But Ylva was contented; for here, she said, they would be safe from King Sven and his ruffianly following.
“This is a place that will suit me well enough,” she said to Orm. “if you can prove yourself as skillful at house-building as you have shown yourself to be at fighting and handling a ship.”
Their first winter there they fared meagerly, for there was little food for man or beast, and they found their neighbors hostile. Orm sent men to a thane of the district, Gudmund of Uvaberg, whom men called Gudmund the Thunderer, and who was famed for his wealth and pugnacity, to buy hay and hops; but the men returned to Orm empty-handed, having received short shrift, for a newcomer to the border who was a follower of Christ to boot did not appear to Gudmund to be worthy of his notice. Then Orm saddled his horse and set forth with One-Eyed Rapp and three other good men. They arrived at Uvaberg a little before dawn. He succeeded without much difficulty in gaining entry to Gudmund’s house, picked him out of his bed, carried him out through his own front door, and dangled him by one leg over his own well, while Rapp and the others set their backs against the door that the people in the house might not disturb their parley. After Orm and Gudmund had argued the matter for a while over the mouth of the well, a bargain was concluded between them by which Orm was to receive all the hay and hops he required at a fair price; whereupon Orm turned him right ways up again and set him on his feet, pleased at having been able to settle the transaction without being forced to resort to violence.
The Thunderer’s wrath, though considerable, was equaled by the respect in which he now held Orm, and was a good deal less than his astonishment at finding himself still alive.
“For, you must know,” he said, “that I am a dangerous man, even though you are somewhat larger of frame and may therefore have to wait awhile before you sample the flavor of my wrath. Few men would have dared to let me escape alive after serving me as you have done; indeed, I hardly know if I myself would have been bold enough to do so, had I been in your trousers. But perhaps your wisdom is not commensurate with your strength.”
“I am wiser than you,” said Orm, “for I am a follower of Christ, and therefore possess His wisdom in addition to my own. It is His wish that a man shall be gentle unto his neighbor, even though that neighbor should do him mischief. So if you are sensible, you will go on your knees and thank Him; for your well looked to me to be somewhat deep. But if it is your wish that we two should be enemies, you will find that I can be wise in more ways than one; for I have encountered more dangerous adversaries than you, and no man has yet worsted me.”
Gudmund said that he would have to endure much mockery for the indignity that he had been forced to undergo, and that his good name would suffer in consequence; besides which, his leg had been painfully stretched by having to support his weight over the well. As he was speaking, the news was brought to him that one of his men, who had rushed at Orm with a sword as the latter was carrying Gudmund out of the house, was now being tended by the women for a broken shoulder that Rapp had given him with the blunt edge of his ax. Gudmund then asked what the attitude of Orm and Christ might be to this piece of information, and whether they thought that such an aggregate of injury and insult was not worth some compensation.
Orm pondered this problem for a while. Then he replied that the man whose shoulder had been broken had only himself to blame for his injury, and that he would give him nothing.
“It was lucky for the foolish fellow,” he said, “that Rapp is as devout a believer in Christian principles as I am; otherwise the man would not now require any attention from your women. He should count himself fortunate to have escaped so lightly. But as regards the injury and insult that you claim to have suffered, I think there is some justice in what you say, and I shall give you compensation. If you will accompany me, I will introduce you to a holy doctor who is a member of my household at Gröning. He is the cleverest physician in the world and will speedily cure the pain in your leg; indeed, so holy is he that, after he has treated it, you will find it sounder than its fellow. And it will greatly add to your honor, and to the respect in which your name is held, when it becomes known that you have been attended by a man who was, for a long period, King Harald’s personal physician and treated him for the many ailments from which he suffered, and cured them all marvelously.”
They argued about this at some length, but in the end Gudmund agreed to ride back with Orm to Gröning. There Father Willibald applied soothing salves to the leg and swathed it in bandages, while Gudmund plied him eagerly with questions about King Harald; but when the priest tried to tell him about Christ and the advantages of baptism, he became very violent and told him that he could keep his mouth shut on that subject. For, he roared, if it became known that he had fallen a victim to such nonsense, it would damage his reputation worse than the news of his suspension over the well, and men would never cease to laugh at him. It was a poor thing, he concluded deafeningly, that anyone should hold so low an opinion of his intelligence as to suppose him capable of being gulled by such foolish prattle.
As he took his leave of Orm, having received payment for his hay and hops, he said: “It is not my wish that there should be a blood-feud between our houses; but if the opportunity should arise for me to repay the insult that you have inflicted upon me, be sure that I shall not neglect it. It may be some time before such an opportunity will present itself, but I am a man whose memory is long.”
Orm looked at him, and smiled.
“I know you to be a dangerous man,” he said, “for you yourself have told me so. Nevertheless, I do not think this vow of yours will cause me to lie awake at night. But know this, that if you attempt to do me a mischief, I shall baptize you, whether I have to hold you by the legs or by the ears to do so.”
Father Willibald was dejected by his failure to convert Gudmund and declared himself convinced that his work in the north was doomed to failure. Ylva, however, comforted him with the assurance that things would be easier once Orm had built his church. Orm said that he in good time would fulfill his promise to do this, but that his more immediate concern was to build himself a house; and this, he avowed, he would start work on immediately. He straightway applied himself earnestly to the task, sending his men into the forest to fell trees, lop them, and drag them back, whereupon he himself chopped them into lengths with his ax. He chose his wood most meticulously, using only thick trunks that had no flaw in them; for he intended, he said, that his house should be of fine appearance and built to endure, and no mere forest shack. Asa’s estate comprised the land that lay in a bend of the river, protected by water on three sides; the soil was firm, and not liable to flooding. There was room here for all that he wished to build, and he enjoyed the work so much that, the further it became advanced, the more ambitiously he began to plan. He built his house with a walled fireplace and a slide-board in the roof for the smoke to leave by, the same as he had seen in King Harald’s castle; and the roof itself he constructed of peeled ash saplings, surmounted by a layer of birch bark and thick turves. Then he built a brewhouse, a cattleshed and a storehouse, all amply proportioned and finer than any that had previously been seen in these parts; and at last, when all these were completed, he announced that the most important buildings were now ready and that he would shortly be able to begin thinking about his church.
That spring the time arrived for Ylva’s confinement. Both Asa and Father Willibald took busy charge of her; they had a deal to do, and fell over each other in their eagerness to ensure that nothing might be left undone. The confinement was a difficult one. Ylva screamed fearfully, vowing that it would be preferable to enter a convent and become a nun than to endure such pain; but Father Willibald laid his crucifix upon her belly and muttered priest-talk over her, and in the end everything went as it should, and she was delivered of twins. They were both girls, which was at first a disappointment to Asa and Ylva; but when they were brought to Orm and laid upon his knees, he found little cause for complaint. Everyone agreed that
they bawled and struggled as vigorously as any man-children; and, once Ylva had accepted that they were girls and could never become boys, she regained her cheerfulness, and promised Orm that next time she would give him a son. It soon became evident that both the girls were going to be red-haired, which Orm feared might bode ill for them; for, he said, if they had inherited the color of his hair, they might also develop a facial resemblance to him, and he was reluctant that his daughters should be condemned to such a fate as that. But Asa and Ylva bade him desist from such unlucky prophesying; there was no reason, they said, to suppose that they would look like him, and it was by no means disadvantageous for a girl to be born with red hair.
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.
CHAPTER TWO
HOW THEY PLANNED A CHRISTENING FEAST FOR KING HARALD’S GRANDSON
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 sou
nd 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.
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