Hrolf Kraki's Saga (28 page)

King Adhils sprang to his feet and screamed from the dais, “What is this uproar? Stop! Stop, I say!”

Slowly the fight ended, until there was silence but for the groans of the wounded, the heavy breathing of the hale. Eyes and iron gleamed amidst shadows. Adhils yelled at his guards: “You must be the worst of nithings, that you set on such outstanding men—our guests! Go! Clear the hall! Bring in servants and … and light—go, you wolf-heads! I’ll deal with you later.”

The warriors stared. However, they caught his meaning, and would not make their failure worse by gainsaying him. They stole out, helping those of their hurt fellows who could move.

“Forgive me!” Adhils said to the Danes. “I have foes, and feared treachery …. When you came in armed, as is not the wont here … then some of my followers grew over-zealous, me unwitting …. But I see now that you must in truth be King Hrolf, my kinsman, and his famous champions, as you told the gatekeeper. Sit down, be at ease, and let us have it good together.”

“Little luck have you gotten, King Adhils,” growled Svipdag, “and honorless are you in this matter.”

They peered at the Svithjodh lord. Adhils had grown bald and fat. The beard which spilled down his richly robed paunch was more gray than yellow. Only his blade of a nose remained lean, and the little squinting, blinking eyes.

Thralls and hirelings hastened in to bear out the dead and disabled, clean up the blood, strew fresh rushes, bring lamps and build fires. With them came new guardsmen, and more must be crowding outside. It would not do to rush at the dais and try to kill Adhils. Besides, that would besmirch the name of King Hrolf, after he had been greeted in friendly words, however empty he knew those words to be.

“Sit, sit,” urged his host. “Come give me your hand, my kinsman of Denmark.”

“The time is not ripe for you to know which of us he is,” Svipdag said.

Hjalti fleered. “Aye,” he added, “it would be to your … dishonor … King Adhils, should more of your men grow … over-zealous.”

“You mistake me, you mistake me,” puffed the fat man. He dared not press the matter and thus remind everyone in the hall of his humbling. He could only sink back into his chair and gibe, “As you will. If you are, hm, hm, not wholly so bold as to make yourself known, Hrolf, well, be it as you wish.” After a bit: “For I do see that you don’t fare outland in the way of wellborn folk. Why does my kinsman have no more of a troop?”

“Since you don’t forbear to sit in treachery against King Hrolf and his men,” said Svipdag, “it makes small difference whether he rides hither with few or many.”

Adhils let that pass, and had a bench brought to the foot of the dais where his guests might sit. Though the hall grew swiftly more bright and loud, hereabouts was a ring of bristling wariness. Ever did Adhils’s gaze flicker across those below him. Which of them, that looked back as fiercely as the hawks which had settled anew on their shoulders, which was King Hrolf, the son of Helgi whom
he had slain and of his own wife Yrsa who hated him?

Ten were here whom he did not know; nor could he slip out to cast a spell that might name them for him. Belike the redbeard, huge as a bear, was not Hrolf, who was said to be a slender man of ordinary height. But would that fit the neat one with the ruddy-gold locks beside him, or the fair-haired youthful-looking one beyond who bore a golden-hilted sword, or the rather short and dark but quick and deft one, or the lean one who had wielded so terrible a halberd, or—or was the whole tale wrong? In the town were seafarers who had seen the Dane-King. He could bring them up tomorrow. It would look too eager, though, it might spring the trap of more trouble, did he send after them this evening. Yet he
must
know as soon as might be, to lay his plans before Hrolf carried out whatever he meant for avenging his father—Hrolf, who had never sworn peace like his uncle Hroar …. Might Yrsa know her son, child though he was when she left him? Was that why she had stayed in her bower?

“Let us make up the longfires for our friends,” called Adhils, “and let us show them the heartiest goodwill, as we have had in mind all along.”

His councillors, captains, and stewards were joining him. “Forgive me, kinsman,” he said, “if I, hm, must speak of something secret before you. I told you I have strong and underhanded foes who seek my life. And you yourself don’t think it unmanly or impolite to, hm, keep secrets from me, eh?”

“We will not hide why we came,” Svipdag said. “We are after the treasures that are King Hrolf’s rightful inheritance from King Helgi.”

“Well, well, that can be talked about.” Adhils turned and whispered to his head steward, who nodded and went off, plucking the sleeve of the chief guardsman to bring him along. They crossed the planks which had now been laid over the pitfalls, and were lost to sight.

Rubbing his hands and blowing frost-clouds, the lord of Svithjodh said: “Yes. We can talk. We can sit and drink like brothers. For truly I do not hold it against
you, Hrolf, that your father plotted my undoing while he was my guest, nor that you, hm, are leery of me. I want to show you honor. So, if you’ll not tell me who you are, that you may be given the seat across from mine, why, I’ll step down to a footing with you. It’s gotten beastly cold in here, hasn’t it? I ought not to make you shiver beneath my roof. Come, let’s sit near the fire-trench.”

Hrolf’s band glanced at each other, but could scarcely hold back when Adhils waddled past them. Soon they were in a row on a bench hard by one of the longfires. Opposite them sat Adhils and the captains of his household troops. It would have looked too much like planned treachery had these broken the rule that only eating-knives might be borne in here. Hrolf’s men kept their weapons, and nothing was said about that.

Horns were brought. Adhils drank their health and chatted on, merrily, meaninglessly. He grew ever harder to see or to hear. For men of his—guards, from the look and way of them, though they wore the kirtles of hirelings—were meanwhile adding peat and dry wood to the fire.

More and more high whirled the flames, red, blue, yellow over coals too hot for the eye to stray near. The noise grew till it shook men’s skulls. The roof overhead was like a storm-sky of ruddy smoke. Heat billowed. The hawks flew aloft, the hound slunk away.

Adhils smiled: “Folk have not talked too big when they praised the courage and readiness of you, King Hrolf’s warriors. It seems as if you stand above everybody else and that the word about you is no lie. Well, let’s strengthen the fire, for I really would like to make out who is your king, and you’ll never flee it. As for me, though, I who’ve not been out in winter air today am growing a little warm.”

He signed to his men. They moved their bench well back. The stokers ran to and fro, bringing more fuel. Out of the soot on them, they leered at the newcomers.

Mail and underpadding made doubly cruel the heat. Sweat gushed from the Danes, stung eyeballs which felt
as if baking, stank in the nostrils and steamed out of the cloth which it had glued to their skins. Lips cracked. The tongues behind were like those blocks of wood which the Swedes fetched as if they worked for Surt himself. “Hrani’s house was nothing like this,” Hjalti rasped low. “What’s he after?”

“He hopes to know King Hrolf by him not being able to stand the fire as well as the rest of us,” answered Svipdag. “In truth he wishes death on our king.”

“I swore I would never yield before fire or iron,” came Hrolf’s parched whisper, barely to be heard through the booming and crackling.

Bjarki leaned forward, moving his shield to give his lord a bit of shelter. Likewise did Hjalti on the other side. But they dared not help him enough that it would give him away.

Squinting through the berserk glare, they could just see that Adhils and his men had shifted as far back as could be. Surely the Swede-King grinned.

“His fine-sounding promises meant naught,” groaned Starulf. “He aims to burn us alive.”

Hjalti stared at his knees. “My breeks have started to smolder,” he said. “If we stay here, we’ll be done … well done!”

Three of the stokers ran to throw another chunk in the trench. Sparks raged upward. The stokers wheeled about after more. They laughed.

Bjarki looked across Hrolf at Svipdag. The same will leaped in them both. The Norseman shouted half a stave:

“Let the fire be fed

here in the hall!”

He and his Swedish friend sprang up. Each grabbed a stoker. They hurled those men into the flames.

“Now enjoy the heat you strove to give us,” called Svipdag, “for we are baked through.” Hjalti did likewise to a third. Maybe the rest escaped. It cannot have been as dreadful a death as it sounds, because no flesh could have lived for more than a heartbeat in that trench.

King Hrolf rose. He took his shield and tossed it into the pit while he cried:

“He flees no fire

who hops high over.”

His men saw his thought at once and threw in their own shields. Thus they dampened the blaze at that spot till they could leap across it.

Adhils and his folk heard choked-off shrieks, saw bodies burst into smoke—and out of the flames came storming those thirteen men, shieldless but mailed and helmeted, sooty and sweat-drenched but thirstier for blood than for water, scorched in clothes and blistered on cheeks but with weapons aflash like the fire itself.

In horror, Adhils’s troopers scattered before the band which had already wrought slaughter among comrades who wore byrnies and swords. Belike too, many felt there could be no luck in fighting for a lord who tried to murder his guests. “Here I am, kinsman!” yelled Hrolf, and sped toward him. Over Hrolf’s helmet the sword Skofnung swung high as his own laughter.

Adhils fled. A roof-pillar bore the outsize figure of a god who leaned on his shield. That shield proved to be a door leading into hollowness. Adhils squirmed through, slammed and bolted the door behind him.

“Batter that down!” Hjalti called.

“No,” said Hrolf. “He must be crawling along some tunnel. Shall we be worms like him?”

“He might have traps to catch us if we try,” nodded Svipdag. “We’re not done with that he-witch.”

Adhils did indeed slip outside. Rising from the ground behind the lady-bower, he entered it. Yrsa sat there. Her woman shrank to see the king in sweating, dirty disarray. “Go,” he told them. “I… want speech … with the queen.”

“No, stay,” Yrsa answered. “I want witnesses, that he may not afterward lie about what was said.”

The women huddled aside. Adhils forgot them. “That son of yours … Hrolf the Dane … is here,” he panted. “He set on me—holds the hall—”

Yrsa drew a breath of utter joy. “He did not drive you thence for no reason,” she said shakily.

“Go to him. Make peace between us. He’ll hear your pleas.”

“Go I will, but not on your behalf. First you had King Helgi, my husband, slain by treachery; and those goods which belonged to your betters, you kept. Now on top of everything else, you’d kill my son. You are a man worse, more foul than any other. Oh, I will do everything I can to help King Hrolf get the gold, and you shall reap naught but ill from this, as well you have earned.”

King Adhils drew himself straight. In that moment he was not altogether a greasy fat man who had been chased from his own dwelling. “It seems that here there can be no trust,” he said quietly. “I shall not come before your eyes again.” He turned and walked forth into the dusk which had begun to fall. Soon she heard him lead his guards out of the garth.

IV

Thereupon Queen Yrsa sought the hall. She found the Danes gusty with glee, shouting for beer and meat to those frightened servants who were left. But when they saw her enter, in white gown and blue cloak and heavy necklace of amber, a hush fell over them. She walked down the length of the room to the bench where King Hrolf sat; nobody now hid which one was he! A while those gave look for look by the light of the still high-burning fire.

Yrsa’s back was yet straight, her body lissome, though her feet no longer danced over the earth as when she was the girl-bride of Helgi. The skin was clear on the broad tilt-nosed face, but many lines marked it, the bronze hair was rimed over, and in the gray eyes lay a bottomless weariness. Much of her lived in the features of her son, who, however, bore easily on unbowed shoulders the red-splashed byrnie in which he had been victorious.

Svipdag started jerkily forward. His gaunt cheeks seemed wet below the eye-patch; the scar throbbed in his brow. “My lady—” he began. She did not turn from Hrolf.

“Are you then Queen Yrsa?” asked the king. “I thought we’d see you earlier.”

She stood dumb.

“Well,” said Hrolf, “here in your house I got a torn shirt.” He lifted his sword-arm, the sleeve of which had been ripped by a spear. “Will you mend this for me?”

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

Hrolf shook his head. “Hard is friendship to find,” he sighed, “when mother will give son no food and sister will not sew for brother.”

Svipdag stared from him to her in a stunned way. Yrsa clenched her fists. Biting back tears, she said: “Are you angry that I did not greet you erenow? Listen. I knew Adhils was plotting your death. Night after night he was at work on his witching stool, with his kettles and runestaves and bones. Surely, I thought, he’d reckon on … on mother being there to cast arms around son … sister taking the hand of brother … surely this was woven into his spells.”

“So at the last she stayed away,” Svipdag said, “and the witchcraft came unraveled, and Adhils must try what else he could think of on the spot.”

Hrolf surged to his feet. “Oh, forgive me,” he cried, near tears himself. “I did not understand.”

They held each other close, and laughed and stood back clasping fingers to see the better, and breathed raggedly, and babbled somewhat. After a while they harnessed themselves. She gave the warriors a stately welcome, bade the servants make food and guest quarters ready, and seated herself in eager talk beside him. They had most of his lifetime to overtake.

Svipdag stepped back. “How she has aged through these dozen winters,” he said, deep in his throat. “Living with that troll-man—” He shook himself. “Well, of course tonight she’s happiest to meet her son.”