by Ken Hagan
Sigi answers by hammering his strake of driftwood on the sand. It is Ulph, who replies, ‘If we delay a day or two, them will be waiting — them will be on their guard.’
‘Exactly what I am saying,’ says Sigi. ‘We will strike at them — do it tonight, while the iron is hot.’
Snorri weighs in — he hasn’t spoken till now. ‘Young master,’ he asks, ‘did you say, when you got to the fold, the steadman was working the smithy?’
‘Aye,’ replies Sigi, ‘his ugly face was black with soot — what of it?’
‘Well,’ says Snorri with a sly look, ‘where there be sparks and a smithy flame, there be a risk of fire. Accidents happen. I’ve known a man’s forge burn to the ground before now. ’ Snorri laughs at his own cleverness and throws his strake unbroken on the fire.
‘Are you saying we could make an accident happen?’ says Cuin.
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ says Ulph, ‘them ones would be too busy fighting a fire to come after us.’
‘I suppose,’ says Lar reluctantly, ‘it would give us time to get away.’
‘What I like,’ says Uncle, warming to the idea, ‘they won’t know how the fire started. They might suspect. They will blame us — even accuse us, but they won’t know for sure.’
‘That’s no good,’ says Sigi, shaking his head. ‘The whole point of doing something is that they know who did it.’
‘Well, young master,’ says Ulph. ‘If that’s what you fancy, let’s climb the roof and block off their smoke-hole. The hall will fill with smoke while them are in there sleeping; them will guess who it was, but we will be long gone.’
‘Better than that,’ says Sigi. ‘Take burning straw to the roof, and stuff it down the smoke-hole. Start a fire, raze them to the ground.’
Uncle puts his foot down. ‘That is going too far with women and bairns in the house.’
I shake my head. ‘It is loose talk, Uncle, don’t pay any heed. None of this will happen! How can they do any of these things?’
‘What are you on about, Kregin?’ My brother turns to me with an angry look.
‘Don’t you see, Sigi, the dogs will be onto us. We won’t get near the yard before an alarm is raised from the hounds. Asgrim will catch us red-handed.’
*
‘Keep rubbing it in, young masters,’ says Ulph the shepherd. ‘Rub the grease all over.’
‘Wool grease gives off a powerful scent,’ says Cuin. ‘It will make you smell like sheep. The ewes in Asgrim’s fold will get a sniff and think that you are wethers from the flock.’
‘And them hounds at the gate won’t tell the difference either,’ says Ulph.
Snorri has a woolback wedged between his knees. Lar grips the animal’s neck to keep it steady, while Ulph combs his fingers through oily tufts of wool at the sheep’s tail. The wether wriggles in protest. Ulph scrapes fistfuls of grease from its hindquarters, working the shoddy to a woollen paste. The paste sticks to his hands like melted glue.
Sigi and I are barefoot, stripped to our breeches. We have been rubbing the shoddy on our skin from head to toe. Faces and beards, hair and neck, arms and chest — even our breeches — are covered in grease and oily tufts of fleece. We no longer feel the cold of a winter night. Our bodies are hot, shining like brass in the light of the fire.
Ulph has stripped naked — he’s too poor to wear breeches — and does the same with his body, covering himself in a layer of grease and wool. Ulph will come with us — with Sigi and me — only the three of us are going to Asgrim’s steading. We are under strict orders what to do, once we get there. While we rub on more grease, Cuin repeats his instructions. ‘Keep to what we have agreed — no funny business — it is what your father would want.’ Cuin lays down the law. ‘There is to be no damage — no fires set in house or barn and no harm done to man or beast. Break into the sheepfold and take back what’s ours by right. Nab three of their woolbacks — like for like — no more than what they stole from us.
Snorri, laughing at something whispered by Ulph, empties Sigi’s hneff-pieces from the linen pouch and replaces them with seaweed and sorrel gathered from the beach. The forage is to entice the sheep to us once we break into Asgrim’s fold.
Ulph cuts himself a short length of rope, a strip no more than four ells long, and likewise one rope apiece for Sigi and me. We will fasten leash-ropes to the sheep when we snatch them to be sure of a quick getaway. My brother and I tie our ropes to the waist like loose belts. We pack no axe or blade. Ulph will carry the bag of forage.
From salty oak-wood — one of the strakes found by Lar on the shore — Cuin hurriedly whittles three pegs — one for each of us. It is an old trick: if we bite on wood, while we are running, it will stop us from talking and help us to breathe. ‘Suck on the peg,’ he says. ‘Keep your tongue on it. Remember, not one word. Stay mute till you get back here.’
My heart pounds. I am breathing heavily.
At first, we run blind in the darkness, but once away from the fire, our eyes accustom to what’s around us — the ground remains dark at our feet. Ulph and I keep together, while Sigi — always one for setting the pace — runs out in front. My brother’s loosened hair, caught in starlight, can be seen bouncing off his neck. His breathing is easy, his step lighter than ours, as he lengthens his stride into the night.
Ulph and I stay shoulder to shoulder. We follow Sigi barefoot over shingle, over sand. Grit grinds between our toes. Clumps of wrack — seaweed cold and mushy — plops under our footfall. Now fine silt from summer’s melted ice; now grainy river peat washed down from the fells — more shingle, more sand or grit, something else — can’t say what — now splashing at the water’s edge, sand soft and yielding underfoot; now back out of water, hopping over shells sharp as teeth, sinking in pebbles swept in by the tide.
I bite the salty chew-peg. I need to spit, need to swallow, need to take air, want to lick the sweat off my lips — to free my tongue — to let out a yell. Sigi stops; sniffs deep through his nose; bites his peg; signs back to us; changes direction. My brother moves downwind, as Cuin told him to. We follow — upwards; blindly; barefoot. Upwards onto grassy land, over dead clumps of scutch — grazed-out grass, spiked crisp, hardened by frost — while prickly gorse plucks our bare legs. On stones, on clay, over dyke, over ditch, into a stubble field — smells of barn dung, sow manure, forge slag, earth-dust wet from slaughter blood, soured milk, roof smoke, pickle tubs, dog-sick, stale slop and ale.
From one hound a sleepy howl, from another, no more than a dog’s yawn. We are at Asgrim’s fold. We have come at it from the bottom end without going through the steading yard. The sheep are tight in the fold — must be two hundred head — they are settled but awake. I can make out their shapes, their faces; wethers and ewes standing, breathing noisily; waiting for daylight and fodder.
A wattle fence, shoulder height, secures Asgrim’s sheep within the fold, the enclosure held fast by sturdy stumps of willow driven into the hard ground. Each wattle section is tied to a stump by withies of twisted yew. We have no axe or knife to cut the withies.
Asgrim’s men have done a job driving in the stumps. Try as we might, we can’t get them loose from the frosty earth. We are heaving, pulling at them, bodies, hands, limbs hampered by sheep grease, wool and sweat. Sigi is at it from above, Ulph and me shoving from below. The stumps are too far in, the ground too firm. We slip, slither and slide all over the place, without dislodging them.
*
Still no breach in the fold. Sigi and I have been at it for ages. The sheep are coming close to the fence, their wet noses rubbing the wattle, making little sniffing cries at us from behind the barrier.
Ulph has disappeared. He has gone off to circle the enclosure. He was crawling, lurking in the dark, groping to find the wattle gates through which sheep were driven into the pen. When he finds the opening — he must have found it by now — he will undo the loops of the gates and release the sheep.
Where is Ulph? Where the hell has he got to?
I feed my rope through a hole in the wattle. I am leaning back, a steady foothold at last on the stump, dragging at the fence, pulling — impossible with greasy hands — but it might shift for me now with the rope tied to my waist for traction.
Sigi sees what I am up to. He scrambles over the wattle, scattering the nosey sheep behind it. They raise warning voices in the night. The sound spreads, the whole flock alive to their cries. I feel my brother pushing outwards at me, ramming with his shoulder from the inside, ramming with his full force at the dent I have made.
Hounds barking, then a child’s cry, up at the steading; cows, young heifers, awake in the barn. Now the swinery is awake, a sow rousing from her slumbers with an angry oinking squeal. The pig snouts off her complaint — a hideous grunzing roar — loud among the shrill squeals of her litter. No pig should be wakened unless for food!
Men’s voices outside the steading, hounds yelping, yelping. I bite on the chew-peg and taste blood on my lips. Sigi bursts through the wattle, tumbles over me — at last, a breach in the fold!
Ulph the shepherd is inside with the sheep, loping around in the dark, a shining, naked body inside the pen with woolbacks around him. Ulph has found the opening, untied the gate-loops and made his way in. He has come down into the fold from the steading end. He is in there among the sheep and they are running from him.
No need for a bag of forage to entice the sheep — no need for sorrel or seaweed to rub under their noses. The flock is flooding past us, past Sigi and me, pouring through the gap and out of the fold. Ulph is after them. He has two woolbacks — one at either hand — held by the horns. Sigi and I rope a third, a fattened wether, and run after Ulph into the night.
‘Listen to their cries,’ yells Ulph gleefully.
‘What’s that smell?’ yells Sigi.
I hear nothing, smell nothing. I run hell-for-leather. All I sense is the rope in my hand, the shaggy fleece of our captured woolback rubbing at my legs. My feet have gone numb. I spit out the chew-peg, taste blood on my lips.
*
Back on the beach with Cuin and the others, fear and thrill subside. Nothing remains but the sickening smell of shoddy wool. Only now do I smell the stink of it. I feel the cold heaviness of sleep coming over me. I fight to stay awake. Snorri Harelip is out there in the darkness, laughing.
*
Lar hasn’t said a word since we broke camp, nor has Uncle. And done with too is the sly muttering between Ulph and Snorri — and the endless chatter from Sigi. All their wasted chin-wag, all their empty bragging has fallen to silence and hunger. We won’t stop to eat until we are in Twaindale. By then it will be dark.
*
In the dim light of morning we have kept going, driving the sheep rast after rast without stopping. We have climbed the fell — all the way from the shore — heading north above Long-fiord. We didn’t pause on the ascent for fear of being followed by Asgrim’s men. We needn’t have bothered. No one is after us. They were busy fighting the fire.
From here, under the south face of the fell, we look across the fiord to where the fire took hold last night. A spot of smoky light glows over there on south shore. The fire that burned down Asgrim’s forge no longer sends flames smithy-red into dark sky. The blaze has died out. What’s left is a fleshy gash in the morning landscape, a gash the colour of a man’s skin, like you see when a ragged hole wears through the knee of your breeches.
Part Three
Chapter 25
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ says Hethrun, doing her best not to look pleased. ‘With the weather so bad, I didn’t think you would come.’
She brushes snow off my boots, sweeps melting ice over the threshold, and forces the lodge door shut against the winter-wind. My skates make a clacking sound on the floor as I hobble to the fire. Ikki rouses from his catnap at the hearth and rubs his arched back against my leg. As for Ogg the goat — inside for the yule months — he sniffs at the pouch of meats that I have brought for Hethrun, muzzles the wet snow-shoes tied to my waist, and starts licking my cold hands — a sign that he is begging for tit-bits.
The meat-pouch is leaking fat. I lay it on Hethrun’s stool. ‘Haldis sent you these pickled trotters. I couldn’t wait till yule-fires. Had to come and wish you the best of the season.’ I sit on the hearth and start to un-strap my skates.
‘That’s a fine pair of sliders,’ she says. ‘Where did you get skates like that?’ I grin and shake the wet blades from my feet. Hethrun has a closer look at them and screws up her nose. ‘What have you done with the ones I carved for you? Aren’t they good enough?’
‘These are whale-bone. They belong to Helga’s brother. I told him the going gets slushy for anyone skating by Laxvik shore, and he said, “Try these: you will fly over the ice!” ’
‘And did you fly?’
‘Not as high as you and Ikki when you are sniffing yarrow-weed!’
Hethrun chuckles at the thought of it. ‘Enough of your cheek!’
I rub my finger on the underside of the skates, testing the edge of the blade. ‘Not bad over soft ice — for crossing the estuary — but the sliders you made from the old broken mast-head, I wouldn’t have anything else for skating on the tarn.’
‘Helga’s brother, you say?’
‘Geir, the younger brother, he arrived before the snows, bringing gifts for yule. Idgar sent two bear pelts. The fur on them is thick, milky-white. You have never seen the like. They are from snow-bears Helga’s father killed on the ice.’
‘Young Idgarson will stop with you over the winter?’
‘He has no choice. It’s too late to make it back over the fells. He will be with us till lambing-tide. Geir is best of company. You would like him.’
‘Well now,’ she says knowingly, stroking her chin. ‘Isn’t that a long stay-over, winter long — and just to deliver two furs?’
With that, the kerling is up with a start, off out into the cold to find her snow-shoes among the junk in the barn — and to bring more bog-berry. She likes to heat her winter brew by the fire and drink it warm.
Later, with a bowl of steaming punch resting on her lap, Hethrun puts her wet feet on the hearth-stones and leans back on her stool. ‘Knattball you say?’
‘Guothie Klepjarn put up a challenge — knatt on the ice, five-a-sides on the morning after yule. He sent word to see if Father could put up a team against his. We are lucky that Helga’s brother is here. Geir is quick on the ice. He will skate for us. It will be one hell of a battle — they have Mord Asgrimson playing on their team, and Gunnar and Bane.’
Before morning is done, Hethrun has heard how we fared on our visit north, the latest news from my folks at Baerskard. And from Twaindale, details of my sister Vrekla and her baby — the losing battle to care for Helga’s mother — and, not least, the blessing I received from the old grandpa.
When Hethrun learns of our midnight raid on Asgrim’s fold, and the fire that burned down his forge, she is not well pleased. ‘Whose dumb idea was that?’
‘If you must know, Sigi came up with the plan.’
‘I should have guessed.’
‘Uncle Cuin went along with it. We all did.’
‘Cuin? Thor help us! That’s even worse!’
‘But Hethrun, we had to get back at them. They stole from our drove.’
‘It wasn’t your loss — you were giving away livestock. What did it matter if you delivered a few short? Even with three head missing, the sheep were a handsome gift for Idgar.’
‘We couldn’t let Mord get away with it. And besides, we came away unscathed. It’s not as if we were caught in the act.’
‘If you think that man Asgrim will leave it at that, you have another think coming.’
‘What can he do?’
‘He is a priest-man, and a guothie. And you have rubbed his nose in it. He can’t allow that. He will find a way to get back at you.’
‘We made off with three wethers. We took from him what his son snatched from us.’
�
��What about the fire? Burning down a man’s forge — that was going too far.’
‘I swear to you, again, Hethrun, we didn’t start the fire. It was Asgrim’s bad luck — our good fortune, maybe — the fire gave us time to run off with the sheep and escape up the fell.’
‘Mark my words,’ says the kerling. ‘That’s not an end to it. This sorry episode will rebound on you. You can’t break an egg and not spill the yolk.’
*
It is a rare thing for Hethrun to venture far while snow is on the ground. She doesn’t like to risk injury from a fall or be caught in a blizzard. But here she is, in snow-shoes and gaiters, her frosted skirts tied to the knees, pressing on through ice and snow. We have come as far as the frozen heath on Skagi ness. Out west before us, the headland stands high above the frozen estuary. Beyond the estuary, glistening in winter light, an endless ice-bound sea. The sea air bites our faces.
‘When are we going back?’ I ask.
‘Be patient,’ she answers, a bit breathless. ‘We have come this far — not much longer.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
A cough is her reply, then, ‘You will see when we get there.’
‘We will be caught in a snowfall. You won’t want to be out in it.’
‘We will miss the snow,’ she replies firmly. ‘More will fall tonight, but the ice-clouds have passed for now. Look over the estuary. You can see as far as Klettur Os. You can see the fishermen’s houses on the shore — even make out their board-ways over the ice.’
Over the hardened estuary, to the north, skies have indeed cleared. The isles of Holmur stand out from the sea, hemmed in by grey ice. It looks like there is a solid footing out in the ocean, but sea-ice is treacherous, constantly on the move. The men of Kletturvik walk on planks for safety, and cut fishing-holes in the drifting ice-floes. They bait lines before nightfall and pull in their catch at first light.
‘Is this it, Hethrun, a piece of rock? Is this what we came to see?’