The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

  ‘Out of all that I have heard in the four days that are past, two things stand clear, and the first of them is this: that the death of the Chief, my son, was no killing on the war-trail, but a slaying carried out in Blood Feud, even as Egil the Captain tells, and the debt has already been repaid. There is nothing more that is called for, in all honour!’ She was silent a moment, holding them all with her gaze. Then she spoke again. ‘The second thing is this, that you came here following your Lord, as the men of Orkney came following theirs, not for a raiding summer, to make a shore-killing of black cattle, and carry off a booty of gold and slaves, and sail home at harvest leaving the smoke of burning thatch behind you. This was in part a war-trail, true, but a war-trail meant for the gaining of a foothold that should lead to peace talks and treaty making, for settlement in a new land. Now the fighting is done – for the main part – and the time for settlement is come; and peace is better held together by marriage bonds and the ties of fostering – I am told that there was talk of the giving and taking of foster-sons, in the south – than by the death of more and always more men.’

  ‘This is strange talk for the Viking kind to be listening to,’ growled an old ship chief, ‘and I am one that’s had enough of it.’

  But the Lady Aud singled him out with a half-smile for an old friend. ‘Maybe so, Ranulf Ormson, yet listen to it, none the less, and remember it well, for the sake of the settlements that will grow up in river mouths, for the sake of women and bairns brought from old hearths grown cold to sit by new ones that are not yet lit, baking bannock from harvest not yet sown. In the name of the White Christ, listen to me, and remember when I am not here to say it all again.’

  A startled breath ran through the crowd. She had been a part of their lives so long . . . and Egil said hotly, ‘Lady, you are not yet old!’

  She looked at him, and then round at the startled faces in the light of the arval torches, and laughed, very softly, as at the foolishness of men. ‘Na, na, not that. Yet I feel myself suddenly too old, and without the heart in me, for the building of a new world. I have no place nor kin here in Caithness, no place nor kin back in the Islands; but in Iceland I have kinsfolk still, brothers whom I have not seen for many years. Therefore in the spring when the voyaging season starts; when certain other plans of mine are worked out, I shall go to join them.’

  And the men of the war-bands knew that there was no more to be said.

  16

  The Ship and the Dark Woods

  THE INLAND FOREST of Caithness was like nothing that Bjarni had ever known before: a dark whispering fleece of wind-shaped pines islanded with stunted dwarf oak and ash and tangled masses of thorn. Dying trees were propped up by those still living, while underneath both were the trunks of dead giants that had fallen and rotted away to timber, where an unwary step might send one crashing through into an ants’ nest. And always there was a sense of the forest having a life of its own, eyes of its own, watching, unseen menace among the trees.

  Through the forest a peat-brown river, deep enough to float a merchant ship though too narrow for her to be worked in any way save by ropes from the shores, looped its way down towards the rocky coast below Dungadr’s stronghold. In one place on the western bank, the trees fell back into a ragged clearing and there, as the last lees of late summer turned to full autumn, a stockade camp was coming into being, a camp of turf and timber bothies squatting round a low-roomed oddly boat-shaped longhouse that was to be winter shelter for the Lady Aud and all her household.

  There was no reason as far as the men raising it could see why the ship her heart hungered for should not have been built on the ship-strand back at the main settlement, while the Lady remained safely among the rest of the Mull men. But no, on the very day after the arval she had decreed that Seal Maiden should be built in the forest, where trees for timber were close to hand; and furthermore she herself would spend her winter with the builders, that she might watch her ship come to life.

  It did not seem reasonable. Bjarni said so to Erp as they worked side by side, making fast the ropes to bind the turf roof on the longhouse through the winter storms.

  Erp spat on his hands to get a better grip on the rope he was securing. ‘Not reasonable, maybe no,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But none so hard to understand all the same. Likely she hates and even fears the settlement; that smells of her son’s death. Maybe she wants the darkness and the wild, as a sore-hurt animal wants them – a place to be away with dignity in her grieving.’

  Bjarni looked round at him a moment in surprise, then turned back to the work under his hands, saying nothing more.

  With the stockade built and the longhouse finished so that there was shelter for the Lady Aud, there was less urgency about the rest of the camp. Some tasks were done in the shipwrights’ bothies, but it was on the river below the camp that the real work was going on as the length of open bank, cleared of scrub, became a ship-strand, and in the forest the felling-axes rang early and late as men searched out and felled curved and crooked trunks and branches that would best serve for the curved ribs and cross-pieces of a ship. And already, the first thing of all, the heart and centre of all that was going on, between securing-piles on a levelled stretch of the bank, lay a great edge-hewn oak trunk that would be the keel of the ship which, in the spring, would carry the Lady Aud on her Iceland faring. Soon the curved stem and stern posts were in place, giving to Seal Maiden something of herself, something of the pride and grace that would be hers when she took to the water.

  All along the bank as the autumn drew on and the river ran gold with fallen birch-leaves, men with adze and chisel were splitting and shaping the green timbers into planks, and the planks were being steamed over pits of hot stones and clamped into the curves of the ship’s sides, and the smith had set up his forge and was working on the iron bolts that would presently hold her together in the northern seas.

  For the most part the work was done under the eye of a couple of skilled shipwrights from the main fleet by the men who would presently sail her, and by the crew of Fionoula, which lay in the lower reaches of the river below the white water, with only a skeleton crew on board, ready for whatever need the Lady might have of her.

  By day, the sounds of camp and ship-strand kept the noises of the forest at a distance, but at night when man-made sounds fell silent, then the voice of the forest woke and the forest itself seemed to draw nearer in the darkness. Wolves cried closer beyond the stockade as the dark and cold of the year drew on, so that they kept torches burning at the corners of the camp, and men sat up with axes across their knees, anxious for the small scrub horses corralled within the stockade.

  Winter came stalking them like a white beast through the trees, with gales and rain giving place to the stillness of deep frost; then the white smother of snow, then back to gales and rain. Shipbuilding went on whenever the weather was open enough, and every shipbuilding day the Lady Aud came down, wrapped to the eyes in her warm hooded seal-skin cloak, to see how the work went forward. It was a harsh winter, but a changeable one, with times when the river iced up under the bank – the churned mud of the camp was solid ice under foot, and the hunting was hard, so that despite the oats and the salted meat in the store-shed, everyone was wearing a lean and hungry look before the end of it. But there were patches of open weather, and the seaways were never quite closed. Twice, Fionoula put to sea, and from time to time messengers came and went between Orkney and Shetland and beyond and the clearing in the Caithness forest where the graceful skeleton of Seal Maiden grew daily more like a ship. And by winter’s end the Lady Aud, never one to turn from the thing that needed doing next, had completed marriage treaties for Lilla and Signy, one in Orkney and one in the Faroe Islands. The blood-line of Thorstein Olafson would run strongly in the island world through the years to come.

  When the ice broke up for the last time under the banks, and the black alder catkins had begun to lengthen, Seal Maiden was nearly ready for the seaways, a clinker-built merchantman to c
arry women and goods and gear on the Iceland faring, and deep in the draft and broad in the beam accordingly, yet with something of a longship’s grace about her none the less, and with the seal-head of her prow up-reared as though she craned her neck to glimpse above the treetops the seaways that waited for her.

  And the five years of Bjarni’s outlawing would soon be up.

  Through the long winter moons while Seal Maiden grew on her slipway among the trees, Bjarni had not thought about that at all, he had not thought about the outside world, nor the passing of time. It had not seemed as though there was anything beyond the winter and the trees, but now with the first stirrings of the still-distant spring, the changed smell of the wind, the fluttering of small birds among the the riverside scrub, there began to be a restlessness in him as though, with the waking of the forest, his own sap was rising too, a restlessness that was one with the wild geese in their northward flighting. But he did not know his direction as the wild geese seemed to do.

  The day came when Seal Maiden, her sides painted and her seams caulked, was ready for her launching. They set rollers under her and then, shoulders to her flanks, ran her down the bank, shouting at the feel of her grow live and buoyant as the river took her. Already her sails and cordage had been brought from the main winter camp, and soon they would be loaded along with the stores and the women’s kists onto the sleds that had been used for timber hauling all the winter, and her crew would pole her down-river, portaging her past the white water where the salmon were already leaping, to the broader, quieter waters where she would be finally readied for the open sea.

  The wolves no longer cried so close about the camp as they had done in the moons of full winter, but they still cried close enough from time to time and it was better to be safe than risk the loss of a pony. The watchfires burned night-long at the corners of the camp. On the night following the launching, Bjarni and Erp took their turn on guard, as they had so many nights before, at the corner close to the pony corral that reached towards the river and the boat-strand, where the new ship which last night had been a dark shape on the chocks now rode, a thing new-come to life, waiting for her mast to be stepped and her great sail to blossom out on the paleness of the water.

  Erp had a broken piece of hauling-harness on his knee, and a length of fresh rope to mend it. In the passing of those forest months, he had come more to be a kind of steward to the Lady Aud; not that there was much in her household that needed a steward’s overseeing; but anything that had to do with the needs of the horses, it seemed, was still Erp’s affair.

  It seemed to Bjarni that the wolves were howling closer again tonight, with a new note, almost a note of triumph in their crying. In the corral behind him, the little scrub horses were restless.

  ‘You’d think they knew,’ he said.

  Erp looked up from the rope he was splicing by the light of the watchfire. ‘Who? And knew what?’

  ‘The wolves – that soon all this will be theirs again. And the wildwood will come creeping in again over the fire scars, and the turf walls will shrink away, and it will be as though we had never been here at all.’

  ‘You sound like a harper,’ said Erp, smiling a little at the rope in his hands. ‘Also you sound a shade regretful. Has life been so sweet, here among the trees?’

  ‘Na, na, it’s not that, it’s – my five years are almost up.’

  ‘Surely that is a matter for rejoicing, you can go back to your own settlement and your own Chiéf.’

  Bjarni threw another branch on the fire and gave a baffled shake of the head. ‘Aye. Yet it seems a poor-spirited thing to do, as if I had spent the whole five years since I was cast out waiting to crawl back at the first moment.’

  ‘Aye, and you had thought to be the Emperor of Byzantium by now,’ Erp said without mockery. He let the half-spliced rope fall on his knee to give Bjarni his full attention. ‘There are other ways open. I am very sure that you can go with the Lady Aud on this Iceland faring, or you can remain in Caithness with the new settlements, or return to Mull – or simply take your sword and look for another sword-service. Plenty of markets for a good reliable blade.’

  Bjarni was silent, gazing into the watchfire. Again, far off in the trees, a wolf howled in the darkness. Somehow none of Erp’s suggested ways seemed the right one, not even the last, or rather there was nothing to tell him which, if any, was the right one.

  ‘I was wondering, I might try the Dublin garrison again. The captain bade me go and grow myself a beard.’ He rubbed his hand against the crispness of hair on his chin. ‘I don’t know – it’s as though I were waiting for a wind to rise . . .’

  Erp sat quietly for a while, working on his rope. ‘I will tell you a thing,’ he said at last, speaking so seriously that Bjarni, who had been sitting with his arms around his knees, staring into the fire, sat up straight and looked round at him with an altered gaze. ‘You are not in truth the stuff that mercenaries are made of. Some men can sell their sword-service like a new saddle or a bale of hay – strike a fair bargain and abide by it, to the death if need be, needing nothing more. You are not one of them. For you there needs to be another kind of loyalty. You’re one of those fools who needs to follow your way for reasons of your roots behind you and the heart within your breast. Your five years are up. Go back to your own settlement.’

  Bjarni stared at him in surprise. ‘Three summer months’ trading or raiding, and the rest of the year sweating over the in-take land to bring it to harvest?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Erp easily. ‘It’s the life you were looking for before you held your holy man’s head too long under water.’

  Anger rose in Bjarni’s throat, while at the same time he knew that what Erp said was true. ‘That’s the kind of advice you might expect from a thrall!’ The words seemed to burst out of their own accord. He heard them hanging in the air, and would have given everything he possessed, little as it was, to call them back again. For a moment there was an odd look in the other’s face. Then, still more angry and not altogether sure what about, he reached out and grabbed the breast folds of Erp’s cloak. ‘I didn’t say that! You hear? I didn’t say that.’ He started to shake him to underline the words, and the shoulder brooch tore away and the loosened folds fell open. There was something lacking, something that had always been there was not there any more . . . It was a moment before he realised that it was the iron thrall-ring; and the light of the watchfire showed the band of thickened white skin round Erp’s neck, where it had been. He raised his eyes to the other’s face, and for a moment they looked at each other in silence, while Bjarni forgot his anger in this new thing.

  ‘When?’ he asked.

  ‘This evening after supper,’ Erp said lightly as though he spoke of some small and passing matter. ‘On the day Seal Maiden took to the water.’

  ‘And so you’re free from the Iceland faring,’ Bjarni said, an idea beginning in his head. ‘Your mother too?’

  ‘My mother will never leave the Lady Aud.’

  ‘But you,’ Bjarni persisted, ‘you’re free; we could head for Dublin or the like, together!’

  Erp shook his head. ‘There could come a day . . . but meanwhile, free or no, I am the Lady Aud’s man still, while she has need of her own about her.’

  And looking at him still in the glow of the watchfire, Bjarni was making a discovery, and his face cracked slowly into a smile. ‘You’re another of the fools who needs to follow your way for reasons of the heart within your breast!’ he said. And he thought, but did not say, You might be worth listening to, after all!

  In the next few days, Bjarni thought a good deal on Erp’s advice, though he still lacked the thing that led the wild geese: he was still waiting for the wind to rise. But it was worth thinking of, all the same.

  He was still thinking, two days later, as he came up the newly-cleared portage way towards the camp. The Lady Aud had wished word of some sort taken downriver to Fionoula, as she had wished it more than once during the winter when milder weather
opened the forest ways each time, and as before, Brother Ninian, her chaplain, had gone as her messenger with a couple of the ship-carles to see him safely back again.

  This time it was Bjarni and Orm Anderson. They had been late starting back, for Brother Ninian had been seized with the desire to pray with Fionoula’s crew, and when the need for prayer came upon Brother Ninian he lost all sense of the passing of time. So the day was fading fast, the still-wintry twilight lying like smoke among the trees, and the white water of the salmon leap was gathering a faint light of its own. The three men walked in hunting file, Brother Ninian in the lead, his head bowed and his crossed hands lost in the sleeves of his habit, probably still in prayer, Bjarni thought, following a little behind, and last of all, Orm, the biggest of the three, to cover their rear. They should have had Brother Ninian in the middle, but the chaplain was, as he said himself, not a man to follow other men, but only the light of God. Well, as long as he did not fall into an ants’ nest, or blunder down the bank into the river . . .

  The dusk was crowding in on them more closely now, the night-time sounds of the wildwood beginning to wake. At least, Bjarni hoped they were the ordinary night-time sounds of the wildwood; they sounded not quite the same out here as they did from within the stockade. The great forest of Caithness was no place for mortal men to be abroad in the night, for there were other and darker dangers than wild beasts among the trees . . .

  The camp was not far now; once he thought he heard one of the hunting dogs bark on the farmost edge of hearing; but the bark did not come again to hold the other sounds at bay. It was good at least to hear the brush and tramp of Orm coming along behind him, and feel that there was someone at his back. Then a new thought came upon him, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck. How did he know that it was still Orm behind him, and not some nameless horror that had taken Orm’s place? Calling himself all kinds of a fool, he snatched a quick glance behind him. Difficult to see in the dusk and among the riverside scrub, but certainly the figure lurching along in the rear had the familiar large and slightly lumbering shape of Orm Anderson.