The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (16 page)

The Jarl’s thick brows shot up, and his flat-backed head on its long neck thrust forward, making it look even more than usual like the prow of a galley. ‘Since when has Onund Treefoot had need to fill his water
casks from another man’s springs, unless it were done without the asking?’

Sven gave his familiar one-shouldered shrug. ‘We are on the whale’s road north-west. An Iceland faring – a peaceful faring; we have women and bairns on board, and roped cattle. Therefore we have no wish for fighting.’ Bjarni knew how he must hate saying that. ‘To have carried enough water from the outset would be to carry fewer cattle and less grain and seed-corn.’

‘And so you thought to refill your bags from mine.’

‘Orkney is the furthest landfall on the Iceland run,’ said Sven.

‘Lewis is further,’ said Jarl Sigurd.

‘Aye, but between Barra and Lewis there has been ill blood these many years.’

That was a story well known to all in the hall, beginning with a raid made by the Lewis chief on Barra when the Barra fleet was away raiding elsewhere.

The Jarl nodded. ‘And the sharing of water is a matter for friends and kindred.’ He grinned into the carefully wooden face of Sven Gunnarson. ‘There has never been friendship between Barra and Orkney.’

Sven swallowed. ‘That is the message that you send back?’

‘That is the message that I send back. Yet I turn no man hungry from my hearth. Now that you are here, eat before you take it to him.’

‘Not under this roof,’ said Sven, and turned away, swinging his salt-stained cloak behind him.

As he passed Bjarni their eyes met, and Sven’s widened for a moment. Then he went on, with no word spoken between them.

Bjarni took a bannock from the bowl in front of him, but sat staring at it, with, for the moment, no
wish to eat. So – of a surety there was a new wind blowing among the islands, and Onund Treefoot filling his sails with it, setting his keels with all those others on the Iceland run . . . Onund down there in the fog-bound harbour, almost within walking distance. And that was all, nothing more . . . Bjarni took a savage bite out of his bannock and dug his horn spoon into the nearest of the large communal bowls of eel stew. What had he to do with Onund Treefoot, that he should be waiting now like a hound for his master’s whistle?

He did not have so long to wait. The eel stew and the baked seal meat were gone, but he was still busy with bannock and curds; and the ale-jars were going around. The Countess and her women were not yet gone from the cross-benches; and the harper on his stool at the Jarl’s feet was scarcely launched into
The Fight at Finnsburg,
when the second stranger came through the doorway, the mist making a silver bloom on the great cloak that he wore huddled about him, the hood pulled forward over his face, and seemingly something under his arm, bundled under the thickness of it.

The dark sodden folds hung almost to brush the bracken on the floor, giving no sight of the man’s feet, but the familiar swinging walk with a sideways lurch of the shoulders at each step told Bjarni instantly who he was, and told him also that the old wound was giving trouble.

How in Thor’s name had he contrived to come up from the harbour unseen? Well, the mist was thick enough, and it was said that Onund could put on a cloak of invisibility when he chose . . .

The harper broke off his tale, one hand still poised above the harp strings; men looked up from their ale or a bout of arm wrestling or a game of fox and geese
to follow the cloaked figure with their eyes as he stalked up the Hall to where the Jarl sat in his High Seat with his sons and his guests around him. Guthorm’s hand half went to his dirk, the movement echoed by more than one of the Jarl’s house-carles, then fell away, back onto his knee. There was no menace in the dark figure, at least none that could have withstood cold steel. The stranger had reached the High Seat and come to a halt before it. As he did so the thing under his cloak stirred, as though roused by the ceasing of the movement, and began to bleat like a lamb.

Onund Treefoot flung back the folds and, stooping, set the thing on the Jarl’s knees, saying as he did so, ‘Sigurd of Orkney, Onund of Barra claims fosterage to his son.’

The creature – it was certainly no more than a year old, though wrapped already in a sealskin jacket and breeks of scarlet cloth – seemed to be newly waked from sleep. It looked about it at the strange place in which it found itself, and the strange faces crowding in the firelight and, shutting its eyes and opening its mouth, burst into a string of shattering roars.

Jarl Sigurd looked at it blankly, then thrust out a hand to keep the thing from rolling straight off his knee again. There was a ring on the hand, a great slab of amber set in gold; the bairn saw it, the yells ceased between one and the next, and it put out its own hand with a wet sucked thumb, to cling to it. The bellowing died into a contented snuffling.

The Jarl’s face combined fury and astonishment as he glanced from the bairn to its father and back again. For a moment he seemed inclined to simply take away his hand and let the creature fall. But it was too late for that. Once a bairn had been set on your knee and fosterage formally claimed for it, there was nothing
you could do, though its father were your bitterest enemy.

Onund had flung back his cloak, and stood looking on, the devilry dancing in his lean white face in the way that Bjarni remembered well. ‘So! Now there is a foster-kinship between Barra and Orkney. And between kindred, water should be free,’ he said. ‘Therefore I claim the right to water ship from your springs.’

THE JARL’S FACE
gathered darkness like a storm cloud. In the chief guest seat opposite him Thorstein Olafson stroked his fiery bush of beard and looked on through the peat-smoke with the air of a man judging the mettle of two stallions before a horsefight. The Pictish envoys looked on with the more remote interest of men watching the tribal custom of a people not much known to them. The whole Hall seemed to be waiting, as though they had seen the lightning flash and were waiting for the crash of thunder.

For a long moment the silence held, and then Jarl Sigurd flung up his head with a roar, but it was a roar of laughter, not storm. ‘Now by Thor and Odin, here is one after my own heart!’ He rocked to and fro, heedless of the bairn on his knee, who would have ended on the floor after all if Guthorm, who sat beside him, had not reached out a long arm and caught it into safety like a puppy by the scruff of its neck, and handed it over to one of the Countess’s women who came out of the shadows to take it from him. The Jarl beat his fists on his knees, laughing still, and the
laughter was caught up and ran and swirled like a racing tide among the crowded benches.

‘Ill would it be for foster-kin to deny his wells to foster-kin! Water ship tomorrow. See now. I will send men down to bring up your people for it is a dreich night to be huddled under canvas. Meanwhile, sit you, and eat!’ He let out a bellow fit to fetch the old swallows’ nests out of the thatch. ‘Food! Bring more food for our guests!’

Onund remained standing before him. ‘My men will do well enough, but I’d be glad to get the women and bairns under cover for the night.’

‘Sit then,’ said the Jarl again. ‘Here at my side while I send for them.’

‘I will sit, and gladly I will eat and drink under your roof when I return, but first I go to fetch my people, for I am thinking that they will not come for a stranger’s bidding,’ Onund said. ‘The bairn, your foster-son, I leave in your keeping, this tide.’

And he turned and stumped away down the Hall, gathering his cloak about him as he went, paying no heed to the laughter and thumping of ale jacks on trestle boards that went with him, nor to the wailing of his son, left alone among strangers.

Bjarni, who had been watching him, still half under the old spell, got up, flinging a leg over the bench, and went out after him. The fog wafted like wet smoke into his face as he came out through the fore porch door and ahead of him he saw a blurred figure moving with the familiar lurch in a saffron haze of torchlight.

On the edge of the garth he caught up with him. Onund looked round at the pad of footsteps behind him. And by the quick movement under his cloak, Bjarni judged that his hand had gone to the dirk in his belt.

‘Slippery going, on the harbour path in this wet
witches’ brew,’ Bjarni said. ‘My shoulder is the same height as ever it was.’

There was a loosening in the cloaked figure; unseen hand came away from unseen dirk, and Onund Treefoot flung back the shoulder fold of his cloak. ‘Broader than it used to be, though,’ he said, setting his arm across Bjarni’s shoulder in the old familiar way. And that was all, no more of strangeness or startlement than if they had last spoken with each other the day before.

They went on together down the rocky path that snaked between furze and rough grass to the ship-strand and the scarce-seen ghosts of ship-sheds and jetties that loomed to meet them through the grey half-light. Water as grey and lightless as the mist lapped upon the shore, and along the ghost of the main jetty, the yellow sheen of mast head and storm lanterns told where two longships were made fast, with the thicker-set shape of what looked to be a merchant vessel between.

Peering down into this vessel, from which a good deal of noise was coming, Bjarni made out the huddled shapes of women and bairns, one of them crying, roped cattle, a barking dog, faces that seemed to belong to the mist, looking anxiously toward the hollow sound of their feet on the timbers of the jetty. And among the men who surrounded them, here and there the glint of torchlight on knife blade.

‘Get the women and the bairns ashore,’ Onund shouted. ‘We have the Jarl’s word. We water ship in the morning.’

All along the line of tied-up vessels, crouching men unfurled themselves and some came scrambling onto the jetty while others set to handing the women up to them, and a few of the Jarl’s men, who had been standing by to keep a wary eye on the strangers’ fleet,
came forward to lend a hand. A short while later Onund had gone lurching forward to speak to someone aboard
Sea Witch,
and Bjarni was being thumped about the shoulders by old comrades, Sven Gunnarson among them.

‘I’d ha’ thought you were a ghost up there in the Jarl’s Hall if you hadn’t had your mouth so full of bannock,’ Sven said, fetching him a buffet that all but sent him sprawling into the belly of the merchantman among the roped cattle.

They were getting the women up onto the jetty. One would not come, but stood in the prow, looking up and calling in a voice sharp-edged with fear and anger, ‘What of my bairn?’

Onund turned from
Sea Witch
to answer her. ‘All’s well with the bairn, as I promised. You shall have him in your arms again before the tide turns.’

She made a small sound that was almost a sob, and came to the shipside, and Bjarni, reaching down to catch her hand and swing her up onto the jetty, saw in the white and weary oval of her face that she was still angry, but no longer afraid. She knew him, just as Sven had known him, but she had other things on her mind, and instantly turned away, thrusting between the other women to come at her lord. ‘How do I know that you speak the truth?’

‘Woman,’ Onund said, ‘I make few promises, but have I ever yet failed in a promise made to you?’ And he swung away from her about other matters that had to be seen to.

It might be no sweet and easy thing, Bjarni thought suddenly, to be Onund Treefoot’s woman.

Soon all was sorted out and, carrying the weary bairns among them, the women had turned to the track snaking inland towards the Jarl’s Hall; a few of the men going with them for escort, while the rest,
left behind, began rigging the usual night-time shelter of ship’s awnings. The Jarl’s coast warden led the way, and Onund brought up the rear, Bjarni again beside him with his shoulder under the other’s armpit, feeling the familiar weight and balance as though there had been no two years between.

In the firelit Hall more food had been brought up in readiness for their coming, and there was warmth and a kind of rough-edged welcome; bannock and curds and laverbread, raw salt fish and porridge sweet with honey-in-the-comb, all things that could be quickly made ready while fresh supplies of seal meat were cooking.

They were gathered in by the women of the household on the cross-benches. Onund’s son had gone back to sleep, and lay curled up in the Countess’s lap, as though it were the lap he had known all his life, his thumb in his mouth and her arms about him. Aesa his mother saw him there, and started towards him, her arms held out, but she met the Countess’s gaze and a faint warning shake of the head. She glanced questioningly round to find Onund, and received from him the same signal. She let her arms fall empty to her sides, and let herself be settled into the place that had been made ready for her, close beside.

Red Thorstein being already in the chief guest seat opposite the Jarl’s, Onund was given a place of honour at the Jarl’s side, and Bjarni, lacking bench space to sit, settled himself among the hounds near by.