Mother of Kings

by Poul Anderson

  Thereafter he almost never came to Seija. But Gunnhild went there still more often than before.

  Helga was only three years her elder. They did not get along. If he heard a quarrel break out, Özur would roar it to sullen silence, but he was not always on hand. And straightway after the midsummer offerings, he sailed on his trading. Aalf had fared with him for some years, and latterly Eyvind too. Those three being gone, hard feelings came forth unhindered, thereby growing harder.

  Gunnhild sat brooding in the hall. Earlier Helga had ordered her out of the high seat, as was the right of the lord’s wife. Now Gunnhild slumped in the seat for an honored guest, across from it. Sunlight and mild air streamed through open doors. She paid them no heed. She wished she could do likewise with the two serving women who were scrubbing dirt and soot off the wainscots. They chattered all the while, the same witless everydayness month after month, year after year, in the same few clacking words, broken by the same hen-cackles of laughter. She knew not why she lingered here, unless that it was like scratching a sore.

  Helga came in from outside. She halted, peered, then strode to the honor seat. There she stood, arms akimbo. Gunnhild glowered at her. It did not help things that Helga was two inches the taller. Yellow braids showed themselves from under her headcloth. Her belly bulged with child. Sourness pinched her mouth.

  “Idle again, Gunnhild?” she snapped. “Are you sick?”

  The girl straightened and stiffened. “No,” she answered. “I was thinking.”

  “Well, we’ve a bundle of carded wool in store. You can think while you spin thread.”

  “I will when I’m ready,” Gunnhild mumbled.

  “You are ready now. Go fetch the stuff.”

  Gunnhild jumped to her feet. “Do not talk so to me!” she flared. “Am I a thrall?”

  “No. Thralls work. You sit like a sow in her pen, or drift about like—like the stink off a dungheap.”

  “Y-y-you dare speak thus—to Özur Dapplebeard’s daughter?”

  Helga fell still, a little shaken. She had let ill will run away with her. After a bit she said less strongly, “Oh, yes, you’ll whine to him when he comes home. But he shall have the truth from me.”

  Gunnhild felt she had gotten the upper hand. Lest she lose it, she flung back, “Let him deem who’s right. I will take no more shame from you.”

  She stalked out. Helga glared after her.

  Yngvar and some other men were in the yard, hitching two horses to the clean wagon. Rakes and forks stood aslant in it. They were about to bring in the cut hay. How she yearned to ride with them!

  “Good evening, Gunnhild Özurardottir,” Yngvar hailed in his grave way. He was headman at Ulfgard when its owner was elsewhere.

  “Good evening to you, Yngvar Hallfredarson,” she said thickly.

  “Where are you bound, if I may ask?”

  “To walk awhile.”

  Yngvar glanced at the open door. “I heard ugly words.”

  Gunnhild felt her face whiten with rage.

  “It is not well when women fight like that,” Yngvar went on. “It can lead to men killing.”

  “Are you against me too?” Gunnhild cried.

  Yngvar lifted a hand. “No, no. I am only grieved. Do take your walk; cool yourself off.” He knew there were no outlaws left alive in the neighborhood, or anyone else who would dare harm her. “I’ll try to say something to—the lady of the house. When you get back, best will be if you both let this lie dropped.”

  Gunnhild nodded, once, and left him.

  It seethed in her. How much longer could the wretchedness go on? Should she ask Father to find her a husband, young though she was?

  No! Bound to a yeoman whose hands forever smelled of the barn or to a fisherman and his reeking catches, bound inside the rim of this land, never to see what reached beyond, never to rule over more than a few grubby workers? No!

  The woods softened her mood somewhat. Air lay laden with greenness, now and then a birdsong. Dusky blue rested behind the outburst of leaves overhead and pine boughs that had gone aglow. Red-gold light ran low past the boles; shadows faded away in the haze of it. The midsummer sun did not yet sink below worldedge, but went around, rising and falling, eventide slipping eerily into daybreak and back again. Folk slept a few winks at a time, as if they would hoard up life against black winter.

  Grass and blossoms—heart’s-ease, little spotted orchids—blanketed the ground at Seija’s hut. She stood at its door. A wreath of herbs ringed the haggled brown hair; a necklace of lemming skulls crossed the dingy wadmal gown. “Come in,” she bade. “I awaited you.”

  Gunnhild stopped short. A wondering passed chill through her. Of late Seija had been more strange than ever, short-spoken, often falling into stillness while she stared at something unseeable. She had lost weight, though she did not seem ill. Rather, it was as if a fire that had smoldered in her was rising at last, fed by her flesh—and by what else?

  “Indeed?” Gunnhild stammered. “I, I have not been here for a while.”

  “No one has,” Seija said. “Not in the body.”

  “What mean you?” Gunnhild heard how thin her voice was. Anger at that swept misgivings aside. “I’d have liked to come, but I get scant freedom these days.”

  “I have had none till now. Come within. Let us talk.”

  The hut was half below ground. They hiked up their skirts and stepped down. Gunnhild took the stool. Seija hunkered on the clay. Though the door stood wide, dimness always dwelt around a hearthfire that barely smoked. The few pots, bowls, and kitchen tools seemed to crouch in the shadows beneath the loom. Witchy things that Seija had made over the years—roughly whittled sticks and bones, rocks and a reindeer skull daubed with blood long since dried black, a small earthen shape that might be a man’s, a god’s, or a troll’s—seemed to watch and hearken.

  Seija’s hands drew signs while she sang a stave too low for Gunnhild to make out the Finnish words. They rose and fell like the midnight sun. Gunnhild’s skin prickled.

  Seija leaned forward on her haunches. She spoke softly but keenly. Her eyes, agleam in the gloom, never let go of Gunnhild’s. “You are my one friend.”

  Gunnhild held back from answering more than, “I wish you well.” She and her dreams had been growing away from here, more and more into the Norse world. The childhood sharings, even the day of the outlaws, could almost have happened to somebody else. This sudden awakening of the memories was not wholly welcome.

  “Do you wish me free?”

  “What?”

  The question shivered. “Would you help me go home, and so help yourself become great?”

  “How can I?” Gunnhild blurted in bewilderment. “I will not betray my father.”

  “What cares he about me? Nothing. Yet he will not send me home. It’s too much trouble, and what would he gain?”

  “If he did let you go, you’d never get through the wilderness alone, on foot. Would you?”

  “No. Nevertheless I have made the trek. Not on foot, no. My soul has gone.”

  Gunnhild caught her breath. “How?”

  “Hark. You know—I’ve told you—during all these years I’ve striven, over and over, to dream myself home. I was torn too soon from my Saami and the noai’de—you would say wizards—who were teaching me. I must grope my own way forward, with shards of memory to go by. The songs I made up, the dances I trod, beating a stick on a log for want of a drum, the herbs and berries and mushrooms I tried—” Seija’s voice broke. Her gaze went elsewhere. “Sickness—tears—”

  Gunnhild’s heartbeat shook her.

  After a while Seija looked back at her anew, eyes dry, and said quite steadily: “In the end, I found pain. See.” She drew back her left sleeve to show the swollen, oozing redness of a bad burn. “Pain, along with song, dance, drumming, witch-food, loosed my soul. I toppled into night. But a bird winged forth, a swallow, and that bird was I. Over the mountains it flew, over woodland, marshland, lakeland, swifter than the wind, till it
found the dear ranges of Finnmörk and a camp where folk herded reindeer.”

  “Oh—” Was the woman mad? Gunnhild could not but shrink from those eyes.

  Yet the voice wavered only as the voice does of one who seeks to tell of a wonder too deep for telling. “I could not have done it without help—found that camp—I would have wandered lost. Maybe I would never have found my way back.” Seija shrugged. “Well, I daresay dark Tuonela is no worse than here.” The words quickened. “It was my brother Vuokko. He saw me flying in his own dreams and called me to him. He lifted the hands of his soul, and I flew down and nestled into them. We wept together. Then we spoke together.”

  “What said you?” Gunnhild whispered.

  “Much, much. The upshot was this. I told him how it stands with me. I told him of you, restless and unhappy, and what I’ve marked in you, how fast you learned what few small skills were mine to give and how you’ve hungered for more.”

  Longing flooded overwhelmingly. “Could I fare like you—”

  “No, that I cannot teach you, nor dare I try. I hardly know how myself. I don’t think I can do it without help. Vuokko drew me thither.”

  “But then—”

  Seija firmed. “Then this. Vuokko called in our kinsman Aimo, whose lore and strength match his. For my sake, but much more the sake of the Saami, who need a powerful friend among your kind—if your father will send me home, and you with me, they will take you in and train you. Spaewife shall you be, and witch, and knower of the gods, with might over Beings of earth, water, and sky—over men and their kingdoms—all this, if you set me free.”

  Gunnhild sat dumbstricken. Her head filled with a thundering and a tumbling as of the tide-races through the narrow mouths of neighboring fjords.

  “I know what you are thinking,” she heard. “Put me any questions you wish. Weigh what I tell you. Try me. There is no haste.”

  “Yes,” said Gunnhild faintly.

  Seija eased a bit. She even smiled. “First, shall we drink? I’ve nothing better than birch beer I made in a crock, but here’s a horn I took off a dead cow I found once. Let’s pretend we have mead.”

  A shrill laugh broke from Gunnhild. “No. Wine. Costly outland wine.”

  “Well and good, wine, that we drink to a happier morrow.”

  VII

  Özur came home shortly before Helga’s lying in. When the midwife entered the long room and laid the newborn at the father’s feet, he saw it was a healthy boy and raised it onto his knee. It would not be left in the woods for wolves or ravens to find; it would be a son of the house. Özur bade his friends to a feast. There he poured water on the bairn and named him Thorstein. Helga took her child to her breast and threw Gunnhild a look that gloated across the fire.

  Soon afterward Gunnhild found Özur in an idleness such as she been waiting for. She plucked his sleeve and asked if they could speak alone. “As you will,” he said. They donned cloaks, he took a spear, and they walked out to Ulf’s grave-mound. It was not far from the buildings, but nobody would seek them.

  This was a day of sharp wind, hurrying gray clouds, fleeting rainshowers. The pines by the barrow soughed loudly; the grass on it rippled; stunted brushwood rustled. A sound of waves rushing and crashing blew together with a salt smell up over the bluff. Whenever a sunbeam struck through a rent in the clouds, it flamed off the water. The sun itself was barely to be seen, south of west, low and wan. Summer was waning.

  Özur gazed at the maiden from beneath his shaggy brows. “Well,” he said, “what do you want?”

  Her heart leaped to and fro. “Seija—” She snatched after breath.

  Özur scowled. “You see too much of that little hag.”

  Bitterness gave boldness. “Who else have I? Time was when you saw her often enough.”

  Özur snorted. “What has she done?”

  “Nothing wrongful. Were she to cast a spell against us, I’d forgive—”

  “I would kill her.”

  “She hasn’t!” Gunnhild said hastily into the wind. “She can’t, she lacks the craft, nor does she want to. I swear she does not. But this year—” The tale spilled out of her.

  Özur listened stock-still, his face wooden, the spear held straight skyward. At the end, he asked slowly, “Do you put faith in that?” Gunnhild nodded. “Or is it your wish that does?”

  She fought down the feelings that stormed in her and gave him words she had picked beforehand. “You know Seija has some witch-sight. It doesn’t always come to her, and never reaches far, but she hadn’t learned much when you took her away. You know, too, Finns who have the gift and the schooling can send their souls abroad—women as well as men. Why should Seija strain after this for weary years, and at last torture herself, only to lie to me about it?”

  “Folk can go mad and see things that are not there,” Özur said starkly. “Or if they seek too recklessly, things can come to them, come upon them, that should have been left in the dark.” His free hand drew the sign of the Hammer.

  “Seija is not mad,” Gunnhild avowed. “Nor has anything taken hold of her. I know.”

  They stood unspeaking. The wind keened, a cold stream over cheeks and brow. Three gulls rode it, watchful for any dead flesh the sea cast ashore.

  “Father, I thought on this myself,” Gunnhild went on. “I said she must show me. Let her send her soul forth again, this time to places I have seen but she not, that none would have told her about, farther off than her witch-sight ever went. I saw what she did, the song, the steps, the wild food, the firebrand, the sleep that was more like a swoon— I feared she was dying— What else could it be than true witchery at work?”

  “What did you want to hear about?”

  Gunnhild swept an arm around the arc of the water and the land beyond, westward a mile across this firth, southward a full seven miles, heights dimmed by wind-whipped mist. “Yonder.” She smiled at him and made her voice warm. “Where you have taken me, Father.”

  He had now and then, sometimes without a brother along, when she, his one freeborn daughter, unmistakably yearned and cunningly asked. This was not in the knarr but in his boat of six oars, which he used when he went around the bays to talk business with men, or merely wanted an outing. How she loved the openness, freshness, newness! Even a squall that had threatened to capsize them was to her a wonder; never had her blood throbbed so high; she clung to a thwart and shouted for glee.

  Özur tugged his beard. “Hm. And she did?”

  “Yes. When she woke and—felt better—yes, she told me at length of the steeps above Whale Ness and the upright troll-stones there, and how the tide brawls over the rocks at Skerrystead, and the red-painted house on Elf Ness—oh, much, much, much, many of them things I’d forgotten, but when she began to speak of them I’d remember—” Gunnhild stopped, gasping.

  Özur’s eyes narrowed. “So you think she did earlier wing the whole way to Finnmörk.”

  Gunnhild clutched her cloak to her against the wind. “Yes.”

  “A hard faring.”

  Gunnhild nodded. “The fire. Oh, I gave her a stern trial. I don’t believe she’s done it anymore. She’d not scar herself worse. What woman would?”

  “You tell me you’re willing to.”

  Gunnhild shook her head till the hood fell back off it. “No, no, no. It was only that she could find no other way to unbind her soul. Her kinfolk know how.”

  “And you would learn.”

  “You’ve seen somewhat of it yourself, among them. You have! Why should we not wield it?”

  Özur’s look and voice went bleak. “Seid.”

  Gunnhild could not straightaway answer him.

  “There are those among us who use that kind of witchcraft,” Özur recalled to her. “Its right name is seid.”

  “I’ve heard mutterings about it,” Gunnhild acknowledged. Her words rang: “Well, you cast runes!”

  “That’s different. Odin brought that lore back from the far side of death—runes for warding, helping, healing, f
oreknowing. Not that I’m so skilled. But seid, howling songs, thudding drums, kettles aboil with deadly brews—it’s unmanly. Unworthy. Unless for a Finn.”

  Gunnhild clenched her fists, letting her cloak flap as it would. “I am not a man. And I will not bring dishonor on our house. No, I’ll raise us high.”

  Özur’s mouth tightened, like his hand on the spearshaft. “You’d not lay a hex on—Helga?”

  Scorn stiffened Gunnhild. “Never. That is indeed beneath me.”

  Özur scowled and stared past her. She saw unease upon him and went after it as a hound follows a deer.

  “Would it be wrong to have your own witch, who forestalls storms, brings in fair winds, strikes down foes—Danes, vikings from the Westlands, robbers from inland—before they overrun us? We’re so few here. Or—more than a spaewife—a seeress. One who can find what the will of the norns is. One such as Odin raised to tell the gods about the beginning and the end of the world.”

  What she thought of was strength, freedom, wealth, a name that would outlive her life.

  Özur stood with his lips locked, a burliness looming like the barrow athwart the flying heavens, before he said, from deep in his chest: “I’ve thrice cast runes about you, daughter mine. All I could read in them was that your weird is like none other. What it is, they did not spell.”

  “I’ll take it on me!” Gunnhild cried headlong. She would ride it as a man rides an unbroken horse, steer it as he does a ship in a gale.

  “I mislike this mightily.”

  She gathered her will and daring. “I shall have it, Father,” she said. “If you naysay me, one night I’ll take a firebrand of my own around the garth, and everything that is yours shall burn.”

  He did not curse or strike her. He watched her for a long while, where she stood unblinking before him as the wind tossed her long black tresses. Then he shook his head and rumbled, “I think you might. Yes, I think you might. You are a girl yet, but a she-wolf’s heart is in you.”

  VIII

  She talked him over enough that he gave thought to what terms he would set. Seija’s tribe should first send him hostages. From his visits to the lands where they roamed, though the last had been years ago, he knew whom to name. He would take children of theirs. Finns were very tender of their offspring. These should be treated kindly and dwell with the settled Finns who herded his reindeer and helped in his fishing, sealing, and whaling. When Gunnhild came back to him they could go home, with gifts. If harm befell her, they would die.