She turned to the jarl himself. “Wise Gudmund, I seek your permission to ask a question.”
The legendary warrior lifted his silver cup, and for a while it was as if she had not spoken. Then, before he took another sip, he lifted one eyebrow in assent.
“Tell me, Gudmund,” said Hallgerd, choosing her words with care, “on your honor—does my father still live?”
Thengskapr.
That was the word for honor Hallgerd used, and she chose it carefully. She was asking for Gudmund’s word as a nobleman.
The old jarl put both hands on the arms of his oak chair. With the assistance of a spearman, he got to his feet. He stood swaying, whether from infirmity or an excess of mead, the young captive could not tell. A guard steadied him as he made his way toward Hallgerd.
Gudmund stood before her and ran his scarred hand over her hair. Was there, she wondered, an air of sorrow in his countenance? She was aware that she could have seized a sword from a nearby guardsman’s hilt, and run the old man through. But she did nothing while the legendary sea chief put his hand on her shoulder.
He patted her, as a man might console a nervous animal. Or, perhaps, a bereaved daughter. Gudmund turned back to his high seat. The great fighter sat with difficulty, and took his mead cup in hand once again without uttering a word to his captive.
Thirty-four
She sat in her chamber once again, her heart racing.
The guard at Hallgerd’s door was joining in the singing, raising his voice with all the others in a rousing, tuneful song about a ship so gracefully constructed that the oarsmen rowed across the sky.
A footstep whispered at her door. Thrand stood in her chamber, putting a finger to his lips.
Hallgerd had been weeping, but she quickly blotted her tears on her sleeves.
“At least bloody-handed Gudmund would not deceive me,” said Hallgerd. “As some seamen have.”
“You asked Gudmund to confirm something impossible,” said Thrand, his voice barely above a whisper. “How can even he say who lives or who dies, four days’ sail across the sea?”
“Was my father,” he asked, choosing her words with care, “in sound health when the Danes left Spjothof?”
Thrand lifted his hands in protest. “I was not with the band who confronted your father’s sword.”
“But you know what happened.”
Thrand ran his gaze over the floor.
“You’ve known all along,” said Hallgerd. “I heard Olaf boasting about it—words it took me a long while to understand.”
Thrand turned away from her.
“All your men knew,” Hallgerd said, pacing, unable to stand still. “The message was in their eyes, but I could not read it—or did not want to.”
Thrand did not speak.
“Tell me,” said Hallgerd, barely able to control her voice, “how my father died.”
“He was alive when we left him.”
Her eyes spoke for her. I don’t believe you.
“But he had suffered a wound at Odd’s hands,” Thrand continued reluctantly, “a sword cut to the head.”
Hallgerd felt her throat close, the pulse frozen in her body.
She had hoped that she was wrong. She had prayed all along that she had mistaken the signs all around her.
Then her faith stirred again. “But he was still alive!” It was a statement, not a question.
Thrand bowed his head. “He was.”
“Give me a satchel of food and a skin of water. I’ll escape this place and begin my voyage home tonight.”
Thrand made a helpless gesture.
“My father will hear of your kindness, before the gods,” said Hallgerd, resorting to the finest speech she knew. “And I’ll pray my neighbors to spare your life.”
Thrand did not respond.
“Some bread,” said Hallgerd, “and water. Nothing more.”
Thrand parted his lips to protest.
Hallgerd continued, “I don’t ask for a ship or a ship’s boat—or even a hollow log and a paddle. I’ll choose my own sea craft. I ask only provisions—and one more thing. One thing I think you can give me without risking your life, courageous Thrand.” She could not keep the sarcasm from her voice.
“My severed head on a stick?” said Thrand with a pained laugh.
“A homespun cloak, with a hood.”
“Hallgerd, I expected you to be a young woman of fire, and beauty. But I did not expect to feel as I do.”
The emotion in his voice surprised Hallgerd.
“I regret having had a hand in your sorrow,” he said.
Hallgerd could not suppress a moment of affection for this gray-eyed Dane.
“But you won’t be able to flee Gudmund,” Thrand was saying. “Men obey him because they have no choice.” The seaman stepped to the game board and picked up one of the soapstone carvings and very gently put it back again. “I am not a weak man, with Thor’s help, but Gudmund and his daughter can be unforgiving, even to a member of their family. We sail, we utter lies, we draw blood, all because it pleases Gudmund.”
What moved Hallgerd she could not have said. She rose and stepped to Thrand and put her hand on his shoulder—just as Gudmund had touched her.
“You will help me, friend Thrand,” she said in a low voice.
Thrand’s eyes were bright with feeling, but he did not assent.
She added, “Before the gods, I ask you—please.”
The feast was at its peak, talking contests as every table, bragging contests, story games, testing who could tell the best story, the most fearsome, the most scandalous. There was a traditional game in which the virtues of a person or beast were enumerated, until the list had gone on so long that men who were sober when the game began were slurring drunk at its conclusion.
It was not the first time Hallgerd had felt a tug of kinship among these Danes. The hall was a riot of boisterous song and dancing. Men and women were entranced with each other’s company, embracing, leading one another off into the shadows. Gleeful figures cavorted near the hearth fire, and thrall and guard alike joined in the singing, a song Hallgerd did not know, about a mare who wished a stallion would stop breeding with the clouds and come back to earth where he belonged.
Hallgerd was hooded and cloaked, her fine gown with the knotted sleeves left behind. She was swift in following Thrand, who was garbed in similar fashion. Arnbjorg was singing, along with everyone else, her eyes ablaze with mead and the obvious relief that her father had returned from sea safely once again. Hallgerd and Thrand walked quickly, looking, Hallgerd prayed, like two slaves hurrying off to attend to some household emergency.
Only one person was aware of Hallgerd and Thrand, watching through the thick feast smoke.
As Thrand opened the door and stepped out into the darkness, Hallgerd glanced back to survey the room.
Syrpa’s eyes caught hers.
Thirty-five
Hallgerd followed Thrand through the muddy, crooked lanes. The town was quiet, except for the roaring, cheering tumult from the hall, and that chanting grew increasingly distant. When Thrand stopped and pressed against a wall to look back and listen, Hallgerd followed his example.
The door of the newly constructed house was unlatched, and swung inward. The rooms echoed around them, each footstep resounding in her prospective home. Starlight fell through the hole in the roof, where hearth smoke would someday rise.
The door to the storage room was so new, it had no latch, swinging silently on its hinges. In the almost total darkness it took a few heartbeats for Hallgerd’s eyes to adjust to the shapes of things around her, shelves and the woven baskets that would be used to store grain.
“Perhaps she did not know who we were,” concluded Hallgerd, giving a brief account of their departure from the hall.
“Syrpa knows everything that happens within her walls,” said Thrand.
“She was kind to me,” said Hallgerd.
“Syrpa was working hard to impress you,” said the seaman. “She believes tha
t someday Arnbjorg will be gray and toothless, and you’ll be a power here. Still, she’s not a heartless woman.”
“I pray she is not.”
“I’ll speak with her,” he said meaningfully. “Look at this grand house!” he added in a tone of wonderment. “Arnbjorg and her father made glorious plans for you.”
An alarm rang, far off.
Many towns had a warning iron, a metal rod that hung from a crosspiece. Such irons were rung to stir a town against attackers, or to warn of some all-consuming emergency. Now an alarm rang ceaselessly, some brute with a powerful arm striking it, and then pausing only to change hands and continue ringing. Voices joined in, cries and shouted commands, the words indistinguishable but urgent. It seemed to Hallgerd that she heard the far-off sound of her own name.
“How much danger,” asked Hallgerd, “have I put you in?”
“No great risk, Jarl’s Daughter,” said Thrand with a quiet laugh. “And even if you have—I’ve tasted danger before.”
“My village will pay any price you ask, if you take me home.” There was a vague, moonlit gleam about the place, the plank floors dimly reflecting starlight from the courtyard.
“Every ship will be searched, every sea chest,” said Thrand. “Hide here, Hallgerd, in this storage room. If Arnbjorg’s house guards search this place, get into one of these new curd vats and pull the lid over you. No one will expect you to be hiding here in this house—they’ll be searching the boats.”
He was speaking quickly now. “I’ll send word to you when it’s safe to leave, and I’ll bring you food.” He retreated, his silhouette dim in the doorway.
Hallgerd tried to shape some high-speech farewell, but approaching steps that splashed puddles in the streets outside silenced her for a moment.
“Go,” she urged, “before they find you.”
He did something then that surprised Hallgerd, and moved her deeply. He returned through the darkness, took her hand, and kissed it.
And then he was gone.
Armed men searched the house the following noon.
Hallgerd had awakened to find a satchel of bread, a wedge of golden butter, and a clay bottle of water. Now the empty building thundered with heavy footsteps, men dragging their spears, in a hurry as they barged into the shadows. In the pine-scented rooms the scent of the spearmen was ripe, sweat and ale, the urgent odor of men in trouble, the way rowers perspire when a ship runs aground.
Hallgerd faded from room to room, just ahead of them, until she crawled into one of the curd vats and curled inside. The container smelled of newly cut wood, and the lid fit snugly over the top. The total darkness nearly choked her. She held her breath as big feet paced the storage room beyond, heavy strides echoing off the wooden walls.
If the searchers had said something it would not have been so bad, just a few syllables so she could judge them, and understand how desperate or angry or weary they might be. But there was only the scuffling of feet, and the sigh of someone slamming the storage door, shutting it again, and giving up when it didn’t latch.
Arnbjorg searched the house herself the following night.
She was accompanied by a serving woman and two armed men who stopped at the threshold, as though Hallgerd, flushed like a rabbit, might escape out the door. The servant carried a candle, their shadows huge across the bare floor.
Hallgerd slipped into the storage room, once again climbed into the wooden container, and crouched there, her eyes shut tight. She knew that any moment the noblewoman’s hand would seize the lid, snatch it away, and empty Hallgerd out onto the floor.
Gudmund’s daughter wept. These were not tears of sadness but frustration and anger. Arnbjorg pounded on the timbers supporting the roof. She kicked doors shut, flung them open. And then she said, “Give me the candle.”
The servant was silent.
“Can you smell her?” demanded Arnbjorg.
“Lady Arnbjorg,” stammered the servant, “I cannot tell.”
“I can nose her well.”
Hallgerd knew where Arnbjorg was, following her with her mind’s eye every moment, the noblewoman pacing, pausing, pacing again. At last Gudmund’s daughter gave a wall a kick and called out, “Where are you, farm girl? Come out or I’ll burn these walls down around you.”
Hallgerd’s body gave a quiet, inner murmur. Barely a sound at all, and certainly inaudible beyond the vat.
“I heard her just now,” said Arnbjorg. “Didn’t you?”
The servant was in apparent agony, admitting that she had heard nothing. “She’s far north by now, I believe, Lady Arnbjorg—on the sea.”
“She would rather freeze on the gray ocean, you believe?” said Arnbjorg in a tone of thorough skepticism. “I don’t think anyone is so foolish.”
She entered the storage room. Hallgerd saw the faintest glimmer of candlelight where the lid—that had always fit so well until just now—had settled crookedly over the opening.
Arnbjorg stood there for a long time, while Hallgerd held her breath.
And then she left without a further word.
Thirty-six
Hallgerd was not accustomed to solitude.
No one in Spjothof was ever alone indoors. The quiet insistence of the loom shuttle, the grinding of barley in stone querns, the sweeping, the washing—it was all fueled by conversation. All the day’s work was accompanied by song, and laughter, and gossip.
She slept and woke. She waited—when had she ever had a life of color and cool wind? She could not remember it clearly anymore. She chewed the shrinking crust of bread and hoarded the last sips of water. The wind sang overhead, along the stone shingles of the longhouse.
The ravens called, but they sounded like mere birds now, scolding each other, greeting each other—or laughing.
When she heard a door creak, and a tread in the room outside, one part of her mind no longer cared if the visitor was captor or friend.
A familiar voice called her name.
Syrpa carried a satchel, and she knelt in the half-dark of the big house. Hallgerd left the shadows to meet her, grateful at the sight of another human being.
The housekeeper gave an account of what was inside the bag, wheat bread and dried cod, and butter. “With this much food you could sail from here to the North Star,” said Syrpa.
There was indeed a pleasing weight of provisions in the satchel, enough for one person sailing four days.
“You’ll find water in the boat I’ve prepared for you,” said the housekeeper.
“You didn’t bring me a weapon, Syrpa.”
“What sort of blade would have pleased you?” said Syrpa. “A harpoon, maybe, so you could run men through—the way you’ve managed to skewer Thrand.”
Hallgerd began to have some understanding of Syrpa’s feelings toward Thrand, and the skein of jealousy and loyalty that tugged at the capable woman. Hallgerd said, “You have been kind to me, Syrpa, from the beginning.”
“My dear lady, when I first saw you I thought that Thrand had captured a very pretty shepherd’s wench. Your garments were of coarse herringbone weave, if you’ll forgive me. Only when you spoke did I realize that, by Thor and the north wind, they had brought back the woman of good name they had been ordered to capture. There will be a sleek little boat moored in the harbor.” She used the word pramr, a compact little craft used for transportation from wharf to ship. “There you’ll find a seal spear and some fishhooks in the vessel. Most of the ships are off searching for you.” Syrpa paused, waiting for her to give a sign that she understood.
Hallgerd did understand, but was too thrilled and hopeful to do more than nod.
“Take the boat to sea,” said Syrpa, adding a few directions through the lanes, down to the moorings. “Not just now—a north wind is blowing. But when you hear the wind shift, make all haste.”
“You are a loyal friend,” said Hallgerd.
“You are a good-hearted woman, Jarl’s Daughter,” said Syrpa, “and I mean you no harm, but Arnbjorg could lock you
in a cage and I would do little more than pity you. Thrand convinced me to do this, and my heart is weak. I don’t know why I heed the counsels of men, especially a well-made nobleman with gray eyes.”
“Syrpa, you’ve treated me well, and I am grateful.”
Syrpa looked away, as though stubbornly trying to deny her own kind nature. “We owe our peace to Gudmund,” she said, “but some of us have little love for his daughter. Besides, she played a dangerous sport when she captured you. The forced wedding would only be acceptable to Spjothof if your neighbors and family were largely unharmed.” The housekeeper spoke formally, but with warm feeling in her voice.
Syrpa turned back once before she left. She had something further to say, a final message. But whether it was blessing or warning, she said nothing more. Her footsteps padded across the timbers, and she was gone.
Thirty-seven
The north wind died, and the house was quiet.
Hallgerd left in the darkness. She felt exposed under the starry sky, certain that someone would spy her and call out.
She did not seek the byways down to the harbor—not just yet. She walked quickly, hidden in the homespun hood, the leather pouch of provisions on her back. Hallgerd made a mistake, turning into a broad street where two men were talking, laughing, rattling dice. Spearmen consulted with each other at the end of this lane, and down another a guard clambered heavily up the wooden stairs to the top of the wall, calling out a greeting to the watch he was relieving.
Freylief was restless on this summer night, every shadowy shape Hallgerd glimpsed sporting a shield and spear. A voice called out, “Thyri, do you have my jug?”
Hallgerd shrank into the shadowy angle of a building, praying that the guard had not seen her.
Alrek the berserker trudged forward along the lane. “Thyri,” he called again, using a feminine name common among the Norse. He came closer. He stopped in his tracks only a few strides from where Hallgerd stood, her form pressed against the hard pine timbers of the house.
“Thyri, I’m thirsty,” called the big man.
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