The Tale of Hauk - Poul Anderson, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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POUL ANDERSON
The Tale of Hauk
One of the most acclaimed and most prolific writers in
science fiction, Poul Anderson made his first sale in
1947, and in the course of his subsequent fifty-year
career has published almost a hundred books (in several
different fields, as Anderson has written historical novels,
fantasies, and mysteries, in addition to SF), sold
hundreds of short pieces to every conceivable market,
and won seven Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and
the Tolkien Memorial Award for life achievement.
Although Anderson is best known as a writer of
“hard science fiction” and fast-paced intergalactic
adventure tales, he has al-ways loved fantasy, and has
published a good deal of it, some quite influential. His
best known fantasy novel is probably
Three Hearts and
Three Lions,
a whimsical
“Unknown-
style
”
deliberately
anachronistic fantasy along the lines of de Camp and
Pratt’s
The Incomplete Enchanter,
but with a somewhat
harder adventure edge to it, as though one of the de
Camp and Pratt stories had been cross-bred with a
Sword & Sorcery swashbuckler such as one of Robert E.
Howard’s
Conan
books; it was followed decades later by
a semi-sequel,
Midsummer Tempest.
The more typical
Anderson fantasy story, though, abandons the whimsy
and explores the harsh, bleak, unrelenting, frequently
violent territory of Norse mythology and folklore—his
explorations of that
milieu
include
Hrolf Kraki’s Saga,
The Broken Sword, The Golden Horn, The Road of the
Sea Horse, The Sign of the Raven,
and short stories
such as “The Peat Bog” and “The Valor of Cappen
Varra”…and the chill-ing story that follows, which tells the
story of a most unwelcome houseguest, one who will
not
go away, no matter how many times you ask him to . . .
Anderson’s books include, among
many
others,
The High Cru-sade, The Enemy Stars, Brain Wave,
Tau Zero, The Might Face, Orion Shall Rise, The
Shield of Time, The Time Patrol,
and
The People of the
Wind,
as well as the two multivolume series of novels
about his two most popular characters, Dominic Flandry
and Nicholas van Rijn. His short work has been collected
in
The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories,
Guardians of Time, The Earth Book of Stormgate,
Fantasy, The Unicorn Trade
(with Karen Anderson),
Past Times, Time Patrolman,
and
Explorations.
Among
his most recent books are the novels
The Boat of a
Million Years, Harvest of Stars,
and
The Stars Are Also
Fire.
Anderson lives in Orinda, California, with his wife
(and fellow writer) Karen.
* * * *
A man called Geirolf dwelt on the Great Fjord in Raumsdal. His father was
Bui Hardhand, who owned a farm inland near the Dofra Fell. One year Bui
went in viking to Finnmark and brought back a woman he dubbed Gydha.
She became the mother of Geirolf. But because Bui al-ready had children
by his wife, there would be small inheritance for this by-blow.
Folk said uncanny things about Gydha. She was fair to see, but spoke
little, did no more work than she must, dwelt by herself in a shack out of
sight of the garth, and often went for long stridings alone on the upland
heaths, heedless of cold, rain, and rovers. Bui did not visit her often. Her
son Geirolf did. He too was a moody sort, not much given to playing with
others, quick and harsh of temper. Big and strong, he went abroad with his
father already when he was twelve, and in the next few years won the name
of a mighty though ruthless fighter.
Then Gydha died. They buried her near her shack, and it was
whis-pered that she spooked around it of nights. Soon after, walking home
with some men by moonlight from a feast at a neighbor’s, Bui clutched his
breast and fell dead. They wondered if Gydha had called him, maybe to
accompany her home to Finnmark, for there was no more sight of her.
Geirolf bargained with his kin and got the price of a ship for himself.
Thereafter he gathered a crew, mostly younger sons and a wild lot, and
fared west. For a long while he harried Scotland, Ireland, and the coasts
south of the Channel, and won much booty. With some of this he bought his
farm on the Great Fjord. Meanwhile he courted Thyra, a daughter of the
yeoman Sigtryg Einarsson, and got her.
They had one son early on, Hauk, a bright and lively lad. But
there-after five years went by until they had a daughter who lived, Unn, and
two years later a boy they called Einar. Geirolf was in viking every sum-mer,
and sometimes wintered over in the Westlands. Yet he was a kindly father,
whose children were always glad to see him come roaring home. Very tall
and broad in the shoulders, he had long red-brown hair and a full beard
around a broad blunt-nosed face whose eyes were ice blue and slanted.
He liked fine clothes and heavy gold rings, which he also lavished on Thyra.
Then the time came when Geirolf said he felt poorly and would not
fare elsewhere that season. Hauk was fourteen years old and had been wild
to go. “I’ll keep my promise to you as well as may be,” Geirolf said, and
sent men asking around. The best he could do was get his son a bench on
a ship belonging to Ottar the Wide-Faring from Haalogaland in the north,
who was trading along the coast and meant to do likewise over-seas.
Hauk and Ottar took well to each other. In England, the man got the
boy prime-signed so he could deal with Christians. Though neither was
baptized, what he heard while they wintered there made Hauk thought-ful.
Next spring they fared south to trade among the Moors, and did not come
home until late fall.
Ottar was Geirolf’s guest for a while, though he scowled to himself
when his host broke into fits of deep coughing. He offered to take Hauk
along on his voyages from now on and start the youth toward a good
liveli-hood.
“You a chapman—the son of a viking?” Geirolf sneered. He had
grown surly of late.
Hauk flushed. “You’ve heard what we did to those vikings who set on
us,”
he answered.
“Give our son his head,” was Thyra’s smiling rede, “or he’ll take the bit
between his teeth.”
The upshot was that Geirolf grumbled agreement, and Hauk fared off.
He did not come back for five years.
Long were the journeys he took with Ottar. By ship and horse, they
made their way to Uppsala in Svithjodh, thence into the wilderness of the
Keel after pelts; amber they got on the windy strands of Jutland, salt
her-ring along the Sound; seeking beeswax, honey, and tallow, they pushed
beyond Holmgard to the fair at Kiev; walrus ivory lured them past North
Cape, through bergs and floes to the land of the fur-clad Biarmians; and
they bore many goods west. They did not hide that the wish to see what
was new to them drove them as hard as any hope of gain.
In those days King Harald Fairhair went widely about in Norway,
bringing all the land under himself. Lesser kings and chieftains must ei-ther
plight faith to him or meet his wrath; it crushed whomever would stand fast.
When he entered Raumsdal, he sent men from garth to garth as was his
wont, to say he wanted oaths and warriors.
“My older son is abroad,” Geirolf told these, “and my younger still a
stripling. As for myself—” He coughed, and blood flecked his beard. The
king’s men did not press the matter.
But now Geirolf’s moods grew ever worse. He snarled at everybody,
cuffed his children and housefolk, once drew a dagger and stabbed to
death a thrall who chanced to spill some soup on him. When Thyra
reproached him for this, he said only, “Let them know I am not altogeth-er
hallowed out. I can still wield blade.” And he looked at her so threateningly
from beneath his shaggy brows that she, no coward, with-drew in silence.
A year later, Hauk Geirolfsson returned to visit his parents.
That was on a chill fall noontide. Whitecaps chopped beneath a
whistling wind and cast spindrift salty onto lips. Clifftops on either side of
the fjord were lost in mist. Above blew cloud wrack like smoke. Hauk’s ship,
a wide-beamed knorr, rolled, pitched, and creaked as it beat its way under
sail. The owner stood in the bows, wrapped in a flame-red cloak, an
uncommonly big young man, yellow hair tossing around a face akin to his
father’s, weatherbeaten though still scant of beard. When he saw the arm of
the fjord that he wanted to enter, he pointed with a spear at whose head he
had bound a silk pennon. When he saw Disafoss pour-ing in a white stream
down the blue-gray stone wall to larboard, and be-yond the waterfall at the
end of that arm lay his old home, he shouted for happiness.
Geirolf had rich holdings. The hall bulked over all else,
heavy-timbered, brightly painted, dragon heads arching from rafters and
gables. Else-where around the yard were cookhouse, smokehouse,
bathhouse, store-houses, workshop, stables, barns, women’s bower.
Several cabins for hirelings and their families were strewn beyond. Fishing
boats lay on the strand near a shed which held the master’s dragonship.
Behind the steading, land sloped sharply upward through a narrow dale,
where fields were walled with stones grubbed out of them and now
stubbled after harvest. A bronze-leaved oakenshaw stood untouched not
far from the buildings; and a mile inland, where hills humped themselves
toward the mountains, rose a darkling wall of pinewood.
Spearheads and helmets glimmered ashore. But men saw it was a
sin-gle craft bound their way, white shield on the mast. As the hull slipped
alongside the little wharf, they lowered their weapons. Hauk sprang from
bow to dock in a single leap and whooped.
Geirolf trod forth. “Is that you, my son?” he called. His voice was
hoarse from coughing; he had grown gaunt and sunken-eyed; the ax that he
bore shivered in his hand.
“Yes, father, yes, home again,” Hauk stammered. He could not hide
his shock.
Maybe this drove Geirolf to anger. Nobody knew; he had become
impossible to get along with. “I could well-nigh have hoped otherwise,” he
rasped. “An unfriend would give me something better than straw-death.”
The rest of the men, housecarls and thralls alike, flocked about Hauk
to bid him welcome. Among them was a burly, grizzled yeoman whom he
knew from aforetime, Leif Egilsson, a neighbor come to dicker for a horse.
When he was small, Hauk had often wended his way over a wood-land trail
to Leif’s garth to play with the children there.
He called his crew to him. They were not just Norse, but had among
them Danes, Swedes, and English, gathered together over the years as he
found them trustworthy. “You brought a mickle for me to feed,” Geirolf said.
Luckily, the wind bore his words from all but Hauk. “Where’s your master
Ottar?”
The young man stiffened. “He’s my friend, never my master,” he
answered. “This is my own ship, bought with my own earnings. Ottar abides
in England this year. The West Saxons have a new king, one Al-fred, whom
he wants to get to know.”
“Time was when it was enough to know how to get sword past a
Westman’s shield,” Geirolf grumbled.
Seeing peace down by the water, women and children hastened from
the hall to meet the newcomers. At their head went Thyra. She was tall and
deep-bosomed; her gown blew around a form still straight and freely
striding. But as she neared, Hauk saw that the gold of her braids was
dimmed and sorrow had furrowed her face. Nonetheless she kindled when
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