Gunnarr’s mother won’t stop crying.
She isn’t sobbing or wailing; Rannveig isn’t the type of person to make a spectacle of herself. She grieves quietly, the front of her kirtle splotched and spattered, the under-dress’s long sleeves streaked brown-red up to the elbows. Her son’s halberd—its enchanted blade famous throughout all of Iceland—is clutched like Óðinn’s staff in her left hand.
The weapon’s long shaft, Hallgerðr thinks, holds her stout mother-in-law upright. That and the hot steel in her gaze. Rannveig glares as Hallgerðr strides to and fro across the hall at Hlíðarendi, sorting through her husband’s possessions, packing her own favourite things. Hallgerðr feigns indifference—let the hag stare!—but her traitor feet speed up as she passes the hearth. The older woman has not shifted from that red-stained spot these past two days, her fine leather boots now ruined with Gunnarr’s lifeblood. Face bleached from lack of sleep, grey plaits frizzed, Rannveig waits for the blade in her grip to sing. For it to resonate with bloodlust, as it has so many times before battle. For it to shout, in its metallic voice, that Gunnarr’s death will be avenged.
Rannveig scowls whenever Hallgerðr draws near. Weeping has done nothing to soften her hatred.
Hallgerðr climbs the short ladder to the loft where she, Gunnarr, and Rannveig sleep. Slept, she corrects. Grief catches in her throat, but Hallgerðr refuses to let it loose. She soft-steps across the platform, avoiding the short beds, the wooden boxes filled with wool blankets, the furs. Smelling the spice of pine clapboards running up to what’s left of the turf roof. The clods of dirt fallen from the low ceiling, peppering mattresses and blankets. Gunnarr’s scent, once so strong, is barely present in the shirt Hallgerðr collects and presses her to face. Inhaling deeply, she breathes his absence.
“What are you up to, girl?” Rannveig calls, words clenched in the old woman’s jaw. “Get what you want, and go.”
What I want, Hallgerðr thinks. From an iron hook on the far wall, she takes a silk pouch: filigreed box-brooches, strings of indigo glass beads, silver rings clatter inside. Next the embroidered girdle Gunnarr gave her after their wedding. She bags the scentless shirt, and two more like it. Rannveig thumps the butt of her staff on the floor downstairs, and Hallgerðr takes a last look around. Light sparks off a single shelf in the corner. Hurrying over, she sweeps her oldest trinkets off the board and cups them in her palm.
What I want, she thinks again, looking at the delicate bronze boat, the tiny silver sheep, the golden crescent. What I want is for things to be how they were.
“Hallgerðr,” Rannveig shouts. “Now!”
“What’s the rush,” she snaps, pulling Gunnarr’s stringless bow out from under the furs on their once-bed. “My hurrying won’t make you any younger.”
Hefting the useless weapon, she wraps it in a wool cloak and stuffs the bundle under her arm.
What I want, she thinks, is to stay.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
It is not wrong to want.
Those were the seer’s words; Hallgerðr remembers precisely, though decades have rushed by since they were uttered. Generations have died. Whole families have been lost. She was ten, maybe eleven. Past thirty now, she yet remembers the tone of the seiðr-woman’s voice, burred as the hand she’d pressed to little Hallgerðr’s head, the edges of the witch’s curse stiff and blue-limned with woad, just like her lips and eyebrows and fingernails. It is not wrong to want, she’d said, flashing black-stained teeth, pain in her smile. Her eyes fixed on Hallgerðr’s uncle Hrút, as he watched his long-legged niece teasing the other children by the hearth, while her father, Höskuldr, crowed, “Isn’t she the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen?”
Hallgerðr already caught warriors’ and bondsmen’s eyes. With thick sheets of blonde hair swaying below her slim waist, she’d abandoned her place at the witch’s side. Skipping around the fire in the centre of Höskuldr’s large hall, snatching bone game-pieces from her cousins’ boards, she forced them to chase her. She’d laughed to see them glower, laughed even harder when at last they caught up, grubby hands tugging at her kirtle until she relinquished their toys. All gazes in the longhouse followed Hallgerðr—from the lowliest slave to Höskuldr’s most trusted retainer, from the oldest grandmother to the newest guest, this Lapplander, the fate-sealing seer. Everyone paid attention to Hallgerðr, and she had been glad. Honoured to have her father’s affection. Proud to be called beautiful. She had been happy, for a while. Yes, she remembers being happy.
Until Hrút spoiled it. “The girl has thief’s eyes,” he’d said. “No good will come of her; she is headstrong and greedy. Foster her out until she learns humility. Þjóstólfr will take her, if you ask him.”
Hallgerðr’s heart sank at her uncle’s comments. Crouching beside the children, she feigned interest in her baby brother Bárðr, while sneaking a look at Höskuldr. He’d sat, like the rest of his men, on the edge of the fur-laden bench that doubled as a bed at night. Bowl in one hand and bread in the other, he’d ruminated, chewing the strands of his drooping moustache. Hallgerðr had leaned over and slapped the baby’s chubby arm to stop his babbling. Then she had scuttled back to the guest-bench at the far end of the room, where the seiðr-woman sat smirking.
Hallgerðr had waited for her father to defend her, to tell Hrút to shut up, to say there was no way he’d let her go.
Slowly, Höskuldr had frowned. Þjóstólfr came from the Hebrides; a strong warrior who had killed many men without once paying reparations. “He’s hardly the type of man to improve Hallgerðr’s character,” he said at last, but had no chance to say anything further. Instead, the witch had made her pronouncement.
It is not wrong to want, she’d said, in that haunting voice.
Grey tendrils did not swirl dramatically around the stranger. No flames guttered, portent-filled. The afternoon was always dark in Iceland at mid-winter, but the elements were calm outside. Snow had blown in great drifts up the sides of Höskuldr’s hall, adding insulation to its turf walls. Inside, all was snug and quiet. Smoke from the hearth and steam from the cook-pot billowed lazily upwards, escaping through a hole in the roof. These wisps of peat-scented air ignored the woman, much as the men did, returning to their ale and fish.
But to Hallgerðr, the foreigner’s observation had been hook-sharp. I want to stay here with father, she remembers thinking. What’s so wrong with wanting that? When the witch urged her closer, Hallgerðr had shifted without hesitation, though there’d been a strange smell about her: tilled soil, pine and juniper. As the woman bent to move her gloves and satchel to make extra room, there’d been a gust of fermented milk.
“It is not wrong to want,” she’d repeated, staring at Hallgerðr with mismatched irises: one hazel, one green. In later years, Hallgerðr would imitate that perfect posture, that haughty tilt of the chin; she would tighten her stomach so her torso also appeared longer and stronger than it was. The seiðr-woman wore a deep red kirtle over a black wool dress, colours Hallgerðr would forever associate with cleverness and far-travelling. An evening-blue cloak hung from her shoulders—lined with the fur of fifty white cats. From a silver chatelaine around her waist dangled a stone-tipped wand, a sheathed knife, a tiny copy of Þórr’s hammer, and a leather pouch of rune-sticks that clattered every time she moved.
“Why do you keep saying that? About wanting,” she’d asked bluntly. Then as now Hallgerðr was not one to waste time with niceties. “Why bother repeating yourself?”
“To remind you,” the witch had said. “To make you understand.” Licking her lips, she’d spent a moment rummaging in her sack. She’d withdrawn three small trinkets that glinted in the firelight. One by one, she placed them in the girl’s hand.
A bronze open boat, with an oversized fish welded inside.
A silver sheep balanced on a cairn of stones.
A gold-plated bow fit for a tiny warrior, only lacking a string.
“You have a rich future in store,” the seiðr-woman had said, and Hallgerðr’s heart raced.
“Can I keep them all?”
The woman grinned, nodded. “It is not wrong to want.”
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Of course Hallgerðr had kept the shining trinkets. Of course she’d agreed with what the stranger said. She’d agreed and in so doing—or so she has come to realise—Hallgerðr had clinched her doom. Her fate. Her urðr. Hers and Gunnarr’s. At the time, she’d believed there was nothing wrong with wanting attention, affection, the precious joys in life. She remembers this last most acutely; how she’d not just wanted, but needed possessions.
Great lengths of fine woollen cloth. Embroideries from the East. Bed-sheets from Constantinople, soft as summer water. Amber beads from Rús. Scarlet and fur cloaks, the gifts of Norwegian kings. She’d needed these treasures and more: barrels of whey, crocks of skýr, jugs of smooth buttermilk, blocks of strong cheese, enough salted herring to see ten families through the long winter. All of this, she remembers thinking, would make her attractive. Desired. Wanted. All of this would prove her worth. With this wealth in her pantry and coffers, she would be loved.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
“Selfish girl,” Rannveig says now, eyeing everything Hallgerðr carries down from the loft. “Gunnarr’s burial mound hasn’t yet been dug—and you’re stealing his grave-goods!”
“So says she who refused to give Njáll that halberd when he came asking for it,” Hallgerðr replies. She will not be called a thief in her own house. “Knowing Njáll and his sons, they’ve worked day and night since Gunnarr’s—” she won’t say defeat “—skirmish. The mound is ready to welcome our warrior to the afterlife. How do you expect him to fight in Valhöll without his best weapon?”
“You know as well as I,” Rannveig says, menace in every syllable, “that given a fair chance, no one could beat my son with a bow.”
“Think what you like, old wretch.” Flushed, Hallgerðr turns on her heel, still carrying her largest bundle. She retreats to the private weaving room Gunnarr had built for her, long ago, at the other end of the house. With trembling hands, she places her burden on a workbench next to the loom. In her fist, bronze grinds against gold and silver. Loosening her grip, she lets the boat, the sheep, the broken bow clunk onto the table.
What good are the seiðr-woman’s predictions? What good are cheap baubles to her now?
Hallgerðr sighs. Crossing to the loom, she admires her handiwork. She takes up the wooden beater and drives home the weft, pushing threads needlessly up and up and up. A hand-span of material is all that’s left to weave, but once Rannveig has her way, Hallgerðr won’t be here to see it finished. The pattern has come together nicely: the colours are strong. Puffin-black lines zig and zag across a field of deep green, the hue fair as the hillsides around Hlíðarendi—or so Gunnarr had said when he came back to the farmstead, months ago now, and found Hallgerðr setting the first threads. Fair are the hillsides, he’d said, returning when he should have been three years in exile. Only three years…
Footsteps scuff past the door. Hallgerðr turns; behind her, the room is empty. The packed earth is swept clean, no sign of intrusion. Not footsteps, she decides. Wind rustles through the grass growing on the rooftop; the beams and turf in the hearth-room will have to be repaired and replaced, but this small corner of the house remains undamaged.
Outside, her son Högni instructs a slave in a voice so like her husband’s it hurts. Ready the horses, he’s saying. Mother’s first. Grani, her second boy, is returning from the homefields, where Gunnarr’s bondsmen are mowing hay; the scythes’ rhythmic song rings across the miles.
Most likely his last harvest here, Hallgerðr thinks. Rannveig always favoured Högni over her younger grandson. “Grani’s disposition is too much like yours,” she’d sneer. “Högni, though, is a good man. Upright. Like his father.” Closer to the house, a goat is griping, joined now and then by a pair of snorting steeds, impatient for the journey.
Unhooking a pair of shears from the wall, Hallgerðr removes her kerchief and grabs a thick handful of hair. Quickly, before she can change her mind, she snips close to the scalp.
In the background, persistent as a truth, comes the rush of the Grótjá. When Rannveig has her way, that dark river will separate Hallgerðr from this land she’s grown to love. The farmstead that once belonged to her most beloved husband, Gunnarr Hámundarson. Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi. Gunnarr the Great.
Her Viking.
And oh, she thinks, long locks falling like water down her face: Oh, how she’d wanted him.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Not like that pig Þorvaldr Ósvifsson, who turned Hallgerðr’s stomach before they’d even met. Her father, Höskuldr, had arranged the marriage in mere minutes, without taking an instant to ask her opinion.
“Name the conditions,” Þorvaldr had apparently said, hand outstretched to shake on any deal Höskuldr offered. “Let’s get this done. I’ll not let Hallgerðr’s temper get in the way of this bargain.”
The memory of her first husband’s audacity—his outright gall—still burns. Unbelievable that such a low-born man had such a high opinion of himself! That he thought himself a match for her. True, his wealth walked on many feet, and some thought him well bred, but he was no warrior. He had no honour. And his personality! She could have found better conversation with that goat bleating in the yard. No, Þorvaldr had been no Gunnarr.
But what’s worst, Hallgerðr thinks, is how eager Höskuldr had been to barter her away, to be rid of her…
Tugging at her hair, Hallgerðr cuts furiously. She has outlived the cursed seer and her charms. She’s outlived three husbands. She’s outlived Höskuldr. She’s outlived her mean uncle Hrút. They’d lived, they’d fought, they’d died, just as all men do—but not before they’d shipped her off to Þjóstólfr, her foster-father, who proved his love more than Höskuldr ever had.
The lavishness of her first wedding feast hadn’t salved her wounded pride. Over a hundred guests, including her foster-father, who’d joined the newlyweds at Medalfell Strand soon as the festivities had ended. Þjóstólfr had stayed with them throughout the winter, a welcome distraction from married life.
Þorvaldr. Hallgerðr shudders. The man kept such a miserly pantry, always running out of flour and dried fish, then accusing her of over-indulgence.
“The supplies used to last until summer,” he’d snarled, pockmarks vivid against the ale-flush in his cheeks.
“It’s no concern of mine if you and your family tried to save money by starving yourselves,” Hallgerðr remembers replying. She still thinks it was reasonable for Þorvaldr to provide the essentials. Support the household. Support her. She’d intended to discuss the pauper-portions of their meals like an adult—but then the pig had slapped her.
Hallgerðr puts down the shears, feels the patch of cropped hair at her brow. Two sturdy strands are all she needs, only two, but she has cut ten times that many. Not enough, she thinks, taking up the clippers again.
“It’s not enough,” she’d said to Þorvaldr, and he’d struck her, struck her face so hard it drew blood. Then he sailed off to the Bear Isles, where their storehouses had stood, to get his wife more grain for bread, more salted herring.
Shivering in the cold weaving room, Hallgerðr contemplates pinning an oiled hide over the window to keep out the breeze. No time, she thinks, just as Rannveig bellows from out in the hall: “Dusk is falling, girl. You’re out of this house today, dark or light. Trolls take you for all I care!”
Hallgerðr plunges her hands into the kirtle’s deep pockets. She balls her fists, harder and harder, nails digging into palms. Harder still, until they cut into flesh.
Do they cut as viciously as the knife Þorvaldr had wielded, defending himself, the day he slapped her, the very day her foster-father ambushed him on the Bear Isles?
Is his loss as heavy as the two-hundreds of silver Höskuldr had been forced to pay as wergild for Þorvaldr’s shortened life?
Perhaps. Sometimes.
Höskuldr and Hrút had blamed Hallgerðr for her first husband’s death, but Þjóstólfr’s axe had done the deed. Yes, she’d been furious, jaw bleeding and sore from his attack. Yes, she’d had a quiet word with Þjóstólfr and maybe, just maybe, she had implied that none of this—none of this!—would have happened if only he’d been around at the time.
“And you would have been here,” she recalls saying, lighting a spark that had burnt Þjóstólfr’s honour, “if you cared for me at all.”
It is not wrong to want.
Yes, she had wanted the pig gone.
But she hadn’t been the one to butcher him.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
At the other end of the house, Högni enters, the clomp of his boots less graceful than his father’s. “Amma,” Hallgerðr hears him say, voiced pitched low, addressing his grandmother. “Amma, they’ve built a huge mound—Njáll and his sons. They’ve stood a great throne in its depths, carved from the best Norwegian pine. Gunnarr sits there even now; upright, as always. The Njállsons will see him avenged. Please, Amma. Forsake this vigil. Clean yourself off.”
Sweet Högni, always avoiding confrontation. In this, too, he is different from his father.
Half of Hallgerðr’s hair is amassed on the workbench, a pool of molten red-gold, a gossamer shield. Two strands are all she needs, just two strands—but which two? Which are the strongest? The best? Tilting her head, she yanks another handful. Tears spring, but she won’t let them fall. Vision blurred, she looks over at the loom. Blinks until she can see more clearly, and waits for her galloping pulse to slow.
It had taken long summer days of stringing wool, threading and rethreading, for Hallgerðr to weave Lætrsérannarsvíti at varnaðiverða across the top margin of her tapestry. Let another man’s woe be your warning. How Glúmr Óleifsson, her second husband, had laughed when his brother, Þórarin, had used this same maxim to discourage him from marrying her!
But to Gunnarr—oh, to a warrior like Gunnarr—this phrase was a call to arms. A Viking’s battle-cry.
Glúmr should have been Högni’s father, Hallgerðr thinks. He’d been a lamb of a man, soft-eyed, curly-headed. Preferred farming to fighting. But he had understood her; he’d accepted she was a woman who knew her own mind. He’d asked her if she’d be willing to marry him. Dear, simple Glúmr. Honest as the flocks he’d loved tending. Plain as the fleece on their backs.
How he’d contented her, for a time.
They’d lived in fine style at Varmalœk, a large farmstead with more bondsmen than Hallgerðr knew what to do with. The larder was always full, the hearth roaring, the blankets piled high on their happy bed. Glúmr had been a sheep, but a generous one. He’d given her whatever she wanted, including a plump baby girl. Þorgerðr grew to be as beautiful as her mother.
When she was asked, Hallgerðr freely admitted how fond she was of her second husband.
“We are very much in love,” she’d told her foster-father, the first and only time he visited them. In hindsight, Hallgerðr realises she shouldn’t have let him stay so long. Maybe she shouldn’t have sweet-talked Glúmr into taking him in after her father had evicted him from Höskuldsstead. No. That wasn’t her fault. Glúmr should have grown a spine: he should have sent the troublemaker away. After Þjóstólfr had spent weeks nitpicking and complaining. After he’d pestered the shepherds and harassed the slaves. After he’d shown no respect for anyone other than Hallgerðr herself.
All that winter and the following summer, she’d taken no sides when Þjóstólfr quarrelled with everyone. She’d done her best to keep quiet. To not let anger consume her.
Only Þjóstólfr could have riled Glúmr into such a fury, and over something so trivial. A few lost sheep—no reason to rage and bellow! The flock was still large, the storehouses bursting with wool and dried meat. The strays would find their way home, but Glúmr took no chances. These sheep were valuable. They needed finding immediately. Supplies would run low too quickly without them. So he’d said.
In truth, Hallgerðr thinks, Glúmr wanted an excuse to get rid of Þjóstólfr. To send him into the mountains just when the weather had turned foul, when the paths would be treacherous with ice.
When Þjóstólfr refused, saying he was no herdsman, saying You seem awfully fond of the beasts, saying Is my foster-daughter not enough for you, Glúmr? saying Does your love spill into these sheep? the growl that tore out of Glúmr’s throat woke little Þorgerðr, who’d finally—after hours of jiggling and feeding and cooing and rocking—finally fallen asleep on Hallgerðr’s lap.
The baby’s puffed eyelids had widened, as had her mouth. And oh how she’d wailed…
Glúmr’s arm was then flailing, pointing at the door, ordering Þjóstólfr not just to the mountain but farther still, Out! Out! Out!
“He’s not going anywhere,” Hallgerðr had shouted to her husband, while the baby screeched in her ear. “Keep your voice down, sheep-lover!”
A thoughtless, heat of the moment cry. But the moment had been hot—hot as the thunderclap of Glúmr’s palm striking her cheek. Hot as the stream of tears she’d wept afterwards, bitter and heart-broken. Hot as her conviction when she’d told Þjóstólfr—she’d commanded him—not to avenge the insult, not to interfere. Hot as her foster-father’s axe whirling through the air, connecting with Glúmr’s back and neck and head. Hot as Hallgerðr’s wrath upon learning of his disobedience.
As Glúmr’s corpse had cooled, so had Hallgerðr’s temper. She’d been clear-headed, calm, when she’d advised Þjóstólfr to travel to her cruel uncle Hrút’s farm and report the murder. To explain that she herself had had nothing to do with it. To admit it had been his blade that had slaughtered her lamb of a husband. To go, now, and seek Hrút’s advice.
Advice she’d known would be swift, and final.
Despite everything, Hallgerðr had loved her second husband.
She had not wanted him dead.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
“Mother, what have you done?”
Hallgerðr’s back stiffens. Gripping the shears, she presses against the table, hoping to screen what lies upon it. The wood’s smooth edge bites into her thighs. Iron cuts into her fingers. The chill, late-afternoon air pricks at her newly-shorn scalp. She does not turn as her son approaches, his tone bewildered.
“Your hair,” he says. Then, panicked, “You’re bleeding!”
“Go away, Högni.”
As always, the boy doesn’t listen. The man. The leather-stink of him draws closer, the clomping boots, the high-pitched concern. “Mother, stop this nonsense. You need to come—”
“Are you deaf, child?” Hallgerðr slams her hand onto the workbench. Once, twice. Pain rattles up to her elbow, but she lashes out again. Only this—agony, anger, violence—only this gets their attention. “I don’t need to do anything. Not yet. Not yet.”
“Mother,” Högni repeats, and there it is at last, the snarling impatience, the rumble before a Viking storm.
That’s more like it, Hallgerðr thinks, giving nothing away. She could have been proud of this Gunnarsson, given the chance.
“Get out,” she says, glancing over her shoulder, meeting her son’s grey glare. “Go tattle to the hag. Tell her I’m being difficult.”
Högni thumps down the passage like a man condemned to Niflheim. “What is she doing up there?” comes Rannveig’s parched voice a moment later, but the question goes unanswered. Putting the shears aside, Hallgerðr burrows into the bundle and retrieves Gunnarr’s bow as Högni’s heavy footfalls traverse—and exit—the hall.
Against the evening-blue cloak, the bow’s pale timber gleams. Its grip burnished from use, the curved lengths polished smooth, the ends capped with silver. Lying on its side, string cut in two, the weapon looks helpless. A viper without fangs.
Many a man had met death at her third husband’s hands, when his bow had been whole.
The weapon was slung over his broad shoulder, the day they’d met, that long-ago summer at the Alþingi. Handsome, muscular Gunnarr. Striding from booth to booth, greeting friends and kin he hadn’t seen since last year’s two-week Assembly. Laughing easily at quips, bantering with tradesmen, play-fighting with the travellers’ children. A sight to behold, a confident man in his element.
Hallgerðr had watched this proud warrior climb the Law Mount, then stand still as an idol at its grassy peak, gazing out over Þingvellir’s river valley below. The tunic and breeches he wore both blue as the water’s depths, the fine stitching around collar and cuffs white as rapids. Forearms gleaming with hard-won rings. Glints of red in his close-cropped beard. A broad smile that dimpled with pleasure when he’d looked down and caught Hallgerðr spying.
There had been no point in playing shy. Hallgerðr had come to the Alþingi dressed in the seiðr-woman’s colours: a crimson gown adorned with silvery finery, a dark cloak that was trimmed with lace down to the skirt. Her elven tresses swung free, hanging to her waist. More than anything else, this had caught Gunnarr’s eye.
Her stunning, beaten-gold hair.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
How quick they’d loved each other that day! Sitting on a gentle slope, rugged cliffs rising behind them, lava-stone crumbling into the river-crossed valley. For hours they’d talked, blithe as fairies in the meadow, facing the duelling-holm below. The earth radiated warmth; they’d discarded their cloaks, plumped them like pillows. Hallgerðr remembers the crunch of grass as she shifted towards Gunnarr, blades prickling through her skirt. His beard bristling against her mouth. The peaty smell of his skin as they kissed, the salt of his tongue. How he played with her hair, running strand after strand through his fingers, and how she’d teased him, pulling away, making him lean. Making him embrace her again…
Stop it, Hallgerðr chided herself, but it was too late. Memory had her in its jaws and shook all her bottled tears loose.
Are you married, Gunnarr had asked late, late that night, the summer sun still five fingers above the horizon.
Before answering, Hallgerðr watched a trio of geese, their wings beating lazily against the mauve sky. “Not at the moment,” she’d admitted, “and there are not many who’d risk it.”
Is it because you can’t find a suitable match, he’d asked—stupidly, Hallgerðr thinks even now, for how could he not know? About Þjóstólfr. About the pig and the sheep. Gunnarr wasn’t that much younger than her, was he? Surely the news would’ve travelled as far as Norway. For years, everyone had paid attention to Hallgerðr’s doings—here in Iceland, Hallgerðr’s ill-fated marriages had been the news.
“Not exactly,” she’d replied, separating fact from gossip. “Though I am apparently hard to please in the matter of husbands.”
Gunnarr had laughed then, loud and long, as if she’d set him a challenge.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Their wedding was the largest Hallgerðr had known. Held at Bergþórsváll, Njáll and his wife Bergþóra’s farm, it had hosted hundreds of guests. Höskuldr and Hrút had come with their entire households, as had the Alþingi’s most prominent speakers, honourable men from each of Iceland’s four quarters. All of Gunnarr’s friends and family had made the short trip from Hlíðarendi, including Rannveig, who had scowled throughout the celebrations. Bergþóra herself served at the feast, an honour befitting the host, helped by Hallgerðr’s daughter Þorgerðr, who was fourteen years old, and a stunning beauty. Course after course crossed the boards. Ale flowed like the Rangá river. And Gunnarr had beamed. He’d kissed his bride. Held her fair hand. Laid a wreath of forget-me-nots, an unbroken circlet of affection, upon her golden head.
This, Hallgerðr had thought, looking at the rich joy around her. This is what I have always wanted.
For the first time, Hallgerðr took over supervision of day-to-day proceedings at her new home. The servants grew to love her; she ran the farmstead at Hlíðarendi with a lavish hand. Gunnarr should only have the best, she’d thought. We all should. So the table was well laden each night, the bondsmen’s clothing expensive, the slaves’ huts clean and free of lice. From chests in the loft, Hallgerðr freed Rannveig’s finest tapestries and hung them year-round in the hall. Guests were invited to feast the smallest occasions, Hlíðarendi’s unending hospitality bordering on the crude. Let them scoff, Hallgerðr had thought. As long as Gunnarr is happy, let the others whisper. She had never hidden her desires from him. She’d never been dishonest. All of her husbands, Gunnarr included, knew what they were getting when they married her.
And yet, Gunnarr’s affections had cooled as quickly as they’d first heated. After Högni’s birth, his attentions were split. Once Grani arrived, they’d completely broken.
Too much time spent with Njáll and his smug kin. Njáll the all-seer who watched the future flicker in the hearth, but did nothing to prevent its unfolding—not even when it came to his own death! Wise, passive Njáll, had lain there in his bed and let life burn down around him.
“The trolls take your friends!” Hallgerðr shouted once, as Gunnarr left for the summer Assembly without her. Njáll was going with him, of course, Njáll and his sons; but as had happened more and more over the years, Hallgerðr had been left behind.
Left behind, but not alone. Rannveig was always close at hand, nagging and condescending. She claimed Hallgerðr wasn’t a good húsfreya, that her only skill was in planning against men’s lives.
Unfair, Hallgerðr thinks. Uncalled for. It hadn’t been her fault that Þorvaldr and Glúmr had died. Those deaths had not been her fault.
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Taking up Gunnarr’s bow, she sighs, weary as the coming dark. The string’s eyelet is lined with bronze, the balance of metal and wood perfect. Angling it to catch the last streaks of daylight, Hallgerðr unknots the broken cord then crumples it into her pocket. She won’t leave anything her husband once prized behind, not even this tangle of thread.
As their children grew to manhood, Gunnarr was so often gone, always gone. What did he expect Hallgerðr to do, left to fend for herself at Hlíðarendi with two young boys, a household to run, a harridan mother-in-law, and Njáll’s arrogant wife constantly taunting?
They’d been a team, once, she and Gunnarr. After the children, their pairing had shifted. Instead of running off together during Assemblies, lying in the long grass on half-lit nights, eating honey straight from imported skeps, licking the sweet-smoky substance from fingertips and lips, Hallgerðr would start things on her own. Later, Gunnarr would sweep in to settle matters, often armed with a purse full of compensation.
“She’s a hothead,” Hallgerðr once overheard Njáll say, accepting a sack of silver from Gunnarr. Payment for one of his servants’ deaths, another casualty in Bergþóra and Hallgerðr’s ongoing feud. It was hard, nowadays, for Hallgerðr to keep track.
“You’ll have a tough time,” the beardless man said to Gunnarr, the two of them newly returned from the Alþingi, “atoning for your wife’s continued mischief.”
It had been no real mischief, Hallgerðr thinks now, keeping Njáll’s servants from dying of old age. Gunnarr disagreed. She can still picture the way he looked when she’d inched up to the door and peered outside at him in the yard. The furrow of his brow when Njáll accused her of being sneaky. Lines deepening beside his nose as he’d pulled his lips firmly shut, the way he always had when being cautious. And he’d been cautious more often than not. Slow to anger. Measured. Everything had always been equal with Gunnarr and Njáll, everything had levelled out—and it had been profoundly annoying.
Gunnarr’s passion had simmered. The wild Viking she’d loved was trapped beneath a calm, business-man’s veneer.
So she’d fought back when Bergþóra taunted. She’d tricked a few slaves into stealing supplies from Bergþórsváll. Yes, there had been a few accidents, a few deaths. But through it all, her ridiculous feud with Njáll’s stuck-up wife, through it all she’d only thought to entice him. Her Gunnarr. Her Viking. Lure him out of complacency with good food and spiced ale, with fire and honey-smoked kisses. She had never done more, never taken less, than what he’d deserved.
Throughout the leanest times, she had served feasts fit for a warrior. Dressed in her best red gown, her best evening-blue cloak, wearing a crown of forget-me-nots, she’d brought platter after platter to her household. She’d borne Rannveig’s barbed words without snapping back, not once; though, yes, some of what she’d prepared—the cheese, the butter—had come from someone else’s pantry. Like her famous forefather, Ragnarr Loðbrók, Hallgerðr pillaged to benefit her family. Surely the Viking sleeping under her husband’s neatly-trimmed beard, beneath the jerkin that hadn’t seen blood in far too long, beneath the muscular chest whose scars had begun to fade—surely that Viking would recognise in her a worthy, like-minded soul? Surely that Viking would be proud to know of Hallgerðr’s conquests, to see others bandage the wounds she’d struck, to hear her crow?
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Though cold, Hallgerðr’s fingers are nimble. Gunnarr had asked her for two, but now she threads three, four, five lengths of her hair through the bow’s eyelets and knots them fast. It isn’t enough, she thinks, twisting the strands into thicker cords, pulling them taut.
“Hallgerðr,” cries Rannveig, the halberd’s shaft thunk-thunk-thunking on the floor. “Time’s up! Enough is enough!”
No, she thinks, looking at the half-strung bow. It will never be enough.
It is not wrong to want, the witch had said and, idiot child, Hallgerðr had believed her.
Not so long ago, the entire household had wanted the provisions she’d acquired from Otkell Skarfsson. Iceland had suffered two seasons of great dearth; last year’s harvest had failed, and every face in the local assembly-places had looked gaunt, Gunnarr’s included. Even so, her husband, stupidly generous, had shared Hlíðarendi’s hay and supplies until their stores were exhausted. The servants, the slaves, even his shrew of a mother, had grown so hungry at Gunnarr’s farmstead, that the great man himself was forced to go begging.
He’d called it buying, of course, but Hallgerðr had known better.
Gunnarr had debased himself, begging at Otkell’s well-stocked homestead. And what was his reward? Nothing but another mouth to feed—that slave who’d caused Hallgerðr so much trouble recently. That split-tongued, dark-browed Melkólfr.
Hallgerðr tastes bile, stomach squirming even now at the thought of the pity-goods they’d received after Otkell had refused to lend Gunnarr essential provisions. Fifteen horses had carried hay, five horses laden with cheese and dried fish and vats of whey, hand-delivered in abundance from Njáll and Bergþóra!
There would be no charity for her husband. A Viking takes what she needs…
It was right, what she’d done, what she’d had Melkólfr do. Otkell had refused to help, despite his wealth; he’d offered not food, but a slave. He’d deserved to be plundered. And Melkólfr had been sly as she’d expected such a liar to be; he’d slipped over to his once-master’s farm at the blackest hour of winter-dark, and stolen more of Otkell’s food than the folk at Hlíðarendi could eat in a season.
“Where did this come from,” Gunnarr had asked, as Hallgerðr brought out the final tray for the feast. He was so thin, jerkin hanging off his lean frame, hollows collecting shadows beneath his eyes. Yet, even diminished, Gunnarr had had the nerve to sit in his hall like a king, back stiff as the table she’d just covered with abundance—creamy cheeses, pots of smooth skyr, plates of rye bread slathered with salted butter—and he’d spat upon what she’d provided.
“It’s not men’s business to be concerned with kitchen affairs,” Hallgerðr had said, more sharply than she’d intended. Hunger had whetted her tongue to a point. “It makes no difference where it came from, you may as well eat it.”
Uncle Hrút’s vulgar words—that girl has thief’s eyes—had echoed in Gunnarr’s reply. “I will not be in league with thieves,” Hallgerðr’s third husband had said, right before she felt Þórvaldr and Glúmr’s rough palms redoubled in his slap. Vaguely, she recalls the crack of skin on skin, the crack of the butter plate as she dropped it, the crack of her heart—but she didn’t feel the impact of Gunnarr striking her, not right away. The burn came much later.
As the servants cleared the table, swept up the broken crock, and brought out the last of their home-dried meat instead, Gunnarr had stood and glared down at Hallgerðr.
Oh, what a glare.
There he was, she’d thought. Her Viking. Rage in his eyes, in the sting of his blow. Rage, a gift he’d given her, open-handed. One she promised to repay, when and if ever she could.
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Winding hair after hair onto her husband’s bow, Hallgerðr knows one thing to be true, deep in her marrow: Gunnarr died of pride and an overblown sense of honour. He died because his reputation had grown too large; his fame overspilled the banks of the Rangá river into the territories of proud men. Men with good reputations, but not great ones, nowhere near as impressive as Gunnarr’s.
It was impossible to live in the shadow of perfection.
So they ambushed Gunnarr once, twice, then put him on trial for surviving. For refusing to lay down his weapons. For being so skilled with halberd and arrows. We’ll accomplish nothing, they’d said, as long as Gunnarr can use his bow… They’d prosecuted him for killing Otkell’s son, Þorgeirr—in self-defence!—because that jowled lug of a man, like his father, had been as popular as he’d been fat.
The trial was a farce. News and rumours, lawsuits and justifications, measures and countermeasures, rumours of who slew whom and why…all a torrent of empty words.
Words can’t nullify a debt. Words can’t make a person forget when she’s been wronged.
Hallgerðr snorts.
Fools, all of them. Proud, vulnerable fools. Þorgeirr Otkelsson had ambushed the greatest warrior in Iceland—no matter how he’d died, Hallgerðr thinks, Gunnarr was still the best of them—and the hero was punished for striking back.
Exile. Three years, no more, no less, to be spent abroad. Banished from his district. Banished from Iceland. Banished from the home he’d loved so well.
A light sentence! Three years overseas, no more, no less. Three years, else he could be slain on sight by the kinsmen of the blubber-faced man he had killed. Three years to save his life.
“Go,” Njáll had said. “A journey abroad will bring you greater honour than any you’ve earned before.”
“Go,” Rannveig had said, a crease of concern darkening her brow. “Give your enemies someone else to quarrel with for a while.”
Hallgerðr had said nothing.
Was it really that hard for him to leave? No, Hallgerðr had thought then. She’d been uprooted herself, three times already. She’d travelled far from the Dales she’d known and loved, far from Höskuldr, far from Hrút. She’d been fostered and married—to a pig, a sheep, and last to this—hero—this warrior, this handsome Viking, who could not bring himself to take to the sea.
Pride.
Honour.
Winding and winding, Hallgerðr readies the bow, stringing it with strands of equal length and tension. They thrum when plucked, resonant as Gunnarr’s halberd before a battle, singing for blood.
Storytellers claim it was the beauty of the countryside that kept him from leaving. A ship was waiting to take him a-viking with Kolskegg and four other men. He had added his wares to the hold, bid his overseer and servants farewell, paid a last visit to his dear friends at Bergþórsváll and left behind his halberd, his deepest thanks, and a household of heavy hearts.
That afternoon, he rode away while Hallgerðr was in the homefield surveying the flocks. He’d saved no kisses, no goodbyes, for her.
Almost, Hallgerðr thinks, not for the first time, like he knew he’d be back.
Around the hearth on winter evenings, the saga-tellers have already started making a tale of Gunnarr’s devotion to Iceland. His horse stumbled, they say. The beast threw our hero just beyond the Markar River. That’s why he stayed; it was the horse’s fault.
But Gunnarr was an accomplished rider.
Others claim it was the landscape that held him captive. Standing, dusting himself off, he was spellbound by fields of rustling grass. By ripples on the river he’d swum as a boy. By the mountain crowned with clouds, thick and rich as Norwegian ermine. From a distance, his gaze had fallen upon the longhouse at Hlíðarendi, so they say, which he’d built with his own hands. Next to the fields of barley, the deep green turf roof had sat like fresh seaweed in a bed of golden sand.
Fair is the hillside. Fairer it seems than I have ever seen before…
That, so they say, was the clincher. A farm, no more beautiful than any other in the region, and no less. As productive as the next ones, but no more. A cluster of buildings, rectangles of peat and straw and driftwood clapboards. Nothing impressive. That is what convinced the exiled man to stay. To open himself to attack. To wax poetic in the face of fate.
But Hallgerðr knew her third husband better than that. It wasn’t a few clumps of dirt or mangy livestock or weed-speckled hills that forced Gunnarr off his horse that day, that convinced her Viking not to spend three years plundering his way to Norway and back.
It was honour, that fickle motivator.
It was stupidity.
It was pride.
In all his life, Gunnarr had never fled from a fight.
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The shine on Gunnarr’s reputation dimmed, the day he returned. On that afternoon, Hallgerðr had seen him more clearly than ever before.
In the slump of his shoulders, she saw weakness. In the jut of his jaw, selfishness. In the clench of fingers on bow, revenge.
Yes, Hallgerðr had been glad to see him tethering his favourite roan in the yard. She’d relished the musk of him as he entered the hearth-room. It was wrong that he’d returned, but Hallgerðr had known—far better than sullen Rannveig ever could—that Gunnarr was where fate had deemed he should be.
Here, at Hlíðarendi, with her.
Here, where she could repay him what he was owed.
“The horses are ready, Hallgerðr,” Rannveig calls now, a note of triumph in her tone. “Grani is waiting with them; hope you’ve packed him some rags. Högni will stay with me—won’t you, child? Let those two go together, the traitor and the greed-driven boy.” Hallgerðr hadn’t noticed her first son’s return, but she hears his faint assent. Typical. Högni hasn’t the guts to challenge his elders.
Unlike his father. For months, Gunnarr had flaunted his outlawry, his bold presence at Assemblies both impressing and incensing the gathered chieftains. He’d had a Viking’s nerve, her husband—and for a while folk were too afraid to attack him. But as the weeks passed, half-hearted grumblings had flared into full-blown affront. Spurred by long-simmering grudges, over a dozen men had advanced on Hlíðarendi, spears pointed at the high-day sun. The horses’ hoofs tore across partly-mown fields, hastening when their riders realised Gunnarr was at home alone.
Well, he hadn’t truly been alone.
Hallgerðr closes her eyes, prays for a half-breath of silence. Not until he is enclosed in his cairn will Gunnarr ever know what it means to be on his own.
Hallgerðr was here, at her husband’s side, when Þórgrímr climbed onto Hlíðarendi’s roof. She’d been here when Gunnarr had eviscerated the Norwegian, shoving the point of his spear-tipped halberd up through the soft turf above their sleeping-loft, between the rafters, then between the struts of Þórgrímr’s ribs. She’d been here when Gunnarr had leapt down to the main hall, where Rannveig had hurriedly opened the windows, and he’d shot arrows through the blank squares with such skill his attackers had been forced to withdraw. Once, twice, thrice the troop had advanced, and each time they’d been beaten back. Yes, Hallgerðr had beheld it all.
Through a gap in the shutters, she’d seen frustration in the men’s flushed faces, their fury, their impotence, and she’d sympathised. She’d understood.
All of them, at one time or another, loved Gunnarr as much as she did. They’d witnessed his feats in battle, his prowess, his boundless luck in horse-fighting and sailing and husbandry. They’d seen him deal incredible blows, seen him kill, heard him talk his way out of trouble. It took twelve, or twenty, or thirty of them to match Gunnarr Hámundarson. Dozens to bring him low, dozens more to serve him his due.
Dozens of men, Hallgerðr thinks, or one woman.
“Give me two strands of your hair,” Gunnarr had said. Hallgerðr hears his strong voice, even now. Fearless, firm, echoing out of his grave. “Give me two strands of your hair,” he said, when the attackers had finally prised the roof off the house, when they’d begun to rain dirt and arrows down on them, when Gunnarr’s matchless bowstring had snapped. “Give me two strands of your hair,” he’d said then, as if Hallgerðr owed him, “and twist them together to make a new string for me.”
What more can I give you, she had wanted to shout. What more than years? Two strong sons? Countless opportunities to increase your prestige and honour? A welcome bed? A full larder, even when others starved? This last still rankled most, and though Rannveig had sneered at Hallgerðr from the corner in which she’d hid, though Gunnarr had already been bloodied from two shallow wounds, though his bow was damaged and his halberd useless against enemy missiles, Hallgerðr had raised a hand to her flushed cheek, remembering.
“My life depends on it,” he’d said, panic slicing his warrior-calm. “They will never get at me as long as I can use my bow.”
“In that case,” Hallgerðr had replied, the words rampaging like trolls from her lips, unstoppable. “In that case, I’ll remind you of the slap you gave me, which I’d promised never to forget. Consider us even.”
Hallgerðr can’t describe the expression on her third husband’s face, though its image has kept her awake for two nights. While his mother yammered about stinginess and shame, Gunnarr’s eyes had glinted—let no one say he wept!—and the mouth Hallgerðr had kissed countless times disappeared beneath the beard she’d never grown tired of touching.
“Every man has his limits,” he’d had said at last. “And his pride. I won’t ask again.”
If only you had, Hallgerðr thinks, twisting the last tight cords of long hair into Gunnarr’s bow. There would have been an apology in that asking. There would have been an acknowledgement—of what? Hallgerðr has thought on it for days, but still isn’t certain. All she knows is she wishes, fervently, that he had asked again. Just once more.
“Get out of my house,” Rannveig screams now, standing in a dried pool of her son’s blood. Every ounce of her energy is now devoted to standing, marking her son’s death, holding his weapon, screeching at his killer.
Hallgerðr gathers the bow, checks the balance. Perfect, she thinks, then tests the hair-string. It’s flexible but tense. Powerful. Strong as her need to give it to Gunnarr. To place it whole in his callused hands. To see him use it, one more time. Yes, Hallgerðr wants that more than anything.
And it is not wrong to want.
“For So Great a Misdeed” by Lisa L. Hannett