One King's Way

“This seems to affect the good name of your family,” said Valgrim, a trifle uncertainly.

The king smiled. “What you are thinking is that it is also a good test of luck. If King Shef was on the rotten ice last night, and survived, that was one test passed. If he got past the wolfhounds, that was another. You want me to set him a third?”

“Third time pays for all,” said Stein.

“I agree. A third test it is, and then no more, from me or from you. Agreed.”

Valgrim nodded, reluctantly, eyes full of calculation.

“Then I will send word to my brother that there is reason to think things amiss on Drottningsholm. I have never done that before, and he knows I would not do it lightly. So he will believe me and give permission for a thorough search of the island and every building in it, from end to end. You must think how you would make it, Stein. And if intruders are found there, hiding, then they must go to the king's justice. It will be heavy, when he thinks the good name of his son Harald is concerned.

“Till then, Stein, you had better double the guards on the bridges, both from Drottningsholm to the second island, and from that to the third and to the mainland. A bold man could swim between the islands too, so have your guard-boats out between them. I need not tell you to make sure there is no boat a man could steal.

“If this is to be a test, it is in your hands to make sure it is a strict one. Do not come to me afterwards and say, this was no fair test, any man might have escaped. You must make sure that the only escape is by Volund's path, through the air! Then if King Shef escapes, we will know that Volund he is, in whatever shape.”

Stein and Valgrim nodded again.

“And no word to his friends,” added Valgrim. Out of the window of the high room where they sat, he could see Thorvin walking across the college precinct, Brand at his side. Both men looked deeply anxious.

“No word to his friends,” Olaf agreed. “I will play fair on this one, Valgrim. See you do too. Otherwise it is no test of king's luck.”

As he turned and went out, Valgrim and Stein looked at each other.

“He said make it a strict test,” said Stein. “I could make it a little stricter than he plans.”

“Do that,” said Valgrim, looking again at the ‘Gungnir’ runes on the spear he still held. “No strictness is too harsh for the man who pretends to come from All-father.”

“And if his luck does prove stronger?”

Valgrim hefted the spear, shook it like a man about to strike. “I think it has left him already. I hated him for aping my master Othin. I hate him more now he has thrown away my master's token.”

From the shadows of the great hall, Karli watched his friend-and-master musingly. All the signs, he thought. I should have realized earlier.

Almost from the moment of their first meeting—certainly from the first time they had talked together—Karli had unconsciously assumed that Shef was the elder of the two, the wiser, the more widely-traveled, the more weapon-skilled. It had given Karli no sense of inferiority. His own animal spirits were too strong for that, and he remained unshakably confident in his own ability to knock any man down with his fists, and bed, if not any woman, at least any woman reasonably good-humored. He did not feel inferior to Shef. But he had assumed that Shef knew as much as he did.

A mistake. He should have realized that where women were concerned, this tall warrior with the scars and the mighty friends was no more than a boy. He was behaving like a boy now. A boy who has met his first woman. What he had been doing with Queen Ragnhild all day, Karli did not know, but now night had fallen and the guards had been withdrawn he still could not take eye or hand off her. As he spooned the strong salt stew into his mouth, his left hand lay on the queen's bare arm, lightly stroking it. Every time she spoke he leaned close to her mouth, laughed, took every chance to touch her again. Karli had heard stories of witches who sucked away a man's manhood. In his experience there was no need of witchcraft. Sexual skill, consciously exercised, worked on any man—the first time anyway. Once you realized there were more fish in the sea than ever came out of it, you might be protected. But Shef did not know that yet. And there was no way of telling him. When Karli had approached him after being freed from the garret, Shef had been pleased to see him, but vague, reluctant to talk or plan or even think about what had happened. He was slit-struck.

It was up to him, then. Karli had no doubt that for all the warmth and the food and the careful attention, he and Shef were in greater danger than they had been on the ice. What Edith and Martha and their two friends had told him had chilled him deeply. Shef was against slavery because he had been threatened with being a slave. Karli was against it because he had no experience of it. In the uncivilized and poverty-stricken Ditmarsh there was neither room nor work for slaves. They might sell shipwrecked strangers to other strangers, but they kept no thralls themselves. The constant fear under which a thrall like Edith or Martha lived was a new thought to him.

And fear made people good listeners. Their lives depended on knowing what might happen and taking the few pitiful precautions open to them. So Martha not only bore with the contempt and bullying she received from the Norwegian female housekeeper who came in with the guards each morning and left with them each night. She encouraged it, making mistakes to provoke a beating and a flood of words. What the massive Vigdis had said after Martha dropped the pan was that a time was coming for idle sluts. Aye, and maybe not them alone. Why else the doubled guards? And don't think to swim off like the spineless eel your father. The men have brought up boats to the channel between each island. When the king comes we'll see who's useful enough to let live and who is fit only for howe-bridal.

Vigdis obviously did not know what the guards were for, and thought it some royal intrigue: maybe King Halvdan tired of his mother waiting to die, or of his wife and her independence. But the slave-women knew better. The dogs, they said. Men coming round to look in their pens, ask where the others were, why they had not all come home, why they could not be heard baying if they were still loose somewhere on the island. We cleared up the bodies before first light, Edith had said, and the rain washed away the blood, but in the soft ground it would not take a tracker to see that people had been doing something.

A night or two's grace, thought Karli, still watching Ragnhild and Shef, the sour queen Asa sitting glaring at both across the table. I know. The slave-women know.

Shef will not listen. And Vigdis has not told the queens. Well, one thing is for sure. They will not notice if I am not there. Quietly he went through the door to the little cramped room where the slave-attendants waited.

“Have you thought what to do?” whispered Edith.

Karli squeezed her hip. “I am a Ditmarsher,” he said. “I know something about water. I need to build a”—he hesitated for the right word—“a boat?”

“There are no boats on the island. No planks, no tools. It would take weeks to fell trees. And anyway, they would hear you!”

“I don't mean a boat like that,” said Karli. “I mean”—he turned to the Frisian woman Martha—“we call it a punt.”

“For the duck-hunters,” said Martha, nodding. “But what do you need to make that?”

Hours later Karli bent sweating over the contraption he had put together on the island's seaward shore, furthest removed from the guard-posts. Its flat bottom was simply a door. There had only been one whose absence would not be immediately noticed the next day—the one that led to the slave-women's stinking latrine. Probably neither the guards nor the queens knew such a place existed, let alone whether it had a door or not. Karli had lifted it bodily off its hinges and carried it out. He could have stood on that alone and poled himself along if he had been able to keep to shallow water. But he knew he would have to do better than that, make a seaward circle before he ran in to the shore. He needed a place to stand if he was not to be tipped off by every wave. And something like a bow to cut the water. Done with no tools and no noise.

Slowly and clumsily he had cut away one edge of the door with his sword, sharp but not serrated. Iron skewers from the kitchen had nailed down billets of firewood toward the stern, hammered in with a flat stone muffled by layers of cloth. On top of that he had fixed a flat wooden tray with four nails worked loose with his fingers and pulled stealthily out of the ornate wooden planking at the rear of the hall. Finally, growing impatient and trusting to luck that the damage would not be seen next morning, he had pulled away one strake of planking low down to the ground, snapped it over his knee. He was trying now to drive three more nails through the planking into the cut-away edge of the door, to make a bluff, square bow. Once it was done he would have a makeshift imitation of the craft the Ditmarsh fowlers steered through their everlasting bogs. He would neither row nor pole it, but scull