Harald, his face flushed with drink, lurched to his feet at the head of the table and proposed, “Yelisaveta!”
“Yelisaveta!” we answered, tipping back our mugs of ale and setting them down again with a bang.
That pleasant young lady was not, however, among the company; nor was her father, nor her mother—to whom we had already drunk ‘Health’ and ‘Damnation’ in that order.
It was early in the month of Yule and Harald was playing host in his new dvor to me and his dozen bodyguards for a day of sledding, fighting with snow-balls, getting drunk, and enjoying his latest purchases from Stavko’s establishment.
Dag was noticeable by his absence: there had been a coolness between those two for some time now. As for me, I would far rather have been abed with Inge than damning her in Harald’s company, but there was no putting him off this time. As the sun sloped toward evening, we had done the first two items on his list, were in the midst of the third, and anticipating the last.
But it was not to be.
At that precise moment one of those pretty slaves ran shrieking into the room.
“What the devil’s wrong with you?” snarled our chief, with his usual good manners.
Not knowing a word of Norse, she could hardly be expected to tell him. But she motioned to the bed-closet and we all followed.
She had been turning the straw mattress and found something rather nasty stuck to the bottom of it—she pointed at it from across the room, not daring to go closer. It was a flat piece of wood, about three fingers wide and the length of your forearm. A brown mess of dried blood covered both it and the mattress around it.
“Odd! Odd, for Christ’s sake!”
“Right behind you, Harald, don’t shout. Here, let me get a closer look.”
Despite the encrusted blood, the rune signs, large and deeply carved, were easy enough to read.
“They’re sickness runes,” I said. “It’s a spell to bring the wasting sickness on you.”
“Get it out! Get it out of here!”
He wouldn’t touch it any more than the girl. It was up to me to peel it from the stiffened cloth and carry it over to the oven, while the others dove out of my way as though I were walking with a bar of red-hot iron.
“Don’t stand there, damn you—get the mattress!” Harald flung the trembling the girl at the bed.
We consigned the rune-stick and, with some difficulty, the mattress, too, to the flames; but Harald continued in a remarkable state of agitation—not that anyone treats this sort of thing lightly, mind you. He shouted up his whole household—the stable hands, the kennel master, the falconer, the cook and her assistant, the jack-of-all-work, the girls he kept for fucking and other household chores, the whole pack of them—and proceeded to rant at them, slap them, and shake them till their teeth rattled, although most of them couldn’t understand him.
Those who did, pleaded that they knew nothing about it. The mattress had not been turned in a week; the thing could have been put under it any time since then. No, they’d seen no strangers about the place. In God’s name he couldn’t think that any of them—
“Eh, what else should I think?” Harald fairly screamed at them. “One of you sneaking dogs is guilty and if I don’t find out which one, I’ll butcher the lot of you, see if I don’t!”
Leaving them all quaking and the girls in tears, he next began to rush from room to room, sweeping crockery from shelves, pulling odds and ends out of cupboards, turning clothes trunks upside down in a search for other horrors. When he was through, the house looked as though a hurricane had swept through it, and all he had to show for his efforts was a cracked cup with a bit of mold and dust and cobweb in it.
“D’you see this? Do you see this?” He waved it under my nose. “Ashes of a burned cat, isn’t it, Tangle-Hair? Or a baby! D’you think it’s a baby?”
I thought it nothing of the sort but agreed anyway. It was not safe to contradict Harald at times like this.
He flung the cup at the wall.
“That bitch! Does anyone deny it’s her? Eilif and his bully-boys couldn’t kill me and she knows there’ll never be a second chance now that I’m on my guard. So it’s magic now! By God, I smelled witchcraft on her the first hour I met her!”
“Harald,” I protested, trying to persuade myself as much as him, “nothing’s more unlikely. Think back. You heard how she talked about the hanging of those heathen sorcerers, she’s dead against ’em.”
“You take a lot on faith, Tangle-Hair, if you swallow all that. You believe she grew up next door to Odin’s bloody great temple at Uppsala and never did more than stick up her pretty nose at the smell? But we’ll pay her back in her own coin. You shall carve a runestaff and slip it under her mattress.”
For an instant I thought, Great Odin, he knows I sleep with her! But I managed to say calmly, “How should I find my way to Princess Ingigerd’s bed chamber? And anyway, the runes themselves are nothing without the singing of spells over them, and that I know nothing of; no more than your assailant does, I think, for you look healthy enough to me.”
But already he’d stopped listening and was off on another tack.
“Thjodolf!” he called to one of the bodyguards. “Drive the sleigh to town and come back with a priest—any priest, I don’t care who—and holy water, he’s to bring holy water, d’you understand? Hurry!”
He never stopped pacing the whole time until the sleigh returned bearing Father Dmitri.
To make short of a long story, the priest was told to sprinkle all the corners of the house with holy water while commanding the evil spirits to begone in Christ’s name; and when he was done, Harald swore him to secrecy. Needless to say, Dmitri rushed off at once to tell everyone he knew and the incident became the topic of much conversation during the next few days.
Despite the cleansing of his house and all the reassuring things that I or anyone else could think of to say to him, Harald continued for more than a week in one of those black despairing moods that would overcome him whenever he felt himself thwarted or threatened. The men who were detailed to stay with him night and day looked half-mad themselves by the time the fog lifted.
I, however, had little time to devote to Harald’s troubles; for I suddenly had plenty of my own.
A few days after the episode of the runes, I was summoned by Putscha quite openly one evening to call on the princess in her chamber after dinner. This surprised me for, as I’ve explained, her usual manner of inviting me to a tryst was by means of the colored threads.
This time, however, love was not her object. I found her in a spitting fury.
“Haraldsskald, what is this?” She thrust a cylinder of birch bark in my face before I was half through the door.
I knew without unrolling it what it was; I had written it. For some time, you see, Harald had been composing love poems (rather good ones, in fact) to Yelisaveta—or rather Elisif, as he always called her—and reciting them to her whenever an opportunity offered of getting her alone for a few minutes. But such chances came seldom, as Inge was, by now, well aware of his interest in her daughter and was doing everything possible to have the girl watched and any encounters with Harald swiftly terminated.
I hit on the idea of writing the poems down. And so lately I’d been inscribing them and passing them on to the other children to give to their sister on the sly. In the same way her answers were returned; answers which grew steadily more ardent and which were reinforced by the glances that passed between the two at meals, even though Inge made sure that they sat too far apart to speak.
“Do you know what it says, Haraldsskald?” Her voice was cold and accusing—a voice that made even boyars wince. I saw at once that I must not give in to it.
“Do you?” I asked.
“I’m not the scholar of the family, godammit, but I know my abc’s!”
see I thou,
my gold-ring-Gerd,
my Gefn-of-Jewels,
winding and twining
thy white bracelet trees,
like a true wedded wife’s,
around my body.’
—she read aloud in a voice that dripped venom. “I doubt she can understand half of it, such fantastic rubbish!” She flung the scroll away. “Father Dmitri found it among her school things and brought it straight to me. I had the children’s room searched and found others. I found this, too, Haraldsskald.” It was the sliver of wood with ‘Elisif’ scratched on it in Roman letters and in runes. “I know nothing of that heathenish writing, I’m happy to say; perhaps you can tell me how my daughter comes to have such a thing in her possession.”
While I explained that it was only a harmless joke of Harald’s, the thought nagged at me that her first question, if she really was ignorant of runes, surely ought to have been not, Why does she have it? but What does it say?
“Inge,” I protested, “you’ve no cause to be angry with me. As you keep reminding me, I am Harald’s skald, which you knew from the beginning, and I’ve done no more than a skald’s duty.”
“I did not expect that your duty included betraying me, you puffed up little sneak!”
“Betraying you! If anyone, I’ve betrayed Harald. Inge, listen to me—”
“You will call me Princess. I’m not Inge to you anymore.”
“I most humbly beg your pardon, Princess, but you’re talking like an ass. You told me yourself that Olaf sent skalds to woo you until your father forbade it? And with what result? The memory of Olaf has made you an unhappy woman ever since.”
“At least, I was a woman, Yelisaveta’s a child.”
“Aye, your child. She’s your daughter, like it or not, with all your fire and defiance. Fighting with her will only bring about the opposite of what you want. If you’ll take my advice, let her see Harald as much as she pleases and I guarantee she’ll find him unbearable within a month.”
“What a smooth-tongued rogue you are. She’ll find herself in his bed long before that! Carry this message to your master, skald. I will not tolerate his tampering with my daughter. He is nobody and the son of nobody. He is not worthy to take off her left shoe—tell him that. And tell him that if necessary I will send her to Pskov, where her uncle, Prince Sudislav, will keep her under lock and key until she marries Eilif in the summer. In the meantime, I will guard her more closely than ever; more closely even than Harald has taken to guarding himself these days. Tell that to your master, skald. Now get out.”
Two spots of red burned in her cheeks.
“Inge, sweet, look at me”—I tried putting my arms around her—“this needn’t make us enemies. We can still—”
“Putscha! Summon men to take this boy from my chamber if he will not go by himself!”
That made me angry. “Boy? Boy! I’ve been man enough for you up till now! No need to call for help, Princess, I’m leaving.”
The heat of my feelings astonished me; no woman had ever affected me like this before. I spent the rest of the night drinking myself stupid and talking to no one, not even Einar.
After that, the days stretched into weeks of misery. To avoid seeing Inge, I took to spending all my time at Harald’s dvor (without, of course, telling him why he was suddenly favored with my constant company). It was Yelisaveta herself who got word to him that her mother had found them out, had gone out of her mind with rage and given her the worst beating of her life, and that he was please! please! to write no more poems for the time being.
Harald laughed when he read me the note—it was this that brought him out of the funk he’d been in ever since the runestaff incident; he gloried in the sense of power that it gave him to drive Ingigerd mad.
I began to fear I was going that way myself. To take my private revenge on Inge, I jumped into bed with my slave woman (who’d been having pretty light duties up until then), plus all of Harald’s (he was generous that way), and when I came to the last of them started in again; but done in anger it left me empty and unsatisfied.
I tried persuading myself that I was glad to be quit of the business: no more sneaking about, conspiring, fearing discovery every day. Yet day and night the same scene came again and again to my mind—a scene where Inge fell sobbing into my arms, pleading for forgiveness, and begging me to come into her bed again. And, oh how I wanted to! I was sick with the pangs of love.