Viking Warrior

by Judson Roberts

  “Halfdan, you are this day a free man,” he said, “and I acknowledge you as my son. I should have done so long ago.”

  He turned to Harald and added, “This is your brother. I entrust him to your care. Do for him what I cannot.”

  4 : Derdriu's Tale

  “Wake up, Halfdan.”

  The words roused me from a deep and dreamless sleep. Someone was shaking my shoulder. When I opened my eyes, I saw Harald standing above me, looking down at me with a tired smile. Behind him I could see a bright beam of sunlight shining through the smoke hole in the roof, cutting through the dim light of the interior of the longhouse. From its angle, I could tell I had slept long past dawn.

  “We have much work to do this day,” he said.

  I sat up, my mind still confused from sleep. I could not understand why Harald would be waking me. He did not concern himself with the doings of slaves.

  “What work?” I asked him.

  “We must build the death ship. Our father, Hrorik, is dead.”

  At those words the memory of the night before rushed back into my head. I was free.

  Long after I’d gone to my bed I’d lain awake, too excited to sleep. My mind had been filled with visions of myself as a warrior, wandering in foreign lands across the seas. All my life I’d expected only to hear tales of such adventures, but now I might actually live them. When I’d finally fallen asleep, it had been from sheer exhaustion, which even my excited imaginings could no longer hold at bay. Looking back, I’m shamed now to remember that during that night I thought only of my own good fortune. Not once did I regret—or even think of—the price my mother would pay to buy it. In the light of morning, though, as the fog of sleep cleared from my thoughts, the fantasies that had filled my wakeful dreams the night before scattered before the realization that my mother was to die.

  Harald continued. “I could tell Hrorik had little time left in this world, so I sat up with him after the rest of the household went to their beds. We spoke of many things. Late in the night, he told me he wished his death ship to be built on the hill behind the longhouse, overlooking the sea. He said it was his favorite place on these lands. Then, as dawn approached, he asked me to give him his sword. He grasped it tightly to his chest and tried to sit up, but was too weak. I reached out to raise him, but by the time I did he was already dead.”

  The news of Hrorik’s death elicited no sorrow in my heart. My mind might know he was my father, but in my heart he was still my owner, even though now I was free. His passing did fill me with dread, though, for it meant that soon my mother must pay the price of the bargain she’d made.

  Harald had spoken of a death ship. I wasn’t certain what he meant. I had seen funerals before, of course. Death, after all, is a part of life, and is ever present. The funerals I’d seen, though, had been simple things. The dead were buried in the earth, sometimes with a few of their favorite possessions to give them comfort in the next life. I had never seen a chieftain’s funeral. I did not know what was required.

  “What do we do?” I asked. “What must I do?”

  “I’ve already been up on the hill this morning and planned where we’ll build the burial ship,” Harald said. “I took three thralls, and showed them where to dig the earth out. Ubbe has taken a cart and two other thralls to collect stones to build its hull with, and Gudrod is in the forest cutting wood to build the death house. This household has been busy this morning while you’ve slept. Now you and I must go supervise the building, to make certain that all is properly done. We are Hrorik’s sons. It is our duty to see that he is honored befitting his rank.”

  I still did not know what Hrorik’s funeral would entail. My ignorance embarrassed me. “I do not know what to do,” I told Harald again.

  “I will show you, my brother,” he replied.

  My brother. To Harald and others of his rank, slaves, though essential to the work of the estate, were property. More than beasts perhaps, but less than men. I wondered if Harald even knew the names of the slaves whose tasks he’d ordered this morning. Yesterday I, too, had been just a thrall. Today I was Halfdan, a free man. Today Harald called me brother. How did he feel about my sudden change of status? Did he feel shamed to be brother to a former slave? Did he resent me? Nothing showed on his face except a tired smile, but folk often mask their true feelings with a smile. It is one of the less noble characteristics that distinguish men from beasts.

  Angry voices erupted in the longhouse. Harald sighed in exasperation and strode down the hall toward the source of the noise. I quickly pulled on my clothes and ran after him.

  My mother and Gunhild were arguing.

  “What is the cause of this?” Harald asked them, irritation obvious in the tone of his voice. “Why do you disturb the peace of this household on this day of mourning?”

  Gunhild spoke first. “There is much work to do to prepare for the funeral feast. I have ordered this slave to come and help. She will not obey me.”

  Harald turned to my mother. “Is this true?” he demanded.

  Mother nodded her head. “It is.” In a bitter voice she continued. “I am to die tomorrow for the honor and pleasure of your father. May I not have this last day of my life to compose my heart and make peace with my God? Gunhild would work me until the very moment I step into the death house.”

  Harald was quiet for a moment as he pondered my mother’s words. Then he turned to Gunhild. “Derdriu is right,” he said. “The time that remains to her should be hers alone, so she may embark on the voyage with Hrorik with her heart at peace.”

  “But I have already given her orders,” Gunhild snapped angrily. “I have already decided.”

  I saw the muscles in Harald’s jaw clench at Gunhild’s words. “No, Gunhild,” he said in a quiet voice. “I have decided. Now I am the master of this household. Do not again forget.”

  Gunhild recoiled as if she’d been struck. Without another word, she turned and rushed away. Watching her go, I knew her rage would soon be felt by some unsuspecting and undeserving thrall. I was glad it could no longer be me.

  “There is one other thing,” my mother said as Harald turned to leave. He turned back toward her, his anger still visible in his eyes.

  “Yes?” he asked impatiently.

  “This shift is the only garment I have. It is a threadbare rag. If I am to enter the great hall of your Gods at Hrorik’s side, should I not be dressed in a manner more befitting the consort of a great chieftain?”

  I was amazed at my mother’s boldness. It was a side of her I’d never seen. Harald stared at her, also startled, then laughed aloud.

  “You are right. A new dress you should have, Derdriu. When Hrorik enters the hall of the Gods, he would want the Gods and heroes there to gaze with respect upon the woman who enters at his side.

  “Can you sew a dress in one day?” he asked her.

  “I can,” Mother answered.

  “Then this is what we will do,” he said. “When we raided along the coast in England, before we reached the Severn Bay and the doom that awaited us there, among the booty Hrorik took was a bolt of fine red linen he found in the house of a Saxon thegn. It lies in his sea chest still. I will fetch it for you now.”

  Harald winked at her.

  “Hrorik intended the cloth as a gift for Gunhild, but we’ll not tell her that.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come, Halfdan, let us fetch the linen from Hrorik’s sea chest. Your mother has a dress to make.”

  Harald strode away. I paused, abashed, before my mother. Tomorrow she would die. I knew it would happen. Yet at the same time, it did not seem real to me while she stood and lived in front of me. I felt there was something I should say to her, but no words came.

  “Mother…?” I whispered.

  “Go now,” she told me. “Go with Harald. He is your brother, and a fine man. You and he have much work to do this day, and you must begin to learn each other’s ways. And I must sew a dress. Tonight we will talk. I have much I wish to say to you.” />
  After I gulped down a bowl of cold porridge, Harald and I climbed the grassy hill behind the longhouse.

  Three men, all thralls who worked on the estate, were digging on the hilltop with wooden shovels. Fasti, who usually cared for the cattle and horses, had once been a free man, a Svear who’d been captured years ago by Hrorik in a raid on the Kingdom of the Sveas. Hrut and Ing, thralls by birth, worked the fields. Since I was a toddler, Fasti had been a special friend to me—almost an uncle. When he would milk the cows, he’d often scoop a cup of fresh milk out of the pail for me. As I grew older, it was Fasti who’d taught me to ride, setting me on the back of a horse and walking beside to keep me from falling.

  When we drew near, I hailed them, wishing them a good morning. The three men turned their eyes to the ground, and none answered.

  “Fasti?” I said. “Fasti, what is wrong?”

  He continued looking down and picked at the ground with his wooden spade as he answered. “There’s nothing wrong, Master Halfdan.”

  He turned to move away. I grabbed his sleeve and stopped him. “What is bothering you?” I demanded.

  “Nothing,” he insisted, his eyes still averted. “It’s just that you are changed.”

  “What do you mean, I’m changed? I’m the same Halfdan I was yesterday. Remember? Just yesterday morning you told me a story you’d heard about a woman in the village. How she sleeps with a piglet in her bed, to keep her warm when her man is away. We laughed together till tears ran down our cheeks. Now you will not even look me in the face. You and I have always been friends, Fasti. Look at me, and tell me truly what is wrong.”

  Fasti looked me in the face then. Perhaps he felt he had to, because I had ordered it. When he raised his face, I saw there was sorrow in his eyes.

  “Forgive me. I did not mean to give offense. I am happy for your good fortune, Halfdan. But whether you know it yet or not, you are greatly changed. You have crossed over a gulf almost as wide as that between the living and the dead. I know. I crossed that gulf myself, years ago, when I was stolen from my home by Hrorik and made to work his lands as a slave. Yesterday you were my companion, one of us, a thrall. Today you are a master.”

  “But can’t we still be friends?” I cried.

  Fasti looked at me sadly. “I will always think with fondness of the boy I helped to raise. You were a good-hearted boy, and I have watched you grow into a fine young man. I am sure you will make a kind master. But the way of things now is that we are no longer equals. When you speak, I must do as you say. You are a master and I am a slave. I am your property, not your friend.”

  Although Fasti did not mean to cause injury with his words, they cut through me like a sharp knife. The thought of my freedom had initially filled me with excitement and joy. Now I found my new status was also filled with pain. My freedom, my dream, was taking my mother and my friends from me.

  Harald, who’d stood quietly behind me watching my exchange with Fasti, stepped forward and put his arm around my shoulders. It felt strange to me that he did, for yesterday I’d been but a thrall to him. He hadn’t even considered me a man. Perhaps it felt strange to him, too, for after a moment he removed his arm. When he spoke, though, his voice was gentle, and his words kind. “Come Halfdan,” he said, pulling me away. “Look here. Do you see how they’ve cut the outline of the ship in the earth?”

  The grass on the hilltop was thick, with deep roots. The three workmen—the thralls—had cut the turf in strips and lifted them from the ground. The strips of turf were stacked some distance away in a pile. The area of bared earth they’d exposed on the hilltop was indeed in the shape of a longship, broad across the middle and tapering to a point at either end. Harald walked out into its center, pulling me with him.

  “This will be the bow,” he said, pointing toward the end nearest the edge of the hilltop. “See how it looks out from this hill over the sea? We’ll stand tall stones at the bow and the stern, to mark the stemposts of the ship. The rest of the stones that Ubbe collects we’ll use to outline its sides.”

  With his foot, Harald scraped a line in the soil, marking off a large square in the center of the outlined ship.

  “Come here,” he called to Fasti. “We will build the death house here. The earth must be dug out deeper in this square, as deep as my leg, from my foot to my knee. Pile the soil you remove beside the stack of cut turfs. We will need it after the fire.”

  “I do not understand what we are doing,” I confessed to Harald. “I have never seen a chieftain’s funeral. What fire? Will we not bury Hrorik in the earth?”

  “Our people, Hrorik’s line, come from the north, above Jutland, across the water,” Harald replied. “It has always been our custom, for as far back as men can remember, to honor the deaths of our chieftains and heroes by burning their bodies in a great fire. We believe the smoke rises to the heavens, and signals the Gods and heroes in Valhalla that a great warrior is on the way to join them. We burn them in a ship, either a real one or a death ship we build specially for their funeral. The flames and smoke launch the ship and the dead on their final voyage, and speed their journey to the feast hall of the Gods.”

  We labored till dusk. Harald was pleased with our progress, and said we should easily finish the following day.

  At the evening meal, my mother ate little, then retired to her bed-closet. Few who lived in the longhouse slept in the privacy of an enclosed bed. Most, slave and free alike, made their beds at night on the long platforms built against the side walls of the longhouse. Hrorik and Gunhild had a small private chamber walled off in one corner of the longhouse at the end farthest from the animals’ byre, and Harald and his sister Sigrid had bed-closets—beds with paneled enclosures for privacy. My mother, Derdriu, also had a bed-closet. It had been something of a scandal and had caused a terrible fight between Hrorik and Gunhild, when Hrorik had told Gudrod the Carpenter to build a bed-closet for my mother, a mere slave. But Hrorik came often to her bed, and did not choose to do his rutting in full view of the entire household.

  That evening, Mother and I sat together on her bed late into the night, talking, the doors of her bed-closet open for light. It was a familiar place to me, and comforting, for when I was younger I had often slept there, secure inside its walls, snuggled close to my mother for warmth—except when Hrorik would come in the middle of the night and turn me out, claiming for himself my place at my mother’s side.

  To me, Mother appeared far more at peace that night than I felt, though she left no silence long unfilled.

  “I do not want you to die, Mother,” I told her. “Let me remain a thrall. It’s wrong that you die for Hrorik, after all the harm and pain he’s caused you. You owe him nothing. I hate him for what he’s done to you.”

  My mother took my face between her hands and gazed into my eyes. “My dear Halfdan,” she said. “I do not die for Hrorik. I die for you. I am grateful I have the chance to give you this gift.

  “Sometimes, though rarely,” she said, “I am visited by the second sight. My grandmother in Ireland possessed it to a very high degree. When my grandfather was king, he would often consult her before he acted. It passed through her blood to my mother, and through my mother to me, though weakly. Perhaps it has passed to you, too. Time will tell.

  “I knew before the Red Eagle returned that Hrorik was dying. In the same way, I know that there is greatness inside of you. But that greatness can only be realized if you are a free man. And I know that only I can set you free.

  “You must not hate your father. There was both good and bad in him, as there is in all men. There is much about him, and about what passed between him and me, that you do not know. I must tell you now, while there’s still time. The past is like a great stone that lies on the bed of a river, hidden from view but shaping the currents of the water as it flows by. You cannot read the currents in the river of your own life, and navigate them safely, if you do not understand what causes them. You must know your past, for it will shape your future.

>   “I have never told you the full tale of how I became a slave—the story of my capture and the first years of my life in Hrorik’s household. By the time you were old enough to understand, Hrorik had already wed Gunhild and the paths our lives were following seemed a doom that was set and could not be changed. To have told you this tale before now would have only made you bitter. Now…you should know.”

  My mother settled back against the end wall at the head of her bed-closet and began. “The summer when Hrorik stole me from Ireland, my home, I was only fifteen years of age, just barely older than you are now. My father, Caidoc, was a king over lands along the River Bann, under the High King of Ulster. I was his only child.

  “My father wished to form an alliance with the ruler of the neighboring kingdom, a king named Frial, so the previous winter he had betrothed me to Kilian, Frial’s oldest son. We were to be wed at the end of the summer, at the harvest feast. Kilian was strong and tall, with a gentle manner and pleasing smile. I was considered the greatest beauty in our two kingdoms, and we were both well pleased with the match. Had the marriage occurred, one day I would have been a queen, and the two kingdoms would have eventually been united and ruled by Kilian’s and my son, if I’d borne him one.

  “Because I was his only child, my father doted on me and gave me more freedom than was enjoyed by most well-born young women my age. One of the ways he indulged me was in my desire for learning. From a young age, I was allowed to study at a nearby monastery whose lands adjoined my father’s. I craved the knowledge contained in the books and manuscripts there, many of them hundreds of years old. And the abbot, who was a kindly man, was willing to humor so avid a student, even though I was not a male. To unlock the secrets contained in the monastery’s library, I learned to read and speak Latin, the language the ancient books were written in.

  “We all were aware, of course, of the pirate raids by the Northmen that had been occurring more and more frequently along the coast. However, my father believed our lands were safe, being so far inland from the sea. Like many folk in our land, he misjudged the Northmen’s greed and daring.