Odin’s Child (14 page)

“Uncle Hoskuld?” My voice rasped in my throat.

“Yes, I'm here. Don't try to talk, dear boy. Drink it all down. There.”

“How did I get here?”

“We found you in the long grass on the island—or rather, Kalf did with his eagle eye.

“How…?”

“Lie still, now. You really must. Kalf, tell him he must.”

I let him push me back on the mound of fleeces they had heaped around me.

“Oh, to see you alive, dear boy! You've got young Kalf here to thank for it. It was the morning, you see, that Gunnar visited us with his sad news of Thorvald dying and all of you leaving. After he left, I took to my bed. I confess, I lay in my bed moaning and weeping for half the day, a thing I have not done since—well …” Since the death of Flosi, his son, he had started to say. “For I'm not an unfeeling sort of man, not a stone, by God, not a tree stump!

“But Kalf made me ashamed of myself, saying it wasn't right to let kinsmen go away without a proper farewell. It was God, of course, who made you say that, Kalf, seeing as how things turned out. So the two of us set out on horseback after Gunnar.”

“I saw the smoke a long way off,” Kalf broke in. “‘By Odin's crow,' said I, ‘they're being murdered!' and I galloped to the brow of the ridge from where I could see your house. I wasn't there a minute when I saw you crawl up onto the island. By the time Grandfather and I got to you, you were stiff and stony cold. I thought sure you were dead.”

Hoskuld resumed, “I put my ear to your lips and could feel a little breath stirring. ‘Not dead yet,' said I, ‘but as good as, if Hrut searches for his body and doesn't find it.' Right away I saw what was to be done. I'm a cunning man when need be. We watched and waited on that island for hours until the fire was nearly burned out, chaffing your poor arms and legs all the while to warm 'em up. You don't remember it at all? Well, by that time, the lot of them were drunk, helping themselves to what was left in your brew-house. Then I took that heathen medal from off your neck, that cursed Thor's hammer, for I recollected how Snorri had fingered it….”

“Snorri was there! I burst out. “I saw him!”

“Let me tell it now,” said Kalf. “I took the Thor's hammer with me and waded across the river. I crept up along the bank until I was just by the house. I got in the way you must have gotten out, through that gaping hole in the wall. How it came to be there, I can't imagine.”

I explained in a few words.

Kalf gave a shudder at the thought of Black Thorvald's draug. “No evil but has some good in it, though,” he said. “Without that hole I don't know what I would have done. I wriggled in and had a look round until I found a body about your size—one of Hrut's men. He was so charred I didn't like to touch him, but I had no choice. I stripped off his sword and jewelry that his friends might recognize him by, blackened his hair with soot, and hung your hammer around his neck.”

“But he didn't have my face.”

“He hardly had a face at all. Then it was just a matter of getting you home. You did give us a scare once, when you woke up screaming before we were out of earshot.”

“Kalf Slender-Leg,” I said, “you're the bravest fellow in all the world. Ask me for my life whenever you need it.”

He blushed to the roots of his hair.

“And it worked!” crowed my uncle. For just yesterday who comes knocking at my door but Snorri himself, looking mighty uncomfortable—admitting nothing, mind you—but saying how he had heard about what happened, and wasn't it a pity, and he had seen to it that Gunnar's wife and baby were delivered alive to her father's house, and that all the victims got a Christian burial, the mother and
both
sons—his exact words—both sons. And you lying under a fleece not six paces away. You're safe, Odd, for a while, as long as you stay hidden here. God has not forsaken us altogether.” He put out a blue-veined hand and stroked my forehead.

†

In the long days that followed, the outside of me healed. They made poultices of moss and marsh marigold and put them on the palms of my hands, which were sliced and torn, and on my scorched toes, and every other part of me that was bruised, burned or cut.

I'd been lucky. My face was untouched except for where my hair and
beard were singed on one side, and elsewhere on my body the wounds did not mortify. Within a month the worst of it was past.

The outside of me, as I say, healed well. But I saw in all their eyes the dawning knowledge that there were things amiss with me that no poultices could cure. You are never the same man afterwards when you should have died but didn't.

I began by taking mead or ale to deaden the pain of my wounds. As the pain grew less, I found that I still could not sleep without drink, and, despite great quantities of it, I slept badly, waking in the middle of the night, my shirt soaked with sweat. I would grind my fists into my eyes to squeeze the pictures out of them. But nothing could take the stench of burning hair and flesh out of my nostrils. Hoskuld placed under my pillow shavings of goat's horn, in which he put great store as a cure for sleeplessness, but neither that nor any other remedy gave me ease.

In the daytime, when the rest of the household was occupied with the work of the farm, I tottered from one end of the hall to the other: from the bed-closet to the stable, and from the stable to the pantry, from the pantry to the bed-closet again; past the hangings, past the ornate high-seat posts, past the old weapons that lined the walls in an unceasing, aimless, and distracted round of movement.

And in the evenings by the fire I talked endlessly, telling the gruesome tale over and over again, jumping up to circle the room, then returning to my place at the bench only to abandon it a moment later, but always talking.

“Gunnar ordered me to run away, Uncle, or else I would not have lived….”

“Yes, dear boy, and thank God for it.”

“Kalf, he made me promise him. ‘Avenge us,' he said—his last words.”

“Yes, Odd, you've told us, and someday you surely will.”

“Gunnar held me by my shirt—like this—and ordered me…”

“Yes, yes, I know.”

They listened to me at first with sorrow, then with perplexity, finally with fear.

“Odd,” said Kalf, when a little drink spilled from the ale horn I was holding and wet my tunic, “your hands—”

After that I was careful to hold them close to my body, to put one on top of the other, to sit on them.

Waking and sleeping I dreamed of revenge, rehearsing to Kalf, or anyone who would listen, the most fantastic schemes, only to reject each one in turn. Any act of mine would draw attention to Hoskuld and make his life forfeit for harboring a fugitive.

Not that he seemed to care much for life now. The past weeks had aged him like so many years. In his heart, I think, he blamed himself for bungling our case, and even for what happened afterward. I, the ‘young dog' of happier days, had never been his ‘dear boy' until now. This unaccustomed tenderness was the measure of his guilt.

For myself, I could have forgiven him, but even his own god, it seemed, would not do so much, despite all the mumbling hours that he spent upon his knees. And meanwhile, his cloudy eyes grew cloudier, the skin around them dark and drawn, and his clothes hung looser from his shoulders. Kalf watched helplessly as the two of us, man and boy, wandered our separate ways into the dark places of the soul.

But there was another who watched, too, one whom I have already had occasion to mention—the man called Stig.

Not Stig the Silent, nor Stig the Ugly, though either of those nicknames would have suited him. Not Stig Sveinsson or Einarsson, or any such patronymic, since he claimed to have no father. He was, therefore, for lack of anything better, called Stig No-One's-Son, though usually simple Stig sufficed.

I had seen him for the first time, you'll recall, on that night in Hoskuld's hall when he danced like a wild man, and then again on our journey to the Althing—a tight-lipped man who seemed to care little for being a servant. Finally, it was his villainous face—pockmarked, broken-nosed, and shock-headed—that watched over me in my delirium. And they were his skillful hands that tended me.

He was, according to his own terse account of himself, a bit of a farmer, a bit of a surgeon, a bit of a sailor.

“A bit of a brigand,” Hoskuld added ruefully, “though the rascal has his uses.”

He was not a thrall, as I had thought at first, but a landless freeman who had arrived at my uncle's doorstep seeking work some summers previous, and had stayed on to tend the forge, to doctor the household and the stock, and even to barter the produce and handle money.

These talents outweighed his defects, which were, in my uncle's eyes,
considerable. He had no religion; he suffered bursts of manic energy, which appeared without warning, although (fortunately for the crockery and the furniture) not often; and lastly, he had a habit of going off unexpectedly on long expeditions of indefinite duration, whose purpose he never cared to disclose.

He was a man who kept to himself and had little to say most of the time, but I began to notice, as much as I noticed anything in those brain-sick days, how he would often follow me with a cool and appraising eye.

It was on a warm evening in high summer, about the fourth week of my captivity—as I now thought of it—and we were ranged around the hall in our usual attitudes: Katla at the loom, Kalf by the fire, fletching arrows, Hoskuld fretting, and I drinking—as I had been doing steadily since morning, though I felt no better for it. Stig sat in a corner, stitching a patch of leather on his shoe.

“Nick his ship,” he said to the wall.

No one quite heard, and after a few moments he took the wall into his confidence again, repeating in a louder voice, “Nick his ship.”

“What's that, you scoundrel?” said Hoskuld, giving a start as if he had been shaken out of a slumber.

Stig glanced around and lifted an eyebrow. “Hrut's ship,” he said. “Nick it.”

We all stared at him.

“What—take it?” said Hoskuld. “But he's gone off a-trading already, man. The sailing season's half over.”

“Hasn't.”

“What d'you know of it?” I demanded, thick-tongued and surly with drink.

It was Stig's habit never to look quite at you when he spoke, but rather to squint past your shoulder as though his keen mariner's eye descried some distant coastline on the horizon. So it appeared that he spoke to walls.

“Talked to a man who happened to mention that your friend Hrut's ship sprung a leak and they had to re-tar her. Then he got sick in his stomach for a while. No sooner recovered than his white gyrfalcons that he'd meant to sell abroad went and died on him, and they had to find more. Troubles that man has had could make you weep.” He allowed himself a quick smile.

“And she's still in the river?” I asked, hardly able to believe him.

Stig scratched his spiky head. “Was yesterday.” He had come back only yesterday from one of his mysterious rambles. Finally, he looked straight at me with the same cool, searching look such as I had caught him at before. It seemed to say,
What are you made of, boy? What are you game for?

“Still moored in the river,” he said, “but not for long. Fellow tells me she'll sail in three, four days' time, now that the new falcons are old enough to live through the voyage.”

“Three or four days!” I cried. “And just waiting to be plundered and burnt. A blow against him where he'll feel it the most!”

“You wicked, thankless boy, “Katla Thin-Hair screeched, wringing her thin hands. “It's no different from all your other plans. If you're caught at it, you'll be your uncle's murderer. It won't take them long to guess who has sheltered you all these weeks. They'll come and burn
us
up in our beds!”

“Sweet darling Katla,” I laughed, “I won't be caught. I've just this second thought of a better plan. Now listen everyone. We don't plunder her, we sail off in her. We'll get away clean with no witnesses left alive. By the Raven, I'll wear a sack over my head, if it'll make you feel better. I promise you Hrut won't know who's to blame for the theft of his ship until the day I come back and throw it in his face.”

I looked at my uncle. “Hoskuld Long-Jaws? I owe you everything. There'll never come another chance like this. Give me your leave.”

For a long moment he sat silently. Then raising his hands toward the rafters, cried out in his deep, strong voice of old, “Praise God, who rejoices in the broken bones of his enemies! Praise Him for He has heard our prayers!” He folded me in his arms and his tears wet my cheek.

“Of course,” resumed Stig, “I mean, before we all fall to kissing each other—there is one little thing. It needs half a dozen lads to sail a ship like her. Seafarers, I mean, not plowboys.”

“But you could get them, Stig!”

“In three days?” he shrugged. “Not likely.”

“Rubbish,” said Hoskuld. “Why the countryside's teeming with rough-edged rascals like yourself who'd as soon cut a throat and steal a ship as spend the summer stacking another man's hay.”

“Why, Hoskuld Long-Jaws,” Stig leered evilly, “I'm overcome to hear myself so well spoken of.”

“But he's right, isn't he? You could find us a crew?”

With some hesitation he allowed that he knew someone here and perhaps another one there, who might be game for a summer's cruise.”

“Now Stig,” I said, “make this plain to them—that my name, for the time being, is none of their business, but it's my vengeance we're about. I, and no other, will command this ship.”

“Don't worry, young Captain, I'll tell 'em so. No need to look so fierce about it.” Again, that momentary smile. “And … you've sailed a ship before, have you?”