Hrald was glad to hear this, and showed it on his face. Over their time sailing here the older man had taken a liking to the youth, and wanted him to prosper.
“I will not leave for three days, if you mean to sail back with me. Mind the silver you have earned,” the captain went on, standing and stretching. “Do not spend it all here on Gotland,” he ended with a grin.
Other than buying needed food and drink Hrald intended to spend none of it. He finished his ale and looked about him. The Sun had passed its highest point and begun its westward journey towards the sea he had just crossed. Hrald thought he would walk about and see the place more fully. He had sold the Anglian salt from the deck of the knorr; had not even the effort of carrying it onto land, for the merchant who bought it had strode down the planking to meet the newly landed ship and inquire what it carried. Hrald knew Gotland had no King, nor even any great chieftains, but he was still surprised when no man of authority stepped forward to demand a tariff from his sale. Trade was free here; no wonder so many merchants favoured the place. He had already seen one with bushels of rare miniver skins, the furs snow-white and of a plushness to make a King open his purse. For its small size, Paviken attracted only the best of goods.
He could return to the knorr and sleep on the deck when it grew dark. For now he would fully stretch his long legs. And he could use a wash. He did not see a wash house, but had already seen a number of women kneeling by a stream that ran into the lagoon, swirling their laundry through the current, then folding and laying it on the flat rocks to beat the water out with wooden washing bats. The flowing stream water would be fresh; he could splash his face and wash his feet.
He went a little upstream from the women, took off his tunic and pulled handfuls of the cold water over face and chest. He had a single piece of linen towelling in his leathern pack, now as soiled as his clothing was, and dried himself with that.
He turned back to the stream, thinking to drink from it, when he heard a woman’s voice.
“I have a wash-tub at my farm,” she said.
He pivoted, still crouching, to see her. She was young, with light brown, almost reddish hair. She was well formed in her person, and with a measure of comeliness to her face. She had a child too young to speak with her, who held a tiny handful of her mother’s green skirts bunched in one hand, and had her other thumb in her mouth. The woman had a pack, half-full of something, hanging from one shoulder. Her eyes were steadily trained on Hrald.
Hrald returned her look. The tone of her voice had been nearly flat, almost as if she were sharing a fact with him. She spoke in the same strangely inflected Norse that he had heard from the mouths of others here, but he could understand her. She was not smiling as she regarded him, but there was no hardness in her eyes. She was dressed as any country-woman of the Danes might be, a long-sleeved shift of undyed linen under a sleeveless over-gown of light wool, with broad straps of the same over her shoulders. The paired brooches pinning her gown in front were bronze, and not simple embossed ovals of the stuff as wore the women of Dane-mark. Hers were shaped like the heads of cats; he had seen similar brooches on other women in town. They brought to mind the Goddess Freya, who sometimes went about the heavens in a cart pulled by two tom-cats.
He did not know what to say. She spoke, for him.
“If you follow the main road, you will come to a grove of spruces. Turn left there, follow the cart track. The croft with the birches is mine.”
Hrald found himself nodding. The woman picked up the child and set her on her hip and left, walking the way she had told him. He watched her go. He paused, trying to sense his hamingja, his luck-spirit, to see if this was a good move. After a moment he rose to his feet and put on his tunic.
His mind was turning on the way there, turning and coming to no conclusion. He was aware of the quickness of his breath, even though he had not hastened his steps. The thought that she was one of a family of brigands luring him to robbery and mayhap death rose in his tumbling thoughts, and was just as swiftly discarded. She lived on the outskirts of the trading town. Paviken might have no chieftain to exact taxes, but it had laws, and violence of any kind in a trading place was always harshly punished.
He saw the clump of birches and the low fence just beyond it, enclosing a small timber house, larger barn, and two or three outbuildings. As he lifted the wooden hoop that latched the gate he saw the woman. She was standing off to one side, in what must be her kitchen yard. He almost thought she was standing waiting for him. Her little girl was sitting on a low stool, pressing a purple plum to her mouth.
He neared. The woman had moved to the cooking ring fire, which she must have just poked into life, the fresh lengths of wood catching over the smouldering coals. The iron cauldron of water hanging above would not take long to warm, and with a poker she swung it over the growing fire.
Without a word she turned to a big tinned washing tub propped up against the wall of one of her outbuildings. Hrald made a move to help her with it, but she had righted it before he could reach her. She truly did mean what she had said on the stream bank.
She vanished into the house, came back with what looked like alcove curtains and a length of hempen rope. There was a wrought iron hook sunk in the wall of the outbuilding, and she tied the line from it to the cross piece of a tall post driven into the hard ground. She slung the curtains over the line, screening the tinned tub from the back of her house.
The water was simmering now, the air above the black cauldron moving in its heat. She dipped a handled pot into the cauldron and began moving the water, pot by pot into the tub. When it was at a hand span’s depth she stopped, went to her well, and carried back a wooden pail of well water, which she set by the side the of the tub. The last thing she brought was a small round crock, one which might hold soft tallow-and-ash soap. Then she looked at Hrald.
“You can wash now,” she said.
He almost might have laughed, if her face were not so grave. Her voice was strained as if she could scarcely speak. They had exchanged no word since his arrival, and he had yet to say anything at all to her. There was no reason for laughter, he knew, save to break the tension he felt, and which he thought she also must be feeling.
“Thank you,” he said.
Her lips were tightly pressed, but began to bow in the smallest of smiles. Then she turned and left him, stopping to take her little daughter by the hand.
He dragged the bench by the fire-pit nearer to the tub, and stripped off his clothes and set them aside on it, with his leathern travel pack. His belt and knife and purses he carried with him, dropping them on the other side of the tub, where his right hand would be near.
The water was hot enough that he pulled back his foot when he touched it, and he splashed some of the well water in to temper it. Then he squatted down on his haunches in the water.
With him in it, it rose up another hand span’s worth. His knees were tucked up almost under his chin, but the water was hot and it was the first real bath he had had in many a day. He dug his fingers into the soap and made use of it, scrubbing himself well, the ash both gritty and slippery in his hands, the tallow smoothing. There was an herbal scent to it, thyme, he thought, looking at the green flecks dotting it. His mother also pounded herbs into the soap she made, masking the tallow smell.
He had finished cleaning himself and just sat, enjoying the warmth a moment longer. Soon his folded legs would begin to complain.
Suddenly the woman came around the corner of the curtain, a linen towel in her hands. He was of course naked, sitting in her low wash tub, and at this point growing ready to stand.
Their eyes met; hers were brown, the shade of sandy soil. She lowered them, and kept them cast modestly down. She began to gather up his clothing from the bench.
“I will wash these,” she offered.
He considered. The day was far gone; it was not likely they would dry in the remaining Sun. They would need to hang overnight by the fire. It w
as nothing short of an invitation to stay the night.
“I thank you,” was how he met this offer.
He had a single change of clothes with him, meant for the return trip, and he put these on. She gestured him to sit at the table near the back door of her house, and he did, a jug of home brewed ale of surprising savour before him. She busied herself, first washing his clothes in the water he had bathed in, then coming and going from house and outbuildings, carrying out bread, and pots of cheese and butter from the spring house.
As he sat there her cow came round the edge of the barn from the field it had been grazing in, and he stood and followed it into the dimness of the barn. The basin was clean and waiting, and he sat on her milking stool and drew forth squirt after squirt of warm milk. When he came out with the basin in his hands and the woman saw him, her own hands rose, a small gesture at her breast of surprise. She smiled at him then. He had already seen her reach down into the half-buried spring house, and he went to it and poured the milk into the crock waiting there.
They ate in near silence, the woman feeding bits of bread and cheese to her daughter. The bread was two or three days old, and hard; but broken and toasted over the fire and spread with sweet butter or the tangy cheese it filled, and satisfied. The plums from her tree were sweet and bursting with juice. They finished with more of her ale. Night-birds were beginning to call, and insects chattered from the tall grasses where the cow had been feeding. A low sliver of Moon began its ascent, golden as it crested the tree-line, paling as it rose higher, and seemingly, much further away.
The girl had climbed into her mother’s lap and was now sleeping against her breast, and the woman rose and carried her into the house.
When she came back she sat down, and Hrald spoke to her.
“Where is your husband,” he asked.
“Away. And for a long while,” was how she answered.
Hrald thought of this. It was not likely he had gone off fishing; they were too far from the coast, and there were no fish-drying racks.
“He went off trading?”
“Já,” she answered.
“When?”
“More than a year ago.” She held his eyes a moment, then looked over the dimming fields.
There was silence between them.
She tidied up, banked the fire, shooed a few lingering hens into the fowl house. She came back to the table, standing before him as she had at the stream. He rose and followed her inside, and to her sleeping alcove.
Hrald had once before known the touch of a woman’s skin, but it had been even longer ago than this one had waited for her husband. Two years past at a Mid-Summer’s fire he had found himself in a field at his sister Signe’s farm. He was almost a stranger there, and the woman who had taken his hand and led him to the ploughed furrow someone he would never see again. She was, like this woman, older than he. She had also been drunk; he was as well, having spent much of the day downing ale and then by the heat of the fire, mead.
It was the first Mid-Summer after his father’s death, and in his young grief he had felt reckless and driven to extremes. His father’s old friend Oke had travelled down to Hroft’s funeral feast a few months earlier, and had reminded Hrald’s mother that Ingirith and Hrald would be man and wife. Hrald felt all was happening too fast; his father’s sudden death, his being thrust into being the man of the house at seventeen, the marriage to a maid he did not know. The fire, and the drinking, and what came after was a way to forget all this.
He was not drunk this time, and neither was she he lay beside. If anything he felt a kind of heightened awareness, made more acute by her silence, and her choosing of him in the bright light of day.
He awoke first in the morning. Dawn was just lightening the sky when he swung his legs out of her bed; he could see the crack of light framing her closed window shutter. He dressed and went outside. He stood looking around at the small work yard. The tub in which he had bathed and his clothes had been washed still held water; she had forgotten to tip and drain it, and he did so now, sloshing the water out upon the hard ground and slanting the tub up against the wall. The cow would be happy to be milked again, and was there inside the barn waiting for him. When he finished with her he freed the fowl from their little house, and they came clucking and strutting out into the early light. Firewood was stacked under the deep eave of the house, with kindling sticks next it. There were few of these latter, an armful at most. He went back to the barn, found the axe, and began splitting wood on the oak stump at the edge of the work yard.
The woman came out at this, wearing her shift and clutching a shawl about her arms. When she saw what he was doing for her, she began to cry.
Her name was Stenhild, she told Hrald, as they ate together, her girl on her lap. At one point the child reached the bread she was holding out to Hrald, as if to share it with him, and he laughed; his brother Yrling had done the same as a babe. Stenhild stopped in her own eating and looked at him, and he feared she might begin to weep again. She did not, just smiled herself, and guided the girl’s hand back to the pink little mouth.
The morning was again dry, and they ate outside. Hrald looked about the place. Small as it was, he could not imagine how she kept the farm alone. He noticed for the first time the diminished rows of vegetables; less than half of the fenced plot showed leafy growth. But then, he thought, she was feeding only herself and her child; she would not need much. The barley would grow, undemanding after the first few weedings, and harvest was hot and hard work, but for a field as small as hers would not last more than a few days. She had a hand quern for grinding, as would all women, and the bread she baked from its flour was good. He saw no pig; there was not perhaps enough waste food and cabbage scraps to fatten one, and slaughtering a full grown beast was man’s work. The cow and hens would keep her in milk and eggs, with boiled and roasted fowl from unwanted cocks, and hens who no longer laid. Fish could be had at Paviken, fresh from the fishing boats that landed each day, and she must trade something for them when she could. But he saw no sheep; how she kept herself in wool he could not guess.
Hrald meant to leave then, after their meal, make his way back to Paviken, wander the stalls, which would be opening now, as he had meant to do yesterday. But he did not. He watched Stenhild lift his clean and dried clothes from the line which had screened his bath, smooth and fold them and lay them next his pack on the bench he had dragged there. She was biting her lip as she did so.
He stood and walked into her barn. At the worktable by the door he scanned the tools, arrayed in order on the dusty table. He chose a few.
He went to the fowl house, took the door from its hinges, planed it down on one side so it would close again; it had bound badly when he opened it that morning. He re-hung it, tightening the iron handle, which had grown loose and rattled in the hand. He shovelled out the leavings in the cow stall, carried them to the manure heap out back, and spent an hour turning it so that the strawy mixture could decay the faster. Then he went back to the oak stump and chopped a vast pile of kindling, stacking it neatly against the side of the house, and carrying armfuls of it into the house to the fire-pit there, ready for cold-weather fires.
That night had a sweetness to it the first had lacked. They had spent only a full day in the other’s company, but they had spoken together, and worked alongside each other. They knew the other’s name, and some of their story. After she led him to her alcove she kissed him, held him, and welcomed him the more, and when he pulled away from her did not turn her face from him in seeming shame as she had the first night.
He felt his own awkwardness still, wondering what more he might do; his hands on her naked breasts and running over the gentle roundness of her hips excited him so he feared he might not control his own body. When she quickly shifted to place herself beneath him, he was relieved. He fell into sleep with her hand on his chest, something he had never known before.
The next morning he took his leave, shouldering his pac
k and leaving her at her croft gate. He turned back to smile, and to wave. She had lifted her child in her arms, and the girl was waving after him, cooing as she did so. Stenhild’s eyes were wide, as if she forced them from tears.
At Paviken he neared the brew-house he had sat in with the knorr captain. No fewer than eight ships were tied at the three wooden piers, several in the act of lading or unlading over their narrow gangplanks, and the brew-house was already busy. Hrald saw his captain, lifting a cup as he talked with another man. He saw the man’s knorr too, quiet and waiting until they left tomorrow; new cargo was already on board.
He lifted his eyes to the expanse of the Baltic. Nothing could be seen on the horizon; he might be at the furthest reaches of Midgard. The sky was deepening to its richest blue, the few clouds swimming in it small, dense, and white as washed wool from his best ewes. The air was dry and crisp, and he had still the taste of the sweet plums he had broken his fast with in his mouth.
He looked again at the number of ships, number of captains. He need not leave tomorrow. There were ships and captains in plenty to take him back to Dane-mark, and would be for another month or so.
He turned and walked back to Stenhild’s farm.
The Moon went from crescent, to full, to crescent. Then to dark. It was too late in the season to plant other than just more pot-herbs, but they did so, knowing she could dry what she could not eat before frost. He tied up her grape vines, and pruned the three plums, now that they were done fruiting. He walked to Paviken and took in all the merchant’s goods, and carried back a doubled handful of choice glass beads for Stenhild. She strung them on waxed linen thread with the nearest he had seen to delight on her face.
After a week, fearing he might be growing restless, she encouraged him to explore some of the island, to walk the coast North or South, visit the smaller trading posts he would come across. He would see something of the rauks, those limestone towers rising from the shingle beaches. Some he had glimpsed on the knorr’s approach by sea, and she told him that at their bases lay stone flowers, and sea-shells of white stone. Just as night-wandering trolls had been caught by the rising Sun and frozen into the twisted forms of the mighty rauks, these small plants and animals had somehow also suffered the same Fate.
Sidroc the Dane Page 3