Her eyes gazed through him, a dead woman’s eyes, and he heard her as if from endlessly far away.

Wild is the one you begot,

Who bends to his will the beasts.

Grim and hard his glance,

Which well can tame a wolf.

He could not cry out. He reached but could not lay his arms around her.

She said:

Watch that you ward your life.

Foul is the bird you fathered,

Ill as an owl her soul,

Sweet as a swan her speech.

He sat up in darkness and slept no longer that night.

In the morning he sent for a soothsayer. The housefolk could hear how he forced himself. When the wizard came, the king took him into a loft room and closed the door. Afterward, as he gave him a coil of gold, Hadding said low, “Yes, I had my forebodings.”

XXXI

The home of Gudorm Thorleifsson lay in northwestern Zealand, a day’s ride from Haven. Broad and rich were his grainfields, grasslands, woods, ponds; herds and flocks, fish, and game abounded. Well over a score of free folk lived and worked there, carles, women, children. Even the dozen thralls were well fed and well treated.

The house was long, stoutly timbered, turf-roofed. It and its outbuildings made three sides of a flagged yard. On the fourth side two barns flanked an opening with a gate for defense. Nearby clustered the lesser dwellings of hirelings, and farther off the huts of the thralls.

Northward rose the wood closest by, a thick shaw of mingled oak, beech, elm, and hazel. At its edge, which axes had long since sharply marked off, stood the high barrow of Keldor, founder of steading and family. The household made him an offering at the time of each full moon, a sheaf, a fowl, a piglet, on the holy days a lamb or calf. Otherwise it was looked on as an eerie place and mostly shunned.

Always the garth throbbed and shouted with life. From the milking at dawn to the stabling at dusk, they were busy cleaning, cooking, brewing, chopping, shearing, slaughtering, spinning, dyeing, weaving, nailing, forging, on and on, the tasks of every year and the tasks nobody had foreseen. Footfalls clattered, hoofs thudded, wheels creaked, hammers crashed, voices of human and beast went through smells of smoke, sweat, meat, hides, hay, dung, earth.