The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  With a quick breath of relief, Bjarni turned face forward again. But almost in the same moment he heard a stumbling crash and a curse from the man behind him. ‘What’s amiss?’ he called back.

  ‘Broken my shoe-thong – keep going – I’ll catch up with you –’

  Bjarni hesitated. A man stooping to mend a broken shoe-thong here would be open to any attack that might come upon him. But Orm could look out for himself well enough – his task was to get the chaplain safely back to camp.

  He went on, after the dark hooded shape that was beginning to blend into the twilight; listening all the while for the sounds of Orm coming up again behind. But all he heard was the faint panting sound that was the breathing of the forest itself – or his own fear.

  Then with a kind of coughing snarl, a giant blackness arose from the undergrowth straight ahead. For a splinter of time it was just blackness without shape, one of the troll kind, the terrors of the wildwood, eaters of men and the souls of men. Then it reared up roaring, taller than a man, and showed its proper shape; the shape of a great forest bear, newly woken from its winter sleep, famished and savage and in red-eyed mood to kill anything that came its way; maybe heading for the salmon run, until men had crossed its track.

  Bjarni saw the massive up-reared head and huge powerful forefeet raised. He saw Brother Ninian fling up his arms in a futile attempt to protect himself. He was not aware of whipping out his dirk, but it was naked in his hand as he sprang forward. He hurled the chaplain aside into a hazel bush, drawing back his arm to strike. The great head with gaping jaws towered above his own, the fetid stink of the huge brute was in his throat. The snarling roar seemed to shake the forest as he drove in the blade; and in the same instant, a blow from the huge forepaw on the side of his head sent him reeling, the curved claws raking down his cheek and shoulder. Bjarni, his head instinctively drawn sideways into his shoulder to protect the place where the life-blood runs through its channel close beneath the skin, heard through the furious roaring of the bear and his own yelling, Orm’s voice behind him and the sounds of the other man crashing through the undergrowth. Next instant the mighty forearms were around him, and the life was being crushed out of him against the hot hairy body. Somehow he managed to drag his arm free, the dirk still clenched in his hand, and drove in a second blow. The creature’s roaring changed to a kind of coughing snarl – blood began to come out of its gaping jaws; then another dirk struck in beside his own, the crushing grip about his ribs slackened, and the whole hairy mass sagged forward like a mountain falling.

  Bjarni was underneath the fallen mountain and its blackness was flowing up, up through him. There was blood everywhere, the smell of it hot and rank, his own or the bear’s, he did not know which. He did not know anything very clearly. But the great twitching weight was being heaved off him, and he was being dragged clear. He had no idea of time passing, nor of the order in which things happened, but he heard voices, Orm’s and the chaplain’s, without any idea of what they said. He felt the chill of river-water sluicing over him, and his shoulder being lashed up with strips from somebody’s sark, probably his own.

  And then somehow he was on his feet on ground that lifted and fell under him like the deck of a galley in a swell, with his arms across other men’s shoulders so that they took most of his weight, which reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what. His head felt as though there was a swarm of bees in it, and he couldn’t think through the buzzing that they made.

  ‘The bear,’ he mumbled, ‘just a bear after all.’

  ‘The bear’s dead,’ someone said. ‘We’ll fetch it later if the wolves don’t get it first. The thing now is to get you back to camp.’

  He had no clear remembrance of getting back to camp at all; but a time came when he was back within the stockade, and there were faces around him in the light of a torch that someone had brought, and a smother of voices. And then the Lady Aud’s voice clear among the rest, bidding him be brought into the store-room behind the longhouse.

  Then he was lying on piled skins in the midst of a pool of torchlight and Muirgoed, with her patient horse’s face bent close above him, was tending the gashes to his neck and jaw and shoulder, while Erp kneeling beside her held his arms tilted outward to keep the wounds open for thorough bathing. There had only been a kind of numbness in his shoulder, but now he felt as though he had been branded with hot irons, and quite suddenly the bee-buzzing in his head became booming darkness that swallowed up the torchlight . . .

  The next thing he saw was the ash-coloured light of morning beyond the outer door-hole of the bothy. He had the kind of headache that came of drinking too much heather-ale, and breast and ribs and shoulder felt as though a galley had been launched across him. Exploring with his free hand, he found bandage-linen, and the memory of the bear came back, and close behind it the memory of Brother Ninian with his arms flung up against the huge darkness with the snarling jaws.

  Something, someone, moved beside him, and for a moment his heart lurched into his throat. But it was only Muirgoed with fresh bandage-linen in her hands. ‘Brother Ninian?’ he croaked.

  It was the Lady Aud, standing behind her, who answered. ‘It is well with Brother Ninian, and he is even now giving thanks to God for his preservation.’ A faint note of amusement crept into her voice. ‘I also give thanks to God for my chaplain’s life; but it is in my mind that something of my thanks is due also to you.’

  Bjarni mumbled something in reply, but scarcely took in what she said, leaving it, as it were, to be taken out and looked at another time.

  Later in the day, when Muirgoed had tended his raked flesh and fed him barley-gruel with something bitter-tasting in it, and he had slept again, he woke again to a feeling of great quietness not unlike the quietness he had known that last morning on Iona. There was a small seal-oil lamp burning in the corner of the bothy, and beyond the door-hole the dusk was blue, with a first star hanging above the dark shape of the wildwood. A wonderful blue, deep and yet translucent as though the light were shining through it from the other side. Bjarni had never seen such blueness, and yet – it reminded him of something – somewhere – a long time ago. He lay wondering what it was: and then suddenly he had it – his blue glass dolphin that he had left in the glen where he had buried it, five years ago. Every detail of the glen, the birch trees and the narrow brown brawling beck, was suddenly clear to him. Five years, and at either end of them a holy man, one dead because of him, one alive because of him. And now the quietness; and the blue beyond the store-shed door . . .

  Afterwards he wondered whether it was because he had quite nearly been dead himself such a short while ago that he had the quietness and the feeling of one skin less than usual between him and the next life; and of having come to the place for staying quite still for a breath of time and then making a fresh start. But most men came close enough to being dead a few times in their lives: more likely it had been something in the gruel that Muirgoed had given him. At the time he did not wonder about it at all, but just accepted it.

  Sleep took him back again; and the next time he awoke, the world had returned to its familiar everyday self. But he did not quite forget . . .

  He lay in the store-shed for four days, sleeping a good deal of the time, tended by Muirgoed and by Erp, while the last preparations for the Iceland faring went on all about him. He began to sleep less, the claw marks on his cheek and shoulder were healing cleanly, and the raging headache he had first woken with had faded to an echo of pain somewhere just inside his skull. On the fifth morning he began to be restive and started demanding his spare sark so that he could get up. ‘Not yet,’ Muirgoed said. ‘Bide one more day.’

  And Bjarni subsided, grumbling. Later he would be alone, then he would get up and wrap the sealskin rug around his nakedness and go and find his spare sark for himself. But maybe Muirgoed, who had nursed other young men in her time, recognised the rather too sudden giving-in, and knew what it meant. At all events, Bjarni found himself very se
ldom left alone in the hours that followed. Some while after noon, men arrived from Thorstein’s settlement, and Aud must go to welcome them and discuss the matters that had brought them there, with Muirgoed to get food and drink for them, while Erp was away seeing to some trouble amongst the sled horses. Bjarni, gathering something of what was happening, was just about to take his chance when the small figures of Lilla and Signy appeared through the door-hole, and squatted down on their heels side by side at the foot of his makeshift bed. They had been in and out a few times in the past days, bringing his food and holding the wound-salve for Muirgoed when she came to dress his shoulder, for they were of an age now where they must become used to such things. But this was different. This time they had come to stay.

  Bjarni glowered at them. ‘And what is it that you do here?’

  ‘Muirgoed and our grandmother bade us come,’ Signy, the elder of the two, explained clearly and kindly. ‘We are to bide here until someone comes back, to make sure that you do not get up – because you are to bide still one more day, Muirgoed said.’

  ‘And if I get up all the same, you will stop me?’

  ‘But you will not do that, will you?’ Signy said.

  And Lilla put in beseechingly, ‘Please, let you not – because you are in our care.’

  Bjarni drew his knees to his chin under the sealskin rugs, and sat looking at them while they sat and looked back. For the moment it was in his mind to get up all the same. But to do that would make the bairns look small and foolish, not able to carry out the task that had been given to them. And fool that he was, he couldn’t do that – which was exactly what the Lady Aud and her bower woman were relying on.

  Lilla, who had something bundled in her arms, pushed back the folds of her cloak and took out a harp. ‘We brought this. We thought maybe you would tell us a story or make us a song, to pass the time,’ and she leaned forward and propped it against his knee.

  Anything, Bjarni thought, would be better than sitting and staring at each other until rescue came. He took up the small well-worn instrument and settled it as well as he could onto his knee and into the hollow of his good shoulder. He could handle a harp as well as the next man, no better, but as well as most; and even with one arm not much use to him, he could probably make some kind of strumming. But any song or story that he knew they would have heard over and over again.

  ‘Tell about trolls,’ demanded Lilla.

  ‘Tell us about you, when you were our age,’ said Signy, clearly seeing his problem and willing to help him out of it.

  So, striking the odd flight of notes from the badly-tuned harp from time to time, when the points in the story seemed to call for it, Bjarni told them about the time when he was a boy in Norway, before ever he came west-over-seas; told them about the time that he and his friend Arva had decided to make their fortunes by breaking into the ancient burial house on the moors above the settlement where it was said that a king lay buried with his treasures of gold and fine weapons all about him. In actual truth, the adventure had not been very exciting, for all they had found, after many spells of secret digging where a warren of gorse bushes hid their work, had been a pot full of charred bones and an ancient dagger eaten through with rust. But with the eager faces of Lilla and Signy before him, he found himself improving the story as he went along. He added a battle with a troll-woman for Lilla; he added a storm that made the sky seem full of rushing black wings – and the bones and rusted dagger became a kingly skeleton clad in a sark of ring-mail as fine as a salmon skin and a helmet with a face-mask set with garnet eyebrows, and all about him cups and swords and horse gear all of solid gold, so much gold that they had had to fetch a ship’s awning to carry it away in. The story grew and blossomed as it went along, as Bjarni discovered more and more that he had the story-telling skill in him that he had not known he possessed before, with the story-teller’s ability to improve on the truth.

  ‘What happened to the treasure?’ Signy asked when the story was done.

  ‘Ah now,’ Bjarni said slowly, to gain time. And then the answer came to him. ‘Harald Finehair, the King, got to hear of it; and that was the end of the treasure so far as we were concerned.’

  His listeners nodded sadly. They knew Harald Finehair’s reputation among the men who had come west-over-seas to get clear of him. And Lilla said, ‘Even the blue glass dolphin?’

  Bjarni had not been aware of putting his blue glass dolphin among the story treasure. He must have done it without thought, simply because it was there, although he had scarcely thought of it for five years, a small private image. ‘Er, no,’ he said, ‘I hid the dolphin and when I came west-over-seas I brought it with me.’

  ‘Have you got it still?’ Lilla said, while in the same breath Signy demanded, ‘Show us!’

  Bjarni shook his head; he was tired and the lovely brightness of invention was leaving him. He went back to telling more or less the truth. ‘I have not got it with me. When I took my sword and left Rafnglas, I buried it for safe-keeping in a place I would not be forgetting, a little side glen below the moors – good farming land it would be – and left it behind me.’

  ‘But you’ll go back for it, one day?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Bjarni said and made a flighting of notes on the harp.

  A small movement in the door made him glance that way. Erp stood there with a piece of hauling-harness in his hand and his head bent at a faintly listening angle.

  On the last evening before they set out to get Seal Maiden down-river, when the sleds were already laden, an evening of squally rain and a west wind blowing through the tree tops, Bjarni sought word with the Lady Aud in the longhouse. His shoulder was stiff and he still felt as though a galley had been launched across him, but the ground was steady under his feet once more, and he could stand before her without swaying.

  She sat beside the fire, the last of the kists and bundles around her, waiting for the morning. Muirgoed and the two granddaughters were moving about journey tasks in the farther shadows, but the Lady Aud sat on her stool gazing into the fire, her hands palm-up and empty in her lap. It was almost the first time that he had seen her sit beside a fire without something in her hands.

  She looked up after he had stood waiting before her a few moments. ‘Bjarni Sigurdson, you have something that you would be saying to me?’

  ‘Lady,’ Bjarni said, ‘I have carried it to the best that was in me, I will carry it still until we come to the coast, but on the day you sail for Iceland, let you give me back my sword-service, that I may carry it otherwhere.’

  The Lady Aud looked at him with her strong brows raised a little. ‘The hunger for strange seas is on you?’

  ‘No, the hunger for land – a land-take of my own.’

  ‘There is good land to be had in Iceland – or are you wishing to bide with the Caithness settlement?’

  ‘My five years are up, and I am free to go back to my own settlement,’ Bjarni said.

  ‘So-o. The homing hunger. It comes to many of us, from time to time.’

  ‘Also, I have a dog waiting for me on Mull, and a message that I have carried with me undelivered these three years past.’

  ‘And these be all good reasons,’ said the Lady Aud. ‘So, come to me on the tide-line on the day Seal Maiden sails for Iceland, and you shall have back your sword-service and your pay.’

  A few days later, on the landing-beach below Dungadr’s stronghold, where the Lady Aud and her women had sheltered while Sea Maiden and Fionoula were provisioned and made ready for sea, a sizeable crowd was gathered, Picts and Northmen. Dungadr himself had come down with his hearth companions for the final leave-taking, and with him Groa and the women of the household. Groa, with her striped cloak flung back despite the thin spring wind, carrying herself proudly like a ship with the wind filling her sail. Before summer’s end there would be a new young one at the Chieftain’s hearth.

  And then for the last time Bjarni stood before the Lady Aud, where she had called him a little apart from the rest, t
o receive back his sword-service. ‘Are you still of the same mind?’ she asked.

  ‘I am still of the same mind, Lady’

  ‘So, then take your pay.’ She gave him a small pouch of soft crimson leather that jingled pleasantly as it passed from her hand to his.

  ‘My thanks, Lady,’ he said, and would have stowed it in his belt, but she stopped him, smiling. ‘Open and check it. Never take your pay unseen.’

  Bjarni opened the purse and tipped the contents into his palm. There were three gold coins, one of them showing a head covered with laurel leaves, a length of silver chain and several small coins and metal fragments. Not over-generous, but just and fair, for the paying off of a mercenary. Much the same as he would have got from Red Thorstein.

  ‘Fair pay?’ she said.

  ‘Fair pay,’ he agreed, tipping the coins back into their pouch and storing it into his belt.

  ‘So then, now a gift,’ said Lady Aud, ‘a gift such as a fighting man should receive, who has deserved well of his lord.’ And she brought from under her great cloak a long bundle wrapped in oily fleece. She turned back the folds and set in his hands a sword, the iron hilt wreathed and braided with silver wires, the pommel formed from a great lump of yellow amber; and when he drew it from the scuffed and age-worn horsehide sheath the blade sang against the metal lip in the way the very finest of smith’s work would do. A blade with ancient magic in its forging.

  Bjarni looked at it with the eyes of instant love. Then he felt a pang of disloyalty, and his gaze shifted to the serviceable blade already hanging at his belt. ‘I have a good sword of my own,’ he said. ‘One sword is enough for a man with only his own way to make.’