Daughter of the Wind

by Michael Cadnum

  She cocked her head and heard nothing more, only the distant shouts of neighbors, spreading the alarm that the alehouse was alight. Some errant whisper caught her further attention, a sound from above. It was possible for someone to hide on a longhouse roof—the wooden eaves and occasional turf coverings easily camouflaged a leather-clad figure. People still told the story of Egil the Stout hoisting himself on a roof to surprise his wife, and falling asleep. A raven had awakened him, one of Odin’s sly, sacred birds perching on his forehead, and people still chuckled over the great hunter’s embarrassment.

  But the roof above her made no further creak. Already figures were racing to the burning hall, veteran sailors and sheepmen, all of them accustomed to shipboard crises and sudden bad weather. Birch wood buckets already splashed from hand to fire, men and women stumbling from their dwellings, hurrying toward the great hall.

  Her father put a hand on her shoulder in the half-dark of the longhouse and said, “Help Astrid with the ewes.”

  Hallgerd fastened her cloak as she ran, pinning it at one shoulder with the amber clasp that had belonged to her grandmother.

  A pen full of bawling sheep struggled, kicking and jumping in the darkness. The creatures were so close to the blaze that the firelight danced in their panicked eyes. Livestock were often held in one common pen in the village. It pleased Hallgerd to consider that soon, thanks to riches won by the three fighting ships, freight-knorrs—heavy-timbered cargo vessels—would arrive with new breeding ewes, fatter and healthier than these tough, long-legged sheep.

  Hallgerd had been trained to be proud of her family—but not too proud to attend livestock. She could lance a boil on a sow and keep a gander from biting by hissing right back at him, but she knew that a noble young woman of seventeen was expected to display a degree of dignity, clapping her hands to drive the sheep uphill through the village rather than kicking them and bawling like her friend Astrid, or whooping like the young boys who joined them.

  Hallgerd used the low, steadying tone her mother had taught her, a no-nonsense sound the sheep responded to as they streamed through the village longhouses. The small herd flowed up into the dark meadow beyond as sparks from the fire descended all around them through the darkness.

  Hallgerd caught the scent of the blaze, and turned.

  As the flames consumed the seasoned spruce and pine the conflagration did not smell right. Fire was an endemic danger in such a timbered village, and stories were told of entire wooden towns burning, every roof down to every threshold, because of an errant spark.

  A few gray-bearded men were hurrying back to their cottages and returning, strapping on swords. Hallgerd had been warned since childhood: Young women were a favorite battle-treasure, and some ships sailed simply to seek out a promising wife. The village of a stolen bride was often compensated with treasure, and marriage reduced to a rough sport benefiting everyone but the bride and any hometown suitor. Political alliances were sometimes forged through such bride-theft—even the loss of a daughter could be soothed with an offering of peace and wealth. Nevertheless, every family dreaded such a raid. If an enemy breaks our ground with his booted foot, her father had always cautioned her, using the language of the sagas, arm yourself and stay within our home.

  Hallgerd and Astrid left the bawling, surging flock with shrill-voiced boys, and the two of them found the jarl. Hallgerd’s father strode through the excited villagers, searching, reaching for her as he spied her at last.

  “Go back to the house,” Rognvald said, “and bolt the shutters.” He caught her arm gently, but with unmistakable urgency. “No one will make my daughter a battle-prize.”

  “Are we under attack?” Hallgerd asked breathlessly.

  “I fear so,” was all he would allow himself to say.

  Hallgerd tried to suppress the fear that swept her just then. The jarl’s daughter reminded herself again that women were frequently war booty, and that there were legendary sea warriors who simply seized women and carried them off, never to be seen again.

  All the other young women were returning to their longhouses, too, Astrid hurrying off to her own dwelling near the shipyard. Sigrid, Hallgerd’s mother, carried a spear, and looked more than capable, weapon in hand. The sagas were filled with tales of women who had battled intruders over the wounded bodies of their men.

  Mother and daughter hurried back uphill, toward their home. The fire was too bright, Hallgerd knew, and it burned too fast. She had smelled it already, the cloying, fleshy smell of mink-whale oil, used to fuel the blaze.

  The fire was a ruse, a threatening distraction. When old Gizzur Quickhand hurried from the edge of the village, sword in his grip, Hallgerd was not surprised to hear him call out, “Nightwalkers! Out in the high meadows!”

  Sigrid put a hand on the old sheepman’s tunic. “How many?” she asked, the only question that mattered, whether the enemy was man or troll.

  “Oh, Lady Sigrid,” gasped Gizzur, unable for the moment to say more. He held up a hand, opening and shutting it, the time-honored way of signaling quantity from ship to ship, five, ten, fifteen.

  Nightwalkers were the stuff of nightmares. Children woke screaming that shadowy, muscular night-men were stealing through the windows, down from the mountainside. No sane or reliable human went out wandering the night.

  “Many,” panted Gizzur.

  “Are they Danes?” asked Sigrid.

  Gizzur had traded livestock as far south as the Danish coast, but he could only say, “My eyes, good Sigrid—”

  Are not what they used to be, was the unspoken apology.

  Hallgerd wished that her father were beside them, but Rognvald was far off now, his voice lifted, giving orders. Hallgerd knew that her father enjoyed carrying out his duties as jarl. He was a wise man, and he valued this quality in himself. Leading his villagers in a fight against a blaze was the sort of deed the gods had created him to do, and he did it well.

  The Danes were bitter, all the sea traders reported, for the raids some five summers earlier, waged by Spjothof’s great ship Landwaster. The Spjotmen had attacked villages belonging to Halfdan the Bald and Spear-Harald, both jarls of high repute. Only the approach of ships belonging to Gudmund the Fair had sent the Spjotmen into retreat.

  Gudmund was renowned for his sea-fighting prowess, although wise Spjotmen offered the opinion that he was less capable when he fought on land. This was, they explained, why the sea jarl had never sought out Spjothof in the years since. Spjotmen were renowned land-fighters, and the village was reputedly sacred to the Hammer God himself.

  And unlike the easy-living villages to the south, the folk of Spjothof enjoyed plain fare. They rarely ate yeast bread, almost never drank cow’s milk, and used their barley harvest strictly for the brewing of ale. Hallgerd knew there was nothing in Spjothof worth stealing, beyond pigs and sheep.

  “Find Hego,” Sigrid was telling Gizzur. “He has a dog’s good sense.”

  And, she did not have to add, the young man had a strong arm and a serviceable ax. “Find him, drunk or sober, and put a weapon in his hands,” Sigrid continued. “And stir the shipwrights and tell them to arm themselves and guard the mountainside approach.”

  “I’ll go, too,” said Hallgerd hopefully.

  Sigrid gave a laugh.

  “I can fight,” Hallgerd insisted, “as well as any keel-shaver.”

  “And so can I,” said her mother.

  She did not have to add, It isn’t worth the risk.

  Six

  In a wealthy village the jarl’s house would be attended by many servants, the place ordered by an efficient matselja—housekeeper—with an obedient staff, all of them subservient to the masters wife. There might even be thralls—slaves—to grind barley ale and shift the heavy loads.

  Here there was only Grettir, a woman heavily muscled from years of pounding salt cod with a mallet. She and Hrolf, a solidly built house guard, were all the household servants the jarl’s family could afford, but they were two saga-worthy r
etainers. Grettir knew all the old rhymes, which charms kept away mice, and which ones soothed Freya the goddess of the earth.

  “No one across this threshold but a friend,” said Grettir, brandishing a meat cleaver.

  Hrolf was missing three fingers on his shield hand from a legendary sword fight. A giant from Namdall bet him a purse of silver he could not last an hour fighting hand-to-hand. That had been long ago, before Hallgerd’s birth, on a glorious midsummer feast night people still sang about. Hrolf’s shield was cleft by a battle-ax, and had been followed by three other shields in succession, but the giant—the stoutest and tallest man anyone had ever seen—had at last suffered a heart attack and died.

  “No wee little intruder is going to tickle any of the jarl’s folk with the point of a knife,” said the old warrior, for whom every subsequent opponent had been small. Hrolf straddled the doorway, and it was as though Thor himself straddled the door sill against intruders.

  In one corner of the longhouse was the vast bear pelt, killed by the berserker Thorsten years before. Berserkers were troublesome, unpredictable men, but Hallgerd knew that one berserker could take on scores of ordinary fighters. Thorsten, like so many others, was voyaging now. Even the two young hunters, Snorri and Gauk, were away from the village. The two friendly, keen-eyed young men would have been beyond value on such a night.

  “It’s just like the Danes,” said Sigrid, plucking the key ring from the wall, “to set the ale hall alight and plunder the cottages when the villagers go running.”

  It was a Spjothof trick, too, but Hallgerd did not want to point this out. It was the time-honored ruse any attacker used when he wanted to sack a village and avoid a battle. Spjothof had never been attacked, throughout the generations, but this was an era when seafaring men sought out far-flung adventures.

  The jarl’s house was called Sword-Rest, both because of the jarl’s reputation as a peacekeeper, and for its storage room of ancient and excellent weapons. The large longhouse was unusual among dwellings in that, in addition to a rush-strewn, pleasantly scented meeting and dwelling space, it had several storage rooms, including a matbur—a pantry, for the storage of food—and a gervibur—a weapons room.

  A storage room was generally considered a woman’s domain, and most men would have felt out of place in a curd room, or in a suthrbur—a south-room, where wort fermented into ale. Storage rooms were secured by heavy bronze padlocks, and opened with large, well-worn keys. Only the jarl himself generally entered the place where weapons were stored. Her mother had never, in Hallgerd’s memory, set a key within its lock.

  She flung the door wide.

  Hallgerd’s heart quickened. She was frightened, but it was a thrilling, joy-sweetened fear. Until she saw her mother remove the legendary Quern-Biter, her father’s blade, from the weapons room, Hallgerd did not quite believe the danger of attack was real.

  “Hold this sword,” said her mother.

  Hallgerd had been taught by her father how to swing a blade, but not one this heavy or so bright with legend. The sword was offered not only for its usefulness in combat, but for companionship. This had been the sword Hallgerd’s grandfather had used to cut a millstone in two—or so the song went. He won a silver arm-ring on a bet, according to the story, and ever since, the steel was kept sweet with oil, but never used.

  Sword in hand, ran the Saga of the Warrior Virgins, no man can take me.

  Many of the houses had been built over diverted streams that sang under the flooring, to wash away the bodily soils and refuse of the households. There was water in plenty in this summer predawn, and already the fire was steaming, dying as Hallgerd leaned on the open window of her father’s house, her grandfather’s sword leaning on the wall beside her.

  But the fire was anything but defeated. As the seething blanket of flames on the peaked roof was doused, trampled, beaten down by the villagers, a host of new flames erupted under another eave. The village still boasted enough sturdy men and women to put out a random fire. And that’s all this was, Hallgerd was convinced now—a dwarfish blaze. Many sprites and powers hid even among human dwelling places, waiting to spill an ember from its place of safekeeping.

  Once again Hallgerd heard a whisper from above, on the roof of her father’s house. Her bedding place was far from the other living space of the longhouse, far from the hearth in the center of the floor, where the kettles hung and the ember pot kept its glowing spark all night. Her mother consulted with Hrolf in the doorway, heads together, and even from here Hallgerd could make out the beginning of a fire tale, a story of burning ships and singed aprons, a recounting of the many freak blazes the village had known, all of them smothered, each fire put to rest.

  Hallgerd straightened her bedding in the far corner of the house, and—she would blush to remember this later—took off her hurriedly donned cloak and stripped to her linen underclothes, made from flax her father had bargained for with traders from far-off lowlands.

  She left the sword in the corner, against the wall.

  She pulled on clothing as a warm, predawn wind spilled through the open window. Soon all the villagers would gather to pick through the still-grand ruin of the ale hall, and the joiner and his apprentice would chop down green pines to replace the charred remains. Hallgerd would join them, all the villagers gathering to mourn the old hall, and begin the work of building it again.

  As she folded her blanket of lamb’s wool, she felt the presence before she saw it, the scent of goat leather and the creak of belt and buckle. A strong arm seized her, a hand clapped over her mouth.

  She struggled and tried to call out, but she could make no sound.

  A man’s voice breathed into her ear, a hoarse whisper with a Danish accent, “Be silent, Hallgerd, or I’ll cut off your nose.”

  The point of a blade pressed against her cheek.

  Seven

  Hallgerd tried to cry out again, but the sound was trapped by the callused hand over her mouth.

  Hrolf and Grettir were in the hall beyond her bedchamber, so close that surely they would hear her squeal. Her mother was complaining that the door to one of the window shutters was warped and wouldn’t close, and Hrolf was saying, “Let me shut it for you,” his voice a study in dutiful solemnity.

  Hallgerd made a noise through her nose. Her mother seemed to hear something, stopping midsentence.

  Sigrid was listening, her attention a palpable presence. And then she started talking again.

  Hallgerd snorted, wrestling, trapped in the arms that held her.

  She struggled hard, kicking over a stool, striking the clothes chest as she swung her foot, digging her elbows sharply into her captor’s sturdy body. As strong arms grappled with her, the sounds of swords clashing came from the darkness beyond, at the village edge.

  Her wrists were bound together, and a gag was thrust into her mouth. A cloth sack was flung over Hallgerd’s head. Even as she struggled, kicking, crying out against the salt-cured leather between her teeth, she was lifted like a bundle and handed out through the window.

  She made as much noise as she could, stifled cries that must have been audible to any neighbor paying the smallest bit of attention. She dug the point of her chin, muffled within its sack, into the muscular back that bore her. The man grunted, but neither cursed her nor made any attempt to hurt her, aside from increasing his grip around her ankles.

  You will eat my father’s sword.

  The man kept a steady loping stride, running with little sound over the soft pasture.

  Ravens will prick your eyes.

  She prayed to Odin the Cunning. She prayed to Thor, friend to plowman and woodgatherer. She prayed to her dead ancestors, the legendary Inga Alfsdottir, who invented the loom, and Ketill, who discovered the hot springs above Midwife Mountain. She prayed to gods of field and water, cursing this stranger.

  Whoever carried her was traveling ever faster now, his shoulder forcing the breath from her body as she hung, head down, wrestling and wrenching from side to side.
Blind within her wool sack, trying to guess the direction they were traveling, she was certain that at any moment her mother would cry out—or perhaps Hrolf, who had always been vain regarding his own watchfulness, would sound a warning.

  Certainly her father would see what was happening, or a neighbor. And people did notice—she could hear the startled voices, but too late, too far behind—Grettir’s cry, and Hrolf’s, “She’s gone!”

  She could make out Rognvald’s voice, “Men and women to their swords!”

  Danish accents surrounded her, men panting, leather armor creaking, while far behind, and in another direction, swords rang against shields. Her father would scatter these invaders like unweaned pups!

  Sheep made their low, startled noises as her captors made their way through the flock. The sharp, familiar odor of the livestock rose around them, and then receded as the heavily breathing men made rapid progress up-slope.

  If any neighbor was going to spy her captors it would have to be now, before they reached the great, lichen-splashed boulders at the foot of the mountains, the paths she knew so well from the long summer twilights, climbing with Lidsmod up to their favorite, secret place, an elf cave just big enough for two people.

  But there was nothing—no cry, and even the sound of battle was muted, was gone. She arched her body, freeing one leg.

  She kicked.

  Her captor struggled to seize her foot, grabbing and missing. She jacked her deerskin shoe hard into his manhood.

  The stranger threw her down into the wet sheep-grass, with a deliberate, even movement. Two hard hands roughly cradled her head, and a voice hissed, “Do that again, beautiful prize, and I’ll break every bone in your skin.”

  She grunted a retort through her gag. To her surprise her captor simply laughed and gave her a gentle pat through her hood.

  Eight

  Her bonds were loosened and retied, all the more tightly, using a length of some sort of fabric she did not recognize. Once again she was flung over her captor’s muscular shoulder. Hallgerd tried to calculate where they were, how high above the village, the strangers’ boots soft across the turf on one of the high sheep meadows.