The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (4 page)

THE GREAT SEA-LOUGH
ran for half a day’s rowing into the heart of the land; and on its north shore, far enough from the open sea to gain shelter from the mountains behind it, near enough to have its longships quickly out into the open water in time of need, the fleet base of Evynd the Easterner lay clear in late sunlight under a great over-arching bank of cloud.

‘Weather brewing,’ said Heriolf, sniffing the wind like a hound, one eye on the threatening cloud bank as the sail came rattling down and the oars were run out; and
Sea Cow
came about in answer to his hand on the steering oar, and headed for the long keel-strand. ‘Well, we shall be snug enough out of storm’s reach tonight.’

Bjarni, squatting at the master’s feet with his sword across his knees, his free hand twisted in the bit of old rope round Hugin’s neck – the black hound had a name by now, taken from that of one of the god Odin’s ravens – looked along the straining backs of the rowers and out past
Sea Cow’
s up-reared prow as the distance narrowed between ship and shore.

He saw long turf-thatched buildings, high-gabled
ship-sheds, the long dark shapes, like basking seals, of galleys lying on the slipways or on the open beach. And mingled with the land scents of sun-warmed grass and heather, the sea-reek of pitch and rope and timber came to his questing nose.

Along the strand, men were making all secure for foul weather; and some among the nearest came wading out to add their strength to that of
Sea Cow
’s crew as they sprang overboard into the shallows; and so they ran her ashore and well up the beach above the tide-line, where they set to work to rig the storm covers and drive in the chocks that kept her on an even keel.

Scarce a couple of oars’ lengths further along the strand two slim war-galleys were being made ready for the waiting timber rollers to take them up to a nearby ship-shed. Bjarni, who had splashed ashore with a hand still twisted in Hugin’s makeshift collar, looked up from the rope’s end which somebody had tossed to him with orders to hang on to it, to see the tall dragon-prow of the nearest up-reared against the gathering storm clouds and the wheeling gulls.

Coming as he did of a sea-going people, he had seen a good few carved wooden dragon-prows before now; but none the like of this one for beauty or for a kind of shining wickedry that lifted the hair a little on the back of his neck. Like many of its kind, it was not all dragon, but held within it traces of some other beast, and looking up at it, letting his eyes follow the long wave-break curves of carving that almost broke into leaves and blossom but never quite, Bjarni realised that this one was part vixen, long-necked, slender and savage, the same curve from throat to chin, the same laid-back ears, the same snarling mask . . .

‘That’s
Sea Witch.
She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’ said
Heriolf’s voice behind him. ‘They do say she barks like a vixen when her lord comes near.’

‘Her lord?’

‘Onund Treefoot. Best have a care to that rope.’

And Bjarni turned back to the work he had forgotten. But when
Sea Cow
had been made secure, and her master had seen the main part of the crew bestowed in one of the seamen’s longhouses that mingled with the ship-sheds along the keel-strand, and with his remaining men was making his way up the sandy track that looped inland through the furze, Bjarni, following with the rest, returned to the subject. ‘Why Treefoot?’

‘Why Treefoot?’ somebody said, clearly surprised at his ignorance.

‘Seems an odd name.’

‘Lost a leg in battle, to Harald Finehair,’ Heriolf said. ‘Six – seven years since, that would be.’

‘And he still goes sea-faring?’ It seemed an unlikely way of life for a one-legged man.

‘Well enough, with a leg of good stout oak-wood under him.’

‘It must be chancy on a pitching deck?’ Bjarni half questioned.

And Heriolf laughed. ‘There’s always somebody’s shoulder to grab.’

The track lifted over a low furze-grown ridge, and there ahead of them rose the Hall of Evynd the Easterner, its high, antlered gable-end catching the last of the stormy sunlight against the murk of the mountains northward, though already the lower buildings clustered about it were swallowed up in the coming night.

Later, with the evening meal inside him, his eyes full of torchlight and his ears full of harp-song, Bjarni sat with Heriolf and his men on the guest bench at the
foot of the great Hearth Hall, and felt that life was good. Soon, maybe in the morning, he would take his sword to Evynd the Easterner. There must be room for another sword, always room for another sword, among the seamen and fighting men who kept the coastwise lands of Northern Ireland against the raids and river-farings of the Viking kind.

He looked at the big dark-haired man with a noble paunch on him who sat in the High Seat, midway up the Hall, and wondered what sort of lord he would be to follow. A giver of gold? Surely a giver of gold by the look of him, and by the glint of the yellow metal on fine weapons and arm-rings that showed among the men around him. The two who sat nearest to him, also, were men worth looking at; the one, younger and less paunchy than Evynd, but clearly of the same blood, was Thrond his brother, ship chief of the second galley on the keel-strand. The other was built altogether on lighter and swifter lines, with hair like a fox’s pelt growing low onto his forehead, thick, upward-quirking brows, and a mouth which Bjarni judged could look kind or cruel as the mood took him. ‘Loki might look like that,’ he thought; Loki the God of Fire, who could warm your hearth or burn the roof over your head, also as the mood took him. The man’s legs were lost among the smoky shadows under the trestle table, but even if he had not been told, Bjarni would have known him at once by the kinship between him and the dragon-head of his galley.

‘Always they hunt in couples, those two, Thrond and Onund,’ Erik of the
Sea Cow’s
crew had said earlier as they bent their heads together over a shared bowl of pigmeat. ‘You wouldn’t think that the first time the foxy one beached on this strand, ten year
past that’d be, that Evynd was all for pitching him back into the sea.’

‘Why was that, then?’

‘Evynd’s woman is daughter to an Irish king. Barra in the Outer Isles was part of his territory until Onund and his friends drove him out of it and took the island for their own living place. Therefore Evynd had small love for Onund, until Thrond, they do say, made some sort of peace between his brother and his foxy friend.’

‘Gossip, gossip, gossip like an old fisherwife,’ Heriolf had said, overhearing. ‘That is threadbare history; and I’m thinking Evynd Easterner would be feeling the lack, these days, if he couldna’ call on yon pirate and his war-keels from Barra when he had the need of them.’

Now the food was done, and Evynd’s flame-haired woman who was daughter to an Irish king had risen and swept the other women after her from the cross-benches at the end of the Hall, away to their own quarters. The trestle boards had been taken down, and many of the younger men were sprawling at their ease among the hounds beside the long hearths. Game-boards had been brought out, and games of fox and geese were going forward, and here and there a man was patching his own breeks or renewing the binding of a spear, while the Hall harp went round, passing from hand to hand, as man after man woke the strings with more or less of skill and offered up riddle or song or story; a bright web of sound to keep out the menace of the rising storm that had come beating up the lough to hurl itself against the settlement out of the dark. There were wonderful stories that came from the Northman’s world, of water-horses and baresarkers’ ghosts and troll-women who rode the roof-ridges of halls on winter nights.

Bjarni, listening spellbound, woke suddenly to the
fact that the troll-women story had been told maybe too often. There began to be a restlessness among the listeners, a snort of laughter in the wrong place from the lower benches. Then heads got together, and a knot of young warriors who had been drinking together in a corner got up, grinning, and were somehow gone through the foreporch doorway into the stormy darkness, scarce noticed in the constant coming and going of the great Hall.

A squall of rain came spattering into the fire; and once Bjarni thought he heard a snatch of laughter outside in the wild weather. Then suddenly in a trough of quiet between gust and gust, there came a flurry of sound high overhead on the highest crown of the roof near the smoke-hole; a trampling of feet and a thick shouting, and something small and dark fell through the hole into the fire beneath. There was a smell of singed fur, and a moment’s high squealing as the rat streaked free of the hot embers. Then the dogs lying around the hearth were up and onto it, and the squealing stopped. Men scrambled up also to cheer on the dogs, and the harper flung his harp aside between note and note.

And in the general uproar a young tawny-haired giant rose to his feet, swaying a little and holding an ale-jar high in one hand. ‘No call for troll-wife tales, for seemingly the real thing is come upon us by the sound of it.’ His voice rose to a joyful bellow. ‘And that is a thing Sven Gunnarson will not be having on any roof he drinks under!’

And slamming the jar on a friend’s head in passing, he set a somewhat wavering course for the foreporch door. A good few of the young men scrambled whooping after him, and with them most of the dogs in hopes of a rat hunt. Bjarni and Erik went with them, Bjarni still with a hand on Hugin’s makeshift
collar, for he had no mind to let the dog run loose among his own kind with the gash only half healed on his shoulder.

Outside the wind buffeted by, and the light came and went as the racing clouds let the moon swim free, then caught and swallowed it again in their dark stampede as another squall of rain came trailing up the lough. There were dark figures on the roof-ridge, found and lost in the swiftly changing light. And below in the garth figures more fiercely lit by the wind-teased flames of the pine-knot torch someone had carried out from the Hall. In the russet flame of it, Bjarni saw Sven Gunnarson already climbing by way of a friend’s back onto the roof, which on that side came down to within not much over a man’s height from the ground. Next instant he had swung himself onto the heather thatch, and with a handhold on one of the weighted ropes that held it down against the winter storms, was heading for the roof-ridge.

High against the racing moonshot sky, one of the dark shapes rose and stood to meet him, crouching a little with arms outspread.

Afterwards Bjarni never knew whether there was so much ale in Sven Gunnarson that he really thought it was a troll-wife there on the ridge, or whether he knew well enough that it was a bunch of his own kind who had caught a rat in the grain store and dropped it down the smoke-hole to enliven the evening. Clearly he was the kind to find one reason as good as another for starting a fight when the drink was in him. Yelling defiance, he scrambled up the steep slope towards the waiting figure, and made a kind of flying upward dive at its legs, striving to bring it down. The figure kicked out, shouting defiance in its turn; Bjarni thought he heard laughter, snatched away on the wind. The kicking foot was captured and
the two figures became one sprawling darkness of arms and legs, then shook itself apart into two once more, half-sitting, half-kneeling astride the roof-ridge, heads down and arms locked. From further along the roof and from the torchlit garth below, their friends and sword-fellows cheered them on. Darkness swept across the moon with the next flurry of rain, and when it cleared again they were on their feet, each struggling for a wrestler’s throw, looking scarcely human but more like two bears struggling up there, swaying together and trampling to and fro. Once Sven was on his knees, but managed to twist clear and come up again on the twist, once the other man was half over the far side of the ridge before he could check himself and come swarming back.

It was a good fight while it lasted, but it did not last long and the end came unexpectedly with a sudden eddying change in the wind that sent a great belch of smoke and a trail of sparks from the smoke-hole side swooping along the roof to engulf the two battling figures. Even the watchers in the garth were coughing and spluttering; and Sven, caught off balance and blinded by the choking cloud, missed his footing on the heather thatch made slippery by the rain and came rolling and clawing down the steep slope.

From the eaves to the ground was not a long drop on that side, but flying off with a yell, all arms and legs, he landed awkwardly, pitching down on the point of an elbow. Bjarni, who was among those nearest, heard the sharp unreal crack of breaking bone.

There was a sudden silence, and in the midst of it, in the midst also of the flaming light of the pine-knot torch, Sven Gunnarson lay with his right arm under him, bent at an unlikely angle between elbow and shoulder. But even as they closed in around him, he sat up, and got slowly to his knees and then to his
feet, cradling his right arm with his left. His foe of the roof-ridge had come sliding down to join them, still coughing and spluttering from the smoke. Somebody went to put a steadying arm around Sven, but he backed away – he seemed for the moment quite steady on his feet and stone-cold sober. ‘If anybody touches me,’ he said, speaking quietly but through his teeth, ‘I’ll kill him.’ And he turned towards the pool of light that spilled from the foreporch doorway.

He went back into the Hall under his own sail and walked up it, the rest of them following close but keeping their hands to themselves, until he came to his own place on one of the side-benches, and sat down in it rather suddenly, as though his legs had given way beneath him.

Somebody came through the crowd, walking with a sideways lurch of the shoulders; and Bjarni got the feeling that they were all being swept back to make room, though no word was spoken about it. ‘What fools’ game hast been a-playing here?’ demanded a voice, swift and light as the speaker himself; and Onund Treefoot was standing in the midst of the small space that had fallen clear about him, his fox-yellow gaze taking in the rigid figure on the bench.