Hrolf Kraki's Saga (14 page)

“Need we rot before we are dead?” rasped Helgi.

“We’ve mighty works ahead of us yet.” Hroar tried to smile. “Anyhow, I said to cheer you, you’ve won the fondness of a most powerful being—”

He broke off, because suddenly his waymate jerked straight upright in the saddle. The hair stirred on Helgi’s arms; he stared before him and hissed like a lynx.

“What is it?” asked Hroar in unease.

Helgi lifted a fist. Iron rang through his tone: “By the Hammer! You’re right! Why should I mope out my days?”

Hroar began, “Good, I’m glad to hear—” His brother’s shout cut through:

“I’ll go to Uppsala and fetch her back!”

“What?” Hroar cried. “No!”

It rushed from Helgi: “Yes. Hear me. I’ve brooded on this, till in a flash you made me see—” He gripped Hroar’s forearm with force that left fingermarks. “I, I
do
have the goodwill of one who stands high among the Others, is of the very blood of Ran. I fathered her child, that I’m rearing myself. Would she let harm come on her own daughter? Why need I further fear any curse? Why need you, or the Dane-lands? Need we ever have? Would Hrolf be as fair and promising as he is, were there a doom in his begetting? No, our grief was from none but that she-wolf
Olof, who’s dead now, may she never walk again.” He lifted his hands to the sky and yelled. “We’re free!”

“No man is free of his weird,” said Hroar. Helgi heard him not, but instead struck spurs to horse and was off in a breakneck gallop.

There followed a whirlwind of making ready. Feverishly mirthful, Helgi overbore every naysayer. His household troopers were so glad to see fresh heart in him that they would have followed him anywhere. Those who had been to Uppsala aforetime told such tales of it that young men swarmed off the steadings to help crew the ships, as soon as the planting was done.

“We’ll fare in peace,” Helgi made known. “If Adhils will grant my wish, I can offer him good terms on outstanding questions such as the amber trade. If not … Adhils is unwise.”

In vain did Hroar protest, “Bjovulf and I worked hard and spent men to get an Yngling who would not be our foe. Do you want to spill this on the ground, for the sake of your own lust?”

“What threat is that sluggard?” Helgi scoffed. “We could plunder up and down his coasts, and he’d never stir from his bloody altar stones.” He tightened. “I’d count myself no fit lord, did I leave my Yrsa with one who gives her woe.”

A single time he was taken aback. He and his boy Hrolf had gone hawking. Their bird struck down a crane. Helgi said into the sunlight: “Thus will I bring your mother to you.”

Hrolf answered gravely: “Dead like yonder prey?”

“What do you mean?”

“They tell me she left us against your will. It may be against hers to come back.”

Helgi stood still in the blowing air for some while before he said, tight-lipped, “Well, I’ll have given her the chance.”

Speaking alone with her husband, Queen Valthjona uttered the same doubt: “If I know Yrsa, Helgi will have had this trip for nothing.”

“I hope the upshot is no worse than that,” fretted Hroar.

“Yrsa will do what she can for his safety and honor.”

“But Adhils—I never liked Adhils, useful though it seemed he could be to us. And what I’ve since heard of him does not leave me unworried.”

Valthjona cast him a troubled smile. “You’ll never swerve Helgi,” she warned. “So don’t drive a wedge between the two of you. Stay quiet, wish him well, and give him as glad a sendoff as you are able.”

X

Adhils seldom left Uppsala. But as wide a realm as Svithjodh, holding many different tribes, under-kings, and lesser headmen, was bound to suffer uproar from time to time. If they did not seek to withhold his scot or break away altogether, they were likely to fall out with each other. To quell this, he kept a large household troop. Foremost were twelve berserkers.

That kind of men were so called because they often fought without mail, that is, in their bare sarks. They were huge and strong but ugly to behold, unkempt, unwashed, surly and bullying. In battle a madness came upon them; they howled, foamed at the mouth, grew swollen and purple in the face, gnawed the rims of their shields, and rushed forward like angry aurochs. Then their strength was such that no ordinary man could stand before them. It was said that iron would not bite on them, either. Truth was, the wounds they got, save for the deepest, hardly bled and closed up almost at once. After the rage was past, they were weak and shivery. By that time, however, most who had tried to fight them would be dead or fled.

Goodfolk loathed berserkers … and feared them. The dread they awoke went along with their might to help them plow through a battle line. While Adhils was not the first king who used this kind of men, it was reckoned against him. He cared little about that.

He did care when his twelve, and most of his other warriors, were away, and a scout galloped in to gasp that a score of ships had come up the channel from the Baltic Sea to Lake Mälar, which even then they were crossing. Soon after, a boy brought a message from that fleet. It had
lain to at the river mouth; upstream, escape might be barred. Its lord had gotten hold of the boy and given him a piece of silver to seek the royal hall and say: “Helgi the Dane-King comes in peace, to visit his ally and talk over what matters may lie between them.”

Queen Yrsa was on hand. Adhils turned to her. “Well,” he asked, half grinning, “how would you like me to receive him?”

She had stood wholly still, save that red and white flew across her brow and cheeks, down her throat and into her bosom. Now she must gulp, and her tone was less than steady: “You must settle that for yourself. But you know from aforetime … the man is not found … to whom I owe more than to him.”

Adhils combed his whiskers, padded about, muttered to himself, before he said, “Well, then, we’ll have him here as our guest. I’ll send a man who can, hm, hm, make known without offending him—um-m—best he not bring his whole strength along.”

Yrsa wheeled and walked quickly off.

Adhils did give that word. Thereafter he sought another trusty man in secret. “Hasten to where the berserkers and their following are,” he bade. “Tell them to leave what they’re at and come back as fast as may be. Near Uppsala, let them hide in the woods and let none but me know they are here. I’ll tell them what to do next.”

When Helgi got the hint in the Swede-King’s invitation, he chuckled to his chief skipper: “Rightly do they call Adhils a stingy fellow! I wonder if those who stay to watch the ships won’t eat better than we will who go to him.”

The seaman scowled. “If treachery’s afoot—”

Helgi snorted. “I don’t think him worth being careful about. Remember, we made sure his crack fighters are afar. He’ll hardly risk his own dear hide against us.” He swung away, quivering in eagerness. “Come, let’s be off!”

He and his captains mounted horses they had brought. A hundred men tramped after them. They were a brave sight, there along the gliding, gleaming Fyris River, between the rich farmsteads of the lowlands on its far side
and the high, greenwooded west bank. Helgi rode haughty, in gray ringmail, gilt helmet, scarlet cloak. Above him, borne by an also mounted youth, floated his banner, the black raven of his forebear Odin on a blood-red field. Behind the riders, a ripple ran over sunlit spearheads.

That night, though, housed by a wealthy yeoman, he slept little. He woke his band before dawn and made them keep a hard pace. At eventide they reached Uppsala.

Its stockade loomed above them, swart against a sallow heaven, as they climbed from the river road. The king’s guardsmen came forth to meet them in flash and jingle of metal, lowing of lur horns; through sundown shadows, shields shone like moons. Within the gates men found a big, sprawling town, abustle with folk who dwelt in well-timbered houses that were mostly two floors high. Yet those walls cast the ways between into gloom at this hour, making burghers, women, children into blurs which buzzed and slipped from sight. There seemed to be uncommonly many swine about—the chosen beasts of Frey, who was the first Yngling. They grunted, rooted in muck, shoved coarse-bristled flanks hard against legs.

On a height outside the burg lifted the mightiest temple in the North. It was made in the wonted way of a building raised to the gods, roof piled upon roof as if the whole were about to fly skywards. But these gables and monster-headed beam-ends stood clear against the shaw which lowered behind, being neither tarred nor painted but sheathed in gold. Inside were the images, wooden but tall and richly bedecked, of the twelve high gods—Odin with the Spear, Thor with the Hammer, Frey on his boar brandishing the huge sign of his maleness, Baldr whom Hel has taken to rule beside her over the dead, Tyr whose right hand the Fenris Wolf bit off, Ægir of the Sea whose wife Ran casts nets out for ships, Heimdal bearing the Gjallar Horn which he shall blow at the Weird of the World, and others of whom there go fewer tales. At holy times, most of the shire could crowd within. Then the foremost men slaughtered horses, caught the blood in bowls, sprinkled it off willow twigs onto the folk; in giant kettles seethed the meat, of which all partook. Otherwise women tended
the temple, cleaned it, washed the gods in water from a holy spring.

But in the shaw both men and beasts were hanged up, speared, and left for the ravens. Thither Adhils was wont to go by himself, to make offerings and wizardries.

“A wonderful sight,” said Helgi’s flagbearer.

The Dane-King scowled. “We’ve more to do with men than gods, I hope,” he answered.

Adhils’s headquarters stood in the middle of Uppsala, a widespread square of buildings inside a stockade of its own. They were handsome, and at their middle a broad, flagged courtyard rang beneath hoofs and boots. Yet Helgi’s frown deepened when he saw the hall. “Gloomy is that for Yrsa to dwell in,” they heard him mutter.

Servants milled about through the dusk. A groom took his bridle. He swung down and strode toward the door which gaped for him like a cave mouth. Then he stopped dead, and it was for him as if nothing else was save that white-gowned one who came to meet him.

“Welcome, King Helgi,” she said, and, faltering the least bit, “my kinsman.”

“Oh, Yrsa—” He caught her hands in his. In the blue twilight he hardly saw her face; but sky-glow lingered in her eyes. Above her the evenstar blinked forth.

The chief guardsman said, “My lord awaits you.” Yrsa said, “Aye, come,” and led the way. Helgi followed, shoulders held stiff.

Adhils sat wrapped in furs upon his high seat. Gold shone around his brow, across his breast, wrists, and fingers, though somehow the longfires and rushlights left him in darkness. Maybe this was because much smoke drifted about, gray and stinging. “Be greeted, King Helgi my friend,” he purred beneath the crackle of wood. “Glad I am that you have sought to me.”

Unwilling, Helgi took the pudgy hand. Adhils talked on, in words which never quite said that the Skjoldung had come to acknowledge him his overlord. Yrsa broke in: “Let our guests be seated, let us drink in each other’s honor before we dine.”

She brought Helgi to the place across from his host’s.
Throughout the evening she took him his ale and mead. At such times he let their fingers touch, caught her gaze and smiled a strangely shaky smile for so famous a warrior. In between, in chosen words, he and Adhils swapped news of their kingdoms. Their men mingled more cheerily. A skald chanted lays. Among them was one in praise of Helgi, for which the Dane-King gave him a whole arm-ring. His look across the floor, to Yrsa where she sat by her husband, said: You told him to make those staves, did you not?

A week went by. Adhils housed and fed his guests well, showed them around, had huntsmen take them forth on chases, spoke about trade and fisheries and such-like business—never about that for which he must know Helgi had really come. Nor did the Dane-King raise the question. He bit back his feelings and abided his chances to see Yrsa alone.

They came more than once. The first was a couple of days after he arrived. He had been out chasing wisent and rode into the courtyard near nightfall, still wet and mud-splashed, men at his back, bow slung at saddle. Dismounting, he took the weapon to unstring it. “My lord Adhils is away,” said the groom. Helgi glanced upward. On the gallery of an offside sleeping-house stood Yrsa. So high aloft, she was still in sunlight, which shone tawny on her gown and struck fire-glints from deep within her hair. The sky behind her was an endless blue.

The bowstring rang.

She hailed him. “Welcome, kinsman!” Her tone drifted down clear and cool among the darting swifts. “Come have a stoup and a talk till King Adhils returns.”

“Thank you, my lady,” he called, and tried not to hasten through that door and up that ladder.

A serving-girl offered them mead. Reading the queen’s look, she closed the door behind her. They stood on the gallery in full view of everyone; none could backbite them, but neither could anyone hear what they said. The royal garth reached below them, and the smoky shadowy town, and the grainfields beyond where the River Fyris ran until it lost itself in southward woods. There
went a faint grumble of wheels, hoofs, feet, voices; a smith was beating iron somewhere, it sounded like bells; now and again a dog barked. But mostly quietness dwelt around Helgi and Yrsa. The breeze chilled him in his wet garments.

She raised her goblet of outland glass. “To your health,” she said. He clashed his on hers and took a long, warming draught. They lowered them and stood a while before either could find words.

“It’s good to see you,” he said at last. “After seven years.”

She had become altogether a woman. Slender above the thin bones, she moved more slowly—almost heavily—then erstwhile. Shadows lay under her cheekbones and around the big grey eyes. Lines had begun to show in her skin. Paler than of yore, it seemed to drink the level sunbeams. Their shiningness washed down over her breast until it picked out how her fingers strained on the goblet stem.

“They have marked you, those years,” she said tonelessly. “You’ve grown gaunt. You’re turning gray.”