As he took his leave of Orm, having received payment for his hay and hops, he said: “It is not my wish that there should be a blood-feud between our houses; but if the opportunity should arise for me to repay the insult that you have inflicted upon me, be sure that I shall not neglect it. It may be some time before such an opportunity will present itself, but I am a man whose memory is long.”
Orm looked at him, and smiled.
“I know you to be a dangerous man,” he said, “for you yourself have told me so. Nevertheless, I do not think this vow of yours will cause me to lie awake at night. But know this, that if you attempt to do me a mischief, I shall baptize you, whether I have to hold you by the legs or by the ears to do so.”
Father Willibald was dejected by his failure to convert Gudmund and declared himself convinced that his work in the north was doomed to failure. Ylva, however, comforted him with the assurance that things would be easier once Orm had built his church. Orm said that he in good time would fulfill his promise to do this, but that his more immediate concern was to build himself a house; and this, he avowed, he would start work on immediately. He straightway applied himself earnestly to the task, sending his men into the forest to fell trees, lop them, and drag them back, whereupon he himself chopped them into lengths with his ax. He chose his wood most meticulously, using only thick trunks that had no flaw in them; for he intended, he said, that his house should be of fine appearance and built to endure, and no mere forest shack. Asa’s estate comprised the land that lay in a bend of the river, protected by water on three sides; the soil was firm, and not liable to flooding. There was room here for all that he wished to build, and he enjoyed the work so much that, the further it became advanced, the more ambitiously he began to plan. He built his house with a walled fireplace and a slide-board in the roof for the smoke to leave by, the same as he had seen in King Harald’s castle; and the roof itself he constructed of peeled ash saplings, surmounted by a layer of birch bark and thick turves. Then he built a brewhouse, a cattleshed and a storehouse, all amply proportioned and finer than any that had previously been seen in these parts; and at last, when all these were completed, he announced that the most important buildings were now ready and that he would shortly be able to begin thinking about his church.
That spring the time arrived for Ylva’s confinement. Both Asa and Father Willibald took busy charge of her; they had a deal to do, and fell over each other in their eagerness to ensure that nothing might be left undone. The confinement was a difficult one. Ylva screamed fearfully, vowing that it would be preferable to enter a convent and become a nun than to endure such pain; but Father Willibald laid his crucifix upon her belly and muttered priest-talk over her, and in the end everything went as it should, and she was delivered of twins. They were both girls, which was at first a disappointment to Asa and Ylva; but when they were brought to Orm and laid upon his knees, he found little cause for complaint. Everyone agreed that they bawled and struggled as vigorously as any man-children; and, once Ylva had accepted that they were girls and could never become boys, she regained her cheerfulness, and promised Orm that next time she would give him a son. It soon became evident that both the girls were going to be red-haired, which Orm feared might bode ill for them; for, he said, if they had inherited the color of his hair, they might also develop a facial resemblance to him, and he was reluctant that his daughters should be condemned to such a fate as that. But Asa and Ylva bade him desist from such unlucky prophesying; there was no reason, they said, to suppose that they would look like him, and it was by no means disadvantageous for a girl to be born with red hair.
When the question arose of what names to give them, Orm declared that one of them must be called Oddny, after his maternal grandmother, which greatly delighted Asa.
“But we must name her sister after some member of your family,” he told Ylva, “and that you must choose yourself.”
“It is difficult to be sure which name will bring her the most luck,” said Ylva. “My mother was a war captive, and died when I was seven years old. She was called Ludmilla, and was daughter to a chieftain of the Obotrites; and she was stolen away by force from her own wedding. For all warriors who have visited that country agree that the best time to attack Obotrites or any other Wendish people is when they are celebrating some great wedding, because then they are drunk and lack their usual skill at arms, and their watchmen lie sleeping because of the great strength of the mead they brew for such occasions, so that rich booty can then be secured without much exertion, in the form both of treasure and of young women. I have never seen a woman as beautiful as she was; and my father always used to say that her luck was good, though she died young, for, for three whole years, she remained his favorite wife; and it was no small thing for an Obotrite woman, he used to say, to be permitted into the bed of the King of the Danes and bear him a daughter. Although it may be that she herself had other feelings concerning this, for after she was dead, I heard her slave-girls whispering among themselves that shortly after her arrival in Denmark she had tried to hang herself; which they thought arose from the fact of her having seen her bridegroom killed before her eyes when they had taken her and were carrying her away to the ships. She loved me very tenderly, but I cannot be sure whether it would be a lucky thing to name the child after her.”
Asa said that such a thing must not be thought of, for there could be no worse luck than being carried away by foreign warriors, and if they gave the child her grandmother’s name the same fate might befall her.
But Orm said that the problem could not be settled as easily as that. “For I myself was stolen away by warriors,” he said, “but I do not reckon that to have been an unlucky thing for me; for if that had not happened, I should not have become the man I am, and would never have won my sword or my gold chain, nor Ylva neither. And if Ludmilla had not been stolen away, King Harald would not have begotten the daughter who now shares my bed.”
They found it difficult to make up their minds about this, for, though Ylva was anxious that her fair and virtuous mother’s name should be perpetuated, she was unwilling to expose her daughter to the risk of being stolen by the Smalanders or some such savage people. But when Father Willibald heard what they were arguing about, he declared immediately that Ludmilla was an excellent and lucky name, having been borne by a pious princess who had lived in the country of Moravia in the time of the old Emperor Otto. So they decided to call the child Ludmilla; and all the housefolk prophesied a marvelous future for one so curiously named, for it was a name that none of them had heard before.
As soon as the two infants were strong enough, they were baptized by Father Willibald to the accompaniment of much bawling. They waxed fast, enjoying the best of health, and were soon tumbling around the floor with the huge Irish dogs that Orm had brought with him from Skania, or fighting over the dolls and animals which Rapp and Father Willibald carved out of wood for them. Asa doted upon them both and exhibited far more patience toward them than toward any other member of the household; but Orm and Ylva sometimes had difficulty in deciding which of the two was the more obstinate and troublesome. It was continually impressed upon Ludmilla that she had been named after a saint, but this had no noticeable effect on the manner in which she conducted herself. The two infants got on well together, however, though they occasionally went for one another’s hair; and when one of them had her bottom smacked, the other would stand by and howl no whit less resonantly than the punished miscreant.