A sample from an early work, based on a medieval Icelandic saga.
© 1975 by asotir. All rights reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Swan-Maiden: Two
A SHOUT SOUNDED when she entered, and a big bearlike man came nigh. He stood so tall his head seemed to duck beneath the rafters, and his face was ugly with the marks of years’ striving against stone, wave, wind and man. In his thickly-braided beard streaks of gray shone amongst the yellow-brown: a great-limbed, big-bellied, horn-in-hand man he was and had ever been, that wore his axe by his side even here in a friend’s hall. He was Thorgrim Thorleik’s son, and he was foremost of all of Olaf’s thingmen. He loomed over the blackhaired shivering woman, his great body shutting out the light and warmth of the open fire beyond.
‘If you were not your father’s daughter, it would go the worse for you,’ he growled. ‘Where are your manners, that you do not serve your father’s guests with mead? You have strange ways, Swanhild: that is the Finn’s-blood for sure. Saw you aught of your father out there?’
Swanhild shook her head; pushed gently past him to seek the fire’s warmth. The heavy, bitter smoke, ill-dispelled through the smoke-hole in the roof, stung the girl’s eyes to tears and blinkings.
‘Take you mead to fire your breast!’ Thorgrim said, but she shook her head. ‘Ah yes, I had forgotten: Olaf’s daughter will have no drink! Yet that was never Olaf’s way.’
He stood behind her and gazed into the ale-horn, an ornate and rune-wrought ox-horn. ‘Why did he not take me along with him,’ he grumbled. ‘I am not so old I could not have matched a few of those luckless wights. And where went you, if that is not too bold a question?’
She cast her eyes back at him briefly: dark slanting eyes with long curling lashes: Finn’s-eyes: the eyes of her mother. ‘Hrafnarroddar rode I: looked down on the Hrafn.’
Now Thorgrim pulled on his beard and gaped. ‘What foolishness! Know you not that the holes of Svinafell hold outlaws, and berserks and dead men’s ghosts besides? Only Odin astride Hlidskjalf could know what you might have run across.’
‘I met with nought,’ she answered, shuddering over the baking heat of red embers.
‘Ox with two legs, Thorgrim, will you stop badgering the girl and look upon her state? Her clothes are wet through. If she does not sicken of this to the death it will be through no deed of yours!’
That was a short broad woman, that had shouldered her way from the far side of the hall. Her gown was stained with flour and dried fish-stew; her braided yellow hair was mostly bound beneath a wimple. From her neck swung a small brass charm in the shape of a square cross, and at her waist swung the big bundle of the house-keys. That was Gudruda, the hall’s mistress and Olaf’s second wife. She hemmed in the slender Swanhild with her bulk, fussing over her state. Then the girl turned upon her, and Gudruda left off.
‘There my dear, you look wretched; even the braids of your hair have come undone,’ she muttered, somewhat warily. Over the girl’s thin shoulders she drew a thick woolen blanket. ‘I have just seen to Erik, but you are in even a worse state. Come along and we will see what can be done. – Rannveig, put a kettle of broth over the fire for Swanhild.’
Gudruda tugged at Swanhild’s arm: the girl yielded, and let herself be led down past the long-fire to the household beds beyond, that were built against the wood-covered walls, beneath the low-falling rafters. Gudruda sat Swanhild down upon the bed and drew the linen curtain: then began peeling off the girl’s sodden gown and undershifts. Those she gathered into a great dripping ball and handed to one of the maids, that she should hang them on the chains beside the open fire.
Swanhild made a tent of the large blanket and huddled wordless on the bed. Gudruda brought closer a lamp: iron bowl of fish-oil with a moss wick, set on a tapering iron rod of curling bands. She thrust the point into the earthen floor where it would give the best light. Rannveig came in softly with a bowl of hot broth, that the young woman took and drank. Gudruda put another blanket about her shoulders and rubbed her dry. Swanhild set the empty bowl onto the floor and sat still and yielding in her stepmother’s hands. Now Gudruda took the long, thick hair into her hands and gently wrung streams of water out of it. She took up another towel and began rubbing Swanhild’s head, halting every now and then to see how her work sped. Swanhild sat gazing at the weave of the linen curtain, her eyes black, giving back no light, like two cracks in the glaciers on the fells in the dim light of a new and frosty moon.
‘You are too thin, surely, stepdaughter. What man will sue for so thin a maid? And that you go abroad on such wild nights as this makes your looks no better. In this will I counsel you: so my mother bade me. Eat for a whole month fresh butter; eat for the second month pork; and in the third month eat you cream-cakes. Then will your form wax round and pleasing to a man. It is no mark of health, this thinness of yours.’
Sitting so, Swanhild in her nakedness seemed some stark thing from the barren fells, foreign and unsettling here within this hall filled with warm smoke, happy smell of burning wood and peat, and the richly rounded carvings of the wainscoting. Her flesh, deathly blue-white from the long winter’s lack of sun and the coldness of the rain, took on none of the golden glow of the lamp before her. That chill whiteness was broken only by the darkness about her eyes and her hair, deeper than night, and the untold riddle of the place crowded between her legs, whereof only a few of the curling strands might be seen.
There was little of womanly roundness about Swanhild’s body, as Gudruda well had said: no round folds of butter-fat, no heaviness of milk in those flat, peaked breasts, no wide rolling hips to bring forth many children. But even so that was a woman’s body, and no man would have gainsaid that. The boyishness about the hips and thin limbs only made the deeper femaleness lurking there all the more sharply felt and longed-for. Her leanness held the comeliness of the glacier’s ice. None would call her a handsome woman: but in the right light, holding her head and shoulders even so, she was lovely, dreadfully lovely. And yet that loveliness too, was pitiless, and made even those who liked her somewhat ill at ease. And as for suitors, she had had none since long years back.
‘How silly, to be abroad on such a night. Whatever put in you such wildness? We were worried to forgetfulness. As if your father’s being away were not enough for us to think on! What would he have done, had he been here to know of this?’
‘Understood,’ Swanhild said.
‘Yes, so speaks a wayward child. Thorgrim said you looked for your father. Did you – did you see aught of him?’
‘No.’
The older woman sighed. ‘Then you think all will be well?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean? Oh Swanhild, do you think it came to blows?’
‘No,’ answered Swanhild, shaking her hair free. ‘I do not think that likely.’
‘Ah, I am so glad that you say that! You are a wise girl, Swanhild. You know your father best of us all. I have prayed many times for Olaf’s safekeeping: I am sure my words were heeded. After all, godi Njal Thoroldsson is said to be a man clever at law, not a fighter – and he holds to the Christ as well. If sheep are missing, then I hold it likeliest they were drowned by a burst of the Jokull or mired in the Skeidararsands rather than stolen. It is the hardness of our men, and that they are unknowing of the Christ. Olaf did not warrant those battles. He and Njal are two peacebearers, and I am sure they have agreed to atonement between them for the wounded and dead. Yes, maybe they hold now to a new friendship, like that one held before between Olaf and Thorold.’
The younger woman turned, looking from her slanting eyes into her stepmother’s simple broad face, that held the lines of all these nights’ worry. For his second wife Olaf Sigurdarson had picked a middle-aged, capable woman, one handsome enough to match his standing. Her first husband, Erik’s father, had been slain in a feud three winters earlier. When she had first come to the household early that winter, then there had been bickerings and bitter words between Gudruda and Swanhild: then Olaf had brought them to peace.
Folk spoke of Gudruda as a good cook, kindly mistress, and a capable handler of accounts, good with sums and people but not too close-handed with either. She was far-told for her open-handedness with guests, and most of all when wandering gangrel women came to the stead; with them she was kindliest of all, and was much praised for it. She also swore by the Christ, and that was as yet no common thing in Iceland.
Swanhild rose, shrugged off the blankets and let the long heavy braid of her hair fall down into the slight hollow between her breasts. Glossy and deep as night was that hair: for that reason she was sometimes called Swanhild the Black. She knelt and pulled out a chest from beneath the bed: drew forth an undershift of light blue linen, sea-borne stuff, very finely woven, and a dark purple dress.
‘Oh yes: I am sure you are right, stepmother,’ she said as she dressed. ‘Once my father told me of a time when he was young and someone had stolen one of his sheep. From what he told me, I think that was a sickly lamb not worth much: still, he went to see the man to see what sort of atonement he might get for it. He went alone, and took no men with him; but he bore along his sword and spear. Now the thief was the elder of two brethren: they had but come from the Hebrides, and both of them had the name of men who liked to have their own way in whatever they set their minds to. – Maybe you have heard the tale? – There had been three suits against these men, and two had been dropped because of flaws in the proceedings, and the third was uncollected. The elder was gift-named Gap-Tooth because of the tooth he lacked in the front of his mouth. To him my father went: but Gap-Tooth stood in his own field with his brother beside him. He would not gainsay the theft but rather boasted of it, and spoke of how sweet that lamb had tasted. Then he gave my father three pennies of bronze and said that was atonement enough.
‘My father took the coins, and was very mild about it. He agreed that that should be compensation enough. Then he gave two of the coins back to Gap-Tooth: who frowned and did not know the cause of that. Olaf my father said then, ‘These two are naming-gift from me to you, for I have a new name for you. No longer will you be called Gap-Tooth but instead Gap-Brow.’ With that he took out his spear and hurled it between the thief’s eyes; burst open his brains and killed him on the spot. Then said my father to the dead man’s brother, ‘I am sorry for that, but you can surely see I had no choice after he boasted how sweet my lamb tasted. But I am not a hard man, and will give you fair atonement for your brother’s life.’ Then he threw down the third penny in the dirt at the foot of Gap-Brow’s brother. Of course he had to kill him too, but there were no suits against my father for that; and greatly grew his standing by this deed. So you see, Gudruda stepmother, what sort of a man it is you have wedded,’ the girl ended, with a slight smile that showed her teeth. ‘There is nought you need worry over. Olaf was ever a man able to fend for himself: and those were hard men, mankillers; and these of Njal’s are only womanish Christ’s-men, after all.’
Thereat Swanhild pinned the second brooch to her purple gown and shoved the chest back beneath the bed with her shoe. She went out through the curtain to the warmth by the long-fire. Behind her Gudruda sat very still upon the bed; and the starkest look of dread spread over her face.
Round the long-fire and over the earthen floor ran the hall-benches, where sat most of the household and the guests. From the highseat to the northern gable and back to the main, or men’s door, the men were sitting; and they drank mead and told tales and verses. Thorgrim sat beside the highseat at chess with Skeggi Einarson, another of Olaf’s followers. On the soft leather board the ornate bone pieces were moved across squares of stitched hide. That was Thorgrim’s own set, that he bore rolled-up behind his saddle wherever he went. Now Thorgrim grinned and made a move: Skeggi looked down sharply, worry in his brow. The women sat beyond the highseat, on a raised flooring of wooden planks: some knitted, and others softly gossiped; one young woman held a bairn to her swollen breast. Quieter they all held themselves this night than was their wont. Between the groups of men and women the oaken highseat, crawling with carvings and rich-wrought runes, reared up big and empty.
Swanhild sat apart from the rest, on the red-and-black lava at the fireside. Below her the cinder-strewn rock hemmed in the long pit of the fire, warm to her feet; the ruddy glow of the low flames gave scant color to her face, sharp and bleak as bone. The men and women’s talk blended round her in a mild buzz. Among the men sat young Erik Gudrudarson, new-dressed in dry garb, watching the play of Thorgrim. When he glanced her way Swanhild looked away. The heat of the flames rose drowsily into her face, causing her to narrow the flattened slants of her eyes. They were strange hard eyes, that those who liked her not called, behind her back, ‘thief’s-eyes.’
A knot of children sat on the earth not far from her, clustered about the knees of Orvar-Odd. The old man sat with his back against the wall, swords and shields and axes pegged on one side, pots and kettles and ladles on the other. He was telling tales to the children, of witches and giants and trolls, and unhappy ghosts that rode the rafters in the winter-nights.
The air rose shuddering from the layers of coals and peat-squares, streaming upward with orange-red arms, to stroke the big, blackened soapstone cauldrons. Hung upon chains above the fire, Swanhild’s dripping shift and gown looked like two ill-formed, dream-wrought ravens: Odin’s ravens, Huginn and Munin. The blue smoke rose to weave flickering mazy patterns upon the rafter-shadowed turf ceiling. So thick and snug was that turf, that it let in none of the cold or wind or wet from without: the lazy smoke twirled in answer only to those gusts that entered through the smoke-hole and the gable at the hall’s end. Old was this hall now: many years had gone by since Hardbein had built it here. The roots of the turf dangled through the roof-bark, and the rafters creaked with the weight of the rare winter snows. Soon it would need to be built anew, out of timber shipped from the high forests of Norway, and peat-bricks from the bogs nearby.
From time to time a man or woman would feel the urge and slip out the women’s-door at the back of the hall to go to the privy: then the silence washed like a sea-wave down the hall, and all eyes sought the shadows thrown across the main door. But it did not open. Then the talk began again, from the men on one side and the women on the other, and wove like drowsy land-winds over Olaf’s daughter’s head.
‘And did you know,’ said Orvar-Odd, ‘in the old nights men were not buried in the earth in howes? Then was there never need to wait until the ground was soft at winter’s end, as Njal had to wait to bury his father Thorold.’
‘Then how did they do their dead ones?’ asked one little girl. She played with the braided ends of her bright yellow hair as she lay on the floor.
‘With fire,’ answered Orvar-Odd. Gently he stroked the silver flax of his scanty beard. ‘Yes, and most of all was it done when a hero fell. Then it was a great thing. Then they should bear away his corpse from the wold-trough and lay it upon a bier. He should be new-garbed in armor and sea-borne robes of fine workmanship: they should comb out his hair and braid his beard, and put bright ribands in his hair above his brows. Beside him went food and drink, drinking-horn, shield, sword and axe. Even gold they laid there, the down-stuff of worms. And if his death were fair, and if he had been mighty in his life, then should they slay his favorite horse in offering to Odin, Lord of Hosts, and lay it there beside him. That was for the Hel-ride.
‘And all this was done on a ship or ship-wrought ring of stones nearby the waves. Thus could he cross the rivers too high to ford. And then they would pick out one of his concubines to die with him and give him company. Sometimes she went willingly; else they must pick her out by lot. And they dressed her in fine bright linens, and put rings on her arms and blossoms in her hair, and gave her ale that was spell-wrought and had no pain, and cut her throat there.
‘Then should they invoke all the gods, but most of all the king of the gallows: Odin, that has his pick of all those men fallen in battle or weapon-slain. Little he cared for us, old blind ones or weaklings dead of sickness. So the bier was set afire, and they made blood-offerings. And as high as the reek of that blaze rose into heaven, so great they said had been the heart of that man in his life.
‘Of course, that was long ago,’ said old Orvar-Odd to the little children – ‘and far away as well, in Norway and the Swede-realm where forests grow as thick as grass. Here in Iceland we are too wood-poor to do any such thing. And anyway it went out of use long ago. Now they build up howes to hold a man down – you know of them, they are the grass mounds on the Svinafell. And it seems to me that few are the men nowanights that die seemly deaths for such an end. Only the lucky get what they want from life, children, and even they are far from happy. The life of a man starts shiny and bright from his mother, with a cry; but it ends in silence, dry and wrinkly and wormy.’
‘But what about the Valkyries?’ asked the little girl. ‘Yes, and the heroes!’ the others clamored, so that Orvar-Odd smiled, and let nod his head.
‘Yes, there were heroes, favored of the gods. And the greatest of these, outside of Sigurd Signison, were the champions of King Hrolf. Those men did not die in their beds, be sure! Their deeds are not unremembered; nor were they overlooked by the High Ones. They knew their ends, and faced them. And so in their last battle, fought they as they had never done in life before, and they great fighters all.
‘And above them, over feast-field of wolves and the fiery billow’s-steeds, would gather the Choosers: deathless maidens on winged mounts, byrnie-clad and shaft-wielding. They obeyed none but the Hanged One, old gray Odin himself: and so gave the win or withheld it, broke hosts and gave men battle-fury so that they knew not what they fought.
‘Of course, those fierce maids come not to Iceland. But long ago, in the firths of Norway, in the Dane-land, in the Swede-realm, they were common as pedlars. They gave luck to their heroes and at times, in troll-ridden forest glades, put on the guise of Swan-maidens, and bathed in icy pools at midnight. Then would they rise and put on again their mail, and fare to battle. An when a hero’s time was done, then would he be borne up heavenward by the maidens, over Bifrost the bridge from Middle-earth, into Asgard where the High Ones dwelt. And there would he feast with all the others, and eat boar-flesh, and do battle in hosts each day, and so be slain. Yet evenward they rose again, and came in fellowship again to Odin’s hall, Valhalla. Mighty kings and jarls led them: such as every hero you have ever heard the tale of. Nor was there pain there, though a thousand died each day. So it is said they took their pleasure at their lord’s command, and readied themselves for the last of all battles, the Battle of Vigrid’s Field...’
