The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (2 page)

Kraka, foremost of the Chief’s hearth companions, who rowed first oar in his galley when she put out to sea for the summer’s raiding and trading, gave him a sword from one of the great weapon kists against the gable wall. A good serviceable weapon with a grip of age-darkened walrus ivory. Not such a sword as he would have chosen for himself, but well enough. He had had no sword of his own until now, but his practice sessions with the other boys had taught him to recognise the balance of a blade. And a little later, knotting the sword-thongs to his belt as he went, he was heading back through the settlement for his brother’s house-place. And Gram, who must have been waiting in the foreporch, was suddenly beside him.

‘If he asks me now, out in the open with half the settlement looking on,’ Bjarni thought, ‘I’ll kill him.’

But all Gram said, glancing down at his new sword, was, ‘Tha’s got that on the wrong side.’

‘Not for a left-handed swordsman,’ Bjarni said between his teeth. And heard the other’s surprised silence. It was wonderful how folk that weren’t left-handed themselves never thought of things like that.

They walked on without another word, up through the settlement, crossing the log bridge over the burn and following the stream upwards for half a mile until they came to the side glen, to the steading that was the nearest thing Bjarni had now to a home. The smell of cooking came out through the house-place doorway, but that must wait. As though the thing had
been decided between them, they turned aside and ducked in through the low doorway of the store-shed. Inside were kists and bundles, farm tools, the dry smell of corn dust from last year’s harvest. Nothing moved but a mouse. Then the hound bitch in the corner looked up and thumped her tail but could not come without upsetting the blind and rat-like pups feeding all along her flank.

Gram seized him by the shoulder and swung him round. ‘Now – what passed between you and the Chief?’

‘He gave me a sword and bade me be out of the settlement. Heriolf the Merchant is sailing on the morning tide.’

‘For all time?’

‘Until I have learned the meaning of an oath; five years he said.’

Gram cursed softly. ‘It could have been longer. But the gods alone know what the Grandfather will say.’

‘The Grandfather in Norway will never know,’ Bjarni said, and felt, even as he spoke the words, how far he had come already from the place where he had been born and bred.

Gram had begun to chew his lower lip as he did when he was trying to clear his mind. ‘I should come with you –’

‘Why?’ Bjarni demanded.

‘You’re too young to set sail on your own.’

‘I’m sixteen and more. There’s some that’s sailed on their first Viking raid when they’d seen but twelve summers. I’ll do well enough.’

Gram was still chewing his lower lip. ‘Tha’ll have to,’ he said at last. ‘I cannot leave the steading and Ingibjorg, not for five years, not now she’s in whelp.’

‘Who’s asking you to?’ Bjarni demanded, and then, seeing the trouble still in his brother’s face, ‘Bide here
and keep the place for all of us. In five years’ time I may be Emperor of Byzantium – I may just be dead – but if I’m neither, I’ll like enough want to come home to it.’

He still felt stunned by what had happened in this day that had wakened like any other, and torn his familiar world to shreds before evening. But if he was to launch out into strange seas, and win his own way and his own fortune, he certainly did not want an older brother along with him to spoil it.

The hound bitch, as though sensing trouble in the air, heaved to her feet and, shaking off the fringe of pups, came padding across the floor, moving stiffly from the holy man’s kick, and thrust her shaggy head against Bjarni’s thigh; but even as he stooped to rub her muzzle, she turned and made her way back to the protesting pups.

‘I can’t take her with me, with the pups not yet weaned,’ Bjarni said, watching her flop into the midst of her young and gather them once more against her flank. ‘You’ll keep her? The whelps are mostly spoken for.’ There was an ache in his throat. Astrid had come with him west-over-seas. He was not good at loving, but he was unpleasantly surprised to find that he loved the rough-coated bitch. She was not young. Even if he came back after five years, likely she wouldn’t be there . . .

‘I’ll keep her when I’m here.’ Gram was a great one for having things cut and dried. ‘In the summer she’ll do well enough with the rest of the pack that gets left behind during the summer sea-faring.’

Bjarni nodded. ‘Then I’ll be gathering my gear, and away.’

‘You’ll come in and sup first. Ingibjorg’ll have cooked for the three of us.’

Bjarni did not like his brother’s new wife. She had
a little pink greedy face, but she was a good cook. His stomach was crying out to him that he must eat somewhere, and he certainly was not going to eat among the Chief’s house-carles in the Hearth Hall.

He followed Gram into the house-place, and sat down in his usual seat beside the fire.

Ingibjorg looked up as they came in. ‘Well?’ she demanded, spooning eel stew into three mazer-wood bowls. So the thing had to be told again.

She said all the proper things: that he should have a care of that temper of his, that five years would pass, that they would keep his place warm for him. But he saw in her face that she was glad of his going.

When the meal was over – a silent meal with spurts of uneasy talk that died like flames in wet wood – Bjarni went up to the loft where he had slept above the cowstall, and collected his worldly goods: a spare pair of brogues and his feast-day sark, a small dolphin made of sea-blue glass that he had picked up one day among the ruins of the Redcrests’ fort above the settlement. He bundled them into his weather-stained wadmal cloak, retied the belt thongs of his new sword and checked that his sheath knife was tucked safely into the same broad leather strap.

When he scrambled down again into the living place, Gram was working at the battered silver arm-ring he wore above his left elbow, dragging it off, while Ingibjorg watched him with her lower lip caught angrily between her teeth.

‘Take this with you,’ Gram said. ‘You’ll be needing journey silver.’

Ingibjorg broke in, clearly continuing an argument that had been going on while he was in the loft. ‘It was your grandfather’s! You have told me so often enough, you must keep it for our son!’ She patted her
belly, which was just beginning to swell like the sail of a ship in a light breeze.

Gram took no notice. He held the bracelet toward Bjarni.

Bjarni wanted to refuse it, but his common sense told him that he might indeed need journey silver for one purpose or another. He took the bracelet with a mutter of thanks, partly for the pleasure of annoying Ingibjorg, who had begun to cry, and pushed it above his own elbow.

‘Fair sailing to you – I have work outside to do before dark,’ Gram said, already halfway through the doorway.

That would be true. In another year or so there might be a few captured thralls if the summer raiding went well, to help with the crops and the few lean cattle; but till then the men of the settlement must work each for himself. There was also, of course, the matter of getting away from Ingibjorg’s tears. Well, he, Bjarni Sigurdson, was going to escape all that.

He hitched up his bundle and set out, across the steading garth and down the burnside, leaving his old life behind him and whistling like a blackbird as he went, to show all men, himself included, how little he cared. But halfway down the burn, on his way to the bridge and the houses of the main settlement, his steps began to slow. Then he paused and, hardly knowing why he did so, he turned into a little valley that led off the main path and sloped back towards the surrounding hills. No one had yet built a steading there, though the land seemed to Bjarni good, and there was a little stream that ran through it, down to the main burn. Finding a soft, flat piece of ground halfway up the glen, he scratched a hole with his knife and buried the blue glass dolphin there. Perhaps the valley would still be empty in five years’ time and
perhaps his dolphin would still be waiting for him. Was it a kind of promise to himself? he wondered, as he walked back to rejoin the main track down to the settlement.

The settlement was so new that some of the house-places were still roofed with sails and ships’ awnings, though others had their proper roofs of heather thatch; and the God-House, raw with newness, stood among staked ash saplings, where in years to come the sacred grove would be.

Here and there, folk with their evening meals inside them were out again, about work that needed doing while there was still light to see by; and faces turned to him as he passed, friendly enough, nobody holding it against him that he had broken the Chief’s oath, yet with something, an uneasiness, behind their eyes. Nobody holds it against the oak tree that it draws the lightning flash, but men stand clear of an oak tree in a thunderstorm, all the same. An oath-breaker was unlucky, and he knew that they were glad to see him go.

Down on the ship-strand was the smell of fish and salt water, rope and timber and pitch, the fisher-boats lying heeled to one side like sleeping seals. The Chief’s longship was drawn out from the ship-shed onto the slipway and men were still busy along her flanks where they had been all day, pitching her seams and making her ready for the seaways of summer. Bjarni went past them all, heading for the broader-beamed merchantman lying in the shallows, her crew wading to and fro between her and the shore with the last bales and bundles of her cargo.

In the bows of his ship,
Sea Cow
, Heriolf the Merchant stood muffled in an old sea-cloak watching his goods come aboard.

Bjarni swung his own bundle onto his shoulder and
waded out towards her. With the silver ring on his arm, he had the price of his passage to – wherever she was bound; but he saw no point in paying when there might be another way. Thigh deep in the swinging shallows, he paused and stood looking up at Heriolf across the dark ship-shoulder as a man on foot looks up at a man on horseback.

‘Where away?’ he said.

‘Dublin, on the morning tide.’

Dublin. That would do well enough. ‘I am for Dublin, too,’ Bjarni said.

‘Have you the price?’ the merchant said. He must have known, the whole settlement knew by now, about the holy man and the horse-pond, but he said nothing as to that.

‘Not in goods or gold,’ Bjarni said. ‘I pay in service.’

‘And what service would that be?’ Heriolf leaned over the bulwark, grinning. ‘I think you are no seaman, as yet.’

‘Not as yet.’ Bjarni returned the grin. ‘Though I can handle an oar none so ill. Meanwhile, I am a better hand with this –’ And he hitched at his sword-belt.

‘So-o! A bodyguard? I, a peaceful trader? Have the Viking kind forsworn overnight the custom by which they raid the land-folk and their own kind at sea, but leave the traders to go about their trade?’

‘There will always be some who forget a custom that was not of their own making,’ Bjarni said, hopefully.

‘Just as there are some who forget an oath that was not of their swearing.’ The shipmaster shrugged. ‘Nay then, we can all make mistakes. Tell me, what do you plan to do when you come to Dublin?’

Bjarni had not had time to think of that. He knew only that Dublin was a fine rich town with the world from Iceland to Byzantium flowing through its streets.
Plenty of chances there. ‘Join the war-band of Halfdan the King,’ he said on the spur of the moment. He did not think that Heriolf was listening to him, for he had turned aside to watch the stowing of some particularly precious bale; but he turned back, saying, ‘The man who sells his sword-service should have a care who he sells it to. Halfdan is not such a king as was Olaf the White. Wolf that he is, he sits uneasy in the King Seat, and has been toppled out of it once already.’

‘That might make for an interesting life for the men who follow him,’ Bjarni said.

‘Or a short one.’

Thigh deep in sea water, Bjarni was growing uncomfortably cold. ‘Dublin first, any road. After that, wherever wind and tide may take me. Do I come aboard?’

The merchant laughed. ‘Throw up your bundle.’

Bjarni threw up his bundle and the man caught it, and reached down a hand. He grabbed it, and sprang like a salmon out of the shallows; and next instant was scrambling over the side to land on the rising and dipping foredeck of the merchant vessel.

When the tide turned seaward on the dark edge of day-spring with the shore birds crying, the
Sea Cow
went with it, her crew swinging to the oars in time to the chant of ‘Lift her! Lift her!’ from Heriolf at the steering oar. And Bjarni squatted at the feet of the merchant shipmaster, with his naked sword laid across his knees.

BJARNI HAD NEVER
imagined that there could be a town like Dublin in all the wide world. Even Miklagard, that some men called Byzantium and others Constantinople, whose streets, as he had heard, were paved with gold, could hardly surpass it; though the narrow winding streets of Dublin seemed to be paved for the most part with split logs half sunk in springtime mud, where they were paved with anything at all. But the size of the place, and the close-huddled buildings and the shifting crowd . . .