The Viking was at his rest in his comfortable home in Northern Louisiana. Aslinn had sparked something in his imagination and now his mind was running on it. He lay there in his ornately carved bed,his body prone, head resting on a pillow. His eyes were closed, still behind their lids.
He had, of course, thought about the place that had been home so many centuries ago when Godric was with them. He missed home from time to time and it startled him when Aslinn asked him if he ever got home sick. Since he had been made, he had tried his best not to think about the small village he was born to. Of course, to modern standards, his village and his home and the grand mead hall where his father held court and feasted and told stories, would seem dismal, primitive but at that time, he thought it was the finest village he had seen.
The mead hall was his father’s domain. It smelled of fur and leather and mead and warrior. He remembered now the first time he was brought to the mead house after his first hunt when he was 12. He had brought down an elk and he and his best friend had field dressed it and brought the heart and liver to his father as tribute. His father had blooded him and kissed him roughly on the face and when they came into the village, he brought his son into the hall and poured him a cup of his best honey mead and his mother brought him food and smiled proudly at him.
Norse people built lodges, similar to the ships they built, long and well supported by heavy logs and mud and wattle and covered in stacked stone on the outside and reindeer hide on the walls on the inside. His wife had made separate sleeping compartments of large mattresses of grass and clover and herbs and covered them in thick furs. The compartments were closed off by heavy hand dyed fabrics in muted greens and rusty reds. He remembered the stone floor he’d laid himself for her that she covered in reindeer hides. There was a fire pit with a spit for roasting meat and she had heavy earthen ware bowls and platters that she cooked vegetables and greens in, supplementing their diet.
In the summers, they would pull away the hides in front of the windows and his wife and the women who were servants in his house would carry out the furs and bedding and rugs and wall coverings and beat them, taking out the filler and burning it and gathering dried grass and refilling them. They would sweep out the lodges and air out the lodge and make things ready for the summer. They would plant their crops and plan hunting parties and fishing parties and war parties. The women worked as hard as the men. She was bright, attractive, full bodied from child bearing but all together pleasing and intelligent and knew what was expected of a future chieftain’s wife.
He remembered how he would come to her bed and she opened her arms to him and he made love with her while the snows and winds and rains of the winter howled all around him. He remembered how ferociously he loved her before a battle or a hunting journey, hoping that he had left a part of himself to grow inside her so should something happen to him, he would be immortalized in his sons. He remembered how she had been taken to the women's house to birth his first son and he lay in the bed they had shared, waiting for the news that his wife and child were safe in the world and the midwives came to him and said, “You have a son,” and laid the fat red boy in his arms and he lay there on his side and cradled the child in the crook of his arm, unwrapping him to look at his child, his large hands seeming to big for the task at hand.
His son had been born in the winter, and he loved the winter. In winter, his wife would cut branches of fir and cedar to sweeten the air and brighten the drab lodge with holly and its red and white berries. They would gather at the mead hall and celebrate Yule, the time of winter when the spirits of their gods walked the earth and celebrated with them and blessed them during the bleaker, shorter days of cold. They would make stews and soups and roast meat and drink mead and tell stories and dance. How long had it been since he had danced to some lovely Norse song. He wondered if these new friends of theirs liked to dance.
Why does she do this, little Aslinn, why does she evoke such things in his mind? He had not thought of the boy or his mother or his village in a long time. He was not sure he liked it, but he was curious about his feelings now. They all made him think of his past, when he was not as he is now. He asked her counselor if he was disturbed when Aslinn did this, and the dark haired man simply looked at him. Of course, he was not that far from his past, he would have clearer memories and he had a closer relationship to his feelings, though this too was difficult for the southern gentleman.
With this thought, Eric Northman finally went into his deeper rest.
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