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
