Hrolf Kraki's Saga (33 page)

“M-m-my honor is to be at your beck,” stuttered Vögg.
He turned his head birdlike back and forth along the row of them. “D-does anybody, any of my lords want more?”

“Aye, you can fill this,” said Hjalti and handed him an aurochs horn twined with gold. As Vögg scuttled off, his arms and legs pumping, Hjalti laughed, “You know, I think his trouble is he needs to get laid. So do I, as far as that goes.”

“Well, you’ve a right pretty sweetheart,” said the king. “Why didn’t you bring her tonight?”

“She was too scared at the thought of going home after dark on Yule Eve. And home she’d’ve had to go, because here’s no place to bang her, guests stacked like cord-wood.” Unlike Bjarki and the other ranking guardsmen, Hjalti owned no full-sized house in or near Leidhra. He felt it was too much trouble, when he could be out hunting or fishing.

Vögg came back and bent the knee as he offered the full horn. Hjalti stroked his own short fair beard—he still did not have thirty winters behind him—and said, “Of course, we do have haymows and such around. Vögg, my friend, how would you like for a Yuletide gift that I told off a thrall girl to pleasure you?”

The youth’s jaw dropped. A while he blushed, sputtered, shifted from one foot to the next, before it dragged from him: “I, I, I thank you, lord, b-b-but—no, if she didn’t want—” He jerked a bow and fled.

Hjalti chuckled and shrugged. Bjarki turned a look more earnest onto the king. “My lord,” he began, “I’ve spoken of this to you before, but being reminded—your only living children are female.”

“And I should beget a son, best by a wedded wife?” said Hrolf Kraki.

“Yes. An heir for us or our own sons to raise on a shield, that Denmark may go on beyond your life.”

“Goodly matches can be had in Svithjodh since King Adhils got rid of himself,” Svipdag said.

Hrolf Kraki nodded. “You’re right, all of you, and I’ve waited too long. There was a girl once—” Pain touched his voice. “She died. I ought to set her ghost
free of me. Let’s talk further about this, the next few days.”

The Golden Boar was borne in. Though the king and his men no longer had much to do with any gods, they had not given up the old usage of making Yuletide vows. He himself was first. He rose, laid his right hand on the image, gripped a beaker of wine in his left, and spoke the words he did each year: “As best I can, I will strive to be Landfather … for everyone.” His tone was low but carried from end to end of the room. Men sat hushed while he drained the cup. Then they cheered forth their love.

Soon after, Hjalti asked leave to say goodnight. He had several miles ahead of him before he could cool his lust. A groom, sleepy and shivering, brought his harnessed horse out into the courtyard. Over the crupper were slung mail and shield, and he bore a spear as well as a sword and knife. Unlikely did it seem he would need any of this in the king’s peace. He mounted. Hoofs clattered on flagstones, pounded down lanes where houses loomed like cliffs, passed through the gates and left the burg behind.

He rode north at a brisk pace. The night was quiet and chill; breath smoke white from man and beast, hoarfrost formed on iron, the
clop
when a rock in the road was kicked rang far across rime-gray meadows and murkily huddled farmsteads. Overhead were many stars and a vast, shuddering sheaf of northlights, from which rays of wan red and glacier green fanned out over half the sky. The Bridge glittered, the Wains wheeled on their unending ring around the year. Once an owl went soundlessly by, and Hjalti thought of fieldmice huddled in fear of those wings … like men in fear of the Powers?

He lifted his head. Not him!

Thyra his leman dwelt alone in a hut, small but stout, which he had bought for the use of those women he found among thralls or poor crofters. When they grew swollen with child, or he otherwise wearied of them, his custom was to send them off with enough gold—and their freedom, if they had not had this before—that they should
be able to marry fairly well. Nonetheless they sometimes wept.

He stabled the horse himself, feeling his way, and beat on the house door. “Who’s that?” trembled from behind shutters.

“Who do you think?” Hjalti teased.

“I … I’d not looked for you—”

“Well, here I am, and badly in need of warmth!”

Having left a clay lamp lit, she could unlatch the door and lead him inside at once. His hands roved in the light of that wick and the embers of a banked hearthfire. Thyra was a big young woman, fair-haired, full-breasted, goodly to see.

She clung to him, her fingers so taut as to belie the rounded softness of everything else. “Oh, I’m glad, I’m glad,” she whispered. “I was frightened. I kept having gruesome dreams, and waking, and trying to stay awake, only they came back—”

He scowled; for strangeness walks ever abroad on Yule Eve. “What dreams?”

“Eagles tearing at dead men, men who’d been horribly hacked … ravens above them, and darknesses beyond, lit by flashes like those lights out there tonight…. We had an old neighbor when I was little, he called the northlights the Dead Men’s Dance…. Then a voice went on and on in my dreams, forever, as if it and I fell down a bottomless gash in the world, but I couldn’t understand what it said—”

For a heartbeat Hjalti was daunted. Remembering his thought as he rode hither, he then smiled. “I’ve that which’ll soon drive such things out of you, my dear.”

They hastened to bed, where he made love to her thrice in a short time. Afterward they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

But the dreams came upon him too: gallopings and shouts through a windy sky, wingbeats, cruel beaks and claws, a feeling of loss unspeakable and unbounded.

He struggled awake. “I will not fall back to that!” he said aloud. Thyra moaned at his side. And did he catch another noise, in the thick night where he lay?

Aye, something moved and shrilled, miles away across the loneliness. Hjalti glided from beneath the covers. Cold gnawed at his bare flesh. He fumbled across the floor to a window and threw back its shutters.

Still the land lay hoar and empty, beneath leaping spears of light and the utterly withdrawn stars. Here and there, trees stood like blackened skeletons. Quartering the world-rim, from Roskilde Fjord toward Leidhra, moved a host.

Hjalti had keen eyes; and he knew too well what the gleam of iron meant, the bulk of men by the many hundreds massed together, muffled sound of boots and hoofs, trundling of carts laden with war-gear. Yet this was no wholly human gang. Wings toiled dark and ragged overhead; monstrous shapelessnesses stalked, crawled, writhed on the flanks of the warriors.

The truth burst upon him. He shouted.

Thyra started from sleep. “What is it?” she wailed.

“Come here.” The answer was raw in his throat. “Look.”

He pointed. “Friends don’t fare like that,” he said. “Too late, I see what was keeping King Hjörvardh and Queen Skuld. They got fighters to meet on Fyn, landed on an unpeopled strand, and now—and now—it has to be them! Who else but that witch would bring such beings … and she withheld the scot—O gods!”

They have a revenge in the North which they call cutting the blood-eagle. The man is held down on his belly, and a blade loosens ribs from backbone till they spread out like wings. It would not have drawn from Hjalti the shriek which the woman heard this night.

“Outnumbered, unwarned,” he groaned. In another yell: “Light! Start the lamp, you lazy slut! I have to get ready—and find my king!”

It may be that she was hurt by the sudden nothingness which she had become in his eyes, and wanted to strike back a little, to remind him of herself. Or maybe she was only shallow, did not grasp what danger was upon King Hrolf, who had been almighty as long as her young memory reached, and she hoped to brighten her lover’s
mood by a jest. She is dead these hundreds of years and cannot speak. As Hjalti, in mail and helmet, led forth his horse, Thyra stood in the doorway. The lamp she bore cast a yellow flicker on a cloak she had thrown over her shoulders and the pride of her beauty beneath. She smiled and called, however shakily: “If you fall in battle, how old a man should I marry?”

Hjalti stopped as if frozen under the stars. At length he grated, “Which would you like best, two fellows of twenty years or one of eighty?”

“Oh, the two young men,” she barely laughed. Maybe she was about to add something like, “Not that they could really replace the one of you, my darling.” But he screamed:

“Those words will you suffer for, whore!” He sprang at her; his knife flared; he caught her by the hair and slashed off her nose.

She staggered back. Her lamp smashed on the earth and went out. Blood poured from between the fingers she lifted. “Remember me if any come to blows over you,” jeered Hjalti, “though I think most’ll find little to want in you hereafter.”

Too stunned to weep, she said—her voice which had been sweet gone flat and strangled—“Ill have you dealt with me. I never looked for that … from you.”

The knife clattered out of Hjalti’s hand. He stood a while, seeing how dread on behalf of his lord and his brothers in arms had made a berserker of him. Stooping, he picked up the weapon, for it might be needed, and sheathed it, red though it was.

“None can think of everything,” he said in his sorrow.

He might have tried to kiss her, but she shrank from him with horror. And … they were asleep at Leidhra. He soared to the saddle and was off.

The enemy host was moving fast and had gotten far ahead of him. Over the land he rushed. Wind roared in his ears, through lungs and blood. It was as if the north-lights filled his skull. He did keep in mind that he must go a long way around, not be seen by his foemen or,
worse, that night made flesh which walked and flapped about them. He came to the stockade of Leidhra burg with some time to spare just as his horse fell dead.

He sprang clear, rolled over on the ground, picked himself up and shouted at heaven: “Then take it if you want!”

Past the drowsy watchmen he stormed, through the lanes to the slumbering hall. There he snatched a brand from a low-burning trench, whirled it till flames blossomed high, and cried his warning.

Out among the houses he sped, calling on every man who ever gave troth to Hrolf Kraki to rise and arm himself. An old Bjarkamaal puts words in his mouth:

“Warriors, waken to ward your king!

All who fain would be friends to their lord,

know that our need is now to fight.

I tell you that here, bearing hardened weapons,

Hrolf, there has come a host against you,

and they ring our dwellings around with swords.

I think that the scot of Skuld, your sister,

no gold has bought to gleam in the halls,

but strife with the Skjoldung seeks instead

Unfriendly he fared here, the false King Hjörvardh,

to lay you low, that lordship be his.

Doomed to the death we are indeed

if no revenge we take on the viper.

Athelings, rise up and honor your oaths,

all that you swore when the ale made you eager!

In foul winds as fair, keep faith with your lord,

he who withheld no hoard for himself

but gave us freely both gold and silver.

Strike with the swords he bestowed, and the spears,

in helmets and hauberks you got from his hand;

let shine the shields that he shared with you,

thus honestly earning the wealth he gave.

In manhood we now must be making our claim

on the goods we got in a time more glad.

Feasting and fondness have come to an end.

Horns we hoisted in drinking of healths;

broad were our boasts as the food-laden board;

we gleeful played games with girls on the benches,

and maidens grew merry when marking our passage

in colorful cloaks that we had from the king.

But leave now your lemans! Our lord has a need,

in the hard game of Hild, for a hewing with blades

to throw back the threat at his throat and at ours.

Frightened men are not fit to follow him;

rather we rally none but the dauntless

who ask no quarter from ax or arrow

and eye unblinking the ice-cold edges.

His champions hold the chieftain’s honor;

best he goes forth when bold men follow

shoulder to shoulder and ready to shield him.

Hard shall the housecarl grip the haft,

swiftly to swing a sword at the foeman

or beak of ax that it cleave his breast.

Hang not back, though the odds be heavy.

Ill did it always become an atheling

if ever he truckled to tricksy luck.”

They sprang up: Hromund the Hard, Hrolf the Swift-Coming, Svipdag and Beigadh and Hvitserk the fifth, Haaklang the sixth, Hard-Hrefill the seventh, Haaki the Bold the eighth, Hvatt the Highborn, Starulf the tenth, and in the forefront Bodhvar-Bjarki and Hjalti the High-Minded himself; and many another man, until the burg roiled with their noise and the clang of their weapons.

Meanwhile the troop of Hjörvardh and Skuld had arrived, to surround Leidhra with numbers which swarmed further than eye could reach through the gloom. Some readied rams to break down the stockade, though doubtless they would rather spare the town by fighting in the open if the defenders agreed. In the offing, houses began to flare where the torch was put to them. Overhead rustled queer flights, and from amidst the grumble and clash of the men came unhuman grunting noises. Black tents had been raised, of ugly shapes; it could be seen that within them glowed witch-fires.

“Now does King Hrolf have need of unfrightened fel
lows,” said Bjarki. “They who’d not huddle behind his back must have boldness in their breasts.”

“You speak oddly, old friend,” his lord told him.

Bjarki shook himself. Standing hunched on a watch-tower, his big shaggy form seemed less a man’s than a bear’s. “The air reeks of spells,” he muttered. “I feel—a stirring? Something my father knew ere I was born, and his ghost remembers—?” He shambled back into the hall.

There King Hrolf sat down in his high seat and let the messengers of Hjörvardh and Skuld come before him. They said, with a firmness that wavered under the grim looks upon them, that if he would save his life, he must become the kept man of his brother-in-law.