Hrolf Kraki's Saga by Poul Anderson Page A

and recalled the neighborhood louts she knew; and suddenly the headlong blood overran her. Crying and laughing, she came to him.
    They sought shelter together. She knew a spring where trees gave murmurous lee and summer had mellowed the grass into hay.
    Helgi abode in the woods, not wanting anybody to pry and leer. She sought him daily, smuggling along food which neither of them truly tasted. They in the hut marked that something had come over her, but she slipped free of their watchfulness. Not that that was very much; nobody hereabouts would take to wife a girl whose belly did not show she would give him children.
    At the right time, Helgi went away. He told her not to be frightened if a ship came. When that happened and everyone else fled, she stayed. The richly clad man who leaped ashore told her he was the Dane-King. “I wouldn’t have cared if you were only a gangrel,” she gasped, and fainted.
    Afterward she found her foster-folk and coaxed them back. Helgi gifted them lavishly before he sailed off with Yrsa.
    He could not leave his fleet, which he had told to stand by at Fyn. Men would scorn him, did he give up his yearly faring and moon lovesick ashore. So he turned Yrsa over to his brother Hroar and then put out to sea. For him and her alike, the next months were weary.
    Said Queen Valthjona to her husband: “I think she’ll be more than just another of Helgi’s doxies.”
    “Maybe.” Hroar tugged his beard and scowled. “Ill is this. A thrall-born crofter-brat!”
    “No, now, she’s a sweet girl,” Valthjona said. “Besides, for the good name of the Skjoldungs, I’ll have to take her in hand.”
    There was much that a lady must know: everything about the running of a big household; arts such as weaving and brewing; good dress, good manners, good speech; the lore and rites of the high gods and the ancestors; who her man’s friends were, who his unfriends, and how to deal with each. Yrsa could not learn it all in a day.
    “Yet she’s willing,” said Valthjona to Hroar, “and had I begun that lowly, I’d have mastered what I must slower than she does.”
    Aside from missing Helgi, Yrsa was a gladsome soul, every day singing while she flitted about her tasks. She kept many beasts, dogs and horses and birds, and made much of them. She did not like to go hunting. On the other hand, in a boat she was as deft and gleeful as any boy. Young herself, she frolicked amongst the youngsters at Hart. Humbly reared, she was friendlier toward hirelings and thralls—even listening to their long-drawn tales of woe and trying to help—than Hroar or Valthjona, though these were reckoned kindly.
    “And yet,” said the queen to the king, “she knows their work so well, having done it herself, they don’t twice try cheating or slacking on her. Not that she has them whipped. She asks in the mildest tone if they’d rather serve someone else. Of course they wouldn’t.”
    “Hm, yes, I’ve come to like her myself,” Hroar said.
    “She’s of good stock,” Valthjona said. “Her mother may or may not have been a thrall as was told her. But if so, I swear she was a highborn woman taken captive. And her father, why, he may have been a king.”
    When Helgi came home and saw Yrsa in linen and furs and gold, the keys of his household at her belt, graciously greeting him, he stood as if hammer-smitten. Toward dawn of that night, he said that being his bedmate was not good enough for her. He would make her his queen.
    And thus he did. Their wedding feast was talked of for years.
    Hroar took that chance to befriend his new-caught islander chieftains. He invited them, and by gifts and fairwords he bound them to the Skjoldungs. “Yrsa’s brought us this, at least,” he remarked to Valthjona.
    “Do you hold it against her that she stands in the way of Helgi making a more useful marriage?” she asked. “Why, he can take as many wives as he pleases.”
    “None other do please him,” said Hroar. “He doesn’t even