Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  Soon, all eyes were secretly on him and it became a sort of game with us, from which only Kalf refrained, to catch him in these grimaces and wink at one another.

  Naturally, he was asked once or twice who he was and where he hailed from, but the story he had told me only that morning, he would not repeat now in front of a dozen men, until I almost began to think I must have imagined the whole thing.

  †

  At last, the hour grew late. Most of our group dispersed to their sleeping places, Bergthora went off to see to her other guests, and Kalf, too, rose stiffly and said goodnight. Stig started up to help him, but once again, Glum was quicker. Resting on that murderous right arm, Kalf retired to his corner.

  Out of nowhere a great longing, tinged with melancholy, came over me. “Stig?” He had stayed by me, gazing into the fire, comfortably drunk and humming some tuneless melody. “Stig, if only I could see a little of my fate, only so much as to know where I will be this night a year from now, and what I’ll have done that is worth anyone’s remembering. My heart aches to know it.” It hadn’t been in my mind at all to make this speech.

  He stopped his humming and studied me over the rim of his ale horn. “Because you imagine you have a future. No end of heartache comes from that. Look at me. I’ve no future save what the morning breeze blows in. I come here, I go there. I make no plans, no promises, and I’m the happiest man alive.”

  “But I have made a promise, Stig, to my Dead Ones, and I must keep it, somehow. But the how of it troubles me in the night.”

  “A fool, Tangle-Hair, lies awake all night pondering his troubles. When morning comes he’s worn out—and whatever was, still is. Give up trying to see so far. It can’t be done.”

  “I suppose,” I sighed. “You know, my father had second sight, or claimed he did. He said that if he put his hand on his hip and someone looked through the crook of his arm, that person would see his fate before him as clear as day.”

  “And did you do it?”

  “No. Somehow we never did. Now I think of it, I don’t suppose he knew his own fate either, or he might have managed things better. I imagine it was all just conceit, like the rubbish they talk about Olaf.”

  “Captain.” Stig looked suddenly sober and gazed past my head at his distant horizon, as he always did when he had something important to deliver. “Captain, be careful what you say about that dead king. Mind you, I care nothing for him myself, but I say it for your own good. Don’t be known as his enemy. Wherever his ghost is, I think he hasn’t done with us yet. I feel it whenever I listen to these Tronders talk—that somehow we’ll hear that dead man shout again.”

  I was drunk and sleepy and for a moment, while he talked, had fallen into a reverie. Hear him shout again? I was drifting in the dinghy on the dark bosom of the fjord, half way between waking and sleep.

  “One day, by God, you’ll hear his shout…”

  “Thorgils!” I said with a start.

  “Who?” Stig watched me curiously.

  “What? Oh, no one. No one you know.” I shook myself and stood up. “It’s late, Stig. I’ll say goodnight.”

  “Good night, Captain.”

  The coals glowed dully on the hearth and the smoke hole overhead was a faint circle of gray. Somewhere a cock crowed. Threading my way across the room—for the floor was littered with sleeping bodies in every position, as though they had been shaken out of a giant’s hand—I peered into Kalf’s dark corner. He was asleep, and next to him lay Glum, curled on his side, with his knees drawn up to his chest, like some monstrous baby. Or, was it only his husk that I saw and his spirit, at this very moment, was loping across the snowfields, a swift shadow against the moon? Who could conceive what thoughts whispered in that wolfish brain?

  Bergthora was still up. Her boast was that she never slept so long as any of her guests was right side up. She sat at a table at the back with half a dozen sleepy-eyed farmers playing at draughts by the guttering light of a lamp.

  As I passed them by, searching among the sleeping bodies for Thyri, who had wandered off some while ago, the men pushed the gaming board away, scooped up their silver, yawned, and began to look round for their hats and mittens.

  I found my girl in the larder, curled around the butter churn fast asleep. I gathered her up and slung her across my shoulder. She was more child than woman and slept like a child, profoundly. I went back through the hall to the ladder that led up to the loft and saw Bergthora’s sleepy guests in the gray rectangle of the open doorway, winding their scarves around their heads. The cold draft on my back made me shiver as I put my foot on the rung.

  “It’s a chill morning, boys, and a long way home,” she was saying in the way she always bantered with her customers. “I’ve plump girls here aplenty to warm your bones….”

  I hauled myself up through the trapdoor and lay Thyri down on the straw. Through the floorboards I could still hear Bergthora’s voice and the shuffling of the men’s feet.

  “Everyone of ’em a beauty, or I wouldn’t have ’em in the place. See if they aren’t.”

  And then a man’s voice that answered her just before the door banged shut: “N-n-not tonight, thank you. Maybe an-n-n-nother time.”

  22

  My Secret Discovered

  “Wake up, Odd Tangle-Hair. Wake up!”

  Ketil’s grandson shook me until my eyes opened. The loft was dark except for the feeble light of his candle.

  “Eh? What do you want, Toke? What hour is it?”

  “Not yet cockcrow, sir, but you’re to run down to the wharf just as quick as you can.” He said it particular, ‘as quick as you can.’ He gave me another shake for good measure.

  “Who says?”

  “Man what was just here, sir. Rouses me with rappin’ on the door and gives me this message for you from One-Legged Gorm. It’s your ship, Master Tangle-Hair. There’s been a fire in the ship shed. You’re to go and see for yourself what’s to be done.”

  “Hel’s Hall!” I was up in a second and fumbling in the dark for my clothes. “Damn the man! He has six silver ounces from me to keep her dry over the winter and what does he do but burn her! Toke, fetch me a light.”

  Throwing a sealskin coat over my shoulders, I scrambled after him down the ladder.

  “When Stig wakes up, send him after me.”

  “But can’t I go along?”

  “Do as I tell you.”

  I lit a torch from the hearth and stepped out, shivering, into the starry night. The snow, which lay thick all around, was crisscrossed by deep trodden pathways. I followed one that took me past rows of houses down to the square, where a black circle on the ground was all that remained of the Lucy fire that had burned itself out three nights before. Another path led around by the side of the cathedral and brought me to the waterfront.

  By the time I reached it, a ribbon of gray lay along the horizon and the huddled shapes of sheds and warehouses were just creeping out of the darkness.

  “Gorm!” I roared, as I slid and splashed ankle-deep through the salty slush that covered the wharf. “Gorm, you son-of-a-bitch, if my ship is ruined, I’ll tear the other leg off you!”

  One-Legged Gorm’s shed, which was nothing but a broad shingled roof supported on squat posts, loomed ahead in the gloom, from under its eaves a glow of firelight. I rushed inside.

  “Over here,” said a low voice. A torch flared in the dark, splashing its light against the curved hull of my ship and one of the props that supported it. The man who spoke stood with his back to me.

  “Gorm, what’s it all about? The shed’s not afire—”

  “N-no indeed.”

  He spun and landed me a blow in the face that staggered me. At the same time, a pair of arms circled me from behind. He hit me a second time, and a third, until I sank down, unconscious.

  A helmetful of icy slush in my face brought me to. I lay on the deck of my ship with my hands tied behind me and my eyes blindfolded. My jaw ached and my mouth was full of blood. What a fool I
was to have walked into this childish trap—to have thought that the stammering man hadn’t seen me at Bergthora’s.

  “S-s-sit him up.”

  Rough hands rolled me over and shoved me up against the bulwark.

  In the conversation that followed, I distinguished three men—the same who had been with farmer Thorgils that night at Stiklestad. Unable to see them, I named them to myself according to their voices. Stammer had done the talking so far. The second I imagined to be a fat man, because his voice was deep and he breathed heavily, and so I called him Rumble-Guts. The last one, from the way he talked high up in his head, I pictured with a good deal of nose on his face, and so named him.

  “You know us, don’t you?” whined Nose close to my ear.

  “What d’you want with me?”

  “Oho, we want a good deal. Yes, a great deal.”

  His fist struck the side of my face, slamming my head against the gunnel, nearly making me black out again.

  “That for Thorgils!”

  “Hold off,” Stammer commanded, “he’s n-no use to us dead.”

  Nose whined again, “That farmer was worth a hundred of you, you heathen scum! When his corpse was found with knife wounds on the breast, we knew who was to blame.”

  “Would it matter if I said he tried to kill me?”

  “Shut up! What matters is the body we trusted him with. Shall I tell you whose body it was?”

  “I know whose it was.”

  “I expected you would. And did you bury it, heathen, or just fling it to the wolves when you murdered our friend?”

  “We buried him.”

  “So. For weeks we’ve tramped Thorgils’ property searching for the grave, while his widow took us in and fed us, for we’re Southerners and have no kin here. When the snow came and covered everything, we lost hope. But God sees all, and look what he has sent us”—he banged my head against the gunnel again—“you!”

  “My friends will be here soon.”

  “Your friends are hard d-d-drinkers and late sleepers,” said Stammer. “You see, we know all about you—who you are and w-what you are. It only took a f-f-few questions asked in the right places. And now you will tell us where to find our k-k-king.”

  “So you can make magic with his rotting carcass? Splendid idea—and good luck to you. Now let me go.”

  “Scum!” cried Nose again, trying to get at me with his fingers, but the other two, with scuffling and grunting, held him back.

  Rumble-Guts leaned close to me and growled in an urgent bass, “Hear the truth, heathen, and try to understand. Magic is of Satan—far be it from us. But when we possess the king’s bones and good Bishop Grimkel, touching them, prays for our deliverance from the Danes, and Olaf himself pleads our cause at Heaven’s Throne, how then will God refuse us?”

  “Even C-c-canute,” added Stammer, “cannot prevail against God. In the Spring, when Grimkel can journey up country, we will unc-c-cover the king’s precious body in front of all. Then the false priest, Sigurd, and Alfifa and her brat will quake and c-c-cringe, and our jarls will take new c-c-courage, and we will throw the foreigners out.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw their faces—plain, rough faces, honest and earnest, like the face of farmer Thorgils or, for that matter, of Kalf Slender-Leg.

  “We’re wasting time,” Nose struck in. “Tell us where his body is and you can go your way.”

  “No, friend, I’m a fool, but not a big enough one as to believe that. I’m a dead man as soon as I’ve told you what you want, and so I will tell you nothing. It’s the end of your little scheme.”

  “Oh,” replied Stammer softly, “n-not quite. Suppose you don’t mind having p-pieces of flesh cut from your body. There are still the others—that c-cripple whose life you were so anxious to save, the old whore at the inn who c-coddles you. And remember that we know their faces, but you don’t know ours. You can’t protect them. We are not c-c-cruel men, but we mean to have our way.”

  Oh, no, I thought, never say ‘cruel’—not when the cause is so noble! “Look, I don’t know where your bloody Olaf is. It was dark, it was four months ago.” I fought down the fear that rose inside me and tried to think. “Maybe when the snow is gone …, yes, I could find him then. You won’t want him until spring anyway. We’ll look then.”

  “And by that time,” sneered Nose, where will you and your friends be, eh? And maybe in the meantime you decide to tell the Danes, eh? We are shrewder men than that, my friend. No, just you show us the spot now and we will dig—enough to know that it is the spot. Then we’ll cover him up again.”

  “Dig in two feet of snow and the ground as hard as iron?”

  “Nothing is impossible with God,” sounded Rumble-Guts’ bass. “You can’t have buried him deep.”

  “All right, then but let’s have more men to lighten the task. My crew—”

  Nose laughed unpleasantly. “You underestimate us again. Your crew isn’t worth discussing. Even among loyal Tronders, we’ve kept our business to ourselves. Men talk; their wives talk even more.”

  “Now,” said Stammer. “Enough. We’ll look for the k-king tonight. And this, my argumentative friend, is what you will do….”

  When he had done talking, they untied my hands, dropped silently over the side and scuttled away. In a moment, there was nothing to be heard but the shrilling of the wind and the crash of the sea on the desolate beach outside.

  In a fury, I cursed Olaf and all his wretched countrymen, who had caused me nothing but sorrows since coming to this place. But cursing only made my head hurt worse, and I needed it clear. I let myself down from the gunnel and stumbled out into the gray morning.

  Just outside the shed Stig caught me in his arms. Looking into his questioning face, I nearly told him all—but thought better of it and didn’t. My crew would arm themselves to the teeth, bluster about the town, and accomplish nothing except to drive these pious assassins deeper into the shadows. And every day thereafter we would have to fear a quick knife thrust in the crowded street, an arrow through the open door, a torch tossed onto the roof at night. For I never doubted that they would carry out their threat to harm Kalf and Bergthora, who were the hostages for my good behavior. I put Stig off with some story about thieves ambushing me.

  But, Odin All-Father, what was I going to do?

  †

  That night, when the moon rose, I mumbled an excuse for going out, and skied to a stand of pines that lay beyond the north wall of the town. After I had stood there for some minutes, my jaws rattling with cold, I heard a hiss of skis and saw three shadows glide out from the trees to surround me.

  “I’m half frozen.”

  “Just making sure you came alone,” Nose answered.

  I peered at their faces in the moonlight. None had the features and bodies that I had given them: Noses’s nose was nothing exceptional. Rumble-Guts turned out to be a slight, narrow-waisted man. And Stammer, as well as I could make him out, was one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen.

  Without more conversation, we struck out, two abreast, through the silvery wood. My captors wore their swords slung on their backs, but on my back they had tied a heavy bundle of picks and spades, so that soon, despite the bitter cold, my shirt was soaked with sweat.

  It was not exertion alone that raised this sweat on me. Since coming to Norway, I had discovered that I suffer from a peculiar uneasiness in the deep woods. I know other Icelanders, too, who feel it. At home we grow up able to see for miles across our naked, wind-swept barrens, so that an Iceland child actually does not know what it means to be lost. The forest is alien to us; it hems us in, suffocates us like the fog at sea. I never willingly went into the woods. Of course, my preferences were not being consulted at the moment.

  “How will you k-k-know the spot?” asked Stammer, running on his skis beside me.

  “There’s an excellent chance I won’t know it. Somewhere along the bank of the fjord, about five miles from here is a blackened tree, not different from a thousand other b
lack trees, except that it’s lightning-struck and has one branch hanging over the water. That’s the task you’ve set yourselves.”

  “We’ll f-f-find it,” was his determined answer.

  We skied for a long time in silence, winding in and out of the pines and birches that grew down to the water’s edge, keeping the fjord on our left, while to the right of us the ground rose gently to a line of distant hills. Somewhere in the space between, hidden beneath the snow, lay the icy ribbon of the Nid.

  But nothing in this bleak landscape offered a sign.

  We were working our way up a long stretch of rising ground, when Nose began to complain, “It’s too far. He’s taken us clean past Thorgils’ land and he knows it. Devil skin him! He’s leading us a chase.”

  Stammer halted and the three of them stood around me, with angry looks. Their leader brought his ice-bearded face close to mine. “Are you tr-tr-tr-,” the word stuck in his teeth. He shook himself in vexation and squeezed it out, “tricking us?”

  “For what possible reason?”

  “You worship the demon, Odin, the Father of Lies. That’s reason enough for you,” whined Nose, reaching back his hand to grasp the hilt of his sword. “I say we kill you now and go home—this was a fool’s errand to begin with.” He took a menacing step towards me.

  In the distance a wolf cried. No one in the forest hears that sound without shivering.

  “Listen!” Nose again, his high-pitched twang sounding higher than before. “The brute’s got our scent. The whole pack’ll be on us soon.”

  “Control yourself,” Rumble-Guts snapped.