Odin’s Child

by Bruce Macbain

  The old fellow, who was just putting the ale horn to his lips, swallowed fast and looked up in wonder. “By the One-Eyed Odin, I should have known! The real thing? D’you bite your shield, man? D’you bare your breast to iron?”

  Glum gave a deprecating smile and in his husky voice replied, “You can say you have ridden on the wolf’s back, old man.”

  “Indeed, I’ll say it.” He looked from one to another of us as though only now seeing us for the first time. “And I’ll say that sometimes Einar Tree-Foot speaks too quick.”

  Satisfied with the impression I had made on him, I poured him more drink and asked carelessly, “Have you been a viking in your own day, then?”

  He was silent for some moments while he fingered his beard and frowned. I was about to shrug and let my question pass, not wanting to embarrass him, when he said,

  “There’s a fortress on this coast not far away, stone walls around its harbor. You’d have passed it sailing in.”

  All the warmth went out of me. “We did, old man. We found them rude.”

  “Oh, young friend,” he chuckled, “men have found them rude these hundred years. What, have you never heard of the Jomsvikings?”

  That word seemed to cut through all the other hubbub in the room. Faces everywhere looked up. Perhaps this old man’s story had been heard here before, perhaps was worth hearing again. He aimed his voice high and began.

  “Some still live—drunk most of the time and gone to fat, skulking behind their wall. But most of us are dead, or as good as. Time was, though, when we could put sixty dragons in the water.

  “Palna Toki the Dane, foster-father to King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark, built that fortress and put in her the best of the Danish fighters—blood brothers all, none younger than eighteen nor older than fifty. Inside her gates no female ever passed, nor was any slander kindled twixt one man and another, nor any word of fear ever spoke. We shared our booty, obeyed our jarl, and the bond between us was stronger than the bond of kin.

  “And every summer we sailed out to plunder—from Bjarmaland to Ireland. Men wailed and prayed when they saw our sails coming.”

  Kraki snorted, as much as to call the old man a liar, looking round belligerently at the rest of us.

  Einar, without noticing Kraki’s existence by so much as a look, continued.

  “It so happened one night, though, that Jarl Sigvalt—he was our chieftain in those days—drank deep at a feast and swore a powerful oath that he would hunt and harry his old enemy Jarl Haakon out of Norway, wipe his ass on Haakon’s best cloak, drink up all Haakon’s ale, and lie with Haakon’s wife. In the morning when he sobered, it seemed like a poor idea, but he had said it out loud and so he was bound.”

  In spite of my irritation with the old man, I leaned forward, enthralled. Here was word music!

  “We sailed for Norway in our sixty dragons, thinking to take Haakon by surprise. But don’t the Norns love a joke. We found him laying for us in the Jorundfjord with a hundred and eighty sail at his back, all the hulls lashed together and crammed to the gunwales with fighters. Even so, he found us a tough mouthful to chew. We gave him blow for blow until in his fear he sacrificed his very own son, his youngest son, to Odin! No sooner done but a hailstorm come out of nowhere and beat against our faces.”

  Here, Glum, his face more than ever a living mirror, laughed out loud as if to say, Yes, that’s friend Odin—that’s his style.

  “Then it was Jarl Sigvalt’s turn to be afraid,” Einar continued. “He turned tail with his own squadron—it shames me to say it—and left the rest of us to perish.

  “I was a warrior aboard Vagn Akesson’s ship, and just about your age, my young captain. Scarce had my beard yet, but I was as fierce as any. Now came Haakon’s oldest son alongside and grappled to us. We gave him good play at Odin’s game, but he beat us down at last and took us prisoner—thirty of us in all with our captain. They brought us ashore and sat us down on a log with our feet tied together, and then, just to mock us, asked us if we minded dying. ‘Not a bit’, says we with a smile. So they commence to chop off our heads. One man of us says, ‘Strike me in the face so you may see that I don’t go pale.’ Another one says how he had always wondered if the body lived on for a bit with its head off and might he hold a dagger in his hand, to raise it as a sign if he could still form the thought.

  “Well, they chopped and they chopped, each man making some joke or other as they took him—until they come to the eleventh man—which was this man that sits here before you.

  “Now, I had a fine, handsome head of golden hair in those days, and I pulled it for’ard, like this.” He raked his hand up the back of his head and stirred up a few white strands “And I ask politely wouldn’t someone hold it away from the blood, being as I was vain about it. So up steps a Norwegian and takes hold of it with both his hands and—I can’t help but laugh when I think of it—as the axe comes down, I jerk back my head, and I pull that man for’ards—” Einar hunched and tossed himself around, “like this. And doesn’t that axe lop off both his hands! You should’ve seen his face!

  “Then up jumps I, crying, ‘Who has his hands in my hair?’ and ‘Not all the Jomsvikings are dead!’

  “To make short of it, Haakon gave us our freedom out of admiration. Admiration! But only a score of us out of that whole ship’s company lived to tell of it. And many a brave boy was left behind to feed the crabs in Jorunga Bay.”

  There was silence in the room as he finished—broken finally, by someone’s loud laugh. Someone else, sitting at the next bench, tossed a copper onto the table in front of the old man, which he caught with a quick movement of his fingers and dropped into his bosom, never looking where it came from. A few more pennies followed.

  But to me, my victory over Red Kol was beginning to seem like nothing but a piddling skirmish.

  Then Stig asked, “Einar Tree-Foot, what became of you after that day?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t quite the end of us,” he sighed. “Not quite the end. There were more fights, and I was in ’em. I left this hand in Sweden”—he flourished the knob in our faces—“and this leg in England, and this eye—well, I forget where this eye went. But when I got too old and trimmed of my parts, they put me out to end my days where you find me.”

  I looked ruefully at my bandaged little finger that was shorter by a joint. Only a small beginning, but still—how many parts would I be trimmed of, I wondered, when half a century was gone.

  Otkel remarked bitterly, “Fine brothers, these, to cast you off.” His heart still ached for his cousin, Stuf.

  “Stick to what you know, boy. It’s our way, and Einar Tree-Foot don’t complain of it. But that’s why I laugh, don’t you see, when you tell me that you crave to be vikings. Because we were vikings, my young friends, and the world won’t soon see our like again.” He took another pull at the horn and a ferocious bite of bread. “And so, to business.”

  “Eh? What business is that, old man?”

  “Your business, of course. D’you mean to go a-viking or do you not?”

  I said we did.

  “Then, you’ll want a pilot.”

  “No, old man,” I answered quickly. “The odor of the Jomsvikings is too strong on you.”

  “You needn’t sniff me.”

  “So say you,” said Starkad. “But if we should ever run into these blood-brothers of yours outside their walls, would you not choose their side?”

  “Pah!” The knobby wrist waved his question away. “You’ve more profitable things to think about than that.”

  “There’s Otkel,” I said. “He has more reason than any of us to hate you. They killed his kinsman, and he may want to kill you in return.”

  Einar raised an eyebrow at this and turned to the shy youth. “Is that true?” he asked, as one might inquire about the weather. “And will you stab me in my sleep or how will you do it?” He looked long and searchingly into Otkel’s face until the boy dropped his eyes and shifted on his seat.

  “Otk
el and I will get on,” said Einar smoothly.

  “Tree-Foot,” spoke Stig, gazing up and away. “Men can put away their hatred for good enough reasons, and no one should think the worse of them for it. What reason might we have?”

  “Sense at last,” Einar snorted. “What reason? Because I was spawned on this coast, and she has been mother, father, and sweetheart to me since babyhood. Because I know every shoal and current, every creek and cove of her from Hedeby to Ladoga. I know where the fat villages are hid, and I know the mounds where old kings lie moldering with their gold!”

  He leaned across the table, bringing his head close to Stig’s and mine—patchy-scalped, white-bearded, loose-skinned, maimed, toothless, and decayed—the whole of its life force concentrated in an eye. I tried to see there another face, of a youth about my age, ruddy-cheeked and yellow-haired….

  His hand reached out and gripped my arm. There was more strength in the fingers than I would have believed.

  “Einar Tree-Foot wants one more viking summer, Captain, before the crows have his carcass. He’ll make you rich for it.” For a long moment, the eye held me. “Now,” he said, “I am going out in the street to piss.” He let me go and heaved himself up, tottering on his ill-assorted legs. “And when I come back, tell me your decision.” He accepted Glum’s long-handled axe to steady himself with and turning, clumped away to the door.

  “He’s all gristle, that one,” said Stig.

  “Aye, and what a story,” said Starkad with a shake of his head. “You think he’s fooling us, Odd?”

  “I don’t know. I’m inclined to put him to the proof. Otkel, could you bear to ship with him?”

  Otkel kept his eyes down and shrugged.

  “Stig? You others?”

  They nodded one by one.

  “Then it’s settled.”

  I found him just beyond the tavern door, standing straight as a stick with his back up against the wall and Glum’s axe on his shoulder as though he had been set there to guard the place. I touched his shoulder and led him back through the door. He went without looking to right or left, with his chin thrust out and his mouth set in a warrior’s scowl. And if, where the firelight caught his eye, it glistened—just possibly—with wetness, I was careful not to see.

  26

  Captured

  Four weeks later.

  A startled deer burst from the underbrush ahead of me—I jumped back with fright and then cursed myself silently. As the day died and a ghostly gray crept down through the tangled branches overhead, that uneasiness that many an Icelander feels in the deep woods grew stronger. Soon it would be too dark to see the path we were following, or the marks we had notched on trees along the way.

  And it was getting colder, too. In these northern regions, a damp chill steals into the nights even in high summer, and after a day of rain the forest reeks with a clammy steam that curls around your feet and legs like the fog at sea.

  The order to turn back was on my lips when one-legged Einar, who always somehow outstripped us on the march, gave a shout. We ran forward, pushing through the dripping pine boughs that swept our faces and soaked our sleeves, and caught up with him where the path skirted a little clearing.

  “Heh? Heh?” Gripping my shoulder, he jabbed the air with his crutch. “Heh? Has Einar Tree-Foot lied?”

  We pressed around him and looked where he pointed.

  After all the long toilsome weeks, here finally was the thing he had promised us. Within a low ring of stones, the rounded grassy hump of a mound, shoulder-high and wide enough to hold a prince and all his treasure. In barrows like this, Einar had said, the chieftains of Finland lay sleeping in earth that was salted with silver and gold.

  “By the Raven, we’re rich men!” His bright eye glittered.

  “Well, maybe he’s told us the truth at last, the old fraud,” said Starkad.

  We stepped into the clearing, circling the tomb, probing it with our spear-points, looking for the way in. Except for the sound of our breathing and the soughing of the wind in the branches, a deep silence lay over everything. How could we know that Kammo eyed us from those dark treetops?

  The summer, until now, had been disappointing. After taking on a dozen new hands and paying out the last of our silver for the Viper’s refitting, we had spent nearly a month in coasting east and north along the marshy shore of the Varangian Sea.

  To pass the time, I plied Einar with questions about the tribes who lived beside those stagnant pools and creeks: the long-haired Prussians with tattooed bodies, who inhabited the dismal swamps; the warlike Kurlanders whose ringforts held the wooded coast beyond the Vistula; and still farther north, the Ests, who worshiped birds and dragons and sacrificed men to unpronounceable gods.

  “When a great one among ’em dies,” said Einar, “they’ll leave him to lie out for months sometimes, even in the summer while they mourn him. The body never rots, for their sorcerers know the trick of making cold, don’t you see. Why, one time I saw a wizard of theirs freeze a pitcher of water with only the look of his eye.”

  “Tree-Foot, you saw this?”

  “Well a brother Jomsviking saw it, then. You do vex me with your questions, Odd Tangle-Hair.”

  There was more in the same vein—fascinating, but no substitute for the bright gold we all craved.

  From time to time we stopped to put off landing parties, but either the forts were too strong for us, or, when we attacked a lonely farmstead, it was only to find the inhabitants had fled deeper into the wood with their livestock and their women. We burned their houses in disgust and took what little they had left behind in the way of honey, wax, or pelts, but even these prizes we had to surrender to the greedy merchants of Gotland and Truso in exchange for just enough ale and meat to live on.

  Once we caught some women, which raised our spirits for a while, and got a decent price for them, too, from a passing slaver, though they were the worse for wear by then, and not particularly good looking to begin with.

  But riches eluded us. As we drifted up into waters less and less traveled, the men grew unhappy and talked of turning back.

  Still, Einar was undismayed. Farther to the north, said he, beyond a great gulf, lay the country of the Finns. “Witches there are, and monsters, as I’ve heard tell. But loot! You’ll not see the like of it anywhere—if you’re bold enough to look.”

  So on we sailed. And if any man was frightened he would not say so.

  †

  So we came to be in that darksome wood; the Viper, a good hour’s walk behind, moored to the bank of a creek with Stig and ten men to guard her, while the rest of us explored a path that must bring us at last, we thought, to some farm or village. It had brought us to this lonely barrow instead. By the All-Father, we were due for a change of luck!

  Glum stepped forward and swung his axe, making the dirt fly up, and a little gold coin fell glittering at his feet, as shiny as the day it was put there.

  “I’ll chop all day for these wages,” Glum smiled. Then we threw ourselves upon the barrow with knives, with fingers, like hungry men let loose on a haunch of meat, prying out the clods of turf, tearing them apart for their treasure.

  Brodd drove his spear in at one end of the barrow striking wood, and we dug away the sods there to lay bare the timber frame beneath—too busy to notice how the shadows of the trees inched across the clearing.

  “Pry ‘er open!” cried Einar, dancing on his one leg, “Smash ‘er in!”

  As the wooden staves gave way under Glum’s axe, a foul exhalation knocked us back. But the odor of gold was stronger. We squeezed inside, as many as could fit, to see our prize.

  Not that you could see much—my memory of it comes through my fingertips. The corpse had not altogether dissolved and I had to touch it more than I cared to as I groped among the grave-goods heaped beside it.

  Desperate for breath, we worked like frenzied moles, flinging the pieces of treasure out behind us—buckles and rings of silver, a casket of coins, a pair of well-wrou
ght swords, a helmet richly embossed, a lump of amber the size of a fist with a piece of the sun inside it.

  But while we plundered this old warrior of his wealth, each of us knew in a secret corner of his mind that the dead live on in their tombs.

  Twilight found us still bundling our loot, and I began suddenly to fear that we could not get back to the ship before night fell.

  “Why not camp here, then?” said young Bengt with a careless air.

  “You’ll stay alone if you do, you young fool,” Brodd growled. But Bengt answered back, saying how Blessed Olaf had kissed him at his christening and how for that reason his mother had always taught him he had nothing to fear in this world or the next.

  “Bengt,” said I, “if we’d all been kissed by Olaf or even by your old mother, maybe we’d be braver men than what we are. Pick up your load and let’s be off.”

  So off we went. But we had hardly gained the trees when Einar must run back for one more look around in case we had missed a ring or a button. By the Raven, he hadn’t come this far to leave anything for another’s pickings!

  Once again then, with our shields on our backs and clutching our booty in our arms, we plunged into the forest. We hadn’t gone half a mile before we realized we were lost. It had begun to rain again, too, and suddenly it was very dark. While we stood quarreling whether to go forward or back, we heard the first low note far away behind us.

  “Eh?” said Starkad in a hushed voice. “Wolves?”

  “Never,” replied Einar firmly. “It’s a moose or some such.”

  “Moose? No moose ever called like that.”

  “No, nor any wolf neither. Now, I tell you….”

  It came again, off to our left this time—three wild and mournful notes close together.

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” croaked Ivar, one of the new hands. “He wants his own back!”

  “Well, he won’t get it back from me!” swore Einar. But there was a catch in his voice.

  I began to taste fear like steel on my tongue. “Enough talk. Keep close and follow me. Glum. Glum! Where are you? I need your sharp eyes.”