Scramasax Read Free

she cried.
    In her delight Solveig strode towards Harald Sigurdsson, arms outstretched, and only when she stood before him did she remember who he was and the respect due to him. She stopped and inclined her head.
    â€˜Look at me,’ Harald boomed.
    Solveig looked. She saw Harald’s pale blue eyes, full of light and laughter. She saw his ropes of tousled straw-coloured hair, his long sideburns, and his bushy, thrusting moustache, gold and red-gold, and the way hisleft eyebrow was higher than the right.
    Harald Sigurdsson stooped a little and took Solveig’s hands between his own.
    â€˜Sister!’ he declared. ‘Almost-sister!’
    And what he saw was not only the young woman stubborn enough to find her way from Trondheim to Miklagard but the ten-year-old girl with whom he had overwintered more than five years before.
    â€˜I recognised you,’ Solveig told him.
    â€˜I should think so.’
    Solveig shook her head. ‘I mean, when I saw you yesterday. I was searching for my father, and the guards directed me—’
    â€˜My guards,’ Harald corrected her.
    â€˜. . . your guards directed me up to the gallery.’
    â€˜Yes, and that fool of a baggy-trousered Bulgar challenged you. But yesterday you were bowed down by your sack. You were ragged and filthy and, frankly, stinking. Now, though …’
    â€˜Yes?’ Solveig dared him, with a roguish smile.
    But instead of replying, Harald took Solveig’s and everyone else’s breath away. He grasped her just above her hips, squeezed the bottom of her narrow rib-cage, and swept her off her feet. He held her at arm’s length and whirled her round and round, round and round until her shift spread out behind her and she was flying.
    When Harald set her down, Solveig reeled away, gasping. She put her hands to her eyes.
    â€˜Remember?’ Harald demanded.
    Solveig peeked at him through her splayed fingers. ‘Oh! I’m seeing two of you. You did that on the last night before you left.’
    â€˜Very good,’ said Harald.
    â€˜You were still wearing that strap,’ Halfdan reminded him, ‘to hold in your guts.’
    â€˜You swung me round until I was giddy, and do you know what you said?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜â€œYour father,”’ Solveig told Harald, ‘“your hamstrung father, he’s still worth double any other man.”’
    Harald Sigurdsson winked at Halfdan. ‘I must have been ale-drunk,’ he said.
    â€˜What I remember you saying,’ Halfdan added, ‘is that you might sail south to Miklagard, and join the Varangian guard. “But be sure of one thing, Halfdan,” you told me, “I’ll send for you. Yes, when the time’s right, I’ll send for you.”’
    â€˜â€œAnd I will come,”’ Harald Sigurdsson told Halfdan. ‘That’s what you replied.’
    Halfdan nodded. He clamped his teeth together and avoided Solveig’s eye.
    â€˜Well, now,’ said Harald. He gazed thoughtfully at Solveig. ‘I know a charm to blunt my enemy’s blade. I know how to catch an arrow in flight between my hands.’
    â€˜But,’ said Solveig helpfully.
    â€˜Exactly. What are we to do with you?’ Harald Sigurdsson turned to his companions. ‘Well, Snorri?’
    Snorri was a quite small, stocky man. And he often kept people waiting for a reply. ‘I know of no poem or story,’ he said at length, ‘not a single line about an army with a woman in it.’
    â€˜What about the Amazons?’ Solveig demanded.
    â€˜Who?’ asked her father.
    â€˜The Amazons. Mihran told me about them.’
    â€˜That’s different,’ said Snorri, and he shook his head and screwed up his face. ‘A whole army of single-breasted women.’
    â€˜Yuch!’ exclaimed another guard, whose name was Skarp. ‘Unnatural!’
    â€˜Not a word about an army of men with a woman