Most men who come to this door below want something of another: a night, a face, a robe on a bough. Aun the Old, king at Uppsala, wanted mornings. He was a wise king, the saga says, and peaceable, not a warrior — and it did not save him. A Danish prince beat him off his throne and he fled to the Geats and sat out twenty-five years in exile. He came home when the man who beat him died in his bed. Remember that detail. Dying in bed is the whole story.
He was sixty when he went to Odin the first time, and the price was a son, and Odin paid sixty years for him. The exchange rate held. Every ten years, another son. Odin, who is never careless with wording, added a condition that should have been read as an insult: the king had to name one of the Swedish provinces after the running count of sons he had sold. The Swedes kept the name. They kept it because it was true. By the seventh son Aun could not walk and was carried on a chair. By the eighth he could not leave his bed. By the ninth he fed like an infant, lying down, suckling from a horn held to his mouth — the old skald calls the horn the sword of the bull, and gives us the picture the whole tale turns on: a grey-haired king who cannot lift his own cup.
Then the last decade ran out, and he asked for the tenth. The price had not changed. The plan was to trade his final son and name Uppsala itself after the count: The Ten Lands. And here the story does something older sagas rarely bother with. The Swedes simply refused. No battle, no god’s answer, no thunder. His own people looked at the arithmetic of their king’s life and would not sign it. So he died, as refused men do, and they buried him in a mound at Uppsala, and his last son Egil ruled after him.
Now the knife, because you came down for it. The skald’s stanza — the oldest layer we have, three centuries before the saga — remembers none of the sons. It remembers the body: decrepitude at Uppsala, the food of an infant taken a second time, the horn, the hand that could not hold it. The sons-for-years bargain is prose, added by Snorri’s generations, who could not stop doing arithmetic on a father’s love. The tellers kept whichever horror their night required. And the Swedish language kept its own receipt: from that day, dying in bed of old age was called Aun’s sickness. A death everyone else gets for free, named forever after the man who paid nine sons for it.
Odin never cheated him, either. That is the worst part. Sixty years for the first boy, ten for each after, and the last night thrown in free when the market closed. The god took payment and delivered exactly what was bought, and what was bought turned out to be the sight of its own price. Some bargains are only ways of watching yourself pay. Count your children tonight. One god pays cash.