IN THE LASHING SLEET of the late winter he dug the good-wife’s garden for her, and when the first spring sun began to shine he planted it. The other men fished for salmon in the rocky streams along the coast. The air warmed in the sunlight. A fresh southern breeze began to blow, a light, female wind. Bjarni took the chain down off the wall, and the goodwife gave him a sack of food; she wept, saying good-bye, which startled him. The white-bearded fisherman walked with him to the path.
“Be careful. The road is dangerous. Watch for thieves.”
“I will,” Bjarni said. He shook the old man’s hand and started away.
“Be wary of the Normans,” the old man called. “They are wicked men.”
Bjarni waved to him. He hung his bundle on his back; his feet sank into the stinking black earth of the swamp.
“Bear,” the old man shouted. “At the Rowan Ford. There is a robber there.”
Bjarni raised his arm over his head, without turning. He did not look back again. He walked on through the swamp, going southeast.
The day was fair. He cut a stout stick from a clump of trees and walked with it. The path led him all that morning through black swamp just coming to bud. The sun rode high in the sky. The path left the swamp and crossed a ridge crowded with brambles and bees. The trail met another, wider road, with ruts from the wheels of carts. This led down a hillside. At the bottom of the slope, the road crossed a stream running shallow over a broad field of pebbles. On the far side of the stream stood a tree with a trunk like a silver column.
Bjarni stopped at the edge of the water. He had never seen a rowan tree before, but in the stories he had heard since his childhood the rowan was a great tree. He had the chain over his shoulder, and he closed his hand on it. At a steady pace he went across the stream.
The water was clear as spring water. It hardly dampened his shoes. He was halfway to the far side when a man shouted at him to stand. A man on a bay horse rode out of the forest beyond the rowan tree.
Bjarni walked on across the stream. The rider swung his horse to bar the way by the rowan. He was a big man, although not of Bjarni’s size. He wore a coat of metal links and carried a long-handled axe.
“Nobody crosses here,” he said to Bjarni, “unless they pay me a toll.”
“I have nothing,” Bjarni said. “And I am already across.”
The horseman reined his snorting horse back to keep between Bjarni and the path. “That chain looks sound,” he said. “I will take that.”
“This I will give to you,” Bjarni said. He swung the chain off his shoulder; he whipped it around the knees of the horse and yanked its forelegs out from under it.
The rider jumped off. He brought his axe around at Bjarni’s head. Bjarni dropped to his knees and the axe flew over him. He dropped the end of the chain and hit the robber in the face.
Blood spurted from the robber’s nose. He raised the axe again and Bjarni hit him full in the face with all his might.
The robber fell over backward. His thrashing horse kicked him. He lay still on the road. The horse was struggling to rise, the chain still coiled around its legs. Bjarni freed it and chased it off down the road.
The robber lay on his back, his head in a puddle of blood. Bjarni bent over him. He was dead. Either the blows or the horse’s kick had killed him.
Bjarni wrapped the chain around the robber’s chest and hung him up in the rowan tree, which was Thor’s tree. Kneeling down before the tree he prayed that the god should see what Bjarni offered in his honor. He swore to the Thunderer to keep faith.
He went on down the road, through a wood of thin white trees on whose branches the green buds were bursting open. His mood was dark; his hand hurt, and his thoughts kept turning to the robber. He wished that he knew whether he himself had killed him or the horse had done it, kicking him. He had never slain anyone. Always before, after the fight was over the fighters got up and shook hands, smiling, sometimes forcing the smile.
The road met another road and widened again, and now a river ran alongside it, and thick-trunked trees grew up on the banks. Night was creeping down from the sky. He would have to find a place to sleep. A sound reached him from back up the road, a clopping rhythm. He looked back and saw the robber’s bay horse galloping after him.
All his hair stood on end. The twilight masked the rider on the horse’s back. He stepped off the road into the high grass. The horse slowed; its eyes were white-rimmed and bulging.
“Bear!”
It was Gifu. He let his muscles go slack. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
He shook his head and stepped onto the road again. “Go on—go home.”
The horse walked after him. From its back, she spoke to him, spoke over him. “I’m not going home. Even if I don’t go with you, I am never going home again.”
He said nothing to that. When the night fell and she was hungry, she would go home. They walked along together. The sky darkened, and he left the road. Putting his bundle down under a tree he built a fire.
“Did you bring anything to eat?” she said.
“Only enough for me.”
“Oh.”
He sat beside his little fire, no larger than his cupped hands. The wind rattled the branches of the tree together over his head. He took bread from his bundle and ate. The girl watched, her mouth open, her bony arms pebbled with gooseflesh from the cold.
“I will buy bread,” she said.
“I don’t want what you have to pay me with.”
“I have money.” She took a leather purse from the front of her dress and spilled it out onto the grass. A dozen silver coins slid into the firelight.
“By Thor’s howe,” Bjarni said. He put his hand put to the shining coins.
She sat back smiling. He did not touch the money. It was the robber’s money. She had robbed the corpse. He stared at her, angry, until she stopped smiling and her eyes grew wary.
“Did you leave him where he hung?”
“I didn’t—” Her hand moved across her body, up and down, back and forth, the Christian sign. “I didn’t touch him. On the horse, the purse was. In the horse’s saddlebag.”
Bjarni grunted. He fed dry grass to the fire. His fingers were swollen. The chain had printed his fingers with bruises.
“Bear?” she said. “I’m hungry. Will you give me something to eat?”
He flung the rest of the loaf at her to quiet her. She broke off a piece and toasted it on a stick in the fire.
THE ROAD FLOWED into another road, broad as eight horses abreast; the ruts worn in it streamed with water. They walked down the side where the ground was dry. Gifu rode the horse, her legs dangling down the saddle, and her feet far above the stirrups. Bjarni did not speak to her; he still hoped that she would go home. Yet he fed her. Her family had sheltered him and when she begged he had to give her food.
The forest yielded to a high windy moor. The road dented it like a crease running through the grass. Tracks showed in the mud of the road: deer tracks, dog tracks, and later in the day the track of a horse’s hoof. They slept in the ditch at night.
After a few days they walked into a village of three little huts around a well. The wives of the place sat around the well; they let Bjarni draw up the bucket and water Gifu’s horse and drink.
“How far is it to York?” he asked.
The women laughed and shook their heads at him; when they spoke he could barely understand one word in five. Gifu’s people had spoken with an accent, but these people’s speech was outlandish to him. He did not try to talk to them again. Gifu hung back from them.
The men of the place came in from the fields. Night was falling. Bjarni felt the sack. There was nothing left of the food Gifu’s mother had given to him when he left Fenby.
Gifu was sitting on the edge of the well behind him. He got hold of her and pulled her down. The robber’s purse was in her bodice. He stuck his hand down past her breast for it.
“Hey!” she cried. “That’s my money!”
Bjarni counted all the silver, except one coin, back into the purse and shoved it under his belt. He took the sack off across the green of the village. Gifu screamed curses at him from the well.
Two oxen grazed at the edge of the green, near the biggest of the three huts. There were heaps of garbage around it and firewood stacked as high as the roofbeam by the door. Voices came through the open doorway. On the threshold sat an old woman, her teeth gone, and her nose hooked, talking to herself. Tufts of white hair poked out under her scarf.
Bjarni stood before the doorway and called. A woman in middle years came out of the hut, brushing past the crone in the doorway. Bjarni held out the sack. He made signs with his hands to show that he wanted food; he showed the goodwife the silver coin. Her eyes widened. From her own hut she carried the sack around to the other two and came back with two long loaves of bread, a wedge of cheese, and some onions and turnips. Bjarni argued a little, and she added a sausage. He gave her the coin and went back to the well.
Gifu sat with her back to the edge of the well, her arms wrapped around her knees. “You’d better give me back my money,” she said.
He gave her a bit of the cheese and some of the bread. They sat together eating. The wind was coming up, and the well sheltered them. Up over them the stars began to prick through the darkness of the sky. He lay down on the grass, his arms behind his head. The memory of Hiyke sprang into his mind. He would see her again; he was eager to think of her. The wind stirred the grass around him. He would tell all this to Hiyke: when he was home, he would make poems to tell everyone.
“Look at that,” Gifu said. “I hope they don’t bother us.”
Three or four boys in a little group moved along the far end of the green. Their voices grew louder. They threw rocks at the oxen and the great cattle lumbered away.
Gifu asked, “Will they throw stones at my horse?” Standing up, she went off through the windy grass toward the horse, midway to the nearest of the huts. Bjarni lay back again. He watched the stars. They were different here. The summer square, just rising, was nearly in the arch of the sky.
“Hey!”
The shout brought him up to a sit. The boys, indistinct in the dark, had come up the meadow and were throwing rocks at the old woman in the doorway of the hut. It was Gifu who had shouted. She ran forward, shouting again, and bent for a rock and threw it at the boys.
They turned on her. She squatted down and coolly dug rocks up from the grass and flung them much better than the boys did. One of them yelped, and another ran away. The two remaining hurried after him. Gifu rose from the grass. The door of the hut opened and the hag was taken in. Gifu came back to Bjarni.
“Here,” he said, and gave her an onion.
She sat beside him to eat it. He lay down again to watch the stars.
“Bear?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we going?”
He lay still a moment, the starlight in his eyes. At length, he said, “We are both going home—you to Fenby.”
“I am never going home. Where is your home?”
“Iceland.”
“Iceland! What is that—a country made of ice?”
He did not answer. His beard itched and he scratched through the wiry hair at his chin.
“Where is it? Iceland.”
He pointed to the North Star. “Almost directly beneath that star.”
She sat up, leaning against him, to see the star he was pointing toward; she looked along his arm. “That’s at the edge of the world.” She bit into the onion. “How will you get there?”
“Over the sea. But it is not at the edge of the world—Iceland is at the center of the world, or very near.”
“Then why have I never heard of it?”
“You have never heard of anyplace,” he said. He pointed to the North Star again. “That star, you see, we call the Millstem. The world is a mill, with the sky as the upper millstone, and the land and sea as the nether millstone. Only a few days’ sail north from Iceland, the sea rushes down through the hole in the nether millstone, which is at the center, of course.”
She was eating the onion. “That is un-so. The center of the world is Jerusalem, as everyone knows, where Jesus was nailed to the Cross.”
“I am going to sleep,” he said. It was a mistake to talk to her, to enjoy her company. She would get him in trouble. He lay down and put his head in his arms.
THE CITY OF YORK was by a river that emptied into the sea, and seafaring ships were anchored there, moored up in rows between the banks where sheep grazed. There were no ships from Iceland. Bjarni spoke to such of the sailors as he could find to understand him, and they told him that a Danish ship could take him home. Most of the ships were Frisian, come to load English wool. He did not find a Danish ship.
He walked back along the riverbank to the city. A great stone wall surrounded it, but the city itself had shrunk down to a few crooked streets in the middle, with a stone tower standing over them. Elsewhere were older houses, deserted and burned, and streets overgrown with brambles.
Gifu said, “The Normans came here. That’s why the tower is there. To keep order. They burned everything. There were rebels and they hanged them.”
She and Bjarni were walking along a cobbled street slimy with the excrement of dogs and goats. The buildings on either side were built out over the street, penning the air under them until it was too foul to breathe. Other people crowded by. He stretched his legs toward the place where the street widened.
Her horse was grazing where they had left it, on a hillside near the wall. Bjarni sat down on the grass. The ruins of a house covered the flat ground below him. Lifting his head, he could see another on the slope above him. There were more ruins here than living houses. The wall was old and crumbling. This had been a great place once. He sat thinking of the Normans who had destroyed it.
Gifu was rubbing down the horse with a handful of grass. She talked to it and sang to it. Bjarni rose and went over to her and said, “The sailors here tell me that I will find a ship in London to take me home.”
Busily she scrubbed dried mud from the horse’s foreleg. “Where is London?”
“At the other end of the Great Road.” He scratched the horse under the jaw and it groaned and pushed its head out, enjoying the caress. The girl crouched almost at Bjarni’s feet. He said, “You’ve come far enough, now, Gifu. You must go back to Fenby.”
She shook her head. “I am never going home. I have told you that.”
“I don’t know how far London is—I don’t know what I might find there. I can’t care for you. Go home. Take the horse.”
“My father will switch me.”
“He will only beat you once.”
She was working over the horse’s leg. The back of her neck was grey with dirt. Lice crawled in her fuzzy red hair. She said, “He will switch me every day. When he finds out I am with child, he will whip me to death.”
“By the nine howes,” he said.
She turned on him like an animal, hooking her fingers into his clothes. “Take me with you. I can’t go home. I have no place to go except with you.”
He recoiled. She smelled strongly of sweat and female humors. He pulled her hands out of his clothes and she caught hold of him again, and two dirty tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Please,” she cried.
“Gifu, I cannot take you with me.”
She wept, clutching him, and when he backed away from her she let him drag her after. He stood still, afraid of stepping on her. She wept and rubbed her face against his thigh.
“Gifu,” he said. “Stop.”
She wailed. He relented; bending down into the ripe field of her smells he lifted her and put her on the horse. He took the horse by the bridle and led it down through York toward the Great Road. She snuffled, making a great display of wiping her eyes, but he caught a glimpse of her when she thought he could not see, and she was smiling. He wondered if s
he had gulled him. Uncertain, he led her on down the road toward London.
* * *
THEY LEFT THE FLAT MOORS behind and traveled through a forest that seemed endless. The sky was hemmed down to a narrow strip over his head, and when the wind blew the trees rubbed their branches together, squeaking and banging, with all the leaves rustling, in a racket that unsettled him. The day after they left York, they came on a river.
Bjarni went along it away from the road. The river curved. A tree had fallen into the water just above the bend, and in its lee was a deep quiet pool. He took off his clothes and dove into the water.
Gifu sat on the bank in the sun and watched him. He scrubbed himself with handfuls of river sand. His skin tingled and glowed red under the scrubbing; light-hearted, he sang:
Bless the giant’s daughter
That spills you onto the ground
Gifu sat frowning at him from the riverbank. “Why do you do that—go naked in the water?”
“To get clean,” he said.
“I would never do that.”
“You will,” he said, “now.” He started toward her, pushing through water up to his waist.
She leapt up and ran toward the horse, hitched to a tree downstream. Bjarni chased her. He thought at first that she was making a game of it, but when he caught her she scratched him and tried to kick him between the legs. She bit him. She was frightened. He held her still, with one knee on her waist pinning her to the ground, and peeled off her clothes. She fought, her breath seething through her clenched teeth. Her body was still adolescent. Under her filthy white skin lay ribs delicate as a child’s. He dragged her into the water and washed her hair, picking out the vermin clustered around her nape and crown, and scrubbed her skin clean.
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