The Sword at Her Door

The cold came up through the floor of the store-room like water through a hull, and Aslaug Thorsteinsdottir stood in it with the keys at her belt and counted what was left of the winter.

Not much. That was the short answer, and she had known it before she came down the dark passage from the hall with a horn lantern in her fist, but there was a difference between knowing a thing in the belly and knowing it in the eye, and so she made herself look. The grain was in the far bins, under lids weighted with beach-stones against the rats, and Onund had drawn the lids back so she could see the level of it: barley gone grey and dusty at the top, rye beneath, the good stuff at the bottom that they were not eating yet because you did not eat the seed-corn until the seed-corn was all there was between you and the grave. She dug her hand in past the wrist. It was cold and dry and it whispered when it ran off her fingers, and it did not come up to her elbow the way it should have in the dark of the year.

"Days," she said. "Give it to me in days, Onund. Not sacks."

The old steward stood at her shoulder with the tally-sticks bundled in a thong, notched hazel wands the length of a forearm, one for every debt the hall held and every debt the hall owed. He was near seventy and bent as a bill-hook and he had kept the reckoning of this hall since before Aslaug was a bride in it, since her Vigmund was a boy, and there was no man living whose word on a number she trusted more.

He wet his thumb and thought. "Grain to the calends of the sowing-month, if we eat as we eat now. Past that—" He turned a hand palm-up. "Past that we eat less, or we eat the beasts, or we do not eat."

"And the households."

"Eleven that still come to the door." He drew a stick from the bundle without looking, the way another man might find his own knife in the dark. "Thorgeir's widow, Gudrun—her folk we've fed since the blood-month, and it's her the whole of the fjord watches to see whether the hall keeps its word to the small. Then the two thrall-families at the boat-strand. Then Kari One-Hand and his. Then—"

"I know the rest." She did. She could have said them off in her sleep, and did, some nights, lying in the bed-closet with the great empty bed cold on the far side of her and the húskarl's breathing steady beyond the threshold. Eleven households, and every one of them had come to the door in the autumn with nothing, and every one of them she had taken in, because a hall that lets its dependants starve is a hall that will not stand to the spring, and because—she was honest with herself, here in the cold where no one could see her face—because each mouth she fed was a mouth that would speak for her when speaking mattered. She had learned that. She had learned it the hard way, the winter Vigmund died, when she found out how quickly loyalty thawed once the man who commanded it was under the howe.

So she bought it. That was the truth of the keys at her belt, and she had stopped flinching from the truth of it around midwinter. She bought loyalty the way you bought anything—with what you had, and what she had was grain, and a warm floor, and promises. The grain was running out. The promises were not; she could make those forever, and she hated the ease of it, hated the way a soft word came to her tongue now smooth as tallow. You'll not want while the hall stands. She had said it to Gudrun's eldest not three days gone, with her hand on the girl's shoulder and her voice full of a warmth she did not feel, and the girl had gone away comforted, and Aslaug had stood in the doorway afterward and thought: that was a lie weighed out in barley I do not have.

A bond bought is a bond that lasts exactly as long as the price. She knew that too. She simply had nothing else to spend.

"The owings-out," she said. "Read me those."

Onund shifted the bundle, found another wand, ran a yellowed nail down the notches. Silver owed to the hall from three seasons of trading and lending, some of it good, some of it she would never see. And against it the hall's own debts, weighed out in hack-silver and reckoned in grain and in the year's wool—what she owed the fjord's freeholders for the timber floated up in the autumn, what stood open to a chapman down at the trading-strand who had carried her word south on the whale-road and might, for all she knew, be drinking her credit away in Hedeby this very night. Numbers. She held them in her head the way a steersman holds a coast, and none of them, turned any way she turned them, came out to enough.

Behind her, in the mouth of the passage, someone let a breath out through his nose—that small, contented, unpleasant sound a man makes when another's trouble sits well with him. She did not need to turn. She knew the tread, and she knew the breathing, and she knew the particular pleasure Eyvind Skeggason took in watching her count what was not there.

"Cold work, sister," he said, coming down into the lantern-light. Vigmund's brother, red-bearded and narrow, with their father's bones in his face gone mean where in Vigmund they had gone kind. He wore his grievance the way other men wore an arm-ring, out where it caught the light. "A hall's stores are a heavy thing to keep in a woman's two hands. My brother, gods keep him, never made you count in the dark alone. He had men for it. He had—" a glance at Onund, dismissive—"younger men."

"He had you, you mean," Aslaug said, and did not sharpen it. She had learned that too, this winter: how to take his hooks and set them down flat, so they had nothing to catch on. "You're kind to remember him. Take a stick, then, if you'll help count. Onund's hands are old."

Eyvind did not take a stick. He never did. He wanted the hall the way a boy wants a thing another child is holding, wanted it as his by right of blood and manhood both, and he wanted her to know he was owed and cheated, but he did not want to lift the wands and learn how little was under the lids. Grievance is lighter carried empty.

"You should think," he said, softer, "on what's easy and what's hard. A widow holds a hall the way a man holds a coal in his fist—it can be done, for a while. But your hand blisters, sister. Everyone by the fjord can see the blister forming." He smiled at her, almost gently, and it was the gentleness that she minded, because there was a kind of truth in it and he knew there was. "There are men who'd take the coal from you and call it a mercy."

"Then it's well I've a húskarl who watches the door," Aslaug said, "and a steward who watches the grain, and no need of mercy from any man who'd measure it out to me by the spoonful." She turned the lantern so the light swung across his face and made him blink. "Was there a thing you came down to say, Eyvind, or only to breathe at my back while I work?"

He opened his mouth. What he might have said she never learned, because that was the moment the boy came.

She heard him on the passage-stair first, the quick clatter of a half-grown foot that has forgotten to be careful, and then he was in the store-room mouth with the cold still steaming off his cloak and his face raw and wide-eyed—Toki, one of the boat-strand thralls' sons, whom she kept at the watch-fire on the headland because he had sharp eyes and no place better. He had run the whole way down. She could see it in him. He got the words out in one breath, the way you throw something you are afraid to hold.

"Lady—there's a ship on the water. Come up past the skerries with the tide. Big. Full of men." He swallowed. "And she's not a chapman, lady. She's flying no trade-flag. Old Svein says—Svein says he knows the beast at the prow, he's seen her south, he says she's Halfdan Ulfsson's, and there's law-men aboard her, he saw the white staves, and shields on the rail, and more than—more than the oars need to row her."

The store-room went very quiet. The grain whispered once more off the edge of a bin and was still.

Aslaug did not move for the space of three breaths. She was aware of Onund gone motionless beside her with the tally-sticks bundled against his chest; aware of Eyvind, and of the thing that came up in Eyvind's face and that he was not quick enough to hide—not surprise. Something nearer to a man's satisfaction when the game-piece he has been waiting for finally comes onto the board. He knew, she thought, cold and clear, the way she saw a coast. Or he hoped. It's the same to me.

Halfdan Ulfsson. She knew the name the way everyone by the whale-road knew it: a hersir south of the fjord's mouth, ring-heavy, well-followed, a man who bought up debts the way a strong man buys up land, quietly, so that one day you woke and found you had been his tenant for a season without knowing the roof had changed hands. A man who had sent no word ahead. Who came in the dead of the starving year, before the thaw could bring other ships to the fjord and other eyes to watch what he did—came with armed men, and with law-men, so that whatever he meant to take he could dress as a thing taken lawfully.

He had not come to trade. You did not carry law-men to trade.

"How far out?" she asked, and her voice came level, which was a small thing to be proud of and she was proud of it anyway.

"An hour of rowing, lady. Less, with the tide under them."

An hour. She set the lantern down on the lid of the seed-bin, slow, so her hand would not shake in front of the boy, in front of Eyvind, in front of the grain that would not last and the eleven households that would watch to see whether the hall held. She laid her palm flat over the keys at her belt—iron warm from her own body, the only warm thing in that cold room—and she felt the whole reckoning shift under her the way a floe shifts underfoot, all her careful sums of days and mouths and silver knocked into a single new column with a single new name at the head of it.

"Onund," she said. "Bind up your sticks. Toki—well run; go warm yourself, and say nothing to the households yet." She drew a breath of the cold air and let it steady her. "And send someone to the fold to fetch Thordis. Tell her there's a ship."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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