The Ice Queen (8 page)

By this time the drink had taken its toll on us all. My own head was going round and round. Harald, at least, had been true to his word in this respect: I wasn't bored anymore.

And so—not a moment too soon—the night drew to a close.

“She feared no one but Almighty God and Him only moderately,” said Yelisaveta Yaroslavna, sitting on a stool in the kitchen with her arms around her knees. She was holding forth on her favorite subject: the life of her great-great grandmother, the formidable Princess Olga.

Two days had passed since Yaroslav's feast. It was afternoon and the girl, done with her lessons and feeling hungry, had repaired to her favorite haunt, which also happened to be mine. We sat warming ourselves by the big bake oven, nibbling on a fresh loaf and drinking kvass.

Yelisaveta had reached that age when she was not supposed to talk familiarly with strange men, and her nurse ought to have been more vigilant. But the old lady's attention was elsewhere. Einar Tree-Foot, wearing a nearly new shirt and a nearly clean rag over his eye socket, was curdling her blood agreeably in a far corner of the room.

“Olga was wife to Igor,” said Yelisaveta, looking serious, “who ruled all the Rus in those days; not his only wife, for he was a pagan and had many, but she was the one he loved best.

“When Igor was murdered by the Drevlyans—they were a savage tribe who dwelt deep in the forest north of Kiev—Olga plotted her revenge. Now the Drevlyan chief, who was a great stupid oaf named Mal, wanted to marry her. She pretended to accept his offer and invited his ambassadors to come to Kiev. But, when they arrived there, thinking themselves so grand and all, she ordered them to be seized and buried alive right before her eyes!

“Then she asked Mal to send another embassy—I've said he was stupid. And when they came she invited them to have a steam-bath, the way you're supposed to with visitors. But when they were all inside, she locked the door, and set the bath-house afire and burned them all up!

“Next, still pretending that she would marry this blockhead, she went with all her boyars and druzhiniks to pay him a visit. And Mal was so happy, he put on a great feast for her. But when all the Drevlyans were drunk, she told her druzhiniks to murder them all, and went round, herself, to each warrior, spurring him on!

“After that, she ruled Kiev all by herself for ten years, until her son grew up. It was then that she became a Christian—the very first of the Rus to do so—and she held to the Orthodox Faith for the rest of her days, no matter that her son and nearly all the Rus people kept on being heathens for years and years.

“And the most wonderful thing of all she did was sail to Constantinople—Miklagard as you Northmen call it—to visit Constantine Purple-Born, the Emperor of the Greeks. And he was so smitten with her beauty that he bowed low before her, he and all his courtiers and eunuchs besides, and begged her to be his wife and live with him in his splendid palace, which is built all of marble and has a golden tree in it with a golden bird that sings!

“After that, she died and went to heaven and became a saint. I pray to her quite often, you know, because she knew how to punish her enemies.” Yelisaveta paused and looked at me gravely. “I have enemies, you know.” Then she bit sharply into the loaf and washed it down with kvass.

The expression of her face, as she told this tale, was striking. I couldn't help thinking how like her mother she was, and how natural, therefore, that they should be enemies. For indeed they were, bitterly and without truce. Almost daily, the palace echoed to their loud wrangling over the smallest trifles.

“Would you like to be a queen one day, Elisif Jarizlafsdottir, in a country far away, and punish your enemies as much as you please?”

Harald had come in silently, stooping under the low doorway, and stood behind her as she finished speaking.

She turned in surprise. “Oh, it's you! You shouldn't creep up on people that way, you'll give them a fit. What did you call me?”

“Elisif. Elisif Jarizlafsdottir—your name in plain honest Norse. These
Slavonic names of yours tie my tongue in knots. Only I will call you Elisif, and then only in private.”

Looking down on her from his great height, Harald seemed more than ever gigantic. But, though her forehead barely reached his chest, she answered him, “Indeed! And who said you might call me anything at all in private? Especially seeing as my mother hates you.”

“Does she? Then we have something in common.” He reached up and with his knife cut a slice of meat from one of the hams that hung from the rafters overhead. “For you, sweet Elisif.” He handed her the morsel.

Her cheeks turned red; she was plainly uncertain how to behave toward this prodigious boy-man. She said petulantly, “There you go again; who ever heard of such a name? If you must call me by it, write it out for me.”

Now Harald was at a loss. Like most people, he had never cared a jot for writing, but suddenly, before this educated girl, he was abashed.

“What, can't you?” she asked with wide-eyed innocence. She wasn't going to let him off easy.

“I, ah, have not had leisure to master your Rus letters.”

“Oh, I know the Roman letters, too, and the Greek ones. Write it any way you please.”

“Gospodin,” I broke in, “it's for just such things that you have a skald. Permit me.”

“Yes, dammit, yes, of course!”

I cut off a sliver from one of the fire logs next to the oven and scratched her name on it in Roman letters (I had amused myself by learning them during my winter in Norway). And then—just to show off, I admit it—wrote it in runes as well.

“What a clever fellow you are!” She cocked an eyebrow at me. Up til now she had paid me little attention. “Where did you learn that?”

“Well—”

“Too clever sometimes,” Harald glowered at me and shouldered himself between us. This was his show and I was spoiling it. I smiled and stepped back. How little it took to make him jealous!

“There's one or two Northmen here that are always talking about the runes,” Yelisaveta said. “I've overheard them. Once I heard one say how they can make a person fall in love against her will. Will they do that to me?”

She swept back her long hair and tilted up her face to him. There was no mistaking the finely calculated lowering of the eyelids.

“They will, pretty Elisif,” he answered; “they will indeed. Throw the sliver into the fire now if you would be free of me. Isn't that the way of it, skald?”

Thor's Billy goat! I thought. He's serious. Does she know that? Surely, with her it's nothing but a game to provoke her mother. And not only her mother, for I had happened to learn just the day before that it was Eilif Ragnvaldsson to whom she was betrothed. Whether Harald knew this, I was not certain.

She tucked the sliver carefully inside her bodice, between her small pointed breasts.

Old Thordis, just then happening to look up and seeing her little pigeon between us two vultures, flew squawking to the rescue and drove us from the kitchen.

“Harald,” I said when we were beyond the door, “can I give you a word of advice?”

“No.”

And he walked away.

And what wise counsel I could have given! Dag himself would not have been more eloquent. We were here, I would have reminded him, to make friends, not enemies; and where we found enemies, not to embitter them more. Money. Troops. An alliance. And then home to Norway! (Or, in my case, Iceland.) These were what we sought; not affairs with betrothed young ladies that could only lead to trouble. Was this a skald's fate, I wondered morosely, to see clearly and be ignored? An incident that occurred soon afterward made me more worried still.

Mstislav had introduced to the court a new game which he called by the foreign word shatranj. The board and pieces, together with some notion of the rules he had gotten from an Arab traveler. Many of us younger folk tried to learn it and spent the long nights playing against each other for modest stakes.

On one particular evening we were all gathered around the board. Harald and I had played to a draw. Volodya had taken on Magnus, when none of
the others would play with him, and had beaten him—but gracefully and with good manners. (It always impressed me that this boy, who as eldest son might have had the best reason for disliking his mother's pet, was the only one of Yaroslav's children to behave at all kindly towards him.)

Then Yelisaveta challenged Harald.

They were both good; and they played eagerly, deploying their men swiftly at first; then, with great deliberation, hunching close over the little board until Harald's lips almost brushed the hair of her head. No need to speak. The thrust and parry of the game took the place of words. That same joy showed on Harald's face as when he played at poetry—which is also a game of intricate rules and subtleties. In Yelisaveta's green eyes was the pure thrill of combat. The men and boys in her life had fought, or would fight, real wars on real battle fields. Only on this little field could she match herself with them. Here she was their equal.

We happened to be in one of the ante-rooms off of the great hall, with the door shut to keep out the cold. It banged open suddenly, revealing Eilif in the doorway. The wind rushing in made the candle flames tremble.

“Yelisaveta Yaroslavna, come into the hall and drink with me.” He had the fiery face and thick speech of one who has drunk deep already.

“Later, if I feel like it.”

“Now! Leave this childish stuff to the children.”

“Am I one of the children, Eilif?” said Harald in a sarcastic voice.

There followed a silence, while the two players studied the board and the rest of us watched Eilif grow redder in the face by the moment.

“Yelisaveta, are you coming or not!”

When an enemy's brows knit together and his mouth turns down to the degree that Eilif's did, a prudent man will just loosen his blade very slightly in its scabbard. I touched my side and remembered, with sinking heart, that I had no weapon on me—nor did Harald—while the captain of the druzhina was wearing both sword and dagger. Distracted perhaps by Eilif's presence, Harald made a careless move on the board.

“Eilif, shut the door,” said Yelisaveta. “You may stay on either side of it for all I care.” She spoke without looking up, while her slim fingers advanced a bishop and removed Harald's rook from the board. “Check,” she said.

Eilif was baffled, and honestly pained; you could see it in his face. He took two steps into the room and stood glowering at them.

Harald moved his king out of danger—you must understand that the whole object of this interesting game is to render that piece unable to move in any direction—but Yelisaveta pursued.

“Check again.”

Harald frowned.

Eilif saw this and his face brightened a little. If this thorn in his flesh was going to be defeated, and by a girl, that was worth watching!

“Eilif,” she said sweetly, “I'm sure if you tried very hard you could learn the rules. It's the same thing as when you command your druzhiniks, except that these little soldiers don't laugh at you when your back is turned.—Check again, gospodin Harald.” She removed his queen from the board.

Gods! I thought. What reckless game is she playing? She wants to infuriate them both. She wants them to fight!

The joy drained from Harald's face. He drank angrily from a flagon that was by his elbow and, after furrowing his brow for a long while, advanced a pawn, slapping the piece down hard on the board. Eilif leaned nearer, screwing up his eyes with the effort of comprehension; and the rest of us—I, Volodya, Magnus, and two boyars' sons—also pulled our chairs close.

The pawn was taken. Yelisaveta's horseman rode to the attack.

Now Harald squeezed his king between thumb and forefinger as if he would punish the little monarch for blundering into this hopeless position. He pushed him violently there, and there, and there; but everywhere the way was barred. He interposed another pawn, but this warrior, like its brother, fell before Yelisaveta's attack.

“Shahmat,” she said. “I fear your King is dead.”

Harald worked hard to force a smile. Although he could never bear to lose at anything, he was doing his utmost—because this was Yelisaveta—to hold on to his temper.

And he might have succeeded had not little Magnus, with more bravado than sense, said cunningly, “Why, Uncle Harald, this makes the second king you've lost in as many years; you really ought to be more careful.” (His meaning being that Harald had lost his first king on the field of Stiklestad, as though he had let Olaf die to suit his own purposes.)

Knocking over table and board and sending the pieces flying, Harald lunged for Magnus' throat. The boy hung like a rag doll in his huge hands, twisting helplessly, unable even to scream.

Here, like an answer to his prayers, was all the excuse Eilif needed.