Hrald and Yrling must stay the night, it was only fitting given the importance of his return. Oke’s surprise at seeing him again was no greater than his eldest daughter’s, but his pleasure at it much the greater. Though Hroft had been years older than Oke, their friendship was a true one, and their desire to join their children stemmed from Ingirith’s birth, the year after Hrald’s.
For Ingirith’s part, her shock at seeing Hrald alive was followed by cool and baffling confusion. You cannot be back, her heart drummed. You cannot still live. On the heels of her shock and confusion rolled a wave of resentment, flushing all other feelings from her breast.
Her parents had always told her what a good match Hrald would be. But it was their match, not hers, just as she knew Hroft and Ashild had determined that Hrald would take her to wife. Ingirith had never been to their farm, and regretted from the start that it was so far down the southern coast of Jutland as to make a trip to Ribe almost impossible.
Ribe was the trading post North of her parent’s farm, a Summer post only, but one at which great quantities of cattle, sheep, and pigs were sold, and all Summer long, not just for the few days of the Thing. A few families lived there year round, one who did brewing and baking both, always needed in such places. Ribe was one of the trading posts ruled by King Horik, which meant that choice goods flowed in from Norway, Frankland, and the rest of Dane-mark, as well as points both further West and East. Her father had been down to Haithabu, and she knew Ribe to be smaller than it, but Ribe was big enough and rich enough for her.
And Ribe had an iron-smith, a master tool maker. And that smith had a son.
Last month Oke had yoked the two oxen and headed to Ribe for a new scythe, and pair of shears. The trip out and back could be made in a long day, and after the earliest of the morning chores were complete he and his three daughters headed there. It was a treat to do so, and each girl had a small sum of silver in a tiny drawstring pouch to spend while there; Oke could afford to indulge them to that extent.
He did not let the girls out of his sight in the trading town. It was still early in the season and not as many stalls were open as they would be at Summer’s height, but there were goods enough on display to catch the eye, and enough men strange to Jutland and its ways to make Oke wary for his daughters’ sakes. Thus they all were in tow as he made his way to the iron-worker of his choice.
His forge, as all the fire-workers’ were, was set aside and back from the crowded side lanes of leather cutters and comb makers. On one side was the workshop of a bronze-worker, already bent over one of his crucibles, pouring metal into clay moulds to form brooches. There was nothing to see, but on the other side of the tool-smith was a glass worker, who squatted down by the heat of his own fire, rolling and shaping molten lumps into multi-hued glass beads. Ingirith’s two sisters were allowed by their father to stay there and watch the man. Ingirith herself disdained necklaces of glass, no matter how gaily coloured; she had always fancied those of golden amber and hoped one day soon to own one, and even a necklace of silver beads or braided chain as well. So she stayed at her father’s side as he dealt with the iron-smith working in his open-fronted shed.
He had two other men and a boy working with him, his sons, she imagined; their backs were mostly to her so she could not see a likeness. She watched the boy work the bellows, seeing the reddish sparks fly up at the air hole at the back of the forging oven. The day was a chilly one, and the warmth coming from the fire enough to draw her nearer. Then one of the men turned, long tongs in his left hand, a white-hot piece of metal caught in its grip. He took up a hammer and began pounding and shaping the glowing thing on an iron anvil.
His eyes were trained on his work, and his brow glistened with small drops of sweat. He was young, two or three years more than she herself. His hair was a shade or two darker than her own. When he raised his eyes from his work she saw they were blue, like her own. He looked at her, and smiled.
Ingirith thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. And he was a tool-smith. No other workers in metals save silver- and gold-smiths earned as much, she knew, none but the makers of knives and swords.
She dropped her eyes for a moment as she had been taught, and then raised them back to him. She had been promised to a man she barely knew. If Hrald had not tried to make a trading trip to Gotland they would have now been wed for more than six months. It had angered her when she heard he had left, word of which had not come from his mother until it became clear that their hand-fast must be delayed.
She was in no eagerness to wed Hrald, and her anger was rooted not in the delay but the fact that as a man he had the freedom to go off without telling her. As weeks turned to months and no news of his arrival reached her, her parents began to console her over his loss. When word of his mother’s death came, it seemed a final note to a song she had wearied of hearing. She was free.
Ingirith smiled back at the young smith. She felt herself straightening up as she looked on him, glad she had chosen her deep blue over-gown to bring out the blueness of her eyes. She had her best linen head wrap knotted at the nape of her neck. It was small enough to show off her spilling yellow hair, hair as straight and pale as ripened wheat. Her mother owned a single pair of silver brooches, and as Ingirith was the eldest daughter, and her mother had ever indulged her, had allowed her to wear these today at her shoulders instead of her workaday bronze brooches. She was thus arrayed more closely to the prosperous women who were selling goods at Ribe than the farm girl she was.
She could hear her father speaking with the master smith, and the man assuring him that the tools he sought would be ready next month. Oke would not need the scythe until the first harvest, anyway. That would mean another trip back here, she quickly realised.
Her father was set on her going to Hrald, and she knew he had held out hope over the long Winter that news would come of his return, or he himself appear on their threshold. Thus she did not feel she could, on the long ride back to the farm, ask him to inquire about the tool-smith’s good-looking son. But the farther they travelled the more her thoughts stayed fixed on Ribe.
Why should she not wed a man who worked the Summer months in such a grand place? She imagined travelling each Spring from wherever the smith’s Winter home was, and the setting up of their Summer quarters in a snug hut on one of Ribe’s side lanes. She pictured keeping house there for her handsome husband, pictured the silver brooches he would give her, far larger and more beautiful than those her mother had lent her. She imagined the expectant waiting for ships on the horizon, and traders arriving in waggons. She saw herself walking the planked streets of the busy trading post, a pert basket hanging over her wrist, respected, envied, and rich. It was a far better life than that on a farm, with its endless hard work. This played in her thoughts as the steady hoof-fall of the oxen took her further from that dream.
Ingirith’s younger sisters spent the silver their father had given them, one on a cluster of glass beads, the other on a square of Frankish linen with fine cut-work. But Ingirith herself arrived home with hers still clutched in her hand. She had seen what she had wanted, and it could not be bought with a few pieces of silver.
“You will make your hand-fast soon,” Oke said at table that night, after all had been cleared away. He was grinning at Hrald and Ingirith as he said it. “We will keep it at harvest-tide, just as it was meant to be last year.”
Late Summer was the best time for the clasping of hands. Not only did it almost ensure plenty for the wedding feast, but it gave the best start to the babe who might be conceived soon after. The new mother had the richness of all Summer’s bounty to feed her in the early months, and babes born in late Spring were the heartier for it.
Both of the young people knew this. Ingirith looked down, and if Hrald’s face had not been browned from the Sun the slight flush on his cheek would have been discerned by any looking at him.
“The bridal-ale here, then you make your way home to Hrald’s,” her
father was going on. Ingirith raised her eyes and saw both parents smiling at her.
“It is quite a good farm,” he assured his daughter. He had travelled there once or twice and had direct knowledge of it, and it was fitting to praise it within the hearing of he who now had possession of it.
“You will be sole mistress, Ingirith,” her father pointed out. “With respects to your dead mother,” he added, with a nod to Hrald.
Ingirith’s eyelids dropped over her blue eyes as she lowered her chin. She had not looked forward to having an old woman, strange to her, telling her how things should be done once she got to Hrald’s farm. She would be free of that, but now saw she would be alone in all the many things that needed to be done. With Hrald’s mother dead, there would be no one to guide her, no one to consult, and no one to work alongside her. She would have to make do with the freedwomen Hrald had mentioned, no one else. And they were likely slatterns.
As if her mother read her thought she spoke now. “She will have help,” she posed to her future son-in-law.
“Já, já” Hrald answered. “Oddi’s kinswomen are there; they kept the place together, and for months. They will be great help to Ingirith,” he promised.
Ingirith’s parents looked at each other, and both rose. “Stay at the table a while,” Oke invited, scraping the bench he shared with his wife out of the way. “We have work outside which must be done.”
With no more pretense than that the prospective couple were left alone, and together. Ingirith sat almost opposite Hrald across the table. He knew he should rise and come sit at her side, and he did.
He lowered himself on the bench next her. It was close to the table and his legs had not enough real room, but she made no sign of rising so he could pull it out further. Sitting down, there was not quite the same difference in their height as standing. When they stood together the top of her head just grazed his shoulder-line. She often seemed to keep her eyes there, at his shoulders, and not raise them to his face.
Now she drew herself up, clasping her hands in her lap but lifting her chin. It was the blue over-gown she wore now, her best, and her mother had urged her to wear it at table that night to welcome her returned intended. As her fingers folded against its wool all she could think was it was this gown she had worn on the day she had met the tool-smith’s son.
She had begun to think of it like that the very same day of the trip to Ribe; she had met the man, when in fact they had exchanged no more than a smile. He would know her father’s name; his father would have told him that when the son had inquired about her, and Ingirith felt sure after that shared smile that he had.
There was a long silence after Hrald sat down next her, and she was still looking ahead into the dusk of the house, and not at him.
“You do not seem happy to see me,” Hrald hazarded at last.
“You have been gone a long time,” was all she answered.
“Já,” he agreed, in a quiet voice. “Já.”
A new silence began, one even more awkward than the first.
“As your father said, you will be mistress at the farm,” he tried.
She still did not turn to look at him.
“I have silver,” he began again, to offer further assurance. It was the same statement he had made to his brother-in-law the day prior, and once again it was not something he had thought he would have need to say. “That which I won by trading the Anglian salt, and that which was my mother’s.”
He should say something of a more personal nature, and went on, in a low voice.
“I will work hard at the farm, and do right by you.”
She nodded. It took effort to be rude to one so earnest, and she knew she was being rude. If her mother saw her she would give her a shake by the shoulders for it.
She gave a quick nod of her head, but her thoughts were saying, I do not want life on your farm. I do not want the roughened hands and aching back my mother suffers, and that even I suffer now, young as I am. I want to live at Ribe, and wed the smith who makes the tools that men like my father pay good silver for. You cannot give me that, Hrald.
At this last thought she turned her face to his, and looked fully at him. She could not hold his gaze for more than an instant; she squeezed her eyes shut. The smiling face of the handsome yellow-haired tool-smith rose in her mind, and the way his blue eyes had met her own. She had imagined a new life for herself founded on that one look, a life she could not have.
Hrald did not know what to do with her silence. It made him feel even more unwelcome than had Ful’s chiding. He thought she would want to speak with him about their life together. That is why Oke and her mother had left them alone, he knew; so they might touch hands, sit close to the other, and murmur hopes about their shared future. Nothing about her suggested she wanted him to move closer, or take her hand. Perhaps she could not yet picture her life at the farm.
His thoughts went to his little brother, already asleep in the curtained alcove in which Hrald himself would soon lay his head.
“Yrling will come back home with me, and we will raise him together,” he told her.
This forced her mouth to open. It was bad enough that she must go so far away to be his wife, and work as hard as she knew she must work. She would not raise his brother as well.
“He is better off with your married sister,” she countered. “He has lived with her for months, and has already found a home there. He should be with his female kin.”
You are soon to be his kin, Hrald was thinking, but did not say. “We will speak of it later,” he ended. He knew his return was a surprise. He would not press such things now.
Hrald and Yrling rode off after dawn next day, back to the farm of Signe and Ful. As he was loading seed-corn onto the bed of Ful’s ox-cart Yrling was begging to be allowed to go home with him. The cart was so chock-full that Hrald would have to walk alongside it, but one small boy would make no difference to the ox team; he could ride atop. Oddi would follow in a week or so, herding the nine sheep Ful allowed Hrald; Ful insisted Oddi stay for shearing-time.
Hrald had thought he would of course bring Yrling home, just as he would bring Oddi back to the farm. But his sister Signe did not agree.
“He is my brother too, and here he has the girls. He is making a home here,” she told Hrald. They had sent the boy off as they began speaking of him like this. Hrald knew that before Yrling came here to live, he scarcely knew his older sister. Yrling had been the child of Ashild’s old age, and Signe had been wed and out of the house before he was born.
Signe’s words echoed what Ingirith had said about the matter. His sister seemed to want Yrling. At last he agreed. Perhaps both women were right, and all was unsettled at the farm just now. But he wished that the maid he would marry had been more welcoming to the boy.
Chapter the Fourth: The Bride
HRALD returned home and told Gillaug and Jorild that Oddi would soon join them, and with sheep. Right now they had seed-corn, and that wanted for grinding and boiling. Before he could address himself to this he need return Ful’s ox and cart, and set out next day to do so. When Yrling saw him again so soon the boy was certain he had changed his mind and come for him. Telling him he must stay was the hardest part of the wearying trip.
Once home he got to work, hacking away with a mattock at the weedy growth crowding the fields. Gillaug and Jorild had already opened fresh rows in the vegetable bed and sprinkled in the bean seeds. A rooster had been left to them, and with the three hens from Kol there would presently be chicks. There was no waste with which to feed the two piglets, but Jorild tended them with care, driving them to the wood edging two sides of the farm where mast trees grew. The dark soil held grubs which yielded to their ploughing snouts.
Even with so much to do Hrald found his thoughts wandering. At night he lay in his alcove in a house far quieter than he had ever known it. Gillaug and Jorild were there, sleeping in the alcoves at the other end of the house in which the two serving
women had once slept, but they were nearly silent. It made his thoughts in the night the louder. In another two months or so he would be expected to return to Oke’s farm and wed Ingirith. There would be a bridal feast, and then he would bring her back here to begin their lives as man and wife.
He thought of the hearty laughter of his dead father, and the teasing smiles of Ashild, his lost mother. Their union had been a good one, Hrald thought. He wondered if he would know the same with Ingirith.
During the month he had spent with Stenhild on Gotland he had never thought of himself as her husband. He always knew he would soon leave for home. Without having to be told he knew they should not be seen together, to spare her awkwardness lest her husband one day reappear. They walked on different days into Paviken. When the day came she decided to again wed all she need do was appear with the man before two or three witnesses and they proclaim themselves wed; she had friends in Paviken and on other farms who would witness for her. When a man had set to sea and not returned for a year, no woman could be expected to wait longer. Life was too difficult to go on alone.
But now he thought that during that month he had in fact been almost as much husband to Stenhild as any man could be. They had arisen together, and worked alongside the other. She had cooked and brought his food, washed his clothing, and crouched with him in his weeding. He had dug and spaded her vegetable plot, looked to those things needing attention by mending and making new, chopped kindling he piled to the eave-line. They had sat by fire’s glow, she with her child on her lap, and spoken in low tones, one to the other. And at nightfall he lay in her alcove, awaiting her as she did the final cleaning up and banked the fire.
It was after their third night together that she asked him to do this, to go ahead, and into the sleeping alcove first. When she parted the heavy woollen curtain and saw him, a brief smile bowed her firmly pressed lips. Later he thought he understood why; for well over a year she had parted that curtain to an empty bed, and climbed in alone.
Sidroc the Dane Page 5