Far After Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

her here if he was to marry the chieftain’s daughter. Suspecting Thyri was trying to warn her, she sent a shaky smile in her direction.
    “Skuli wanted to marry her to Snorri Longnose,” said Helga. “But Katla would have none but Flane. You can understand it; she is the chieftain’s daughter, and Flane is his finest warrior.”
    “But it might be better for everyone to merge our steading with that of Snorri Longnose,” Inga suggested. “The two camps would then become one, and be all the better because of it.”
    “She is a strong woman, our chieftain’s daughter. He, of course, gives her whatever she asks for.”
    Emer’s heart sank. Katla would not take kindly to her once she knew Flane had brought her to the steading.
    “Katla talks of an agreement made at the summer solstice,” Inga said. “But I notice Flane always looks a little shifty about it. I suspect he was too drunk to remember what he said.”
    The women laughed, and took turns to run a fine-toothed wooden comb through Emer’s hair while they gossiped and giggled. Occasionally they found something they tossed on the fire, and when her hair dried to its usual rich chestnut sheen, Birgit plaited it, coiled it into a bun at the back of her head and skewered a long bone pin through to hold it in place.
    Thyri held out her newly washed bleached linen chemise and Emer pulled it over her head, and drew the cords at her throat. The white linen gathered neatly around her long neck and hid her glass beads.
    “Show off your pretty necklace.”
    Emer shook her head. She wanted to keep it private, for it was her only link with her mother.
    “Better to keep it covered,” Inga replied, with a meaningful glance at the first speaker. The woman shot a quick look at Inga and then nodded.
    By evening, her linen overtunic was dry, too. Someone admired the lovely rose colour as they tugged it over her head. “It becomes your chestnut hair so well.” They were kind enough not to mention how small and tight it was.
    “I dyed it myself. My first attempt. It is a very old gown.” Emer smiled, but didn’t tell them she had intended the gown to be crimson. No need for them to know her first attempt at dyeing cloth had failed.
    Once she was dressed and with her stout leather sandals securely tied about her ankles, her stomach started to churn with anxiety. The women would leave the bathing hut soon, and where would she go then?
    ***
    Inga took her to the main hall, which was much bigger than the home she was used to on Pabaigh, and left her on the bed space nearest the main door. Emer looked around. Sleeping platforms ran along two sides, some partitioned off by wattle walls or leather curtains hung from wooden poles. She guessed twenty or thirty people might live here on a permanent basis. A red cloth curtain at the far end of the hall caught her eye. That would be where the chieftain and his wife retreated to private sleeping quarters.
    Flane could not be Skuli Grey Cloak’s son, of that she was sure. There was no family resemblance, and he could hardly marry Skuli’s daughter Katla if he were her brother. But there seemed to be some special relationship between the two men. That much she had gleaned from the afternoon’s chatter, but quite what the relationship was she had not been able to discover.
    People wandered back into the hall after a day’s work, saw her, recognised a stranger and stared. They asked one another who she was, and one man ambled across the hall in her direction. Emer kept her gaze on the hard earthen floor.
    “Who are you?”
    Emer couldn’t have said why she felt threatened, but she did. Since she had to look up at him, he seemed excessively tall, with a lank fringe of hair around his ears. The light from the lamp in its niche above the door glanced off his bald head as he leant toward her, smiling in a way that made Emer shudder. She looked away, for his teeth, gapped and stained, were ugly.
    He straightened abruptly. “Answer me,