Hrolf Kraki's Saga (32 page)

Always she nagged Hjörvardh about his lowliness. This way of hers grew worse after the High King returned from Uppsala, to make war no longer and to stand aloof from the gods. “It must not go on,” she said.

Hjörvardh sighed, where he lay in bed next to her. “Best will be for us as for the others, to suffer this and let things stay calm.”

“Small manhood do you have,” she spat through the dark, “seeing how you brook the shame that’s put on you.”

“It’s unwise to brave King Hrolf. None dare raise a shield against him.”

“You
don’t, so skimpy is the strength in you. He who risks naught, wins naught. Who can know before it’s been tried, whether anyone can beat King Hrolf and his warriors? I think he’s become altogether victoryless, and he
himself knows that, and this is why he stays at home. Well, we can come to him!”

“Skuld, he’s your own brother—”

“I’d not spare him on that account.”

“Be glad of what we have, my dear.” He groped for her, feeling the cool smoothness of her skin, breathing the summeriness of her hair. She thrust him away and turned her back. Hjörvardh did not try to have her. He had long since learned he could only do that when she wanted it, and then it was oftenest her who bestrode him.

She did not push the matter further for a while, aside from a growing shrewishness. Indeed, the overthrow of King Hrolf was nothing to undertake lightly. For four more years she busied herself in the deeper lore of witchcraft.

“Have a care with those spells,” Hjörvardh begged her. “King Adhils was a great wizard. It did him no good.”

Skuld’s laughter froze him. “Adhils? That poor wretch? He only thought he knew something; and few were the beings that heeded him. I have teachers—” She broke off and said no more.

Then a Yule Eve came when she rode off alone as was her wont. Folk glimpsed her from afar, mounted on the ugly old nag she used at such times, her hair and a cloak of the same blackness tossing around her shoulders. She was armed only with a knife and a rune-carved staff; but from men she had nothing to fear. She vanished in twilight, and those who had seen her go by hastened indoors to their hearthfires.

Some miles from Odense, on the shore of the bay, stood a hill. Wind-wrenched trees and brush, bare now in winter, grew around its bottom. Whins and ling decked the rest of it, up to the top where a dolmen squatted. Snowfall had been scant thus far in the year; the land lay dark, bushes snickering an answer to the whine of a north wind. Clouds drove over heaven, rimmed in paleness by a crooked moon which flew between them. Waves clashed on the strand, making stones rattle. The air flowed raw. A taste of salt was on it, and the stench of a
dead seal which had washed shore. Inland, wolves gave tongue.

Skuld dismounted and went into the dolmen. There she had a kettle and firewood for the seething of spells. Something had already filled it for her; and she needed no toil with flint and tinder to kindle a blaze. Those were low flames, blue, heatless on the skin if not the water, making shadows move so monstrously on the stone walls that the murk was not lifted but came nearer.

Crouched in the low, narrow room, Skuld held her rune-staff over the brew and cried certain words.

A sound came as of sucking. She stepped forth. Any other horse than hers would have screamed and bolted at how the water bubbled down below, how something rose from it and moved ashore. Earth shivered at the weight of each slow footstep. He who climbed the hill dripped water which glowed coldly white. Chill breathed from his wet flesh, with a rankness of fish and undersea reaches. Like kelp were his hair and beard, and his eyes like lamps.

“Bold must you be to have called me,” he whispered.

She looked up the hulk of him and said: “I have need of your help, kinsman.”

He waited.

“I know how to raise beings from outside the world of men,” she told him, “but they may well rend me unless a might like yours bids them stay their fangs.”

“Why should I ward you?”

“That the High King’s peace may be broken.”

“What is that to me?”

“Do not ships plow your waters, more every year, and never a manslaughter aboard to feed your conger eels? Do men not fare out in yearly greater numbers, unfrightened, to club your seals, harpoon your whales, raid the nests of your cormorants and gannets, drag their nets full of your fish, and wreck the sky-clad loneliness of your outermost islands? I warn you, I who am half human, I warn you: man is the foe of the Old Life, whether he knows it or not, and in the end his works will cover the world—never again will it know freedom or wild
magics—unless we bring him down, haul him before it is too late back into the brotherhood of Beast, Tree, and Waters. For your own sake, help me!”

“Would you not merely replace one king with another?”

“You know I would not. Not really. I would
use
folk.”

Long and long he stared at her, there in the windy dark, until she herself grew frightened. At last he laughed, a strangely shrill gull-noise out of so vast a throat. “Done! You know how such a bargain is made fast.”

“I do,” said Skuld.

When she had taken off her clothes and followed him into the dolmen, she must bite her lips against the cold weight and scaliness and smell, clench her fists against the hugeness that battered her bloody. She knew this would happen often again.

But he would stand by her when she called horrors out of the earth.

Toward dawn she rode home. Clouds had wholly shrouded heaven. Her nag stumbled in the gloom. Dry snow blew over the ground. Shuddering with cold, her body one ache of weariness where it was not in pain, she nonetheless held her head aloft in a pride no hawk could have matched.

Of sudden, hoofs resounded. They did not thud, they rang, and went swifter than moonbeams. The steed which overhauled hers was the hue of milk and silver, unearthly fair. Likewise was the woman in the saddle. In robes which gleamed and shimmered as if woven of rainbows, she had the face and midnight hair which were Skuld’s; but her eyes were golden, and sorrow was upon her.

“Daughter,” she cried, “wait! Hear me! You know not what you are doing—”

Other hoofs—too many hoofs—roared over the sky. Hounds bayed up yonder, horns blew, iron flashed. He who rode before that troop was on a stallion which had eight legs, and wore a cloak which flapped like wings and a wide-brimmed hat which shaded his one eye. He hefted his spear as if to cast it at the woman. She wailed, wheeled her horse around, and fled weeping. Skuld sat
where she was, watched the Wild Hunt rush by, and laughed.

In the morning, as she and her husband made themselves ready for the Yule offerings, she sent their servants away. Across the room she strode to grab Hjörvardh’s wrist. Her nails drew blood. He looked at her: worn out, darknesses around the sunken eyes, yet a flame clad in flesh.

“Hear me!” Though her voice was low, somehow it shook him. “I’ve told you before how unfitting it is that you bow down to Hrolf Kraki. I tell you now, it need not go on, and it will not.”

“What—what—” he stammered. “What are you thinking of?”

“I have gotten signs that promise us victory.”

“My oaths I swore—”

“The night which is past heard other oaths. Hjörvardh, you are my man. You must then be man enough to take revenge for the scurvy trick my brother played on you long ago—and moreover get the lordship of Denmark.” He opened his mouth. She laid a finger across those lips, smiled, and purred: “I’ve thought out a plan which should work. Listen.

“Strong is King Hrolf’s household. However, we can raise more fighters than that, and if we take him by surprise, he’ll have no chance to send a war-arrow among the yeomen. You ask how we’ll get such a band of our own, without his knowing? Well, there are many who’ve no love for him, chieftains he’s humbled, berserkers he’s sent away, outlaws skulking hungry, Saxons, Swedes, Götar, Norsemen, aye, even Finns who’d be glad to see him cast down, and … others I know of.

“We need wealth for bribes and to pay for weapons from abroad, smuggled hither. I’ve hit on a way to get that—keep it, rather, keep what’s rightfully ours. We’ll send word to Leidhra, asking leave to withhold payment of the scot for three years, and at the end of that time to bring it all at once.”

“Why?” Hjörvardh got out.

“We’ll explain that we need it to buy ships and goods
which’ll further outland trade. Hrolf ought to like that. And it’ll help make the work, the comings and goings hereabouts, seem harmless to him.”

“But—but—”

“What’s the risk? At worst he’ll refuse us, and then we must stay at peace. I don’t think that’ll be needful. If we can keep back the wealth, why, we’ll feel our way forward, doing nothing till we’re sure of our next step, making no move till any doubt is dead that we can overwhelm him.”

Hjörvardh was unwilling, but Skuld kept after him day by day, night by night. At length he agreed, and messengers went off across the Great Belt.

They brought back word that King Hrolf was happy to let his brother-in-law put off payment for as long as was asked, and wished him well in his undertakings.

Thereafter Hjörvardh began searching out those who had grudges against his overlord, and every kind of ill-doer. Egged on by Skuld, his eagerness waxed as he saw his strength building up. For her part, she found cunning ways to keep hidden from Leidhra what was really going on. If one who was loyal to Hrolf Kraki began wondering aloud about some of the men who came to Odense, and if the story given out did not set his mind at ease, she had spells to blind and dazzle.

No longer did she pester her husband. Instead, she was so loving to him that he became like a worshipful puppy. Even then, he never got the courage to ask what she did on those nights when she rode alone from the hall.

Thus three years went by.

As for King Hrolf and his men during this time, what can be said other than that they lived in happiness, and the land which he steered did likewise? In the welfare and safety of folk, in righteous laws and judgments, in good harvests and burgeoning markets, in growth of towns and sowing of new fields, in man dwelling at peace with his neighbor, are no tales to tell—only, afterward, memories.

Surely the troopers found much to do. Besides attending the king, they had their own ships and farms to look after. No doubt Bjarki went back to the Uplands
and greeted his mother and stepfather, taking along many fine gifts; and Svipdag fared away off to Finland in search of furs; and Hjalti sailed to England to see what he could see; and it may well be that they rowed up the rivers of Russia or along the Rhine to Frankish countries. If so, they were traders. Big and well-armed as they were, nobody tried attacking them.

At home they had merriment, every night a feast in the king’s hall where the boards well-nigh buckled under the meat and horns were always filled, skalds chanted, wanderers yarned about their travels, and Hrolf Kraki the ring-breaker stinted nothing. There would be daily weapon drill, and the care of steel, and such-like chores; but there would also be hunting, fishing, fowling, wrestling matches, races afoot or on horseback or in boats, stallion fights, games of skill like draughts or gambling with knucklebones, long lazy talks, gadding about and chaffering with yeomen, planning, daydreaming; and somewhere in or near Leidhra burg, each man had at least one woman, and thus fell into those bonds which the hands of small children weave.

There is nothing to tell about those seven years of peace, save that Denmark has never forgotten them.

At the end, King Hjörvardh and Queen Skuld sent word to their kinsman King Hrolf. They would come spend Yule with him, bringing the scot they owed.

Said he to the messengers: “Tell them how glad I am of that, and how welcome they shall be.”

II

The week around midwinter was a time for feasts, fires, meetings in mirth and love, a break in that season when a day was no more than a glimmer in the night. But never was there more honest joy than in the hall of Hrolf Kraki.

On this Yule Eve the flames bawled, horns and cups clashed together, laughter and song and talk surfed everywhere around till the walls boomed. In a sable-trimmed kirtle embroidered red and blue, trews of white linen,
gold heavy on arms and neck and brow, the king in his high seat glowed before them all. At his feet panted the hound Gram, on his shoulder perched the hawk High-breeks, close to him were the sharers of his tarings, beyond them the best men and ladies of the whole wide realm he had forged. He smiled, happy to see this much happiness. Yet a slight sorrow was in him and he said to Bjarki:
“Why
are Skuld and Hjörvardh not among us? Could they have been shipwrecked?”

“Hardly, lord, on that short a trip and calm as the weather’s been,” answered the Norseman. “Belike something came up that held them back from starting, and they’re beached for the night on Zealand’s west coast and will row into Roskilde harbor tomorrow.”

“Unless she’s come to grief from one of those businesses she’s forever running and runing after,” muttered Svipdag. He had never liked the king’s sister or her dark crafts.

“Hoy, that’s too uncheerful.” Bjarki drained a silver goblet of beer, wiped the foam off his red mustache, and shouted for more.

Vögg sprinted to obey. The boy from Uppsala was become a young man. It could hardly be told; he was still short, scrawny, almost beardless upon what little chin he had, his hair tangled regardless of how hard he combed it. The troopers had given up trying to make a warrior of him. At weapon practice, weak, slow, awkward, he won merely bruises, and a few times broken bones. However, they liked him well enough—his pale eyes dwelt upon them with such endless awe—spoke kindly to him, saw to it that he was well-fed and well-clad. In return he fell over himself in his eagerness to run any errand or do any job. His proudest boast was that he had worked his way up to being cupbearer to the king and the twelve great captains.

“Thank you,” said Bjarki. He peered through the roiling, juniper-smelling warm smoke and added across the din: “Why, you’ve sweated yourself as wet as a fresh-caught haddock. Sit down, lad, have a stoup and let the women serve for a while.”