The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

  ‘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.

  ‘No game but a fight with the troll kind. Their hair is in my eyes even yet,’ said Sven.

  ‘Fell off the roof and broke his arm,’ other voices struck in.

  ‘So I see,’ said Onund Treefoot. ‘His sword arm, too. The goddess Ram, the Mother of Foul Weather, would see to it that it is his sword arm . . . Well, we must be doing what we can . . .’

  Evynd the Easterner, seeing that it was no man of his own, had returned to a game of draughts with his brother Thrond. A general shout went up for Hogni Bone-grinder, and a man who might have been a troll himself for his hairy ugliness and the length of his arms appeared as from nowhere, followed by a boy carrying flat billets of wood and strips of binding rag.

  Onund sat down on the bench beside his man, his wooden leg stuck out in front of him, and braced himself behind the other’s shoulders, holding his upper arm in a grip that looked easy to Bjarni, watching, until he saw how the muscles stood out like cords on the ship chief’s own arm, as the bone-setter got to work. Hogni was pulling the damaged arm out straight, twisting and drawing it, frowning a little over what he did. Sven turned not so much white as a kind of dirty yellow, his mouth shut and his breath whistling a little through flared nostrils. Bjarni heard the two ends of bone creaking together with some curiosity. He had never been so near to a broken bone being set before, and he was interested accordingly. The thing seemed to take a long time to do; all the while it was as though Hogni Bone-grinder was feeling and listening and looking through his hands at what he did. At last, with one slow powerful heave, it seemed that it was done, the sweat springing on the faces of all three men shone in the torchlight, and the arm was more or less straight once more. Still holding it, the troll-man took the bits of wood from his boy and began to splint it, binding them on tightly with the strips of rag. A little blood pricked through, but not much: the bone had barely pierced the skin. And when it was done, and Onund had taken his hands away, the bone-setter fashioned a sling to take the weight and knotted it around Sven’s thick neck.

  Onund got up, and stood looking at his tawny giant without sympathy. ‘You mazelin!’ he said. ‘Now we shall be lacking a man from the rowing benches and the sword-band all this summer!’ But the tone was not as harsh as the words. To the others of Sea Witch’s crew he said, ‘Get him drunker than he is already, and bed him down in the byre.’ And to Evynd, sitting with a draught piece in his hand, ‘He’ll be good for neither man nor beast until the bone is knit. Will you give him hearth-space until I come again at summer’s end?’

  And Sven Gunnarson’s friends got to work on him with a fresh jack of ale, before carrying him away. To be borne into the Hall like a swooning maiden would have shamed him, but there was of course no shame in being too drunk to leave it on one’s own feet. And the rest of the company returned to whatever they had been doing before.

  Bjarni stood where he was, thinking hard and quickly. ‘Lacking a man from the rowing benches and the sword-band all this summer,’ Onund had said. ‘Lacking a man’ – Oh! But where was the sense in hiring one’s sword to a one-legged ship chief who must in the nature of things be less worth following than a captain with two good legs under him . . .

  He started up the crowded Hall, Hugin following as usual at his knee, towards the High Seat where Evynd the Easterner sat over his game of draughts.

  But not knowing that he was going to do so, he stopped short, where Onund Treefoot sat with his wooden leg stuck out in front of him, leaning his shoulders against the weapon-hung wall and watching the sparrows who had built in the thatch.

  ‘Onund Treefoot,’ said Bjarni, bright-eyed and formal, ‘I have no lord to follow. I can handle an oar, and my sword is for hire. I am your man.’

  4

  Harvest on Barra

  BJARNI LAY ON his stomach in the short mountain grass, his chin propped on his forearm, and gazed away over the windy emptiness. From up here on the shoulder of Greian Head you could look out over the score or more of islands that went to make up Barra and on northward past Eriskay and Uist away and away along the great wild-goose skein of the Outer Isles.

  He had been across to one of the native fisher-villages on the south shore, after a new pair of sealskin brogues. There was a little black-eyed hump-backed man over there who claimed to have been taught the art of making them by the Lordly People and charged accordingly. A whole silver coin with a king’s head and three ears of corn embossed on it, these had cost, but Bjarni knew that they would be worth it; they were his second pair.

  Now he was on his way back to the settlement with them tucked into his belt. But there was no hurry. It was good up here. Beside him Hugin thumped his tail, head alertly up into the wind. It was over a year since he had followed Bjarni out of Dublin, and he had grown and fleshed out into a big powerful hound, black as midnight save for some white hairs under his chin, and still those surprisingly light amber-coloured eyes.

  Bjarni, his hand rubbing behind the pr
icked black ears, let his mind drift back over the time, to the Hearth Hall of Evynd the Easterner. ‘I have no lord to follow,’ he had said to Onund Treefoot. ‘I can handle an oar, and my sword is for hire; I am your man.’

  And Onund Treefoot had looked him up and down as a man looks over a horse he is minded to buy, and agreed, ‘You are my man.’

  It had meant leaving Hugin behind along with Sven Gunnarson for the three months’ summer sea-faring. But when at summer’s end they had returned for Sven, whose arm had mended somewhat out of shape but as strong as ever it had been, they had picked up Hugin too, out of the dog pack. Bjarni had earned that, and had the hands to prove it; hands that had blistered on the oarloom and grown red-raw when the blisters burst and healed over into thickened and calloused skin that marked him for a seasoned rower.

  Another sea-faring summer since then. Merchant runs – not the long open-sea runs down as far as Spain for slaves and spices from the Saracen traders, but coastwise and island-hopping with salt and hides; once north as far as Orkney with farm-slaves for Jarl Sigurd. He remembered lying off the Great Head waiting for the right stage of the tide that they might slip through from the Pentland Firth without falling foul of the roaring, down-sucking turmoil of the whirlpool there, the Eater of Ships, the Widow-maker. He remembered the tide races between a score of islands, the storms and the occasional calms. He remembered the land journey with Evynd against a flare-up of three native Irish kings and the Danish war-bands they had brought in to help them. A southward raid on their own account upon the Danish settlements on the Welsh coast.