The Blue Fox

By Nancy Henshaw

Jodis had been born with everything her society had to offer, and had lost it all. Could it be that the bedraggled blue-haired castaway she drags from the Icelandic ocean holds the key to her return?

And has Jodis fought against the world for so long that her heart has become too hard for love?

A powerful drama of love, revenge, politics and violence in the bleak wilderness of 11th centry Iceland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781329877542

Book preview

The Blue Fox

The Blue Fox

Nancy Henshaw

Copyright © 2007 by Nancy Henshaw

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

ISBN 978-1-329-87754-2

Chapter 1

Iceland

June AD 1002

The first time Jodis saw the bluehaired man she thought he might be dead.

She had been pacing the shoreline collecting driftwood and piling it up so as to make her claim before any of the men arrived to dispute it. Those farmers – who were sometimes also traders, travellers and warriors – had drunk so hard that it might be a long time before they came charging down to the strand, bellowing into the wind that still blew strongly.

The storm had lasted three days, and the nights had been dark with clouds although summer was giving its light by day and by night. Any ship that had been caught in the storm might well have been swamped, sliced on unfriendly rocks and dragged under; or possibly had made harbour if the vessel and its crew were Viking mettle. Flocks of puffin were scudding over the water, their rounded bodies lifted by hard-beating wings, but it was not whale weather. The salt waves were rising too high and falling into troughs too deep to bring one of those mighty sea travellers in-shore, perhaps to be stranded alive and dismembered, its great heart still beating

Jodis focussed her long sighted eyes. Something dark, not a beached dolphin or a drowned seal pup, disfigured the dunes. It was always possible to recognise a man’s or a woman’s shape from a beast’s, even from a long way off. And the clear light showed her a man’s body partly covered by the grey-gold sand that sloped upwards from the shore. He must have dragged himself beyond the encroaching surf and then the sand had blown over him.

There was no point in leaving a half-drowned man to die when he might be useful in any number of ways, as slave or servant; or hostage if he was a man of worth. Or even sold as a husband, if any woman on the Island was foolish enough to value looks above wealth and status. As she drew closer, Jodis felt sure that if he were bathed and clothed he would be handsome in an outlandish way, and she was no mean judge. Although not tall compared with the islanders, the rags of his tunic displayed strong and well-formed limbs under the water bleached skin. Of the many shades of blue, his hair was the darkest of all: the raven’s wing.

As she approached this stranded, helpless male human, Jodis had been scanning the foreshore and the sea as far as the horizon. She was about to turn him to spew out sea water when she saw with quickening interest a large balk of timber, the longest and chunkiest she had seen that morning. Then, with a thrill of incredulity, she recognised it for what it was: a carved pillar that would decorate the hall of any Icelandic chieftain worth his salt; so precious that a man who left to make a home elsewhere would never take ship abandoning such a treasure.

Jodis watched the waves and wind do the work for her, heaving shorewards a prize that was going to be hers. Still too far out to be guided in but she could wait. Her mouth curled in self-mockery as she turned from the ocean to the ocean’s unpromising leavings. First of all she had another task: an act of mercy.

The moment she reached down and grasped the man’s shoulders his eyes opened. Her hands flew back, tingling as if she had mistaken a conger eel for a human body.  

‘Goddesses from the old times...’ he spoke like her grandfather with a winter-wheeze ‘…still live here.’

‘I’m Helgi’s daughter,’ she answered, guardedly.

She stood and watched him rise to his knees and he stayed like that for a count of four heartbeats before standing up shedding lumps of damp sand and starting off uncertainly down to the shore.

His voice came back to her on the wind. ‘See that fine wood pillar?’ He didn’t seem to feel any shame at being so weak. ‘It’s mine.’

She had been right: it was a carved ‘high seat post’ that had once graced a chieftain’s hall. If she could manage to guide it on to the sand it would be hers – and if the half-drowned man tried to claim it he would have to use a lot more force than he looked capable of. This blue-hair who seemed likely to fall down at the least flick from a club was lucky to have been found by a woman. A male landowner would have struck him to the ground and, if he was feeling foul, might even have followed up with a sword thrust.

Jodis strode across the strand and waded through the surf, calling, ‘I claim this pillar and I’ll bring it in.’

‘I claim what’s mine.’ The wind gusted with sharp indifference and her skin shivered as if a ghost had spoken over her shoulder. She hadn’t known that he was close behind her.

Chest deep in the surf, she laid her hands on the post that lay just below the surface. She said, ‘You’re too weak to claim anything,’ dismissively. A man ought to be either strong or dead.

His next words came to her clear enough through the breakers crashing round them. ‘I’ll complain to the Althing at Thingvellir where the lawmen of Iceland resolve hard disputes.’

He knew where he was, he knew the law, someone had taught him the language and he thought he could threaten Jodis, granddaughter of Halgrim, senior chieftain and former Law Speaker for all Iceland!

She spoke, as if to herself but loudly because she wanted him to hear. ‘I know the Law better than most Icelanders. The man I was married to found that out to his cost.’

He picked up her words as they began working together in instinctive harmony. ‘Is he dead then?’

‘No, Thond’s alive. He divorced me. He sent away my sons.’ Jodis, plagued for so many weary months by her own helplessness, gave a mighty thrust that sent the balk surging shorewards, leaving the stranger floundering. If she wept now for her two sturdy boys, Halli and Eirik, sea water would wash away her tears.

It wasn’t until they had their treasure on the sand, safe from the retreating tide but immoveable without a rope, that he said, after looking her over carefully, ‘Were your sins very great? I would have forgiven you because you are strong and have born living children.’

He wasn’t long past boyhood himself and he would never have the privilege of forgiving Jodis for anything. Moreover, her grandfather was a priest of the new Christ god as well as chieftain and Jodis knew that only the god or his priest could forgive sins.

‘My sin,’ she said, busying herself with the long, narrow strip of plaited leather and sinew she kept tied round her waist for a tow-rope, ‘was wearing a man’s clothes.’

‘Uh-hu?’ he was too busy to look at her, scrabbling like a dog making a hollow in the sand under the wooden column so that she could feed her looped thong underneath, slip the free end through the loop and draw it tight.

She would make him pay attention. ‘Luckless stranger,’ she intoned. (She had listened to her friend, Stormbird the seer, when she spoke warnings.) ‘I foresee the men in Thora’s hall slaying you on sight.’

‘I’m a helpless stranded mariner.’ He sounded more indignant than fearful, spitting out the ends of his long blue hair which had blown into his mouth. ‘Are they savages?’

‘They swear by Odin,’ she told him, ‘and the powerful young god, Christ, whose priest is a fierce man.’ Jodis had seen him that morning: Halgrim, her grandfather. She had wanted to shout angry words after him as he rode away; then the light had begun to brighten and she had made her way down to the strand at a steady run.

When she began to fasten the strip of leather round her waist so as to test whether she had the strength to move such a great burden, her companion laid his hands over hers and said, ‘Let me.’

Without warning or reason her heart pounded, as if she had already been heaving at the post he claimed was his. Take care, blue haired stranger, I am a bringer of ill luck.

‘I still say you’re too weak,’ she said.

He looked up from the hands that covered her own. His thick, dark eyelashes were crusted with salt. ‘So use a goad, Helgi’s daughter.’ There was a lilt in his voice, as if her disparagement unaccountably gave him pleasure.

She pulled away from him, saying, ‘Do it, then.’

He examined the leather rope before binding it round his head. ‘I’m going to make a harness.’

She stared at his oblivious back. ‘It’s not long enough.’

‘And I say it is.’ This time his accent gave his words a blunt obstinacy that did not please her.

‘I’m going to call you Bluehair,’ she said.

He leaned into his task, his bared neck and shoulders taking the strain as he began to move. Freya-goddess, he had a good, hard-muscled body… What was that to Jodis Helgi’s daughter? She wanted her sons, not a ragged castaway, nor any man, least of all her former husband, mighty Thond Eiriksson.

Jodis walked behind Bluehair, guiding and steadying the pillar, lending him her strength with the pride of a woman in full maturity. The carvings were curlicues that needed to be studied before they would clearly reveal the bird and animal shapes. But surely that was a long-billed whimbrel, unmistakably the puffin, and possibly the raven. There was also a sea serpent or dragon.

‘That will do,’ she said when they reached her mound of driftwood. No man would have the right now to challenge her claim.

Bluehair, showing signs of strain in his breathing and stress of shoulder and leg muscles, subsided on to the grass. ‘When Ran caught our ship in her net we were all tipped into the sea together.’ He gave Jodis a rueful look like an invitation to laugh at him. ‘By the gift of the sea goddess…I was brought ashore and the great pillar has followed… Who is the greatest chieftain hereabouts?’

‘My grandfather. Now keep quiet. I’m going to bury my prize until I’ve made ure of my claim.’

There ought not to be any dispute but who could say what might happen with so many strong landowners and their forceful women, back in the splendid hall where the marriage of her cousin Thora was in its third day of celebration. They might simply take, and then there would be the irksome, long-drawn-out matter of having her right argued at the Althing.

‘Your grandfather!’ Bluehair gave her another close look. ‘He must be an aged man.’ He did not add, because his granddaughter is not in her first youth, but he was still staring at her as he laid a fingertip on the post, tracing a puffin’s outline by touch alone, as if it were familiar to him. Then he slapped the wood and asserted, ‘You’ll never be able to hide this.’

‘Want to wager?’ Jodis, on her knees, looked up and met a smile that fed his thought into her mind: what if you were to lose?  For the second time her heart gave a spasm, a strong muscular flip like a seal’s tail. Her voice hard, she said, ‘Follow me inland if you still have the strength. The wedding guests have been celebrating the marriage of Thora Heartshaker for three days now.’ His dark eyes were red rimmed but still bright and attentive. But there was something else; a lack of gravity. Something unreliable. She added, ‘For Freya’s sake be humble. They were all drunk when I left the hall, although Orm Einarsson may give you the time of day since he’s only just arrived. He needs a worker; after his herd dog was found with its throat torn out Orm hasn’t been able to bully the shepherd back to work. The fool believes it was a troll’s doing.’

‘He may be right,’ said Bluehair. ‘Helgi’s daughter, have you formed a high opinion of my courage? I’d rather stay here and help you.’ She was building up the sand around the squared-off timber. He leaned back on his elbows, watching her. ‘You’re in woman’s dress. Can’t see your undergarments.’

Jodis, momentarily speechless with a burning rage, wouldn’t have been surprised if steam had risen from her wet garments – under or over. This boy, at least three years her junior, admitted to cowardice, he was insolent, and now: ‘Helgi’s magnificent daughter, I reckon you goaded your unlucky husband into divorcing you. No man...‘

‘Hold your tongue...‘ She stopped dead and stood up, the sodden gown wrapping itself round her legs, blown by the wind’s force. Dry sand, whisked up and driven along the beach, scoured her ankles. ‘Stop gawping at me.’ He instantly assumed a kicked puppy look which she answered with severity. ‘Attend to me: the driftwood will hide any sign of the pillar, so follow me and don’t interrupt my thoughts.’

They left behind the crashing, hissing and snarling of a sea that had turned ugly. The brightness had gone out of the day and Jodis was hollow with hunger. She had been unable to face the morning meal with Thora and her oafish bridegroom who would be sure to rise from their marriage bed sleek with satisfaction. Jodis had borne children in wedlock but had no husband and no sons.  The thrill of the stranger’s appearance, the excitement of receiving the carved post of a chieftain’s hall; all were buried under a mudslide of sullen reality.

Bluehair’s voice, as he trod three paces behind her was an unexpected comfort. ‘You may have the strength of a giantess but you were too long in the water. If I had you in my household I’d want you dry-clad as soon as might be.’

Her body which had started to feel the chill was flooded by an invasion of warmth. Was Helgi’s daughter so starved of admiration that she welcomed his words with the all-over blush of an eager young maiden? She ought to turn and blast him for his impertinence with words as fierce as a geyser. But she could not, because suddenly she was ready to laugh out loud, buoyed up with hope, glorying in the grey day. Ran, wild goddess, you have sent me two gifts and I’m taking one of them to the place I used to call home

As they approached Thora’s hall, Jodis lost all wish to laugh. The feasting ought to have been winding down, but that morning the chieftain Orm Einarsson had arrived late, bringing a rumour that Thond’s ship had already beached; Jodis’s former husband might be here within days, demanding his sons from their fostering and denying Jodis any right.

With Orm had come his son Barri and half a dozen lesser men who had all required suitable entertainment. Jodis had seen Orm and Barri welcomed with the luxury of the bathing pool with its paved surround but it must be deserted by now.

She called back to Bluehair, ‘Come here beside me. There it is: the hall and landholding of Thora Heartshaker.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said, gazing, suitably awed, at the vision dominating the barns and outbuildings, the horsefields and the farmed land.

The main dwelling was justly named. It seemed to extend right into the grass-covered hillside at its back. From the outside its timber frame was hidden and protected by a lower layer of stone and an upper layer of thick turf extending upwards and covering the roof, apart from the hole for the escaping smoke which was whisked away in the wind. A carved snow eagle graced the roof ridge.

Bluehair said, unexpectedly, ‘There ought to be children, a family living there.’

She had an unaccountable wish to take his hand and say: ‘There was – there were once, and they were mine.’

She tried to keep bitterness from her voice: ‘Thora and her husband will have children; the Heartshaker seldom fails to achieve her desire. Come, I’ll take you to the bathhouse. You may bathe after me and someone will find you some clothes.’

The servants may have turned up their noses at Jodis but she was still the granddaughter of Halgrim the Chieftain. There were easily identifiable sounds from the nearest barn and she pushed open the door, sent the loutish swain scurrying with one unfriendly look and told his lumpish darling to send Groa to the bathing place with clothes for Jodis Helgi’s daughter plus male garments and boots. Groa would resent receiving Jodis’s instructions but curiosity would bring her. She had been nurse to both Jodis and Thora; moreover, when young she had been a concubine of the chieftain Halgrim, and made sure nobody ever forgot it.

Bluehair was jumping up and down and slapping his arms across his chest. Then he started trotting round in circles.

As Jodis opened the door to the bathing hut she called to the departing servant, ‘Tell Groa that the man who is running about may use the bath after me.’ She went inside and latched the door.

The pool had once been left to the open air. As well as having the roof turfed Thora had gone to the expense of walls and floor covered in smoothly planed imported oak with a bench at one side. But the dimensions were unchanged: the pool where long ago Thond Eiriksson had been able to stretch out at full length where it was hottest and deepest – and he was nearer seven than six feet tall – enjoying the obedient ministrations of his fortunate wife, Jodis Helgi’s daughter.

Jodis thankfully shed her clammy dress on to the floor and submerged. In a land of wildly fluctuating weather and months of near-dark, the god had given Iceland this one luxury beyond price: water hot from the earth’s core. She had known pleasure to laughing point each time she and her little naked sons had enjoyed this bubbling bathing place, Halli shrieking to go into the middle where it would scald his and his brother’s tender skins. Halli would soon be eight years old and Eirik was already five, and she would see them soon if it was the last thing she ever did in this world.

She was roused by the door opening to its fullest extent and Groa’s shrilling ‘... poor young man, like to drop dead...‘ as she dumped her armful of garments and seized the birch twigs. ‘Do you want me to use these in earnest, Helgi’s daughter? Thora has sent me to make sure that the stranger is shown courtesy.’

‘Dry and dress me first,’ protested Jodis and staggered about as she submitted to being roughly dried and clad in saffron coloured wool trimmed with squirrel fur. ‘Do you think my foundling was worth saving?’

She was held between hands that were sometimes hard, sometimes loving. Groa gave her a firm shake. ‘Don’t start thinking of him as yours. Thond’s on his way home – yes, I know, he’s no longer your husband and he was your father’s killer. But you share two sons. Think of them.’

‘I do! You know I do.’

‘And I’ll know what I think of the foundling after I’ve held him – thus – between my hands.’

Jodis suggested, ‘Show him Groa, a prattling old fool. You won’t have to try very hard.’ She avoided a slap by sitting down on the bench to pull on her shoes as Groa opened the door. Bluehair was just outside, sitting on a stone and drooping dejectedly.

‘I see you’ve brought clothes for this incompetent seafarer,’ remarked Jodis, her voice aimed at Bluehair as she left the hut. ‘So you may stay and see to his needs, Groa,  since you are so tender of his welfare.’

Jodis’s foundling with his fluent, forthrightly accented Icelandic and a broad forehead, frequently wrinkled as if he was working on a puzzle. His nose gave a touch of absurdity to the rest of his face – no, she was being cruel but it was a nose looking for a mature man and he was so young: the supple movements of his body as they worked together in the rough water of a dying storm. He had learned more about her than she had intended but of her plans for him, cloudy in her mind, he knew nothing.

Jodis took a deep breath and set off for Thora’s hall at a rapid pace. It had become hateful to her. This place, where Jodis Helgi’s daughter and Thond Eiriksson had spent their wedding night had now passed into the slender, beautiful hands of her cousin Thora, called ‘Heartshaker.’

Chapter 2

Inside the bath house, the air was heavy with a moisture unlike salt-laden sea spray; earthy-smelling droplets filled Bluehair’s nostrils with every breath while Groa fussed around, divesting him of the salty rags which were already starting to stiffen as they dried, as she did so handling him more than was needful. She was already past her middle years, greyhaired and, like Helgi’s daughter, she was tall. In spite of his scant knowledge of these people he had been prepared for that, although their race was not so pure that they would all be images of one another.

‘A sad sight,’ commented Groa, eyeing him with turned-down mouth and pushing him under the water. ‘Well, I admit you’ve a fine dark hide on you; or it will be when it’s dry and you’re fed. You’d have been wasted as fish food but you may yet be destined for death. What’s your name?’

‘Helgi’s daughter calls me Bluehair. I call her Helgi’s daughter and I’ve a mind to call you an impertinent crone. What’s her name?’

‘Jodis.’ Groa dipped a giant ladle into a barrel and emptied cold water over his head.

He scrambled out of the bath protesting, ‘I’ve had enough of that, inside and out. Just let me dry myself.’ He snatched at the towel. Groa kept her grip on it. ‘Groa, who is Thora Heartshaker?’

‘Ah!’ She pushed him this way and that, rubbing, stroking and patting. He gasped, grunting helplessly at her intrusive fingers. ‘Heartshaker: never was a woman more rightly so called. The fairest bride I’ve seen in my lifetime and until just now snug-a-bed with her bridegroom; a fine specimen of young manhood.’

For a whim Bluehair had invited his own death today and had been granted life, the high seat post following him like an obedient hound. His rest amongst the sand dunes had been broken by an alarmingly powerful young woman with Freya’s own stern beauty of face who was intending a shameless theft of his property. Now he had fallen into the hands of a woman not yet old enough to be excused her burbling on account of an enfeebled mind. Christ aid him, he had never been so tweaked and pummelled by a servant.

Jodis, beautiful, bad tempered…and desperately unhappy. He closed his eyes, swaying, and was revived by Groa. ‘Men don’t fall asleep between my hands, boy.’

‘Groa, he said, sternly. ‘I’ve had many hard days at sea and almost lost my life. Does it please you to play fox and drake with me for my pitiable lack of vigour?’

She grinned and tossed him the towel. ‘Jodis and Thora are first cousins. See if you can step into these shoes without walking straight out of them; they belong to the grandfather of my two grand girls.’

‘You’re making very free of the old man’s property. Is he too senile to protest?’ The pleasure in at last being properly clothed in trousers brought lightheaded relief, untwisted his gut and released a ravenous wish for food that he couldn’t fulfil; not until he had drunk a draught of local gossip.

‘Halgrim the chieftain came here with Jodis for the wedding; then he left all of a sudden. I wasn’t told why.’ Groa, indignant, had taken up an ivory comb set with little red and blue jewels, and was ruthlessly dragging it through his tangled hair. ‘But one thing I saw: Jodis who has never had the pride crushed out of her, turned as white as curd disputing with her grandsire; as if anything she might say would have changed his mind after all she has cost him!’

So Jodis, pale with fright, had tried in vain to prevent her grandfather from leaving the wedding feast.

‘Wisest of women,’ said Bluehair in blatant flattery, ‘Tell me all you know about the chieftain and his family so that if Thora receives me in her hall I shan’t offend anyone in my ignorance.’

‘Keep still while I’m talking,’ said Groa, ‘and let me roll up those trouser legs somewhat. They were not made for a dwarf…tell you all? That