by Tim Severin
By this stage men from both factions were trading blows with swords and axes and daggers, slamming shields in one another's faces, headbutting, wrestling hand to hand. This was not a military encounter between trained soldiers, disciplined and skilled in the use of arms. It was an ugly brawl between enraged farmers, and no less dangerous for being so.
The Burners and their friends began to fall back in disorder, and as the retreat began, Kari, the experienced fighter, picked his targets. He looked around for the men whom I had identified to him, those who bribed Eyjolf at the meeting at the gorge. One — Hallbjorn the Strong — was already in retreat with his injured foot, the other was Bjarni Brodd-Helgason. Seeing Bjarni in the scrimmage, Kari began to press towards him. There was no room for Kari to use his axe in the thick of the turmoil. Instead, again with his left hand, he snatched up a spear which someone had thrown and which was sticking up from the ground, and slithered the weapon through a gap between two men. His intended victim swung his shield round just in time to deflect the stab, which otherwise would have spitted him. With Kari extended fully forward, Bjarni saw his chance. As a space opened up, he darted his sword at Kari's leg. Once again Kari's remarkable agility saved him. He jerked back his leg, pivoted like a dancer, and in a moment was poised again and making a second spear thrust. As he lunged forward, Bjarni's life was saved by one of his retainers running forward with a shield. Kari's spear penetrated the shield and gashed the man in the thigh, a deep wound which was to make him a cripple for the rest of his life. Kari swayed back, preparing to strike a third time. He had dropped his axe and, holding the spear with both hands, thrust straight at Bjarni. The Burner threw himself sideways, rolling on the ground so the spear passed over him, then got back on his feet and ran for his life.
The fighting was now getting hazardous for the onlookers. The retreating Burners had to pass between the booths of several godars who had been friends with their victim, Njal. These godars and their retainers deliberately blocked the way, jostling and taunting the unfortunate Burners. Their taunts soon turned to blows and it seemed that the entire Althing was about to disintegrate into a general battle. A man named Solvi, who belonged to neither faction, was standing beside his booth as the Burners streamed by. Solvi was cooking a meal and had a great cauldron of water boiling over the cook fire. Unwisely he made a remark about the cowardice of the Burners, just as Hallbjorn the Strong was passing by. Hallbjorn heard the insult, picked up the man bodily and plunged him head first into the cauldron.
Kari and his allies chivvied the Burners through the booths and back towards the bank of the Oxar River. Both sides began to suffer losses. Flosi hurled a spear which killed one of Kari's men; someone else wrenched the same spear from the corpse and threw it back at Flosi, injuring him in the leg, though not badly. Once again it was Kari, the professional fighter, who did the most damage. Of the men who had almost humiliated him at the court, the key figure was Eyjolf the lawyer. Now Kari was out for revenge. As the Burners began to cross the river to safety, splashing their way through the milky-white shallows, Thorgeir Skora-Geir, who had been fighting alongside Kari all the time, saw the lawyer's scarlet cloak.
'There he is, reward him for that bracelet!' Thorgeir shouted, pointing to Eyjolf.
Kari seized a spear from a man standing beside him and threw it. The trajectory was flat and low, and the spear took Eyjolf in the waist and killed him.
With Eyjolf s death, the fighting began to subside. Both sides were exhausted, and Kari's faction were unwilling to cross the river and advance uphill against the Burners. One last spear was thrown — no one saw who flung it — and it struck down one more Burner. Then several of the leading godars arrived, among them Skapti the Lawspeaker, with a large band of their followers. They placed themselves between the two groups of combatants and called a halt to the fighting. Enough blood had been spilled, they said. It was time to make a temporary truce, and try to settle the dispute by negotiation.
To my astonishment, I now learned that conflict and killing in Iceland can be priced. Half a dozen godars assembled before the Law Rock and formed a rough-and-ready jury to calculate who had killed whom, how much the dead man was worth, and who should pay the compensation. It was like watching merchants haggle over the price of meat.
The weary fighters, who had been hacking at one another a moment before, were now content to lean on their shields or sit down on the turf to rest while they listened to the godars make their tally. The killing of this man was balanced by the killing of someone on the other side, the value of that wound was set at so many marks of silver, but that sum was then set against an injury on the opposite side, and so forth. In the end the godars decided that the losses that the Burners had sustained at the Althing brawl made up for the deaths they had inflicted on Kari's faction on previous occasions, and that both sides should make a truce and waive their claims for compensation. The original outstanding matter - the Burning of Njal and his family - was also settled. Compensation was to be paid for Njal's death, also for the death of his wife, and the Burners were to suffer outlawry. Flosi was banished for three years, while four of the more belligerent Burners — Gunnar Lambason, Grani Gunnarsson, Glum Hildisson and Kol Thorsteinsson — were banished for their lifetimes. However, in a spirit of compromise, the sentence of outlawry was not to take effect until the following spring, so that the chief malefactors could spend the winter arranging their affairs before beginning their period of banishment from Iceland.
The one man for whom no compensation was either sought or paid was Eyjolf. His underhand ways, it was commonly agreed, had brought the law into disrepute. One by one, the various farmers shook hands on the agreement, and thus ended what was, by all accounts, the most violent battle ever to take place before Logberg, the Law Rock.
ELEVEN
'OUTLAWRY FOR THREE years - that I can accept, but it's not for a youngster,' Kari explained later that evening. He had remembered me, even after all the violence of the day, and summoned me to the booth where he was staying. There he told me as much as he could remember about my mother Thorgunna in Orkney — including the details which I have given earlier — and now he was trying to make me understand why I had to fend for myself. When the godars announced their decisions at the Law Rock, Kari had been the only person to reject their judgement. He refused to acknowledge that the killings and maimings of the recent skirmish could be equated with the murders committed by the Burners on Njal and his family. 'In front of the most influential godars in the land, I declared that I refused to give up my pursuit of the Burners,' he went on, 'That means that sooner or later they will condemn me to outlawry and force me to leave Iceland. If it is lesser outlawry, then I must stay away for three years. If I come back before the time is complete, then my sentence is increased to full outlawry and I will be banished for life. Anyone declared an outlaw and still found in Iceland can be treated as a criminal. Every man's hand is against him unless he has friends willing to take the risk of protecting him. He can be killed on sight, and the executioner can take his property. It is no life for you.'
I still asked Kari if I could continue to serve him. But he refused. He would have no retinue or following. He would act alone in pursuing his vengeance, and a thirteen-year-old lad would be a hindrance. But he did have a suggestion: I should travel to Orkney, to the earl's household, and find out more details about my mother for myself. 'The person there who might have some more information for you is the earl's mother, if she is still alive. Eithne is her name, and she and Thorgunna got on particularly well. Both came from Ireland and they used to sit for hours at a time, quietly talking in Irish to one another.'
And he promised that if he himself was ever going to Orkney, then he would take me with him. It was my reward for spying on the Burners during the Althing.
Kari's revelation that on Orkney, in the person of the earl's mother, I might find a source of direct information about my mother completely eclipsed my earlier, ill-formed scheme of trying to re
join Gudrid and Thorfinn. There were another six days before the Althing would be closed and the people dispersed to their homes, and I spent those six days going from booth to booth of the more important landowners, looking for work. I offered myself as a labourer, willing to spend the autumn and winter on a farm doing the same humdrum jobs I had performed in Greenland. In return I would receive my board and lodging and a modest payment when spring came. I realised that the payment would probably be in goods rather than cash, but it should be enough to buy my passage to Orkney. As I was rather weakly looking, I encountered little enthusiasm from the farmers. Winter was not the season when they needed extra hands, and an additional employee in the house had to be fed from the winter stocks of food. My other failing was that no one knew who I was. In Iceland's close-knit society that is a great disadvantage. Most people are aware of a person's origins, where he or she comes from, and what is their reputation. The people I spoke to knew only that I had been raised in Greenland and had spent some time in Vinland, a place few of them had even heard of. They were puzzled that I did not speak with the vocabulary of an ordinary labourer - I had Gudrid to thank for that - and I was certainly not slave-born, though once or twice people commented that my green-brown eyes made me look foreign. I supposed that I had inherited their colour from Thorgunna, but I could not tell them that I was Thorgunna's son. That would have been disastrous. I had made a few discreet enquiries about my mother, without saying why I wanted to know. The reactions had been very negative. My informant usually made some comment about 'foreign witches' and referred to something called 'the hauntings'. Not wanting to seem too curious, I did not pursue my enquiries. So, with the exception of Kari, I told no one about my parentage.
Thus my anonymity, which had been a help when Kari set me to spy on the Burners, was now a handicap, and I became anxious that I would not find a place to spend the autumn and winter. Yet, someone had made a very accurate guess as to who I was, and was keeping an eye on me.
He was Snorri Godi, the same powerful chieftain whose half-sister Thurid Barkadottir had stolen my mother's bed hangings at Frodriver.
Thus when I arrived from Greenland, bearing the name Thorgils, and of the right age to be Thorgunna's son, Snorri Godi guessed my true identity at once. Typically, he kept the knowledge to himself. He was a man who always considered carefully before any action, weighed up the pros and cons, then picked the right moment to act. He waited until I approached him at his booth on the penultimate day of the Althing, looking for work. He gave no indication that he knew who I was, but told me to report to his farm at a place called Tung five or six days' distance to the northwest at the head of a valley called Saelingsdale.
Snorri's bland appearance belied his reputation as a man of power and influence, and it would have been difficult to give him a nickname based on his physical looks. Now in late middle age, he was good-looking in a neutral way, with regular features and a pale complexion. His hair, once yellow, had turned grey by the time I met him, and so had his beard, which once had a reddish tinge. In fact, everything about Snorri was rather grey, including his eyes. But when you looked into them you realised that the greyness was not a matter of indifference, but of camouflage. When Snorri watched you with those quiet, grey eyes and with his expression motionless, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. People said that, whatever he was thinking, it was best to be on his side. His advice was sound and his enemies feared him.
Snorri turned that quiet look on me when I reported to him on the day I arrived at his farmhouse. I found him seated on a bench in the farthest shadowy corner of the main hall. 'You must be Thorgunna's son,' he said quietly, and I felt my guts coil and tighten. I nodded. 'Do you possess any of her powers?' he went on. 'Have you come because she sent you?'
I did not know what he was talking about, so I stood silently.
'Let me tell you,' continued Snorri, 'your mother left us very reluctantly. For months after her death, there were hauntings at Frodriver. Everyone knows about your mother's reappearance stark naked when they were taking her corpse for burial. But there was more. Many deaths followed at Frodriver. A shepherd died there under mysterious circumstances soon afterwards, and his draugar, his undead self, kept coming back to the farm and terrifying everyone living in the house. The draugar even beat up one of the farm workers. He met the worker in the darkness of the stable yard and knocked him about so badly that he took to his bed to convalesce and never recovered. He died a few days later, some said from pure fright. His draugar then joined the shepherd's draugar in tormenting the people. Soon half a dozen of the farm workers, mostly women, got sick and they too died in their beds. Next, Thorodd, the man who had given your mother a roof over her head when she came from Orkney, was drowned with his entire boat crew when they went to collect some supplies. Thorodd's ghost and the ghosts of his six men also kept reappearing at the house. They would walk in and sit down by the fire in their drenched clothes and stay until morning, then vanish. And for a long time afterwards there were mysterious rustlings and scratching at night.'
I remained silent, wondering where Snorri's talking was leading. He paused, eyeing me as if to judge me.
'Have you met my nephew, Kjartan?' he asked. 'I don't think so,' I replied.
'He was the only person who seemed to be able to quell the hauntings,' Snorri went on. 'That is why I'm sure your mother's spirit was responsible because in her life she really desired that young man. I think that even as a ghost she still lusted for him until finally she understood that he had no wish for her. She came back one last time, in the form of a seal, and poked her head up through the floor of the farmhouse at Frodriver. She was looking at him with imploring eyes, and Kjartan had to take a sledgehammer and flatten her head back down into the earth with several strong blows before she finally left him alone.'
I still did not know what to say. Had my mother really been so enamoured of a young teenager, scarcely three years older than I was now? It was unsettling for me to think about it, but I was too naive as yet to know how a woman can become just as hopelessly attracted by a man, as the other way around.
Snorri looked at me shrewdly. 'Are you a follower of the White Christ?' he asked.
'I don't know,' I stammered. 'My grandmother built a church for him in Brattahlid, but it wasn't used very much, at least not until Gudrid, who was looking after me, took an interest in going there. We didn't have a church in Vinland, but then we didn't have a temple to the Old Gods either, we only had the small altar that Thorvall made.'
'Tell me about Thorvall,' Snorri asked, and I found myself describing the cantankerous old hunter - how he had placed his trust in Thor, and vanished mysteriously, and was believed killed by the Skraelings. Snorri made no comment, except to ask an occasional question that encouraged me to talk further. When I told Snorri about Tyrkir and how I had worked alongside him in the smithy and learned something of the Old Ways, Snorri cross-examined me about Tyrkir's background, what the wizened German had told me of the various Gods and of their different legends, and how the world was formed. Occasionally he asked me to repeat myself. It was difficult to guess what Snorri was thinking, but eventually he stood up and told me to follow him. Without another word, he led me out of the house and across to one of the cattle byres. It was little more than a shed and from the outside looked like a typical cattle stable, except that it was round not oblong, and the roof was higher and rather more steeply pitched than usual. Snorri pushed open the wooden door and closed it behind us when we went in, shutting out the light.
When my eyes had adjusted to the dim interior, I saw that there were no cattle stalls. Instead the building was empty. There was only a bare earth floor and rising from it a circle of wooden poles supporting the steep cone of the roof, with a hole at the apex to let in the light. Then I realised that the poles were not necessary to the structure of the building.
'I built this four years ago when I moved here from my father's home,' Snorri was saying. 'It's a bit smaller tha
n the original, but that does not matter. This does.' He had walked to the centre of the circular earth floor, and I now saw there was a low, round stone, very ancient and almost black, directly under the sky hole. The rock seemed to be natural, and was not carved or shaped in any way. There were irregular bumps and protuberances so that it was slightly misshapen. There was a shallow depression on its upper surface, like a basin.
Snorri walked over casually and picked up something which had been left lying in the basin. It was an arm ring, apparently made of iron and without any markings. Snorri handled its smooth surface, for it was much worn, then slipped it on his right arm, pushing it up just above his elbow. He turned to me. 'This is the priest's ring, the ring of Thor. It was my father's, and it is as precious to me as the cross of the White Christ. I continue to use it because
I know that there are times when Thor and the other Gods can help us here in Tung as they did my father and my grandfather before him.'
He was standing in the shaft of light that came in through the smoke hole so I could see his expression. His voice was utterly matter of fact, not in the least mystical or reverential. 'When Kjartan and the others came to ask my advice about the hauntings I went to the temple and put on the arm ring. Thinking about the hauntings and deaths, it came into my mind that the deaths might have something to do with the bed hangings that your mother left. She had said they were to be burned, but Thorodd, egged on by his wife Thurid, failed to do so. They kept some of the bedlinen, and somehow that brought the deaths and sickness. So I ordered that every last scrap of linen, sheets, hangings, drapery, everything, should be taken down and committed to the flames, and when that happened the sickness and death stopped. That is how Thor helped me to understand.'
