Chapter Three

Gunnhild was known as a Mother of Kings because she had many sons, each groomed for leadership of Norway, but they were a wild bunch of insolent souls, always vying with each other, and only Harald Grayhide, her eldest, held any true potential for the throne. In Harald, Gunnhild invested all of her hopes, efforts, and time. She made her tall, bearded son ruler of his brothers and when her husband, Eric Bloodaxe, died in battle, it was up to Harald to take his position over Norway.

Thyra had often heard the story of her cousin Harald, how long before she was born, her aunt incited him to kill any chief who stood between him and the throne. Among these lesser vassals was his cousin Tryggve Olafson, a stout warrior who ruled Viken in the Eastlands. Thyra’s nursemaid, Hetta the Wise, would often tell her the tale. Thyra begged her for it. Only ten winters old she could already coax anything she wanted from those more than twice her age, even if her mother forbade it. The story gave her nightmares, but she loved it anyway, never tiring of the drama. When Hetta took her on twilight walks, Thyra would pull her into the fields of angelica, tall stalks nodding in the wind. Here, amongst their soft gold and green fronds, the two would sit until the sun went down and the tale was told. Little did Thyra know that in this story would be the unfolding of her own life, and that one day she would meet the son of King Tryggve and her destiny would be forever changed.

For some odd reason the story of this Norwegian King and his demise had come back to her when she wiped the wax from Poppo’s face. In his eyes she had seen the same fury she imagined to be in Tryggve’s when Gunnhild’s son ambushed him on a promontory all those years ago and smote him with his axe. It was the fire of a righteous rage and his hands trembled as he cried out his psalm in defiance. How those words kept the pain of the burning wax from destroying his skin no one knew. He remained unblemished and whole, as if the event never occurred, and was completely able to finish her father’s rites, making sure that the great king was buried along side his parents as requested.

When the Danes disbanded and the little church fell quiet, Thyra followed her mother and siblings down the aisle through its long row of arches. They were the last to leave, Poppo behind them. The elegant pillars reminded Thyra of a row of beech trees arching high overhead. She felt the comfort of her father’s design, as if he had coaxed the very forest into the house and made its branches a canopy over her head.

Through this woodland shelter she passed, weeping quietly. Poppo closed the great doors behind them and after her mother thanked him he was gone. The family huddled close together. The evening was cool and her mother’s retinue waited to escort them back to the castle. Thyra felt glad for the darkness and hoped it hid her sorrow from the men in arms. Like her father, she considered tears a sign of weakness. Her family climbed into the royal cart, but Thyra hesitated. She felt something, a presence, and hearing a twig snap somewhere far off, turned. She looked hard through the trees, and there standing beside a great, old beechwood, glimpsed the figure of a man. She knew him at once by his cavalier stance and the two long prongs of his famous, forked beard. It was her brother Sweyn holding the reins of his great warhorse. Though Gunnhild was long gone with her wolf cubs behind her, fear struck Thyra once again—that deep, familial fear. Her father’s sworn enemy—this tall, handsome, illegitimate son that he both doted upon and hated—held up a gloved hand to caution her. She turned back to her family. “Come along now” Gyrid motioned for her to climb up into the seat beside her, “what’s keeping you, Thyra?”

“Nothing...” she whispered back.

Still, everyone turned to look in the direction she’d been staring. Thyra looked too but brother and horse were gone, as if they’d been no more than an apparition. Was her imagination playing tricks on her? Could it be the confusion of grief? No, she knew she had seen her older brother, from his arrogant, half-cocked smile, to that burning stare that commanded men, Sweyn had surely been there. Yes, he had been at his father’s funeral just as she had, denied yet determined to stand on the outside of the walls, for what reason she did not know. Did he want to say goodbye to the father slain by his unjust cause? Was it remorse at this late hour? Could he feel such a thing after turning rebel on his own flesh and blood? Thyra wondered about these things as the cart jerked and rumbled down the rutted path that led out of the forest. More than once she looked behind her to see if Sweyn had followed them. Her sister looked too. “What’s back there?” she kept asking.

“I don’t know,” she found herself still whispering, afraid her mother might take alarm. She needn’t have worried, though, for Gyrid was lost in thoughts of her own, staring up at the stars through the branches overhead.

“Could it be Gunnhild? I don’t see her cubs?”

“No, stop asking!”

“But you must tell me!”

“Shhh....” Thyra put a finger to her lips and turned back around. The two girls stared straight ahead now, watching the path open out onto the dusty road that led back to their father’s ringfort, Trelleborg, due south of Roeskilde.

They were almost asleep by the time the cart rattled over the drawbridge and through the gate of the palisade. Trelleborg was a circular complex, like all her father’s ringforts, with a rampart and four roofed gates facing the four points of the compass. Within its heavily walled structure were four more sections, and within these sections four longhouses each set along the neat, geometrical streets. People and livestock lived under the same roof, as did servants and nobles. Thirty two could sleep comfortably in the great halls amongst the snorting and shuffling of goats and sheep. The royal family were the only ones afforded standing beds, the rest slept wrapped in their cloaks on the wide benches set along the walls. How she longed for her bed now! The cart still had to pass over more bridges and through another palisade, until she was finally shut within the confines of her father’s fortress.

As she passed down the main road she admired the boat-like arc of the rooftops of the longhouses he had built. Their shingled gables gleamed in the moonlight. Her father constructed every house like a ship, with doors carefully spaced for men to leap out without collision into the streets the moment any alarm sounded. Trelleborg was built for war.

To complete it, her father felled so many oaks that the island seemed naked in the bright, white light of winter. His finest engineers were employed, men well versed in Roman-British fortifications, and a plan drawn up not that dissimilar to a favorite ringfort in Norfolk—the Warham camp near the sea-port of Wells, where he had often spent time during his British campaigns. His engineers carefully measured everything by the Roman foot and designed wall upon wall for battle efficiency.

The promontory on which it was built had originally been used for sacrificial purposes. Thyra remembered trailing behind her father as a child, how he angrily kicked dirt into the indentations of shallow graves, demanding that his workers fill in the memory of human sacrifice, level off the pockets that held so many bones: infants, women, men, and children, all tangled together, all forgotten. Poppo followed him, pausing to bless every sad valley, making the sign of the cross and muttering in Latin as the laborers shoveled dirt into the hollows and smoothed them flat. Sometimes she had bad dreams about the land. In these nightmares she saw the thick staves driving down into the silty bones of lost souls and the bones growing flesh, coming alive, hands of all sizes reaching up to grasp the endpoints of the staves, the very underpinnings of Trelleborg. She dreamt it because she saw it, the men driving the staves hard and deep into the land. She watched their fierce ends pierce the belly of the earth, push past the dead, drive down to the bedrock. Her father said they must go deep enough to stand against siege and storm, time and wear. They were Denmark’s walls and anchored the nation’s hope. The King spared no efforts in building them.

She remembered awaking to the trembling of whole forests falling to their knees as her father’s men ransacked the island for timber. Trelleborg alone demanded the felling of 8,ooo of its oldest, well-grown trees. How it pained her to watch these beautiful oaks shudder and crash one after the other. Her father tried to comfort her, said it was a price a king must pay for his princess to grow up into a queen.

Within two short years his men had stolen over 200 acres of her childhood, dragging a defeated forest to this lonely crag overlooking the sea. As Thyra stepped from the cart, Gunnhild behind her, she welcomed the sight of her safe place. Without her father, knowing that Sweyn lurked on the outskirts, sensing the shifting of power all around her, she could at least look at the walls of Trelleborg and know she was home. “Father...” she found herself addressing him in her mind, “I know you’re still here.” She lifted Hirig into her arms and felt his head nestle under her chin. She carried him into her father’s longhouse, past the central fire, to his small bed. It was made of oak, like everything in Trelleborg, and her father had carved the headboard with birds, leaves, and runes. Gunnhild followed behind her, carrying Skullsplitter with great care, as if it were another child. Her mother moved past them like a ghost, slow and dreamy. She stood at the foot of the great bed she once shared with the King and lifted her arms, allowing her serving girls to undress her down to her simple linen underclothes. They helped her into bed, covering her with the great seal pelt he’d bargained for in the land of the Scots. “Girls...” she mumbled, “thank you for letting me rest.” and with that she rolled over and within moments was asleep.

Thyra and Gunnhild undressed each other and laid their beautiful clothes in the chest their father had given them. For a moment they both looked at Skullsplitter and, by unspoken agreement, did not place the great blade on top of their linens, but carried it with them to bed. They slept in their usual fashion, Gunnhild spooning behind Thyra, her arms wrapped around her big sister, both their loose hair intertwined on the pillow. The only difference now was that Skullsplitter had entered the picture. Like a lover, the blade remained wrapped in Thyra’s arms all night, its cold hilt pressed against her cheek. In this fashion the girls found some peace, at least Gunnhild did. For Thyra it was harder to rest. She found some comfort listening to the soft rise and fall of her sister’s breathing, but her mind kept racing. She knew with that deep kind of certainty in the pit of her stomach that everything had changed overnight, from the moment she received the news of her father’s death. These dark tidings heralded a change in her future. Her brother Sweyn would now have the legal right to determine her marital choices. Even though he was the sworn enemy of the family, he still possessed the power to promise her to any man he chose. If it had been her father she wouldn’t have minded—he always took her opinions under consideration and valued her as much as a son.

There had been a marriage, a short one, in her eighteenth winter, to Stybjorn the Strong, Prince of Sweden, but he had died suddenly in the battle of Fyrisvalla, not long after the betrothal and she had come home, heart-sick and lonely, resuming her role as daughter. Her father got her out of her misery by setting her in charge of the upkeep of his ringforts. There were many to watch over, a whole system of protection, interconnected by bridges: Trelleborg, Aggersborg, Borgeby, and Skane. Their names, like their inner workings, were as familiar to her as a nursery rhyme. Fyrkat was the smallest, a winter retreat. She liked the farm there since she was a small child and Nonnenbakken always intimidated her, standing like a beacon high on a misty hill. It had a spiritual power, she often felt, perhaps because it was built on the remains of an abbey and the grounds seemed soaked in the prayers of nuns long passed. It was her job to make sure the bridges were in good repair, for across their thick beams many troops must be maneuvered quickly in times of war.

Tomorrow she would go to Jelling, she thought, to stand at the rune stones her father had erected in memory of her grandparents. She wanted to run her fingers into the grooves of the runes, like she did as a child, and remember in particular her grandmother—the one she’d been named for. Perhaps, somehow, by returning to Jelling she could receive her grandmother’s strength to face the road ahead. At the very least, she needed to go for closure. Though she knew that her father was now buried with his parents in the church, it was at Jelling she felt that she could find them again, as if the very stones held the memory of their heartbeats.

Her grandmother had single-handedly overseen the building of the Danevirke--the great wall that protected Denmark from the Germans. If she could complete this mighty task then Thyra could somehow, by standing in the shadow of that stone, take on her mantle. She fell asleep remembering her last conversation with her father. It was, as usual, a talk about the defense of his fort systems. “In unity and order is strength.” They were walking along the timber-lined streets of Trelleborg. She remembered the feeling of his arm in hers and the roughness of his voice. “Your grandmother taught me this,” his smile flashed blue teeth “Danes-Defense, that’s what they called her, your grandmother, the jewel of Denmark...and you are just like her—my jewel.”

“How long did it take grandma to make the wall?”

“Three winters, three winters to unify the people and finish the wall. Leagues and leagues of stone, Thyra, each one placed by farmer’s hands, swordsman, ploughman, children too, even your grandmother set the last stones in place to leave her mark. You remember, don’t you, when you were little, I took you on horseback along the wall, to show it to you, from the marshes in the west to the Baltic...when I am gone it shall be yours to defend, yours and your older brother’s.” When he mentioned Sweyn his face fell. He dropped her arm and turned to face her. “Don’t forget me when I’m gone, Tyri...” he used her childhood nickname, “Remember me and remember what I taught you: Protect, unify, strengthen.” Then he let out a huge laugh and stretched his arms out for full effect, “it was the greatest damn wall ever made and it kept out those stinking Saxons!” She smiled as she fell asleep, remembering.