Odin’s Child (11 page)

Inside, we hung our dripping clothes by the fire and wrung out our hair, then threw ourselves down to sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough to take stock.

But Thorvald did not sleep. He fumbled in the kindling pile for a stick, took it, and sat down heavily in his high seat. He drew his knife and began to carve:
“Fe … Ur … Thurs … Oss….”
The slivers flew.

I lay on the wall bench opposite, wet and shivering under my fleece. “Father,” I whispered, “it was good to fight again, wasn't it?”

He didn't answer, and before my lips could shape another word I was asleep.

That night I dreamt of Grani, my brave stallion. In my dream I stood beside him in the ring, saw the goad descend in aching slowness through its arc, and heard myself scream …
Too late
! The iron hook clawed out the red gobbet of his eye. But instead of the shriek of pain and hoofs beating the air, he turned his blood-streaked face to me in silence. And as I took his head between my hands, it seemed to dissolve, becoming instead the head of a bull—a black bull, from whose eyes streamed not blood but tears, rivers of tears. When I thought on it later, it seemed obvious that the bull was my father's
fylgia
, his spirit animal. Then I felt a crushing weight: a nightmare sat on my chest, pressing down, suffocating me. I thrashed and struggled to wake up and finally, with a wrenching effort, broke free. I lay still for a few moments.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that the rain had stopped and bright sunlight sifted down through the smoke hole. No one else was awake. It was very still.

The next thing I noticed was my father's knife lying on the floor by the side of his chair. Raising myself on an elbow, I was surprised to find him still sitting just as he had been when I fell asleep, only that his right hand hung down, and his head, turned a little to one side, rested against the carved chair back.

And his furious dead eyes looked into mine.

For the length of a heartbeat I simply stared. Then I dropped to the floor and rolled out of the path of his gaze. With my heart knocking against my ribs, I circled the wall until I was beside him. Then snatching his cloak from its peg, I threw it over his face. Feeling a little easier once his eyes were covered, I woke the others.

That morning while Thorvald sat—indifferent as always and only a little less animated—in his high-seat, we tried to make our brains, numbed already by so many shocks, take in this one too.

Jorunn, pale and lifeless as a corpse herself, sat on the bench close by her husband's side, unable to speak a word. It fell to the cool-headed Vigdis to set us moving.

“Find a big plank, husband,” she said to Gunnar. “Odd, fetch water and cloths.”

We began the ritual of preparation: laying him on the plank as best we could, for he was already stiffening; sealing his eyes and nostrils, and wrapping up his head. With an effort, Gunnar and I got him stripped, washed, and clothed again in clean breeches and a fine embroidered shirt that we discovered lying in the bottom of his chest. I didn't remember ever seeing him in that particular shirt, but my mother's cheeks colored for a moment when I brought it out.

Then Vigdis said to us in a low voice, “You know you must put him out through the wall, for he was a difficult man when he lived and I don't
imagine death will improve him.”

When Gudrun Night-Sun died, we had carried her out by the door, but of course, no one feared her little ghost if it should find its way home again. Thorvald was a different case. A
draug
is a terrifying thing—especially so when the living man died in anger, still more so if, like our father, he was uncanny.

Gunnar replied sarcastically that he would enjoy nothing better that morning than to tunnel through five feet of sod wall, but that we mustn't hope to get rid of father as easily as that. “He'll be back to stamp on our roof and kill our cattle however we carry him out, that grim man.”

“Hush, Gunnar,” said Vigdis, with a nervous glance at Jorunn. But our mother, sitting with her hands limp in her lap, gave no sign of hearing anything we said.

So Gunnar and I, with Skidi Dung-Beetle to help, set to work to break a hole in the rear wall, the farthest from the door, just large enough to admit the plank and body. While they dug from the outside, I applied the bow-drill and sawed through a section of the wooden planking that lined the inside of the room.

The day was a hot one. By the time we had dragged out the last basketful of dirt, the sun beat down straight above our heads, so that we got no shade even in the angle where the stable adjoins the house wall. Luckily, the river ran close by this end of the hall. We drank the icy water and rested a little.

“Now then, Tangle-Hair,” said Gunnar, “you at his head and I at his feet.”

We shoved our burden through and trudged with it over the stony path that followed the river.

“Brother, “said Gunnar over his shoulder, “doesn't he seem a little heavier than you would have guessed?”

A draug's weight, it's well known, grows in proportion to its mischievousness. I thought this a poor joke and didn't answer.

‘The Barrows' was not a place we visited often. Here the heath was humped up all around in grassy mounds which gave the appearance of a range of foothills as it might look to a strolling giant. Within each barrow, like a worm in a cocoon, an ancestor kept his vigil and thought his patient dead man's thoughts—or so, at least, they did when not feasting inside the fiery mountain. One little mound was new, the grass not yet thick upon it. There Gudrun Night-Sun lived.

Altogether, six generations of our kin rested under our feet.

Thorolf Braggart had been a priest in the temple of Thor back in Norway. It was a large temple that boasted a man-sized statue of the god, covered from top to toe in gold leaf, and seated in a chariot drawn by wooden goats.

In those days, because of the tyrannical rule of King Harald Fair-Hair, thousands of Norwegians loaded their families, their cattle, their tools and weapons into any leaky tub that would stay afloat and braved six hundred miles of open sea to make their home on this island, only recently discovered. They found a country by no means rich, the interior nothing but ice and lava, the seacoast and river-valleys able to bear only hay and a little barley in the south. In place of the magnificent pine and oak forests that they'd left behind them, they found nothing here but stunted birches. Despite these drawbacks, immigrants continued to arrive until, within sixty years of its discovery, all the useable land was taken.

Thorolf, too, decided to join this migration—in his case, impelled by neighbors who had chanced to find their missing cattle in his barn. Arriving at the mouth of the river Ranga, he soon discovered that all the decent land along that coast had already been claimed by others, and he was compelled to follow the river and seek land up country. He could find no place that suited him, though, until he came in sight of Hekla. Here, at any rate, his horse lay down and refused to go another step, and he took this as an omen.

So there, beside the riverbank, Thorolf Braggart set down his high-seat pillars and built his hall around them. The pillars in our hall are those very pillars, and the hall has changed little in two hundred years.

Not far from his new hall, Thorolf built a temple, just large enough for himself and his neighbors to sit comfortably in when they drank ale and ate the consecrated horseflesh on feast days. And in it he placed images of Thor, Odin, and Frey, all carved with his own hands, as well as a table to hold the bowl and twig by which the sacrificial blood is sprinkled on the worshippers, and the silver arm ring, which a man touches whenever he swears an oath.

Now, Thorolf was gifted with the second sight, as many of our family have been, and was able to see how the land-spirits from round about came up out of the ground to see this new temple of his and appeared to be favorably impressed with it. When he died, his barrow was built
within sight of it, and all his descendants thereafter were buried in this same place.

From that time on, every father in his turn served as Thor's priest, beginning with Thorolf's son, Amundi Twist-Foot, who was the father of Olvir the Childish, who was the father of An Bow-Bender (the first of our line to be a godi), who was the father of Stein the Fast-Sailing, who was the father of Odd Snout, who was the father of my father.

But Black Thorvald, as I have already described, being angry with the god for letting the White Christ make a fool of him, neglected the temple and it soon fell to ruin. The idols within it, punished by the weather and gnawed by mice, shrank away until they were nothing but misshapen stumps.

Ironically, there seemed to be no other space large enough to contain our father's mound than this very spot. With the help of the thralls, who trooped along with us, carrying their spades and mattocks, we broke up Thor's earth.

Jorunn came up behind us as we worked, so quietly that no one noticed her until she spoke. By that time the grave was nearly dug and a mountain of dirt and stones lay heaped up beside it.

“Odd, will you do a thing for me even though it doesn't please you?” She knelt at the edge of the hole and held down to me a wooden crucifix. “He wouldn't have one in the house, but I have kept this all these years hidden in my chest.”

“He won't like it any better now, Mother.”

“I want you to carve runes on it—the way he taught you. I want you to carve
Thorvald, do not walk
. We will lay it on his breast when we bury him.”

This was the woman who only the day before had begged him to grovel before Snorri. Who could blame him now if his draug should haunt her?

“Ask a priest to write it in priest-letters, why don't you? It's no job for me.”

But she persisted. “Your father can't read the priest-letters, what good would it do? Carve the runes for me, Odd.” She thrust the thing in my hands, turned, and took a few steps. Then she came back. She said, “Odd, carve on it too
God help his soul
. Then she went quickly back along the path to the house.

Sitting down on a nearby rock in the shade of a barrow, I began to carve, and, as I carved, sadness and pity filled me. For the runes represented to me all that unfinished business between my father and me: questions never asked, understanding never gained, comfort never given. It would never be finished now.

Gunnar, laying his spade by, came over to watch. “He tried that with me once, you know, before you were born—the runes—but I didn't take to 'em. When he set me to carving, I threw the stick away, and he flew into a rage and beat me so hard I couldn't move for a week. After that we went our own ways.” The bitterness in his voice surprised even me.

“Gunnar, I never knew that.”

“Lots you never knew, brother.”

“Do you have no tears for him even now?”

“For a coward?”

“But he fought, Gunnar! At the end, he
fought
. You saw him.”

“Oh, he fought—like a weak man goaded to it, not joyfully as a warrior fights.”

“I call that hard words for a dead man.”

“Odd … Brother!” Gunnar put out his hands to fend me off, for I had jumped to my feet and swung at him with the crucifix, like a club. An instant before, nothing could have been farther from my mind.

“Odd, don't!” he said. “I wouldn't have us fight for anything—not now of all times. I take back what I said.”

Putting his hand on my shoulder, he sat me down again. I poured my anger into my carving and made the slivers fly, just as if Father himself wielded the knife. Was his spirit raising its awful head among us so soon?

But anger with me has a way of rushing in and out like a madman on an errand. Before long it went its muttering way, and I mumbled words of apology to Gunnar.

I finished the inscription and drew the knife blade across my thumb. My blood flowed into the deep lines and notches of the runes. Rune spells are weak, so my father had taught me long ago, without the added strength of blood.

“Gunnar, if you haven't tears….”

“Aye.”

He took the knife from me and sliced between his thumb and finger,
cutting deeper than he needed to, and let his blood run together with mine over the crucifix. “May he have good of it.”

I knew Gunnar did it only for me. I loved him very much at that moment.

†

That morning the sun had been bright and hot in an empty sky, but by afternoon, rain clouds stood again over the mountains.

We laid Thorvald in his tomb, placing next to him a joint of mutton on a platter, his silver-rimmed drinking horn, his blacksmith's tools, a pair of spears, and his sword—first bending the blade to consecrate it. I whistled for Ulf and, when the old hound loped up, I scratched him behind the ears and cut his throat, laying his body at Thorvald's feet. Then Jorunn placed the crucifix on his chest and folded his hands over it. I thought I heard Hekla grumble in its sleep as she did this, though it might have been only the echo of distant thunder. After that we shared ale and mutton at the graveside and, lastly, covered the crypt with planks, shaped the mound over it, and bade Black Thorvald farewell.

Our mother did not weep. It isn't our custom for women to wail and claw their cheeks at funerals in the appalling fashion of Greeks or Arabs. Nevertheless, she bore it hard.

Little Gudrun's death had stirred rage in her. Thorvald's, once the first shock was past, affected her in a different way. All that evening she stood at her loom, her hands never still, weaving and talking, talking to herself more than to any of us, recalling the man that she alone remembered.

“Lord,” she said, “the day I came here to live. His old mother was still alive then, the daughter of a king in Ireland, as she claimed, and maybe she was. Anyway, she thought I wasn't good enough to wed her son, though I came of a proud hall. ‘We'll see about that,' thought I to myself, and I stood at this loom, just as I'm standing here now, to weave him as fine a shirt as ever man wore. But, as often as I would set the heddles for my pattern, that old mother of his would curse me for a stupid girl and pull them out again, until I grew so vexed that I cried and begged to go back to my own hall where they treated me kindly.