The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘As most dogs are to those that love them,’ said the Lady Aud, and her hand rested lightly for the moment on the head of the great brindled bitch beside her. She turned and looked up to the woman at the loom. ‘Muirgoed, leave the weaving, it is your skills in leechcraft which we need here.’

  The woman let her shuttle fall and came to kneel beside the hearth. ‘Let you show me,’ she said, the faint lilt that she gave to the words showing that the Norse was not her native tongue.

  Bjarni kept his hand on Hugin’s collar, watching anxiously as she took a little knife from her belt and began to cut away and fold back the stained rags. Hugin whimpered and tried to pull his paw away but made no attempt to bite, seeming to know that she meant no harm against him.

  When the last fold of rag fell away she drew in her breath at the sight of the mutilated paw, hot and swollen and with an ugly weeping mess where the ends of the two midmost toes should have been. She put her hand under Hugin’s chin and lifted it to look into his eyes. ‘Mai, mai, mai, here’s a sorry thing,’ she said to the dog alone; and then to Bjarni, ‘Keep him still, I will fetch the salve?’ Rising, she disappeared through a door behind the painted hangings that enriched the walls.

  By the time she returned, the other women had drawn closer to watch. The three children had come in also, the youngest still clutching the saffron-striped kitten; and even the Lady Aud had paused in her stitchery and was leaning forward for a closer view.

  ‘Who did this?’ she asked as the woman Muirgoed dropped to her knees again, setting down her remedies and the bowl of water she carried, and fell to bathing Hugin’s hot and angry paw.

  ‘Onund Treefoot,’ Bjarni said.

  ‘So-o! Onund Treefoot. Was the dog chasing his deer?’

  ‘There’s not many deer on Barra.’

  ‘Why then?’

  Bjarni was silent a moment, then he began carefully to try to explain. ‘There was a girl –’

  ‘And you wanted her?’ said the Lady Aud gravely.

  ‘No. She wanted me: and I grew weary of pretending not to see . . . It was at Onund’s bride-ale, and we were dancing.’ He wondered what in the name of all the Gods of Asgard had possessed him to try to tell the whole confused and ugly story to this unknown woman, simply because she had asked. But he ploughed on, trying to get the thing sorted out in his own mind as he went along; trying to tell it true. ‘She came at me out of the ring-dance, seeking to pull me in with her. I was drunk, I suppose. I pushed her on to the man beside me, and reached for another girl out of the circle to dance with, and she – the first girl – was daughter to the Odin Priest; later, I think she told a lying tale of me to her father. There was thunder, and I think she put it into his mind that the Lord of Thunder was angry because there was no sacrifice on his altar – Odin and Frigga had the black ram and white ewe that wedding custom calls for – and that he demanded a black dog.’ Bjarni stumbled and checked for the moment; the story was growing confused, running out of hand, but having begun it he could not stop until the end. The woman Muirgoed had finished bathing Hugin’s paw and was spreading strong-smelling green salve on the wounds.

  ‘Bad girl,’ said the bairn with the saffron kitten into the top of the little creature’s head. She seemed to find the story quite clear so far anyway.

  Bjarni took a deep breath and struggled on. ‘After, when we had taken the bride home to Onund’s hall, the Priest came demanding Hugin – my dog – for a sacrifice. There was fighting. Onund came out to see with his sword. He did that to Hugin to settle the thing quickly’

  ‘I am thinking that Onund Treefoot was never one to waste time picking at knots,’ said the Lady Aud as though to herself. Then to Bjarni she said, ‘And after that?’

  ‘Nothing after that, Lady. You asked me why, and I have told.’

  ‘So now I ask you what happened after. Tell me how the bedraggled pair of you come to my threshold.’

  ‘After – Onund bade me go from Barra. I had sold him loyal sword-service through two summers. He said that himself, and gave it back to me with honour, to take elsewhere. Heriolf Merchantman was in the harbour.’

  He made a small gesture of finish with his free hand across his knee. Then he added one thing more. ‘Heriolf said that after that night’s work, there’d have been but a short life left for me on Barra.’

  ‘I think Heriolf Merchantman may well have been right,’ Aud said gently.

  The woman had begun to rebind Hugin’s paw with a clean linen rag. ‘Groa,’ she said to the eldest of the three bairns, ‘let you bring some milk, and a flask of the green fever-draught.’

  The girl rose and slipped away through the inner door. When she returned Muirgoed had made fast the bandage. She took the wooden stopper from the flask and sniffed at it, then poured a little into the milk and held it under the dog’s nose. ‘Drink, Dark Brother.’ Hugin hesitated, then flicked his tongue into the milk, and having got the taste of it, dipped his muzzle and lapped until the bowl was empty. ‘That should cool the fever,’ the woman said, her hand on his head. ‘Bring him back to me here tomorrow.’

  Then, as though suddenly remembering something, she looked up at the Lady Aud, who had returned to the cloak that she was mending. ‘I have your leave?’

  ‘Do you not always have my leave?’ said the Lady. ‘As one queen to another.’ Clearly that was a long-standing jest between them and Bjarni, getting to his feet, wondered what it was. Men had small hidden jests between themselves, but he had not known that women did.

  Heavy steps came thumping up through the garth and something loomed like a bear in the doorway. Swinging round, Bjarni saw a big man broad-built and already inclined to paunch, and got the impression, though he could not see clearly against the yellow sunset light, of big blunt features and a badly broken nose amid a bush of fiery red hair – not the dark fox hue that was Onund’s, but a lighter, fiercer colour, almost the colour of molten iron.

  He did not need to be told that he was looking at Thorstein the Red, sea lord of a great fleet and many islands and a man to carry fear with it along the mainland coasts.

  He was grumbling as he crossed the threshold: ‘That moon-calf Kadir has let the brood mare out again.’

  His mother cut the thread with the little knife at her girdle and held up the heavy folds of wolfskin and thick Roman-red cloth. ‘Has he? I make no doubt that Erp will have all things in hand . . . See, I have finished mending your cloak.’

  The man came tramping round the hearth to take it from her; and brought a hand like Thor’s Hammer down on her shoulder by way of thanks.

  And Groa, the eldest of the three children, standing with the empty milk-bowl in her hands, clearly felt that the newcomer amongst them was in danger of being forgotten, and put in a little breathlessly, ‘O my father, see – here is a stranger with us. He was with Onund Treefoot until his dog –’

  Bjarni, standing by with his hand in Hugin’s collar, wondering how to make his own thanks and get away, or maybe get away without making them at all, grew rigid. Fool that he had been to tell! Now it was all going to be told again, and he had a sick feeling that Aud in her lovely kindness was going to offer his sword-service to this huge son of hers as though he were some stray bairn to be befriended. And if she did that, even if Thorstein would take him, he must refuse. Whether or not he wanted to, he must refuse, or know that yet again his life was being shaped for him by other hands than his own . . .

  But the Lady Aud had dropped her spool of thread, and was commanding, ‘Groa, help me rewind my thread, your fingers are so neat.’ And then over the bent red-gold head to Thorstein, ‘Heriolf Merchantman is in the haven, maybe you have seen him? Bjarni Sigurdson here is with him, but his dog has an injured paw, and he has brought him here for Muirgoed’s tending.’

  And a wave of relief and gratitude broke over Bjarni.

  Thorstein was looking at him out of a pair of tawny golden eyes, the kind that having met their gaze, it is hard to look away from. ‘You do not look like
the merchant kind.’

  Bjarni shook his head. ‘I leave that to Heriolf. He has fine silks and good hide ropes – the usual. Oh, and a jewelled cup with a cross on it that he thinks may interest the Lady Aud.’ This with a glance toward the mistress of the house, who looked up from her grand-daughter and her spilled thread to meet it with a smile.

  ‘For myself I have only my sword-service for sale.’

  8

  Easter Faring

  SO BJARNI BECAME Thorstein’s paid man as he had been Onund’s and he was well enough content, though still there was an ache in him somewhere like the ache of an old wound when the wind is from the east.

  And with Hugin also, all was well. With Muirgoed’s salves his paw mended cleanly and before the next moon had waned and the yellow birch-leaves were falling, he was running on four paws again, and only limped on three when suddenly he remembered to.

  The gales blew up from the west and the year darkened towards winter. In the sheltered crop-lands the ox-ploughs were busy and the winter wheat was sown. The bees which could not be kept through the black months were turned out of the hives, and the woods rang with the sound of axes felling timber for the raising and mending of farm buildings and the slim war-keels down at the ship-strand.

  For the most part the farm work of the settlement was done by thralls, while the free men of the Kindred, the ship-carles and hearth companions, threw in their lot with the shipwrights, and rode hunting red deer and wild pig, for the most part not so much for pleasure as for meat to add to the slaughtered cattle for the winter salting down. But at times – harvest, sheep-shearing, the round-up when the horses were brought down from the summer pastures – thrall and free, farmers and seamen and warriors (they were mostly the same thing), came together, working side by side.

  On the evening of one such day, a day of flying cloud and changing lights in which Ben Mhor, the Great Mountain as the Gael folk still called it, would be clear enough one moment to pick out the high corries and the screes scarring its sides, and the next time one looked it would be gone into empty sky and trailing storm cloud, Bjarni was standing with his elbows propped on the long wall of the colt-garth, watching the ragged, slender two-year-olds, whom he had been all day helping to get in for their breaking. Hugin sat pressed against his leg with lolling tongue and half-closed eyes. And beside him, also watching the colts, leaned a man whom he had seen often among the horses, but never spoken with or met eye-to-eye with before now; a tall young man with a quiet face, not unlike a horse himself, and the glimpse of an iron thrall-ring showing at the neck of his rough wadmal sark.

  The colts were uneasy, the wind setting their manes and tails flying as they wheeled and fidgeted with wide eyes and up-flung heads. The young man spoke to the nearest in a tongue that Bjarni guessed was no tongue known to men, and the mealy-muzzled colt swung its head to look at him and whickered softly as one horse greets another before it remembered its fear and arched away.

  ‘Were you born in a stable, that you talk to the horse kind in their own tongue,’ Bjarni said, ‘with a mare for a mother, who could cast her skin like a seal-woman?’

  ‘No stable of Red Thorstein’s, anyway,’ said the other and, glancing round, Bjarni saw that he had turned his head from the colts and was gazing away south-easterly along the dim blue line of the mainland, with the look of someone seeing beyond the range of mortal sight.

  ‘From that way?’ he said.

  The man nodded. ‘From Argyll – a land of the horse people. But that was long ago. My mother too. She is Muirgoed, chief among the Lady Aud’s bower-thralls.’

  Bjarni looked at him in surprise. ‘Then I know your mother. She tended Hugin’s paw when it was scaithed.’

  ‘That sounds like my mother.’

  ‘But I did not see any thrall-ring on her neck.’

  ‘Not now, not for a long while. But the mark is still there, hidden by the silver chain the Lady Aud set there in place of it.’

  ‘You were bought together, then? Or was it war?’ Bjarni asked after a pause, not prying, just taking a friendly interest.

  ‘War,’ said the other man, seeming to take the thing as it was intended. He brought his gaze back out of the distance. ‘You will not be knowing? No one has told you?’

  Suddenly and a little bitterly, he laughed. ‘Ach well – good it is for the soul to find our own unimportance. Ten – twelve years ago, Jarl Sigurd of Orkney came summer-raiding along the Islands and my father the King called out his spears to withstand him and his war-bands, but they were too strong. They slew him and his warriors around him, and my mother and me – I was not yet old enough to be with my father among the dead – they carried off into thralldom. Others also – they sold them in Dublin market but my mother and me, the Jarl kept. We were a year on Orkney, and then he gave us both, together with a fine stallion and a gold cup, for a friendship gift to Thorstein the Red.’

  Bjarni was silent, taking this in, thinking back to the woman with the Lady Aud in her bower while Hugin, growing bored, nosed at his hand.

  ‘You are not believing me?’ One eyebrow gently quirked.

  ‘Why would you tell me such a tale if it were not true?’ Bjarni said. ‘Na, na, I was thinking now there is an odd thing, Bjarni Sigurdson, that you took your dog to a queen for tending, and she salving the wound as though she were none but some old herb woman of the woods.’

  ‘The princesses of Erin are many of them herb-wise,’ said the man. ‘There was one called Iseult. Muirgoed my mother was wise in herbs and healing before ever she came to be a queen.’ He pushed off from the turf wall. ‘It grows late, and I grow hungry if you do not.’ But as Bjarni turned also, he said, ‘I have your name now, Bjarni Sigurdson. Let you have mine in fair exchange. I am Erp Mac Meldin of Argyll.’

  And he went swinging off to his own place, while Bjarni whistled Hugin to heel and headed for the Hearth Hall and supper. He understood now that small jest that had passed between the Lady Aud and her bower woman, understood also something of the bond that must have grown between them over the years, before they could share that particular jest without bitterness.

  There was good rich witty talk in Thorstein’s Hall in the winter nights between the harp-songs and the horseplay after the women had gone from the cross-benches. Travellers’ tales to listen to from the farmost edges of the world. Thorstein counted a good few mercenaries among his hearth companions; men as far-flying as the wild geese, to whom the Iceland run and the long haul around the North Islands and on to Norway were no more than a river crossing. Andred, who had been far south to the Hot Lands and into the mouths of great rivers to trade with men whose skin had been burned as black as bog oak by the sun, while other men hairy all over swarmed among the branches of great trees overhead and threw strange fruit over them. Leiknen One-eye, who knew the Mid-Land Sea as other men knew their own back garth and had walked the streets of Miklagard and swore they were paved with gold. And among them, Bjarni had his own tale to tell when the harp of story-telling was handed round, for though he had been no further afield than when he first came west-over-seas to join the settlement of Rafn Cedricson, no one else in that company had been with Onund Treefoot in the narrows of Bute when the great stones came whistling out of the sky.

  They worked and slept and fought and feasted together, and as the dark months went by he formed an easy comradeship with them, though nothing that could not be easily broken. The only real friendship that he formed on Mull remained the odd crooked friendship he had struck up with Erp Mac Meldin on the day they brought the horses down from the summer pastures.

  Winter passed, with its black winds and bitter rain and the wild seas pounding on the coast. Amid all the wild weather, suddenly there began to be signs of spring; catkins lengthening on the hazels down the bumside and a fluttering of small birds among the birches that were flushing purple. The first of the greylag geese that had grazed on the machair all winter long took off for the North one wild night, yapping like a pack of hounds throu
gh the storm clouds overhead.

  And down on the ship-strand there began to be a swarming activity, as the lean war-keels were run out from their sheds, and their crews set to pitching their sides and overhauling spars and rigging and sails in readiness for the summer sea-faring. And newly run out onto the slipway from her own high-gabled shed where she had lain in slings all winter, the Lady Aud’s own galley was being made ready for the seaways ahead of her sisters, for it was the Lady’s custom to make a sea-faring of her own at Easter, to spend the few days of the fast and the feast with the brothers on the Holy Island of lona. Bjarni, returning from the nearby drift-wood fire with a pitch pot, saw the ship lying there, almost ready for the water, in the early spring sunshine, though mast and gear all lay still in the brown-shadowed shed behind him, and he felt a pang of delight at sight of her. She was so beautiful, the unbroken sweetly-running line of her from stem to soaring stem. She had no dragon-head but her carved and freshly painted stern post ended in a curve that was faintly like a shepherd’s crook, or maybe the arched neck of a swan. He had been told that her name, Fionoula, had something to do with a swan – an Irish maiden who had been turned into one, long ago.

  Despite all the difference between them, she called to something in Bjarni that Sea Witch had called to before ever he was one of her crew, and he reached up and laid his hands upon the curves of her bows, thinking that it would be good to be taking an oar among her rowers for this springtime sea-faring in honour of the White Christ.

  The White Christ was not quite the stranger that he had been to Bjarni last autumn, for there were many of his followers in the settlement. A fine free mixture of old faith and new, Thorstein himself had been born and bred a Christian, but had loosened the ties somewhat as he grew older, and thought it quite enough to have added an altar to the White Christ to the ancient axe-hewn figures of Thor and Odin in the God-House where Thor’s Ring lay on his altar and the smell of old blood rose darkly from the earthen floor. The Lady Aud grieved for that; she prayed for him daily and never ceased to hope that her prayers might mark a change, and meanwhile loved him as he was. She had her own little stone-built chapel further up the glen where she and her women and a few of the menfolk went every Sunday. The rest of the settlement shared their worship – when they worshipped at all – between the church and the God-House. Bjarni did nothing about either of them. He had lost his own gods, as they had lost him, on the night that their priest had demanded the death. of Hugin, but he felt no call to cross over to follow the Lady Aud’s god. And it was certainly no wish for her Holy Island at Easter that drew him now, but simply the longing to which he could give no name to have some share in the thing that would be Fionoula at sea . . .