The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Bjarni was half-asleep, sprawling with his feet to the fire and Hugin’s black flank pressed companionably against his thigh, when the storm-curtain over the foreporch was wrenched back. The storm seemed to leap into the hall, and three figures appeared in the doorway with the flickering lightning behind them. The hounds sprang up snarling, and in upon the startled men around the fire strode Asmund the Priest, and his two huge God-House thralls behind him, naked save for their blood-stained leather aprons.

  The men round the fire were scrambling to their feet, Bjarni with the rest, his hand twisted in Hugin’s collar. There seemed to be a quietness all around him, a core of quietness in the midst of the raving storm. He saw the tall drenched figure in the firelight, Asmund, Thara’s father, swallowed up in Asmund the Priest of the High Gods. He saw the widened pupils of his eyes and the flecks of spittle in his beard and knew that he had drunk again of the sacred juice that brought the gods’ fire into his head in times of sacrifice. As he looked into those widened eyes, the understanding leapt in him with the speed of the lightning flash, and made sense of the talk that he heard behind the peat-stack. He knew that it had been him they spoke of, after all, and Thara was quite capable of making the needful bruises herself. Fool that he had been not to think of that . . .

  ‘Seize the black dog,’ Asmund commanded. ‘Thor demands the black dog!’ and the thralls dived forward to do his bidding.

  In the same instant Bjarni took his hand from Hugin’s collar and dealt him a stinging blow on the rump, shouting, ‘Off with you! Go!’

  The door was unguarded to the storm, and if the dog was fast enough he might get clear. But Hugin was bewildered, knowing only that his lord was in trouble, and crouched for a moment unsure what he was to do, and in that moment the God-House thralls were up, snaring with their ropes. He was struggling like a wild thing for his freedom, his black face become a snarling wolf-fanged mask. ‘Let him go! Let my dog free!’ and in the same instant Bjarni hurled himself against them, his dirk in his hand. Everything had the confusion of an evil dream.

  Hands were on him, friendly hands of men who had rowed and fought with him through two sea-faring summers, but dragging him back, twisting the dirk from his grasp. Voices shouting in his ears not to be a fool, not to call down upon himself the wrath of the Lord of Thunder.

  Hugin had all but broken free, leaving one of the thralls with a fang-slashed forearm running red, before he was seized again, and in the same instant Bjarni had torn himself free and, unarmed as he was now, hurled himself into battle. The smell of blood had come into the back of his nose and the leaping flame-light made a red mist before his eyes. And he was not aware of the baying crowd around him, of the hands again on his arms, of anything but the faces of the men who were dragging Hugin away . . .

  The curtain over the inner doorway was wrenched back and Onund stood there, stripped to sark and breeks, his sword naked in his hand. Then Onund’s voice cut through the uproar, demanding in a tone that cut like a whiplash, ‘What means this fighting at my wedding feast?’

  And the whole ugly scene checked into stillness under the fading rolls of thunder. Bjarni stood panting in the grip of Sven Gunnarson and another of Sea Witch’s crew, while Hugin still struggled and snarled against the ropes that were half strangling him, though the men had checked for an instant in dragging him towards the door.

  ‘They are taking my dog,’ Bjarni said, snatching at his breath. ‘They are taking him for the sacred trees.’

  But the voice of Asmund the Priest closed over the words before they were spoken. ‘Thor the Thunderer is angry that there is no sacrifice on his altar at this feast. He demands the life of the black dog!’

  ‘It is not the custom for Thor to receive sacrifice at a wedding feast,’ Onund said.

  Spittle was trickling into the Priest’s beard and again the thunder sounded, though less loudly than before. ‘Hark to his Hammer in the clouds! Who are you – who am I – to question the demands of the Lord of Thunder?’

  ‘If it is his demand, and not rather the demand of the Priest,’ Onund said at his most silken. The two faced each other, their wills crackling in the air between.

  Then the thunder rolled again, fading westward over the open sea.

  And Asmund, as though feeling the power slipping from him, let out a baffled howl. ‘The Priest speaking with the voice of the god, the thing must be done, and done swiftly to quench his wrath –’ And suddenly his right hand, which had been hidden in the folds of his mantle, appeared, and in his hand the sacred blade. He gestured with it to the flat bake-stone beside the fire.

  Bjarni, his arms twisted behind him, was shouting desperately, ‘The sacrifice must be willing! He’s not willing – look at him – and no more am I! I’ll fight you for him. I’ll fight anybody for him –’

  ‘Will you fight Thor himself?’ shrieked Asmund.

  ‘It’s not Thor, it’s only you with too much of the sacred juice in you, and you know why –’

  He half expected the wrath of the Lord of Thunder to strike him into nothingness in that instant, and yet the other half of him knew that it was true, that it was only Asmund with spittle in his beard and Thara’s malice working in him that he had to fight.

  Then Onund’s voice came between them again. ‘There is one quick way to put an end to this matter,’ and he walked with that stiff swinging strut of his, down the hall to where Hugin, half strangled with the ropes about his neck, still struggled in the hands of his captors. Bjarni saw the firelight catch the naked blade in his hand, and unbelieving horror rose like vomit within him. Someone was bellowing, ‘No! No!’ and it was him – unless it was him making that terrible howling noise. Then in the confused horror of the moment he heard Onund ordering, ‘All’s over! Let him go – let them both go!’

  The thing was over between one heartbeat and the next, and next instant Bjarni and Hugin were crouched together, the hound suddenly silent, thrusting against him and the blood pumping from the place where his left forepaw now lacked the ends of its two long central toes.

  ‘You have lamed my dog!’ Bjarni shouted, glaring up at the ship chief where he stood wiping his blade with a handful of rushes, with Hugin whimpering against his breast and scattering bright droplets everywhere.

  ‘You have robbed the Thunderer of his sacrifice!’ the Priest was almost shrieking. ‘For how may I offer a maimed beast on his altar?’

  ‘How indeed?’ said Onund simply, and in Bjarni there began to be a glimmer of understanding.

  Chieftain and Priest stood confronting each other. The wind was dropping away moment by moment, the bruised darkness beyond the door growing lighter, the crown of the storm over. ‘A fine thing it must seem to both of us that the Lord of Thunder seems not so angry as you had feared,’ Onund said into the sudden after-storm stillness. ‘You will have a moon to light your homeward path.’ Asmund seemed to be trying to say something, but in the end he turned away with it still unsaid, and strode from the hall, his two thralls following like hounds behind him.

  When they were gone and when Bjarni, his hand twisted in Hugin’s collar, had got to his feet, Onund spoke again. ‘There is a time for battle and a time for peace and Sea Witch has no place among her crew for a man who cannot tell the one from the other.’

  ‘They would have taken my dog for sacrifice,’ Bjarni said, thinking desperately that he could not have understood.

  But Onund Treefoot had understood. ‘You would not have been the first man to lose a dog in such a way. So now, take him and be gone from Barra.’

  Bjarni could not believe it. It could not be simply because he had got into a fight at the wrong moment. No ship chief was so set against a scrap among his crew. It could not be because he had raised hand against the Priest in defence of Hugin – it was Onund himself who had made Hugin unfit for sacrifice . . . He was just starting to urge these things, but what he saw in Onund’s face stopped him. Instead, he said only, ‘Loyal sword-service you have had of me these two summers p
ast, Onund Treefoot.’

  ‘So now do I give you back your sword-service with honour,’ Onund said, ‘that you may take it elsewhere.’

  7

  Thorstein the Red

  THERE WAS A heavy swell running and Sea Cow wallowed through it, not so much like her namesake as like a farrowing sow. Bjarni had forgotten how different the motion of the broad-bellied merchantman was from that of the slim Barra longships he had grown used to in the past two years, but it was last night’s ale partly, and with it the cold shock of all that had blown up like storm out of a clear sky, that had given him today’s queasy belly and splitting head, though it was only the ale that he blamed. He crouched against the bulwark, Hugin stretched beside him, his left forepaw lashed up like a small blood-stained pudding in dirty rags. Sometimes Hugin tried to bite the pudding and Bjarni would put out his own foot to thrust the dog’s muzzle aside.

  He was going over last night in his mind, not remembering very clearly through a haze of ale and firelight and the dark and levin-flash of storm. Faces crowded in on him, Onund’s face, Thara’s and the drugged face of the Priest her father; faces of the men striving to drag Hugin away, the faces of his fellow ship-carles turned into the faces of troubled strangers. And again, Onund’s face as he wiped his sword blade. A chill spatter of spindrift in his face brought him back to the present, and the sickness in his belly twisted itself into a sudden hard knot pressing up behind his breast bone. He dragged himself up, leaned over the side, and threw up like the veriest landlubber on his first sea-faring.

  Putting up his hand to wipe the back of it across his mouth when the heaving was over, he found the string of amber swinging forward through the neck of his leather jerkin, and wished that he had flung it at Onund’s feet – foot – last night, even as he gathered it up to thrust it back inside. But whether the thought made him harshly clumsy, or the thing happened by chance, the cord snapped and suddenly the honey globules were purling down through his fingers into the long green trough of the swell. Gone like the Barra years, the years that he had been Onund’s man. He opened his hand and found that a single bead was left, lodged between two of his fingers. For an instant he thought to keep it, thought maybe he was meant to keep it. Then he parted his fingers and let it go after the rest.

  Someone had come lurching up, and was beside him. For a short while they gazed out together on the heaving skyline. Then Heriolf Merchantman said, ‘This is the second time. And the dog this time also. Have a care that you do not find yourself living in a circle and getting nowhere.’

  It was said half in jest, but something in the words struck home to Bjarni all the same. He had had such dreams at the outset; stupid, boy’s dreams of carving a path for himself with his sword. He might as well have dreamed of becoming Emperor of Byzantium. But it seemed all the time other men were laying his course for him: Dublin and the King’s bodyguard, Heriolf beside him here. The nearest he had come to choosing his own seaway was the night he had sold his sword-service to Onund Treefoot. But now Onund had cast him out.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ he demanded.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Everything – I don’t know – lame Hugin – throw me out?’

  ‘For the first,’ said Heriolf, ‘it was the quick and sure way to save him from Asmund. When the wound is healed it will but take the edge off his speed. In some lands they do it to dogs to stop them chasing the king’s deer. Would you rather have had him hanging from the god’s tree with the corbies and the black-backed gulls pulling at his carcass? For the second, he will have trouble enough to make his own peace, with the priest kind, without you on hand to make the thing yet harder. For the third – how long think you it would have been, after last night’s work, before death, disguised as the wrath of the gods, came upon you?’

  ‘I had not thought of that,’ Bjarni said after a silence filled with all the voices of a ship at sea; he found an odd comfort in the merchant’s words, an easing to the sense of rejection.

  ‘Na,’ said Heriolf, ‘I did not think you had.’ His face creased into its slow reflective smile. ‘You could do worse, I’m thinking, than take sword-service with Thorstein the Red.’

  The weather was worsening, and they had to lie up storm-bound for three days in the lee of Coll, so it was fine before Sea Cow came wallowing past Calf Island into the sheltered harbour of Mull; and all was not well with Hugin. The rags that bound his injured paw were beginning to be stained with evil-smelling brownish pus, and he was increasingly restless, his eyes cloudy and his nose dry and warm.

  ‘There must be a wise-woman, a healer of some kind, in the settlement,’ Bjarni said in response to Heriolf’s, ‘Whither away?’ He was scrambling ashore and hauling the big dog up beside him as soon as they had tied up to the timber jetty.

  ‘There will be,’ the merchant said, turning from the orders that he had been giving to his crew. ‘Bide while I see to the cargo; then come up with me to Thorstein’s Hall. After, we will find her.’

  ‘No,’ Bjarni said, Hugin’s hot head under his hand and the dog’s tongue curling round his thumb. ‘First I find the healer. Thorstein can wait.’

  Heriolf looked at him, on the edge of hard-held patience. ‘Aye well, you know best what things come first with you. Go you up to the Hall, all the same, but make for the Women’s House behind it. The Lady Aud keeps her own bower apart from the main Hall, but it is open for all corners. I reckon there’ll be someone among the women with the skills you are looking for.’

  So Bjarni slipped the bit of rope he kept for the purpose through Hugin’s collar, and set out alone save for the great hound limping three-legged at his side. Up from the ship-strand with its tall ship-sheds and slipways, rope-walk, smithy and timber stacks, into the warm huddle of the settlement. Up from the cold sea smells of fish and salt and pitch and timber into the warmer reek of the settlement, dung and hearth smoke and the fatty goodness of evening meals and the fainter inland smells of fern and heather coming down on the evening wind from the high moors, and he saw ahead of him further up the glen the unmistakable whale-backed mass of the Chieftain’s fine Hall standing guard, as it were, over all. Here and there faces turned to look at him as he passed, men seeing to a broken harness strap, women spinning in a house-place door, balms driving home the family pig from its daylong rooting. But strangers coming up from the sea were common enough in the settlements of Thorstein the Red.

  The hurdle gate in the quickset hedge of the Hall garth stood open and unguarded in the usual way and Bjarni looked in. A man mending a leather byrnie on the bench before the high-gabled Hall jerked a thumb over his shoulder when the stranger with the black dog checked to ask where he could find the Lady Aud.

  ‘The Women’s House is up there beyond the cookhouse apple tree, by the doorway. You can’t miss it.’

  Bjarni rounded the end of the Hall and found himself in the usual huddle of outbuildings, stables and byres, cookhouses, store-sheds and guest lodgings, and then the bower, the Women’s House, low-set under its thick heather thatch, and the wind-shaped apple tree at the gable end, the small russet apples catching the westering light among the salt-burned leaves. On the rough grass beneath it three saffron-haired girls were gathered about a creel of freshly-dyed wool; the eldest two, perhaps twelve and ten, hanging out the damp brown hanks to dry on lines strung between the lower branches, while the youngest sat close by, humming tunelessly to the saffron-striped kitten in her lap. They looked round at Bjarni as he passed, then went on with what they were doing.

  Beyond them the doorway stood wide on warm shadows and a flicker of firelight; and Bjarni came to the threshold and paused, looking in.

  The westering light lanced in through narrow horn windows under the thatch to mingle with the light of the fire on the central hearth and show what he knew must be the main chamber of the bower. It was full of quiet movement that had nothing of restlessness in it. A woman was weaving some patterned stuff at an upright loom set under the western windows where the lig
ht was good, and two girls sat spinning close by; another, her hair falling all about her hot face, was turning little flat barley-cakes on the bake-stones of the hearth at the heart of it all. A fifth, older and seemingly cast in a larger and richer mould than the rest, was sitting in a low carved chair beside the fire, seeming to be mending a tear in the shoulder of a great wine-red cloak lined with wolfskin. Her own gown was of some rich stuff the dark almost sullen green of hill-juniper, held with a glint of gold at the neck, and a pair of beautiful brindled deerhounds lay beside her in the folds of it. Her head was bent over her work; the hair, drawn-back and knotted like any country woman’s to be out of the way, must have been crow-black in her youth, but looked now as though somebody had raked ashy fingers through it.

  Easy enough to tell which was the Lady Aud; Aud the Deep-Minded, who had once been Queen to King Olaf the White of Dublin, by that rich gown and the fact that hers was the only chair. But Bjarni, standing on the threshold and looking in, felt that he would have known her in a room of women wearing the same gown and seated in the same chair.

  The thrum of the spindle and the lazy chatter of women’s voices fell silent, and one of the hounds growled softly. Bjarni felt the vibration of an almost silent growl in answer pressed against his own leg, and gave a small jerk to Hugin’s leash. He could do without a dogfight at this moment.

  ‘Peace, Vig! Peace, Asa!’ said a voice, deep for a woman’s. The Lady Aud looked up, and Bjarni found himself meeting the gaze of the darkest eyes he had ever seen, faintly slant-set in an old and beautiful broad-boned face. He had heard it said that the Lady Aud had skraeling blood, the blood of the far North, in her veins, and that was maybe where her wise-powers came from . . .

  ‘Come your way in, stranger, and tell the thing that brings you here.’

  And keeping a light hold on Hugin’s collar, Bjarni advanced into the broad chamber to stand beside the hearth. ‘Lady, I am Bjarni from the ship of Heriolf Merchantman in the haven. It was told to me that I might find here someone with the skill and kindness to mend my dog of a wound to his paw that he took five days ago?’ He looked anxiously into her face. ‘He’s a good dog – worth the saving.’