The Tale of Melkorka

by Octavia Randolph

  But one morning Jorunn walked into the farm yard to see the slave retching up her breakfast. As the girl lifted her head, the eyes of the two women met.

  “I’ll not have her in the house any longer,” Jorunn told her husband. “She and her bastard – your bastard – will have to go.”

  Hoskuldr dropped his hands at his sides. He could not sell the girl now, now she was carrying his child. He was cursing the girl, cursing her babe, cursing Gilli, cursing himself. He let go a long breath.

  “She can go to the old sheepfold hut in the south pasture,” he agreed.

  So there the silent girl was sent. Her days at hard labour were for the moment over, but she was kept busy with baskets of mending sent over from the house. She stitched up rips in gowns and tunics, darned thin places in the bed linens, and trimmed and hemmed rags to make them useful one last time. A serving woman carried food to her each day, a woman known as Hallgerd, who, out of the shadow of the house, felt she could speak gently to the girl. Though the girl be a mute, Hallgerd did not see why she should bear the brunt of what, to Hallgerd, should have been her master’s shame.

  “Poor girl,” Hallgerd would say, as she packed up the sewing the slave had finished. “Never a complaint from you. And nice work you do, too, for a slip of a thing.” Mindful of the coming child, Hallgerd brought her extra food whenever she could manage, for she knew a bit of cheese or an extra ladle of mutton stew might make the difference between bearing a child live or not.

  So the troublesome slave was out of the house, and as neither Jorunn nor Hoskuldr had often to see her, a brittle peace came once again between the two.

  As fall darkened and moved towards winter the slave became someone to be whispered about. She could be seen sometimes walking near dawn by the long ridge of rocks bordering the far pasture, or coming to the hot spring to carry off a seething bucket of water. But none went to visit, save the serving woman Hallgerd who took her food and mending. Some thought her fey, or even possessed of some impish spirit. Once when Hoskuldr was crossing the farm yard late after supper he saw her from afar, backlit to the night sky, a ghostly sheepskin clutched around her shoulders.

  She was gazing at the northern lights, at the skies pulsing with yellow, green, and blue, as if a queen was running long fingers through her jewel casket.

  ~~~~

  Jorunn had her child in late winter, another boy. And in late spring the slave girl had her child. The same serving woman who had always dealt with her went to tend to her, and came back to tell that the girl had hardly whimpered during her ordeal. It was a boy, the woman told Hoskuldr and Jorunn; the prettiest child the woman had ever set eyes upon.

  Hoskuldr wanted to go and see his son.

  “You’ll not go without me,” Jorunn told him, and in truth Hoskuldr would rather have her along. He did not want to be alone when he was confronted by the sight of the girl and his new son.

  The next day they hiked across the sodden grasses to the sheepfold hut. It had a window either side, and was built partly into the earth for warmth in winter. They paused before the closed door. It was mossy with age, and Hoskuldr wondered if he should knock and give the woman some warning or just walk in. Then he recalled she was his slave. He put his hand on the door and pushed it open. He and Jorunn stepped inside, nearly filling the place.

  The slave girl was sitting up in her cot, the babe asleep in her lap. Her eyes showed her startle, and she made to stand, but Hoskuldr waved her back. Both he and Jorunn drew closer to where the infant lay. His head was perfectly round, his skin white as milk, and the hair on his head as bright as spun gold. He did not look like the wizened old men that Jorunn’s newborns had resembled. Hoskuldr knew he had never seen a more beautiful child. And thinking this, he felt a swell of pride as he remembered this was his child. He was the father of this perfect boy.

  Jorunn stepped back after seeing how lovely the babe was. All her anger against her husband was newly aroused, and so she hissed, “Son of a slave!”

  Hoskuldr heard her but did not turn his head, or even flinch.

  “A fine fellow,” was what he said, still looking at the little one. “I will call him Olafr. It was my father’s brother’s name.”

  Jorunn gritted her teeth when she heard this, that this bastard should receive an old family name that her own son, born four months ago, had not been given.

  Hoskuldr was still gazing at the child. Then he reached his arms out to take the child in his hands and so acknowledge it as his own. In response the slave quickly lifted the babe to her breast and wrapped her arm about him; in that moment her brow darkened and she looked capable of any violence.

  He heard Jorunn snort behind him. “Ha! She thinks you would drop the brat in the well!”

  Hoskuldr turned once again to the new mother, and reached for the child. She pressed herself against the wall, and pressed the child to herself so that she might smother him if Hoskuldr did not relent. And Jorunn was urging him from the doorway.

  “Come, come away. We’ve seen enough,” she told him.

  Walking back to the house they were silent. Later that night Hoskuldr told Jorunn that as soon as the boy was weaned he would sell the slave girl away to another farm. They would keep the boy; he had to, it was his own son. But the girl he would get rid of. He sought to appease his wife with this, but knew that he would have to keep a lookout that Jorunn did not mistreat his youngest son.

  ~~~~

  In high summer Jorunn was walking across the south pasture from a shallow ravine where she had gone with her daughter to gather ferns for drying. They were walking awkwardly with their filled baskets when the little girl stopped. Jorunn stopped too, and then heard it. A woman, singing. They were completely alone in the field, with no one in sight. Jorunn turned her head again. The sheepfold hut where that slave lived. The singing came from there.

  She hurried her daughter back home and found Hoskuldr in one of the sheds, hammering away at the crosspiece of a new ox cart shaft. She waved her hand at him to follow, and by her face he saw it was important. He lowered his hammer, slapped the sawdust from his hands and went with her.

  They walked the long way cross the pasture, keeping themselves out of view of the open windows of the hut. The singing went on. It was sweetly-pitched, melodious, and slow, not a song of lament, but one, perhaps, of remembering. Strain his ears as he might, Hoskuldr could not pick out the words. They were close upon the hut when he realized why. The singer was not singing in Icelandic Norse. It was a tongue he recognized, but did not quite know. Then he recalled it from his trips to Eire when he was a boy.

  “By all the Gods that be,” he breathed aloud to his wife. “She is singing in the Irish.”

  Part Two: The Princess

  “You sing – and in the Irish!” said Hoskuldr.

  He had once again burst into the hut, Jorunn at his heels. They stood looking at the slave girl, who had been standing by the window, holding her little boy above her head as she sang to him. She lowered the boy into her arms and turned to them.

  They scarce recognized her. First of all was her hair. She wore no head-wrap, and her hair lay thick and curling along her shoulders, a red-orange that shimmered as burning embers do in still air.

  Her gown was the same plain cream-coloured wool gown she had always worn, but it had been transformed. Coloured thread-work adorned the neckline, the hem, and the hems of the long sleeves. She had somehow thought to unravel some of the bright rags she had been mending and use the thread to embroider running scrolls, intertwined flowers, and, on her breast, a beast like a leaping deer.

  She smiled at their gaping mouths. They had never seen her smile.

  “Yes. In the Irish,” she said to them in their own tongue.

  “What…what are the words to the song?” Hoskuldr asked.

  She began to sing, but this time so they could understand.

  In my kingdom there is a castle

  In that castle there is a t
ower

  In that tower there is a chamber

  Into which the sun an extra hour

  Beams his light, a golden shower

  Falling on Melkorka in her room of light!

  It was beautiful to hear her, so much so that Hoskuldr feared she might be casting a glamour over them. He forced himself to speak.

  “Who – what are you?”

  Her smile faded, but her voice was cool and steady. “I am Melkorka. My father is Mellan, king of Connacht, of the country of Eire, and I am his lawful daughter.”

  Hoskuldr heard Jorunn’s sudden intake of breath; he himself felt he must sit down lest his knees buckle. But he stood staring at this once-mute slave girl and was unable to move. She moved a little closer to the window and her hair caught the sunlight; it looked like the red gold of the most costly ornaments he had ever seen.

  She went on, this slave-princess, looking from the child in her arms back to the speechless couple before her.

  “The kings of Connacht are of the Fir Bolg – the Men of Bolg – the most ancient of people, the first men who trod upon the soil of Eire, before even the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the children of the goddess Danu, came and fought with them. That noble blood runs through me, the princess of Connacht, and through the veins of my babe.”

  She cocked her head at the boy she held. “Thus my son is a prince of Connacht.”

  She shifted the child slightly, and they saw the little linen shift the babe wore. Upon it was embroidered three hills, outlined in green, and above the hills, three swords, in black – the ancient emblem of the kings of Connacht.

  “Olafr – a prince?” breathed Hoskuldr. His eyes were round as a startled cat’s.

  She answered his gaze, but her voice was again quiet. “My son’s name is Mellan, the same as my father’s. It is a name for kings.”

  They could do nothing but stare. This girl before them – this Melkorka – stood slender and straight, her hair about her breast like a waterfall of blood. Neither Hoskuldr nor Jorunn had ever seen a queen, but surely this woman was possessed of queenly bearing. They looked again at the babe. His mother had nothing with which to adorn her little son, save a bit of coloured thread, yet the beautiful child seemed marked to their eyes as if he was clad in cloth of purple.

  “Why did you not speak before?” asked Jorunn. She had meant it as an order, but her voice came out a whisper.

  Now Melkorka dropped her eyes.

  “I could not. I was taken from my homeland by force and lost my speech that very day.” The deep blue eyes clouded, the red lashes sweeping down. Her lowered eyelids were translucent. “It took my son’s voice to call me to my own,” she ended, and here she kissed the downy red head.

  And at this the boy began to coo and warble, patting his plump hand on his mother’s breast and calling, “Maw, maw”.

  “Once he spoke to me, child of Connacht as he is, I could answer, and again speak.”

  Jorunn thought on this, and then wondered, “And in our own tongue, too.”

  “I have listened to it for more than a year,” answered the princess. Her voice implied it had not been a pleasant interval.

  Melkorka moved her eyes from Jorunn to Hoskuldr.

  “I am ready to return to my homeland. You will take us,” she said, nodding with the smallest of movements towards him. “When my father sees me alive there will be feasting in his hall. He is a great king, and beyond that, a good king, generous with silver, and with gold. You shall be rewarded with rare metals.”

  Hoskuldr’s head was reeling. This girl, for whom he had laid down good silver, and then whom he had been eager to give away, now turned out to be a princess. He would bring her back to her kin in triumph. She would be the making of him! In his mind’s eye he saw the gratitude of the old man, passing to him on a silver salver a heap of silver and gold. And his own son, Olafr – what did she call him, Mellan – was a prince! He was dumb with the possibilities of it all. His daughter – maybe even his sons – could wed, perhaps, into her Irish royal family –

  He shook his head to bring himself back and looked about at the rudeness of the place. The sheepfold hut held naught but her narrow cot, and one stool. A pile of stones to prison a fire lay at one corner of the tiny space. He felt abashed by the meanness of the surroundings.

  “Princess,” he said, his voice wavering a little on the title, “you must come up to the house with us.”

  The Irish princess cocked her head for a moment, considering. “Yes,” she said, “I will walk to the house with you.” She lay her child down and draped a length of coarse woollen fabric over her fiery hair. Then she picked up her son and walked with the astonished couple back over the pasture to their house.

  As it was a day bright with sun, all the household were about in the farm yards or working in the sheds. When they saw the master and mistress walking with the strange woman they stopped in what they did, and when they saw the woman in the gown adorned with such fanciful stitching was actually the banished slave with her child, they stood straight and stiff with their hoes and axes still in their hands. Hoskuldr’s sons and daughter ran, wide-eyed, to them as well.

  They stepped into the house, the first time Melkorka had set foot within it in nearly a year. The floors, which she herself had swept, were as neat as ever, and Hoskuldr gestured her to sit at the table where they themselves sat. Jorunn went to the kitchen and brought back a pot of ale, but she could not stomach the thought of serving the girl herself, so she called to a serving woman, who brought out three white-bronze cups. The serving woman, whose amazement was clear upon her face, filled the cups, and her master and mistress and the strange slave lifted them to their lips and drank.

  Melkorka’s eye now fell upon the face of the woman who had passed the cups. It was Hallgerd, the woman who had brought her food, and her sewing to mend; the same woman who had come to help her as she gave birth.

  “This is one who was kind to me,” she said, and Hoskuldr and Jorunn felt the rebuke in the woman’s being singled out.

  “She is held here against her will,” went on Melkorka, and in fact the woman Hallgerd was a sort of bond-woman at the farm; her brother owed Hoskuldr silver and could not pay, and so the woman had been sent to serve at Hoskuldr’s farm to settle the debt.

  “Send her home now, to her own people,” said Melkorka.

  Hoskuldr jerked his head back from his ale cup in his surprise. The Irish princess was staring at him.

  “Send her home now, to her own people,” repeated Melkorka.

  Jorunn looked as though she could barely contain her anger, but she kept silent.

  “Yes,” Hoskuldr found himself saying. What was the loss of one serving woman to him now? He was about to return a lost princess to her rightful home. If it pleased the princess to repay his serving woman with her freedom, it was a small enough price to pay.

  “Tomorrow you will set out for your brother’s farm,” Hoskuldr told the woman. “His debt is forgiven.”

  In reply, the woman Hallgerd put her hand to her face and then dropped to her knees in gratitude before the princess.

  ~~~~

  Melkorka refused their offer to move to the house while Hoskuldr readied his ship and supplies for the voyage to Eire. Even Jorunn pressed her to stay there, for eager to see her go as she was, she too could not help but calculate the reward coming to Hoskuldr for returning the girl in a safe and honourable manner. Jorunn was, besides, a proud woman, and she would not have it be said that once the truth about the girl was known, Jorunn Bjornsdottir had stinted in anything. She did not intend for the girl to further insult her by refusing to stay under her roof. As it was she was already galled that the serving woman had thanked the princess and not her or Hoskuldr for her freedom.

  “You will sleep in our own alcove,” she told the princess, moving her hand to the largest of the sleeping alcoves along the wall. “We will sleep in the strong-room.”

  Melkorka’s blue eyes fo
llowed the movement of Jorunn’s hand. As a slave she had never so much as glimpsed the inside of the mistress’ sleeping alcove. But the princess shook her head.

  “We are content with the house given to us,” she told her. The boy in her arms began to fuss, and Melkorka soothed him with a word or two of Irish. She rose as if to leave, and her hosts rose also.

  “When do we set out?” the princess asked Hoskuldr. “The sooner I am home in Connacht the better.”

  Her host could not disagree with that, and so said, “Day after tomorrow.”

  And so the Irish princess left, without Hoskuldr ever laying hands upon his youngest son.

  ~~~~

  Despite the hurried preparations of the next few hours Jorunn sent several serving folk to the sheepfold hut, bringing to it platters of food on well-wrought salvers, a pot of Jorunn’s best and clearest ale, and even a little silver cup from which to drink it. Melkorka sent it all back, requesting only the same fare she had been given during the length of her stay at the farm.

  Likewise she refused the offer of good clothing from Jorunn herself. The princess, her son in one arm, stood at her hut’s door while Jorunn held out her two best woollen gowns, and a red fox-trimmed mantle which she prized.

  “For your return home you should take these, –” and here Jorunn faltered, for she could not bring herself to use the word Princess, or say, My Lady. Her eyes dropped from Melkorka’s face and rested on the leaping stag the girl had embroidered on the bodice of her cream-coloured gown. What right had she to be so lovely, to be so skilled with needle and thread, what right to come and disrupt her household in this way? She wanted to stamp her foot, but her anger was for Hoskuldr, not this girl she so yearned to be rid of. But she again pressed the clothing towards the princess.

  Melkorka narrowed her eyes, and lifted her palm in refusal. Then she shifted the child in her arm, and looked down at him. “I will take with me only what I brought,” she answered softly.