The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson by Rosemary Sutcliff
Onund took his son, and handed him on, also rather hurriedly, to Aesa, who had come up beside him.
She and the Countess had kissed each other tenderly at parting; but outside in the keen wind, huddling the damp baby under her cloak, she said in a bleak whisper to her lord, ‘I hope the water is worth it?’
‘You will think so, by the time we come to Iceland,’ said Onund Treefoot, turning his face to the way down to the ships.
Bjarni took the harbour path with them the one last time, his shoulder under Onund’s in the old familiar way.
‘What of the dog?’ Onund asked at the very end, when he was about to board Sea Witch.
‘Well enough,’ Bjarni told him, ‘though something lacking in speed, as you said he would be.’
And with nothing more said on the matter, the old grief was left behind.
‘Thara is safely wed to a mainland farmer, and the priest her father, Asmund, bides with his sacred wood and the Barra folk who remain,’ Onund said after a pause filled with the voices of men calling to each other, and the crying of the gulls. ‘Come with us, then.’
Something tugged at Bjarni, a two-way pull deep within him. Then he shook his head. ‘If I were to come with you, I would come, Asmund or no Asmund. But my sword-service is sold to Thorstein Olafson, at the least to the end of the next summer faring.’
‘Ach well, the Iceland road is open for all men to follow, and at all times,’ Onund said.
He swung himself over Sea Witch’s side, and Sven put up a hand to steady him as he made his way aft towards the steering oar.
Standing on the salt-caked timbers of the jetty, Bjarni watched Sea Witch cast off, watched the rise and dip of the oars as they were swung out, followed by the big, deep-bellied merchantman with the women and bairns and livestock on board, and Star Bear bringing up the rear. He saw the seas begin to take them out in mid floe, and the sails bloom out from the masts. Saw them heel a little before the wind . . .
He turned and went back up the looping track towards the settlement and the Jarl’s Hall.
‘The doubt was on me that I should be seeing you again,’ Thorstein said to him later that day, grumblingly, through the red bush of his beard. He had come down to the harbour again, to watch where his crews were readying Sea Serpent for the next morning’s homeward tide.
‘My sword is sold to you, at least for another summer,’ Bjarni said, not looking up from the rope he was coiling.
12
Summer Faring
MULL AND THE lesser islands of Thorstein’s ruling thrummed like a hive that was about to swarm. The armourers’ hammers rang early and late; while down at the ship-sheds of the main settlement there was a new war-keel on the slipway, and the rest of the fleet being made ready for sea; and the smell of pitch and paint, hot metal and raw new timber hanging over all. It was the hum of activity that broke out every year when the birch buds thickened and men began to talk of the seaways by day and dream of them by night. But this year it had been going on all winter long, growing more urgent as the time for launching the longships drew near.
Worn sails and rigging were renewed; dried and salted fish made ready, and on every hearth in the settlements the women were baking the flat round ships’ bannocks that never went stale. And it was said that in the Women’s House behind the Hall, the Lady Aud and her bower women were making a new banner of poppy-red silk from foreign parts worked with a great spread-winged raven, stitching into it seven black hairs from her own head, and the ancient spells for victory that women weave at such times.
No harm in a spell for victory, even though the enterprise had been agreed with the Pictish envoys; no embassage could speak for all the tribes of Pictland.
In full spring, with the grey geese flighting northward to their nesting grounds, the small birds busy in the forest fringes and the lambs crying in the sheltered pastures, the time came to be launching the longships.
On the last night before sailing the crews gathered, some to the Lady Aud’s little stone chapel, the rest to the God-House where the altar to the White Christ stood beside the altars to more familiar gods. And there in the torchlit dark a young boar was slain, and the Priest dipped the sacred whisk into the blood and sprinkled the gathered warriors and smeared the waiting altars, all the altars, lest the White Christ should feel himself unfairly used.
Afterwards the war-bands swore faith to Red Thorstein on Thor’s Ring, the great arm-ring that lay with his Hammer on the tallest of the altars; the great brotherhood oath of the war-trail, on ship’s bulwark and shield’s rim, horse’s shoulder and sword’s edge.
Bjarni swore with the rest, but he had a sore and angry heart within him. He was not the only one – for along with a good few others, including Fionoula’s crew, he was not to go with the war-bands, not as yet anyway, but bide on Mull to guard the settlement, the Lady Aud and her granddaughters against all comers while the Lord of the island was busy elsewhere.
‘It was not for this that I sold him my sword for another year,’ he grumbled to Erp, squatting against the stable wall and pulling too hard at Hugin’s ears until the big dog growled softly in protest.
And Erp looked up from the broken headstall that he was mending. ‘And there was I, thinking that you sold it in the way of these things, for whatever use he chooses to make of it.’
‘If he thinks so little of me, I wonder he would be wasting good silver on me at all.’
‘There is a thing maybe you have not noticed,’ said Erp. ‘That you are not the only one, and that among the others are some who all men know to be his foremost warriors. Are you thinking that Red Thorstein would leave the guarding of his womenfolk to the dregs of his war-bands?’
‘Aye, you’re in the right of it,’ Bjarni agreed. Then with a rush of rage and misery, ‘But it’s easier for you to talk wisdom, like a grey-beard whose fighting days are past, because you –’ He heard what he was saying, and broke off.
‘Because I am no fighting man? Because I have never been a fighting man, since I was too young to carry a sword when the raiders came.’
‘I had forgotten,’ Bjarni said. And then, looking round at the man beside him, ‘Have you never thought to run for it?’
‘Where does a man with a thrall-ring on his neck run to? My own land is lost to me, and I am not one of the Viking kind whose home is wherever there is salt water. Also I could not be making my own escape and leaving Muirgoed my mother here unfree.’
Bjarni had gone back to pulling his hound’s ears, stripping them through his hands like a pair of gloves, but more gently this time. He heard the ache in the other’s voice, but there did not seem anything more to say.
And Erp breathed on the bronze buckle of the headstall and rubbed it with a bit of rag. ‘Comfort yourself with the thought that you may have raiders to beat off while the Lord of Mull is away on his own war-trail.’
The summer passed, while the men left on Mull fidgeted and fretted, went hunting, and gambled the sarks off their backs and picked quarrels among themselves for lack of anything better to do. There was always the chance that the Old People of the fisher-villages might seize the chance to rise, but they did not. Once, raiders came, but the headland watch gave warning of their coming, and the cattle had been driven far inland before they beached. So they never got the shore-killing that they had come for, and left a few of their own kind dead on the shoreline behind them, and at summer’s end the thatch was still on the roofs of the settlement.
Then just as the late northern harvest was being got in, Wild Horse put into the harbour with the news that they had been waiting for so long. Haki the ship chief went up to the Women’s House to speak with the Lady Aud, and before the evening meal the word was running like heath fire through the farms and villages.
Thorstein and Jarl Sigurd had come together, the one by way of the Great Glen, the other across the Pentland Firth and down from the north. There had been fighting in Caithness, as all men had guessed that there would be, despite last year
What passed between Aud and her granddaughter on the matter, no one outside the inner circle of the household ever knew. Some, who saw her afterward, said that Groa looked as though she had been weeping. But when Wild Horse and Fionoula were run down into the water three days later – Aud, who was not called the Deep-Minded for nothing, had been making certain preparations of her own through the summer, so that now there need be little delay – she followed her grandmother aboard, walking with her head up, and the look about her of knowing that she was fifteen and a marriageable woman, the look too of knowing that she was a king’s grand-daughter with a princess’s duties. And Bjarni, seeing her come, thought for a moment of the bairn she had been three springs ago, wishing to sail on and on into the West to find a new world or St Brendan’s Isle with the trees full of white birds and all of them singing like the evening star.
Her younger sisters came also, round-eyed with excitement, for it would be too dangerous to leave them at home in a settlement that must be so thinly defended in the months ahead.
‘Will it not be as dangerous for them, this faring into unknown Pictish lands?’ Muirgoed had asked her, anxious for the bairns who had been her nurslings.
‘At least, whatever the danger, they will be under my own eye. Under yours, too,’ the Lady Aud had said, and then more lightly, seeing that the young ones were listening, ‘And who knows, we may find bold bridegrooms for all of them, though they are something young as yet.’
So now they were packed all together with the kists and creels containing the wedding gear in the cramped space under the awnings and the after-deck of Fionoula, while Erp, whom the Lady had bidden to come along as her household thrall, sat before the dark entrance much like a hound on guard.
Bjarni, hauling on a hide rope as the striped sail broke from the yard, tasted the spray salt and cold on his lips after the whole summer spent ashore, felt Fionoula keel a little to the wind, and the life leap within him.
They did not follow the water-line of the Great Glen as the springtime fleet had done, for that would have brought them in too far south of Thorstein’s base; too much Pictish territory to cross with the tribes still unsettled, maybe on the war-trail.
Instead they ran northward, keeping to sheltered waters as far as might be for the women’s sake, even running the narrows between Ellan Skyaine, the Winged Isle, and the mainland coast before they came out into the open sea with nothing between them and the world’s end save, for a while, the dim blue cloud bank of the Outer Isles.
At least, with women on board and the garland of greenery at the masthead which signified a bride being taken to her new land, neither they nor Wild Horse following in their wake were likely to have trouble from others of the Viking kind, unless of course they met with the likes of Vigibjord and Vestnor.
They did not have altogether plain sailing, all the same, for the seas were as wild as usual up the West Coast, and worsened as they ploughed their way up toward the great headland at Cape Wrath – the Ness of the Turning, men called it – where the coast changed direction to face almost north. And though Fionoula was a good sound little seaboat, she had been built for inland waters and rolled like a farrowing sow in the steep western seas, and most of the passengers were in a sorry state. ‘Better it would be for them if they might pull at an oar or handle the sail with the rest of us,’ Bjarni thought. ‘Less time they’d have for the wave sickness then.’ But at last on the fifth day out from Mull they sighted the three limestone stacks that marked the mouth of the Pentland Firth, and a while later the ship chief brought them into the quieter waters of a broad bay, guarded by cliffs as tall as the stacks had been, loud with the crying of sea birds, then, riding the in-flowing tide, up the estuary of a river that came looping to meet them between rock ledges and skerry-fingered shoals and shallows, out of the wide wastes of moor and bog. On either side of them as they rowed stretched a wide-skied misty land, full of the crying and calling of shore birds, a land of coarse grass and winding waterways and sky-reflecting pools, and far off the dark cloud-line, like another shore, of distant forest, a land which seemed to Bjarni to have too much sky for comfort, as the sea never did.
13
Bride-Ale in Caithness
THORSTEIN’S CAMP WAS some way inland, much like any other winter camp of the Vikings, a headland taken and fortified. This was no sea headland, though, but a low hill shoulder guarded on three sides by looping river and on the fourth, where it ran out from the main mass of the hill behind it, by a ditch and a roughly thrown-up turf wall. In the enclosed space was a confused huddle of turf and hurdle-walled bothies, mostly still roofed with ships’ awnings. The ships themselves were drawn up like stranded sea beasts on the marshy river bank, and the blue reek of hearth smoke lay over all.
Fionoula and Wild Horse had been sighted by lookouts at the river mouth, and all the last stretch men on small shaggy horses had kept pace with them along the banks, while others raced ahead with news of their coming. And when they came toward the makeshift jetty Thorstein, with a great arrow-breasted goshawk on his fist, and a knot of his hearth-companions, was there to meet them. They shipped the oars and came alongside under their own way, to the shouts of a greeting going to and fro across the narrowing water. Fionoula settled with a faint bump and scrape of timber against timber, and men sprang ashore with ropes to make her fast. The women and bairns had come out from their quarters a while back, to see and be seen as they came up the last stretch of the river, and the jolt as the Fionoula touched the jetty caught Lilla the youngest bairn off balance, so that she fell over backwards, bumping her head, and began to cry, but was picked up and comforted by Muirgoed of the gentle horse-like face. Now the bairns and then the women were being got ashore to the helping hands of the men on the jetty. Erp lifted the Lady Aud ashore, and Bjarni, who was nearest to her, caught up Groa and clambered ashore holding her high against his shoulder, her arms round his neck as cold as oar-thresh to the touch, like something that belonged to the sea. Maybe a seal-woman would feel like that, to the mortal man who stole her skin . . .
For one instant, as he would have set her down, he felt her arms tighten round his neck, and saw her frightened gaze going out past her father to someone, something, beyond. And looking the same way, he saw the strangers who had come down with Red Thorstein and his hearth-companions. Men of the same kind as the envoys of last year on Orkney, with the blue patterns on their foreheads and their beards cut long and narrow. And foremost among them was a tall raw-boned man in a cloak of magnificent freckled lynx skins over his darkly checkered breeks, dark eyes looking out from either side of a great beak of a nose which, together with the rough grey-brown hair that sprang from his forehead like ruffled feathers, gave him a look of kinship with the great gyrfalcon he carried on his fist. At least he was not old. Bjarni had been afraid of that. He was much older than Groa, which was to be expected, but much younger than Thorstein Olafson. Bjarni was surprised to find out how much that mattered to him.
‘You have made good speed, my mother,’ Thorstein greeted the Lady Aud. ‘And see now, here stands Dungadr of Duncansby, lord of many spears, my friend, eager for a first sight of his bride.’
The Lady stood on the weed-grown jetty, looking from her wet feet to her braided hair the Queen of Dublin. ‘Groa is in no state to be seen by any bridegroom, still drenched and emptied from the wild seaways from Mull. I would have thought that might have struck home to even your wooden wits!’
But the Lady Aud, old and weary and seasick as she was, was bestowing upon this Pictish princeling the slow and beautiful smile that had won many men to her way of thinking. ‘Then he will understand what I have just said to you.’
The Pict bent his head to her in courtesy, and put in swiftly, speaking the Norse well enough, though with a strange dark lilting accent, ‘Lady, I do not see the maiden: I shall not see her until you give me leave,’ and lifting his free arm, he held the folds of his cloak before his face.
‘That is prettily done and prettily said,’ the Lady Aud told him. ‘Though not after the manner of our people.’
Thorstein said between laughter and growling impatience, ‘So be it, then, but let it not be too long before our two people are bound together by marriage peace.’
‘I will speak the word as soon as I see fit. Meanwhile I and my granddaughter and my bower woman have the need upon us for warmth and food and shelter, and quietness to gather our scattered selves together again.’
A long heather-thatched bothy had been made ready for them, and when the Lady Aud’s treasure kists and the wedding goods that they had brought with them had been carried up from the ships, they settled in to recover from the wild seaways and make themselves ready for Groa’s bride-ale. And while they did so the Painted People and the Northmen ate and drank together and went hunting for the fresh meat that would be needed for the feasting, returning from the forest at evening with the carcasses of red deer and grizzled boar slung across the backs of the hunting ponies. It was a pleasant time, Bjarni found; a time for greeting old friends and exchanging the summer’s news. There was news from the men of the war-bands of fighting and the making of treaties, of Jarl Sigurd in Sutherland talking peace with Melbrigda Tusk, the Mormaor, or ruler, of those parts. From Fionoula’s crew there was news of a smaller and more friendly kind; of harvest and the seal hunting, a son born to a man, an old man dead after a glorious drinking bout and a cliff-top fall, a quarrel between neighbours, a litter of pups born to someone’s favourite bitch . . .