War of the Gods

by Poul Anderson

  “So you have seen that at last,” she sighed.

  He frowned. “I’ve other things to deal with than moods and whims.”

  Ragnhild bridled, and they spoke no further that day.

  Afterward, though, she told him more. This was bit by bit. She herself did not clearly know what was wrong, why she so often felt sad and thwarted. Nor would she whine about it. But in the end, they both saw.

  “I am homesick,” she owned. “Denmark is a sweet land—but how flat, how tame! I live in high honor—but once I roved the mountains, wielded a bow, sped on ski, beheld boundlessness around me, almost as freely as a man. Yes, now I understand a little of what is in Ulfhild.”

  Hadding gave thought. More was at stake here than her wishes. Her father King Haakon was aged, would surely die before long. Hadding wanted to keep whole his ties to the Niderings. To that end, he might well be wise to spend more time among them than hitherto.

  “Things are in hand in this kingdom,” he said at length. “Should aught go awry, it’s not too many days by sea for me to come back. We could lodge yonder for months at a time.” He laughed. “I’d like some newness myself!”

  She gasped. Fire leaped in her eyes, behind tears. She flung her arms about his neck. They being alone in a loft room, he could kiss her, and one thing led to another.

  So did it come about that in the ninth year of the great peace they took ship for Norway. They had sent word ahead the year before, asking that a house be built for them in the wild uplands, though at a spot readily reachable. In Nidaros they got a welcome that went on for days. Already gladness shone from Ragnhild. Yet she yearned elsewhere, and for her sake Hadding left with her sooner than he really wanted to. He had been sounding out the men of weight, above all the sons of Haakon. One of them would be hailed king after the old man’s death. Hadding hoped to learn who among them would be best, and begin quietly lending that one what help he could. A kingdom torn by warfare between brothers would be of small use to him. Still, he went off with his wife and their housefolk.

  The dwelling stood broad and tall, high on a ridge overlooking peaks, dales, hasty streams, and silver streaks of waterfall. Slopes strewn with boulders, their grass starred with gentian, tumbled down to where, not far below, birch and pine stood thickly mingled. An eagle hovered aloft, sunlight golden on his wings; lesser fowl sped to and fro, hares scuttered, marmots whistled; now and then a bear stumped by, and most nights wolves gave tongue across the wind. That wind blew cool, clean, the farthest mountain as clear to see through it as if one soared there oneself alongside the eagle.

  “I am home again,” Ragnhild whispered. “Thank you.”

  At first Hadding roamed happily about with her, hunting, fishing, or climbing cliffs that belike no human had ever dared before. It took him back to his boyhood. He wondered how Vagnhöfdi and Haflidi fared. He remembered Hardgreip, and uncouth though she had been, the thought of her stung more than he had awaited. He shied back from it, into the sport he shared with Ragnhild.

  But as the days dragged into weeks, pleasure dwindled out of him. She blossomed; his answers to her mirth and her singing grew ever shorter. Here he sat, the lord of a few servants, doing nothing more heroic than chasing deer, his mind taken up with nothing more meaningful than next day’s outing, while beyond these hemming heights the world roared. He began to hate them. They held him back from his greatness, they barred him from the sea. In the end he wanted only to break loose from them.

  Like most well brought up men, he had some skill in skald-craft. On a day when rain held everybody indoors, hunched in chill and gloom at stinking fires, the bitterness crashed forth as a stave. He prowled the length of the room, a shadow in which eyeballs and teeth caught flickers of what light there was, his footfalls heavy, and spoke what was in him.

  Why must I dawdle, huddled in darkness,

  Caught in a cleft of the barren mountains?

  The freedom of faring on waves have I lost.

  High through the night goes the howling of wolves;

  Never their noise lets rife shut an eye.

  Wildly they wail as they prowl the clouds;

  Grimly the bears growl at their prey;

  Lurking lynxes yell when they pounce.

  Empty reaches and rocky wastes

  Hold for heroes only horror.

  Foul to them seem the rearing fells.

  Ill it is to live in this land.

  They long for the sea that lures them hence,

  To plow the waves with the prows of ships,

  Winning in war a deathless name,

  Starkly striking from off the waters,

  Bearing homeward an outland booty—

  That is a handicraft fit for heroes,

  Rather than squat by the scaur of a berg

  Or build and bide in useless woods.

  “Are you that weary of my homeland?” asked Ragnhild sharply through the twilight.

  “Well, the time is overpast for me to get back where I belong,” he mumbled.

  “Yes, doubtless we must,” she sighed. “Next Year we’ll return.”

  He said nothing to that, but busied himself making ready to go. They did not speak much on the way to Nidaros, nor afterward when sailing to Denmark.

  Sight of its low greenness, nestled in the sea like a woman in the arms of a lover, woke his mirth from its long and sullen drowse. He shouted, he slapped the backs of crewmen, swapped coarse japes with them, and laughed so that a flight of gulls sheered off. At Haven he gave a feast that filled hall and town to overflowing and went on for days and nights, while oxcart after oxcart groaned up laden with fresh casks, until the last guest lurched home clutching his head. Afterward there was much to do, things that had waited for the king’s word. He gave himself gleefully to them.

  But as soon as might be, he moved away. The Sound, softly lapping on weed-strewn shingle, its tides mild as the breathing of a slumbrous bairn, was not the sea for which he had yearned. Instead he took his men and servants to another kingly hall, on the Skaw. Here, at this northern tip of Jutland, heath rolled down to great dunes and heaped driftwood, below them the broad sands running from end to end of sight. Trees were few and dwarfed, gnarled and sideward-leaning, from the winds that blew ever out of the west. Surf tumbled and brawled, thundering inward, hissing back again to meet the onslaught that followed. Beyond ramped the waves, green and gray, foam-swirled, ragged-maned, sunlight a steely flare along their flanks when weather was clear, lashed to black anger when storms swept in. Seals tumbled among them or basked darkly agleam on the skerries around which breakers spouted. Northward across the Skagerrak, westward across the North Sea, the eye found no spoor of land, only this wet wilderness. The air was damp, mostly chill, always laden with taste of salt, smells of kelp and fish, never really at rest. Gulls wheeled and mewed in their hundreds.

  This hall was built for a stronghold, keeping watch over the sea lanes and the fisher hamlets along these shores. Some ways away, on the east side, was a town of craftsmen and traders, where ships went in and out. Across the Kattegat from it stood a bigger town of the Geats. In these easy times, hulls plied steadily between them. From the hall, in season, were seen many others going by bound on greater farings, up to Norway or over to Friesland and England, returning home battered but laden. It was no more than a sight, like the passing of birds. Ragnhild seldom got to the town. She stayed at the stronghold, running its everyday life, while Hadding rode around his Jutish shire.

  He would come home glad, tales crackling from his lips, eager for the night and their shutbed. But now, as winter set in, it was she who slowly became curt and withdrawn. He offered her what he could—sailing, horseback riding, hunting, days-long trips through the hinterland—such things as he himself liked. Less and less did she take them.

  “It’s too low hereabouts,” she said once. “You can never see farther than from your own height. Nor is there much that’s worth beholding.”

  He pointed to a hill, steep against the low
ering sky, ling-decked to the crest, where sheered a menhir raised of old by a folk unknown. “I’ve always thought that a tall sight,” he told her.

  Her laughter scoffed. “In Norway we’d call it a hole in the ground.”

  She brightened whenever they had guests with something to say that she cared to hear. This was less often than when they had lived deeper within the kingdom. Still, chieftains, traders, outlanders, and others not of the ruck were bound to have dealings with the king; skalds brought their verses, wanderers their gifts of strange things from afar, in hopes of reward; the hall would ring and seethe with their gathering, gold would gleam and ale gurgle forth, and on the high seat Ragnhild would be a queen in truth. Yet when the guests had gone she sank back into moodiness.

  “Do you feel left out of the world here?” Hadding asked her bitterly when she had been two days well-nigh unspeaking after the Yule feast ended. “Maybe this is not Haven, but more happens than ever did in Nidarcos. And—you dwelt months in the uplands, where we saw hardly anyone for weeks on end, without yawning or sulking.”

  She stared away from him, “I had been so long gone from my mountains. Oh, I would have come back down again to be among men. But in Nidaros the mountains are always near.”

  He growled deep in his throat and stalked off.

  The year died in sleet and spindrift. Slowly the sun climbed up toward the new year, higher every day. Snow lay in dingy clumps, melting to mud, puddles, and clucking streamlets. Snowdrops scattered white across earth, and from darksome, leafless woods the thin piping of lapwings sounded through the creaking of the gulls.

  Hadding found Ragnhild by herself on the strand. She gazed across a gray sea that tossed and crashed below a gray sky. A ways out yonder, seals thronged a reef. Their calls went. hoarse through the wind that skirled above the booming surf. That wind was too bleak to carry much smell. It fluttered her. cloak and a stray lock of red hair, the only real color inside this worldrim.

  He stopped beside her. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

  Her glance kept northward. “What do you want?” she asked dully.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you seek me?”

  “I thought if I came on you alone, we could talk freely.”

  “About what?”

  He struck fist in palm. “About what’s wrong with you, hell take it! Are you sick? Bewitched? You go through the days like a walking stone. Your face is haggard, your eyes are ringed with darknesses like bruises, at night you lie stiff whatever! do and then afterward toss about till dawn so I too get scant sleep. What ails you?”

  “It is where we are.” Not yet did she look his way nor have any hue in her voice.

  He stood for a while starkly thinking. Wind whistled, withdrawing breakers seethed. “Why?” he asked at last.

  She drew breath. “Once you made a stave for me,” she said. “I have been making one for you. Will you hear it?”

  His nod jerked. “Say on.”

  Now her look went straight at him. She spoke with more life than he had heard from her for a while.

  No home can I have upon the strand.

  The barking seals break my sleep.

  Billows burst across the rocks.

  And rob me of rest in my fog-wet bed.

  Too soon does the scream of the gull arouse me,

  Filling my ears with its ugliness.

  Never it lets me lie in peace,

  But always I hear it harshly mewing.

  Better by far to be on the fells.

  Here are no heights, no lordly quiet,

  But shattering waves and shrieking fowl.

  He stood wordless, arms folded, head bent down toward the sand.

  “Well,” said Ragnhild, “I will outlive it. In summer we go back to Norway.” She stopped. “No?”

  Hadding straightened. “No. I cannot be gone so long.”

  “You could last year. It seems me a fair trade.”

  “To swap wretchedness for wretchedness?” Hadding gusted a sigh. “Ragnhild, in the uplands the wolves kept me awake, though never had they done so before when I lay out in the woods on a hunt. Nor do I think the gulls at Nidaros ever troubled you. It’s when a place grows hateful in itself that the little things begin to gnaw.”

  “That may be I told you, on the fjord in Norway I knew I could be quickly back in my mountains.”

  “I think there’s more to it than that,” he murmured. “But we’ll never understand what. Well, we need not live here any longer. We can hold ourselves mostly to the towns—and, yes, now and then call at Nidaros.”

  “And even make a meager short visit to the uplands?” she cried. “No! You have your man’s freedom to ride around wherever you will and then sail off overseas. I will take whatever freedom a woman may have.”

  He swallowed hard, but had the wisdom to say no more that day.

  After all, he thought later, her brothers, younger than her, looked up to her. Their goodwill was important to him. Shrewd and bold, she could very well speak to her landsmen on his behalf, softly as behooved a woman but with steel underneath, and send news to him of how things were going. She might even help nudge more kings in the high North to swearing fellowship with him. Though Hunding of Svithjod was his friend, who knew what ill hap might suddenly take Hunding off, or what foes might raven in from elsewhere?

  The upshot was that in spring they sailed to Nidaros, and he came back without her. They gave out what was true as far as it went, that she would spend a while being his eyes and ears in these parts. If she did some of that while off in the wilderness, who dared question the Dane-queen? Otherwise let tongues wag as they would.

  Their last night together had not the lustfulness they once knew, but it left them feeling closer in their hearts.

  Hadding bade farewell and hoisted sail for Denmark. There he would have no dearth of women. Mainly, though, he found himself among men, from jarls to crofters, wrights to warriors.

  It was the warriors who most thrust their wishes upon him, his housecarles, youths everywhere, even graybeards who had been keeping their battle axes whetted. Too long had they lain idle or plodded the rounds of farm and burgh. Where now were masts aslant and rig athrum, new shores upheaving from the waves, shield-gleam and weapon-clash, great deeds, fearless dyings forever remembered, booty and brags brought home for the wonderment of maidens, the bond between man and man that goes deeper than love? How could a hero forever sit still?

  “I remember how we slogged through mud and shivered beneath rain, how the flux came on us in camp, how the newly dead stink and stare, how ready one is to kill one’s comrade if he belches just once more in the selfsame way,” Hadding had said once to Ragnhild. “And yet—”

  Besides, he could not well keep strength in being if he never used it.

  In the following summer he led a fleet across the Baltic. They harried widely among the Wends, they rowed up the rivers of Gardariki, they came back loaded with gold, amber, furs, and thralls. Thus for a while afterward there could again be peacefulness in Denmark.

  On the way home, Hadding sent most of the ships on ahead while he, with a few, grounded on Scanian shores. There he and some guards got horses. They rode to Bralund that he might call on his friend and jarl, Eyjolf.

  One day during this visit, he went for a walk with his daughter, Ulfhild. Her foster father had told him that though she curbed herself better than erstwhile, beneath it she stayed as willful and flighty as ever. Hadding thought he might try getting to know her a little. She was Ragnhild’s daughter too.

  The trail they took wound by a stubblefield. On its other side rose trees kept for a woodlot. The birches had already lost most of their leaves, which lay yellow and scrittled drily aside from feet. Elsewhere greenness lingered, but fading. Sunlight spilled through silent air that smelled of ‘earth. Geese trekked overhead. Their honking drifted faintly downward. Crows cawed, hopping bits of night, where they picked the cropland over for grain the gleaners had overlooked.
Let wanderbirds go off into the unknown; the crows would abide.

  “So now you will soon round out your twelfth winter,” Hadding said. “Good for you. Before long you’ll be a woman.”

  The girl clenched her fists. “It’s too long for me.” Her voice was small and cold.

  He laughed. “That’s because you are young. I draw nigh my fiftieth, and yet it feels like only yesterday I was a boy among the giants.”

  She cast him a look. He did not seem old. The gold of hair and beard was going fallow; furrows trenched his cheeks and when he squinted the crinkles stood forth around his eyes; a skin once fair had gone to dry leather; he limped a bit more than formerly; but still he had most of his teeth, still he stood straight and broad-shouldered, still the sword at his hip. hung ready.

  “We must start to think about your morrows,” he said. “I’ll be asking around about a husband for you. He’ll be a man whose strength we want at our side—but also a good man, dear, one you can be happy with.”

  She tautened. “How happy has my mother been with you?” she screamed. “I’ve heard!” She turned from him and ran.

  He did not follow, but stood watching her slight form speed away. That evening in Eyjolf’s hall he did not talk much. Next day he rode back to his ships.

  Winter fell.

  Its endless nights came to an end.

  In spring Hadding sailed north. Old King Haakon had now died, but his son Knut had been hailed without any naysaying. Hadding gathered that Ragnhild had had something to do with that. Knut made the Dane-king unstintedly welcome, and from the first night Ragnhild shared his bed it was as if nothing had ever pushed in between them.

  “I’ve missed you, oh, I’ve missed you,” she stammered in the warm blindness.

  “And I you,” he said. “Come back with me.”

  She was slow to answer. “We, were too stubborn, both of us. I think we always will be. Our souls are not the same. But surely we can meet halfway—often enough.”

  In the days thereafter they went aside from others and spoke of how this might be done. His ship bore her home with him to Denmark. As for what else they agreed to, later he never fully recalled it.