“Go to Geira. She could use a sister’s care while her husband is far away at war. And now, it’s our time. We must both change, because Oda won’t let us into the feast in such a state.”
* * *
Astrid left Poznań fearing for her father. Since she could remember, the powerful ramparts of the borough had made her feel as if everything they surrounded was safe. Today was different. She looked up at the sky-high barricades and saw only the shadows they cast within.
No sun can reach here, she thought, and fear blossomed in her breast.
There was no one she could trust at Poznań’s court, no one she could ask to keep an eye on Mieszko discreetly. If only Bolesław had been there! But he and all his men were fighting in far-off Moravia, and his new wife was making a home for them in the empty borough in Kraków. Astrid sent messengers to Wolin and Jom relaying that she was going to Gdańsk to her sister instead of heading home. She also sent word of Mieszko’s order to Sigvald, to demand a ransom from Sven for his freedom.
“We can’t hold the Danish king indefinitely,” her father had decided. “But we can ensure that he never sits on a throne as powerful as Harald Bluetooth’s. We can embarrass him in the eyes of his subjects, forcing them to pay for his freedom. We can demand so high a ransom that he will lose all honor in their eyes.”
“Why not order him killed?” she asked.
“Because you don’t kill kings, my child,” he replied, and the words sank into her mind like a spell.
What if I send a trusted man to Bolesław? she thought. And then she berated herself: What will I tell him? That I suspect Oda is poisoning Mieszko? We’ve talked of nothing else since the day she became his wife. It’s the center of our cruel jokes about her. How many times have I told Świętosława not to jest like that? But this time, it’s not a joke, she told herself. I saw it, I smelled the mead laced with henbane.
The more afraid she was, the faster she traveled. But the dark thoughts followed, and she couldn’t escape them. What if Oda was acting in good faith? Father doesn’t want to admit to any weakness, and Oda might not want to show him she knows how much he suffers. She prefers to add the medicine to his mead rather than to force him to see that this is the beginning of the end. What drives her? Love, pity, or…?
The intensity of her worries translated into her riding. She arrived in Gdańsk within six days, and there she found Geira over an empty cradle.
“Sister, what are you doing?” she exclaimed, in lieu of a greeting.
Geira stood up. Her fair, straight hair, once heavy and thick, was now in gray tangles. Fear shone in her eyes.
“Astrid? Is it really you?” she whispered through cracked lips. “Oh! You’ve come to … What’s happening with Olav? Is something wrong with him? No!…” She shook her head. “No, he can’t be, he mustn’t be…”
“Everything is all right. Olav is alive and unharmed,” Astrid said quickly, seeing her sister’s distress. “I’ve come to see you, sister.”
She couldn’t tell her the truth: “I’ve come to ensure your birth goes smoothly.” She recalled Geira at their last meeting in Wolin. Cheerful, bubbling. Her older sister had never been like that before. Then she had miscarried on their way home. Word had it that she suffered the loss badly, but now she was pregnant again. The rise of her belly was clear beneath her dress.
“To see me? Really, to see me? Because you wanted to?” Geira’s eyes were wide in disbelief.
“Yes, sister.” Astrid summoned a happy sigh, though she felt anything but. “Are you going to make me stand in the doorway, or will you invite me to dine with you?”
The evening that followed was a pleasant one, full of laughter and memories. Astrid dug out the happiest ones she could recall, recounting them joyfully with her sister.
“Remember how Świętosława unthreaded the entire pattern on Father’s banners?”
“Oh, yes! All that was left on the material was a dark shadow of it, and she convinced his squad in the morning they’d drunk poisoned mead and lost their eyesight.”
“And Borzymir the flag bearer, trying to avoid admitting that he’d been drinking all night, announced that the banner was as it had always been and he’d carry it. One hundred armed men rode out against the Veleti with an unraveled banner.”
“Or when Świętosława smeared honey onto Oda’s stirrups and she was swarmed by wasps when she rode out?”
“Oh, Astrid.” Tears of laughter streamed down Geira’s cheeks. “Everything that’s happy goes back to our littlest one.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her expression suddenly serious. “And for me, everything connected to her ends badly.”
“I don’t understand,” Astrid said untruthfully.
“She stole my husband.”
Unable to keep feigning igonorance, Astrid decided to feign fatigue instead. “I’m very tired after my journey, sister, and you, as I hear it, are, too. Don’t be angry, but I will retire to my room now.”
“I’m not mad, sister. And I know what I’m saying.”
I also know, but I don’t want to listen to this, Astrid thought, panic flooding through her.
“Olav doesn’t love me. He loves her,” Geira said.
“What are you saying, sister…” Astrid murmured, pretending to be drunker than she was.
“It’s the truth,” Geira insisted. “He sleeps with me, but dreams of her. He caught a pair of lynxes for her, did you know? And he brought me back berries, as if I were a child.”
“I saw you together … his feelings for you run deep…” she lied, horrified that only so recently she had envied her sister for having Olav in her life, even if she didn’t have his heart.
Geira covered her belly with her arms and began to sob.
“He’s smothered here … It isn’t a life for him, I know that. But when I think he might leave, I know I’d prefer to die…”
“Geira, Geira!” Astrid enclosed her sister in her arms and truly embraced her for the first time since her arrival. “When should your child be born?”
“It’s not time yet, at least another two moons,” Geira sniffed.
“I’ll stay with you until then. Would you like that?”
* * *
They went for long walks. They breathed in the salty sea air. Astrid kept an eye on what her sister was eating and drinking, and ensured Geira didn’t go riding. Together, they awaited Olav’s return. They prepared the house. The child’s cradle. Astrid had no talent for the needle, but she stubbornly sewed caftans from white canvas. When her sister rested, she snuck out to the fields. She collected nettles, marigolds, baskets of chamomile and scented sage. She cooked oak bark carefully in the evenings.
She told herself: Enough of this. The herbs speak to you, use them! Help your sister achieve both her dream and Mieszko’s, so that his heir might be born here, in Gdańsk’s borough. Their son.
Yes, the thoughts still came, that if Geira had not been there, Mieszko still would not have allowed Olav to leave Poland’s shores alone, and then she … but she sobered herself up whenever these thoughts appeared, imagining that someone had poured cold water over her head, as she had done for her father before the feast.
It’s not for me to weave the threads of life, she told herself. It’s not for me to tangle, tie, or weave them.
She allowed the herbs to give her their power, but she still didn’t allow herself any visions or dreams. She ordered the servants to burn a fire in her chambers at night. Waking, she looked at the light, and the clearest of dreams would vanish. She didn’t remember anything, not even a crumb was left in her mind’s eye. Only what might be useful for poor Geira, she told herself day and night. I’m doing this only for her.
But it wasn’t true. She secretly imagined successfully bringing this child into the world, returning to Poznań and sharing the news with her father, then staying to help care for him, whether the Old Hawk wanted her to or not. She’d summon Bolesław and tell him: “Brother, come back!” and together they�
��d stand guard over the great duke’s final days. Let his death be like his life, victorious and honorable. All of these things were more important than guarding Sigvald in Jomsborg, bedding a man who she had nothing but contempt for, knowing, as she did, all of his darkest secrets.
“Mistress Astrid! My lady … it’s begun!”
The servant’s voice woke her unexpectedly, and she didn’t have the clarity of mind to look at the fire when her eyes first opened. She looked instead into the darkness that enveloped the chamber.
“What’s going on?”
“Lady Geira’s labor has begun … she’s calling for you, my lady…”
Astrid collected her herbs with a single sweep of her arm and, her bare feet pounding on the stone floor, she ran to her sister.
“Geira, no! It’s too soon! You can’t!”
Geira was sweating, her face as pale as a sheet. She was breathing heavily. Blood seeped out between her legs. Astrid quickly gave her a brew from yarrow and knotweed to stop the bleeding, and poppyseed for sleep. Sleep came, but it didn’t stop the birth. The child came out from between her sister’s thighs in waves. Astrid was dreaming with her eyes open, the dream she couldn’t forget. She was a bird in her dream. A gray heron which flew between the clouds into the golden light in the heavens. The light didn’t come from the sun, it turned out to be the cloak of a golden goddess, hanging down from the great throne in Sessrumnir, Freya’s palace in the beautiful land of Folkvanger.
Golden Freya, Astrid groaned in her dream. My mother wore a brooch with the goddess’s image. The women of the north gave her gifts for a happy birth.
That most beautiful goddess and the gods’ lover appeared in Astrid’s mind, comfortably spread on a sculpted throne, watching her from between golden eyelashes.
“I like you,” she said, and her smile seemed to be mocking Astrid. “But I don’t like her.” She pointed a golden finger at the bleeding Geira in labor. “A goose cannot hatch an eagle egg, do you understand, heron?”
“I do,” she said, “but I wish to help her, Beautiful One!”
“Then help.” The golden-eyed goddess smiled indulgently. “You know how…”
A gust of wind blew Astrid from Freya’s bright Sessrumnir and back into Geira’s dark bedchamber.
She landed at her sister’s bedside, though she’d never left it. She held a tiny, bloody baby’s head in her hands, the body of which was still inside her sister, as if it were fighting against being born.
“You know how,” the goddess’s voice echoed in her skull.
Geira opened her eyes; she was still conscious.
“His seed burned me,” she whispered with difficulty. “It was too strong. I couldn’t hold it … I couldn’t bear it, though I loved him so much, more than life itself … I’m leaving, sister…” She touched Astrid’s shoulder and looked into her eyes. “I’m afraid, Astrid, because there is only darkness around me…”
“Come back,” Astrid whispered, though she knew it was fruitless.
A goose, an eagle, an egg. The little eagle’s head was still in her hands. She pulled gently. With a final spasm of life, Geira pushed the child into her sister’s arms. Thick, dark blood followed.
“A boy! My lord father, it’s a grandson,” Astrid exclaimed, but the happiness didn’t last long.
The child was like a chick thrown from its nest too soon. Its eyes, lips, and fists were closed. It hung on the rope of the umbilical cord as if from a gallows.
“Sister, oh sister,” Astrid sobbed, holding the child close. But Geira was still, and there was no reply. Both mother and child were beyond her reach now.
* * *
Astrid didn’t allow the gray servants to be called, the women who take care of the dead. No one else could help Geira in her final journey. She ordered the servants to boil water. They carried in basin after basin. Astrid washed her sister. Her beautiful, pale hair. Her eyes, which had taken in the world around her with such wonder. Her heavy breasts, filled with milk her son would never consume. Astrid gave the final ministrations as a beloved sister, wanting to repent for every small cruel envy of the past. But as much as she resisted the thought, she knew the beginning of a new life waited for her in this ritual of death. “You know how,” Freya had said, the night she had brought them death. Did I know? Astrid asked herself, searching for the answer in Geira’s dead body. In the blue bruises that blossomed on her buttocks and back. In the increasingly stern expression on her face. What do I know of life and death? I have dreams which I chased off years ago, and which returned this night. But they are only dreams, visions, nothing more. What good can dreams do? Words heard long ago crept out of her memory like larvae: “a strand of hair for good fortune in love,” “the womb for smooth skin,” “the fingernails of the dead for an abscess,” “the tongue of a newborn for…” She chased them away. Charms. The whispers of old ones. “Take the child’s genitals at least!” a voice in her head laughed. Astrid flinched. How could she be thinking this? Why were these thoughts filling her head at such a moment? “It’s you,” a hiss sounded in her mind. “It’s you.”
Geira had been afraid of death, she saw darkness around her, and part of that darkness remains even now, Astrid thought. I need to finish what I started.
She took the clothes they had made for the child from a chest. Dressing the small, stiff body wasn’t difficult. Geira’s face changed from moment to moment. Her cheeks looked hollow, her small straight nose resembled a bird’s beak. Astrid struggled to get the funeral dress on her sister. She couldn’t get her stiff shoulders inside the sleeves. It was too much, and she knelt on the bed helplessly.
“I should have summoned the gray servants,” Astrid said, too exhausted for tears, and she felt more alone than she had in a long time.
But when she looked at her sister’s pale blue body, she gathered herself. She wouldn’t give in. She fetched scissors and cut the dress. She fitted it around Geira, then sewed it back together once it was in place. She plaited Geira’s hair and hung ear cuffs on her ears. The rings fit onto her fingers with difficulty. When she finished, she called the serving girls to clean the room.
“Oh, my lady looks so beautiful, as if she were asleep,” the one who entered first cried.
That’s not true, Astrid thought. It’s the illusion of jewels and a dress. The woman in this bed was beautiful when she was alive, but now she’s gone into a darkness that she feared. It’s horrible, to know one’s final feeling is fear.
21
POLAND
Olav learned of Geira’s death only when he reached the shore, and even then, the news was delayed. He was surprised, later, by how quickly life went back to normal, as if to cover up the fact of death as quickly as possible. Life in the port went on. Fishermen mended their nets after the morning catch. Women bought fish, bartered over them, argued. Children shouted as they rolled an old, battered barrel along the bank. A dog barked. They moored Kanugård and threw the cargo out onto the dock. Leather sleeping bags, blankets, weapons. Plunder, of course. Within minutes, the dock was full of onlookers.
“They’re back,” the words traveled from lips to lips. “They’re back.”
“Has mine returned?” a voice shouted. “Can you see him? Is he there? Is he all right?”
“Master Olav is back,” someone else called, and silence fell over them all. Dead silence.
“The one who burns ships,” the children murmured.
He swept his tangled, greasy hair from his face and peered into the crowd. It wasn’t Geira who was waiting for him, it was Astrid.
It occurred to him that he liked Sigvald’s wife far more than his own. Dark-haired, not as bold as Świętosława, the mistress of his desire, but similarly regal. Geira was merely stubborn. He regretted this harsh thought within moments, though.
“Your wife and son are dead,” Astrid told him, in the middle of the dock, in the middle of the crowd. “We buried them a month ago. We couldn’t wait any longer, I’m sorry.”
Sh
e was looking at him with pity, and he, though he understood what she’d said, responded with an empty, absent stare.
“Geira and…?”
“Your son. She died in childbirth. The baby didn’t survive.”
When he’d sailed out to war with Sven, Geira had cried like a madwoman.
“She begged me not to leave her alone,” he told Astrid that evening.
His voice was hollow. They sat by the fire in Geira’s chambers. An empty cradle stood in the corner. Geira’s bed, its straw mattress and bed linen peeled off, haunted them with its freshly cleaned frame. He hadn’t felt bliss in this bed, though his wife had done everything she could to give it to him. Yes, her body might have been scented and warm, but he’d never felt anything other than gratitude for her help in finding his mother. Looking at her, he had endlessly compared her to Świętosława. He had never betrayed himself with so much as a word, but he was afraid that his eyes had revealed the truth.
“Not to leave her alone,” he repeated.
“Stop,” Astrid said, exhaustion heavy in her voice. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is, Astrid. I wanted to leave her.” The truth spilled from him. “Our life here was draining, in a way I can’t explain. Like I was losing myself. More and more each time the tide went out and I was not sailing with it. Geira was like … an anchor. She held me in place.”
“It wasn’t Geira who kept you here, but Mieszko. He is the one who put us into the positions we’re in,” she said. She picked up her glass. “Let’s drink.”
He looked over at his sister-in-law. “Have you not had too much already?”
“Why?” she snorted. “Because I’m speaking openly? I love my father, but that’s no reason to lie. I know what I said, and I won’t take it back. Świętosława loved you, you loved her…”
“Stop it!” he hissed. “We’re in my wife’s bedchamber.”
The Widow Queen Page 25
