Braki and his wife gave them a grudging welcome. His was no kingly dwelling. A well-built house and its outbuildings stood around a stone-paved yard. Kine grazed widely about, fields awaited the plow, and leaf buds laid green mist over a woodlot. Many other steadings were in sight. Beyond lay the wilds, where men logged, hunted, fished, and trapped. The uplands that were forbidden them lifted hazy blue in the north.
All these farms had bred sturdy young men and looked to Braki for leadership. Svipdag’s riders spoke softly as they asked for Gudorm and told what they had for him. Braki said that he was not here and it would take days to reach him. The chieftain would go, but with only a few close-mouthed followers. The Norsemen could cool their heels in his home.
So he came back to Vagnhöfdi’s house. The giant took him in with gruff good cheer and they all sat about the fire, in a rank gloom, while wind hooted outside and from afar sounded the howling of wolves.
Braki gave Gudorm the word given him. “You may return to Denmark for peace and power, if you will swear yourself to King Svipdag.”
“But this is wonderful!” cried the youth.
“Your father fell at his hands,” Braki said.
Gudorm flushed, looked away, and mumbled, “Here I can’t even see to the well-being of my mother. And how could I ever hope for vengeance? Instead of skulking in the woods till I die like an outlaw, why can’t I—win back honor—if I take a weregild worthy of my father, and, and keep his blood alive?”
“Bide your time,” rumbled Vagnhöfdi. “Who knows what may happen? Bide your time.”
“You never say anything else!” Gudorm screamed. “I’m sick of it!” He leaped up and ran out. Nor did he come back until after dark, when the rest were asleep.
In the morning-Braki took him off alone. Gudorm told his foster father how he hated this rough and lonely life and was bound that he would take Svipdag’s offer. Braki put it a little more mildly to the thursir.
They made Gudorm swear that he would utter no word to anyone about Hadding. Hardgreip said he must not leave yet. She seethed strange things in a kettle, cut runes in an ash stave, daubed them with blood from a nick she made in his thumb, and sang eerily beneath a crooked moon. “If you betray us, a doom will come on you that is not good,” she told him.
“We had no need of your nasty witchcraft,” he said, white-faced, “and I will be well rid of you.”
Thereafter he rode off with Braki, and from Braki’s home back to Zealand. Svipdag met him without much warmth but with full honor, while Gro watched. The king paid him for his father’s death and, Gram’s jarls being all dead or fled, made Gudorm, young though he was, jarl over the whole of Den-mark. Men said to each other that belike this lad would more trustworthily keep the peace and gather in the scot than someone might who was full grown.
Now Svipdag led a fleet over the Sound and up the Baltic shore to the Skerrygarth. Rowing through that many-islanded water, deep into Svithjod, he landed, struck swiftly, and took Uppsala. There he held a great slaughter to the gods, and began overrunning the whole kingdom. Houses burned, men fell slain, women were made booty, until one by one the shires yielded to him.
His thoughts about Gram’s child by Signy were few and short. It was not with its mother. Nobody could tell him where it might be, nor felt that it mattered. What danger was in a mewling babe? Belike she had left it at some poor croft, where neighbors would hardly mark it among the other bantlings. If it lived to grow up, it would know nothing more than how to grub a meager living out of the ground. Svipdag soon forgot about it.
V
Nursed at the breasts of a giantess, Hadding grew swiftly and strongly. Before long he was eating the same fare as the rest: meat from the hunt, fish from the waters, milk and cheese and butter from the cows, bread from grain that mother Haflidi grew in a clearing and ground on a quern as big as a man. Roots, leaves, sedges, mushrooms, and grubs were food to pick up along the trail. In their seasons came also nuts, berries, and the honey of wild bees. Vagnhöfdi brewed ale and mead, but Hardgreip taught Hadding that every spring and every stream had its own taste, its own magic.
Much else did he learn from the thursir. Going by himself rather than with the hounds, he became a keen hunter, wily trapper, patient fisherman. He could flay a quarry, cut it up, cook its meat, tan its skin, find uses for guts and bones. He could make and wield a fire drill, weave branches together for a shelter, read clouds and winds to foreknow weather, find his way by the heavens both day and night, bind up a wound or set a broken limb. He shaped stone and iron into tools for which he whittled the hafts. The iron itself Vagnhöfdi found in bogs and brought back to wrest from its ore with his overhuman strength.
The wilderness was Hadding’s home, which he came to know through every depth and every change. He wandered through the quick rains and quickening leaves of spring while returning birds darkened the sky with wings and filled it with clamor. He was out in the long days and light nights of summer, green growth and sun-speckled shade, warmth and thunderstorm and the manifold smells of life. He ghosted under trees gone red and yellow in fall, his feet rustling nothing, and from hilltops looked into hazy farnesses or down at drifting mists. He ranged through winter on skis and skates, unheeding of cold, not only beneath the
