“It wasn’t the gods, Grandfather,” Acton said. “It was a friendly spirit.”
“Hmph,” his grandfather said. He turned to Baluch. “Is that so?” Baluch nodded silently. “No more to be said, then.”
Elric relaxed, and so did Baluch. Moving back into the hall, Harald spoke over his shoulder, seemingly casual. “But you’d better have mulled wine to warm you. It’s a man’s drink, I know, but just this once . . .”
Acton smiled blindingly and slapped Baluch on the back. “Told you it’d be all right,” he said. “Swith, I’m hungry! Mother, any meat left from dinner?”
Baluch followed him into the hall smiling, his internal music changing to triumphant horn blasts as the waters rose up and Bramble floated on their tide.
Asa’s Story
THE WOMEN STAY in the women’s quarters. Yes, of course. So the men think, if they think about it at all. But when the men venture away after the spring sowing, what do they think the women do? The ewes must be milked, the cows tended as they calve, the wheat weeded, the vegetables hoed, the barley malted and the ale brewed, and the women do it as they always do. But the sheep must be shepherded too, and the birds kept off the crops, and the horse yoked and the cart loaded for market. The wool is mostly spun in winter so the looms can be busy all through the long evenings of summer — but with the men away the wood must be chopped and the animals slaughtered and the meat butchered — yes, and the wolves chased away from the young lambs, too. The boys do some, of course, but without the women the men would find a cold hearth and an empty steading when they returned with their wounds and their tales and their glory.
So the women stay in the women’s quarters, of course. But in the soft summer evenings after the light has faded too much to use the looms and the children are asleep, the women sit in the long hall and sing and laugh and drink small ale and make jokes about the men. As women always have.
So it was in our steading until the raiders came. For our men had sailed off, as they always did in summer, taking the pelts and the hides and the precious inkstone to the trading towns down south, sometimes all the way to the Wind Cities, and there was no one to protect us from the raiders.
The men came not from the sea, where we had a lookout placed, but over the mountains from the east. Not in the morning, when mostly they attack, but in the cool evening. So it was that the women were in the long hall, and that was the saving of us, because Eddi, Gudrun’s son, called out loud enough from the stable before they killed him so that we had warning, and we could bar the doors and drag the tables across them. I thought they might burn us out, but it had been a long march and they wanted beer, and knew there would be barrels in the hall. So they battered the doors down. But we had time, Haena my mother, Gudrun and Ragni and I, to take down the ancestral shields that hung along the walls, and the spears that went with them.
My mother Haena was the oldest, white-haired and bent, but she straightened herself and faced them first, as she should, being our chieftain Harald’s wife. The rest of us lined up behind her, hoping that by fighting we were dooming ourselves to die, and a quick death was what we prayed for, the best we could have, we thought.
They burst through the doors and came at us, but stopped in surprise when they realized it was only women facing them. Their leader was a tall strong man, sandy-haired and green-eyed, so green I saw it even in that moment of dread. I will not say his name in case his ghost seeks me out and takes revenge, but his use-name was Hard-hand, for indeed his hand was very hard on those he punished. He looked at us — and no doubt we looked ridiculous enough to his eyes — and laughed so hard he brought tears to his eyes. His men began to grin, then laugh, and lowered their weapons. Then Haena threw her spear and got one of them in the arm. He swore and pulled the spear out. The rest laughed even louder. Their leader had to prop himself up against the wall.
“Serve you right, Os!” he howled.
“Pierced by love’s arrow!” said another, who looked to be the most intelligent of them. I found out later that he was their skald, their poet, and his name was Gris the Open-handed, for he was the most generous of men, even to strangers and women. He was Hard-hand’s brother.
Then Gudrun heard her son Eddi’s death cry come from the stable and grief took her and made her berserk. She ran screaming and struck at the leader. He swiped her aside with a casual blow with his sword, but such was his strength that the single blow near cut her in two and she fell, her scream turned to pain and then to silence before she lay full-length on the ground.
Hard-hand smiled, still, but his eyes were cold as he looked us over. He looked longest at me, and lingeringly. I knew that look and I hefted my spear higher. My mother Haena took a step back and rested her hand on my shoulder, giving me strength, because she knew that look too. Athel, my cousin, who was younger than I but had the Sight, dropped both spear and shield and put up a hand.
“Remember the strength of women,” was what the men heard her say, but the women heard her voice, or perhaps the voice of the goddess, speaking under her words, saying, “Remember the strength of Haena’s line.”
We all remembered that the women of my mother’s line had a power over men, only one kind of power, and only to be used once in a woman’s life. My mother had used it to bind the man of her choice to her and so married my father Harald, and he was faithful to her lifelong. My grandmother had done the same with my grandfather, Sigur. So it went back for generations, and for the men concerned there was no shame, for to be chosen by a woman of our line was an honor-gift, and the power bound the woman as much as the man, to be faithful forever. We remembered that now, and I began to shake as I understood what was needed of me.
To bind this green-eyed man to me for life, for his life or mine, and to have no other man. I was very young and had not even exchanged courting glances at the Summer Gatherings. It seemed hard to me, too hard, to give away all that: all the possibilities of love and marriage and children and happiness. I felt I would rather die. But then I looked around the hall. There were nine of us, counting Gudrun, and I had the lives of seven other women in my hand. Women of our steading, for whom my family was responsible. My mother’s hand on my shoulder tightened and then dropped as she left me to make the choice alone. I thought, I will make this choice, but my life will be short.
So I looked at that green-eyed man, and I looked with the eyes of power. They say the power came from the gods originally, and I believe it. At that moment I was more than a woman in her hall; more than a girl facing her enemy. I was greater, impossibly strong, impossibly desirable, impossibly desiring. I saw his face change, and I exulted.
“I will go with you,” I said, in the trading language that my people and his shared. “If you and your men leave this steading and all its people in peace.”
One of his men laughed. “You’ll go with us if we choose and we’ll all have you until you’re —” Hard-hand smote him with the flat of his sword right across the mouth so that he fell to the floor, bloody, his teeth falling out into his palm, and he was called Bloody-mouth forever after. Hard-hand never took his eyes from mine.
“Willingly?” he asked. There was so much yearning in that question it made me both exultant and sick to my stomach with all it implied.
“If all are safe. Willingly,” I said slowly.
“So be it,” he said. “I will come in the morning and escort you to my home, where you will be my wife.” At that his men almost fell over with astonishment, but they said nothing.
He turned slowly, reluctant to take his eyes from me, but once that contact was broken he whirled into action, ordering his men outside to retreat, to set up camp by the stream in the sheep meadow, to leave all their plunder behind them. They complained loudly, as such men do, but Gris quietened them. He looked strangely at me, Gris. Later, when I knew more of Hard-hand’s life I understood why, for giving mercy to defenseless women was not something anyone who knew him would have expected.
I spent the night collectin
g my belongings and crying in my mother’s arms. But in the morning I rose up and put on my traveling clothes. My mother pinned my cloak with her best brooch, that had been made by Elric the Foreigner in her youth at the behest of my father Harald, as a betrothal gift.
“You are a worthy daughter of a great line,” she said formally. “May the gods protect you and bring you safe home.”
“My mother, live long and die blessed by kith and kin, by wealth and weal, by fame and fortune.”
“Fame I shall garner from your actions, fortune you have already been to me, kith and kin shall live here safe, remembering your name with praise.”
She was proud and stately but her eyes were full of tears, as were mine. Tears of grief and fear, for who knew what waited for me over the mountains in the strangers’ land?
Customs differ, but work is the same everywhere. What I found over the mountains was a strange life, yet in essence it was the same life I had left. There were no women’s quarters or men’s hall. Families had their own quarters and women lived with their own men and children, all in one small house. It is not a good system, for the children annoy the men and the men annoy the women and no one ever gets a moment to sit quietly alone. Women are kept apart from the other women who would give them comfort and advice and share the child-rearing and the cooking and the endless scouring of pots. That was different. The herbs they used for cooking and preserving were sometimes strange to me. But the work was the same: they had goats, not sheep, but though goats are cleverer than sheep they still need to be fed and milked and delivered of their young. The wool was softer but a little harder to spin; the blankets lighter but warmer. Small differences.
The great difference was Hard-hand. On that first morning, when I left my mother, he had given me a horse to ride, a pony that carried me sure-footedly over the mountain trails, even past a great chasm that reached so far down into the depths of the earth that the bottom could not be seen. Hard-hand had ridden beside me all the way, but there he got off his horse and led my pony. He remounted and I thanked him, and then he tried to talk to me, although he had trouble finding something to say. He was not a clever man. In the end he told me about his land, his manor as he called it, and the people who owed him fealty. He had been elected a chieftain, at least, and so I would not be shamed in lying with him.
The gods’ power worked strangely on me. In my heart I hated him — not so much for his attack on our steading, for such things are to be expected — but for forcing me to make the choice I had made, for taking me from my family and friends, for stealing from me my right to choose my husband. For turning the great power of my mother’s line, which should be used to create strong families living in joy, into a weapon. Yet his person was not distasteful to me. When he reached for my hand I did not feel the urge to snatch it away.
We came to his farmstead with its cluster of small buildings in the late evening after a long, long ride. I was swaying in the saddle and he looked at me with concern as he lifted me down.
“Siggi!” he yelled. A woman came out of his house and went to greet him, to kiss him, but he pushed her back roughly.
“This is —” It was then he realized that he did not know my name, that he had ridden beside me all day without asking. Gris laughed.
“Asa,” he said. “Her name is Asa.” I learned later that it was typical of him, to learn what others did not know, did not think worth knowing.
“Asa,” Hard-hand said, his voice caressing. The woman Siggi heard it, and her face went hard. “She is to be my wife,” he said. “Treat her well. Tonight I will sleep in my mother’s house and in the morning we will be hand-fasted.”
Siggi hated me from that moment, and I did not blame her. She had been his concubine for three years before I came, and had borne him two daughters. Now he looked at her as though she were no more than a servant. She wanted me dead, but she did not dare disobey him.
She took me inside and showed me a room to sleep in, for in this place they slept in separate rooms, alone or with their husbands and children, instead of all together as we did.
I slept well through exhaustion and rose to wash and ready myself. Hard-hand came at sunrise, as the custom was there, and we were hand-fasted over a holy fire struck from flint that had never been used before. Unlike us, where the chieftain is the go-between to the gods, these people had a seer to perform all the ceremonies, a man who could always hear the gods’ voices, as Athel sometimes could. I discovered, after, that their gods are smaller than ours but much more approachable, and anyone could go to their black stone altar and speak to the gods, ask for favor, beg forgiveness. I never dared, being a child of different gods, but Siggi gained great comfort when the gods told her I would be gone within a year.
She told me that the morning after my wedding, when I rose from my marriage bed bruised and shaken. Hard-hand was bound to me, but that did not change his nature, and it was his nature to take what he wanted when he wanted it. And I was bound to be faithful to him until death.
Siggi taunted me, “The gods have promised me, you will be gone in under a year! He will tire of you and kill you and I will have him back.”
“Is that what the gods say?” I asked, looking her straight in the eyes.
She shrugged, uncomfortable. “They say you will be gone in under a year, and I will be the chieftain’s wife.” Then she smiled maliciously. “You thought you had stolen him but he will come back to me when he tires of you.”
I nodded. “Until then, I am his wife and the mistress of this steading. Fetch me water to wash in.”
She glowered, but she obeyed. I washed slowly, thinking about her message from the gods. “Gone” they had said, not “dead.” I would have been an honorable wife to him if he had treated me with honor. But he did not. I rinsed the blood from my thighs and decided, at that moment, to kill Hard-hand.
He was not an easy man to kill. He slept lightly, with his hand on his weapons. He ate no food that I had not eaten first. Although he wanted me nightly and the power of the gods meant that I did not resist, he never trusted me. Nor should he have. But when two months went by and we realized I was with child, he relaxed a little.
That was a hard moment for me. I had planned to kill Hard-hand and then myself, but a child changed everything. I could not take the life of an innocent. Which meant I had to live. To live with Hard-hand until the child was born and I was well enough to travel. The day I realized I ran down to the goatfold and sobbed into the side of a nanny as she suckled her twins. I raged against Hard-hand’s gods, because I thought they had caused this as a punishment for not worshipping them. Now I think I was wrong, but then I felt caught in a trap from which there was no escape. Except one.
So I played the part of the willing wife. I worked hard. I joked with the other women and with his men. I pretended to have fallen in love with him at first sight and the only one who did not believe me was Gris, who had looked at my face in my father’s long hall when all the other men were looking at my body. There was a reason for that. Gris did not lie with women. Nor with men, so far as I could discover, but then men lying with men was scorned in that place and he would have been dishonored by it.
As it was, his brother taunted him about his refusal to marry and advised him to get a woman from the far north, one of the Skraelings, who were so hairy they looked like men and might thus satisfy him. Hard-hand talked like this only in private, and I think did not understand that he was heaping dishonor on his brother. A joke, he thought it. But to Gris it was no joke, and his heart hardened against his brother day by day. The taunting became worse after my pregnancy started to show and the seer pronounced the child a boy. Hard-hand bragged that he was founding a dynasty and that his brother would never have descendants. That, I believe, truly hurt Gris, and I was sorry for him and tried to turn the talk away to other things. We became, in a sense, allies.
I began, through the winter, to squirrel food away against the time I had borne the child and recovered enough to trav
el. I would have to kill Hard-hand and try to escape over the mountains. Steal a horse. I did not ride well, but I could manage. Again, no one noticed except Gris. He came to me one afternoon in late winter. The rest of the men were out searching for missing cows. That day my back protested at every movement, I was so gravid. It would be only a matter of days before the child came. Gris handed me a travel pouch filled with dried meat.
“It is a hard journey even in summer,” he said. “It will be early spring when you are fit to travel and you will need to keep your strength up on the road.”
I nodded. I felt that more was needed, that this man and I were bound together in a great undertaking. “My son will be your son,” I said. “When he is grown and you have need of an heir, send for him, and he will come.”
He stood very still for a long moment. “He will unite our peoples,” he said finally. “And rule with justice.”
I nodded formally, accepting his words. I expected to have many sons, then; to marry again and have a family with a man of my choice. Later I found that the gods exact a price for every boon. Never again did I look on a man with desire, no matter how well favored he was, nor how kind. I would have married Elric Elricsson otherwise, because he was a good man and a kind father, but it would have been a poor bargain for him, getting a wife with no passion in her. I think the gods would have resented it.
The lying-in was hard, but then all are. The women did everything right and with gentleness, even though I was a stranger, even Siggi. She took the mattress from the bed-box and laid in the straw thick and deep, which was just as well for there was a deal of blood as well as the birth-waters. Well, no need to talk about it, maybe. Once it is over, birth is a private thing, a memory of darkness and pain and piercing joy.
Deep Water Page 16