The Long Ships

by Frans G. Bengtsson

“This is a bold fellow and a good swimmer,” said one of the men. “He has dived under our ship to get away from the Jutes.”

  “And a wise man, too,” said another, “for he sees that we are better men than they.”

  A third said: “He is black like a troll, and yellow like a corpse, and does not look the sort of man who brings good luck with him. It is dangerous to take such a man aboard.”

  They discussed the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, and some of them shouted questions at the man in the water; but he lay there without moving, clinging tightly to the oars and blinking his eyes and swaying with the sea. At last Krok ordered him to be brought aboard; he could always be killed later, he explained to those who opposed the idea, if the course of things showed that it would be best to do so.

  So Toke and Orm drew in their oars and hauled the man aboard; he was yellow-skinned and strongly built, and naked to his waist, with only a few rags to cover him. He tottered on his feet and could hardly stand, but he clenched his fist and shook it at the Jutish ships as they merged into the distance, spitting after them and grinding his teeth. Then he cried something and fell head-long as the ship rolled, but was quickly on his feet again, and beat his breast and stretched his arms toward the sky and cried in a different voice, but in words that none of them could understand. When Orm was old, and told of all the things that had befallen him, he used to say that he had never heard so terrible a grinding of teeth, or so pitiful and ringing a voice, as when this stranger cried out to the sky.

  They all wondered at him and questioned him profusely as to who he was and what had happened to him. He understood some of what they said and was able to reply brokenly in the Nordic tongue, and they thought he said that he was a Jute and that he disliked rowing on Saturdays and that it was for this reason that he hated the men he had now escaped from; but this made no sense to them, and some of them were of the opinion that he was crazy. They gave him food and drink, and he ate greedily of beans and fish; but when they offered him salt pork, he rejected it with disgust. Krok said that he would do to man an oar, and that when the voyage was over they could sell him for a good sum; meanwhile Berse, out of his wisdom, could try to make something of what the stranger said and discover whether he had any useful information to give them about the lands from which he had come.

  So during the next few days Berse sat and talked a good deal with the stranger, and they conversed as well as they could. Berse was a calm and patient man, a great eater and a skillful bard, who had gone to sea to get away from a shrewish wife; he was wise and full of cunning, and bit by bit he succeeded in piecing together most of what the stranger had to say. This he told to Krok and the others.

  “He is not crazy,” said Berse, “though he seems so; nor is he a Jute, though we thought him to be one. He says that he is a Jew. They are a people from the East who killed the man whom the Christians regard as their God. This killing took place long ago, but the Christians still cherish a great hatred against the Jews because of it, and like to kill them, and will not accept any ransom for them or show them any clemency. For this reason most of the Jews live in the lands ruled by the Caliph of Córdoba, since in his kingdom the man they killed is not regarded as a god.”

  Berse added that he had heard some talk of this before, and many others said that they, too, had heard rumors relating to it. Orm said that he had heard that the dead man had been nailed to a tree, as the sons of Ragnar Hairy-Breeks had done in the old days with the chief priest of England. But how they could continue to regard him as a god after the Jews had killed him, none of them could understand; for obviously no true God could be killed by men. Then Berse went on to tell them more of what he had managed to grasp of the Jew’s story:

  “He has been a slave of the Jutes for a year, and there he underwent much suffering, because he would not row on Saturdays; for the God of the Jews gets very angry with a Jew who does anything on that day. But the Jutes could not understand this, though he often tried to explain it to them, and they beat him and starved him when he refused to row. It was while he was in their hands that he learned the little he knows of our tongue; but when he speaks of them, he curses them in his own language, because he does not know sufficient words to do so in ours. He says that he wept much when he was among them and cried to his God for help; then, when he saw our ship approaching, he knew that his cry had been heard. When he jumped overboard, he dragged with him a man who had often beaten him. He asked his God to be a shield to him and not to let the other man escape; that, he says, is why no spear hit him, and how he found the strength to dive under our ship; and so powerful is the name of his God that he will not name him to me, however much I try to persuade him to do so. That is what he says of the Jutes and his escape from them; and he has more to tell us about something else, which he thinks we shall find useful. But much of what he says about this I cannot clearly understand.”

  They were all curious to know what else the Jew had to say which might be useful to them, and at last Berse managed to discover the gist of it.

  “He says,” Berse told them, “that he is a wealthy man in his own country, which lies within the Caliph of Córdoba’s kingdom. His name is Solomon, and he is a silversmith, besides apparently being a great poet. He was captured by a Christian chieftain who came from the north and plundered the region where he lives. This chieftain made him send for a large sum of money to ransom himself, and then sold him to a slave-trader, for the Christians do not like to keep their word to Jews, because they killed their God. The slave-trader sold him at sea to merchants, from whom he was captured by the Jutes; and it was his bad fortune to be set at once to pull an oar on a Saturday. Now he hates these Jutes with a bitter hatred; but even that is mild compared with the hatred he feels toward the Christian chieftain who betrayed him. This chieftain is very rich and lives only a day’s march from the sea; and he says that he will gladly show us how to get there, so that we may plunder the chieftain of all he possesses and burn down his house and take out his eyes and loose him naked among the stones and trees. He says that there is wealth for us all there.”

  They all agreed that this was the best news they had heard for many a day; and Solomon, who had been sitting beside Berse while he was recounting all this and had been following him as well as he could, leaped to his feet with a great cry and a joyful countenance and cast himself full length on the deck before Krok and put a tuft of his beard into his mouth and chewed it; then he seized one of Krok’s feet and placed it upon his neck, all the while babbling like a drunken man in words that no one could understand. When he had calmed himself a little, he began to search among the words of their language that he knew; he said that he wished to serve Krok and his men faithfully until they had won these riches and he had gained his revenge; but he asked for a definite promise that he himself should be allowed to pluck out the eyes of the Christian chieftain. Both Krok and Berse agreed that this was a reasonable request.

  On each of the three ships the men now began hotly to discuss all this, and it put them in the best of spirits. They said that the stranger might not bring much luck to himself, to judge by what had happened to him, but that he might bring all the more to them; and Toke thought that he had never hooked a better fish. They treated the Jew as a friend, and collected a few clothes for him to wear, and gave him ale to drink, though they had not much left. The country to which he wished to guide them was called León, and they knew roughly where it lay: on their right hand between the land of the Franks and that of the Cordoban Caliph; perhaps five days' good sailing southwards from the Breton cape, which they could now see. They sacrificed again to the sea people, were rewarded with a good wind, and sailed on into the open sea.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOW KROK’S MEN CAME TO RAMIRO’S KINGDOM, AND HOW THEY PAID A REWARDING VISIT

  WHEN Orm was old and spoke of the adventures that had befallen him, he used to say that he had had little to complain of during the time that he was in Krok’s service, though he
had joined his company so unwillingly. The blow he had received on his skull troubled him only for a few days; and he got on well with the men, so that before long they ceased to regard him as their prisoner. They remembered gratefully the good sheep that they had obtained from him, and he had other qualities that made him a good shipmate. He knew as many ballads as Berse, and had learned from his mother to speak them with the intonation of the bards; besides which, he could tell lie-stories so cunningly that you had to believe in them, though he admitted that in this particular craft he was Toke’s inferior. So they prized him as a good comrade, and a clever one, well able to while away the dreary hours agreeably for them during the long days when they had a good wind in their sail and were resting from their oars.

  Some of the sailors were disgruntled because Krok had left Brittany without having first tried to get new supplies of fresh meat; for the food they had aboard was now beginning to smell old. The pork was rancid, the stockfish mildewed, the meal stale, the bread maggoty, and the water sour; but Krok and those of his followers who had sailed on expeditions of this sort before asserted that this was as good fare as any sailor could wish for. Orm ate his rations with a good appetite, though while he did so, he used often to tell the others of the delicacies to which he was accustomed at home. Berse remarked that it seemed to him to be a wise dispensation of the gods that a man when at sea could eat and enjoy food that at home he would not offer to his slaves or his dogs, but only to pigs; for, were it not so arranged, long sea voyages would be exceedingly nauseating.

  Toke said that the thing that troubled him most was the fact that the ale was now finished. He was, he assured them, not a fussy man, and he reckoned that he could stomach most things when necessity demanded it, not excluding his sealskin shoes, but only if he had good ale to wash them down. It would be a fearful prospect, he said, to envisage a life without ale, either on sea or ashore; and he questioned the Jew much concerning the quality of the ale in the country to which they were journeying, without, however, being able to extract any very clear information from him on the subject. He told the others stories of great feasts and drinking-bouts that he had been present at, and mourned that on those occasions he had not drunk even more than he had.

  Their second night at sea a strong wind arose, driving high breakers, and they were glad that the sky remained clear, for they were steering by the stars. Krok began to wonder whether it would be wise to come out into the limitless sea; but the wisest sailors among them said that, however far you might sail to the south, you would always have land on your left, save only in the Njörva Sound,1 where the waters led in to Rome, which stood at the center of the world. Men who sailed from Norway to Iceland, said Berse, had a more difficult task, for they had no land in whose lee to shelter, but only the open sea, stretching away for ever on either bow.

  The Jew knew all about the stars and declared himself skillful at navigation; but in the event, he proved to be of little use to them, for his stars had different names from the ones they were used to, besides which he was seasick. Orm suffered likewise, and he and Solomon hung over the gunwale together in great misery, thinking that they would die. The Jew wailed most piteously in his own language in the intervals of his vomiting; Orm told him to shut up, but he answered that he was crying to his God, who was in the storm wind. Then Orm grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and told him that, though he himself was in poor shape, he yet had enough strength to throw him over the side if he uttered one cry more, for there was sufficient wind about already without his bringing his God any nearer to them.

  This quieted Solomon; and toward morning the wind lessened and the sea grew calm, and they both began to feel better. Solomon was very green in the face, but he grinned at Orm in a friendly way and seemed not to bear him any ill will for his conduct of the night before, and pointed his finger across the sea at the sunrise. He sought among the words he knew and said that those were the red wings of the morning far out in the sea, and that his God was there. Orm replied that his God appeared to him to be the sort of divinity who was best kept at a respectable distance.

  Later that morning they discerned mountains far ahead of them. They pulled in to the shore, but had difficulty in finding a sheltered bay in which to anchor; and the Jew said that this part of the coast was strange to him. They went ashore and came at once into conflict with the inhabitants of the place, who were numerous; but these soon fled, and Krok’s men ransacked their huts, returning with some goats and other food, as well as one or two prisoners. Fires were lit, and they all rejoiced at having reached land without mishap, and were glad to have the taste of roast meat once more on their tongues. Toke searched high and low for ale, but succeeded in discovering only a few skins of wine, which was so harsh and sour that, he said, he could feel his belly shriveling as he swallowed it; so much so that he could not drink it all himself, but gave away what was left and sat alone for the rest of the evening singing sadly to himself, with tears in his beard. Berse warned them not to disturb him, for he was a dangerous man when he had drunk himself to weeping-point.

  Solomon questioned the prisoners, and told the Vikings that they were now in the country of the Count of Castile, and that the place to which he wished to lead them lay far to the west. Krok said that they would have to wait for another wind to carry them in that direction, and that in the meantime they could do no more than rest and eat; though, he added, the situation might become awkward if strong hostile forces should attack them here while the wind was blowing landwards, or if enemy ships should block their exit from the bay. But Solomon explained, as best he could, that there was little danger of this, for the Count of Castile had hardly any ships at sea, and it would take him some time to gather a sufficient force to cause them trouble. In former years, he told them, this Count of Castile had been a powerful ruler, but nowadays he was forced to bow the knee to the Moorish Caliph in Córdoba, and even had to pay him tribute; for, saving only the Emperor Otto of Germany and the Emperor Basil of Constantinople, there was now no monarch in the world as powerful as the Caliph of Córdoba. At this the men laughed loudly, saying that the Jew was doubtless saying what he supposed to be the truth, but that he obviously knew little about the subject. Had he, they asked, never heard of King Harald of Denmark, and did he not know that there was no king in the world as mighty as he?

  Orm was still groggy after his seasickness and had little appetite for food, which made him afraid that he might be sickening for something serious, for he worried continually about his health. He soon curled up in front of one of the fires and fell into a deep sleep; but during the night, when the whole camp was still, Toke came and woke him. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he protested that Orm was the only friend he had, and said that he would like, if he might, to sing him a song that he had just remembered; it was about two bear cubs, he explained, and he had learned it as a child at his mother’s knee, and it was the most beautiful song he had ever heard. So saying, he sat down on the ground beside Orm, dried his tears, and began to sing. Now, it was a peculiarity with Orm that he found it difficult to be sociable when he had just been waked out of a sound sleep; however, he voiced no protest, but merely turned over on his other side and tried to go back to sleep.

  Toke could not remember much of his song, and this made him miserable again. He complained that he had been sitting alone all the evening, and that nobody had come to keep him company. What had hurt him most, he said, was the fact that Orm had not once given him so much as a friendly glance to cheer him up; for he had always hitherto regarded Orm as his best friend, from the first moment that he had set eyes upon him; now, though, he realized that he was, after all, only a good-for-nothing blackguard like all Skanians; and when a puppy like him forgot his manners, a good sound hiding was the only remedy.

  So saying, he got to his feet to look round for a stick; but Orm, who was by this time fully awake, sat up. When Toke saw him do this, he tried to aim a kick at him; but as he raised his foot, Orm snatched a brand o
ut of the fire and threw it in Toke’s face. Toke ducked in the middle of aiming his kick and fell on his back, but he was on his feet again in an instant, white in the face and blind with rage. Orm, too, had leaped to his feet, so that they now stood facing each other. It was bright moonlight, but Orm’s eyes were flickering a dangerous red as he threw himself furiously upon Toke, who tried to draw his sword; Orm had laid his aside and had not had time to lay his hand on it. Now, Toke was a huge and powerful man, broad in the loins, and with tremendous hands, while Orm had not yet grown to his full strength, though he was already strong enough to deal with most men. He secured a lock on Toke’s neck with one arm and pinned Toke’s right wrist with his other hand, to stop his drawing his sword; but Toke took a good grip on Orm’s clothing, lifted him from his feet with a sudden jerk, and threw him over his head like a starfish. Orm, however, managed to hold his lock, though it felt as though his spine would snap at any moment, and, twisting round, got one of his knees into the small of Toke’s back. Then he threw himself backwards, dragging Toke down on top of him, and, exerting all his strength, succeeded in turning him over, so that he had Toke under him with his face in the dust. By this time several of the others had been roused, and Berse ran toward them with a rope, muttering that what else could you expect if you allowed Toke to sozzle himself like that. They bound him fast, hand and foot, though he struggled wildly to stop them. He quieted down after a short while, however, and before long he was shouting to Orm that he had now remembered the rest of the song. He began to sing it, but Berse threw water over him, whereupon he fell asleep.

  On awakening the next morning, Toke swore fearfully at finding himself tied up, being unable to remember anything of what had happened. When they told him, he was full of remorse for the way he had behaved, and explained that it was his great misfortune that drink sometimes made him difficult. Ale, he said, translated him completely, and now, regrettably, it seemed that wine was going to have the same effect. He inquired anxiously whether Orm now regarded him as his enemy, in view of his conduct of the previous night. Orm replied that he did not, adding that he would be delighted to continue the fight amiably any time that Toke felt so disposed; but he begged that Toke would promise him one thing: namely, that he would abstain from song, for the rasp of a nightjar, or the croaking of an old crow on an outhouse roof, was far more melodious than his nocturnal serenading. Toke laughed, and promised that he would try to improve his talents in that respect; for he was a kindly man except when ale or wine distorted his nature.