The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (5 page)

‘No game but a fight with the troll kind. Their hair is in my eyes even yet,’ said Sven.

‘Fell off the roof and broke his arm,’ other voices struck in.

‘So I see,’ said Onund Treefoot. ‘His sword arm, too. The goddess Ram, the Mother of Foul Weather, would see to it that it is his sword arm . . . Well, we must be doing what we can . . .’

Evynd the Easterner, seeing that it was no man of his own, had returned to a game of draughts with his brother Thrond. A general shout went up for Hogni Bone-grinder, and a man who might have been a troll
himself for his hairy ugliness and the length of his arms appeared as from nowhere, followed by a boy carrying flat billets of wood and strips of binding rag.

Onund sat down on the bench beside his man, his wooden leg stuck out in front of him, and braced himself behind the other’s shoulders, holding his upper arm in a grip that looked easy to Bjarni, watching, until he saw how the muscles stood out like cords on the ship chief’s own arm, as the bone-setter got to work. Hogni was pulling the damaged arm out straight, twisting and drawing it, frowning a little over what he did. Sven turned not so much white as a kind of dirty yellow, his mouth shut and his breath whistling a little through flared nostrils. Bjarni heard the two ends of bone creaking together with some curiosity. He had never been so near to a broken bone being set before, and he was interested accordingly. The thing seemed to take a long time to do; all the while it was as though Hogni Bone-grinder was feeling and listening and looking through his hands at what he did. At last, with one slow powerful heave, it seemed that it was done, the sweat springing on the faces of all three men shone in the torchlight, and the arm was more or less straight once more. Still holding it, the troll-man took the bits of wood from his boy and began to splint it, binding them on tightly with the strips of rag. A little blood pricked through, but not much: the bone had barely pierced the skin. And when it was done, and Onund had taken his hands away, the bone-setter fashioned a sling to take the weight and knotted it around Sven’s thick neck.

Onund got up, and stood looking at his tawny giant without sympathy. ‘You mazelin!’ he said. ‘Now we shall be lacking a man from the rowing benches and the sword-band all this summer!’ But the tone was not as harsh as the words. To the others of
Sea Witch
’s
crew he said, ‘Get him drunker than he is already, and bed him down in the byre.’ And to Evynd, sitting with a draught piece in his hand, ‘He’ll be good for neither man nor beast until the bone is knit. Will you give him hearth-space until I come again at summer’s end?’

And Sven Gunnarson’s friends got to work on him with a fresh jack of ale, before carrying him away. To be borne into the Hall like a swooning maiden would have shamed him, but there was of course no shame in being too drunk to leave it on one’s own feet. And the rest of the company returned to whatever they had been doing before.

Bjarni stood where he was, thinking hard and quickly. ‘Lacking a man from the rowing benches and the sword-band all this summer,’ Onund had said. ‘Lacking a man’ – Oh! But where was the sense in hiring one’s sword to a one-legged ship chief who must in the nature of things be less worth following than a captain with two good legs under him . . .

He started up the crowded Hall, Hugin following as usual at his knee, towards the High Seat where Evynd the Easterner sat over his game of draughts.

But not knowing that he was going to do so, he stopped short, where Onund Treefoot sat with his wooden leg stuck out in front of him, leaning his shoulders against the weapon-hung wall and watching the sparrows who had built in the thatch.

‘Onund Treefoot,’ said Bjarni, bright-eyed and formal, ‘I have no lord to follow. I can handle an oar, and my sword is for hire. I am your man.’

BJARNI LAY ON
his stomach in the short mountain grass, his chin propped on his forearm, and gazed away over the windy emptiness. From up here on the shoulder of Greian Head you could look out over the score or more of islands that went to make up Barra and on northward past Eriskay and Uist away and away along the great wild-goose skein of the Outer Isles.

He had been across to one of the native fisher-villages on the south shore, after a new pair of sealskin brogues. There was a little black-eyed hump-backed man over there who claimed to have been taught the art of making them by the Lordly People and charged accordingly. A whole silver coin with a king’s head and three ears of corn embossed on it, these had cost, but Bjarni knew that they would be worth it; they were his second pair.

Now he was on his way back to the settlement with them tucked into his belt. But there was no hurry. It was good up here. Beside him Hugin thumped his tail, head alertly up into the wind. It was over a year since he had followed Bjarni out of Dublin, and he had grown and fleshed out into a big powerful hound,
black as midnight save for some white hairs under his chin, and still those surprisingly light amber-coloured eyes.

Bjarni, his hand rubbing behind the pricked black ears, let his mind drift back over the time, to the Hearth Hall of Evynd the Easterner. ‘I have no lord to follow,’ he had said to Onund Treefoot. ‘I can handle an oar, and my sword is for hire; I am your man.’

And Onund Treefoot had looked him up and down as a man looks over a horse he is minded to buy, and agreed, ‘You are my man.’

It had meant leaving Hugin behind along with Sven Gunnarson for the three months’ summer sea-faring. But when at summer’s end they had returned for Sven, whose arm had mended somewhat out of shape but as strong as ever it had been, they had picked up Hugin too, out of the dog pack. Bjarni had earned that, and had the hands to prove it; hands that had blistered on the oarloom and grown red-raw when the blisters burst and healed over into thickened and calloused skin that marked him for a seasoned rower.

Another sea-faring summer since then. Merchant runs – not the long open-sea runs down as far as Spain for slaves and spices from the Saracen traders, but coastwise and island-hopping with salt and hides; once north as far as Orkney with farm-slaves for Jarl Sigurd. He remembered lying off the Great Head waiting for the right stage of the tide that they might slip through from the Pentland Firth without falling foul of the roaring, down-sucking turmoil of the whirlpool there, the Eater of Ships, the Widow-maker. He remembered the tide races between a score of islands, the storms and the occasional calms. He remembered the land journey with Evynd against a flare-up of three native Irish kings and the Danish war-bands
they had brought in to help them. A southward raid on their own account upon the Danish settlements on the Welsh coast.

Onund and Thrond, Aflaeg and Thormod Shaff, sometimes hunting in couples, more often running their longships together as a fleet. Three who had come west-over-seas together, to be done with King Harald Finehair: one, Aflaeg, who was on Barra already, a friend from earlier raiding days, older than the rest and of mixed breeding so that the Isles were already in his blood. Maybe that was why in land matters he took the lead; why it was he who sat in the High Seat in Hall when the others gathered from their steadings in the settlements round about, and had the last word as to the time for barley sowing or the start of the seal hunt, while in all matters to do with sea-faring, it was Onund Treefoot, without argument, who was the Sea-King, the ship chief over them all.

Away between the islands the sea was changing colour with the turn of the tide, and his belly told him that it was time to be getting back for the evening meal. Bjarni rolled over and sat up, and remained a few moments with narrowed eyes gazing across the shining water toward the west. No more islands that way, only emptiness until one fell off the edge of the world – unless one came upon those other islands that Aflaeg’s harper sang of sometimes, the islands beyond the sunset, the lands of the ever young . . .

Meanwhile, the surf was going down, the pale feather of a new moon was in the sky, and he was hungry. He drew his legs under him and scrambled to his feet, Hugin leaping up beside him. Together they started back towards the settlement. Down from the high bare rock and grassland of the mountain shoulder into the lower country of hills and heather
moors that sank at last to the
machair,
the fine grazing-land behind the white sands that ringed all the western length of Barra. Just where moorland fell away to
machair
a stream came down from the higher ground, pushing its way through a narrow glen suddenly and unexpectedly choked with trees a-tangle, birch and rowan and willow and thorn. Checking a moment with an odd cold fascination to look down, Bjarni saw the corner of a turf roof half lost in thicker woodland, a dense clump of ash trees, old and wind-twisted, and felt, as he always did, the darkness and the chill that seemed to lie over the place. He shook his shoulders, jibing at himself for a fool. It was no more than the God-House, just such another as the God-House at Rafnglas. But at Rafnglas they seldom offered more than a tassel of hair cut from a horse’s tail, a blood sacrifice only seldom and in time of need. Here they kept to the old ways. Here there were bones in the sacred grove, things that had once been alive hanging from the trees. Downwind, you could smell this place from a long way off . . .

He turned away and went on down, following the spur of moorland, making for the place where the glen opened out and the burn ran clear of the shadow, before crossing over, whistling as he went. But just above his chosen crossing place, in a thicket of brambles spilling down the bank, he came upon a girl.

She was sitting there, forlorn as a fledgling fallen from the nest, the skirts of her grey homespun kirtle bunched to her knees, nursing one foot, and at her side, an over-set creel, trickling a few blackberries into the grass. Bjarni knew her well enough for the daughter of the settlement’s Odin Priest. He stopped, looking down at her. ‘Thara? What’s amiss then?’

‘I slipped among the stones crossing over, and twisted my foot.’

He squatted down for a closer look. She had been going barefoot and he could see that her instep was already swollen and turning red.

‘It hurts,’ said Thara in a small whimpering voice.

‘I can see it does. Can you walk on it?’

‘No – it hurts.’

‘So you said before.’ He looked at her consideringly. She was a plump little thing, but small-boned. Probably not heavy. ‘I’d best carry you,’ he said somewhat grudgingly and got up, thrusting Hugin’s exploring nose aside. ‘Leave that,’ he said as she reached for the over-set creel. ‘Someone else can fetch it by and by – the bramble fruit is not full ripe yet, anyway.’

She abandoned the creel and held out her arms to him, and as he picked her up he got the distinct feeling that despite the pain of her foot she was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘Put your arms around my neck,’ he ordered. ‘There, that’s the way of it.’

It was none so easy fording the burn, for the stones rolled underfoot and, feeling him lurch, the girl giggled excitedly and craned round to see how near the water might be. ‘Don’t wriggle, or I’ll like enough drop you,’ Bjarni told her, and she was quiet again.

He gained the opposite bank safely, Hugin leaping out after him and showering them both with burn water as he shook himself. Bjarni whistled him to heel and set out once more for the settlement.

‘But you’re so strong,’ Thara said, continuing where they had left off in midstream. ‘You feel so strong. You would never drop me.’ And somehow she made it sound as though his strength was something that she was proud of, something that belonged to her.

He glanced down, and found speedwell-blue eyes surrounded by feathery silver-gilt lashes gazing up at him, and noticed for the first time how bonny she was in a kitten-witted kind of way. He had never carried
a girl before, and the feel of her in his arms was warm and soft and pleasant. But she was heavier than she looked, and there was still quite a way to go, and he had to stop once or twice to heave her further up when she started to slip.

‘I have seen you when you come under Onund’s armpit, for him to use you as a crutch. So strong you are . . .’

And that was true. At most times Onund Treefoot was as swift and able on his wooden leg as though it were a part of him, but there were times, just now and then, when the stump grew hot and red and even wept a little, so that it would not bear his weight. He had a crutch for such times, but most often he used who came nearest. And Bjarni was just the right height. Also he was left-handed . . . ‘Together, we make a fine two-bladed swordsman,’ Onund had said, and they had practised the thing, half in jest, half in deadly earnest, with the rest of the crew baying them on. It did not in fact take all that much strength. But Bjarni would have braced himself to it gladly, if his chief had been built like a bull walrus.

But it was not a thing he wanted to talk about, especially to a girl. He grunted, making a great thing of how heavy she was becoming, until soon after on the edge of the settlement, he came to the fine long house-place of Asmund the Odin Priest – after the chieftain, the priest, with his barns stacked with tribute, was generally the richest man in any settlement. And there he let her down on the threshold and left her to the scolding care of the woman thrall who came in answer to his shout, and went on, stretching the strain out of his shoulders as he went, up through the in-take fields toward the Hall.