by Tim Severin
My first step was to take the two little wax moulds pressed from the striking irons of Brithmaer's elderly workmen, and bring them to the huscarls' barracks. There I asked to see Kjartan. 'I've come to say goodbye,' I told him, 'and to ask a favour. If you hear that some accident has befallen me, or if I fail to contact you with a message before the spring, I want you to take these two pieces of wax and give them to Thorkel the Tall. Tell him that they came from the workshop of Brithmaer the moneyer while Knut was the king of England. Thorkel will know what to do.'
Kjartan took the two small discs of wax in his single hand, and looked at me steadily. There was neither surprise nor question in his eyes. 'You have my word on it,' he said. 'I have the feeling that it would be tactless of me to ask why your departure from London is so sudden. Doubtless you have your reasons, and anyhow I have a strong feeling that one day I will be hearing more about you. In the meantime, may Odinn Farmognudr, the journey empowerer', protect you.'
Within the hour I was back at Brithmaer's exchange office on the waterfront and I asked if I could speak to him in private. He was standing at the window of the room where he met his private clients, looking out on the wintry grey river, when I made my request.
'I need to leave England without the knowledge of the authorities and you can help me,' I said.
'Beally. What makes you think that?' he answered blandly.
'Because new-minted coins bear a dead king's mark.'
Slowly and deliberately Brithmaer turned his head and looked straight at me. For the second time that day an old man regarded me with strong dislike.
'I always thought you were a spy,' he said coldly.
'No,' I replied, 'I did not come to you as a spy. I was sent in good faith by the queen. What I learned has nothing to do with Aelfgifu.'
'So what is it that you have learned?'
'I know that you are forging the king's coinage. And that you are not alone in this felony, though I would not be wrong in believing you are the prime agent.'
Brithmaer was calm. 'And how do you think that this felony, as you call it, is enacted? Everyone knows that the coinage of England is the most strictly controlled in all Europe and the penalties for forgery are severe. Counterfeit coins would be noticed immediately by the king's officers and traced back to the forger. He would be lucky only to lose a hand, more likely it would be his life. Only a fool or a knave would seek to forge the coins of the king of England.'
'Of the present king of England, yes,' I replied, 'but not the coins of a previous king.'
'Go on,' said Brithmaer. There was an edge to his voice now.
'I discovered quite by accident that the two elderly workers who strike coins at night in your workshop are not producing coins with the head of Knut. They make coins which carry the head and markings of King Ethelred. At first it made no sense, but then I saw coins which had arrived from the northern lands, from Sweden and Norway. Many of them had the test marks, the nicks and scratches. Most of them were old, from Ethelred's times, when the English paid vast amounts of Danegeld to buy off the raiders. It seems that huge numbers of Ethelred's coins are in circulation in the north lands, and now they are coming back in trade. Thurulf spends a great deal of time counting them in the storerooms.'
'There's nothing wrong with that,' Brithmaer murmured.
'No, but Thurulf remarked to me how the numbers of the old coins never seemed to diminish, but kept piling up. That made me think about something else which was not quite right. I had noticed that here in the exchange you accept large amounts of inferior jewellery made with base metals and cheap alloys. You say it is for the jewellery business, yet your so-called jeweller is nothing more than a workaday craftsman. He is an engraver, familiar with the cutting and maintenance of striking irons and he knows nothing about jewellery. Yet I found very little of the broken jewellery. It had disappeared. Then I realised that the engraver had the skill and equipment in his workshop to melt down the low-grade metals, and turn out blanks for stamping into coins.'
'You seem to have done a great deal of imagining,' said Brithmaer. 'Your story is a fantasy. Who would want low-grade coins from a dead king?'
'That is the clever part,' I replied. 'It would be reckless to issue forged coins in England. They would be quickly identified. But forge coins which you then issue in the north lands, where the coins of England are regarded as honest, and few people would detect that the coins were counterfeit. Cutting or nicking the coins would not reveal the purity of the metal. And if it did, and the coins are revealed as fakes, then the coins carry the markings of long-dead moneyers, and could never be traced back to their maker. However, there has to be one more link in the chain.'
'And that is?'
'The link that interests me now. You can obtain the base metals from the cheap jewellery, make low-grade coins, forge the marks of other moneyers, but you still need to distribute the coins in the north lands. And for that you need the cooperation of dishonest merchants and ship owners who make regular trading voyages there and put the coins into general circulation. These, I suspect, are the people who visit your private office, even in winter. So my request to you now is that you will arrange with one of these men for me to be smuggled aboard ship, no questions asked. It is in your interests. Once I am out of England, I would no longer be in a position to report you to the authorities.'
'Would it not be more sensible for me to arrange for you to vanish permanently?' Brithmaer said. He was no more emotional than if he was suggesting a money-changing commission.
'Two wax impressions taken from the striking irons used in the forgery will be delivered to the king's regent if I vanish mysteriously or fail to report by springtime.'
Brithmaer regarded me thoughtfully. There was a long pause while he considered his alternatives. 'Very well. I'll make the arrangements you request. There's a merchant ship due to visit King's Lynn in two week's time. The captain trades from Norway and is one of the very few who makes the winter crossing of the English Sea. I will send you to King's Lynn with Thurulf. It's about time he returned to Norwich, which is nearby. If he meets up with any of the king's officials he will say that you are travelling as his assistant. I will also write a note to inform the ship captain that you are to be taken on as supercargo. It would be hypocritical to wish you a safe journey. Indeed, I hope I never see you again. Should you ever return to England, I think you will find no trace of the conspiracy which you say you have uncovered.'
And with that I left the service of Brithmaer the king's moneyer, and master forger. I never saw him again, but I did not forget him. For years to come, every time I was offered an English coin in payment or as change in a market place, I turned it over to see the name of the maker and rejected it if it had been minted in Derby or in Winchester.
'You Icelanders really get around, don't you?' commented Brithmaer's accomplice as he watched the low coastline of England disappear in our wake. The Norwegian shipmaster had not informed the port reeve of our impending departure before he ordered his crew to weigh anchor on the early tide. I suspected the harbour official was accustomed to seeing our ship slip out of port at strange hours and had been bribed to look the other way.
I barely heard the captain's comment, for I was still brooding on the thought that every mile was taking me further away from Aelfgifu. Unhappiness had haunted me throughout the three-day journey to King's Lynn with Thurulf. We had travelled on ponies, with two servants leading a brace of packhorses and I did not know how much Brithmaer had told his nephew about why I had to travel posing as his assistant or the need for discretion. Our servants blew loudly on trumpets and rang bells whenever we approached settlements or passed through woodland, and I had suggested to Thurulf that it might be wiser to proceed with less ostentation, as I did not wish to attract the attention of the authorities.
Thurulf grinned back at me and said, 'Quite the reverse. If we used the king's highway in a manner that might be considered surreptitious, people would take us to be skulkin
g criminals or robbers. Then they would be entitled to attack, even kill us. Honest travellers are required to announce their presence with as much fanfare as possible.'
Thurulf had brought me to the quay where the Norwegian vessel was berthed. There he handed me over to her captain with a note from Brithmaer to say that I was to be taken abroad, on a one-way trip, and that it would be wise to keep me out of sight until we left England. Then he had turned back to rejoin his family in Norwich. The gloom of parting from a friend was added to my heartache for Aelfgifu.
'Know someone by the name of Grettir Asmundarson, by any chance? He's one of your countrymen.' The captain's voice again broke into my thoughts. The name was vaguely familiar, but for a moment I couldn't place it. 'Got quite a reputation. They call him Grettir the Strong. Killed his first man when he was only sixteen and was condemned to three year's exile. Decided to spend part of it in Norway. He asked me to make some purchases for him while I was in England, but they cost rather more than I had anticipated. I'm hoping you could tell me the best way of dealing with him so he'll pay up without any trouble. He's a dangerous character, quick to anger.' The captain was trying to strike up a conversation so he could find out just who I was.
'I don't think I know him,' I answered, but the word outlaw had jogged my memory. The last time I had seen Grettir Asmundarson had been six years earlier in Iceland. I remembered a young man sitting on a bench in a farmyard, whittling on a piece of wood. He had been much the same age as myself, with middling brown hair, freckles and fair skin. But where I am quite slender and lightly built, he had been broad and thickset, though only of average height, and while I am normally self-possessed and calm by nature, Grettir had given the impression of being hot-headed and highly strung. I remembered how the little shavings had jumped up into the air with each slice of the sharp blade as if he was suppressing some sort of explosive anger. Even at that age Grettir exuded an air of violent, unpredictable menace.
'Troublemaker from the day he was born, and got worse as he grew up,' said the captain. 'Deliberately provoked his father at every turn, though his parent was a decent enough man by all accounts, a steady farmer. The son refused to help out with the farmyard chores. Broke the wings and legs of the geese when he was sent to put them in their house in the evening, killed the goslings, mutilated his father's favourite horse when he was asked to look after it. Cut the skin all along the animal's spine so the poor creature reared up when you laid a hand on its back. A thoroughly bad lot. His father would have thrown him out of the house, but for the fact that his mother was always asking that he should be given a second chance. Typical of a mother's spoiled pet, if you ask me.'
'What made him kill a man?' I asked.
'Quarrelled over a bag of dried food, would you believe. Hardly a reason to attack someone so viciously.'
I remembered the jumping wood shavings, and wondered if Grettir Asmundarson was touched in the head.
'Anyway, you'll soon have your chance to make your own judgement. If this wind holds steady on the quarter, our first landfall will be the place where he's staying with his half-brother Thorstein. Quite a different type, Thorstein, as even-tempered and steady as Grettir is touchy and wild. Got the nickname "the Galleon" because he has a rolling stride to his walk, just like a ship in a beam sea.'
I saw what the captain meant when we dropped anchor in the bay in front of Thorstein's farm in the Tonsberg district of Norway three days later. The two brothers met us on the beach. Thorstein, tall and calm, was waiting for us, feet planted stolidly on the shingle; Grettir, a head shorter, tramped back and forth nervously. He was a squat volcano, ready to erupt. But when our eyes met, I felt that shock of recognition I had experienced half a dozen times in my life: I had seen the same look in the eyes of a native shaman in Vinland, in the expression of the mother of the Earl of Orkney who was a noted sibyl, in the glance of the wife of King Sigtryggr of Dublin, whom many considered a witch, and in the faraway stare of the veteran warrior Thrand, my tutor in Iceland, who had taught me the rune spells. It was the look of someone who possessed the second sight, and I knew that Grettir Asmundarson saw things hidden from more normal people, as I do. Yet I had no premonition that Grettir was to become my closest friend.
We began by treating one another warily, almost with distrust. No one would ever call Grettir easygoing or amiable. He had a natural reticence which people mistook for surliness, and he met every friendly remark with a curt response which often caused offence and gave the impression that he discouraged human contact. I doubt if the two of us exchanged more than half a dozen sentences in as many days as we sailed on along the coast towards the Norwegian capital at Nidaros. Grettir had asked if he might join our ship as he intended to present himself at the Norwegian court and petition for a post in the royal household, his family being distant relatives of the Norwegian king, Olaf.
Our passage was by the usual route, along the sheltered channel between the outer islands and the rocky coast, with its succession of tall headlands and fiord entrances. The sailing was easy and we were in no hurry. By mid-afternoon our skipper would pick a convenient anchorage and we would moor for the night, dropping anchor and laying out a stern line to a convenient rock. Often we would go ashore to cook our meal and set up tents on the beach rather than sleep aboard. It was at one of these anchorages as the sun was setting that I noticed a strange light suddenly blaze out from the summit of the nearest headland. It flared up for a moment as if someone had lit a raging fire in the mouth of a cave, then quickly extinguished it. When I drew the skipper's attention to the phenomenon, I was met with a blank look. He had seen nothing. 'There's no one living up on that headland. Only an old barrow grave,' he said. 'Burial place for the local family who own all the land in the area. The only time they go there is when they have another corpse. It has proved to be a lucky place for them. The current head of the family is called Thorfinn, and when he buried his father Kar the Old, the ghost of the dead man came back and haunted the area so persistently that the other local farmers decided to leave. After that, Thorfinn was able to buy up all the best land.' Then he added tactfully, 'You must have seen a trick of the light. Maybe a shiny piece of rock reflecting the last rays of the setting run.'
The rest of the crew looked at me sideways, as if I had been hallucinating, so I let the matter drop. But after we had finished our evening meal and the men had wrapped themselves in their heavy sea cloaks and settled down for the night, Grettir sidled across to me and said quietly, 'That blaze was nothing to do with the sun's rays. I saw it too. You and I know what a fire shining out from the earth means: gold underground.'
He paused for a moment then murmured, 'I'm going up there to take a closer look. Care to come with me?'
I glanced round at the others. Most of the crew were half asleep. For a moment I hesitated. I was not at all sure that I wanted to go clambering around the dark countryside with a man who had been convicted of murder. But then my curiosity got the better of me. 'All right' I whispered. 'Let me get my boots on.'
Moments later Grettir and I had left the camp and were picking our way between the black shapes of the boulders on the beach. It was a dry, clear night, warm for that time of year, with a few clouds moving across the face of the moon but leaving us enough moonlight to see our way to the base of the headland and begin our climb. As we moved higher, I could make out the distinct humpbacked profile of the grave barrow up ahead of us, curving against the starry sky. I also noticed something else: each time clouds covered the moon and darkness suddenly cloaked us, Grettir would hesitate, and I heard his breath come more quickly. I felt his sudden onset of panic, and I realised that Grettir the Strong, notorious murderer and outlaw, was desperately afraid of the dark.
We followed a narrow path used by the funeral parties until it brought us out onto a small, grassy area around the grave barrow itself. Grettir looked away to our left out over the black sheen of the sea, its surface pricked with the reflection of the stars. 'Fine place for a
burial,' he said. "When I die, I hope I'll finish up in a spot like this, where the helmsmen of passing ships can point out my last resting place.' Given Grettir's reputation as a youthful homicide, I wondered what his epitaph might be.
'Come on, Thorgils,' he said and began to clamber up the grassy side of the barrow mound. I followed him until we were both standing on the top of the whale-backed hillock. Grettir produced a heavy metal bar from under his cloak.
'What are you doing?' I asked, though the answer was obvious.
'I'm going to break in and take the grave goods,' he answered jauntily. 'Here, give me a hand.' And he began digging a hole down through the turf which covered the tomb. Grave-robbing was a new experience for me, yet when I saw the furious energy with which Grettir hacked and stabbed at the soil with his iron bar, I decided it would be wiser to humour him. I was frightened of what he might do if I tried to restrain him. Taking it in turns to excavate, we burrowed down to the outer roof of the tomb. When the point of the iron bar struck the roof timbers of the vault, Gettir gave a grunt of satisfaction, and with a few powerful blows punched a hole large enough for him to climb down into the tomb.
'Stand guard here for me, will you?' he asked. 'In case I get stuck down there and need help to climb out.' He was unwinding a rope from around his waist, and I realised that plundering the tomb had been his intention from the moment he had suggested that he and I climb to the headland.
A moment later Grettir was lowering himself down into the black hole and I could hear his voice as he vanished into the gloom. For a moment I thought he was speaking to me, and tried to make out what he was saying. But then I realised that he was talking to himself. He was making a noise to keep up his courage, to compensate for his terror of the dark. His words, echoing up from the entrance hole into the tomb, made no sense. Then came a sudden loud crash, followed immediately by a loud yell of bravado. There was another crash, and another, and I guessed he was nailing about in the dark, floundering and tripping over one obstacle after another, falling over the grave goods in the dark, driven by his determination to carry out the robbery, yet gripped by a sense of panic.