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 But now, as winter set in, it was she who slowly became curt and withdrawn.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 lowering 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
