The Viking Takes a Knight - By Sandra Hill Page 0,1

to his stableman, “Do you want to quit the project, Graeme?” John had twelve couples of childbearing years involved in his experiments to prevent conception. One less would not be fatal to the study.

“Nay!” Graeme replied. “We need the coin.”

“My idea…Does no one want to hear my idea?” Hamr was waving his hand to get their attention. “You could remove Mary’s honey by licking her nether folds.”

Graeme’s expression bespoke his reluctance.

“And she could remove yours by sucking your cock.”

Graeme’s eyes lit up with delight. “Good idea!” he said. “I will tell Mary it is Lord Hawk’s orders.”

John groaned. But he had no time to bemoan his dilemma. Efrim the Woodsman arrived, holding a bloody rag to his left hand, which had been cut almost to the bone two months past. The wound still festered. “Maude, the scullery maid, said you used honey on her husband Harry’s boil an’ it healed jist fine.”

Honey on a broken blister was one thing, a gaping wound quite another. Next, his people would expect him to cure leprosy with honey.

John washed Efrim’s wound, then honey-salved it, emphasizing the importance of keeping an open sore clean and covered with unsoiled bindings.

“Thank ye very much, m’lord. I have no coin, but my Essie will send ye some of her special goat cheese.”

Arguing that he did not need to be paid had gained John naught in the past; so, he just nodded. “I do appreciate good goat cheese.” I loathe goat cheese.

“Do you do this all the time?” Hamr wanted to know once Efrim departed.

“I do not claim to be a healer, but, yea, a fair number of people come to me as a last resort when all else fails.”

“And they pay for your services with cheese?”

“And eggs, fish, venison, live chickens, a pig, wool, manure…yea, manure for the gardens. Even a barrel of eels.”

Hamr rolled his eyes. “Mayhap you could hint that a big-breasted woman with wanton ways would not be unwelcome payment.”

John decided the best course was to ignore the lackwit.

That night a lone rider entered the keep gates. A man of about fifty years with a grizzled white beard and long hair in the Viking style, and a patch over one eye. Oh, Good Lord! It was Bolthor, the world’s worst skald, who quickly told John that he had been sent by his mother to keep him company. A mother he was going to throttle if she did not stop interfering in his life.

John knew from past experience that come nightfall there was going to be a poem about honey licking and miracle cures.

And there was.

That night in John’s great hall, where the fare was plain due to the recent death of the longtime Hawk’s Lair cook, a glaze came over Bolthor’s one eye…a sure sign that he was overcome by the verse mood. Without much ado, Bolthor announced, “This is the saga of John of Hawk’s Lair. I call it ‘Hawk’s Honey.’” It mattered not that John groaned and pleaded with Bolthor not to recite his saga aloud, or that Hamr laughed so hard he fell off his seat. Bolthor considered it his gods’ given duty to spread his poetic wisdom.

In the land of the Saxons,

A lackwit knight was born.

Day and night he spent

Mooning over honey.

But alas and alack,

As time went on,

He did not realize that

Ice was growing on his heart.

Even worse, cobwebs were growing

On his manpart.

And the most important honey

Was missing from his life.

Mayhap honey is a bane betimes.

Mayhap man needs a bit of sour

To offset the sweet.

Mayhap the hawk should fly

Instead of resting on his feathery arse.

While everyone else laughed and clapped their hands with appreciation, John was heard to murmur, “Mayhap someone ought to stuff a codpiece in a certain skald’s mouth.”

CHAPTER TWO

To market, to market, to buy a…chauvinist pig?

Ingrith Sigrundottir walked through the busy streets of Jorvik with five young orphans trailing behind her.

To Ubbi, her elderly “guard,” she whispered, “I feel like a goose with its goslings.”

“Best ye not be waddlin’, m’lady. Many a lustsome man here in the city might take it as an invitation.”

“Ubbi! I’m almost thirty-one years old. Way past the time when men grow lustsome and drooling at my comeliness.”

“Age is naught when the sap rises in a man,” Ubbi said, “but ye are not to worry. I will protect you.”

Which was ludicrous, really. Ubbi…seventy if he was a day…was no taller than ten-year-old Godwyn, who preceded him. If anyone waddled, it was him on his short bowed legs. The little man carried a lance