Bald

Bald was born in early February of 453 on low, wet ground by the sea where the islands and inlets met, in a farmstead among scattered settlements. The household spoke both West Germanic and the North Germanic speech of their neighbors. A free farmer named Erman held the land and the livestock. Bald’s mother, Freda, worked under his authority as an unfree woman in the longhouse: carrying water, scraping pots, stirring porridge, cleaning ash from the hearth. Bald’s father was not in the house. No man claimed him at the doorway, and no one spoke a name for that absence.

The longhouse held more than one family. Freda’s mother, Hildi, also worked unfree in Erman’s household and slept beside her daughter. Hildi took the child when Freda had to move fast. Bald learned early to push himself into the center of any moment. When someone called from the yard, he ran for the threshold on unsteady legs, shouting his own sounds, reaching for boots and buckets as if the newcomers had arrived for him. He wanted faces close. Set down behind a bench, he protested until Hildi lifted him high enough to see.

By his second summer he had a few words in both tongues—names for food, the dog, the door. He stayed busy with anything that fit his hand. He favored a scrap of smooth wood from the work area and carried it from place to place. He offered it out and then yanked it back if Sigi, an unfree boy of eight or nine who worked in the yard, tried to take it. Once he shoved the farm’s puppy away from it and shouted until Hildi slapped his hand and put the scrap on a shelf.

That autumn an acute fever took him. By the second day he had stopped eating. Freda pressed cool cloths to his head while Hildi called on the spirits of the land and the dead for help, and Erman allowed a small offering of ale poured onto the earth at the yard’s edge. Bald was buried near the farm boundary in a shallow grave, wrapped in cloth, with a pinch of grain set by his hands.