Excerpt from The Thrall's Tale by Judith Lindbergh, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I am glad there are some new faces aboard: men mostly, broad-backed, with thick woolly beards and eyes as sharp as the sky, clear in their faces which are ruddy as if burned by the sun's distant fire. Some of their women already have cracked their chests' heavy locks to fetch a blanket or toy to keep a child from climbing the rail or up the mast. My master, Einar, is unused to such traveling companions, though in these past years he has traveled less about. Of late, he's been more farmer and husbandman of sheep than a Viking doing battle on foreign shores. Yet I've heard prideful talk at table of those days of raids and plunder and conquest and brave men now all gone to Valhalla. Often I would see my mother wince at his honor in such tales. Still, I know he does not fancy these softer days.

Nor does Torvard, who has yet to see such fight. Even now he anxiously flings his knife into the thick mast-pole. Forthwith, my master scolds him, "Beside this mast, only Odin's humor and Thor's strength will carry us again to land," and sharply withdraws the blade, angrily dulling it with his whetstone. Then he hands both back. "Here. Hone this, and keep your ire at bay."

I want to laugh, for Torvard is an angry fool, but, fearing he might see me, I bite my cheeks.

The ship bobs in the current as wind fills up the sail and sweeps us farther and farther from the home fjord. Audun, at the steering oar, charges the men still to work the oars to breach the rocks beneath the keel. Their stroking slaps barely sound in the heavy surf. Far in the distance, the land we leave is but a thinning line of gray.

There is one other on this ship, one I dare not cross or catch with an eye or even pass. From where I sit, she is far across the deck, but still I draw back in fear, and I see the others do so also. Even on this crowded boat we leave a wide circle of air around her, for it is said she knows the gods, that they twist her tongue and make her speak and whatever words she tells always come true. They call her Thorbjorg the Seeress, and say she comes alone, with no husband, no children, and none she leaves behind, with only her sheep and cattle and a handful of thralls and a chest full of gold got from the invisible ones she caters in their earthen mounds.

For some long while, she has lived upon a distant spit, far, but not yet far enough, from Einar's homestead. Well I've known but, grateful, never ventured, hearing oft of her evil eye, her evil hand, her evil foot. It is said that wherever she steps trips death, that her nights are filled with shrieking, that, where'er she goes, she mutters softly on the shadows' murk and sometimes spits and seethes upon her seeing.

'Twas one such sight, all weird about, on which she called a plague to sweep nearly all the farms at Arnarstapi. And the people there - those few who lived - in a rising rage burned Thorbjorg's household to the ground. It is said her 'stead was razed before, in Norway long ago, upon a famine's fate. Hard, she fled from there to Iceland - first to Herjolf Bardsson's farm, then, after this last plague's burning, to my master, Einar's place. Though my master never speaks such things; and sometimes Mistress Grima feeds her, sending provisions from our own short stocks. 'Twas ever other thralls who bore them, trudging up the fell-slopes and across the glacier's ashen fields, then returning, breathing hot with running terror, bearing back in shaking hands stinking, greenish ointments the seeress said would heal.

From the first, when it was rumored she would come aboard this ship, all the thralls in the house and in the fields clutched hard their amulets, put fresh herbs in their hair and pockets, spat in their shoes as they put them off for bed; but these things did not keep the woman from our deck. Our only comfort is that the others of her household do not sail with us. They are broken up among the other knarrs, for it was thought unwise to shelter all beneath one sail, dangerous all together on the same thin boards. Better to spread such dubious power about and lessen its potent' for harm. Yet now their mistress sits far at the rear, beside Audun, and I swear her lips are sparked with cants, and I see that her hands are moving - perhaps over a stick of secret runes.

Excerpted from The Thrall's Tale by Judith Lindbergh. Copyright © 2006 by Judith Lindbergh. Excerpted by permission of Plume, a division of Penguin Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.