Unfit for the Shield

Ten winters ago Bergthora Hallbjarnardottir had shut every bench in the district to her with four words, and Asvor Eyjolfsdottir had come home to call her to the holm for them.

The trader's boat put her ashore at the fjord-head an hour before dark, and she paid the man in hack-silver for carrying her chest up past the tide-line. He weighed it on his own little scales and grumbled at the weight, and she let him grumble. She had last walked down this same shingle with a bundle on her back and nothing in it worth stealing. Now the chest was oak with iron corners, and there were two arm-rings on her arms, and neither of those things had come to her from anyone in this district.

Asvor left the chest above the weed-line with a boy to sit on it and went up to the hall.

It was Winter Nights, and the whole district had come in for it. Smoke stood out of the hof-hall's roof-vents in three grey ropes and lay flat over the fields in the cold, and the yard was full of horses with frost in their manes. Somebody had killed a great many sheep. She could smell the blood still on the slaughter-stones behind the byre, and over it the fat and the smoke of the pits, and over that the sea. Her hands knew the sea better than they knew this yard. She had been away long enough that the smell of a home field made her shoulders tight.

She had dressed for it on the boat, crouched under the sail with the trader's lad pretending not to look. The green wool tunic was the best thing she owned. It was fitted close through the waist and long in the arm, and the tablet-woven bands at the cuffs were red and gold and had cost her a season's share. Close trousers, leg-wraps wound tight, the belt with the silver-mounted seax across the front of her where everyone would see it. Her copper hair was still in the two tight braids she wore at the oar, because she had not wanted to come home looking like a girl who had been to a market. Over all of it the fox-lined cloak, pinned at the shoulder with a ring-headed pin, and the arm-rings showing below the cloak's edge when she moved. The left one was Vebjorn's. He had taken it off his own arm on the strand at Kaupang the autumn she was eighteen and said she had pulled the stroke-oar three days into a headwind without being told. The right was a Hedeby man's, a trading captain with a belly and a temper, given the night she had put his steersman on his back for laying a hand where it was not asked for. Silver did not lie about where it had come from. That was why she had worn them.

The door-wards knew her by her hair before they knew her face. One of them said her mother's name, not hers, and then corrected himself and looked at the rings.

Inside, the heat came at her like a wall of wet wool. The long-fire ran the length of the hall with the pits of meat at either end, and the benches on both sides were packed hip to hip. The goði's high seat stood between its carved posts with the pillar-gods dark with old smoke above it. A skald was on his feet near the fire, working through something about two shield-maidens and a black skerry, and the hall was half listening and half shouting for ale. Dogs under the tables. Children asleep against their mothers in the straw at the walls. Ten winters, and nothing had changed but the faces, and not many of those.

She found a place standing near the door-posts, where the young men who had no bench stood, and she let her eyes go along the hall.

She had meant to look for the goði. She looked instead at the women's bench, and found Bergthora Hallbjarnardottir at once, the way the hand finds a cut.

She had not remembered her rightly. She had remembered the word, and the shape of a tall woman saying it, and she had carried that shape for ten years until it was smooth with handling. The woman on the bench was not smooth. She sat near the high end among the wives of the bigger farms, and she sat taller than all of them, her back straight against the wall-boards and her legs crossed at the ankle under the hem. Her overdress was madder-red, a deep dyed red that the firelight made darker, and it was cut close over a full high bust and gathered at a waist she kept narrow by the belt. The belt was silver-mounted. The keys of her steading hung from it, a heavy ring of them, lying against her thigh. Gilded tortoise brooches held the straps at her shoulders, and between them a string of amber and silver beads that moved with her breath. Her braid was near-black and very long and came over one shoulder into her lap, bound at its end with a ring of silver.

Her right arm lay along her knee. It ended at the wrist in a fitted leather cuff, dark and oiled and shaped to her, and the cuff lay still on the red wool as if it were simply the way an arm was made.

She was laughing at something the woman beside her had said. Not much. One corner of the wide mouth, and the eyes not moving at all. Grey-blue eyes, Asvor remembered now. Grey-blue, and the lines at the corners of them that the years had cut deeper.

Something went down through Asvor's belly and lodged there, low and hot, and she knew it for exactly what it was. She had seen enough women across enough fires in Hedeby and Kaupang to know it by its name. She wanted that one. She wanted the long back and the steady hand, and she wanted to see what that mouth did when it was not laughing politely at some farm-wife's joke. And it was this woman. Of every woman on the whole whale-road it was this one.

She ground her back teeth together until her jaw hurt, and made herself think about the word.

She had been fifteen. It had been this hall, at this same feast, on a night as cold as this one. Her mother was ten years dead by then and her kin had fed her and clothed her and taught her nothing with a blade, and she had taught herself on a hay-fork and a driftwood shield and on every boy in the district who would stand up to her. She had walked down this hall in her cousin's cast-off dress, with her hands wet, and asked the captain of the district's longship for a bench on her in the spring, before the whole district, because her mother had always said that a thing asked in the open is a thing that has to be answered.

He had not answered. He had looked up the bench at Bergthora Hallbjarnardottir, who was not a captain and had not been on a ship since the raid that took her hand, and the whole hall had looked with him, because her word on a fighter was the word that counted in this district, and everyone knew it.

Bergthora had looked at her for the length of a breath. Then she had said, Unfit for the shield, and turned back to her cup.

Four words. That was all it took. The captain had shrugged and said he was sorry for it. In the spring after that, three home captains one after another had turned her away on the strand and given the same reason every time, and it had always been somebody else's reason. Bergthora's word. I can't go against Bergthora's word. Ask her, not me. So before that spring was out she had walked south along the coast until she found a ship that had never heard of Bergthora Hallbjarnardottir, and she had rowed for strangers ever since. Vestfold, Kaupang, Hedeby and home again, and never this home. Ten years of benches she had had to win from men who did not know her name, because the one woman whose word could have given her a name at home had used it to take one away.

The skald came to the end of his song. The two shield-maidens went down still hating, the way they always did in that song, and the hall drummed its cups on the boards.

Asvor walked up the hall.

She did not hurry. The floor was rushes over beaten earth, and her boots made no sound on it, but heads turned anyway, along both benches, the way grass turns ahead of a wind. She heard her mother's name again. She heard her own. Someone said Eyjolf's girl, and someone else, lower, said that's never Asvor, and someone laughed. She went past the long-fire close enough that its heat dried the sea-salt on her cheek. She stopped in the open floor before the high seat, where a person stood to be heard, and she put her left hand on the head of her seax and turned so that she faced the women's bench.

Bergthora had already seen her. The grey-blue eyes were on her face, and there was no surprise in them at all.

"Goði," Asvor said, loud enough for the far end of the hall. "I ask to be heard."

The goði was a heavy, grey, slow man who had held that seat since before she was born. He set his horn down on the arm of the high seat. "You're heard. Say who you are."

"Asvor Eyjolfsdottir. Hlif's daughter. Born in this district and raised in it, and turned out of it ten years since." She lifted her arm a little so that the silver showed. "I've rowed for Vebjorn of Vestfold and for the traders out of Hedeby since then. I've come home to bring a cause."

The hall went quiet in the way of a hall that has realised it is about to be told something it will repeat for years. Even the dogs seemed to stop.

"Bring it," the goði said.

"Ten winters ago I stood here and asked for a bench on a home ship. Before the whole district, in the open, the way a thing should be asked." She looked at Bergthora and nowhere else. "Bergthora Hallbjarnardottir said I was unfit for the shield. She had no ship and no bench to give or keep. She said it because her word was worth more than a captain's, and she knew it was. On that word three home captains turned me off the strand that spring and named her when they did it. I have rowed ten years for strangers on the strength of it."

A man on the near bench said, not quite under his breath, that it was a long time to hold a grudge over a girl's hurt feelings. Somebody else told him to shut his mouth. Along the women's bench the wives had drawn a little closer together around Bergthora, the way women close around one of their own, and the looks they gave Asvor were not kind. She understood them perfectly. Bergthora had held her dead husband's steading alone for nine years and held it well. She had lost a hand for this district's silver on a raid that half the old men in this hall still talked about. And here was Hlif's girl come home off a foreign boat with foreign rings on her, picking a quarrel with a woman who could not hold a cup and a knife at once.

They thought it was shameful. Let them.

"I'm not here for silver," Asvor said. "And I'm not here to be told I was a child and should forget it. I was a child. I haven't forgotten. A famous mouth that takes a name away in front of the whole district can answer for it in front of the whole district." She drew a breath. Her heart was going hard under the green wool, and she was glad of the cloak. "So I call you, Bergthora Hallbjarnardottir. I call you to the holm, to stand inside the hazel-ropes with me and answer with your body for the word you said with your mouth. I call it before the goði and before all of these as witnesses, and I'll not take it back."

Under the formula her voice had not shaken. She was proud of that, afterwards.

For a moment no one spoke. Then the old men began to nod, one and then another, slowly, the way old men nod at a thing done in proper form whether they like it or not. A word given in public was answerable in public. That was older than any of them. She watched it go through the hall, the sympathy staying exactly where it had been, with the woman on the bench, but the cause going over to her side all the same. It was a fair cause, and they knew it, and they did not have to love her for it.

Bergthora uncrossed her ankles.

She stood without using her hands, the madder-red falling straight from her hips, and she was as tall as Asvor had feared, a hand taller than the wives around her and very nearly of a height with Asvor herself. The keys moved at her belt and were still. The cuffed arm hung at her side. She did not put it behind her and she did not put it forward. She came two steps out from the bench into the open floor, so that the long-fire was between them and the light of it was on both their faces, and she looked at Asvor the way Asvor had seen captains look at a new oar on the first morning: down the arms, across the shoulders, at the hands, back to the face.

It went on longer than it needed to. Asvor felt it on her skin as plainly as the heat of the fire. Her nipples drew tight under the wool and she hated that too, and she held the look and did not drop her eyes.

"I said it," Bergthora said. Her voice was low and carried without being raised. "I will answer for it."

That was all. No reason. No you were too young or you were too wild or your mother would not have wanted, nothing Asvor could take hold of and break. Ten years she had waited to hear the reason so she could throw it back, and the woman simply gave her the thing she had asked for and nothing besides, as if the reason were a key on that ring at her belt and she had no intention of taking it off.

Behind Asvor somebody let out a long breath. The goði shifted his weight in the high seat, and the old wood creaked.

"Then hear the law," he said, "since it's Winter Nights, and some of the young ones won't know it." He did not stand. He looked down the hall at the both of them and said it the way it had been said to him, every word in its place. "A challenge called after Winter Nights waits for the spring Thing, and until then the challenger lodges under the challenged woman's roof as her own living surety, so that neither can slip the field and the host answers for her whole."

It took Asvor longer than it should have to understand what she had heard.

Under her roof. Until the spring Thing. The four districts' Thing on the river-field, after the thaw, more than half a year from here. She had known there was a winter law, in the way one knows there is a law about everything, and she had not once thought what it would mean, because she had been thinking for ten years about the word and the hall and this moment and nothing past it. She had thought she would call it and sail. Winter in Hedeby, or at Kaupang, among people who did not know her name, and come back to the field at the thaw.

Instead she would sleep in this woman's hall. Eat from her board. Sit at her hearth every night of the dark half of the year, as her guest by right, and be answered for by her whole.

Someone on the men's bench laughed out loud, and others took it up, and it went round the hall like a cup. It was not cruel laughter. It was the laughter of a district that has just been given its whole winter's talk in one breath.

Asvor kept her face as it was. She looked at Bergthora to see how she had taken it.

Bergthora was looking back at her, and for the first time something had moved in her face. It was not much. It was gone almost as soon as Asvor saw it, a tightening at the corner of the mouth, as though a thought had gone through her that she did not care for. Then it was smoothed away and the grey-blue eyes were as level as the water in the fjord on a still morning.

"My boat goes home at first light," Bergthora said. "Be on the strand."

She turned and went back to the women's bench and sat down, and the woman beside her filled her cup without being asked.

Asvor stood in the open floor a breath longer, because walking away at once would have looked like running. Her hand was still on the seax. Her palm had sweated against the silver. She let go of it and wiped it on her cloak as though she were only settling the fur.

It was then that she noticed the man.

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

Get the e-book