Carl stirred where he sat. “But what of your homes?” he asked. “Raiders could outflank you, unbeknownst, and fall on steadings like yours.” He left the rest unspoken: plunder, burning, women in their best years borne off, everybody else cut down.
“We must risk that. Else we’ll be whipped piecemeal.” Winnithar grew silent. The longfires leaped and flickered. Outside, wind hooted and rain dashed against walls. His gaze sought Carl’s. “We have no helmet or mail that would fit you. Maybe you can fetch gear for yourself from” wherever you get things.”
The outsider sat stiff. Lines deepened in his face.
Winnithar’s shoulders slumped. “Well, this is no fight of yours, is it?” he sighed. “You’re no Teuring.”
“Carl, oh, Carl!” Jorith came out from among the women.
For a while that reached onward, she and the gray man looked at each other. Then he shook himself, turned to Winnithar, and said: “Fear not. I’ll abide by my friends. But it must be in my own way, and you must follow my redes, whether or not you understand them. Are you willing to that?”
Nobody cheered. A sound like the wind passed down the shadowy length of the hall.
Winnithar mustered heart. “Yes,” he said. “Now let riders of ours take war-arrows around. But the rest of us shall feast.”
—What happened in the next few weeks was never really known. Men fared, pitched camp, fought, came home afterward or did not. Those who did, which was most of them, often had wild tales to tell. They spoke of a blue-cloaked spearman who rode through the sky on a mount that was not a horse. They spoke of dreadful monsters charging at Vandal ranks, and eerie lights in the dark, and blind fear coming upon the foe, until he cast his weapons from him and fled screaming. They spoke of somehow always finding a Vandal gang before it had quite reached a Gothic thorp, and putting it to flight, making sheer lack of loot cause clan after clan to give up and trek off. They spoke of victory.
Their chiefs could say slightly more. It was the Wanderer who had told them where to go, what to await, how best to form array for battle. It was he who outsped the gale as he brought warning and summons, he who got Greutung and Taifal and Amaling help, he who overawed the haughty till they worked side by side as he ordered.
These stories faded away in the course of the following lifetime or two. They were so strange. Rather, they sank back among the older stories of their kind. Anses, Wanes, trolls, wizards, ghosts, had not such beings again and again joined the quarrels of men? What mattered was that for a half-score years, the Goths along the upper Vistula knew peace. Let us get on with the harvest, said they: or whatever else they wanted to do with their lives.
But Carl came back to Jorith as the rescuer.
—He could not really wed her. He had no acknowledged kin. Yet men who could afford it had always taken lemans; the Goths held that to be no shame, if the man provided well for woman and children. Besides, Carl was no mere swain, thane, or king. Salvalindis herself brought Jorith to him, where he waited in a flower-decked loft-room, after a feast at which splendid gifts passed to and fro.
Winnithar had timber cut and ferried across the river, and a goodly house raised for the two. Carl wanted some odd things in the building, such as a bedroom by itself. There was also another room, kept locked save when he went in alone. He was never there long, and no more did he go off to Tiwaz’s Shaw.
Men said between themselves that he made far too much of Jorith. They were apt to swap looks, or walk away from others, like some fuzz-cheeked boy and a thrall girl. However… she ran her home well enough, and anyway, who dared mock at him?
He himself left most of a husband’s tasks to a steward. He did bring in the goods that the household needed, or the wherewithal to trade for them. And he became a great trader. These years of peace were not years of listlessness. No, they brought more chapmen than ever before, carrying amber, furs, honey, tallow from the North, wine, glass, metalwork, cloth, fine pottery from the South and West. Ever eager to meet somebody new, Carl guested passersby lavishly, and went to the fairs as well as the folkmoots.
In those moots he, who was not a tribesman, only watched; but after the day’s talk, things would get lively around his booth.
Nonetheless, men wondered, and women too. Word trickled back that a man, gray but hale, whom nobody formerly knew, was often seen among other Gothic tribes…
It may be that those absences of his were the reason why Jorith was not at once with child; or it may be that she was rather young, just sixteen winters, when she came to his bed. A year had gone by before the signs were unmistakable.
Although her sicknesses grew harsh, joy shone from her. Again his behavior was strange, for he seemed to care less about his get” that she bore than about her own well-being. He even oversaw what she ate, providing her with things like out-land fruits regardless of season though forbidding her as much salt as she was wont to. She obeyed gladly, saying this showed he loved her.
Meanwhile life went on in the neighborhood, and death. At the burials and grave-ales, nobody made bold to speak freely with Carl; he was too close to the unknown. On the other hand, the heads of household who had chosen him were taken aback when he refused the honor of being the man hereabouts who would swive the next Spring Queen.
Remembering what else he had done and was doing on their behalf, they got over that.
Warmth; harvest; bleakness; rebirth; summer again; and Jorith was brought to her childbed.
Long was her toil. She suffered the pains bravely, but the women who attended her became very glum.
The elves would not have liked it had a man seen her during that time. Bad enough how Carl had demanded unheard-of cleanliness. They could only hope that he knew what he was about.
He waited it out in the main room of his house. When callers came, he had mead and drink set forth as was right, but stayed curt in his speech.
When they left at nightfall, he did not sleep but sat alone in the dark until sunrise. Now and then the midwife or a helper would shuffle out to tell him how the birth was going. By the light of the lamp she bore, she saw how his glance sought the door he kept locked.
Late in the second day, the midwife found him among his friends. Silence fell upon them. Then that which she bore in her arms let out a wail—and Winnithar a shout. Carl rose, his nostrils white.
The woman knelt before him, unfolded the blanket, and on the earthen floor, at the father’s feet, laid a man-child, still bloody but lustily sprattling and crying. If Carl did not take the babe up onto his knee, she would carry it into the woods and leave it for the wolves. He never stopped to see if aught might be wrong with it. He snatched the wee form to him while he croaked, “Jorith, how fares Jorith?”
“Weak,” said the midwife. “Go to her now if you will.”
Carl gave her back his son and hastened to the bedroom. The women who were there stood aside. He bent over Jorith. She lay white, sweat-clammy, hollowed out. But when she saw her man, she reached feebly upward and smiled the ghost of a smile. “Dagobert,” she whispered. That was the name, old in her family, that she had wished for, were this a boy.
“Dagobert, yes,” Carl said low. Unseemly though it was in sight of the rest, he bent to kiss her.
She lowered her lids and sank back onto the straw. “Thank you,” came from her throat, barely to be heard. “The son of a god.”
“No-”
Suddenly Jorith shuddered. For a moment she clutched at her brow. Her eyes opened again. The pupils were fixed and wide. She grew bonelessly limp. Breath rattled in and out.