The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

  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.

  And then, the light westering and the time drawing on toward evening, food was brought, and great jars of brown cloudy heather-ale. But before they set to feasting, the old chief in the deerskin cloak, who all along had acted as spokesman for the rest, looked up from the fire and said, ‘There is another thing.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Jarl Guthorm, ‘I was thinking there might be,’ and his tone had a guard on it.

  ‘Now that there is foster-kinship promised, and the bonds of friendship between our two peoples, let you give back to us the head of Mormaor Melbrigda.’

  ‘You are too late in that asking,’ said the Jarl after a moment. ‘The head of Melbrigda Tusk has already gone to the flames, and the ashes have been laid with all honour.’

  There was a moment of crackling silence.

  And into the silence Jarl Guthorm said, ‘But we can give back to you the body of his son who first came seeking it.’

  The silence dragged on, full of the crying of shore birds and the hollow sounding of the tide, the stamping of a pony in the picket line; but in the heart of it, just silence, dragging on and on.

  ‘So-o,’ said the old chief at last. ‘That was the hunting trail that he would follow alone.’

  Low-voiced, Erp translated.

  ‘Who killed him?’ the old chieftain asked at last.

  And Red Thorstein, speaking almost for the first time, said simply, ‘I killed him.’

  The chieftain took his gaze from the young Jarl. ‘Why?’

  ‘He made to kill the Jarl Guthorm, and my blade was the nearest.’

  ‘Sa, sa. It is a reason that holds water,’ the old man said, with an air of detached judgement. And he leaned forward and took a gobbet of meat from the dish that was cooling in front of him. ‘Yet it is glad I am that the friendship was sworn between us before this thing came into the open; for there are those, especially among my young braves, who might misunderstand.’ He took a piece of barley bannock to go with the meat.

  Bjarni, setting another dish down in the ashes of the fire, guessed that he had deliberately waited until the oath-taking was over, before bringing up the matter of the Mormaor’s head.

  15

  The Shadow Among the Trees

  THE ELDERS OF the Painted People went back to their own place, carrying with them their dead, wrapped in skins and roped onto a hurdle drawn behind one of the horses. And next morning, leaving the new young Jarl and the new-made cairn behind them, Red Thorstein and his war-band headed north again.

  Towards noon on the second day, they came down off high moors into a shallow wooded glen through which a burn ran in a chain of pools strung together by stretches of swift-running water. And there they halted, as they had done on the way south, to water the horses and turn them loose to graze.

  The trees that grew down to the water’s edge were not the dense oaks and dark whispering pines of the wildwood, but birch and rowan and alder, thin leaves making a threadbare summer’s-end dazzle of sunlight and dapple-shade, and there were open spaces of coarse grass underfoot, so that the grazing was none so ill.

  The air was shimmering with dancing midge-clouds; and Bjarni, itching from their stings on every bit of himself that was open to the air, strolled upstream to above the pools where they had watered the horses, drawn by the idea of cold water on his burning skin: but coming on a small backwater just above the horse pool, and kneeling down to plunge his head into it, he saw something that made him forget his midge-bites. A fat brown trout was lying close under the bank, nose upstream, the current making ripple patterns along its flanks. Something to add savour to the evening bannock!

  Careful not to let his shadow fall across the water, he slipped down full length along the bank, and with infinite care and slowness, slid his hand and then his arm into the cold peat-brown water. Time passed, while slowly, slowly, he edged his hand upstream, till his faintly curving fingers were almost under the fish. A little more, a very little more . . . No sound in the heavy noon-tide save the whine of the midge-clouds that he had forgotten, and the lap and purling of the burn. Once, for a moment, he was half aware of a moving darkness among the trees, but no sound; then it was gone. Probably it was no more than the faint web that one may see in certain lights out of the tail of one’s eye. He had not moved: already his fingers sensed the living flank of the trout. He was not even breathing now. Another instant . . .

  And then, from somewhere downstream toward the noon camp, the silence was snapped by the twang of a released bowstring.

  Bjarni whipped his hand from the water, the trout flicking away as he sprang to his feet. He was racing back toward the camp. Ahead of him there was a great stillness in the woods; a stunned stillness only just breaking into uproar as he reached the clearing, a snarling surge of voices and the snatching up of weapons, and in the midst of it Thorstein Olafson, a war-arrow flighted with red kite feathers between his shoulders, lay coughing up his life into the coarse burnside grass.

  Coming so quickly after the quietness of the trout in the backwater, the thing burst over Bjarni like a dream. In the dream men were running, and Bjarni was running with them, in the direction from which the arrow had come. The direction of that dark flicker among the trees. His dirk was naked in his hand, though he did not remember having pulled it from his belt. The tumult had sunk away and they ran in silence, spreading out, questing like hounds stubborn on a half-lost scent.

  He had no idea how long the dream lasted, but afterwards he thought not long. In the dark shadows and crowding undergrowth of the wildwood the bowman would almost surely have got away; but here among the open woodland of wind-shaped birch and rowan and alder it was another matter; and afterwards Bjarni wondered if the man was really not much interested in getting away, once he had done the thing that he came to do . . .

  There began to be a changed smell in the air, a chill rooty smell, and the trees were thinning out as the glen broadened, the hills on eithe
r side falling away; and suddenly before him was open country, coarse grass and furze, and beyond a rich and wicked greenness feathered with the white tufts of bog grass. And ahead, not more than a bowshot away, was the quarry.

  Bjarni let out a shout with all the wind that was yet in him, to gather in the scattered flanks of the hunt and, free of the tangle, somehow lengthened his own stride.

  The man had lost speed and there was an uncertainty about him. He swivelled as he ran, losing still more ground – it must be that he was off his own hunting run and had not known of the bog, or at least was unsure of the ways across. Still in the dream Bjarni was aware of the rest of the hunt gathering to his shout close on his heels, breaking out of the woods on either side, but himself still in the lead. There were short throaty cries around him, the cries of the pack when it sights the game. Ahead of him the man had turned at bay; he saw the drawn bow and jinked to one side as he ran, and felt the wind of an arrow whistle past his cheek.

  There was no time for another, or maybe no more shafts in the man’s quiver. He flung his bow aside and crouched, his knife in his hand, the bog behind him, as Bjarni hurled himself forward over the last short distance between. The ground was beginning to feel soft and hungry under his feet, but he was not aware of that; not aware of anything save the man waiting for him, dirk in hand, and the dirk in his own hand and the high red killer-singing inside his own head. Only the two of them in the dream; even the rest of the hunt had ceased to exist. For an instant he saw the bared teeth and widened eyes of the man who had killed Red Thorstein, his lord, as he dived in under the snake strike of the Pictish blade. He felt the dull shock, and grating of blade on bone as his own blade went in above the collar bones into the taut throat. And the thrust burst the dream and let in reality. Let in the faint shiver of cool air off the bog, and the sharp cry of a raven sweeping overhead – and the man still rocking on his feet for a moment before sagging to his knees, twisting over as he fell, so that he lay face up among the bog grasses.