She put her hand on my arm with a suddenness that startled me. “You knew him?”
“Purely by accident. Harald has probably told you already—”
“Harald has said little about anyone but himself. You tell me.”
And she made me narrate the battle and Olaf’s death from start to finish in every grim detail: the leg chopped off, the neck nearly severed, the fight over his corpse in which it was dragged this way and that until it nearly came apart. By the time I was done, her cheeks were wet.
“Your feelings are strong, Princess,” I said. “And since we’re being frank, I will say that I find it curious—to be so warm for a man you’d never seen in the flesh before a year ago?”
“But you saw him! You felt his courage, his strength, his passion for the Faith. The whole northern world rang of it. So, when he came to us at last, seeking refuge from the Danes who had driven him from his throne, I knew what to expect—and I was not mistaken!” She passed her hand over her eyes. “He had already sought my hand in marriage—did you know that? Years ago he had sent his skalds to my father’s court, and they praised him in such language that I would have married him gladly; but my father, who was his enemy, forbade it. He favored a more advantageous match, here in Gardariki. Well. All for the best. It was God’s hand at work. As Princess of Novgorod, I could see that Olaf got the money and soldiers he needed to regain his throne. But then so soon to see him go! And then to learn of his death! But he left with my husband and me a part of himself—Magnus, his son, to foster like our own. An obligation we will honor—with our blood if need be.”
She swallowed hard and looked away.
What an extraordinary speech. These were the words of a woman in love. And though she was careful to say ‘we’, I suspected that Yaroslav had little to do with it.
In a moment she was herself again. “Tell me now about this Harald whom you serve, for I have hardly been able to form an impression of him; no sooner does he arrive than he goes off on campaign. What is he like? Is he a man or only an elongated boy?”
“He is fast becoming a man, Princess, and a hard one to deal with.”
“And why do you attach yourself to him?”
“It serves my own purpose and costs me little.”
“Little so far.”
“What do you mean?”
“You expect to rise with him; very well, but you must be prepared to fall with him, too, unless you’re the kind of man to whom treachery comes easily. Are you?”
“My empty purse should answer that.”
“Yes, of course,” she laughed. “Putscha?”
Again the dwarf materialized at her elbow.
“Odd Haraldsskald, I will put you to a test. You will need money for women, and drink, and so forth before your lord returns. Will you do me the favor to take back one of these gold ounces—just one, mind you—as a gift of simple friendship and nothing more? For we are agreed you would not take it otherwise.”
“I will take it with gratitude, Princess, and repay it when I can.”
“Repay? Ah me, what does he say? Does he mistrust me still?” She put on a sad expression though her eyes belied it. “Take it under what terms you like, then, and I vow that Harald is a luckier man than he knows to have you in his retinue. And now I have work to do. Putscha, see my friend out and bring back the scribe.”
“Princess?” I said.
“Yes?”
“It’s nothing—I feel like a fool asking.”
“What, for heaven’s sake?”
“Since I walked in your door I’ve smelt wildflowers or heather, I could swear it, though there’s none about.”
“You smell this.” Smiling, she motioned to the dwarf, who brought from her table a vial of blue glass. She unstoppered it and held it under my nose. “Distilled from the crushed petals of roses, a flower you’ve never seen, I think. I put a few drops of it on my body every day. It comes all the way from Golden Miklagard, where they have the skill to put a field of flowers inside a little bottle, and it cost my husband a stack of kuny—of marten pelts—this high.” She held out her arm at shoulder level. “How he moaned! Do you like it?”
“I—yes.” It reminded me, in fact, of those delicious scents that clung to the girls in Stavko’s establishment, but I thought it best not to say so.
“You’re blushing! Whatever for?”
“First the mirror, then this. I have much to learn.”
She laughed—not as people do when they show you up for a bumpkin, but gently. “I should be the one to blush, Odd Tangle-Hair. At this rate, you’ll soon know every secret we women have. Where do you come from that they have neither mirrors nor scent? You’re not Norwegian?”
“An Icelander, Princess.”
“Ah? And you didn’t like it there?”
“I liked it.”
“But—?”
“There was some trouble. I had to leave.”
“The old story. You men are never happy unless you’re murdering each other. Well, I hope you will like it here with us, Odd Tangle-Hair. And now, my friend, good day.”
I took a solitary walk that afternoon and held conversation with myself. I had been prepared to dislike Ingigerd for any number of reasons. But I found her a very different woman from the one I had imagined. A woman of fierce loyalties, passionate, intelligent. A woman who did not marry, I calculated, until she was far into her twenties, and then only by order of her exasperated father. Was it because she secretly loved a fierce viking, who sent her poems?
Despite all the blather about his virtues, this affair was passing strange. Perhaps, just because she had never seen him in the flesh, she could turn him into a figure of fancy that no other man—certainly not her husband—could hope to live up to. Could Olaf himself live up to it when they finally met? What really had happened between them? Had they consummated their love, or had she offered herself and been spurned? Olaf’s piety was, by all accounts, as excessive as his bloodlust. But clearly her whole existence centered on him. Only now she had transferred that passion to little Magnus.
Often in the days that followed, having nothing else to occupy me, I found my thoughts going back again to my conversation with the princess.
I asked myself why Fate had so arranged things that at every turning I encountered Bloody Olaf: first the living man, then his corpse, then his memory. I of all people. It was decidedly unfair. I’d had to endure a year of my friend Kalf’s mooning over him while I bit my tongue and kept silent. Now must I hear it all over again from Ingigerd? I almost felt as if his ghost were stalking me.
What was the man’s secret? How had he fired the passions of these otherwise level-headed people? Was it possible that Kalf, Ingigerd, Dag, and so many others were wrong and I alone was right? I nearly began to doubt myself … but, no! Olaf, the terror of pagans, gouger of eyes, chopper off of hands, was my natural enemy. The broken bodies he left in his wake could just as well have been mine, or my father’s, or Glum the berserker’s, or Einar’s. No. Let him haunt me to the last day of my life, let him infect the whole world around me with this strange enthusiasm, he would still not have my willing prayers!
And I remembered, too, I was not completely alone. There was one other—I was convinced of it—who shared my hatred of Olaf, although for other reasons. His half-brother.
If young Harald could learn to lie so smoothly, well, by the Raven, so could I.
These were some of my thoughts.
At other times they revolved around Ingigerd herself. I’d expected some mannish monstrosity in woman’s dress. I found instead a woman full of charm and pleasantry—laughing sweetly, smelling of flowers.
Yet deep-minded. One who would not give up all her secrets in a day. What other loves, hates, ambitions, longings lurked behind those wise grey eyes? I made up my mind to try what I could learn.
An interesting puzzle, I said to myself. At the time it seemed no more to me than that.
4
The Brothers Vladimirovi
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The blare of war-horns shattered my sleep. I leapt up and rolled off the oven. The servant girl I was sleeping with caught me by my shirt and saved me from breaking an arm.
With Einar and a crowd of servants, wives, and children, I ran to the porch that overlooked the courtyard to see what the matter was. The sun, rising at our backs, had just cleared the roof of the palace and bathed everything below in the golden light of dawn. There was nothing yet to see, but the horses caught the smell of their brothers on the wind and trotted round and round the palisade, whinnying.
Our ears caught the distant rumble of men’s voices singing a marching song, mingled with the clatter of hoofs and the tread of boots. Soon there came into view the tips of spears and two fluttering banners, both emblazoned with the trident emblem of the House of Rurik.
Then through the gate, hastily unbarred, rode a troop of heavy cavalry in spiked helmets and long mail hauberks, armed with lances and bows. Behind them marched a column of foot soldiers, battle-stained and dirty but singing away lustily, until the spacious yard was filled with them.
Yaroslav, as I’d been told, had gone to make war on the Chuds, accompanied by his brother Mstislav, who had joined forces with him on the march, and by Harald, whose good luck it was to arrive just as the prince was setting out. Here they were back again, weeks before they were expected, and to judge from the dozen or more sledges heaped with precious furs now being dragged into the courtyard, the campaign had been a great success.
Ingigerd, with a fur thrown around her shoulders against the morning chill, pressed past us and descended the stairs to the courtyard, holding in her hands a goblet of mead. One figure detached itself from the knot of horsemen and rode toward her.
“Yaroslav Vladimirovich, by God’s grace all is well with us here,” she declaimed in a voice that could be heard to the farthest rank, “though your people hunger for your wisdom, which no one, I least of all, can emulate.” Standing by his stirrup, she proffered the goblet, which he took and drained.
Hurrying after the princess came Father Dmitri, the family chaplain and tutor, all bows and smiles. Three deacons followed him, carrying the big icons that ordinarily hung above the throne in the great hall.
Yaroslav dismounted, knelt, and kissed each icon as it was held out to him, while addressing it by name: Saint George (his patron), Saints Boris and Gleb (who in life had been his half-brothers, murdered in the blood-letting that followed their father’s death), and lastly the Theotokos—the Mother of God—whom he kissed most reverently. The warriors who filled the yard uncovered their heads and echoed his prayer of thanksgiving for the preservation of his City and himself.
From kissing the icons, he stood up to embrace his wife and kiss her tenderly on each cheek and on the lips. If a woman’s back and shoulders could speak, Ingigerd’s delivered an oration on the theme of frigid submission.
Then Mstislav threw back his head and laughed like a clap of thunder. “By the Devil’s mother, Inge, it’s good to see you again!”
Yaroslav, smiling weakly, yielded to his brother of the booming voice, who swept Ingigerd up in a huge bear hug and planted woolly kisses on her.
Where Yaroslav’s embrace was chaste and careful, Mstislav’s was a tornado. But her unyielding spine continued to speak—to shout—the same text as before.
“My children?” asked Yaroslav, finding himself with no one else to kiss. “Where are my sucking pigs?”
The ‘sucking pigs’ were produced at once, hastily dressed and faces washed, shepherded down the stairs by their old nurse, Thordis. They stood in a row, from shortest to tallest, and Yaroslav kissed each in turn gravely on the brow and called down God’s blessing on them. Coming to his pretty Anna, his manly Volodya, and his darling Yelisaveta, he asked them in a most solemn tone if they had been good children and obedient to their nurse, their tutor, and their mother?
“Yes, Papa,” Yelisaveta lied for them all.
Mstislav, done with smothering Ingigerd, now directed his boundless joviality at his nieces and nephews. Where their father had blessed them, their uncle tossed them, spun them around, crushed them to his fur-clad bosom—especially Vladimir, calling him Young Falcon, and declaring, “Soon it’ll be your turn, Eaglet, to go a-warring with us, for, damn my head! No young man who’s worth anything can exist without war, eh? What sort of a Rus would he be who never once slew pagan! You’re worthy of our father, Vladimir, whose name you bear, for by Christ, he slew many a pagan!”
Young Volodya looked as if he thoroughly agreed with his uncle’s view.
“You, Father What’s-Your-Name, tutor.” Mstislav dragged Dmitri to him by the front of his cassock. “Let these young pups be free of lessons for today. Damn it all, how often do they see their uncle?”
Yelisaveta, Volodya, and Anna whooped and threw their arms around him, and he enfolded them all in one great embrace. A stranger coming upon this scene could pardonably have made the mistake of thinking that these were Mstislav’s children and that Yaroslav was only some elderly bachelor to whom they had just been introduced. Not that Yaroslav didn’t love his children—he did, fiercely. But even with them, he could not overcome the timorous shyness that thwarted his relations with everyone.
Neither brother, though, had much of a greeting for Magnus, who, as always, hung back from the rest. Ingigerd drew him to her and put her hand on his head.
Meantime, Vsevolod, the littlest ‘sucking pig’, or ‘falcon’, or ‘eaglet’, whom his uncle had absent-mindedly tucked under one vast arm, reached that pitch of excitement that he pee’d on Mstislav’s armor. He was hastily given back, howling, into Nurse’s arms.
Then the two brothers, handing their horses over to the grooms, mounted the steps to the porch, where I and the other members of the household stood watching.
On horseback, and seen from a distance, Yaroslav looked the part of a warrior and prince; but at closer hand one noticed the clubbed foot and the limp, as well as the shortness of his stature, the roundness of his shoulders, the mildness of his face, and overall, the awkward movements of one who plainly felt uncomfortable, even slightly absurd in helmet and armor and massive sword belt and scabbard.
Other warriors in the front rank dismounted and followed the two princes up the stairs. Harald, taking the steps two at a time, led the pack.
I stepped in front of him.
“What?—Tangle-Hair! You’re alive, you bloody beggar! I almost didn’t know you! Don’t they feed you here? The fever, of course! Christ, it’s good to see you! How long have you been here? You’re all settled in? Ah, you should’ve been with us!”
He looked triumphant, a whirlwind of energy and high spirits.
Dag, right behind him, began apologizing: “Look, old fellow, I hated to leave you with Ragnvald but your ferocious friend here”—with a glance at Einar Tree-Foot—“seemed to have everything in hand so—”
The fever was nothing, I assured him. It was boredom I was dying of at the moment.
“No fear of that now!” laughed Harald. “Now you’ll see things happen!”
“What sort of things? Tell me.”
“No,” said Dag, with a twinkle in his eye, “let him be surprised. Odd Tangle-Hair, your curiosity must wait a little longer.”
And, grinning both, they would say no more.
A feast was announced for sundown. The butchers and the cooks got busy; heralds were dispatched all over the town, bearing invitations to various important personages; the druzhiniks, dismissed to the barracks or to their houses, were instructed to wash and change their clothes, and reassemble at the appointed hour.
Yaroslav and Mstislav enjoyed a steam bath and then spent an hour together in St. Sophia’s church, thanking God for their victories. (Mstislav, in his way, was every bit as pious as his brother.) Harald, Dag, Einar, and I passed the day in drinking and trading impressions of our Rus friends.
5
The Boy at Dinner
When the festive board was finally laid, you
would have had to listen closely to hear it groan; by which I mean that the vittles were adequate but not what you would call princely. The meal consisted mainly of tough mutton and black bread. The prince himself, because he had painful teeth, had to be content with a little boiled chicken minced up fine, some cabbage soup, and mushrooms—the latter provided by his ‘sucking pigs’ who had spent the afternoon mushrooming in the woods beyond the town and had returned with full baskets. Yaroslav was an expert on the subject of mushrooms. He picked through their baskets carefully, naming all the different varieties and exclaiming on the delicious qualities of each.
The majority of his army—Rus, Slav, Swede, Norwegian, and Pecheneg (a troop of the latter serving as Mstislav’s personal guard)—caroused in the barracks in Gotland Court. Only some fifty of the most favored dined with the prince in his hall.
Nearest Yaroslav sat his wife and brother. Seated next to Ingigerd was Yefrem the Bishop, a sleek, well-oiled man, whom I had not seen before, but would see much of hereafter. Farther down sat Dyuk the mayor. Next to him was Eilif, Jarl Ragnvald’s eldest son, who held the post of captain of the druzhina. Eilif was about thirty years old, short and coarse-featured (though I should be the last to hold that against anyone). In fact, he bore a strong resemblance to his parent, although compared with the jarl, he was slower of tongue and duller of eye. Opposite these sat Harald, Dag, and myself.
Harald had already introduced me to Yaroslav as his skald and the prince gave me a warm greeting. Not so Ingigerd. Her greeting to him and Dag was frosty. And to me also, even though she had been so affable at our first meeting and in the days that followed whenever I encountered her. This stung me. It seemed unfair in her to make me an enemy, just when I had decided that I liked her. (It never even entered my head that she might be acting coolly toward me in order not to compromise me with Harald and Dag.)
The feast proceeded with an unstinting flow of ale and mead—in this respect, at least, Yaroslav was not miserly. And he himself drained as many cups as anyone.
The Ice Queen Page 4