The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (20 page)

‘My first bairn . . .’ said Aud, and her gaze went out for a passing moment to follow where Thorstein the Red strode through the camp, with his war-axe on his shoulder and the late sunlight making a bonfire of his coppery beard.

She brought her gaze back to Bjarni. ‘She will do well enough, the little one, if all that this mating has been for does not go up in a shower of sparks and fall to ruin, after all.’

IN THE GREEN
light of early morning with the plovers calling over the moors, the war-bands rode out through the gate-gap in the turf rampart; a moving darkness of men and horses heading south. Thorstein Olafson with yesterday’s messenger beside him and his own sword companions close behind and, behind again, the men of the three longships’ crews, with the pack beasts among them. And beside Bjarni, rather surprisingly, rode Erp, to act as horsemaster and maybe scout.

‘A horsemaster you will need; and like enough one to spy ahead for you,’ he had said, standing before Thorstein the night before.

‘And how shall I be sure that you will not lead us into a trap?’ Thorstein had asked, as one reasonable man to another.

‘If this were Argyll and my own land, I might well do that thing,’ Erp had returned in the same manner. ‘But these are not my hills and the people are not my people, though I can pass for one of them more easily than you could do. Also our tongues are kin, though not the same. Did I not serve you well enough in the
turning of tongue to other tongue when you had need, in times before this?’

And Thorstein the Red had thought on the question a moment, pulling at his fiery bird’s-nest beard, then said, ‘Sa, sa – ride with us, then, and if you have earned it, and live to ride back again, the first thing that Grim the Smith shall do after our return is to cut the thrall-ring from that scraggy neck of yours.’

They rode south at speed, a three-day ride, checking for a few hours at night, and a short break at noon to feed and rest the horses; for themselves scarcely any rest at all. And they rode with their swords sitting loose in the sheath.

More than once they halted while Erp scouted ahead, where a river bend or steep glen mouth or deserted rath might shelter an ambush; but even when they drew toward the Dornoch Firth and the Sutherland boundaries, the country seemed empty, and surprisingly quiet for a land locked in battle. Burned homesteads and slaughtered cattle, yes, but of warriors, living or dead, scarce a sign and no sign of women or bairns about the ruined steadings, who must all have taken to the wildwood.

‘This is a land that has been at war, but one way or the other, I am thinking that the war is over,’ Erp said, sitting with Bjarni beside their horses as they ate their noontide bannock on the third day.

They had begun by that time to find bodies. Bodies of their own kind and the Painted People, sprawling among the heather or beside a river ford, from which the horses shied, wild-eyed and snorting.

And not long after, cresting the ridge ahead of them, they came in sight of Jarl Sigurd’s camp, the usual rookery of turf bothies and ships’ awnings, and saw here and there the scars of burning, and beyond the grey sheen of the firth, and dappled mountains far to
the south. And from then on they rode through a spent battlefield, with the smell of death lying over it, from which the ravens and black-backed gulls burst upward at the last moment from beneath their horses’ hooves.

But when Thorstein set the great curved oxhom to his mouth and sounded a long hollow call, it was answered; and the two calls echoed to and fro, setting the echoes flying along the shore.

‘Seems there’s one man left alive, at all events,’ Thorstein shouted back to the men behind him, as they headed on for the gap in the stockade. They saw the dark shapes of many men, it seemed, gathering there to meet them and draw them in.

Whatever had happened there, a strong company of the Jarl’s men had come through it alive, and seemingly having had the best of it.

But not the Jarl himself.

Sigurd of Orkney lay on his great bearskin cloak, his galley prow of a nose tipped starkly towards the striped wadmal overhead, in the turf bothy roofed with his own ship’s awning, which his men had rigged up for him to die in when the wound fever seized him four days ago, and the threads of redness that carry death had begun to spread upward from the small wound above his knee towards his heart. His great sword lay beside him, and before the entrance of the shelter, up-reared on a spear shaft, was the hacked, shaggy and blackening head of a Pictish warrior, with the huge dog-tooth sticking out from the side of the mouth, that had given the Mormaor of the Sutherland tribes his name, Melbrigda Tusk.

Just inside the entrance stood Guthorm, wearing the dragon-coiled arm-rings of the Jarl of Orkney, and the heavy amber ring sitting somewhat loose on his sword hand that had been his father’s.

‘It was a good fight while it lasted,’ he said in answer to Thorstein’s grim questioning. ‘I am thinking that there will be no more fire in the furze in these parts, not for a while and a while anyway. My father rode back from the fighting with the Tusker’s head swinging by its hair from his saddle bow. The wound on his leg seemed a small enough matter then.’ He glanced up at the grizzled trophy on its spear shaft and gave a short crack of laughter. ‘They will say, I suppose, given time, that Melbrigda’s hacked-off head bit him, and the wound sickened from the venom of the bite.’

‘Like enough, like enough. There have been strange tales told of the deaths of heroes before now.’ Thorstein rested a kindly hand for a moment on the young man’s rigid shoulder.

The Orkney men were already raising a death pyre for Jarl Sigurd, big and high with fallen branches from the dark low woods inland, with drift-wood gathered from far and wide along the shore, and with logs hacked from an ancient pine that had been struck by lightning in some long-past summer storm. They built it where the land rose above the firth, where the caim, or howe, that they would raise afterwards would make a future sea-mark for longships coming and going that way. In the green late summer gloaming they brought him out from the bothy and carried him down to it, his hearth companions close around him and Guthorm to support his head and shoulders as a son should do. Pine-torches were carried before him and behind, their smoky flames teased out by the light sea wind, and all the men of the war-bands save the few left on guard streaming after.

There was no moon that night, only a blurred brightness in the drifting cloud-roof, and the sea
sounded loud and faintly hollow under the bowl of the sky.

They laid his body, still wrapped in his bearskin cloak, on the crest of the pyre and the head of Melbrigda at his feet. They cut the throats of two captured bullocks by way of sacrifice, and flayed the carcasses and stacked the hides with the fat still on them around the pyre, with the champion’s portion from each beast, setting aside the rest for the funeral feast (meat was too precious, just then, to be given recklessly to the flames).

Then Guthorm, with a torch in one hand and the dead Chief’s sword in the other, mounted onto the pyre, laid the sword in its accustomed place beside him and, leaping down again, plunged the spitting torch deep into the base of the pyre.

A great shout went up, and torch after torch was thrust into the brushwood and piled logs. Fire kindled and ran in red seams through the pile, to meet and flow together and flare up in sheets of flames, the crests bending over in the sea wind. There were no women to keen for the dead man. That would come later, round hearths far to the north. But the warriors started up a slow heavy death-chant, leaning on their spears around the pyre. And the flamelight lipped the tide-edge of the firth with wavelets of fish-scale gold.

The flames were at their height when there was a shout, and some kind of distant scuffle broke out and drew nearer on the fringe of the crowd, and out of the night shadows two men who had been left on guard appeared, dragging a third man between them. The death-chant grew ragged and fell away, and a murmur ran through the Northmen as his captors hauled him into the full red glare of flames and torches, to where the new Jarl stood with Thorstein beside him.

‘This is a matter that cannot wait until we have howe-laid my father?’ demanded Guthorm in a voice that flayed like an east wind; a strange voice for so young a man.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said one of the guards. ‘We found him behind the woodstack, and were not liking the pattern on his forehead. Stand up, you!’ He wrenched the man back against his shoulder, and spiked up his head with the point of his dirk under the chin.

Bjarni, standing close by, saw that he was very young, the crescent-arrowhead patterns on his forehead that would have been pricked there in woad when first he came to manhood showing still clear-edged with newness in the torchlight; the long oval of his face as smooth as a maiden’s amid a tangled mane of dark hair.

‘Canst speak my tongue?’ Guthorm demanded.

‘Somewhat,’ said the young man. He was panting like a deer that has been hard run, but his eyes, long and dark, were steady on the new Jarl’s face.

‘Then what brings you lurking behind the logstack in my camp?’

‘I came to fetch away my father’s head,’ said the young man.

There was a small harsh silence, and men crowded closer to watch and listen.

‘You come too late,’ Guthorm said. ‘Your father’s head has already gone to the flames.’

The next thing happened so fast that it came and went and was done with in the time covered by five beats of a racing heart. The young man gave a strange snarling cry, and sagged forward in the grasp of the men who held him; and next instant, as, taken off guard, they slackened their hold a little, he writhed clear with the speed of a striking snake; his hand
whipped to the torn breast of his jerkin of fine jay-marten skins and came away with something small and bright and deadly in it. And snarling still, he sprang at Jarl Guthorm’s throat.

The new young Jarl had not slept for four nights, and was slow in his reactions, and it was Thorstein whose dirk stopped the attacker in mid-leap. Others, Bjarni among them, sprang in from all sides. There was a flicker of bare blades in the flamelight; and the young Pict lay among their feet, his life pumping out of him from a score of wounds. But it was Thorstein whose blade had struck first, and Thorstein who had a small deep stab wound in his own upper arm to show for it.

A couple of warriors stooped to haul the body away. ‘Onto the fire or over the cliff?’ someone said.

Thorstein stood with a hand clapped over his upper arm, a little blood oozing between the fingers. It was for the Jarl to say.

Guthorm, breathing a little quickly, shook his head. ‘Neither. Carry him up to one of the tents, and leave him. Likely his own kind will come for him, and for talking of – other matters – before my father’s howe is raised.’

Sure enough, next morning when the flames were quenched and the ashes cooling, and the war-bands, gathering stones from the long tidal ridge and the country round, had begun to raise the long boat-shaped howe, a knot of horsemen riding under the Green Bough came to the gap in the stockade, seeking to renew the treaty talks that had broken down before.

Guthorm met them, his cloak flung back to show the Jarl-rings above his elbows, his face hard and steady under the worked rim of his father’s war-helm and Erp beside him to turn his words to and fro. ‘The last time we talked peace together, little came of it
save the death of many men, my father among them,’ he told them. ‘Yet we had the winning of that fight, and your hunting runs have not returned to you. How then shall it serve either of us to talk peace again?’

‘If an arrow fail to find its mark, shall it serve no purpose to loose another?’ returned the foremost of the riders, an old man in a cloak of fine red deerskin with the gold and amber torc of a chieftain about his neck. ‘You come seeking living-space in Caithness and Sutherland; and indeed there is room, maybe, for both of us, but only as a thing agreed and freely sworn to by both of us. Without that, though we be not free of our own hunting runs, how shall you be free of them either? Free to ride abroad without fear of an arrow between the shoulders; free to sleep at night without fear of our fire in your thatch; free to let your women and bairns out of your sight when the time comes that you bring them from over-sea to warm your hearths.’

‘That is a true word,’ Guthorm said after a moment. And then, abruptly making up his mind, ‘Down with you then, and we will talk, in hope of a happier outcome than the talking had before.’

And so in a while, when the horses had been led away, the chiefs and elders of the Painted People, with their escort of young braves behind them on the one side, and Jarl Guthorm and Thorstein Olafson with the captains of their war-bands on the other, sat confronting each other across the newly kindled Peace Fire in the midst of the camp. And there they set up the Green Bough lashed to its spear shaft, and talked of peace between their peoples for the second time.

Thorstein, his own peace talks past and ended in a wedding feast, seldom spoke, but remained pulling gently at his great beard and listening, his tawny eyes moving from face to face as one way and another the tangles and confusions were unsnarled or cut through,
points stubbornly argued, demands and counter-demands resisted or yielded to, and agreement drew slowly nearer. At last the thing was done, even to the promise of an exchange of foster-sons. It sounded better that way than to talk of hostages. And the peace oaths were sworn on sword blade and barley bread and salt: and so the treaty was made for a second time, with maybe something more of hope for its holding power.