Fenrir by MD. Lachlan

password!’
    ‘It’s good to see you alive, my friend!’
    There was laughter, backslapping and questions about what had happened to who; who had died and who lived.
    ‘We walked in there with twelve of us and came out with twelve. We should tell the rest of this army to go home; we can take this city ourselves, I reckon.’
    ‘Did you get the girl?’
    ‘Oh yes, I just didn’t mention it.’
    ‘That’s a no, then.’
    ‘It’s a no.’
    ‘But we did get this kind merchant and his stack of wine. Merchant, introduce yourself.’
    ‘Leshii, servant of your kinsman Helgi the Prophet, friend to King Sigfrid and to all who serve him.’
    ‘Very nice, where’s the wine?’
    ‘Boy, a couple of bottles for our friends,’ said Leshii with a note of forced jollity in his voice. ‘I will take the advice of these fine warriors and allow you to see where I keep them but know that, should any go missing I will give you the best justice – the Viking kind!’
    ‘Just two? Seems a bit skinny. Boy, get more.’ That was a Norseman.
    ‘He doesn’t understand your tongue, friend.’ The exotic voice again. An easterner, Jehan thought.
    ‘Then translate.’
    ‘Lady, the bag on the rear mule contains the best wine for these fellows. Take out a skin of that, would you?’
    Had Jehan heard right? ‘Lady’? The merchant hadn’t said domina , which even non-Latin speakers would recognise. He’d said era , which was mildly less respectful but probably wouldn’t be known to the Norsemen. So there was a woman there, a disguised woman.
    The merchant spoke in Norse: ‘Serve the wine, boy; don’t stand there staring at the monk. Haven’t you ever seen a god before? You’ll be seeing another soon enough if you don’t hurry up.’ More laughter. Then the exotic voice in Latin: ‘Take heart, lady. This is the easiest way to make them see what we want them to see.’
    ‘The lad’s crying again!’
    ‘The monk’s a cripple, boy, like you can see on any roadside. By Thor’s bulging bollocks they don’t breed ’em very tough in Miklagard, do they? Maybe we should try our luck there. If they don’t like deformity we could just show ’em Ofaeti’s bollocks and they’d open the gates to us. That’s more like it, get another. Let’s drink this lot dry and think about seeing the king later. We deserve a little reward after our labours, don’t we, lads?’
    It couldn’t be her, could it?
    ‘Give me that.’ It was a cold, hard Norse voice, close by.
    Under his breath, more felt than spoken, he said the word: ‘ Domina .’
    The confessor felt fingers brush his face, a gesture of tenderness. He had the strangest sensation, the only way he could have described it was to say that it felt like her, but he had never touched her, nor any woman that he could remember. Still, the touch seemed to carry her signature, the note of her, like a distinctive perfume, almost. The pain and the indignities had not daunted him. This did. No one had touched him but to lift or bathe him since he had been seven years old. A chill went through him, a delicious cold tingle from his forehead to his knees. He had warned people about the pleasures of the flesh since he had been old enough to speak in church but to him such pleasures had been only dry things, spectres raised from the Bible by the readings of his brother monks. He had despised them without knowing them. One touch, though, and he had understood. Who had done that? Was it her? For the first time in years he hated his blindness. He needed to see, to know.
    The men settled down to drinking and the confessor felt the cold of night deepen.
    He calmed himself by focusing on preparing to face Sigfrid. He would not beg or bargain for his life, he was determined. The monk knew that the longer he stayed in the camp, the more likely the Emperor Charles was to come and rescue him. A living saint could not be allowed in the hands of heathens. Jehan made himself forget the strange feelings that