Tales of Infamy (Viking)

5 - Thyra

With the men gone, the job of hunting was left to the women. This was not uncommon though. When the men were too drunk, the women left to hunt. When the men were at the thing, the women hunted. They loved to point it out to us that the heavy job would fall on our shoulders when they left, but really it was nothing new.

I was fairly good at hunting, though my husband was better. When I still lived with my parents we ate nothing but fish, because we were so close to the water. However, up in the mountains, the fish would rot before we reached home. We relied on our livestock and on the animals we could kill in the surrounding forest.

This was the reason that we decided I would be the one to go out and hunt. Sefa and Vif still lived off of fish every day, meat was something special to them. We needed something special.

I sat down against the tree for a few moments, enjoying my view. I could see down the fjord, all the way to the horizon. It felt weird to be up on the mountain without Ailmær, to not walk further up and join him in our own home. The restlessness in my stomach had only gotten worse as days went by.

I had found my sister outside last night, another two weeks had passed since I told the story of Fenrir. She was staring down the docks, to the water. When she heard me approach she spoke.

"Do you worry Thyra?" She asked.

"No, I know the gods will guide them back home." I had lied to her. I was worried, every time I saw an axe I thought of what might have happened to him, every time I felt the sun on my skin I thought of his words. He would think of me every time he saw the sun, but what if the sun was beaming down on his dead body? What if he was already waiting for me in Walhalla?

"I spoke to Estrid." She said, referring to her neighbour and the oldest woman in our town. "She says it has never taken them this long to return."

38 days it had been since they set sail. We could pretend everything was fine for the majority of those days, but the last week has been the worst. Kolþerna had tried to rally up some women to sail out too, to provide aid. The only boat we had wasn't finished yet, and the carpenter did not respond nicely to Kolþerna's request. Still, they could have died in a storm at sea, they could have died in England, they could be on their way back. Everything could have happened, yet no answers were given to us.

We sacrificed three animals to the gods, but there was still no sign of them. I returned to my job of hunting, though it was made significantly harder by my occupied mind. Every shadow could be an animal, every noise was Ailmær sneaking up on me to scare me. To kiss me, to distract me completely.

There was one sentence, one sentence that lingered in my mind more than anything. Kolþerna had shouted it across the marketplace. Not a lot of women were willing to go along with her plan, not a lot agreed that there was something we could do. Signe, the woman I had met in the jarl's house, and another one of the wives were trying to get her back inside, trying to get her to lay down. Kolþerna fought them with all her might.

"When winter falls, they won't be able to get back!" She had shouted. I knew it was true. When winter comes again as harshly as it did last year, the water will freeze completely shut and the boats won't be able to get through. Even if it isn't as bad as that, a big chunk of ice could sink a ship. When winter came, the men were dead.