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There has to be a first time for everything; for friendship as well as love; and first friendship, once given, can no more be given again than first love.
-Blood Feud, by Rosemary Sutcliff
Winter had closed in on the city all at once, turning the great river to white; a haze of blue woodsmoke hung over Kiev, and over the sleeping-lodges around Khan Vladimir’s palace and the halls of his lords, and the last few ducks had winged south through grey skies. It was a curious winter, half hard labor fitting the ships out for the spring’s campaign, half huddling in the fire-warmth, drinking and sharing old songs and stories.
That evening was near to Midwinter, and there was feasting in Erland Silkbeard’s Hall, and so I did not expect Thormod back until morning. In the ordinary way of things I would have gone with him, but tonight was the sacrifice to Frey. I had thought of the grave, dark-eyed icon of the Christ’s mother with her golden halo in the little wooden church on the outskirts of Kiev, and I had stayed behind.
I did not expect Thormod to blow into the sleeping-lodge, bringing with him the sharp bite of the wind off the frozen Dnieper and a gust of snow that melted at once in the warm woodsmoke dimness. The shoulder of his tunic was stained dark, and I did not think it was wine. “Thormod! What happened?”
“There was a fight,” he said, level but light, as if it were no great thing. But in that moment I had the sickening thought that it had been Anders Herulfson, that Thormod had broken the vow we swore to Khan Vladimir and finished what we had begun at the Holm-Ganging, without me.
“Who?” I asked.
“Oh, one of the men of the Serpent,” Thormod said, with a flip of his hand that seemed to pain him, although he quickly covered his wince. “I do not think you know him, and anyway, it was no great matter. I am hardly hurt at all, although I cannot say the same for him. Have you any rags to hand?”
I did have some clean rags with my spare tunic, for someone always needed a bandage in Khan Vladimir’s camp. “Let me see it,” I said, fetching some water in my empty supper-bowl and going to where Thormod had sunk down to sit on his bedroll, with his back to the planked wall of the sleeping-lodge.
He shook his head, laughing a little, although there was a tightness to it that gave me pause. “It is only a scratch, Jestyn, you need not worry. I’ll have some ale and be well enough in the morning, but I should be glad for your help in binding it up.”
Thormod would have called it a scratch if his arm were nearly hacked off.
He was fumbling with the brooch of his cloak already, one-handed, without much success; I mind even now how the garnets set in it caught the firelight, like wine in a glass cup at Khan Vladmir’s high table. So I set down the bandages and the water and leaned over to help. I heard Thormod’s breath catch, and knew his arm must hurt more than he let on. A burr on the brooch-pin had snagged on the rough wadmal of his winter cloak, and it only took a moment, with two good hands, for me to free it.
I had to help ease his tunic over his head, as well. Thormod was tight-lipped and shaking by the time it was off; even in the firelight I could see the sweat stand out on his forehead and the cords of his throat stand out as if he gritted his teeth.
The blood had begun to crust black and sticky on his shoulder, which was a good sign. At least it was not still bleeding freely, I thought as I dampened one of the rags and set to cleaning the blood away, as gently as I could.
“You have some skill at this,” Thormod said, his breath hitching a little between words. “Perhaps you were meant to be a surgeon, like old Nikolaos.” Nikolaos was a wizened old Greek from Constantinople who oversaw the rough field surgery that had to be done, if a man’s leg had to be cut off or a sword-cut stitched up.
It might not be such a bad life, I supposed, but I was Thormod’s shoulder-to-shoulder man, his blood brother, his. I had sworn myself to him when I did not have to. What kind of a blood brother would I be if I set aside the sword and left him with no one to stand at his shoulder? I did not think he would ever give up the sword for the plot, to grow old and content on his farm as some of the Viking-kind did. Always the sea-road would be calling to him--one more raiding season, and one more, until the last one.
“I am of the Red Witch’s crew,” I said, rather stiffly, for it was easier to say that then the deeper truth. “Khan Vladimir’s man.”
I must have sounded stung, for Thormod looked startled. “Jestyn, no--I do not mean it like that. Only that if you wanted to part ways, after this--” By ‘this’ he meant the Blood Feud as much as Khan Vladimir’s campaign, of course. “--I would not hold it against you. You are not of the Viking-kind.”
That cut more than his words earlier; I knew I was not of his kind, and never would be, but I had found my pack as much as I ever expected to with the Sea Witch’s crew. He hissed through his teeth as I wiped away the last of the blood. “If you wanted a wife now, to have children--the women all talk about you, you know,” Thormod went on.
I neither knew nor cared what the women of Erland Silkbeard’s Hall thought of me; nor the women of Khan Vladimir’s Palace. “I do not want a wife.” And perhaps my voice was sharper than I meant it, for he did not answer.
The wound was deep, but clean, and not so deep that it would need to be stitched up. Thormod slumped back, closing his eyes; he had gone a little white at the corners of his mouth, and kept silent for a time, as I began wrapping the bandage. I was glad for his silence. I did not wish to speak of our paths parting.
As I tied off the bandage Thormod made a little sound in the back of his throat and flushed, slowly, from his russet hair to this collarbones. It was not quite pain, that sound, and I glanced down.
It was not a thing easy to hide in his breeks, the way he was sitting. Sometimes it takes men that way, after a fight; the blood is up either way.
“Do you want,” I had to stop and swallow here; the smoky air of the sleeping-lodge seemed unbearably close. “Do you want me to see if one of your women is around?” I did not much wish to go out into the snow, but it seemed somewhat better than to stay. It would be easy enough to find a woman for Thormod, even on a night like this.
It was the only time I ever saw Thormod uncertain, save perhaps when he had first told me of his friend Anders Herulfson, who had not come raiding with him to Ireland. “I am not wanting a woman,” he said at last, catching my wrist. And then his wide mouth twisted into laughter, as if he meant nothing by it. I did not know much of these things, only the talk of men around the fire, and that was ugly more often as not. But I had seen his eyes when he said it, and I knew he had meant something.
His hand was still on my wrist, as if he had forgotten.
“I am not a woman,” I said. My heart was pounding; I felt flushed and hot, as though I had drunk too much ale. Behind me one of the logs cracked in the fire, with a scent of pine-sap, and I started, jerking against Thormod’s light hold.
“You are not my thrall, either,” he said, but his sword-callused fingers tightened, as if he was afraid I would pull away.
“I know that.”
“Jestyn,” he said very softly, “will you come and lie down with me?”
There was very little Thormod could ask that I would not agree to, although I do not think he ever knew it; it was not in him to think overmuch on what might be in other men’s hearts that they did not say. It was near Midwinter, and bitter cold outside--the others who slept in the lodge would as like as not be sleeping ale-drunk and warm on the floor of Erland’s Hall rather than brave the snow--but that seemed a distant concern. What mattered was Thormod’s hand on my wrist and the look in his eyes.
There was only ever one answer I could give.
I was glad, after, that I had not been with any of the women, that the first time another touched me in this way, it was the awkward, careful touch of my sword-brother; his mouth on mine; his gasped cry muffled in my shoulder. We had to be wary of his arm, and it was not the kind of easy joining the Greek poets sang of, but it was sweet all the same.
“What were you fighting over, with the Serpent’s man?” I asked, while we were drowsing tangled together in the blankets like puppies, warm and lax. I mind the warmth of him and the way his hair brushed against my skin, even now; perhaps nothing is ever so clear in memory as that first time.
Thormod said nothing for so long I began to think he must have fallen asleep and had not heard, but at last he lifted his head and gave me a crooked little smile. “Olaf said it was not right, for me to be so selfish of you, when we are all brothers. You see why I had to fight him.”
At first I did not take his meaning. Of course, I had been Thormod’s thrall, and there were some among Khan Vladimir’s men who thought less of me for it, but those of the Red Witch’s crew had always treated me like any other man, as if I had always been free. So I had forgotten what men think of thralls, and often enough of freedmen who had been thralls.
Thormod had not been a kind master, but neither had he been that sort of master; and what we had just done had nothing to do with the thrall-ring I had once borne, nor with anything the man of the Serpent would understand. I might have felt sick with it, remembering what others would think if they knew, but instead I felt a warmth in me, that Thormod saw me as his blood brother first, his shoulder-to-shoulder man; that he thought my honor worth defending; and I did not care at all what anyone else thought of me.
“You need not defend my honor,” I said, letting myself run my palm down the lean smooth line of Thormod’s side, tracing the jut of his hipbone with my fingers. Soon enough we would have to roll ourselves into our separate bedrolls and sleep back to back, as we always did, but there is only the one first time for anything and I did not wish it to end. “I do not care what they think.”
Thormod rolled himself out of the blankets abruptly, gasping a little when he caught his wounded arm, and came up over me, kneeling up next to my hip, with my wrist caught again in his good hand. The fire had died down to smouldering embers and I could hardly see his face in the red dimness, but when he spoke there was something fierce in his voice, very unlike his usual good humor. “But you are mine, Jestyn,” he said, halfway a question. Behind his words I felt the shadow of something else, an old hurt not quite healed.
His fingers trembled as they traced over my cheek, my mouth, my throat where the thrall-ring had once set, and down to my collarbone; but it was the thumb of his other hand brushing over the little white scar on my wrist that I felt, as keenly as I had felt the knife-blade in that moonlit apple garth in Sitricstead.
And perhaps that old wound was mine to heal, after all.
“I am yours, Thormod Sitricson,” I said past the tightness in my throat, “to the last.”