The Reluctant Berserker by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online Page A

favour of my own martyrdom.”
    “Just bear in mind that we will never gain a place in any lord’s household if you cannot learn discretion. It is no shame to give every man what he wants. It is part of a scop’s skill—to please, to praise, to flatter and to fawn. And I would rather have a home in my old age than any amount of cold gold in my pocket.”
    “I would rather have my freedom,” Leofgar mused, pushing the now-dry stone into the centre of the fire. The salt on it burnt off in long blue flames, wondrous to behold. “I know all the songs tell us how terrible it is to be alone, without place or protector, a wanderer in the wilderness. I can recite the lament of the lordless with every syllable dripping with woe. It isn’t to be alone that I fear, it is to be caged. Bound to some man who thinks that because he feeds you he thus owns you. That his are the words that come out of your mouth, and his are your thoughts—that you exist only to praise and serve him. How can a man of pride bear that? How can any real man be content as another’s servant?”
    “I’ve an answer to that.” It was the slave, Asc, who spoke. “For I was starving, and my family were starving, before I sold myself to Alfric to pay my debts. I tell you, you can’t have ever been hungry enough, if you think you wouldn’t embrace a few years as someone else’s chattel rather than see your young daughter die, with the bones all but sticking through her skin, and her bright eyes like wounds.”
    He replaced the hot stone in Anna’s bundle, raked out and changed the one in the pan, and sat again, all unselfconsciously, as though no shame weighted down his shoulders. Leofgar thought that Asc had a dignity Anna shared, that he himself—spiky as a hedgehog with pride—did not. If the price of that dignity was to learn to submit to something greater than himself, whether that be famine or old age, he had no desire to pay it.
    “We all serve in the end.” Anna nodded at the slave’s words. “Asc serves Alfric, Alfric serves Hereswith, Hereswith serves the king. The king serves God. In the end we are all alike in needing to surrender to God’s will, for the Lord of All works our wyrd as He sees fit, and our weal is only to do—for the fleeting days of our mortal life—as we are given to do.”
    He shifted inwards, gingerly, as though trying to get as much of himself as he could in contact with the hot stone. Leofgar didn’t like to see the way his old arms moved, jerking against his will, closing creakily slow, like a door whose leather hinges have stretched and left it gouging its way through the ground.
    By the side of the salt pan, under a shallow shingled roof to keep it dry, a stack of peat waited to be burned. Leofgar brought out hairy, dirty bricks of the stuff and made a mattress of it in front of the fire. Anna accepted his help to struggle to his feet and limp the few paces from the wall to this makeshift bed. Supporting him, Leofgar could feel the effort it took him to kneel down again, to lie, straightening himself out on the dry and yielding surface. The fire shone on his face and warmed his chest and belly. Leofgar put the stone at his feet and tucked the pack with their clothes beneath his head to serve him for a pillow. He lay down behind and blanketed the old man’s back with his own scrawny body, wrapping their cloaks around them both.
    The turf was soft beneath them and smelled of ancient heather and dust—long-ago vanished summers in a time of giants. He let his arm rest about Anna’s waist and felt the old man’s shivering slowly ebb as, in their swaddlings, it grew warm. And I serve you , he thought. Reluctantly—for it didn’t suit him to think himself bound by ties of obligation to anyone.
    “There is no shame in serving a lord worthy of you,” Anna mumbled, his voice drowsy. “I do not know why you need to be told the things that are obvious to all.”
    “Perhaps my mother was right.” Leofgar