Wayward Heroes

by Halldor Laxness

  At Ögur there was a young slave named Kolbakur, who was Irish. Katla’s husband had purchased him on one of his voyages abroad, when Kolbakur was a boy of ten. Seven years had passed since then. Kolbakur was a red-haired, squint-eyed man, rather short-statured, but exceptionally fair of form: he had broad shoulders and a slender waist, lissome limbs, and small hands. He was not particularly strong, but did most of his chores better than hardier men. He was the deftest of fishermen, and the nimblest at rounding up livestock in the mountains. Kolbakur was never first to make conversation or jest, but if addressed, he would respond lightheartedly and spiritedly. When he was alone, a shadow fell across his face, as if he were mulling over things hidden to others.

  It annoyed some of the freedmen to see this slave, hardly more than a child, do most of the farm work quicker and better than themselves. They loathed fishing next to him, watching him catch fish after fish while they got barely a bite, or seeing him run up steep slopes that made them quail. He was often harassed out of sheer envy. Foreman Skati, in particular, was quite hostile toward this Irish lad, brooding, as he often did, over the way high-minded Norse chieftains had been driven from Ireland to end up behind cows’ rumps in Iceland. Their kingdoms had been sundered, after they had won them with gallantry and valor and subjected the Irish to the rule of law, while those excellent men who had not been killed or driven out had been forced to stretch their necks beneath Irish heels. Skati thought it fair and fitting that Slave Kolbakur taste the humiliation that the Irish had inflicted on the Norsemen when they drove them away.

  When Þórdís Kötludóttir was a small child, she found it funny to see Kolbakur abused and laughed merrily, as children do at others’ misfortune. The Norseman Skati was no less contented to please the girl, and was constantly finding fault with Kolbakur’s work. If Kolbakur so much as broke a tooth of his rake during haymaking, Skati would grab him and shove him to the ground, while hurling gibes at him. It certainly did not befit a Norseman to stand up for a beaten slave, and most folk acted as if they saw nothing. Yet none but the children laughed out loud.

  As time went by and the girl grew, she became less jocose. She no longer found it as amusing to watch slaves being thrashed, and, as might be expected, turned her mind to more interesting means of passing the time.

  Word went round Djúp that a fair flower had sprung up in Laugadalur: to be more precise, the skald Þormóður Bessason, who entertained folk with his lays, and was a friend of chieftains and favorite of women.

  Report also came that the son of Hávar Kleppsson of Ísafjörður, whom the men of Borgarfjörður killed, was now in Reykjahólar. This lad’s name was Þorgeir, and he was such a warrior, even at his young age, that he went round armed day and night and never spoke a word to anyone. People said that the doughtiest of men would find him a handful in a contest, and that the dísir had most likely preordained great glory for this lad.

  One day in early summer, some men came to Ögur from Hornstrandir to buy stallions, and Kolbakur was sent to the mountains to drive the herd down. As the men were standing at the corral, watching the horses descend, the colt thought to be the finest in the entire herd broke from the others and galloped back toward the mountains, whinnying shrilly in a rutting frenzy. Kolbakur rode after it for some distance before turning back – the path the young stallion had taken being impossible for a rider.

  Besides those from Hornstrandir, quite a crowd of men, women, and children had gathered at the corral for amusement. The sun shone in the dry air and gleamed on the steeds, which had newly shed their winter coats and were plump as seals. The girl Þórdís Kötludóttir had also come, along with other women.

  Slave Kolbakur had been unable to round up the stallion, and was now on his way back without it. As he rode toward the corral, Foreman Skati ran into his path, grabbed his horse’s reins, yanked the boy off the horse, slapped him across the face and shoved him to the ground, then pulled the slave’s shirt over his head, tore the whip from his hand, and lashed the boy’s naked back several times before finally hurling it at him as he lay there groveling.

  Skati The Easterling was the most courteous of men, comely of appearance and most stately in stature, with a bright countenance and the fairest eyes of all.

  When Slave Kolbakur was fairly certain that Skati had had his fill of beating him, he got to his feet and hastily pulled up his trousers, his cheeks slightly red with youthful modesty, and then smiled apologetically at those who had witnessed this incident.

  The horse-traders carried on with their bargaining.

  Late in the day, Þórdís went home. She and the other young girls had passed the time during the horse-trading in fun and games, and they soon forgot the incident just described. Kolbakur and an aged manservant had rowed to a sheltered spot to fish, and they came ashore just as Maid Þórdís was walking across the homefield. Kolbakur was dangling his catch on a string. The girl stopped and addressed him at once:

  “Why do you chase after horses and slaughter fish, Kolbakur?” she said. “It would beseem you better to become a hero and skald.”

  “I am a slave,” said he.

  “How can a man as comely as you,” she asked, “be a slave, for others to beat at will?”

  “Heroes and skalds came to my home in Ireland,” said he.

  “Why do you not cry when you are beaten?” asked the girl.

  “I do not cry, young woman,” said he, having laid his fish on the grass as he spoke. “I do not cry because heroes and skalds burned down my house; because they slew my father in his field and thrust a spear through my grandfather, just a frail old man. My grandmother was on her knees praising her beloved friend, the blessed Columbkille, when a man bashed in her skull with a blow from his ax. That is why I do not cry. Then they took my infant brother, unwound his swaddling clothes, and tossed him naked between them on their spear points. My mother and my young sister they dragged away wailing to their ship. And that is why, young woman, I do not cry.”

  The girl stared at Kolbakur for several moments, without another word, and then walked away.

  5

  ON THE NEXT day, Skati the Easterling went to visit his mistress in her bower and presented her with good silver. “I have gotten you this in trade for horses.”

  “You are a gem,” said the woman. “Sit down. I shall prepare you some dainties.”

  She beat eggs and mixed in wine and honey.

  Her daughter was there as well, standing by the window opening, whose frame and membrane she had drawn aside.1 The girl stared out, listening to the chirping of the birds. She did not turn to look when the Easterling walked in. He said:

  “Why does Mardöll not laugh as usual for her Viking Skati?2 Does she not wish to sit on the warrior’s lap tonight? We had not finished the story of how I fought with the Wends and they clapped me in irons.”

  The girl made no reply. Mistress Katla said: “Keep your custom, child, and sit on your foster-father Skati’s lap. Away with peevishness and timidity – such dispositions do not suit little girls.”

  The girl answered: “I shall do as you wish, mother – but it is you who have most at stake, for I am no longer inclined toward nursery rhymes.”

  Skati laughed, lifted the girl to his lap, and warbled her part of a lullaby. Then he took up the story of how the Wends captured and enchained him. The centerpiece of his tale was a place of cruel dreams, a dark and foul dungeon whose floor and walls were crawling with lizards, toads, and other poisonous creatures, some of them bristling or shaggy with hair. When a warrior, however, tells of the worst of all places he has visited, he must never admit to having felt fear – that is out of the question. Skati went only so far as to say that it had been a rather dull dwelling. One time, he recounted, he heard a peculiar noise in the dark, and, still in his shackles, edged nearer to the wall to try to make it out. From there he heard what he thought was a fiddle being bowed deep in the earth, and a woman singing along in spellbindingly beautiful tones.

  On mo
st days, it made the girl drowsy to sit like this on the Easterling’s lap, leaning up against him and feeling his grip around her ankles as he rambled on with his stories, but now the girl sprang with a shriek from his grasp, shook her fists furiously at him, and showered him with the most scornful of names.

  Her mother asked her the cause of this tantrum.

  She replied: “He laid hold of my knee.”

  Mistress Katla stopped her beating and looked at her foreman.

  He said: “I never knew the girl to have a woman’s touchiness. Until now, she has never made a fuss about where I lay my hand.”

  “Keep your paws where they belong,” said Þórdís. “And hereafter, you shall never touch me. I am going now to see Kolbakur, who is far nobler than you.”

  When the girl had left the bower, Mistress Katla said to her Easterling: “It is quite clear,” she says, “that my daughter has come of age, and your lullabies have been far from my liking for some time. She has now sensed the situation more clearly than I had seen it: your fondness for her is growing, and will grow overmuch if you cling to this place for too long – you faithless man.”

  This said, the mistress raised the whisk she had been using to beat the eggs and honey, and with it whacked the Viking’s upper lip.

  The slave sat with his dogs on the homefield wall. One of his tasks was to scare off sheep from the homefield during the night. The girl walked up and sat down on the wall beside him, drooped her head, and plucked blades of grass. He asked what was on her mind. She raised her head slowly, looked him in the eyes and said: “I want to ask a trifle of you.”

  He inquired what it might be.

  She said: “I want you to kill the Easterling.”

  “I was not aware that you loved him so much,” answered Slave Kolbakur.

  She asked why he said such a monstrous thing.

  He replied: “My kinsmen have told me that when a Norse woman loves a man beyond all else, she will seduce an assassin into murdering her beloved, and then marry the murderer.”

  She laughed and replied: “It may be true that we women choose, if given a choice between two men, to marry the one we love less. And indeed, we may also condemn our lovers to death if their affection should turn to other women than us. But I do not know whether I am fond enough of Skati to give myself in marriage to the man who slays him. In short, I weary of hearing how he put Wends and Kurs to the sword, while my mother sits by with her cheeks flushing red, waiting for me to fall asleep to his tales. I find myself shunning him more the more tales that he tells, and I am now determined that if any man is to lay his hand on my knee, it shall be you.”

  “I shall risk neither,” said Slave Kolbakur. “Neither laying hold of your knee nor slaying your Easterling – for which bootless acts I would forfeit my life.”

  “Would you just be beaten, then,” said the girl, “and never lift your neck?”

  “My being beaten matters little,” said he. “ ‘Ever may a living man come by a cow.’ ”3

  “Your wisdom is hardly heroic,” said the girl. “Where did you learn it?”

  “When old Grímnir and I go out fishing, he teaches me lore of his that is not austere to the point of spooking fish. ‘Halt may ride horses, handless may herd.’ ”4

  She replied: “I wish to learn this lore from you, and any other that you know. Nor are you required to kill the Easterling – just as you prefer.”

  “Why should I hazard to teach you this lore?” said he.

  She said: “Would you have me return to the Easterling and tell him that it suits champions to slay men with swords, not beat them with whips?”

  “Your words are your own choice, young woman,” he said. “But for you I will perform no other task than what befits a man taken captive in war.”

  She said: “My mother has built me a loft, with the window facing the mountain. But the frame is fastened so tightly that it cannot be moved. In my abode, I would have a window that I may open and shut at will, as my mother has in her bower. Now I would ask you to loosen the frame and fix it with bolts, that I might unbolt it to hear the birds chirp in the evenings.”

  He said: “Carrion birds might fly in.”

  “What flies through my window,” said she, “is of no matter to you. Let me just say that I prefer not to use the main door when night falls.”

  “I would never have guessed a woman fair as you to be a night hag,” said he.

  “Is your whole intent to belittle my friendship and vex me?” asked the girl, the corners of her mouth twitching as she fought back tears. Then she looked up, glared at him, and said sharply: “I would have such a window in my loft,” said she, “that I might fly out with my spinning to a certain headland where I know two young warriors dwell – one of whom beats iron into a sword, while the other embosses a shield with ancient tales. On that headland I will lay aside my swan’s dress and spin their fates.”

  He replied: “I will loosen your window frame for you, that you might fly out and fix their fates.”

  6

  ONE DAY ÞORGEIR Hávarsson came to speak with his kinsman Þorgils in his sitting room at Reykjahólar. At Þorgeir’s waist hung an inferior-looking sword, and he held a spear and a shield at the ready. He took his stand opposite his kinsman and gave him a look that might have been called audacious.

  “You have no words of greeting for us, your kinsmen?” asked Þorgils Arason, with a laugh. “Or am I to rise and serve you?”

  “Greeting others is an unmanly custom,” said Þorgeir Hávarsson. “Laugh at me as you wish. Due to our kinship – and your being a man of wealth and might – I am entirely at your disposal.”

  Þorgils said that it was in fact a great honor to the family tree to have sprouted such a sprig as Þorgeir. “But shall we speak to each other with weapons drawn?” Without rising from his seat, he reached for a fine, hefty sword lying on a shelf, drew it from its sheath, and pointed it at Þorgeir. Upon beholding such a noble weapon, Þorgeir nearly dropped his own. “Or,” said Þorgils, “shall we behave like men and keep the peace as we converse?”

  Þorgeir laid his weapons on the dais, and Þorgils sheathed the sword and put it back on the shelf.

  Þorgeir said: “I have endured the gibes of you kinsmen of mine in Reykjahólar for quite some time now, and many would say that I am no peevish man to have put up with such treatment for so long. Your place for me was with your dogs, and I have not had any clothes other than my own, apart from what I pressed your slaves into giving me. The time has now come for me to thank you for your hospitality. I intend to go south to Borgarfjörður.”

  “What business do you have in Borgarfjörður?” asked Þorgils Arason.

  “I must pay a debt that my mother and I owe a farmer there,” said Þorgeir. “She is not fond of us being indebted to folk outside the family.”

  “Say no more,” said Þorgils Arason. “It is obvious that you are descended from fools on your father’s side, if you believe that manslaughter makes you more of a man. When I was in the Orkney Isles, one of the servants of King Christ in Rome told me that his lord would do away with militarism and its accompanying campaigns, and instead grant men wealth and prosperity through trade, benedictions, baptisms, church-building, land acquisition, the keeping of servants, and celebration of the Divine Office. It would be more propitious for you to saw panels and plane altar boards for the church that I intend to dedicate to Christ within the next few years than to trudge southward to slay folk. This winter, I will bring clerics here to sing Masses for us and baptize all those who, out of sheerfoolishness and paltriness, have been depriving themselves of such excellent boons.”

  Þorgeir replied: “I learned from my mother that many an outstanding man has challenged White Christ to single combat, and he has dared to fight with none.1 He must be a milksop, and I would rather serve almost any other king than him. My mother has also told me that the power that waxes in men and gods is called the Earth-force, and is fused from the hardness of stone and the s
ucculence of plants, as well as the ferocity found in a wolf’s tooth. I am convinced that Christ has not received this power, while other gods mourned and withered away when they lost it – and so it will go with men.”

  Nothing further of the two kinsmen’s conversation will be told in this book. To continue with Þorgeir Hávarsson: he set off for Borgarfjörður with no possessions but his poor weapons and the tatty clothes on his back. Winter set in, freezing the lakes and rivers. Nothing is told of Þorgeir’s travels until he arrived at Skeljabrekka late one evening around bedtime. He knocked at the door. A manservant came, asked who was outside, and invited the visitor to enter, but Þorgeir said that he never told slaves his name or accepted their invitations. “Where is Farmer Jöður?” he asked.

  “What do you want with him?” asked the servant.

  “I have a debt to settle with him,” said Þorgeir.

  The servant went in and reported that a stranger was at the door, wishing to pay a debt to Farmer Jöður, but that he apparently never entered people’s houses at the invitation of inferiors. Jöður called to his son to come with him, and they both grabbed axes. They went to the door. The brightness of their lamps burning inside blinded the father and son to the world outside. Þorgeir, however, whose eyes were adjusted to the dark, saw the farmer’s silhouette in the doorway, and he thrust his spear ferociously into the farmer’s belly, driving the man back into his son’s arms. Without hesitation, Þorgeir swung his ax at the farmer’s son’s head and cracked his skull. Having struck down the farmer and his son and leaving both lying there dying in the doorway, Þorgeir continued to thrash them for some time, to ensure that they did not escape death. In those days, Norsemen were greatly in the habit of using their weapons, badly forged from inferior steel, as bludgeons, being too blunt to bite. Having taken his fill of flailing and flogging, Þorgeir went his way that same night, not stopping until he reached his mother’s door at Hávarsstaðir in the faint gleam of dawn.