Troll Blood (35 page)

Astrid and Floki looked at each other. “We didn’t,” said Astrid.

Floki shook his head. “Nah. We just thought—what’s worse? Coming out there with the rest of you, or hiding in the house waiting for it to get us?”

“And there weren’t any weapons left,” Astrid added. “So the Nis said—”

“Aha, the Nis!” Tjorvi interrupted, glancing up. There were no secrets left. The Nis was sitting openly on a beam overhead, noisily guzzling a bowlful of hot groute garnished with the last of the butter. “That was the Nis’s idea, was it? I wish I’d known we had a Nis with us all this time.”

“Wait a minute,” Ottar interrupted. “Let me tell the others all that.” He turned and began to translate.

Peer drew Hilde against him. She whispered, “It’s a full house.”

It was. Sinumkw’s warriors sat cross-legged on the floor by the fire, or sprawled on the sleeping benches. The firelight shone on their oiled black hair and brown faces, still smudged with war paint, and on their finely worked clothes. Peer smiled as he looked around. Trades and swaps were happening already. Halfdan had a tuft of blue feathers in his hair. Tjorvi was sporting Kopit’s bear-tooth necklace, and Kopit had slung Tjorvi’s steel-edged knife around his neck. Both looked very happy with their bargains, and they hadn’t needed Ottar to translate for them, either.

“So the Nis suggested the torches?” Peer tipped his head back. “Well done, Nithing!”

The Nis squeaked cheerfully. It was licking its messy fingers, and a splash of groute dripped into Peer’s hair. “I has lots of good ideas,” it boasted. “Has you heard how we threw the clothes at Harald?”

“Hilde told me.” Peer wished he could have seen Harald struggling to fight a rain of socks and trousers.
No wonder he ran berserk.
…

Then he felt sorry. After all, Harald was dead.
But he brought it on himself. He deserved it a million times.
…

“What name suits me best, Peer Ulfsson?” the Nis inquired. It upended the basin and stuck its entire face inside to
lick out the bottom. “Nithing the Seafarer or Nithing the Warrior?”

“Oh, well—um …”

“It was brave of you and Floki to come out,” Hilde said to Astrid. “Weren’t you afraid of hurting the baby, running like that?”

“It was time I did something to help.” Astrid pressed a hand to her stomach. “He’s fine. I can feel him kicking.”

Sinumkw spoke to her across the fire, his dark eyes gleaming. Astrid raised her brows and turned to Ottar. “What does he say?”

“He says a brave mother makes a brave son,” said Ottar.

Astrid’s eyes filled.

“Don’t cry,” Hilde said softly.

“I’m not,” Astrid muttered, dashing a hand across her face. “Well, yes I am. I’m thinking of Gunnar. He’ll never see his son now. If it is a boy, I mean.” She shivered. “And I promised I’d save him, and I didn’t. I harmed him instead.”

“You didn’t harm him,” Hilde protested.

“Yes I did. I was so angry when he slapped me. I wanted revenge. I wanted the
seidr
all undone. I could have warned Harald not to crush the egg, but I didn’t. I’m not a nice person like you. It’s true about troll blood, you see. It always comes out in the end. And my son will inherit it from me. He’ll be the same.”

“How can you know that?” Hilde began. But there was an
outburst of excitement in the roof. The Nis knocked its empty bowl off the beam, just missing Peer’s head, and scrabbled in an angle of the rafters, scattering bits of straw and dust.

“See, see?” It opened spidery fingers and tossed something light into Astrid’s lap. A tiny hollow egg.

“I finds it on the floor when I is tidying up,” the Nis chirped, full of self-importance. “When Harald Silkenhair makes all that mess and leaves it for the Nis to clear away. And I thinks,
a thrush egg
! I keeps it—I puts it in my den to look pretty, in my nice nest up in the roof.” It looked down at Astrid with sharp eyes. “It’s empty,” it added.

Astrid’s hand closed around it. “Harald didn’t smash it after all,” she breathed. “Then—it didn’t matter….”

“Oh, Astrid,” said Hilde impatiently. “Gunnar died because of what
he
did—not because of what you did. Do stop going on about your troll blood. Take my advice: Don’t tell your baby anything about it, and he’ll grow up fine.”

Astrid looked at her with slowly dawning relief. “Do you think—if I’d never known …?”She took a deep breath. “I could forget about it. I could be just like anyone else. …”

The Nis cracked its knuckles gleefully. “Always, always the Nis finds the answer. Maybe I should be Nithing the Clever. …”

Troll blood
, Peer thought.
What does it mean to have troll blood
? He remembered how, years ago, his two bullying uncles had turned into trolls after drinking troll beer. He suspected they’d been trolls on the inside all along. Perhaps
being a troll was more to do with the way you behaved than the blood you inherited. If you howled to the
jenu
, the
jenu
would howl back.

And tomorrow
, thought Peer,
we’ll give Harold’s sword to Sinumkw. Kiunik and Tia’m can take it with them on the Ghost Road, on their long journey to the Land of Souls
.

He looked at Floki, who sat silently with lowered head. “Hey, Floki.” Floki looked up out of red-rimmed eyes. Peer leaned across. “It was great, the way you ran out with the torches. Magnus would be so proud.”

Floki didn’t speak. But his rough, freckled hand came out to grip Peer’s. He sniffed.

There was a short, shrill yap, a screech, and a roar of laughter. Peer looked up sharply. The Nis was shooting into the rafters, chittering hysterically.

“Did you see that?” Hilde stifled giggles. “The Nis got up the nerve to creep behind Kwimu. I don’t know what it did—but it got too near that pet fox of his.” She looked more closely.“It’s not a fox, is it? What on earth …?”

Kwimu smiled across at them. For a second, Peer was sure the fox winked. But a moment later Kwimu lifted it, and it was just a fur pouch, with the mask and paws and tail of a fox attached. He plunged his hand into it and pulled out a pipe. He lit it and handed it to his father.

The noise and chatter died. The Norsemen watched curiously: “He’s swallowing fire!” “They’ll never believe this at home.”

“It’s a sign of friendship,” said Peer. “Isn’t it, Ottar? If he gives the pipe to you, make sure you take it.”

Sinumkw blew out a thin flutter of smoke. He rose ceremoniously and passed the pipe to Peer. Peer drew down a mouthful of sweet smoke.

“Arnë …” He held out the pipe. Arnë looked at it without moving. Then he scratched his head. “A sign of friendship, eh? All right, I’ll give it a go.” He took the pipe, sucked on it, and coughed. “Not bad!” he said with watering eyes, handing it on to Tjorvi. He added gruffly, “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

“Thanks,” said Peer. They looked at each other with uncertain smiles.

With jokes and backslapping, the pipe passed around the room. Up in the rafters the Nis coughed and spluttered, pretending to be annoyed by the smoke. Considering it spent most of its time in the haze of wood smoke floating about the rafters, that was rich, Peer thought.

He stood on tiptoe and whispered, “Here’s a good name. How about Nithing the Wise Warrior?” The Nis purred.

“What are you thinking?” Hilde asked Peer as he sat down.

He stretched. “Oh, lots of things. What to do next. How to spend the winter. When to go home. Whether Ottar will come with us. And who’s going to decide it all? Now Gunnar’s gone, who’s going to lead us?”

“You, I should think,” said Hilde.

“Me?” He stared at her.

“Yes, you.” Hilde grinned at him. “Who else will do all the
thinking?” She leaned against him and whispered into his ear, “So go on. What’s going to happen to us?”

Peer dropped his arm around her shoulders. He thought of the months of cold ahead: the blizzards, the creatures like the
jenu
lurking in the woods. He thought of trying to cross the immense ocean dividing them from home, with no Gunnar to guide them, and only five men to sail the ship. He remembered the storms and icebergs of the voyage out. He looked down at Hilde, and saw his own fears in her eyes.

“The winter will pass,” he whispered back. “Perhaps we’ll stay here in the house for the whole of it. Or, if they’ll let us, we’ll go back to the village with Kwimu and the People, and go hunting and trapping with them. Astrid’s baby will be born there, and she’ll have lots of women to help her, not just you by yourself. And then the spring will come. The ice will melt, and the buds will thicken on the trees. We’ll take
Water Snake
out of her winter quarters and push her down into the sea. And we’ll sail away.

“It’ll take us a long time, weeks and weeks, but we’ll sight Greenland and the Islands of Sheep. We’ll follow the whales home. And then, one day, we’ll see our own mountain again. Troll Fell.

“I wonder if it will be sunrise. Or sunset, or raining, or foggy even. Maybe we’ll meet Bjorn in his faering, coming out to the fishing grounds. But anyway, we’ll sail into the jetty and walk up through Trollsvik. And we’ll see the farmhouse, with the smoke rising from the roof. And Gudrun will dash out to
meet us, and Ralf will come running from the field …”

Hilde was smiling, though her eyes were full of tears.

“And I’ll say, ‘Here we are. We’re back. And we want to get married.’”

“That will be such a happy ending,” Hilde sighed.

“There’s never any ending,” said Peer softly. “Life goes on.”

O
ver a thousand years ago—five hundred years before Columbus—the Vikings reached North America. Leif Eiriksson of Greenland sailed across what is now called the Davis Strait, and named three lands on his way south: Helluland (which means “Slab Land,” a country full of stones), Markland (“Forest Land”), and finally a grassy, wooded peninsula where he and his men built houses and spent the winter, naming the place Vinland for the grapes they said they found there.

No one doubts now that Helluland, Markland, and Vinland were parts of the northeastern coast of America. The most likely candidates are Baffin Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland, respectively. An excavated Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland may be the actual site where Leif built his houses.

Two sagas,
The Greenland Saga
and
Eirik the Red’s Saga
, tell how Leif and his men met “Skraelings,” a scornful term used by the Norsemen for all the Native Americans they met,
including the northern Inuit. Both sagas tell of battles between Vikings and Skraelings. When Leif’s brother Thorvald found nine Skraelings asleep under their canoes, he and his men promptly killed eight of them. He paid the price for his aggressive behavior. The ninth Skraeling escaped to raise the alarm. A fleet of canoes attacked, and Thorvald died from an arrow wound.

So who were these “Skraelings”? The Native American people of Newfoundland were named the Beothuk. They saw off the Vikings. But European diseases and guns in later centuries drove them to extinction. The last of the Beothuk, a woman named Shaw-na-dith-it, died of tuberculosis in 1829. And with her died the last chance of learning the Beothuk’s language, beliefs, and customs. Only a few scraps of information remain—not enough clues to build a story on.

So, since the Norsemen surely explored beyond Newfoundland, I have based Kwimu and his People on the Mi’kmaq people of New Brunswick—only a step farther south—who still live in the land of their ancestors, and many of whose beliefs, customs, and stories have survived to be a matter of living and proud tradition.

I didn’t invent any of the magical creatures in
Troll Blood
. From the Nis to the
jenu
, they are my interpretations of creatures which have all been believed in by real people in the past. I wanted to write about the world in which such beliefs were possible—a world in which ordinary men and women coexisted with spirits and ghosts both helpful and harmful. I
tried to imagine how the Norsemen and Kwimu’s People lived and thought. I even had the fun of sailing a reconstruction of a real Viking ship on a Danish fjord. But, at the end of the day,
Troll Blood
is fantasy, not history.

Six hundred years ago, the London printer William Caxton published Sir Thomas Malory’s story of King Arthur,
Le Morte d’Arthur
. I feel I can’t do better than to pass on Caxton’s warning to readers: “And for to pass the time, this book shall be pleasant to read in. But for to give faith and believe that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty. …”

A
ll the Native American words in the book are from the Mi’kmaq language. Here is a rough guide to pronunciation. As a rule of thumb,
k
is pronounced as a hard
g
, and
t
as a light
d
.