This was Iden, the priest of Woden, a fat man with grey hair, who enjoyed mead a little too much and as a result had a large belly and red cheeks. Anna, as well as the other children, thought him stuffy and when he preached found him boring and dull. Nothing like Radeann’s fun tales of the gods, of great heroes, of the monsters that lived in the woods and hills and of the adventures he had supposedly had in the world outside their tiny village of Scenestane.
Iden was right in that Raedann was a tinker: he sold trinkets as he travelled around the villages of Mercia. But he sold stories too - anything for a bed for the night and maybe some food and mead. His stories were good ones and the children loved them.
“Are you saying that Raedann lies?”
“Child,” Iden replied as he came to join them at the table, “he is a spinner of tales. He exaggerates. He makes stories seem more than they really are.”
“But there have been shield maidens,” Anna insisted, ”women who fight alongside the men.”
Iden nodded, but Anna could see he was reluctant to admit it. “Maybe,’ he agreed, ‘but not many and only when something unusual happens, when special times come along and they are forced to take up arms. It is best to forget such tales. You will soon be old enough to marry. You should be thinking about that and not this nonsense.”
“I can be a warrior. I will prove it to you one day!”
“Please, Anna,” her father pleaded with her. “Take back your seax and go help Udela prepare the evening meal.”
Fists clenched, teeth gritted, Anna glowered at him for a while and then finally let her shoulders drop. Reaching out she removed the long knife which he offered her and slid it into the scabbard on her belt. With a nod she left the headman’s hall and walked out into the village. Once there though, she did not go as ordered to the cookhouse to find the elderly cook, but looked around the village, past the wooded path that led up to the rocky outcrop upon which Iden’s small temple was built, to the hut that lay beyond. This was home of the healing woman, Julia. Outside it Anna could see her friends loitering, playing a game of Tafel on the ground, with pebbles and a board they had created by cutting lines into the sun-baked mud. She joined them.
Her brother Lar looked up from the game as she approached. He gave her a kindly smile.
“So how did your talk with father go?” he asked, tilting his head towards the headman’s hall.
She stuck out her lower lip and frowned at him, “What do you think? You are the boy so you will be leader and a warrior, whilst I have to have babies.”
“Sorry, sister, but that is just the way it is,” Lar said. “Shield maidens are all well and good in stories, but in the real world we all have to accept what fate has in store for us. If it helps I don’t feel any better about it than you, but you can’t fight fate.”
Anna snorted. “Maybe I can. Maybe I can prove I am worthy to be a warrior and defend the village.”
But Lar was not listening to her. He had turned back to the board, smiled and moved one piece.
“My game, pay up Wilburh!”
His opponent, ten-year-old Wilburh, gave Lar a dark look from under a fringe of blond hair, his blue eyes darkened, suddenly seeming almost black.
Wilburh’s twin sister, Hild, gurgled with laughter. “Come on, pay him,” she said. Her own eyes, whilst also blue, seemed lighter somehow, just like Hild herself - bubbly and happy in a way that gave Anna headaches sometimes and contrasted with Wilburh’s more gloomy nature.
Wilburh shrugged and reaching into a pouch at his belt brought out a tarnished old ring and handed it over. Lar held it up to the late afternoon sun and examined it.
“Should be able to sell that to Raedann for a new knife,” he boasted.
“A knife? Why in Woden’s name do you think that dirty old ring is worth the same as one of my knives,” a man’s voice cut in.
They turned around and saw the tinker looming over them. Tall, almost gangly, with curly brown hair and a hook nose, Raedann grinned at them. “I will give you this seashell bracelet for it,” he said with wink, and Lar and Raedann were soon bargaining and trading.
Listening to her brother Anna shook her head in despair. Lar had no interest in swords and fighting. He had passed on to her all he had learnt after she badgered him into going off to the woods to teach her how to fight with a sword and how to fire a bow. No, Lar was a trader at heart and a good one at that, but he was no fighter. She sighed. If only her father could see that.
“Well, I must be off,” Raedann said, after he and Lar had finally agreed a fair exchange for the ring and Lar had got his knife, although not as fine a one as he would have hoped. “I want to reach Wall before the sun sets and that’s a couple of miles to go.”
The tinker set off towards the Roman road that ran past the west side of the village. Anna beckoned at the children and they all trailed along with Raedann, passing between the blacksmith’s house and the one next to it, crossing a field and finally stepping onto the cobbled road beyond.
“We will go to just past the old Roman house with you, Raedann,” Anna said. “Tell us about shield maidens again.”
Lar groaned. “Not again, sister. Raedann, tell us something different. Tell us about giants.”
“Giants? Ah, now there are many sorts of giants in this world. There are hill giants and cliff giants and fire giants and frost ones too. They come from other worlds you know, places like Jotunheim, Niflheim and the fire world, Muspelheim. They visit our world of Midgard from time to time.”
He went on telling a tale about how he had once been chased by a fearsome fire giant and had escaped by swimming a river. By the time he had finished they had crossed the ford north of the town where a brook trickled over the old road, and soon they were passing the crumbling ruins of a Roman farm beyond.
“Did the giants build that?” Wilburh asked, gazing at the stone structure.
Raedann smiled at him. “You ask me that because it is made of stone, don’t you? But no, the Romans were not giants, just men. They built many houses like that, walls and cities too, all over this land. Then they left because their empire was under attack. That was two hundred years ago. When our own people, the Saxons, came here across the Eastern Sea they gazed on such buildings, and because they could not build them they assumed the Romans must have been giants. That is why those ruins and many others like it make our people feel scared and why we keep away from them.”
The children stared at the ruins and Raedann, chuckling at the expressions on their faces, said, “Well, I’ll be on my way. I will be back in a couple of days. You’d best be getting home to the village, children. The sun is sinking. You don’t want evil spirits to find you out in the dark do you?”
He pointed to where the old fort on the hills to the west was silhouetted against the setting sun. Then he was off, singing a song and strolling up the road.
“Come on, let’s go home,” Hild said, turning to head back down the road.
Anna moved to join her and then abruptly changed her mind. “No! Let’s go and look in the ruins,” she said.
“The Roman ruins? In the dark?” Lar asked, studying the decaying structure.
“Indeed, why not?”
The others stared at her. Lar opened his mouth to speak but did not get a word out. Around them the twilight was gathering, the evening air warm but quiet. Into that silence they heard a noise that made them all jump: the sound of running footsteps coming along the road from the direction of the village. They spun around to glance back towards the ford, but could see nothing apart from deep shadows at the bases of the trees.
No, there was something else there.
A shape was moving in the shadows....