Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  Our heads snapped up as if yanked by invisible cords. We stared at him blankly.

  “Like your quarters?” He smiled and winked as though this were some private joke that we all shared. “Know the inside of her like the palm of my hand. Used to be this was the sauna—what they call a steam bath here—until they built the bigger one closer to the new well. That’s why she’s put together tight as a boat’s bottom—to keep in the heat, don’t you see. Now it serves ’em for a lock-up.”

  We burst out in a rush of speech—which seemed to alarm him so much that I thought he would run away. “No, no, friends, not so eager, not so eager.” He waved a skinny finger in our faces. “You know they aren’t half pleased about me talking to you. Just you sit quiet. There, that’s better.”

  “But who are you?” I whispered.

  “It is good to hear the old speech again, damned if it ain’t.” He grinned, showing bad teeth. “You know, I feared I had lost it with no one to talk it to these thirteen years.”

  “Thirteen,” murmured Bengt weakly.

  The poor fellow lowered his watery eyes to the ground, while his narrow shoulders worked up and down in a constant motion—for this was a peculiarity of his that he seemed quite unable to control. His head, too, would take violent jumps to one side or the other as shudders ran through him. In fact, now I remembered seeing him before, trotting here and there about the place with his queer shakes and a lost look on his pinched and dirty, young-old face. Bits of straw in his hair, tattered clothes, and birch bark shoes as big as boats at the ends of his skinny legs, made him seem just another one of the peasants whose huts clustered within the wall.

  “Maybe fourteen—maybe more,” he chuckled, settling himself on the ground with his legs tucked under him. “Name is Hrapp, though the Finns call me hullu—’fool,’ as you might say in our words.”

  That brought me up sharp. “You understand their speech?”

  “Oh, yes. Talk it, too. The first few months I just kept my mouth shut and my ears open and pretty soon, why, damned if she didn’t start making sense to me. After that it come quick.” He laughed again and tapped his forehead with a skinny finger.

  “And why do they call you fool?” said Stig, studying him with a careful look. “You aren’t a fool, are you, Hrapp?”

  “Ha, ha! Maybe yes and maybe no—but I must start my story at the beginning if you want to know all.

  “There was fifty-six of us when they caught us. Brave lads, from Sodermanland in Sweden, off for a summer’s harrying—like yourselves, as it might be? Well, you’ve seen how things go here. After a while there wasn’t a one of us left alive but me. Shall I tell you why? It was learning their gabble kept me alive. Because the old woman—you haven’t met the Mistress yet, old Louhi—she loves stories, just dotes on ’em. Any sort—stories about trolls and giants, kings and battles, just anything at all. They never sail far from home, these folk, and they know naught of the world outside. And I got to be a fair hand at putting stories into their words. Done it all these years—told every story I know a hundred times if I’ve told it once. But she never seems to tire of ’em, and she lets me live.”

  “If you call this life,” muttered Ivar.

  “Well, damn it, I like it better than watching the world go by from the top of a sharp stick. Though there was the time that I got fed up—for it is a grim place here.”

  “We know,” I said.

  “Oh no, friend, you don’t know—you don’t know….” His voice trailed off, and he stared vacantly, as though we had all suddenly vanished. Another great twitch of his head and shoulders brought him back to attention.

  “It is a grim place here—and so I ran off to the woods one time. After a few days, though, wandering about, cold and starving, I come back. Didn’t mind by then if they did whack my head off. Joukahainen was for doing it, too, but Louhi wouldn’t let him. Instead he gave me a beating that near killed me—left me this dent on my forehead here, do you see it?

  “Then they throw me down the dry well that’s a trash pit now, over inside the old well house, cram me down in it with a skin of water and a bit of moldy cheese, throw a dead goat in after me and shut the trap. And there I sit, just me and the worms and the rats—big’uns, too, and as hungry as me.

  “I don’t know when it was that I begun to wail and throw myself about—feeling the vermin all over me, if you see what I mean. Even tried to kill myself by holding my breath, but you can’t, you know. And it was a long, long time before they pulled me out.

  “I’ve been shaky in my ways ever since then, and they take me for a crazy man. But I don’t complain. I’ve got the run of the place, sleep where I like, and nothing to do all day but tell my stories whenever Louhi takes the fancy. I’m luckier than most!”

  It was she who ruled here, then—the bundle of rag and hair I had glimpsed that first morning and never seen again. I begged Hrapp to tell us more of her, though he was plainly unwilling to, glancing uneasily around him while a whole series of minor tremors ran through his body.

  “She’s a witch, I can tell you,” he said softly. “There’s death in her mouth. She can sing herself into an eagle or a hawk, call down sun and moon, send the killing frost….”

  Stig, who took such things lightly, snorted.

  Hrapp shot him a frightened look. “It’s the truth! Day and night she sits in the hall with her wizards, and they sing and sing till the place stinks with taika—what they call magic. Times like that she sends me away, and I wouldn’t stay there if she was to beg me.”

  While Hrapp talked, I stole a look at Glum. His face was in his hands, and he rocked back and forth, groaning. He had known it that first night, had felt the crippling magic all around that was deeper and blacker even than One-eyed Odin’s.

  “And she rules wide,” he went on. “This place they call Pohjola—North Farm, as we should say. It’s the strong-place of her tribe. But she takes tribute from others too, all up and down the coast.”

  “Alone?” I asked, “No husband?”

  “There she is unlucky. He went a-hunting one day last winter and never come back. They found him in the woods, shorter by a head. But he was hardly worth the killing. Even while he lived, it was only her they feared. She did carry on, though, and buried him handsome.”

  Stig looked up and caught my eye. “The barrow—”

  “What? Oh, no, no, no,” Hrapp sounded almost offended. “No, they wouldn’t treat you near so kind as they do if you’d rifled his tomb. No, Louhi put him where no man’s hand will ever touch him.”

  From where we sat, we could see over the roof of the hall to the barren, cone-shaped hill that had impressed me on our first morning here. I followed Hrapp’s gaze to it.

  “All that for him?”

  “Ask nothing about that.” He tore his eyes from it and glared at me with desperate anger.

  “As you like.” I put up my hands and smiled until he seemed easier.

  “And the Headsman, Joukahainen?” asked Einar. “He’s her son, is he?”

  “Of sons she hasn’t any, though she loves him like a son. And some say,” he added slyly, “better than a son.”

  “Friend Hrapp,” I broke in suddenly, for in my deadened brain a thought had begun to stir. “Hrapp, teach me to speak. I am a story-teller too.”

  “What d’you say?” He eyed me narrowly. “My Old Woman wants no other story-teller.” He tried to draw away, but I held him fast by his ragged shirtfront.

  “Stop, stop it!” he cried. “They’ll see.” Now his eyes bulged with fear.

  I gripped him tighter and commenced to shake him, while Stig and Einar and the others stared at me as though I had lost my wits.

  “Now, mind me, Hrapp the Fool. I don’t want your wretched office. I want freedom for my men and me and I’m powerless until I can speak. Help me and come with us—or else, rot here for thirteen years more.”

  “You’re the fool!” he cried. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. “How will it serve
you to talk to Louhi, eh? You think she’ll let you go for that? Or Joukahainen? He has precious little conversation, has poor Joukahainen, except in the matter of heads!”

  My other hand closed on his throat. “Say yes, Hrapp.” Across the stable yard, a guard stared at us. “Hrapp, they’re watching. Say yes.”

  “Yes—alright, yes.”

  I pushed him back on his heels. The guard, unslinging his crossbow, started toward us.

  “Now, Hrapp, quickly”—I smiled into the twitching face—“what shall we say to this curious sentry? Begin my lessons.”

  27

  Old Louhi

  Try as we might, we could not ignore our former shipmates, who were a mute audience to the daily round of our lives. At first they had regarded us from the tops of their wooden stakes with expressions of sleepy indifference or only mild surprise. But as the days passed into weeks, other emotions seemed to possess them. Their mouths drew back at the corners so that some appeared to be smiling in secret amusement, while others frowned or even screamed in silence. But this, too, changed in time, as the rain and the crows and the vermin cleaned them up, until, when a month had passed, there was not enough flesh left on them to interest a fly; and they had ceased to be our friends.

  Meantime we, the living, came more and more to resemble the dead. Glum, who was still sunk in his special despair, toiled through the day like a dumb beast of burden. Stig grew morose and irritable. Though he never said so aloud, into his eyes oftentimes came a look that told me his mind was on Nidaros and Bergthora and how he might have been there now, sitting by a warm fire with food in his belly. Even Einar turned moody, baffled by the silent resentment of the others. They needed someone to blame for their sorrows and he was the outsider, the hated Jomsviking.

  For us all, the days dragged by in ceaseless toil and growing despair. Added to our other miseries, we soon began to notice the black bruises on our arms and legs, the bleeding gums, and faintness which herald the dreaded scurvy. So at night, when we sank down on our cold floor that hadn’t even the comfort of a bit of straw on it, we slept the restless sleep of sick and exhausted men.

  Nevertheless, I continued to work at learning the speech of our captors. I couldn’t have said why. I had no plan really. Stig and one or two others who had caught my enthusiasm for it in the first days had long since given it up, but sheer perverseness kept me at it. I must do something. And so I willed myself to believe that somehow my effort would bear fruit in the end.

  I should say something more here about my teacher, Hrapp the Fool. As to his age, I had guessed him to be near fifty. It was a shock to learn he was only thirty-two. He had lived nearly half his life in this wretched hole. For all I knew, he was a cheerful and generous youth when he and his mates set out on that unlucky voyage that ended here, but fear had taken him over like a leprous wound, deforming him beyond recognition. He trembled as easily as he breathed; cringed as naturally as he shat himself; was fawning, greedy, sly, and suspicious. When I asked him once if he suffered much from nightmares (as I did myself), he only laughed. I suppose he meant that this life was all one nightmare.

  He was certainly not stupid. To have survived here at all bespoke quick wits. But he grudged each little bit of knowledge that I dragged from him, whether about the speech, customs or history of Pohjola, as if it diminished by so much the precious hoard of knowledge that was literally his life’s blood.

  Why, feeling as he did, had he agreed to teach me at all? Though I had taken him by surprise with a bluff at our first meeting, I had no real hold over him. Nevertheless, he quickly fell into the habit of following me to my work every day, and even of spending the nights with us in our foul little cell, although my crew mistrusted him.

  I doubted he was a spy. Where was the need? I decided finally that while he might fear me as a rival for his Mistress’ favor, he also dreaded the thought that we might go off without him. And so he balanced on a knife blade of doubt whether he should risk the little that he had for the much he might gain.

  I pitied Hrapp easily, liked him with difficulty, and never for a moment trusted him.

  In any case, though, I put him to good use; always making him speak to me in Finnish, asking him the name of each thing, and saying it over until I had it right. And soon, what had sounded like nothing more than the twittering of birds, began to separate itself into words I could roll around on my tongue.

  I have more wit for this than most men. From my earliest childhood I possessed a great memory for words, which is the reason my young head was as well stocked with tales and poems as many a man twice my age.

  Soon I could hold simple conversations with the peasants who toiled alongside us in the fields, though they had little to say.

  What their rank in the society of Pohjola was, I never understood. They were angry when I called them orjat, and yet they seemed no better off than slaves, being as dirty, dumb, and starved as the rest of us. It was only the children who were sometimes merry, and vastly entertained by my efforts to speak their language. Whenever I made a mistake they would put their hands in front of their faces, shriek with laughter, and guess wildly at my meaning until the approach of some sour-faced elder put an end to the game.

  Sometimes I would try to overhear these peasants talking among themselves. Mostly they spoke too quickly for me, and I didn’t get much, but there was one word that I would catch now and again that intrigued me—sampo, as nearly as I could make it out. When they said it, they would lift their eyes quickly to the hill, then look away and bend their heads again to their tasks. And this they did more frequently as the first month of our captivity drew to an end.

  That hill began to haunt my dreams. Nothing grew on it, nothing near it. Our work never took us there, and I could make no one talk to me about it. And yet its shadow, in every sense, hung over us. In some lights, as when the setting sun threw a bloody haze over the landscape, its dun-colored earth seemed to glow like molten copper. At those times it reminded me of my own Hekla—and stirred troubling memories in me.

  †

  The warriors of Pohjola, who lived with their women in the great hall, were a class apart. They did no work of any kind, but passed their days sweating in the sauna, carousing, and swaggering about the place dressed in their finery and armed to the teeth.

  One day, though, Joukahainen assembled three score of them together, more than half his total force, and led them out, shrieking their war cries, through the sea-gate to their boats.

  Following that, we spent one joyous week without beatings, until, on a gray morning, the sentries blew long blasts on their birch bark trumpets and presently the gate swung open and the warriors pranced through again—fierce scowls on their faces, crowing and leaping and whirling their swords around their heads as the whole farm ran down to greet them.

  I happened to be standing at the woodpile by the hall, where I had been sent to split firewood. From there I had a clear view down to the seagate, and through it, for the first time since our captivity began, glimpsed a sliver of sea. I could see the prow of a boat, crammed to the gunwales with hides, sacks of meal, and other stuff as might be looted from a rich settlement. Unnoticed, I joined the crowd and drew closer.

  While his warriors carried this cargo in and heaped it up in the yard, Joukahainen displayed before us his special prizes—the inevitable heads, eleven of them, which he unwrapped one at a time. He held each one up by its hair and encouraged the Pohjolans to scream abuse at it before handing it over to one of his men to set on a stake. Several were the heads of women, five were children, one an infant.

  His best prize he saved for last—a girl, pushed through the gate by two warriors. She was slim as a willow and dressed in a red shift that was sewn all over with little bells and golden disks. Two yellow braids hung down to her waist. With a sudden pang I thought of my dead sister. Joukahainen shouted up to the hall for his Mistress to show herself and accept the gift he had brought her.

  By and by, Louhi answered his call.
Pulling her head down into her shoulders tortoise-wise, she advanced with a quick shuffling gait over the dusty ground between us. The crowd drew aside for her, warriors and peasants alike, touching their foreheads and dropping their gaze as she passed by—this stumpy, halting old woman, swaddled to her ears, as though she feared the touch of what little sunlight there was. In a month, I still had not had a good look at her face.

  Standing in front of the girl, she thrust a finger at her and spoke some words, but too low and quick for me to catch. Then, in an instant, the girl spat in the old woman’s face. Louhi, recoiling, dove into the folds of her clothing and came up with a knife. She would have ripped the girl from belly to breastbone if Joukahainen had not made a lightning grab for her wrist. It astonished me that he dared this, such fear did she inspire in everyone. But he had his way. She retreated a step and the knife went back inside her rags.

  In return, he made her a very low bow, while touching his fingertips to his forehead, and said something to the effect that she must be patient just a little while longer. To this she made some piping reply, and turning from him, scuttled back to the seclusion of her dark hall.

  The Headsman followed her there, dragging the girl behind him. With fair Louhi and gentle Joukahainen gone, the crowd dissolved and drifted back to its labors.

  †

  My curiosity about that morning’s business was soon to be satisfied. Hrapp found me some hours later in the stables and informed me coolly that a feast was ordered that night to celebrate Joukahainen’s victorious return. I was to present myself to Louhi, who was aware of my progress in the language, and entertain her with whatever poor effort I was capable of. I swallowed hard and thanked him.

  The rest of that day I spent in a sweat of preparation, cudgeling my brains for some simple story that I could manage in their tongue and feeling my little store of words leaking away by the minute.

  The feast was already under way when Hrapp and I crept into the high-raftered hall and took seats at the farthest table from where Louhi, black and shriveled as an old spider, sat amidst her warriors and wizards.