Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  He blushed to the roots of his hair.

  “And it worked!” crowed my uncle. For just yesterday who comes knocking at my door but Snorri himself, looking mighty uncomfortable—admitting nothing, mind you—but saying how he had heard about what happened, and wasn’t it a pity, and he had seen to it that Gunnar’s wife and baby were delivered alive to her father’s house, and that all the victims got a Christian burial, the mother and both sons—his exact words—both sons. And you lying under a fleece not six paces away. You’re safe, Odd, for a while, as long as you stay hidden here. God has not forsaken us altogether.” He put out a blue-veined hand and stroked my forehead.

  †

  In the long days that followed, the outside of me healed. They made poultices of moss and marsh marigold and put them on the palms of my hands, which were sliced and torn, and on my scorched toes, and every other part of me that was bruised, burned or cut.

  I’d been lucky. My face was untouched except for where my hair and beard were singed on one side, and elsewhere on my body the wounds did not mortify. Within a month the worst of it was past.

  The outside of me, as I say, healed well. But I saw in all their eyes the dawning knowledge that there were things amiss with me that no poultices could cure. You are never the same man afterwards when you should have died but didn’t.

  I began by taking mead or ale to deaden the pain of my wounds. As the pain grew less, I found that I still could not sleep without drink, and, despite great quantities of it, I slept badly, waking in the middle of the night, my shirt soaked with sweat. I would grind my fists into my eyes to squeeze the pictures out of them. But nothing could take the stench of burning hair and flesh out of my nostrils. Hoskuld placed under my pillow shavings of goat’s horn, in which he put great store as a cure for sleeplessness, but neither that nor any other remedy gave me ease.

  In the daytime, when the rest of the household was occupied with the work of the farm, I tottered from one end of the hall to the other: from the bed-closet to the stable, and from the stable to the pantry, from the pantry to the bed-closet again; past the hangings, past the ornate high-seat posts, past the old weapons that lined the walls in an unceasing, aimless, and distracted round of movement.

  And in the evenings by the fire I talked endlessly, telling the gruesome tale over and over again, jumping up to circle the room, then returning to my place at the bench only to abandon it a moment later, but always talking.

  “Gunnar ordered me to run away, Uncle, or else I would not have lived….”

  “Yes, dear boy, and thank God for it.”

  “Kalf, he made me promise him. ‘Avenge us,’ he said—his last words.”

  “Yes, Odd, you’ve told us, and someday you surely will.”

  “Gunnar held me by my shirt—like this—and ordered me…”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  They listened to me at first with sorrow, then with perplexity, finally with fear.

  “Odd,” said Kalf, when a little drink spilled from the ale horn I was holding and wet my tunic, “your hands—”

  After that I was careful to hold them close to my body, to put one on top of the other, to sit on them.

  Waking and sleeping I dreamed of revenge, rehearsing to Kalf, or anyone who would listen, the most fantastic schemes, only to reject each one in turn. Any act of mine would draw attention to Hoskuld and make his life forfeit for harboring a fugitive.

  Not that he seemed to care much for life now. The past weeks had aged him like so many years. In his heart, I think, he blamed himself for bungling our case, and even for what happened afterward. I, the ‘young dog’ of happier days, had never been his ‘dear boy’ until now. This unaccustomed tenderness was the measure of his guilt.

  For myself, I could have forgiven him, but even his own god, it seemed, would not do so much, despite all the mumbling hours that he spent upon his knees. And meanwhile, his cloudy eyes grew cloudier, the skin around them dark and drawn, and his clothes hung looser from his shoulders. Kalf watched helplessly as the two of us, man and boy, wandered our separate ways into the dark places of the soul.

  But there was another who watched, too, one whom I have already had occasion to mention—the man called Stig.

  Not Stig the Silent, nor Stig the Ugly, though either of those nicknames would have suited him. Not Stig Sveinsson or Einarsson, or any such patronymic, since he claimed to have no father. He was, therefore, for lack of anything better, called Stig No-One’s-Son, though usually simple Stig sufficed.

  I had seen him for the first time, you’ll recall, on that night in Hoskuld’s hall when he danced like a wild man, and then again on our journey to the Althing—a tight-lipped man who seemed to care little for being a servant. Finally, it was his villainous face—pockmarked, broken-nosed, and shock-headed—that watched over me in my delirium. And they were his skillful hands that tended me.

  He was, according to his own terse account of himself, a bit of a farmer, a bit of a surgeon, a bit of a sailor.

  “A bit of a brigand,” Hoskuld added ruefully, “though the rascal has his uses.”

  He was not a thrall, as I had thought at first, but a landless freeman who had arrived at my uncle’s doorstep seeking work some summers previous, and had stayed on to tend the forge, to doctor the household and the stock, and even to barter the produce and handle money.

  These talents outweighed his defects, which were, in my uncle’s eyes, considerable. He had no religion; he suffered bursts of manic energy, which appeared without warning, although (fortunately for the crockery and the furniture) not often; and lastly, he had a habit of going off unexpectedly on long expeditions of indefinite duration, whose purpose he never cared to disclose.

  He was a man who kept to himself and had little to say most of the time, but I began to notice, as much as I noticed anything in those brain-sick days, how he would often follow me with a cool and appraising eye.

  It was on a warm evening in high summer, about the fourth week of my captivity—as I now thought of it—and we were ranged around the hall in our usual attitudes: Katla at the loom, Kalf by the fire, fletching arrows, Hoskuld fretting, and I drinking—as I had been doing steadily since morning, though I felt no better for it. Stig sat in a corner, stitching a patch of leather on his shoe.

  “Nick his ship,” he said to the wall.

  No one quite heard, and after a few moments he took the wall into his confidence again, repeating in a louder voice, “Nick his ship.”

  “What’s that, you scoundrel?” said Hoskuld, giving a start as if he had been shaken out of a slumber.

  Stig glanced around and lifted an eyebrow. “Hrut’s ship,” he said. “Nick it.”

  We all stared at him.

  “What—take it?” said Hoskuld. “But he’s gone off a-trading already, man. The sailing season’s half over.”

  “Hasn’t.”

  “What d’you know of it?” I demanded, thick-tongued and surly with drink.

  It was Stig’s habit never to look quite at you when he spoke, but rather to squint past your shoulder as though his keen mariner’s eye descried some distant coastline on the horizon. So it appeared that he spoke to walls.

  “Talked to a man who happened to mention that your friend Hrut’s ship sprung a leak and they had to re-tar her. Then he got sick in his stomach for a while. No sooner recovered than his white gyrfalcons that he’d meant to sell abroad went and died on him, and they had to find more. Troubles that man has had could make you weep.” He allowed himself a quick smile.

  “And she’s still in the river?” I asked, hardly able to believe him.

  Stig scratched his spiky head. “Was yesterday.” He had come back only yesterday from one of his mysterious rambles. Finally, he looked straight at me with the same cool, searching look such as I had caught him at before. It seemed to say, What are you made of, boy? What are you game for?

  “Still moored in the river,” he said, “but not for long. Fellow tells me she’ll sa
il in three, four days’ time, now that the new falcons are old enough to live through the voyage.”

  “Three or four days!” I cried. “And just waiting to be plundered and burnt. A blow against him where he’ll feel it the most!”

  “You wicked, thankless boy, “Katla Thin-Hair screeched, wringing her thin hands. “It’s no different from all your other plans. If you’re caught at it, you’ll be your uncle’s murderer. It won’t take them long to guess who has sheltered you all these weeks. They’ll come and burn us up in our beds!”

  “Sweet darling Katla,” I laughed, “I won’t be caught. I’ve just this second thought of a better plan. Now listen everyone. We don’t plunder her, we sail off in her. We’ll get away clean with no witnesses left alive. By the Raven, I’ll wear a sack over my head, if it’ll make you feel better. I promise you Hrut won’t know who’s to blame for the theft of his ship until the day I come back and throw it in his face.”

  I looked at my uncle. “Hoskuld Long-Jaws? I owe you everything. There’ll never come another chance like this. Give me your leave.”

  For a long moment he sat silently. Then raising his hands toward the rafters, cried out in his deep, strong voice of old, “Praise God, who rejoices in the broken bones of his enemies! Praise Him for He has heard our prayers!” He folded me in his arms and his tears wet my cheek.

  “Of course,” resumed Stig, “I mean, before we all fall to kissing each other—there is one little thing. It needs half a dozen lads to sail a ship like her. Seafarers, I mean, not plowboys.”

  “But you could get them, Stig!”

  “In three days?” he shrugged. “Not likely.”

  “Rubbish,” said Hoskuld. “Why the countryside’s teeming with rough-edged rascals like yourself who’d as soon cut a throat and steal a ship as spend the summer stacking another man’s hay.”

  “Why, Hoskuld Long-Jaws,” Stig leered evilly, “I’m overcome to hear myself so well spoken of.”

  “But he’s right, isn’t he? You could find us a crew?”

  With some hesitation he allowed that he knew someone here and perhaps another one there, who might be game for a summer’s cruise.”

  “Now Stig,” I said, “make this plain to them—that my name, for the time being, is none of their business, but it’s my vengeance we’re about. I, and no other, will command this ship.”

  “Don’t worry, young Captain, I’ll tell ’em so. No need to look so fierce about it.” Again, that momentary smile. “And … you’ve sailed a ship before, have you?”

  “You’ll teach me all I need to know.”

  “I? I teach you? Did I ever say I meant to risk my skin? Why it’s been longer than long since I held a tiller stick under my arm, and I’ve a warm berth right here. I fancy myself a farmer nowadays.”

  “D’you fancy yourself swinging from a tree, damn your eyes!” sputtered Hoskuld. “You’ll either steer that ship for him and teach him seafaring, or I’ll hang you here and now for the thief that you are! But I’ll make you a bargain, Stig,” he added, lowering his voice. “If you serve my nephew faithfully for one year and still fancy the life of a farmer after that, come back and find a purse of silver waiting for you, and you can buy yourself as tidy a farm as you’ll ever see. Would that suit you?”

  Leaning his back against the wall, the brigand gave his spiky head a good scratch and seemed to gaze at some imaginary horizon. “Part with old Stig as easy as that, is it, sir? And just when I thought we was getting on famous. But it’s a tempting offer to be sure—lick this young ‘un into shape for a purse of silver. You did say she’d weigh five pound, eh, sir?”

  “Praise God!” cried Hoskuld again, and this time sent Katla running to the bed-closet to take down the crucifix from over his bed and bring it here to hang above his high-seat. “And we had better all fall on our knees—yes, especially you, Odd Thorvaldsson, and thank Him properly, for vengeance is His specialty!”

  Hoskuld had us on our knees a good long while. I looked sidelong once or twice at Stig, kneeling dutifully with his hands folded under his bristly chin and his eyes turned reverently upwards. He might have been a bishop in that pose. Add acting to this man’s many talents, I thought. How far can a rogue like that be trusted?

  I stole a glance, too, at Kalf, who knelt beside me, and nudged his elbow. Long-limbed Kalf, who could spit a moorhen on the wing with one arrow, and who loved to swear oaths by Odin and Thor to please me. I hoped for a wink. But Kalf’s mouth was hard set, and he turned his face away.

  I knew why. That night, after Hoskuld had gone to bed, Kalf and I talked quietly for a long time.

  †

  Stig was away for the next two days while I suffered such a state of excitation—torn between visions of revenge and a sickening fear that the ship would sail before we were ready—that I nearly gave up sleeping altogether, and my nerves were as raw and ragged as, a month before, my skin had been.

  In the intervals between these bouts of despair, however, I pondered my future, taking Kalf and Hoskuld into my confidence. “I won’t come home just to be an outlaw in my own land. And I won’t go to Vinland either, there are no riches to be had there. I must gain wealth and fame enough, somehow, to pay back the butchers of my family and force the Althing to restore my rights. Does anyone doubt that a man with a hundred warriors and a full purse can do as he pleases in this country of ours?”

  No one doubted it.

  “Will you turn viking like our fathers?” asked Kalf. I saw Hoskuld wince, pained by even this allusion to his son, so long ago tortured to death by the Irish.

  “Maybe,” I answered. “In any case, I’ll begin by sailing to Norway—to Trondelag, where our ancestors came from. It’s where exiles from Iceland go, I’m told. There rules a king there who keeps a great court and is a friend to our countrymen. Once there, I’ll look for my opportunities.”

  My uncle nodded sagely and approved of my plan. Being not a traveled man himself, but not ignorant either, he felt himself well informed about life in the wide world.

  So Norway it was—or rather, would be—if only Stig returned in time. I plunged my horn into the ale barrel again and resumed my fretful pacing.

  Just when I thought I could stand it no longer—it was about midnight of the second night—I heard a commotion in the yard and threw open the door to find Stig and five others straggling in through the gate.

  “Captain, your crew,” he called, with a wave of his arm. “You might find prettier than these but none more willing when it comes to robbery and murder.”

  They trooped inside and sat down in a row on the wall-bench.

  “Now these two galumphing lads,” Stig said, “are Stuf and Otkel. Cousins. Never go anywhere one without the other. Not brainy, but good-natured and energetic as you could want. I’ve known ’em for a while.”

  They were somewhere between my age and Gunnar’s. Stuf had hair like a haystack and a pendulous lower lip and was very strong. Otkel was slighter of build and seemed afflicted with shyness, for he seldom lifted his eyes from the floor.

  “And this rat-faced man is Starkad.”

  Starkad had sad eyes and a sharp nose with a brush of brown moustache under it, which gave him the appearance of an unhappy rodent. But there was intelligence in his face.

  “Don’t be fooled by his puny size. We’ve taken many hard knocks together, Starkad and me. Now these last two I haven’t had the pleasure of knowing so very long, but they claim to know their way around a ship and don’t object to a little rough and tumble.”

  I didn’t doubt it. The one called Bald Brodd was an oldish fellow, gone to fat, but with muscle under it. His manner was gruff and deliberate and with his shiny head and small eyes, made me think of an ancient sea turtle.

  The other called himself Hogni Hard-Mouth, a man of about five-and-thirty whose heavy grinding jaws were constantly at work, and whose wide mouth was set in a scowl, as though he were condemned for life to chew some morsel that did not agree with him. He was the only
one who didn’t touch his forehead or his cap when Stig introduced him. I paid it no attention at the time.

  Altogether, not an imposing lot, I thought. Not quite the sea rovers of ancient song. Landless men, all of them, or even the sons of thralls, who lived hand to mouth as laborers at harvest and haying time or as seamen when they could get a berth, armed with nothing more than knives and sickles—though with those they looked well-practiced. I was in no position to be finicky.

  “They’re right good-looking men, Steersman,” I said, addressing Stig by the title I meant to give him. “I’ll gladly ‘plow the sea’s furrow’ with these.”

  My poetic kenning must have appealed to Hogni Hard-Mouth for he laughed out loud.

  “We had a look at your ship,” said Stig. “Moored at the mouth of the Whitewater and heavy laden with cargo. If the weather holds fair, I guess she’ll go out on the morning’s tide.”

  “Then there’s no time to lose! Uncle, I need arms for these men and me, and your fastest horses with a trusted thrall to lead them back again. With hard riding we’ll be aboard Strife-Hrut’s ship before he’s drunk his morning ale.”

  Hoskuld strode about bellowing orders at his people. Swords, axes, shields, and steel caps, all grimy and rusting from years of disuse, were pulled down from the walls and handed out amongst us.

  “Dear boy,” he said, “you haven’t a sword yourself.” I had lost Neck-Biter in my escape. “This one wants sharpening, but it fits the hand well.” It was his own sword, which hung beside his high-seat; a heavy weapon with spots of rust on the blade.

  “What’s its name, Uncle?”

  “You give it one, it’ll answer.”

  “Then I name it ‘Hrutsbane’ and ‘Snorrisbane’—to remind me whose lives I am sworn to take.”

  In the cool night air the horses stood sleepy-eyed, tossing their shaggy heads and snorting while we flung saddles on them and fumbled in the near-darkness with knots and buckles.

  Kalf was beside me. Now there remained only one last thing to do. Though it was a sad train of events that had brought it to pass, still, this was the day that he and I had dreamt of for so long. Leaving the others in the yard, we went together to the doorway where Hoskuld stood.