The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (13 page)

Bjarni looked at him in surprise. ‘Then I know your mother. She tended Hugin’s paw when it was scaithed.’

‘That sounds like my mother.’

‘But I did not see any thrall-ring on her neck.’

‘Not now, not for a long while. But the mark is still there, hidden by the silver chain the Lady Aud set there in place of it.’

‘You were bought together, then? Or was it war?’ Bjarni asked after a pause, not prying, just taking a friendly interest.

‘War,’ said the other man, seeming to take the thing as it was intended. He brought his gaze back out of the distance. ‘You will not be knowing? No one has told you?’

Suddenly and a little bitterly, he laughed. ‘Ach well – good it is for the soul to find our own unimportance. Ten – twelve years ago, Jarl Sigurd of Orkney came summer-raiding along the Islands and my father the King called out his spears to withstand him and his war-bands, but they were too strong. They slew him and his warriors around him, and my mother and me – I was not yet old enough to be with my father among the dead – they carried off into thralldom.
Others also – they sold them in Dublin market but my mother and me, the Jarl kept. We were a year on Orkney, and then he gave us both, together with a fine stallion and a gold cup, for a friendship gift to Thorstein the Red.’

Bjarni was silent, taking this in, thinking back to the woman with the Lady Aud in her bower while Hugin, growing bored, nosed at his hand.

‘You are not believing me?’ One eyebrow gently quirked.

‘Why would you tell me such a tale if it were not true?’ Bjarni said. ‘Na, na, I was thinking now there is an odd thing, Bjarni Sigurdson, that you took your dog to a queen for tending, and she salving the wound as though she were none but some old herb woman of the woods.’

‘The princesses of Erin are many of them herb-wise,’ said the man. ‘There was one called Iseult. Muirgoed my mother was wise in herbs and healing before ever she came to be a queen.’ He pushed off from the turf wall. ‘It grows late, and I grow hungry if you do not.’ But as Bjarni turned also, he said, ‘I have your name now, Bjarni Sigurdson. Let you have mine in fair exchange. I am Erp Mac Meldin of Argyll.’

And he went swinging off to his own place, while Bjarni whistled Hugin to heel and headed for the Hearth Hall and supper. He understood now that small jest that had passed between the Lady Aud and her bower woman, understood also something of the bond that must have grown between them over the years, before they could share that particular jest without bitterness.

There was good rich witty talk in Thorstein’s Hall in the winter nights between the harp-songs and the horseplay after the women had gone from the
cross-benches. Travellers’ tales to listen to from the farmost edges of the world. Thorstein counted a good few mercenaries among his hearth companions; men as far-flying as the wild geese, to whom the Iceland run and the long haul around the North Islands and on to Norway were no more than a river crossing. Andred, who had been far south to the Hot Lands and into the mouths of great rivers to trade with men whose skin had been burned as black as bog oak by the sun, while other men hairy all over swarmed among the branches of great trees overhead and threw strange fruit over them. Leiknen One-eye, who knew the Mid-Land Sea as other men knew their own back garth and had walked the streets of Miklagard and swore they were paved with gold. And among them, Bjarni had his own tale to tell when the harp of story-telling was handed round, for though he had been no further afield than when he first came west-over-seas to join the settlement of Rafn Cedricson, no one else in that company had been with Onund Treefoot in the narrows of Bute when the great stones came whistling out of the sky.

They worked and slept and fought and feasted together, and as the dark months went by he formed an easy comradeship with them, though nothing that could not be easily broken. The only real friendship that he formed on Mull remained the odd crooked friendship he had struck up with Erp Mac Meldin on the day they brought the horses down from the summer pastures.

Winter passed, with its black winds and bitter rain and the wild seas pounding on the coast. Amid all the wild weather, suddenly there began to be signs of spring; catkins lengthening on the hazels down the bumside and a fluttering of small birds among the birches that were flushing purple. The first of
the greylag geese that had grazed on the
machair
all winter long took off for the North one wild night, yapping like a pack of hounds through the storm clouds overhead.

And down on the ship-strand there began to be a swarming activity, as the lean war-keels were run out from their sheds, and their crews set to pitching their sides and overhauling spars and rigging and sails in readiness for the summer sea-faring. And newly run out onto the slipway from her own high-gabled shed where she had lain in slings all winter, the Lady Aud’s own galley was being made ready for the seaways ahead of her sisters, for it was the Lady’s custom to make a sea-faring of her own at Easter, to spend the few days of the fast and the feast with the brothers on the Holy Island of lona. Bjarni, returning from the nearby drift-wood fire with a pitch pot, saw the ship lying there, almost ready for the water, in the early spring sunshine, though mast and gear all lay still in the brown-shadowed shed behind him, and he felt a pang of delight at sight of her. She was so beautiful, the unbroken sweetly-running line of her from stem to soaring stem. She had no dragon-head but her carved and freshly painted stern post ended in a curve that was faintly like a shepherd’s crook, or maybe the arched neck of a swan. He had been told that her name,
Fionoula,
had something to do with a swan – an Irish maiden who had been turned into one, long ago.

Despite all the difference between them, she called to something in Bjarni that
Sea Witch
had called to before ever he was one of her crew, and he reached up and laid his hands upon the curves of her bows, thinking that it would be good to be taking an oar among her rowers for this springtime sea-faring in honour of the White Christ.

The White Christ was not quite the stranger that he had been to Bjarni last autumn, for there were many of his followers in the settlement. A fine free mixture of old faith and new, Thorstein himself had been born and bred a Christian, but had loosened the ties somewhat as he grew older, and thought it quite enough to have added an altar to the White Christ to the ancient axe-hewn figures of Thor and Odin in the God-House where Thor’s Ring lay on his altar and the smell of old blood rose darkly from the earthen floor. The Lady Aud grieved for that; she prayed for him daily and never ceased to hope that her prayers might mark a change, and meanwhile loved him as he was. She had her own little stone-built chapel further up the glen where she and her women and a few of the menfolk went every Sunday. The rest of the settlement shared their worship – when they worshipped at all – between the church and the God-House. Bjarni did nothing about either of them. He had lost his own gods, as they had lost him, on the night that their priest had demanded the death. of Hugin, but he felt no call to cross over to follow the Lady Aud’s god. And it was certainly no wish for her Holy Island at Easter that drew him now, but simply the longing to which he could give no name to have some share in the thing that would be
Fionoula
at sea . . .

‘Hi,’ barked a voice behind him, ‘stop looking at her as if she was your first girl and get on with pitching that seam!’ and he came back to himself and looking over his shoulder saw old Hrodni the master shipwright, and with him, wrapped in a sealskin mantle against the chill wind, the Lady Aud come down to see how the ready-making of her galley went forward. She did not say anything to the men at work along her curving clinker-built sides, but for a splinter
of time her eyes met Bjarni’s, and as he got back to his pitch pot and
Fionoula’
s seams, he had the oddest idea that he could feel them still, resting thoughtfully on the back of his neck until, deep in talk with the master shipwright, she moved on.

It was the custom in the settlement long since agreed to by Thorstein the Red that each year the Lady Aud might name her own rowers, who also served her as bodyguard, for the Easter faring. For the most part she chose the same men year after year, but three days later when Verland Ottarson, who was always her captain and ship chief, called in the chosen ones, Bjarni was amongst them.

At first he did not believe it. ‘You have got the wrong Bjarni. There’s more than one of us on Mull.’

‘Only one cack-handed swordsman who sold his sword-service to the chief last harvest end, and him with a black dog lame in one paw.’

Bjarni looked about him at the chosen crew, knowing them all: a Christian crew for a Christian sea-faring. ‘I am not of the Lady’s faith,’ he said. ‘Tell her – she’ll have forgotten.’

‘Tell her theesen,’ growled Verland, ‘I’ve better things to do.’

He found the Lady Aud in the herb plot behind the bower, sitting on a turf seat and watching the first bees among the physic herbs that Muirgoed was tending, the two brindled hounds lying at her feet.

‘Lady,’ he began when he stood in front of her, and then checked, not quite sure how to go on.

She looked at him, her beautiful old hands relaxed in her lap. ‘Bjarni Sigurdson. There is a thing you wish to say to me?’

‘Verland, your shipmaster, called my name among your chosen crew for the Easter faring.’

She nodded in the way that she had, with her head a little to one side, with a trace of a smile. ‘That would be because I bade him.’

‘But, Lady, you are forgetting.’

‘What am I forgetting?’

‘Lady, all the other men that you have chosen are of the Christian kind; a Christian crew for a Christian feast-faring.’

‘It so happens, for this time,’ said the Lady Aud. ‘Yet there is no rule carved like runes in stone that says that I may not have a follower of the old gods amongst my rowers, and surely a man who has helped to make her ready for sea should have his place among
Fionoula’
s crew when they run her down from the landing-beach.’

Bjarni swallowed. He had to make sure that she understood, get the thing quite clear.

‘Lady, I do not feel any call to follow your god.’

‘Not now,’ the Lady agreed. ‘Time can change many things, but that will be for you to choose.’ Her face in the shadow of the sealskin hood lit into its rare, slow smile. ‘I never order any man to row my galley; I have had no need to. Instead, I ask – let you come as one of my rowers on this sea-faring.’

They took
Fionoula
out for sea trials next morning. And in squally weather two days later they hove out from the haven, bound for lona, following the inshore waters between Mull and the mainland, for the sake of the women under the awnings that had been rigged to give them some privacy and shelter from the wind and spray. Even so, Muirgoed was direly sick, and the Lady Aud not much better; and only Groa, the eldest granddaughter, being brought for the first time, seemed quite unaffected by the pitch and toss of the galley in the short steep seas, and came out with her
kirtle bunched to her knees and her hair thrust back under a blue and russet striped kerchief, to scramble and balance her way between the rowers toward the bows.

She checked beside Bjarni, holding on to a stay to steady herself. ‘Where’s your dog?’ she asked, and glanced down as though half expecting to see Hugin at his feet.

He looked up at her through the hair that the wind was blowing across his eyes. ‘I left him to run with the hound-pack. He got used to that way of things these two past summers on Barra.’

Groa was silent awhile, gazing ahead into the squally distance. ‘This is so good,’ she said at last, ‘I wish we could sail on and on – round lona and out between the islands to the open sea, beyond Ireland – beyond Iceland, maybe . . .’

‘Careful, tha’d have to be,’ Bjarni warned her. ‘Nobody knows what happens out there: we might fall off the edge.’

‘But how if there isn’t an edge?’ Groa said, seemingly more to herself than to him. ‘The sea might be like the Mid-Land Sea that Leiknen One-eye talks of, only much, much bigger with more land on the far side of it, and another great city like Miklagard, waiting to be found – and good farming land . . .’

It was not the first time that she and Bjarni had talked together since the day that he had brought Hugin to the Lady Aud’s threshold, but he had never known the bairn launch out into this kind of daftness before. Maybe it was the effect of being at sea. If so, he wished she would just go away and be sick like the other women; it wasn’t lucky, this kind of talk, not on ship-board.

‘There’s other islands out there too, so they say – St Brendan’s Isle, with trees covered with white birds
instead of blossom, every bird singing like the evening star. If I were a man I’d build a ship of my own, and go to see.’

‘And if you were a man, I’d come with you,’ said Bjarni, suddenly, not caring whether the talk was unlucky or not. Certainly this Easter faring had a strangeness to it not like any sea-faring that he had known before.

‘Lift her! Lift her!’ came the voice of Verland at the steering oar, giving the rowing time.

Next day, after a night passed at one of the fisher-villages along the coast, they had a fair wind and were able to raise sail as they came coasting down the Ross of Mull towards the low green shores of lona.