Runestone

by Don Coldsmith

  Maybe it was Helge’s attitude toward people. That had changed, certainly. Once he had been a cheerful and friendly youth, liked and admired by all. A popular young man. More popular than Nils, actually, because he had been more outgoing. That had certainly changed. Not the outgoing part, but…well, the interest and concern for others, maybe. Yes, that was it. Helge had come to regard other people as something to be used, not respected. Used, to achieve his own goals. The incident of the severed hand drifted through his mind for a moment, a troubling commentary on the last days of the man who had been his friend.

  “Let us sleep,” said Odin shortly.

  Nils wrapped himself in his robe and lay waiting for sleep to come. The soft night sounds and the crackle of the fire were a comforting lullaby. Through half-closed eyes he watched the ghostly flicker of firelight reflected from the trees. Somewhere a hunting owl called, and its mate answered. The quiet murmur of the water provided a droning background that lulled his senses.

  He was almost asleep when he heard the splash…Ah, a fish, jumping to escape a larger one, probably. He listened, but it was not repeated. Still, he had the feeling that something was not right. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, he rolled out of his sleeping robe and stepped toward the river.

  The fire was dying and the light was poor, but he could see the white of the canoe’s birchbark shell. It seemed not to have been disturbed, and he moved on past its upturned hull and to the shore. There was something on the river’s surface, maybe a stone’s throw away, a mere blob of darker hue on the dark water. It seemed alive, seemed to move. There was a moment of splashing, and then quiet. The dark shape slid on downriver in the current, or disappeared under the water, he was not certain which. Anyway, his doubts were answered.

  “Beaver,” he grunted half aloud to himself.

  Then he turned back toward the fire, and to the warmth of his sleeping robe.

  The three travelers were on the river early the next morning. Odin was eager to put distance behind them. He had not given any definite answer as to how long a journey it might be to the village of his people. Maybe, thought Nils, he does not know.

  Later, they wondered how they could have failed to notice the problem as they embarked. It should have been apparent. Looking back, they realized that there should have been footprints, but none of the three recalled having seen any.

  They had embarked when the light was still poor, the rays of the rising sun filtering in crazy striped patterns between the trunks of the forest’s trees. Odin, with all his experience in this woodland, was still distracted by the excitement of starting home. The other two were unfamiliar with the country, the weather, and the intricacies of the craft in which they traveled. So it was not unusual after all, maybe, that they noticed nothing.

  To further complicate the morning, there were areas of patchy fog on the river and in low inlets, hanging like white smoke among the trees.

  It was not long, however, before a problem became apparent. Odin had steered their course to a distance out from shore to avoid rocks, stubs, and snags that might rip the delicate underbelly out of their craft. They were not quite in the main current, which seemed to hug the far shore at this point. They were moving well.

  “Ah! The fog is damp this morning,” noted Svenson as they came through a wisp of the mist and emerged on the other side.

  Svenson was seated in the middle, with Nils in front and Odin in the rear in the steersman’s position.

  “That is true,” agreed Nils.

  A little while later, Odin grunted to attract their attention, and pointed quietly with his paddle. Near the distant shore on their left, a large antlerless deer stood in the water with her calf by her side.

  “Moose,” whispered Odin.

  The animal raised her large, ungainly head to stare at them as they moved past.

  “Moose?” asked Svenson.

  “Yes.”

  “It looks much like our red deer,” Sven said to Nils, “but bigger, maybe. The stags have antlers, you think?”

  There was a moment of confusion in language. There was difficulty in expression as the Norsemen’s word for a male deer was tentatively clarified. Then Odin laughed.

  “Yes, it is as you say. The father has big flat horns, so.”

  He placed his hands on his head to illustrate the appearance of the bull moose, and Svenson chuckled as he glanced over his shoulder. It was such diversions as this that prevented the immediate discovery of their problem.

  Soon, however, there was an exclamation of surprise from Svenson.

  “Water!”

  “What?” asked Nils.

  “Water! In the boat…that is why it seems so wet!”

  Sven was shifting the bundles of supplies, which were packed around him. The change of balance rocked the canoe, and it took a moment to steady it. Water sloshed among the bundles, rolling back and forth on the flat bottom.

  “We must go to shore!” said Odin quickly. He thrust his paddle into the water and swung the canoe’s prow. “There!” he pointed at a level strip of shore. “No, too many rocks…to the left!”

  The prow swung again. Water was deeper beneath them now, and the rolling weight was slowing their progress. The canoe rocked from the shifting mass of the water, and more water spilled into the left side as it dipped. Too much correction…now the right side…more water…

  They were within a stone’s throw of the shore when they capsized, spilling them into the water as the canoe rolled.

  “Catch the paddles! Hold to the canoe!” called Odin.

  They began to swim toward the shore, pulling the dead weight of the canoe and its sodden load. The three stumbled into shallow water and managed to drag the craft partially up on shore. Then they fell forward, trying to catch a breath, exhausted from the exertion.

  “What happened?” asked Nils when he was able.

  Odin shook his head, still breathing hard.

  “We will see,” he said. “But you see…why I…tied our supplies … to the canoe? They would be gone.”

  27

  It took some time to dry their supplies and to inspect the damage to the canoe itself. The day was chilly, even with the fall sunlight, and they built a fire to assist in the drying process.

  Odin crawled beneath the overturned canoe to look for leaks in the bark shell.

  “Ah, here!” he said, from inside the hull, as a ray of sunlight shone through. “Can you see a hole from outside?”

  “A crack,” answered Nils. “A scrape or cut, maybe.”

  “Cut?”

  “Yes. Like a knife!”

  Odin scrambled out to examine the area of damage.

  “You are right … a knife cut. Someone wanted this!”

  It was a ragged slash, much like the cut from a sharp rock.

  “Could we have struck a snag when we landed to camp?”

  Even as he asked it, Nils knew the answer. The cut was across the long axis of the canoe. Any sharp obstacle that they might have struck would produce a lengthwise rupture, because of the forward motion of the craft. Besides, it appeared that there had been an attempt to hide the damage. The cut followed one of the dark rough stripes that patterned the chalk white of the bark. It had been a deliberate act, probably done with a stone knife. It was an alarming thought, that someone was still out there who had tried to harm them in this way.

  But who?

  Suddenly, the situation appeared more clearly to Nils. A knife … the Knife Woman! And the sounds that roused him as he drifted toward sleep…

  “Wait!” he exclaimed. “Last night, I thought I heard something. I decided it was a beaver, but …”

  Quickly, he revealed his suspicions. The others listened, nodding.

  “This may be true,” Odin admitted. “I did not see the woman when we left the village. She was ahead of us, maybe. Did you see her when we left?”

  Neither of the others could remember that the Knife Woman had been present. And, with the intensity of her hate
, it seemed unlikely that she would have let them go without a parting shot of some sort.

  “Maybe she is still out there,” said Svenson, glancing nervously at the dark forest. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and Sven was only voicing the thoughts of the others.

  “Maybe,” agreed Nils. “We must be careful.”

  “Yes,” agreed Odin. “Some of their women can use a bow as well as their men.”

  “Can we fix the canoe?” asked Nils.

  “Oh, yes. It will take us a day, maybe two.” Odin was still examining the upturned canoe, and now uttered an exclamation. “Huh! Another cut!”

  Soon they had found yet another, the third not quite all the way through the bark shell.

  “Why would she stop?” wondered Nils. “It is as if she stopped before it was finished.”

  “I do not know, Thorsson. Something stopped her?”

  They talked of it at some length, but came to no conclusion.

  “Maybe we will never know,” Odin observed. “She is a little bit crazy, and who knows what she might do? We must be watching.”

  “What do you need to patch the holes?” asked Nils.

  “Not much…some sap from the trees.”

  “Pines? Pitch?”

  “Yes, you call it that. The blood of the tree.”

  Nils had never thought of it in just that way. A tree … a plant, a living thing with life-blood, and a spirit of its own. It was a far different way of thinking, that of the Skraelings.

  “What else?”

  “Nothing much. The holes are small. A bigger hole would need to be covered.”

  “Covered? With what?”

  “A piece of bark, over the hole. Hold it on with the pine sap. But we will not need that.”

  It was decided that Svenson would stay with the canoe, his back to the river. He would have to watch only half of the circle around him to escape any sneak attack. The other two would stay together as they went into the woods a little way, protecting each other. Nils could stand watch while Odin gathered the material that he needed for his repair.

  None of the three saw anything unusual, but this did not lessen their concern. Knife Woman had already demonstrated that she could wait. None of them remotely questioned whether the danger was past. The risk was there, hanging over their heads, proven by the three gashes in the bark shell of their canoe.

  Odin waited most of the day, after assembling his materials, allowing the damaged bark to dry completely. Toward evening, he took a brand from the fire and held it near each hole in the shell for a little while.

  “To drive out any water-spirits,” he explained in answer to Nils’s question. “I want to do this tonight, because they will come in with the morning fog, and we would have to dry for another day.”

  And lose a day’s travel, thought Nils. Of course…The Skraeling’s approach to the world appeared to be a strange mixture of things of the spirit and things of the world. It appeared quite practical in application. Why is it not so with us? he wondered. How did we come to separate these things? He would have liked to talk to his grandfather about this. Odd, how each time a deep thought came to him, he was reminded of that wise old man. He had not fully realized at the time, the wisdom that was his for the asking. He had learned much without even trying. Even more, because his grandfather had demanded it. Ah, the long winter evenings when he had sat by the fire with the old man, drawing the runic alphabet on a smooth board with a charred stick. Both alphabets…

  “You must learn both, Nils,” Grandfather had told him repeatedly. “I am not certain this new set of runes will last. If it does, so be it. You will know it. But the old runes…They will be here a long time. You must know them, too.”

  Then they would play games, devise riddles and rhyming conundrums using the runes from both old and new. In an odd way, Odin reminded him of his grandfather. That was strange, that a person of his own age would affect him in this way. And a person of a completely foreign culture, too. Maybe it was a similarity in the way the two men had approached the world. He must think about this some more. Maybe he would talk to Odin about it. He wondered what his grandfather would have thought of that idea, and smiled at the thought. This recalled that both men had had the same wry sense of humor, which allowed them to enjoy the things of life. Things of the earth and things of the spirit…or are these different after all? he asked himself.

  He was recalled from such abstract thoughts to watch Odin begin work on the canoe. The Skraeling warmed the pitch he had gathered on a bark slab next to the fire. Now he lifted it quickly and with a stick that he had shaped for the purpose, began to smear and poke the pitch into each of the defects. He set the remaining pitch near the fire again to keep it soft, and took a pinch of finely shredded cedar bark. With a clean stick, he began to force the bark into the crevice.

  Nils’s thoughts drifted back to the shipbuilders of his homeland. How many times he had watched the skilled craftsmen as they pounded shredded tow or oakum into the crevices of a ship under construction. It is the same! he realized. Shredded fiber and pitch, used for the same purpose, to make a boat watertight

  “What?” asked Odin, busily forcing his cedar bark into the crack before the softened pitch could harden.

  “Oh…nothing,” Nils answered. He had not realized that he had spoken aloud.

  Odin reheated the second of his damaged spots and proceeded with the bark treatment. The third, not completely through the shell, he did not consider quite so important, but still used a pinch of the shredded cedar as a precaution. Then more pitch over all, and close attention while the patches cooled.

  “It is good,” Odin finally grunted. “In the morning, we move on.”

  They each took a watch, and none would have trouble remaining awake that night, at least while on guard. Svenson took the first part of the night, placing himself in a position of easy observation and defense, gripping his battle-ax tightly. Odin drew his robe around him, curled up near the fire, and within a few heartbeats, it seemed, his breathing was deep and regular.

  Nils did not relax so easily. He wished that he had the ability to do so. This was part of the complicated man of contradiction that was Odin, the one-eyed Skraeling. Nils lay in his sleeping robe, staring at the night sky, thinking of how his own attitude had changed. When they first met, the Skraeling had seemed unimportant. A lesser person, an ignorant savage, not to be taken seriously. Except, of course, that he might be able to provide some information. Nils had thought of him as a nonperson, almost. There was a strange twinge of guilt. Had he not mentally criticized Helge for much the same approach?

  With another guilty pang, he realized that he did not even know Odin’s name. That appellation had been given the Skraeling by those at Straumfjord, as a joke. A cruel joke, one that called attention to a physical handicap. The loss of an eye is a serious thing, one not to be taken lightly. Here was a man who had been subjected to torture as a captive, and was then ridiculed because of it by yet another group. Nils wondered whether he could have survived to handle it as Odin had done.

  Most compelling of all was that Odin, on learning the reason for his new name, had seemed pleased. “Father of the gods,” he had proudly told their erstwhile captors. Nils wondered if the man realized that it was a thing of ridicule. Yes, surely. A man so quick and intelligent would quickly realize when he heard of the one-eyed Norse god, that it was a joke to call a half-dead refugee by his name.

  Nils wished that he could ask Odin his true name, but was not certain that he should. It might be an embarrassment that he, Nils, was not prepared to face. Possibly Odin (or whatever his name) would handle it better than Nils. He had proven himself quick and resourceful. Nils was still not certain how it had all happened, that morning of the berserking. Sometimes he felt that there had been something of the supernatural. Another thing that he would have liked to discuss with his grandfather. Or maybe later, with Odin. Meanwhile, he would look for an opportunity to ask Svenson what he had seen, that morning on the
ledge.

  With these confusing thoughts drifting through his head, Nils finally slept. There were dreams, ones that he could not remember when he woke. Strange fragmentary dreams in which Odin appeared in a shipyard in Oslo, meticulously caulking the planks of a trim longship, readying her for a sea voyage. The Skraeling was talking to him, calling him by name as he worked, talking somehow of a voyage “home.”

  Then he woke, and it was in the present. The stars were still bright overhead. The seven stars of the Dipper had rotated around the North Star…yes, it must be past midnight. And the Odin of his dream, smelling of fragrant pine pitch, was touching him on the shoulder.

  “Wake up, Thorsson! It is your turn to watch. We travel early tomorrow. I would hurry home!”

  28

  “I remember this place!” said Odin, excitement in his tone. “The rock, there. Even that tree…” He pointed to a gnarled pine precariously clinging to the gray stone face of the cliff.

  A stray seed, carried generations ago by the wind, or perhaps by a bird or a squirrel, had lodged in a crevice. It had found enough moisture and soil to sprout, and the probing roots, so tender yet so relentless, had found other small cracks in the stone that held water and debris. Through the seasons, the tree had forced the crevices wider, providing a better footing for its slowly enlarging root system. But it had been slow, limited to the nutrition that chanced to blow or fall into the crevices that furnished life.

  “It is not much bigger,” Odin continued.

  He seemed to attach a great deal of importance to this place. He walked restlessly up and down the sandy shore, his eyes roving over the area, pausing on a thicket, a tree, a clump of late-blooming flowers. It was apparent that here was a place of memory for him.

  Nils was gathering fuel for their evening fire, and Svenson was securing the canoe. Both were watching their companion as he experienced his memory trip.