The Long Ships (39 page)

When the question arose of what names to give them, Orm declared that one of them must be called Oddny, after his maternal grandmother, which greatly delighted Asa.

“But we must name her sister after some member of your family,” he told Ylva, “and that you must choose yourself.”

“It is difficult to be sure which name will bring her the most luck,” said Ylva. “My mother was a war captive, and died when I was seven years old. She was called Ludmilla, and was daughter to a chieftain of the Obotrites; and she was stolen away by force from her own wedding. For all warriors who have visited that country agree that the best time to attack Obotrites or any other Wendish people is when they are celebrating some great wedding, because then they are drunk and lack their usual skill at arms, and their watchmen lie sleeping because of the great strength of the mead they brew for such occasions, so that rich booty can then be secured without much exertion, in the form both of treasure and of young women. I have never seen a woman as beautiful as she was; and my father always used to say that her luck was good, though she died young, for, for three whole years, she remained his favorite wife; and it was no small thing for an Obotrite woman, he used to say, to be permitted into the bed of the King of the Danes and bear him a daughter. Although it may be that she herself had other feelings concerning this, for after she was dead, I heard her slave-girls whispering among themselves that shortly after her arrival in Denmark she had tried to hang herself; which they thought arose from the fact of her having seen her bridegroom killed before her eyes when they had taken her and were carrying her away to the ships. She loved me very tenderly, but I cannot be sure whether it would be a lucky thing to name the child after her.”

Asa said that such a thing must not be thought of, for there could be no worse luck than being carried away by foreign warriors, and if they gave the child her grandmother’s name the same fate might befall her.

But Orm said that the problem could not be settled as easily as that. “For I myself was stolen away by warriors,” he said, “but I do not reckon that to have been an unlucky thing for me; for if that had not happened, I should not have become the man I am, and would never have won my sword or my gold chain, nor Ylva neither. And if Ludmilla had not been stolen away, King Harald would not have begotten the daughter who now shares my bed.”

They found it difficult to make up their minds about this, for, though Ylva was anxious that her fair and virtuous mother’s name should be perpetuated, she was unwilling to expose her daughter to the risk of being stolen by the Smalanders or some such savage people. But when Father Willibald heard what they were arguing about, he declared immediately that Ludmilla was an excellent and lucky name, having been borne by a pious princess who had lived in the country of Moravia in the time of the old Emperor Otto. So they decided to call the child Ludmilla; and all the housefolk prophesied a marvelous future for one so curiously named, for it was a name that none of them had heard before.

As soon as the two infants were strong enough, they were baptized by Father Willibald to the accompaniment of much bawling. They waxed fast, enjoying the best of health, and were soon tumbling around the floor with the huge Irish dogs that Orm had brought with him from Skania, or fighting over the dolls and animals which Rapp and Father Willibald carved out of wood for them. Asa doted upon them both and exhibited far more patience toward them than toward any other member of the household; but Orm and Ylva sometimes had difficulty in deciding which of the two was the more obstinate and troublesome. It was continually impressed upon Ludmilla that she had been named after a saint, but this had no noticeable effect on the manner in which she conducted herself. The two infants got on well together, however, though they occasionally went for one another’s hair; and when one of them had her bottom smacked, the other would stand by and howl no whit less resonantly than the punished miscreant.

The next year, early in the summer, Orm completed his church. He had sited it on the water’s edge, where the bank curved, so that it would shield the other buildings from the river, and he had made it so spacious that there was room for sixty people to sit in it, though nobody could suggest where so large a congregation was likely to come from. Then he built a good rampart across the base of his peninsula, surmounted by a double stockade with a strong gate in the center of it; for, the more he built, the more he worried for the safety of his house, and he was anxious to be prepared against the danger of attack by robbers, as well as by any ruffians whom King Sven might send their way.

When all this work had been completed, Ylva, to her great joy and that of all the household, gave birth to a son. Asa said that this must be God’s reward to them for having built the church, and Orm agreed that this might well be the reason for so excellent a stroke of luck.

The new child was without flaw in limb or body and, from the moment of his arrival, leather-lunged. Everyone agreed that he must, without doubt, be destined to become a chieftain, since he had the blood both of King Harald and of Ivar of the Broad-Embrace in his veins. When they brought him to his father for the first time, Orm took Blue-Tongue down from her hook on the wall, drew her from her sheath, and placed flour and a few grains of salt upon the tip of her blade. Then Asa brought the child’s head carefully toward the sword until his tongue and lips touched the offering. Father Willibald watched this procedure frowningly. He made the sign of the cross over the child and said that so unchristian a custom, which involved bringing the child into contact with a weapon of death, was evil and not to be encouraged. But nobody agreed with him, and even Ylva, weak and exhausted as she was, cried cheerfully from her bed that there was no sense in his argument.

“It is the custom for children of noble birth to be initiated thus,” she said. “For it brings them the courage of chieftains and a contempt for danger, and weapon-luck, and, besides, skill in the choosing of words. I cannot believe that Christ, from all that you tell us about Him, is the sort of god who would be likely to object to any child receiving such gifts as these.”

“It is a rite honored by time,” said Orm, “and the ancients had a great store of wisdom, even though they did not know about Christ. I myself was made to lick a sword-tip for my first meal, and I do not intend that my son, who is King Harald’s grandson, shall have a worse start in life than I had.”

So there the matter remained, though Father Willibald shook his head sadly and muttered something to himself about the way the Devil still ruled these northern lands.

ORM was now in better spirits than ever before, for every enterprise to which he laid his hand flourished. His fields bore a rich harvest, his cattle waxed fat, his barns and storehouses were full, a son had been born to him (and he had good hopes that it might not be his last), and Ylva and his children enjoyed the best of health. He took good care to see that there was no idleness among his men once dawn had broken; Asa kept a sharp eye on the female hands as they toiled in the dairy or sat on their weaving-stools; Rapp showed himself to have a good hand at carpentry and smithery and at setting snares for birds and animals; and each evening Father Willibald invoked the blessing of God upon them all. Orm’s only regret was that his home lay so far from the sea; for, he said, it sometimes gave him a feeling of emptiness to have no sound in his ears but the murmur of the forest on all sides, and never to hear the whisper of the summer sea or feel its salt on his lips.

But sometimes he was visited by evil dreams, and then he would become so agitated in his sleep that Ylva would wake him to ask whether the night mare was riding him, or whether there was any trouble on his mind. When he had awakened and had fortified his courage with strong ale, she would hear, perhaps, that in his sleep he had returned to the Moorish galley and had been rowing his heart out as the whip snaked across his shoulders and the groans of his fellows filled his ears and their wealed backs bent painfully before his eyes; and on the morning after such a dream he loved to sit beside Rapp, who never dreamed, in the carpenter’s shed, and exchange memories with him of those far-off days.

But worse than these were the two dreams that he dreamed about King Sven. For the Moorish galley was but a memory of the past, but when he dreamed of King Sven and his wrath, he could not be sure that they might not be omens of ill luck to come. When, therefore, he had had such a dream, a great unrest would come over him, and he would describe in great detail to Asa and Father Willibald all that he had seen in his sleep, in order that they might help him to arrive at the dream’s meaning. On one occasion he saw King Sven standing, smiling evilly, in the prow of a warlike ship that rowed nearer and nearer toward him while he, with but a few men manning his oars, strove desperately, but vainly, to flee. The second time he was lying in the dark, unable to move a finger, listening to Ylva screaming piteously for help as men carried her away; and then, of a sudden, he saw King Sven walking toward him in the light of flames, carrying Blue-Tongue in his hand; and at this he had awakened.

Asa and Father Willibald agreed that such dreams as these must possess some significance, and Asa wept when Orm told her of his second vision. But when she considered the matter more closely, she became less despondent.

“It may be that you have inherited from me the gift of truthful dreaming,” she said, “though it is a gift that I would not willingly bestow on anyone, for I myself have never gained profit from it, and it has brought me nothing but anxiety and sorrow that I would not otherwise have known. One thing, however, comforts me, and that is that I myself have not had any dream which could be interpreted as a warning of evil luck to come. For any stroke of bad luck that injured you would touch me no less nearly, so that if anything was to threaten you and your house, I, too, should receive warning of it in a dream.”

“For my part,” said Father Willibald, “I believe that King Sven has enough to occupy him elsewhere and has little time to spare trying to search you out in these wild forests. Besides which, do not forget that it is against me, and not you, that his anger is primarily directed, for it was my hand that flung the stone that felled him, as David, the servant of God, smote the heathen Goliath; and I have had no evil dreams. It cannot, though, be denied that the paths of evil are long and crooked, and that it is always a good thing to be prepared for the worst.”

Orm agreed with this last observation, and had the stockade on his rampart strengthened and tested, and the great gate reinforced with good crossbeams, that he might sleep the more soundly at night. Before long the memory of these bad dreams had almost passed from his mind, and he began to think less of them than of the great christening feast that he was intending to hold in his son’s honor.

He lost no sleep in trying to think of a name for the child, for he was determined that the boy should be called Harald.

“There is always the danger,” he said, “that, by giving him a king’s name, I may expose him to some grievous fate. But few men have enjoyed such luck as King Harald, or have won a greater name; and of all the chieftains I have met, only one, Almansur of Andalusia, was as wise as he. So I think I should be denying my son great possibilities if I withheld from him the name that his grandfather bore so well.”

“There is only one thing about that name that worries me,” said Ylva. “It might cause him to become inordinately greedy for women as my father was. He could never have enough of them. It may be a good quality in a king to be so inclined, but I do not think it is to be desired in other men.”

“He will be strong and well-shaped,” said Asa. “That I can tell already. And if he is blessed with a merry humor also, he will need no king’s name for women to fall ready victims to the snares he will lay for them. My son Are was such a man, though his talent brought him bad luck. Women could not resist him when he winked at them and took them by their plaits. I have heard them confess as much with their own lips. He had laughing eyes and a humor that was never clouded, and was the best of all my sons after Orm; and I pray that God may never allow you, Ylva, to know such grief as I knew when he came to bad luck because of his skill at love-making and went the way to Miklagard and never came back.”

“That is my wish, too,” said Ylva. “Though, now that I think about it, I would rather that my son had his way with women than that he should stand tongue-tied in their presence and never dare to chance his luck with them.”

“You need have no fear of that,” said Orm. “There is little bashfulness in his ancestry.”

They now began to make great preparations for their son’s christening feast, to which many guests were to be invited; for word of it was to be sent to all good people for miles around. It was Orm’s wish that there should be no stint of anything, whether baked, brewed, or slaughtered; for he was anxious that these forest people should have the opportunity to see what happened when a chieftain held open house for three whole days. All the eating and drinking was to take place in the church, because there was more room there than in any of the other buildings; then on the third day, when all the guests were merry and replete, Father Willibald would preach them a sermon, after which, Orm doubted not, many of them would offer themselves for baptism.

At first Father Willibald flatly refused to allow a feast to be held in his church, because of the rowdiness and blasphemy that would certainly accompany such an occasion, especially since he had just completed his altar and had carved a fine cross to stand upon it. In the end, however, the consideration that many souls might thereby be won over to the true religion overcame his scruples and he consented. Two things troubled Ylva: first, she was anxious that the ale should not be brewed too strong, since their guests were, many of them, wild folk, and women as well as men would be sitting at the tables; and secondly, she could not make up her mind whether to wear her gold chain or whether it might not perhaps be wiser to keep this hidden.