The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (25 page)

‘Tell about trolls,’ demanded Lilla.

‘Tell us about you, when you were our age,’ said Signy, clearly seeing his problem and willing to help him out of it.

So, striking the odd flight of notes from the badly-tuned harp from time to time, when the points in the story seemed to call for it, Bjarni told them about the time when he was a boy in Norway, before ever he came west-over-seas; told them about the time that he and his friend Arva had decided to make their fortunes by breaking into the ancient burial house on the moors above the settlement where it was said that a king lay buried with his treasures of gold and fine weapons all about him. In actual truth, the adventure had not been very exciting, for all they had found, after many spells of secret digging where a warren of gorse bushes hid their work, had been a pot full of charred bones and an ancient dagger eaten through with rust. But with the eager faces of Lilla and Signy before him, he found himself improving the story as he went along. He added a battle with a troll-woman for Lilla; he added a storm that made the sky seem full of rushing black wings – and the bones and rusted dagger became a kingly skeleton clad in a sark of ring-mail as fine as a salmon skin and a helmet with a face-mask set with garnet eyebrows, and all about him cups and swords and horse gear all of solid gold, so much gold that they had had to fetch a ship’s awning to carry it away in. The story grew and blossomed as it went along, as Bjarni discovered more and more that he had the story-telling skill in him that he had not known he possessed before, with the story-teller’s ability to improve on the truth.

‘What happened to the treasure?’ Signy asked when the story was done.

‘Ah now,’ Bjarni said slowly, to gain time. And then the answer came to him. ‘Harald Finehair, the King, got to hear of it; and that was the end of the treasure so far as we were concerned.’

His listeners nodded sadly. They knew Harald Finehair’s reputation among the men who had come west-over-seas to get clear of him. And Lilla said, ‘Even the blue glass dolphin?’

Bjarni had not been aware of putting his blue glass dolphin among the story treasure. He must have done it without thought, simply because it was there, although he had scarcely thought of it for five years, a small private image. ‘Er, no,’ he said, ‘I hid the dolphin and when I came west-over-seas I brought it with me.’

‘Have you got it still?’ Lilla said, while in the same breath Signy demanded, ‘Show us!’

Bjarni shook his head; he was tired and the lovely brightness of invention was leaving him. He went back to telling more or less the truth. ‘I have not got it with me. When I took my sword and left Rafnglas, I buried it for safe-keeping in a place I would not be forgetting, a little side glen below the moors – good farming land it would be – and left it behind me.’

‘But you’ll go back for it, one day?’

‘Maybe,’ Bjarni said and made a flighting of notes on the harp.

A small movement in the door made him glance that way. Erp stood there with a piece of hauling-harness in his hand and his head bent at a faintly listening angle.

On the last evening before they set out to get
Seal Maiden
down-river, when the sleds were already
laden, an evening of squally rain and a west wind blowing through the tree tops, Bjarni sought word with the Lady Aud in the longhouse. His shoulder was stiff and he still felt as though a galley had been launched across him, but the ground was steady under his feet once more, and he could stand before her without swaying.

She sat beside the fire, the last of the kists and bundles around her, waiting for the morning. Muirgoed and the two granddaughters were moving about journey tasks in the farther shadows, but the Lady Aud sat on her stool gazing into the fire, her hands palm-up and empty in her lap. It was almost the first time that he had seen her sit beside a fire without something in her hands.

She looked up after he had stood waiting before her a few moments. ‘Bjarni Sigurdson, you have something that you would be saying to me?’

‘Lady,’ Bjarni said, ‘I have carried it to the best that was in me, I will carry it still until we come to the coast, but on the day you sail for Iceland, let you give me back my sword-service, that I may carry it otherwhere.’

The Lady Aud looked at him with her strong brows raised a little. ‘The hunger for strange seas is on you?’

‘No, the hunger for land – a land-take of my own.’

‘There is good land to be had in Iceland – or are you wishing to bide with the Caithness settlement?’

‘My five years are up, and I am free to go back to my own settlement,’ Bjarni said.

‘So-o. The homing hunger. It comes to many of us, from time to time.’

‘Also, I have a dog waiting for me on Mull, and a message that I have carried with me undelivered these three years past.’

‘And these be all good reasons,’ said the Lady Aud.
‘So, come to me on the tide-line on the day
Seal Maiden
sails for Iceland, and you shall have back your sword-service and your pay.’

A few days later, on the landing-beach below Dungadr’s stronghold, where the Lady Aud and her women had sheltered while
Sea Maiden
and
Fionoula
were provisioned and made ready for sea, a sizeable crowd was gathered, Picts and Northmen. Dungadr himself had come down with his hearth companions for the final leave-taking, and with him Groa and the women of the household. Groa, with her striped cloak flung back despite the thin spring wind, carrying herself proudly like a ship with the wind filling her sail. Before summer’s end there would be a new young one at the Chieftain’s hearth.

And then for the last time Bjarni stood before the Lady Aud, where she had called him a little apart from the rest, to receive back his sword-service. ‘Are you still of the same mind?’ she asked.

‘I am still of the same mind, Lady’

‘So, then take your pay.’ She gave him a small pouch of soft crimson leather that jingled pleasantly as it passed from her hand to his.

‘My thanks, Lady,’ he said, and would have stowed it in his belt, but she stopped him, smiling. ‘Open and check it. Never take your pay unseen.’

Bjarni opened the purse and tipped the contents into his palm. There were three gold coins, one of them showing a head covered with laurel leaves, a length of silver chain and several small coins and metal fragments. Not over-generous, but just and fair, for the paying off of a mercenary. Much the same as he would have got from Red Thorstein.

‘Fair pay?’ she said.

‘Fair pay,’ he agreed, tipping the coins back into their pouch and storing it into his belt.

‘So then, now a gift,’ said Lady Aud, ‘a gift such as a fighting man should receive, who has deserved well of his lord.’ And she brought from under her great cloak a long bundle wrapped in oily fleece. She turned back the folds and set in his hands a sword, the iron hilt wreathed and braided with silver wires, the pommel formed from a great lump of yellow amber; and when he drew it from the scuffed and age-worn horsehide sheath the blade sang against the metal lip in the way the very finest of smith’s work would do. A blade with ancient magic in its forging.

Bjarni looked at it with the eyes of instant love. Then he felt a pang of disloyalty, and his gaze shifted to the serviceable blade already hanging at his belt. ‘I have a good sword of my own,’ he said. ‘One sword is enough for a man with only his own way to make.’

‘Yet once a man has made his land-take and so is looking to the time ahead, he can be doing with two good blades,’ said the Lady Aud. ‘One for his own hand, and one for giving to his son when the time comes.’

Bjarni sheathed his new sword. The belt-thongs were somewhat worn and would need renewing, he thought, before he could hang it at his belt. He stood nursing it across his forearm and looking at her, gravely at first, then with a sudden delight. ‘My thanks, Lady, and the thanks of my maybe someday son.’

Later that morning, with the voyage safely blessed by Brother Ninian, with the women and the last of the gear finally on board and the oars already swung out, Bjarni stood with those who had shared the forest winter but were not sharing the Iceland faring, and
watched them head out from the shallows,
Seal Maiden
in the lead and
Fionoula
following behind, and wished for the moment that he had made his choice the other way; and a small pang of loss knotted in his belly.

Then a hand came down on his shoulder, and for the one instant he thought that it was Erp. But he had just taken his leave of Erp on the tide-line; when he looked round it was only one of the shipwrights.

‘Come away, lad, we’ve a keg of ale to drink to fair seas and following winds for the old lady. Reckon Iceland doesn’t know yet what’s coming down on them.’ The man grinned.

Bjarni turned to the broached ale-keg, with a feeling of stumbling forward over a new threshold: and when he looked out to sea again,
Seal Maiden
and
Fionoula
had almost disappeared into the morning murk that hung above the swinging waters of the Pentland Firth.

ONLY A FEW
days after the Lady Aud sailed for Iceland, a band from the main settlement started out by way of the Great Glen to fetch up the first women and baims and breeding beasts. And with them, carrying his few possessions and his old sword slung behind his shoulders, went Bjarni Sigurdson.

Presently there would be a steady coming and going along the way between the Islands and the new Caithness settlements; galleys on the long chain of lochs, and portage-ways and drove-roads of a sort through the forests and across the moors in between. But for now the way was hard and hazardous, and slow to travel. Three of the band were dead in one way or another, and early spring was drawing on towards summer when the air began to take on the soft familiar tang of the West Coast, and they came down at last to the blue waters of the Firth of Lorne.

They managed to gather up a few skin-clad coracles from the fisher-villages down-coast, and so came at last into the home-harbour of Mull. The first thing Bjarni in the foremost coracle saw as they came bobbing past Calf Island into sheltered water was the
fat familiar shape of
Sea Cow
, beached above the tide-line.

The second thing was a wild and joyful baying and a familiar black shape ploughing out through the shallows to meet the coracle. Then he was out over the side with the rest, to haul the light craft up the beach; and Hugin was plunging and circling round him like a black seal. Bjarni abandoned the coracle – it would not take more than the three of them anyway to handle her – and gave himself up to being greeted and half drowned by his dog.

Among the high-tide kelp he squatted down, his eyes shut and his arms round the wriggling and ecstatic body, while Hugin lunged against him, licking his face from ear to ear. And when the great hound’s joy had somewhat abated and he opened his eyes again he saw
Sea Cow
’s master standing straddle-legged grinning down at him. He scrambled to his feet.

‘Heriolf! Here’s a fine meeting! Why did the sea news not tell me I’d be seeing you before the day was out?’

‘But I knew I would be seeing you,’ said the merchant, ‘for has not this black devil of yours been sitting on the ship-strand since first light, staring out to sea?’

The other coracles had been dragged ashore by now, and a crowd was gathering, women for the most part, calling for word of sons and husbands, for there had been little enough news since the first ill tidings of their Lord’s death. Bjarni took his share with the rest, giving what answers he could to the eager and anxious questions. But the affairs of the Caithness settlements were no longer any concern of his; in a little he collected his sea-kist and, once again slinging his worldly goods over his shoulder, headed with
Heriolf for the ale-house at the far end of the ship-strand.

And later, when the rest of the returned ship-carles had scattered to their own homes or were eating in the Chieftain’s Hall – men still ate there, passing the harp among them, where Egil, Thorstein’s former war-band captain, now sat in the High Seat – and news of their return was already running to the farthest headlands of Mull, Bjarni sat taking ease with
Sea Cow
’s crew around the ale-house drift-wood fire, with Hugin sleeping at his feet. Some of the faces in the firelight were strange to him, but most were familiar enough, and there was a certain warm contentment in him because in the new life that he knew he had walked into, the old life could still reach out to him friendliwise. They passed the ale-jack from hand to hand, and exchanged the news of the past three years. So Bjarni heard of
Sea Cow’
s long voyage south and east into the Mid-Land Sea for dark-skinned slaves for the Dublin market, and told in his turn of Onund Treefoot’s visit to Jarl Sigurd of Orkney and how he gained the right to water ship from his springs, and of the deaths of the two Chiefs before the Caithness settlements came into being, and of the Lady Aud’s departure on her Iceland faring. But a good part of these later stories they had heard already, and so were more interested in his own part in them.