“I told you already,” said Solvi.
“You told me very little,” Svanhild insisted. “I promise, I will not . . . judge. I only want to know.”
“This was the only place I could go after my defeat at Hafrsfjord,” said Solvi. He seemed to find it easier to speak when they need not face one another. “A man thrice defeated by Harald Tanglehair, and this time with no one to blame but himself—I would not be welcome at all of those courts you remember so fondly.”
He might have suffered that defeat with or without her, but Svanhild had captured many of his followers and condemned them to death at the hands of Harald and her brother. Solvi did not seem to blame her as much as himself—Svanhild had never seen many similarities between Solvi and Ragnvald, but in this they had some kinship. Harald never thought himself at fault for anything that went wrong.
“First,” he continued, “I thought to make certain that Unna still held the land that you claimed, and she did. She had farmed it and grazed it, hired slaves to root up the scrub trees that grew upon it, and planted the beginnings of a windbreak. She had done her duty and more.
“I could have left then, but instead I hired men to build a small house, and stayed until the seasons turned. The next spring young Thorstein invited me to come raiding with him—there is so much trade with Dublin that a dozen ships can tax those merchants and hardly leave them poorer. So I went with him.”
He fell silent, playing with the end of Svanhild’s braid that he had pulled down over his shoulder. She remembered when she had spread her hair over both of them as part of their lovemaking, how Solvi said he enjoyed feeling the silken strands slip across his skin.
“What happened?” Svanhild asked.
“I can’t. I couldn’t.” His voice changed, seeming to come out of him from somewhere far away. Svanhild felt a quiver in his muscles, like the shaking of a small, frightened animal.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said sadly. She had glimpsed fear like this before, in men and women both—a loss of nerve that could never be regained. She had thought it cowardice and thanked the gods that she was made of stronger stuff. Perhaps, though, this fear was a curse from the gods, for Solvi, who had survived the terrors of his early childhood, could never be called a coward.
He took a shuddering breath. “We attacked a ship, and instead of being first into the fray, I held back. I was afraid—I have never been afraid in battle before, but I was. And then, when I overcame that fear, my legs failed me.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Tryggulf died defending me, and Snorri had to carry me out.” His voice fell to a whisper, thick with pain. “A man who cannot go into battle is no man. He may as well be a farmer.”
“You are more than your sword arm, more than your legs,” said Svanhild. “You are still clever—those spikes at Hafrsfjord that ripped up the hulls of Harald’s ships . . . You would have succeeded if your allies had been more effective.”
“So I came back here. I knew you would not be using the land.” Solvi continued as though he had not heard her. “I could not bring myself to go to another king’s court, to be pleasant and clever, to charm nobles and inspire warriors. Better to retire and let the skalds sing songs of my old victories.”
Svanhild took his hand from around her braid and intertwined his fingers with hers. The rainstorm would reach them soon. Already a few fat drops painted the copper-colored rocks a darker brown.
“I told you I had changed,” said Solvi. “I know you will leave, having found me as I am. It is too late in the year to sail away, but don’t worry, spring will come soon—though likely not soon enough for you.”
Svanhild gripped his hand tighter and laid her cheek against the side of his head, the silver hair almost as fine and soft as his red-gold had once been. “When we parted, you asked me to come to you if Harald mistreated me. He was my husband in nothing but name for many years. I would have come long ago, but I wanted to keep my promises. And my brother was there. Now that he has betrayed me and I am free, I have come to you.”
“You wanted me to make revenge on Harald,” Solvi reminded her.
“When I first came here, I did,” she admitted. “But when I sent Falki off, it was only to warn the Scottish vikings—your friends—that Harald would bring his forces. I will not try to draw you into it.”
“Promise me that,” said Solvi. “Promise you will not try to draw me into it.”
“I swear it,” said Svanhild. The rain was coming down in earnest now. Harvest would have to wait another day while the fields dried out. They must return to the farm soon, or become soaked. Before Solvi could get up, Svanhild moved into his lap and looked down at him. He avoided her eyes for a moment but met them when she would not let him turn away.
“I’m here,” she said. She kissed him and he responded, wrapping his arms around her. “Now marry me, after harvest is done. Let me keep your house. Tova will still have a place, but I have never had a house of my own.”
“You bought me a pony,” said Solvi, lightly jesting. “How can I not? But all I can bring you is this farm, which is already yours.”
“I wanted it for our son,” she said, her voice hitching. “How can you live here without regretting that, regretting him?”
“I can no longer flee my regrets,” said Solvi heavily. “And they would follow me anywhere. But Svanhild . . . our son was too weak to live.”
“He was not weak,” Svanhild protested. Unna had too recently scolded her for calling Freydis weak.
“His body was weak,” said Solvi. “Weak from birth. You know this.”
“He needed a different life than we could give him,” said Svanhild.
“He would have died wherever we went,” Solvi insisted.
“You have to believe that, or you would have to believe that you caused his death,” she cried.
“It was both of us,” said Solvi. “And the gods who gave us a sickly son. But we have a daughter now.” He moved to cover her hand with his. “Tell me, how did you choose the name Freydis for her?”
Svanhild wiped her eyes with her other hand. “I thought our . . . I thought Eystein would have made a good priest of Frey. Remember when he chose that boar’s head amulet? I had—Harald built a priesthood on the bank of Trondheim Fjord where his—where we left him. But even before then, when I gave birth to her, I thought to honor our son in her name.”
Wordlessly, Solvi pulled a pebble from the pouch he wore at his waist and handed it to her. Svanhild held it gently between her fingers. In his pyre, Eystein’s amulet must have melted over a stone. Over years of handling it, Solvi had rubbed away most of what remained of the design, but it still had the shape of a boar’s head.
“I carry him with me everywhere,” said Solvi.
Svanhild put the stone back in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. “So do I,” she said.
27
For the last months of her pregnancy, Freydis felt as though she had no existence beyond her body, its needs, its pains. The child sat hard on her pubic bone, giving her an ache that could only be relieved by lying on her side, but that gave her different aches in her shoulder and hip, which were poorly padded, since she had only grown thinner through the winter. She could see it in her fingers, the residual plumpness of childhood sloughed off, the shape of the bones coming through.
After the harvest was over, her parents had wed, and Freydis traded places with her mother. Svanhild had asked Freydis to stay with her, Solvi, Rolli, Tova, Snorri, a few servants, and one of Rolli’s friends, a thin, quiet young man who sometimes looked at Freydis with shy interest, but Freydis refused. Unna was easier company; she wanted nothing from Freydis but whatever work she had the strength to perform.
Unna pressed food on her, but it seemed like no amount of eating could fill the pit of hunger within her, nor restore her lost flesh. At times she did not even feel like a warm-blooded animal but a snail, her hard belly its shell, the rest of her soft and slow, dragging her, unthinking, to eat things both strange a
nd ordinary. She craved seaweed often, which Unna thought was normal, but it was never something Freydis would have thought of at home. At the end of winter the wind sometimes carried a marine scent from the harbor that made her mouth water. Other times she craved fresh greens, so much she almost cried. Through the long winter, dried nettles came the closest to satisfying that desire. She drank down the teas Unna made her; even when the bitterness rasped against her tongue, she needed it.
At times, she craved her mother. When Svanhild visited, Freydis felt calm if they spoke of minor farm business: lambs that had died during the winter, too weak to survive on their mothers’ thinning milk; Svanhild’s plans for the following summer; how to use Solvi’s farmland more efficiently. They argued, though, whenever Svanhild tried to press Freydis about her future.
Earlier in the winter, Freydis was called to Solvi’s farm to nurse Snorri through a bout of pneumonia. Unna had been away at another sickbed, so Freydis followed Rolli out into the blinding brightness of a winter midday.
“He has trouble eating sometimes,” Solvi told Freydis bleakly. “This has happened before.”
“I have heard of this,” said Freydis. “At least he will not spread the disease.” If he had a piece of food in his lung, it would cause coughing and trouble breathing, even collapse of that lung. The only cure was waiting and treating the fever and breathing problems. “Is he strong otherwise?” she asked.
“Strong enough for a man near sixty winters,” said Solvi. “Can you help him? He is the only companion of my boyhood left to me.”
Though Snorri’s powers of speech were even less than usual, Freydis was able to confirm Solvi’s report that he had aspirated a piece of food, and now it was souring his lung. His chest hurt on one side, and when Freydis listened to his breathing, it had a thick sound. Freydis tapped on his ribs with her fingers and found that one side sounded dull while the other was still resonant.
A fever could be helpful, but not if it was too high. Freydis checked him through the afternoon for signs of delirium, and felt his forehead from time to time. When it became too hot she dosed him with willow-bark tea. She saw her mother watching her work and felt self-conscious.
Over the next few days Snorri began to improve. His fever fell and rose again, but never very high, and he was able to drink broth and slowly eat bread that had been well soaked in it. When Freydis was not tending him she joined Tova to help spin her endless piles of wool. Solvi told stories that Freydis had never heard, about growing up young and scarred, and how Snorri had been the first young warrior to care for Solvi, and to follow him rather than his father.
The weather turned brilliant, cold and clear. After three days Freydis decided that Tova could give Snorri all the nursing he needed, and resolved to leave the next morning. As she laced up her snowshoes she found her mother sitting next to her doing the same.
“I will go with you to visit Unna,” said Svanhild. “I have been indoors too long.” Boredom was winter’s dullest weapon, but it could still injure. Still, Freydis thought it more likely that her mother wanted to be away from Snorri’s sickbed, which she found discomfiting, as she did any sign of weakness.
Svanhild had skis, on which she moved faster than Freydis, unpracticed, in borrowed snowshoes. She stopped on the crest of a hill and waited for Freydis to catch up, shivering in the sharp wind.
“Has the child quickened?” Svanhild asked, starting to ski again.
Freydis nodded, though Svanhild could not see her, already pulling ahead.
Svanhild stopped again. “Well?” she said. This time she could see Freydis’s nod. “Good. Have you given thought to what you will do when it is born?” She began to ski at a pace Freydis could match more easily. “If you want a marriage, I’m sure one can be found for you.”
“But I don’t have to marry?” Freydis asked.
“No, though what else are you going to do?”
Freydis heard the scorn in her voice. “I don’t know,” she said, getting louder on each word. She had thought of being a priestess of Freya, but she did not feel as though she could say that to her mother, who did not care much for the gods. And revealing that much of her desires felt too threatening. If her mother mocked her, or dismissed her, or said anything at all, Freydis did not think she could bear it.
“At least Unna—” said Freydis.
“At least Unna what?” Svanhild asked.
“At least Unna doesn’t always look at me as though there is something wrong with me,” said Freydis.
“I don’t—” Svanhild began.
“You do,” said Freydis. “You want me to be exactly like you, but if I were, I would have fled Snorri’s side, rather than help him. Next time you think me weak, remember that.”
Svanhild looked so angry, staring back at Freydis, that Freydis thought she might slap her, but after a moment Svanhild’s shoulders sagged. “You are not weak,” she said. “I was frightened of Snorri’s illness, but you knew exactly what to do. I admire that.” Against Freydis’s will, her mother’s praise warmed her. “You are my daughter,” Svanhild continued, “and I should have done better by you. I would raise your child as my own if you wish to be a child yourself again.”
She had offered that before, but Freydis did not think Svanhild had changed as much as she thought. She would leave her granddaughter as easily as she had her own daughter. “I thank you,” said Freydis. “But I do not.”
Svanhild stayed overnight with Unna and left the next morning, giving Freydis a hug good-bye. A series of blizzards gripped the settlement as the days grew longer, and Freydis swelled and hungered more every day for the fruits of a land across the sea.
* * *
Freydis fell into labor at the end of winter, during a foggy, dripping thaw that made the floor of Unna’s house too muddy even for the stacked rushes to absorb. Suddenly she became aware of her body, its every process and need, as never before. Little existed for her save her sensations, pain and a feeling beyond pain, a doorway opening for her, if she could make it through the crushing tunnel that led there.
“I am worried,” she heard Unna say to Donall. “Her hips are still narrow. She is over-young for this. Fetch Svanhild and Solvi.”
She thought she had heard wrong, and did not believe Unna would have invited a man, her father, to this birth, until the wave passed and she saw him sitting on a chair, looking diffidently at his hands.
“How long will it be?” Solvi asked.
“It is a first child, and she is narrow,” said Unna. “By morning we will know.”
Freydis wanted to be angry that they spoke of her as though she could not hear them, but when the pain took her, she did not have the energy to spare. Svanhild walked with her, her voice low and soothing, the tones that Freydis wanted at that moment. She spoke of the birth of her firstborn, Eystein, this brother that Freydis had never met, and rarely heard mentioned. Svanhild and Solvi had been in Spain, fleeing the first of Solvi’s defeats at Harald and Ragnvald’s hands.
“I was surrounded by these dark-haired, dark-eyed beauties, and none of them spoke Norse. I was terrified and I wanted my mother, as useless as she would have been,” Svanhild said. “Even more useless than I am now.”
“Glad you’re here,” Freydis said between harsh breaths.
“Solvi refused to be with me,” she said. “He said it was women’s magic, but I wanted him there.”
Freydis heard him make a noise behind her. “This is women’s magic,” he said gruffly. “But Unna said I should be here. I don’t know why.”
“You were born too,” said Unna. “It is not only women’s magic. This is where you should be.”
In case she died, Freydis realized. Unna wanted Solvi to be able to say good-bye. Then the house grew dimmer, and Freydis was in the sea again, riding swells of pain that filled her body and then ebbed. At times the pain contracted, falling like the droplets of water that came down from the ceiling, and then it swelled, filling, until it dripped down again. Her father wa
s there, scowling at the floor. She walked until she could not anymore, and Unna and Svanhild helped her to her bed, frowning.
She was the ground where the forces of sleep and pain battled, and wanted to follow the armies of sleep, to rest in their strong arms, until she felt a blow on her cheek, and opened her eyes to see Unna standing over her with an open palm. “Freydis, you must stay awake or you will die,” she said, her voice harsh.
“Your child will die,” said Svanhild. Was she crying? Freydis struggled to sit up, and as she changed position, she felt the desire to push that had been missing all this time.
“No,” said Freydis, gritting her teeth, the effort of forming words almost as difficult as her body’s labor. “She is coming.” She had made this, made her child out of her body, giving it the flesh of her girlhood. This child was hers. Hands were on her, all around her, steadying her, lowering her onto Unna’s birthing stool.
The moments of birth came with pain far worse than anything before, that she felt she could not endure except she had no choice, the child would come out, and that—Alfrith was saying, cool and calm, speaking to another birthing mother years and an ocean away—was far better than the alternative, no matter the pain.
Freydis felt the head and the shoulders come, the oddly empty feeling of the feet sliding through, and then the wrenching need to hold the child as quickly as possible, the eternity between the moment when it slipped forth and the little creature was placed, clammy and screaming, on her breast.
“A girl,” Unna was saying. She was still feeling between Freydis’s legs—for the afterbirth, Freydis thought dimly. She wanted so badly to sleep, and never think again about anything below her waist.
“Greet her,” said Svanhild. “Greet your daughter, as I could not.”
The child filled her vision, bald and crying, pawing furiously at the damp, unwelcome air. Freydis touched her tiny nose with a cold finger, and then slumped back into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
By tradition a child remained nameless for the first seven days of her life. If Freydis had identified a father, it would be his duty to acknowledge the baby, and give her a name. Without him, the task fell to Solvi to claim the girl as a part of his lineage. A girl child would not pass on her name, though, so Freydis suspected if she wished to name the girl herself, she could.
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