The Widow's Champion

The barley came off the home field in long swathes that morning, and Thyri Ketilsdottir walked the stubble behind her reapers counting what the weather owed her.

Three dry days. That was the debt. Three dry days to get the grain stooked and carted before the autumn rains came off the sea and turned a year's bread to black rot in the field. The sky over the fjord was a high, thin blue with mare's-tails streaking in from the west, and mare's-tails meant rain inside two days, whatever the old men by the fire said. So she walked the rows, and where a swathe lay ragged she said so, and where a stook leaned she set her shoulder to it and squared it herself, because a thing done under her own hands was a thing done.

"You cut too high on the slope," she told Grim, her overseer, who had been her husband's overseer and had needed two years to learn that the farm's voice now came from under a linen headcloth. "There's a hand's-breadth of straw standing that the sheep could have had."

"The scythes were dull by the slope, mistress."

"Then whet them before the slope. Not after." She said it without heat. Heat was waste. She had learned that the winter Sigfus died, when there had been heat enough in her to burn the district and nothing for it to do but eat her hollow. Cold words got the same work done and cost nothing.

Grim ducked his head and went. He was a good man, slow-moving and honest, and like every man on the steading he watched her sidelong now and then with the same unspoken question: how long. How long would the widow hold the high seat alone. How long before some brother of the dead husband, some suitor, some claim off a law-man's tongue pried her loose from land that a woman held the way a gull holds a cliff ledge — by grip and weather's mercy.

Four years she had been giving them the same answer. As long as I breathe.

She was in the yard with grain dust in her sleeves and a tally of cartloads in her head when the riders came.

Ranveig saw them first, from the byre door — six horses on the shore track, coming easy, no hurry in them at all. It was the no-hurry that Thyri marked. Raiders hurried. Neighbours with a strayed cow hurried, or at least fussed. Men who came slow and comfortable up your own track, in the middle of your own harvest, were men who believed the ground already belonged to them.

"Fetch my keys," Thyri said. The keys hung at her belt already; what she meant was fetch the household, and Ranveig, who had kept Thyri's hall since before Thyri was its lady, understood and went. By the time the horses came off the track and onto the beaten earth of the yard, Thyri stood before her own door with her people about her — Grim with a whetstone still in his fist, the reapers drifting in from the field, two thrall-boys gone big-eyed by the woodpile. Witnesses of her own, for whatever this was.

The man who rode first was worth looking at, and knew it. Thirty or a little past, a green cloak pinned with silver worked in the southern fashion, a sword at his hip with a hilt that had never gone dull in a scabbard's dark. He rode a grey mare that must have cost a farm's yearling crop and he sat her like a man sitting his own bench. Fair-bearded, clean, smiling. He swung down without waiting for her word and stood in her yard smiling that open, warming smile, and Thyri felt her spine set the way it set before she threw a man.

Behind him, five others. Two were housecarls with the shoulders and the flat eyes of the trade. Two she knew: Thorvald of the Ridge and old Onund Crow, bondi of the district, neither of them friends of hers nor enemies — men of standing, men whose word would be taken at the thing-stead. The sixth was a thin fellow with ink-stained fingers folded before him like a Christian priest at prayer, and he had the look of a man who kept other men's words in his head for pay.

Witnesses. He had brought witnesses of the law's own kind. Whatever came next had been built beforehand, joint by joint, like a roof.

"Thyri Ketilsdottir." The smiling man's voice carried, pitched for the yard and not for her. "I am Eyvind Snorrason. My father held Marram-slope and the valley farms north of it; you will know the name."

"I know the name." Snorri's brood, from the north where the land ran to money and the money ran to law. "You're a long ride from your own hay, Eyvind Snorrason. And I am in the middle of mine, so name your business and I'll not keep you."

"Direct." His smile widened as if she had given him a gift. "They told me you were direct. It is a fine quality in a woman, whatever's said."

"My business," Thyri said, "is barley. Name yours."

Eyvind turned a little, taking in the yard — the fat byre, the new-raised drying frames, the hall with its carved doorposts that Sigfus's grandfather had shipped in from Trondheim — the way a man takes in a horse at market. Not coveting. Appraising. Coveting at least would have been honest.

"This is my business," he said pleasantly. "This farm. I hold that Aldis Grimkelsdottir, my father's mother, was cheated of her lawful share of this land when it passed to old Hrafnkel's line three generations back. The documents of it, such as the men of that day left, are in my keeping, and Hallstein here" — the ink-fingered man bowed — "can recite the descent of the claim to any who ask. I have come to give you fair warning of the suit, as the law likes, before witnesses. That is courtesy."

For a moment Thyri almost laughed. She had been braced for raiders, for fire, for some ugliness of the body, and this — three generations, a grandmother, a share — was so bloodless it was nearly funny.

"Your grandmother's grievance is older than my father's teeth," she said. "There's no man alive who witnessed that settlement, and no court that will unwind three generations of lawful holding for a northern purse's convenience. Take your suit to the autumn assembly if it amuses you. Bring your ink-man. I'll bring the district's memory, and we'll see which weighs."

"You may be right." Eyvind said it easily, agreeably, a man conceding the weather. "Suits are slow, and memory is stubborn, and lawful holding is a wall I might break my purse against for three assemblies running. Which is why I do not offer suit." He paused, exactly as long as a skald pauses. "I offer holmgang."

The yard went quiet. Somewhere behind the byre a ewe called, stupid and ordinary, and the sound fell into the quiet like a stone down a well.

"I challenge for the claim," Eyvind said, in the carrying voice, the one for the witnesses, and now the words had the ring of something learned by heart, or written by the man with inked fingers. "Land against land. My claim on this farm, staked against the farm entire. And as the law allows when the holder of disputed land is a widow without son or brother to stand for her — I name the widow's hand among the stakes. If the field falls to me, I take the farm, and the lady with it, honourably, to wife. If the field falls to her champion, my claim dies, and I will pay atonement for the trouble in silver, before these same witnesses. Thorvald and Onund have heard the terms. Hallstein holds the wording."

Each piece set down like a merchant counting rivets. And each piece lawful — that was the thing she understood before her mind had finished walking around it. She had sat through enough assemblies beside Sigfus, and after him alone, holding her seat by wit and stubbornness in a booth full of men who spoke past her. She knew the sound of law worked the way a poacher works a snare. The claim did not need to be good. The claim needed only to be nameable, and the challenge did the rest, because refusing holmgang was forfeit, and forfeit meant the stakes passed unfought.

Her farm. Her hand. Her body in the bride-bed of this smiling appraiser, all of it wrapped and knotted in the same clean words the law used for honest things.

"The claim is dung," she said. "You know it. Your ink-man knows it. You built it to be challenged on, not to be tried."

"The law does not ask whether a claim is beautiful," Eyvind said. "Only whether it is made in form. It is made in form."

The rage came up her body slow and cold, from the ground, the way it had come the day they carried Sigfus up from the shore. Four years she had held this place. She had buried a husband — hauled dead out of the surf with his lungs full of the fjord, three days after their wedding-month ended its second year, and she had stood at the grave-ale white and dry-eyed while his kin measured her with their looks. She had faced down two of those kinsmen the following spring when they came sniffing after the high seat, and thrown the bolder one bodily off her threshold, and the district had laughed at him for a season and then, slowly, stopped laughing at her. She had lambed ewes with her own arms in sleet, priced wool against Trondheim traders who thought a woman's arithmetic soft, drilled herself in the fold behind the hill every week of every year with the shield and the axe and the ugly, patient craft her father had hammered into her when the sea took his sons — someone of my blood will know how to hold her ground, girl, and it seems the gods mean it to be you.

Her own two hands. Everything she had, she held with her own two hands, and here stood a man arranging to take it with a word-snare, in her own yard, in the middle of her own harvest, smiling.

She stepped forward. Her people saw it; Grim made a small sound in his throat.

"Then answer for it in form," she said. "You have named holmgang on my ground, before my household. Good. I answer it. I'll meet you on the holm myself, Eyvind Snorrason — axe and shield, three shields apiece if you like the old rules, and your ink-man can write down how you fare against a woman you came to buy like a heifer. I have thrown better men than your hirelings off this land with my bare hands. Ask in the district if I lie."

She watched the housecarls go carefully blank. She watched Onund Crow wince. And she watched Eyvind Snorrason's smile deepen — deepen with real pleasure, the first true thing he had shown her — and understood, one heartbeat before he said it, that she had walked precisely where he had built the road.

"They told me that too," he said, almost gently. "That you drill in secret like a man, that you have a hard hand and a harder tongue. I confess it is half of why I chose this farm and not another." He shook his head, rueful, kind, monstrous. "But you know the law as well as Hallstein does, I think. The circle is closed to women. No woman may stand on the holm; the challenge falls to her champion — her kinsman, or any free man willing to bear her cause for love or silver. You have no son. You have no brother. You have no husband." He let that word stand a moment in the harvest air. "So find a man to stand in the hazel poles for you within the law's term — the duel to be fought at the autumn assembly, six weeks hence, before the lawspeaker. Or forfeit, and I will have what I have named without any blood at all. I would honestly prefer it so. I am not a cruel man, Thyri Ketilsdottir. I am a thorough one."

He mounted the grey mare without haste. The witnesses turned their horses; Thorvald would not meet her eye, and old Onund gave her a look that might have been pity, which was worse.

"Six weeks," Eyvind said from the saddle, warm as a wedding guest. "Get your harvest in first. Whoever holds this farm at Yule will thank you for it."

They went down the track at the same easy, unhurried walk. Thyri stood in her yard with her people silent around her and the grain dust still on her sleeves, and above the fjord the mare's-tails thickened, promising rain.

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

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