by Jason Born
The gathering remained oddly quiet until the door slapped shut. Then a round of laughter and chattering erupted. I later learned that neither Edana nor Horse Ketil was considered insufferable by the citizens of Man. The free men and women at the Tynwald did not give any thought to the personalities of husband or wife. Those gathered, like men and women far and wide, did not care a whiff about the politics at stake. Godfrey merely tolerated the pair, waiting until a better option came his way. The king exploited the indifference everyone harbored for the couple and pushed off his cousin’s divorce petition again and again. It kept the peace on the island and made for a terrific sideshow. The latter is why people came to the Tynwald in the first place.
Leif leaned in. “You see, Halldorr? This is just like home. A Tynwald is run no different from a Thing.” He was right. Arguments, disagreements, ale, happy petitioners, angry participants, sex on tables, it was all part of every Thing I’d ever attended.
“What were all those arguments about?” asked Tyrkr. He was Leif’s thrall. Actually, he was Erik’s thrall, but he’d volunteered to come into exile with us in order to protect Erik’s son. Tyrkr’s native tongue was German. He had learned Norse later in life after a group of Danes had captured and sold him into the frigid north. We considered his accent humorous, his inconsistent comprehension more so.
Though he was a slave, I liked Tyrkr very much. Our crew treated him as nearly an equal. But he still understood his place when it came time to sharpen blades, prepare the morning meal, or to slosh out a dung bucket. I decided to lie to him, for fun. I spoke slowly so that he could get a better grasp. “That woman who just stormed off wants to marry the man in the corner over there,” I said pointing to the drunken husband. “But it seems they have a tradition that one of the man’s kinsmen must sleep with her first. She’s upset that no one volunteered.”
“Oh,” said Tyrkr with an understanding nod as if what I just told him made any real sense. “I suppose I could do it.” The thrall held out his hands wide and swayed his hips as if he was humping the large woman right there. Leif gave a chortle. Tyrkr shrugged with a devious grin. I smiled and shook my head, slightly disappointed that my ruse didn’t go further.
“Settle yourselves,” scolded Killian after he had let his meeting ramble. “We’ve much work to do. All our exertions tonight result from the transactions of man, but we must perform them as if we do so for Christ. Let us labor well.” I was really not sure of this Christ person. He was somehow related to the One God, though he must have been in many ways even more important since the Christians were named for him and did many of their daily tasks in his name.
A string of people and animals were trotted before Killian and the king. There was an argument about a bride-price for an upcoming wedding. The father of the bride said that twelve ounces of silver had been agreed upon. That was the standard price at the time and most of the rumbling from the crowd began to side with the father. After taking one look at the bride and her family, though, Killian easily surmised that no bachelor in his right mind would have offered more than eight ounces silver. The priest didn’t bring the matter to a vote or consult the king. He used his own authority to levy a decision. Godfrey waved his approval, though Killian didn’t seek it.
There was the case of an old farmer, nearly blind, who complained that a neighbor had slowly been moving his land markers further onto his land so that his crop of barley shrank every year while the neighbor’s grew. The aged, crusty man had waited five seasons, he said, in an effort to be neighborly before he reported the crime. With narrowed eyes, Killian accused, “It is widely known that you can barely see a hand stuck in front of your face, you have no sons left, no wife to support your allegation. How is it that you expect to make such a claim and have it believed?”
The old man pinched one side of his lips together, squinted one eye, and scratched his tanned neck. “Father,” he began. “When the night has long since fallen and your fire is nothing but cold, dark embers, and your lamps and candles are out, when your bladder reminds you of your humanity, how do you find your way to the door?” asked the weathered farmer.
Killian was quick-witted, faster than me. He studied the old plaintiff and the young defendant. “I find in your favor, old man. You’ve walked those fields for two lifetimes. You know the number of steps and paces from one end to the other, sight or not. Anyone who has followed a horse for just one day knows the distance from one headland to the other. Tomorrow three of Godfrey’s men will return with you to your farm and replace the markers where they go.” The crowd murmured their admiration at the quick decision making.
Godfrey silently nodded his consent while gripping the rump of an English thrall who stood next to him. He’d bought her in Dyflin. She was pleasing to the eye. The woman stroked the king’s back.
“It’s a good partnership they have,” Magnus, who was our longtime helmsman, whispered. He referred to Godfrey and Killian not the king and his thrall.
“Like Halldorr and me,” said Leif with a broad smile.
I began nodding and then wondered if Leif was saying that he was the brains, like Killian, and I was the brawn, like Godfrey. When I frowned, Leif began laughing. I rapped him on a black and blue knot that he had received from the knattleikr game. It was his turn to frown and my turn to laugh, though I suppose I had my answer as to who played which part.
Cases, claims, and petitions came through like a string. It was fun to watch all the problems and disputes of others. It helped me forget my aching bones and all the turmoil I had felt just a few weeks earlier when we first arrived. Killian took each problem seriously, though not in a morose manner. He gave the ancient proceedings a dignified air. With each new complaint, he attacked as if it was the first. Even when two shitting heifers were brought into Godfrey’s hall so that the owners could show the differences and similarities in their ownership marks, Killian executed his duties faithfully and honestly. He hiked up his plain vestments and stepped right through the dung, not mocking, not feigning disgust. The more I watched the priest, the more I liked him. I could see why Godfrey had kept him around.
“Now our king would like to raise the issue of an army in order to renew our strength and the very safety of this island,” called Killian when the line of petitioners was finally empty. It was late into the night, possibly morning. It was the first time that one of the priest’s actions caused a disapproving grumble from the crowd. Godfrey heard the mumbling and sat up in his chair, ready to fight, but Killian steadied the king with one hand. With the other hand, the priest scratched the thick, dark stubble that was coloring his own face more with every passing moment. The priest’s touch calmed the king. Godfrey slowly stood. His English pet backed away. His wife beamed.
“My brothers,” King Godfrey bellowed, “we’ve suffered of late. Men of Norse, Dane, and even Manx descent have run to God’s heaven before their time or they’ve entered Odin’s hall. We care not where they’ve gone, only that they died serving us.” Godfrey held up a wooden mug. “Let us drink in honor of our fallen.” We joined the king in draining our mugs. Cheers rang out, but an undercurrent of murmurings persisted.
The king shared every detail of his Dal Riatan raid the previous year. He told of their approach to the village from the west. The king said if he did it again, he would slide right under their noses and slice the monks at Lismore. Godfrey told of how they were vastly outnumbered by a host of warriors who happened to be there. It was poor timing, the king said, no more. It wasn’t any specific part of a vast tapestry woven by the norns who spun out our lives from their dwelling under the Yggdrasil tree. It wasn’t his fate to lose that day. It was a temporary setback. Man was to be at the center of an up and coming kingdom.
I remember how I felt when I heard Godfrey’s tale. It was a turning point in my life. Perhaps it was the turning point. He convinced me that my brothers, none of whom I had ever met, died in that rainy pasture just outside the monastery. I was livid. I was furious, indignant. I was also young whic
h goes hand in hand with foolishness.
The tiny Irish thrall walked by again with more ale. I snatched another cup. The wicked little thing gave me the same snarl that she’d given me before. Leif took note and prodded my ribs. “She likes you,” he said. I made a drunken face at him and the girl.
By the time I heard about the wicked Dal Riatans, my passions were up from swilling Godfrey’s ale all day. It was fine ale. In truth, I was totally drunk. Add in my lingering anger at being banished from my own home by my adopted father. Toss in being penniless for having spent two weeks dropping what pathetic amount of coins I had left onto the tables of the mead halls each and every night. Add in my youth. With all of it you get a powerful army of raw emotions. When Godfrey, king, told the assembly the tale of my brothers dying in their shit under a dark sky, I rammed my balled fist into the heavy oak table. The cups of my equally drunk friends bounced, spilling some of their contents onto the sticky, wet wood.
“We kill them!” I shouted over the king’s words. I said the phrase as if killing men who didn’t want to die was as easy as stepping on the back of a mouse in the thrush.
King Godfrey stopped. He smiled. The hall fell silent.
If anyone with whom I sat had any sense that night, the conversation would have ended right there. Leif or simple Tyrkr or some maiden with hips broad enough to make children and perhaps a mind equally as thick could have pulled me aside and instructed me of my folly. Magnus should have dragged me out and put me to sleep on our ship.
I suppose since I take the time to write this story which took place back in my young days, you already have guessed that none of us had even an ounce worth of brains. My friends all pounded the table too. They furrowed their brows and sloppily drank another swig of ale so that much of it found its way into their beards. What did go down their gullets clouded their minds as much as mine. “Kill them! Kill the Dal Riatans!” they shouted when their cups, that had been so full of courage, again slammed into the table.
I am now an old man, well beyond my ninetieth winter. I recall with my mind’s eye today that my companions looked fearsome then, for they were bruised and battered from the day’s events. My friends had not yet become raiders. I couldn’t have called myself one at that point. But each of us was raised in the harshness of life in the frigid north. We, my friends and I, were north men. We were Norsemen. I had been born in Rogaland, Norway. After my father was killed, a rapscallion named Erik Thorvaldsson took me in as his own. I followed him to Iceland and then to his discovery and settling of Greenland. Like Erik and his son I had fought and killed along the way for mere survival, not glory. My friends around that mead table, young Leif among them, had done the same. So we weren’t raiders, yet. But we were hungry, young, and so full of life that we still thought we could freely decide who should and would receive death.
King Godfrey was pleased. He basked in our bravado. His queen studied us with a curious eye. Her gaze lingered on Leif. She reached forward from her throne and gave her husband’s hand a squeeze.
Looking back, I suppose it all makes sense. Those one hundred forty men who died under the soggy tree of Dal Riata were Godfrey’s men. They had been his crew, his army, his hungry young men. They were the warriors, the thought of whom, caused the king to choke up. He looked at us around that mead hall table and saw the beginnings of a new army, a fresh batch of his men, sent to him by the old gods.
To the king’s side, Randulfr and Brandr folded their arms as they dubiously studied us. In the corner, drunken Ketil rolled over again. It looked like he scratched notes on a piece of parchment, though I was drunk and could hardly believe all that my eyes showed me.
Damn. As I scratch out the tales of my youth on vellum made by my own worn hands, I shiver. I shake in the evenings of summer even though I huddle under two great hides brought to me by my little Skjoldmo. Getting old is a curse, I say. The other men of the village where I live say otherwise. They say things like, ‘Getting old is a blessing from Glooskap.’ Or they say, ‘How much more of a blessing is age when you can see your children become men and women of the tribe?’ If any of them knew what a horse was, I’d tell them they are full of horse dung. None of my current people has ever seen a horse. I haven’t seen a Norseman in many years. But all this is beyond the tale. Well, it is part of another tale which I have written on another page of vellum that sits stacked up somewhere in my smoky hovel.
I tell myself in my aged feebleness that had I known the entire story of those hanged men, my brothers whom I never knew, and their gory deaths, that I would have moved on and not chased after the glory of war so quickly. I tell myself that had I known the truth and not been so drunk, I would have thanked Godfrey for buying my ale that night and returned to the Charging Boar to sleep rather than pounding the table, spewing vitriol and nonsense. Those are the things I tell myself. They are delusions, in truth. They are no different than the fat, ugly jarl that weds the seventeen year old maid, the fairest in the village, and deludes himself into believing that she married him and not his power or the heaps of hacksilver he had stored under his bed. They are my own fantasies. They are the songs I make up in my head about my life’s events. Like a skald is asked to make his lord into a hero in every song, I do the same in my mind.
The truth is that I probably did know the full story even in my drunkenness. I was a foolish youth, but not stupid. I could see that Godfrey was a typical king, like every one of whom I’d ever heard – Harald Fairhair or Gorm the Old. He was King of the Isles – exactly which isles changed with the day as opponents’ fortunes ebbed or flowed. What made him like all kings and men, for that matter, was that Godfrey wanted more, more gold, more land, more ships, more women, in a word, more. And it was the pursuit of more that got him and his one hundred forty brothers into trouble in the first place.
“Look at these fine men,” exclaimed Godfrey. “They are new to us, fresh from the sea and yet they understand our cause. They will lead us to our final revenge over Dal Riata and they will take us to our rightful place among the kingdoms of the earth.”
One of the Manx citizenry sidled next to me. “Lad, you’re a fool.” Godfrey talked on, but I listened to the whispers in my ear. “The king up there already had his revenge last year. On Christmas night, the time you heathens call Yule, our fine king slunk into the church at Lismore. His sword cut the bishop. It sent the abbot’s blood spraying against the wall. The story goes that thirteen monks were butchered. Monks!” the man scoffed. “What kind of man bothers killing monks?”
I turned to defend the king I didn’t really know, but the man had slipped back into the crowd. When I again turned to face the king, the Manx gossip was crouching down talking with Horse Ketil who had sat up against a low wall.
“So you Greenlanders will be mine! We’ll take your oaths soon.” King Godfrey was pacing with excitement. “I’ll need more native Manx to join our army than I’ve ever had before. It will be some time before we can count on Norse transplants to arrive. In the meantime, let us show the world what you men of Man may do with steel in your hands.”
Horse Ketil shook his head, clearly indicating, “No.” The man who had been whispering with him climbed to his feet and moved through the crowd. He quietly encouraged a cautious course for the assembled men.
No one ran forward to volunteer, confirming two things: that even when drunk, Horse Ketil held sway and that we were young, inebriated fools for having so quickly joined Godfrey.
“I hear some griping,” said Killian. This time it took the priest’s hand and Gudruna’s slender hand to calm the king. Godfrey sat back down to see what inspiration his priest could provide. The king crossed his legs, sinking low, and pouting on the throne. He wound a stray shock of his beard around a finger.
“What? Is it fine to have our Norse and Dane warriors battle the swells of the seas and fight our enemies in order to keep us safe? Is it acceptable to let them weaken the Welsh, Scots, or English so that those brigands cannot attack us? Is it sa
tisfactory to have the men, who a few generations ago were complete foreigners to us, provide us security and return with treasure, riches, and plunder? Wealth, I might add, that finds its way into all of our homes in the form of goods imported from Frankia, England, Ireland, and even the Mediterranean? If so, perhaps the ancestors of these Norsemen were correct. Perhaps we Manx are docile sheep to be penned, shorn, and kept. Perhaps without them we would be taken by the wolves.”
“Stop saying we, Irishman!” shouted a man’s voice from the crowd.
A wrinkly smile curled amid Killian’s dark features. “As you wish,” said the priest, now pacing like Godfrey had done. “Though I’ve been preaching the gospel among you for fifteen years, you wish to view me as foreign. That suits me, because then I do not have to include myself or my ancestors among the pets of Man, who are all-too content to let Norsemen and a small Irish priest be their shepherds. I will volunteer to be a part of our king’s next army. I will return to Dal Riata with him and exact retribution for what they’ve done to our men.” Killian looked accusingly at Horse Ketil, but said nothing to him. “I, a lowly Irishman, a peaceful Christian priest, will come back to this place, my home, with treasure for the benefit of our church and our poor and the rest of you cowards.”
Killian kept up his pacing. Godfrey and Gudruna scanned the crowd expectantly, clearly hoping that the priest’s goading would have the desired effect. Volunteers would always fight better than conscripts.
I drank more ale, trying to forget all my promises from just moments earlier. I studied the swirling grain in the table, rather than accidentally meet the king’s eye. Was it too late to sneak off to sleep in an alley?
“What’s the pay?” came another lone voice. Killian smiled. The priest was making headway, he thought. He turned to Godfrey who sensed the small shift and eagerly jumped to his feet.
“Plunder,” shouted Godfrey, cutting to the core. His voice echoed among the rafters and high, peaked roof. “The monasteries, churches, and towns of Dal Riata are filled with riches. We take them. The monks pay us a ransom to give them back. It is so much more profitable than outright thievery because we sell the same item time and again. Every man who comes will get a portion. Even those who fall and do not return to their homes will have his share go to his widow.”
