“King Olaf really did that, Thorgils?”
“He did.”
“It’s too bad then, that most of your countrymen give him no credit for it.”
He shrugged. “God has his time for everything. Meantime, we wait and keep his precious body safe. Heaven forbid that that head should hang on Thorir Hound’s wall and that flesh feed his dogs.”
I replied with a hearty “Amen.”
“But, I wonder,” I said, “that the wicked heathens didn’t take him when they had the chance. I saw him fall, you know, just before we ran.”
“Before you ran. Some of us were knocked down where we stood, and some of us lay still until the enemy were past.”
“But the jarls?”
“Rode off to drink each other’s health. They expect to find him in the morning.”
“I see. Well, you’re a brave man, Thorgils, and that’s the truth.”
“Enough talk. It’s deep enough.”
Together we laid the corpse in its shallow grave, heaped up the sand, and set a heavy stone pried from the bank on top of the little mound for a marker.
“Now I will know where to find him when the day of reckoning comes,” Thorgils said with satisfaction.
“So will I, you forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
If he meant to kill me he would do it now. I was as ready as I could be.
“If I knew you,” he said, kneeling on the grave to scratch a cross on the marker with a bit of flint, “or, at least, your kin. But I don’t.”
I wasn’t prepared for the handful of sand in my face. He followed with a lunge at my knees, taking me down hard. A stab of pain seared my injured shoulder. His hands closed on my throat, the thumbs pressing against my windpipe. I felt like a child in the grip of his strength—my head ready to burst, the light going black.
My knee jerked in a final spasm. He grunted and rolled away, clutching his privates. I swung my fist hard against his chin and fell on him with my knife. The blade grated against a rib going in. When he stopped moving, I pushed him off the bank and stayed long enough to see his head slip under the water.
“Go to Valhalla with your precious king, brave Thorgils,” I whispered.
†
Along the Nidaros wharf the shopkeepers were just giving each other good morning as they threw open their wooden shutters and set out their bolts of sailcloth, their ships’ tackle, and their trinkets for the day’s trade.
Only a handful of other folk were up and about: a fresh-faced country lass with her egg basket on her arm; a stout ship’s captain hunting up his crew; a sailor, stinking of last night’s beer, propped in the doorway of the tavern where he’d slept; and a solitary dog that trotted, sniffing hopefully, along a row of sacks.
When they saw me step onto the pier with Kalf’s body in my arms, his head falling backward and one arm hanging down, they ran over to me—first the lass, who was nearest, then one, then two, then a dozen of the shop men and their wives.
“From the battle?”
“Yes.”
“You’re the first. Ain’t he the first?”
“Yes, the first.”
“Let me pass. My friend—” Friend no longer, but I must call him something.
“Best get another friend. That one’s gone.”
“Hush. What a thing to say,” one of the wives chided. “Give ‘im room there, he’s ready to fall down himself.”
“But who won? Where’s the king? Come on, lad, can’t you tell us?”
“Dead. The king is dead.”
“Dead!” They said the word in hushed voices. “Olaf?” The sound of their voices followed me as I mounted up the winding street to the inn. “Wake up! Wake up! The king is dead!”
The inn door was still locked. I kicked it until feet scuffled within and the bolt slid back. Young Thyri, peeping out, put her fist up to her mouth. Instantly, hands surrounded me—reaching out to take Kalf from me, helping me to a bench.
They laid Kalf on a table, and Stig peeled away the crusted bandages to examine the wound with his practiced eye. Blood still oozed from it, and the flesh all around was black and swollen.
“Should have been washed with wine hours ago. Bergthora, fetch all the wine you have. Send a girl for more, and get me clean cloths and a pair of shears.” She ran to get these articles.
“You there, Ketil, blow on the coals and stick a poker in ’em. The wound must be seared before he loses any more blood. Dammit, Odd Tangle-Hair, how did it happen?” I heard a tightness in his throat—Stig, whom nothing ever upset.
How did it happen? How had I let it come to this? I sank back on the bench and let the story run out at my lips, only leaving out our quarrel. I couldn’t bring myself to speak of that, and said nothing about the business with Thorgils and his mysterious corpse. I felt too weary for that pathetic tale.
“Poor puppy,” Bergthora sighed when I told about Ogmund PotBelly.
“A bloody shambles,” said Stig, shaking his head. “You did what you could, no one could have done more.”
Stig thrust the poker into Kalf’s wound with a hiss and a smell of burning flesh. Kalf writhed and shrieked and began to shake in all his limbs. Snatching the flagon from Bergthora’s hands, Stig splashed wine all over the wound. “Cut me a strip of bandage,” he ordered, “and make it well soaked with wine.”
“Oh, Stig, it’s no use,” said Bergthora, wiping her eyes. “Toke!” She called to Ketil’s sooty grandson, who slid down from the loft where he’d been watching. “Toke, run to the church. Find someone. Kalf’s a Christian, and he’s dying.”
The boy tore out the door. To me she said, hesitatingly, “You don’t mind, do you, Odd? It would be a sin not to.”
I shrugged and looked away.
Deacon Poppo was a brisk young man, lately arrived from Bremen to be Bishop Grimkel’s secretary. Caring nothing for war and still less for the local politics, he had contrived to be absent on the day that the bishop decamped with all his clergy to Stiklestad.
The deacon came in behind Toke and gave us a sympathetic cluck. When he saw the figure on the bench, he knelt at once to begin those spells which the Christmen say for their dead. All the others there, except for Stig and Brodd, knelt beside him with their hands folded under their chins—making between me and my friend-no-more a wall of backs. But in truth, that wall had been there always, hadn’t it? It had only now, at the moment of his death, become visible.
I turned and went out into the yard. There I stood, absorbed in sad and angry thoughts, while I watched the clouds roll in from seaward. A fat raindrop fell at my feet making a crater in the dust. A tear for Kalf? Why not? What use to hate him now? He’d been my friend once, the best and truest that I had. Rather hate those Christmen who had stolen him from me—that bishop and his king.
The king! I gave a start as the thought struck fully home. Shaking my head, all muddled with grief and exhaustion, I thought it through again. The body of a dead king is powerful magic, for good or ill. What a joke! How One-Eyed Odin must be laughing! That I, of all people, the unlikeliest man on earth—a stranger, a heathen, the enemy of all he stood for—should find myself now the sole guardian of that man’s curious, precious, and perhaps very dangerous secret.
For I alone knew where Olaf was buried.
21
Echose of Battle
Maybe it was the wine and the cautery, or perhaps some power in the crucifix that Deacon Poppo placed between Kalf’s hands, or maybe even a little magic in the rune stave that I slipped under his bedding when no one was looking. Thanks to any or all of them, Kalf’s wound did not turn black and stink. After a week had passed—days and nights filled with his screams and moans—Stig opined cautiously that he would live.
It was generally accounted a miracle.
During those anxious days, he was the constant object of my thoughts. As long as it seemed he would die, I could think that he’d been punished enough, but as his strength returned, then did all my bitte
rness return with it. He had said things that could never be unsaid, that would rankle in me forever. There need be no open breach, no shouted reproaches for others to hear, but there would be a coolness between us now. Our friendship, as far as I was concerned, was dead.
It was only right that I should feel this way. What man would not? Yet in my heart I felt not so much justified as diminished, as though it were I who had lost a limb.
In time, Kalf’s wound healed over, but though he might cling to the nickname ‘Slender-Leg’ and we oblige him by using it, his swift-footed youth was gone. He would have done better to lose the leg entirely, for a man can get around nimbly enough on one leg and a crutch, but the wound was too high up to allow amputation, and so he must drag this useless limb around with him for the rest of his life. He would never be a sea rover like his father, never stride his home-field sowing barley seed. He was fit for nothing now but to be a hermit.
Eventually, they told him how I had saved his life. He remembered the monster with the axe, but nothing afterwards. He called me to his side and made the others leave us alone. His face was gray, the deep shadows under his eyes purple, like bruises. He tried to speak. I cut him short.
“Kalf Slender-Leg,” I said in a low voice, “I am glad to see you alive, but give me no thanks for it. I want none. As for what passed between us, I will say nothing about it, and I hope you will not either, for it does you no credit. I think there’s no more to be said.”
At that he buried his face in his arm and began to blubber, mumbling the name of Christ between sobs. My father was right: what a womanish religion it is, this Christianity. I turned in disgust and left him. From that day on we seldom spoke.
†
Bergthora’s inn was soon awash with wounded men. They straggled into Nidaros by the hundreds in those first days after the fight—some piled in farmers’ carts, some walking alone or leaning on a comrade’s shoulder. Many from both armies found their way to her door, and she, with a good heart and a whore’s impartiality, took in all alike, and did what she could for them until her hall resembled a hospital more than a pleasure house. The dragon’s head from its perch above the doorway watched unblinkingly, the wounded go in and the dead go out.
With so many dead and dying, notice was hardly taken of a certain farmer Thorgils, whose body was found one morning by a fisherman, snagged in a clump of reeds along the riverbank above the town.
†
There was a general feeling of satisfaction among the Tronders at the outcome of the battle of Stiklestad. The heathen country folk, of course, were jubilant, but even the Christian population of the town felt a quiet relief. In large numbers they had simply ignored the whole affair, not liking to fight against a Christian king, but nevertheless unwilling to support that bullying Southerner.
Their satisfaction was short-lived.
I was loafing about the harbor one morning, a week or so after the battle when the bray of a horn carried to us over the water. All along the wharf, eyes turned seaward.
At first we saw nothing, but then one dragon ship, and then another, and another, came in sight around the headland where the fjord bends, their oars rising and dipping in perfect time, their striped sails bellied in the wind, and their gilded prows flashing. Four vessels in all were racing towards us over the water. The horn rang out a second time, louder.
While we watched in silence, the dragons glided into the royal boat slips, threw out their gangplanks, and emptied their bellies of warriors. And it was no mob of viking raiders who spilled onto the wharf. Obedient to the shouts of their officers, they fell in smartly in four long ranks of sixty men each and stood to attention.
Each man wore a ringmail coat and shouldered a long-handled axe. Their hard eyes glinted through the eyeholes of their visors. Proud, disciplined, richly armed, here were the far-famed Housecarles of Canute the Rich.
From every part of the town, people gathered to the harbor, quietly and with worried looks, to see this sight. The iron faces stared them down, and the iron axes kept them at a distance.
One ship still had not given up its cargo. To the accompaniment of another raucous note of the horn, its gangplank swung out now and a dozen picked men, with swords drawn, raced down to form a double line at its foot. Behind them strode a young warrior, bearing on a staff a standard of white silk with a black raven on it: the ensign of Canute.
But the figure to step over the gunnel was not the mighty king of Denmark, England, and Norway, but rather a short, sharp-faced woman. She descended the gangplank with cautious steps, leaning on a servant’s arm, while the Housecarles banged their axes rhythmically against their shields in salute.
Last, came two other persons—one, a bishop in full regalia, the other, a pasty-faced boy of about twelve who kept his eyes on his shoes.
The sharp-faced woman, we very soon learned, was the Lady Alfifa, a minor concubine of Canute’s, and the boy, her son, Svein, one of the king’s numerous and little-valued bastards. The bishop was one Sigurd, a Danish cleric from England. To these three, we soon learned, the realm of Norway was entrusted. Canute himself could not be bothered to set foot in it.
Out of the crowd bustled Deacon Poppo with energetic clasping of hands to receive our masters. The deacon, I should mention, still represented the Church in Nidaros. Bishop Grimkel, it was reported, was alive but had fled with his clergy to the south to take refuge with Olaf’s mother.
Flanked by the Housecarles then, and with Poppo dancing attendance, Alfifa, Svein, and Sigurd marched in state up the winding street from the harbor, while the Tronders fell back to give them way. They did not smile at the Tronders, and the Tronders did not cheer. Squatting on its hill above the town, Olaf’s empty hall seemed especially to glower at its unwelcome new tenants.
†
Within a week of their arrival, our new masters put an end to any doubts about how things now stood between Norwegians and Danes. One wet morning, the ringing of the church bell summoned us to the square where a Danish herald read out to a stunned populace a decree, whose gist was as follows:
New taxes henceforth to be levied on fishing catches and harborage. All Tronder men to be subject to forced labor on the royal estates. In legal disputes the word of one Dane to be counted as equal to that of ten Norwegians. At Yuletide, every household to deliver to the king—the boy Svein was meant—a measure of malt, the leg of an ox, and a pail of butter. And on, and on.
Of course, the people turned angrily to their jarls. And soon the jarls came riding into town. Not for this had they driven the Fat Man from his throne. They would send this hatchet-faced bitch home on the next tide.
The people waited.
But the jarls came out of the king’s hall tight-lipped and grim, mounted their horses, kicked them savagely, and rode back to their estates, beaten. Canute, it turned out, held a hostage of every one of them as his ‘guest’ in England. Alfifa had only to lift her finger.…
Soon after that, a surprising thing happened. Or not so surprising, when you thought about it. These same men who had just reddened their hands in Olaf’s blood began to whisper to their friends that he had been, after all, a pious man. Indeed, one could go so far as to say he was a holy man, a saint, in fact. Thorir of the magic shirt, who had run his spear through Olaf’s body, began it. Kalv Arnesson, who had sawed Olaf’s neck, followed suit. Then, almost overnight, one heard it everywhere: a blind man cured with a few drops of the water in which Olaf’s wounds had been washed, prayers addressed to him in Heaven promptly answered. He secured health for this man, a safe journey for that one. The testimony multiplied day by day.
In every shop and on every corner, people gathered to recall his saintly life, telling each other in solemn tones—just as Thorgils had told to me—about demons he had exorcised and trolls he had wrestled, and how, wherever he laid his head at night, the elves fled the place, burned by his prayers.
Soon it was hard to find anyone among the Christian population of Nidaros who would admit to
ever having been his enemy. Even hard-headed Bergthora finally succumbed, though grudgingly, to the general persuasion.
Our new bishop, Sigurd, so I was told, ranted long and loud against this talk until most of his parishioners refused to hear him and left him alone in his church. If the bishop was any indication, the Danes were worried. Olaf dead was becoming more dangerous to them than Olaf living had ever been.
Kalf, who day and night lay helpless on his back in a dusky corner of the hall, nourished his madness on these stories, which the girls brought back from the marketplace and recited to him by the hour. They were his meat and drink. Certainly, he took little else besides. It astonished me that he could survive on the pitiful ration of water, bread, and vegetables that he allowed himself. Bergthora tried every way she could to feed him manly food, but he was unshakable in this. Plainly, he had set himself to become one of those starveling hermits whom he had heard praised by Bishop Grimkel.
But he was a very popular hermit, and soon became a local hero. The inn was always a place congenial to gossip, and now each night the pious Tronders, and the more pious of my crew as well, would coax the shining tale from him once again. Though he could scarcely speak above a whisper, he made them sigh when he told how saintly Olaf had baptized the heathens in his army, and how he had led them in the charge (which he had not), and how he had died—especially that part.
No doubt Kalf had been somewhere near the scene and witnessed the same events as I. Only he saw them through the eyes of zeal and passion, which made them glow in quite a different light.
Now and again, someone who remembered that I, too, had been there would trouble me for my version, but I gave them shrugs and vague answers, and they soon turned back to Kalf to hear it yet again from his pale lips, until Bergthora would scold them for tiring the boy and chase them away.
“And the king’s body?” they would always ask when he had finished. “Never found?”
Odin’s Child Page 22
