The Raven's Table

by Christine Morgan

  “Your lord?” asked Unn. “Hrothgar?”

  “If he returns. If ever he does. Until then, Lady Gethril holds Skuthorpe’s keys.”

  “She is his wife?”

  He barked another laugh, this one more contemptuous than mirthful. “Freyja’s glorious tresses, no! Arnulf is husband to Lady Gethril, if such a vile and cringing grub can be said to be husband to any woman, or indeed man at all. No, Lady Gethril was sister to Lady Brynja, who was Hrothgar’s wife.”

  “Brynja of the beacon?” Unn pointed in the same direction Sjolfr had when indicating the headland that marked the land’s boundary.

  “The same. She used to kindle a watch-fire there, when Hrothgar sailed afar in the Hawk’s Wing, to await and guide his safe return.”

  “What happened to—?”

  “I say too much and you listen too well,” he said, tempering the gruff words with a smile. He thumped the donkey on the flank and added, “You make far better company than this surly brute. But, quicken your pace, girl. I would be home before dark.”

  Sjolfr hurried on, and Unn did indeed have to quicken her pace to keep up. They went on with no more talk, as dense clouds gathered promising a downpour of rain. Soon, they came to the first of Skuthorpe’s outermost-lying farms, and soon thereafter to the cluster of them that formed the village itself.

  She saw huts with sod walls and thatch roofs. She saw, as he’d said, fields of oat and barley, gardens of onions and cabbage. She saw men and women at their labors, boys tending pigs, girls milking goats, elders spinning and whittling, thralls shoveling dung and hauling wood.

  And she saw on a rise of land a longhouse, a hall measuring twenty paces or more from end to end and nearly five paces across, with smaller rooms, additions, jutting out to either side. The timber posts had been sunk deep in the earth, supporting cross-beams, and the walls were thick-packed with a plaster of mud and straw. The skull of a ram hung mounted above the single door, sacrificed to Thor and Odin. Hearth-smoke issued forth from gaps in the gables’ peaks, carrying the aromas of boiled meats and stews.

  A crowd gathered at Sjolfr’s arrival, hailing and clamoring, eager for news. A woman who could only be the wife of whom he’d spoken greeted Sjolfr with a scolding and a kiss, to which he responded with a grin and a squeeze of her ample bottom. Two strapping little boys—twins no more than three years of age, as alike as peas in a pod—tugged at his legs for attention, while an older son took hold of the donkey’s lead.

  Unn stood apart as the goods from the cart were unloaded, not sure of what was expected of her. Then she heard more people approaching, and turned to see a tall woman with hair like flax and the bearing of a queen. Her gown was of wool dyed a rich nut-brown, embroidered at the hem and cuffs and neckline with yellow thread. Over this she wore a cloak trimmed with fur and pinned with a silver brooch. On her feet were fine leather shoes, at her wrists were bracelets, and at her waist she carried a ring of keys.

  “Lady Gethril,” Sjolfr said, inclining his head to her. He handed over the carved wooden box, setting atop it the depleted purse from which most of the coins had been spent.

  A vile and cringing grub was how the steward had described the lady’s husband, Arnulf. Unn marked him thus easily, a short but overfed man of pallid tallow complexion, weak chin and darting eyes. He sported no arm-rings or other jewelry, and his only weapon was an eating-knife. With him was a youth of perhaps fifteen, sulky of lip and insolent of manner, whose flaxen hair and weak chin proclaimed his parentage. He wore a tunic as blue as the summer sea, and his belt buckle was bronze in the sinuous shape of a dragon.

  With them also were two other children, dressed plainly but well. The girl, eleven or twelve, was slim as a reed but pretty, her red-gold hair in neat braids that fell to her waist. She held the hand of a boy with vivid leaf-green eyes and wild hair like a fox’s brush.

  “This is the slave?” Lady Gethril asked, the question directed to Sjolfr but her gaze upon Unn.

  “Yes, lady.”

  The gaze continued its inspection. Unn felt smaller and shabbier than ever, standing here before such a grand woman of obvious wealth.

  “A plain and scrawny creature, but she does not seem sickly,” Lady Gethril said at last.

  “Strong enough,” Sjolfr said. “Obedient, quiet, and clever.”

  “Hmf.”

  Gethril’s husband glanced once at Unn and then away, disinterested. Her son sneered. The other children regarded Unn with earnest curiosity, but when the boy opened his mouth as if to speak, his sister hushed him with a nudge.

  “You, girl,” said Lady Gethril, addressing Unn. “What is your name?”

  “Unn, lady.”

  “And can you cook, Unn? Can you spin and weave and do hard work?”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “Hmf. I suppose you’ll do.” She turned to berate the thralls as they clumsily handled the soapstone bowls, promising them that a single chip or crack would be to their sorrow.

  Unn slipped Sjolfr’s cloak from her shoulders. The lowering clouds had not yet birthed rain, but a dense mist hung low over the wooded hills around Skuthorpe, obscuring the trees.

  As she offered the garment back to him, Sjolfr waved it aside. “Keep it, little mouse,” he said. “You need it more than I.”

  “Thank you.” Unn pulled it around herself again, aware that even the other slaves had looked upon her with scorn and pity, there in her ragged dress.

  “Brynja!” Lady Gethril called. The young girl with the red-gold braids jumped at the sharp tone.

  “Yes, aunt?”

  “Take this,” she said, shoving the wooden box into the girl’s hands. “Set it by my chair and mind that you do not drop or mislay it.”

  “Yes, aunt.”

  “And keep your brother out from underfoot. He’s worse than the dogs.”

  “The dogs, at least, can hunt and be useful,” said Gethril’s son, glaring at the boy… whose reply was to make a fearsome mocking grimace, tongue stuck out, eyes crossed. The youth made to threaten him with a fist, but the girl Brynja swiftly dragged her brother away.

  Then Lady Gethril turned again to Unn. “As for you, follow me and I will show you to your duties.”

  Unn did, keeping her head down. The lady of Skuthorpe led her toward the longhouse and then past it, onto a muddy track that went around a kennel and a midden pile. Gethril picked up her skirt as she walked so as not to trail the embroidered hem in the mud.

  Far at the back behind the timbered hall sat another small hut, dug halfway down into the earth with a sod roof so overgrown and wild that from fifty paces away it looked like a hummock of grass. An old cowhide held by pegs served as the door, and the smoke streaming thinly through the gaps had a wet, sour, greenwood smell.

  Even for a slave-hovel, this was a miserable place, Unn thought.

  “Hrudiger the Old dwells here,” said Lady Gethril, her nose wrinkling. “You, girl, will look after him. Cook for him, clean for him. See that he does not piss himself, and if he does, see that he washes. Comb the lice from his hair and beard. Do not let him wander off on some foolishness to get lost in the forest or fall from a cliff.”

  “Yes, lady,” Unn said.

  “Agree with him, coddle him, humor him, and pay no heed to his mad talk.” She swept Unn with another of her inspecting gazes, mouth wryly tucked. “I doubt he’ll try to get between your legs, or that there’s any iron left in his ancient sword if he does… all the same, no need to squawk and bleat about it.”

  Unn nodded.

  “So. Look after him, keep him out of the way. You’ll have food and firewood and a place to sleep, and I’ll provide you something decent to wear. Those are your duties.”

  With that, the lady walked away, toward the large and proud longhouse, leaving Unn at the hide-covered entrance to the hovel.

  She lifted the hide aside to peer in. What light there was fell through air tinged thick with smoke. The earthen floor was damp so that worms wriggled and in the corne
rs mushrooms sprouted. Shoddy benches built of sticks lined the sod walls, heaped with dirty blankets. In the center of the hut was a low rock-ringed hearth where the green wood smoldered, and by it on a log stool hunkered the sole occupant, who had to be Hrudiger the Old.

  Old, indeed, he was. He sat rocking back and forth on bony haunches, bare-headed with tangles of hair falling to his shoulders and matted beard falling to his chest. Both hair and beard were, in the dimness, the color of old ivory. He wore a wolfskin over a torn and filthy tunic, below which his knobby knees and skinny shins protruded, and his feet were bare. One gnarled hand gripped the wolfskin; the other stuck out as if forgotten in the act of half-reaching for something, and it shook with a palsy.

  “Brynja?” he asked, in a voice cracked but strong. He squinted at the doorway. “Brynja, child, is that you?”

  “No, lord… I am Unn… a slave,” she said.

  He squinted further. She noticed that while one of his eyes was clear and blue, and that the one seeming to fix upon her, the other lay curdled beneath a yellowness and saw nothing. On that side of his head, too, he bore an ugly scrawl of scar.

  “Unn?” His seamed brow furrowed. “Do I know you, Unn? Have you been here before?”

  “I have just come here.” Pity stirred in her heart. “To cook and to clean—”

  “To tend a useless old man until he has the courtesy to drop dead and rot as he should have done years agone, is what you mean to say.”

  Unn blinked with astonishment.

  “You need not explain, girl.” His good eye glinted at her, crafty and clever as Odin’s own. “But tell me, are you Gethril’s creature? Do you spy for that wretched sour-milk bitch? Has she sent you to gain my trust in hopes I will tell you where to find my buried hoard?”

  “She… she did not…”

  “No, no, she did not, did she? You are as you seem, Unn the slave. She had you bought and brought here—though paid as little for you as she could, no doubt—so that no man might say I was neglected in my last days. Very well, then. Get to it.”

  There was much to be done, so much that Unn hardly knew where to begin, but she hung the cloak Sjolfr had given her from a root that served as good as a hook, and went to work. She tied back the cowhide to change the air, shook out the blankets and hung them on a bush and beat them with a branch until the dirt flew, rooted out the mushrooms from the wet corners. She found a pail and a broken clay bowl, and used these to dig out the worst of the mud and filth.

  As she cleaned, he rocked on his log stool and carried on talking, sometimes addressing her by name and sometimes as if addressing another person… or no real person at all. Unn worked, and listened, and learned. How much of what she learned was true and how much madness, she could not be sure. That he was Hrudiger, yes.

  “Hrudiger the Younger, once,” he said. “For my father was also Hrudiger. When he went to the great feasting-hall of Asgard, I was only Hrudiger, until I made more of a name for myself. Hrudiger of the Storm Horse, men called me, for I took a horse as a prize. He was the color of a dark cloud and his hooves shuddered the ground like thunder. I rode to many battles on his strong back before I was struck a fierce blow.” He touched the scar on the side of his head, grazed his fingertips over the curdled eye. “Later, I was known as Hrudiger the Elder, after my first son was born and he, too, was named Hrudiger.”

  His mentions of hoards and treasures, dragons and dwarf-gold, great fleets of a hundred ships and armies thousands strong… Unn remembered a traveler who’d visited their village once, claiming to be a monk, clad as a monk in humble brown robes. He had told such tales, as well as tales of the Christian god’s miracles. He had carried with him a bone he said was from the toe of a saint. And he had left one of Unn’s sisters with a babe in her belly after he’d gone.

  Soon, as Lady Gethril had promised, thralls came from the longhouse with firewood and food, a sheaf of straw, and a bundle of slavewoman’s clothing. Unn built up the fire, strewed the straw upon the floor, and stripped off her ragged linen dress to put on the wool one. Hrudiger the Old ignored her nakedness beyond remarking that she was leaner than a bad winter.

  “My second wife, Hrothgar’s mother? Now, she was a woman!” he said. “Plump as a heifer, and warm as a man could wish for on a cold night. She gave me three sons and two daughters, though of my sons only Hrothgar lived long.”

  “Hrothgar?” Unn asked. “Hrothgar Firehair?”

  “My son was his father. You’ve heard of him, then? My grandson?”

  “From the steward, Sjolfr, who brought me here. He said they were war-companions.”

  “Yes… yes. A sight he was, too, leader of swordsmen and spearmen, rallying them to break even the mightiest shield wall. I gave him a helm, steel chased with bronze, bronze around the eyepieces and crowned with a bronze hawk—for his ship, the Hawk’s Wing—but when he pulled it from his head, his hair flew out long and red like a battle flag, and every warrior knew him.”

  When Hrudiger proved not to have the teeth left for chewing hard barley bread, Unn put a pot over the fire, fetched water, set some salted meat to boil, and added the mushrooms with some greens she picked. She poured him ale into a wooden mug, helping to steady it for him while he drank.

  “Your grandson was lord here?” Unn frowned, piecing together all she’d heard. That this old man, once a proud warrior… whose grandson had been a ring-giver and lord of this land… that he should be here in this miserable hovel…

  “He was, and is. Or will be, when he returns. If not him, then his boy.” Hrudiger consented uncomplainingly as Unn began the difficult work of picking the snarls from his hair and beard. It was slow going, as she had no proper comb, only a twig.

  “The children I saw,” Unn said. “The girl, and her brother. They are your grandson’s children?”

  “Hrothi, yes, because he is also called Hrothgar. And Brynja, pretty Brynja, named for her dear, gentle mother.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Freyja’s hall, spinning and sewing with all good women who’ve died that noblest death.”

  Unn gave a solemn nod. If war was a man’s battlefield, childbirth was a woman’s.

  She washed and dressed the old man, finding a cleaner tunic for him in a once-fine chest beneath one of the benches. Its hinges had been broken and one side was split, but there were also breeches within, and a belt, and a pair of leather shoes. Soon, she had Hrudiger in a far better state than the unkempt beggar who’d been huddled by his smoky fire. With his hair bound back by a length of cord, and his beard smoothed, he showed a shadow of what might have, in bygone years, been a proud and handsome man.

  “You care for me too well, Unn,” he said, holding his arms out to the sides. In so doing, his hands nearly struck the sod walls, and the one hand continued its palsied tremor, but he smiled. “Gethril will not be pleased. I must look as if I might live a while longer after all.”

  He sat again, dunking the hard barley bread into the soup, devouring both with such hunger and delight that Unn wondered how long it had been since anyone had fed him a hot meal. And wondering, again, why it was that he stayed here alone instead of warming himself by the longhouse’s hearth.

  That answer came to her soon enough. As the days went by and she grew familiar with the ways of Skuthorpe, she also became better known to its people.

  Most treated her with the indifference they did any thrall or slavewoman. Some, seeing that she had little favor in the eyes of Lady Gethril and sought that favor for themselves, scorned or cuffed or abused her. Others, who held a fondness for Hrudiger, were kinder… though Unn did not miss that they were cautious in their kindness, as if they did not want the lady’s disfavor brought down upon their heads.

  It was from young Brynja, who made regular visits to the old man—often she brought along her brother, and sometimes a dog or three, and always her spindle or needlework—that Unn learned more of how matters stood in the longhouse. How Hrudiger had indeed lived there, been kept there i
n honor and comfort, respected, attended for his wisdom.

  “Our mother loved him like she would have loved her own grandfather,” Brynja said, during one of the afternoons when she followed Unn about on her tasks as if glad to have a friendly ear. “She cared for him as well as our father did. But after she died bearing Hrothi, Aunt said the hall needed a proper mistress. She said Skuthorpe would be like a den of wild wolves otherwise, without someone to keep everything orderly.”

  And so, Lady Gethril had moved herself, her husband Arnulf and their son Arnuld into the longhouse. She managed it shrewdly, far more shrewdly than Lady Brynja. The farms prospered, there was surplus enough to trade, disputes were settled with less violence and wergild. Brynja and little Hrothi had a woman’s guidance, the old man would not be left to worry about taking care of a household. Hrothgar Firehair could go trading or raiding as much as he liked, while knowing his home was in capable hands during his absences.

  Absences that became more and more frequent, lasting longer and longer, until Hrothgar Firehair was gone from Skuthorpe more than he was there. Until his return began to seem less and less likely.

  By the sounds of it, Lady Gethril had at first grudgingly tolerated the aged man who was no blood kin of her own, but as more time passed she grew weary of the burden. Hrudiger was, she claimed, old and unfit, half-blind, addled. An embarrassment to the hall when he sat and rambled his fanciful tales, when he could barely feed himself without spilling, when he went about disheveled and stinking. A dog or horse in as sad a state would have been shown quick mercy and spared them all such suffering.

  So, the hovel. Where he would not be seen or heard, where he would bring no shame.

  That was, Unn thought as she, far more shameful in and of itself.

  “Now there is talk that he might never return,” Brynja said, her clever fingers swift at the spindle, teasing carded wool into thread. “That the Hawk’s Wing must have been dashed to pieces on some rocky shore, or sunk to the sea bottom, or burned by some enemy. Or that Father must be dead, killed or drowned, his ship taken.”

  Hrothi and the dogs had come with her that day, and for a while Brynja fell into a silence more pensive than her years as she watched her brother run about striking at imaginary foemen with a child’s wooden play-axe. The dogs capered barking in his wake, giving chase whenever their antics scared up birds from the brush. Hrothi laughed, his foxbrush hair the brightest color to be seen.