The Golden Wolf

by Linnea Hartsuyker

  “Diarmuid had left his badge of membership to Finn’s warrior band behind when he fled with Grainne. This Finn placed upon Diarmuid’s breast as he slept, and that night, he swore to the gods that his pursuit of the couple was done.”

  Einar took a drink and made as if to sit down, leaving the story with an ending that felt abrupt to Ragnvald. What had happened to Diarmuid and Grainne? Did this Finn allow the traitorous couple to live in his land without seeking revenge for the rest of their lives? The clamor around him echoed Ragnvald’s thoughts. Einar took another drink of his ale and set his cup down slowly, then smoothed his tunic down over his waist, still holding all attention.

  “What happened to Diarmuid and Grainne?” Einar asked the crowd. “I do not know. Some say they were given land on the outskirts of the kingdom, and some say Finn thought better of his mercy later and slew them both, and then was slain in his turn, for he had outlived his skill at arms and it was time for him to die. All I know is that Diarmuid and Grainne betrayed their war-leader, but were loyal to each other, and the gods’ mercy grew from that.”

  He bowed his head again and would not be persuaded to speak more. Ragnvald joined the throng of people who wished to give him congratulations, to beg one more scrap of the tale off him. The tale had left Ragnvald unsettled. The betrayal of an old king—did Einar mean Harald or himself?

  All of his sons suddenly seemed grown beyond him: Einar with motives he could not plumb, Ivar who had taken a wound and killed a bandit king, and Rolli, his foolish giant of a son, who had committed a grave crime. Ragnvald made alliances between kings, but his own sons could not be managed.

  He clasped Einar’s forearm and congratulated him, then leaned in, close enough to speak in his ear. “What do you mean by telling a tale like that on the eve of Harald’s wedding?” he asked.

  Einar’s smile disappeared and his throat worked. “Did it insult him?” he asked quietly. “He does not marry a woman far too young for him. It should be a compliment to his good sense. And anyway, he is not here, is he?”

  “It is good he is not,” said Ragnvald. “Though his betrothed was. Perhaps she will think you intend to carry her off.” Einar shrugged and darted his eyes toward her. “It was well told, my son, though a strange choice. You must tell me what happened in Hordaland. Is there anything I should know?”

  Einar pressed his lips together. “It was well we came when we did,” he said. He glanced at the men and women standing around them. “There is not very much to tell, but what there is I can relate tomorrow.”

  Dismissed by his own son, Ragnvald returned to his seat, next to Hilda. “He is a fine boy,” she said. “You can be proud of the raising of him.”

  Ragnvald put his arm around her waist. “I had little to do with it. He was born to be a success.”

  “Do you think Rolli truly killed Aldi’s son?” she asked.

  Ragnvald pulled her closer. “I do not know,” he said. “I will do my best for him. And even—”

  “What?” Hilda asked sharply.

  “I will do my best for him,” said Ragnvald. “You must believe that.” He squeezed Hilda’s hand under the table. Rolli could only be outlawed for his crime—Hilda would have to face that. If he acted as a man, he must face punishment as a man as well.

  11

  Thorstein let Hallbjorn stay another few days at Grimbister while the merchant they had followed from Norway finished his trading. Freydis asked the cook if she knew where she could find the crone Runa, and was told that she came and went as she willed, but she had a house high on the hill above the settlement. Freydis abandoned her duties in the kitchen to visit the house the next morning, found it empty, and returned to the kitchen, both disappointed and relieved that she need not choose. Hallbjorn might use her body, but he would also carry her to Iceland, where Thorstein had said she would find her father.

  Thorstein himself came to bid them farewell. Hallbjorn had not let Freydis stir far from his side after her attempt to find Runa, and he shared her bed each night. He had his hand on her still-tender shoulder when they stood on the beach waiting for the tide to turn.

  “Carry my greetings to Solvi,” said Thorstein. “Tell him we finally have a chance to defeat Harald if he comes here after midsummer.”

  “How?” Hallbjorn asked.

  “Harald’s own son Halfdan is gathering allies against him. King Erik of Jutland has joined with him, and I hear that even King Ragnvald is considering rebellion,” said Thorstein.

  Hallbjorn snorted, his hand tightening on Freydis. The touch was not yet painful, but she felt his potential for violence in the pressure of his fingers. “Not likely,” he said. “Halfdan hates him, and I would not join any rebellion with my father’s killer.”

  Thorstein shrugged. “I do not think your sword will turn the tide.”

  “I would help defeat Harald if I had the chance,” Hallbjorn protested.

  “Come, and bring Solvi if you can,” said Thorstein. “He’s not much of a fighter anymore, but if his mind is still sharp, I would follow him.”

  These Orkneymen were so isolated—could they bring a war that would destroy King Harald? He and King Ragnvald seemed to Freydis as though they were part of Norway’s very stones—they could not be brought down by tattered island raiders. Though she had never expected her own life would be thrown into such disarray, as it had these past few weeks. Nothing was as permanent as it seemed.

  Thorstein looked over Hallbjorn’s shoulder. “You had better catch the tide,” he said.

  They pushed off, following the merchant who had led them to the Orkneys as he continued his journey. It was strange to be back on a ship, to feel it move under her feet when she scrambled from one side to the other to avoid the sailors raising and lowering the yard. Somewhere beyond the horizon, Rolli sailed back to Norway, bringing news of what had happened. She wondered what her mother would think on hearing of her—would she care, or would she only worry about whether Freydis’s fate diminished her own legend?

  The wind was steadier on this leg of the journey, so Freydis was able to work her more complicated ribbon-weaving—a weaving that she would never gift to Harald’s new bride now. Perhaps she could buy some goodwill in Iceland with it. Torfa batted at the strings that hung down, making Freydis smile through her worry.

  They sailed north from the Orkney mainland, stopped in the Shetlands for a night, and then continued to the Faroe Islands. It took the better part of a month to sail around these small northern isles, to stop and pass news, to trade goods. On nights when they slept on land, Hallbjorn often joined her, and on nights when he did not, she stayed awake, wondering if the previous time had been the last. She still avoided him during the day, and now that he had her, he no longer tried to charm her or even talk to her. When she looked at him during the day, she did not know how she had ever thought him handsome like Einar. The differences between them made him ugly to her now.

  Sometimes Freydis saw other men looking at her, and wondered if they saw her, or only her shame. When Hallbjorn came to her at night, though, her body still responded to his, turning as traitorous as everyone else who had abandoned her: Rolli to Hallbjorn, Aldi to her fate, Hilda and Alfrith sending her to Sogn, and her mother leaving her when she was just a baby.

  The evening before they were to set off from the Faroes, Hallbjorn asked, “It has been a month since I first took you. Are you pregnant yet?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She knew she was supposed to have her courses every month, but it had only happened once, before she departed Sogn.

  “Then I shall have to keep at you, my Freydis, and believe me, it is no hardship.”

  She ducked her head. She had not become any more comfortable talking with him, even though he had such freedom with her body. He had encouraged her to become familiar with his, placing her hands where he wanted them, but she still rarely touched him of her own volition.

  She had heard that pregnancy felt strange, but her body felt strange all the t
ime, as though it belonged to Hallbjorn more than herself. Perhaps it had never been her own. Her body had felt alien too when her courses arrived, bloodying her thighs and reminding her that she would be a woman whether she willed it or not. That was the loneliest she had ever felt until now, away from Alfrith, and the rites and wisdom that Alfrith had promised her when she became a woman.

  Now her stomach twisted as the ship moved under her, and she knew her body was not her own in a new way, belonging to a new life within her, a hook placed there by Hallbjorn, an argument that said she should marry him.

  As time passed without sight of land, Hallbjorn’s men grew more ill at ease and whispered charms against the spirits of the deep, but Freydis felt calm, suspended out of time during the long crossing. Hallbjorn would not take her during a night that never came, on board a ship, among so many other men.

  She was almost disappointed when they caught sight of Iceland. This was her father’s place, the place from which he sent his raiders, the place where he had retreated. She might find a legendary warrior or an old and useless man, a father who valued her or merely another owner.

  The black rocks of Iceland rose against a charcoal sky. The ship passed a bay choked with ice of purest blue, so blue it seemed as though the eye of a god looked back at her when she peered into it. Eddies of different colored water washed out from streams, this one clear as crystal, the next a cloudy white. Freydis watched these with interest, even as the swirls in the water made her stomach twist. The men behind her still spoke in superstitious whispers. Freydis murmured the prayers that Alfrith had taught her. The spirits of this land might be strange, but they could not be more alien than the spirits of the open sea.

  The first night they camped on a black and empty beach. The green hills looked close, but the merchant Torveig said they were more than a day’s walk from the water’s edge. Hallbjorn set up a tent and pulled Freydis into it after she had washed her hands from dinner in the chilly surf. He put a hand over her taut, skinny stomach, still sunken below too-prominent ribs. She had not eaten well on this journey. She had tried to hide her pregnancy, new as it was, from Hallbjorn, but he had told her he would know, having made thralls pregnant before.

  “It is my son,” he said. “You are pregnant.”

  “It is too early,” said Freydis. “I have not yet missed my courses.” If she was truly pregnant, he would insist on marrying her.

  “I know women,” he said with a laugh. “And I know girls like you. It is a son. My son. Your father will have to accept me.” He laughed again, made bold in his plans by this triumph.

  “It might be a daughter,” said Freydis, pulling away from him.

  “Then we should make sure,” he said.

  She did not answer, nor did he seem to want her to. He slept next to her that night, as he sometimes did. She stayed awake until he loosed her from his arms and rolled away. Then she dreamed of the fire she had heard of that roared from Iceland’s mountains, a liquid fire that burned everything in its path. She dreamed that it swept down the black slope above their campsite, burning away her and Hallbjorn, picking up their ship and settling around it, like metal around a gem.

  She woke feeling as though she herself were that molten fire grown hard, metal around the gem growing inside of her. Hallbjorn called it a son, but Freydis, wrapping her hand over her abdomen, prayed for a daughter. If any of Alfrith’s magic had passed to her, let it be this, the power to transmute the seed within her to a girl child, to anger Hallbjorn and set her free.

  * * *

  Another day of sailing brought them to Iceland’s main settlement, a small trading town set within a wide bay. Hallbjorn asked a grizzled fisherman who sat on one of the shore rocks where he could find Solvi. Freydis stood carefully still, trying to keep her pregnancy sickness from making her vomit amid the strange smell of sulfur and more usual smells of rotting seaweed, refuse from the town, manure that ran off of fields and from byres in brown rivulets toward the water.

  “The dwarf farmer!” said the fisherman. “He lives up yonder, next to Unna’s farm.”

  “Who is Unna?” Hallbjorn asked.

  “Who is Unna?” the man repeated incredulously. “Everyone knows Unna. You will be better asking for her than for Solvi. He keeps mostly to himself.”

  One winter when Svanhild stayed in Tafjord with her sons, Freydis had asked about her father. Her mother told her of adventures in foreign lands, and of her farmland in Iceland, which she had claimed in a ritual sacred to the gods. She had left that land behind in the care of a woman named Unna, her friend and mentor, a hard woman who bowed to no man. Unna had advised Svanhild to disobey Solvi and claim the farm in Iceland, where she and her son could live while Solvi went away to war. “I wonder if he has gone to my farm,” Svanhild had mused to Freydis, “the one he did not want me to claim. It would be justice indeed if he is trapped there by a vow while I can still sail and make war.”

  Freydis followed Hallbjorn along a path that wound between juts of hard, broken rock twisting up out of the earth, before reaching soft green fields that looked closer to those Freydis had left behind in Norway. The settlers had carved out patches of home in this alien place.

  Solvi lived on a piece of land far enough from the sea that Freydis could see only the masts of the ships onshore, and the gray horizon where sea met sky in the distance. Some thralls worked the fields, identifiable by their close-cropped hair, clothes of rags, and clean-shaved faces. Another man drove an ox that pulled a plow behind it, a simple spike that split the earth. When he turned at the end of a row, Freydis saw the ruin of his face, lips split above and below his mouth. A skilled healer could have sewn it back together better than whoever had done the work. Alfrith could probably still fix it even many years later, closing tattered lips over a cleaved-in jaw. This man was old, though, and he must have grown used to it.

  “We come seeking the great Solvi Hunthiofsson,” said Hallbjorn. “This is his daughter.”

  If those words gave the disfigured man any surprise, he did not show it, only jerked his head toward the house. The clouds lowered as the afternoon wore on. A breeze on Freydis’s face made her think rain would come soon.

  Hallbjorn took her arm and pulled her so she had to trot after him. She was out of breath from their brisk walk; she had not had to walk more than the length of a ship in almost a month.

  When they reached the house he let go of her, and she rubbed at her shoulder. Solvi’s dwelling was a small structure made of wood, one of the few Freydis had seen on Iceland where most houses were made of turf. A goat grazing on the roof climbed down and made a noise of curiosity at them.

  A man who could only be Solvi emerged from under the eaves. He was as short as Freydis’s mother had told her, but his smallness was still a shock to Freydis. He walked impatiently, with a stick to support him. His gait had a quickness to it that put Freydis in mind of a crab, as if his way of walking, though not the way a man usually walked, was entirely natural to him. He was older than Freydis had imagined, and had piercing eyes with wrinkles at the corners that only came from many years at sea. His features had a pleasing symmetry to them, and his hair was silver with only a hint of the red-gold Svanhild had described.

  Freydis had wondered what she would feel when looking on her father for the first time. A shock of recognition, or perhaps revulsion, for songs sung at King Ragnvald’s feasts made much of his deformity, though also of his skill in battle, for it was better to defeat a strong enemy than a weak. Instead she only felt helpless.

  “My lord Solvi Hunthiofsson,” said Hallbjorn with a bow. “I bring to you your daughter, my intended, Freydis. Freydis Solvisdatter.”

  Freydis searched his face for some feeling on his part, and thought she saw the lines on his face deepen.

  “I have never acknowledged a daughter,” he said gruffly.

  A rushing filled Freydis’s ears, as though she had foundered in deep water. She had not thought that she hoped for anything from Solvi, but she
did; she wanted him to make her feel less adrift than she did in Hallbjorn’s power. She hugged herself, her eyes burning, and let her hand creep up to her shoulder again, which ached from Hallbjorn’s tugging on it.

  “Why is this girl crying?” Solvi asked him.

  “He dislocated my shoulder when he took my guardian’s ship,” said Freydis, surprising herself by speaking. Her voice sounded sullen to her ears and she kept her eyes on Solvi’s feet, which were shod in thick-soled boots. Threadbare wool wrappings covered his legs. “And then he made me pregnant. He says he will marry me but I do not want him to.”

  Hallbjorn whirled toward her, and hit her across the jaw so suddenly that she was on the ground before she realized what had happened. Her head spun when she raised it, so she remained sitting where she fell, holding her hand to her face. Solvi’s man from the field took hold of Hallbjorn, wrenching his arms back. Freydis hoped it hurt.

  Solvi had another young guard, who came from behind the house, advancing toward Hallbjorn with his dagger out. Freydis looked at Solvi. She saw an expression she recognized pass over his face—a deep and paralyzing fear—and then quickly disappear. She had only seen a man look that frightened once before, a man who had come to Alfrith to have his infected foot amputated. She had done a good job, but still he died of fright and shock under her knife.

  Solvi took a few steps toward Hallbjorn. “You bring my daughter here and then abuse her before me?” he asked, in a forced whisper. If Freydis had not seen the fear on his face, she would have found it menacing. Hallbjorn looked frightened.

  “You said she wasn’t your daughter,” said Hallbjorn. He struggled against his captor.

  “I said that I had never acknowledged a daughter. I do so now. This is my daughter, Freydis Solvisdatter, and her mother is Svanhild Eysteinsdatter. She is my true-born daughter and my heir.” Solvi took a deep breath. “You say you are her intended? Based on what she said, I tell you that you are not. I say that the child she bears is not yours.”