Sunniva
Sobriquet: The Wolf-dancer, Sunniva - means gift if the sun in ancient German, ironic since she turns with the full moon.
Appearance: Sunniva is a Nordic beauty, although born to a Saxon family, there can be little doubt that one of her grandfathers was a Norseman who came to her village in the act of viking. Regardless, her flawless and milk pale skin tells the tale and none can have any doubt after looking into her arctic blue eyes. At first glance one would call Sunniva little more than a waif, for she stands just short of five feet tall and probably weighs one-hundred pounds soaking wet. Her face is faintly vulpine in shape and her small breasts accentuate a sinuous athletic body born to dance and to hunt. Although not originally trained to dance, Sunniva has found a novel and superior grace since her first turning and she now serves as the understudy of Salome, the Wife of the Serpent. As a dervish, Sunniva is quite popular and regularly receives gifts and offers of affection from admirers, allowing her to maintain the lifestyle of medieval merchants wife or one of the less nobility. Her clothing and jewelry reflect her opulent lifestyle as she possesses numerous dresses, fine cloaks, rings, necklaces, baldrics and jeweled daggers. Her prize piece of jewelry is masterfully worked wolf's head medallion that she prominently displays upon her bosom.
Behavior: Despite her air of frigid indifference, Sunniva has always been a woman of intense passion, even before her turning. Since her transformation her hungers have all grown in intensity, whether it be for food, sex or dance. The beast inside her ever seek for release and even in her dreams she transforms to hunt through surreal landscapes.
History: Born in Wifilisburg, of peasant stock in 1080 A.D., Sunniva grew up the youngest of seven children. She never knew her father for he died of a rotten gut the same year she was born. Sunniva's mother had her hands full raising seven children while trying to work a farm and not long after she remarried. Sunniva's stepfather was a much younger man than her mother, hard working, but inexperienced with children. Quick with discipline and light on love, Sunniva's stepfather wasn't what the family really needed, but her mother exhausted from carrying the load of two medieval parents did not really care.
As a young girl growing up without the love of a good father-figure, Sunniva never really knew what she was looking for as she searched for in the form of male affection. Like all the children of the village, she was required to spend some of her time learning the basics of her faith and found a sympathetic soul in the old village priest, father Sigiward. The kindly old priest spent an hour or two everyday with the village children teaching them about Christ and the Church of Rome. But as often as not, the old man was a glorified babysitter who saw the children of the village as his grandchildren and took good care of them all. But when Sunniva was nine, the old man died suddenly in the night and for a time the village was without spiritual leadership.
Then Frater Eadweard arrived from a distant village and took over Sunday sermons, catechism and confession. At first everything seemed fine, the monk was fatter than the old priest, but everyone liked him and he had a way with the people of the village. In the year of Sunniva's birth, several daughters had been born to the village and these girls quickly took to playing together when not performing chores. In the year following Frater Eadweard's arrival, a number of these young girls passed through their first menstrual cycle together -- becoming young women, at least in the medieval mind.
Almost immediately, the goodly Brother began to pay extra attention to these young women and the villagers so used to the excesses of attention provided all the children by the old village priest thought nothing of it. Within months all the girls were becoming ill, not eating, having nightmares and irregular courses. Frater Eadweard quickly diagnosed this as the influence of the devil, perhaps even witchcraft. It had never occurred to anyone in the village that one of their neighbors might be a witch, but the charge kept the villagers watching one another and not the Brother. Eadweard took each of the girls in hand and personally exercised the demons within them, but upon returning them to their families he demanded that they all come to him once a week for blessing to ensure the evil spirits did not return. The good Brother tracked the evil back to an old crone who lived at the edge of the village and she was exiled from her home never to be seen again.
For Sunniva, as for each of the other girls, this was a hellish time. Frater Eadweard often broke sweat ensuring the evil spirits did not return to possess the girls and when he smiled at them it was different than when he smiled for everyone else. It was during this time that Eadwulf, the huntsman's son began to take notice of her. They exchanged glaces in church, and on the village common or where ever they might chance to meet one another. Over the next year, Eadwulf brought her small gifts, leaving them where she would find them and sometimes they would meet in the woods while he hunted or swim in the nearby lake. Unlike the other villagers, Eadwulf did not seem to think there was something wrong with her and dismissed her possession as a fever of the church.
When Eadwulf came to her stepfather and asked for her hand it was good news from every front. It was well known that Eadwulf was a skilled hunter from a well respected family, her marriage would lighten the load at home, she would marry a man she adored and Frater Eadweard would no long touch her. A small dowry was arranged and the wedding set for Winter-Night, but Eadwulf created hard feelings in the village when he spurned Frater Eadweard as the holy man at their union, something that secretly pleased Sunniva. Instead, Eadwulf invited an elderly priest from the next village to perform the ceremony and while everyone attended, many were angry including the good Brother. Yet Eadwulf was a man of commanding presence and not afraid to break with local tradition if it suited him and his beautiful new wife.
On her wedding night, Sunniva finally understood what Frater Eadweard had actually been doing and although she was not disappointed with her new husbands efforts, she could not be satisfied for all the rage that boiled up inside her at the lecherous Brother. Sunniva's honeymoon was longer for Eadwulf's desire to please his young wife and as he made-love to her, she plotted her revenge against Eadweard. Sunniva and Eadwulf's first year of marriage passed quickly as pleasant things do and then the strange pageant arrived. Never before had a traveling pageant stopped in the little thorpe of Wifilisburg, barely three hundred souls and country peasants at that. Many wondered why such a group of skilled entertainers and their odd collection of beasts and freaks would want to entertain simple country folk, but nothing so exciting had ever happened before in the little village so no much cared to ask.
Eadwulf took Sunniva to the pageant and they saw its many wonders and they were impressed, but something else, quite different happened to Sunniva. As she and Eadwulf watched each of the shows late into the night, she began once more to nurse her revenge against Eadweard. It was as if the strange fortune teller knew what the filthy Brother had done to her and the other girls and in the guise of offering her advice on receiving justice, she set Sunniva on the road to revenge. The next morning Eadwulf was gone hunting and she woke to a cold bed and with angry thoughts like spiders skittering in her head. That very afternoon she sought out the other girls as they washed clothes in the river and spoke to them of exposing the foul and false holy-man. But now that Sunniva had found a good husband, the other girls wanted the same and if the Brother was exposed then the shame of what he had done to them would ensure they never had husbands and none of them wanted that to happen. So they pressed Sunniva to keep silent on their behalf, and they could know happiness too. It wasn't an unreasonable request, and Sunniva struggled to stick to the agreement when she had all winter to watch the dirty Brother looking at the younger girls.
That winter was a cold one with heavy snow and the pageant was trapped in the valley below the village until the spring thaw. It was a long, bitter winter the end of which everyone looked forward to with the return of warmth and greenery. One night, a few weeks before the Spring equinox, a brilliant light lit up the top of Beacon Hill and then was gone. It had happened in the darkest hours of night before dawn and the shepherds who attended their flocks on the hill came back to the village in the company of strangers and everyone was sick.
The village elders fearing plague wisely placed the strangers in an old unused house at the edge of the village and sent for a healer. But nothing the healer could do seemed to help the strangers or the shepherds who had gone blind. It was then that Brother Eadweard began to talk of witchcraft once more which stirred some of the villagers up, while others remained uncertain. It was the pageanteers who settled the matter when their leader, a massive black-man spoke on behalf of the the strangers saying that the pageant had healers who could cure this illness and there need not be bloodshed. The village elders were pacified and the shepherds where given into Mauritanus' care. The others seemed to be healing on their own and the fear spread by Eadweard dissipated like fog in the sun, but not before his treachery incensed Sunniva once again and she confronted the other village girls a second time. Things did not go so well however as each of them told her they would call her a liar before the village if she attacked the reputation of the monk.
Sunniva returned home to find Eadwulf acting strangely, their coupling was more frantic than usual and then he left to begin a long night's hunt. Sunniva drowsed thereafter until the arrival of Æthelred the smith's son. His appearance late in the night left Sunniva dubious of his intentions, but from the door of her hut he confessed his feelings for Godiva the baker's daughter and that there was a way for them both to get what they most wanted, but she needed to come with him to the pageant and together they would navigate the Shanty of Fools for his love and her revenge. Without Eadwulf to consult, Sunniva gave in to her darker instincts and followed the smith's son into the pageant.
By night, without all the lights, music and all the performers the pageant was ominous and brooding. As the two of them passed not even the animals in the cages made a noise and eerie silence held sway as if all the tents and their sleeping occupants were holding a collective breath. It bred fear in both Sunniva and Æthelred, for even though they saw no one, nonetheless they were spied upon, if only by the shadows between the tents. The hour was bitterly cold and the sky above a vault of black swirling with countless cold pinpricks of light.
The entrance to the Shanty of Fools lay on the west side of the encampment. It was a singularly unimpressive structure like a corral with old blankets and rotting canvas covering lengths of rope strung between old posts to create a separate space between the area of the shanty and the rest of the pageant. Two crossed logs served as an entrance and once inside, everything changed. The canvas walls of the maze seemed to rise up twenty feet and a thick ground fog obscured the earth, as they walked the labyrinth they saw many strange sights and odd sounds. Periodically they would come upon a group of fools performing a scene, but rather than being from the bible or parable, these scenes were taken directly from Sunniva and Æthelred personal lives and played out mockingly before them. Things that neither wished know were revealed to both that night before they found themselves at the center of the shanty, a place the fools called the Tabernacle.
The tabernacle turned out to be a beautiful white tent of expensive silk embroidered with gold thread. Before it was a great bronze basin and stone alter upon which burnt offerings still smoldered. All the fools gathered together behind Nabil ibn Saqr in his strange bright clothes so much like a woman's dress. He called her forth alone and asked her what she truly desired, her answer was revenge. Then he smiled and asked for the silver wolf's head medallion which he held up to the sky and and all the fools began to chant in a strange tongue until the medallion seemed to glow in the star-light. Placing the medallion around Sunniva's neck, he told her what she must do and when it must be done and that once it was done, it could never be undone short of death.
Sunniva and Æthelred were then shown out a much shorter route through the shanty to find themselves on the edge of the pasture between the pageant and the town. The moon was nearly up when they separated, but Suniva stopped him with a hand on his shoulder telling him to keep her secret and they would both have what they wanted, his nod was the only answer she ever got, but it was enough. By the time the moon shown full on Sunniva, Æthelred was long gone, and just as well for he wouldn't have enjoyed hearing her sinews stretching and bones cracking or her screams at the pain not unlike child birth, but far from holy.
Over the next few nights Sunniva punished each of her former friends for refusing to expose the vile monk for pervert he was with terror and death. She told herself it was justice, but really she enjoyed being the one with power taking what she wanted from those without. At the last when she came for Frater Eadweard in the church, her husband Eadwulf, Æthelred and Godiva, along with the village folk and pageanteers were present for her victory. She could have killed the monk and devoured him whole, but instead she gave him her poisonous bite that he might go mad slowly rather than offer him the ease of a quick death. It was a decision that would haunt her for years to come, for Frater Eadweard fled to the pageant for safety and healing.
In the months that followed, she discovered several important things about her new life. That which she had truly bartered away to Nabil ibn Saqr that night had been her marriage, for Eadwulf grew cold and unloving to her and loneliness was the price for her vengeance. This made the discover of her pregnancy particularly painful and then Eadwulf became a vargr, cursed as much as she, but undead, a terrible father for a living child. Worst of all these things was the discovery of another wolf-killer among the pageant-folk. For she began to find the bodies of young women wherever the pageant would go, torn and shredded as if by a wolf. Then one night in Verona she came upon the killer, a giant black wolf as large as she and they fought, but neither was stronger and both fled in different directions, but the next morning after the full moon, Brother Eadweard smiled at her and she knew he too had made a deal with Nabil ibn Saqr. And their rivalry continues still to this night.
Relationship with Rambert: Sunniva's relationship with Rambert is chilly, due mostly to the fact that she can sense his vargr (vampire) nature and because she still hungers for her husband's lost love.
Recent Events: A year ago, Sunniva went to Rome to confess her pregnancy to Eadwulf (Volberk) and seek his aid in protecting their child. While still chilly of disposition, he agreed to help her, giving her a house of her own on the outskirts of the city and servants to ease her life. After their son's birth, she called him Hákon Eadwulfsson, she returned to the pageant leaving the boy in the hands of Eadwulf's Norse servants. Sunniva now regrets that decision but could not be apart from the pageant for any longer and the pageant is not a place for children.
