Chapter VIII: The Spae-Wife’s Curse

Thorveig, the mother of Ord and Gudmund, was a grave, heavy woman with thin hair and light eyes, wide open, which seemed always to be looking at things which were not there. They were like dead eyes. The tale says that she knew too much. Certain it is that when Cormac rode to see her, accompanied by his testimony, betimes in the morning--certain it is that she had Ord laid out for burial and Gudmund in bed. She was sitting by the dead when they came to the door. It was covered with a sheet, as it had need to be.

Cormac said what he had to say. “I was attacked from an ambush; I defended myself. It was unprovoked on my part, and well you know it. I offer no atonement nor ransom for this dead man, and I require you to leave our land as soon as may be, and carry yourself and your evil seed elsewhere.”

She watched him, but said nothing. Thorgils added his testimony. “I am with Cormac in this, Thorveig. I know that he did nothing against Ord. If you doubt of that, do you ask Thorkel of Tongue, or his man Narve, who was of the ambush too, but never came to blows. And when Cormac says that you must leave our land, I am with him there also. We will not have enemies at our doors.”

Then Thorveig got up and said: “Ill fall him who takes land from another, but worse fall them who take again what they have freely given. Think not you, Cormac Ogmundsson, to prosper in these ways. True enough you can get me gone from the hundred; like enough you will not ransom my sons. But I have that within me to put me even with you yet. You think you have cleared your way to Stangerd by such doings. You are a fool, then, for you will never have her.”

Cormac looked as if he would laugh at her; but he changed his mind. “The settlement of such a thing is not with you, woman,” he said.

“Ah,” said she, “you are right there. It is with you, and I see it in you, and know it. And this, too, I see: that the foolishest thing you ever did was to fall foul of me and mine. It will come to pass also that you will wish me back at Melstead before many years are gone over. These things I see, but you cannot see. Now get you gone with your friends and leave me with my dead.”

With that she sat down by the covered corpse, and Cormac rode away.

* * * * *

He did not go to Tongue that day, nor the next, though he thought of Stangerd, and never had her out of his mind. He wandered about the country by himself, asking of himself why he did not go to see her. He hungered and thirsted for her; he was sure of that. But it was a new kind of love--it was more than love, or less. It was a craving. He knew what he had felt when he brake open the door of the byre, and took her. He knew that he should feel that again directly he was in her neighbourhood. To look at her with eyes of desire, not with eyes of wonder; to hold her close, to kiss her long; to need, more and more, never to have done--all this she could call out of him now; but, in the doing, she would lose her first power over him, to evoke amazement and delight, to reveal to him glory and power. One thing or the other, but not both. How was it to be? He thought of these things all day and went to bed with them. In the morning he woke up to find them all about the bolster like flies. He made a bitter song, wherein she suffered as much as he did.

“This is not love that drains me--nay,
This is to crave. O girdled Fricka,
Dare I come near thee with lips gray
For need of thine, and hot tongue-liquor
Where once my mouth was clean to pray?

I would go back! There is no way
To thin the blood I have made thicker;
Save scratch for itch is no allay.
The flame is at its dying flicker,
Blown by hot breath, it cannot stay.
Speed it with scorn, that it die quicker--
Alas, the hour! Alas, the day!”

But there was another thing: He must go to Tongue to show Thorkel that he was as good a man as he, and not one to be scared off by a door-trap. He must go to Tongue, as his right was; and if it was his pleasure to talk to Stangerd, he would do it, let come what might--even if so to do were to cheapen her. And thus he left it, and thus it was when he did go up to Tongue.

He got scowling looks from Thorkel, and very scared looks from Narve in response to his pleasant greeting. From Stangerd he got little. She was rather cool, he thought; whereas the truth was that she was conscious of her company and conscious of herself. Men had been fighting for her, and here she was now in the presence of two of them, and of a third, you may say, since her father would have been a fighter if she had not stopped him. All this made her shy and awkward. She could not feel herself that day; it was now for Cormac to begin. But Cormac did not begin.

He was with her most of the morning, saying little. He felt that a look from her, a sigh, however little, would set him blazing like dry hay. But he did not get it, and he began to wonder whether he wanted it. He watched the play of her hands at the loom, he watched the light show silvery on her chin and neck as she moved about. He had glimpses of her deep blue eyes; while, as for her hair, he bathed in the golden glow and strength of that. She was indeed a burning lass; but she was not what she had been at first--a light and wonder of the earth. Tears came to his eyes as he remembered his first estate, and knew it lost for ever. And yet he loved her, and could not keep away from her.

He began to judge her. He thought she was slow to move, somewhat insensible; he felt sure that she did not love him. To be sure, it was some testimony to a girl, lovely as she might be (and was, God knew), that a man should dare a houseful to see her, and fight single-handed against three. It was not much--poetry was much more--but it was something. And she reckoned it for nothing, and waited to be wooed. But had she not been wooed by that fighting? He went away early, and did not ask her, since she did not offer, to come to the door with him.

Next day he was in a black mood and most wretched. He did not go to Tongue, which was a remarkable thing in these days. His mother waited for him to speak, but as he would not, she herself began upon the affair, and got short answers from him. Presently she said, “I will tell you this, my son. It was not thus that your father, a captain of men, wooed me.”

“Why, what did he?” said Cormac.

“He saw me at a wrestling, and spoke to me before it was over. Then he went to your grandfather and asked for me, and gave gifts; but I only saw him through the half-open door, for my mother kept me in the Bower. He went away without asking for me, and came rarely to the house. He used to say, ‘There is time enough. You will find me a good husband to you. I should not have asked for you if I had not believed that. All I see of you, and all I hear, satisfies me. I am a man of full measures, not of half. Wait until the wedding-day and trust to me.’ That I did. Your father was a true man of his word, and his deeds suited his words, as a sword lies in a sheath.”

“He was a true man,” said Cormac; but he thought in his bitterness, “That was a way to buy cows at a fair, but not to love a woman.” He went out by himself on to the heath; but Stangerd called him from afar, and he rose up presently and went to a place whence he could see the house and steading at Tongue, settling down into the dusk. “It is a wonderful thing that within those walls is the loveliest body upon earth, sitting on a bench, leaning by the board. Men are about her insensible of her glory, not trembling in the air which is about her. And I, who know and tremble even here, I am so cursed that I cannot go down there and tell my knowledge! This is madness in me, and must be fought. To-morrow I go and claim her of Thorkel. But my father’s way will not suit me. I shall do it in my own way.” He rose up and went home comforted.

So much for what was to be a bad business. He thought nothing of the spae-wife and her curse upon his doings. He was too disturbed to think of anything or anybody. He seemed to be groping about with scummed eyes. There was a blur, a tarnish upon everything. The pity of it--with the glory so new!

* * * * *

But as for the spae-wife herself, it is told of her that after a while she buried her sons--for Gudmund never got better, and died without knowing her again--and crossed the hills into Sowerby and came to the house of a strong man called Berse. To him she told her tale, that her sons had been killed, weregild refused her, and she turned out of her holding by the slayer. “Therefore,” said she, “I come to you, Berse, because you are a just man.”

Berse sat well back in his leather-seated chair, and laid the ankle of one leg upon the knee of another, and twirled his thumbs.

“Who was the man that slew your sons?”

She told him. “It was Black Cormac Ogmundsson, who lives in Midfirth.”

Berse blinked. “I have heard tell of him. His father was a great Viking, and died ashipboard. Now wherefore did he so to your sons?”

“They got bickering,” she said, “over Stangerd, Thorkel’s daughter.”

Said Berse, “From breaking hearts to broken sconces there is a short and straight road. I will wager that Cormac was no more forward on it than your sons. If I don’t blame them, I don’t blame him either.”

She said nothing to that, but waited on where she was.

Berse said, “That girl of Thorkel’s is a fine girl, I hear.”

Thorveig said she was. “But they will spoil her,” she said, “with all this quarrelling about her. Yet Cormac will never have her--that’s certain.”

“Who says so?” said Berse.

She answered, “I say so. I know it.”

Berse went on twirling his thumbs for a time. Then he said, “Well, you shall have land of me. I know nothing against you. There is a steading down on the firth--a good small house and intake. You shall have that. It has a staithe into the water, and there are some boats go with it. You shall have that--but remember, I don’t blame Cormac Ogmundsson. I am the last man to do it. They call me Battle-Berse, Holmgang Berse. I’m a fighting man myself.”

The spae-wife said, “And you will have more to do yet, Berse, with your charmed sword.”

“Get along with you,” said Berse, rather pleased with her. “I am not so young as I was, and Whiting keeps the fireside nowadays.” Now Whiting was his famous sword, with which he had fought thirty wagers-of-battle and won them all. It had a magical stone in the hilt, and was said never to lose its edge.

“Look to Whiting,” said the spae-wife, “and you won’t be sorry.” She thanked him for his open-handedness, but he only said, “Get along with you.”

She took up her abode in Berse’s ferry-house, which is called Bersestead to this hour. It was a good house upon the further shore of Ramfirth, with a haven and a mole. Boats lay snug there. There was a ferry, and many men used the place to cross over the water to go into Sowerby. Berse himself used it, for his own house was far from the water, high up in the hills of Sowerby. You can see it from the staithe, like a patch of snow afar off; and a great force of water near by.