Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  “Well, if it pleases you now,” he said, “look your fill.”

  I crept to the edge and peered over. Far below, the fiery red muck rolled and spat like blood soup in a cauldron. I felt its scorching breath on my skin and sweat broke out on me. The stench of sulfur made my stomach heave.

  “Well, boy, d’you see them? The Old’uns? Sitting at their stone table, feasting, banging their mugs, roaring for ale? D’you see how they grin and howl at us? They wait for us, boy, they wait for us!”

  I stared until I could stand it no more. Weeping and retching from the fumes, I drew back from the edge. I had seen nothing. I shook my head, afraid to look at him.

  For a time he was silent, and then he said in a gentler voice, “You haven’t the sight, boy, and you’re better off without it. It’s a curse. If I could, I would never see again, for it can steal the heart from a man.” He sounded suddenly weary.

  “No, Father, don’t say so. Your heart is still in its place, ready to beat again. Believe me.”

  “Believe you? Why, what have you seen of the world?”

  “None of it, Father, I’m sorry.”

  He gazed at me in silence for a time. “Well, not your fault. Not your fault. Go away now, Odd. We’ll talk another time. Go home and sleep.”

  “What about you?”

  “I sleep best here.”

  I stood, uncertain what to do. He turned me around by the shoulders and I began to pick my way down the mountain track.

  “Odd,” he called after me, “the horse fought well?”

  “Like a hero, Father. I never had to touch him with the goad.”

  “You say so? Never touched him? Well, bravely done, boy. You are a stallion fighter. I was one once, too.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  I left him to the volcano, which he loved, and to the dead, with whom he spoke more easily than with the living. But I thought that, maybe, I had made a small beginning on our unfinished business.

  †

  The sun was high in the sky by the time I reached home. Mother and Vigdis were working in the garden, Gudrun was chasing piglets, Gunnar and the thralls were at work shoring up the hay barn’s sagging roof. My brother stared at me in frank curiosity as I passed. So did the others. Our mother, kneeling to pull out weeds, avoided my eyes. They all guessed where I had been.

  I went inside and threw myself down to sleep.

  4

  A Whisper from Another World

  Heyannir is the month of haymaking. In the home fields of Thorvaldsstead, the sweet-smelling hay grew as high as our heads. Brown-shouldered under the sun, we worked late into the white nights, Gunnar and I with the thralls, swinging our scythes in long straight lines across the field. Scraps of straw clung to our bodies, stuck in our hair, filled our nostrils and throats, and often we stopped to sluice ourselves with buckets of cold river water and shake our heads like wet dogs to fling away the droplets.

  Behind us followed the women and children, gossiping and playing as they gathered the hay with long-handled rakes, spread it on the racks to dry, and heaped it on the wooden sledges to be dragged by oxen to the barn.

  It’s hard work and happy work, haying.

  And dangerous. An open field is a bad place to be found by your enemies. Always, while we worked, we kept our weapons close at hand and posted a man on the ridge to watch for riders. But none came to molest us and the summer passed without incident. It was a better summer than many we had seen. We made three crops of hay and one each of barley and rye. Now winter could do its worst, but the animals would not starve and we would have enough to eat and drink.

  Meantime, the sheep grazed placidly in their upland pasture. We men took it in turns to spend a day and a night there, camping out in the little stone shieling that perched on the rim of the high valley. And Gudrun often sneaked away to join us. There was a certain hillock up there where elves lived and she was determined to surprise them into showing themselves. If an elf man wanted her for his bride, she told us, she would happily go with him into the hillside.

  I looked forward to these hours up in the pastures, too, but my love was no elf girl. Morag was an Irish woman, neither young nor old, with a strong thick body, an open face, and a giving nature. Thorvald had bought her as a child from a band of vikings who’d lifted her in a raid and brought her home to sell. We owned about a dozen thralls and treated them decently, feeding them good porridge every day and beating them rarely. When Morag was fifteen or so, Thorvald made her his concubine. However, when the melancholy grew so great in him that his spear would no longer rise to the challenge, he sent her back to the thralls’ quarters to be a bedfellow to Aelfric, his freedman. Morag resented this bitterly. Her revenge was to cuckold Aelfric, and not just with anyone, but with the master’s sons. She found us willing accomplices. First had been Gunnar, and now me.

  I liked Morag because she said my looks reminded her of her own people and she didn’t mind them a bit. On such flattery, I throve.

  As often as we could manage to find ourselves alone in meadow or pasture, I would assail her with my ardent young kisses and we would couple in a hot and hasty rush, she with her skirt under her chin, crooning as I rolled between her muscular thighs. Such moments came seldom enough and were too short. And sometimes they were not as private as we thought.

  One hot afternoon as we lay stretched on the earthen floor of the shieling, there came a muffled giggle from the doorway.

  With my trousers down, I lurched toward Gudrun Night-Sun. She danced out of reach before I could get my fingers around her neck.

  “Shame on you, Tangle-Hair,”—wagging her finger at me—“for tumbling dear old Morag, who’s practically one of the family, and do pull down your shirt, you look ridiculous. Now, what will you give me not to tell Father?”

  “It’s what I’ll give you if you do, you little sneak!”

  She would settle for nothing less than my best belt with the buckle of silvered brass, which happened, at that moment, to be around my ankles.

  Clasping that treasure around her, she raced away shrieking with merriment down the hillside.

  I was cross, but Morag chuckled and pulled me down to her again. “Never mind, darling,” she whispered into the hollow of my neck, “we’ll catch little sister here one day and pay her back.”

  It is frightening how words come true in ways we never meant.

  †

  As autumn drew to a close, we girded ourselves against the coming of the long nights. Now our mother took charge—marshaling her army of women and girls, and scolding the men out of her way.

  Jorunn Ship-Breast was as strong as a man, with a broad face, big hands, and shrewd blue eyes. It was said she’d been a beauty once, and you could still see a little of it when she smiled. For one smile of hers, she told us, young men had whiled away hours in her father’s hall. But it was the fierce, black-haired viking she’d chosen, and her father, of course, had been delighted to marry his only daughter into the family of a godi, one of the forty-eight chieftains of Iceland.

  But now she was nearing fifty, and her beauty was mostly gone. She had born ten babies and buried seven, had labored like an ox in the fields, had seen her bold young husband change into a hateful stranger—yet she had steadfastly refused to divorce him for his heathenism, even though her family begged her to. She was a brave-hearted woman such as only Iceland breeds, and it was her strength that held us together. I admired her more than loved her. What was in her secret thoughts, I never knew.

  Under her watchful eye, the thrall women poked the cakes of soot down from the rafters, scrubbed the tables with sand, and lay new straw on the floor. They made ale, seething the malted barley in foaming caldrons over hot stones; they churned the milk into tubs of butter and great yellow wheels of cheese; they packed our soiled clothes, stained with the summer’s sweat, onto the backs of the horses and carried them to the hot pools. Like an officer at the head of her column, rode Jorunn Ship-Breast, and it was four days’ scrubbing and
boiling before they marched triumphantly back.

  It came time now for Gunnar to go down to the coast and trade. Gunnar loved trading. Though he cared little for anyone’s religion, he’d gone to the trouble to have himself prime-signed by a priest, so that the Christian merchants would feel easier doing business with him. In his dealings he always made a shrewd bargain and never lost a friend.

  Often I had gone with him. But this year, though the name of Strife-Hrut was not mentioned aloud, it was understood that one of us should stay at the farm. Early one morning then, with all the packhorses loaded and four armed thralls to accompany him, he set out.

  As soon as they were out of sight we felt naked. Vigdis was tense, and her baby turned colicky, crying night and day. Thorvald kept himself in his smithy, hammering furiously all the day long at horseshoes and bucket hoops. I spent my days in the bog with a crew of thralls cutting peat for our winter’s fuel. And I never went out without my sword.

  A week passed, then two. Gunnar had never been gone as long as this. Fear gathered round us like a fog. I was just debating with myself whether to go after him when, about midday, we heard his halloo from the shoulder of the ridge where it slopes to meet the river. We looked up to see him on his sorrel mare, plunging down in a spray of stones with the pack animals skittering after.

  Springing from his horse, he swept Vigdis up in one arm, threw the other around our mother’s neck, and kissed them both. “It was a capital trip if I say it myself!” he laughed. “Wheat flour, dried fish, seaweed for our salt, all the usual, and more!”

  “Gunnar,” Vigdis squealed. “What have you done to your face?”

  “What—oh, this? Saw a Norwegian fellow with his beard combed to a point. Fancied it myself. And then I thought an earring would go nicely with it. What do you think?” He kissed her again and we all stood laughing at him. “But look here,” he said, “I’ve brought presents for you all. We need a bit of cheering up, don’t we?”

  With a flourish, he reached inside the folds of his cloak, playfully mumbled magic words, and materialized his treasures, one by one. “New combs of walrus-ivory for mother and Vigdis and—where’s the Night-Sun? Gone to find her elf-lover in the pasture? Well, she never combs her hair anyway. And for mother a breast-brooch, and for Vigdis three ells of fine linen to make me a shirt….”

  “Gunnar, the way you spend!” Vigdis scolded, but she was smiling in spite of herself.

  “And for Odd … now let me see … what have I done with it? Ah!” Turning away, he fumbled in his purse, then stretched out his closed fist to me.

  “Well, let loose of it,” I said, prying at his fingers until he opened them. In the hollow of his palm lay a silver coin, scarcely bigger than my thumbnail. I held it up to the sun, turning it this way and that, while the others crowded round.

  “Some great king for sure,” said Jorunn. “See his crown.”

  “And see how the eyes hold you,” said Vigdis.

  “Who is he, Gunnar?” we asked.

  Gunnar shrugged. “Won it at dice from a Saxon captain who had it from a Dane who had sailed far to the east. The Dane said it was Greek, but that was all he knew.”

  We studied it some more. One side of it bore the head and shoulders of a bearded man—gaunt, thin-lipped and solemn, who stared at us out of round eyes. The other side of the coin was covered with writing—half a dozen words in letters none of us had seen before.

  “They aren’t runes,” I said.

  “Nor priests’ writing,” said our mother.

  While they talked, I rubbed the little precious thing between my thumb and forefinger, trying to imagine what other fingers had touched it; fingers of gaunt, round-eyed men and women who glided in jeweled robes through unimaginable landscapes somewhere at the ends of the earth. My mother, laying her hand on my arm, begged me to treasure the coin for it was sure to bring me luck.

  Whatever luck it brought me was mixed of good and evil. I finally lost it during my years of slavery, long before I reached Golden Miklagard. Still, I happened to think of it one evening when I was strolling with the Empress Zoe in the gardens of the Great Palace. A tear trickled down her cheek to think that her grandfather’s face had reached the shores of Ultima Thule and stirred my young heart.

  We hadn’t noticed Thorvald trudging from the smithy until he was suddenly upon us. Gunnar turned quickly to rummage in a packsaddle and brought out a parcel wrapped in chamois. “The chisels, Father. The ones you wanted.”

  Thorvald let him put the chisels in his hand. They avoided each other’s eyes.

  “What’s that thing?” He took the coin from me and squinted at it. “Keep your Christian king out of my sight or I’ll take a hammer to him.” He flung it on the ground and stalked away.

  Gunnar clenched his fist and looked as if he would go after him, but Jorunn held him back, her eyes pleading. In embarrassed silence we all turned to unloading the horses.

  That evening, after an early supper, we sat with our ale horns, talking quietly across the long hearth, except for father who kept his usual silence while he whittled.

  “Did you hear anything of Hrut?” I asked Gunnar.

  “Only that he’s back from his summer trading voyage. They say Mord’s still got both his eyes, worse luck, though he isn’t so pretty to look at anymore.”

  There was a scratching on the outside of the door, close to the ground.

  “But what do you think?” Jorunn pressed him.

  “Well, it’s been four months, hasn’t it, and they haven’t stirred a finger against us. I expect we gave Strife-Hrut more of a fight than he’d bargained for.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “Or, don’t want to believe it, Odd?” asked my mother. “Must we feud to make you happy?”

  The scratching came again.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” said Vigdis, taking the baby from her breast and handing him to her husband to bounce. “Did you stop off to see my brothers?”

  Again, the scratching.

  Jorunn in exasperation said to Vigdis, who was nearest the door, “Daughter-in-law, shoo the pig away or let it in, I don’t care which.”

  Vigdis opened the door and screamed.

  5

  Blood for Blood

  Gudrun Night-Sun lay on the threshold, her face pressed against the stone, her hands clawing the ground. A trail of blood led out through the garden gate. Her face was dead white, the eyes glassy. She looked as though she had no blood left in her body—her dress was sodden with it. It oozed from a wound in her chest.

  Jorunn gathered her up and lay her on the wall bench. Thorvald stared at her, his eyes almost out of his head, then staggered away. I heard him groan.

  “Christ Jesus!” cried my mother. “How? Where was she?”

  She knelt beside Gudrun and lifted the blood-soaked dress from her legs. “Ahh!” she moaned when she saw the blood between her thighs where she had been ripped. “Baby, who did this to you?”

  Gudrun’s lips moved, but no sound came out. Only saliva bubbled at the corners of her mouth.

  Vigdis dashed to the river and came back with her hands full of moss to press against the wound. But we all knew it was too late for that.

  “Where was your sister?” Jorunn demanded of Gunnar and me.

  “Up at the shieling,” I said. “Looking for her elf lover.”

  “And dragged herself all this way?” Vigdis murmured. It seemed almost impossible.

  “Elves didn’t do this,” said Jorunn between her teeth, her breath coming short.

  “Trolls, then?” I said.

  “Or men no better than trolls,” Gunnar said.

  We looked at each other and knew.

  “I’m going to the shieling,” I said, reaching for my sword. “Father—?”

  But he had retreated to his high seat and wouldn’t look at us.

  “Leave him,” Gunnar snarled. He grabbed up a spear and ran out the door.

  I raced after h
im.

  In the high pasture we found a bloody shambles. Slaughtered sheep lay everywhere, and the bodies of the three young thralls who had been with her, too—all dead. Inside the hut, I noticed something glittering in a corner—my belt with the silvered buckle. They must have pulled it off her when they raped her. We ran farther up the slope to the rim of the valley and looked out. Nearly lost in the glare of the sun were some black specks moving rapidly away from us—toward the coast where Hrut’s farm lay.

  Back at the house we told what we had seen.

  “Send us after them, Father!” I cried.

  But he pressed his hands to his temples and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Send us, you useless, pitiful old man,” shouted Gunnar, nearly in tears, “or we’ll go anyway.”

  “No!” Thorvald backed away from us toward the door. “How do you know it was Hrut—doesn’t the whole world hate us? It might have been anyone. Time enough to act when the girl recovers.”

  “Recovers!” Jorunn hissed, kneeling by the body. “Husband, in Christ’s name….”

  With a sudden swift motion, he snatched his sword from the wall and planted himself in the doorway. He was breathing hard and sweating.

  “Listen to me, all of you! I know what you think of me, but I’m telling you the truth. Listen to me. We are defenseless. We have no allies, no friends. But this man, Hrut, isn’t he a Christman like the others? They’ll back him up. Oh, don’t I know how it’s done? They’ll combine against us. They’ll wipe us out. Can’t you see that? Except that we’ll not give them their chance—oh no, not for a few sheep, and thralls, and a … and a girl. We won’t let them destroy us just for that!”

  He swayed in the doorway, making menacing thrusts at us with his sword. His eyes were mad. We would have to kill him to get past him. Gunnar would have done it gladly but for our mother.