by Tim Severin
‘But it was Earl Ulf’s men who attacked us,’ I blurted.
‘Precisely. That is why it would be wise if you did not tell anyone else about the Jomsvikings’ ambush.’
Kjartan must have had considerable influence with the royal secretariat because my interview with the king took place that same evening. It was held in secret, away from the king’s official residence. Only the three of us were present – Kjartan, myself and the husband of the woman I still loved.
For the first time I was able to see Knut close to, and of course I judged him jealously. The king was on his way to an official banquet, for he was wearing a brilliant blue cloak held at the right shoulder by a gold buckle, a tunic of fine linen with a thread of gold running through it, gold-embroidered bands at the hem and cuffs, scarlet leggings and cross gaiters. Even his soft leather shoes had lines of gold stitched in square patterns. He radiated authority, privilege and virility. What impressed me most was that he was almost my own age, perhaps three or four years older. I did a quick mental calculation. He would have been leading an army while he was in his teens and I was still a youngster in Vinland. I felt inadequate by comparison. I doubted that Aelfgifu had found me a satisfactory substitute. Knut had a magnificent physique, well proportioned and robust. Only his nose marred his good looks. It was prominent, thin and slightly hooked. But that deficit was more than made up for by his eyes, which were large and wide-set and gave him a level, confident gaze as he stared at me while I stumbled huskily through my account.
When I had finished, Knut looked at Kjartan and asked bluntly, ‘Is this true?’
‘Yes, my lord, I’ve known the young man for some time and I can vouch for his honesty as well as his bravery.’
‘He’s not to tell his story to anyone else?’
‘I’ve told him not to, my lord.’
‘Well, he’s certainly earned his pay. How much did we promise the Jomsvikings?’
‘Fifteen marks of silver each man, my lord. Half in advance. Final payment to be made after they had fought for you.’
‘Well, that’s a bargain! They fought, it seems, and now there’s only one of them to collect his pay. I’ll double it. See to it that the paymaster gives him thirty marks. And make sure, also, that he’s kept out of sight. Better yet, arrange to have him sent away, somewhere far off.’
The king turned on his heel, and was gone. Knut’s brusque dismissal left me wondering whether he knew about my affair with Aelfgifu.
As Kjartan escorted me back to his own lodgings, I dared to ask, ‘Is the queen, Aelfgifu, I mean, is she here with the king?’
Kjartan stopped. He turned to me in the darkness, and I could not see his expression but his voice sounded more serious than I had ever heard him. ‘Thorgils,’ he said, ‘let me give you some advice, though I know it is not what you want to hear. You must forget Aelfgifu. Forget her completely, for your own safety. You do not understand about life at court. People act differently when they are close to the seat of power. They have particular reasons and motives and they pursue them ruthlessly. Aelfgifu’s son, Svein, is now ten years old. He takes after his father in looks and manner, and she is ambitious for him to be Knut’s heir rather than the children of Queen Emma. She will do anything to further his chances.’
I tried to interrupt. ‘I never knew she had a son; she never told me.’
Kjartan’s voice ground on remorselessly, overriding my halfhearted objection. ‘She has two sons, in fact. If she failed to mention them to you, that makes my point. They were fostered out at an early age. They grew up in Denmark while Aelfgifu was in England. Right now she’s playing for very high stakes – no less than the throne of England. If she thinks that you are a threat because of anything that happened at Northampton . . . I’m not accusing you of anything, Thorgils. I just want you to realise that Aelfgifu could be a danger to you. She has a ruthless streak, believe me.’
I was stunned. First I had lost Thrand and now my cherished vision of Aelfgifu was smashed. Mother of two, ambitious royal consort, deceitful, conniving – this was not the sweet, high-spirited woman whose memory I had cherished these two years past.
Kjartan’s voice softened. ‘Thorgils, give thanks to Odinn that you are still alive. You could be a corpse along with your shipmates on the drakkars. You are young, you are free of restraints and from tomorrow you’ll have money to spare. Tomorrow I’ll take you to see the king’s paymaster and you’ll have your royal bounty. Look upon Knut’s wish to be rid of you as another sign that Odinn protects you. The court is a snake pit of intrigue and you are best away from it. You may think that the king was generous in his payment to you, but if the Danish vessels which attacked you had reached Holy River in time for the battle, King Knut might have lost his crown. And monarchs do not like to know that they are in another’s debt.’
His last observation made no sense. ‘I don’t understand how the defeat of the Jomsvikings could have saved the king. We never reached the rendezvous. We were no use to him,’ I said.
‘Think of it this way,’ Kjartan replied. ‘Recently Knut has been increasingly mistrustful of Ulf. He fears that the earl is plotting against him and your story of the ambush of the Jomsvikings confirms Ulf’s double dealing. His ships attacked the Jomsvikings, knowing them to be reinforcements for the king. They did not expect any survivors to live to tell the tale. But as it turned out, the ambush delayed Ulf’s ships so they missed the vital engagement at Holy River. Had they been there, Ulf might have felt strong enough to switch sides and join the Swedes. And that would have been the end for King Knut.’
I thought that Kjartan was being overly cynical, but he was proved right. Soon afterwards matters came to a head between the king and Earl Ulf. They were playing a game of chess when Knut, a chess fanatic, made a wrong move on the board. Ulf promptly took one of his knights. Knut insisted in replaying the move, and this so angered Ulf that he got up from his seat, tipped over the chessboard and stalked out of the room. Knut called after him that he was running away. Ulf flung back the jibe that it was Knut who would have run away from Holy River if Ulf’s force had not fought on his side.
That night the earl fled for sanctuary in Roskilde’s White Christ church. It did him little good. At dawn Knut sent a huscarl to the church with orders to kill Ulf. There was uproar among the Christians that murder had been committed in one of their churches. But when I heard the story, I felt a more immediate chill. Ulf was married to Knut’s sister. If a brother-in-law could be assassinated in the struggle for the throne, how much more likely a victim would be the queen’s illicit lover.
‘I NEED THE DETAILS!’ said Herfid excitedly. ‘It’s perfect material for a saga – “The Last Fight of the Jomsvikings!” Can you describe to me the leader of the Danes? Was there any exchange of insults between him and Thrand? Hand-to-hand combat between the two of them? That would be a nice touch, to catch an audience’s imagination.’
‘No, Herfid, it was just as I described it. Chaotic and savage. I didn’t see who chopped off Thrand’s foot and I don’t even know who led the Danes. At first we thought they were on our side, on their way to join the king. But then they attacked us.’ My throat hurt. Sometimes, when I was tired, my voice suddenly changed pitch like a boy in his puberty.
By a happy coincidence Herfid was travelling on the ship that Kjartan had found to take me clear of court intrigue. Herfid had finally given up his attempts to find a permanent job as a royal skald, and was heading back to Orkney where the new earl might have work for him. ‘Knut’s got too many skalds as it is,’ Herfid lamented. ‘Sighvatr Thordarsson, Hallvardr Hareksblesi and Thorarin Loftunga, not to mention Ottar the Black, who is his favourite. They didn’t welcome more competition.’ He looked woebegone. ‘But if I could compose a really good saga about the Jomsvikings, that might get me some attention.’
‘I think not, Herfid,’ I said. ‘Knut may not want to be reminded of the episode.’
‘Oh well . . . if you ever change your mind. Meanwhil
e perhaps you could tell me some of the Irish sagas you heard when you were in that country, maybe I could work parts of them into my own compositions. In exchange I’ll give you a few more lessons on style and structure. They could prove useful should you ever decide to make a living by story telling. Besides, it will help pass the hours at sea.’
The captain taking us towards Orkney was in a hurry. It was late in the season to be attempting the trip, but he was a man with weather luck and his crew trusted his judgement and sea skill. Herfid, by contrast, probably knew at least a hundred poetic phrases for the sea and its ships, but had no practical knowledge. He made a singular impression on our hard-bitten crew as he walked about the deck referring to the little vessel as a ‘surge horse’ and a ‘twisted rope bear’, even ‘a fore-sheets snake’. When we cleared the Roskilde anchorage the waves became ‘the whale’s housetops’, and the jagged rocks were ‘the water’s teeth’. I noticed several crew members raise their eyebrows in astonishment when he referred to our hard-driving skipper as a ‘brig elf’, and I feared the captain had overheard.
Fortunately, just when I was thinking that Herfid was going to get himself tossed overboard for his presumption, we ran into the sea race off the tip of Caithness. It was an intimidating experience, as unnerving as anything I had yet experienced at sea, except perhaps for being wrecked on the Greenland skerries, but I was too young to remember that. The west-going tide ripped past the headland, creating overfalls and strange, swirling patches of water, until it seemed we were riding a huge river in full spate rather than the ocean. I could see why his men trusted our captain so implicitly. He timed his vessel’s entry into the race with perfection. He thrust boldly into the torrent just as the tide was gathering, and we were swept along like a wood chip on the spring flood. Our vessel began to make a strange swooping motion, lifting up, then sliding forward and down as if we would be sucked to the bottom of the sea, only to rise again, check, and begin the next plunge. It required prime seamanship to keep the vessel straight. The captain himself manipulated the side rudder, which Herfid had called ‘the broad-blade ocean sword’, and by some smart handling of the sheets the crew made sure that we did not broach and roll. We hurtled through the race, our ears filled with the grumbling roar of the tide.
Poor Herfid fell silent as the motion of the ship increased. Soon he had found his way to the rail and was hanging on to a mast stay, then in a sudden lurch he was doubled over the rail, throwing up the contents of his stomach. He was bent in that position for some time, retching and heaving miserably. When we were clear of the waves, and the motion had subsided enough for the skipper to be able to relinquish the helm, he sauntered over to Herfid and asked innocently, ‘And what do you call the sea – “breakfast swallower” or “vomit taker?” ’ Herfid raised his green-white face and gave him a look of pure loathing.
BIRSAY, THE HOME of the Earl of Orkney, was just as I remembered it – a modest settlement of a few houses huddling behind tussock-covered sand dunes. As a port of call, Birsay only existed because it was on the crossroads of the shipping lanes between the seas of England, Ireland and Iceland. The anchorage was so exposed to the fierce winter gales raging in from the west that the local boats had been hauled ashore and secured in half-sunk sheds or bedded behind barriers of rock and sand. Our captain had no intention of staying a moment longer than necessary in such a dangerous place, and he paused only long enough for us to visit the long hall to pay our respects to the earl, and for Herfid to ask permission to stay.
Like Knut, the new Earl of Orkney was of the coming generation – energetic, ambitious and completely without qualms. His name was Thorfinn, and Herfid was in luck. The young earl was looking for a skald to enhance his reputation and Herfid was given the job, initially on approval. Afterwards – as I learned – his post was made permanent when Thorfinn heard that he was becoming known as ‘the Mighty’, a phrase that Herfid had used to describe him.
To my astonishment, the earl’s grandmother Eithne was still alive. I had not seen her for almost eight years, yet she seemed to have changed hardly at all. Perhaps she was a little more stooped, and even more of her hair had fallen out, so that she kept her headscarf knotted securely under her chin. But her mind was as alert as ever.
‘So another battle nearly killed you,’ she wheezed at me by way of greeting. I was not surprised. Eithne was acknowledged to be a volva, a seeress, and there was little that she did not know or divine. She was the one who had told me that I was a spirit mirror, my second sight occurring most frequently when I was with someone else who had the gift.
‘There’s something I want to ask you about,’ I said. ‘There was a vision which I do not understand, and I have not mentioned to anyone as yet.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘It was during a sea fight. In the midst of the battle a hailstorm suddenly lashed us, chilling us to the bone. The wind which brought the hailstones always seemed to be in our faces, never to hamper our enemies. It blew so powerfully that it turned our arrows, nor could we hurl our spears against it. It was unearthly. Everyone thought so. Some of our men from Wendland and Witland cried out that magic was being used against us.’
‘What did you think?’ the old woman asked.
‘I think our enemies had a supernatural ally. I saw her – it was a woman – she appeared in the hailstorm. At first I thought she was a Valkyrie come to carry away our dead, for she seemed unearthly and she rode the wind. But this woman was different. She had a cruel face, a cold eye and was in a frenzy, shrieking and raging at us, and pointing at us with a clawlike hand. Whenever she appeared, the hail flew thicker and the wind came in stronger gusts.’
Eithne gave a snort of derision at my ignorance. ‘A Valkyrie indeed. Have you never heard of Thorgerd Holgabrud? That’s who you saw.’
‘Who’s she?’ I asked.
‘Thrand could have told you,’ she replied. ‘She appeared at Hrojunga Bay, the first time the Jomsvikings were defeated. She is the patron Goddess of the northern Norwegians. Earl Haakon, who led the battle against the Jomsvikings, sacrificed his own seven-year-old son to her to obtain the victory. That sacrifice was so powerful that, even now, Thorgerd Holgabrud returns to ensure the extinction of the Jomsvikings. She is a blood drinker, a war witch.’
I must have looked sceptical because Eithne reached out and gripped me by the arm. ‘Listen to me: signs appeared in Caithness and Farroes soon after the great slaughter at Clontarf. There the Valkyries did appear to Old Believers – twelve Valkyries, riding horses. They set up a loom in each place, using the entrails of dead men as weft and warp, fresh skulls as the loom weights and a sword as the beater. An arrow was their shuttle. As they wove, they sang of the men who had fallen. You may never have heard of Thorgerd Holgabrud, or her sister Irpa, but those Wends and Witlanders were right. A volva was working against you that day, someone invoking the hailstorm and the gale and inciting Thorgerd to fight against you. Learn from this event. Be on your guard against those who use the occult to defeat you.’
I forgot her words over the next few months and paid the price.
I ARRIVED BACK IN Iceland to find that Grettir was now a legend. Against all odds he was still at large and evading every attempt to hunt him down. What made his survival all the more remarkable was that no outlaw had ever had such a high bounty put on his head. Thorir of Gard had redoubled the reward he and his family would pay to anyone who killed or captured Grettir, and several bounty hunters had tried and failed to collect the prize money. I heard a great deal of chuckling about the fate of one of them. Grettir had overpowered him and forced him to undress and return home in only his underclothes. Other stories were more far-fetched and reminded me of when Grettir and I had robbed the barrow grave together. It was claimed that Grettir had thrown an evil troll-woman to her death over a cliff, that he had swum under a waterfall and found a giant living in a cave carpeted with men’s bones, that he had shared a remote cave with a half-giant. On one point, everyone was
agreed: Grettir was now living on an island in the north-west fiords.
‘Why doesn’t someone get together a group of like-minded fellows to go and capture him?’ I asked.
My informant, a farmer from Reykholt with whom I was staying overnight, shook his head. ‘You should see the island he’s chosen for his retreat,’ he said. ‘Sheer cliffs that are near impossible to climb. The only way to the summit is by ladders and Grettir hauls them up whenever he sees a strange boat approaching. And he is not alone. His younger brother Illugi is living there with him and there’s said to be a servant as well. A man called Glaum or some name like that. There may be others, too. It’s difficult to be sure. Grettir has allowed no one on the island since he took it over, though I’ve heard that the local farmers are furious. Previously they grazed a few sheep on the flat top of the island. Someone would go ashore, lower down a rope and the sheep would be hauled up one by one. After you got the sheep on the summit, you could go away and leave them there without a shepherd. There was no way the animals could get off.’
He said the island was called Drang, meaning ‘sea cliff’, and it was in the mouth of Skagafiord.
‘Is there any way of getting out there?’ I asked.
‘There’s a story that Grettir occasionally swims ashore, but that’s impossible,’ the farmer said. ‘The island is too far out in the entrance to the fiord, and there are powerful currents that would sweep away a man and drown him. I think that tale is pure fantasy.’
It was odd, I thought to myself, how a farmer would believe in trolls and giants living under waterfalls, but not in a man’s ability to swim long distances. Yet I had seen Grettir do just that in Norway.
When I stood on the shore of Skagafiord a few days later, I understood why the farmer had been so sceptical. Drang Island was far in the distance. Its shape reminded me of the massive blocks of ice which occasionally drifted into harbour at Eiriksfiord in Greenland when I was a boy. These ice mountains had stayed in the channel for weeks at a time, slowly melting. But the ice blocks had been a cheerful, sparkling white tinged with blue, and Drang Island was a dark, square, brooding oblong. It gave me the shivers. The thought of swimming across the intervening expanse of sea – I could see the tide swirl – was daunting. Someone on the mainland must be acting as a go-between, occasionally rowing out to the island to bring supplies and news.
