Mother of Kings

by Poul Anderson

  “That’s what makes me afraid,” whispered Ragnhild.

  The maid brought the vessels. Gunnhild drained the ale fast. Thereafter she sipped the mead. The fire hissed, mumbled, and dimmed the flames with its stinging smoke. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Ragnhild stared into the shadows. “You couldn’t. It’s not in you to yield and have done.”

  Gunnhild’s free hand reached for the other’s. How small it was in her clasp, how cold. “I’ve had my man and his blood to fight for.”

  “Yes. You’ve had them.” Ragnhild wrenched loose. “What will you do now?”

  “Tomorrow many men will die,” Gunnhild said. “May Haakon Jarl be among them. Whatever happens, your brother shall not be.”

  “You’ll try—” Ragnhild lifted her arms a little, almost as if begging. Her voice cracked. “You’re killing yourself. There are too many ghosts here already.”

  “Is this the daughter of Eirik Blood-ax who speaks?”

  The arms dropped. “As you will, Mother,” Ragnhild sighed. “What do you want of me?”

  “Keep the wretched household off my back,” Gunnhild snapped.

  “As I’ve done before. Well, best I seek my bed.”

  Her narrow bed, Gunnhild thought. “Goodnight,” she said, knowing it would not be.

  A carl stole in to do such tasks as banking the fire. Gunnhild put the emptied mead cup down, took a lighted candle in a holder, and limped to her chosen room. The bees of lost summers had begun buzzing ever so slightly in her head. She needed what warmth they brought with them, but had better drink no more. Soon she would again be going beyond herself.

  Fireless, the room was chill, a hollow of night. After she shut the door, she could not but think of the man she had had laid to rest beneath the stones—if rest it was. Often she had kept from telling Ragnhild that she, witch, spaewife, wisewoman, had learned mostly that she did not know what waited yonder, or what the God or gods were whom Ragnhild had forsaken.

  Let her brothers be victorious, kings once more, and they would take her home. They would find her a man as good as—no, Eirik would never have brooked her moods or tried to heal her—as Arinbjörn. Then maybe someday she would win her own victory, over the men she had murdered.

  That lay now with Ragnfröd, and with his mother.

  Gunnhild set the candle on the witching-stool, in front of a crucifix. The image was carved from wood, about a foot high, with a stand at the bottom. Most of the paint and gilt had worn off in the unrestful years, albeit Gudröd seldom took it out of the chest in which he kept things he had brought with him from York. Somehow this made the outspread shape the more taut, the gaze the more stern. He had been glad to lend it to her when she asked, thinking that showed she would not be doing what he had feared.

  A kind of smile twisted her mouth before she knelt, folded her hands, and spoke into the stillness.

  “Lord Christ, Son of Mary, one with the Father and the Holy Ghost, who walked on earth that we might know the truth, died to redeem us from our sins, and rose from the tomb that we might live forever in your nearness—” So had Brihtnoth prayed, and wanted her to pray. He flitted wistful across her awareness. “—hear me. Tomorrow a king goes to war for your Faith.” More for himself, but leave that aside. “I call on you to keep faith with him. So shall men see that you are indeed the Lord on high, and plight their troth to you.” Anyhow, some would, and the sons and grandsons of the rest. “Otherwise they will abide by the gods who stood by the foe of the kingly house. Whatever you may do with me, know that I will work to keep this unrightfulness from throwing the world awry.

  “Enough. Amen.”

  Stiff and in pain, she climbed back to her feet. If Christ was as the Christians believed he was, he had foreknown. But to say something aloud gave it power, the spellcraft of words and runes.

  If by calling on him as well as on the heathen gods she had angered them all, let their wrath fall wholly on her. Ragnfröd knew nothing of this. Gunnhild’s thought had been to challenge them, and even lay her will on them, as the Finnish wizards sought to do.

  She would go that way too, the third and oldest way, on the road of spells and dreams, for then she would not be waiting altogether helpless while her son fought.

  A cough racked her. It burned her lungs. Her cheeks and brow felt hot. She went to her bed. There was no need for haste. At this time of year the night was about as long as the day. She lay remembering.

  When she got up and ate the mushrooms she had left in a bowl of water, they quickly told hold. Weariness dropped away. Almost lithely, she made ready for her faring.

  Unclad but for the feathers, claws, and teeth, hair unbound, she danced around the stool, drummed, sang, shook the witchy bones, sat down and swayed, heard ever louder the grinding of the world-quern. Blackness whirled. Her body sank. Her soul soared from it, out through the candleflame.

  Dawn barely lightened a sky of ragged clouds, raw wind, and spatters of rain. Manes tossed white on the horses of the sea. The shadow winged eastward.

  XXXI

  The clouds over Norway were a wild gray flock in flight from the north wind. A darkness lifting behind them threatened storm. Low above mountains, the morning sun cast shafts that shattered on roaring, rushing waters. The steeps along the Sognefjord and the islands that sheered upward at its mouth somewhat checked the wind, though it whistled bitter and waves chopped. Few fowl were aloft. Nonetheless, nobody marked a lone swallow. Here was where men would fight.

  Southbound past Stad, Haakon had learned that Ragnfröd’s fleet was at the fjord. The jarl’s ships put into the sheltered narrows. They swarmed, dragons, knarrs, karfis, skutas, fisher boats, hulls and oars across a mile or more, men come from end to end of the kingdom. Sunbeams flitted to flash off iron. While most of Ragnfröd’s craft were bigger, they numbered only a third as many.

  Haakon left them where they rode and went on by. Horn-blasts and yells rang between. He made for the southern shore of the mainland, a spur called Dinganess. Seen against the heights everywhere around, it was nearly flat, bedecked with new grass whose green seemed astoundingly bright in this weather. A few stands of woodlot trees tossed their boughs. A few buildings clustered offside, a hamlet, its dwellers fled with their livestock when the king’s ships hove in sight.

  Haakon’s keels grounded. He was among the first ashore, staking off a battlefield. As his crews landed, their leaders shouted and beckoned to muster them. Banners snapped in the wind.

  Ragnfröd could ill withdraw south. Half Haakon’s ships waited manned, to waylay his if he tried. Should he get through, the jarl would come after, sooner or later catching him; and by then much of his following would be gone. The wolf bared fangs and stalked forward. He made land not far north of his foe. His pack splashed through the shallows to the strand and gathered itself. Haakon, busy disembarking the rest of his crews now that they were not wanted afloat, let him.

  Soaring above, Gunnhild watched. She could do nothing else, not yet; she must keep her strength against the sorest need.

  Haakon stayed where he was. Ragnfröd moved toward him. Gunnhild understood. The king had drawn his ranks into the wedgelike swine-array that Odin long ago taught Harald Battle-tooth. He would make straight for the jarl. Lesser hosts had beaten greater in the past. How well her son must remember what Haakon Aethelstan’s-foster did. If he could cleave through to this Haakon and fell him, the jarl’s troops would soon break.

  Horns brayed. Ragnfröd’s guardsmen burst into a run. Well drilled, they kept shield near shield. The levies trotted after. The swallow beheld their awkwardness, worse than might have been awaited.

  Arrows whirred. Spears and stones leaped. Only she heard the shriek, felt the cold, and staggered in the sky, flung aside by a newly torn-off soul. Warriors below might or might not have spied the youth who sagged down, a shaft in his eye. They were likeliest too caught up in their onslaught. Feet trampled the body to shapelessness.

  Man shocked against man. S
words flared; axes thudded. Bone split; flesh spurted blood. Step by red step, Ragnfröd hewed his way onward and inward.

  Haakon stood firm. As men fell, the dead and the groaning, writhing wounded became a heap in front of him. The attackers slipped and stumbled. The defenders caught them unready and cut them down. Suddenly Ragnfröd fought stalled. The stream of the angry dead swept Gunnhild off over the ships.

  From there she saw with horror—the faraway feeling of a soul unclad and alone—how Haakon’s right and left wings swung around to close in from the sides. He must have planned this, told his headmen, given them the horn-calls that would say when he wanted it done.

  Could she but have foreseen; could she but have forewarned!

  How? And to what use?

  Ragnfröd’s flanks crumpled. Those yeomen, farmhands, fishers, sealers, herders, trappers, hunters, folk lowlier still, had no wish for strife with their fellows. Some fought forlornly until they died. More dropped their weapons and ran. Many did not get free.

  Murk from the north was overflowing heaven. What sunlight struck through had gone brass-yellow. Ever stronger, the wind boomed and shrilled.

  Ragnfröd and his seasoned warriors held fast, shields a bulwark around their king. Haakon’s tides surged against it, fell back, surged forward anew. Warded by him and his nearest men, Ragnfröd’s standard bearer struggled ahead. Horns defied the wind. The king began beating a way back to his ships.

  But as they ended their slaughterer’s work, Haakon’s wings turned about and bore in. So thick was the press that some slain men did not fall straightaway to earth. They flopped and gaped between others; they hindered their friends as if they had become foes. Howls, screams, clattering, banging tore through the weather.

  Now if ever it was Gunnhild’s time. For this she would spend all that she was.

  The swallow scattered apart. The shadow swept earthward, unseen beneath the flying gloom or above torn, blood-muddied soil. Akin to the dead, it wove between their flights. Their shrieks keened at it more sharply than the wind. Gunnhild went on through.

  She would come at Haakon’s men from behind. None in the outermost of the throng were dying. They were not close enough for the iron to reap them. Instead, they gave weight to the attack; they were a wall that held the fight where it was.

  She would slide through byrnies, slip past ribs, bring night and ice into heart after heart. She would be fear. The battle was a maelstrom where men churned blindly, unwitting of what went on beyond themselves. Once dread had taken some, they knew not why, it would go from one to the next until it overwhelmed everybody but the guardsmen whose life was war. If those did not bolt, they would at least mill back, for Ragnfröd to cast aside and fend off.

  Out of the northern darkness, black and huge, eyes like fire and mane like storm-billows, a stallion galloped. He bore a woman as mighty, mail-clad, who gripped a dripping spear. Only the shadow saw, only the shadow heard those hoofs and the wolf-cry of the rider. Gunnhild knew her from aforetime. Then she had fled. Today she must not.

  The shadow rose to meet Thorgerd Shrine-bride.

  The spear stabbed. The shadow flowed on around the wound. It took hold of the rider’s neck. Thorgerd clawed at it. Her nails ripped. Gunnhild clung and tightened. The horse reared, neighed, himself afright. Thorgerd let go of the shadow to grab the reins. Gunnhild afar snarled in her sleep. The shadow reached a smoke-arm down the rider’s open mouth, through the strangled gasps, into the throat, and on toward the heart.

  Even as it did, Gunnhild felt her strength wane. Be this a war of gods or a fight between a witch and one Being, she was an old woman who could merely do her utmost to save her son and the blood of her son.

  Thorgerd hauled the horse to a shivery halt on the wind. She tore the shadow loose and flung it from her. The spear lunged after it and pierced. Shredded, the shadow gave way.

  Yet Thorgerd had also suffered, had lost her grip on the victory she brought.

  And meanwhile men felt the strangeness of it. Something, they knew not what, was going on, and awful. The unease spread. Haakon’s levies wavered. Undaunted, Ragnfröd’s guards thrust ahead.

  Thus did he win to his ships with the last of his followers, launched those few he could man, and stood out to sea. Folk reckoned that behind him lay some three hundred and sixty of his own. Haakon’s losses were much less. A skald of his boasted afterward in a poem that the jarl could walk from the field to the strand on the heads of the slain.

  Thorgerd Shrine-bride left him there. The shadow of a shadow flew slowly back to Orkney.

  XXXII

  Gunnhild needed no witchcraft to know she was dying. What she had shed in the sky above the Sognefjord was not blood; it was life. The fever in her flesh, the noises in her lungs, brought Harald Fairhair to memory. Yes, they were like a low surf on the shore that was herself.

  She lay in a guest-bed in the same room as Ragnhild’s. It was fairly bright by day, and a lamp burned there at night. Her locked box stood in the offside room with the witching-stool and the crucifix. She had ordered that when she was gone, it be taken out to sea and cast overboard.

  Ragnhild tended her mother with broth and bathings. She still said little, but never since that first bitter farewell had Gunnhild seen tears on her lashes. Maybe the winter within her was thawing toward a springtide.

  As the illness worsened, she sent a boat to Gudröd on Mainland. The next afternoon his bulk blocked the doorway. He strode to the bedside and took both Gunnhild’s hands in his. “How fare you, Mother?” he asked hoarsely.

  She looked up into the rugged face and half smiled. “Away from the world,” she answered in the near-whisper that was now her loudest speech.

  “I hoped otherwise.” She could see that any such hope had gone from him. He let go and stiffened his shoulders.

  “Late or soon, it happens to each of us,” Gunnhild said. “I’ve lived longer than most. What is your news?”

  She had foreseen his grimness. “Bad. As I was starting off, Ragnfröd made haven with a handful of ships and men. Haakon won.”

  “I know.”

  He stared, a bit shaken. “What?”

  “At least Ragnfröd lives.” That was her doing, but she could say nothing about it to this man. Not that she cared to.

  “He couldn’t come with me,” Gudröd said, as if to sweep shame aside. “He’s worn out. They were storm-bound; then when they could sail it went hard. And he has wounded to tend to.”

  “I understand.”

  “He sends—greetings.”

  “Bring him mine, with my blessing.” For whatever that was worth, Gunnhild thought wryly. “It was good of you to come.”

  His voice stumbled. “How could I not?”

  This much love lived yet. The thought held a sweetness she had nearly forgotten. “And fare you likewise well, my son.”

  Gudröd lifted a fist. “We’ll go back to Norway,” he growled. “Oh, we may want years to gather new strength, but one day we’ll take what is ours—and was yours, Mother.”

  “Luck be with you,” Gunnhild said.

  She knew it would not. Was that a sight into time that the shadow had had, or only the hard wisdom that oftener belonged to women than to men? Her sons would never again be other than sea-kings, highborn but holding scant land, vikings because nowise else could they wrest a living. Yes, they might try once or twice, but it would be doomed. Their own leman-born sons, her grandsons, were already lost in the ruck of rovers. Her work had gone for naught.

  “God be with us,” Gudröd said.

  “As you wish.”

  Shocked again, he promised: “When I’m where I can get it done right, I’ll buy masses for your soul’s peace.”

  “Ever were you the kindest of us.” To say more than that would be a mockery, which his God might avenge on him.

  Her eyelids drooped.

  “I’ll leave you to rest,” he mumbled. “Sleep well.”

  She nodded. She heard his heavy tread go out. He cl
osed the door behind him.

  The murmur in her breast lulled. She dozed off.

  When she woke, the lamp guttered low in an unrestful gloom. Air hung thick. Not a sound trickled through. Ragnhild’s bed was shut. It must be nighttime. Her slumber had become fitful.

  But seldom was she this awake. She wanted to rise and move about. No, getting up for the pot was as much as she could do anymore. Nonetheless she longed. Had the world really shrunken to one small room?

  How boundless that world had been. She found herself harking back over her whole life, back to childhood and maidenhood and olden dreams. A song came to her lips, as if singing itself under the rustling breath.

  Why, it was Finnish; it was a spell-song.

  None of those she had wielded against men. It was a song to call the sun home to summer and welcome the life that quickened on earth. It called to her.

  She would not die in this stifling dark. She would not.

  It was astonishingly easy to throw off the blankets and rise. The rushes rustled under her bare feet. Quietly, go quietly, or someone well-meaning would hear and take her back.

  Coals lay dull red on the hearth. They gave barely enough glow for her to pass. The snores and the smells of men stretched on benches stuffed the main room. She crooned a sleep-song while she went by.

  A full moon stood high in the west. Its brightness flooded most stars out of heaven and scattered them onto the hoarfrosty grass along the path. Nothing broke the hush other than the gurgle of the brook and the sound of the surf ahead, strong and deep, calling to the tide in her. A breeze flowed cold, but although she wore only a bed-gown, the heat in her blood kept any chill from her. Nor did the clay and pebbles below seem to bite.

  Her head felt as light and far off as the moon. She was bound she knew not where, to a meeting with she knew not what.

  Folk believed they did. But why then were their beliefs not the same?

  She neared the water. On her right loomed the headland. Suddenly she spied three shapes atop it, black athwart the lower stars. Two reared as high as ever eagles flew, like skeletons, and men hung there. The third, between them, was dancing.