“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.
In the summer she grew great with child. A while past Yule, on a night when wind wailed and sleet hissed around the hall, she was brought to bed of it.
Through the long darkness and the glimmer of day and the darkness again she fought. Lamps guttered, torches smoked, shadows wavered thick. The bower stank of their smoke and of the sweat, cold and slick, that drenched every gown the women gave her. Straw ticks, gone sodden with blood, were taken off to be burnt. The midwife hovered helpless. In the corners, three witch-wives whom she had sent for hunched on their three-legged stools, singing their spells.
Ragnhild gasped. The midwife brought water and held up her head that she might suck of it. She fell back onto the bed. Another wave passed through her belly.
Again and again.
Hadding sat in the hall among his housecarles. They drank. By daylight they ate something, without giving it heed, and then drank more. Sleep overwhelmed one after another, until at last they all slumped on the benches or sprawled on rushes, snoring. Hadding sat alone in the high seat. His gaze smoldered ember-red.
Dawn grayed. The midwife came in to him. “Lord, I bring you sorrow,” she said. “The queen has died, and the birth was cold.”
Hadding looked at her as a blind man might look. “Was it a boy or a girl?” he croaked.
“A girl.”
“I think she would have liked that.”
He rose and stiffly followed her to the bower. The flames of a few lamps were fading into the dimness that leaked from the sky outside. He was used to blood and reek, he need give them no heed. Instead he walked across the floor, between the awed witches, to the birthbed. A while he stood, looking down. Ragnhild stared back at him. Her face was gray and hollowed out, nothing like the face that once he kissed.
He bent over to close her eyes. “You were a warrior,” he said. “I could never have fought the fight you did. Wherever you are bound, let them honor you.”
His hand stroked the wet ruddy hair. He straightened and went out.
XXVII
A man hight Tosti. He it was who broke the long peace. In those days the Danes lived mainly on their islands and in Scania. Only the northern fourth of Jutland paid scot to their king. However, more and more of them were moving in, as younger sons overflowed from olden farmsteads. For the most part this happened quietly. The Jutes thereabouts were not many and much land lay open for the taking. The newcomers cleared, built, plowed, and married daughters of the earlier dwellers. Thorps grew, some until they were towns; ships sailed in and out; overland trade waxed; households did well.
Otherwise the Dane-king held only a pale, some two miles long and wide, on the eastern shore across from Funen. Hadding’s father Gram had taken it with the sword, that he might have a sheriff there to keep watch on the Little Belt that sundered island and mainland.
Elsewhere the Jutes were in the hands of kings who were hardly more than quarrelsome chieftains. They did not have all the rest of the peninsula. The Anglians owned much of its western half and lands reaching on toward Frisia. The Saxons filled the eastern side of its lower neck though most of their country swept from the valley of the Elbe through the valley of the Ysel. Some of their kingdoms were strong.
Though Dane, Jute, Anglian, and Saxon thought of themselves as unlike each other, they were closely akin in blood, tongue, and lifeways. Many of them were going west overseas to harry the Franks and carve new homes out of England.
Tosti hailed from the backbone of mid-Jutland, the son of a poor yeoman who barely grubbed a living from a few gaunt acres. The father died while the boy was small, and Tosti did not get on with the man who took his mother in. Nor was he ever willing for such a lowly life Early on he ran about with other youths of his bent. Their wildness fed on itself. As they got their growth, they started to waylay men, whom they robbed and left beaten half to death.
Word went around and charges were brought at the Thing. The fathers could not pay weregild. The gang would not even come speak for themselves. Instead, they broke into lonely garths while the owners and carles were at the meeting. They raped, killed, and robbed. Thereafter they were named wolves in the halidom, whom any man could slay without having to answer to the law.
They took to the heath. First Tosti split the skull of his stepfather.
A few fights made him their unquestioned leader, while he never owned any man his lord. In the course of the next ten years or so, he gathered more ruffians to him. By their raids they gained skill and weapons, as well as plunder which they could trade for whatever else they wanted. When king’s men came after them, sometimes they threw back the attack on a camp of theirs, sometimes they withdrew to another. Deep woods,
