The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  Love and Honor

  Of Olaf it is related that he was a devout Chrisrian. He slaughtered many pagans, and burned the sorcerers in their houses. For a time it was his dearest dream to get Queen Gunhild, Eric Bloody-Axe's widow, into his hands; for

  not only had she killed his father and harried his mother into foreign lands, but she was also known for her poisonous witchcraft; it would be a deed to bring a smile to GOD's face if he could punish her as she deserved. But Gunhild, now bereft of all her sons save King Gudrod, lurked on the outer islands beyond the knowledge of him who had supplanted her, so that he could but twist his beard in his hands and curse, at which his serving-man Blue-Shirt said, meaning to console him, "Take her escape not so hardly, Lord, for after all she was baptized, and her son Harald Greycloak pulled down all the idols." But at this King Olaf flew into a rage and shouted, "You consider her a Christian, do you?" and Blue-Shirt fled from his presence. Now King Olaf shot the absent Gunhild with insult-arrows day and night, pronouncing her the most villainous of all Norway's Queens, but this led him to think upon the GOOD and BEAUTIFUL Queens, the better to make a contrast with her wickedness, and before he knew it he had fallen in love wdth the idea of taking one for himself The men of his court were relieved at the change of subject, and encouraged him, saying, "Yes, Lord, indeed it is your duty to give us the gift of an heir!" at which King Olaf began to smile, saying, "I will not say no to that," and his men swore to support him with all their power. In due time, therefore, he became engaged to Queen Sigrid of Sweden, who was sumamed the Haughty because of her habit of burning her suitors alive. - "I will make those small Kings tired of coming to court me!" she said. - With her Olaf, however, she was justly content. He was a surpassingly handsome man (whispered her serving-maids), and very skilled in arms - and, of course, he ruled all Norway. - The King now razed a pagan temple near Drontheim, and took from it a great golden ring which had hung in the door. His carles cut down the idols wdth their axes and worms came out; the axes split Thor's skull; then the men stripped that place of everything rich and goodly, and burned it. But King Olaf joyed in the ring that he held. So large it was that it would easily slip over his pretty Sigrid's head ... Then she would come into his arms, so cool and slender and soft; and only he, he at his pleasure, would be the one to lift that treasure-collar from her shoulders; and then she would fill his mead-cup. This vision came to have the strongest hold over his inclinations. In the end he sent the ring to her, for it was considered a most distinguished ornament. But the Swedish goldsmiths sneered to see it. Then Queen Sigrid's eyes flashed and she said very quiedy, "What do you mean by these grimaces?", and the goldsmiths turned to one another like fingers curling inward to make a fist, each waiting for the next to speak. And Queen Sigrid smiled and said even more quietly, "Well?" and the pikemen waited for her command and the goldsmiths said, "Let us weigh this ring," and the

  Queen said, "Do so," and the goldsmiths set up their scales and put die ring in place and puzzled over it and then said joyously, "Queen, this ring is false!" and Queen Sigrid turned very pale and directed that it be broken into pieces, and inside it was only copper. Then Sigrid flew into a rage. - Strange it was that that ring, which first had been meant to be a token of worship, became next a token of love, then of deceit; and yet its inner self never changed. - In the spring, she met her sweetheart in Konghelle to complete the discussion of dieir marriage, and Olaf said diat she must be baptized. - "I am satisfied with my own faith, which is the faith of my fathers," said Sigrid. "But I will not object to your believing in whatever god pleases you best." - He slapped her in the face widi his glove and called her a faded heathen bitch. - Queen Sigrid the Haughty stepped back. A welt was rising very slowly on her cheek. "That may well be your death," she said.

  Waiting for Favorable Winds

  In the spring, Leif, not wanting to rush too far down the road he had taken with Olaf, elected to return to Greenland and court his father somewhat, because he did not want to let Thorstein supplant him in the enjoyment of his rights; so he set sail, but unfortunately the winds were against him, and he was blown straight to the Hebrides. He spent the summer there waiting for favorable winds. Of course he was not about to stand on the docks wetting his finger every second to see if the breeze had changed, not when there were fiiends to make, such as noble-bom Thorgunna, who went to such lengths to welcome him! -She was a tall, strong woman, says the Erbyggja Saga, and somewhat plump. She had a pale long face, with big eyes, green eyes as big as marbles, within which the dark pupils seemed glittery and fi-eckled, like watermelon seeds. Her teeth were very white, and when she smiled they glittered with a purity made eerie by the dark red fall of hair around her shoulders, so dark and red that light seemed to vanish into it. When she smiled, little lights moved in her eyes. She took Leif to the Callanish Stones and made runes, for she was a woman of much knowledge; and for his delight she called hedge-riders down fi-om the blue-black clouds to bewitch the town, raising her pale shoulders, outstretching her arms to pick ghosts from the wind; and he sat beside her in the grass-grown mound of a forgotten god, feasting upon milk, cream and blaeberries, and thinking to himself, "Never has there been such a woman!" Thorgunna had a way of leaning her head back on his shoulder and pursing her lower lip, which he considered charming. - How lucky he was to be

  here! - The sea was so still that summer, and the grass so green, that Leif's pleasure had safe residence. (There were no trees anymore, of course; the Vikings had set fire to those when they routed out traitors.) In the §ords, beams of cloud-light moved across the water, and Leif exalted himself in cool tranquility and felt the breeze upon his face. He let his idleness travel up the long blue inlets; he watched the crows aswarm around the Vikings' stone forts ... Because the mountains were so dark, their reflections in the sea resembled shadows. - "Look!" said Thorgunna. "Do you see those great stones on the hilltops, like gateways? Those mark the road for the SHINING One. He walks only from hill to hill; I have seen Him in the wind. - And do you hear the cuckoo singing? He must have two full meals of cherries before he can change his tune." - She wore a blue kirtle. Leif liked to watch her breasts heave under it. For her part, when it was all over, she never forgot how he used to bury his dark-tanned face in her white neck, worrying and worrying it like an animal, wdth his many-ringed hand about her neck, pulling it against his face, and then when he pulled away she looked straight ahead, breathing fast, but he kept his head turned toward her and presently pulled her face toward him again, kissing and kissing her mouth with such force that she could not breathe. It seemed that he could not get enough of her. - So the summertime passed agreeably enough for Leif, as Thorgunna took him to gather brovm crabs and cockles. Oh, so often he took her chin in his hand; he pillowed his head on her creamy white thighs ... - But presently, as was often the case in Leif's life, the wind changed, and he went in to see Thorgunna and tell her that he must be going - for, says the Grcenlendinga Saga, he was always moderate in his behavior. Although Leif was not yet nicknamed the Lucky, in those days he did have an idiot luck, for it never dawned on him that Thorgunna was not only a determined woman, but also a formidable witch, and that although he might take his leave of her now, she might not choose to take hers of him. She lived with clenched teeth, schooling her bastard son Thorgils in hate-craft, raising him on adders' hearts; and never did she put Leif out of her mind. When the boy was old enough, she sent him to Greenland to work witch-woe on his father Leif as best he might; then, when she had gathered venomous nectars to rub in whatever wounds he might have made, she bought passage to Greenland on a trading ship, happy now only to inflame her heart still further by tasting herself already burying her teeth in Leif's side; and she had taken a private berth, so that she might lie the more contented in the dark with her fixed smile; and the ship bit the waves and sped toward Greenland, but then a fog began to infuse the sea and the fog became more and more luminous the closer they drew, so that the

  Captain became leery of shoals u
nseen; but in her berth Thorgunna used her arts so that the ship broke through into sunlight and began its crawl upon the surface of an immense blue-grey plain of fog, beneath an omelette sky of blue and white, in which there loomed far off the great shoulder of Blue-Shirt, and Thorgunna smiled as before and the ship sailed on; but closer to Greenland the clouds drew together and started looking like sandbars upon which die ship was doomed indeed to run aground, since Leif's luck-wind had sprung up (Leif all unknowing of the fact, for he lay whisding and passing the time with a concubine from the Orkneys), and though Thorgunna lay calling upon her familiars until the veins stood out in her neck, she could not have her desire despite her possession even now of sufficient Power to see how it would have been if only her Wave-Riders had been able to thrust the ship north on their ice-wet shoulders while she gave birth to her wolf-bitch self of vengeance whose red mane of hair stood straight up on her back like long-fire as she howled with the joy of the Changing-Game; now, outstripping the Wave-Riders in lust, she would have leaped into the sea, darting from wave-peak to wave-peak until she saw that first low ice-cliff of Greenland - for a moment she even believed that she did see it, having lost hold of the difference between the certainties and conditionals which she used to gather like pebbles in the shell-beaches below the Callanish Stones, sorting them one from the other, each for its own use; but now she could not do that because Leif's luck-wind had blown her back down inside herself where she lay chilled by sweat-drench and tear-drench; and very slowly her eyeballs rolled up like the bellies of dying fishes and when a sea-lurch banged her head against the wall she did not feel it, and the wind blew all her clammy Wave-Riders away and caught the sail in its whirly palms and nudged it eastward as the traders began to swear and pull at their beards; and over the ocean the clouds were like flat white tundra polygons, with blue sky-cracks in between. At last they swept, all unwilling, into Snaefellsness Reef Through the clouds punched the white-capped pyramid of Snaefellsjokul. The snow was like a spider on top of it. Spider-legs of snow crawled down its sides. The whole blue peninsula swam in cloud like a crocodile. There the ship lay, rocking and rocking all summer in the bad wind. Many Icelanders went to chaffer with the ship for her trade-goods, which the merchants let go for low prices, being desperate not to lose all profits to the west-wind; seeing how matters stood, the Icelanders saw yet more, and in time it got about that a certain tall woman with dark red hair had many fme clothes, although she would not sell them. There was a woman in Frodis-Water named Thurid, who, being vain and covetous (the one impHes the other, for vanity is a form of insecurity, which must enshroud

  itself in costly cerements) decided to have her people row her out to the ship, in order to see Thorgunna's clothes, and, being a woman of means, she was sure that a sufficiency of red gold would make Thorgunna strip herself half-naked, if need be, like a butterfly becoming a caterpillar again for the sake of a leaf, so that Thurid could have whatever of her finery she desired. Oflf she went one day to the lisdess ship, on which the traders paced to and fro, cursing the wind; and Thorgunna sat by the prow, gazing dully into the water. She had aged; Thurid thought her a very hale woman of fifty. There were now little ridges on either side of her eyes, which had sunken into deep black pits, although they still gleamed green like stagnant well-pools. - "IVe come to look at your clothes," said Thurid, perhaps a bit too briskly, for, having taken note of Thorgunna's sad and desperate face, she gloated in the likely success of her purpose; but Thorgunna looked up at her very slowly and then looked down at the deck again and said, "Well, Fm wearing them, so look at them if you like, but please don't trouble me;" and Thurid's anger was inflamed, but the truth was that Thorgunna wore a very becoming purple wind-cloak, so Thurid said mildly, "If I may, I'd like to see all your clothes," so Thorgunna rose rather heavily and led her down to her berth. In a wooden ark, which she now unlocked for her guest, Thorgunna kept blue serks and kirtles that Thurid snatched into the light and held before her in a critical ecstasy, sniffing at them to see if they were perfumed and caressing the weave of them more lovingly than she had ever caressed her husband, for she thought that she would become a finer person if she wore them (again that game of Changing!); and in the ark were also belts of silver and gold, and many festive slcedur-dresses of different colors that made Thurid's breath come quickly, and cloaks lined with velvety pell that Thurid placed in her lap and stroked like cats, so that Thorgunna had nothing to do but listen to Thurid exclaiming over how lovely the clothes were. And Thurid set many of them aside and put the rest away with due reverence and wanted to know how much it would cost to buy what she had chosen, but Thorgunna smiled coolly and said that her clothes were not for sale, that she was not some rag-merchant, and Thurid did not believe her and offered to pay a great price for them. But Thorgunna chopped the air with her hands and said again that her clothes were not for sale; and as she said this she remembered Leif sliding his hand into her kirde, caressing her strong white shoulders and ripping off her fine clothes until they lay in a heap at his feet, and she stood before him, the wonder of it being she had let him do it; - and now here was this Icelandic woman inspecting her clothes as though Thorgunna had no feelings. So Thorgunna took her clothes from Thurid's lap and replaced

  them in her ark and closed and locked it while Thurid sat in die stillness of disappointed envy, and Thorgunna smiled pleasandy, and Thurid rocked herself, her eyes hard and shiny, and presently invited Thorgunna to dwell with her at Frodis-Water until the wind changed, for it was in her mind diat she could make Thorgunna part with her pride and all her fine diings, if only she had leisure enough to do it. - "Thank you," said Thorgunna, smiling wearily. She knew now that she was not fated to get to Greenland. - They left the ship together on Thurid's skiff. All the way, diat covetous woman kept fingering the stuff of Thorgunna's mande, but Thorgunna merely bit her lip and turned her dull gaze to the bird-islands of Breida^ord, which were still much the same as when Leif's father Eirik had hidden in diem; and the black skarfur-hirds curved their necks to gaze down disdainfully at each other's toes, and they stood on their white-dunged rocks and shook themselves, while the sea foamed grey and green over low rocks, and kelp swam in the waves. - "Nothing good will come of this," said Thorgunna, but Thurid pretended not to hear. She gave her guest a bed in the hall, wiich Thorgunna covered with English sheets and a silken quilt. Thurid came and watched her arranging the bed-hangings, and presently said she wanted to buy them, but Thorgunna's Httle nostrils flared, and she said quietly that she wasn't about to lie in straw for her, no matter how fair-spoken she was; she preferred to pay for her keep with labor, she said; and she also wished it known that she would do no wet work. - Although she went to church every day, people thought her reserved and ill-tempered. For example, she never got along with Thorgrima Witch-Face. When she worked at the loom, she often wove figures of women whose heads were howling dogs, so that Thurid wondered whether she might be mocking her, but nothing was ever said about it; in the matter of the hay-drying, Thorgunna was equally peculiar, for she would not do it until they made her a special hay-rake that no one but she was permitted to touch. - One day it was very good hay-drying weather, and Thorgunna was working in the fields with Thurid's husband Thorolf and the others when a black cloud appeared on the horizon, and this black cloud came closer and closer until Thorolf directed that the hay be raked up, but Thorgunna ignored him and went on spreading the hay with her special rake until the cloud was directly overhead, and then it rained blood. - Thorolf asked Thorgunna what she thought this meant. - "I imagine," said Thorgunna lazily, "that it wdll mean the death of someone here. It's hardly a good omen, now, is it?" - Most of the hay soon dried, but Thorgunna's pile never did, and neither did the rake that she had used. - When her thralls told her of these events, Thurid strode triumphantly into die field, saying, "Now, Thorgunna,

  you will have to pay for the hay that you wasted with your carelessness!" and Thorgunna said, "I can guess what you want me to pay for it!", but the colo
r had fled from her face and she leaned upon her bleeding rake for support, as if her strength were leaving her. It was now hot and sunny again, and Thurid walked away and Thorolf gave the order to spread the hay back out again, but Thorgunna raked very slowly, and her tines left glistening red furrows of blood in the hay. After awhile, though the day was still far from over, she went into the stead. She took off* her bloody clothes and climbed into her bed. That evening she did not come to dinner, and they heard her sighing in her fine EngUsh-hung bed, so they knew that she was ill, and in subsequent days her condition worsened, until it was clear that she would never rake hay anymore. She called Thorolf in, and he came uneasily. - "Well," she told him, "I'm going to die tomorrow. Thurid may have my scarlet cloak, so that she can feel she's gotten something out of me. But my bed-hangings have to be burnt. I don't really expect you people to have the intelligence or good faith to do it, but at least I've warned you. And I want to be buried in Skalholt." - Thorolf promised to obey her requests. - Thorgunna died, and they laid her out in church while Thorolf made her corpse-chest, with four iron bands around it, and a great bolt which he nailed shut. Then he kindled a fire for the bed-hangings. Perhaps it was in these that her Wave-Riders had dwelled, for while she was alive they often flickered and rustled like the surface of the sea, even when there was no breeze, and the odor of the sea had come fi-om them. But now, at any rate, they hung as listlessly as becalmed sails; they did not tremble in terror at the glowing fate that Thorolf now prepared for them, hoping meanwhile that he could do it decently, without his wife making a scene; but no, of course here she came rushing into the death-chamber, almost sick vdth greed; she threw herself down at his feet and embraced his knees and begged that he might spare the bed-hangings, because, she said, Thorgunna only wanted them burnt for spite, so that she should not have them, and Thorolf felt sorry for her but he said, "It is an ill thing to disregard the wishes of the dead," and Thurid shouted, "Why do you think I wanted her here but because I could see that she was/ey*?" Then Thorolf said, "Surely she was a witch," but Thurid cried, "I do not fear her! You must not bum her goods! You must not!" and her aspect was so wild that he began to fear she might do herself an injury, so at last, deeming this evident peril to be of more consequence than mere forebodings that would probably come to nothing, he agreed to let her have her way. - The result of this was that Thorgunna's