She was not really Hoskuld’s wife. She had come to live with them four years before. Hoskuld’s second wife had been long dead; at Hrafnfell they were used to being bachelors, although Bjarni knew that his father was blanket-wise with a woman beyond the mountains. Then one spring she came across the pass to Hrafnfell, leading her black-haired boy by the hand. In the summer, she miscarried. She and Hoskuld never married.
As he trudged behind the spoke of the millstone, he tried to make poems of her. He made one for his father.
Odinn slew
The son of Loki
Made ropes of his guts
To bind his father
Would you were Loki
I would lust for death
He had no words for Hiyke.
On the fifteenth night, he moved the anvil five feet across the forge to the hearth.
He laid the chain in the coals and pumped the bellows. When the links began to glow, he stretched them across the anvil. He knew some charms for smiths and said them, although he could not hammer the links for fear of bringing down the Christians; he wrapped his hands around the cooler part of the chain and pulled, heated the links and pulled them until the stretching iron broke.
Dawn was coming. He found a knife and an axe in the forge and took them down to the shore. The cove was deserted. It looked much wider with the longships gone. Three or four smaller boats were drawn up on the beach.
He found oars in one, sails in another, and put the oars into the boat with the sails. All the while he considered what he might do to avenge himself on Sigurd. He could fire some of the buildings, but that would waken the people in the place just as he was trying to steal away. He would have to wait for his revenge. Bjarni filled a bucket with fresh water from the rainbarrel and stowed it into the boat. In the silent dawn he rowed out of the cove.
When he left the lee of the island, the wind freshened, and he stepped the mast and raised the sail. The boat flew before the wind. The islands shrank in the distance and slid below the horizon. The rigging sang like harps. The rudder worked in his hands. Until well into the day he let the boat go where the wind blew.
His wrists were still locked up to the chain. He wrapped the dangling lengths of the chain around his arms and tied them to keep them out of his way. In a locker under the stern thwart there were line and hooks of fishbone. He stabbed his finger with the hook to bloody it and cast the line out behind his boat.
The wind was out of the north. Dark cloudbanks lay along the horizon. He put the boat on a broad reach, running to the east. In the afternoon he caught two stockfish. While he was boning them with his knife the humps of a mountainous island rose out of the sea to the east. He took the sail down and ran out the oars.
He spent the night on the shore. In the morning the wind was foul and he rowed the boat northward. Islands dotted the water. His fishing line snagged on hidden rocks. He kept watch for reefs. The wind was so cold he could not sleep all that night; he rowed to keep warm. In the sunlit morning he landed on a little island and slept.
Clouds covered the sun. The wind veered around to the southwest. Bjarni raised his sail. The boat ran north over rising waves. The water chuckled past the rudder. Rain began to fall. Bjarni was reluctant to give up the fair wind; he did not run into the shelter of an island.
The wind rose. The boat began to buck and shy along the waves. Water spilled over the railings. He brought in the sail. Gradually the dark was settling over him. There were islands to his left, but the battering waves burst in plumes of spray along their shores. If he landed he would lose the boat. The storm roared around him. He flung the sail over to act as a sea-anchor. He bailed with the bucket, his knees wedged against the thwarts to keep him with the boat. The boat sounded and swooped over the wild sea. His hands were numb and his mouth was full of salt. With the coming of daylight, the storm passed.
He lay exhausted in the boat with his head on the gunwale rail. In fitful sleep he dreamt of giants and of burning in the wolf-sister’s hall.
When he woke the boat was floating on the open sea. The sun rolled through clouds. The mast was gone, lost overboard in the storm. His knife was gone, and the bucket and the fishing line. The wind was blowing out of the north again. He put out the oars and poled the boat north.
He was thirsty and hungry and his back hurt. Darkness fell; the sky was starless. He shivered all night. In the morning he licked the dew from the iron links of the chain around his wrists.
There were clouds mounded up in the sky to the east. He thought there might be land under them, and he put his back into the oars. All that day he rowed under the pale sun. His tongue swelled with thirst. When he looked over his shoulder to see where he was going, his gaze met only the heaving sea.
Night closed over him. He rowed on in the dark. He had ceased to think or feel anything. He dragged the oars through the water and raised them and dipped them back into the sea again. He forgot to look behind him. The first he knew that he had reached land was the grating of the keel on the pebbly shore.
He climbed out of the boat into knee-deep water. The air was bitter with woodsmoke. A cliff leaned out over the beach. The beach ended in rocks. The cliff curved away into the darkness, and in the distance, a fire burned.
He looped the chain over his shoulders and walked along the foot of the cliff toward the light. When the beach gave out he walked in the sea. His eyes were fixed on the fire.
“Halt.”
There was someone on the cliff above him, and he stopped walking, to his waist in the surf. The fire was only twenty feet away.
“Who is there?”
The men around the fire stood and backed away from the light. The man on the cliff was shouting at him again.
“Put up your hands, and stand where you are.”
He lifted his hands over his head to show he was harmless and walked forward up the shore toward the fire. His tongue was too thick for speech. One of the men gathered behind the fire came to meet him and stood in front of him, at the edge of the waves.
This was an old man. A white beard covered his chest. He had a knife for boning fish in his hand. Bjarni stopped, still in the icy water.
“Whose chains are those, before you use our fire?”
Bjarni croaked, “Sigurd Gormsson’s.”
“Come.” The fisherman sheathed his knife and led him to the fire.
They gave him water and covered him with blankets. He shed his wet clothes. The white-bearded man sat down beside him in the firelight.
“What business did you have with Sigurd Clench-Fist?”
“That’s a long story,” Bjarni said.
“Eat first,” the fisherman said.
They gave him bread and baked fish. The bread was gritty and studded with bits of chaff. While he ate he told them what had happened between him and Sigurd Gormsson. The other fishermen sat there listening.
“Everything good, Sigurd steals,” the white-bearded man said. “That is how we value goods around here—’not worth Sigurd’s stealing.’ What is your name?”
“Bjarni Hoskuldsson.”
“Barney. That fits you, you are as big as a bear. You eat like a bear, too.”
Bjarni put down what was left of the loaf. “I will work. I don’t beg.”
The fisherman’s head nodded.
“What island is this?” Bjarni asked.
“This island has no name—we have only pulled in here to wait out the storm. We live on the mainland, in Fenby. Jarl Robert is our lord, and our king is William the Red.” The fisherman was looking Bjarni over closely. He saw the amulet Bjarni wore around his neck. “That is a strange cross. Where do you live?”
“Iceland,” Bjarni said. The amulet was in the shape of Thor’s Hammer; it looked somewhat like a cross. “I have heard of a king named Rufus. Is that the same man as William the Red?”
“Yes. Red William. Praise God there is only one.” The fisherman signed himself in the Christian way, and the others did also. “You must be tired.
We will let you rest.” He went off to the other side of the fire. The other fishermen followed, talking to each other of Bjarni.
In the morning when the sun shone again, the six fishermen put off in their boat and sailed across a narrow sound toward the mainland. Their boat was clumsy and overloaded with fish. Bjarni helped them with the sail. The boat wallowed in toward the low hills of the mainland.
Bjarni watched the shore. That was England, half across the world from Iceland. He had heard more of England in stories than from living men. The boat touched shore and he jumped out and helped drag it up onto the beach.
The village of Fenby was only a few families. The women and children came down from the cluster of huts on the shore to unload the fish. When that was done the old fisherman took Bjarni to a hut made of wood and branches woven together into dense tight walls. With a hammer and a stone they banged and twisted at the chains until they broke the links off Bjarni’s wrists.
“You may sleep here,” the fisherman said, “and share our fire.”
The hut was one large room. Along the walls the people slept; two sheep and a pig were penned in the center. During the day, all the villagers cleaned and cut and salted the fish. Everyone worked at it. Soon Bjarni knew the villagers as if he had always lived with them.
The old fisherman had a daughter named Gifu, barely thirteen. She was thin and tall, red-headed, her white skin scattered with freckles. One day Bjarni came into the hut and found her father thrashing her with a switch.
Bjarni went by them to the corner of the hut where he slept. He had to stoop under the roofbeams.
“Slut,” the old man shouted. “If I see you near a man again I will sell you to the Vikings.”
“I did nothing,” Gifu cried. “I did not kiss him—”
Bjarni left the hut again, to get away from the quarrel. He went out across the village. The villagers were hurrying around to their last chores of the day. A boy was driving in the sheep and pigs. Bjarni wandered around looking at the huts; he was taller than any of them.
To the inland side of the village was a black swamp. He walked along the edge of the solid ground. At one end of the village a path ran off across the marsh. The old fisherman came up to him.
“Bear, where did you say you came from?”
“Iceland.”
“I have never heard of it. But you are obviously a fisherman.”
“We fish, somewhat.” Bjarni combed his fingers through his beard. He nodded down the path into the marsh.
“Where does this trail go?”
“Across the fen,” said the old man. “You can stay here with us, if you want.”
“Where does it end?”
“It meets the Great Road that goes to York. Stay with us, and I will give you my daughter for your wife.”
Bjarni was looking down the track that led through the swamp. “I would rather go to York.”
“Well, you can’t go now,” the fisherman said, disgruntled. “The road is drowned in the winter.”
They were facing out over the swamp. Behind them the fisherman’s wife called them to supper. Bjarni said, “When will it be passable?”
“In the spring. When the rain stops.”
Bjarni turned back toward the village. He and the old fisherman went across the village to their supper.
THE WINTER RAIN FELL. Bjarni and the old fisherman mended the nets and the long lines. The fisherman wanted to use Sigurd’s chain as a weight for his nets, but Bjarni would not. He hung it on the wall of the hut beside the straw tick where he slept. The rain stopped. With the other villagers Bjarni went across the sound to a wooded island and cut wood. He left his silver amulet behind. When he returned, it was gone. He guessed that Gifu, the fisherman’s daughter, had taken it, and by threats of force made her give it back to him. A few days after that, she asked him for a favor.
“Come with me across the village,” she said. “Just to the edge of the fen.”
It had been raining; Bjarni was tired of being inside. He put on his shoes and went across the village with her.
“Have you ever been to York?” he asked her.
“York! That is a thousand miles away.”
They were passing an open shed. Two boys stood behind the streaming eave. They stared at Gifu, who pretended not to see them. She slid her arm under Bjarni’s arm.
“Let go of me,” he said.
“Just a while longer, please, Bear.”
“Now.”
Ahead the ground sank down to the slime of the marsh. She glanced behind them and took her hand from his. “Thank you,” she said. He stood looking out across the swamp. The water was black as bog-iron. Gifu went away, leaving him there in the rain.
When Bjarni had been in Fenby almost two months, a boy ran into the village shouting that he had seen a host of longships sailing up the coast from the south.
The villagers met in a crowd on the shore. They listened to the news and wailed. The old fisherman said to Bjarni, “It must be Sigurd Clench-Fist.”
Bjarni stood looking over the heads of the other villagers at the panting boy. Between breaths the boy was describing the host that he had seen.
“Yes,” Bjarni said. “It sounds like Sigurd’s fleet. But many fewer than when I saw him last.” He lifted his eyes toward the sea, gladdened. He blessed his fate that was bringing Sigurd to him.
The old fisherman called out to his people. He raised his hands, and the other villagers turned to listen. He said, “Now, we shall not run in panic. Everyone must gather food and clothing for himself, and we shall drive the beasts back into the fen and wait there until Sigurd has gone by.”
The villagers rushed off to their huts. Bjarni said, “Why are you running from a name?”
“Don’t be foolish,” the old fisherman said. “There are but eighteen grown men in Fenby. We are not warriors.” He turned and walked across the village toward his hut. Bjarni walked beside him, talking.
“Sigurd must have been beaten in his war. Otherwise he would winter over in the south. Half his ships are gone.”
“One of his ships could take Fenby,” the old man said, without missing a stride. He ducked through the door of his home. Before Bjarni could follow, the good wife came out, a fat bundle of clothing over her shoulder.
“Bring your blanket,” she said to Bjarni. “And your chain. They will steal that too.”
“I am not running from Sigurd,” Bjarni said.
She stared at him a moment and turned back to the door. “Then I will take your blanket.”
Bjarni went down to the beach. A rime of ice lay along the tide line. The people of the village crowded off down the swampy path, their belongings on their backs, and their few sheep and pigs trudging behind them. The rain began again.
Bjarni went around the deserted village. Every few steps his eyes turned toward the sea.
The fishermen had left their nets and boats on the beach. In a rowboat he towed the big fishing boat out into the middle of the sound and anchored her fast. The smaller boats he spaced on either side, stretching from one shore to the other. He hung the nets between them. On the beach he piled wood to last the night and built a fire. He took sticks and planted them in the sand, above the tide line, like a flimsy fence. He scavenged around the huts, found nests of dry seaweed and tinder, and heaps of old shells, and the dung of beasts.
The dry tinder and the dung he collected in a place out of the rain. He strung the shells together and hung them up in the wind, between the stakes, and the wind blew them about and made them clatter together.
Around nightfall, Gifu walked out of the swamp.
“I’ve come to help you,” she said.
“Help me?” he asked. “What can you do to help me?”
“I don’t know, but I will try,” she said. “I promise.”
He shook his head at her. The fire burned high, hissing in the rain. He gathered up the tinder he had kept dry and fastened bunches of it to the heads of the stakes, and set them each on fire
. The foul night settled down around him. In gusts of wind the shells clacked and banged together. He went up to the hut and took the chain from the wall, and he sat beside the fire with the doubled chain at his feet, waiting for Sigurd.
Gifu huddled in the warmth of the fire, a ragged blanket over her head. She watched him expectantly. He said nothing. He had not asked for her presence and whatever happened to her was her own doing. With his finger he traced runes in the sand. He spelled Hiyke’s name. The night gloom was wild with the wind. Only the firelight broke the darkness, and the flames of the torches, laid out flat in the wind.
Around midnight Gifu reached out her hand toward the sea.
“There.”
He straightened up to his feet. In the rain he could barely see the barrier of boats and nets he had made across the water. He went back a few paces, away from the flames, to see better.
The wind rose. All around the beach the shells clanged like armor in the darkness. He blinked the rain from his eyes.
Something dark moved out on the water, past the line of boats. His straining ears caught the grinding of oars in their oarlocks. A longship was rowing up the sound.
Now he could make out the mass of the other ships of Sigurd’s fleet, clustered beyond the low island where he had met the fishermen. The longship sent in to scout had to put up her oars. A light burned in her waist. Tentatively the ship nosed forward again, turning to row along the barrier.
Bjarni wiped the rain out of his eyes. Something touched his elbow. Gifu had followed him; she stood beside him, shivering, her hand on his arm. Together they watched the longship row back out to meet the other ships beyond the island. Those ships began to move.
“They are going away,” Gifu murmured.
The fleet glided away to the north. Bjarni watched until they were gone.
“Why did they go?” Gifu said. “They could have broken through the nets with the prows of their ships.”
“Once you start to run away, you never stop,” Bjarni said.
He went back to the fire, the chain swinging in his hand, and sat down in the warmth of the flames. The English girl sat beside him. She leaned against him, her head against his arm. He stared into the fire, curling up from the charred wood, popping and sparkling in the rain. He was running away from Hiyke Ragnarsdottir. He reached out for another piece of wood and put it on the fire. At that moment he decided to go back to Hrafnfell.
Two Ravens Page 5