Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  Hoskuld and my father looked about, equally astonished.

  Jorunn did not lose a second. Snatching up a horn of mead, she abandoned her brother and ran to her husband’s side. His shoulders were bunched, and he was snorting like a bull.

  “Drink, Husband,” she urged, sitting down by him and putting the flagon to his lips. “Enough gloomy talk for one night. The young’uns are right to be impatient.”

  She covered his hand with hers and brought it slowly down to rest on her thigh and as she did so, looked past him and caught my eye.

  Every shade and hue of pain was in that look. She understood that this meeting, on which she had fastened all her hopes, was a disaster—that her husband was just possibly not as mad as she had thought, and her brother, perhaps, not as wise. Between these two angry men she did not know where to turn. The only thing certain was that we dared not let them come to blows.

  We sang ourselves hoarse. Finnbogi’s Daughter has a great many verses, each dirtier than the last, and after a little, you could see the tension begin to go out of Thorvald’s shoulders and the fingers uncurl around the hilt of his knife. Even his foot began to move absently in time to the music. Who would have believed it? Jorunn drew a deep breath and slowly let it out. It would be all right now.

  Hoskuld, on his side, had regained a little of his composure. Katla hovered about him in her fawning way, patting his forehead, arranging his ruffled hair until, exasperated, he pushed her away.

  When Gunnar’s song was done, Kalf brought out his bone whistle, which he always carried on a cord around his neck, and began to pipe. He piped The Dun Mare, which, after a few times through, turned into Old Haakon at the Well, and so on, without stop through half a dozen more.

  Gunnar led Vigdis to the middle of the floor and they danced together, face to face, hands on one another’s shoulders, as they used to do in their courting days. And soon others in the hall joined in, mostly men partnered with other men, as sailors do, for there weren’t enough women to go round. After a while, my mother prodded me to dance with Katla Thin-Hair, which I did, though she held me at arm’s length with the tips of her fingers and gazed steadily over my shoulder with a look of distaste. Kalf doubled over with laughter watching us.

  There was one fellow in particular, one of Hoskuld’s hired men, who caught my eye with his antics. His face was battered, pockmarked, and villainous, and his close-cropped hair was as spiky as a patch of thorns. I believed he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen. I had noticed him earlier in the evening, sitting well back from the fire, speaking to none nor spoken to by any, with a sort of dreamy look in his eyes. And yet I felt he paid very close attention to everything said and unsaid.

  Now he leapt into our midst, with a savage grin splitting his face, and all alone began to execute the wildest and funniest capers with great skill, not clumsily or drunkenly. He kept this up for a good long time, until just as suddenly as he had begun, he stopped and withdrew again to his place in the back.

  What a strange man, I thought, but soon dismissed him from my mind.

  As the evening passed, my eye strayed now and then to my parents. Gunnar’s little babe had gone to sleep in Jorunn’s lap. Thorvald’s hand rested on the child’s head, and he ran a calloused thumb gently back and forth over its pink scalp. The two of them did not look at each other or speak, and yet something was there between them. I caught myself wondering, not for the first time, what secrets these two shared that we children would never know.

  Uncle Hoskuld was no more a dancing sort of man than a poetical one, but he put on a show of good spirits, grateful, I think, for the respite. In truth, we were all glad to send our troubles away for a little while. They were greater troubles than we had thought, and we made ourselves the merrier to forget them.

  7

  All Iceland Assembles

  Our great-great-grandfathers, newly come from Norway, fashioned a government for our kingless land: a thing, an assembly, to be held during two weeks in June on a wide, well-watered plain in the southwest quarter. Here, free men come together to hear the laws recited and sit in judgment on their peers. Nowhere else in the world does such a gathering exist.

  Approaching, as we did, from the east, you ride down into a grassy plain that stretches for miles, bounded on the south by the vast sheet of Thingvalla Lake and cut by the meandering streams of the Axe river. The plain is a sea of color: the tents and booths, roofed with homespun cloth, where the folk from Skagafjord and Snaefellsnes and Ljosawater, from the Eastfjords, from Breidavik and Eyr, and every inaccessible corner of our island are encamped. In a land without towns, without villages even, we create, briefly, a city of the whole nation.

  At the far edge of this plain you can see a thin ribbon of black. As you draw closer, that ribbon grows thicker and darker, and becomes, at last, the immense black and jagged rampart of Almanna Gorge. The walls and floor of this gorge, dense with shouting and jostling farmers, is the arena, the cockpit where we must stand and face our enemies.

  My uncle’s booth was a snug little cabin of turf with a roof of striped awning that he brought with him each year for the purpose. Besides the godis, not many kept such permanent quarters on the plain. Our family had had one once, too, but it had long since passed from our hands along with Thorvald’s chieftaincy. Here we stopped while Kalf and I got Hoskuld’s awning up and all the baggage unloaded with the help of his two servants. One of these was that ugly man who had performed the wild dance. I heard my uncle call him Stig. He seemed to me, as before, an uncomfortably silent and watchful fellow and disinclined to talk when I tried to sound him. I wondered why Hoskuld kept him.

  We pitched our own two little tents some ways away, and soon had a fire going. We all supped together on the leavings of yesterday’s dinner and tried our best to be cheerful.

  Kalf, washing down a last hunk of bread and mutton fat, licked his fingers, and said, “Tangle-Hair, let’s explore. Who’ll come along?”

  To our great relief the old folks begged off and only Gunnar, before Vigdis could get a good grip on him, jumped up, shouting, “Off to the fair!” and with an arm around each of us, plunged into the roiling crowd.

  Everyone was out and about, as hungry for the sight of new faces after winter’s long solitude, as they were starved for the sun’s light. A human river wound slowly up from the lake to the great gorge and back again, turning aside in chattering eddies around every oddity that fairs attract—dealers in charms, sellers of falcons, sword-grinders, wrestlers, stone-lifters, and storytellers.

  I was listening to one of these, when I noticed that Gunnar and Kalf were no longer beside me. A twinge of alarm pricked me, but I ignored it and drifted again with the crowd, expecting at every moment to see their faces. When after some time I still hadn’t found them, the twinge became something stronger. With gathering panic, I realized I was lost.

  You will laugh if you are accustomed to the ways of cities, but remember that I grew up in an empty country, whose few solitary landmarks were known to me from infancy. I had never been lost in my life, had never even imagined the condition.

  I pushed my way through the resisting mob, going faster and faster in my agitation. The sun, by this time, was below the mountains, leaving the plain, not in darkness, but in soft deceptive shadow where every striped canvas looked like ours, and every bulky shape that sat or sprawled around a campfire seemed, for a moment, familiar.

  I thought that if I steered toward the distant mountains, I must eventually come out at about the right place, and before long, I glimpsed with relief the blue and black striped awning—I was positive—of my uncle’s booth.

  Coming upon it from behind, I failed at first to notice the strange shields propped against its turf walls, or the unfamiliar faces of the men who sprawled in the grass nearby. In my eagerness, I very nearly yelled out Hoskuld’s name before I heard a sound that froze me in mid-step. A voice I knew well—and it wasn’t my uncle’s.

  Taking advantage of a passing horseba
ck rider to shield me from view, I worked around to the front of the booth and made myself as inconspicuous as possible in the milling crowd. The man whose voice I’d heard sat on a three-legged stool in front of the booth’s little doorway, with a drinking horn in his hand. There was no mistaking that brutal face with its missing ear.

  But it was his companion who riveted my attention. Strife-Hrut was a good-sized man, but he looked like a puny child beside this other one who overtopped him by half a head and whose blond beard was streaked with gray. Though I’d never laid eyes on him before, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt who he was; I’d heard him described often enough at home. My father’s nemesis, the man whom he had denounced here thirty years ago for delivering Iceland up to the Christmen—the great and powerful Snorri-godi of Helgafel.

  While I stood hesitating, one face in the gang of men near the booth happened to glance my way, and the eyes—I could almost swear it—fixed on me with a look of surprise.

  Snorri’s thingmen were handsome and well dressed, but among them was a smaller number of scruffy looking characters, who, I guessed, were Hrut’s bullyboys. It was one of these who seemed to watch me now, a snaggle-toothed fellow with a frayed white cap pulled down to his ears and a hank of hair falling over his dirty face. Feeling his eyes still on me, I slipped away into the crowd.

  Again, I ran, pushed, searched—driven now by urgency more than panic.

  “Odd?”

  Gods! I’d just about stepped on her, sitting by the last embers of our campfire. I dropped onto a campstool and heaved a deep sigh. “Mother, where is everyone?”

  “Why, your father’s just over there, resting in the grass, and your uncle’s napping in his booth. Vigdis is with her family, and as for Gunnar and Kalf, why, I thought they were with you.”

  “We must get Uncle and Father up at once.”

  “Heh? What’s that—Odd? What is it, boy?” His tongue was thick with drink and he could scarcely sit up. ‘Resting’ wasn’t the word for it. He was drunk. The wine skin, which had been full when I left, lay beside him nearly flat.

  “Father, you were right….”

  “You’re a good boy, Odd … good boy … and you don’t hate your father, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Good boy. I don’t say it often, do I? Well, if I don’t say it again, you’ll remember, won’t you? You’ll remember I said it.”

  “Thorvald,” Jorunn commanded, “hold your nonsense. Can’t you see the boy’s trying to tell us something?”

  Before I could speak, there came the sound of a scuffle behind the tents and Gunnar and Kalf stepped into the firelight, holding a figure between them who kicked and struggled to get free.

  “Here you are!” cried Kalf, seeing me.

  “We looked everywhere,” said Gunnar, “and finally came back here, just in time to catch this fellow skulking about, looking for something to steal, no doubt.”

  “I never!” bleated the figure, twisting helplessly in Gunnar’s grip.

  I peered into his face. It was the same dirty one that I’d just now seen at Snorri’s booth. He returned my gaze with the beginnings of a smile.

  “You know me, don’t yer? I know you, and your brother here. It didn’t take me a minute to say to myself, when I saw you back there, ‘Sigmund’—for Sigmund Tit-Bit is my name—’Sigmund,’ says I, ‘here’s your chance, don’t yer lose it.’ And so I slips away and comes after you. Christ and Thor, didn’t you lead me a chase—dashin’ about from tent to tent like you done, and me runnin’ after, bendin’ low to keep out of sight of them as might recognize me. Now just you tell these two fellows to unhand me, sir, if you please, and after I’ve moistened my throat—for I am pitiful thirsty—let us have ourselves a nice talk.”

  Kalf and Gunnar, looking doubtful, released him. He swept off his cap and made a clumsy bow toward Jorunn and Thorvald: “Housewife and Master, a good evening to yer from Sigmund Tit-Bit.”

  “That’s no name I know,” answered my father, somewhat soberer than a moment before. “What’s your business?”

  Sigmund grinned, plainly enjoying his little mystery. “I am so pitiful thirsty—just a little sip from that skin of yours would make me a new man.”

  Kalf went and shook out the last few drops into a cup and gave it to him.

  “Ahh.” He drew a dirty, out-at-elbow sleeve across his lips. “Mead? I don’t believe I’ve ever had the pleasure, being that no one gives such stuff to a poor hireling in our hall. Very nice it is, too.”

  “Well?” said Gunnar, laying a heavy hand on the man’s neck and squeezing till he winced.

  “On the beach, masters,” cried Sigmund wriggling free. “By the whale—don’t yer remember? When one of you killed my mate, Bork, and took off after Master Mord Hrutsson, and the other one killed Brand, though I didn’t stay to watch it, but run away as fast as I could.”

  Gunnar’s hand went to his sword.

  “Oh no, sir, no, it’s nothing like that. I haven’t come to finish that fight.”

  “Then what?”

  He narrowed his eyes and looked at us slyly. “When I tell you that, I expect yer will want to take sword to me. You must swear to me first that yer won’t.”

  “We don’t swear oaths to thralls’ sons like you.”

  “Be still, Gunnar.” It was our mother, her voice icy calm. “Say your piece, man, no one will harm you.”

  He doffed his cap to her again. “Thank ‘ee, Housewife.”

  He told his story, halting at every few words to fidget or shrug or glance up hopefully. And Jorunn, listening, never took her eyes from his face. Her stare must have felt like two points of fire on his flesh.

  When he had done, we looked at each other in silence.

  “Wake the lawyer,” said Thorvald.

  Hoskuld was fetched, and it all had to be gone through again. Only this time my mother turned aside and covered her eyes with her hand when Sigmund came to the part where two of the men held Gudrun down on the floor of the shieling while she screamed, and Hrut, Brand, and Mord and the others took turns getting on her until she didn’t make a sound any more, and then someone stuck a knife in her chest.

  No, he didn’t see who because, Christ and Thor be his witness, he wouldn’t take part in such low stuff, but just went outside and killed sheep like he was told. But all the way home master Hrut and his sons laughed and joked about it with the boys and said how everyone knew that Black Thorvald and his sons were such cowards as wouldn’t stir a finger over it. Afterwards Master Hrut had flogged him half to death for leaving Brand to die alone and had treated him like a dog ever since, making him sleep out in the barn in all weathers. And so that was why he was here now to tell his story and would tell it in open court, too. By Christ and Thor he would, if only we would protect him from Hrut’s vengeance and afterwards send him out of the country with enough silver to live comfortable until things cooled down.

  To this I added my information about Hrut visiting Snorri’s booth just now. And as I spoke, I realized that we had the answer to my uncle’s objection to our case. Hrut, left to himself, was a braggart—no crime so cowardly that he wouldn’t make a boast of it. But if Snorri, for his own good reasons, had gotten hold of him right afterwards and ordered him to keep his mouth shut…?

  Hoskuld stroked his long jaws with the tips of his fingers and frowned.

  “Well?” Jorunn burst out when she could stand it no longer. “Bless you, brother, you were wrong! Admit it. God has heard us!” She stood between me and Gunnar and hugged us both to her. “No outlawry for these sons of mine!”

  But Hoskuld shook his head. “The word of a landless man like him won’t carry much weight. Not unless we find someone of standing to take an oath on his truthfulness.” He was silent for a bit and then straightened his shoulders. “Kinsmen, I change my mind. I am cheered by this, indeed I am. And as for having been wrong, why I make nothing of that at all, not being a proud sort of man. Now then, my task lies clear before me, to enlist a p
owerful ally or two. We must seek friends.”

  “How is it, brother-in-law,” said my father, his voice dripping irony, “that you always come round at last, and with such certainty, to my own view?”

  8

  Accused

  At the pealing of the morning bell, the whole plain stirred and moved toward the gorge. Carried along by the crowd, we entered at its shallow end and filed down between its black walls toward Law Rock. There was a crush of people there already, giving their attention to the Law Speaker. The ancient Skapti Thoroddsson, who had held this post for a generation, stood upon the jutting boulder above the crowd and recited from memory one-third of the laws of Iceland. I stole a look at my father and wondered what thoughts were going through his mind, seeing all this again after the passage of so many years. But his face told me nothing.

  The recitation completed, the day’s business could commence. Now it was time for the proclamation of lawsuits

  Wrapped in a skin cloak, his pig’s eyes screwed up tight, Strife-Hrut charged out of the crowd like a boar from a thicket and, scrambling onto the Rock, bawled his accusation, the words nearly drowned out by the loud cheering of his men.

  “…notice of an action against Odd and Gunnar Thorvaldsson … did afflict my son with gut wound, brain wound, and bone wound, the which did cause his death … full outlawry.” Full outlawry—the rock walls flung the words up and down the chasm. “To have no harbor, help, nor hand, no friend, and no food in this island forever!”

  He flung out an arm in our direction and every head turned toward us. On that cue, his men commenced to bang on their shields and chant his name. Snorri’s men, who were there in force too, joined in. Here and there in the crowd others picked it up, people, who a moment before had had no notion of who we were or what we had done.