The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  And turning back as she bade him, Bjarni was aware for the first time of the pain in his fang-gashed shoulder and blood spreading through the torn stuff of his sark, aware too of the reddened blade in his hand.

  When Angharad had him stripped to the belt and squatting by the hearth where the light fell strongest, she pushed up the sleeves of her gown, and set water to heat among the peats, while she brought clean rags and salves from the kist in her sleeping place, and bathed and searched the gashes, dripping in some fierce spirit and spreading on a dark, evil-smelling salve that burned like fire.

  Looking from her frowning intent face to the ruthless work of her hands, Bjarni told her, not complaining but purely as a matter of fact, ‘You are hurting me – more, I think, than you are given to hurting the folk who come to you for tending. Is that because of your kinsman’s coming?’

  ‘If you mean because I am angry or afraid, no!’ Angharad said, reaching for a strip of clean rag. ‘There are ills on a dog’s teeth that must be knuckle-kneaded out before they may breed poison in the wound they make.’ She began to bandage his shoulder and upper arm.

  Bjarni watched her. She had not denied that she was angry or afraid, and he knew she was, with good cause, all tied in with the sense of danger that he had known here all summer long; and having for its centre, the eye of the storm, the young man on the red horse who had left the dead hound on the threshold. ‘I am sorry I had to kill the dog,’ he said, ‘I have made you an enemy – or added to the venom of the one you had already.’

  Angharad knotted the bandage. ‘Tomorrow we will let the air get to it, but for tonight best keep the salves close.’

  ‘If I carry sword for you, I would fain know the ill that I may have to fight with it. Your kinsman wanted you years ago, and he wants you still – I saw that in his eyes when he looked at you. Yet he bade you go back to the Holy Sisters, and I do not think that I understand.’

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ Angharad said. ‘He is greedy, as I told you before, land-greedy. He wanted me even without the land, then when my brother died and I came home to run the farm, he thought he might have both of us, and when he found that he could have neither, the want began to fester inside of him – oh, long before you and Hugin came out of the storm. He wants both still, but if he can drive me back behind the walls of my nunnery, he might at least have the land.’ She laughed a little wildly, her hand going to her throat. ‘But he will not take me by force, lest this on my neck really is a witch mark, after all.’

  She turned to the black dog, who had lain by the fire pawing at his torn muzzle. ‘And you now, my black darling.’

  And while Bjarni held the dog against his knee, she bathed and salved his hurts, which were many, for beside his muzzle and fang-slashed throat he had a long shallow gash on his flank, and one ear flying like a war flag from the thick of battle.

  When it was done, Bjarni went to get rid of the dead hound in the garbage pit behind the house-place, and cleaned his dirk by stabbing it again and again into the peat-stack. The broken-down thornwork would have to wait till morning.

  But the events of the night were not yet over. When he came in again through the foreporch, the house place was full of rasping breathing not like anything that he had heard there before. And Angharad was kneeling beside Gwyn in his shadowy corner, the torch again in hand, the fingers of her other hand resting, somehow as though she were listening through them, against the old man’s neck.

  She looked up as Bjarni crossed to stand beside her, thrusting Hugin’s enquiring muzzle back with his heel.

  ‘He knew what was going on around him earlier this evening,’ she said. ‘I am thinking that he is beyond that now.’

  The old man’s face had darkened. He lay staring straight upwards, but not as though he saw the rafters overhead; his mouth sagged open, and from it came those terrible snoring breaths. ‘Is there nothing that you can do?’ Bjarni asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing save be with him, so that if he knows anything, he knows that he is not alone.’

  Old Gwyn died soon after dawn, with the green plover calling over the head of the valley.

  Angharad carried out for him the ancient tasks of womenkind for their dead, keening for him the while, according to the custom of her people, as she made the old man ready for burial. And all the while, Bjarni, not quite knowing why, stood in the doorway, his sword across his thighs, staring down at the valley as though on guard.

  When all was finished and the old man made decent and dignified, he asked, ‘Will I fetch a priest – if you tell me where to find him . . .’

  She shook her head almost fiercely. ‘He would not come to this house. Nor will I hand Gwyn’s body over to the folk down-valley, who like enough would deny him Christian burial as my servant.’

  ‘What then?’ Bjarni asked.

  ‘When the light goes, we will take him up to High Cross and bury him there.’ She sounded as though the thing were clear in her mind and had been settled long since. ‘It is a place he loved in his herding days, and surely the cross will make it hallowed ground.’

  So when the light began to fade, Bjarni harnessed Swallow to the farm sled, and brought it round to the house-place door, and they laid the old man’s body on it wrapped in the blanket under which he had lain so many months. And with the first dark they set out up the valley, Angharad going ahead to lead the horse, Bjarni bringing up the rear with a spade on his shoulder, Hugin loping at his heel, to make sure the sled’s rigid burden was not jerked off over the uneven ground.

  At the head of the valley where the rough pasture was islanded with heather and furze, the ancient Celtic cross had stood through the lifetimes of many men, forming a boundary mark for the farm, and close before it Angharad brought Swallow to a halt. From up here the light of the day still lingered in a bar of dim gold far out beyond Anglesey. But the moon was coming and going through the drift-light for them to see what they had to do. Bjarni unslung the spade from his shoulder and began to dig.

  It was hard going at first through the tough surface net of old heather roots, but lower down the earth was softer. The sound of steady digging and earth cast aside was almost lost in the soughing of the wind across the heather, save for a sharp ringing note from time to time when the blade caught a stone. Presently he had opened up a large pit too deep to be dug from the surface, and was standing in it, flinging the spadefuls of earth over his shoulder.

  The smell of the earth was in his nostrils, and the sound of the earth heavy behind him as it fell. Hugin would have joined in, and had to be thrust off.

  ‘That’s deep enough,’ said Angharad.

  Bjarni straightened up and judged the depth of the grave in which he stood, then nodded. ‘Aye, it will keep off the wolves.’

  He climbed out and between them they lifted Gwyn’s body from the sled, and slid him, as gently as might be, down into his grave. At the last moment Angharad, who had been hunting among the heather while Bjarni dug, bent down and laid a loose handful of harebells on the man’s blanket-covered breast. Then with spade and hands they shovelled back the earth, pressing it well down, and adding the heather last of all. The old man’s body was so thin that the ground scarcely rose higher than it had done before he was laid in it. By daylight there would be signs, for any who came looking. But who would come? No one would know that the old man was dead, and no one but the two of them would ever care.

  It was very quiet now, only the wind, and somewhere far off in the woods below an owl calling, and the faintly raised place before the High Cross the quietest thing of all.

  And against the quiet Angharad was speaking words in the strange stately tongue that he had heard her use for timing her potions.

  She went to the old horse and got him and the sled turned, and they set off down the valley. Where the valley looked westward round a shoulder of the moor, the sky was lighter than it should be, and the wrong colour, a reddish glow behind the dark shoulder of the moors. Bjarni saw it the instant before
Angharad, and checked, putting out a hand to check her also.

  ‘What –’ she began, and then, ‘Oh no! Oh, Holy Mother, no!’

  ‘Wait here with Swallow,’ Bjarni said, and started forward again up the gentle slope towards that angry stain that was growing stronger in the sky.

  For answer, she flung Swallow’s bridle over the branch of a tattered hawthorn tree, and in a few steps she was beside him again. He did not argue; he had learned now that there was little use in arguing with Angharad; and anyhow this was not the moment to be wasting time in argument, so they went on together. ‘Down!’ he whispered as the slope levelled just before the skyline, and they covered the last axe-throw of distance on their bellies. On the lip of the ridge they lay still, looking down, Bjarni with his hand on Hugin’s collar, half strangling the great hound into silence. Below them, across in the pasture, the steading lay clear, horribly clear in leaping flamelight. Byre and barn were blazing, and even as they watched, fire sprang up from the house-place roof, bending over before the wind. Figures too, dark and flamelit and running with bits pulled from the blazing buildings to spread the fire, and amongst them, on the edge of the firelight, urging them on as it seemed, a figure in a great crimson cloak on a red horse; and on the wind, the sound of voices, crazed voices, shouting, screaming, ‘Burn her! Burn the witch!’

  Bjarni drew a deep whistling breath through his nose, and for a moment his free hand went itching for his sword hilt, his whole instinct to go leaping down across the home pasture and fling himself into what was going on there, and kill and kill and kill, beginning with the rider of the red horse. That way, he would account for a good few of them before they pulled him down.

  But once dead, what use would he be to Angharad? He fought the rage down in him, and his free hand, going out, found the girl’s arm and gripped it. ‘Come away,’ he said.

  She started at his touch, as though she had not known that he was there at all, but then, without another word said, allowed him to draw her back from the ridge.

  Safely out of sight of the steading, he got up and, catching her hand, pulled her after him. She came unresisting, but not as though she were afraid or escaping or even aware of what she left behind her.

  And when they got back to the hawthorn tree she stood beside it unmoving while he searched about for the spade and drove it deep among the roots of the heather, and unharnessed Swallow from the sled.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he asked. ‘Better, maybe, not to risk tiring Swallow until we have need.’

  She did not answer, but fell into step beside him as he turned eastward, leading the old horse and with Hugin padding at their heels.

  A while before dawn they struck what remained of a paved road, knowing it by the ditches on either side and the feel of a metalled surface under the heather. Maybe it was one of the roads that the Redcrests had made. Bjarni had heard of such things. No good to ask Angharad walking beside him as she had done all night, like a creature bound by some dark spell out of the Hollow Hills.

  Anyhow, the road seemed to run more or less in the right direction. Just on the edge of dawn it brought them to the ford of a narrow stream coming down from the high moor between banks tangled and arched over with hazel and rowan. And turning aside from the road they came some way downstream to a backwater that broadened into a small sky-reflecting pool.

  A good place to pause for a while, out of sight of the road – if anyone had used it this past hundred years. He brought his little party to a halt, and the moment she was no longer moving forward, Angharad folded at the knees and sat down. Bjarni left her where she was, sitting between the roots of a rowan tree, her arms around her updrawn knees, and staring straight before her, and took Swallow over to the pool, watering him and, knee-hobbling him with his rein, turning him loose to graze. By the look of it there might be fish for tickling in the tail of the pool. But first he went back to see what if there was anything more he could do about Angharad. He was getting sorely worried, wondering how long it was going to be before she stopped being like a shadow and started to look out of her eyes again.

  Maybe it would be better for her to go on like this for a while . . . But when he got back to the place where he had left her, Angharad was sitting up and looking about her like somebody just wakened from a deep sleep. The first light of a low sunrise was slanting under the rowan branches into her face. ‘So it was not a dream,’ she said when she saw him.

  Bjarni shook his head, suddenly very weary, and folded up beside her. ‘No, it was not a dream.’

  ‘I must go back.’

  ‘You can’t go back,’ he said heavily.

  ‘I must. I can’t leave the farm to Rhywallan’s taking.’

  ‘I am not thinking that you have much choice,’ Bjarni told her flatly. ‘You couldn’t even marry your kinsman now.’

  ‘I never could – or would,’ Angharad said in a small hard voice. ‘But I must go back. Gwyn Coed was my father’s and his father’s father’s.’

  And he realised a little desperately that he had not even dented her resolve. Anxiety made his voice a little rough. ‘Land is but land, and somewhere, always, there is another land-take to be made, with fire carried round it. With Gwyn gone to his rest, there is nothing left to fall living into your kinsman’s hand.’

  ‘Except the ducks,’ said Angharad on a sound between a laugh and a whimper.

  ‘Grief is on me that we could not save the ducks. We have saved Swallow.’ To his own surprise he put out his left hand, a little clumsily, and set it over hers. ‘I will take you back to your nunnery if you’d have it that way. If you’re not for the Holy Sisters, then there’s not much you can do but come back to Rafnglas with me.’

  Until that moment he had not thought what he was going to do with Angharad, where he was going to take her, only that he had to get her away from the burning farm; and he heard his own voice saying the words as though they were not quite his own, and he was as surprised as it seemed that she was. She pulled her hand from under his and looked at him with her brows up. ‘And what makes you think that I would marry with a blue-eyed barbarian?’

  Anger and hurt took Bjarni by the throat. ‘Who spoke of marriage? You have not even a dowry!’

  For a moment they looked at each other, on the verge of a scene that might have put bitterness between them for all time. Then Angharad said, with a hand going to the marred side of her neck in a familiar gesture, ‘Nor any beauty to take its place.’

  And the moment tipped over into something else, and Bjarni swallowed his own hurt and anger to take hers from her. ‘Tha’s bonny enough for me, though,’ he mumbled awkwardly. And suddenly he was realising something that he had not realised before; that while he came of a people who could uproot easily, whose home was as much the sea as the land, she was of another kind. And save for the nunnery years she had known no home, no familiar place, but the valley and the farmstead that now lay in black ruin behind her. She was flung out into a strange world that held nothing familiar, a cold place; he could feel the cold in her. He was the only thing she knew in it; and though they had worked together through the summer, and come close in many ways, he was still a stranger to her in others.

  He searched around in his weary mind for the right thing to do, the right thing to say. He was not practised in love talk, but suddenly his arms were round her and his face buried in the side of her neck, speaking softly where the red flare was.

  ‘I have done something that I never did before. Last night I ran from a fight for your sake. Because I would not see you killed.’

  And this time she did not draw away. Instead she put her arm round his neck, and he felt the beginning flicker of warmth, of life in her. ‘I have a dowry to bring,’ she said with a kind of weary laughter. ‘I have a horse and a ring that cures warts.’

  ‘And that’s a fine dowry after all,’ Bjarni said as they slipped down into the growing warmth of the streamside grass.

  23

  The Return

  IT WA
S LATE in the autumn when Bjarni brought them all down to Eskdale and turned seaward down the long winding drift-way that linked the older and lower steadings of Rafn’s settlement. The journey behind them had not been so long, as journeys go, but they had made slow travelling across high moors and through forest land so dense that even when they had the firmness of a Redcrests’ road underfoot, it was as though no mortal had ever passed that way before them. They had travelled slowly, trapping game and tickling trout for food as they went, sometimes stopping for a whole day to rest Swallow; once, in vile weather, claiming shelter from a solitary holy man, though of what faith even he did not seem quite sure. Once a shuffling brown bear came out of the forest too near to the camp fire, setting Hugin raving, which they had to drive away with a flaming branch. More than once driven eastward by mountains or unfordable rivers, they had seemed to lose the sea – the only thing that Bjarni really knew about his way back to Rafnglas was that he must keep in touch with the sea always on the left – and he almost doubted whether he was going to get back at all.

  Yet here they were at last, towards evening on a day with drifting skies, with the wind booming through the woods, the burn that they followed swimming yellow with fallen birch leaves, coming down into Eskdale.

  Most of the way they had walked, leading Swallow, occasionally riding and then never more than one of them at a time. But at the first boundary-stone of the in-take, he mounted the old horse and took Angharad up before him, being minded to ride home as a man should do who had been away five years making his fortune. He had the feeling Angharad understood this and was laughing at him, but when he looked down at her, her face was perfectly grave.

  Grave still, she pulled off the old stocking cap and let her hair fall free, shaking it out over her shoulders. She too had an entrance to make.

  And so they rode down into Rafnglas.

  At that time of day there were not many to see them pass, for the men were still away in the in-take fields about their daytime work, and the women within doors making ready the evening meal. But once or twice an old woman spinning in a doorway, a child playing in the dust, a man with a bundle of faggots on his back, the smith with a plough-share on his anvil in the mouth of the wayside forge, looked up to see them go by; a tattered and journey-stained young man riding on an old horse, with a woman dressed like a man mounted before him in the curve of his bridle arm, and a huge black hound slightly lame in one paw loping beside them. The settlement had grown in five years, and there were faces that were strange to him. Others that he knew had grown; but none of them knew him. For a while he had somewhat the feel of a ghost returning to the place where he had lived long ago. He did not attempt to make himself known even to them; there would be time for all that later.