Odinn's Child (9 page)

That same morning Grimhild's husband went about the day-to-day chores of the farm as if nothing had happened. It was his way of coping with the shock of his wife's sudden death. He told four farmhands to go to the landing place where we kept our small boats and be ready to do a day's fishing. Trying to make myself useful and not wanting to stay in the same house as Grimhild's corpse, I accompanied the men as they headed to the beach to begin preparing the nets and fishing lines. We had loaded up the fishing gear into the two small skiffs, and were just about to push off for the fishing grounds when a runner came stumbling down from the farmhouse. In a lather of sweat and fear, he told Thorstein the Black to come quickly, something very odd was happening in the sick room. Thorstein dropped the sculls he was about to put into the boat and ran, clumping back up the narrow track to the farm. The rest of us stood there and stared at one another.

'What's happening in the farm?' someone asked the messenger, who was not at all in a hurry to get back to the longhouse.

'Grimhild's corpse started to move,' he replied. 'She sat up in bed, slid her feet to the floor and was trying to stand. I didn't see it myself, but one of the women came running out of the bed closet screaming.'

'Better stay away for a while,' said one of the farmhands. 'Let Grimhild's husband sort it out, if the story's true. I've heard about corpses coming alive, and no good ever comes of it. Come on, let's shove off the boats and go fishing. We'll find out what's happened soon enough.'

But it was difficult to concentrate on the fishing that day. Everyone in the two boats kept glancing back at the farmhouse, which could be seen in the distance. They were very subdued. I had gone along in one of the boats, helping bail out the bilges with a wooden scoop when I wasn't baiting hooks - my fingers were small and deft — but every time I caught sight of one of the men looking back at the farmhouse, I shivered with apprehension.

By mid-afternoon we were back on the beach, and had cleaned and split the few cod and saithe that we had caught, and hung

them up in the drying house. I walked very slowly back to the house, staying at the rear of the group as we tramped up the path. When we came to the front door, no one would go in. The farmhands held back, fidgeted and looked at me meaningfully. I was just a boy, but they thought of me as a member of their employer's family, and therefore I was the one who should enter the house first. I pushed open the heavy wooden door and found the long hall strangely deserted. At the far end three or four of the workers' wives were huddled together on benches, looking very troubled. One of them was sobbing quietly. I tiptoed to the door of the bed closet and peered in. Thorstein the Black was sitting on the earth floor, his knees drawn up to his chest and his head bowed. He was staring at the ground. On the bed in front of him lay the corpse of his wife. A hatchet was buried in her chest, the haft stuck up in the air. To my left, Gudrid was seated on the side of the bed where her husband lay. Thorstein Eriksson was propped up on a pillow, but looked very odd. I ran to Gudrid and threw my arms around her waist. She was deathly calm. 'What's happened?' I croaked.

'Grimhild was on her feet. Her fetch must have come back and entered her body,' Gudrid replied. 'She was stumbling slowly round the room. Knocking into the walls like a blind person. She was bumping and fumbling. That was when I sent for her husband. I feared she would do harm. When her husband came into the room, he thought that Gudrid was possessed. That she had been turned into a ghoul. He picked up the hatchet and sank it into her. To put an end to her. She has not moved since.'

Gudrid pulled me closer. 'Your uncle Thorstein is dead as well,' she said quietly. 'He stopped breathing during the afternoon and I thought he had passed away. But then he did come back to us briefly. He called me over to him and told me that he knew he was about to die, and that he did not want to be buried here, but back in Brattahlid. I promised him that would be done. Then he told me not to forget the volva's prophecy about my own future. He said he was not the man who had been promised to me. It was the last thing he said. Then he fell back and did not stir again.'

I was half-kneeling beside Gudrid with my head on her lap. 'Don't worry,' I told Gudrid, trying to console her. 'Everything will be all right now. You will not die from the plague. Nor will Thorstein the Black. Only old Amundi is going to die, and Sverting, who was with me in the boat this afternoon. That's all the people who were with Gardi last night in the yard.'

She put her hand under my chin, and gently turned my face so she could look into my eyes. 'How do you know?' she said softly.

'Because I saw them too, just as Grimhild did, all of them were there with Gardi and his whip. Last night, in the yard,' I answered.

'I see,' said Gudrid, and let her hand fall as she looked away.

I was too confused and frightened to make any sense of what was happening. I had never intended to tell anyone that I too had seen the group of fetches in the darkness of the farmyard. It was something which I did not understand. If I could see them, what did it mean about me and my responses to the spirit world? I had heard the rumours about my real mother Thorgunna and the ominous circumstances of her death. Would I see her fetch next? It was a terrifying prospect. But had I glanced up and seen Gudrid's expression when I made my confession, I would have been reassured. I would have realised that Gudrid too had seen the not-yet-dead, and that she had the gift of seidr, far more than me.

SIX

S
EVEN-YEAR-OLDS
are remarkably quick to adapt. Naturally enough, the farm workers at Lyusfjord refused to spend the winter cooped up in a building where such supernatural events had occurred, so our household moved back to Brattahlid, and within days I was back into the normal routines of childhood, playing with the other children. There were more of them than there had been at Lyusfjord so our games were more complicated and rowdy. I was smaller in stature than most of my contemporaries, but I made up for my lack of brawn with clever invention and quickness of thought. I also found I had a talent for mimicry and an imagination more vivid than most of my friends. So in our group I was the one who tended to invent new games or embellish the existing games with variants. When spring came and the days lengthened, we children moved out of doors to play the more boisterous games that the adults had forbidden indoors during the winter months. Most of our games involved a lot of play-acting with loud shouts, makeshift wooden shields and blunt wood swords. It was only natural that one we invented was based on my uncle Thorvald's voyage. Of course Thorvald's heroic death was a central feature of the make-believe. The oldest, strongest boy - his name was Hrafn as I remember — would play the leading role, staggering around the yard, clutching his armpit dramatically and

pretending to pull out an arrow. 'The Skraelings have shot me,' he would yell. 'I'm dying. I will never see home again, but die a warrior's death in a far land.' Then he would spin round, throw out his arms and drop in fake death on the dirt and the rest of us would pretend to pile up a cairn of stones around his body. My own contribution came when we all boarded an imaginary boat and rowed and sailed along the unknown coast. I invented a great whirlpool which nearly sucked us down and a slimy sea monster whose tentacles tried to drag us overboard. My friends pretended to scan the beaches and called out what they saw — ravening wolves, huge bears, dragon-snakes and so forth. One day I created for them a monster-man who, I said, was grimacing at us from the beach. He was a troll with just one foot and that as big as a large dish. He was bounding along the strand, taking great leaps to keep pace with us and — to demonstrate - I left my companions to one side, and hopped along, both feet together until I was out of breath and gave up the pretence.

It was a harmless bit of play-acting, which was to draw attention to me in a way that I could never have anticipated.

The following day I got a really bad scare. I was walking past the open door to the main cattle shed when a thin arm reached out of the darkness, and seized me by the shoulder. I was yanked inside, and in the gloom found myself staring close up at the sinister face of Tyrkir. I was convinced he was about to batter me for some fault, and I went numb with fear as he briskly hefted me to the back of the cow byre and twisted me round to face him. He was still gripping my shoulder and it hurt. 'Who told you about the uniped?' he demanded in his heavy accent. 'Did you speak with any of the crew about it?'

'Turn the boy so I can look at his eyes,' said a voice with a deep rumble, and I saw another man, seated on the hay at the back of the byre. I had not noticed him before, but even without looking at his face I knew who he was, and my fright only increased. He was Thorvall, known as 'the Hunter'.

Of all the men in Brattahlid Thorvall was the one we boys most feared and respected. He was the odd man out in our community of farmers and fishermen. A huge, weatherbeaten man now in his late fifties but still as fit and tough as a twenty-year-old, he was disfigured by a scar which ran from the corner of his left eye back towards his ear. The ear had been partly torn away and healed with a ragged edge so that Thorvall looked like a tattered tomcat that had been in numerous fights. The injury was the result of a hunting accident in which Thorvall had been mauled by a young polar bear. Standing in front of him in the cowshed, I tried to keep my glance away from that terrible scar, while I thought to myself that Thorvall had been lucky not to lose the eye itself. As it was, the lid of his left eye drooped, and I wondered if it affected his vision when he was drawing his hunting bow.

Thorvall was dressed in his usual hunting clothes, heavy leggings bound with thongs, stout shoes and a jerkin with a hood. I had never seen him wear anything else, and to be frank the clothes did smell strongly even over the stench of the cow byre. Thorvall had no one to look after his laundry. He was a bachelor who lived by himself in a small house on the edge of the settlement and he came and went as he pleased. His only personal ornament was a necklace made of the teeth of polar bears he had killed. At that moment, he was looking at me steadily and I felt I was being scanned by some sort of predatory bird.

'Maybe the woman told him. She has the sight and knows a good deal of the ways,' he said.

Tyrkir was still gripping my shoulder in case I made a dash for the open door behind me. "We know about her qualities, but she's only his foster mother. Besides she wasn't there either. I think the boy saw the uniped himself. They say that Leif s Orcades woman had seidr powers. More likely the boy has his abilities from her.' He gave me a slight shake as if to check whether these mysterious 'abilities' would somehow clank together inside me.

'You'll only scare him more if you rattle him around. Let him speak for himself.'

Tyrkir relaxed his grip slightly, but did not release my arm. 'Have you talked with Gudrid about the uniped?' he asked.

I was puzzled.
I
had no idea what a uniped was.

'That creature who hopped along on just one foot.'

I now realised what this interrogation was about, but was completely baffled why Tyrkir and Thorvall would be interested in my childish antics. Surely I had done nothing wrong.

'What else do you see? Do you have any strange dreams?' Tyrkir was asking the question so intently that his German accent was all the more obvious. I did not know how to reply. Of course I had dreams, I thought to myself, but so did everyone else.
I
had nightmares of being drowned, or pursued by monsters, or that the room was squeezing in on me, all the usual terrors. In fact I was rather ashamed of my nightmares and never spoke about them to anyone. I had no idea where my vision of the so-called uniped had come from. It was not something I had dreamed in the night. The image had simply popped into my head at the time when I was playing with the other children and I had acted it out. I was still too scared to speak.

'Anything else unusual in your head, any odd sights from time to time?' Tyrkir rephrased his question, trying to adopt a more soothing tone.

My mind stayed a blank.
I
wanted desperately to answer, just to save myself, but
I
couldn't recall a single dream out of the ordinary. But
I
was beginning to understand that these two gruff men meant me no harm. With a child's acuteness of observation
I
was becoming aware that in some mysterious way they needed me. There was an undercurrent of respect, and of something else — of awe — in their attitude to me. Clamped in the rough grip of Tyrkir, and faced by the scarred face of Thorvall,
I
realised that the two men were expecting me to supply something they could not achieve, and it was something to do with the way
I
saw things.