Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  I didn’t let him finish. Hardly slowing down, I seized hold of his arm and pushed him ahead of me, “Kalf, follow me out of here, we’re deserting this pack of lunatics while there’s still time. Pot-Belly, you can do as you please.”

  But Kalf wrenched himself away from me. I wasn’t dismayed. I had struggled and pleaded in just the same way when he held me back from drowning myself.

  “It’s all right, brother, you’ll soon be yourself again, just trust to me.”

  “Odd, I prayed to God last night to change your heart.”

  “Don’t try my temper, brother. I know you’re half mad.”

  “I’m Christ’s soldier. If you call that mad, I … I pity you.”

  “Idiot! Your king’s nothing but a bloody monster, and soon to be a dead one, I’m glad to say. I won’t let you waste your life for him. That’s the only reason I’m here. Now do as I say, Kalf.”

  “No, Odd. I’ll do God’s will, not yours. Stand out of my way.”

  We were toe-to-toe, screaming at each other above the din.

  I forced my anger down. “Slender-Leg, listen. Don’t believe what Olaf says. He’s doomed, and you with him, if you stay. Now come!”

  He looked at me then with such contempt as I never hope to see again on the face of friend or enemy. “Run away, Odd. Isn’t that how you treat your brothers? I should have expected it. Yes, run away and tell everyone how we died here. You’re a poet. You’ll tell it well. Run, Odd—run away.”

  All the world fell away.

  A great silence seemed to engulf us for that moment while we stared into each other’s eyes. It wasn’t pain we saw there now, as when we’d first quarreled. No room now for pangs of sympathy. It was scorn in his eyes, hate in mine.

  Oh yes. At that moment I hated him more, I think, than I have ever hated anyone—and that’s saying a good deal, for I’m a lusty hater, as you know. The little psalm-singing bastard! He knew he had the power to shame me, to break me—and he used it. If he had held a dagger to my heart and thrust home, it would have been kinder.

  I hardly know what words I said in answer, but they were halting, and abject. I was beaten. I owed Kalf my life twice over and he was calling in the debt. Not for me to ask, why now and why here? He had the right, that was all. Well then, so be it. Let one madness swallow us both. Let us both die for bloody Olaf and his god!

  Ogmund, who had listened with great agitation to our speech, laid a hand on each of us and shouted above the uproar, “To the king’s side!”

  So back we pushed through the shield-castle. Its ranks were in disarray now anyway, though we could not see why until we stood within sight of the royal banner. What we saw and heard there was yet another loud and bitter clash of wills, this one of more consequence to history.

  “Get you back! This is no work for boys, damn your head—not even weeds like you. Get back behind the palisade.”

  Olaf was in a thundering rage. Within a ring formed by the hirdmen and other warriors from the ranks, he bellowed in the face—more accurately, in the chest—of a youth who overtopped him by a full head.

  There was no mistaking the family likeness. Though where Olaf’s face was shaggy, this one’s was smooth as a baby’s. Where the king’s body was thick in the waist, young Harald’s—for it was surely he, whom the Noisy had described to me last night—was like a sapling. His tunic and trousers were too short on him, as though he grew faster than his mother could weave.

  He was a handsome youth, his regular features marked with only one peculiarity, that one of his eyebrows sat higher on his forehead than its mate. This gave to his face a mocking expression that went well with his words.

  “You think me too weak to hold a sword, brother? Then, tie it to my hand, for in God’s name I will fight today, whether it please you or not. You don’t command me and my men!”

  “Your men!” The veins bulged on Olaf’s neck and the square chin jutted dangerously. “Your men!”

  “Let him stay, King, let him fight,” the men of the hird pleaded, pressing round them both. “Hold a sword? Christ, he can bend one double with his bare hands! Don’t shame your own mother’s son.” Anxiety showed plainly on all their faces. This quarreling among their leaders was an ill omen.

  “I do it for our mother’s sake,” Olaf rounded on them. “That she not risk both her sons on one day’s luck.”

  “Oh, brother of mine,” said Harald with a sneer, “tell these honest warriors the truth. It’s not our mother’s sorrow but envy that pricks you. Must none have glory so that you can have it all?” (I should say here that I never understood what began the bitterness between these half-brothers. In later years, Harald would never speak of it, even drunk, although he kept little else from me.)

  “My lords, this is neither wise nor seemly.” Out of the crowd beside them stepped a man of middling age, slightly built, with a high forehead and fine features. His clothes, though worn, retained something of elegance, and his manner was easy. I recalled seeing him yesterday in the lean-to. “Come and give up this snarling like two dogs at the same dish.” He looked from one to the other. “Kiss now or you will displease God and ruin our cause.”

  “Yes, King, kiss him—” those men who were close enough to have heard these words took up the cry, “—and God save you both!”

  While Harald turned his mocking eyebrow to them, Olaf looked murder. But seeing that they would not desist, he flung up his arm at last and snarled, “Heaven forbid I should injure God’s cause. Take your place in the shield-wall, Harald Sigurdarson, and thank your kinsman, Dag, for it.”

  “A kiss, a kiss!” clamored the men, not yet reassured.

  So, the two embraced for a bare second while the Norwegians cheered, and hard-bitten warriors grew moist-eyed at this spectacle of brotherly affection. A few in the crowd, too, shouted, “Dag! Dag Hringsson!” But this made that elegant peacemaker frown, and he waved them to silence.

  “Back to your ranks, you men!” shouted Bjorn the Marshall. “Only the king’s hirdmen in the shield-wall, the rest of you to the front.”

  There came the sound of a horn faintly across the field and, while we watched, the enemy’s vanguard broke from the distant trees and raced, leaping and yelling towards us, halting just little more than a bowshot away.

  Behind these skirmishers rode the jarls on prancing horses with their standard bearers and their hirdmen running beside them.

  A javelin rose high in the air, catching the sunlight on its quivering point. It seemed for a moment to hang there, motionless, then fell slowly back. The rider who had thrown it wheeled and galloped forward, leaning so far back in his saddle that his shoulders touched his horse’s crupper. Catching the spear in an outstretched hand, flung it up again. We could hear the hurrahs of his men.

  “Thorir Hound,” Ogmund spat. “See the greyhound on his banner. He wears a magic shirt of reindeer hide from Lapland that no iron can pierce—and calls himself a Christman.”

  I thought, ruefully, of the noaidi. Could I have gotten such a shirt for myself, if I’d only thought to ask?

  Ogmund pointed out more banners as they came into view—the dragon of Kalv Arnesson, the raven of Haarek of Tjotta, and many others, until the whole field was a-flutter with them.

  Standing in our ranks, we watched more farmers pour onto the plain and heard the shouts of their captains as they formed them into the ‘swine array’—a wedge whose point is like a pig’s snout. As fast as the wedges could be formed, still more men filed from the wood. It was later said that twelve thousand warriors, from Rogaland in the south to Halogoland in the north, had gathered for this fight—the biggest army ever brought together in Norway and four times the size of ours.

  Horns blew from everywhere in the field, and from our side came an answering blast.

  Now it comes, I thought. Our only hope is to charge them before they’re ready.

  Suddenly I had to piss. I untied my breeches and did it where I stood, as others did, too—in another minute there
wouldn’t be time.

  But no. First, Olaf must rouse us with a speech. Four strong men raised him up on his shield where he could be seen by the whole army.

  “Brothers,” he cried, “for this hour, God has prepared me. I mean not to leave this field unless I am the victor.” This was greeted with cries of “Olaf!” and “Victory!” from the men of the shield-wall. “We are Christ’s army. And every man of you is now to mark a cross on his helmet, as I have done on mine, and is to kneel and say his Paternoster, if he knows it. And,”—he looked over our heads to where the Swedes were marshaled on the far left—“and if there are men here who are unbaptized, and I know there are some, I tell you that you must take the sacrament here and now or leave my side. God forbid a heathen should stand in the ranks of God’s army on this day!”

  The cheering was suddenly much thinner. On the left there was silence. The Swedes lowered their weapons and looked at one another. At that moment I began to be truly afraid.

  Olaf’s whole army numbered not more than three thousand men, of whom two out of every three were Swedes—and easily half of them heathen. These, now nine hundred or a thousand strong, went apart right there on the field with the enemy breathing in our faces, and proceeded to argue with each other about how they should answer this extraordinary order.

  By degrees, they separated themselves into two groups—the smaller of which, four hundred or so, came back and fell into line, greeted with cheers from our side. The rest, including the wildest fighters that Olaf had, ran straight across the field to join the enemy, who waved their banners up and down when they saw them coming.

  Odin help us, I thought, he’s just killed us all.

  For the next hour, while the sun beat on us out of a cloudless sky and the jarls’ army grew larger and louder, we stood under arms as our Swedish comrades, in batches of fifty at a time, splashed uncomprehendingly in the muddy stream to the accompaniment of Bishop Grimkel’s Latin spells.

  The mass baptism being at last completed, we were all ordered to our knees to pray and receive a blessing. Lean-faced Grimkel, wearing his armor under his chasuble, walked up and down the ranks, flanked by acolytes, sprinkling us with holy water. I gritted my teeth when the droplets touched me. What would Olaf think if he knew that there was still one unbaptized head ready to fall for him? Then Bjorn the Marshal bawled at us to stand and look to our weapons.

  At last! I tightened my grip on my shield and spear. Kalf, on my right hand, tested his bowstring while Ogmund flexed his plump and sweating fingers around the haft of his ridiculous great axe. I waited, holding my breath, for the trumpet’s blast that would fling us forward.

  Not yet.

  Olaf had one final thing to do before he would join battle, and it made me think that he was not, perhaps, an utter fool after all.

  He ordered the shield wall to part and let Thormod, the greatest of his skalds, pass through to the front. “Skald,” he cried, “you are old, but your throat is silver, and your mind is clear water. I will give you a ring from my arm whose worth is the price of twenty cows, if you can sing us into battle with some ancient song of heroes.”

  Two hundred paces away stood the enemy in their bristling wedges, while the jarls cantered up and down before them. No time! I wanted to shout.

  But Thormod, as if minutes and hours meant nothing to one whose memory stretched back time out of mind, bowed stiffly to the king and took up his place before us, carefully arranging the folds of his cloak over his left arm. He might have been a king himself to look at him, hawk-faced and straight as a spear.

  The air was suddenly so still that you could hear the crickets stirring in the hot meadow grass. On the other side, too, fell a hush when they saw that he was going to sing, even though they were too far away to hear his words.

  He sang the Lay of Bjarki (my father had taught it to me years ago), which tells how Bjarki and Hjalti, the two champions, died fighting for their king when foemen sacked his hall. No man can listen to it and not be stirred.

  What a puzzle is this Olaf, I recall thinking while Thormod sang. This pious viking who won’t let a heathen fight for him and yet loves the old poetry which, as everyone knows, is Odin’s gift to men.

  From where I stood I could see him, if I turned my head, still as a statue, only his helmeted head nodding to the cadence of the song. And well he knew that every man in the army would fight the better for hearing this song. There is no wine like poetry—holy water and Latin are thin stuff in comparison.

  Soon strutting ravens rend apart our limbs (Thormod chanted)

  and greedy eagles on our corpses feed,

  but high-souled, hardy hero it befits

  to dying, dwell by king who’s rich in deeds.

  The last words hung shimmering in the charged air.

  “Odd, brother? Will you die for our king, rich in deeds?” murmured Kalf in a voice choked with feeling. It only made me hate him more.

  “Rot your king,” I said between my teeth. “I die for you, damn you, and I call the account balanced between us.”

  What a look of pain on his pious altar boy’s face! His next words I didn’t catch, they were drowned out by the war horn’s bray. Once, twice, three times.

  “Bowmen to the rear!” shouted Bjorn, and Kalf turned to go.

  Above the scream of the horns rang Olaf’s voice, “Onward Christmen, Crossmen, Kingsmen!”

  And we roared back, clashing our spears against our shields. The shield-wall lurched forward. We began to walk, to trot, to race—breathless, mindless, wild with battle joy—toward death.

  20

  A Deadly Secret

  All the world knows what happened at Stiklestad—or thinks it does. Some of what you hear is nonsense—the sun did not hide his face at noon—but people love to invent stories like that when a great killing happens, as if the truth were not grim enough.

  Across the field we raced. A flight of arrows hit us aslant and men twisted and screamed, clutching their throats.

  Our archers returned fire, sending volley after volley over our heads. Then, with a shock and a roar, we flung ourselves against their spears, like a wave breaking against rocks, recoiling on itself, dissolving into eddies and whirlpools of men who stumbled this way and that. On every side of me, armor clattered and men groaned. The press of bodies was so great that dead men stood upright with no room to fall. The foeman who faced me struck overhand with his spear, aiming for my neck. I parried with the rim of my shield and returned the blow with my spear, piercing him through the eye. Another took his place. This one raised his axe above his head with both hands, intending to split me like a stick of firewood. A bad mistake. I buried my spear in his groin. But as he fell he snapped the haft, leaving me holding a splintered stick.

  Out of the tail of my eye I saw a scythe blade flash up and down, sending a head spinning into the air—a farmer mowing us down like wheat-stalks. I drew my sword and when he swung his arms back for another stroke, darted round behind him and severed his backbone.

  “Up and follow me!” yelled someone ahead, hewing a hole with his axe in the enemy’s line. Shouting Olaf’s name, we poured in after him. But we were five ranks deep and they were twelve. To the cry of “On farmers!” they pressed us back over the blood-slick grass. Ogmund had been beside me a moment before; I couldn’t see him now.

  Those were the first few minutes.

  We had not joined battle until the sun was high in the sky, and it was hours since we had last eaten or drunk. Now, toiling under a fierce July sun, hunger and thirst began to tell on us. We charged, fell back, charged again—but fewer each time and weaker—while our arms ached and our sweat blinded us.

  My new shield was soon hacked to splinters. I threw it away and fought with my sword, two-handed. Putting myself at the front of every charge, I rushed to wherever the fighting was fiercest, reckless of my life, meaning to spite Kalf by dying. But though I faced man after man, death eluded me that day.

  When the sun was well past his ze
nith and our dead lay upon the ground in heaps, the king’s horn sounded behind us. I glanced over my shoulder to see Olaf himself, with his standard bearer and his skalds all around him, pushing through our ragged line to fight at last in the van and give us heart for one last effort. From where I stood in the crush of battle, the banners of the jarls that fluttered in different parts of the field seemed to turn, swoop, and dive on Olaf’s white banner like falcons on a swan.

  By this time, the battle was already lost. The Swedish freebooters on our left, who’d had no stomach for the fight to begin with, were in full retreat, while on our right the contingent of Norwegians that served under Dag Hringsson, the king’s kinsman, had been outflanked and was being cut to pieces. With both flanks gone, the shield-wall was surrounded. Though we fought for every foot of ground, the farmers drove us steadily back.

  A red-faced, sweating farmer charged at me, swinging a gnarled tree root, his only weapon. My shield was gone, my sword somehow entangled with another man’s axe.

  If he had hit me square on the head, he would have brained me. As it was, the cudgel glanced off my helmet but landed hard on my right shoulder. I sank down, dizzy with pain. I expected my deathblow in the next moment, but when I raised my eyes, the fellow had vanished in the swirling swordstorm.

  I discovered that I wanted to live after all, and began to drag myself along the ground through a forest of legs. Choking and blinded by the dust, I had no notion which way I was headed. I broke through the leg-forest into a momentary clearing, where Olaf’s white banner stood. Just as I wiped the dust and sweat from my eyes, the young standard-bearer who held it went down with a sword cut across his face, and Olaf himself reached out to keep his banner from falling.

  At the same instant, an axe-man ran up and chopped off the king’s left leg at the knee. He groaned and fell on his side. Two of his skalds—one of them that Thormod who had sung so beautifully in the morning—flung themselves on his body, but rough hands dragged them off and slew them.

  The jarls and their men ringed Olaf now. He lifted his arms and called the name of Christ just as Thorir (of the magic shirt) rammed him through the belly with his spear so hard that the ring mail burst apart. Kalv Arnesson, for good measure, hewed halfway through this neck. A geyser of blood shot out, and the square, brown head fell over on his shoulder. The face, I thought, looked surprised.