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Broken Meats in Upsala
Styrbiorn slept the night after that banquet a sleep tumultuous with visions. In sleep, he rode a swift horse through lands silent and unpeopled, white with moonlight. He rode now through fires, as it were Brynhild’s fiery girdle about Skatalund, and now down deep wooded valley-slopes of darkness, where the young leafage brushed his hair and lips and hands as he passed. Then, in the swirling about of the visions which belonged to that unquiet slumber, he seemed to behold suddenly Sigrid the Queen naked before him in a whiteness of blinding brilliance; with the glory of which sight, sleep broke, and he opened his dazzled eyes on lamplight, and on Sigrid indeed in very presence standing beside his bed, but cloaked in her great scarlet cloak lined with swansdown.
She stood there by his feet, holding the lamp high. Her eyes were large and shining. Beholding him awake, she said, “I slept ill, and the whim took me to see if thou didst sleep tonight. I would not have waked thee.” Her breath caught as she spoke.
Styrbiorn rose sharply on his two elbows. His eyes, broad awake now, were fixed on her. And there was in that look, and in the whole frame of him, a tenseness like as is in a bowstring stretched. His face, flushed with sleep, took while he looked a yet darker red.
“This would I know,” he said, and his speech came hoarse and stumbling: “is it with the King’s leave thou goest o’ these night-walkings?”
Sigrid’s mouth hardened. She gave him an odd look from half-closed eyelashes, then, daintily as a seagull settles on the sea, sat down at the far end of the bed. Styrbiorn’s stillness was like the stillness of great clouds brooding before the lightning.
After a little he said, “Come nearer.”
Sigrid marked his voice, and the look of him. These things gave her a delicate pleasure, as of dangerous steering round a rocky headland in a strong sailing breeze blowing on the land. “O no,” said she. “I can hear thee very well so.”
Styrbiorn moved a little. “Why needest thou have waked me out of my dream? Shall I not have atonement of thee for that, Sigrid? Shall I tell thee,” he said, and his voice came like that light and sudden wind that sets a-quiver the leaves before a storm, “what I was a-dreaming on?” With that, he would have caught her into his arms; but she was a wary steersman, too swift for this gust of his, sudden though it was, and was leapt up and out of the door ere he could reach her. Styrbiorn, barefoot, guided by the leaping flicker of the windblown lamp, overtook her at her own door, flung himself in betwixt door and doorpost before she might shut him out, and had her in a moment alone with him in her own chamber, trapped.
The Queen stood facing him between the bed-head and the wall. She had set the lamp on a shelf, shoulder-high on her left, and stood there rigid, cloaked to the eyes in her great scarlet mantle, her eyes fierce and bright, like some beautiful beast brought to bay, her breath coming and going in pants. She did not speak. Styrbiorn abode some paces off, by the closed door. He reached a hand behind him, fumbling for the bolt, found it, and shot it softly home. He abode there silent, his hand still on the bolt, leaning towards her as the setting moon leans towards the sea. So for a minute’s space they face one another, Styrbiorn and the Queen, alone with the lamplight and its shifting shadows: with the velvet dark (with here and there a faint star shimmering) that filled the window above the Queen’s bed with the silence of night, so deep that each seemed to hear the other’s heartbeats: night, that is of kin with those shadowy-visaged and iron-handed Fates that lay men at their length: summer night, and the glittering of her eyes and his in the beams of the watchful lamp.
Styrbiorn came a step nearer to her, his gaze fixed, like a sleepwalker, saying, hardly above his breath, “Sigrid.” She neither spoke nor moved, but abode as if fascinated. Like the passing shadows of the moon, so silently he drew towards her, or like some motion of those grey Fates, or of things drawn by them blindly. He was kneeled now at her feet, his arms locked about her above her knees. The Queen rested motionless, only he felt the quivering of her flank under the rich mantle where his cheek was pressed. Styrbiorn lifted his eyes to her face; and now time past and time to come went for him clean away out of mind and caring, so that he was ware now no longer of any other thing save only of her: the perfume of her presence, her lips that parted a little, her eyes that looked down on him dark and wide. His hands reached upward and, as if afraid all should on the motion vanish in air, paused, scarcely touching her either shoulder. She, still gazing on Styrbiorn out of her eyes’ unsounded darks, suddenly let slip with a noble and divine grace her great red mantle, and stood there in her white loveliness before him.
The night wore now, and the stars moved on, and those unseen powers which weave the web of destiny threw the shuttle yet again, and Styrbiorn, with his wits now awake again, looked and beheld in the lamplight stretched at his side there Sigrid the Queen, and, in his mind’s eye, that which he had this night accomplished. He leaped from the bed.
The Queen, startled so out of her sweet and pleasant dreams, sat up, first in amaze: then, meeting her lover’s wild and unfriendly regard, her proud face darkened and she rendered him back look for look in that kind. He turned with a sudden blundering twist of the body; but she was, as for this time, the swifter, and, leaping up and catching her cloak about her, stood betwixt him and the door. He swerved sidelong from her and came heavily against the wall, face to the wall, his eyes buried in his great hands.
The Queen beheld him awhile in silence. “It is likely thou art some churl’s son,” said she at length; “or some changeling. No man of kingly blood would carry it thus, after honours the like of which I’ve done thee: more’s the pity.”
Styrbiorn moved like a blinded man towards the door; then, finding her in the way, gave back a pace. Then he said, yet with eyes averted and in alien and hard tones half-choked, “Let me go, Sigrid.”
“I’ll let thee go,” said she, “when thou speakest to me like my noble kinsman, not like a baseborn thrall.”
For a moment he paused as if doubting what were best to do, then lifted up his head and strode forward as if he were minded to thrust her aside by force. At hands’-reach he halted. The ghastliness of his look as he stood and looked upon her took from her for a minute all power of thought or motion. Then he opened his mouth and said, “What have I to do with thee, a faithless bitch?”
With that, he turned from her, catching in his two hands the pillars of the bed. Under the grip of his hands and the weight of him flung between them the great oak pillars shook and creaked. He turned again, dazed yet with this nightmare, steadying himself yet with one hand by the pillar of the bed. He looked at her now with eyes like some dog’s eyes asking to be let out: naught else matters.
But the Queen faced him, back to the door, staring. Under the injury of those words she had moved not an eyelid. But instant by instant she seemed stonier grown; her face whitened, even to the lips; and then the blood flooded back terribly. She said in a low tone, the words even and steady like water dropping and clear as the clicking of blades, “But this shall be thy death, then.” Therewith so loud shrieked Sigrid the Queen that the cups rang on the wall and the geese screamed in the King’s garth.
She gave him way now: but he was not quicker in the doorway than those women of hers, hearing this larum, and others running. Styrbiorn, thrusting past them like one straught of his right wits, butted into old Thorgnyr three paces without the Queen’s chamber-door. He swerved past the old man, and Helgi caught at him. He smote Helgi so good a whirt on the ear as laid him out senseless. Styrbiorn came so to his own chamber, yet not so well but that Thorgnyr and Helgi and some four or five women of the Queen’s had seen him in such sort rush out from the Queen’s bedchamber.
Eric the King came now, roused by that great cry, cloaked and with bare sword in one hand and a lamp in the other, along the passage to the Queen’s chamber. They gave back all before him to right and left: not one, neither Thorgnyr nor any other, took heart to speak word to him, but gave back and let him by. He came in, looked on her an instant, then shut to the door behind him. Sigrid fell down at his feet and clasped him about the knees in a great passion of tears. The King suffered that to have its course. Choking and sobbing she let him understand little by little to what vile use his darling nephew, lust-burned and ale-heated, had by violence turned her. The King heard all out, silent and without sign or stir, looking down the while on her head bowed and shaken with her sobbing and crying, on the nape of her neck where the first little hairs shadowed the white skin with their prettily curled growth, and, where her cloak opened at the throat, on that sweet and shadowy place where her breasts pressed one against the other like two doves perched together on the edge of a roof. When she had told her tale, she looked up in his face and cried and said, “Lord, why didst thou leave me?”
Like a great tower and big the King stood over her. He said nothing: only lifted up his jaw a little and so stood looking steadily before him over her head, with set face. Sigrid, frighted with his coldness, rose up, clinging her arms now about his neck, shivering and weeping with her face hidden on the King’s breast. Stone still he stood. His face looked drawn and hard, awful to look on, unsearchable as the brow of night, and sad like the sea under a winter dawn. At length, coming out of that study, he looked down at her again, gently loosed her hands from about his neck and without word said went from the chamber. Sigrid, looking at his face, deemed it wholesomer to speak no word but let him go.
A bleak greyness of morning began now to pale their lamps and the last embers of the long fires in the King’s hall. In a little while there came a man to Thorgnyr from the King bidding him come and see the King straightway. Thorgnyr went, and found the King sitting armed in his chair with a drawn sword laid across his knees. The King looked at him a long time in silence. Thorgnyr stood with head bowed. At length the King said, “Let me see thy face, Thorgnyr.” That old man raised his eyes and looked the King in the face. After a minute the King spake again and said, “Forty years hast thou been my man. It is well that thou shouldst know my mind.” And he said, “Of these things that have this night befallen I will have no man speak to me, neither thou nor another, on pain of death. For the Queen, every woman should be forgiven once. For Styrbiorn, thou shalt go thyself and find him and say unto him that he shall have free way out of the Swede-realm so he be gone this very day. But if ever he shall come into the land again so long as I be alive, or shall come anigh me, that shall be his death.”
Thorgnyr said naught, looking on the King from under the dark eaves of his brows. His lean hands twitched a little. Then he spoke, “You have sometimes thought I played for mine own hand, Lord, and not for yours. Will you not see him?”
“If I should see him,” answered the King, “that should be his death. Go thou, and do my bidding.”
Thorgnyr went out from before the King. There was great stir throughout the house, and a noise of horses in the King’s garth. Thorgnyr went out into the garth and came upon Styrbiorn as he went a-horseback, and his Jomsburgers were mounting round about him on every side. Thorgnyr came close to Styrbiorn, so that none might hear save the twain of them, and gave him the King’s message neither adding aught to it nor taking aught away. Styrbiorn had the look of a man stupid for sleeplessness during many nights. Thorgnyr, knowing not for sure if he had heard the message aright, spake it over again word by word. But Styrbiorn answered and said, “I heard thee very well. Thou hast gotten the goal, then. What need to trattle more on’t?” Therewith he swung his leg into the saddle and, without looking back or giving further heed to Thorgnyr, rode with his men out of the King’s garth and out of Upsala southward to the sea.