Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

But Nose was plainly frightened. “Kill him and leave him for the wolves. They won’t chase running men where there’s easier meat.”

  “We need him, you i-imbecile!” said Stammer.

  “Damn you all, I’ll do it myself!” Nose took another step toward me with his sword upraised while I retreated so as to get Rumble-Guts between us. To the surprise of us all—I disappeared.

  We were standing, without knowing it, on the brink of a deep hollow. I slid backwards, making windmills with my arms, until my skis flew out from under me and I hurtled down the slope in a spray of snow, sometimes head first, sometimes tail, and afraid I would meet my death in collision with a tree before my murderous companions had time to overtake me.

  The tree did come first, catching me flush on the forehead and leaving me stunned.

  On my face in the snow, with my legs sticking up at queer angles, I returned to my senses as Stammer and Nose resumed their argument over my fate—an argument which Nose seemed to be on the point of winning. Luckily, Rumble-Guts shouted just then, from a little ways away, to come and have a look at what he’d found.

  “It’s very like, isn’t it?” I heard him say to them.

  “Like enough. F-fetch him over here to see it.”

  Nose came back for me, yanking me upright and setting me down hard on my legs, which, I am sure, he hoped were broken. We pushed through a thicket of branches down to the water’s edge.

  “W-W-Well?” Stammer asked, slapping his hand against a blasted trunk whose single crooked branch hung over the water.

  I started to say that Yes, it did seem….

  “It is the one,” he said with finality. God does not p-p-play jokes. So. And you will f-f-find our king.”

  “I’ll find him when I’m damned good and ready!” I’d had enough of being ordered about by these three. With slow deliberation I brushed the snow from my clothes, adjusted the bindings of my skis, and felt my various bumps and bruises while they watched impatiently. “All right,” I said at length, “follow me.”

  Where we came to a ribbon of snow that divided the wood, I stopped and pointed to my feet.

  “You’re s-s-sure?” asked Stammer sharply.

  “A few paces right or left, I can’t remember. There’s a stone over it about as big around as a plate.”

  So Stammer and his friends began a slow march up and down the bank, stooping and thrusting their swords into the snow at every step. After a few minutes of this, Rumble-Guts’ sword struck the stone. From the farther side of the stream—louder than before—the wolf howled again. Nose stifled a groan.

  “Wants his dinner,” I remarked pleasantly.

  “Just you get to work,” he spat out.

  After some minutes’ steady digging, we cleared a rectangle of three paces by two down to the sandy crust of the riverbank and rolled aside the stone marker.

  “It is my fate,” I sighed, “to dig and un-dig this king.”

  “How d-deep,” Stammer asked.

  “Less than a foot.”

  “Good. Pray first, comrades, and G-God will guide our hands.”

  So they prayed, and God, it seemed, did.

  Stammer pushed his spade into the ground, working the handle from side to side, prying the sandy soil away. Steel glinted dully in the moonlight—a patch of mailed coat.

  “Gently,” urged Rumble-Guts. “God forbid that we injure this sacred flesh.”

  Two more spadesful and the moon shone upon Olaf’s face.

  I squeaked with fright, I admit it, and jumped backward. My captors let go of their spades, dropped to their knees, and commenced to pray in earnest—all three of them stammering now, they were in such a state.

  It is one thing to believe that the dead live in their tombs, another thing to see it. The face seemed longer and thinner, the flesh had sunk in around the bones, making dark hollows of the eye sockets and the cheeks, and the ruddy skin had paled to the color of old ivory. But it was Olaf’s face—whole and uncorrupted, I will swear to it. To see him, he might have been asleep. And if asleep, dreaming bloody dreams—for even the moonlight could not soften that hard mouth and that jutting jaw.

  It occurred to me later, when I had my wits again, that the sandy soil, the shallowness of the grave, and the hard frost that autumn might have been enough to save him from decay. Who knows?

  “See his beard,” whispered Nose. “Is it not longer than it was?”

  “Aye, it is,” came Rumble-Guts’ hushed reply. “He lives. He’s only waiting.”

  The wolf wail that sounded again seemed fitting music for this sight.

  They crossed themselves and, unsheathing their swords, turned on me.

  “Naturally, we c-c-can’t l-let you leave.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Your friends will c-c-come to no harm.”

  “Good of you to say so.”

  “And now, we will slay you by his grave. A heathen’s blood will g-gladden him.”

  Yes, I agreed, I was sure it would.

  “And leave your corpse for the wolves,” Nose laughed evilly, with a nervous glance into the dark.

  “I will be missed.”

  “Oh, but don’t you have the same belief as Norwegians,” said Rumble-Guts, “about the Yulerei? The ghosts who roam the countryside in the month of Yule, carrying off folk who are foolish enough to go out alone at night? That is what your friends will think.”

  A growl rattled in the throat of something very near. Where we looked, two luminous eyes shone in the dark. Nose let out a strangled scream and flung himself into the snow, churning it with his legs. His friends stood their ground for only a heartbeat longer. The Thing bounded forward, brushing me with its matted coat as it shot past. It caught them before they had gone a dozen steps, lifted them screaming one by one into the air, and cracked their backs on its knee.

  Afterwards, it crouched over them, moving from one to another, making wet mouth sounds. Then, standing to its full height, the growl still in its throat, it’s face smeared with blood, it started toward me.

  For a swift instant I stood again on Stiklestad plain, paralyzed with fear. Does he know me? I had worried about that when I made my plan with him, but what choice did I have? The werewolf’s steaming breath, sweet with blood, licked at my face. If I ran, he would kill me for sure. I stood, not moving a muscle, my eyes lowered in an animal’s gesture of submission, and repeating, “Odin—Odin—Odin—” to myself, filling my mind with the magic name. The creature’s jaws gaped open, showing red teeth, he shook his huge head from side to side—and with an enormous yawn sank on his knees before me.

  I let out my breath very slowly. “Wash your face in the snow, friend Glum,” I said, “and then lend me a hand with this lot.”

  “Sleepy,” he answered with a weary groan. “Always after I change shape.”

  “Well, you can’t sleep here. Come along now.”

  Reluctantly, he helped me drag the bodies over to the trunk of a pine where we threw snow over them. They should stay well hidden until the spring thaw. In the meantime, Thorgils’ widow, or anyone else who missed them, could mutter darkly about the Yulerei all they pleased.

  I looked at them one last time and wondered at the force of the passion that had driven them. Was it conceivable that Kalf, as drunk on religion as any of them, could have done to someone what they had tried to do to me? I didn’t like to think of it.

  “Friend Glum,” I said, “I find no joy in these killings.”

  The berserker only shrugged, as if joy or the absence of it had simply no meaning for him.

  You will ask me if he really was a shape-shifter. The berserkers have all gone now, and people begin to doubt that there ever were such men. They never met Glum. He howled, ran, killed as a wolf does. He smelled like a wolf, and he dreamed a wolf’s dreams. What more is required? And haven’t we all some drops of the wolf’s blood in us? Glum, at least, could put a name to his frenzy that carried some honor once. And that is something.

  I turned my fac
e toward Olaf in his grave.

  “King,” I addressed him in a solemn voice, “you’ve only yourself to blame, you know. If you hadn’t driven the heathens from your army that day, my friend Kalf would still be walking on two good legs and we would have launched our dinghy by ourselves and gone away, never meeting farmer Thorgils and these others, and your secret would still be safe. Something to think about during the long night, King. And farewell to you.”

  When we had closed up his grave and spread the snow around, I put on my skis again and said, “Now you can rest, friend Glum. Stand up behind me and hold tight to my belt.”

  With only the whisper of my skis hissing in the silent forest, we glided back to town.

  23

  I Go A-Viking

  The rest of that winter passed uneventfully.

  I decided, for the time being, to say nothing about my adventure in the forest, and swore Glum to secrecy as well. And the three Norwegians, it seemed, had kept their mission a secret. No one else came to trouble me about King Olaf’s sweet-smelling corpse.

  The weeks wore on without bringing any change in our circumstances. Between Kalf and me there was still that coolness, those awkward looks and silences, which had continued for so long now that they went uncommented on.

  Month after weary month, I nursed and cherished my anger. “Run away, Odd,” he had said. “Isn’t that how you treat your brothers?” Devil and coward! he had called me. Whenever I felt myself weaken, I called it all up again as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

  As for Kalf, he spent all his time now conning Latin. He was laboriously translating a book lent him by Deacon Poppo about the Life of Saint Anskar, who had been a missionary to the Danes two centuries ago.

  At night, Kalf would recite his translation to a circle of listeners, which at different times included Bergthora and her girls, and several of my crew, but always Glum. Long after the rest had drifted away, the berserker would still be found sitting at Kalf’s elbow in rapt attention, with what sort of understanding, who could say? He was content just to be distracted, I think, from the puzzle of his existence.

  It was bound to happen sooner or later that Kalf learned who and what Glum was—and did the most astonishing thing: kissed him on the cheek, forgave him, and renounced any act of vengeance to be taken in requital for his wound! Which puzzled the berserker mightily, but he took it in good part, even agreeing to wear a crucifix which Kalf hung around his neck.

  There was even talk of preparing Glum for baptism, but when he was made to understand that this meant a dousing with the magic water, the same that Olaf had tried to force on him and his comrades at Stiklestad, he ran howling from the inn and stayed hidden for two days. Thereafter, it was pretty well agreed between Deacon Poppo and Bishop Sigurd that Glum’s conversion, while being a victory for the Church greatly to be wished for, must be allowed to happen in God’s own time, which might be a very long time indeed.

  †

  Through it all, the town of Nidaros, under its blanket of snow, seethed with rumor and report and smoldering hatred of the Danes.

  It was on a bright morning early in the month of sowing that two boys out hunting noticed a sparkle of metal at the top of a snowdrift that had begun to shrink in the sun, and going over to have a look, discovered the crown of a helmet, and scooping away the snow with their hands, uncovered three fresh pink faces with beards as brittle as gingerbread and black ragged holes in their throats.

  Time to be going, said I to myself, when the news of this got around. For I had settled in my mind that I would turn viking for a while.

  Calling my crew together, I opened my plans to them. Stuf, Otkel, Starkad, and Brodd agreed to ship with me for another year and try their luck at the viking life. But Stig shook his spiky head, no.

  “Looting’s a young man’s game,” said he, “and I’ve grown fat and comfortable here, I won’t bother to deny it. I’m content to be a tavernkeeper.”

  “But Stig, it was only last year you looked forward to buying a farm in Iceland—you said as much to Hoskuld.”

  “Did I really? No, not the thing at all for old Stig. Too hard on the back. No, this is the life for me.”

  Bergthora, standing behind him with her hand on his shoulder, allowed herself a smile of triumph. Her wandering bird was safe in the nest at last!

  “But I’ll tell you boys something,” he went on, “if you’ll take an old thief’s advice. You want a sleeker ship to sail in than Hrut’s fat-bellied tub. A sow can’t be a fox, try as it may, and you’re liable to end up as the dinner on someone else’s plate. Now, if I was you, I’d pay a visit to Ake the shipwright and see what he has on hand.”

  “Steersman,” I urged, trying him one more time, “what good will a ship like that do me without you to hold the tiller?”

  “Pah! In all my thieving days I never handled a dragon like the one you want. What there is to steering one of those, old Stig can’t teach you.” He looked at me severely. “That you must learn where the spears and arrows fly.”

  †

  A little ways beyond the wharf, the music of hammers and the odor of pitch and pine proclaimed Ake’s shipyard.

  Here Glum labored. I spied him at once, standing a-straddle of a pine trunk, working along it with his axe. I hallooed and went toward him over a carpet of shavings.

  “How goes it today, friend Glum?”

  “Not so badly,” he sighed, peeling off a long curlicue of bark with a swipe of the half-moon blade, “but not so very well, either.” His face wore a particularly woebegone expression. “It’s soon time that I walked home to Sweden, and yet here I am with my fortune still unmade. I expect a scolding from my aged father and nothing but raillery from my brothers.”

  “Well, Glum, this is a coincidence. You see, I’ve made up my mind to go a-viking this summer. Now, I think our victims would shower us with their wealth if only you were to growl at ’em. What d’you think? And afterwards, if you like, we’ll set you down on the coast of Sweden and you’ll go home a far richer man than you left. Would that suit you?”

  His little bow mouth stretched itself into a wolfish smile.

  “It might suit.”

  “Agreed then! We’ll talk more about it later. Right now I’m in search of a ship for us—a sleek one and fast. Show me to your master.”

  Nearby, a dozen men swarmed over the skeleton of a ship while the master builder stood back, cocking his head first to one side, then the other, measuring the curve of her hull down to a finger’s breadth with only his sharp eye.

  He was a rope of a man, with knotted muscles on his long arms and big knuckles on his fingers. We talked over the clack of axes and the chink of hammers.

  “A ship?” said Ake. “A ship is like a tool, they come in every shape and size, each right for its purpose—and what might yours be?”

  I told him.

  “Aha! Then cast your eye over this very one we’re building.” And taking me by the arm, with Glum following behind, he led me ‘round her.

  “She’s a karfi—a small dragon, seventy-six feet from stem to stern, seventeen in the beam, and mounts sixteen pair of oars. Add a steersman and you can sail her with a crew of just thirty-three, though you could cram a dozen more in her if need be.

  “Now, a trim little craft like this one, while she’s got the fast lines of a big dragon-ship, can hold her own in rough water better than one of those, for they’re all too narrow in the beam for the length of ’em. She handles better, too. In a pinch, a good steersman could spin this ship around on the head of a pin. And she’ll draw but three feet of water. You can run her up on a beach, strike, and be off again before they ever know what’s hit ’em.”

  He reached a long arm up to the gunnel, hauled himself up and over, and dropped down into the hollow of the hull, where the deck planking had not yet been laid. Glum and I followed.

  “Solid oak,” he said, thumping the mast block with his fist. “Oak won’t grow this far north, as you know, but this s
hip was a special commission—no expenses to be spared. We had timber brought up from the south for mast-block, keel, stem, stern, and ribs.”

  Dropping to his haunches alongside the keel, he ran his fingers over the smooth-planed strakes.

  “I’ll show you something else. Only a landlubber thinks that a ship floats on the water. A well-joined ship swims in the water like a fish. Look here.” He tugged at a length of pliant root that was knotted over one of the ribs where it passed in front of a strake. “All nine strakes below the water line are tied to the ribs with these. Without nails, they’re free to move, and when you stand on her deck in a rolling sea you’ll feel her ripple under you as she fits herself to the waves.

  “The upper strakes we nail, as you see the lads doing now, then we caulk her with braids of horsehair dipped in pitch, give her bottom a coat of tar—and she’s ready for the water.”

  “She hasn’t got her figurehead yet,” I said.

  “Ah, that comes last. When we give her her head and tail, we say goodbye to her because she’s alive then and wants to swim. The heads are carved separate. I’ve a shed full of ’em and any one you like can be fitted on.”

  “Hold on, Master Ake, you talk as if I’m to buy this ship, and I wish I were, but you said she was promised to another.”

  “Died of the cough this winter, poor man. But I will finish her just the same. She won’t go looking long for an owner.”

  “And how much might you be asking for her?”

  “What—with sail and tackle and oars and all?” He stared into space for a while, moving his lips, then named a price that fairly knocked me over the side. I shook my head sadly.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “You’ve a sea-worthy merchantman, haven’t you? I know where I can sell one of those and no questions asked about where she came from.” He said this with a wink, for it was pretty well known around the harbor that we’d lifted the ship. “That’ll take a good bit off the price, and for the rest—why, I’ll give you until we finish her to find it. Young pirate like you shouldn’t have any trouble grubbing up a bit of silver.”

  And how long, I asked, until he finished her?