Odinn's Child (17 page)

To avoid the poisonous atmosphere of the settlement, I began making long excursions deep into the forest. I claimed that I was going hunting, but I seldom brought back anything more than the wild fruit and roots that I had collected. Nevertheless, I would stay away from the settlement for two or three days at a time and my absence was barely noticed. Everyone was too engrossed in their own selfish concerns. On one of these trips, heading in a direction that I had never tested before, I heard a sound which puzzled me. It was a gentle, steady, rhythmic beat. I was following a deer path through dense underbrush and walked in the direction of the noise, feeling curious rather than fearful. Soon I smelled wood-smoke and, coming into a small clearing, saw that smoke was rising from what appeared to be a large pile of branches heaped up against a tall tree on the far side of the clearing. Looking closer, I realised that the pile of branches was in fact a simple lean-to shelter and the sound was coming from inside it. I had stumbled upon Skraelings.

Looking back on that moment, I imagine that most people would have stepped quietly back into the cover of the underbrush and quickly put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Skraeling hut. This would have been logical and sensible. Yet this thought never occurred to me. On the contrary, I knew with absolute certainty that I had to go forward. I knew, also, that no harm would come to me if I did. Later I was to come to understand that this sense of invulnerability mingled with curiosity and trust is a gift that I have naturally. I felt no fear or alarm. Instead a strange numbness ran right down through my legs, almost as if I could not feel my feet, and I felt I had no control over what my limbs were doing. I simply walked forward into the clearing, went across it to the entrance of the shelter, stooped down and pushed my way in.

As I straightened up inside the smoke-filled interior of the little lean-to, I found myself face to face with a small, thin man, who was flicking some sort of rattle steadily from side to side. It was this rattle which had made the rhythmic chinking sound I heard. The man must have been about sixty years old, though it was difficult to tell because he looked so different from any other human I had yet seen. He was no taller than me, and his narrow face was very brown and deeply lined, and framed with long, lank, black hair which hung down to his shoulders. He was dressed entirely in deerskin, from the jacket to the slippers on his feet. Above all he was very, very thin. His hands, his wrists where they emerged from the sleeves of his rough jacket, and his ankles were like sticks. He glanced up as I entered and the expression in his narrow brown eyes did not change as he looked straight into my face. It was almost as if he was expecting me, or he knew who I was. He gave me a single, long glance, then looked down again. He was staring down at the figure of another Skraeling, who was lying on a bed of branches and was obviously very ill. He too was dressed in animal skins and covered with a deerskin wrap. The man seemed barely conscious and was breathing erratically.

How long I stood there I have no recollection. All notion of time was absorbed into the hypnotic beat of the Skraeling rattle and I was completely relaxed. I too looked down at the invalid, and as I gazed at his recumbent body, something strange happened to my senses. It was as if I was looking through a series of thin veils arranged within the man's body and, if I concentrated hard enough, I could shift aside a veil and pass forward and see deeper and deeper inside, past his external form and into the man's interior. As each veil was passed, my vision became more strained until I could progress no further. By then I knew that I was seeing so far inside the sick Skraeling that I could distinguish the interior shape of his spirit. And that shape, his inner soul, was emitting a series of thin flickers, too light and frail to be sustained. At that moment I knew he was mortally ill. He was too sick to be saved and no one could help him. Nothing like this insight had ever happened to me before, and the impact of the premonition broke through my own inner calm. Like someone struggling to come awake from a deep sleep, I glanced around to try to grasp where I was, and I found myself looking into the eyes of the Skraeling with the rattle. Of course I did not know a single word of his language, but I knew why he was there. He was a doctor for his sick comrade, and he too had been peering into the invalid's soul. He had seen what I had seen. I shook my head. The Skraeling looked back at me quietly and I am sure he understood. Without any hurry I pushed my way out of the lean-to, then walked back across the clearing and away into the underbrush. I was confident that no one would follow me, that the Skraeling would not even mention my presence to his fellows, and that he and I shared something as close as any ties of tribe or race.

Nor did I tell Freydis, her husband, Thorvard, or anyone else in the camp about my encounter with the two Skraelings. There was no point in trying to explain it. They would have thought that I was hallucinating or, in view of what happened a month later, they would have seen me as a traitor who had failed to warn them that the Skraelings were closing in.

They came when the leaves on the trees had turned to the vivid reds and russets and yellows which herald the arrival of winter in those lands. Later we guessed that the Skraelings had needed to assemble their menfolk, who had dispersed to hunt and gather food for the winter, before they made their united effort to drive us away. Certainly the fleet of canoes which came paddling towards us that late autumn morning was twice the number of anything we had expected, though many of our more belligerent settlers had been waiting eagerly for the encounter. For weeks they had endlessly discussed their tactics and boasted how they would crush the Skraelings. So when the Skraeling canoes eventually approached the land, our main force rushed down to the beach and showed their red shields in defiance. For their part, the Skraelings stood up in their canoes and — as they had done the first time I ever saw them - they began to whirl their strange humming sticks through the air. Only now I noticed that they did not swing them with the sun as before, but in the opposite direction, and as they they whirled them faster and faster the air was again filled with a dreadful droning sound that seemed to work right inside our heads.

Our men were still on the edge of the surf, shouting insults and defiance, when the first Skraeling missiles struck. Once again the range of their dart throwers took our men unawares. Two grunted in surprise and slumped down so suddenly that their comrades turned round in puzzlement.

Unnerved, our men began to fall back. They retreated up the beach in disorder, leaving the corpses at the water's edge. We watched the Skraeling flotilla paddle right up to the beach unopposed and their warriors step ashore.

The mass of the Skraelings advanced up the beach towards us.

There must have been nearly eighty of them and they kept no particular order or discipline, but neither did our men, who were scampering back towards the settlement. What followed was a chaotic and deadly brawl, which I watched from the shelter of a dense willow thicket, where I had been sent by Freydis's husband Thorvard when the Skraeling boats first appeared. Earlier I had told Thorvard how the Skraelings had been terrified by the bellowing of our bull on my first visit to Vinland. Now Thorvard told me to run and catch one of the bulls we had brought with us and produce the animal as our secret weapon. But by the time I had brought the animal to the willow thicket, ready to drive it into the open, our forces were about to gain an even more spectacular advantage.

Our men were fleeing back along the bank of one of the small rivers leading up from the strand. Later they claimed that a second band of Skraelings had emerged from the forest and was blocking their line of retreat towards the settlement, though this was a fabrication. The real problem was that our men had no leadership or cohesion. Once again the Icelanders and Greenlanders were behaving as though they were complete strangers to one another, and neither group showed any sign of helping the other. In their panic-stricken haste men were tripping over and picking themselves up, then running onward and bumping into one another as they glanced over their shoulders to see if any more of the Skraeling darts were on their way, or if the Skraelings were pressing home the attack. At this point, when it seemed that our forces were beaten, we were saved by a berserk.

The term berserk has now such common currency that it is known to nations far beyond the Norse world. All agree that the word describes someone so brimming with fighting rage that he performs extraordinary deeds on the battlefield with no regard for his own safety. Some say that in his fury the berserker howls like a wolf before he attacks, others that he foams at the mouth and bites the rim of his shield, glares at his foe, snarls and shakes before he strikes. A true berserk scorns any notion of armour or

self-protection and wears only a bearskin shirt as a mark of his role. Sometimes he wears no shirt at all and goes half-naked into battle. This I have heard, and much more besides, but I have never heard tell of what appeared that day as our men fought the Skraelings — a female berserk.

Our situation was desperate. Our ill-disciplined men were degenerating into a worse rabble. A few of them had turned to skirmish with individual Skraelings, while others were scrambling along the river bank, fleeing ignominiously. One or two were shouting for help, or standing open-mouthed and apparently shocked by the reality of hand-to-hand fighting. It was shameful.

Just at that moment the gate of the settlement palisade banged open, and out rushed a frightful figure. It was Freydis. She had been watching the rout and was appalled by the cowardice of our men. She was in a fury. She came running full tilt down the slope towards the battle, roaring with anger and cursing our men as cowards and poltroons. She made an awesome sight, with her massive bulk, thick legs like tree trunks pounding the ground, red-faced, sweaty and her hair streaming behind her. She was wearing a woman's underdress, a long loose shift, but had discarded her overmantle so as to be able to run more swiftly, and now the undershift flapped around her. She thundered down the slope like an avenging heavyweight Valkyrie and, coming on one of the Norsemen who was standing futilely, she gave him a hefty blow with her meaty arm, which sent him flying, and at the same time snatched the short sword from his hand. She was in a blinding rage, more with her own men than with the Skraelings, many of whom had stopped and turned to look in shocked amazement at this huge, blonde woman raging with obscenities. Freydis was incandescent with anger, her eyes rolling. 'Fight like men, you bastards!' she bellowed at our shamefaced settlers. 'Get a grip on yourselves, and go for them!' To emphasise her rage, to shame our men and work herself into an even greater frenzy, Freydis slipped aside her shift, pulled out one of her massive breasts and gave it a great stinging slap with the flat of her sword. 'Come on!' she screamed to her followers. 'A woman could do better.' And she flung herself at the nearest Skraeling and slashed at him with the weapon. The wretched man, half her size and strength, put up his spear shaft to ward off the blow, but Freydis's sword chopped through the timber cleanly and dealt him such a terrific blow on his neck that he crumpled up instantly. Freydis then swung round and began lumbering at full speed at the next Skraeling. Within seconds the invaders broke and ran back towards their canoes. They had never seen anything like this, and neither had our men. Puffing and panting, Freydis churned along the beach, taking wild swipes at the backs of the departing Skraeling, who did not even attempt to turn and throw darts at her. Our attackers were utterly nonplussed, and they left a panting Freydis standing in the shallows, her loose shift soaked at the hem, great patches of sweat staining her armpits, and splashes of Skraeling blood across her chest.

It was the last time we saw the Skraelings. They left seven of their number dead on the beach, and when we examined them I found that they were not like the healer I had met in the branch shelter in the woods. These Skraelings who had attacked us were shorter in stature, broader, and their faces were generally flatter and more round than the man I had met. They also smelled of fish and wore clothes more suited to the sea than the forest — long sealskin jerkins and heavy leggings. We stripped their bodies of any useful items — including some finely worked spearheads of bone, then carried their bodies to the top of a nearby cliff and threw them into the tide. Our own dead — there were three of them — were buried with little ceremony in shallow graves scraped out of the thin soil.

Our victory, if such an inglorious encounter deserves the name, made the resentment within our camp even worse. Icelanders and Greenlanders heaped blame on one another for being cowards, for failing to come to help, for turning and running instead of making a stand and fighting. No one dared look Freydis in the face, and people slunk about the settlement looking thoroughly ashamed. To make matters worse, winter came on us within a few days and so swiftly that we were caught unprepared. One morning the weather was crisp and bright, but by afternoon it began to rain, and the rain soon turned to sleet, and the following morning we woke up to find a heavy covering of snow on the ground. We managed to get the cattle rounded up and put into the sheds, but we knew that if the winter proved to be long and hard we had not gathered sufficient hay to feed the cattle through to springtime. And the cattle would not be the only ones to suffer. The Icelanders had spent so much time on the construction of their new longhouses during the summer months that they had not been able to catch and dry enough fish for a winter reserve or save a surplus of sour milk and cheese. Their winter rations were very meagre, and when they suggested to Thorvard and the Greenlanders that they should share their food supplies, they were brusquely told that there was not enough to go round. They would have to fend for themselves.

That winter did prove to be exceptionally long and bitter, and in the depths of it we were hardly able to stir from our longhouses for the deep snow, ice and bitter cold outside. It was the most miserable episode of our entire Vinland experience. In the long-house of the Greenlanders, where I lived, life was hard. Our daily intake of food was quickly reduced to tiny portions of gruel with a handful of dried nuts which we had gathered in the autumn, and perhaps a few flakes of dried fish as we huddled around the central fire pit, nursing the embers of our small stock of firewood. All our cattle were dead by midwinter. We were feeding them such short rations that they never gave any milk anyhow, and we killed them when the fodder ran out entirely, though by then they were so scrawny that there was hardly any flesh on their bones. I missed my two mentors, Tyrkir and Thorvall. Before, in Vinland, they had been on hand to help pass the long dark hours with their tales of the Old Gods or instructing me in the Elder Lore. Now, with both men gone, I was reduced to empty daydreaming, turning over in my mind the tales they had told and trying to apply them to my own circumstances. It was at this time, in the depths of uncommonly harsh Vinland winter, that I first began to pray to Odinn, making silent prayers partly for my own solace, and partly in the hopes that he would come to help, to make the winter pass away, to reduce the pangs of hunger. I made sacrifices too. From my tiny ration of food, I would set aside a few dried nuts, a shred of meat, and when no one was looking I would hide them in a crevice in the longhouse wall. They were my offerings to Odinn, and if the mice and rats came and ate them, then — as I told myself — they were either Odinn in disguise or at least his ravens, Hugin and Munin, who would report back that I had made my proper obedience.