The Ice Queen by Bruce MacBain Page B

resumed. It would take time, it would need caution. But when the moment was right we’d settle accounts with Ingigerd, Eilif, Ragnvald, Magnus—the lot. “But hit back wildly, Harald, like a blind man dueling, and we lose everything. As for our Norwegians, they must continue to believe in the pagan ambush for a while longer; I want no brawling with the Swedes, not yet.”
    â€œHow do we explain the bodyguard to them?” he asked.
    â€œYour dignity requires it, that’s all. You’re practically a boyar, aren’t you?” Dag folded his arms and leaned back against the wall, his handsome face frowning. “Now you know what you’re up against and you know my plan. If it doesn’t suit you, say so and you’ll see the last of me.”
    There was a long pause—too long. Harald gave him a sullen nod.

    That night I sat up late, chewing over the events of the past few days. The last thing I wanted was for Harald to be killed—on his success rested all my hopes. And I was more than half persuaded that Dag was right about Ingigerd, and that, having failed once, she would try again. And with what result? If she didn’t succeed in killing Harald, he would surely kill her, whatever Dag said. The leash that held him in check was growing more frayed every day; sooner or later it must snap.
    The thought of Ingigerd’s death sent an unexpected rush of feeling through me, and left me with my heart beating fast.
    A second thought came on its heels. Why, in the ambush, had I onlybeen knocked down? Why had I escaped death, unless my attacker’s purpose was not to harm me but to keep me out of harm’s way? And, if so, on whose orders? Who cared so much that I should live?
    That night, as if Perun of the Silver Face still watched from his Russian sky and muttered some warning to me, it thundered.

9

The Holy Fool
    Not long after our return from the hunt, Mstislav and his warriors set off in their log boats up the Volkhov, bound for his capital of Chernigov. Without his booming voice, the dvor seemed unnaturally quiet. The stillness was soon made deeper by a blanket of snow that smothered everything. A damp cold gripped the country and, though the palace ovens blazed day and night, still the walls were icy to the touch and we wore our fur coats to bed.
    The cattle and horses that grazed in the prince’s yard were brought inside now and lodged on the ground floor, where they and the slaves burrowed for warmth in the same straw. Snorting, lowing, bleating—all the various conversation of animals—together with their warm and comfortable smells rose through the floorboards to our quarters above.
    By the end of November the rivers and lakes had become one great highway of ice reaching from the Varangian Sea to Lake Ilmen and beyond. As the ice sealed Novgorod off from the sea, it opened it to the land, for a horse can pull a sled over snow and ice at twice the speed that it can pull a wagon over a dry road. Thus, farmers from far and wide brought their goods to market more easily now than earlier in the year. Whatever cattle they hadn’t the fodder for, they slaughtered, and on any day you could see in the market place heaps of rock-hard carcasses stacked with their legs sticking up in the air.
    Four-footed beasts of a less welcome sort appeared in the city too.Packs of wolves and wild dogs, driven by hunger, prowled the streets, even in broad daylight, killing livestock and the occasional child.
    Dag and I were constantly on the alert for any new threat against Harald. Our warriors stood guard around his bed day and night while he recovered from his wound. But nothing untoward happened. Instead, life in Yaroslav’s dvor settled down to a routine.
    We rose every day before sunrise, following which the prince and princess, with others of the court, would hear mass sung in the cathedral of Saint Sophia. Following mass, the prince and his boyars would busy