Odinn's Child

by Tim Severin

  'If he is so destitute, would it not be appropriate to forgive a pauper for his crime? Isn't that what you preach — forgiveness of sins?'

  The treasurer glared at the brithem. 'Our Holy Bible teaches us that he who absolves a crime is himself a wrongdoer,' he retorted. To the marshal's left I saw the churchmen nod their agreement. They looked thoroughly pleased with the treasurer's response. No one asked me a single question. Indeed they barely glanced at me. I knew why. The word of a runaway novice counted for nothing against the word of a senior monk, particularly someone with the status of the treasurer. Under both Church law and brithem custom, the value of testimony depends on the individual's rank, so whatever I said was of no import. If the treasurer stated I was the culprit, then it was useless for me to deny it. For my defence to be effective, I needed someone of equal or superior status to the treasurer to speak for me, and there was no one there who appeared willing to act on my behalf. As I had known from the beginning, it was not a question of whether I was innocent or guilty, but of what my sentence would be.

  'I find the culprit guilty of theft of Church property,' the marshal announced without any hesitation, 'and order that he should suffer the penalty as sought by the plaintiff.' He began to rise from his chair, clearly eager to close the day's hearings and leave for his supper.

  'On a matter of law . . .' a voice interjected quietly. I could recognise Eochaid's voice anywhere. He was addressing the marshal directly and, like everyone else, ignored me completely. The marshal gave an exasperated grimace, and sat back down again, waiting to hear what Eochaid had to say. 'It has been stated by the plaintiff that the accused is a foreigner and that he has no family or kin in this land, and therefore there is no possibility of compensation or restitution for the theft. The same criteria must surely apply to the court's sentence: namely, any individual without family nor kin to guide or instruct him in what is right and what is wrong, must — by those circumstances — be regarded as having committed his or her crime out of a natural deficiency. In that case, the crime is cinad o muir and must be punished accordingly.'

  I had no idea what Eochaid was talking about.

  But Brother Mariannus clearly did know what the brithem had in mind because the Treasurer was looking wary. 'The young man has been found guilty of a major felony. His offence was against the monastery of St Ciaran, and the monastery has the right to carry out the appropriate sentence,' he said.'If it is the monastery which is the injured party,' Eochaid replied calmly, 'then punishment should be carried out in accordance with monastic custom, should it not? And what could be more appropriate than allowing your own God to decide this young man's fate. Is this not how your own saints were willing to demonstrate their faith?'

  The treasurer was clearly irritated. There was a short silence as he searched for a retort, when the marshal intervened. He was getting bored with the continuing discussion. 'The felon is judged to have committed a cinad o muir,' he announced, 'He is to be taken from here to the nearest beach and the sentence to be carried out.'

  I thought I was to be drowned like an unwanted cur, with a stone about my neck. However, the following day, when I was brought to the beach, the boat drawn up on the shingle was so small that I could not imagine how I would fit into it as well as the person who was to throw me overboard. The tiny craft was barely more than a large basket. It was made of light withies lashed together with thongs to form an open framework and then covered over with a skin sewn of cowhides. The boat, if such a flimsy vessel could be called that, was in very poor condition. The stitching was broken in several places, there were cracks and splits in the leather cover, and the thongs of the basketwork were so slack that the structure sagged at the edge. It looked as if its owner had abandoned the craft on the beach as being totally unfit for the sea and that, I gathered, was precisely why it had been selected.

  'We'll have to wait for the wind,' said the senior of the two monastery servants who had escorted me. 'The locals say that it usually gets up strongly in the afternoon and blows hard for several hours. Enough to see you on your way for a final voyage.' He was relishing his role. On the half-day's walk to the beach he had lost no chance to make my journey unpleasant, tripping me up from time to time, then jerking viciously on the leading halter as I struggled to get back on my feet. Neither Abb Aidan nor the treasurer had thought it worth their while to come to the beach to witness my sentence being carried out. They had sent the servants to do the work, and there was a minor official from the marshal's court to report back when the punishment had been completed. Apart from the three of them, there was just a handful of curious bystanders, mostly children and old men from the local fishing families. One of the old men kept handing a few small coins from one gnarled paw to the other, his lips moving as he counted them again and again. I guessed he was the previous owner of the semi- derelict little boat, which, like me, had been condemned.

  'Are you from the settlement outside St Ciaran's?' I asked the older servant.

  'What's that to you?' he grunted disagreeably.

  'I thought you might know Bladnach the leather-worker.'

  'And so what? If you think he'll show up here by some holy miracle and sew up the boat before you set sail in her, you must be even more optimistic than Maelduine sailing for the Blessed Islands. Without his legs, Bladnach would really need a marvel to get here so briskly.' He laughed bitterly. 'You would have thought he had suffered enough without losing his daughter as well.'

  'What do you mean, losing his daughter?'

  He shot me a glance of pure loathing. 'Don't think your antics with Orlaith didn't get noticed by her neighbours. Orlaith got pregnant, thanks to you, and there were complications. She ended up by having to go to the monastery for treatment, but the hospital couldn't help her. Both she and the baby died. Brother Cainnech said there was nothing he could do.'

  His words sickened me. Now I knew why the servant had been so vicious to me. It was no good protesting that I could not have been the father of her child.

  'I'm sorry,' I said feebly.

  'You'll be more than sorry when the wind changes. I hope you die at sea so slowly that you wish you had drowned; and, if your wreck of a boat does float long enough for you to come ashore, that you fall into the hands of savages who make your life as a fuidir unbearable,' he retorted, and kicked my feet from under me so that I fell heavily on the shingle.

  Now I knew what Ardal had been when he was described as fuidir cinad o muir. He had been a castaway, found in a rudderless boat which had drifted onto the coast. The tribesmen of Cairpre had presumed that he was a criminal deliberately set adrift as punishment. If such a person came back to land, then whoever found him could treat him as his personal property, whether to kill or enslave him. That was what it meant to be fuidir cinad o muir — human flotsam washed up by the waves, destined for a life of servitude.

  As predicted, the wind changed in the early hours of the afternoon and began to blow strongly from the west, away from the land. The two monastery servants roused themselves and, picking up the battered little boat with ease, carried it down the beach and set it afloat. One man held the boat steady, and the other came back to where I sat, kicked me hard in the ribs and told me to get down to the water's edge and climb into the boat. The tiny coracle tipped and swivelled alarmingly as I got aboard, and water began to seep in through the leather hull. Within moments there were several inches of water in the bilge. The older servant, whose name I gather was Jarlath, leaned forward to cut the leather thong binding my wrists, and handed me a single paddle.

  'I hope God does not grant you any more mercy than he gave Orlaith,' he said. 'I'm personally going to give your boat such a shove that I hope it carries you to Hell. Certainly you cannot paddle back to land against this wind, and in a few hours it may even raise waves big enough to swamp your vessel if you have not already capsized. Think about it and suffer!'

  He was about to send the boat into deeper water when someone cried, 'Wait!' It was the court o
fficial, the man deputed to report on the conduct of my punishment. He waded out to where I sat rocking on the waves.

  'The law allows only a single oar, a sail and no rudder, so that you cannot row to shore but are dependent on the weather that God sends. However, you are also permitted one bag of food . . . here . . .'He handed me a well-worn leather satchel filled with a thin gruel of grain and nuts blended with water. I recognised Eochaid's favourite diet, the produce of what he called the briugu caille, the hospitaller trees of the forest. I also identified the leather satchel. It was the same one that I had carried away with me from the monastery when I fled from St Ciaran's. Old and stained and battered, it had been repaired many times because the original leather was thick and stout enough to take the needle. I clutched it to me as Jarlath and his colleague began to push the little cockleshell of a boat out into deeper water, and my fingers slid down the fat seams of the satchel so I could feel the hard lumps. They were the stones I had stolen from St Ciaran's. My time spent sitting in Bladnach's workshop waiting for him to blind stitch the book satchels had not been wasted. I had practised how to slit and close leather so neatly that the stitches could not be seen, and that is where I had hidden my loot. Now, belatedly, I understood that Eochaid must have known all along about my hidden hoard.

  Jarlath was so determined that I never come back to land that he kept on wading after his colleague had turned back, until he was chest deep in the sea and the larger waves were threatening to break over his head. He gave the boat a final shove, then I was adrift and the wind was rapidly carrying me clear. Still clasping the satchel, I slid myself down to sit in the bilge of the coracle and make her more stable. There was no point in looking back because the man who had helped me was not there. Without Eochaid's intervention at my trial before the king's marshal, I knew I would have finished up like the unfortunate sheepstealer at St Ciaran's, hanging from a gibbet in front of the monastery gate. I found myself wishing that somehow there had been a moment when I had thanked Eochaid for all he had done for me, ever since that morning on the day we first met when he had stood silently regarding me drink water from the woodland stream. Yet, probably I would not have found the right words. Eochaid remained an enigma. I had never penetrated his inner thoughts, or learned why he had chosen to be a brithem, or what sustained him along that demanding path. He had kept himself to himself. His Gods were different from mine and he had never discussed them with me, though I knew they were complex and ancient. His studies of their mysteries made him wise and practical and gave him a remarkable insight into human nature. Had he been an Old Believer, I would have taken him for another Odinn, but without the darker, cruel side. My silent homage to him as I drifted out to sea was to admit that if there was one man on whom I wished to pattern my life it would be Eochaid.

  At first I clung fiercely to the sides of the little coracle as it lurched and swivelled crazily in the waves, then tilted and hung at a steep angle, so that it seemed on the point of capsizing at any moment and throwing me into the sea. With each gyration I braced myself in the bottom of the little vessel, and tried to counterbalance the sudden movement. But soon I discovered it was better to relax, to lie limp and let the coracle flex and float naturally to the waves. My real worry was the constant intake of water. It was seeping through the cracks and splits in the leather and splashing over the rim of the little vessel with each wave crest. Unless I did something, the coracle would swamp and founder. I gulped down the gruel in the satchel and began to use the empty leather bag as a scoop, steadily tipping the bilge water back into the sea. It was this action, repeated again and again and again, which distracted me from my fear of capsize and death. As I bailed, I found myself thinking back to my fellow fuidir cinad o muir — Ardal, the mysterious clansman who had been found adrift on the western coast. The more I thought of Ardal, and how closely he had resembled Thorvall the Hunter, the more I convinced myself that they were one and the same man. If so, I told myself as I carefully poured another satchelful of water back into the sea, then Thorvall had drifted across the ocean from Vinland in an open boat, a voyage of many weeks riding the wind and current. The terrible ordeal must have destroyed his memory so he no longer knew his own identity or recognised who I was, but he had survived. And if Thorvall could live through such a nightmare, then so could I.

  It was impossible to tell when the sun went down. The sky was so overcast that the light merely faded until I could no longer make out the distant line of the coast far astern. My horizon was reduced to a close circle of dark, restless sea, out of which appeared the white flashes of wave crests. I kept bailing steadily, my arms aching, my skimpy gown soaked against my skin, and the beginnings of a thirst brought on by licking away the spray which struck my face. It must have been nearly midnight when the cloud cover began to break up and the first stars appeared. By then I was so tired that I scarcely noticed that the waves were diminishing. They broke less frequently into the coracle. I found myself setting aside the satchel and relaxing until the rise of bilge water from the leaks obliged me to go to work again.In these intervals, resting from the labour of bailing, I thought back to the eerie coincidences that had occurred in my life. From the time that my mother had sent me away as an infant, it seemed that there had been a pattern. I had been brought into contact, repeatedly, with people who possessed abnormal qualities — my foster mother Gudrid with her volva's powers could see draugar and fetches; Thrand knew the galdrastafir spells; Brodir had shared with me the vision of Odinn's ravens on the battlefield; Eochaid had spoken of his mystic inheritance from the ancient Irish drui; and there had been the brief encounter with the Skraeling shaman in the Vinland forest. The more I thought upon these coincidences, the more calm I became. My life had been so strange, so disconnected from the humdrum progress of other men, that it must have a deeper purpose. The All-Father, I concluded, had not watched over me through so many vicissitudes only to let me drown in the cold, grey waters of the sea of Ireland. He had other plans for me. Otherwise, why had he shown me so many wonders in such far- flung places, or let me learn so much? I sat in the water swilling in the bottom of the coracle and tried to determine what that design might be. As I brooded on my past, I scarcely noticed the wind was dying away. A stillness settled on the water until even the swell was barely felt. In that tiny coracle, motionless save for a very gentle rocking motion, I was suspended on the surface of black sea, the darkness of the night around me, the inky depths below. I began to feel that I was leaving my own body, that I was spirit flying. From exhaustion, from exposure, or because it was Odinn's will, I went into a trancelike stupor.

  A hand grasping my shoulder broke the spell.

  'Sea luck!' said a voice. I looked up into a heavily bearded Norse face.

  It was broad daylight, my coracle was nuzzling against the side of a small longship, and a sailor was leaning down to grab me out of the coracle.

  'Look what we've got here,' said the sailor, 'a gift from Njord himself.'

  'Pretty miserable gift, I would say,' commented his companion, helping drag me aboard still clutching my satchel, then sending the coracle on its way with a contemptuous kick so that the little vessel tilted and sank.

  'May Odinn Farmatyr, God of Cargoes, reward you,' I managed to blurt out.

  'Well, at least he speaks good Norse,' said a third voice.

  My rescuers were savages. Or that is what the monks of St Ciaran's would have called them, though my word for them was different — they were vikingr, homeward bound after a season on the coast of what I later knew as Breton land. Their luck had been fair, a couple of small monasteries surprised and looted, some profitable trading for wine and pottery in the small ports farther south and now they were headed north again in their ship. They were proper seamen, so the lookout with the dawn light behind him had spotted the tiny black speck of the coracle appearing and disappearing on the gentle swells. They had rowed across to check what they had found and as they approached they had seen me sitting there, so motio
nless that they thought I was a corpse.

  The Norse consider it propitious to rescue someone from the sea, as much for the rescuer as the rescued. So I received a kindly welcome. I was shivering with cold and they wrapped me in a spare sea cloak and gave me chunks of dried whale blubber to chew, their diet for someone who has been exposed to the cold and wet. After I was recovered, they asked me for my story and discovered that I had abundant tales to tell. This made me popular. My stories helped to pass the long hours of the homeward trip and Norsemen love a good yarn. I found myself telling my tales again and again. With each repetition I became more fluent, more able to pace the run of my narrative, to know which details caught the attention of my hearers. In short, I began to understand how satisfying it is to be a saga teller, particularly when the content of your tales has an appreciative audience. I learned that I was one of only a handful of Norse survivors from the great battle at Clontarf, so I was asked repeatedly to describe the progress of the great battle, where each man fought in the line, how each warrior had dressed for the combat, what weapons had proved best, who had said what and to whom, whether such-and-such had died with honour. And always when I came to describe how Brodir of Man had ambushed the High King and slain him in the open, though he knew it would mean his own certain death, my audience would fall silent and, as often as not, greet the conclusion of my story with a sigh of approval.

  As I told the story for perhaps the twentieth time, the thought occurred to me that this might be what Odinn was intending — that I should be an honest chronicler of the Old Ways and the truth about the far-flung world of the Norsemen. Was it really Eochaid who had told me that words hold greater power than weapons? Did Senesach at St Ciaran's encourage me to learn to read the Roman and Greek scripts and write with the pen and stylus? Was it Tyrkir who showed me the cutting of runes in Greenland and taught me so much of the Elder Lore. Or were all of them really Odinn in his many disguises equipping me for my life's path?