The Sword Song of Bjarni Sigurdson

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  It was still raining before the squally gusts, but away to the westward on the shoulder of the mountains the sky was breaking up and a long beam of sodden daffodil light showed through. Stumbling on down the hillside, he headed for the promise of warmth and something to drink. He did not want food, but the longing for the smooth sweetness of milk was in his salt-parched throat. Yet as he drew near, the place began to look more and more derelict. No sign of sheep or cattle in the home pasture. No sign of anything living; but from the roof of the house-place, a pale plume of smoke trailed sideways on the gusts. Not quite deserted, then, and with a fire on the hearth. He stumbled on towards it.

  As he reached the gate-gap in the thorn hedge that surrounded the steading garth, a figure appeared round the corner of the house-place, and crossed the garth towards a tumbledown byre; a boy with a bundle of hay on one shoulder and a pail in the other hand, and a stocking cap low on his head against the rain.

  He checked at sight of Bjarni in the gateway and stood looking at him, wary as a wild animal. Probably few strangers came that way. Then as Bjarni came slowly on through the gap towards him, he said something that had the sound of a question in it.

  But the tongue was not Bjarni’s. He shook his head, his gaze fixed almost painfully on the pail. ‘Drink,’ he said.

  And that was clear enough. The boy held out the pail and echoed, ‘Drink.’

  Bjarni took the pail and drank. It was water, not milk, but clean and sweet, and he drank deeply, then handed it back. The boy set it down, and the hay beside it, in the door of the byre; said something to the shadows within, from which came the stamp of an impatient hoof and the familiar smell of horse. Then he turned back to Bjarni, and looked him up and down with a little frown between his brows. All at once he seemed to make up his mind, and his frown disappeared, and he half turned, pointing to the house-place door. ‘Come.’

  Bjarni lurched after him through the doorway. Inside was warmth and firelit darkness, and the peat smoke that hazed the shadows caught at his throat. He choked and lurched off balance, and could not right himself again, and the boy steadied him in a headlong fall into buzzing and spinning darkness.

  When the darkness gave him up again, he was lying by the fire, and somebody was kneeling over him with a bowl of something. Squinting upwards he saw that it was the boy. Then the boy’s arm was under his shoulder, raising him, and the bowl was against his mouth, and the boy was saying with a kind of concerned roughness, ‘Drink, then sleep and grow strong; do not you dare to die under my roof. I have enough on my hands without that.’

  Bjarni understood about half of what he said, but he understood the first command, and gulped down the stuff that was being tipped into his mouth. It was a kind of warm and watery oaten gruel with honeycomb in it, and somewhere behind the sweetness a bitter taste of herbs. Close by, Hugin was slurping his way through a bowl of what looked like the same gruel with household scraps in it. They finished in almost the same moment, and the great dog lifted a mealy muzzle from his empty bowl, and whimpered on a puzzled note, deep in his throat.

  The boy’s hand went out to touch his head behind the ears. ‘All’s well,’ said the tone of his voice.

  Bjarni mumbled urgently, ‘Careful, he’s not one for strangers.’ Hugin lifted his head under the hand, and thumped his tail behind him.

  ‘All animals are for me,’ said the boy. ‘It’s one of the reasons . . .’ He broke off. ‘Now sleep,’ he said again, with an odd authority in his tone. The warmth of the gruel and the taste of herbs seemed to be rushing in a kind of pleasant fog into Bjarni’s head, and he slept.

  When he woke again it was daylight; he was as weak as a half-drowned puppy but there was a feeling of morning within him, and his head seemed to be working again, which it had certainly not been doing last night. He became aware almost in the same instant of two things. The first, that he was naked, lying under the warmth of an old weather-worn cloak, with the rags of his breeks and tunic still steaming gently beside the slurried remains of last night’s fire. The boy must have stripped him while he slept and set his clothes to dry. But his sword – he dragged back the cloak in a sudden panic to find his sword, and there it was, laid beside him under the cloak, the hilt almost in his hand – his left hand. His fingers closed on the grip, and he relaxed with a sigh of relief. But as he did so, he became aware of the second thing: that he was being watched.

  Hugin was sitting beside him, watching his face, with small hopeful thumps of his tail behind him, but there was someone, something, other than Hugin, whose presence he had sensed. He looked round and saw that in the far corner of the house-place, where he had thought last night were only crowding shadows, an old man was lying on a pile of heather, straight and still under a rug pulled to his chin as someone lying on his funeral pyre, but with his head sharply turned, and his eyes, bright and desperately full of life, fixed upon him.

  Bjarni let out a kind of croak but there was no response. And a few moments later the boy appeared in the doorway with the morning light behind him. ‘That is Gwyn, he was my cattleman,’ he said. ‘He is very sick and cannot speak, but he knows what is going on.’ He spoke slowly and carefully, mostly in the Norse tongue, though with an outlandish accent that made the words hard to understand.

  He came across to the fire and picked up the bowl that had been keeping warm on the smoked peats, then came and squatted down beside him. And watching, Bjarni made the discovery that he was not watching a boy at all, but a girl clad in breeks and sark instead of a woman’s kirtle, and with her hair – since the storm had passed she had laid aside her stocking cap – knotted close behind her head as men knot up a horse’s tail to be out of the way.

  ‘You are a girl!’ he told her.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she returned gravely, but he had the feeling some part of her was laughing at him.

  ‘Why breeks?’

  ‘Easier it is to do a man’s work in a man’s clothes,’ said the girl.

  ‘You alone here?’ He frowned up at her.

  ‘Except for Gwyn. Eat now.’ She slipped an arm under his shoulders. There was a horn spoon in the bowl, and she began spooning the stuff into him. He ate abundantly; the stuff was thicker than last night’s gruel and seemed to have something else, an egg maybe, stirred into it.

  In a little, seeming to decide that if he was strong enough to ask questions he was strong enough to answer them, she began to ask the odd question in her turn. ‘Who are you? What fortune brings you to my door?’

  ‘Bjarni Sigurdson. I am from the sea.’

  ‘Ship?’ she asked.

  He realised that it was not such a daft question as it sounded; not when you thought how he had landed on her threshold out of the worst summer storm in years; and him left-handed and with a great black dog at his heels.

  ‘Ship.’ He nodded.

  ‘Shipwreck?’

  He had not thought of Heriolf or Sea Cow, or wondered as to their fate, until that moment. ‘I think – yes,’ he said and pushed the bowl away, suddenly not wanting any more to eat.

  ‘There are many wrecks on Dragon’s Head, though few at this time of year,’ said the girl. ‘But sometimes a ship escapes and finds shelter in the great bay facing towards Anglesey.’

  He only understood about half of what she said, but he heard in her tone the comfort she was trying to give him, and felt a little warmth in the sudden cold desolation within him.

  She set the bowl aside, and he was grateful to her for not being one of those women who cluck like a hen and try to force food into a man when he has not the stomach or heart for it.

  He humped himself together under the cloak, and said, ‘I get up – my clothes . . .’

  She pressed him back. ‘The rags that the sea has left you will not cover your nakedness. Lie quiet now. Sleep and grow strong, and in the evening if I judge you ready we’ll find you clothes to dress you in, and you shall get up and sit beside the fire and eat meat, and clean your sword before the salt water can do i
t harm.’

  ‘Now?’ he croaked.

  ‘Not now,’ said the girl. ‘I have not the time to find you clothes. Lie still, and this evening will come.’

  And suddenly she was gone, leaving him to wonder whether she was always like that with a man when she had him at her mercy.

  Most of the day he dozed, drifting in and out of sleep and wakefulness, vaguely aware of the girl coming and going about her own affairs, and seeing to her outdoor tasks, tending to and feeding the old man in the corner; but gradually the sleep-time grew less and the waking times more.

  And then it was evening, and he was restless with impatience, and the girl had taken a pair of homespun breeks and a tunic of good rowan-red wool out of a carved kist against the far wall. ‘These were my brother’s,’ she said, and dropped them beside him, and turned away, about the evening meal.

  He put the breeks and tunic on – they were much about the right size – and buckled on his own belt with the pouch containing his three gold pieces. When the evening meal was over he sat, comfortingly full of eel stew and beginning to feel more like a living man again, with his sword across his thigh, burnishing the blade before the cold sea salt could rust into the ripple-patterned blade. Hugin lay outstretched beside him gnawing a pig bone, and on the far side of the fire the girl sat spinning. It looked odd to see her spinning there, in her breeks and sark.

  Sometimes they talked to each other, managing none so ill, with her slight knowledge of Norse. With traders and settlements along the coast, most people had a few words of it. The British tongue, though a different branch of the one that Bjarni had gained in the three years he and Erp had talked friendliwise together, helped too, eked out with gestures. Sometimes they sat silent, a silence made up of small sounds: the flutter of the flames on the hearth, the purr of the spindle and the dog gnawing his bone, the faint rasp and hiss of Bjarni burnishing the sword across his thigh.

  He had only one sword again – it had been good to have two, his own to hold his land-take, and one for his son; he remembered Aud saying that as she gave it to him. It made a good feeling inside, as though the land-take and the son were already part of him. But now his old sword, his son’s sword, was lying somewhere among the rocks off Dragon’s Head, among the wreckage of Sea Cow and the bodies of men who had been his friends, and he felt rootless again, a man without any place of his own in life, and only his one sword for sale again.

  For the sake of something else to think about, he looked up at the girl on the far side of the fire, watching her through the faint fronds of peat smoke. The light of the fading day shining in through the doorway showed her clearly. Beautiful, she would have been, he thought, if she had not always had the look of a harp too tightly strung, the hair pulled up behind her small head so black that when the light touched the blackness it was almost blue. Her eyes were dark under brows like slim black feathers, her skin silky where it rose out of the worn neck of her sark and had not browned in the sun and wind like the rest of her face. On the creaminess of it a red mark showed, like . . . like . . . as though somebody had laid their wine-stained fingers on it close together. He had not noticed the mark before, because he had not sat really looking at her before.

  She looked up and saw where he was looking and, dropping the spindle, made a quick movement as though to pull up the neck of her sark, then with a gesture that was oddly disdainful, picked up the spindle again. Proud, that one, Bjarni thought, a woman wearing the clothes of a man, but who carried herself like a queen.

  ‘Tha’s known my name since morning,’ he said. ‘But tha’s not told me yours. Fair’s fair.’

  She answered him gravely, for the exchange of names was a grave matter, after all. ‘I am called Angharad, and my father was Iowan, son of Nectan, of the line of Erin.’ She spoke like a queen, too. Then she grinned like the veriest urchin, but somewhat wryly. ‘The Lordly Ones do not give their names to mortal kind, so now at least you know that I do not come from the Hollow Hills, despite the faery mark on my neck.’

  19

  Witch Mark

  THAT NIGHT BJARNI slept by the fire again; but the next morning he woke in the normal way of things, and got up, in the clothes he had slept in, when he heard Angharad moving behind the curtain that shut off the far corner of the room. He wondered whether he and Hugin should be on their travels again before the day was through, and if so, which way they should go. East and northward, probably, heading for Rafnglas on their own feet, but somehow he seemed to have lost his roots there again. Or maybe across to Anglesey, where he had heard that Anarand the King of Gwynedd had many Danish and Norwegian soldiers for his wars on the kingdoms further south . . . Meanwhile, he did odd jobs for Angharad, cutting wood, turning the old dun horse which seemed, apart from five ducks, to be the only livestock about the place, into the home pasture to graze and mucking out the stable behind him. She gave him his share of the morning meal, and afterwards, when she had gone about some business of her own, he took up his sword, which until now he had left lying under the old cloak, between his bed place and the wall. He was just going to belt it on, when suddenly he bethought him that he did not own the clothes he stood up in. He did not doubt that Angharad would give them to him. He had the price of them several times over in his pouch, but surely they were part of her hospitality. And he had the feeling that to offer to pay for hospitality would be as unforgivable among her people as it would be among his.

  While he stood considering, he heard a small grunting sound, and looking round, saw that it came from the old man in the corner. Gwyn clearly wanted something, and Angharad was not here. He crossed over to the still, bundled shape. ‘What is it, old father?’ he asked, forgetting for the moment that Gwyn had no power of speech. Then following of the direction of the old, terribly bright eyes, he saw the pannikin of water on a stool close by. He squatted down and picked it up. ‘This?’

  The old man gave a faint nod.

  Bjarni slipped an arm under Gwyn’s head, and lifted it, and held the cup to his blue lips. A horrible sour smell came up from the old man. He drank after a fashion, some of the water going down his chin. ‘We’ll do better another time,’ Bjarni told him, without really thinking what he said, and laid him back again on the plaited straw pillow. Pity, almost the first time Bjarni had felt such a thing, rose in his throat.

  There was a faint movement behind him and he looked round to see Angharad in the doorway.

  ‘I think he’s fouled himself,’ he said. ‘Shall I help you?’

  When it was done, and the old man made clean and seemly again, and the soiled rushes taken out to the midden behind the house-place, Angharad said, ‘Let you stay another night at least. The salt water is scarce dried out of you yet. And you are not in any state to be out on the moors heading for – wherever you are heading for, you and the dog.’

  But Bjarni had the feeling that it was only partly for his sake that she bade him stay, and partly for her own; that to have a hale man with a sword about the steading was a respite from something, some kind of fear maybe.

  So he stayed the night, sleeping on piled bracken in the byre, with his sword beside him and Hugin and the old horse for company; and the next night also. And by day he helped her with the work of the steading. The hay was ready for the first cut, in the meadow that ran down to the stream, and they gathered it between them and laid it out in silvery swaths to dry. And he helped her tend the old man. ‘He was my cattleman,’ she said, that first day, but there was no sign of any cattle about the place, nothing living except the old horse and the five ducks that followed Angharad wherever she went. But the whole place gave signs of having dwindled from something much more than it was now; the fine Hall and the surrounding byres and barns, half in ruins, showed signs of being the steading of a big and busy farm, with the in-take lands spread far up and down the valley. And one girl in breeks who carried herself like a queen, working just enough of it to feed herself and one sick old man, and a horse? Surely there was a story here . . . />
  On the fourth morning the wind was blowing from the west, not hard, but enough to silver the young green barley in the one small crop-field all one way. And on the wind Bjarni, coming back from turning out the horse, caught very faintly the sound of a distant bell. It was the first sign he had had since the storm that there was anyone outside the valley.

  ‘Do you hear the bell?’ he asked Angharad, who was collecting duck eggs.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s the chapel, you can hear it when the wind is in this direction, calling the folk of the valleys to worship God.’ She reached into the hollow of the peat-stack for another egg.

  ‘Best you had be on your way then,’ Bjarni said.

  ‘I cannot leave Gwyn.’

  ‘I will stay with Gwyn,’ said Bjarni.

  She put the last egg gently into the bowl. ‘You are not Christian?’

  ‘I am a prime-signed Christian,’ Bjarni told her. ‘But I will stay with Gwyn.’

  She said, speaking steadily, ‘I think I am not welcome where that bell calls; nor among the folk it calls to.’

  That evening as they sat together over the evening meal, she asked him, ‘Where will you go, after you go from here?’

  ‘Wherever the wind sends me,’ Bjarni said. ‘It was in my mind to go back to my own settlement at Rafnglas, where the Lakeland rivers come to the sea. That was before the storm came and blew us off course. Now I am not so sure.’ By that time he and Angharad were beginning to be able to talk to each other quite well in the bastard Norse and British tongue that they seemed to be weaving between them, but he did not feel he could tell her about his second sword in it, not in any way that would make sense. ‘It’s five years that I have been away; and I am not sure that I belong there any more.’

  ‘Five years with the sea-faring merchant kind. That might make it hard to strike sword?’