The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Map

  A Note About This Book

  1. Dublin on the Morning Tide

  2. The Streets of Dublin

  3. Sword for Sale

  4. Harvest on Barra

  5. Sea Fight

  6. Bride-Ale in Barra

  7. Thorstein the Red

  8. Easter Faring

  9. The Bay of the Coracles

  10. Council on Orkney

  11. Foster-Kin

  12. Summer Faring

  13. Bride-Ale in Caithness

  14. The Making of Treaties

  15. The Shadow Among the Trees

  16. The Ship and the Dark Woods

  17. Storm at Sea

  18. Angharad

  19. Witch Mark

  20. Harvest Weather

  21. Harvest Wrath

  22. Witch Hunt

  23. The Return

  About the Author

  Also available in Red Fox Classics

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Sword Song is the swashbuckling story of Bjarni, a Viking swordsman. Banished from his home, as a boy, for a murder he didn’t intend to commit, Bjarni takes up a new life as a mercenary. He journeys to the islands off the west coast of Scotland and there his life is shaped for years to come. A life that will see him fighting among the clan chiefs in feuds as bitter and bloody as can be imagined. This enthralling novel was the last thing Rosemary Sutcliff wrote and was discovered in a drawer after her death. It is published here in paperback for the first time.

  A Note About This Book

  Throughout her working life my godmother and cousin, Rosemary Sutcliff, wrote each of her books in three consecutive drafts. The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson (later re-titled Sword Song) was two-thirds through its second draft when she died suddenly in July 1992. Since then, as her executor and chairman of the company which looks after her books, I have transcribed her manuscript, with the encouragement of her agent for some years, Murray Pollinger. Her long-time editor and friend Jill Black has edited the result. Many thanks are due to them.

  In this, her final book, Rosemary returns to the Norse world she had so memorably portrayed many years earlier in The Shield Ring.

  Anthony Lawton

  October 1996

  1

  Dublin on the Morning Tide

  HALFWAY UP THE Hearth Hall the man and the boy faced each other.

  The man sat leaning forward a little, hands spread-fingered on the carved foreposts of the High Seat. The boy stood before him, stubbornly returning his accusing blue gaze with eyes that were just as blue under a thatch of barley-pale hair.

  Bjarni Sigurdson was not much over sixteen; a tall raw-boned stripling whose voice, when he spoke, still sounded faintly rough at the edges, betraying the fact that it had broken not so many years ago.

  ‘He kicked my dog,’ said Bjarni Sigurdson.

  ‘Your dog having just attacked him.’

  ‘Her pups are no’ but three days old, her temper a bit shaken.’

  ‘And so you killed him.’

  ‘I was not meaning to – only the horse-pond was near-hand, and he cannot have had much hold on life to have drowned in the little time I held him under.’

  There was a long silence. At the lower end of the Hall women were about their ready-making for the evening meal, with anxious glances towards the High Seat. From outside came the sound of metal on wood and men’s voices as they worked; all the sounds of the young settlement; and beyond that the crying of the gulls. Beside the turf fire one of the hunting dogs was snuffling after fleas in his flank. Bjarni heard them all with great clearness; and yet he had the feeling of silence that went on – and on.

  He had hoped, when he was summoned to stand before Rafn the Chief here in his Hall, instead of being held to appear before the Thing – the Law Gathering – on a charge of man-slaying, that nothing so very bad was going to happen after all. He had not meant to kill the old man in the long brown kirtle who had come to the settlement to tell them about his god, as though they had no gods of their own. Anybody could make a mistake. But looking into the unforgiving face of Rafn Cedricson he felt less hopeful as the moments passed.

  ‘How long since you came west-over-seas to join the settlement?’ the Chief asked at last.

  ‘Half a year,’ Bjarni said sullenly.

  Half a year. It seemed longer than that, somehow, as though he had already begun to put down roots. Half a year since the Grandfather, too old to pull up his own roots, but wanting to get the young ones out of Norway (which King Harald Finehair was making too hot for those who valued their freedom to live as they chose) had sent him to join Gram his elder brother in the settlement of Rafnglas, which their own chief’s brother had made here on the north-west coast of the Angles’ Land.

  ‘Time enough to learn that in this land-take the men of the White Christ walk safe.’

  ‘I did not think – I had forgotten –’

  ‘Then listen,’ said the Chief, ‘and I will tell the thing over to you again. When I was a bairn, I was fostered, according to common custom, on a friend of my father’s. His son and I grew together, closer than brothers-in-blood, as is often the way with foster-kin. In young manhood he came – no matter how – under the influence of folk who worship the White Christ. He left his own gods behind, and turned to theirs, and in time took the cowl and the shaven forehead, and became one of their holymen. So I lost my brother from the hearth fire and the shield-ring. But for his sake I swore on the Hammer of our god Thor that within my land-take and among men of my own following, the men of his kind should be safe.’

  The silence came back. Bjarni said nothing. There seemed nothing to say.

  ‘Therefore you have made of me an oath-breaker, and that is a thing I do not lightly forgive,’ said the Chief at last. ‘But it is a thing between you and me, and not a matter for hearing out there at the Thing.’

  And Bjarni knew that he was waiting for sentence just as surely as though he stood before the Law Gathering of the settlement, after all.

  Rafn’s hands tightened on the foreposts, the carved heads of Odin and Frigga that made the High Seat the sacred place in any hall. ‘Kraka will give you a sword from the weapon kist. Take it and get out of my sight, out of the settlement until you have learned the meaning of an oath. Heriolf the Merchant sails on the morning tide.’

  Bjarni stood while the words sank in. ‘Just – go?’ he said at last, his mouth feeling oddly dry.

  ‘Just go! A man with a sword need never lack the means of life – or death. If after five years you still live and you shall be free to return and take your place in the settlement again, it may be that I shall be able to stand the sight of you.’

  ‘If I still live when the five years are up, it may be that I shall not wish to return to this boat-strand,’ Bjarni said.

  The Chief let out a kind of moan. ‘Then – the seas are wide, and you may sail them until you fall off the far end, if you choose.’

  Kraka, foremost of the Chief’s hearth companions, who rowed first oar in his galley when she put out to sea for the summer’s raiding and trading, gave him a sword from one of the great weapon kists against the gable wall. A good serviceable weapon with a grip of age-darkened walrus ivory. Not such a sword as he would have chosen for himself, but well enough. He had had no sword of his own until now, but his practice sessions with the other boys had taught him to recognise the balance of a blade. And a little later, knotting the sword-thongs to his belt as he went, he was heading back through the settlement for his brother’s house-place. And Gram, who mus
t have been waiting in the foreporch, was suddenly beside him.

  ‘If he asks me now, out in the open with half the settlement looking on,’ Bjarni thought, ‘I’ll kill him.’

  But all Gram said, glancing down at his new sword, was, ‘Tha’s got that on the wrong side.’

  ‘Not for a left-handed swordsman,’ Bjarni said between his teeth. And heard the other’s surprised silence. It was wonderful how folk that weren’t left-handed themselves never thought of things like that.

  They walked on without another word, up through the settlement, crossing the log bridge over the burn and following the stream upwards for half a mile until they came to the side glen, to the steading that was the nearest thing Bjarni had now to a home. The smell of cooking came out through the house-place doorway, but that must wait. As though the thing had been decided between them, they turned aside and ducked in through the low doorway of the store-shed. Inside were kists and bundles, farm tools, the dry smell of corn dust from last year’s harvest. Nothing moved but a mouse. Then the hound bitch in the corner looked up and thumped her tail but could not come without upsetting the blind and rat-like pups feeding all along her flank.

  Gram seized him by the shoulder and swung him round. ‘Now – what passed between you and the Chief?’

  ‘He gave me a sword and bade me be out of the settlement. Heriolf the Merchant is sailing on the morning tide.’

  ‘For all time?’

  ‘Until I have learned the meaning of an oath; five years he said.’

  Gram cursed softly. ‘It could have been longer. But the gods alone know what the Grandfather will say.’

  ‘The Grandfather in Norway will never know,’ Bjarni said, and felt, even as he spoke the words, how far he had come already from the place where he had been born and bred.

  Gram had begun to chew his lower lip as he did when he was trying to clear his mind. ‘I should come with you –’

  ‘Why?’ Bjarni demanded.

  ‘You’re too young to set sail on your own.’

  ‘I’m sixteen and more. There’s some that’s sailed on their first Viking raid when they’d seen but twelve summers. I’ll do well enough.’

  Gram was still chewing his lower lip. ‘Tha’ll have to,’ he said at last. ‘I cannot leave the steading and Ingibjorg, not for five years, not now she’s in whelp.’

  ‘Who’s asking you to?’ Bjarni demanded, and then, seeing the trouble still in his brother’s face, ‘Bide here and keep the place for all of us. In five years’ time I may be Emperor of Byzantium – I may just be dead – but if I’m neither, I’ll like enough want to come home to it.’

  He still felt stunned by what had happened in this day that had wakened like any other, and torn his familiar world to shreds before evening. But if he was to launch out into strange seas, and win his own way and his own fortune, he certainly did not want an older brother along with him to spoil it.

  The hound bitch, as though sensing trouble in the air, heaved to her feet and, shaking off the fringe of pups, came padding across the floor, moving stiffly from the holy man’s kick, and thrust her shaggy head against Bjarni’s thigh; but even as he stooped to rub her muzzle, she turned and made her way back to the protesting pups.

  ‘I can’t take her with me, with the pups not yet weaned,’ Bjarni said, watching her flop into the midst of her young and gather them once more against her flank. ‘You’ll keep her? The whelps are mostly spoken for.’ There was an ache in his throat. Astrid had come with him west-over-seas. He was not good at loving, but he was unpleasantly surprised to find that he loved the rough-coated bitch. She was not young. Even if he came back after five years, likely she wouldn’t be there . . .

  ‘I’ll keep her when I’m here.’ Gram was a great one for having things cut and dried. ‘In the summer she’ll do well enough with the rest of the pack that gets left behind during the summer sea-faring.’

  Bjarni nodded. ‘Then I’ll be gathering my gear, and away.’

  ‘You’ll come in and sup first. Ingibjorg’ll have cooked for the three of us.’

  Bjarni did not like his brother’s new wife. She had a little pink greedy face, but she was a good cook. His stomach was crying out to him that he must eat somewhere, and he certainly was not going to eat among the Chief’s house-carles in the Hearth Hall.

  He followed Gram into the house-place, and sat down in his usual seat beside the fire.

  Ingibjorg looked up as they came in. ‘Well?’ she demanded, spooning eel stew into three mazer-wood bowls. So the thing had to be told again.

  She said all the proper things: that he should have a care of that temper of his, that five years would pass, that they would keep his place warm for him. But he saw in her face that she was glad of his going.

  When the meal was over – a silent meal with spurts of uneasy talk that died like flames in wet wood – Bjarni went up to the loft where he had slept above the cowstall, and collected his worldly goods: a spare pair of brogues and his feast-day sark, a small dolphin made of sea-blue glass that he had picked up one day among the ruins of the Redcrests’ fort above the settlement. He bundled them into his weather-stained wadmal cloak, retied the belt thongs of his new sword and checked that his sheath knife was tucked safely into the same broad leather strap.

  When he scrambled down again into the living place, Gram was working at the battered silver arm-ring he wore above his left elbow, dragging it off, while Ingibjorg watched him with her lower lip caught angrily between her teeth.

  ‘Take this with you,’ Gram said. ‘You’ll be needing journey silver.’

  Ingibjorg broke in, clearly continuing an argument that had been going on while he was in the loft. ‘It was your grandfather’s! You have told me so often enough, you must keep it for our son!’ She patted her belly, which was just beginning to swell like the sail of a ship in a light breeze.

  Gram took no notice. He held the bracelet toward Bjarni.

  Bjarni wanted to refuse it, but his common sense told him that he might indeed need journey silver for one purpose or another. He took the bracelet with a mutter of thanks, partly for the pleasure of annoying Ingibjorg, who had begun to cry, and pushed it above his own elbow.

  ‘Fair sailing to you – I have work outside to do before dark,’ Gram said, already halfway through the doorway.

  That would be true. In another year or so there might be a few captured thralls if the summer raiding went well, to help with the crops and the few lean cattle; but till then the men of the settlement must work each for himself. There was also, of course, the matter of getting away from Ingibjorg’s tears. Well, he, Bjarni Sigurdson, was going to escape all that.

  He hitched up his bundle and set out, across the steading garth and down the burnside, leaving his old life behind him and whistling like a blackbird as he went, to show all men, himself included, how little he cared. But halfway down the burn, on his way to the bridge and the houses of the main settlement, his steps began to slow. Then he paused and, hardly knowing why he did so, he turned into a little valley that led off the main path and sloped back towards the surrounding hills. No one had yet built a steading there, though the land seemed to Bjarni good, and there was a little stream that ran through it, down to the main burn. Finding a soft, flat piece of ground halfway up the glen, he scratched a hole with his knife and buried the blue glass dolphin there. Perhaps the valley would still be empty in five years’ time and perhaps his dolphin would still be waiting for him. Was it a kind of promise to himself? he wondered, as he walked back to rejoin the main track down to the settlement.

  The settlement was so new that some of the house-places were still roofed with sails and ships’ awnings, though others had their proper roofs of heather thatch; and the God-House, raw with newness, stood among staked ash saplings, where in years to come the sacred grove would be.

  Here and there, folk with their evening meals inside them were out again, about work that needed doing while there was still light to see by; and fac
es turned to him as he passed, friendly enough, nobody holding it against him that he had broken the Chief’s oath, yet with something, an uneasiness, behind their eyes. Nobody holds it against the oak tree that it draws the lightning flash, but men stand clear of an oak tree in a thunderstorm, all the same. An oath-breaker was unlucky, and he knew that they were glad to see him go.

  Down on the ship-strand was the smell of fish and salt water, rope and timber and pitch, the fisher-boats lying heeled to one side like sleeping seals. The Chief’s longship was drawn out from the ship-shed onto the slipway and men were still busy along her flanks where they had been all day, pitching her seams and making her ready for the seaways of summer. Bjarni went past them all, heading for the broader-beamed merchantman lying in the shallows, her crew wading to and fro between her and the shore with the last bales and bundles of her cargo.

  In the bows of his ship, Sea Cow, Heriolf the Merchant stood muffled in an old sea-cloak watching his goods come aboard.

  Bjarni swung his own bundle onto his shoulder and waded out towards her. With the silver ring on his arm, he had the price of his passage to – wherever she was bound; but he saw no point in paying when there might be another way. Thigh deep in the swinging shallows, he paused and stood looking up at Heriolf across the dark ship-shoulder as a man on foot looks up at a man on horseback.

  ‘Where away?’ he said.

  ‘Dublin, on the morning tide.’

  Dublin. That would do well enough. ‘I am for Dublin, too,’ Bjarni said.

  ‘Have you the price?’ the merchant said. He must have known, the whole settlement knew by now, about the holy man and the horse-pond, but he said nothing as to that.

  ‘Not in goods or gold,’ Bjarni said. ‘I pay in service.’

  ‘And what service would that be?’ Heriolf leaned over the bulwark, grinning. ‘I think you are no seaman, as yet.’

  ‘Not as yet.’ Bjarni returned the grin. ‘Though I can handle an oar none so ill. Meanwhile, I am a better hand with this –’ And he hitched at his sword-belt.

  ‘So-o! A bodyguard? I, a peaceful trader? Have the Viking kind forsworn overnight the custom by which they raid the land-folk and their own kind at sea, but leave the traders to go about their trade?’