renegades, httyd

li. Lesson Five: How To Thief the Thief

renegades
chapter fifty-one

    We were led through a town that was the heart of the tribe. I saw women passing off goods in markets, women fighting in pens with boars (or each other), while others cheered them on with tankards full of mead. There were fields were younger Vikings were being trained with spears, swords and shields, another field where they played a game to which they flung a rock across the grass with a stick to other players, aiming to hit them in strung up fishing nets on either end. A set of young girls were chasing each other towards the cliffs where there was a group of them already waiting, leaping off the edge and hurtling towards the water far below. A forge was smoking where a burly woman worked with a hammer at an anvil to straighten a broadsword with a customer waiting in a tight set of armour, chatting to another in what I would consider a normal tunic set━at least, from what I'd see at home.

     Girls, Women, and more women inhabited Bog-Burglar Island. They wrestled each other in the smaller streets, shared drinks outside homes, accused each other of stealing, then congratulating the other for such a great theft. Some were building houses and posts, others were tending to sheep and yaks, one was sitting amongst a group of young girls━no older than five━and teaching them to read and write. It struck me with awe; back on Berk, only the rich learnt to read and write, for it was considered non-essential that a Viking was literate. We were too busy fighting, battling and riding dragons to consider such things.

      There was an amphitheatre where what seemed to be a play was at full-swing. A saleswoman was selling apples and other fresh goods next to another who held up a miniature breast-plate to a babe in a mother's arms.

      I hugged my things close to my chest, careful to not have anything stolen. This place was so strange and unlike Berk━and yet, similar at the same time. It held the same life, the same day-to-day errands. Except, there was not one sight of a man amongst them all aside fro Harald who walked beside me, grinning and enjoying his time far more than I was.

     "How ...?" I asked him softly. "How do they ... I mean ... men are not allowed, how do they...?"

     "Have kids?" Harald glanced at me. I nodded. "Well, Estrid, when a mummy Viking and a daddy Viking love each other very much━" I stopped him with a scowl. He laughed at me. For someone walking in a tribe that hated men, he seemed quite at ease. "Men can visit, they just can't stay here. Men come and go, whether they be traders, travellers, or some Bog-Burglar's lover across the sea, they're allowed to step foot on this island, they just can't live here. They can't get married on these grounds, can't build a home to settle, can't witness the birth of their child━that is only for the Bog-Burglar Tribe."

      "They can't see their child be born?" I whispered, aghast. "But━?"

      "When a man is there for the birth of his child," went on Harald, "he from that moment on holds power. Tell me, what is like on Berk when a child is born?"