by Tim Severin
Her ears, as well as her eyes, were collecting information. I had barely begun to question the older servants about their memories of a certain Thorgunna, who had stayed at Birsay one winter fifteen years before, when I received another summons. This time it was to Eithne’s retiring room at the back of the great hall. I found the earl mother standing so that the light from a small window fell directly on my face as I entered. Most windows in Norse houses are no more than open holes in the wall, which can be closed with a shutter in bad weather or when it is cold outside, but it was a mark of Sigurd’s wealth and status that the window in his mother’s chamber was covered with a sheet of translucent cow horn, which allowed a little of the dreary north light of winter to fall on me.
‘I’m told you’ve been asking about Thorgunna, who stayed here a long number of years ago,’ Eithne said. ‘I suppose you are her son.’
My mouth must have dropped open with shock, for she went on, ‘Don’t look so surprised. You have the same colour of eyes and skin as she had, and perhaps the shape of your face is the same.’
‘I never knew my mother,’ I said. ‘She sent me away to live with my father when I was still a babe in arms, and she had died by the time I came back to where she lived.’
‘And where was that?’ asked Eithne.
‘At Frodriver in Iceland,’ I answered. ‘She died there when I was only three years old.’
‘Ah yes, I had heard something about that,’ this strange, rotund little woman briskly interrupted.
‘It was said that there were portents shortly before she died and hauntings afterwards.’ I ventured. ‘It was something to do with her goods, with the things she brought with her, her clothes and bed hangings. At least that was what I was told. When these things were finally burned, the troubles ceased.’
Eithne gave a little snort of impatience. ‘What did they think! No wonder there was trouble if someone else got their hands on a volva’s sacred possessions.’
She gave another sniff. ‘Your mother may have been nothing to look at, but she was skilled in other ways and I don’t mean just at needlework. Those wall hangings she owned, she brought them with her from Ireland and she had stitched them herself and chanted the spell-words over them.’
‘You mean like rune writing,’ I commented.
Eithne gave me a patient look.
‘Yes, like rune writing, but different. Men and women can both cut runes, but women often prefer to stitch their symbols. In some ways it is more painstaking and more effective. Those cloths and hangings and garments your mother cherished were powerful seidr. In the wrong hands they caused the spirits to be uneasy.’
I was about to make some comment about the earl’s mystical raven flag, but thought better of it. ‘I was told that you and my mother spent time together, so I was hoping you would be kind enough to tell me something about her. I would truly appreciate any details.’
‘Most of our discussions were on trivial matters – or on matters which do not concern men,’ she replied crisply. ‘Your mother kept herself to herself nearly all the time she was here. She was a big woman – as I expect you know – and rather fierce, so most people kept out of her way. I had more to do with her than anyone else because we spoke Irish to one another, and of course she recognised that I have the sight, just as I knew she was a volva.’
‘Did she say where she came from? Who her family were?’ I persisted. ‘If I knew that, perhaps I could find out if I have any living relatives.’
Eithne looked at me with a hint of pity. ‘Don’t expect too much. Everyone thinks that they are descended from some special line, princes or great lords. But most of our forebears were ordinary folk. All I know is that your mother spoke excellent Irish and she could be well mannered when she was not being peevish, which might mean she came from a family with good social standing. She did once mention that she belonged to a tribe who lived somewhere in the middle of the island of Ireland. I don’t remember its name but it might have been Ua Ruairc or Ua Ruanaid, or something like that. But the Irish tribes love giving themselves new titles and names, even changing where they live. The Irish are a restless and wandering people. I’ve been living in Orkney so long that I’m out of touch with what goes on there. It’s possible that King Sigtryggr might recognise your mother’s clan name. But, on the other hand, he may not have any idea at all. Although he’s King of Dublin and has his home there, he’s a Norseman through and through. You would be better advised to find your way to Ireland yourself and make enquiries there. Though don’t be in a hurry, there’s already war in the west and it will soon get worse. But why am I telling you this? You know that already, or you should.’
Again I must have appeared puzzled because the old woman shot me a glance and said, ‘No, perhaps not. You’re still too young. Anyhow, I can arrange for you to accompany Sigtryggr when he returns home, which should be some time very soon – that doesn’t require second sight to anticipate. He and his men are locusts. They’ll eat up our last stocks of winter food if Sigurd doesn’t make it obvious that they have outstayed their welcome. I’ve advised him to serve up smaller and smaller portions at mealtimes, and resurrect some of the stockfish that half rotted when the rain got into the storehouse last autumn. If the smell doesn’t get rid of them, nothing will.’
The old lady was as good as her word and her dietary stratagem was effective. Sigtryggr and his followers left Birsay within forty-eight hours, and I was added to the royal entourage at the earl mother’s particular request. I had failed to learn anything more about Thorgunna, but was glad to leave Orkney because I had noticed how one of the Burners had started giving me occasional puzzled glances, as if he was trying to remember where he had seen me before. I recognised him as one of the men on whom I had eavesdropped at the Althing, and was nervous that he would make the connection. If he did so, it was likely that I could finish up with my throat cut.
FOURTEEN
SIGTRYGGR’S SHIP WAS a match for his magnificent dress brooch. The Norsemen may not be able to weave gossamer silks into gorgeous robes or construct the great tiled domes and towers of the palaces that I was later to see in my travels, but when it comes to building ships they are without peer. Sigtryggr’s vessel was a drakkar, sleek, sinister, speedy, a masterpiece of the shipwright’s craft. She had been built on the banks of the Black River in Ireland, as her crew never tired of boasting. The Ostmen, the word the Norse in Ireland use to describe themselves, build ships every bit as well as the shipwrights in Norway and Denmark because the quality of native Irish timber equals anything found in the northern lands. Coming as I did from two countries where big trees were so rare that it was unthinkable to build a large ocean-going vessel, the moment I clambered aboard the drakkar I could not resist running my fingertips along the handpicked oak beams and the perfect fit of the flawless planking. I would have been a complete ignoramus not to appreciate the gracefully sweeping lines of the long black-painted hull and the perfect symmetry of the rows of metal fastenings, the ingenious carving of the wooden fittings for the mast and rigging, and the evident care which the crew lavished on their vessel. The drakkar – her name was Spindrifter – was deliberately flamboyant. At anchor her crew rigged a smart wadmal tent to cover her amidships, a tent sewn from strips of five different colours, and set it up so tautly that she looked like a floating fairground booth. And as soon as we were at sea with a fair wind, they set a mainsail of a matching pattern so that the vessel crested along like a brilliant exotic bird. As a king’s ship, Spindrifter was prettified with fancy carvings and bright paint. There were intricately cut panels each side of the curling prow, a snarling figurehead, blue, gold and red chevrons painted on the oar blades, and the intricate decorative lashing on the helmsman’s rudder grip was given a daily coat of white chalk. Even the metal weathervane was gilded. Spindrifter was meant to impress, and in my case she did.
Most mariners, I have noticed, share a particular moment of weakness. It comes in the first hour after a ship safely clears
the land and is heading out to open sea. That is when the crew lets out a collective breath of relief, sensing that they are back in their closed world that is small, intimate and familiar. The feeling is particularly strong if the crew has previously sailed together, gone ashore for a few days and then returned to their vessel. They are eager to re-establish their sense of comradeship, and that is their moment of indiscretion. As the last rope is coiled down and the ship settles on her course, they begin to talk about their time ashore, compare their experiences, comment on sights they saw and the people they met, perhaps boast of the women they encountered and speculate about the immediate future, and they do so openly. They are a crew binding together and, as our ship sailed down the inner channel from Orkney, the crew of Spindrifter overlooked the fact that among them was a stranger. Too insignificant to be noticed, I heard their unguarded thoughts on the success of their visit to Birsay, the prospects for the coming war and the manoeuvrings of their lord and master, King Sigtryggr.
What I heard was puzzling. Sigtryggr’s kingdom of Dublin is small, but it is the richest and most strategic of all the Norse domains scattered around the rim of Ireland, and Sigtryggr was savouring its prosperity to the full. Dublin’s thriving commerce was the milch cow providing him with the money for the luxuries he enjoyed so much – his jewellery and fine clothes, his splendid ship, and the best food and wine imported from France. Indeed, his income from taxing the Dubliners was so great that Sigtryggr had taken the unique step of minting his own money. No other ruler in Ireland, even their own High King, was wealthy enough to do that, and I saw one of the drakkar sailors produce a leather pouch and double-check his wages by counting out a small stack of silver coins struck by Sigtryggr’s moneyers.
The more I heard the sailors brag about the wealth of their lord, the more rash, it seemed to me, that he should be about to risk such a comfortable sinecure by joining a rebellion against a grizzled Irish veteran who styled himself ‘Emperor of the Irish’. This was the same High King Brian whom Sigurd’s steward had mentioned, a warlord who had been rampaging up and down the country with a sizeable army, imposing his authority and winning battle after battle.
Brian Boruma claimed to be driving out the foreign invaders from his land. Yet a large part of his army was made of foreigners, chiefly Ostmen, so what really distinguished his actions was that he was as virulent a Christian in his own way as ‘St’ Olaf of Norway had been. He travelled everywhere with a cluster of White Christ priests. Wild-looking creatures, they seemed as convinced of their own invincibility as any berserker. These Irish holy men, according to one of the drakkar sailors, were by no means as peaceable as their profession might suggest. The sailor had been in Dublin some fifteen years earlier when Brian Boruma had entered the city and ordered the destruction of a sacred grove of trees, a temple site for Thor. A group of Old Believers had stood in the way of the woodcutters, and the Irish holy men had rushed forward and beaten them back, wielding their heavy wooden croziers like clubs. The sailor’s mention of Thor’s sacred grove reminded me of Snorri and his twin role as priest and ruler, and it seemed to me that this Irish High King who mixed rule and religion was a grander version of my more familiar godi, and perhaps even more ruthless.
King Sigtryggr’s informers had warned that the plan for Boruma’s next campaign was to overrun Dublin once again and bring to heel the provincial ruler, the King of Leinster. So Sigtryggr was scurrying around to build up a grand alliance to defeat the expected invasion. He was using his ample war chest to hire mercenaries and looking for assistance from overseas. In Birsay he had set a clever snare, according to the crew of Spindrifter. He had promised Sigurd the Stout that if the Earl of Orkney came to his help, then he would arrange for Sigurd to marry Kormlod, Brian Boruma’s ex-wife. This Kormlod was an irresistible bait. She was not only the divorced wife of the High King, but also the sister of the Irish King of Leinster. Whoever married her, according to Sigtryggr, would be able to lay claim to the vacant throne of Ireland after the defeat of Brian Boruma, and his claim would be supported by the Leinster tribes. Yet I noted that when the crew of Spindrifter talked about this scheme, they chuckled and made sardonic comments. Listening to them, it seemed to me that the Lady Kormlod was not the meek and willing consort Sigurd would have been led to expect and neither did Sigtryggr himself set much store by the plan.
Thor sent our drakkar the wind she loved – a fine quartering breeze that brought us safely past the headlands and the tide races, and into the mouth of Dublin’s river without the need to shift sail or even get out our oars until we were closing the final gap across the dirty river water ready to tie up at the wooden jetty which was the royal landing place.
I had never even seen a town before, let alone a city, and the sight of Dublin astounded me. There are no towns or large villages in Greenland or Iceland or Orkney, and suddenly here in front of me was a great, grey-brown untidy sprawl of houses, shops, laneways, roofs, all spilling down the side of the hill to the anchorage in the river. I had never imagined that so many people could exist, let alone live together cheek by jowl in this way. The houses were modest enough, little more than oversized huts with walls of wattle and daub and roofed with straw or wooden tiles. But there were so many of them and they huddled so close together that it seemed there were more people living in one spot overlooking the south bank of Dublin’s river than in the whole of Iceland. It was not just the sight of the houses which amazed me. There was also the smell. The river bank was thick mud littered with rotting, stinking matter, and it was clear that many of the citizens used the place as their latrine. On top of the stench of putrefaction was laid an all-pervading odour of soot and smoke. It was an early January evening when we moored and the householders of Dublin were lighting fires to keep warm. The smoke from their hearths rose through holes in the roofs, but just as often it simply oozed through the straw covering so it seemed as if the whole city was smouldering. A light drizzle had begun to fall, and it pressed down the smoke and fumes of the fires so that the smell of wood smoke filled our nostrils.
Sigtryggr’s steward was waiting at the quayside to greet his master and led us up the hill towards the royal dwelling. The roadway was surfaced with wooden planks and woven wicker hurdles laid on top of the mud, but even so we occasionally slipped on the slick, damp surface. Through open doorways I caught glimpses of the interiors of the houses, the flicker of flames from an open hearth, dim shapes of people seated on the side benches or a woman standing at a cooking pot, the grimy faces of children peering round the doorpost to see us go by until unseen hands reached out and dragged them back out of sight. Sigtryggr and his cortege were not popular. The reception for the King of Dublin was very muted.
We passed through the gateway of a city wall which I had not noticed before because the cluster of houses had outgrown Dublin’s defensive rampart. Then we had reached the centre of Dublin, where the houses were more spread out, and here stood Sigtryggr’s residence, similar in size and shape to Earl Sigurd’s hall though it was built of timber rather than turf. The only unusual feature was a steep, grassy mound slightly to the rear and right of Sigtryggr’s hall. ‘Thor’s Mound,’ muttered Einar, the sailor, who had spoken about the warlike Irish priests earlier, and who now saw me looking in that direction. ‘Those mad fanatics chopped down the sacred trees, but it will take more than few axe blows to get rid of every last trace of his presence. Silkbeard still makes an occasional sacrifice there, just for good luck, though his real worship should be for Freyja. There’s nothing he would like better than to be able to weep tears of gold.’ Tyrkir had taught me long ago in Vinland that the Goddess of wealth shed golden tears at the loss of her husband, but I didn’t know who Silkbeard was, though I made a shrewd guess. When I asked the sailor, he guffawed. ‘You really are from the outer fringes, aren’t you? Silkbeard is that dandy, our leader. He loves his clothes and perfume and his fine leather shoes and his rings, and haven’t you noticed how much time he spends combing and stroking and
fondling his chin whiskers.’
But I hardly heard his reply. I had come to a dead stop and was staring at a woman standing at the entrance to Sigtryggr’s hall among the group of women and servants waiting to greet the king formally. I guessed her age at about fifty. She was very richly dressed in a long blue gown with expensive shoulder clasps, and her grey hair was held back in a matching silk scarf. She must have been important because she was standing in the front rank, next to a younger woman, who I guessed was Sigtryggr’s wife. But it was not the older woman’s dress which had caught my eye; it was the way that she stood, and the way that she was looking at Sigtryggr, who was now walking towards her. There was a sense of exasperation and determination on her face. I had seen precisely that look before and that same posture. I felt that I was seeing not the grey-haired matron in front of me, but another person. It was a memory that made me feel queasy. I had seen exactly that expression on the face of Freydis Eriksdottir.
‘Get along and stop gawping,’ Einar said from behind me.
‘Who’s the grey-haired woman standing in the front row?’ I asked him.
‘That’s Sigtryggr’s mother Kormlod, the Irish call her Gormlaith.’
I was utterly confused. ‘But I thought that she was the person Earl Sigurd was supposed to marry as a reward if he came to help Sigtryggr. The person who would help him become High King.’
‘Precisely. Until last year she was the wife of the High King Brian, but he divorced her after some sort of a row. Now she says that Brian doesn’t deserve to remain on his throne. She hates him so much that she would support whoever marries her in a bid to replace him. She’s got a lot of influence because she also happens to be the sister of King Mael Morda of Leinster, and at one time she was even married to Malachi, another of the important Irish chieftains who’s spent years intriguing and fighting against Brian to become the High King himself. Whatever happens in high politics in this part of the world, you can be sure that Kormlod is involved. Now you’d better report to Sigtryggr’s steward and see if he can find a place for you.’