The Half-Drowned King

“I should change that,” said Ronhild. She unwrapped the wound, releasing whiffs of body scents, the tang of blood and heat of healing, but no smell of putrefaction. She set his hand gently on his belly, palm up. Ragnvald wriggled onto his elbows so he could look at it without moving it too much and saw a shiny ridge of brown and blistered skin crossing the flesh. Someone had burned it closed and driven the evil from it. He leaned back on his pillow and sighed.

It hurt distantly when Ronhild rebandaged the hand. Ragnvald recognized the fuzzy feeling in his head now, no longer fever but strong drugs to dull pain.

“My thread,” said Ragnvald. He barely had a voice. Ronhild put a cup of water to his lips, and Ragnvald remembered her son doing that, Harald, gentle and kind for a moment. Then a moment of uncertainty, when Ragnvald had voiced his questions, the darkness of his thoughts. “My thread must have been measured longer. I have been saved for your son.”

“I think you have,” she said.

“Have you seen anything? Can you prophecy my fate?”

“I have seen your hand, torn, bloody, and full of evil,” she said, “and none had known you were injured before battle. I do not have to prophecy to see that you will drive yourself to your death, because you trust yourself too much and your friends too little.”

That sounded like something Hakon had said to him. Ragnvald shook his head. “But you are a sorceress,” he insisted. “Can you prophecy for me? Did the gods save me to protect your son?”

“If you believe it so, you do not need prophecy, only follow your will. Most men are better off not knowing, for if they knew their wyrd, they would be frightened of it.”

“I am not frightened.”

“Then I will tell you: you will give up everything for my son, and when you have nothing left to give, you will give up your life as well.” She tucked in the end of his bandage, placed his hand back under the blankets, and took a deep breath, seeming human for the first time. “That is what I see for you,” she added.

“I have already tried to do that once. It does not surprise me that I will again.”

“I know. You do not need to seek death, for it will come to you.”

“There are things I need to do first,” said Ragnvald. This conversation seemed half like a dream, his words as fated as everything that had come before.

“Yes,” said Ronhild. “Your land. Your revenge. Your wife.” She looked sad when she named those things, and Ragnvald thought he knew why, with the clarity that the lack of fever had brought: those might be among the things he would lose to Harald, before he lost his life.

“Drink this, and sleep.” She pressed a cup to his lips. Her potion floated him away, this time on a calm and buoyant sea, a pleasant, warm sea that had never existed in the Norse lands.

*

When Ragnvald woke again, he was hungry, and as soon as he ate, his strength began to return. He walked slowly around the camp with Oddi, who told him what had happened in the week he had missed. Harald, or Guthorm, had won the battle, but Gudbrand had escaped with a fair number of his men.

King Eirik, locked within his fort, continued to refuse parley, so Harald’s men finished building the ramp over the wall. Eirik’s guards never attacked in force. After the ramp was completed, Thorbrand led an attack over the wall. The inner protections were just as fearsome as the outer, he said, with an even deeper ditch before the inner wall, lined with spikes and patrolled by guards as well. They fired arrows into Thorbrand’s massed men. The outer wall guards retreated rather than attacking, which Ragnvald thought wise—the bowmen could do their work for them. Thorbrand quickly called for a retreat back over the outer defenses.

“They have provisions to outlast us, but they don’t have enough men,” Ragnvald mused. “They did not even emerge to take the advantage when we faced Gudbrand’s men.”

“You should tell Guthorm,” said Oddi.

“He must know,” said Ragnvald.

“Perhaps,” Oddi allowed. “But another voice, one that has been right before, would be welcome.”

Ragnvald let Oddi accompany him over to where Guthorm sat with Harald, while they watched the life of the camp, men sharpening daggers, poking at steaming messes that hung over campfires. After they exchanged greetings and good wishes for Ragnvald’s health, Ragnvald told Guthorm what he suspected.

“That seems right,” said Guthorm, once Ragnvald explained his reasoning. “What do you suggest we do?” It was strange to see respect in Guthorm’s eyes now, when only yesterday, in Ragnvald’s time at least, he had been so dismissive.

“Show him we are not afraid to spend our own lives to end his warriors’ lives. Show no mercy. Pursue and kill.”

Guthorm played with one of the gold rings in his beard. He narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said, “though we should not risk our lives needlessly. Yet King Eirik must see us show no caution.” His stern face transformed entirely when he gave Ragnvald a slow, pleased smile. “He must think we would not hesitate to spend our whole army, to take this fort.”

“It is true enough,” said Harald. “I cannot be seen to retreat from a fight, especially at this early stage. If I ever hope to make kings swear to me without a fight, they must think me invincible.”

*

In the next skirmish, Thorbrand poured men over the first wall. Harald was still too injured to fight, but he promised a gold arm ring to any man who brought back the head of one of Eirik’s men, and so a number of fights broke out between his own warriors, once the fighting was done and twenty of Eirik’s men lay dead. Harald’s best warriors had made this sally, and only a few fell.

The following morning, King Eirik emerged from the fort under the flag of truce, with ten guards. He brought a woman with him, of such rich dress and haughty bearing that she could only be his daughter, the famed Princess Gyda. They met with Harald’s party on the open plain, within a bow strike of the walls and Harald’s men. Eirik was a slight, proud man, well-formed, with pretty features that echoed those of his daughter. Her beauty was known throughout Hordaland, and beyond it in the songs of skalds. She bound back her red-gold hair under a narrow fillet, and let it flow in rippling curls down her back. Her dress, dyed a deep blue, made her slanted, elfin eyes look like pools with no ending.

“I will consider swearing to you,” said King Eirik. “You have defeated many Hordaland kings, you say, and since they have not come here to help me, even after I lit the signal fires, I think you must be telling the truth.”

“We killed the men at your signal stations,” said Harald, “but yes, I am. I never lie.”

“What can you offer me, for my allegiance, and the allegiance of the greatest fort in all Hordaland?” King Eirik asked. He wore the richest clothing Ragnvald had ever seen, brightly dyed in stripes of orange and purest white, with gold at his shoulders and wrists. He meant to impress Harald. This display told Ragnvald he had been correct: Eirik had riches but no men.

“What can you offer us,” Guthorm asked, “besides a fort built far away from the coasts it must protect, which needs many men to defend it, men you do not have?”

Linnea Hartsuyker's books