A struggling band of horsemen made its way along a forest trail where fallen leaves rustled golden under their feet. They were lean, grim-faced men who rode with backs slumped and hands fallen low, as if they had only the strength to keep themselves in the saddle, and no more. As they wound out of the wood and into a clearing at the foot of a hill, a child playing in the leaves alongside the track jumped up and ran for the walled holding that stood ahead on the hillcrest.
They were no more than halfway to the holding when the log gates swung open and a crowd of men and women came hurrying down the track to meet them. The lead rider raised his dark head and pushed his weary horse forward. His blue-and-green shield thumped against his knee where his arm hung loose at his side, and he straightened it carefully.
“I’ll take that, lord,” a small boy panted, outdistancing the rest to hurl himself practically under the horse’s feet. Kari nodded and handed the shield to him, and the boy clutched it to himself importantly, chattering as he trotted alongside the horse: “We had given up looking for you, and the chieftain almost made the Death Song. Are you truly all right, and have you brought your harp back with you?”
“That will do, youngling.” Kari slipped from his horse as Nyall came up beside them. “Yes, I have brought her, and if you give my shield to a friend, you may carry her, very carefully, to the hall for me.” He handed the boy the deerskin harp bag from his back. “And bring the other boys to see to my men.”
The boy ran off and Kari turned slowly to Nyall. The chieftain’s eyes were pinched and worried, older than they had been.
“He’s right,” Nyall said. “We nearly keened you.” He put out a hand and gripped Kari’s arm hard. “Brother, I am glad to have you back.”
“I was not… sure that I would find you, either,” Kari said. They stood and looked at each other for a long moment before they turned and walked together through the gate.
The stumbling horses and their weary riders followed, and the women of the hold clustered around them, faces alight or bereft as each searched the horsemen for the face that mattered most. Nyall’s mother, Morgian, sent thralls scurrying for food and to take the horses. They were all her people to care for now, the Black Forest men as well as the Semnone warriors, but she looked for no one among them. The face that she wanted would not ride home.
Nyall drew Kari away with him into his own chambers, and shouted for someone to bring food.
Fiorgyn came herself with it, hot thick stew and beer from the last year’s brewing. She settled herself like a cat in the rushes beside her husband’s chair, and watched Kari with relief while he ate. Of them all, she thought, it was Kari that Nyall feared most to lose.
“That was good.” Kari put the bowl on the floor and one of Nyall’s hounds slunk forward to lick it. “I can’t remember when we’ve had a decent meal.”
Nyall nodded, remembering their own nightmare trek from Jorunnshold. At least Kari had not had to watch women and babies die, he thought. But he had gone through something bad enough, Nyall knew. The harper’s thin face was flushed and the sunken dark eyes had an unnatural brightness.
“What happened?”
“We… saw the fire,” Kari said. “So we pulled around and rode back, but it was too late. Everything was burning.”
“You didn’t attack—?”
Kari shook his head. “No. There was… no point. It was lost already. And Gunnar and Runolf drew off as soon as they saw what had happened. They will be back in their holds by now,” he said, “no doubt telling the Roman-kind they had nothing to do with any of it. We… we crossed the river without being seen, and rode.” His face was bleak and Nyall knew that it must have cost him something to leave that burning hold behind.
“The Romans were out hunting,” Kari went on. “We dodged them but we found… bodies. We buried what we found.” He broke off and ran a hand over his face. The flush was gone and he was pale now and sweating. “What is it?” Fiorgyn looked at him sharply.
“Bad water,” Kari said. He shook his head as if to clear it. “The Romans fouled it, I think. I… should have known they would.”
“You are ill,” Fiorgyn said. “I will get the priests.”
“No. No… it is almost gone now. We had to ride on anyway, and some died of it, but we are mostly all right now.”
“Are you sure?” Nyall said. “We have… something of a surplus of priests at the moment.”
“Valgerd is here,” Fiorgyn explained. “He came in two days ago with his beard full of twigs like a woods hermit, and all he will say is that he had a vision and so came away before the Romans reached my father’s hold. I think it must have been a message sent by the priests’ drums. We are glad to have him – he is a very great man – but he and Asuin sit and glower at each other, and argue about signs in the sky and the proper time to gather herbs, until Morgian is afraid they will put a curse on each other.”
“Then I shall do without their potions,” Kari said, “lest they kill me trying to outdo each other. I saw Geir as we came in. Who else rode with you?”
Nyall gave him the total, and Kari grimaced as he came to Ingald’s name.
“So the gods spared his thief’s hide and took your kin,” he said to Fiorgyn. “Lady, I am sorry.”
Fiorgyn nodded her thanks. “Perhaps they saw more use for my father in Valhalla,” she said sadly.
“Mord was with us,” Nyall went on, laying a hand on her shoulder. “But he died on the trail. Arni came in behind us. He must have tracked us like a hound – there were none of our men with him, only some of Jorunn’s and Mord’s.”
Kari gave Nyall his own tally. Sigurd and his men had stuck with him, and so had Thrain, after some debate. It was likely that he would stay now that he knew Fiorgyn, who was kin to him, still lived. Nyall mentally recounted the survivors. Too few for a war band, and too many to feed. “We will have to split them up before snowfall,” he said. “The hold won’t support them all. I’ll try to sort them out after they have slept.”
The sun was dropping and a thrall came in to light the fire in the stone hearth. Fiorgyn gave him the empty bowl to take away and told him to send blankets and bed-straw to the main hall.
“We’ve been giving the warriors holdings left empty by our own dead,” Nyall said. “With luck they will marry the widows.”
Kari nodded. There were too many widows. Best that they go to new husbands if they could. And best that the Black Forest warriors become Semnones, and so come under Nyall’s rule. There would be no way to judge their disputes otherwise, and make the judgment stick. And the chieftain who couldn’t keep order soon found a Council looking down his throat.
Kari went away to the Companions’ chamber to sleep, and Morgian, having seen to the others, tapped on the doorpost and came in to sit by the fire with Nyall and Fiorgyn. She still mourned Lyting, Nyall knew, but he thought she had forgiven him for his death. Morgian had welcomed Fiorgyn, bereft of her own mother, with love. Fiorgyn returned it with a whole heart. She had loved her mother, but Gudrun, shrewd and practical by nature, had put so much of herself into holding her uncertain husband’s chieftainship for him, that there was little left over for tenderness. A soft bosom to weep on and a sweet, clear voice that could sing away her nightmares were new to Fiorgyn.
Morgian looked concerned at what Kari had said about the bad water, and his refusal to have the priests pestering after him. “If he is still fevered in the morning, or any of them are, he will drink their potions and like it,” she said. “But Nyall, you must send Valgerd to another hold soon. Two high priests under one roof draw more attention from the gods than we really need.”
“I’m going to send him with Arni,” Nyall said. “Mord and Jorunn’s men who rode with Arni have asked my permission to swear to him, so that will give him enough followers to take holding with, and Valgerd may put a little caution into his young brain.”
Morgian picked up a stick and poked thoughtfully at the fire, making its glow ripple along the stones on the hearth front. “Ingald also needs… occupation.”
“Ingald’s occupation has always been with the rumor that runs in the marketplace!” Fiorgyn said. “Let him out of your sight and he’ll make trouble!”
Nyall looked at them both and thought a moment before saying: “He is of the chieftain’s Kindred of your tribe, Fiorgyn. If I let Arni and Ranvig take holding and keep Ingald here to dance attendance on me, he will have a right to make trouble. Mother, I want to give Lyting’s holding to Ranvig.” He waited to see her reaction.
Morgian spread her hands in her lap and looked at them. “It is going to ruin now that it is masterless. Yes, better that Ranvig have it.”
“There is another holding empty close by,” Nyall went on. “We will put Ingald there, and let Ranvig play watchdog.”
“They will fight and steal each other’s cattle,” Morgian said.
“But I will know what Ingald’s doing, won’t I? And I will have put no insult on him.”
Morgian nodded, and Fiorgyn also, though reluctantly. Morgian understood why Nyall refused to fight with a man he had already bested in the matter of his wife and the command of the war band – it would seem a jealousy, as if he feared Ingald. Fiorgyn found that harder to understand.
“That will give him a place in Council,” she said. Any lord with a holding of his own, and warriors and peasant folk under him, was entitled to a voting voice in the Council. Younger men who were still holdless, or warriors sworn to a lord, could also speak their mind, but the final vote rested with the landed lords.
“He has a right to it,” Nyall said stubbornly.
“Your own Semnone lords are calling for a Council already,” Morgian said. “There is some question over the rights of the newcomers.”
“I feel like a nursemaid with a pack of children,” Nyall said. “What they mean is, they are worried about their own rights. Well, we’ll thrash it all out when Kari’s men have had time to rest.”
It was almost a month before Nyall could call his Council. The bad water had taken a greater toll than Kari admitted, and when Morgian went to look at him the next morning, she drew in a sharp breath and sent for Asuin and Valgerd both.
The fever was back, and a wasting sickness of the stomach with it. After that one meal of stew and beer the night before, Kari could keep nothing more down. The two priests put their quarrels aside and worked together in a healers’ truce so amicably that Morgian said that if Kari lived, his sickness would have been worth it. But she was very much afraid that he wouldn’t, and it was plain that the priests were worried, too. There were others sick as well, but Kari was the worst.
“I think that he got here on nothing but strength of will,” Asuin said, coming out of the Companions’ chamber with a barely touched bowl and the deerskin bag, embroidered with the healing signs, that held his herbs and potions. “There is nothing left but his will.” He gave his things to the boy who served him and pulled a chair to the hearth. The day was turning gray and there was a wet feel of rain in the air.
“The others grow better,” Nyall said, then, almost pleading, “why not Kari?”
“He is half-Roman, chieftain,” said the boy, an apprentice priest and full of his own knowledge. “It may be that the gods show their hand against him.”
Nyall’s eyes flashed and Asuin cuffed the boy into silence. “Do not be thinking that you know the gods’ minds so well! If Kari’s half-blood has any bearing here it will be to his good. They are a strong people, the Roman-kind, not in size but in force of will. They hang on like fighting dogs. That is how Kari came back to us at all, lord,” he went on to Nyall. “He brought the others in on his will alone, I am thinking, and he has drained himself doing it. You know well that it takes more strength to command than to follow.”
“Indeed it shows the gods’ favor that he is here at all,” Valgerd put in. “So perhaps the Lady Eir guards him still. Did she not lift the sickness from me, when it was time to go from Arngunnshold?”
“Yours is the sickness of age,” Asuin said, the truce temporarily forgotten, “and an easier thing to lift than bad water in the stomach.” He was younger than Valgerd, his beard still a light brown clay color. Age equated with wisdom among the priest-kind, and Asuin combated Valgerd’s advantage in this by a show of earthly medical knowledge.
Nyall left them arguing, while Morgian made soothing, peaceful noises, and he went to sit by Kari’s bed.
They fought the chills and the burning fever that ran their alternating courses through Kari’s restless, shaking body for more than three weeks, while the others grew well. Nyall sat beside the bed until he was bleary-eyed, deaf to the priests’ urgings to leave. Fiorgyn finally persuaded him to get some sleep, promising that she would sit with Kari herself, or bring Morgian to do so, until Nyall came back.
Nyall slept restlessly himself, amid bad dreams of Lyting in an open grave, and Kari’s dark, half-Roman face strangely overlaid with an iron Roman helmet, and the Roman centurion who spoke Semnones’ German suddenly sprouting a Semnone beard and mustache. And then they straightened themselves out again, and Kari’s face was familiar again behind his brown mustache – Kari never wore a beard, perhaps because Nyall did not – and the Roman had his helmet on again. Nyall awoke sweating, and with something vague about half-blood chasing its tail in the back of his mind. The Roman centurion was half-blood also, he thought. You took one blood or the other, he thought, and became that… but somewhere in the depth of things, the other blood still ran.
He stood up, feeling in the rushes for the soft indoor boots that he had left by the bed – itself a pile of rushes and straw threaded through with sweet herbs and covered with soft, worked deerhides and a blanket of bearskin. He had fallen into bed without undressing. He rebraided his hair and pinned it up; outside the hall he took an icy splash in a beer vat of water. In his chamber, a thrall lit the fire and straightened out the rucked-up bed. He brought the chieftain clean clothes and scurried away with the dirty ones. There must be a washing today, Nyall thought. The women were making a lot of bustle in the great hall, and he could hear the splashing of the washtubs being filled outside with water from the rain vats that stood in the open court. It was morning, and it had been morning when Fiorgyn had made him go and sleep. He must have slept the day around. He shouted for a thrall to bring him food to the Companions’ chamber, and went to sit by Kari again.
The Companions had risen already, and the chamber was empty except for Fiorgyn and the priests by the bedside and Kari’s still figure, cold and sweating now in damp bedclothes. When they had finished with their potions, the priests called in a thrall, who changed the bedclothes, and Nyall sat down again to his vigil.
He sat, sometimes holding Kari’s hand in his when he grew restless, sometimes just watching the dark, sunken eyes and the chalky face, while the business of the hold went on all around, unnoticed.
Morgian came once to tell him that the Council lords grew demanding, but Nyall just shook his head and never took his eyes from Kari’s. She shrugged and went about her work again. The fall rains would come heavily soon, and after them the snow, and Nyallshold made busy in preparation. The chambers were swept of their old rushes and fresh ones were laid down, and there was still the last of the autumn brewing to be done, and the stacked hay in the fields to be brought into the barns. Morgian, Fiorgyn, and their women, in rough gowns with aprons tied over them and their sleeves rolled up, worked in the hall and over the drying ovens in the smokehouse. The men rode after meat, returning at dusk with wild boar or a red deer carcass slung from the carrying poles.
The meat was dried or smoked, and the hides would be scraped, stretched, and tanned; the bones and horns were saved for knife handles, combs, and other implements, and the entrails were thrown to the hound pack. Nothing would be wasted.
The red coats of the cattle were already growing shaggy with the cold as they were driven in from the pastures, and the weaker ones, not worth feeding through the winter, were slaughtered. The horse herds were brought into the barns and the sheep into folds near the hold where the tribe could stand guard over the midwinter lambing.
Every building in the hold was aired and scrubbed from rafters to floorboards, and the herbs and onions and garlic hanging to dry in the still-room gave off a pungent scent. The harvest tribute from each lord came in to the chieftain’s hold, and with it came such lords of the tribe as were not there already for the Harvest Feast that marked the ending of the year. A place had to be found for all, with their wives and thralls and dogs; and those who were feuding had to be kept well apart.
Through it all, Kari slept or more often thrashed restlessly on the bed, sometimes singing to himself feverishly jumbled snatches of Hero Songs or songs of the battles of the gods. Once, he sat up and looked frantically for his harp and would not be quieted until Nyall put it in his hands. Occasionally Fiorgyn came away from her work, her pale braids wound into a crown on her head to be out of the way, to sit with Kari and make her husband sleep; but for the most part it was Nyall who kept watch, day after day, shaking off even Geir when that old councilor tried to reason with him.
Finally, on the third day before Harvest Feast, with the hold crowded with quarrelsome guests and two blood feuds already sparked by sheer boredom, Kari opened his eyes and seemed to see not the dark things that prey on a fevered mind, but Nyall’s face above him in the firelight, almost as haggard as his own.
“Have you been here… all this time?” he whispered, and Nyall nodded. Kari smiled and closed his eyes again, at last in quiet sleep, and Nyall got up and staggered to his bed to sleep also.
He called Council for two days later, nearly a month after Kari had come in. Kari was also awake now, and Valgerd and Asuin had nodded their heads in agreement, saying that the sickness had passed. The Council would be on the day of Harvestnight – propitious enough if a chieftain wanted an excuse to cut a Council short once his orders had been given. Harvestnight marked the end of the old year, when the herds had been gathered in, and the tribe gave thanks for the stored harvest that would sustain it through the dead time to come. On Harvestnight, folk paid a wary homage to the dead of mankind, who might come to warm themselves at the feast fire on this one night when Hellgate stood open at the joining of the year. It was ill luck to talk of living matters on a night when the dead, or worse things that might come out of Hellgate, could hear and decide to take a hand in them. For that reason, when the feast began at sundown, the Council must end.
It was plain, when Nyall came out into the courtyard with Geir beside him, that he had waited too long to call the Council. Ranvig and Ingald were arguing with each other under the carved dragon’s head on the roof tree, and both glared at him out of sheer temper as he passed. Fiorgyn was talking in a low voice to Thrain, while Sigurd, who had renewed an old enmity with him over some long-gone cattle raid, was working off his temper in a boys’ game of ball in the field. Arni was perched happily enough on the stone wall of the well, mending a bridle strap, but the glowering looks being accorded him by two of the Semnone lords indicated that he too had found time to pick a quarrel. Valgerd and Asuin, their truce abandoned with their patient’s recovery, were standing over a terrified thrall with a rush basket of river herbs, debating whether or not he had cut them properly.
Matters proved little better in the Council. Nyall strode in, his green tunic and trousers freshly cleaned and his flaming hair washed and neatly braided and pinned. Kari came beside him, his thin form wrapped in a blanket, to sit in Lyting’s old place. It was raining, and the cold and wet came in through the withy shutters and down the smoke hole to make the fire smoke and spit. Almost before their chieftain was seated, the Council lords were on their feet, each trying to yell above the others.
Nyall sighed, gripped the oaken arms of the chair where he sat on piled deerhides, and began to sort through the complaints. He assigned empty holds to new masters from among the chieftains and Kindred of the newcomers, and although the Semnone lords spat like cats and shifted in their seats, it was finally, grudgingly, agreed that the Black Forest men must be taken into the tribe and this was the best way to do it. A man who had once been chieftain or chieftain’s kin in his own tribe must be a lord in his own right. Taking holding under another tribe’s chieftain was hard enough to swallow.
When he had finally wrested agreement for that much, Nyall assigned the Black Forest warriors among the new lords, taking into account those who had been sworn to certain lords before, as well as those leaderless ones, such as Arni’s group, who had asked permission to swear to one new lord in particular.
And then the debates began. Each holder, new and old, shouted to be heard over the rest and over the thunder that was booming above the hold, while the dogs added their howls to each new thunderclap. If an adopted lord of the tribe was killed, did it carry the same blood-price as a birthright lord? And what about existing feuds between hold and hold – did the new lord make good his predecessor’s quarrel? And if not, what recompense to the other aggrieved party? And what of marriage, and of daughters sent to wed new holders? Did blood-right apply? And what of dead holders’ widows, dead holders’ sons? What rights there?
Slowly, and with much dispute, Nyall sorted the questions out, giving each an answer, some anticipated, some thought out in haste, and every single one argued with from all sides by anyone who could think of anything to say.
After that came the peace-making, the settlement of quarrels and lawsuits arisen since the last Council, done amid the usual protests that the chieftain did not have the right to intervene unless he was requested to. Fortunately, someone involved in the tangle could generally be found to make that request, and once the chieftain was asked to decide, his judgment was final. It was all done amid much shouting and banging of tables while Asuin thumped his staff and shouted for order.
Finally, when the last judgment had been made and the Council lords were glaring balefully at each other, but were quiet, Nyall stood up, put hands on his hips, and glared at them all himself.
“We are the Free People!” he said with a fine, cutting scorn in his voice. “We make a Council and spend it arguing over precedence and cattle-rights, while the Romans build their eagle-forts in the lands we have lost!”
They sat up and looked at him. These other matters were important, as important as war with the Roman-kind, maybe more. They touched on a man’s honor.
“We cannot raid the Roman-kind again until spring,” pointed out Hauk, a square-faced lord with heavy bull’s shoulders, whose holding lay to the east on the edge of the Semnone lands.
“We do not ‘raid’ the Roman-kind again at all,” Nyall said flatly, and they stared at him again. “We make a war, a Roman war. I have been thinking while the Council has been quarreling, and now I will tell you what I have thought, and for this there will be no argument!”
There were mutterings. Argument was always the privilege of the Council.
“Silence and hear me!” Nyall’s gray eyes were dangerous. “The rights of the Free People will be the death of the Free People if they do not learn to use them wisely! The commander of the Eagles said to me that he commanded soldiers, not warriors, and there was much in what he said. It is why he beat us. He had an army that marched when he gave the word, while my war band hid their heads in their cloaks for a full month because a priest and a few warriors of our allies” – he spat out the word – “made large talk and were listened to!”
“Not by all of us!” Ranvig jumped up, his bright, slightly askew eyes fixed on Ingald, whose own anger was rising.
“By enough of you,” Nyall said grimly. “Ranvig, I know your loyalties, sit down.”
“The dead must be—” Ingald said.
‘Those dead are still unburied!” Thrain snapped, He had a thin face with a healing scar on one cheek, and a look of Fiorgyn about him. “I listened to that talk, and it cost me my land!”
Hauk nodded, but another lord, Koll, shook his head dubiously. “Let the chieftain explain to me,” he said gruffly, drawing bushy gray brows together in a frown. “I am thinking that I do not understand where this talk is going.”
“It is simple,” Nyall said. “We must stand together against the Romans, or go down, divided, as the Gauls did. So unless you are liking the idea of that, this time I will be obeyed! There will be no more alliances and no priests telling me when I may or may not make war. And no man will answer to any other man but me.”
“Plain enough,” Koll said. ‘Tell me this, young chieftain, before I swear this obedience – can we conquer Rome?”
“No,” Nyall said flatly. “We cannot. But we can make it so great a trouble for Rome to conquer us that we are not worth the effort of it.”
“How do we know Rome will try to conquer us?” Ingald asked quietly.
After a moment of heavy silence, Nyall said, “They will come. If not next year, the year after. Would you wait and see? And when they come what will you do? Maybe throw rocks at them on the doorstep?”
There was a murmuring of agreement to that, especially from the Black Forest lords. Ingald, seeing how the wind blew, said nothing further. He lounged forward on the table, chin in hand, his handsome face devoid of any expression but polite attention. Ranvig, who possessed no such subtlety, turned toward him to speak, but Kari, wrapped in his blanket by the chieftain’s chair, caught Ranvig’s eye and shook his head slightly.
“You have heard my thinking,” Nyall said. “Does anyone wish to make challenge to it?” His voice was soft, but there was a tinge of menace in it that was well noted. “If so, do it now. Because I will kill the man who does it on the war trail.”
No one moved. Kari held his breath. Then Koll stood up and said: “I vote with the chieftain.”
“And I.” Hauk heaved his bull shoulders up out of his seat, a giant of a man dwarfing even the big men beside him.
“I also!” Ranvig leaped up lightly, followed by Arni, Thrain, and Sigurd.
Kari let out his breath slowly as the rest followed – one-eyed Geir; Steinvar, the lean, scarred holder from the south; and the landed lords of the Companions’ troop, Svan, Starkad, Asgrim, and Gilli the Lame, who fought better with a limp than most men with two good legs. Ingald gave his vote also, and Valgerd and Asuin solemnly swore obedience with their hands clasped on the sun-disks of their staffs. Kari pushed his blanket back and stood, still weaving a little on his feet, to add his voice. He drew a snort of amusement from Geir, who was keeping track of the vote with his tally sticks. Kari would have ridden through Hellgate and back if Nyall had asked it.
Nyall stood with thumbs hooked in his belt, rocking lightly on his heels and watching until the last lord had spoken. Then he sat back in his chair, strong hands on the oaken arms, and looked each man in the eye. “You have sworn to keep your peace with me in this. So. Now I say that you will also keep it with each other. When we make Council again in spring, it will be a Council of War, and there will be no feuds and grievances to settle, and no dead men to make the war band one spear lighter. That you understand this law clearly, I tell you now that I will put curse on the man who breaks it.”
They eyed Nyall with a wary respect at that; even Asuin was impressed. The chieftain’s curse was stronger even than a priest’s curse; and it killed always – the man who was cursed, and sometimes also the chieftain who had set it. The last chieftain who had invoked that curse was only in ancient Hero Songs, but that did not lighten its strength.
“So,” Nyall said into their silence, while the rain poured down outside and the fire spat in protest, “it is done. There will be a gathering at midwinter, for those who are not snow-held, and a Council at first thaw. Now let us leave the hall to the thralls.”
The smell of roasting meat had begun to drift in on the wet wind, and there was a scurrying of footsteps and voices outside the doors as thralls waited with trestle tables and armloads of green branches to begin decking the hall for Harvestnight as soon as the lords had gone.
Nyall paused for a brief, quiet talk with Geir and Kari, and then made his way to his own chamber where he flopped wearily down in a chair and watched his wife’s woman dress her hair.
“That will do, Hallgerd,” Fiorgyn said, waving the girl away as she knotted the last of the little gold balls into the ends of Fiorgyn’s braids and held a bronze mirror up for her mistress to see. “Go and make ready yourself.”
Hallgerd pattered away and Fiorgyn pulled her chair around to face her husband. She looked very bright in her Harvestnight finery, with a gold collar glowing against her pale braids, and gold bands on her arms. Her gown was of three shades of blue, pale at the top, and deepening in wide bands to the midnight-colored hem. It was a rare pattern, difficult to dye, and it had been part of Nyall’s bride-gift to her. The hem was sewn with twining vines in gold thread with the berries picked out in red. She rested her blue-slippered feet on the warm hearthstone and looked at her husband thoughtfully.
“And have you whistled your hounds to order?” she asked.
“Yes,” Nyall said, “but I carried a large whip to do it.” He tugged off his boots and began to pull the laces from his trousers. His Harvestnight clothes lay spread on the bearskin blanket on the bed.
“And my people?”
“The lords are all hold-settled, and their men with them. That was the easiest part. For the rest, they are oath-sworn not to question my commands by so much as a whisper – there will be no repeat of Jorunnshold this spring.” He flung his boots and trousers into a corner for a thrall to pick up. “And I have put threat of the chieftain’s curse on them that they are not to raid each other this winter.”
Fiorgyn’s sky-colored eyes narrowed. “They will not bide still all winter. They will raid in other tribes’ land.”
Nyall chuckled from beneath the folds of his shirt as he pulled it off over his head. “And that will make the other tribes… amenable, when Geir takes the green branch to their chieftains.”
Nyall threw the shirt in the corner with the rest and stretched, naked, by the fire, turning his hands outward with a crack of knuckles.
“Do the Council lords know this?”
“No,” Nyall said. “They don’t need to. It is enough that they will be hunting where I wish them to.”
Fiorgyn nodded. He looked pleased with himself. He had maneuvered his Council with a ruthlessness that would have done credit to a Roman. And when Nyall had used their raids to hammer the other tribes of the Suevi into agreement with an alliance, and told his own lords that now they couldn’t raid there anymore, either – it would be too late for them to argue with him. Then they would have two months, she thought, penned in and restless, to turn all their energies to thinking about what they were going to do to the Romans. Sufficient time to build up a good fury, though short enough not to break peace before Nyall was ready. Suddenly she laughed. She began to see how a man so young had held the greatest tribe of the Suevi to his hand. And now he would call the rest to him also. Fiorgyn’s face turned thoughtful again.
“Why did you not tell your Council that you intend to make alliance?” she asked. “Surely they will see the need for it if they are not fools?”
Nyall began to dress, not in his usual forest-green color, but in a shirt and trousers of autumn russet, like his hair, with a gold embroidery running like fire around the hem and sleeves. “They are not fools, and they will see the need when they have thought of it.” His face was more sober now. “It was plain enough that we hadn’t the men to make war properly, even before Jorunnshold. I underestimated the Roman-kind. It is not a mistake I will be making again.”
She watched him quietly, hands in her lap, and he came unexpectedly, shirt and trousers still in his hand, to sit in the clean rushes beside her.
“Fiorgyn, I am tired.” He leaned his back against her knee while she ran her hands over his bare shoulders, rubbing the tension from them and from the nape of his neck where the bright hair ran upward into the warrior’s knot on the right-hand side. “I am tired with fighting the Roman-kind and my own kind as well. I did not tell them of the need for alliance because they need to learn a lesson: that I command. I rule. You cannot fight a war from a Council chamber. That is something your father never learned.”
“Why do you think I asked to be given to you?” Fiorgyn said quietly. “It also occurs to me that if your own lords have no say in this alliance, it will make it easier for the other chieftains to swallow their pride and come oath-bound to you. It is not exactly alliance that you want, is it? You want complete obedience.”
Nyall twisted his head around to look at her over his shoulder. “You are no fool either, are you? No, wise one, the others also will come oath-bound, and for that I put a little fear in them first. I learned that from Jorunn. May the gods take his prideful soul to Valhalla, anyway.” He shifted his shoulders and Fiorgyn’s hands slipped over them, down across his bare, scarred chest. He caught them in his own, and looked up at her, his head still twisted sideways like an owl. “Tell me, was that the only reason you asked for me?”
It was an old joke between them now and she bent to kiss him, but stood up before he could pull her down on the floor with him. She chuckled at his obvious intent and dropped his clothes in his lap over the evidence.
“Go and dress before we make ourselves late for the feast.”
He thought about saying that he didn’t care, but she called a thrall in to help him dress and watched with a wicked little smile on her face as the thrall retrieved his boots from the corner and brushed the dust from the russet shirt. Nyall stood docilely while his cloak was pinned on with the huge amber-studded pin. Then, as they paced side by side up the hall to the High Table, he put his arm around her waist and whispered something in her ear that made her blush and laugh.
The hall was now ablaze with torchlight and hung with pine branches; the withy shutters were pulled close against the rain and whatever else might be about on the night of the dead. The storm howled in the courtyard, but inside it was warm and comforting. The men and women came running through the rain from the buildings that ringed the yard, hurrying into the welcoming safety of human companionship. They shook off by the fire and made their way to their places at the tables that ran the whole length of the hall. The thralls came around with food and beer, and strong, sweet mead was ladled into pitchers from the vats in the storehouse.
The walls were hung not only with pine branches, but with wheat sheaves, onions, sweet herbs, and the few fruits that grew in these parts. (It was bad country for orchards, although the Romans had begun to cultivate grapes in terraced vineyards on their side of the Rhenus.) When they had eaten and wiped the hot fat from their hands in the rushes on the floor, the pitchers went around again, and laughter and tall tales flowed with it, as did a new kind of hunger, born of the heady harvest mead on a night when all things were possible. Harvestnight was an older festival than even the solstice gatherings, and it honored an older god – Frey, lord of fruitfulness and increase, who lay with the Goddess in her winter form to quicken the seed that would make the land green again in spring.
Kari took up his harp and began to make music, not a battle music now, but a song of joining and new beginnings. The men and women of the tribe, carried on the music and the need to shut out the dead that battered with the rain against the shutters, drew closer together. Nyall gazed at his wife. She dropped her eyes, but he could tell that the Harvestnight magic was running in her blood, too. He also saw that Kari, lost in his music with his dark eyes closed and his thin hands rippling on the harp strings, was oblivious to the girl Hallgerd who had crept up to sit in the rushes at his feet. He nudged Fiorgyn and pointed, and she smiled.
Kari began to sing the Song of Frey’s Wooing. The men of the tribe, with their arms around their women, settled themselves to listen. The man who could read was rare, and in any case the runic script was for magic, not for stories. The only tie they had to the lives of the gods and the history of their people was a skald’s songs. Kari had learned to fit Gaulish harp music to the old songs, and to new ones of his own devising.
The tale was familiar, but they listened intently nonetheless, perhaps gaining in persistence from the example of Frey’s servant Skirnir, the Bright One, sent to woo the giant’s cold daughter Gerda, in his master’s stead. First he offered her the eleven golden apples of immortality, then the magic arm ring, Draupnir, which produced eight rings like itself on every ninth night. These were scorned, and Skirnir resorted to threats. He would cut off her head and her father’s too, to set them on poles at the gates of Asgard. Gerda spat at him. A giant’s daughter had no fear of gods. Skirnir fell back on curses: Gerda would waste away and her flesh become evil to all men. She would lust after monsters. At that she relented finally and agreed to wed the longing Frey who had seen her when he looked out over the world from Wuotan’s throne. In nine nights she would meet him and lie with him in the windless barley field.
The song ended with Frey’s lament at the delay, and a sad acceptance of the great price he had paid for his bride:
One night is long and three are longer;
How can I endure for nine?
Often a month has seemed to me shorter
Than the thrice three nights I pine.
Frey had won his bride, but lost his magic sword to Skirnir as the price of his silver-tongued wooing. And at the last battle of the gods, at Ragnarok, the price would come home to him. There was always a price.
Kari drew a last note from the harp strings, and as it died away there was a murmur of approval and calls for other favorites. Kari waited until the commotion died down and then took up another song, also the Song of Frey, the golden lord who danced in the sun and rain while the fields swelled where his feet had touched. Still unnoticed, Hallgerd snuggled against Kari’s knee, and Nyall began to laugh.
A few couples were slipping from the hall now, hand in hand, for their beds in the guest chambers, or for the warm straw of the stables. Thrain had pulled the young widow of his new holding close to him, and she seemed content enough; even Morgian felt the magic of Harvestnight as she lifted her still unlined face to smile at Steinvar’s lean, scarred one as it bent above her. In the ordinary way, the Germans counted the passions of men and women strictly – a matter for marriage and alliance and not to be taken lightly. But things done on Harvestnight were the god’s affairs and never questioned afterward. It was as well, Nyall thought, looking at a hall too full of women, even though many of the lords had left their own behind them in their holds. There were too many women in the aftermath of war. It was not right that they should always walk lonely.
He saw Arni pull a girl with a fall of red-gold hair into his arms. Astrid, Steinvar’s daughter – if that went well it would be a good match, he thought with half his mind, while the other half made him lay his hand on his wife’s arm with a new urgency.
Fiorgyn set down the mead pot she had been drinking from, and before she rose she whispered something in Kari’s ear as his song ended.
Kari blinked, looked down at Hallgerd cuddled close against his knee, and opened his eyes wide in surprise, while the chieftain and his wife laughed and made their way with arms entwined through the revelers in the hall.