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It was because the man had not carried an axe that he had died and Athelstan had lived. The stranger had been armed with a wicked sharp blade - there seemed to be so many words for weapons that Athelstan could not be sure what Ragnar might have called it - but it had the narrow look of a blade for threatening at close range, not for swinging wildly in battle. He had been dressed lightly as befit the season, cloth and hides both loosely bound to his body. He was tall, and strong, and his face bore the marks of weather and battles survived. That he had not been armed with an axe, that alone had been his downfall.
He seemed to be a stranger, though not so much a stranger as Athelstan himself, and his error in strategy was that he might have come to capture instead of to kill.
***
There had been no whispers, none of the measured discussions of violence to come that haunted Athelstan's sleep. The only warning had been Ragnar's voice, raised to carry to each corner of the house and the pens beyond, as it always was in these dangerous days when a visitor approached. "What is your purpose here?"
Though it was not a daily thing, these attacks, Athelstan's reaction to these conflicts had begun to feel like habit. Be quiet, be still. Hide, and wait. Familiarity had sapped none of its capacity to petrify him.
***
Athelstan hadn't the knack of turning items at hand into weapons. It had only taken him weeks to learn that nearly every possession contained danger that could be unleashed in the hands of Ragnar or Lagertha. It was luck, bad luck, that he had been preparing turnips for the night meal when he had heard noise of a conflict outside; he had taken the knife with him into hiding because he had been too stupid with fear to put it down. It was a blessing that Athelstan had not stabbed himself as he curled under the table.
It was likewise a blessing, though it hardly deserved the word, that the blood coating the blade was the intruder's and not Athelstan's own. It was pure chance that when Athelstan had been dragged from under the table, when he'd stumbled forward for a mere half-second as his knees buckled, that he had tried to catch himself with one hand on the man's shoulder and the other just above his hip.
The look of shock on the man's face must have matched Athelstan's own. He'd been pushed away as suddenly as he'd been dragged up, and struck his head on the edge of the table as he fell. It was only looking up, dazed, from the floor that he noticed that the knife hadn't fallen to the floor with him. The hilt protruded from the man's tunic, just above his belt, and he looked down at it until Bjorn came up behind him, brave, foolhardy boy, and clubbed him over the head with the fire-iron.
The man's blood started to pool beneath him, and Athelstan was sick on the floor and shaking while Bjorn yelled his triumph to his parents. Athelstan was doubly ashamed later, alone on his pallet, when he realized it ought to have been his duty to clean it up.
***
"The intruder will die from his wound," Ragnar assured him. He had offered this news like praise and not as if it were notice of a mortal sin. There were few enough stories of anyone surviving such a wound to the belly, he said. There were no stories of anyone who had survived the fever following such a wound. It was unfortunate, Ragnar said, that the intruders would all take the secret of their origins to the grave. "Convenient," Lagertha muttered. Still, she took the joy from the news of his impending death that Athelstan had been unable to.
Inexplicable that this man should have been spared Ragnar's vengeance, and Lagertha's, for his invasion of their home, and that his death would be on the heads of a monk and a boy. If the man were to die, was it God's will that Athelstan should be the instrument of that death? 'We are all sinners,' he thought, but suddenly he and his northern captors were united in this sin. He had longed to feel connected once again. It had been foolishness to believe they might find that unity in peace.
Even the thought that he might have sheltered Bjorn was no consolation. It was only a matter of time until Bjorn joined his father in raiding; his path was now as set as Athelstan once believed his own had been. He had to suppress a laugh at the thought that a group of monks might come and steal Bjorn away from his home, to save Bjorn like they might an orphan.
Athelstan's prayers would not save the man, but he prayed nonetheless: for his nameless enemy among countless bands of enemies; for himself; intercession and confession wound together. Ragnar made no such offerings for mercy or healing.
***
The harvest made Athelstan strong. Much of the hard work of planting had been completed before Athelstan had arrived, and the daily work of the farm was tiring in its unfamiliarity as in its constancy. But the autumn - the endless hay harvest, the slaughter of livestock to cull the herds to winter forage, the storing of firewood, drained him to an empty vessel. He had ceased to wonder whether life would ever be easy again, but the moments where he caught himself living without fear were becoming more frequent. He had not yet felt a moment of calm such as those he had taken for granted in his earlier life.
It was for this reason that he did not object when Ragnar summoned him to the yard and pressed a weapon into his hand. The instinctive "no" rose to his lips, smothered to dust as it must be, but he was unable to produce the "why" that he had learned to substitute for it.
"You do not fight, you will not fuck," Ragnar said. "If I do not fight, if I do not fuck, my family will not prosper, my line will die out. Why should you receive that gift?"
Athelstan had no words to answer. His prayers of thanksgiving, though silent, never dulled to rote repetition. Instead, he pushed himself back up to standing, and tried to find a grip on his blade that would not create new blisters.