by Tim Severin
‘How do I know that I will be able to return?’ I asked.
‘That, too, I can arrange with Allba’s help,’ he answered.
He woke Allba and me long before dawn the next day. He had already lit a small fire in the central hearth and cleared a space at the back of the tent. There was enough room for me to sit cross-legged on a square of deerskin. The hide was placed fur side down, and its surface had been painted with the four white lines in the pattern that I had known from throwing the rune counters and the Saxon wands. Rassa indicated that I should sit within the central square and that Allba would squat facing me. ‘As my daughter, she has inherited some of my powers,’ he said. ‘If she is near at hand, you may meet her in the saivo.’
Allba’s presence gave me more confidence, for I was feeling very nervous. She untied the small leather pouch she wore on her belt when she went on her hunting trips and shook out the contents onto the deerskin in front of me. The red caps with their white spots were faded to a dull, mottled pink, but I could still recognise the dried and shrivelled mushrooms. Allba picked them over carefully, running her small fingers over them delicately, feeling their rough surface. Then she selected three of the smallest. Carefully putting the others back into the pouch, she left two of the mushrooms on the deerskin, placed the third in her mouth and began to chew deliberately. She kept her eyes on me, her gaze never wavering. After a little time, she put her hand to her mouth and spat out the contents. She held out her palm to me. ‘Eat,’ she said. I took the warm moist pellet from her, placed it on my tongue and swallowed. Twice more she softened the mushrooms and twice more I swallowed.
Then I sat quietly facing her, observing the firelight play across her features. Her eyes were in shadow.
Time passed. I had no way of judging how long I sat there. Rassa stayed in the background and added several dry sticks to the fire to keep it alight.
Slowly, very slowly, I began to lose touch with my body. As I separated from its physical presence, I felt my body trembling. Once or twice I knew I twitched. But there was nothing I could do about it and I felt unconcerned. A hazy contentment was settling over me. My body seemed to grow lighter as my thoughts relaxed. Everything except for Allba’s face became indistinct. She did not move, yet her face came closer and closer. I saw every tiny detail with extraordinary clarity. The lobe of her right ear filled my vision. I detected the gentle blush of blood beneath the skin, the soft fuzz of hair. I wanted to reach out and nibble it in my teeth.
Suddenly there was no ground beneath me. I was suspended in a comfortable space. I knew that my body was there with me, but it had no importance. Without any sensation of movement I was in an endless landscape of trees, snow and rock, but I felt no cold. I glided over the surface without contact. It was as if I was riding on a gentle air current. The trees were a vivid green and I could examine every leaf and wrinkle of the bark in minute detail. The snow reflected the colours of the rainbow, the crystals shifted, merged and rippled. A small bird flew up from a bush and I knew that it was Allba’s companion. Between two trees I glimpsed the upright form of a white bear, close, yet not close. It was standing upright, its two eyes gazing at me with a human expression and motionless. I heard someone speaking to me. I recognised my own voice and replied. The conversation was reassuring. I felt peaceful. A bear, dark brown this time, appeared to one side of my path, head down, lumbering and swaying as it walked along and our tracks were converging. When the animal was in touching distance, we both halted. I felt the brush of a bird’s wing against my cheek. The bear slowly turned to face me and its muzzle beneath the eyes seemed to smile.
The eyes were grey-blue, and I realised that I was looking into Allba’s face. I was back on the deerskin, still seated.
‘You have come back from the saivo,’ said Rassa. ‘You were there only a short time, but long enough to know how to return there if you wish.’
‘It seemed very like our own world,’ I said, ‘only much larger and always just beyond reach, as though it withheld itself.’
‘That is appearance only,’ said the noaide. ‘The saivo is full of spirits, the spirts of the dead as well as the spirits who rule our lives. By comparison our world is temporary and fragile. Our world is in the present, while the saivo is eternal. Those who travel into the saivo glimpse the forces that determine our existence, but only when those spirits wish to be seen. Those who visit the saivo regularly become accepted there and then the spirits reveal themselves.’
‘Why should a bear smile?’ I asked.
Opposite me Allba suddenly got to her feet and left the tent. Rassa did not answer. Without warning I felt dizzy and my stomach heaved. More than anything else, I wanted to lie down and close my eyes again. I could barely drag myself back to my sleeping place and the last thing I remembered was Rassa throwing a deerskin over me.
Snow fell almost daily now, heavy flakes drifting down through the trees and settling on the ground. Our hunters made repeated sweeps of the forest to lay out their wooden traps because the fur-bearing animals had grown their winter coats and were in their prime. The siida made one final move. It was laborious because our tents were now double- or triple-layered to keep out the cold and difficult to dismantle and we were hampered by our heavy winter clothing. We went to ground, quite literally. The siida had its midwinter camp in the lee of a low ridge, which gave shelter from the blizzards. Over the generations each family had dug itself a refuge, excavating the soft earthen side of the ridge, then covering the crater with a thick roof of logs and earth. The entrance to Rassa’s cabin was little more than a tunnel, through which I crawled on hands and knees, but the place was surprisingly spacious once inside. I could stand upright and though the place was smoky from the small fire in the central hearth it was cosy. I admitted to myself that the thought of spending the next few months here with Allba was appealing. Rassa’s wife had spread the floor with the usual carpet of fresh spruce twigs covered with deerskins, and had divided the interior into small cubicles by hanging up sheets of light cotton obtained from the springtime traders. The contrast with the squalid dugout where Grettir had died could not have been greater. I said so to Rassa and described how my sworn brother had met his end through a volva’s malign intervention, with curse runes cut on a log.
‘Had your sworn brother met with such an accident among the Sabme, injuring himself with that axe,’ commented Rassa, ‘we would have known that it was surely a staallu’s doing. The staallu can disguise himself as an animal, a deer perhaps, and allows himself to be hunted down and killed. But when the hunter begins to cut up the animal to take its flesh and hide, the staallu turns the knife blade on the bone, so that the hunter cuts himself badly. If the hunter is far from his siida, he bleeds to death beside the carcass of his kill. Then the staallu returns to his normal shape, drinks the blood and feasts on the corpse of his victim.’
Allba, who was listening, gave a little scornful hiss. ‘If I ever meet the staallu, he will regret the day. That’s just a story to frighten children.’
‘Don’t be so sure, Allba. Just hope you never meet him,’ her father murmured, then turning to me said, ‘The staallu roams the forest. He’s big and a bit simple and clumsy. We say he’s like those coarse traders who come to acquire our furs in the springtime, though the staallu’s appetite is even more gross. He eats human flesh when times are hard, and has been known to carry off Sabme girls.’
That same week I gave away the rest of the contents of my trader’s pack. I had lost any ambition to barter with the members of the siida for furs and I was ashamed to hold back items which could be useful to the band. The Sabme were so generous and hospitable to me that it seemed wrong not to contribute my share to their well-being. Apart from mending nets and doing some primitive metalwork, I was useless to them, so I handed the pack over to Rassa and asked that he distribute the contents to whoever needed it most. The only item I kept back was the fire ruby – and that I gave to Allba as a love token. The jewel delighted her. She spent
hours in the cabin, sitting by the fire with the ruby in her fingers and turning the gem this way and that so that the red light flickered within the gem. ‘There is a spirit dancing inside the stone,’ she would say. ‘It is the spirit which brought you to me.’
The effect of giving away all my trade goods was the reverse of what I had expected – instead of ending my chances of obtaining furs to take to Miklagard, I was deluged with them. Nearly every day a hunter left outside Rassa’s cabin the frost-stiffened carcass of an ermine, a sable, a squirrel or a white fox, whose luxurious pelt Allba would skin and prepare for me. There was no way of knowing which hunter was responsible for the gift. They came and went silently on their skis. Only the blizzards stopped them. When the blizzard spirit raged the entire siida would disappear inside their underground shelters and wait for the terrible wind and driving snow to end. Then, cautiously, the Sabme dug themselves out of the snow-covered lairs and, like the animals they hunted, sniffed the wind and set out to forage.
Of course we ate the flesh of the animals we skinned. Some were rank and disagreeable – marten and otter were particularly unpleasant. But squirrel was tasty and so too was beaver. Whatever meat was left over we placed in the little larders each Sabme family had built close to their cabin, a small hutch on a pole or set on top of a rock, so as it was out of reach of animals. The food never spoiled in the bitter cold. If a hunter was lucky enough to kill a wild boaz, he stored wooden bowls of the fresh deer’s blood in the same place. Within hours it had frozen hard and could be chopped in pieces with an axe and brought within the cabin as required.
Rassa was called away by the spirits from time to time, though not always when he wanted. Without warning he would begin to twitch and writhe, then lose his balance and fall to the ground. If the spirit call was urgent, he foamed at the mouth. He had told us to press a rag into his mouth if his tongue lolled out, but not to restrain him if he was in spasms because, as his body writhed, his spirit was entering the saivo, and soon all would be calm. Rassa’s family were accustomed to these sudden departures. They would lay the unconscious noiade comfortably on his face, place his drum beneath his outstretched right hand in case he had need of it in the saivo, and then await his return to our world. When Rassa did rejoin us, his mood depended on what he had experienced in his absence. Sometimes, if he had been fighting evil spirits, he would come back exhausted. At other times he was elated, telling us of the great spirits that he had encountered. Ibmal the Sky God was untouchable and unknowable, but Rassa sometimes met Biegg-Olbmai, the God of Wind, and wrestled with him to prevent a three-day blizzard. On another occasion he had asked the God responsible for hunting, a spirit he called ‘Blood Man’, that the siida’s hunters should be rewarded. Two days later they tracked and killed an elk. The Gods and spirits whom Rassa revered were new to me, but his words aroused a faint recollection of a spirit world far older than the Elder Faith. I sensed that my own Gods, Odinn, Frey, Thor and the others, had all emerged from Rassa’s saivo to take the shapes in which I knew them.
It was when Bolive, the Sabme Sun God, had begun to appear regularly over the southern horizon that one of our neighbours came to the entrance of Rassa’s cabin and called excitedly down the tunnel. He gabbled his words so fast that I could not understand what he was saying, though Allba had spent many hours teaching me a working knowledge of her language. Whatever the hunter’s message, Rassa immediately put aside the drum he was repainting and rose to his feet. Reaching for his heavy wolfskin cloak, he gestured for me to follow, and the two of us emerged from the cabin to find a group of eight Sabme hunters, looking towards him, impatient for instructions. One of the Sabme said something about ‘honey paws’, and when Rassa replied, the hunters began to disperse towards their cabins, calling out to their families excitedly.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked Rassa.
‘The time has come to leave our cabins and live in our tents again, though this is much earlier in the season than is usual,’ he said, ‘but the Old One wants it to be that way.’
‘The Old One? Who’s he?’
Rassa would not answer directly. He asked his wife and Allba to get ready to leave the cabin. So uncomplicated was the Sabme life that our entire siida was on the move within the time it took for the men, women and children to load our belongings onto light sledges, strap infants to their mothers’ backs in tiny boat-shaped cradles lined with moss, and fasten on skis. I had no sledge to pull as I was so clumsy on skis, nor was I given a pack because I was already heavier than the Sabme and would have broken through the crust of snow.
We returned to the camp that we had left before we went into the cabins, and once again triple-covered the standing tent frames with deer hides. Everyone seemed in great good humour, leaving me confused as to what was going on.
‘What is it?’ I asked Allba, ‘Why did we leave the cabins so quickly?’
‘It’s time for the most important hunt of the entire year,’ she replied. ‘The hunt that will ensure our siida’s future.’
‘Are you going on the hunt?’
‘That is forbidden.’
‘But you’re almost our best hunter,’ I objected. ‘You will be needed.’
‘Brothers are needed, not women,’ she replied enigmatically as she tugged the final layer of the tent’s deerskin into position.
I was still bemused the next morning when I woke up to find myself covered with a layer of snow a hand’s breadth deep. The smoke hole in the top of the tent had been left open, and a late heavy fall of snow had half-buried the camp. No one seemed perturbed.
‘Here, wear these,’ said Allba, handing me a pair of shoes she had been working on all winter.
I turned them over in my hand. ‘Can’t I wear my usual shoes?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I stitched those with the seams inside so that the snow does not gather on them and I made them from the skin from a boaz head. The thickest and strongest hide, it is fitting that you should wear them today.’ She also insisted that I put on my best winter garment – a heavy wolfskin cape – though it looked strange on me because the cape had previously belonged to Rassa, and Allba had lengthened it with a skirt of reindeer hide to make it fit my extra height. Rassa himself was donning his noaide’s belt hung with the jawbones of the various fur-bearing animals we hunted, a cap sewn with sacred amulets and a heavy bearskin cloak. I had never seen him wear all these items at the same time, nor the short staff wound with red and blue ribbons and its cluster of small hawk’s bells. When I offered to carry his sacred drum for him, Rassa shook his head and gestured for me to leave the tent ahead of him. Outside I found every hunter in our siida already waiting and dressed as if for a festival. Some had put on dark blue surcoats made of cloth acquired from the traders, and their wives had sewn the hems with strips of red and yellow ribbon. Others wore the familiar deerskin hunting garments, but had added colourful hats and belts and tied sprigs of spruce to their sleeves. They all looked excited and eager, and it took me several moments to realise that they were not equipped with their usual hunting bows and arrows, throwing sticks and wooden traps. Each man was armed with a stout spear, its shaft of rough wood, the tip a broad metal head.
I had no time to ask the hunters why they had changed their equipment because Rassa now made his formal appearance. He emerged from the tent and tramped through the snow to the flat boulder at the centre of our camp. With each step he softly jingled the bells on his noiade’s wand and chanted a song I had never heard before. The words were very strange. They came from a language which bore no relation to that I had learned over the winter. When Rassa reached the rock he placed his magic drum on it, then faced towards the south. He raised the wand three times and called out what I took to be an invocation. Then he reached inside his cloak with his right hand and pulled something out from under his left armpit. He held it up for all to see. It was an arpa ring, but not of brass. From where I stood, I guessed that it was of gold and was sure of it when Rassa tossed the ring onto the dru
m skin. It fell with a dull and heavier thud than a token made of baser metal.
Rassa struck the drum’s wooden rim with the end of his noiade’s wand. The golden arpa skidded across the taut deerskin and came to a halt. Everyone craned forward to see the symbol where it rested. It lay on the serpent sign of the mountains. A shiver of delight ran through the crowd. The small, nimble men glanced at one another and nodded happily. The ancestors were observing and approving. Again the noiade rapped the drum with his staff and this time the golden ring came to rest on the figure of a bear. Now I detected that the onlookers were puzzled, almost doubtful. Rassa sensed their hesitation. Instead of striking the drum a third time with his wand, he snatched up the golden arpa and with a cry like a heron’s angry croak he tossed it in the air so that it landed on the drum skin. By chance the ring landed on its edge, and began to roll, first to the edge of the drum, then rebounding it began to trace its path erratically. It wobbled along as if uncertain until it finally slowed, remained for a heartbeat on its edge, then toppled gently to one side and settled with the gentle reverberation that a coin makes as it falls upon a gaming table. Again all the spectators leaned forward to see where it had come to rest. This time the arpa lay upon the sign of my saivo companion – the bear.