Fires blazed the length of the hall, beating back the chill outside. Dried herbs sweetened their smoke. On the trestle boards shone drinking vessels from the treasury, gold, silver, glass; even the horns were banded with costly metals. At the far end, workers had brought in a tub twice as wide as a man is tall and half his height, which they filled with ale. But first the women went pouring Southland wine from pitchers. The carven gods and heroes on the pillars, the woven heroes and beasts on the hangings, seemed to stir amidst the shadows, in the wavering light.

Hunding stood up, his beaker aloft. “Drink we to Freyr, son of Njord, the god whose feast King Hadding did found,” he called.

“Skaal,” rumbled through the sputtering of the fires.

Hunding looked across the hall. “Drink we now to King Hadding, for whom I have kept my high seat open,” he said.

The answer had an undertone of unease. Some of the folk shuddered.

But no ghost came in. And now the servers brought the food, heap after heap of beef, pork, mutton, deer, duck, goose, grouse, swan, salmon, leeks stewed with chicken, wheaten bread, butter, cheese, honey, more and more and more. The drink became mead, Until heads buzzed with the summers that bred it. Talk and laughter went like surf, except when skalds stepped before the king to say forth the praises of him and his friend. He rewarded them freely.

By the time the tables were cleared away, night had fallen outside and everybody was awash. The guests shifted around the floor like the waters in a tide-race, still gripping cup or horn. They gossipped, bantered, boasted, recalled days long ago, wondered about the morrow, forgot what they had been saying, and drifted to something else. Yet if anger flared, someone would quickly step between. For they were in the house of their king, mourning him whom that king had held to be above all others; and they too had been in awe of him.

Hunding got up from his seat. “I will honor him,” he said thickly. “I will myself serve those who’re here to honor him.”

His queen caught at his sleeve. “Stop,” she begged. “You’re being foolish.”

“I am not;” Hunding answered. “I an honoring him.”

He lurched to the tub. Though men and women were dipping from it as they liked, he filled his golden beaker and went about slopping ale into other vessels. Most of it splashed on the floor or onto clothes. Nobody said anything, but they looked. After a while he felt it.

“Whatever you wish,” he said. “Be your own servers if you want. But I, I will bring a drink over to my bath-brother there in the high seat.”

He pushed through the crowd back to the tub. Sticks had burned thin under a log in a fire-trench. They gave beneath it and it crunched downward. Sparks showered. Shadows flooded and ebbed.