Cranky Ladies of History

by Tehani Wessely

  All that winter and the following summer, she’d taken no sides when Þjóstólfr quarrelled with everyone. She’d done her best to keep quiet. To not let anger consume her.

  Only Þjóstólfr could have riled Glúmr into such a fury, and over something so trivial. A few lost sheep—no reason to rage and bellow! The flock was still large, the storehouses bursting with wool and dried meat. The strays would find their way home, but Glúmr took no chances. These sheep were valuable. They needed finding immediately. Supplies would run low too quickly without them. So he’d said.

  In truth, Hallgerðr thinks, Glúmr wanted an excuse to get rid of Þjóstólfr. To send him into the mountains just when the weather had turned foul, when the paths would be treacherous with ice.

  When Þjóstólfr refused, saying he was no herdsman, saying You seem awfully fond of the beasts, saying Is my foster-daughter not enough for you, Glúmr? saying Does your love spill into these sheep? the growl that tore out of Glúmr’s throat woke little Þorgerðr, who’d finally—after hours of jiggling and feeding and cooing and rocking—finally fallen asleep on Hallgerðr’s lap.

  The baby’s puffed eyelids had widened, as had her mouth. And oh how she’d wailed…

  Glúmr’s arm was then flailing, pointing at the door, ordering Þjóstólfr not just to the mountain but farther still, Out! Out! Out!

  “He’s not going anywhere,” Hallgerðr had shouted to her husband, while the baby screeched in her ear. “Keep your voice down, sheep-lover!”

  A thoughtless, heat of the moment cry. But the moment had been hot—hot as the thunderclap of Glúmr’s palm striking her cheek. Hot as the stream of tears she’d wept afterwards, bitter and heart-broken. Hot as her conviction when she’d told Þjóstólfr—she’d commanded him—not to avenge the insult, not to interfere. Hot as her foster-father’s axe whirling through the air, connecting with Glúmr’s back and neck and head. Hot as Hallgerðr’s wrath upon learning of his disobedience.

  As Glúmr’s corpse had cooled, so had Hallgerðr’s temper. She’d been clear-headed, calm, when she’d advised Þjóstólfr to travel to her cruel uncle Hrút’s farm and report the murder. To explain that she herself had had nothing to do with it. To admit it had been his blade that had slaughtered her lamb of a husband. To go, now, and seek Hrút’s advice.

  Advice she’d known would be swift, and final.

  Despite everything, Hallgerðr had loved her second husband.

  She had not wanted him dead.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  “Mother, what have you done?”

  Hallgerðr’s back stiffens. Gripping the shears, she presses against the table, hoping to screen what lies upon it. The wood’s smooth edge bites into her thighs. Iron cuts into her fingers. The chill, late-afternoon air pricks at her newly-shorn scalp. She does not turn as her son approaches, his tone bewildered.

  “Your hair,” he says. Then, panicked, “You’re bleeding!”

  “Go away, Högni.”

  As always, the boy doesn’t listen. The man. The leather-stink of him draws closer, the clomping boots, the high-pitched concern. “Mother, stop this nonsense. You need to come—”

  “Are you deaf, child?” Hallgerðr slams her hand onto the workbench. Once, twice. Pain rattles up to her elbow, but she lashes out again. Only this—agony, anger, violence—only this gets their attention. “I don’t need to do anything. Not yet. Not yet.”

  “Mother,” Högni repeats, and there it is at last, the snarling impatience, the rumble before a Viking storm.

  That’s more like it, Hallgerðr thinks, giving nothing away. She could have been proud of this Gunnarsson, given the chance.

  “Get out,” she says, glancing over her shoulder, meeting her son’s grey glare. “Go tattle to the hag. Tell her I’m being difficult.”

  Högni thumps down the passage like a man condemned to Niflheim. “What is she doing up there?” comes Rannveig’s parched voice a moment later, but the question goes unanswered. Putting the shears aside, Hallgerðr burrows into the bundle and retrieves Gunnarr’s bow as Högni’s heavy footfalls traverse—and exit—the hall.

  Against the evening-blue cloak, the bow’s pale timber gleams. Its grip burnished from use, the curved lengths polished smooth, the ends capped with silver. Lying on its side, string cut in two, the weapon looks helpless. A viper without fangs.

  Many a man had met death at her third husband’s hands, when his bow had been whole.

  The weapon was slung over his broad shoulder, the day they’d met, that long-ago summer at the Alþingi. Handsome, muscular Gunnarr. Striding from booth to booth, greeting friends and kin he hadn’t seen since last year’s two-week Assembly. Laughing easily at quips, bantering with tradesmen, play-fighting with the travellers’ children. A sight to behold, a confident man in his element.

  Hallgerðr had watched this proud warrior climb the Law Mount, then stand still as an idol at its grassy peak, gazing out over Þingvellir’s river valley below. The tunic and breeches he wore both blue as the water’s depths, the fine stitching around collar and cuffs white as rapids. Forearms gleaming with hard-won rings. Glints of red in his close-cropped beard. A broad smile that dimpled with pleasure when he’d looked down and caught Hallgerðr spying.

  There had been no point in playing shy. Hallgerðr had come to the Alþingi dressed in the seiðr-woman’s colours: a crimson gown adorned with silvery finery, a dark cloak that was trimmed with lace down to the skirt. Her elven tresses swung free, hanging to her waist. More than anything else, this had caught Gunnarr’s eye.

  Her stunning, beaten-gold hair.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  How quick they’d loved each other that day! Sitting on a gentle slope, rugged cliffs rising behind them, lava-stone crumbling into the river-crossed valley. For hours they’d talked, blithe as fairies in the meadow, facing the duelling-holm below. The earth radiated warmth; they’d discarded their cloaks, plumped them like pillows. Hallgerðr remembers the crunch of grass as she shifted towards Gunnarr, blades prickling through her skirt. His beard bristling against her mouth. The peaty smell of his skin as they kissed, the salt of his tongue. How he played with her hair, running strand after strand through his fingers, and how she’d teased him, pulling away, making him lean. Making him embrace her again…

  Stop it, Hallgerðr chided herself, but it was too late. Memory had her in its jaws and shook all her bottled tears loose.

  Are you married, Gunnarr had asked late, late that night, the summer sun still five fingers above the horizon.

  Before answering, Hallgerðr watched a trio of geese, their wings beating lazily against the mauve sky. “Not at the moment,” she’d admitted, “and there are not many who’d risk it.”

  Is it because you can’t find a suitable match, he’d asked—stupidly, Hallgerðr thinks even now, for how could he not know? About Þjóstólfr. About the pig and the sheep. Gunnarr wasn’t that much younger than her, was he? Surely the news would’ve travelled as far as Norway. For years, everyone had paid attention to Hallgerðr’s doings—here in Iceland, Hallgerðr’s ill-fated marriages had been the news.

  “Not exactly,” she’d replied, separating fact from gossip. “Though I am apparently hard to please in the matter of husbands.”

  Gunnarr had laughed then, loud and long, as if she’d set him a challenge.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Their wedding was the largest Hallgerðr had known. Held at Bergþórsváll, Njáll and his wife Bergþóra’s farm, it had hosted hundreds of guests. Höskuldr and Hrút had come with their entire households, as had the Alþingi’s most prominent speakers, honourable men from each of Iceland’s four quarters. All of Gunnarr’s friends and family had made the short trip from Hlíðarendi, including Rannveig, who had scowled throughout the celebrations. Bergþóra herself served at the feast, an honour befitting the host, helped by Hallgerðr’s daughter Þorgerðr, who was fourteen years old, and a stunning beauty. Course afte
r course crossed the boards. Ale flowed like the Rangá river. And Gunnarr had beamed. He’d kissed his bride. Held her fair hand. Laid a wreath of forget-me-nots, an unbroken circlet of affection, upon her golden head.

  This, Hallgerðr had thought, looking at the rich joy around her. This is what I have always wanted.

  For the first time, Hallgerðr took over supervision of day-to-day proceedings at her new home. The servants grew to love her; she ran the farmstead at Hlíðarendi with a lavish hand. Gunnarr should only have the best, she’d thought. We all should. So the table was well laden each night, the bondsmen’s clothing expensive, the slaves’ huts clean and free of lice. From chests in the loft, Hallgerðr freed Rannveig’s finest tapestries and hung them year-round in the hall. Guests were invited to feast the smallest occasions, Hlíðarendi’s unending hospitality bordering on the crude. Let them scoff, Hallgerðr had thought. As long as Gunnarr is happy, let the others whisper. She had never hidden her desires from him. She’d never been dishonest. All of her husbands, Gunnarr included, knew what they were getting when they married her.

  And yet, Gunnarr’s affections had cooled as quickly as they’d first heated. After Högni’s birth, his attentions were split. Once Grani arrived, they’d completely broken.

  Too much time spent with Njáll and his smug kin. Njáll the all-seer who watched the future flicker in the hearth, but did nothing to prevent its unfolding—not even when it came to his own death! Wise, passive Njáll, had lain there in his bed and let life burn down around him.

  “The trolls take your friends!” Hallgerðr shouted once, as Gunnarr left for the summer Assembly without her. Njáll was going with him, of course, Njáll and his sons; but as had happened more and more over the years, Hallgerðr had been left behind.

  Left behind, but not alone. Rannveig was always close at hand, nagging and condescending. She claimed Hallgerðr wasn’t a good húsfreya, that her only skill was in planning against men’s lives.

  Unfair, Hallgerðr thinks. Uncalled for. It hadn’t been her fault that Þorvaldr and Glúmr had died. Those deaths had not been her fault.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Taking up Gunnarr’s bow, she sighs, weary as the coming dark. The string’s eyelet is lined with bronze, the balance of metal and wood perfect. Angling it to catch the last streaks of daylight, Hallgerðr unknots the broken cord then crumples it into her pocket. She won’t leave anything her husband once prized behind, not even this tangle of thread.

  As their children grew to manhood, Gunnarr was so often gone, always gone. What did he expect Hallgerðr to do, left to fend for herself at Hlíðarendi with two young boys, a household to run, a harridan mother-in-law, and Njáll’s arrogant wife constantly taunting?

  They’d been a team, once, she and Gunnarr. After the children, their pairing had shifted. Instead of running off together during Assemblies, lying in the long grass on half-lit nights, eating honey straight from imported skeps, licking the sweet-smoky substance from fingertips and lips, Hallgerðr would start things on her own. Later, Gunnarr would sweep in to settle matters, often armed with a purse full of compensation.

  “She’s a hothead,” Hallgerðr once overheard Njáll say, accepting a sack of silver from Gunnarr. Payment for one of his servants’ deaths, another casualty in Bergþóra and Hallgerðr’s ongoing feud. It was hard, nowadays, for Hallgerðr to keep track.

  “You’ll have a tough time,” the beardless man said to Gunnarr, the two of them newly returned from the Alþingi, “atoning for your wife’s continued mischief.”

  It had been no real mischief, Hallgerðr thinks now, keeping Njáll’s servants from dying of old age. Gunnarr disagreed. She can still picture the way he looked when she’d inched up to the door and peered outside at him in the yard. The furrow of his brow when Njáll accused her of being sneaky. Lines deepening beside his nose as he’d pulled his lips firmly shut, the way he always had when being cautious. And he’d been cautious more often than not. Slow to anger. Measured. Everything had always been equal with Gunnarr and Njáll, everything had levelled out—and it had been profoundly annoying.

  Gunnarr’s passion had simmered. The wild Viking she’d loved was trapped beneath a calm, business-man’s veneer.

  So she’d fought back when Bergþóra taunted. She’d tricked a few slaves into stealing supplies from Bergþórsváll. Yes, there had been a few accidents, a few deaths. But through it all, her ridiculous feud with Njáll’s stuck-up wife, through it all she’d only thought to entice him. Her Gunnarr. Her Viking. Lure him out of complacency with good food and spiced ale, with fire and honey-smoked kisses. She had never done more, never taken less, than what he’d deserved.

  Throughout the leanest times, she had served feasts fit for a warrior. Dressed in her best red gown, her best evening-blue cloak, wearing a crown of forget-me-nots, she’d brought platter after platter to her household. She’d borne Rannveig’s barbed words without snapping back, not once; though, yes, some of what she’d prepared—the cheese, the butter—had come from someone else’s pantry. Like her famous forefather, Ragnarr Loðbrók, Hallgerðr pillaged to benefit her family. Surely the Viking sleeping under her husband’s neatly-trimmed beard, beneath the jerkin that hadn’t seen blood in far too long, beneath the muscular chest whose scars had begun to fade—surely that Viking would recognise in her a worthy, like-minded soul? Surely that Viking would be proud to know of Hallgerðr’s conquests, to see others bandage the wounds she’d struck, to hear her crow?

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Though cold, Hallgerðr’s fingers are nimble. Gunnarr had asked her for two, but now she threads three, four, five lengths of her hair through the bow’s eyelets and knots them fast. It isn’t enough, she thinks, twisting the strands into thicker cords, pulling them taut.

  “Hallgerðr,” cries Rannveig, the halberd’s shaft thunk-thunk-thunking on the floor. “Time’s up! Enough is enough!”

  No, she thinks, looking at the half-strung bow. It will never be enough.

  It is not wrong to want, the witch had said and, idiot child, Hallgerðr had believed her.

  Not so long ago, the entire household had wanted the provisions she’d acquired from Otkell Skarfsson. Iceland had suffered two seasons of great dearth; last year’s harvest had failed, and every face in the local assembly-places had looked gaunt, Gunnarr’s included. Even so, her husband, stupidly generous, had shared Hlíðarendi’s hay and supplies until their stores were exhausted. The servants, the slaves, even his shrew of a mother, had grown so hungry at Gunnarr’s farmstead, that the great man himself was forced to go begging.

  He’d called it buying, of course, but Hallgerðr had known better.

  Gunnarr had debased himself, begging at Otkell’s well-stocked homestead. And what was his reward? Nothing but another mouth to feed—that slave who’d caused Hallgerðr so much trouble recently. That split-tongued, dark-browed Melkólfr.

  Hallgerðr tastes bile, stomach squirming even now at the thought of the pity-goods they’d received after Otkell had refused to lend Gunnarr essential provisions. Fifteen horses had carried hay, five horses laden with cheese and dried fish and vats of whey, hand-delivered in abundance from Njáll and Bergþóra!

  There would be no charity for her husband. A Viking takes what she needs…

  It was right, what she’d done, what she’d had Melkólfr do. Otkell had refused to help, despite his wealth; he’d offered not food, but a slave. He’d deserved to be plundered. And Melkólfr had been sly as she’d expected such a liar to be; he’d slipped over to his once-master’s farm at the blackest hour of winter-dark, and stolen more of Otkell’s food than the folk at Hlíðarendi could eat in a season.

  “Where did this come from,” Gunnarr had asked, as Hallgerðr brought out the final tray for the feast. He was so thin, jerkin hanging off his lean frame, hollows collecting shadows beneath his eyes. Yet, even diminished, Gunnarr had had the nerve to sit in his hall like a king, back stiff as the table she’d
just covered with abundance—creamy cheeses, pots of smooth skyr, plates of rye bread slathered with salted butter—and he’d spat upon what she’d provided.

  “It’s not men’s business to be concerned with kitchen affairs,” Hallgerðr had said, more sharply than she’d intended. Hunger had whetted her tongue to a point. “It makes no difference where it came from, you may as well eat it.”

  Uncle Hrút’s vulgar words—that girl has thief’s eyes—had echoed in Gunnarr’s reply. “I will not be in league with thieves,” Hallgerðr’s third husband had said, right before she felt Þórvaldr and Glúmr’s rough palms redoubled in his slap. Vaguely, she recalls the crack of skin on skin, the crack of the butter plate as she dropped it, the crack of her heart—but she didn’t feel the impact of Gunnarr striking her, not right away. The burn came much later.

  As the servants cleared the table, swept up the broken crock, and brought out the last of their home-dried meat instead, Gunnarr had stood and glared down at Hallgerðr.

  Oh, what a glare.

  There he was, she’d thought. Her Viking. Rage in his eyes, in the sting of his blow. Rage, a gift he’d given her, open-handed. One she promised to repay, when and if ever she could.

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  Winding hair after hair onto her husband’s bow, Hallgerðr knows one thing to be true, deep in her marrow: Gunnarr died of pride and an overblown sense of honour. He died because his reputation had grown too large; his fame overspilled the banks of the Rangá river into the territories of proud men. Men with good reputations, but not great ones, nowhere near as impressive as Gunnarr’s.

  It was impossible to live in the shadow of perfection.

  So they ambushed Gunnarr once, twice, then put him on trial for surviving. For refusing to lay down his weapons. For being so skilled with halberd and arrows. We’ll accomplish nothing, they’d said, as long as Gunnarr can use his bow… They’d prosecuted him for killing Otkell’s son, Þorgeirr—in self-defence!—because that jowled lug of a man, like his father, had been as popular as he’d been fat.