The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (28 page)

The old man gave a faint nod.

Bjarni slipped an arm under Gwyn’s head, and lifted it, and held the cup to his blue lips. A horrible sour smell came up from the old man. He drank after a fashion, some of the water going down his chin. ‘We’ll do better another time,’ Bjarni told him, without really thinking what he said, and laid him back again on the plaited straw pillow. Pity, almost the first time Bjarni had felt such a thing, rose in his throat.

There was a faint movement behind him and he looked round to see Angharad in the doorway.

‘I think he’s fouled himself,’ he said. ‘Shall I help you?’

When it was done, and the old man made clean and seemly again, and the soiled rushes taken out to the midden behind the house-place, Angharad said, ‘Let you stay another night at least. The salt water is scarce dried out of you yet. And you are not in any
state to be out on the moors heading for – wherever you are heading for, you and the dog.’

But Bjarni had the feeling that it was only partly for his sake that she bade him stay, and partly for her own; that to have a hale man with a sword about the steading was a respite from something, some kind of fear maybe.

So he stayed the night, sleeping on piled bracken in the byre, with his sword beside him and Hugin and the old horse for company; and the next night also. And by day he helped her with the work of the steading. The hay was ready for the first cut, in the meadow that ran down to the stream, and they gathered it between them and laid it out in silvery swaths to dry. And he helped her tend the old man. ‘He was my cattleman,’ she said, that first day, but there was no sign of any cattle about the place, nothing living except the old horse and the five ducks that followed Angharad wherever she went. But the whole place gave signs of having dwindled from something much more than it was now; the fine Hall and the surrounding byres and barns, half in ruins, showed signs of being the steading of a big and busy farm, with the in-take lands spread far up and down the valley. And one girl in breeks who carried herself like a queen, working just enough of it to feed herself and one sick old man, and a horse? Surely there was a story here . . .

On the fourth morning the wind was blowing from the west, not hard, but enough to silver the young green barley in the one small crop-field all one way. And on the wind Bjarni, coming back from turning out the horse, caught very faintly the sound of a distant bell. It was the first sign he had had since the storm that there was anyone outside the valley.

‘Do you hear the bell?’ he asked Angharad, who was collecting duck eggs.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s the chapel, you can hear it when the wind is in this direction, calling the folk of the valleys to worship God.’ She reached into the hollow of the peat-stack for another egg.

‘Best you had be on your way then,’ Bjarni said.

‘I cannot leave Gwyn.’

‘I will stay with Gwyn,’ said Bjarni.

She put the last egg gently into the bowl. ‘You are not Christian?’

‘I am a prime-signed Christian,’ Bjarni told her. ‘But I will stay with Gwyn.’

She said, speaking steadily, ‘I think I am not welcome where that bell calls; nor among the folk it calls to.’

That evening as they sat together over the evening meal, she asked him, ‘Where will you go, after you go from here?’

‘Wherever the wind sends me,’ Bjarni said. ‘It was in my mind to go back to my own settlement at Rafnglas, where the Lakeland rivers come to the sea. That was before the storm came and blew us off course. Now I am not so sure.’ By that time he and Angharad were beginning to be able to talk to each other quite well in the bastard Norse and British tongue that they seemed to be weaving between them, but he did not feel he could tell her about his second sword in it, not in any way that would make sense. ‘It’s five years that I have been away; and I am not sure that I belong there any more.’

‘Five years with the sea-faring merchant kind. That might make it hard to strike sword?’

Bjarni shook his head, tossing a half-gnawed knuckle bone to Hugin. ‘Not the merchant kind,
though
Sea Cow
was a merchant ship and the shipmaster was my friend. When the Chieftain bade me out of my settlement – an ill thing that I had done – he gave me a sword, not this one, which I carried for pay among the ship companions of Onund Treefoot, he that had his nest on Barra in the Outer Isles, and then with Red Thorstein of Mull. I was with him when he died in Caithness last autumn, and now my sword is my own again. I was hearing that King Anarand has Danes and Northmen among his war-bands on Anglesey.’

The girl looked at him in silence a long moment through the peat-reek; then she said, ‘Maybe, one day. Meanwhile, let you bide here with me.’

He returned her look, startled for the moment, and then demanded, ‘What as? You don’t need a cattleman.’

‘As my hired sword,’ said Angharad. ‘No, no cattleman . . .’

Just for the moment he thought it was a jest, and then he saw that she was in slightly desperate earnest; and again he had the feeling that she was afraid of something.

He held out his hand to her – palm up – above the fire. Hers came to meet it and they shook hands as men do on a bargain.

So Bjarni Sigurdson, who had hired his sword to Onund Treefoot and Thorstein Olafson, was hired sword now to the lady of a derelict farm. And for the moment surprisingly content that it should be so. He went on working with her about the house and farm much as he had in the past three days, work that might have been done by a thrall, or the lord of the household come to that.

He hunted and fished for her so that there was food
for them both. It was a life nearer to the life he had grown up with than anything he had known in the past five years. Yet not quite like it – and he always wore his sword.

At times, Angharad would disappear into the woods or up onto the high moors with a big wicker creel, and the growing things she came back with she hung up to dry above the fire, or pounded in with goose grease from a great jar in her store-shed, or infused in water from the stream, timing the process with incantations in a strange stately-sounding tongue that was neither British nor Norse. So it was not many days before Bjarni realised that young though she was – maybe no older than himself – she was herb-wise as an old village crone; but maybe something a little more, a little other . . .

‘Why do you do all this, and nobody comes for your salves?’ he asked one day, finding her tying dried herbs into bundles.

‘People do come – sometimes,’ she told him. ‘When they come, what they need is ready for them.’

And sure enough, one day when it would have been past sheep-shearing time if there had been any sheep, a man came over the edge of the valley holding his right arm in his left, with an ugly gash on his wrist that had sickened with neglect and was oozing yellow pus.

Angharad cleaned it for him and salved and bound it with clean rags. And she dosed him with something dark and pungent-smelling, and gave him more of everything in a bundle. ‘Come back in three days,’ she said.

But watching him go away over the rim of the valley, she said, ‘He’ll not come back, not unless he gets so sick that all my leechcraft is undone.’

‘Why so?’ Bjarni said.

‘Because he’s afraid. Did you not smell how afraid he was?’

‘But he came, this time he came . . .’

‘Because he was more afraid for his arm.’

‘But what is he afraid of?’

‘What they are all afraid of – me,’ said Angharad.

They were leaning side by side on the empty pigsty wall in the late sunshine, and he looked round at her quickly, not quite sure if he had heard her aright.

She returned his look for a moment, then turned her gaze down the quiet valley. ‘When my father knew that he was dying he sent me to the nunnery over beyond . . . thinking, I suppose, to find safety for me there.’ Her hand moved up to the wine-coloured mark on her neck, as though it was linked somehow with what she was saying. ‘I was not made for the cloisters, but there was an aged sister there – Sister Annis – who was their infirmarer, very wise in leechcraft. I was set to help her because I had some knowledge of herb-lore myself, and from her I learned all that she had to teach of healing; some that the mother superior maybe did not know about, that came from part of an old book that was saved when the Emperor Theodosius burned the great library at Alexandria. Such knowledge is forbidden to us because it came from the ancient world, before the birth of Christ. But Sister Annis did not believe that any knowledge that might heal men’s suffering could be ill, and she passed on to me what she still remembered. So my father died, and when my brother was killed three winters ago at the boar hunting – I was close to taking my final vows, but I had not yet taken them – I left my nunnery and came home to handle the farm. At first the people of the valley were glad of my coming, for they had no wise-woman. But there have been bad harvests, and last year many of the cattle dropped their calves
too soon. And when they brought their ills to me for healing, they were frightened of Sister Annis’s spells in the Latin tongue, though I told them that they were but Paternosters and words of healing power.’

She had been talking in a level, hurried tone, as though having started to tell these things that maybe she had never told before, she could not stop. But now her quick rush of words fell away.

‘Could you not use the spells that they are used to?’ Bjarni said.

She shook her head. ‘The spells and the salves and the draughts are part of each other. I could not change one without the other. This is the leechcraft that I have learned and I will not betray it. Beside, I cannot turn away the bad harvests. Nor can I charm this away.’ And again she touched the strange mark on her neck.

The man did not come back; but a few days later, a girl of maybe ten summers came to the door, clutching a bunch of wilting wild flowers, tormentil, and bedstraw and crushed silken poppies, and holding out her left hand with a large wart on the forefinger and two more at the base of the thumb. Most of those who came to Angharad for healing brought payment of some sort: a pot of pig-fat, a few eggs, a handful of wool combed and ready for the spindle; though if they did not, it seemed to make no difference to Angharad. She took the flowers, and put them in a crock of water which she set beside Gwyn’s bed. Then, returning to the child in the doorway, took her hand. ‘Oh, you have knocked the big one, it is bleeding,’ she said, and took out from the breast of her sark something – Bjarni had never seen what it was – that she wore always on a silken cord round her neck and, kneeling, rubbed the wart with it. The child stood quiet to have it done, but Bjarni saw that she was shivering, and that the other hand behind her
back was making the sign of the horns against the evil eye.

Angharad rubbed each of the warts in turn. Then she dropped the thing back inside her sark. She cupped the girl’s face for an instant, looking deep into her eyes. ‘The Sea Beast will have taken them all away before the old moon dies,’ she said.

The child remained still for a moment, then twisted away and turned and ran.

‘She was making the sign of the horns behind her back, all the while,’ Bjarni said.

‘I know. But none the less, the warts will go.’

MOST OF THE
summer had gone when one day Bjarni returned from fishing the tail of the upstream pool with two fine spotted char in his hand. There was a small mean wind blpwing and a fitful scudding of rain, and he looked somewhat anxiously to the weather, for the barley was near to harvest. There was a feeble wailing coming from the house-place, as of a sick lamb trying to bleat without enough breath to bleat with. And another sound, a low rhythmic murmuring that he knew well enough by now was the sound of Angharad at her leechcraft, and timing something with one of her strange Latin spells.

He checked at the doorway, for often Angharad did not like a watcher at such times. But she did not seem to notice him, and nor did the woman who sat beside the fire, bent all together over the child in her lap, almost as though she would gather it back into her own body. There was a thick pungent smell, and something was bubbling gently on the fire, while a pot of some kind of dark greasy stuff stood near by.

‘Paternoster . . .’ murmured Angharad, watching
the pot and moving it a shade to one side when the bubbling grew too swift and again, ‘Paternoster . . .’

The woman was rocking a little, as though already in grief.

Angharad finished the Paternoster, and drew the pot aside. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘If you do as I tell you, the child need not die.’

She fished a soggy mass of leaves from the pot as soon as it was cool enough to put her hand in. ‘Now put back your cloak from him and hold him steady.’ She spread the hot leaves on the baby’s small panting chest, and it broke its wailing to sneeze at the fumes. She bound all in place with clean rags, then drew the edges of the soft fawn-skin in which it had been wrapped close about it. She poured something into a little flask stoppered with wood, and gave it to the woman. They were on the threshold by this time: and Bjarni had drawn aside to let the woman pass.