by Henry Treece
Beorn said, ‘I am sorry, master. I have been so hungry and frightened. That is why I ran away. I meant no harm.’
But, all the time he was saying this, he was glancing one way and the other, to see if there was any chance of scrambling up the rock at the far side, and getting on to the headland and away once more.
Crafty Glam knew well enough what was in his mind, for he laughed and said, ‘You may have meant no harm, dog’s son, but I do. My stick, Backbiter, will teach you a lesson that needs learning, when you do come up. And do not think to escape me this time. I can run all the way round this little basin and meet you, wherever you turn.’
Beorn cast a quick glance round, and saw that what Glam said was true. The green and slippery slopes of the rock-pool gave him no chance. Glam was bound to get him now.
So he said hoarsely, ‘ Master Glam, it is no use, I am caught. If my father was here, he would help me against you. But I am alone.’
Glam spat down into the pool and said, ‘Your father was a dog, and the son of dogs. Your father was a coward. He would no sooner have faced me today than he did three days ago, when he took the coward’s way and flung himself into the sea to avoid my axe.’
This made Beorn angry, and for a while even his fear left him. He knew that his father had once been a brisk fighter, before his sword arm got broken at a boatlaunching, and he hated to hear Glam speak so ill of him now. So a plan came into his head, and he said as pitifully as he could, ‘ You are the strongest man along this shore, master. All the folk fear you. There is nothing I can do now, so please pull me up with your stick, and then I am ready for the thrashing I deserve.’
Glam gave another of his bitter laughs, and said, ‘You see sense at last, little dog! I hope you still see sense after I have beaten you. Come up, then.’
Standing at the lip of the rocky basin, he reached down with his staff, so that Beorn could take hold of it. The boy’s hands shook so much now that he could hardly take a firm grip on the bog-oak, and twice Glam rapped him hard on the knuckles to liven him up a bit. Beorn did not complain at this, though it was painful enough, for now he saw his chance. Glam had moved on to a part of the rock where the slimy green weed was thickest, so Beorn grasped the staff firmly and, without warning, gave a great tug.
Glam shouted out as his feet slithered from under him, then his heavy body came hurtling down. Beorn sprang away just in time, and heard the man fall into the rock-pool with a splash and an angry groan.
Then the boy was scrambling like a frog back up the slope, terrified in case his feet or hands slipped and let him go tumbling down again beside his enemy.
He gained the top before Glam had got his wind back, and glanced down to see the big man floundering to his feet, drenched through with salt water and stumbling about like a madman, his shoulders and head covered with green weed.
Now that he was out of the basin, Beorn was frightened again at what he had done to Glam. He was sure that the man would follow him the length and breadth of the land to get even with him. In a way, he wished he had gone up and taken his thrashing, then at least he would have known the worst and could have got used to it. For an instant, he even thought of waiting until Glam was on his feet again, and giving in to him just to save being afraid any further. But all at once Glam bellowed out, ‘So! Like father, like son! You have brought this on yourself, and no one can save you now! When I have finished with you, even the shore-dogs will not want what I leave!’
Beorn saw the man dragging the Haying-knife from the hide-belt round his thick waist, and he knew that Glam meant every word he said.
The boy had never been far away from Thorstead before, but he had heard the fishermen talk of Thingvellir, that lay up to the north, in a deep inlet hidden by pine trees. So it came to his thoughts that if he could only get over the headland before Glam caught him, he might somehow struggle on and on; over Eyjafells Glacier and Markar River and even reach Thingvellir, and offer himself as a slave there, if his new master would only keep Glam away from him.
He saw Glam’s wet head coming up over the rocky basin and turned and raced towards the headland, bruising his feet and legs against the limpets that clung to the rocks there. At first he got a good start, and hope rose in his heart. But then he knocked his toes against the sharp edge of a rock, and cried out with the sudden pain. Glam’s feet came thumping behind him. The man was blowing hard, but was shouting out, ‘You can’t get away, you little outlaw! I’ve got you this time!’
Beorn could hardly get his breath now, and the gentle slope that led before him, up to the headland, seemed like a mountain. The gorse spikes tore at his bare legs, and every stone seemed to twist under his feet, as though they were his enemies too. But he was somehow on to the headland, and Glam had not caught him yet, though he was getting closer with each echoing stride.
Beorn knew that, just over the brow of the rocky slope, there was a steep drop of loose shale. If he could only reach that, he could slither down it, full pelt on his backside, and perhaps get down to the far beach.
A hare started up under him, nearly flinging him to the ground, but Beorn skipped over it and ran on. Then he was on to the shale-slope, when suddenly Glam flung his staff and caught him in the middle of the back. It almost winded Beorn, but he did not stop. He saw the bog-oak cudgel go skeltering down the grey slope before him, into some bushes at the bottom, and he thought: At least Glam has lost his stick!
The loose shale fell away before his feet, and Beorn flung himself down, with the dust and dirt flying all over him, into his mouth and eyes and ears. He hurtled onwards and, as he rolled, saw that Glam was only three paces above him, and coming down even faster, because he was so much heavier.
They reached the beach together, and Glam was already grasping out to hold the boy by the hair when a loud voice shouted out, ‘What fool’s tricks are these? Speak, or by Odin I’ll skewer you both! ’
Beorn looked up, and then his heart almost jumped out of his chest. A big ship was beached just round the rock, not more than ten paces away, and before it was the tallest man he had ever seen. In his right hand he held a thick-shafted ash-spear as though it were a twig.
3 Man with a Spear
At first, Beorn thought this man must be Thor himself. From his dull iron helmet with the boar’s crest, to the gold rings on his fingers, and the decorated sword-belt about his body, he looked a god, or a hero at least. His face was broad, and as brown as a piece of leather. His hair was a rusty red and his eyes as blue as the summer sky. His square beard jutted as stiffly as though it were carved from whalebone. His mighty spear was thrust out in front of him.
What Beorn noticed most, though, was that the iron point of the spear never shook the slightest bit. And it was aimed at Glam’s heart now. Glam was twittering like a partridge disturbed on the nest and his voice was not coming out very strongly. He was saying, ‘Peace
be with you, master. I am only chasing my slave. The little outlaw is trying to run away from a thrashing.’ The red man with the spear said, ‘Do you blame him? And who is to give the thrashing?’
Glam answered, ‘ I am, master. It is my right.’
The man said, ‘ What have you done, slave, to merit a thrashing from this big fellow? ’
Glam tried to answer, raising his voice above Beorn’s, but the man with the spear stepped forward a pace and kicked out, sprawling him on the beach. Then the man said to Glam, ‘I am a Jomsviking out of Jomsburg in Vendland. My name is Starkad, and, apart from my master, Jarl Skallagrim, no man disobeys when I command. If I say to a seal, “ Speak now,” then that seal speaks. If I say to a rock, “Dance for me,” then the rock dances. Yet you, a stinking hound of a stinking island, dressed in a stinking cowhide that should have gone on to the midden three years ago, you dare to speak first when I am talking to this boy. How do you explain that? ’
He bent a little and put the point of his spear against Glam’s ribs, just by his heart, and pushed so that the blade went through the horse-hide a little way.
Glam lay back so hard on the pebbles that he looked as though he wanted to burrow into the earth. The big man leaned a little more on the ash-spear, and held Glam there.
Beorn was amazed to hear that Glam was crying now, just as he himself had been only a short while before; and this made him even more afraid. For if a man like Glam was crying, then this Jomsviking must be more terrible than any wolf or bear.
Then the man who called himself Starkad said sharply to Beorn, ‘Well, I am waiting, slave. What did you do to cause your master so much anger that he comes sliding down the shale-slope like a madman to catch you? ’
Beorn noticed that many men, all in iron helmets, and holding spears, were standing by the ship now, and he felt foolish to speak in such brave company. But Starkad was glaring at him with his pale eyes so fearfully that Beorn whispered, ‘I am no slave, sir. I am free-born and a farmer’s son. This man claims me because my father would not fight him, but jumped over a cliff instead.’
Glam began to cry out, ‘His father was a coward. He burned my barn, then he would not face me with the axe.’
Beorn got angry then and began to shout that his father was crippled in the axe-arm, and that, anyway, it was the lightning that had burned Glam’s barn. Starkad listened to them both, his features never moving. Only his blue eyes shifted, from one to the other, and his stiff red beard flickered a time or two as the land-breeze caught it.
He said, ‘Whether it was lightning or not, if the man died, then that was his punishment, surely?’
Beorn called out.
‘This man burned down our house, too, viking. So I have neither father nor house to go to.’
Starkad said coldly, ‘It seems that strange bargains are driven in Iceland these days. I have always heard that you Icelanders were wild dogs with a law of your own. To me, it seems that this man has a very good bargain if he gets a cripple to fling himself over a cliff, then burns that man’s house down and takes his son as a slave - all because lightning fired his own barn.’
Glam was yelling out, ‘I claim my rights, Jomsviking. I will not let you or anyone, not even Odin, cheat me of my rights.’
When he said this, the Jomsviking’s eyes stretched themselves so wide that Beorn thought they would jump out because the lids could not keep them in any longer. It was almost as though Glam had struck the man on the face.
There was an awful quietness then, as the man began to press a little harder on his spear end. Glam started to struggle again and whimper like a trapped fox-cub. Then, from the prow of the longship, a voice called out, ‘ This fool still speaks of Odin. He is a heathen, then, and does not know that the White-Christ is master in the north today. He does not know the trouble our old king, Harald Bluetooth, once went to, teaching the heathen about the true God.’
Beorn looked past Starkad at the man who spoke from the ship. He was very tall and thin, and had long grey plaits on either side of his head, coming down from below a gilded war-helm. In his bronze-studded belt he carried two swords; one long, one short. In his right hand, a tall ash-spear; on his left arm, a round hide buckler plated with silver strips. His heavy cloak of red wool flared out behind him, like a storm cloud in the setting sun.
The men about the ship, on the shore, began to clap their hands together and shout out, ‘Jarl Skallagrim! Jarl Skallagrim!’
Even Starkad seemed rather small beside this splendid man on the ship. And Beorn was scarcely surprised when Glam held out his hands wide and called in a shrill voice, ‘I meant no harm, lord. I spoke of Odin only because we poor folk here have always held him as our master. We know no better, lord; we are poor fools, lord. You will see that we mean no harm to the White-Christ, or to old King Bluetooth.’
Jarl Skallagrim smiled like winter, with his grey hair riding the wind about him like a snow cloud. He said bitterly,‘We call at this forsaken midden of a place, to pick up a keg or two of fresh water, and a sheep or two to fill our bellies, voyaging, and we have to listen to a madman who is so afraid to die that he will praise any god or any king in return for his miserable life! ’ Starkad called back over his broad shoulder, ‘What with him, Jarl? Slave or spear-point? ’
Jarl Skallagrim turned his back and began to walk down the deck.
‘Neither,’ he said, just above the hissing of the sea. ‘I want no thing like him aboard Reindeer; nor should you want his dog-blood on your point, to eat it away with its poison and blunt it. He is a heathen and that’s that. Bind him hand and foot with thongs, and put him into the first rock-pool that will hold him. Not a very deep pool, though. He needs time to think on God before he drowns at the next tide.’
Beorn did not watch while the men did this. Starkad stood looking at him coldly, and said, ‘Why do you mourn, boy? He was your enemy.’
Beorn answered, ‘I do not like anyone to be hurt, Jomsviking.’
Starkad smiled for the first time and said, ‘Then you should have been born into another world than this. Everyone gets hurt, as you should know by now. But why mourn? If this dog keeps howling long enough, someone will come down and take him out of the pool, more’s the pity!’
When the other Jomsvikings came back from putting Glam down, and his cries had started echoing along the shore, Starkad turned and began to walk towards the longship, for it was time to catch the ebb-tide and be away.
Beorn was still kneeling among the pebbles when the men strained to push off with the long oars. Now he felt lost indeed. He would almost have been glad to have Glam beside him, for at least that would be some sort of company, bad as it was.
And when the boy had begun to feel that he was shut off from all men, Starkad came to the prow and called to him sharply, ‘Well, must we wait here all day for you? Are you afraid to wet your feet and come aboard? ’
No dog ever ran to his master as fast as Beorn ran to that ship, gasping as he plunged waist-deep in the cold salt water. Then a black-bearded Jomsviking leaned over the side and hauled him in, grumbling a little that the boy brought so much water into the ship with him.
4 Snorre Pig and the Herring
Reindeer was a vessel of black oak with its planks overlapping one another, sixty paces from prow to the after-cabin, and twenty paces across the beam. Her dragon-head was cased in thin gold, beaten into the chisel-grooves of the wood. Garnets, as big as a man’s thumb-joint, were set in the mask for eyes, and the curling tongue was hammered out of red bronze.
Beorn badly wanted to go up on to the prow-platform and see the dragon-head and touch it, but the watch-out man frowned at him, and he shrank away.
Once they had pulled offshore and Reindeer was riding the Iceland Sea like a nutshell, Starkad took the steerboard, and drove the longship like a rider spurring a stallion. He had no eyes for Beorn, but stared ahead.
Jarl Skallagrim only came down amidships, among the sea-chests, once a day. At other times he was shut in the after-cabin with a man named Thorgaut, trying to learn Latin. It was hard going, for the Jarl was getting over-aged for such things. Often the teacher, who wore wolf-skin and iron byrnie or war-shirt like the rest of the rovers, got angry with him and made him say words over and over again before he was satisfied. The Jarl was very slow at his Latin, though fast enough at spear-play and sword-work. Beorn was glad he didn’t have to learn Latin. It made no sense at all to him, as far as he could hear.
There was only one man who would talk to Beorn at first; a man out of Hedeby, called Gauk the Guardian. When Beorn asked why a man should twist his brains at Latin, which .was a right dog’s tongue, Gauk the Guardian said it was because the word of the White-Christ was set down in Latin; or if that didn’t suit you, it could be got at in Greek - but that was worse. It was like trying to read the thorns in a bush.
This Gauk the Guardian was a friendly enough man, who had had a family of his own, in his youth, but they had got lost in a fire when some Franks came up to bring Christ to the Danes by force. Before he joined the viking community at Jomsburg, he had been a butcher. He told Beorn that there wasn�
�t so much difference; they both used axes.
Some of the Jomsvikings got angry with Beorn for running up and down Reindeer, especially when they were playing chess and he accidentally knocked their boards sideways. They shouted at him and told him to jump into the sea and swim home to Iceland, where he belonged.
But Gauk took pity on him, and let him help with one of the sheep that they had taken from the hill above the shore. Some of the joints Gauk hung on hide thongs over the side, letting them trail in the water to keep cool and salted for when they were needed. Other pieces were put into buckets of sea-water on deck. The meat the vikings wanted to keep longest was buried in hot ash, in the fire that Gauk lit in a flat iron pan on the after platform. When this was baked a dark brown, Gauk lifted the deck-planks, near the mast-stepping, and put the meat down in the dark there, over the keel, among all the swords and spears. These weapons were thick with pig-fat, to keep them from rusting, so when mutton came up from under-deck, it tasted more like pig-meat than it should have done. But the men were so hungry before they reached Orkney that no one complained.
One night, as they lay under the tent on deck, with the Pole star behind them, Gauk told Beorn that Reindeer made a run up to Iceland almost every year, just to see if there was anything worth taking. He said that most of the northland was picked clean now, by one or another, and that if things didn’t improve, the Jomsvikings would be running Reindeer down the rivers to Miklagard next season, to see if the Greeks had anything they didn’t want, in their famous city where the Emperor lived.
Beorn said, ‘If you come to Iceland every year, why have I not seen you before?’
Gauk the Guardian laughed and said, ‘Because when we come, all the folk go indoors till we have sailed away. Your folk must have kept you under the bed, or in a coffer-chest. That’s why you haven’t seen us. Folk usually know when we are about; they light bonfires on the hills to tell one another to stay in. Oh, yes, we know all about it! But we pay no heed. In fact, we often find our way by these bonfires at night! In the old days, when vikings were really fierce fellows, shipmen like us would go ashore and burn a whole town down for fighting those bonfires; but not today, now that we know about the White-Christ. Now, we do not even pick slaves up, as often as we used. We mainly take things like cups and swords and money-chests.’ Beorn said, ‘When you used to pick slaves up, did you ever take any from Thorstead, master?’
