Then Thormod said, ‘I am not selling him.’
Eric said, ‘What would you be needing with another thrall in Svendale?’
‘With another thrall, nothing. I am not minded to leave a man who’s fought shoulder to shoulder with me, sold off in a strange land with a thrall-ring round his neck; that’s all.’
He stowed his pouch away, and swung round, jerking his chin at me as he did so. ‘Come, then, we’ve business with Grim the Smith.’
I heard the snort of surprised laughter behind us, as I followed him out from the boat-shed, and up towards the smithy near the gate of the King’s forecourt, where Grim and his striker forged and mended weapons for the men of the Garrison. He was beating out the dint in a damaged shield boss, his boy behind him kneading the goatskin bellows to keep the forge fire roaring.
He glanced up as Thormod checked in the doorway, and then went on with his hammering. Thormod waited in silence, leaning against the door-post. Nobody interrupts a smith at his art. After a while, when the glow had darkened from the metal, Grim thrust it back into the fire. Then he straightened up and looked at us properly. ‘What is it this time? Another sprung rivet?’
‘A thrall-ring to be cut off,’ Thormod said.
Grim’s gaze slipped over his shoulder to myself standing behind him. ‘So? That makes a change. Bide while I finish this, it will not take long.’
So we waited, hearing the ding-ding-ding of the light hand-hammer, watching the sparks fly upward from the red dragon-throat of the fire. I was being careful not to feel much; it was as though once I started to feel, I might not be able to stop. But even so, I had to clench my hands to stop them shaking.
At last Grim laid the finished work aside, and said, ‘Now.’ And took a mallet and a cold chisel from his tool bench, while the boy let the fire die down. ‘Come you and kneel here.’ I went forward and knelt where he bade me, beside the anvil. ‘Your neck, so. Don’t move unless you want to lose an ear.’
The stroke of the mallet on the chisel nearly jarred my head from my shoulders; but at the third blow the thing parted, and Grim laid down his tools and wrenched the iron ring open. I saw the blue knotted veins on his wrists and forearms stand out with the strain. I got up, rubbing my neck. Thormod gave him a coin, and we walked out of the smithy without a word spoken between us.
On the way up through the town, I had walked behind my master, but on the way down again, we walked side by side, shoulder brushing shoulder in the narrow ways, and still without a word, until we came out at the head of the Strand, above the boat-sheds and the bay. And then we checked and turned to look at each other.
‘Well?’ said Thormod, breaking the silence at last.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘You’re free.’
I asked slowly and carefully, ‘What is it that I do with my freedom?’
‘Whatever seems to you good. You’ve a head on you, and hands to your elbows. You could get yourself taken on by a shipmaster bound for Bristow. Or –’
Abruptly he reached out and laid a heavy arm across my shoulders. ‘The Sea Swallow could do with another man for the rowing benches.’
‘I’ve never handled an oar,’ I said slowly.
Thormod’s long straight mouth quirked at the corners. ‘You’ll have learned the way of it before we come to Thrandisfjord, and have the blisters to prove it . . . I may need a man to stand with me another day. Come, Jestyn.’
The grin that had flashed across his face had left it; and suddenly he was grave. We stood looking eye into eye; and for the first time it came to me that I need not have answered that shout in the dark alleyway at Yule; the Viking Kind meant nothing to me, and surely I owed him nothing because I was his thrall, bought whether I would or no. I had answered because it was Thormod in need of help, and I was Jestyn. Thormod and Jestyn. Nothing to do with Dane and English, master and thrall. And Thormod knew it also. There has to be a first time for everything; for friendship as well as love; and first friendship, once given, can no more be given again than first love.
I was suddenly and piercingly aware of the wind off the bay and the sun-dazzle on the water, and the thin crying of the gulls wheeling with the evening light under their wings.
‘I’ll come,’ I said.
I had my blisters, and the blisters broke and my hands were raw and then healed and beginning to harden, when, with the many days of our seafaring behind us, we rounded the North Ness into the cold blue-green waters of the Sound, and came down the east coast of Jutland, making for Thrandisfjord.
We made the fjord mouth towards evening; the shadows of the land lying out across the water, and the shore-birds crying. Inside the shoaling sandbanks, the water was quiet and deep, reflecting the alders and birches that grew down to the shore. The fjord swung northward, and as a fresh reach opened up, there was a little spur of land thrusting out into the water, and a man on it, lopping the branches from a fallen birch tree, who dropped his axe as we came in sight, and began to wave his arms and shout. The crew shouted back, cursing and joyful. And then the man turned and ran.
‘Thord Loudmouth, first with the news as usual,’ Haki said. And laughter swept the Sea Swallow from stem to stern; not because there was really so much to laugh at, but because her crew had been away so long and were home again. There was no familiar home waiting for me round the next bend of the fjord, but the heart-bursting, salt-stung, vomit-tasting days of the long seafaring were behind me, and I was a free man, and I followed Thormod. And so I was content enough.
Thord Loudmouth must have done his work well, for when we came to the landing beach, it seemed that all the folk of Thrandisfjord were there to meet us. We shipped oars and sprang overboard into the shallows, and ran the Sea Swallow up the gull-grey shingle; and men were greeting their women, and brother greeting brother, and a father tossing up a joyfully shrieking child, all along the brown sea-wrack of the waterline.
That night we all feasted in the Chief’s Fire Hall. I mind how the fern-strewn floor still heaved gently under me with the long slow swell of the Northern Seas. And next morning the crew of the Sea Swallow split up, those whose homes were in the settlement biding where they were, the rest scattering to farms and steadings in other valleys.
Thormod and I and a few others set off southward. After an hour’s walking over the moors, Haki went his separate way; and a while past noon we came to a cattle track that forded a stream and disappeared up a birch-wooded side valley, and Eric took it, while the rest of us pushed on up the stream bank. They had fought and slept and drunk together for more than a year, yet they parted as though they had been out on a day’s hunting. Once, it would have seemed strange to me, but by now I had learned the ways of the Northmen.
By evening, Thormod and I were alone.
We took our shelter for the night in a little turf bothy on the moors between one valley and the next. A shieling where the herdsmen would live when the cattle were out on the summer pasture. We made a hunting fire of birchbark and heather snarls before the door-hole, and ate the ship’s bannock and garlic-flavoured curds that we had brought with us; and washed it down with ice-cold water that I fetched in Thormod’s war-cap from a little spring near by. After we had eaten, we bided for a long while, feeding the fire with bits of birch bark, and talking or companionably silent as the mood took us – Thormod was always a good person to be silent with – alone in the sky-wide emptiness of the moors.
Thormod lay propped on one elbow, staring into the heart of the fire. Presently, maybe because he had been so long away and tomorrow’s homecoming was so near, he began to talk of his own place and people, as he had never done before. Home and kinsfolk, father and brother and brother’s wife, friends from other farms, whom he had run with since he was a cub. Two friends in particular, Herulf and Anders Herulfson, from some steading further up the same valley. ‘It was a near thing that Anders came with me to Ireland,’ he said, ‘a very near thing.’
‘What happened, that he did not?’ I asked; and
wondered if I should have left the thing unsaid, for I could sense a hurt somewhere in him.
Thormod fed the fire with a sprig of dry heather, carefully waiting for the tip to flower into flame before he dropped it into the red heart. ‘He had cast his eye on a girl. So he settled for a raiding summer – out after sheep shearing and back to get in the harvest. I’m thinking he’ll be wed by now. Not that any woman would hold that one long to hearthfire and home acre. He was ever one for the wind in his sails.’
‘Aren’t you all, you of the Northmen Kind?’ I said.
‘Aye, I suppose so. The wandering is born in us. Though maybe if it were not for the leanness of our pastures . . . a poor land always casts its sons as a gorse-pod casts its seed in summer.’ He laughed. ‘Thor’s Hammer! I sound like some greybeard that’s been forty years West-over-seas! When Anders and Herulf and I stood not much higher than the hounds under the table, we forged plans to take the road to Miklagard and make our fortunes in the south. We’d been listening to merchants’ stories.’
I nodded. I had not lived a winter among the Northmen of Dublin, and listened to their talk, without hearing of the golden fortress-city many months’ journey to the south-east, where the Emperor of Byzantium sat on his golden throne; also of the long and perilous river-faring, followed mostly by the men of the Baltic shores, that was the road to Miklagard, and the strange and wonderful adventures to be had, and the fortunes to be made . . . Merchants’ stories, travellers’ tales . . . I suppose most boys listen to them, one time or another, and get a pang of the wander-hunger and dream a brightly-coloured dream or so. For myself, the wandering was in my feet also.
‘This merchant had lumps of raw amber as big as my fist and as yellow as the sun,’ Thormod was saying. ‘Anders and Herulf traded him some more – just small bits; we used to go hunting it among the seawrack after a storm. He was taking it south to trade for wine and enamel work. He promised to tell us more stories when he came back, but we never saw him again.’
‘You did not trade him your piece of amber.’
‘Other pieces I did, but not this.’ Thormod touched the breast of his byrnie. ‘It seemed to me more beautiful than the reindeer-skin belt he would have given me for it. Also there was its shape. And the very day after I found it, I won the Boys’ Wrestling Contest at the Thing Gathering, so I kept it for luck. I’m thinking you had maybe something of the sort in mind, the night you came after me with it through the darkest alleyways of Dublin.’
Abruptly, he rolled over and huddled himself in his cloak. ‘I’m for sleep.’
I built up the fire against night-prowling creatures of the wild, thinking, as I laid the last thorn root over the red core, that it would be good if I were not following Thormod back into his own world, kinsfolk and old friends and old hounds, that would be none of mine, familiar fields where I should be a stranger. It would be good if we were setting out, the two of us, on some unknown road that led to the ends of the earth. Even the road to Miklagard, maybe.
And in that moment a little thin wind came sighing through the young heather; and I shivered, and the hair stirred on the back of my neck as though cold fingers had brushed it. I pushed the thought away. It was a bad thought, that took no heed of Thormod, but only of myself. An unchancy thought, and I wished that I could unthink it again.
I rearranged the thorn root with great care, pulled my cloak about me, and crawling back into the shelter of the bothy, lay down beside Thormod, with my feet to the fire.
6 Home-coming
NEXT MORNING WE ate what remained of the bannock and set out on the last part of our journey. Over the moors, the curlews were in mating-call, and as the sun rose higher there began to be a warm scent of bog-myrtle in the air, mingling with the salt tang from the sea. Well on between noon and evening we came over a gentle ridge beyond which the land sank away to a broad shallow dale. And on the crest of the ridge, close beside the track, stood a tall lichened stone with what looked like a pair of eyes carved on it – carved long ago and half lost again to the wind and weather – and beside it, a wind-shaped thorn tree starred with sparse grey-white blossom. Thormod checked beside the stone, and touched it in a peculiar way. ‘That is for home-coming,’ he said. ‘Next time we come this way, it will be for you to do that, also . . . From here on, all this is Svendale. We’re home, Jestyn.’
And we went on, following the herding track down into the sun-dappled cloud-shadowed dale.
Presently, with the shadows lengthening, I glimpsed brown-thatched roofs in the loop of an alder-fringed stream; and we were coming down between in-take fields laid up for hay and barley. I thought, so close in to the steading, to see folk at work, but everywhere seemed strangely empty of humankind. I looked questioningly aside at Thormod, and saw the frown line between his eyes as he glanced about him.
Something was wrong. No word passed between us, but Thormod lengthened his stride, and I did the same, following him, as we came down to the stream and splashed through the cattle ford.
Voices reached us at last, as we came up towards the steading gate; and the folk who had been missing from the fields were all there, gathered in the wide garth; and more beside, from farms up and down the dale, I guessed, old and young, men and women, children and hounds. Some of the hounds leapt up and raced, joyfully baying, to greet Thormod as we came in through the gate. But the folk, looking round to see who it was, glanced at one another and back again, and were oddly still; a kind of troubled and uncertain stillness. Something was wrong indeed, horribly wrong. And yet beyond the people, I could see trestles before the house-place door, spread as though for a feast. Someone cleared his throat as if to speak, and then was silent again. Then an old man with a long nose and a bright and expectant eye, the kind that likes to be the stirrer of trouble and the bearer of ill news, came out from the rest and pushed through the welcoming dogs.
‘You are returned in a black hour, Thormod Sitricson.’
Thormod never looked at him. Whatever the trouble was, seemingly he did not want to hear it from that particular old man. He thrust the dogs aside and walked on towards the house-place. The dogs, suddenly fallen from their high spirits, followed him. So, with some idea of keeping close to him in case of need, did I.
Before the house-place, the women were bending over the long trestle boards, setting out platters of meat and bannocks and great jugs of ale. They also checked into that odd stillness at the sight of Thormod; and one of them, who seemed, young though she was, to be the mistress of the house, turned and called through the doorway into the darkness beyond it, ‘Sitric, it is Thormod come home.’
In answer, someone loomed into the doorway; a man somewhat like Thormod but a few years older, taller and darker, and of a blunter make. ‘Thormod, my brother! You have heard?’
They put their arms round each other’s shoulders, and pulled close a moment. ‘No, I am straight come from Thrandisfjord,’ Thormod said. And then, ‘Is it our father?’
‘It is our father.’
They went in together, and I – I followed still, much as a hound might have done.
They went down the long central aisle between the stalls where the cattle would be housed in winter. There was torchlight at the far end where it widened out into the family’s living space. No firelight, for the fire had been quenched on the hearth; and the torches burned at the head and feet of a dead man, who lay under a great brown bearskin in the midst of the place. The fur was pulled up to his throat; and Sitric stooped without a word, and drew it back a little way.
I had checked between the last of the cow-stalls, and saw nothing of what was beneath. But I saw Thormod’s back grow rigid, and his hands clench at his sides into quivering fists.
‘Who killed him?’
Sitric let the rug fall back. ‘Anders and Herulf Herulfson – either or both.’
‘Anders? Herulf? That’s madman’s talk!’ Thormod began shouting; then he checked and quietened. ‘What was the way of it?’
Sitric told hi
m, in a dead level voice, standing over their father’s body. ‘We have had trouble with the wolfkind, this spring. Five days since, our father went hunting. He’d a new bow to try out, and you know what he was like with something new. He hunted late, and at dusk he saw what he thought was a wolf among the alder woods up the back. It was too dark to see properly, but he let fly . . .’
‘And it was not a wolf,’ Thormod said.
‘It was Herulf Blackbeard in his old wolfskin cloak.’
‘And so Anders and Herulf took up the Blood Feud.’
‘The Thing was summoned to try the case. I suppose as it was an ill-chance killing, the Lawman would have ordered that we pay the man-price, and that would have been the end of it. But Herulf and Anders . . . They must have got him while he was out riding the lower sheep-run. Yesterday at first light they came across by Loud Beck and flung his body down by the Mark Stone, and shouted to Ulf, who was taking out the cattle, that they were not waiting for the Greybeards of the Thing Council, and that they set more store by blood than Wyr Geld, in payment for their father’s death. Then they rode off southward.’
‘What possessed Father to ride out alone along the lower run?’ Thormod said after a moment.
‘Maybe he thought they would wait for the Thing, and abide by its ruling.’
‘And maybe he knew that they would not; and thought that he’d had the best part of his life, and thought that his death, alone, would come cheaper than his death along with the rest of you, and the farm burned over your heads in the good old-fashioned way.’ Thormod did not speak accusingly, as though to say ‘Why did you let him go alone?’ but only as one stating facts. I come of a people who do not howl and cast ashes on their heads for the death of kinsfolk; but this was something that I had not met before.
And then in the same level, fact-stating tone, he added, ‘Herulfstead shall burn for this.’
‘In the good old-fashioned way? You’ll not find the young wolves in the lair.’