“Jorgen.”
After so much silence the rasping call from the wife of the absent chieftain jerked everyone’s head up, including his own. He abandoned the repair he’d been trying to make to his rotting left shoe, stuffed his foot into it, and again made his way around the fire. This time, because he’d been summoned, he didn’t pause to talk with anyone.
It gave him a shiver to boldly squat in the empty place at her side, the chieftain’s seat. As his elbows met his knees, his heart quickened. She, too, was breathing with some effort, her chest rising and falling beneath her tunic, but it wasn’t shared excitement. The sickness that had crawled through the nostrils and mouths of so many clan members and splatted out the bowels of the now dead ones had wormed its way deeply into her. He could almost warm his hands in the heat radiating from her feverish body.
Stop. He dug for and found the bear tooth and pressed its point steadily into his flesh. He bowed his head beneath this discipline and tried not to wriggle. “Yes?”
“We need a story,” she said.
He lifted his eyes, by chance catching the daughter’s suspicious expression. Deftly, careful to conceal any emotion, he slid his gaze back to the mother. The chieftain’s wife—no, the chieftain’s widow, he reminded himself—hadn’t bothered to look at him at all as she spoke. Fully under the spell of the fire’s dancing orange embers, she stared blankly, unblinkingly. “But it’s not yet nightfall,” he countered. “Don’t you agree that stories are best saved for the evening?”
“Look around you,” she said in a husky voice only a few could hear, “and prove the time.”
She was right, of course; the longhouse slumbered in a cold, smoky gloom that belied dawn or dusk, day or night. Except for the copper-headed girl and one or two children and, oddly enough, himself, its remaining inhabitants were either too sick or too dispirited to move about. They hovered near their mattresses, perpetually half rising, half sleeping. There was nothing to reach for. Every waking breath seemed to deny hope.
The woman gathered herself and struggled onto one elbow, no doubt to hurry his answer, but instead triggering a spasm of coughing. It was a thick, swampy cough that drew her fists to her chest and flung her onto her back. The girl bent close, holding a bowl to her mother’s lips. He watched the liquid dribble down the woman’s chin, watched her shove the bowl away and push herself upright once more, bracing on one shaky arm. She was a tough one, he had to admit. Slowly she swung her head round to look at him, breathing hard, fighting the cough that convulsed in her throat. But he knew she was no match for it. And he was right. The cough exploded in her and from her and she doubled over again, helpless. The girl murmured something. Setting both hands on her mother’s shoulders, she coaxed her to submit, to lie down and to give in, and his chest swelled with the possibilities.
The girl wasted no time at all in fastening her own eyes on him, eyes that stormed like the ocean’s blue-black waves. “Will you tell us a story?”
Such insolence! That hot feeling raced beneath his skin again. How dare she, a child, command a story from him as if he were no more than a leashed dog? This was not how things were going to be.
Only now was not the time to chasten her, not with all the others watching. For now he had to store his scythe and plant another seed. He felt his lips widening into an agreeable smile. “Of course,” he replied, “of course.”
And he held his face in that ridiculously agreeable smile, his lips stretching thin, while he searched for the appropriate story. None of his father’s stories was exactly right, he knew, none of them would hand to him what was so deliciously close to being in his grasp. He’d begin with a familiar one, though, then craft his own ending. And even as he was forming the plot in his mind the words came flowing out of his mouth. He heard them following one another so smoothly, so orderly, that no one could say this wasn’t one of the time-honored, wisdom-filled tales of his father and his father before him.