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Broken Meats in Upsala
Styrbiorn slept the night after that banquet a sleep tumultuous with visions. In sleep, he rode a swift horse through lands silent and unpeopled, white with moonlight. He rode now through fires, as it were Brynhild’s fiery girdle about Skatalund, and now down deep wooded valley-slopes of darkness, where the young leafage brushed his hair and lips and hands as he passed. Then, in the swirling about of the visions which belonged to that unquiet slumber, he seemed to behold suddenly Sigrid the Queen naked before him in a whiteness of blinding brilliance; with the glory of which sight, sleep broke, and he opened his dazzled eyes on lamplight, and on Sigrid indeed in very presence standing beside his bed, but cloaked in her great scarlet cloak lined with swansdown.
She stood there by his feet, holding the lamp high. Her eyes were large and shining. Beholding him awake, she said, “I slept ill, and the whim took me to see if thou didst sleep tonight. I would not have waked thee.” Her breath caught as she spoke.
Styrbiorn rose sharply on his two elbows. His eyes, broad awake now, were fixed on her. And there was in that look, and in the whole frame of him, a tenseness like as is in a bowstring stretched. His face, flushed with sleep, took while he looked a yet darker red.
“This would I know,” he said, and his speech came hoarse and stumbling: “is it with the King’s leave thou goest o’ these night-walkings?”
Sigrid’s mouth hardened. She gave him an odd look from half-closed eyelashes, then, daintily as a seagull settles on the sea, sat down at the far end of the bed. Styrbiorn’s stillness was like the stillness of great clouds brooding before the lightning.
After a little he said, “Come nearer.”
Sigrid marked his voice, and the look of him. These things gave her a delicate pleasure, as of dangerous steering round a rocky headland in a strong sailing breeze blowing on the land. “O no,” said she. “I can hear thee very well so.”
Styrbiorn moved a little. “Why needest thou have waked me out of my dream? Shall I not have atonement of thee for that, Sigrid? Shall I tell thee,” he said, and his voice came like that light and sudden wind that sets a-quiver the leaves before a storm, “what I was a-dreaming on?” With that, he would have caught her into his arms; but she was a wary steersman, too swift for this gust of his, sudden though it was, and was leapt up and out of the door ere he could reach her. Styrbiorn, barefoot, guided by the leaping flicker of the windblown lamp, overtook her at her own door, flung himself in betwixt door and doorpost before she might shut him out, and had her in a moment alone with him in her own chamber, trapped.
The Queen stood facing him between the bed-head and the wall. She had set the lamp on a shelf, shoulder-high on her left, and stood there rigid, cloaked to the eyes in her great scarlet mantle, her eyes fierce and bright, like some beautiful beast brought to bay, her breath coming and going in pants. She did not speak. Styrbiorn abode some paces off, by the closed door. He reached a hand behind him, fumbling for the bolt, found it, and shot it softly home. He abode there silent, his hand still on the bolt, leaning towards her as the setting moon leans towards the sea. So for a minute’s space they face one another, Styrbiorn and the Queen, alone with the lamplight and its shifting shadows: with the velvet dark (with here and there a faint star shimmering) that filled the window above the Queen’s bed with the silence of night, so deep that each seemed to hear the other’s heartbeats: night, that is of kin with those shadowy-visaged and iron-handed Fates that lay men at their length: summer night, and the glittering of her eyes and his in the beams of the watchful lamp.
Styrbiorn came a step nearer to her, his gaze fixed, like a sleepwalker, saying, hardly above his breath, “Sigrid.” She neither spoke nor moved, but abode as if fascinated. Like the passing shadows of the moon, so silently he drew towards her, or like some motion of those grey Fates, or of things drawn by them blindly. He was kneeled now at her feet, his arms locked about her above her knees. The Queen rested motionless, only he felt the quivering of her flank under the rich mantle where his cheek was pressed. Styrbiorn lifted his eyes to her face; and now time past and time to come went for him clean away out of mind and caring, so that he was ware now no longer of any other thing save only of her: the perfume of her presence, her lips that parted a little, her eyes that looked down on him dark and wide. His hands reached upward and, as if afraid all should on the motion vanish in air, paused, scarcely touching her either shoulder. She, still gazing on Styrbiorn out of her eyes’ unsounded darks, suddenly let slip with a noble and divine grace her great red mantle, and stood there in her white loveliness before him.
The night wore now, and the stars moved on, and those unseen powers which weave the web of destiny threw the shuttle yet again, and Styrbiorn,
