Geirmund's Saga

by Matthew J. Kirby

  The man glared at Fasti. “I am.”

  “I found him lurking on the other side of the river.” The younger Dane shifted his feet next to Geirmund. “He claims he is a Northman.”

  Odmar scoffed. “This is no Northman. He is Gyrwas. A swamp-Saxon.”

  “I am from Rogaland.” Geirmund dropped the heavy basket to the ground and the oysters clattered. “I was at Ribe, in Jutland, and I sailed with King Bersi’s fleet.”

  “Oh?” Odmar looked to the left and right. “Where is he? Where are Bersi’s ships?”

  “At Lunden, I assume, on their way to Readingum. A storm took me overboard, and I washed up here.”

  “Then you must either have good luck or a god’s protection. Or you are a liar.” Odmar pointed at the basket. “Are those our oysters?”

  Geirmund looked down at the shells. “They are.”

  “Dump them in the coals,” Odmar said.

  Geirmund paused, but then did as the man asked, tipping the basket’s contents into the embers near the edge of the flames. Within moments they began to whistle and whine, and the Danes gathered around to pull them out of the heat as the boiling juices inside popped their shells open. The warriors grinned as they slurped the juices and used their knives to prize the shells open to carve out the meat inside. Geirmund stood by until Odmar motioned for him to join in while scraping the inside of a shell with his teeth.

  The oyster juices scalded Geirmund’s tongue, tasting of brine and the sea, and the meat inside was rich and fatty. Within moments all the oysters were gone, but Geirmund had managed to snatch six of them for himself, afterwards tossing the shells in the same pile as the Danes.

  “Took me the whole day to gather those,” Fasti said, looking down at the remains of his harvest.

  “Don’t despair.” Odmar wiped his mouth and beard with the back of his sleeve. “You can always gather more tomorrow.” A few of the Danes chuckled, and then Odmar turned his attention back to Geirmund. “I still say you don’t look like a Northman.”

  “I haven’t looked like a Northman since the day I was born,” Geirmund said. “Do you suppose you’re the first man observant enough to notice?”

  That drew more laughter, including Odmar’s, and he shrugged. “Then sit, Northman. Join us here. The smell of smoke and burnt temple keeps the myggs from biting.”

  “I thank you, Odmar.” Geirmund took a place with them around the fire, no longer hungry and a bit more at ease.

  “I see your sword must have stayed on the ship,” Odmar said, and then glanced at the warriors to his left and right. “We are Ubba’s men. Young Fasti is Ubba’s kinsman. We were at Hagelisdun, where Ubba slew Eadmund, the king of these swamp-Saxons. He now marches to Mercia, but we have stayed in the fenland to keep the people here obedient.”

  Geirmund thought of the bodies he had seen in the river and wondered how those priests had been disobedient. Then he looked again at the burnt temple’s surroundings and noticed that one outbuilding had escaped destruction, a small round hut of sticks and mud sitting near the remnants of the orchard, a solitary shadow in the dusk that had now fallen over the marsh. It had a single narrow window and no door, and those features alone would have set it apart, but its survival amidst the ashes suggested that it had been deliberately saved.

  He nodded towards it. “What is that place?”

  “It’s a tomb,” Odmar said.

  Geirmund looked at the building again. “The Saxons put their dead in wooden tombs?”

  “They are living dead,” Odmar said.

  The oysters turned cold and heavy in Geirmund’s stomach. “A haugbui?”

  The Dane grinned. “Go and see.”

  None of the other men spoke. They were all watching Geirmund, waiting, and his unease returned. Odmar played at some mischief, that was plain, but it wasn’t clear whether the Dane intended humour or harm. After a few moments of hesitation, Geirmund decided to satisfy his own curiosity, without regard for Odmar’s purpose. He left the Danes around their fire in the temple ruins and made his way in the darkness towards the hut, which smelled of shit and piss a dozen paces away. That lifted some of his dread, for the dead did not shit and piss in the tales Bragi told.

  As he crept up to the building, he located the waste he was smelling on the ground outside the window, suggesting prison more than tomb. Geirmund approached that window from the side, leaning and stretching his neck to peer within, heard a sloshing sound, and caught a brief glimpse of a pale, wild man just as something flew at his face. He ducked out of the way, barely dodging a cascade of more shit and piss that splashed on the ground.

  The Danes back at the fire burst into laughter, and Geirmund’s face turned hot. At first he cursed himself for a fool, but soon enough he wore a grudging smile at the prank. The man inside the hut did not laugh, and he was unlikely to be smiling either as he shouted and cursed in the Saxon tongue, which Geirmund found he could mostly understand.

  “Keep away, you pagan devil!” he shouted.

  Geirmund looked at the quantity of waste the man had just thrown out of the window and doubted there could be more in reserve, so he risked a second glimpse.

  The Saxon wore the clothing of a priest, though his robes were filthy, and his tangled hair and beard hid much of his face. When he saw Geirmund, he threw himself at the window, howling from dry, cracked lips, and Geirmund retreated again.

  “Leave him!” Odmar shouted, still laughing, and waved Geirmund back to the temple.

  He looked one more time at the strange doorless hut, and then returned to the circle. The Danes taunted and pointed at him, still quite amused, and Geirmund held up his hands, nodding his admission that he’d been well tricked.

  “You’re quick, Northman,” Odmar said. “Several of these warriors had to go and swim in the river after talking to that dead man.”

  “Why do you say he’s dead?” Geirmund asked.

  “I told you. That is his tomb.”

  Geirmund frowned, still confused, and Odmar swatted Fasti on the shoulder.

  “Tell him.”

  The younger Dane cleared his throat. “Some Christian priests will go into a hut like that to pray to their god, and then they are sealed inside. Then another priest prays over that priest to say he is now dead.”

  “The priests choose to go into the hut?”

  Fasti nodded.

  “Do they ever come out?”

  “No,” Fasti said. “Their god forbids it.”

  Odmar laughed. “Some of them come out when we light their tombs on fire.”

  Geirmund wondered how many of the charred buildings around them had been huts like the one left standing. “Why did you spare him?” he asked.

  “I want to see if he is really dead,” Odmar said. “No man can die twice.”

  “What about the priests I saw in the river?” Geirmund asked. “Did they die twice?”

  “They left their tombs,” Odmar said. “If it is some Christian galdur, maybe the priests lose their power if they come out. A haugbui and a draugr can be slain.” He leaned towards Geirmund and pointed at the lone hut. “No food or water. If that one dies in there, then he was never dead, and there is no power.”

  The marsh had come alive with night-sounds all around the island: frogs and singing insects. Geirmund looked into Odmar’s eyes. He saw fear there, and hatred. “What did the priests do?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You said you were here to keep them obedient. How did they disobey?”

  Odmar leaned back. “They refused to give us their silver.”

  “They had no silver,” a Dane said from the other side of the fire. “We came here for–”

  “All priests have silver!” Odmar shouted.

  Fasti looked at the ground. “Not these dead priests.”

  Odmar leapt to his feet, spitting fury.
“Does any man wish to challenge me?” He pulled his bearded axe free and pointed it at the circle of warriors in a long, slow arc. “Speak! Let us settle things between us right now.”

  When none of the Danes made an answer to him, he sat down again, and that put an end to all talk afterwards. The warriors drifted apart and settled for sleep, wrapped in their cloaks, and Geirmund laid himself down also. He knew that doing so was a risk, but if they had wished him ill, they could have killed him before he ate a share of their oysters, or at any time since, and he was glad for the fire to keep him warm.

  He fell asleep quickly, but in deepest night a distant wail startled him awake. For several moments he lay there in the dark, a chill at the root of his neck, unsure if he had heard an animal, a man, or something else that haunted the marshes. It had been a sound of suffering and pain. Geirmund thought it might have come from the priest, and he couldn’t sleep after that for wondering if the dead man had died.

  It seemed none of the Danes around him had stirred at the sound, but Geirmund got to his feet and crept from their midst towards the hut. When he reached the outbuilding, he stood near the window to listen for signs of life within.

  He heard whispering, in a tongue that he did not understand, and the dread he had felt when he’d first approached the hut returned, thinking perhaps the priest now worked some magic or curse. But the longer he listened, the less it sounded like galdur and the more it sounded like a prayer to his god.

  That meant the man was alive, or at least as alive as he had been when he threw shit from his window. Satisfied, Geirmund moved away, but his sleeve caught against the hut’s rough skin.

  The priest’s whispering ceased. “Is someone there?” he asked, speaking once more in the Saxon tongue that Geirmund understood, his voice hoarse and weak.

  “Yes,” Geirmund said, softening his own voice. “But I won’t harm you.”

  The priest chortled, but it was the pained laughter of the mad and the doomed. “Perhaps you should harm me. Perhaps you should end my misery the way you ended the lives of my brothers.”

  “I didn’t,” Geirmund said. “I’m not with these Danes.”

  “No? Who are you with, then? By your speech you are no Saxon.”

  “I am with…” Geirmund paused. “Other Danes.”

  The priest laughed again. “I am certain there are many kinds of devil, but none of them serve God.”

  Geirmund glanced back at the Dane camp to see if any warrior had awakened, but they all appeared to sleep. “Are you alive in there, priest?”

  “What manner of question is that? I’m speaking with you, aren’t I?”

  “I ask because the Danes say another priest prayed over you as if you were dead when you entered your hut.”

  “Ah. That is a pagan’s understanding.” He groaned, and Geirmund heard rustling, and when the priest spoke again he stood near the window. “My body did not die when I became an anchorite. When I entered my anchorhold, I forswore the world outside it, forsaking all wealth and title, and that is treated as a kind of death.”

  Geirmund shook his head. Priests who forsake wealth and title will have no silver to steal, and Odmar could have known that if he had simply asked them. “That means you can still die in there,” Geirmund said.

  The priest sighed. “Yes, that means I can still die, and I hope to die very soon. I have asked God to release me from this torment, but thus far he has left me here, perhaps for some purpose I do not yet see.”

  “Why do you not end your own life?”

  “That is a sin against the god I pray to.”

  “So you cannot leave, but you also cannot end your life? Your god dishonors you.”

  “How so?”

  “He denies you the right to meet your fate in the manner of your choosing.”

  “That is a pagan’s understanding.”

  Geirmund understood the situation well enough to know that he would never pray to such a god, but he pitied this priest in his prison who did. “Would your god let you accept water from a pagan?”

  A moment of silence passed. “Yes,” the priest said. Geirmund heard more movement inside, and then the priest extended his arm through the window, holding a plain wooden cup. “Will the other devils punish you for this?” he asked.

  Geirmund took the cup and stalked away from the hut, and from the Danes, through a corner of the burnt orchard, towards the river on the opposite side of the island from the corpses of the other priests. The thorny bramble scratched him as he stumbled in the darkness, but he eventually reached the bank and filled the man’s cup. Further along the river to the west he glimpsed several dark shapes on the water and knew them to be the boats that had brought the Danes to this place. Then he stood and looked down at the cup, hoping the water here was clean.

  Back at the hut, he handed the cup through the window, then listened as the priest gasped and guzzled the water down. “Bless you, pagan,” he said.

  “Do you bless me?” Geirmund asked. “Or does your god bless me?”

  “I ask my god to bless you,” the priest said with a sigh.

  Geirmund shrugged. “I will accept a favour or gift from any god. Or any smith.”

  The priest laughed as through clenched teeth. “I should not have accepted that water from you. It will only delay my death. But it was a balm, so perhaps you were sent by God.”

  “No god sent me, priest. I am here by my choice.”

  “Then I am grateful you chose to show me a kindness,” the priest said. “My name is Torthred. What is yours?”

  “I am Geirmund.”

  “I am pleased to have met you, Geirmund. Now I wish to pray and then sleep. But I would say one more thing to you.” He stepped up to the window, his eyes and face barely visible in the darkness. “I think you do not belong with these Danes. I think they would kill you with little reason.”

  Geirmund agreed with him. “I would also say one more thing to you. If your god wants you to stay and starve and die alone when you could leave and keep making offerings to him, then your god is a fool.”

  Torthred didn’t argue. He simply smiled, bowed his head, and retreated into the deep shadows within his hut.

  Geirmund turned and looked at the ruins of the temple, thought about Odmar and his Danes, and decided not to return to their circle. Instead, he went back to the river the same way he had gone to fetch the priest his water, and then he crept down the bank towards the boats.

  It would be a simple matter to take one of them, and Geirmund quickly had the nearest vessel untied and ready to push off. But then he heard a footstep behind him and turned to see a figure advancing, someone set to watch the ships, though it was too dark to see who it was.

  “What are you doing?” the Dane asked. The voice belonged to Fasti.

  “The rope wasn’t secure.” Geirmund pulled his knife from its sheath, trying to keep it hidden, knowing he had only moments to avoid death at the hands of this Dane or Odmar. “I needed to tie it.”

  “Liar.” Fasti was now only a pace away. “You were trying to steal it.” He inhaled to shout and raise the alarm, but Geirmund lunged and plunged his knife into the warrior’s throat, up to the handle, silencing him before he could.

  Fasti seized Geirmund’s wrists, and his eyes went wide enough for the whites to show. He gurgled and sputtered, and Geirmund’s hand grew warm and wet with Dane-blood as he lowered Fasti to the ground. Then he jerked his knife free, trembling, heart drumming, and returned to the boats, aware that he needed to put distance between himself and the Danes. Odmar was not a man to let such an insult go unpunished. He would give furious chase, and he seemed to know the fenland well. But Geirmund had no axe to harm the other boats in a lasting way and refused to steal a dying man’s weapon, and anyway, such noise would rouse the Danes.

  Fasti twitched and kicked weakly in the grass as Geirmund went to each o
f the boats, gathered up all their oars, and threw them into his vessel, knowing Odmar would find it difficult to push upriver without them. Then he launched his boat and leapt aboard.

  10

  The river’s current wasn’t strong, but the boat was Saxon-built, both heavy and large, with three oarlocks to a side. Geirmund scrambled up to a forward thwart, dragging two oars with him, and the river had pulled him a short distance downstream by the time those wooden blades slapped the water.

  For speed he rowed facing the stern, with his back to the river ahead, and watched the island where Fasti lay dying or dead. He listened for the shouting of Danes and searched the thorny bushes for signs of movement, but all seemed quiet near Odmar’s boats until the fenland took them from Geirmund’s view.

  It was only then that he paused in his oarstroke to dip his hands and his knife in the river to wash away the blood. When he’d left Rogaland, he expected the first man he killed to be a Saxon on the field of battle, not a Dane in the shadows of a marsh, but now he wondered how much the difference between them mattered. The Three Spinners determined the length of every life-skein, which meant that Fasti had reached the end of his, whether at Geirmund’s hand or by some other means. What mattered, then, was not whether Fasti had died, but whether Geirmund had needed to kill him. He knew that if he could have avoided killing Fasti, he would have, and decided then that, as a tool of fate, he could and always would choose honour.

  Something moved in the reeds to his left, and though it vanished as he turned to look, he thought he had glimpsed the pale face of a woman, and he wondered if he’d seen a river-vættr. He didn’t want the spirit to mistake him for one of the Danes who had fouled its water with corpses, but he had only silver to offer. He dropped a piece into the current to be safe, shivered, and then rowed hard, wanting to be away from that place.

  In time the fenland lifted out of night into day, and Geirmund watched the sun rise dull and distant through the fog that overhung the marsh. Just past that first daymark, the river he travelled met with another wider waterway, and not far from that joining he arrived at a second town.