The Prisoner of War (Pilot): Part I of the Serial Novel



  The PRISONER

  of WAR

  Part One of the Serial Novel

  BY E. M. AMABEBE

  Copyright 2015 Eremi Amabebe

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Reader, please note that this is not a stand-alone work, but rather the first four chapters of a Victorian-style serial novel. What is a serial novel? I would love to tell you! If, however, you prefer to consume your novels the new-fashioned way (that is, as a single edition), please sign up for the (very low volume) mailing list to be notified when the complete version becomes available. In the meantime, come hang out with me on Goodreads, Twitter, or my website. Thank you very much for reading. I hope you enjoy.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chapter One

  WAITING FOR THE SHIPS

  Which is the day that changes your life forever? The answer is—of course—all of them. And yet the human mind is a capricious thing: ever grasping after the thread of a narrative, always imposing a story onto events that may not yield their mysteries to meaning. Just so, Audgunn, eldest daughter of the chieftain of Gruntal, would later reflect that her life was forever altered on a particular day. The day the prisoner was brought ashore.

  It was late August and the days were still hot and sunny and seemed to stretch on and on forever. Afternoon was just turning to evening when the cry went up that a ship had appeared on the horizon. Although there had been many false alarms in the past weeks, Audgunn nonetheless dropped her knife and the length of wood she had been sharpening and ran down to the little beach that served the valley of Gruntal as a port. She was one of the first to reach the water, and as she squinted into the distance she could see the faint outline of a broad, square sail that could only mean a longship.

  Gruntal was a small valley of seven farms, the largest of which belonged to Audgunn's father, Agnar, the chieftain of the district of Norsande in the kingdom of Rogaland. For the past two weeks rumors had been circulating through the valley that the first of the longships were making their way back, and in minutes the little beach was thick with people. There was not a human soul in Gruntal who did not have some wish bound up with the return of those ships – that a lover would arrive safely home, that a husband had acquired a slave who would ease the burden of housework, that an eldest son had won honor for the family. Everyone was eager to hear stories of the men's adventures – to know who had traveled farther south or east, who had ventured west into the unknown, who would never come back at all.

  Audgunn stood on a rock at the far end of the beach and watched the ship draw closer. She was tall enough to see over the heads of the people in front of her, and her sharp blue eyes could almost pick out the symbols painted on the shields that decorated the ship's sides. After a moment she felt her adopted sister Ragne come up and stand beside her. Ragne did not speak – she always slipped in and out of rooms without a word – but the two girls were so close that Audgunn could sense her presence, and could guess what was in her mind.

  Since the day she first arrived in the valley as a scared and hungry eleven-year-old, Ragne had been in love with Erik, the youngest of Audgunn's five brothers, and had watched him as if he were made of gold. And indeed he was a golden boy – tall, athletic, and well built, with a soft smile, serious blue eyes and golden hair that curled into ringlets when it grew long. He was quick and brave and gentle, and he had been good to Ragne in those early months when all the other children had shunned her for being small and dark and foreign, and for speaking with a strange accent. It was he who had taught her her first Norse words, he who had explained their customs, he who had by turns bullied and cajoled the other children into including her in their games. Of course, Erik was good to everyone – he was the darling of all Gruntal, liked even by Orm Raven Eye and his clan, who were suspicious of anyone not of their own blood. But from the first, his relationship with Ragne had been special; even after she had grown accustomed to the Gruntalers and their ways, she and he continued to go off together and sit alone on the little promontory that overlooked the water to talk about no one knew what.

  But even if Erik did love Ragne as more than a sister – which was not certain – he could never marry her. Ragne was a blaman – the Norse word that meant “blue person” and referred to the dark people from the remotest regions of the south country, the lands that winter never reached. Small and dark, with tight brown curls and large silent eyes that missed nothing, Ragne was the only blaman Audgunn had ever seen. She was in fact the only blaman most of the people in the surrounding countryside had ever seen, and even now, more than half a decade after she was first brought to Gruntal, people would still turn to stare at her whenever she traveled beyond the valley.

  But it was not simply because she was different that Erik could never marry her. Ragne was a slave: she and her mother had been bought from a trader seven years before for two small bags of silver. And this would never, could never, change – even though Agnar had loved Ragne's mother and honored her like a wife, even though he treated Ragne as though she were his own daughter, and even though all his children looked on her as a sister – despite some of their neighbors grumbling that a slave was allowed to live like the chieftain's daughter in the richest house in Gruntal. In spite of all this, she was still a slave – still different, still small and dark and foreign, still utterly without wealth or ancestry or kin. Erik would marry the daughter of someone important, someone with whom an alliance would bring power or security – not someone whose mother had been a concubine and whose father was unknown.

  So when Ragne silently appeared at her side, Audgunn knew she was hoping this would be the ship that brought Erik back, and wished for the sake of her adopted sister's happiness that she would set her heart on another man. For her own part, Audgunn was not particularly worried about Erik, or any of her other brothers' return. Of course she loved them and wanted them all to come back safely, but they were her brothers – noisy, teasing, spoiled, in her opinion – and she took them for granted.

  In fact there was no one whose return Audgunn particularly longed for, and it was this that worried her. Ragne had Erik, Svanhild had Thander, and the rest of the girls in the valley all seemed to have someone – however impossible or unreciprocated – on whom their heart was set. But Audgunn had no one. She found all the Gruntal boys – or men, as they were starting to insist on being called – too familiar and unexciting to fall in love with. They were her friends, but there was not one of them who made her tremble or blush, not one about whom she thought when she was drifting off to sleep, not one whom the idea of kissing did not make her want to rinse out her mouth with salt water. And this troubled her. Audgunn had always been the fastest and brightest of her peers: the most agile, the quickest to learn, the first to try anything new. But it seemed that in this new game of adulthood, she had suddenly slipped from her top place. For the first time in her life she felt like the dullest student, like the other girls were racing ahead into womanhood while she dawdled behind, more interested in horse-breaking or sailing or Latin letters than in men. And so she was impatient. She wanted to catch up to the others, to feel her heart flutter and her breath come short, to want someone. She wanted to fall in love.

  The two girls stood, side by side, each treasuring her own private wish, and watched as the ship slowly drew closer. Audgunn shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted out over the gently rolling waves toward the horizon. At any moment the ship w
ould be close enough to recognize the carvings on the prow and the faces of the men aboard. The seconds slipped by. Ragne reached for her friend's hand and squeezed it. Audgunn squeezed back, and they both strained their eyes and waited.