Sworn Brother (44 page)

‘How could the fish be there and not there?’

‘They had gone away to their own saivo river. I could have followed them, or sent my companion to plead with the water spirit who sent them there. But if the water spirit was still angry, the fish might not have returned.’

The saivo, according to Rassa, is a world which lies alongside our own. It is a mirror of our world, yet more substantial and in it live the spirits of the departed and the companions of the living. These companions come into our world to join us as wraiths and sometimes we can visit the saivo ourselves, but we need our guardian wraiths to guide and protect us.

‘Our companions are animals, not people,’ Rassa said, putting aside the wooden bowl he had been carving. ‘Every Sabme has one - whether it is a fox, a lynx, a bird or some other animal. When we are very young the drum tells our parents which creature is to be our saivo companion through life. Occasionally the wrong choice is made and then the child gets sick or has an accident. So we ask the drum again and it indicates a new companion, one that will be more suitable. Since Allba was a baby her saivo wraith is the bird whose image she wears.’

‘Among my people,’ I said, ‘there are fylga, the fetches. I have seen them myself at times of death. They are our other-persons from another world. When they appear, they resemble us directly. Do you mean that I have an animal companion as well?’

Rassa reached across to where his drum lay on the ground. It was always close to his hand. He placed the arpa on the taut drum skin, and without even closing his eyes or singing his chant, he gave a single hard rap on the drum with his forefinger. The arpa leaped, struck the wooden rim and bounced back. It landed on the outline figure of a bear.

I chose to doubt him. ‘How do I know that my companion is a bear?’

‘It was decided for you at the time of your birth.’ ‘But I was born on an island in the ocean where there are no bears.’

‘Perhaps a bear entered the lives of your parents.’

I thought for a moment. ‘I was told that when my father first met my mother, he was on his way back from a voyage to Norway to deliver a captive polar bear. But he had handed over the bear many weeks before he met my mother, and anyhow the bear died soon afterwards.’

‘You will find that the bear died about the time you were born,’ said Rassa firmly. ‘The bear’s spirit has protected you since then. That is your good fortune. The bear is the most powerful of all creatures. It has the intelligence of one man and the strength of nine.’

Before the sun vanished below the horizon for winter, Rassa suggested that if I wanted to know more about the saivo I should enter it myself. I hesitated. I told him that my experience of the other world had been in brief glimpses, through second sight, usually in the company of others who also possessed the ability, and that sometimes the experience had been disturbing and unpleasant. I said I was doubtful that I had the courage to enter the spirit world deliberately and alone. He assured me that my spirit companion would protect me, and that he himself could assist me to pass through the barrier that separated us from the saivo. ‘Your second sight shows that you already live close enough to the saivo to see through the veil that divides it from us. I am only proposing that you pass through the veil entirely and discover what lies on the other side.’

‘How do I know that I will be able to return?’ I asked.

‘That, too, I can arrange with Allba’s help,’ he answered.

He woke Allba and me long before dawn the next day. He had already lit a small fire in the central hearth and cleared a space at the back of the tent. There was enough room for me to sit cross-legged on a square of deerskin. The hide was placed fur side down, and its surface had been painted with the four white lines in the pattern that I had known from throwing the rune counters and the Saxon wands. Rassa indicated that I should sit within the central square and that Allba would squat facing me. ‘As my daughter, she has inherited some of my powers,’ he said. ‘If she is near at hand, you may meet her in the saivo.’

Allba’s presence gave me more confidence, for I was feeling very nervous. She untied the small leather pouch she wore on her belt when she went on her hunting trips and shook out the contents onto the deerskin in front of me. The red caps with their white spots were faded to a dull, mottled pink, but I could still recognise the dried and shrivelled mushrooms. Allba picked them over carefully, running her small fingers over them delicately, feeling their rough surface. Then she selected three of the smallest. Carefully putting the others back into the pouch, she left two of the mushrooms on the deerskin, placed the third in her mouth and began to chew deliberately. She kept her eyes on me, her gaze never wavering. After a little time, she put her hand to her mouth and spat out the contents. She held out her palm to me. ‘Eat,’ she said. I took the warm moist pellet from her, placed it on my tongue and swallowed. Twice more she softened the mushrooms and twice more I swallowed.

Then I sat quietly facing her, observing the firelight play across her features. Her eyes were in shadow.

Time passed. I had no way of judging how long I sat there. Rassa stayed in the background and added several dry sticks to the fire to keep it alight.

Slowly, very slowly, I began to lose touch with my body. As I separated from its physical presence, I felt my body trembling. Once or twice I knew I twitched. But there was nothing I could do about it and I felt unconcerned. A hazy contentment was settling over me. My body seemed to grow lighter as my thoughts relaxed. Everything except for Allba’s face became indistinct. She did not move, yet her face came closer and closer. I saw every tiny detail with extraordinary clarity. The lobe of her right ear filled my vision. I detected the gentle blush of blood beneath the skin, the soft fuzz of hair. I wanted to reach out and nibble it in my teeth.

Suddenly there was no ground beneath me. I was suspended in a comfortable space. I knew that my body was there with me, but it had no importance. Without any sensation of movement I was in an endless landscape of trees, snow and rock, but I felt no cold. I glided over the surface without contact. It was as if I was riding on a gentle air current. The trees were a vivid green and I could examine every leaf and wrinkle of the bark in minute detail. The snow reflected the colours of the rainbow, the crystals shifted, merged and rippled. A small bird flew up from a bush and I knew that it was Allba’s companion. Between two trees I glimpsed the upright form of a white bear, close, yet not close. It was standing upright, its two eyes gazing at me with a human expression and motionless. I heard someone speaking to me. I recognised my own voice and replied. The conversation was reassuring. I felt peaceful. A bear, dark brown this time, appeared to one side of my path, head down, lumbering and swaying as it walked along and our tracks were converging. When the animal was in touching distance, we both halted. I felt the brush of a bird’s wing against my cheek. The bear slowly turned to face me and its muzzle beneath the eyes seemed to smile.

The eyes were grey-blue, and I realised that I was looking into Allba’s face. I was back on the deerskin, still seated.

‘You have come back from the saivo,’ said Rassa. ‘You were there only a short time, but long enough to know how to return there if you wish.’

‘It seemed very like our own world,’ I said, ‘only much larger and always just beyond reach, as though it withheld itself.’

‘That is appearance only,’ said the noaide. ‘The saivo is full of spirits, the spirts of the dead as well as the spirits who rule our lives. By comparison our world is temporary and fragile. Our world is in the present, while the saivo is eternal. Those who travel into the saivo glimpse the forces that determine our existence, but only when those spirits wish to be seen. Those who visit the saivo regularly become accepted there and then the spirits reveal themselves.’

‘Why should a bear smile?’ I asked.

Opposite me Allba suddenly got to her feet and left the tent. Rassa did not answer. Without warning I felt dizzy and my stomach heaved. More than anything else, I wanted to lie down and close my eyes again. I could barely drag myself back to my sleeping place and the last thing I remembered was Rassa throwing a deerskin over me.

Snow fell almost daily now, heavy flakes drifting down through the trees and settling on the ground. Our hunters made repeated sweeps of the forest to lay out their wooden traps because the fur-bearing animals had grown their winter coats and were in their prime. The siida made one final move. It was laborious because our tents were now double- or triple-layered to keep out the cold and difficult to dismantle and we were hampered by our heavy winter clothing. We went to ground, quite literally. The siida had its midwinter camp in the lee of a low ridge, which gave shelter from the blizzards. Over the generations each family had dug itself a refuge, excavating the soft earthen side of the ridge, then covering the crater with a thick roof of logs and earth. The entrance to Rassa’s cabin was little more than a tunnel, through which I crawled on hands and knees, but the place was surprisingly spacious once inside. I could stand upright and though the place was smoky from the small fire in the central hearth it was cosy. I admitted to myself that the thought of spending the next few months here with Allba was appealing. Rassa’s wife had spread the floor with the usual carpet of fresh spruce twigs covered with deerskins, and had divided the interior into small cubicles by hanging up sheets of light cotton obtained from the springtime traders. The contrast with the squalid dugout where Grettir had died could not have been greater. I said so to Rassa and described how my sworn brother had met his end through a volva’s malign intervention, with curse runes cut on a log.

‘Had your sworn brother met with such an accident among the Sabme, injuring himself with that axe,’ commented Rassa, ‘we would have known that it was surely a staallu’s doing. The staallu can disguise himself as an animal, a deer perhaps, and allows himself to be hunted down and killed. But when the hunter begins to cut up the animal to take its flesh and hide, the staallu turns the knife blade on the bone, so that the hunter cuts himself badly. If the hunter is far from his siida, he bleeds to death beside the carcass of his kill. Then the staallu returns to his normal shape, drinks the blood and feasts on the corpse of his victim.’

Allba, who was listening, gave a little scornful hiss. ‘If I ever meet the staallu, he will regret the day. That’s just a story to frighten children.’

‘Don’t be so sure, Allba. Just hope you never meet him,’ her father murmured, then turning to me said, ‘The staallu roams the forest. He’s big and a bit simple and clumsy. We say he’s like those coarse traders who come to acquire our furs in the springtime, though the staallu’s appetite is even more gross. He eats human flesh when times are hard, and has been known to carry off Sabme girls.’

That same week I gave away the rest of the contents of my trader’s pack. I had lost any ambition to barter with the members of the siida for furs and I was ashamed to hold back items which could be useful to the band. The Sabme were so generous and hospitable to me that it seemed wrong not to contribute my share to their well-being. Apart from mending nets and doing some primitive metalwork, I was useless to them, so I handed the pack over to Rassa and asked that he distribute the contents to whoever needed it most. The only item I kept back was the fire ruby — and that I gave to Allba as a love token. The jewel delighted her. She spent hours in the cabin, sitting by the fire with the ruby in her fingers and turning the gem this way and that so that the red light flickered within the gem. ‘There is a spirit dancing inside the stone,’ she would say. ‘It is the spirit which brought you to me.’

The effect of giving away all my trade goods was the reverse of what I had expected — instead of ending my chances of obtaining furs to take to Miklagard, I was deluged with them. Nearly every day a hunter left outside Rassa’s cabin the frost-stiffened carcass of an ermine, a sable, a squirrel or a white fox, whose luxurious pelt Allba would skin and prepare for me. There was no way of knowing which hunter was responsible for the gift. They came and went silently on their skis. Only the blizzards stopped them. When the blizzard spirit raged the entire siida would disappear inside their underground shelters and wait for the terrible wind and driving snow to end. Then, cautiously, the Sabme dug themselves out of the snow-covered lairs and, like the animals they hunted, sniffed the wind and set out to forage.