall freed at the death of Hrald’s father three years ago, by the dead man’s will.

  He had reached the gate, plucked at the hoop fastening it closed. The lifeless work yard struck him with a dull and unreasoning fear. The geese, always so noisy, should be honking in alarm at any who entered; there were none. When a lone brown hen strutted into view he almost jerked to attention.

  He left the gate open behind him, standing just inside its confines. Two women came around from behind the ti
mber-framed house, passing so close to its corner that the shoulder of one brushed the low thatching of the roof.

  He had never before seen them. They stopped and regarded him, one young, one older.

  “Where is my mother?” were the first words that dropped from his lips.

  The elder of the two answered with a question of her own. “Are you then Hrald?” Her hands had risen towards him, almost in entreaty.

  “She is buried in the field,” she went on, without waiting for his answer. “She caught cold at Jul, and was so sore-pressed to breathe it was a mercy when she died.”

  He blinked at her, but could find nothing to say.

  He turned his head to the family burying ground, on the other side of the rye field. Hrald had stood by his father’s grave the morning he left, and spoken a few words over the low mound which marked where his body rested. Now his mother must be lying next him. Indeed, he could make out the contour of a second mound, upon which new grass sprung.

  He forced his eyes away. The woman came closer, the younger one at her side. They were both thin and worn, and he saw tears welling in the eyes of the elder. “I am Oddi’s sister,” she told him, “and am sorry to tell you this.”

  The hands she had lifted to him were gaunt and thin-skinned, the veins standing out upon the backs of them. “My name is Gillaug. I am from above Ribe; when your mother took ill he asked me to come and care for her.”

  “Where is Oddi,” he managed. He did not quite recognise his own voice; he had spoken to no one for days.

  “Oddi is now at Signe’s house.”

  Signe was Hrald’s older sister, wed and living up the coast, a day’s walk away.

  A new thought struck him.

  “Where is my brother?” he asked, his voice rising as the hand of fear clutched at it.

  “The boy is well, and living with Signe. It was deemed best he go live there, young as he is.”

  He found himself nodding, his chin just moving enough to show he heard, and understood. Signe and her husband Ful had two small daughters; Yrling would not be alone.

  “Where…where are our serving women, our thralls?” he asked next. They had had two freewomen, and two male thralls, when he had left.

  “The women, off to other households; one wed. The thralls were taken in taxes, with most of your beasts. The other animals we had to eat, to live.”

  Besides the two thralls, able-bodied both, when he had left they had the sheep, three milk cows, an ox, a pig who had just farrowed, and many geese and fowl.

  “Taken in taxes,” he echoed. His belt was filled with silver.

  “Já,” Gillaug said. “We could not find the silver to pay; Oddi dug everywhere, looking for where your mother had hidden it. The King’s men came twice, and were rough with my brother the second time.”

  Hrald knew that King Horik still ruled; he had heard that when he landed at Haithabu. There was trouble in the King’s own hall, and he had levied higher taxes; the trading folk were still grumbling about it.

  He fought from turning his head to the grain-house. The woman said that Oddi had not found their silver; he must believe her. And they all had suffered real want from lack of finding it.

  He took a long moment now, his eyes slowly moving from house to barn, from smoke-house to grain-house. They returned to her lined face.

  “Are you freed, or thralls,” he asked.

  “We are both freed,” she told him. “My niece from when she was a child.”

  He could not then understand what kept them here. “Why did you serve my mother,” he asked.

  “For the sake of Oddi, who honoured her name, and that of your dead father. After her death he asked us to stay on, against the day that you returned, that you might find the place in some order.”

  She began to weep now, tears rooted in hardship, and relief both, he thought. “My niece never left your mother’s side, nursed her as a daughter would,” she was saying. The young woman’s eyes had also filled, but she swept the tears aside with her reddened knuckles. She had as yet said nothing.

  “What is your name,” he asked her.

  “Jorild,” she answered.

  In the hours that followed Hrald had them kill two of the remaining fowl, that they might all eat; he had next to nothing in his food-bag. There was dried barley enough to boil, and the root cellar yielded a shrunken cabbage to his shovel. He had gone into the nearly empty grain-house, having to duck his head as he did, to see the floor boards undisturbed. He need not pry them up now; he would look at the pot buried underneath later. For today this was all he could do; this, and walk at dusk to the rye field to stand beside the mounded graves of his parents.

  His mother Ashild was almost a score of years younger than his father; it made the loss the crueller.

  “Do not tarry on Gotland,” Ashild had told him, at their last parting, though her face was smiling. “No dice, and no wine; keep your wits about you.” Hrald had heard these warnings in the days leading up to his departure, and had again nodded his head.

  He had been to Haithabu the week prior, his first trip there since his father’s death. The sheep they raised had done well, and he had twelve good fleeces to take for barter. There were nearer trading posts on their own coast, but he thought he could get a better price for them at a place as rich as Haithabu; the fleeces he chose were all white, the wool long, dense, and clean, the kind most desired for dying. He had taken the single ox, loaded the small cart, and hauled them overland to the long river where sat Haithabu.

  It was the largest trading-town in all the lands where Norse was spoken, and a thousand people lived there in Summer’s height. King Horik’s men guarded its boundaries, kept order within, and collected fees from all who set up stalls to sell goods there. Traders came from the best merchant-towns of Frankland, carrying wares from even further West, and came too from the southern and eastern reaches of the Baltic, bringing goods from deep in the lands of the Rus up the river-routes. Hrald had been only twice before, with his father Hroft, and knew himself lucky to be able to carry his fleece to such a trading centre.

  The roadways of Haithabu were paved with wooden planking, and all the larger walkways were also so laid. No mud mired the many wheels of the waggons and carts that rumbled along the rows of workshops and ware-houses; and up the side-roads, each plot where lived the artisans and merchants was edged with trenching to carry off rain and waste-water.

  Hrald had his pick there of what to barter, though certain things would be beyond his ability to make pay; the tiny handful of black pepper-corns offered in exchange, for instance, that a merchant brought from Serkland could only be sold to a King’s household. Sword blades from Frankland, huge bones of whales from Norway, wax tapers destined for the high tables of war-chiefs, wools and linens of fine weave and vivid hue, bronze and soapstone pots; all lay before him.

  Walking along the river port where ships tied up, or up and down the planked roads, Hrald was at times jostled by the sheer mass of folk about him, bargaining for these and much else. Goods in chests, casks, baskets and huge jars were hauled down gang-planks from landed ships, and carried up those of ships departing. From their decks men called out orders to others, in Norse, and in many tongues Hrald could not understand. Men and women, singly and in clusters, went from stall to stall or workshop to workshop, buying with silver or bartering for goods they had brought. Comb-makers sat at work-benches, joining together with minute rivets of bronze the two slices of red deer antler that held a third piece into which they would saw finely-spaced teeth. Amber-workers stood at lathes turning golden chunks into finished gaming-pieces, or drilling holes into roughly shaped amber beads, ready for polishing. Workers in leather cut, pierced, and stamped fanciful designs into belts, packs, harnesses and small draw-string-mouthed purses; and shoe makers folded and sewed boots and shoes. Hrald lingered at a display of fine-grained whetstones, shaped from the hardest slate, before being distracted by a stall whose tables were
laden with glass beakers. This was Rhenish glass from Frankland, and with their pointed ends, looked like cups of ox horn, but were clear enough to see through. Some had ripples of yellow-coloured glass seemingly interwoven into the pale green glass at their lip, or swirled around their narrow bases. Hrald had never held anything so delicate in his hand, and did not hazard picking one up now. As glad as he would have been to carry one back for his mother as a special gift, he knew only local chieftains would open their purses to such a luxurious item.

  At the heart of the selling area he neared goods of greater and greater worth. Swarthy-skinned men in loose and flowing robes stood at tables upon which bolts of precious silk shimmered, or opened chests holding aromatic spices and resins. Others presented great handled jugs of Frankish wine, tasting cups at the ready. Silver-smiths and gold-smiths smiled, waving their hands over necklaces, bracelets, brooches, and mantle pins; and merchants in gathered, baggy leggings opened tiny caskets holding red carnelians and garnets from the Black Sea.

  Hrald moved back, to the fringes of this central area. He found himself stopping before the stall of a man who had poured a domed pile of glittering salt on a fabric square spread on the table before him. Next to it was a small cask of wood, no larger than that which holds whale or seal oil. The crimped dullness of its lead lining proclaimed it protected more salt. Behind the man stood a much larger cask, an upright barrel, sealed with a wooden lid, from which an edge of sheet lead lining extended; even more salt. A lad of perhaps fifteen years sat on a stool near the large cask, shaping with a knife wooden plugs for a series of tiny crockery jars. Over all of this was an oiled fabric awning stained deep red, warding off any errant damp.

  The man grinned at Hrald, and beckoned him closer with the small horn spoon he held in his fist. He dipped the bowl of the spoon into the salt, let it sprinkle down, a cascade of pure white, with flakes as large as that of new snow on a Winter’s day.

  “From Anglia,” he told Hrald.