Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  He was altogether a comic little manikin. They all were—except that all the while he spoke, they held their weapons pointed unswervingly at our breasts.

  Stig answered the little man by sheathing his sword and holding out his open palms. “Friend,” said he, “we are not the king of Norway’s tax gatherers and I don’t envy the man that is. But I’ve been in Norway and heard the Lapps mentioned with respect. We’re merchants from Iceland who’ve lost our way, and we would take it kindly if you’d allow us to camp here awhile in peace, for we’ve been a weary time at sea.”

  This was the longest formal speech ever known to have been uttered by the laconic Stig.

  ‘Iceland?’ The name clearly meant nothing to the Lapp, but “merchants” he understood, and his eyes brightened. “Colored cloth?” he asked. His leather coat, I should say, was embroidered all over the shoulders and front with bright strips of red and blue wool, and balls of the same stuff hung from the three peaks of his hat.

  “A boat-load of it,” said Stig with his crooked smile.

  The manikin turned and spoke some words to his people in a tongue that sounded like rippling water. While he did so, Stig spoke quickly to us.

  We were hundreds of miles north of our destination, as he had guessed, in a vast country of mountain and forest from which the Norwegians levied tribute, though they hardly could claim to rule over it. “These Lapps are hard folk to deal with. Don’t be fooled by their size. They spend most of the year wandering with their reindeer—it’s a sort of tree on legs, Otkel—and they can fairly outrun man or beast up the sides of those mountains yonder.”

  “My God!” exclaimed Starkad as if he had only now noticed them, “the mountains!”

  And Kalf cried, “You see, Stig? Hogni, you see? The fog lifted—by itself!”

  “No need to shout,” replied Stig, “I’m neither blind nor deaf—we’ll worry about your friend later. Hear me out now. In the summer, these folk come down to the coast to fish and hunt the seal and sometimes they’ll wander down into Norway for a while—that’s where our friend here must have learned his Norse. Now this is the main thing about ’em—whether they be dwarves, or elves, or imps, or God knows what—they have powers. Leastways, I’ve heard it said their sorcerers can call up thunder and lightning and wind and I don’t know what all. They’re nobody to fool with.”

  The manikin turned back to us with a hesitant smile. “I am Nunna,” he offered, touching his breast. “I speak—oh, so badly—for these fellows. It is possible these poor Lapps might find a little antler, a few sealskins to trade for colored cloth. How we Lapps do love that stuff! We would cover our whole bodies in it if we could, and look like Norsemen.” He repeated this to his friends and they chuckled at the absurdity of the idea.

  The weapons came down on both sides. Stig took Nunna’s small hand in his paw and gave it a squeeze.

  “And who is that one?” inquired the little man then, pointing at me with his chin. “He saw us a whole horizon away and did not warn you. He is your prisoner?” Of course, I was still tied to Kalf, and unarmed.

  “He’s our Captain,” answered Kalf.

  “Was our Captain,” said Hogni, at the same time giving Stig a clumsy nudge and a wink. “Pay him no mind. He’s cursed, or mad, or—”

  “In that case,” Nunna interrupted matter-of-factly, “it is your good fortune to have come here.”

  Without another word, the Lapp hunting band turned and trotted off down the beach, moving swiftly on their short, muscular legs. We hurried to keep up.

  A brisk trot of two miles or so along the rocky shore brought us, foot-sore and breathless, to their campsite, which was no more than a few untidy huts clustered round a small inlet. The huts themselves were cone-shaped and made from strips of birch bark tacked onto a framework of poles tied together at the top. The whole thing gave the appearance of a badly made haystack. From the top of each hut curled a wisp of wood smoke, nearly invisible against the white sky.

  The camp dogs, leaping and growling, announced our approach. After them streamed the rest of the population—an antic crowd of little women, children, and old folks who formed a chattering circle around us that moved as we walked, all jabbering and pointing. The bravest ones even ventured to touch us. Starkad bent down, scooped up one little mite of a girl, and popped her on his shoulder. There was a gasp from the elders, but shrieks of excitement from all the children who flung themselves upon him, clamoring to be picked up.

  But no one touched me. I shambled along on my leash behind Kalf, whey-faced, hollow-eyed, and palsied. The little people drew back from me and looked away.

  Nunna halted before the entrance to one of the huts, which was larger than the others, though not any better made, and told us to wait. Inside a muffled conversation went on for some time before his round face reappeared in the entrance.

  “Go, please, to any of our houses,” Nunna said, addressing himself to Stig and the others. “Eat and rest. The man with no soul”—he looked at me—“is to come inside.”

  He drew the reindeer-skin curtain aside for me. “The noaidi has agreed to see you, Man-With-No-Soul. Your keeper may come, too.”

  “Who will see him?” asked Kalf warily.

  “You have no word for it, I think. Just come.”

  The ripe smell inside the hut—smoke mingled with sweat, rancid grease, and old meat—nearly made me retch.

  Taking a cautious step into the darkness, I found my feet entangled in a prickly mattress of twigs. I tumbled to my knees alongside Kalf. From somewhere close at hand came muffled laughter.

  “Begging your pardon,” said Nunna, “we crawl. This way.”

  Like clumsy infants, we followed him on hands and knees over the twiggy floor. In the center of the room a fire flickered within a ring of stones, and over it, an iron kettle hung on a chain whose other end was lost in the haze of the smoke-hole. The fire gave off just enough light to reveal the outlines of a dozen or so figures who lay stretched head to toe along the circumference of the wall, their glistening faces propped on elbows, their eyes watching us.

  Reaching a spot on the side of the hut exactly opposite the entrance, Nunna stopped. In front of us, there lay what appeared to be a sleeping child. He spoke softly to it. It stirred, lifted its head, and answered in a voice that was as dry as the rustling of dead leaves.

  I peered at the tiny face. Its skin was the color of beeswax and infinitely wrinkled. The nose and chin caved in around a toothless hole of a mouth. It was a face shriveled and soft as a windfall apple and old beyond sex.

  Nunna listened a moment to the rustling leaves and then turned to me. “The noaidi wishes to know why you do not go to the sorcerers of the Christmen for help? He wonders if they are not as powerful as they claim.”

  I think that I just shook my head in dumb wonderment. Kalf let it pass with a shrug.

  Again the leaves rustled.

  “The noaidi,” said Nunna, “wishes you to know that what he will do is very hard for him. He asks what you will pay him?”

  “Ten ells of blue cloth,” said Kalf quickly, indicating the length of his forearm from elbow to fingertips and holding up all his fingers.

  “The noaidi is disappointed.”

  “Twenty, then.”

  Nunna translated and listened to the dry rustle of the response. “The noaidi is content and wishes you and your friend to know that he is not greedy, but it is his belief that what is not paid for is not valued. See the wisdom of our noaidi!”

  The wizened face acknowledged our presence now for the first time with a toothless smile in which there was just a touch of cunning.

  While our bargain was being struck, other Lappish men and women crept through the low doorway, jostling and squeezing in wherever there was a bit of room, until soon the hut was entirely filled, save for a little open space around the noaidi and ourselves. The heat and the smell were getting worse by the minute.

  Now a man crawled to the hearth and dipped a wooden cup into the
steaming cauldron, drawing off some evil-smelling liquid, which the noaidi downed at a single gulp. The cup was refilled and emptied several times.

  “So he hardens himself,” whispered Nunna. “Neither iron, nor steel, nor water, nor fire can hurt him now.”

  The Ancient raised his body to a sitting position. Putting out a scrawny hand, he fumbled behind him under the heap of skins that served as a pillow, and brought out two objects—one a drum, flat like a plate with the skin on one side only, the other a small hammer of carved antler. There was an intake of breath all around us in the dark.

  “Here is his power,” said Nunna in a low voice to Kalf. “See the pictures on his drum.”

  Three dark stripes were painted across the drumhead, dividing it into zones that were filled with a jumble of shapes and figures.

  “Here is the whole world—look closely.” Nunna pointed to one figure after another with his finger, being careful not to touch them. “The rivers, the lakes, and the mountains, fish, reindeer, wolves, and bear. All here. The gods, too. And the sun and moon, and the Mountain Men, the spirits whom the noaidi commands. You understand? Ours is a very great noaidi, few are greater. He commands fourteen spirits. With these he will cure your friend.”

  Again the dead leaves rustled, and Nunna translated, speaking this time to me. “Now you must tell the noaidi—omitting nothing—how your sickness began.”

  I could more easily have climbed a glass mountain with greased shoes than I could voice one single syllable of my numbing despair. I shook my head while the tears ran down my cheeks.

  “You must talk,” he said gently. “Try.”

  “I … am waiting … to die.”

  “Yes, yes, the noaidi understands this, but he must know the reason for it. Try harder please.”

  Kalf, seeing my helplessness, spoke up and said that he knew my story from my own lips as well as from what he himself had seen, and would they let him tell it in my place? Nunna interpreted and the Ancient nodded.

  So he began, telling a long story about someone with my name, whom I scarcely seemed to know. “The best friend in the world, but strange in his ways, given to moods and tempers, and his father stranger still—a sorcerer, so they said….”

  The noaidi’s eyes flickered with interest.

  Then Kalf told about the house-burning.

  “Kalf, you filthy liar,” I pleaded in silent anguish, “how can you say such things about me? Running, hiding like a rat in a clump of weeds! Must you tell everything just to shame me?”

  The noaidi stopped Kalf and made him go back, asking questions about this detail and that. And all the time his black eyes in their deep folds never left mine. Gradually, Kalf’s voice began to sound to me as if it came from the end of a long tunnel, and soon I stopped listening altogether. There were only those eyes.

  “Now,” said Nunna, shaking me by the shoulder. “You must do as I tell you.” He untied the belt that still attached me to Kalf. “Your keeper must step outside, but I will stay. Lie down. It begins.”

  With a muscular arm around my shoulders, Nunna pushed me over on my side and pulled my legs straight out in front of me—the way we straighten the legs of a corpse for burial. My father—Gunnar! This image flashed like an arrow through my mind and I began to shake, but Nunna knelt by my head and held me down.

  The noaidi brought his face close to mine and began to tap his drum, and at the same time he chanted in a high sing-song that rose and fell, rose and fell.

  Nunna whispered in my ear. “He calls the Mountain Men. He will catch them in his drum and make them obey him. Can you hear me?”

  I nodded.

  “Your Dead Ones miss you. They have captured your soul. It is a common thing. Now the noaidi must send his own spirit down to Jabmiidaibmu, where Jabmiidahka rules, and make them give it back. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  The drumming grew faster and the old man’s eyes stared, looking past me, past the faces that ringed me, past the ragged wall of his mean hut. Looking to the mountains. No part of his body moved except the hand that held the little hammer—almost a blur as it struck and rebounded from the drum.

  Hours passed this way, or minutes—who can say? I knew nothing, was nothing, but the sound of that drumming and humming.

  Then abruptly it stopped.

  The Ancient’s head snapped back as if jerked by an invisible cord, his eyes rolled up showing the whites, and the pink tip of his tongue protruded from his mouth. His little body arched up and back until his head nearly touched his heels, and he gave out a sharp cry like a woman in childbirth. The drum and hammer dropped from his hands, and he pitched over on his side, crumpled in his loose clothes like an empty wineskin. His chant was taken up now by the others in the hut—a droning hum that sounded like a swarm of bees.

  Now I saw things that I would be happier not to tell about. I was waking and dreaming and seemed to be in many places all at once. The stinking haze that filled the hut was Hekla’s sulfurous breath, and I was a child of ten again, stumbling down the mountainside, flying in terror from my terrible, mad father. But also, it was the smoke that reeked of bodies turning black in the flaming shambles of my home when I leapt up from my brother’s side, shrieking and beating the sparks out of my hair, with no thought for anything but to save my life. I was in both dreams at once, and both of them more real than reality itself. Everything happened not once, but again and again until it was all one heat, one stench, one fear, one pounding of the heart and pumping of the legs. I was running … running … running away….

  I thrashed on the floor, tossing my head from side to side, while four men sat on my arms and legs and Nunna’s sweating face hung over me.

  Sometimes I knew the face was his and sometimes not. For sometimes I believed I was looking into my father’s face, and sometimes Gunnar’s, and sometimes Mother’s or Gudrun’s, and all of them giving me such piteous looks that, if I could have moved, I would have torn myself apart in despair.

  Through it all, the bees hummed, drawing out their long, vibrant syllable—thirty voices, or a hundred, or it might have been a thousand. I heard it even through my chattering fear, a sound like summer in the fields—the droning of bees in the hot sun and the humming of the women while they bundled sheaves. Nunna’s cradling arms were my mother’s, then Morag’s. In my nostrils was the smell of new hay and women’s hair. A low voice sang in my ear, “It’s all right … it’s all right. Rest now.”

  For the first time in five weeks I sank into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  15

  Mutiny

  I was alone when I awoke, except for a young boy who squatted on his heels beside me. Seeing me stir, he gave a shout. Instantly Kalf and Nunna came in, and behind them, creeping like a little ancient baby, the noaidi. Kalf helped me to sit up and told me that I had been asleep for more than a night and a day.

  I had an evil taste in my mouth and felt light-headed with hunger. I looked from Kalf to our companion. “Nunna,” I said, “bring me food.”

  “Hah! You know me, do you?” His good-natured face beamed.

  It did seem strange, but I knew his name, and I knew where I was and why. Or, thought I did, anyway. Later, when I tested my memory against Kalf’s, I realized how much out of those days I really had lost.

  “All right, you wait.” Nunna went out and presently returned carrying a wooden trencher piled high with a steaming mess that turned out to be boiled salmon and cloudberries pounded into a paste. Nothing ever tasted so good. I asked for ale to wash it down.

  “This the poor Lapps do not have,” he made a sorrowful face. “Probably for the best. Drink this instead.” He pushed a bowl of some dark, thick gruel at me. “Hot water and reindeer blood. Very good.”

  Meantime the noaidi had sunk into his usual place against the wall and regarded me through half-closed lids.

  “He is tired,” Nunna said, seeing me glance at him. “His spirit was gone many hours.”

  “Nunna, he really sp
oke to my Dead Ones?”

  “Gently, you’ll spill your bowl.”

  “Please, I have to know.”

  “Tell me, friend Captain, are you cured?”

  “Maybe … yes.”

  “So then, why do you ask? It’s as I told you. The dead, you must know, are always jealous of the living. They can’t help it, poor things. It’s their nature. And so they will catch a man’s soul, knowing that his body must soon follow. But the noaidi spoke very sternly to your dead. They were hard to deal with, like all you Norse. Oh, how they grumbled and complained. But in the end they had to confess the truth, that they are no braver than you, only unluckier.”

  “They said that?”

  “Oh, yes. And they are quite ashamed of the tricks they played on you. They have given you back your soul and will bother you no more—except that, from time to time, your father may make himself known to you, if you want his help. He hopes you will not hate him.”

  I sat for a while, turning this over in my mind. “All the same,” I said at last, “they have a claim on me. They have a right to vengeance. Nunna, will I avenge them someday? Can the noaidi tell me this?”

  He shrugged and scuttled over to the old man’s side and they had a long whisper together. Coming back, he hunched down on his heels in front of me and said, “The noaidi sent his spirit into the gray wolf, and into the albatross, and into the seal. Everywhere he searched for the end of your fate, but it lies a great way from here, and even he cannot see all the threads of it. He says that you will travel far and, for a time, will forget your home. But one day, he says, the time of your returning will come, and when it does, you will know it without a doubt.”

  “There will be a sign? A dream?”

  “You will know it, just as the reindeer know when it is time for the winter trek, who can say how? Then you will go back to your country and do what is necessary—though it may not make you happier.”