Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  “Why not, Nunna, can’t your noaidi speak more clearly?”

  The little man smiled. “Our noaidi is very old. He loves riddles as a child does. But his riddles come true.” From the shadows the dry leaves rustled. “The noaidi says that he has done enough for you now. He will answer no more questions.”

  I struggled to my feet, dizzy with the sudden motion. “I have no more questions, Nunna. Tell the noaidi I thank him from my heart.”

  Outside, I stood by the door, blinking in the bright sunlight. Across the wasteland of stone and scrub, the great, gray mountains—the Sacred Mountains—half filled the sky. Even to an Icelander it was a bleak and forbidding landscape. But the air was clear and fresh and tingled deep down when I drew in a lungful of it. I shivered and sneezed three times—big sneezes that rang in my ears like three magic handclaps, waking me from a poisoned sleep.

  “Goodbye, Dead Ones,” I said aloud. “I don’t forget you, but I put you away for a while. One day we will see each other again—but not today, not today.”

  I held my hand out in front of me—it no longer shook.

  Kalf came out and stood beside me. “How are you feeling?”

  “Weak as a baby and glad to be alive. For the second time, Kalf, I owe you my life. How will I ever repay you?”

  “There’s no reckoning between friends.”

  “Fate stole my brother from me, Kalf. There’s a saying, ‘One’s back is bare without a brother.’ Take his place, my friend. Be my sworn-brother.”

  He hesitated. “Brothers fall out sometimes, Odd.”

  “But we won’t. I’m not what you’d call a steady sort of fellow, Kalf Slender-Leg. I need your sound head and good heart. Will you do it?”

  For answer, he drew his dagger and cut his thumb and mine. We mingled the blood together with earth, and then knelt and swore that each of us would avenge the other like a brother.

  “Brother, I must tell you,” he said, “that you’ll soon need more friends than one. Come and look.”

  I followed him ‘round the side of the hut to where there was a view across the inlet. There lay our ship with a good portion of her cargo strewn on the beach, and beside it, my crew with a crowd of Lapps amidst heaps of furs, whalebone, and antler. With much wagging of heads and waving of arms on both sides, a lively barter was going on.

  “Who ordered this?”

  “Stig’s taken over as captain.”

  “And the others?”

  “Hogni’s his strongest supporter. He hates you—the rest only fear you. Who knows why? He came within a whisker of splitting your skull when you were, ah, distracted.”

  “What d’you think they’ll do when they see me alive?”

  “Kill you. They’ll have to. Mutiny’s a hard thing to take back, even if some are willing. Odd, I was talking to Nunna before—it’s possible to go to Norway overland with the Lapps, on their winter trek. Let the ship go, Odd. The two of us can—”

  “Can run? Let them bury me here first! Where are my weapons?”

  “Inside. Don’t, Odd, you haven’t got the strength of six.”

  “Brother, I haven’t got the strength of one—but they don’t know that. Nunna,” I yelled through the bark wall, “bring me my sword!”

  The manikin appeared in the doorway accompanied by a boy, his youngest son, who struggled with both hands to carry my sword, trailing the belt on the ground behind him. Giving me a cautious eye, he stretched up to his father’s ear and whispered something.

  “Please,” said Nunna, “he asks if the battle will be very ferocious, for he has never seen the giants fight before.”

  Kalf and I looked at each other and burst out in laughter. It hadn’t occurred to us that we were the terrible giants of the North!

  “Say to him, friend Nunna,” I replied, “that he will tell his grandchildren of it.”

  The cacophony of bartering faded away when we were spied coming along the beach. The Lapps shooed their women and children to safety while my men gathered around their two ringleaders and grimly stood their ground. Ignoring Hogni’s glowering looks, I walked straight up to Stig. He stood at ease, facing me squarely with his arms hanging loose at his sides.

  “Steersman, I don’t remember telling you to do anything with this ship’s cargo.”

  Before Stig could answer, Hogni struck in: “I guess you don’t remember much of anything, seeing as how you was out of your wits!” He held up his hands and shook them, imitating my palsy. “And you’ve been up to some black sorcery, too, haven’t you? We heard the wailing and the drumming. Now, I say the thing to do with madmen and heathens is drown ’em. Stig for captain, and the deep water for this one, eh lads?”

  There was a chorus of ‘ayes,’ though not as loud as might have been expected. They liked Stig all right but not Hogni, who was a bully—and not much of a seaman either. During Hogni’s speech, Stig had said nothing at all but only watched me with that same cool, inquisitive look that he had turned upon me in earlier days—the one that asked, What are you made of? What are you game for?

  I decided to stake all on that look.

  “Hogni Hard-Mouth,” I said mildly, “what is it that puts you in such a temper? Is it being deprived of a diet of mare’s ass to which you’re addicted or is it heart-sickness for that troll who uses you as a woman every ninth night?”

  A snort of laughter came from Stuf and Otkel; thin smiles from Starkad, Brodd, and Stig. Hogni’s jaws began to work like two millstones.

  “Hot to kill me, are you, Hogni? Good. No need for anyone else to bleed. Hogni and I will settle this.” The truth was, I doubted I could beat Stig on my best day—which this was far from being.

  Suddenly Hogni changed his tune. “What if they’ve made his hide so as it can’t be cut, or what if they’ve charmed his sword? They can do that, these sorcerers….”

  He looked from face to face, and the faces looked stonily back. They might share his fears, but all the same they didn’t respect a coward. Hogni sensed it. “Make him use a different weapon, that’s all. I’ll fight him, him and his ghosts. Jesu, he looks like a bleeding ghost himself! Ha, ha!” He cleared his throat to spit as he always did when he wanted to seem cocksure.

  “Mind the wind, now, Hogni.”

  The men brought shields and helmets from the ship. Hogni chose to fight with his axe. I chose an ash wood spear because I knew I was too weak to manage anything heavier.

  “Finish him fast,” said Kalf—advice I didn’t need. Nunna, coming close to my elbow, whispered encouragingly, “The noaidi has not seen your death in this place, my friend, and our noaidi is never mistaken.”

  “Well, let us by all means not embarrass the noaidi!” I said under my breath.

  The fight started badly and got worse. Hogni was a clumsy fighter but a strong and determined one, and he knocked me about pretty hard, aiming smashing blows against my shield until it was battered to pieces and my arm was numb.

  I feinted and retreated. In seconds I was gasping for breath. My legs wobbled. The faces of the spectators swam in front of me. In Hogni’s eye was the gleam of victory. Desperately, I flung my spear and pierced his shield. With a snort of contempt he tossed shield and spear away. He raised his axe in both hands and drove in for the kill.

  But hadn’t my father stood weaponless when Strife-Hrut went for him at the trial? Hadn’t my father crouched and thrown his shoulder against the charging man and flung him into the air?

  I don’t say that those thoughts passed knowingly through my brain, but somewhere near me—and not for the last time in my life—I caught a strong scent of Black Thorvald in the air and knew the noaidi spoke truth.

  Hogni was coming too fast to stop himself. He went up and came down on his back. The axe flew out of his hands. I picked it up and split his head.

  Taking my sword back from Kalf—and praying that my legs would hold me up just a little longer—I walked to where Stig stood and leveled the point at his breast.

  “Is this hand steady
enough for you, Steersman?”

  With an eye on his distant horizon, he allowed that it seemed pretty steady.

  “You’re a good man, Stig. I want you with me. But by the Raven, you’ll take orders from me or you’ll take a long walk with the Lapps come winter.”

  Of course, it was all bluff. The ship and crew were his, if he wanted them. He knew that. But somehow I didn’t think he would do it.

  He looked me up and down, then held my sword point lightly between his thumb and forefinger and drew it away from his heart. “Odd Tangle-Hair, I don’t know what all that was about back in the fog—and I don’t want to. But anyone that can be house-burnt, haunted, brain-sick, and beaten as you have been and still talk so bold is a tough man or a lucky one. Maybe a little of that luck will rub off on me, for I’ve never had much of my own. I’ll take your orders, Captain.”

  “Starkad, Brodd, Stuf, and Otkel?” I looked at each in turn.

  “Let old quarrels lie and we’re your men,” they answered all together.

  Such are my countrymen. You can be a raving lunatic, but be a fighter and they will follow you cheerfully to the gates of Hel.

  †

  We stayed on a few more days with the Lapps. They were shrewd traders and wheedled most of our cloth away from us. It was a poor Lapp who couldn’t wear a blue coat and leggings now. But we did well out of it, too, and gathered a haul of bear and marten skins that would bring a handsome price on the quays of Nidaros.

  Meanwhile, I found time to study our hosts. It astonished me to learn that there were people in the world with ways so different from our own. In fact, this was the beginning for me, I think, of that lust to see and to know that has dragged me over half the earth.

  We were invited to sleep with them in their huts, which, even with the stench, seemed preferable to camping out on the stony beach. I elected to stay in Nunna’s hut, which he occupied with his two aged parents, his little black-haired wife, his three sons and two daughters, and his kennel of half-starved curs. Added to this mob was an unending stream of visitors who marched in uninvited at all hours of the day just to sit and stare at me.

  My host grumbled that he must soon build a bigger hut but in fact, he loved the celebrity, although he was kept in a fever preparing food for us all. I say he because among the Lapps it is the man who cooks—this task being thought too important to entrust to women—and they keep their provisions, along with their fetishes, in the sacred part of the hut where no woman ever goes.

  While Nunna cooked and fussed, his wife and daughters made it their task to fashion a pair of leather boots for me. They make their boots large and loose and stuff them for warmth with handfuls of springy moss. Once a year a Lapp takes off his boots and replaces the moss.

  Nunna’s eldest daughter, a girl of fifteen or so named Risten, was tracing around my feet, which are pretty large, with a stick of charcoal. She said something in their twittering tongue that sent everyone in the room into peals of laughter. Her father explained: “She only wishes to know if what she can’t see is as large of its kind as what she can—excuse her rudeness.” Then he looked thoughtful for a moment. “You may, if it pleases you,” he said, “allow her to find out.”

  Handsomely offered, I thought. And at the first opportunity, I did. She had a pretty face, round and shiny as a penny, a trim little body, and no modesty. We spent that night together under the furs while everyone around us kept up a steady, loud, and unconvincing rumble of snores.

  And the next morning when we gathered for breakfast, the girl was fairly bursting with jolly conversation, which the others greeted with gasps and clucks and smiles. Her papa, especially, kept giving me large and encouraging winks and speculating on the likelihood that I had gotten his daughter with child, until it began to dawn upon me that his whole design—good stock-breeder that he was—was to become the grandfather of a giant. Well, I wasn’t one to complain.

  “Not that you are so very tall,” he mused, “not like some of the others.”

  “Ah, but my mother’s people, friend Nunna, are extraordinarily bulky—like pine trees, like mountains. Of course, you understand that nothing so large as that can be conceived in a single night.”

  He understood perfectly. Could I exert myself again? He would vouch for his daughter. I thought perhaps I could.

  Visitors had arrived already to share our breakfast and to gawk—and the girl was happily launched on her second recitation of the morning—when Nunna and his sons got up to go about their chores.

  We walked together up into the foothills beyond the camp where, as far as the eye could see in every direction, reindeer grazed.

  Reindeer are a Lapp’s pride and his wealth. A rich man like Nunna might own hundreds of animals. I watched as his dogs dashed into the herd to cut out particular animals and drive them towards us. His purpose today was to castrate some of his bucks.

  “It is coming time for the trek,” he remarked, coiling his lasso and measuring the distance with his eye.

  “How far will you go?”

  “Oh, many horizons up into the mountains. You are lucky, you know, that you found us this summer. I fear the old noaidi will not live through one more trek. Even for the young it is very hard.”

  He flicked his wrist. The lasso snaked out and dropped over the rack of a young buck. The animal jumped, snapping the sealskin rope taut, and Nunna dug in his heels. Quickly, his two biggest boys wrestled it to the ground and held it down with its hind legs spread apart.

  “For the old folks,” he continued, coiling up his rope again, “a time comes when they cannot keep up with the herd anymore.”

  “I suppose you must leave them to their fate, then?”

  He had just buried his face between the buck’s legs, put its testicles in his mouth, and bit. With a squeal the animal regained its feet and shot back to the herd. Nunna raised his head and regarded me with a look of pure horror.

  “Leave them? Leave them! Do you take us for savages?”

  I searched for words to apologize.

  “Of course we do not leave them. No, no, no. It is like this: the children and grandchildren bundle the old one into a sledge at the top of a precipice. Everyone says goodbye—and they push. In a moment, spirit and body are parted. It is a fine thing to see. And in the case of a great noaidi like ours, the spirit will dwell in the Sacred Mountains with those of other sorcerers who have gone before. One day, when we beat the drum to call the Mountain Men, his spirit will be among them and, being dead, he will be even wiser than he is now.”

  While we talked, the boys had caught another buck.

  “Leave them,” Nunna muttered, still shaking his head, and knelt once again to his work.

  †

  My crewmen’s adventures, each entertained by a different family, had been quite as interesting as my own. Stig had impregnated four daughters in a single night—or so he boasted, and Kalf was obliged to visit several huts on successive days where they hoped to breed his long, runner’s legs to their stock. Still, after a week had gone by, we were growing restless.

  “Let us leave this place,” grumbled Brodd, “where the mosquitoes are as big as hummingbirds, no beer is brewed, and you can’t tell the women from the reindeer by smell alone.”

  That evening I told Nunna we were going.

  “Yes, my friend, quite right. We will soon break camp ourselves. Time to be off, time to be off.”

  From this I gathered that our appetites were beginning to make a dent in the Lapps’ provisions, and they were now confident that the spring would bring them a crop of grandsons as tall as trees.

  The weather had been holding fair, with only a little early morning mist each day. Still, Nunna pressed me to make a sacrifice, in the Lapp fashion, for a good wind.

  The next morning, he chose two white male reindeer out of his herd and we led them into the center of the camp where stood a low platform of rough planks. There sat Nunna’s gods: two squat stumps of birch with sticks for arms and nothing much fo
r faces.

  “Wind Man and Thunder Man,” he explained. “Thunder Man holds his hammer, you see,”—he pointed to a cudgel tied to one of the stick arms—“just like your Thor, yes? And Wind Man has his shovel for serving out the winds, and his club for beating them back again. Oh, they are rough fellows, these gods,” Nunna laughed. “They roar and bluster. But feed them well and they will be your friends.”

  My crew, seeing what we were up to, gathered round—some with uneasy looks.

  “You’ll do as you like, Odd Thorvaldsson,” young Otkel said, screwing up his courage, “but I’m not going to stay where devils are. I wasn’t brought up to it, like you.” And he retreated a few steps to what seemed like a safe distance.

  “Boys,” I said, “you may call on the White Christ as much as you like and Nunna here won’t mind a bit, will you, Nunna?” He shook his head vigorously. “But let’s not be quick to slight these wooden friends of his. Take help where it’s offered, say I. And for that matter, I recall a few voices calling on Thor when the storm was like to have sunk us.”

  There were guilty smiles all around at this.

  “Otkel was one,” brayed Stuf treacherously. “I heard him. Don’t you deny it now, it’s true.”

  “T’ain’t,” muttered his cousin, kicking at a stone. But having gone too far to back down, he turned and marched down to the seashore.

  The others stayed. Stuf and Starkad, who were Christmen, crossed themselves hurriedly. Bald Brodd, who was heathen and didn’t care who knew it, glared at them. Stig, to whom all religions were equally uninteresting, gazed at us with faint amusement.

  “Brother of mine,” I called to Kalf. He stood not far away, his eyes fixed on the ground. “You’ll lend a hand, won’t you? Brother? Ho, Kalf, d’you hear me?”

  “Aye, brother” he answered in a loud voice that sounded unnatural in him. “Give me the knife quickly. Where do I cut?”

  Kalf, my loyal friend, my sworn brother. Kalf, who always swore by the old gods just to please me—why were his movements awkward and his features strained? I felt the beginning of anger stir, but the next moment he seemed himself again, and I dismissed it from my mind.