I stopped to look at him, and though I knew better than to answer honestly, I could not manage to do otherwise. “I do not. She is a fool,” I said crisply.
Although his lips remained curled at the corners, Sigurd’s eyes became rigid, and I could see that he was angry. “You are jealous. You must be, or how could you say such a thing?”
My tears came all at once. “Do you love her?” I cried.
I searched Sigurd’s eyes for the answer, but before I could discover it, he grabbed me and pulled me to him. “Do you truly believe that I could stop loving you within the span of a few days, Gudrun, and fill the void with the love of a stranger?”
My thought was that Sigurd had spent more time alone with her in the past few days than he had with me in the past several years. I longed to lash out at him and ask him what events had caused him to be with her so long. But that would have been unthinkably discourteous, and my responses already lacked courtesy enough. “Gunner loves her already, and he has known her only one night,” I whined.
“Silly Gudrun,” Sigurd whispered. He took my arm and we began walking up toward the forest to the north of the hall. “Gunner does not love her. He loves her face and the sound of her laughter. And why should he not? Her face is flawless, and her laughter is music more sweet than that which issues from Gunner’s harp. But a woman is more than her face and her laughter, and one does not discover the expanse of a woman within so short a time. We, on the other hand, have known each other long and well. When I say that I love you, I am referring not merely to your face and your laughter—” He stopped suddenly and took hold of my shoulders. “Let me hear no more from you on this subject, Gudrun. You give me no credit when you suppose me to be so shallow.” And he began to walk again.
“I am truly sorry,” I croaked as I hurried to keep pace with him. “You will not hear me speak that way again.”
Up at the rock-horse, among the birches that glittered in the moonlight, I decided to prove to Sigurd that I had put the matter of Brunhild out of my mind. “Let us speak of our wedding,” I said in a voice which I hoped sounded cheerful.
Sigurd had been staring out at nothing. Now he turned to look at me, his expression strange. It was a moment before he responded. “If you like,” he said. “Here is my plan. Tomorrow I leave for Frankish lands. I have put that off long enough now. I must get back and let my people know what happened to Regan, and naturally, they will want to know the rest, as well. When I return, we will have the weddings—yours and mine, and Brunhild and Gunner’s. I suppose your mother will have to sleep in the hall with Hagen and Guthorm for a time. Then, when the growing season comes around again, we will leave the others and make our way to the hall I share with my uncle. I have given some thought to Guthorm, too. If you like, he can live with us until we come again to your lands. He can go back and forth, whatever you want. We will visit often enough, I wager.”
His response had been blunt, matter-of-fact. “That suits me,” I said, and I could think of nothing more to say on the subject. We sat like strangers, until Sigurd began to rub his stomach and yawn. “Are you tired?” I asked.
“Very. Would you mind?”
“Not at all.” I was already up on my feet.
* * *
I tiptoed into the bower and took my place between Mother and Guthorm. It was narrower than it had been before because an additional mattress, which was empty at the moment, had been laid out for Brunhild. I pulled my sheepskin rug up over my shoulders and settled myself. My black thoughts had tired me out, and I was ready for sleep. I kissed the back of Guthorm’s head and was about to close my eyes when all at once Mother whispered my name, startling me. “You failed to give him the drink,” she whispered harshly.
“I had no opportunity.” Out of curiosity, I had tasted the brew myself earlier in the day, and it tasted badly—far worse than the medicinal brew. I could not think of a way to get Sigurd to drink such a thing without telling him the reason for its preparation. And now that he had proven to me how repulsive my jealousy was to him… Still, there had to be a way. Sigurd’s little speech, meant to reassure me of his love, had the opposite effect. It seemed to me that it was forced, perhaps even rehearsed. When I lifted my head to look at the vessel that contained the brew, I saw only the smaller of the two vessels, the one that held the medicinal brew. “Where have you moved it to?” I snapped.
“In the corner, near Guthorm,” Mother whispered. “I moved it so that the valkyria would not notice it and become curious. Will you give it to him tomorrow?”
“He rides back to the Franks, first thing.”
“Then you must rise early and give it to him before he leaves. Tell him it is something you made to ensure his safe travel.”
“But there are few dangers between here and there.”
“There are always dangers. Tell him you had a dream and foresaw some horror. Use your imagination, daughter. Now go to sleep so you can rise early.”
“I will,” I said, but I did not go to sleep for some time. I did use my imagination however, though not in the manner Mother intended. I used it to imagine that Gunner and Brunhild had argued, and that when they returned, she would awaken Sigurd and bid him to take her away at once. I used it to imagine that Sigurd and Brunhild had only returned to dig up the gold, that their participation in our paltry feast had been a sham, and that when the rest of us were asleep, they would rise and go to the riverbank together. And when Brunhild and Gunner came in that night, and Brunhild found her way into the bower and took her place on the other side of Mother and almost immediately began to snore, I used it to imagine that her snoring was a pretense, that she could hear my thoughts and feel my hate—for how could the black, fiendish presence of my hatred, which had coiled itself about me like a snake, which was consuming me, suffocating me—be anything less than apparent to the object of its inclination? Yes, I used my imagination—far into the night. And when I slept, I slept the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. And thus I failed to hear when Sigurd awakened in the morning. When I awoke, he was, of course, long gone.
8
WHAT DID BRUNHILD do during the day? No one knew. But one thing was certain—she slept a good deal when she was not doing it. The birds and the sunlight and the voices of Mother and Hagen and Gunner in the hall, which were plenty enough to rouse Guthorm and me, had no effect on her. When we quit the bower each morning, she was still sleeping soundly on her stomach, with her head turned toward the wall and her arms pinned to her sides like flightless wings. It was usually mid-day, when my brothers were returning from their hunting or from meetings with our freemen, when Mother and I were just finishing with the cows and the goats, that Brunhild made her first appearance, her long silver hair flowing behind her like a shaft of sunlight. And then she did not speak of her dreams, as other people do when they have just awakened. She merely offered Gunner and Hagen her enchanting smile and Mother and me her less-than-enchanting nod (Guthorm she never greeted at all) and went off about her business taking the northeast path into the forest. That was the last we saw of her until evening.
One day, when Brunhild was just going off, Mother questioned Gunner. “That girl is no help,” she said. “Where does she go? What does she do? You must have asked her?”
Gunner, still mesmerized by the sight of Brunhild’s hair visible yet among the trees in the distance, mumbled, “She is not a woman like yourself. She does what she does. It is not for us to question.”
As if to obstruct his view of the silver butterfly flitting away into the forest, Mother shoved me in front of him. “Nonetheless,” she insisted, “there are ways she could make herself useful. She could be instructing Gudrun here in the ways of the runes. Can you not ask her to take your sister along sometimes?”
Gunner laughed. “Anyone can write a rune. It is merely a matter of connecting one line to another. What makes Brunhild’s runes work is her power, and that, you will recall,
she was born with—a gift from the gods like the bees’ gift of honey.”
While he spoke, he kept his gaze set over my head, and when his eyes began to shift, I knew that he had lost sight of Brunhild. He sighed once, then turned, and mumbling something about sharpening his sword blade, he left us, Mother and me with our milk pails and Hagen with two dead rabbits lashed together and hanging from his shoulder.
Mother shook her head. “We hear about her powers often enough. But I have seen no sign of them myself. Have you?”
Hagen lifted the rabbits from his shoulder and inspected them. “I have seen how her glance sets Guthorm running if Gudrun is not near to grab hold of his wrist. And look at the effect she has had on him.”
We all turned to look at Gunner. He was sitting beneath the oaks with his arms folded and his sword across his lap.
I saw very little of Brunhild in the days between Sigurd’s departure and return. We ate at the same table each evening, but saying no more than “pass this, pass that” to each other. And as she slept late and I retired to the bower early, ostensibly to work on my feather mattress but in fact to nurse my black thoughts and let fly my increasingly reckless imagination, we were rarely ever in the same place at the same time. Gunner did not see much more of her than I did (or at least he did not see her alone), though of course this was not his doing. From my bower I heard him ask her on several occasions, “Will you come and walk with me tonight?” But her response, though always kind, was firmly negative—she had tired herself out during the course of her day, or she had eaten so much that she could not lift herself now, or, more often, she would rather stay put and hear him play his harp.
Gunner was content then to take up his harp for her, and when he had done with one strain, to take it up again. He sang to her about our father and how he had bargained with Aetius. About our uncle, Gundahar. About the Burgundians we had once been at Worms, and the sorrowful vulnerable lot we had since become—and much more. In this way, Brunhild came to know all there was to know about us while we still knew next to nothing about her. Once, when Gunner had put down his harp, I heard him say, “We need you, Brunhild. You can change the fate of the Burgundians with your runes. What rune will you write for us?”
Brunhild replied, “I will know what rune to write when the time comes to write it.”
“Write one now,” Gunner persisted. “Be our entertainment tonight. Make the fire soar, though not so high that it brings the hall down. Make day of night. Make my harp to play itself; the gods know my fingers burn with all the strains that I have played for you.”
Brunhild’s response came quickly and harshly. “Do you think I would write a rune for some trifling matter? To see you laughing or amazed? The force that drives my runes is not some wide river ever flowing. It is more a stream which is apt to dry up if the gods do not see fit to fill it. When the time comes, I will know, and only then will I write my runes.”
I was so intent on listening for Gunner’s response that I did not hear Brunhild’s footsteps coming until she had already reached the bower. She caught me sitting over my sack of feathers with my hands still and my ear straining toward the hall. “What ails you?” she snapped, and then she pulled her mattress closer to the wall and lay down on it with her back to me.
As far as I know, this was the only time that Gunner and Brunhild ever crossed each other during Sigurd’s absence. And the next day, Gunner went out of his way to make amends. He rushed to her side when she made her appearance beneath the noonday sun, pulling from his tunic some flowers he had managed to hide from the rest of us. That evening (and, indeed, on all the evenings that followed), he made no attempt to get her to walk with him. He went right to his harp when our meal was done, and he played her the strains that she professed to love best—and, moreover, one new one telling of the enchanting valkyria who had come to our hall to enrich our lives with her beauty and her grace; her runes he wisely did not mention.
My life was not enriched. The days that passed were the longest I had ever known. As I quickly learned, when one’s heart is black, when one’s spirit has perished and one’s body is forced to endure without it, a day is an obstacle, a mountain to be surmounted. I continued to believe that Sigurd would marry me—for Sigurd was a man of his word—but I had already invested much time imagining how he would look off at nothing, as he had when we sat on the rock-horse the night of Brunhild’s arrival, when we lay on our feather mattress as man and wife.
Nor was Mother’s life enriched. Though she no longer questioned Brunhild, her face was rigid when Brunhild was about—and much of the time when she was not. Guthorm’s life certainly was not enriched. He had thrived always on my kindnesses and Mother’s, and we had no mind for such matters now. Hagen was Hagen, a practical man and a man of good humor, and if Brunhild changed his life at all after his initial astonishment at her beauty, I could not say how. Only one life was enriched, and that was Gunner’s. Gunner had become a new man. Though one could see in his eye that he continued to take note of Guthorm’s mishaps, he refrained from scolding him for them now. Nor did he speak sternly to Mother and me when we disagreed with him on some account. Rather, he was indifferent to us. Whatever we said or did was fine with him, as long as he could keep his eye on Brunhild (which he did unceasingly), fill Brunhild’s drinking horn, carry Brunhild’s bowl, strain his voice and bloody his fingers on his harp to please her ear.
And who could blame him? Her beauty remained startling, her laughter music. Her voice was as sweet and low as a summer breeze. Her movements were quick and purposeful, and yet she carried herself like a queen, with her chin lifted high and her watery gaze at once candid and imposing. And for all that she wore a tunic not unlike my brothers’, no one could ever mistake her for a man. Her confidence in herself and her powers endowed her with a strength which the rest of us had forgotten. And yet, there was about her a vulnerability as well. Sometimes, for instance, she would shudder, as if she knew some secret too terrible to share. And the way she slept at night, with her arms tight against her sides. It made one want to bend over her and pull her rug up to cover her shoulders. No, I did not blame Gunner for loving her, and had I not believed that she loved Sigurd and he her, I might have cherished her myself. But as it was, she served only to remind me of all the things that I was not. My dwarfish stature, my gritty voice, my laughter (which I had forgotten the sound of but which I was certain was a sordid thing compared to Brunhild’s), all these deficiencies which I had hardly given a thought to before were foremost in my mind when she was in my sight.
Fortunately, much of the time I was too busy to dwell on Brunhild, for there was much work to be done, and with the exception of our ‘honored’ guest, we labored each day side by side with our servants at those chores which mark the end of the growing season. Our chief task was the hay. It had to be cut and gathered and formed into rain-shedding cones to be stored as fodder for winter. The amount of hay had to be reckoned carefully so that we would know what number of livestock could be kept alive over the winter and what number should be slaughtered at the beginning of the new season. And there were other crops to be harvested. For my brothers, there were many consultations to be had with our freemen, who were performing the same tasks on their own pastures, but some without the aid of their servants.
When our preparations for winter had been completed, when the late crops were harvested and and stored and the hay cones were drying in the fields, Gunner called for a day of rest before our servants went off to aid those of our freemen who had lost theirs. Gunner, who had never before given a thought to the servants (who had always needed Hagen to remind him that they were something more than oxen), assembled them all together very early on the morning of that day and made a great speech about all the good work they had done. He promised them that they would be his guests in our hall when we had our end-of-the-season feast. The servants all cried out their praises for Gunner, and then, uncertain what to do with a
day to themselves, they retreated into their huts.
As I watched them disperse from my place on the edge of the roof, I wondered myself how I would get through a day without work. Now my mind was already filling with the future, and all the shadowy, sorrowful images that I usually conjured up at night were beginning to take on a more authentic form. We were expecting Sigurd back any time now, and I had no doubt that my worst fears would soon be confirmed for me.
The sun had not yet risen above the trees when I heard a rider approaching from the opposite direction, and when I turned, I saw Hagen. He had ridden off just before supper the day before to play at tables, or so he had said, with Vascar, one of our freemen, and he was only now returning. Of course, we all knew his real purpose. Vascar had an unmarried sister, and Hagen had taken some interest in her of late. I crouched down to hide from him, but he spotted me anyway and brought his horse up beneath me. When he saw that I would ignore him, he dismounted and climbed up to sit by my side. His face, when I finally bothered to look at it, was tranquil—Gunner, Hagen, Brunhild, their faces were all the same. I did not need to ask to know that Vascar’s sister had begun to return his affection. He cupped my chin in his hand as I was turning away from him and said, “Sister, I do not know you anymore.”
I pushed his hand away. “I do not know myself.”
He slid down the roof some so that he was more or less in front of me. “Perhaps Sigurd will not know you either when he returns.”
“What of it? It is too late to matter one way or the other.”
He laughed. “You sound like Gunner,” he mumbled. He considered. Then he laughed again. “I should say, you sound as Gunner used to. It is as if you exchanged your humor for his.”
This hurt me deeply, though I tried to show no trace of it. All at once he pulled me toward him and kissed my cheek, my eye, my brow, in his rough manner. I pushed him away and set my gaze on the sun, which had just cleared the treetops. “What do you call this force that governs you now, Gudrun?” he asked. “Hatred? Envy? Hopelessness?”
The Last Wife of Attila the Hun Page 14